Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various ‘Marian moments’ from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation of the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the ‘Old Faith’? How do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm and/or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the audience? Regina Buccola is Associate Professor of Literature and Language at Roosevelt University, USA. Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

General Editor’s Preface Helen Ostovich, McMaster University Performance assumes a string of creative, analytical, and collaborative acts that, in defiance of theatrical ephemerality, live on through records, manuscripts, and printed books. The monographs and essay collections in this series offer original research which addresses theatre histories and performance histories in the context of the sixteenth and seventeenth century life. Of especial interest are studies in which women’s activities are a central feature of discussion as financial or technical supporters (patrons, musicians, dancers, seamstresses, wigmakers, or ‘gatherers’), if not authors or performers per se. Welcome too are critiques of early modern drama that not only take into account the production values of the plays, but also speculate on how intellectual advances or popular culture affect the theatre. The series logo, selected by my colleague Mary V. Silcox, derives from Thomas Combe’s duodecimo volume, The Theater of Fine Devices (London, 1592), Emblem VI, sig. B. The emblem of four masks has a verse which makes claims for the increasing complexity of early modern experience, a complexity that makes interpretation difficult. Hence the corresponding perhaps uneasy rise in sophistication: Masks will be more hereafter in request, And grow more deare than they did heretofore. No longer simply signs of performance ‘in play and jest’, the mask has become the ‘double face’ worn ‘in earnest’ even by ‘the best’ of people, in order to manipulate or profit from the world around them. The books stamped with this design attempt to understand the complications of performance produced on stage and interpreted by the audience, whose experiences outside the theatre may reflect the emblem’s argument: Most men do use some colour’d shift For to conceal their craftie drift. Centuries after their first presentations, the possible performance choices and meanings they engender still stir the imaginations of actors, audiences, and readers of early plays. The products of scholarly creativity in this series, I hope, will also stir imaginations to new ways of thinking about performance.

Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama

Edited by REGINA BUCCOLA Roosevelt University, USA LISA HOPKINS Sheffield Hallam University, UK

© Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Marian moments in early modern British drama. – (Studies in performance and early modern drama) 1. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint – In literature 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Themes, motives 3. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism I. Buccola, Regina, 1969– II. Hopkins, Lisa, 1962– 822.3’09351 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marian moments in early modern British drama / edited by Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins. p. cm. – (Studies in performance and early modern drama) Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5637-1 (alk. paper) 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. 2. English drama—17th century—History and criticism. 3. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint— In literature. 4. Christianity and literature—England—16th century. 5. Christianity and literature—England—17th century. 6. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. I. Buccola, Regina, 1969– II. Hopkins, Lisa, 1962– PR658.R43M37 2007 822’.309351–dc22 2006032272 ISBN 978-0-7546-5637-1 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents Contributors Preface Foreword by Arthur F. Marotti Introduction Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins 1 ‘Here in this garden’: The Iconography of the Virgin Queen in Shakespeare’s Richard II Helen Ostovich 2 ‘One that’s dead is quick’: Virgin re-birth in All’s Well That Ends Well Alison Findlay 3 Inverting the Pietà in Shakespeare’s King Lear Katharine Goodland 4 ‘Black but Beautiful’: Othello and the Cult of the Black Madonna Lisa Hopkins 5 Desdemona and the Mariological Theology of the Will in Othello Greg Maillet 6 The Wonder of Women: Virginity, Sexuality and Religio-Politics in Marston’s The Tragedy of Sophonisba Thomas Rist 7 Easter Scenes from an Unholy Tomb: Christian Parody in The Widow’s Tears Alice Dailey 8 Virgin Fairies and Imperial Whores: The Unstable Ground of Religious Iconography in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon Regina Buccola 9 Not kissing the (He)rod: Marian Moments in The Tragedy of Mariam Stephanie Hodgson-Wright Index

vii ix xiii

1

21 35 47 75 87

111

127

141 161

175

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors Alice Dailey is Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University. The focus of her research is devotional, hagiographic, and martyrological literature, particularly passion drama and martyr narratives. Her book-in-progress, The Structure of Suffering: Martyrdom and the English Reformation, studies the interplay between Reformation history and the structural imperatives of martyrological discourse. She has published articles on John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and the execution of Father Edmund Campion. Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama, Department of English & Creative Writing at Lancaster University in the UK. Her research interests include early modern performance spaces, Shakespeare’s ties to Lancastrian Catholic traditions, and early modern women’s writing. Her most recent publications include Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama, and the essay collection Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, co-edited with Richard Dutton and Richard Wilson. Katharine Goodland is Assistant Professor at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island where she teaches Shakespeare, Early English Drama, and Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Her first book, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear, was recently published by Ashgate. Volume I of her second book, Directory of Shakespeare in Performance, 1970–2005 (Palgrave), co-edited with John O’Connor, is forthcoming in May 2007. Volume II is forthcoming in 2009. Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, formerly of the University of Gloucestershire, has published widely on early modern women’s writing, especially drama. She has contributed two volumes to the Early Modern Englishwoman facsimile library series (Ashgate) and has edited an anthology of Early Modern Women’s Writing 1588– 1688 (Edinburgh). Stephanie recently changed careers and now runs an accountancy practice with her husband. Greg Maillet is an Associate Professor of English for Atlantic Baptist University in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, where he teaches a wide range of courses, including Shakespeare, Milton, T.S. Eliot, and the Bible and Literature. Previously Dr. Maillet also taught at the University of Ottawa, Peking University, and Campion College at the University of Regina. His other publications include work on rhetoric, Tolkien, Dante, Longfellow, and Shakespeare.

viii

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Arthur F. Marotti is Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986), Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995), and Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005). He has edited or coedited six books, including Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press) and he is currently writing a book on the personal anthologizing of poetry in manuscript in early modern England. Helen Ostovich is Professor of English at McMaster University, where she teaches early modern drama. Author of many articles on Shakespeare and Jonson, she is the editor of the peer-reviewed journal Early Theatre and much of her research involves the editing of play-texts, as a Revels Plays general editor, the general editor of the Queen’s Men Electronic Editions, editor of All’s Well that Ends Well for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and of The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for the Richard Brome Electronic Edition. She has just completed her sixth Jonson edition, The Magnetic Lady, for the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson. Thomas Rist is a lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and a member of the university’s Centre for Early Modern Studies. He is author of various academic essays and articles on the involvement of early-modern theatre in the religio-politics of the period and he has published one book: Shakespeare’s Romances and the Politics of Counter-Reformation. Among his forthcoming publications is a second book: Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England (Ashgate, 2007/08).

Preface Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins

In 2002, Katharine Goodland organized a panel at the Renaissance Society of America conference titled ‘Mariological Moments in Early Modern Drama.’ A number of other panels at the conference addressed the same issues as those that, in the main, concerned us: the persistence of remnants of beliefs specific to Catholicism in the prose tracts, poetry and drama of early modern England and, in the case of our panel, what vestiges of Marian devotion, in particular, might indicate about the dramatic plots and characters in which they surfaced. In the few years since that conference, a number of literary scholars as well as historians of religion have also begun to reexamine the religious conflicts of Reformation England on a spectrum that runs from recusancy to anti-Catholic polemic. Marian devotion has come in for reconsideration during this time as well, but no one has yet systematically studied the presence of what we have come to term ‘Marian moments’ in the drama of the age.1 Hence this collection, which has more than doubled in terms of authors since that original Renaissance Society of America meeting. Marian Moments in Early Modern Drama is almost evenly divided between essays devoted to Shakespearean plays (the first five) and essays that consider Jacobean works by other dramatists (the final four). Since so little is reliably known about the production of early modern plays – including who, exactly, wrote them, when they were originally written and staged, what the production looked like, and who, exactly, saw them – early modern dramatic criticism is often a study in possibilities and contingencies rather than certainties. Marian Moments approaches the uncertainties of early modern dramatic history as opportunities to reconstruct the significance of Marian references

1 Among the works that one could include in this arena are: Catholicism and AntiCatholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Early Modern Catholicism, edited by Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003); Beth Kreitzer, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology, edited by David C. Steinmetz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, edited by Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); and Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

x

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

in the popular drama at a time when such gestures would have been doctrinally unacceptable in Protestant England. One of the certainties that recent studies such as those referenced above has shaken is the notion that the Reformation worked in England. Many scholars over the past few decades have challenged this assumption, raising important questions about, for example, continued references to purgatory in early modern drama long after such a halfway house for the soul had been eradicated from accepted Church teaching in England.2 Marian Moments in Early Modern Drama shifts this consideration to references to the Virgin Mary. At times, such references deal with the overt, as in Thomas Rists’s analysis of the virginal heroine of John Marston’s The Tragedy of Sophonisba, dubbed ‘The Wonder of Women’ in the original main title of the play. As Rist notes, the long-standing critical preference for what was originally the play’s subtitle, The Tragedy of Sophonisba, as a main title constitutes a back construction which elides the Marian resonance of the play’s title and the depiction of its heroine. Rist recovers these aspects of the play, highlighting the Mariolatry implicit in heralding a heroine who chooses death over loss of virginity: ‘The Wonder of Women.’ In other cases, Marian Moments trades in stage pictures of far greater subtlety. The originator of the RSA panel and of this collection, Katharine Goodland, explores King Lear’s final entrance onto the stage carrying Cordelia’s limp body as evocative of popular depictions of Mary mourning over the body of the crucified Jesus. As Goodland explains, such images were familiar not only from religious iconography in churches, but also from medieval passion plays. Therefore, two distinct strands of religious history cohere in Shakespeare’s depiction of a mortal king mourning the child who could and would have saved him if only he had had faith in her. King Lear offers a unique, masculine invocation of a Marian motif. While the gender analysis in the essays collected here is consistently complex, Goodland’s essay is the only one that is not focused on female characters in early modern plays. Therefore, this collection also attempts to address important questions not only about how Mary might have been evoked in early modern drama, but also about what such stage portrayals of one of the most significant women in Christian history (Eve being her greatest rival for the title) suggested about the social roles of the women in the audience and on the throne. While there can be no definitive answers to these questions, bringing the presence of Marian references to the fore in our analysis of early modern drama necessarily changes our view of it, and of the characters – usually women – that such references impact. During the course of our work on this project, we have all come to think differently about these plays as well as others that we routinely teach and see staged. In the case of the non-Shakespearean plays gathered here, perhaps the Marian resonance will provide new ways of teaching texts that have been relatively recently added to the early modern pedagogical repertoire, 2 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

PREFACE

xi

such as Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, or constitute an argument for teaching neglected texts like George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears. In any case, it is our hope that this collection will serve as a useful starting point for further analysis and discussion. Works Cited and Consulted Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Early Modern Catholicism, edited by Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Hunt, Maurice, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). Kreitzer, Beth, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology, edited by David C. Steinmetz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Peters, Christine, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, edited by Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003). Shell, Alison, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

This page intentionally left blank

Foreword Arthur F. Marotti Wayne State University

Some recent historical analyses of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English religious culture have emphasized the slow process by which England was Protestantized and the persistence of elements of a residual Catholic culture within the emerging, eventually dominant, Protestant one. Countering older accounts of the English Reformation, which portrayed the country as ready to throw off a corrupt, papally-centered medieval Catholicism, some recent historians have argued that the new Protestant orthodoxy was largely a top-down imposition on a religiously conservative and resistant populace and that elements of the ‘old religion’ had a remarkable persistence in the first hundred years after Henry VIII’s break with Rome.1 Specific governmental orders and official and non-official waves of iconoclasm damaged or destroyed many of the signs of the older religion—rood screens, stained-glass windows, wayside crosses, sites of pilgrimage, relics, etc.— but habits of mind and patterns of private devotion were harder to eradicate. One of the areas of practice in which residual Catholic culture was most evident is that of Marian devotion. The studies of dramatic texts included in this collection of essays detect ‘Marian moments’ in the plays of Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries, but such ‘moments’ occurred in life as well as in art in early modern England. In the former they were part of a fabric of religious and folk practices that shaped both public religious ceremonials and private devotion: pilgrimages to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham; processions; communal Marian devotions within and outside churches; personal reading of (both illustrated and non-illustrated) primers or Books of Hours, recitation of Marian litanies, prayers and poems such as the Stabat Mater and the Obsecro te and praying of the rosary.2 Anthropologically speaking, practices centered on the mediatory figure of Mary were part of the art of everyday living in pre-Reformation England and since, not surprisingly, such habits were hard to change or eradicate, they lingered as a residual presence in the newly Protestant nation.

