In Act IV, Scene II of John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi (1614), the eponymous heroine asserts, just before her execution, ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ (Webster, 1996, 170). There has been much debate about whether this is a defiant statement of independence or an expression of the self defined by external roles and others’ expectations. The Duchess's assertion remains ambiguous because, as Frank Whigham argues, the play dramatises ‘the shaping of the social self in the abrasive zone between emergent and residual social formations’ of the Jacobean world (Whigham, 1996, 223). However we choose to read her words, they are certainly not a disruption.

To move from Jacobean drama to the poetry of Denise Riley may seem like a huge leap of critical faith, but the early modern stage's dramatisation of a struggle with ideas of worth versus degree and of the self emerging into new social contexts can also be read as a dramatisation of language's affects. Indeed, in her most recent critical study, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect, Riley uses Cordelia's responses to Lear in the opening of Shakespeare's play to emphasise that Cordelia, ‘like any speaker’, is ‘already practised in instinctive accommodation to the greater power of an expectant context’ (Riley, 2005, 78). One might add that Cordelia and the Duchess of Malfi are, to some extent, victims of what Riley identifies as the ‘tension, unease, or a feeling of dispossession [that] can result from the gulf between the ostensible content of what's said, and the affect which seeps from the very form of the words’ (Riley, 2005, 2). Seeping affect is precisely what Cordelia and the Duchess are unable to control and, in both plays, it becomes simultaneously property and pervading presence, open to ownership and interpretation by others. This opens up fascinating questions: is part of the continuing seeping affect of these early modern dramas a sense that the feminine is always being shaped in an abrasive and wounding zone between emergent and residual social formations? And is the feminine-as-expression itself an abrasive zone between instinctive accommodation to, and resistance of, expectant contexts?