Plot Source
The play's subplot deals with Swetnam, who is brought to trial before a court of women for his offenses against the gender and ends up recanting his bias. The play's main plot, a story of political intrigue and courtly love, derives from a novel by Juan de Flores called the Historia de Aurelio e Isabella (also known as Grisel y Mirabella), written c. 1495. (The same novel provided John Fletcher with plot material for his Women Pleased.) De Flore's novel was popular, and had been published in English translation five times between 1556 and 1586. It has been argued that the play also shows specific debts to earlier dramas, notably George Peele's The Arraignment of Paris and John Lyly's Endymion.
The tone of de Flores' novel is strongly chivalric, a trait that carries over into the play. "Swetnam the Woman-Hater is remarkable for the unusually high moral tone it adopts with regard to women."
Read more about this topic: Swetnam The Woman-Hater
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or source:
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“The particular source of frustration of women observing their own self-study and measuring their worth as women by the distance they kept from men necessitated that a distance be kept, and so what vindicated them also poured fuel on the furnace of their rage. One delight presumed another dissatisfaction, but their hatefulness confessed to their own lack of power to please. They hated men because they needed husbands, and they loathed the men they chased away for going.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)