1 See, for example, Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,’ Past and Present 93 (1981): 37–69 and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). See also Haigh’s recent review essay, ‘Catholicism in Early Modern England: Bossy and Beyond,’ The Historical Journal 45.2 (2002): 481–94. 2 See Duffy, 256–65.

xiv

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Queen Elizabeth’s strategy of rule involved appropriating elements of idealized womanhood from the cult of Mary. As John Phillips has noted in his study of English Protestant iconoclasm, most rood screens, which contained not only the image of Christ on the Cross but also, in addition to the figure of John the Baptist, the image of Mary as both mother and mediatrix, were removed from English churches and often the royal arms of Queen Elizabeth were set up in their place—an act that emphasized state control of religion as well as the displacement of the Queen of Heaven by the Queen of England.3 Queen Elizabeth not only replaced her half-sister, Queen Mary, but, to some extent, she attempted to assume the place of the Blessed Virgin Mary in English culture. This is one reason why Henry Cuffe, in the voice of the condemned rebel, the Earl of Essex, inserted a section into the valedictory ‘The Passion of a Discontented Mind’ expressing strong devotion not to the feminine earthly monarch but to the Queen of Heaven: And thou faire Queene of mercy and of pittye, Whose wombe did once the World’s Creator carry, Bee thou attentive to my painefull dittye, Further my Sutes deare gracious blessed Mary; If thou begin the Quire of holy Saints Will all be helping to preferre my plaints. (25–30)4

Mary here is presented in her traditional roles as Mother of God, as supreme mediatrix and as font of mercy and pity.5 Given the cultural competition between the cult of Elizabeth and the cult of Mary, it is not surprising that these politically dangerous lines were omitted from the printed version of this poem. Catholic and crypto-Catholic authors as well as religiously ambiguous or conflicted writers nostalgic for certain forbidden features of residual Catholic culture could portray certain female figures in their writings in ways that resonated with the older Marian devotion. The essays in this collection concentrate on this phenomenon in the drama, but, of course, the practice manifested itself in other genres as well—in poetry, in fiction, in religious devotional verse and prose. John Donne, for example, in his religious lyric, ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,’ even went so far as to depict Mary as a co-redemptrix, a theologically extremist formulation within the Marian tradition: … durst I Upon his [Christ’s] miserable mother cast mine eye, 3 John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 128–29, 138. 4 I cite the text from Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 235. 5 See the discussion of both of these qualities associated with Mary in Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).

FOREWORD

xv

Who was Gods partner here, and furnish’d thus Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransomed us? (29–32)6

Donne kept a picture of the Virgin in the deanery of St. Paul’s until his death, despite the Protestant demotion of Mary to the status of ordinary saint. Radical Protestants, of course, were hostile to traditional forms of Marian devotion. The rabidly anti-Catholic father of Richard Crashaw, William Crashaw, whose pen did heavy labor, wrote a much-reprinted work entitled The Jesuites Gospel (1610) in which he adopted a Protestant hard-line stance, provoked by Justus Lipsius’s book on the Virgin of Halle. At the start he lists the supposed Catholic beliefs to which he objects: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

That the Milke of Marye may come into comparison with the blood of Christ. That the Christian mans faith may lawfully take holde of both as well as one. That the best compounde for a sicke soule, is to mixe together her milke and Christs blood. That the sinnes & spirituall deseases of the soule are cured as well as by her milke as his blood. That Christ is still a little childe in his Mothers armes, and so may be prayed unto. That her milke and the merit and vertue of it, is more pretious and excellent than Christs blood. (1)

Five other tenets are also listed as repugnant: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

That no man, but a woman did helpe God in the worke of our redemption. That God hath made Marye partaker and fellow with him in his divine Majestie and power. That God hath devided his Kingdome with Marye, keeping Justice to himselfe, and yelding Mercy to Her. That a man may appeale from God to Her. That a man shall oftentimes be sooner heard at Gods Hands in the mediation of Marie, then of Jesus Christ. (2)

Attributing extreme Mariolatry to the Jesuits, Crashaw not only objects to viewing the Virgin as a co-redemptrix and as a privileged mediator, but also seems fearful of Mary’s female power and the ability of women to infantilize men. Outraged by the cult of the Infant Jesus,7 he expresses his fear that 6 John Donne, The Divine Poems, 2nd edn, edited by Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 31. See George Klawitter, ‘John Donne’s Attitude Toward the Virgin Mary: The Public versus the Private Voice,’ in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway, AZ: UCA Press, 1995), 123–40. 7 One of the most famous cases is that of ‘The Infant of Prague,’ a statue moved from Spain to Bohemia in the sixteenth century and which became a cult object in the seventeenth century.

xvi

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA the common people might have occasion to imagine, that looke what power of overruling and commaunding the Mother hath over her little childe, the same hath she over her sonne Jesus. … And now after 1600 yeares, she must still be a commaunding mother, and must shew her authority over him, and he must receive our prayers by her meanes, and stil she must beare him in her armes, or lead him in her hand, and her picture must worke all the miracles, but his none: and she must be saluted as a Lady, a Queene, a Goddesse, and he as a childe. (31, 36)

Crashaw objects to the figures of the maternal Mary and infant Jesus as putting the emphasis on the carnal rather than the spiritual: ‘for what can the carnall man, much more the Atheist, the Turke, and the Jewe imagine of Christ, when he that is his pretended Vicar suffers his followers to speake and write of him [Christ], and pray to him, as a playing childe, and sucking infant, and to describe him in his behaviours as a very childe, greeving and crying that any should touch his mothers papes but onely himself?’ (63). Putting Mary too close to the center of devotion, then, supposedly contaminates religion with a debilitating and distracting female presence, creating a goddess idolatrously set in rivalry with God. In his final evaluation of Roman Catholicism Crashaw portrays it as irremediable heresy. Seeing it as dangerously feminized, he views the carnal Mary as an idolatrous figure, a goddess who would displace Jesus at the center of Christian religion. His corrective Protestant view of Mary de-physicalizes her: ‘… her spiritual bearing of Christ was happier then her carnall, and her selfe more blessed by conceiving Christ in her heart then in her wombe, and by beleeving in him then by bearing him, for her bearing him in her body would not have saved her soule, if she had not more happily borne him in her heart’ (15–16). Only by replacing the lactating, affectionately maternal Mary with a spiritualized one can Christianity, in his view, tolerate her presence. In this approach, a true Christianity is both masculinized and dissociated from the kind of physical embodiment signaled by Mary’s maternity. Though most mainline Protestants did not take such a hostile approach, Marian piety was, at the least, controversial in early modern England—a sign of a potentially dangerous return to what was conceived as idolatrous Catholic practices and retrograde (unscriptural) beliefs. Anthropologically speaking, however, the Marian presence in English culture was hard to eliminate, given some of the human psychological and emotional needs it satisfied. An idealized woman, a mother who was seen as an endless source of love and compassion, an image of perfect piety and holiness, Mary was hard to replace in the lives of English Christians. In one sense, a displacement of some of her qualities onto other figures, male and female, actual or fictional, was a partial solution to the problem as was the portrayal, in the drama and elsewhere, of a certain nostalgia for her immediate cultural presence. In this context, the ‘Marian moments’ of the plays studied in this book strike to the heart of some of the most important cultural and religious struggles of early modern England. In King Lear, for example, Katharine Goodland argues, those older customs of mourning for the dead associated with the figure of Mary grieving over the body of the dead Christ, which were under assault in Protestant

FOREWORD

xvii

England, were transformed in the inverted Pietà of the final scene, which ‘probes the nature of grief in a society in which this vehement and debilitating passion has lost its public footing.’ The shift from Catholic to Protestant culture entailed a movement toward a ‘general distrust of grief, and the public expression of grief in particular’ and a consequent replacement of ‘communal rituals of mourning of preReformation England’ by ‘written works of mourning—elegies, published sermons, and treatises. …’ Shakespeare’s play demonstrates, Goodland claims, in the change of ‘the exemplar of mourning’ from female (Mary, Cordelia) to male (King David mourning over Absalom, Lear over Cordelia), a new privatization of mourning (as in Cordelia’s reported, offstage emotions) and removal of it from communal rituals. Nevertheless, Goodland states, ‘Lear’s mourning over Cordelia is haunted by the Virgin’s mourning over Jesus’—one of numerous examples of the Catholic past’s intrusion into Protestant England’s present, ‘the taboo pietà … resuscitated in the breath of the tragic actor’ against the background of medieval dramatic portrayals of Marian grief. The cultural volatility of Marian figuration and of the Jacobean context for the Elizabethan characterization of Queen Elizabeth as ‘fairy queen’ or cult object is explored by Regina Buccola in her essay on Thomas Dekker’s confused and confusing play, The Whore of Babylon. She notes that what should be a clear distinction between Catholic idolatry and Protestant virtue breaks down as the rival Titania, the queen of fairies, and the Empress of Babylon ‘threaten repeatedly to collapse into one another, imploding the distinctions between the warring factions of Christianity and revealing them for what they might, horrifyingly, be: the same thing.’ Given the fact that ‘[l]ike fairy belief, sustained devotion to Mary constituted popular culture resistance to politically-prescribed religious hegemony,’ the use of this material for religio-political purposes was hazardous. One of the important moments in English dramatic history came when English Protestant authorities banned the performance of the medieval religious dramas that continued to be performed in the sixteenth century: this attempt to suppress a form of popular entertainment that contained disapproved Catholic elements was only partly successful since many of the elements of these plays migrated to the secular stage of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.8 Alice Dailey, for example, demonstrates how, in George Chapman’s tragicomedy, The Widow’s Tears, ‘Chapman’s adaptation of religious material necessarily links his play to earlier Christian drama’—particularly in the ‘parodic revision of the scenes at Christ’s empty tomb on Easter morning’ found in the play’s final two acts. The Marian material she discusses is that relating to Mary Magdalen, whose weeping at Christ’s tomb is the model for the behavior of the character Cynthia, who, ironically, turns from a ‘goddess-like paragon of marital chastity’ to a loose woman. Dailey examines the Jacobean play against the medieval 8 For a discussion of the persistence of a Catholic ‘incarnational aesthetic’ in the drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, see Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm & Theater in Early-modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

xviii

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

dramatic handlings of the scene of the discovery by the three Marys of Christ’s empty tomb, only to emphasize the distance between the sacred material and the profane thematics of Chapman’s drama, which turns holy material to ‘burlesque’ as the dramatist portrays the human depravity he perceived in his contemporary world, a religiously pessimistic perception to which the medieval religious sensibility would have seemed alien. One way of eradicating the culture of the ‘old religion’ was to mock it. Marian material in the drama could take the form of secularized versions of attributes of the Virgin. Alison Findlay, in her discussion of All’s Well That Ends Well, argues that, in this play, ‘moments which celebrate virginity and maternity can be read as a secular refashioning of the cult of relics, images, and rituals in which Mary had assumed a tangible authority of her own in the lives of Christians.’ She claims that ‘[t]he authority of the patriarchal world is subverted by a tripartite representation of the Virgin Mary as virgin, mother and intercessor in the figures of Diana, Helen, the Widow and the Countess’ and that ‘[t]he play sets up the speech of kings, fathers and husbands to be deconstructed by a Marian maternal language that prioritizes human flesh and feeling, including female desire.’ Behind the character of Helen she sees the figure of the Virgin Mary as mediatrix, a role that was translated into courtly terms by the contemporary St. Francis de Sales. Beyond this, in this play ‘Marian examples of love as sacrifice and intercession offers a feminized image of the divine’—just the sort of thing William Crashaw hated and feared. Findlay demonstrates how some of the Marian characteristics that modern feminists decry as poor ones for women—perfect obedience, self-sacrifice, willing suffering—actually and paradoxically are dramatized in Shakespeare’s play as forms of empowered selfassertion. In her discussion of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Stephanie HodgsonWright claims that the play ‘generates a strongly argued debate about submission to and resistance against tyranny’ and invokes ‘“Marian moments” to underpin its key points.’ Noting that the name of the central character links her both to Mary, Queen of Scots and to the Virgin Mary, Hodgson-Wright argues that Cary demonstrates how, in marriage, the Catholic wife is more empowered than the Protestant one because ‘her relationship with the Church was essentially separate, affording her a limited amount of spiritual autonomy.’ The tyrannical Herod, on the other hand, exemplifies Protestant hostility to the presence of the feminine in religion: ‘Herod’s excision of the queen regnant from the Judean body politic might be read as analogous to the theological excision not only of a spiritual female presence in religious observances, but also of the spiritual autonomy of the individual female subject, by the Protestant Reformation in England.’ Lisa Hopkins observes that, in Shakespeare’s Othello, ‘two religious systems jostle for pre-eminence … [and] women tend to adhere to the older one.’ She examines the pan-European (and Mexican) phenomenon of the black Madonna, some four hundred examples of which existed by the sixteenth century, including that found at the shrine at Loreto and that of England’s ‘holiest shrine’ at Walsingham, whose Madonna was

