










































Kidnapped Amazonians, 
Severed Breasts, and Witches: 
Renaissance Perceptions of 
the Destructive Nature of the 
Freakish Female in Spenser’s The 
Bower of Bliss and Shakespeare’s 
Two Noble Kinsmen

Social stratification operates 
via the vehicle of gender 

norms and the deviation from or 
nonconformity to these cultural 
expectations. Those people who 
cannot or refuse to conform to 
social norms are often the subject 
of spectacle, observed by society 
as outsiders in a metaphorical 
freak show. The societal attitudes 
of Renaissance England toward 
gender are permeated with 
a pervasive fear of feminine 
sexuality and the destructive impact that such “vehement passions” were 
believed to have upon men. This anxiety of gender nonconformity is 
especially prominent in the portrayal and perception of “foreign” women—
females voluntarily transcending the roles of domesticity placed upon 
them or women deriving from cultures in which the ideals of femininity 
are noticeably different than those of Renaissance England. William 
Shakespeare and other authors within this time write from this bias 
when creating their own female characters, positioning these characters 

  -  Laken Brooks, Emory & Henry College

Abstract
Freak shows are physical and metaphorical, 
demonstrating a cultural perception of what and 
who is privileged. In Renaissance England, Shake-
speare and Spenser both write of deviant women 
and perpetuate the stereotypes of foreign women, 
creating literary “freak shows” in their works Two 
Noble Kinsmen and The Bower of Bliss. Whether 
these characters are Amazonian women disinter-
ested in heterosexual romance or promiscuous 
witches, they are set as spectacle in the confines 
of their respective texts.

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as commodities which readers may observe from outside of the text, as 
one stares at creatures in an exhibit. In Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen 
and Edmund Spenser’s The Bower of Bliss, two very different women—
Emilia and Acrasia—emerge from a similar cultural anxiety concerning 
the inevitable carnality of female sexuality. Although both women 
approach their femininity in very different ways, their identities are shaped 
within the literary arena of spectacle within Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s 
texts (indicative of the universal Renaissance English biases against 
nonconforming women), and both lead to the downfall of the male ideal of 
temperance. 
 To write of something is to arrest it and place it on display so that it 
may be witnessed by readers.  Spenser’s Faerie Queene was a work channeling 
the essence of misogyny. One particular section of Spenser’s epic poem, 
titled The Bower of Bliss, praises the chastity and holiness of the familiar in 
the form of Una, symbolic of the English Queen Elizabeth, while depicting 
the downfall of the wicked other embodied by Acrasia. Spenser’s work is a 
form of the human zoo to show the binary of gender and cultural norms. 
Both the Queen and Acrasia are female leaders over their own respective 
kingdoms with the same perceived potential for weakness in comparison 
to a male, as indicated by their genitalia that, in the Early Modern period, 
would have been thought of as being internalized (and incomplete) penises. 
Their differences lie in their adherence or lack thereof to standards of 
idealized femininity. Elizabeth, the “virgin queen,” is loved and becomes 
an effective ruler in spite of her identity as a woman; it is only by not openly 
utilizing that which marks her as female that she can effectively transcend 
the vices of carnality and excessive emotion that are thought to be 
characteristic of womankind. Acrasia represents the fulfilled fears of men 
concerning female sexuality in nearly every aspect. Spenser’s poem views 
her through the male lens, identifying her socially unexpected qualities as 
one would label an animal in a zoo: mutant, sorceress, lustful. She is a witch 
who lures noblemen into her bower with her beauty and her spells.
 When Sir Guyon, representative of male power and spiritual 
temperance, first comes across the enchantress, he sees her, 

half-sleeping, on a bed of roses, clad in a veil of silk and silver, 
all round were many fair ladies and boys singing sweetly. Not far 
off was her last victim, a gallant-looking youth, over whom she 

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had cast an evil spell. His brave sword and armour hung idly on 
a tree, and he lay sunk in a heavy slumber, forgetful of all the 
noble deeds in which he had once delighted. (Spenser 163) 

