Abortive Poetics and Tragedies of Reproduction on the Early Modern English Stage

Abstract: This essay argues that early modern English tragedies frequently understood the primary political crisis through what we call an “abortive poetics of tragedy.” This pervasive trope relied upon actual abortions, abortive metaphors, procreative refusals or regrets, and socially unacceptable births that signal an antisocial strain within the population that threatens its reproductive future. The characters embodying antisociality often experience literal, potential, or metaphorical abortions through the catharsis of the tragedy’s bloody end. From Isabella’s grief-driven maternal regret in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592) to Annabella’s death and terminated pregnancy at the end of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) to Lady Macbeth’s infamous refusal of maternal care in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), we illustrate how abortive poetics were a central and even structural component of early modern tragedies. By way of conclusion, we point to the urgency of attending to the wide-ranging definitions of “abortions” in the past, present, and future. In the context of the current politicization of women’s healthcare in the United States, we urge that attending to the slipperiness of the “abortive,” as a political, medical, and even (to some degree) fictional category, will open the door to a more robust and humane discourse around abortion care.