FOREWORD

xix

a copy of the one in the former. Hopkins argues that ‘Othello reproduces the concerns and emotions generated by Black Virgins by similarly bringing together and exploring images of blackness, virginity, identity and salvation, in order to situate its domestic tragedy within an epistemological and eschatological context. Ultimately … Othello presents a world in which the loss of the rich heritage and complex possibilities of Mariology is perceived as imposing stark limitations on human behavior and selfimage.’ In line with some recent discussions of Shakespeare’s Catholic background, she concludes that ‘[i]n Othello, we seem to see one more sign of the consequences of the loss of Catholicism’—a loss that might, for Shakespeare, have been a personal one.9 There are ‘[e]choes of … devotion [to Mary],’ Helen Ostovich argues, in Shakespeare’s presentation of Queen Isabel in Richard II. This historical childbride of the king is associated, specifically, with the Marian virginal metaphor of the enclosed garden. The three scenes in which the Queen appears put her ‘in the paradoxical position as maid, wife, widow, and mother’ and she is associated ‘generally with the cult of the Virgin Mary and the related cult of Elizabeth.’ Ostovich interprets Isabel’s religious language as authoritative confirmation of the monarchical legitimacy of Richard, not just as political partisanship, arguing that Shakespeare uses a residual Catholic language to deal with political ideology in this drama. In a similar fashion, Thomas Rist argues that John Marston’s Sophonisba, in evoking the medieval cult of the Virgin, ‘presents such [a] cult in a world of moral and political relativity in which “the honour of the saints” could no longer be taken for granted, reflecting challenges to the cult of Mary which the Reformation brought to the fore and which themselves render Marston’s “Marianism” self-consciously political.’ Instead of using the older symbolic language to reinforce an ideology of kingship, however, Marston, Rist claims, chooses to suggest ambiguity in religious/ national divisions in post-Reformation English culture. Together, the essays in this collection highlight the presence in the time of Shakespeare and his contemporaries of a Catholic symbolic residue10 of Marianism, which dramatists utilized for figurative purposes to enrich the thematic material of their plays. The little-recognized presence in post-Reformation England of elements of a pre-Reformation Marianism helps to confirm the view of Christopher Haigh, Eamon Duffy and others that English Catholicism was slow to recede from its position of cultural centrality. Given the psychological, emotional, and social needs satisfied by Marian devotion, it is not surprising that the figure of Mary did not fade into the background as quickly as the more determined Protestant reformers wished it would. As the essays dealing with the meaning of Mary for women demonstrate, Marianism was not necessarily the politically-retrograde ideology from which Protestantism liberated women: in fact, as several contributors suggest, the opposite 9 See, for example, my essay, ‘Shakespeare and Catholicism,’ in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Gail Findlay and Richard Wilson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 218–41. 10 I use Elizabeth Mazzola’s term from her book, The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998), 7.

xx

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

was the case. Feminist scholars have been slower to rediscover the lives and writings of Catholic women (except for the case of Elizabeth Cary) than they have those of more dramatically transgressive women such as Eleanor Davies and Anna Trapnel, since they have associated the Catholic women with rigid forms of subservience and obedience. But, as the discussions of ‘Marian moments’ in the drama of early modern England demonstrate, women’s religious, personal, and political empowerment could be facilitated, rather than impeded, by the ‘old religion’ and by the functioning within it of the figure of Mary and the practices of Marian devotion. What, on the face of it, looks like an unpromising topic of feminist inquiry, proves quite rewarding. Works Cited and Consulted Donne, John, The Divine Poems, 2nd edn, edited by Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400– 1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Haigh, Christopher, ‘Catholicism in Early Modern England: Bossy and Beyond,’ The Historical Journal 45.2 (2002): 481–94. ——, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,’ Past and Present 93 (1981): 37–69. Klawitter, George, ‘John Donne’s Attitude Toward the Virgin Mary: The Public versus the Private Voice,’ in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway, AZ: UCA Press, 1995), 123–40. Marotti, Arthur, ‘Shakespeare and Catholicism,’ in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Gail Findlay and Richard Wilson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 218–41. May, Steven W., The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991). Mazzola, Elizabeth, The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998). O’Connell, Michael, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm & Theater in Early-modern England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Pelikan, Jaroslav, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). Phillips, John, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535– 1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973).

Introduction Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins

Scholars of early modern English verse and prose have been slower than their counterparts in the discipline of history to fully explore the significance of holdover elements of Catholic practice in the culture of the period. Drawing on historical analyses that complicate our understanding of the ideological shifts generated by the English Reformation,1 recent studies of early modern drama have begun to suggest a complex relationship between the period’s fraught religio-political culture and the literature that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a water spigot in response to sixteenthcentury religious reform, a number of early modern British scholars have begun turning their attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in early modern drama, via stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization. While often such theatrical invocations of ‘the old faith’ are vague in their import, certainly they are not always clearly engaged in the business of Protestant panegyric or polemic.2 Authors like Alison Shell, David Beauregard, Arthur Marotti, Paul Voss, Linda Kay Hoff, and David McCandless have explored the multivalent implications of such Catholic remainders in the poetry and plays of the period, dramatic and courtly, examining both works suggesting surviving or resuscitated Catholic sympathies and those revealing the imaginative impetus of anti-Catholicism.3

1 See, for example, Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 2 See, for example, Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) and Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 3 See, for example, Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); the special section devoted to ‘Catholicism and English Renaissance Literature’ in The Ben Jonson Journal, vol. 7 (2000); Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, edited by Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); and Linda Kay Hoff, Hamlet’s Choice (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990). On the subject of survivalism, Haigh writes, ‘For a while it was possible to sustain an attenuated Catholicism within the parish framework, by counterfeiting the mass, teaching the seven sacraments,

2

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Answering the call that many of these authors have issued in their own studies for further investigation of this largely unexplored terrain, Marian Moments in Early Modern Drama concerns itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various ‘Marian moments’ from the medieval, Catholic past. In the case of the former variety of response, the essays collected here follow Huston Diehl’s astute observation that ‘popular belief in the power of images drives the iconoclastic impulses of the reformers, generating a fear of images that is at least as intense as the image-centered devotion of the old religion.’4 The Virgin Mary’s status shifted during the Reformation period from touchstone for religious piety to litmus test for heretical idolatry.5 Mary is a particularly vexed instance of Reformation Christianity, as she remained part of Reformed Christian doctrine, but with a difference. Her virgin motherhood of the savior remained as a tenet of Reformed Christianity, but popular devotion to her as a quasi-goddess and mediatrix on behalf of the devout with Gods father and son was sharply curtailed. Adoring images of Mary became taboo, but often images of Mary, particularly the pietà, remained in Protestant churches.6 Tracing the central points of Protestant dogma to Martin Luther, Merry Wiesner asserts that Luther evacuated two Biblical Marys – the Virgin, and Mary the sister of Martha, who forgoes her household duties to listen to the teaching of their houseguest, Jesus – of their potency as role models for women with his clear preference for the path chosen by Martha: silent attention to domestic duty rather than spiritual or intellectual development. Wiesner acknowledges that Luther did sanctify marriage – an improvement over Pauline calls for celibacy – but adds that ‘by that sanctification [Luther] feminized and domesticated women.’7

preserving images of saints, reciting the rosary, observing feasts, fasts, and customs: by what some historians have called “survivalism.”’ See Haigh, 252. 4 Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 14. 5 Anthony Milton, for example, notes that, ‘Protestants generally held Rome to be guilty of idolatry in her doctrine and practice of the invocation of the angels and saints, and especially of the Virgin Mary.’ See Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206. 6 On the march of iconoclasm, see Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 217. 7 Merry Wiesner, ‘Luther and Women: The Death of Two Marys,’ in Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy, edited by Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper and Raphael Samuel, 295–308 (New York: Routledge, 1987). The material quoted appears on page 306. Beth Kreitzer seconds this assessment, noting that in the specifically Lutheran view of Mary ‘she no longer serves as the powerful Queen of Heaven, but is only held up and praised as a meek, pious, chaste, and obedient girl.’ See Reforming Mary: Changing Images

INTRODUCTION

3

Such attempts to limit attention to Mary within Protestantism resulted, in part, from Catholic efforts to shore up the loyalties of the faithful by emphasizing those points where Catholic doctrine and the various strands of Protestantism diverged, such as prayer to the saints, and the cult of the Virgin Mary.8 However, even Catholic veneration of Mary came under fire during the course of the Catholic counterReformation.9 Therefore, as the essays collected here will demonstrate, her invocation in early modern stage plays – be it implicit or explicit – is always necessarily mired in religious controversy, despite dramatic sleights of hand like setting the play in the belly of the beast, Italy, or in England’s own medieval, Catholic past. The conflicted attitudes toward Mary within both Catholic and Protestant dogma and popular practice are reflected in the essays gathered here as well. For the most part, the authors represented here present a range of possible interpretations for the Marian moments that they have identified in early modern plays, unable to definitively assert their meaning. The general consensus is that Marian moments probably played differently to the members of even a single theater-going audience, with the heterogenous mix of beliefs likely represented there. Yet, that still leaves open the question of how these moments came to be staged in the first place. As Alison Shell observes, ‘At some irrecoverable point, a medieval celebration of Corpus Christi or a folk carol about the Virgin would have become a Catholic text to a singer or copyist, not simply a religious one.’10 This collection works from the of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology, ed. David C. Steinmetz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25. 8 See Early Modern Catholicism, edited by Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 118–119. 9 For a succinct discussion of counter-Reformation ideology, see Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 237–238. Christine Peters notes that by the middle of the sixteenth century, both Catholic and Protestant theologians would have been in agreement that ‘inappropriate veneration’ of Mary constituted a problem for what should be a Christocentric belief system. See Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 217. 10 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11. Shell later observes that ‘It was more natural for Catholics to make the connection with Mary; individual conformists could hold Mary in high regard, but nevertheless, veneration of her was one of the doctrinal demarcations separating Catholic from Protestant, and controversial impedimenta were inseparable from the way she was invoked in a text.’ See Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 186. For an analysis of the way in which, by the mid-seventeenth century, Laudians were exercising more restraint in linking repudiation of worship of the Virgin to repudiation of ‘popery’, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 63–68.

4

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

assumption that if modern readers or viewers of early modern plays are able to locate instances of apparent Marianism in them, early modern theatergoers living at a short remove from medieval, Catholic invocations of such gestures would certainly have been able to identify them as such. For some of the essayists here, this assumption also calls into question the intentions of playwrights such as Shakespeare who created such Marian moments for the early modern stage. However, along with Maurice Hunt we can collectively say for all of the playwrights studied what he says of his study of Shakespeare, specifically: ‘I am not at all interested in “proving” that Shakespeare was a conservative or a liberal Protestant, a Catholic, a Catholic sympathizer, or a lapsed Catholic with Protestant sympathies, or an agnostic, and so on.’ Hunt goes on to say that his interest lies in exploring the religious interests that the eruption of sacred references in secular texts reveal, regardless of the texts’ (seeming) doctrinal sympathies.11 The analyses collected here are grounded in similar principles, although several contributors, including Lisa Hopkins, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright and Greg Maillet, do take up the question of whether ‘Marian moments’ allow for the possibility of a continued commitment to Catholicism, on the part of the playwright, the viewing audience, or both. Moreover, the essays in this volume are written not from the perspective of the religious commitments of the essayists, but, rather, with a view toward illuminating the ways in which subversive attention to Marian devotion manifested itself on the early modern English stage. In Hail Mary? Maurice Hamington offers a helpful definition of Mariolatry which serves as a litmus test for the early modern theatrical moments discussed in this collection. In Hamington’s judgment, Mariolatry is a level of devotion to Mary ‘out of proportion to Catholic orthodoxy’ which officially recognizes Mary as neither divine, nor worthy of worship commensurate with that directed to God, Father and Son.12 Reformation iconoclasm struck out at Marian devotion with particular vigor, categorically denying her devotional status as an ‘honorary member’ of the Holy Trinity, a human incarnation of the ambiguous Holy Spirit.13 However, Mary’s role in the narrative of Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection remained current in the Church of England, producing tension between belief and devotion, and retaining faith without lapsing into idolatry. Marian moments 11 Maurice Hunt, Preface, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). 12 Maurice Hamington, Hail Mary? The Struggle for Ultimate Womanhood in Catholicism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 6–7. 13 On this point, as well as other general observations about the trajectory of the cult of Mary, see Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 19. Despite efforts to detract from Marian veneration, Christine Peters notes that ‘It is oversimplistic to see an attack on Marian veneration as getting rid of the Virgin Mary to the detriment of women and their access to a female role model.’ See Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 223.

INTRODUCTION

5

in early modern drama, therefore, mark religio-cultural stress points, which always yield something when pressed. In his magisterial study Mary Through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan links Mary to her sister in theological debate and early modern misogynist polemic, Eve: [T]he Virgin Mary has been the subject of more thought and discussion about what it means to be a woman than any other woman in Western history. To an extent that many have chosen to ignore, explanations about Mary or portraits of her in words or in pictures can tell us much about how ‘the feminine’ has been perceived. Together with Eve, with whom she has often been contrasted as the Second Eve, she has provided the subject matter for some of the best and some of the worst in that checkered history [...] Because Mary is the Woman par excellence for most of Western history, the subtleties and complexities in the interpretation of her person and work are at the same time central to the study of the place of women in history.14

Recent criticism devoted to the work of early modern women writers such as ‘Constantia Munda,’ Rachel Speght and Aemilia Lanyer has focused primarily on these writers’ recuperations of Eve and her role in the fall; often, such rescue missions hinge on the fact that had Eve not initiated the Fall, the birth and subsequent salvific death of Christ would never have been necessary.15 As Rachel Speght notes, ‘the first promise that was made in Paradise, God makes to woman, that by her Seede should the Serpents head be broken.’16 Speght redeems Eve here as the originary ancestor of Jesus, but also, implicitly, celebrates Mary as the actual bearer of the Christ child. While work such as Speght’s remains a rich mine for further study, it is the position of the editors of and contributors to this collection that the exploration of Marian moments on the early modern stage also has much to tell us about cultural attitudes toward women in early modern English society. In some instances, as Ruth Vanita has argued, ‘Elements of Mariology critique male-female relations and suggest visionary resolutions which resonate with the medieval past and look forward to an imagined Utopian future [... T]hese plays mourn the loss of those popular elements of the old 14 Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 219; see also 41–48. For further discussion of the theological history of Mary as second Eve, see Beth Kreitzer, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology, edited by David C. Steinmetz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 13, 36–39 and 44. Kreitzer asserts that, for Luther and his followers, Mary’s positive valence was still outweighed by the sheer magnitude of Eve’s negative one. 15 See, for example, Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre and the Canon, edited by Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998); Women & History: Voices of Early Modern England, edited by Valerie Frith (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995); and Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 16 Rachel Speght, ‘A Mouzell for Melastomus,’ in The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, edited by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski; Women Writers in English 1350–1850, eds Susanne Woods and Elizabeth H. Hageman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15.