Acrasia claims men, taking physical and emotional control over them in a 
way that deviates from the expected female role of sexual submissiveness. 
Her identity as a sexually-active woman, living in her mysterious kingdom, 
labels her as dangerous and foreign in the eyes of Renaissance English 
society. She distracts noblemen from their spiritual and physical valor by 
initiating sex and adopting the masculine role of penetrating them, so to 
speak, with her temptation. Her victims are emasculated to the point where 
they become nearly feminine themselves, mutated by Acrasia’s influence. 
They are compared to boys who have been stripped of their cultural 
markers of masculine significance, made into sleeping exhibitions to be 
passively acted upon by Acrasia. What separates men from women and 
from other lower life forms, what makes men perhaps more human than 
their female counterparts, is their abstinence from the animalistic lusts of 
sexuality. In Acrasia’s bower are wild creatures which “are really men whom 
the enchantress has thus transformed. Now they are turned into these 
hideous figures, in accordance with their bad and ugly minds” (Spenser 165). 
They are viewed by Sir Guyon in the artificial habitat of the golden bower, 
living among the metallic fruit trees as zoo animals removed from their 
natural landscape, and are incorporated into Spenser’s framework of nesting 
scenes of human bizarreness. 
 Such a society is in direct opposition to the patriarchal culture of 
Renaissance England and threatens the male privilege inherent in Spenser’s 
setting. In Acrasia’s land, feminine deviant power and sexual autonomy 
engender masculine inferiority and lead to Acrasia’s delusion of her own 
capacity to lead. With the common concepts of a woman whose very 
emotional and physical wellbeing is at risk due to her deviant behavior, 
Guyon is completely justified in capturing Acrasia, “bound with adamantine 
chains, for nothing else would keep her safe” (Spenser 165). This final act of 
caging Acrasia is to make her and her bower into a menagerie. She is a freak 
of nature, an anomalous woman to serve as an entertainment and a warning 
to all who look upon her: See here what is different than us and know that her 
chains are the consequences of deviation. 
 Within Shakespeare’s time, a foreign woman like Emilia is something 

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of a paradox within the eyes of a masculine society; she is to be lusted after 
and to be won, to be appropriated into the traditional female domestic role 
in English society. Yet she is also to be feared. Such a woman is something 
to be captured and brought back to England, a prize token of the cultural 
other. The act of writing of such foreignness is, on Shakespeare’s part, an 
active attempt to profit from the cultural fascination of exoticness by placing 
an Amazonian character on display for playgoers. Shakespeare’s play Two 
Noble Kinsmen utilizes legends of gendered conquest with its introductory 
account of Hippolyta, an Amazonian woman, entering in a wedding 
processional with Athens’ king Theseus. This very perception is, in and of 
itself, influenced by the misogynistic attitudes of the Renaissance period 
in that it paints Hippolyta, a woman, as the passive recipient of the marital 
desire of Theseus, a man. This introduction to the play Two Noble Kinsmen 
neglects to mention that, in mythology, Hippolyta is a ruler who is abducted 
with her sister and brought back to Athens. This act of male conquest against 
a female-dominated kingdom would perhaps have been approved of at this 
time, as it brings masculine order to the perceived chaos of a matriarchy. 
Such opposition of “exotic” feminine power is not an unfamiliar topic in 
Renaissance literature. 
 The act of introducing Two Noble Kinsmen with a wedding officiated by 
the god of marriage indicates a profound sense of female commodification. 
The portrayal of a divine figure watching over the upcoming nuptials of 
Hippolyta and Theseus implies that this marriage is not only acceptable, 
but that it and the non-consensual way in which Hippolyta is “won” as a 
bride are the prototypes of ideal matrimony. If Hippolyta is a symbol of 
the other, Theseus is the tamer who brings this powerful woman to heel 
and flaunts her physical variation in his court as a sign of status. She is 
made into a sideshow to demonstrate Theseus’s power to shape a foreign 
woman with English ideals. This idea harkens back to the perceived danger 
that foreign women have in their independence; without male guidance 
and without conforming to the appropriate English ideals of feminine 
domesticity, women like Hippolyta are bringing themselves toward further 
danger of spiritual and physical debasement. Theseus, like Sir Guyon, is 
not a male conqueror but is a rescuer who is helping Hippolyta by holding 
power over her and thus by putting her “in her proper place.” Despite 
the apparent conformity of Hippolyta and her sister Emilia to English 

