UCLA

Scholars examining captivity in the medieval and early modern periods have laid a strong foundation of work that explores both historical details (the layout of prisons, the laws of ransom) and individual captive voices (especially in martyr stories and captivity narratives). Recently, definitional and theoretical questions have risen out of such specific analyses. For example, what is the difference between a “captive” and a “slave”? Can captives be best categorized by the reason they are held, the duration of their loss of freedom, their social status, or something else?

In response to these challenges, To Yield or Die identifies and explores a persistent discourse about captive characters in English late medieval and early modern texts including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Malory’s Le Morte Darthur; Spenser’s Faerie Queene; Marlowe’s Edward II, The Jew of Malta, and two Tamburlaine plays; and the works of Shakespeare (with particular focus on Richard II, Measure for Measure, and The Rape of Lucrece). When characters face the literal or figurative sword’s point and are ordered to “yield or die,” texts treat their answers as permanently characterizing choices. The discourse thus creates three categories of captive character based on those choices: those who yield, those who risk death by resisting, and those who reply illegibly (or not at all) and thus negate the question’s definitional power. These categories operate within each story’s world to explore selfhood and establish relationships; they also operate at the formal level of textual construction (characters who yield are almost never protagonists; illegible characters often provoke interpretive confusion for fellow characters and readers alike).

While exploring this discourse, To Yield or Die also examines how texts manipulate and subvert its conventions, especially when the discourse collides with others including those involving gender, religion, chivalric culture, and so forth. The yield-or-die discourse both celebrates unexpected means of resistance (for example, it respects patient suffering) and is also cruelly oppressive (for example, it labels as “slavish” those who yield to save their own lives). To Yield or Die provides a clarifying lens through which to study texts about enslaved people, prisoners, and other captive figures.