6

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

religion that imaginatively empowered the powerless, especially women, and that combated the power of the patriarchal family.’17 In other instances, invocations of Mary exist in uneasy relationship to Protestant religio-political agendas and, finally, there are, of course, pure instances of anti-Catholic misogyny related in some way to Mary on the stage that threaten to collapse into self-loathing, given continued Reformed Christian reliance on beliefs centered on Mary. In a pregnant phrase, Marina Warner identifies the Virgin Mary as ‘a protagonist in the drama of the Incarnation and the Redemption of Christ.’18 When these narratives were staged in medieval and early modern mystery plays, Mary was literally a theatrical protagonist in a manner still fresh in the memory of many sixteenthcentury theatergoers. Further, early modern stage pictures that recall scenes from the narratives that the theater audience heard from the pulpit week after week as members of the congregation were likely to resonate in complex ways. In exploring the contours of Marian moments in early modern drama, we take as a starting point a question posed of early modern theater generally by Huston Diehl and apply it to Mariolatry, specifically: ‘What might be the relation between the suppression of late medieval religious culture, with its well-established forms of popular piety, its rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James?’19 What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the ‘Old Faith’? To what extent is it true, as Alison Shell suggests, that the ‘Virgin Mary, as queen of all female personifications, links the transcendent and the topologically immanent: the abstraction of the Church with the local specificity of a church’?20 How do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm and / or the Reformation in early modern England? What do invocations of Mary on the early modern stage suggest about the roles proper to women in culture, society, and religion? Consider, by way of example, how the stage picture of Cleopatra cradling the dead Antony might evoke depictions in statuary, painting and tapestry dating to at least the Medieval period of the Virgin mourning for Christ, as does, quite possibly, Lady Anne’s lamentation over King Henry VI’s corpse in Richard III.21 Moreover, there is the possibility that, even when Mary isn’t mentioned in the text, she may be 17 Ruth Vanita, ‘Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,’ Studies in English Literature 40.2 (Spring 2000): 311–37. 18 Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Random House, 1983), xxiii. 19 Diehl, 2–3. 20 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558– 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 181. 21 For a discussion of the significant role played by Mary as empathetic witness to Christ’s suffering in depictions of the pietà, see Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge

INTRODUCTION

7

iconographically present. The ‘Marian moments’ with which this collection will be concerned are not restricted to representations of women and need not directly evoke Mary. So, for example, Katharine Goodland’s essay builds upon C. L. Barber’s suggestion that King Lear’s onstage mourning over Cordelia’s body evokes an inverted pietà in which the father mourns for the daughter instead of the mother for her son.22 This image of a king – god on earth in the early modern cosmology – twice betrayed by those who owe him dual loyalty as daughters and subjects, carrying out the dead body of the one child he had who was selfless in her love, resonates beyond the stage, beyond ancient England, beyond the confines of the mortal realm. Given its invocation of the pietà, Goodland suggests, this stage image also effectively feminizes Lear, and renders Cordelia a powerful Christ figure, a connection toward which many modern productions have gestured by having her lead the French army against her evil sisters in male military regalia, in a desperate effort to save the kingdom that should have been hers. As Marina Warner notes, ‘Although Jesus and Mary exemplified the virtues of poverty, humility, and obedience in equal measure, and although Christians of both sexes were exhorted to imitate them, the characteristics of these virtues – gentleness, docility, forbearance – are immediately classifiable as feminine.’23 The ways in which Marian moments on the early modern stage tap into the traditions of medieval drama are also explored in Hodgson-Wright’s and Maillet’s essays about The Tragedy of Mariam and Othello, respectively. By the medieval period, Mary had come to be understood as Queen of the Underworld24 by virtue of her role as mediatrix with God, the Father-Judge. This status linked Mary simultaneously to the mythological tradition which the Catholic leadership appropriated to her, as well as to the fairy beliefs that grew out of earlier mythologies and which survived in popular culture in tandem with both Catholic and Reformed Christian beliefs. Persephone (or Proserpina) is, of course, the mythological Queen of the Underworld. The suggestive links between and among these cosmogonies arise from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century association of University Press, 2003), 74–9. Peters also discusses here the prevalence of images of the pietà in English churches. 22 C. L. Barber, ‘The Family in Shakespeare’s Development: Tragedy and Sacredness,’ Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 200. 23 Warner, 183. 24 Hamington, 90. In Hamlet in Purgatory, Stephen Greenblatt offers evidence that Mary was identified as queen of heaven, earth and hell by the Middle English period, drawing upon the popularity of The Gast of Gy where Mary informs the titular ghost: ‘of heuen am I coround queen / And lady of all ρe erth bidene, / And I am emperys of hell, / Whare yhe and other deuels dwell.’ Qtd. in Hamlet in Purgatory, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 289 n. 36. For further discussion of the ways in which The Gast of Gy portrays Mary as mediatrix for souls in purgatory, see Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 72–3.

8

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

fairies with an ambiguous spiritual region between heaven and hell in response, at least in part, to Reformation efforts to eradicate belief in Purgatory.25 The belief that Proserpina could escape Hades for finite periods each year with the aid of her mother paralleled the conviction that those for whom good Catholics properly sought intercession – often via Mary – might be spared the pains of Purgatory, and be promoted to heavenly bliss. When fairies were made the guardians of a realm analogous to Purgatory, the Fairy Queen took on something of this intercessory role. For example, Bessie Dunlop delivered a deposition in Ayrshire in early November 1576 in which she reported contact both with the departed spirit of Thom Reid, who had been killed in battle at the Field of Pinkie 29 years before, and his mistress, the Queen of Elfame (Fairy Queen).26 Dunlop reported making the acquaintance of Reid’s ghost shortly after she had risen from childbed, where she had experienced her initial visit from the Fairy Queen.27 Christian doctrine held that new mothers were vulnerable to spiritual assault from the time they gave birth until they had been ritually purified. Katherine Briggs notes that ‘nursing mothers who had not yet been churched were in the greatest danger’ of being abducted by fairies.28 Rather than abducting her, the Fairy Queen that visited Dunlop appointed Reid her spiritual guardian. He proved a rather Catholic-leaning guardian, greeting her with a devout ‘Sancta Marie,’29 linking his fairy mistress with the mistress of Catholicism. Reid also shared his politico-religious views with Dunlop, views consistent with the tendency, increasingly common over the period of Protestant religious reform, to link the fairies with ‘the auld ffayth.’30 Marian Moments in Early Modern Drama seeks to deepen understanding of the ways in which representations of such powerfully resonant and conflicted moments functioned on the early modern stage. While the first half of the collection is devoted to the work of Shakespeare, the final four essays are devoted to other dramatists of the era, including the best-known female playwright of the era, Elizabeth Cary, famed for her recusancy (though not, as Stephanie Hodgson-Wright notes in these pages, until after she wrote The Tragedy of Mariam). In the first essay, ‘“Here in this garden”: The Iconography of the Virgin Queen in Shakespeare’s Richard II,’ Helen Ostovich reads the staging of the Queen in act 3, scene 4, of Shakespeare’s Richard II in the 25 See, for example, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, edited by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (1621; reprint New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1941), 169. 26 See Robert Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland From the Reformation to the Revolution, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1859),107 and R. Pitcairn, Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1833), 51. 27 Pitcairn, 51. 28 Katharine Briggs, Fairies in Tradition and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 119. 29 Pitcairn, 52. 30 Pitcairn, 56. For further discussion of Dunlop’s case, see Diane Purkiss, At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

INTRODUCTION

9

context of Renaissance art depicting the Virgin in garden scenes that both replay and recast the original garden moment with Eve. In such visual representations, Mary promises salvation in the same context in which Eve damned humankind to suffering and death. Warner reports that ‘St. Jerome glossed the Hebrew Miriam of the Gospel as stilla maris, a drop of the sea,’ but this was transmuted to stella maris, star of the sea, due to a copyist’s error.31 Hamington charts the evolution of Mary’s identity as ‘Star of the Sea’ in the Middle Ages, noting a chapel dedicated to her in this capacity in Maastricht, Holland. He cites in full a prayer that is posted in this chapel in which Mary is addressed variantly as ‘O dearest Mother,’ ‘Mother of Mercy,’ ‘O sweetest Mother, O most merciful Star of the Sea,’ ‘O most merciful Virgin’ and ‘O good Mother.’32 According to Marina Warner, it was in the twelfth century that Mary acquired the title that links her to cathedrals around the world, Notre Dame, ‘Our Lady.’33 By the fifteenth century, popular tradition surrounding the notion of Mary as the Mater Dolorosa, or Mother of Sorrows, evolved, ultimately becoming linked with the appellation ‘Our Lady’ to produce ‘Our Lady of Sorrows.’34 Pelikan traces most of these modes of address back to the Middle Ages, when such titles as Queen of Angels, ‘Mother of Truth; Mother and Daughter of Humility; Mother of Christians; Mother of Peace; My Most Merciful Lady’ and the Augustinian City of God accrued to Mary.35 Ostovich links Shakespeare’s representation of Richard’s queen to this many-sided iconography of Mary. In her analysis of Richard II, Ostovich relates the image of the young queen to concepts of the Virgin taken from Italian paintings like The Madonna in the Rose Garden, by Stefano da Verona, and elsewhere in Europe repeated in the fruit and flower motif of the anonymous German Paradise Garden and Madonna of the Rose Bower by Stefan Lochner (in Cologne), both Gothic renderings of the same subject and influenced by the Verona painting. The Sacra Conversazione by Domenico Veneziano, in the Uffizi, offers up a Madonna figure that is also common to his St. Lucy Altarpiece, or Andrea Mantegna’s Trivulzio Madonna and Madonna of Victory, at least to the extent of having the rose motif, a motif that became a familiar sign of the cult of Elizabeth, after the cult of Mary was suppressed in England. The plants and fruits of the garden and the enclosing wall testify to the purity, spiritual love, and fecundity of the virgin.

31 Warner, 262. Beth Kreitzer offers an interesting take on the Hebrew original of this phrase, suggesting that it was meant to indicate that ‘Mary and the other Jews who believed in Christ were only a little drop compared with the sea of those who did not believe.’ See Reforming Mary, 30. 32 Hamington, 96. 33 Warner, 153–159. 34 Warner, 206–223; Pelikan, 125, 132–133; and Kreitzer 18, 116–118, 120–122, 130. Kreitzer finds that Mary as sorrowing mother emerges as ‘poor, weak, alone, in danger and in need of protection from caretakers, preachers, and civic leaders.’ See page 120. 35 Pelikan, 130.

10

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

In Richard II, the garden motif suggests that Shakespeare, contrary to current critical opinion, was thinking historically of Richard’s queen as a young budding virgin, not a mature woman, when he installed her in a garden at the play’s centre in a political and (meta)physical paradigm of purity, immanence, and sorrow. Although Richard’s queen will not bear a child as the Madonna did, she does feel metaphorical growth within her, and speaks explicitly of pangs, midwives, and birth. In a barren reversal of age and authority, however, this young virgin ends by being mother only to her broken husband, whose spirit she revives and nurtures in her farewell, giving him the strength to die well. Ostovich argues that the three scenes in which she appears present a kind of triptych which superimposes a sacred view of kingship over the heavily political and pragmatic emphasis of the scenes commenting on Richard’s removal from office. Mary has associative links with the paradigmatic garden, Eden, in her status as the ‘Second Eve,’ an identity forged, according to Maurice Hamington, in the second century formulation of Irenaeus, and continued in the work of St. Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries.36 Chief among these points of connection is the fact that Eve disobeyed God in heeding the invitation of the serpent to sin, a paradigm that Mary reversed in obeying God by accepting the angel Gabriel’s invitation to become the ‘Bearer of God.’ Consequently, Eve is associated with the fall from grace and sin, whereas Mary is associated with the possibility of salvation for the faithful. While many theologians have construed the edict issued by God in Genesis ordering Adam and Eve out of paradise as a curse, Mary is famously celebrated in the Gospels as ‘blessed among women.’37 Finally, while Eve has been construed by theologians as well as by writers such as John Milton as a physically seductive temptress associated with illicit sexuality, Mary is, of course, the bastion of virginal purity.38 As Pelikan puts it, she could be seen as ‘Our Lady of the Paradoxes: Virgin but Mother, Human Mother but Mother of God.’39 In Warner’s estimation, Mary demonstrated her humility and submissiveness to God not only by accepting the invitation to be the mother of Christ, but also by accepting the pains of childbirth and lactation assigned to Eve upon her dismissal from the garden.40 Marian piety and humility served in the Catholic faith as the apex of a hierarchy of the faithful that extended from the base sinner, to the sainted, to Mary – something more than a saint but less than a god – and, ultimately, to the godhead itself. Linked to the divine, Mary was ultimately stripped of her associations with the mortal realm; this posed a problem in the Reformed Christian tradition, which had eradicated the 36 Hamington, 134–135. 37 The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, Lloyd E. Berry, intro. (Madison: University of Milwaukee Press, 1969). See Genesis, 3.16 and 20 and Luke 1.28 and 42. 38 For these and other contrasts between Eve and Mary, see Hamington, 137, and Marina Warner, ‘The Second Eve,’ Alone of All Her Sex, chap. 4 (New York: Random House, 1983), 50–67. 39 Peilikan, 51. 40 Warner, 202. For this Biblical verse, see The Geneva Bible, Genesis 1.16.