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ideals of femininity, there is always a mistrust of their adherence to such 
standards because the very nature of women, especially those women from 
cultures that do not adhere to male-dominated gender roles, is perceived as 
dangerously carnal. There is the underlying fear that these mighty women, 
made to perform docility before the court like trained animals performing 
tricks, will turn upon their captors and destroy them with their feminine 
debasement. 
 Whether from willful choice or from an existence centered around 
emotionality, even the most well-intentioned woman’s sexuality has the 
potential to destroy men, tempting them into the dregs of carnality. This 
ideology stems from the belief that such women operate in opposition to 
men, that they are incomplete or lesser forms of men and thus, by their 
very presence alone, can emasculate their partners. In Renaissance England, 
Biblically-sanctioned gendered behavior was expected in society and in 
the family unit: women were to keep house and care for children; men 
were to engage in community discourse. After all, “[i]n classical thought, 
folly is frequently associated with a feminized sexuality that is savage 
and transgressive. Christianity reinforces the connections between folly, 
sexuality and woman in the Fall myth” (Chakravarti 81). To tip these scales 
with non-normative behaviors is to commit an abomination against God’s 
natural order of husbands lording over their wives, thus adopting the 
mantle of freakishness by threatening the social institutions that depended 
largely on Christianity and the assumption that men pass economic and 
political power to their sons. These norms are unmet by women such as the 
Amazonians, who are raised within matriarchal government and military 
systems. Amazonian women are free from the constraints of the patriarchal 
women who adapt to misogynistic standards, yet Emilia and Hippolyta are 
expected to naturally assimilate to this “traditional order.”
 According to Paromita Chakravarti, “[t]he dichotomies of passion 
and reason, nature and culture, formlessness and form inflect the male-
female binary” in that they perpetuate the “stereotypes of irrational, 
instinctual and unstable women and rational, civil and balanced men” 
(80-81). Contemporary notions about friendship rose from Renaissance 
Humanism, cementing friendship between two men as the most important 
social relationship, “superseding all other possible human associations, 
including those connected with family, courtship, romance, marriage, 

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sexuality, service, fellowship, and politics” but threatened by “the unruliness 
of heteroerotic desires” (MacFaul 222). Women hindered the perceived 
perfection of male bonding, especially since Renaissance England was a 
patriarchal society. Autonomous women were criticized as attempting to 
erode these social norms with the indicative traits of the freakish female 
other: hyper-sexuality and hyper-emotionality. Physically, English women 
were expected to fulfill the role of Mother and Wife. Symbolic of these 
responsibilities are the breasts—objects of maternal care in the form 
of nursing and sexual gratification for men. Amazonian women were 
dually freakified as other; not only did they transcend the cultural gender 
norms that prevented Renaissance English women from having equal 
opportunities with their male counterparts, but they also looked physically 
different than English women. While the breasts were a blazon of the 
idealized wife and mother, the Amazonian warrior woman may have had 
darker skin and cut off her right breast to offer her better control of her bow 
and arrow (Foreman). Physically and culturally, the Amazonian woman as 
a character evokes intrigue and fear—an image of freakishness for a strictly 
patriarchal society.
 Emilia is brought to Theseus’ court in the freakshow wedding 
processional of supposedly-tame Amazonian women, yet she does not 
conform to the English standard of privileging male-to-male friendships. 
In fact, she goes so far as to state, “true love ‘tween maid and maid may be 
more in sex dividual” (1.3.81-82). This line expresses gender nonconformity 
on multiple levels; not only does it outright state that women have the 
same capacity to form bonds that are equally, if not more, meaningful 
than the friendships held by men, but it also expresses the potential 
support of lesbian relationships over heterosexual romance. Emilia is an 
image of otherness, involved in everything that is dangerous and unusual 
to Englishmen: physical power in warfare and politics as an Amazonian 
princess and a lesbian identity deviating from expected female heterosexual 
submissiveness. She, as a character, is freakified upon the stage—she is 
written as a foil of Englishwomen to entertain an English audience, yet she 
is not even performed by a woman since most Renaissance theaters did not 
hire actresses. 
 Emilia’s identity within Two Noble Kinsmen threatens traditional male 
privilege in that it implies that men are not needed to form romantic 

