Dirt Pharmacy

Abstract

My creative thesis, Dirt Pharmacy, is a historical fiction novella about a murder in seventeenth-century London. As a Renaissance-era crime thriller, my work is influenced by a number of writers who work in the genre and period, such as Patricia Finney, C.J. Sansom, and Rory Clements. Where my work differs from theirs is that I examine early modern crime the other way around; their protagonists are proto-detectives, while Dirt Pharmacy is written from the point of view of the women committing the murder. My aim is to shine a light on two parts of history that typically go unseen, and thus unrecorded: the discreetly accomplished poisoning, and the private lives of women. My novella is a dark comedy, satirising the revenge tragedies popular on the Jacobean stage, written by playwrights such as John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and Philip Massinger. I challenge the overblown gruesomeness of the killings in these plays, as compared to the subtle, somewhat tedious nature of poisoning over a period of several months, as well as the plays’ implicit biases against women and Italians, two of the groups considered likeliest to commit murder by poison according to the Jacobean mentality. The work of critics who have examined the depiction of poison, vengeance, and stereotype in early modern drama and society, such as Miranda Wilson, Tanya Pollard, and Derek Dunne, helped me craft the worldview of a young girl who believes absolutely anything she sees onstage. Dirt Pharmacy offers a new viewpoint to the historical thriller, that of women who exploit their place in the shadows to commit perfect crimes, while also poking fun at the absurdity of theatrical vitriol in Jacobean England. I hope it ushers forth more study of quietly angry women and the havoc they could wreak unnoticed.