INTRODUCTION

11

saints – it left the faithful with no intermediaries, no human models. Of course, this was part of the point, as Reformed Christian doctrine prized the individual interaction with God. As Warner notes, however, the increasing sense of Mary as something more than human drove the quest for a biblical doppelgänger in addition to the sinning Eve: Mary Magdalene, the repentant whore. The other, dark side of the virgin mother of Christ, the Magdalene is defined by her illicit, uncontained sexuality and its ultimate repudiation.41 Alison Findlay, in ‘“One that’s dead is quick”: Virgin re-birth in All’s Well That Ends Well,’ argues that Marian iconography functions as a powerful means to rewrite the relationship between knowledge and sexuality in All’s Well That Ends Well. Having demonstrated her knowledge to win Bertram, the fruits of her desire, Helen is thrown out of the paradise she had hoped to achieve for her forwardness. Fallen from Bertram’s favor, she spends the rest of the play scheming to reverse that fall, and redeem her husband. Her Catholic pilgrimage to St. James de Campostella, and her meeting with Diana and her mother, lay the foundations for a feminist rewriting of the virgin birth. Findlay examines early modern views of female pilgrimage and the poetry of St. Teresa of Avila as a key context for Helen’s plot. The three women represent an empowering trinity of female love, based on three aspects of the Virgin Mary, which can recreate Helen from the annihilation to which Bertram’s hate has doomed her. Diana the virgin determines to ‘live and die a maid’ (4.2.75) but, like Mary, risks her reputation to help save Helen. Indeed, as David McCandless observes, Bertram’s requirements ‘essentially ask for assurance that Helena can conceive a child without sexually contaminating herself or surrendering maternal purity.’42 Helen, in essence, is asked to perform the same feat that the Virgin Mary accomplishes at God’s behest. Diana’s mother’s knowledge, like that of the Countess, offers a protective love reminiscent of that of the Virgin as intercessor. Furthermore, as several critics have observed, the Countess identifies Helen as a Marian spiritual intermediary for her intractable son when she says, ‘What angel shall / Bless this unworthy husband? He cannot thrive, / Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear / And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath / Of greatest justice.’43 For Findlay, Helen is the intermediate Marian figure, whose superior knowledge during 41 Warner, 224–235. 42 See David McCandless, ‘Helena’s Bed-Trick: Gender and Performance in All’s Well That Ends Well,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 45.4 (1994), 467. 43 William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, edited by David Bevington, 4th edn (New York: Longman, 1997), 3.4.25–29. Perhaps the earliest articulation of this interpretation of the Countess’s lines occurs in Heinrich Mutschmann and Karl Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952), 253. This passage is also discussed with respect to its Marian implications in Robert Grams Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 129–130, and in David McCandless, ‘Helena’s Bed-Trick: Gender and Performance in All’s Well That Ends Well,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 45.4 (1994), 456. David Beauregard discusses All’s Well (in conjunction with Measure for Measure) as an explicitly Catholic play. See ‘Shakespeare

12

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

the sexual encounter with Bertram allows her to transform sin into redemption. Findlay’s argument situates Shakespeare’s empowering vision of female knowledge and sexuality firmly in the context of early modern depictions of the Virgin Mary in terms of a unique combination of erotic, redemptive and heavenly power. All of this occurs, however, in a play in which romantic love is linked analogically to blasphemous idolatry, and in which the guardian of Helen’s chaste pregnancy is named for the classical paragon of chastity, Diana. From its inception the Christian Church rendered its doctrines more palatable by linking them ideologically with the pagan traditions it sought to supercede. So, for example, Warner points out that ‘The theme of the nursing Virgin, Maria Lactans, probably originated in Egypt, where the goddess Isis had been portrayed suckling the infant Horus for over a thousand years before Christ.’44 Both the Greeks and the Romans had myths associating their gods with mortal nurses, according to Warner, including the belief that Zeus was suckled by the woman Amaltheia, and that Juno created the Milky Way when she spattered her breast milk across the sky while nursing Hercules.45 Isis’s fierce grief over the death of her son Osiris, whose body she sought and then resuscitated, prefigures Mary’s mourning over the crucified Christ, particularly, as Warner points out, when the figure of the dead son is depicted as disproportionately tiny, visually recalling his status as infant of the anguished mother.46 Ironically, the development of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary mitigated worship of Maria Lactans, since it made no sense to venerate a Mary subject to punishments from which her miraculous conception, free from the taint of original sin, exempted her.47 A similar fusion of classical and Christian belief systems is part of what allows All’s Well That Ends Well to close on a note of reconciliation and possibility, however qualified that might seem, rather than culminating in disaster.48 While All’s Well That Ends Well hovers repeatedly on the edge of tragedy, the next series of essays in Marian Moments is devoted to Shakespearean plays that unequivocally take the plunge, King Lear and Othello. Katharine Goodland’s ‘Inverting the Pietà in Shakespeare’s King Lear,’ as noted above, examines the contours of grief manifested in the inverted pietà at the end of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Post-Reformation discourse pathologized the ritual features of mourning embodied in the Mater Dolorosa of medieval Catholic piety. Such iconography Against the Homilies: The Theology of Penance in the Comedies,’ The Ben Jonson Journal 7 (2000): 27–53. 44 Warner, 193. 45 Warner, 195–196. 46 Warner, 208–209. 47 Warner, 204. 48 See Lisa Hopkins, ‘Paris is Worth a Mass: All’s Well That Ends Well and the Wars of Religion,’ in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, edited by Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Pressm 2003), 369–381.

INTRODUCTION

13

draws on one of the most important of all of Mary’s aspects, her role as mother. In the fifth century, bishops convened at the Council of Ephesus (431) identified Mary as Theotokos, or ‘“the one who gave birth to the one who is God.”’49 Hamington asserts that, ‘Lacking theological training to understand the nuanced difference, common Catholics often understood “The Bearer of God” to mean “The Mother of God” (a title not officially declared until Pope Paul VI did so during the last session of the Second Vatican Council in 1965).’50 Albeit not officially declared until the twentieth century, the belief in Mary as both maternal figure to Christ and to all true believers held widespread popular acceptance for centuries prior to its formal instantiation, particularly during the Middle Ages, a time of rapid growth in Marian worship.51 Goodland argues that the end of King Lear reincarnates the theatrical power of this articulation of Marian sorrow. Lear’s mourning for Cordelia visually and verbally recalls the ritual tradition of weeping with the image of the pietà. Visually the figure of the father mourning the daughter inverts and parodies the mother mourning the son; verbally, the poetry of the scene echoes the Virgin’s words as she mourns for Jesus in medieval English drama. Goodland analyzes this moment in the context of early modern discourses about death and mourning, exploring how the construct of ‘natural’ grief – the idea that sorrow should be something felt and expressed rather than obligatory and performed – emerges out of the earlier ritual forms. The complex conflation of expression and ritual in Lear’s pietà, however, suggests the performative nature of both, and thus reveals the strong continuing affective power of the Virgin Mary on the early modern English stage. Lisa Hopkins’s and Greg Maillet’s essays both look at another text from the first decade of James’s reign, William Shakespeare’s Othello, and both consider the controversial relationship between the Virgin Mary and early modern ideologies of race and racial difference. Hopkins’s ‘“Black but Beautiful”: Othello and the Cult of the Black Madonna’ proposes that the play’s often-noted interest in theology and spiritual destinies should be read in the light of early modern Mariology, and in particular can be profitably related to the devotion paid in many parts of the early modern world to black Madonnas. There were many notable examples of these in Europe, most famously Our Lady of Loreto, in Italy, of which the early modern statue of the Virgin at Walsingham, England was a copy, but they were attracting growing controversy, with several publicly burned during the French Wars of Religion. In the New World, meanwhile, Our Lady of Guadalupe, allegedly imprinted by miracle onto cloth in 1531, was dark-skinned and of clearly indigenous features. Such images raise a number of issues about the nature of proof and faith, whether man is indeed 49 Pelikan, 55; on the Lutheran retention of this terminology for Mary, see Beth Kreitzer, Reforming Mary, 44. 50 Hamington, 14–15; see also Beth Kreitzer, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology, edited by David C. Steinmetz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12. Warner also discusses this appellation for Mary; see pages 64–66. 51 Pelikan, 14, 48, 129–132.

14

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

made in God’s image or whether the process is in fact the other way about, and the cultural significances of blackness. Hopkins argues that Othello similarly brings together and explores images of blackness, virginity, identity and salvation, as well as hinging its plot on a handkerchief which, as has often been pointed out, clearly recalls the tradition of miraculous cloth images of which Our Lady of Guadalupe forms part. Ultimately, she suggests, Othello presents a world in which the loss of the rich heritage and complex possibilities of Mariology is perceived as imposing stark limitations on human behavior and self-image. Maillet’s essay ‘Desdemona and the Mariological Theology of the Will in Othello’ also finds Mariological motifs in the play, but for him they are focused on the figure of Desdemona, since he sees Cassio’s praise of Desdemona as informed by the ‘stella maris’ theme. Maillet argues that Shakespeare’s Marian motifs encourage a recognition of Desdemona, not Othello, as the play’s true spiritual adversary of Iago. Though critics have often seen a dramatic medieval structure in which these two opposites embodied a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ angel vying for the soul of Everyman, Othello, Maillet argues that a more profound battle can be seen by contrasting Iago’s view of the will, so central to his evil, with the philosophy of the will enacted, indeed embodied, by Desdemona. However, the nature and importance of Desdemona’s view of the will requires not only philosophical but also theological explanation, drawing on a theology well known to Shakespeare’s audience not only through Christ but also through the obedience of Mary. The later to be exalted ‘Mother of God’ famously accepts God’s will, announced by the angel Gabriel, and with it not only the pains of childbirth but the far greater pain of her child’s life, via the humble abnegation of her own will. Maillet accepts that the Christian view of the extraordinary consequence of Mary’s decision – the possibility of human salvation – is not precisely mirrored in Othello, and it is simplistic to label or reduce Desdemona to a ‘Mary-figure’. However, he argues that a positive view of the Marian theology embodied by Desdemona can radically alter both our assessment of the strength of her character and the nobility of her choices, and possibly even alter how we view the oft assumed, self-proclaimed description of Othello’s painful damnation (5.2.284– 87). Further, this positive assessment can serve to remind us, as have numerous recent historical studies, that the audience for Shakespeare’s plays included many ‘recusants’ – including, quite possibly, both the playwright himself and his family – for whom the ‘old faith’ was not part of a distant, medieval, Catholic past, but a living faith whose recent, violent suppression made dramatic references to this faith all the more poignant and significant, however tragic. In the first essay devoted to non-Shakespearean drama in the collection, Thomas Rist explores the ways in which John Marston examines the value of feminine and married virginity in The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606), a heroine suggestively referred to on the play’s title page as ‘the Wonder of Women.’ What renders Sophonisba wondrous is, of course, her impossible commitment to virginity, even once wed, and violently ‘seduced.’ ‘The Wonder of Women: Virginity, Sexuality and Religio-Politics in Marston’s The Tragedy of Sophonisba,’ argues that Massinissa’s

INTRODUCTION

15

‘idolatry’ of Sophonisba has Marian echoes. Rist maintains that Sophonisba’s wondrousness, grounded, as it is, in her sexuality, would necessarily invoke that of the Virgin Mary. Like Desdemona’s conversation about marital fidelity with Emilia in Othello, Sophonisba engages in a debate with Zanthia about the relative merits of virginity that, Rist suggests, resonates with Christian doctrinal import.52 Rist also discusses the cult of the Virgin Mary and the controversial claims that some Elizabethans worshipped their queen in a manner similar to that of Catholics’ worship of the Blessed Virgin Mary.53 Marston’s work is not as widely studied as Shakespeare’s plays, and certainly not as widely taught or staged. Rist’s analysis raises significant questions about the import of a Jacobean dramatic rendering of a wondrous virgin, and the return of the Catholic repressed that such a figure might represent. In a critical landscape dominated both by Shakespeare and the assumption that Reformation campaigns to squelch Marian devotion were largely successful, Marian moments in non-Shakespearean texts have seldom been given critical consideration. Marian Moments considers the implications of such incidents in the work not only of Marston, but also George Chapman, Thomas Dekker and Elizabeth Cary. Alice Dailey’s ‘Easter Scenes from an Unholy Tomb: Christian Parody in The Widow’s Tears’ argues that the final two acts of The Widow’s Tears, a 1605 play by George Chapman, comprise a parodic revision of the scenes at Christ’s empty tomb on Easter morning, a scene at which the Virgin Mary was traditionally believed to be present. Although this feature of the play has been overlooked by Chapman scholarship, the Easter parody is integral to an understanding of the play’s moral and thematic concerns. Moreover, Chapman’s adaptation of religious material necessarily links his play to earlier Christian drama in ways that not only help us to interpret The Widow’s Tears but point to an evocative interaction between early modern drama and its medieval predecessors. The Widow’s Tears provides a case study of how seventeenth-century drama accommodates the structures and tropes of biblical, liturgical, and popular traditions to explore secular – and even profane – subjects. Contrasting the fallen world of The Widow’s Tears with the ultimately redeemed one of A Winter’s Tale, Dailey argues that Chapman’s play depends on ‘a vision of womanhood and humanity as ultimately microscopic representations of

52 Beth Kreitzer discusses the detriments of such theology for actual women, noting that Mary’s ‘religious virtues (faith, humility) are intertwined with her ‘feminine,’ moral virtues (modesty, purity, chastity) in a way that gives added support to the image of the proper woman as both theologically humble and passive, and sexually chaste and domesticated.’ See Reforming Mary, 43. 53 One of the seminal studies of the link between the Virgin Mary and Queen Elizabeth I is Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). Alison Shell argues that Catholics were deeply ambivalent about this link. See Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 203–204.