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relationships or friendships, and in fact the presence of men might 
hinder women from having rewarding friendships and sexual interactions 
with other women. Emilia expresses a female sexual and emotional 
independence that questions the advantage of exclusively male friendships, 
viewing these homogendered masculine connections as being as freakish 
to her as her Amazonian identity is to Athens (a setting upon which are 
imposed the cultural norms of Shakespeare’s England). As Emilia questions 
the power of male friendships, her very presence as a woman serves to 
break apart the quintessential relationship between Arcite and Palamon by 
invoking sexual desire in these two companions. 
 According to Kathryn Schwartz, “[a]ccounts of generation define 
woman as matter, man as spirit” (148). This gendered notion of existence 
is prevalent in the Renaissance in which women were seen as emotional 
beings that evoke sentimental fragility and sexual desire in men, while 
men themselves are perceived as being more spiritual beings—the likes of 
which could be gravely distracted from such a higher frame of being by 
the carnality of female nature. This fear comes to life in the text of Two 
Noble Kinsmen when Arcite and Palamon first fall in love with Emilia. Upon 
seeing her, Palamon exclaims, “Never till now was I in prison, Arcite... Might 
not a man well lose himself and love her?” (2.2.133-156). Arcite responds 
likewise by saying, “Now I feel my shackles” (2.2.157). In falling in love with 
Emilia, the men are confined to the chains of sexual desire that indicate 
feminine existence rather than enjoying their own mutual friendship. They 
have become toys for female pleasure and control, taking on the instability 
of sexual desire that society deems grotesque in men. The men shed the 
pure aspirations that established them as belonging within a chaste and 
patriarchal society, delving into the animalistic desires of carnality that were 
previously freakish to the young men. Although Emilia has no direct control 
over how these men perceive her, her very nature as a foreign female leads 
the men’s friendship and the characters themselves toward their doom. Her 
innate bizarreness destroys Palamon and Arcite’s friendship, establishing 
Emilia as a force of freakishness that corrupts what is normal. 
 With their shared attraction toward Emilia comes Palamon and 
Arcite’s distraction from their plans of happiness, their thoughts that they 
would live their lives together. While they are in prison, they find comfort 
in one another’s presence—Arcite tells his friend, “Whilst Palamon is with 

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me, let me perish if I think this is our prison” (2.2.61-62)—but their freedom 
for male-to-male unity is shattered by their lust for Emilia. Their feelings 
for her threaten their chaste masculine identity (similar to Acrasia’s victims). 
Emilia’s presence is foreign and changes the atmosphere of stability around 
her. Before they encounter Emilia, Palamon and Arcite agree that there is 
no record of any two humans who have loved each other as much as they 
do (2.2.113-114), yet after they have both fallen in love with her, Palamon tells 
Arcite, “You shall not love at all” (2.2.168). Due to the influence of Emilia, 
a nonconforming female who ignites the flame of earthly desire in the 
two noblemen, these characters immediately redefine their definitions of 
“love” from their prototypical standard of male friendship to mere physical 
attraction. This change in Palamon and Arcite’s perception indicates a 
Renaissance fear that women and the sexual desire that they incite have 
the power to cause men to alter or even lose their self-identity; women, 
especially those like Emilia who are open or nonconforming in their 
sexuality and gender expression, are not normal. Even putting such women 
on display as a testament of foreignness—as Emilia is when she is brought 
to Athens—can evoke the darkness of chaos in those who see her, releasing 
the inner freakishness of men who are otherwise held in balance by male 
friendships and chastity. 
 Initially, the two prisoners of war revel in their captivity, thinking that 
it will increase their ability to keep themselves pure of the outside world. Of 
their captivity, Arcite states, “Let’s think this prison holy sanctuary, to keep 
us from corruption of worse men” (2.2.72-73). The irony of this is that it is 
female corruption that breaks down their friendships and their desire for 
chastity. Arcite and Palamon’s adoration of Emilia is expressed as a form of 
idol worship, something unholy, even in their first expressions of love for 
the woman: “Behold and wonder! By heaven, she is a goddess!” (2.2.132). 
Sexual desire toward females is portrayed as being artificial in nature: 
a distraction from true worship and from the true happiness that can 
traditionally be found exclusively in male-to-male friendships, a sensation 
leading to the decimation of male values. The truly frightening quality of 
Emilia’s unusual identity is not that she is a symbol of what is different and 
otherworldly, but that she encourages a breakdown of social cohesion. She 
is a freak, but those who love her swiftly devolve into freaks themselves. The 
death of Arcite and Palamon’s friendship foreshadows the physical death 