16

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

God,’ and shows how the loss of faith in Mary ultimately led to a cataclysmic loss of faith in all women. Regina Buccola’s ‘Virgin Fairies and Imperial Whores: The Unstable Ground of Religious Iconography in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon,’ shows how Thomas Dekker’s 1607 play The Whore of Babylon invokes Catholic-inflected Marian imagery in complex and contradictory ways that are revelatory of the increasingly fractured nature of Reformed Christian sectarianism in seventeenth-century England. By the time of Dekker’s writing, reform Christians traded in a pernicious, two-sided coin featuring a positive and a negative image of femininity – the Virgin Mary and the Whore of Babylon, respectively – both related to Catholicism.54 Buccola traces how Dekker compounds this set of ideological associations by portraying a fairy queen (superstition) as a paragon of chaste virtue and moral leadership (like the Catholic Virgin Mary) set off against a nightmare vision of Catholic carnality (the Whore of Babylon). However, the two female characters threaten repeatedly to collapse into one another, imploding the distinctions between the warring factions of Christianity that they represent and thereby verging on the suggestion that they are, in fact, the same. Buccola’s analysis reveals that well after her official marginalization from Protestant belief, the figure of the Virgin Mary still possessed magnetic force on the English stage, allowing the encapsulation of a wide range of beliefs. In the final essay in the collection, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright finds both continuity and contestation with respect to Catholic iconography in Reformation England in ‘Not kissing the (He)rod: The Tragedy of Mariam and the English Reformation,’ the lone essay in this collection devoted to the work of a woman writer. Hodgson-Wright begins by pointing out that unlike many of the plays in this volume, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) comes to the twenty-first-century reader somewhat loaded down with Catholic baggage. The eventual conversion to Catholicism by its author, Elizabeth Cary, together with the existence of a hagiographical account of her life and progress toward Catholicism, has meant that the overwhelming majority of the play’s literary critics have read the play in terms of Cary’s embryonic Catholic faith. As Cary professed her Catholicism almost twenty years after writing the play, HodgsonWright considers the relationship between Cary’s eventual conversion and her play with some skepticism. Rather, she concentrates upon reading the play in relation to the contexts of English traditions of dramatic performance and of religious authority. Clearly, the play draws upon the Corpus Christi Cycles, particularly in its portrayal of King Herod. In so doing, the play gives rise to the issue of authority, both religious and secular. The uncompromising and brutal centralization of power that results from Herod’s unexpected return from Rome and his immediate re-assertion of his position as single source of truth perhaps offers some reflection upon the effects of the Reformed Church both upon drama and worship in England. Cary’s decision to depart from the source spelling of her heroine’s name (Mariamne) to one that 54 Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 30.

INTRODUCTION

17

clearly evokes the Virgin Mary (Mariam is the Latin form of Mary, in the accusative case) perhaps points to an interpretation of the relationship between Mariam and Herod as a conflict between Rome and Reform. As Marina Warner notes, Mary is not consistently identified as ‘Mary’ in the Bible: ‘Twelve times she is called Mariám, which when applied to the sister of Moses in the Greek Old Testament becomes Miriam.’55 However, though Hodgson-Wright begins by considering this relationship, she moves on to investigate the possibility that other characters and situations in the play may not equally qualify to be read as ‘Marian moments.’ As in Buccola’s essay, the figure of the Virgin Mary is revealed in Hodgson-Wright’s analysis as one which, in early Jacobean England, was fraught with radical uncertainties. Many of the essays here offer new perspectives on familiar plays by Shakespeare, offering different points of entry into scholarly discussions and theatrical presentations of these texts. Others, such as those devoted to Marian moments in Chapman, Marston and Dekker, point up the significance of plays that are seldom studied and performed even less frequently. It is our hope that the insights offered here will spur greater interest in Marian moments in early modern British culture. In addition to the fact that there are many other plays than those analyzed here that are open to such consideration, there are also entire bodies of work not represented here that offer rich opportunities for Marian exploration, including masques, and the private entertainments staged for Queen Elizabeth I on her annual summer progresses. Such analyses will profit all students and scholars of this period much, as they offer glimpses of popular conceptions of and attitudes toward the place of woman in the family, the political community, and the religious hierarchy. Works Cited and Consulted Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre and the Canon, edited by Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998.) Barber, C. L., ‘The Family in Shakespeare’s Development: Tragedy and Sacredness,’ Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Beauregard, David, ‘Shakespeare Against the Homilies: The Theology of Penance in the Comedies,’ The Ben Jonson Journal 7 (2000): 27–53. Briggs, Katharine, Fairies in Tradition and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, edited by Floyd Dell and Paul JordanSmith (1621. Reprint, New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1941). Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

55 Warner, 14.

18

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Chambers, Robert, Domestic Annals of Scotland From the Reformation to the Revolution, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1859). Diehl, Huston, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Dolan, Frances E., Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and SeventeenthCentury Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400– c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Early Modern Catholicism, edited by Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, Lloyd E. Berry, intro (Madison: University of Milwaukee Press, 1969). Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Hackett, Helen, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). Haigh, Christopher, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Hamington, Maurice, Hail Mary? The Struggle for Ultimate Womanhood in Catholicism (New York: Routledge, 1995). Hoff, Linda Kay, Hamlet’s Choice (Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990). Hopkins, Lisa, ‘Paris is Worth a Mass: All’s Well That Ends Well and the Wars of Religion,’ in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, edited by Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (Fordham University Press, 2003). Hunt, Maurice, Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). Hunter, Robert Grams, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965). Kreitzer, Beth, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology, edited by David C. Steinmetz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). McCandless, David, ‘Helena’s Bed-Trick: Gender and Performance in All’s Well That Ends Well,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 45.4 (1994): 449–68. Mendelson, Sara and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press,1998). Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Mutschmann, Heinrich and Karl Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1952). Pelikan, Jaroslav, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

INTRODUCTION

19

Peters, Christine, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Pitcairn, R., Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1833). Purkiss, Diane, At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, edited by Dennis Taylor and David N. Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003). Shell, Alison, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Speght, Rachel, ‘A Mouzell for Melastomus,’ in The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, edited by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski; Women Writers in English 1350– 1850, eds Susanne Woods and Elizabeth H. Hageman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Vanita, Ruth, ‘Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,’ Studies in English Literature 40.2 (Spring 2000): 311–37. Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Random House, 1983). Wiesner, Merry, ‘Luther and Women: The Death of Two Marys,’ in Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy, edited by Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper and Raphael Samuel, 295–308 (New York: Routledge, 1987). Wiesner, Merry E., Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Women & History: Voices of Early Modern England, edited by Valerie Frith (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995).

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

‘Here in this garden’: The Iconography of the Virgin Queen in Shakespeare’s Richard II Helen Ostovich McMaster University

Historically, Queen Isabel’s claim to fame is her age. Most sources agree that she was born on 9 November 1389, married to Richard II on 1 November 1396 at barely seven years of age, separated when she was ten by his imprisonment and forced abdication in 1399, and widowed well before she turned eleven in 1400. Throughout this period of marriage, political separation, and widowhood, Isabel was a virgin in a prepubescent state. Iconographically, a budding virgin is a hortus conclusus, a metaphor rendered concrete at the centre of Shakespeare’s play Richard II by Isabel’s appearance within a garden. This dramatic placement gives Isabel a power, visually and verbally, that expands back and forth in the play into a kind of triptych – composed of 2.2, 3.4, and 5.1 – revealing the virgin queen’s paradoxical position as maid, wife, widow, and mother. The triptych not only aligns her generally with the cult of the Virgin Mary and the related cult of Elizabeth, but also suggests the young Isabel’s frustrated longing to rush into womanhood, explicates her fierce unswerving loyalty to Richard, and questions the political realities of the play by asserting a spiritual dimension of kingship that the Lancastrians unsuccessfully deny.1 Although Shakespeare’s usual source, Holinshed, says next to nothing about Isabel, Froissart, accessible to Shakespeare in Berners’ translation, gives several telling details about her role in Richard’s life. Three significant facts – significant, 1 I am grateful to Lisa Hopkins for pointing out to me the correlations that have already been made between the Wilton diptych and Shakespeare’s play. See Caroline Barron, ‘Richard II: Image and Reality’, in Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych, edited by Dillian Gordon (London: National Gallery Publications, 1993). The Wilton diptych, or Richard II presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund, is a portable altarpiece painted (about 1395–99) for Richard’s private devotions. It shows three saints with Richard kneeling in the left panel, in profile to the viewer, facing the virgin with child and other saints in the right panel. The virgin seems to be standing in a paradise garden; little of the ‘ground’ is visible, but flowers bloom at her feet. See the National Gallery website at or .

22

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

that is, to a playwright in search of a striking dramatic angle – led to Richard’s selection of Isabel as his second bride, after his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, died in 1394. First, Froissart tells us, ‘the kynge loved [Anne] so entierly. They were maryed yonge; howebeit, she dyed without issue ... and there was no spekynge of remarying, nor the kyng wolde here no spekynge therof’.2 Second, when he refused other brides and insisted on Isabel, over English objections that ‘it is nat pleasaunt to the realme of Englande that he shulde mary with Fraunce [the enemy]; and it hath ben shewed hym that the doughter of Fraunce is over yonge, and that this fyve or syxe yere she shall nat be able to kepe hym company’, Richard replied ‘that she shall growe ryght well in age, and though he faste a season, he shall take it well a worth, and shall ordre her in the meane season at his pleasure, and after the maner of Englande; sayenge also howe he is yet yonge ynough to abyde tyll the lady be of age’.3 In other words, Richard preferred the immediate role of parent to that of husband, partly because he had loved and lost one queen already, and partly because his otherwise successful first marriage was childless. The marriage to Isabel would satisfy the political necessity for a bride and the personal desire for a child; at the same time, it would allow him a tender private relationship without sexual demands. As Froissart describes her, Isabel’s demeanour during the courtship was unusually self-assured and charmingly affectionate: The erle Marshall, beyinge on his knees, sayde to her: Fayre lady, by the grace of God ye shall be our lady and quene of Englande. Than aunswered the yonge lady well advysedly, without counsayle of any other persone: Syr, quod she, and it please God and my lorde my father that I shall be quene of Englande, I shall be glad therof, for it is shewed me that I shall be than a great lady. Than she toke up the erle Marshall by the hande, and ledde him to the quene her mother, who had great joy of the answere that she had made, and so were all other that herde it. The maner, countenaunce, and behavoure of this yonge lady, pleased greatly the ambassadours, and they sayd amonge themselfe, that she was lykely to be a lady of hygh honoure and great goodnesse.4

After the proxy marriage ceremony in Paris, Froissart reports ‘it was a goodly syght to se her behavour: for all that she was but yonge, ryght plesauntly she bare the porte of a quene’.5 The third factor in this marriage, and perhaps the most pressing, was Richard’s desire to end the war with France through a mutual alliance. Just before the formal wedding to Richard in Calais, the French king voiced a wish that his daughter were older, ‘than she sulde take my sonne with the better good wyll’, but Richard replied firmly that his will was for peace and harmony between the two kingdoms: ‘Sir, the age that my wyfe, that shall be, is of, pleaseth [us] right well; we love nat so moche her herytage than I do the love of you and of our realmes: for 2 S. J. Froissart, The Chronicle of Froissart, trans. Lord Berners (London, David Nutt, 1903), 6.127. 3 Froissart, 6.139–40. 4 Froissart, 6.159. 5 Froissart, 6.190.

‘HERE IN THIS GARDEN’: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE VIRGIN QUEEN

23

we two beying of one accorde, there is no kynge, Christen nor other, that are able to anoye us’.6 All this emphasis on the undisturbed virginity of the child-bride, and the spiritually healing dimension of the marriage itself, personally and internationally, I speculate, inspired Shakespeare to think of Isabel in terms of the enclosed garden and its religious analogies. The hortus conclusus image derives from the Christian reading of the Song of Songs, in which the enclosed garden, shut off from the earthly world, is symbolic of virginity, and all its plants testify to the purity of the virgin’s enclosed womb. As a subject for paintings, the paradise garden of the early fifteenth century shows the virgin in the company of saints, meditating in an enclosed garden of spiritual peace, a contrast to carnal gardens of love, where physical and emotional delight is the focus.7 Stefano da Verona’s Madonna in the Rose Garden, c. 1410,8 shows the Virgin and Child, Mary Magdalene, and several almost incorporeal angels among flowers and birds in a garden. The painting announces its spirituality by offering little suggestion of spatial illusion or perspective. The German Paradise Garden, c. 1435,9 influenced by Stefano da Verona, depicts the same innocent fruitfulness, which Shakespeare also duplicates in his garden scene. The rich colours and overlapping figures in Stefan Lochner’s Madonna of the Rose Bower, c. 1445,10 echoed in Master E. S.’s copper engraving, Virgin of the Lilies of the Valley, c. 1450,11 and in Martin Schongauer’s Madonna of the Rosehedge, 1473,12 indicate the familiarity of such depictions (especially the link between the virgin and the rose) in the popular imagination. The symbolism of the paradise garden persevered in later treatments of the Tudor rose and specifically in the cult of Elizabeth, whose eglantine rose frequently appeared in her portraits and portraits of her courtiers, as in the border of Nicholas Hilliard’s

6 Froissart, 6.228–29. 7 C. Grossinger, Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 9. 8 Also called Madonna in the Rosary, the painting (tempera on wood) by Stefano da Zevio, known as Stefano da Verona, is owned by the Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona . It is posted on the internet at . 9 Or Garden of Paradise, owned by the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, is beautifully reproduced online at . The Virgin and Child with Angels in a Garden with a Rose Hedge (painting on panel, c. 1430), attributed to Stefano da Verona, is owned by the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, which posts a good reproduction on its website at . 10 Also called Madonna of the Rose Bush (oil on panel), held by the Wallraf-Richartzmuseum, Cologne, and online at . 11 See Manfred Wundram, The Universe History of Art and Architecture: The Renaissance (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1972; rpt New York: Universe Books, 1988), 184, Plate 198. Unfortunately, this item is not reproduced online. 12 Or Madonna of the Rose Bower (tempera on wood), owned by the Church of St Martin, Colmar, France is shown at .

24

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Young Man Amongst Roses, 1588.13 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books like Henry Hawkins’ Partheneia Sacra, 1633, render the garden images more explicit by presenting them within a devotional text praising the Virgin Mary, whom Hawkins defines as the quintessential ‘HORTUS CONCLUSUS; wherein are al things mysteriously and spiritually to be found, which even beautifyes the fairest Gardens: being a place, no lesse delicious in winter, then in Summer, in Autume, then in the Spring; and wherein is no season to be seen, but a perpetual Spring.’14 Hawkins lists the fruits and flowers which demonstrate aspects of her virtues, ending with a description that suggests a link between Mary’s suffering at ‘the bitternes of her Sonne’s passion’ and Isabel’s tears at seeing ‘My fair rose wither’ (R2, 5.1.8) in her farewell to Richard: for each virgin feels ‘the bitternes of compassion for the affliction of the miserable; and the sweetnes of devotion was in Her mind.’15 Once Shakespeare places Isabel within a model garden in which planting, flowering, and fruition are unseasonally simultaneous, it is virtually impossible to dissociate her from spiritual values traditionally understood in a hortus conclusus. Isabel’s implicit Marian associations challenge readings in which a harsh critique of Richard enables approval of Bolingbroke; instead, a reading of the play that looks at Richard through Isabel establishes Richard as God’s vicar on earth, the true king anointed in God’s name. Shakespeare’s presentation of Isabel selectively imitates the apocryphal biography of Mary, from the virgin-birth imagery and the garden association to the sorrowful procession that ends in death. According to the Book of James, Mary’s mother, the barren Anne, conceived the Virgin in her garden. The story of Anne’s immaculate conception of a daughter acts as a precedent for Mary’s own pivotal role in later Christian tradition as God’s bride and mother whose magical virginity conferred strength and ritual purity.16 Particularly in England, Mary was the chief emblem of the Christian mystery, divinely irradiated with ‘powers of intercession, healing, and grace.’17 Fervent devotion to Mary dating from Anglo-Saxon times had totally penetrated English life by the thirteenth century; by the fifteenth, Lady Chapels had been built all over England, and Marian images 13 Roy Strong comments briefly on this famous miniature in The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 46, and extensively in The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 56–83. Young Man amongst Roses, owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, appears on several websites, including the Haverford course on Shakespeare’s sonnets showing the Hilliard miniature and a photograph of Joseph Fiennes posing as that young man at , and the Santa Clarita Valley Rose Society’s pictorial essay on ‘Roses in Art, Part One’ at . 14 [Henry Hawkins], Partheneia Sacra (Aldington, Kent: Hand and Flower Press, 1950), 11. 15 [Hawkins], Partheneia Sacra, 15. 16 Marina Warner, Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), 25–49. 17 Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 137ff.

‘HERE IN THIS GARDEN’: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE VIRGIN QUEEN

25

dominated public and private decoration, from the Master of the Duke of Bedford’s Book of Hours to statues on house walls, bridges, and city gates. Henry VIII gave new windows to the Marian shrine at Walsingham in 1511, and continued his support right up to 1538. The St. Peter Mancroft windows in Norwich, like the carvings and sculptures of many parish churches in Suffolk and Norfolk, escaped the 1561 order to destroy representations of Mary, proof that such iconography continued in Shakespeare’s day to exert a powerful influence. Echoes of this devotion in the presentation of Isabel, then, can be understood as determinants that proclaim Richard II’s true kingship authoritatively. Richard McCoy has already argued that Elizabethan public displays, like the Accession Day Tilts, adapted Catholic symbolism and ritual to exploit the residual powers of the old forms and customs. He points out that Shakespeare borrowed that cynical use of royal ceremony for secular political purposes, especially in 4.1 of Richard II, when the rebels force the king to depose himself formally in order to confirm Bolingbroke’s accession as effective.18 I want to make a similar claim for the garden scene, drawing as McCoy does upon Stephen Greenblatt’s definition of stylized display as a kind of ‘displacement’;19 that is, Shakespeare displaces the traditional sacred values of the paradise garden when he lets Isabel stand in for the Virgin Mary. The substitution compels those sacred values to coexist with Isabel’s political view of Richard as the true king, thus (as it were) sanctifying her opinion, giving it an authority and virtue beyond the secular and partisan. This kind of replication in the service of religious devotion was not unfamiliar to an early modern audience: the Holy House of Walsingham, a mere replica (so-called) of Mary’s house in Palestine, profited from a similar transfer of spiritual power, even though no claims were ever made for its being original. Nevertheless, the replica became a canonical image of the sacred house that enclosed the virgin, in whom God himself had been enclosed.20 In Shakespeare’s replication, although Isabel occupies Mary’s bitter-sweet position in the garden, Isabel is not simply passive and silent, grieving patiently over what she cannot help or understand. Shakespeare seems to draw on Froissart’s depiction of the self-assertive little princess, developing her into an imperious child-woman who idolizes and desires her handsome husband, defends her emotions and his actions in aggressively black and white terms, and wants to fulfil her role as wife and mother before her marriage contract deems her ready. Isabel’s devotion to Richard, psychologically or physiologically, may have a variety of explanations in terms of her early separation from her biological family, her prepubescence, and her anticipation of the matrimonial bed, but Shakespeare

18 Richard C. McCoy, ‘“Thou Idol Ceremony”: Elizabeth I, The Henriad, and the Rites of the English Monarchy’, in Urban Life in the Renaissance, edited by Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (Newark, London and Toronto: University of Delaware Press/ Associated University Presses, 1989), 254. 19 McCoy, 248. 20 Gibson, 142.

26

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

exploits the garden setting by superimposing the sacred on the secular, not admitting any conflict between the two. We get a sense of how the sacred interacts with the secular in 2.2, the first panel in Isabel’s triptych of scenes. As a prelude to the garden scene, the queen initiates an inexact parallel with the Virgin Mary by envisioning a virgin birth of sorts. In this scene, she speaks at length for the first time, although she appeared in the previous scene as a silent observer of Richard’s arguments with his uncles and of Gaunt’s imminent death. Her silence in 2.1 need not place her as a ‘self-effacing ... absence’ or ‘a pathetic melancholy spectator of her husband’s downfall’:21 154 lines of family dispute allow plenty of time for Isabel to signify distress at rudeness, attempts at appeasement, wifely support, resentment of the uncles’ reproaches, dismay at the outcome of the sickbed visit. Isabel’s failure to speak out may simply underscore her age and deference to powerful elders. But in 2.2, free of the hampering authority of Richard and York, Isabel bares what she calls her ‘inward soul’, revealing trepidation that suggests that she, like most children, has been kept ignorant of adult decisions, although she cannot help responding to the tensions they generate. Perhaps in an effort to seize a grown-up perspective, Isabel expresses her anxiety in the imagery of pregnancy and birth, viewed vicariously and yet experienced empathetically. She feels Some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune’s womb Is coming towards me; and my inward soul With nothing trembles. (2.2.10–12)

Despite Bushy’s dismissive argument that the queen ‘weeps things imaginary’, Isabel repeats, ‘my inward soul / Persuades me it is otherwise’ (28–29). Her rejection of adult opinion reveals unusual strength of mind, because she consciously determines to rely on her emotions as a valid way of interpreting her situation.22 Her premonition of a disaster that cannot be warded off oddly inverts the more usual aristocratic female self-depiction within an Annunciation which figures as a prayer for fertility. Mary of Guelders Standing in a Hortus Conclusus, from the Book of Hours of Mary of Guelders, 1415, for example, shows the childless lady assuming the pose of the Virgin Mary, flanked by angels, while God blesses her with a visitation of the Holy Dove.23 Isabel instead experiences a dire sensation of advanced pregnancy, describing herself as ‘heavy sad’ and ‘with heavy nothing faint’, although she cannot name the

21 Graham Holderness, ‘“A Woman’s War”: A Feminist Reading of Richard I,’, in Shakespeare Left and Right, edited by Ivo Camps (New York: Routledge, 1991), 170, 172. 22 Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982), 129; and J. G. Moore, ‘Queen of Sorrow, King of Grief: Reflections and Perspectives in Richard II’, in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, edited by D. Kehler and S. Baker (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991), 23. 23 Grossinger, 56–57.

‘HERE IN THIS GARDEN’: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE VIRGIN QUEEN

27

‘forefather’ who ‘begot’ her condition. She seems to know that the impending grief is not directly hers, but that she is somehow in line for it: ’Tis in reversion that I do possess, But what it is that is not yet known what, I cannot name. (38–40)

Once Green announces that, taking advantage of Richard’s absence in Ireland, ‘banished Bolingbroke repeals himself’ and is winning support from a ‘revolted faction’ of lords, Isabel recognizes the messenger as ‘the midwife to my woe’ and Bolingbroke as ‘my sorrow’s dismal heir’: Now hath my soul brought forth her prodigy, And I, a gasping, new-delivered mother, Have woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow, joined. (62–66)

Instead of being a means of producing peace and good will, Isabel discovers she has spawned civil war and usurpation. Instead of a messiah, she has brought forth a monster, and her reaction is understandably to rage: ‘Who shall hinder me? / I will despair and be at enmity / With cozening Hope’ (67–69). If her fantasy of innocent motherhood aligns her with the Annunciation, its miscarriage reminds us that she is herself a child trying to cope with political conflicts in which the disloyalty of others makes her affirm her own faith even more vigorously. The garden scene, the central panel in the triptych, also focuses on Isabel as child. She enters in the same mood of angry grief, unwilling to be distracted by playing some ‘sport ... here in this garden’ (3.4.1). Her lady-in-waiting suggests bowling, dancing, story-telling, and singing, but Isabel responds only to the repeated address, ‘Madame,’ which crops up in every one of the Lady’s speeches; Isabel pointedly calls her ‘girl’. On stage, this exchange might come off as comic, perhaps as a longstanding tease between the young queen and her motherly caregiver, or as bitter, perhaps with French edginess to the English servant. When she sees the gardeners approach, Isabel decides on her own apt game of hide-and-seek: Let’s step into the shadow of these trees. My wretchedness unto a row of pins, They will talk of state, for everyone doth so Against a change. (3.4.25–28)

Isabel thus introduces the political discussion that follows, but her eavesdropping on the men also emphasizes her youthful predicament: no one wants to tell her the truth and she wants to know. The garden scene is usually understood as a prophetic emblem or figurative lesson on how to gain and preserve political authority. The controlled cultivation in the garden comments on the overgrown and weedy state of England, of which John of Gaunt had complained that ‘This other Eden, demi-paradise’, once a garden walled in by the