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of Arcite, pointing toward the fulfillment of the fear that foreign women 
and their deviation from standards of domesticity engender the ultimate 
destruction of masculine identity. 
 Emilia is a double outsider. Within this play, there are levels of oddity: 
Emilia’s perception of the exclusivity of male-to-male friendships, the 
Athenians’ interest in and fear of the Amazonian women’s status as symbols 
of alternative gender norms, and the English audience’s observation of the 
play and their perception of Emilia’s nonconformity as portrayed by a male 
actor. Even though she, unlike Acrasia, never actively endeavors to seduce 
men, her very existence as a female has this result. Her presence goes so 
far as to result in the accidental death of Arcite and, with it, the death of his 
potential to complete more noble activities and to reproduce in his lifetime, 
two standards that would have marked the life of a successful and fulfilled 
gentleman in Renaissance England and thus would have perpetuated the 
social norms of the day. The freakishness of her open femininity, in its lack 
of domesticity, forces her outside of the male-dominated society in which 
she has been placed; furthermore, her status as a foreigner isolates her 
within Athenian culture. The audience watching the play understands Emilia 
as a caricature of otherness, further emphasized by an actor performing 
her role. Emilia is thus perhaps predestined to hold a semi-villainous role 
from the very start of Two Noble Kinsmen. She is, in spite of herself, a force 
of chaos in the lives of men. Her life as an autonomous being identifies her 
as being a commodity to represent the novelty of the exotic Amazonian 
culture, yet due to her status as a foreign woman, she remains inherently 
dangerous to the ideals of the masculine society in which she is now forced 
to reside. 
 Emilia and Acrasia are two characters, written within the metaphorical 
freak shows of their texts, which are born from the fears of Renaissance 
society toward female independence and sexuality. The very concept 
of such feminine autonomy is a freakish concept in the masculinity of 
Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s England. These women are foils for idealized 
conformity and are written to be observed as freaks by readers. Emilia and 
Acrasia exist in opposition to the male privilege upon which much of the 
cultural infrastructure of the country is built. In the examples of Emilia 
and Acrasia, the reader is exposed to two females who question and/or 
threaten male power. The lives of these two characters, despite their very 

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different actions (Acrasia is intentional in her seduction of men, and Emilia 
has no control over Palamon and Arcite’s perception of her), serve to lead 
toward the same result of the inevitable destruction of male temperance, 
embodying the freakishness of deviation and catalyzing the inner sinful lust 
that is the freak within all humans. This demonstrates the cultural fear that 
foreign women, as individuals who don’t conform to traditional femininity, 
are destructive figures whose very nature undermines social masculine 
values. In their role as representatives of physical and cultural difference, 
these women have little to no ability to change this identity. 

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WORKS CITED

Chakravarti, Paromita. “Folly and Androgyny: Shakespeare’s King Lear.” 
Renaissance Themes: Essays Presented to Arun Kumar Das Gupta. Ed. 
Sukanta Chaudhuri. Comp. Das Gupta Arun Kumar. New Delhi: 
Anthem, 2009. 80-81. Print.

Foreman, Amanda. “The Amazonian Woman: Is There Any Truth Behind 
the Myth?” Smithsonian. Smithsonian, Apr. 2014. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.

MacFaul, Tom. Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. 
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xi + 222. 
Print. 

Schwarz, Kathryn. “Missing the Breast.” The Body in Parts: Fantasies of 
Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. Ed. David Hillman. New York: 
Routledge, 1997. Print.

Shakespeare, William. “Two Noble Kinsmen.” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. 
Julia Reinhead. Oxford 2nd ed. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 
2008. N. pag. Print.

Spenser, Edmumd. “The Bower of Bliss.” Sacred Texts. Evinity Publishing, 
Inc., 2011. Web. 26 Mar. 2015.

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