28

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

sea, ‘is now bound in with shame’ (2.1.42–63). The gardener himself appears as ‘an explicator of the new order of realpolitik that Bolingbroke will inaugurate’: a politics that uses murder as a ‘necessary survival strategy’ and represents political action as a morality more meaningful than family, tradition, or law.24 From the gardener’s point of view, Richard’s failure as king was not that he lopped off one branch of his family tree by killing the Duke of Gloucester, but that he didn’t complete the job by destroying other ‘Superfluous branches’, grafting, pruning, and weeding in order to preserve his crown. This principle of active intervention, including violence in the name of progress, like cutting off heads of ‘too fast growing sprays’, draining the sap of fruit trees, and killing parasites that swarm over ‘wholesome herbs’, makes the gardener endorse Bolingbroke as the more efficient politician. David Norbrook has suggested that there is a ‘tinge of republican discourse’ in the gardener’s preference for an egalitarian commonwealth – ‘All must be even in our government’, he remarks of ambitious plants that ‘look too lofty’ (3.4.35–36) – as opposed to the ‘sacramental rhetoric’ voiced by the queen.25 Nevertheless, a garden itself was an aristocratic luxury in the early modern period, not the suburban hobby it is today, and Shakespeare’s gardeners are actually talking about maintaining upper-class privilege when they voice concern over botanical lineage and exclusivity ‘in the compass of a pale’. The first instruction to the workman to tie up ‘young dangling apricocks’ on a trellis (3.4.30) might remind Shakespeare’s audience that this fruit was an expensive recent import, not accessible to ordinary people. Henry VIII’s gardener introduced the apricot during the 1530s from France for planting in the Privy Orchard at Hampton Court,26 alongside dynastic and heraldic displays of topiary and statuary, including the royal lion.27 A garden of identically shaped fruit trees requires time and money, and was seen mainly at royal palaces and great houses like Wimbledon, Kew, or Theobalds. The same is true of the mathematically clipped hedges grown to enclose elaborate knot gardens of herbs and flowers or to create covered alleys and arbours for hidden shelters, designs for which are illustrated in The Gardener’s Labyrinth, 1586. The association between enclosed gardens, nubile young women, and aristocratic power can be seen in the knot-garden conceit from the 1573 ballet performed in the gardens of the Tuileries, as part of the Magnificences for the Polish Ambassadors to the French court, in which

24 Dorothea Kehler, ‘What the Gardener Knew: Pruning and Power in The Troublesome Raigne of King John and Richard II’, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 9 (1988): 125, 118. 25 David Norbrook, ‘“A Liberal Tongue”: Language and Rebellion in Richard II’, in Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions. Essays in Honour of W. R. Elton, edited by J. M. Mucciolo (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press / Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1996), 46–47. 26 Laurence Fleming and Alan Gore, The English Garden (London: Michael Josephs, 1979), 26. 27 Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England, 25.

‘HERE IN THIS GARDEN’: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE VIRGIN QUEEN

29

sixteen court ladies, including the princess, Marguerite de Valois, danced attired as the provinces of France.28 But when Isabel comes forward from the arbour to confront the gardener, she ignores the political implications and concentrates on the gardener’s betrayal of trust, which she classes with Adam’s betrayal of God’s trust in Eden, asking ‘What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee / To make a second fall of cursed man?’ (3.4.75– 76). From the audience’s point of view, her posture triggers images of the new Eve, as in Domenico Veneziano’s St Lucy Altarpiece, c. 1445,29 which shows the Virgin in sunlight at the centre, and the garden hinted at in the background beyond the framing windows of the summerhouse. The tree bears flesh-toned fruit, possibly apricots, associated with female sexuality and fecundity. Andrea Mantegna’s Trivulzio Madonna, 1497,30 depicts Madonna and child within a bower of infants, framed by abundant fruit trees, apparently apricot or peach on one tree, and apple on the other – a rich image of the spiritual regeneration of faith. His Madonna of Victory, 1496,31 shows the Madonna and child in a bower lavishly decked with lush fruits: the pedestal reveals Adam and Eve eating the apple that caused the fall of man while the snake writhes around the tree of knowledge, but the real fruit of that tree seems to be the new Eve with her infant, promising the successful return to paradise and the redemption of the fallen. Isabel like the new Eve plays a spiritual role that cannot alter political fact. Her curse, ‘Gard’ner, for telling me these news of woe, / Pray God, the plants thou graft’st may never grow’ (3.4.100–101) and her tears remind us of the similar cry for vengeance and departing tears of the Duchess of Gloucester in 1.2. In that earlier scene, the widowed duchess, relying on garden imagery, cursed Richard for hacking down ‘One flourishing branch of his most royal root’ and then exited with ‘weeping eye’; John of Gaunt’s advice to ‘Let heaven revenge’ seemed at first to mark her helplessness. But subsequent scenes suggest that her demand for retribution instigates the catastrophes that follow. The gardener’s decision to plant a bank of rue on the spot where Isabel’s tear fell also prompts a heavenly vengeance that begins to work in 5.1, the final prophetic panel of the Isabel triptych.

28 Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Woodbridge, Sussex: Boydell Press, 1984), 114–15. 29 Located in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the central panel, known as The Madonna and Child Enthroned with SS. Francis, John the Baptist, Zenobius and Lucy, is the main part of the triptych called in full Altarpiece of St. Lucy of the Magnolias (tempera on wood), and is online at . 30 Also called Madonna in Gloria con Santi [Our Lady in Heaven with the Saints] is located in the Castello Sforzesco, Milan, but is unfortunately not yet reproduced online. See Ettore Camesasca, Mantegna (Scala, c. 1992), 69, for a good reproduction. 31 Virgin and Child Surrounded by Six Saints and Gianfrancesco II Gonzaga, known as The Madonna of Victory (oil on canvas) is in the Louvre, Paris, France, and online at , and (in a less effective reproduction) at .

30

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Rue, also called herb of grace, was supposed to have miraculous powers to stir up the spirits, sharpen the wit, and provide an antidote against poison. According to John Gerard’s Herbal, 1597, astrologers considered rue a herb of the sun, and placed it under the sign of Leo.32 Given that Richard’s royal badge was the rising sun and his heraldic animal the lion, this bank of rue raises new hope of kingly resurrection through Isabel in her final roadside scene with her husband. The location deliberately evokes the road to Calvary, as does York’s later description of the jeering and the ‘dust and rubbish’ thrown on Richard during his walk through the London streets (described at 5.2.6). Isabel is shocked at how the deposition has ‘Transformed and weakened’ Richard, whose self-defeat is even more unnerving than his political loss. His abdication of responsibility thrusts her into a role-reversal not uncommon in families experiencing crisis. The young Isabel is forced to become the sharply reproving mother, castigating the now childish schoolboy Richard: Hath Bolingbroke Deposed thine intellect? Hath he been in thy heart? The lion dying thrusteth forth his paw And wounds the earth, if nothing else, with rage To be o’erpow’red, and wilt thou, pupil-like, Take the correction mildly, kiss the rod, And fawn on Rage with base humility, Which art a lion and the king of beasts? (5.1.27–34)

Her verbal slap in the face works a change in Richard, who begins to reclaim his dignity, first in his caustic contempt for Northumberland, ‘thou ladder wherewithal / The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne’ (55–56) and in his accurate prediction of the future falling-out between the two traitors, each fearing the other’s power. Isabel rewards Richard with loving embraces during the last 30 lines of the scene, a vivid reminder that the gardener planted ‘Rue even for ruth’ (3.4.106), which he meant as a sign of his compassion for her, but which, in Isabel’s plea not to be parted from Richard, echoes the love and loyalty of the biblical Ruth: ‘Then whither he goes, thither let me go’ (5.1.85). Shakespeare signals Isabel’s success at inspiring new life in Richard and confirming his status as God’s anointed in two ways. One is by framing Isabel’s experience with comparisons to the Duchess of Gloucester in Act 1 and the Duchess of York in Act 5. Both of these older women, whether as wife, widow, or mother, serve as models for family-centred devotion through which we can understand Isabel’s choices as different in final focus, if not so very different in origin. Where the Duchess of Gloucester wanted revenge despite God, Isabel wants justice with God’s approval. Whereas the Duchess of York is concerned to preserve the physical life of her son, Isabel wants to restore the spiritual life of her king. And like both duchesses, Isabel is successful. In prison, Richard spends his final hours ‘studying’ 32 E. Singleton, The Shakespeare Garden (New York: Century, 1922), 228–30.

‘HERE IN THIS GARDEN’: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE VIRGIN QUEEN

31

the value of his life, a reminder of rue’s miraculous effects. His wits sharpened and his spirits stirred up, touched by the compassion of the Groom who visits him, Richard challenges the Keeper to taste his dinner. When the Keeper refuses, and Richard declines to eat – a reminder of rue’s ability to ward off poison – the murderers enter. At this point, Richard is reborn as the monarchial lion, killing several of his attackers until Exton strikes him down – from above and behind, according to Holinshed33 – while Richard courageously defends himself against the remaining men. He dies a heroic death, asserting not only his kingship and the damnation of his murderer, but also his soul’s right to ascend to heaven as God’s anointed: That hand shall burn in never-quenching fire That staggers thus my person. Exton, thy fierce hand Hath with the King’s blood stained the King’s own land. Mount, mount, my soul; thy seat is up on high, Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward here to die. (5.5.108–12)

Richard’s final appearance in his coffin puts the play into the appropriate political and sacred perspective. The hypocritical Bolingbroke seems merely a pale imitation of the kingliness that died with Richard, and as Henry IV, upstaged by Richard’s coffin, is reduced to a final horticultural regret ‘That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow’ (5.6.46), a blood that he intends, like Pontius Pilate, ‘To wash ... off from my guilty hand’ by promising a pilgrimage, never undertaken, to the Holy Land. Such performance values argue a strong theatrical and dramatic rationale for accepting that Shakespeare was indeed thinking of the historical ten-year-old virgin when he designed the queen’s role in the play. Her age and virginity would have suggested to him the model of the hortus conclusus, the implicit virgin in the garden, displayed to the audience as part of a triptych of key scenes in the style of sacred art, an art whose object, inherently theatrical, is to ‘to make the Word flesh’ and to offer ‘visible signs that speak of the invisible grace’ conferred by redemptive suffering.34 Admittedly, early modern art generally tended to offer pastiches of time and space; for example, in the Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I,35 the queen’s head is framed by the Armada setting sail on the left, and sinking ignominiously into the sea on the right, while her hand rests on a globe, implying her control of her world. The picture of Isabel in the garden at the centre of Richard II has a similar symbolic logic: it informs the other scenes by asserting spiritual values to guide our reception of political actions. The representation of Isabel as a variant of the Virgin Mary is 33 Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 414. 34 Gibson, 174. 35 The Armada portrait (NPG 541; oil on panel), attributed to George Gower, is displayed in the National Portrait Gallery, and also online at . Another version of the portrait is located at Woburn Abbey (online at ).

32

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

supported by other imagery identifying Richard with Christ: notably in repeated assertions that Richard is God’s chosen deputy on earth (3.2.55–57; 4.1.121–44), that the traitors are like Judas multiplied: ‘So Judas did to Christ: but he in twelve / Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, none’ (4.1.170–71), and that Richard ultimately discovered strength in humiliation. Even Richard’s love for Isabel seems to be recast from Jesus’ instruction, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me.’ Isabel herself provides a significant holistic comment on Richard’s status. If she were a full-grown woman, then her inability to bear children might comment adversely on Richard’s reign as barren and sickly, and her ties to the older women in the play might merely reinforce parallels of frustration and grief over untimely death. But if Isabel is a child approaching puberty, then she is a promise of fruitfulness and vitality, borne out by Richard’s reinvigorated last moments and by Isabel’s own desire to play positive female roles of wife and mother, as well as her assigned roles of maid and widow. Her failure to become literal wife and mother is not owing to Richard’s insufficiency, but to the criminal ambition of Bolingbroke, Northumberland, and others whose rebellion prevented her full flowering. Her virginity, on the other hand, is the most positive feature of her queenliness, with ties both to the Queen of Heaven and the Queen of England. Elizabeth, especially in the last decade of her reign, fostered an idea of herself that is strikingly represented in Isabel. In the poetry, painting, and entertainments dedicated to Elizabeth, the image of the virgin queen often shows us a young girl with loose hair, glittering and earnest, whether she is Astraea, goddess of justice, or a virginal Venus, goddess of beauty and eternal spring, celebrated for her wit, wisdom, virtue, chastity, and love (especially in the anonymous painting, c. 1600, representing Elizabeth at her coronation36). As in Botticelli’s Primavera,37 she stands like Venus in the demure posture of the Virgin, representing divine love and divine beauty. Above all, she is young, even fragile, but paradoxically iron-willed. By assimilating the virtues idealized in both the cult

36 See Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth, 46–54. The dating of The Coronation Portrait (oil on panel) is disputed, but there is no doubt that it attempts to capture the young queen of 1559. See NPG 5175 at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Elizabeth Gallery website shows an alternate version on display in the Great Hall of Warwick Castle (); this site has several portraits, including a Hilliard miniature of Elizabeth with her hair down, in a case set with diamonds, owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The Rainbow Portrait, c. 1600, , likewise shows the queen with curls trailing over her shoulder; this painting, attributed to Isaac Oliver, is in the collection of the Marquess of Salisbury and on display at Hatfield House. 37 This painting (tempera on panel) is in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, and has been reproduced online at , and somewhat more clearly at . It is one of the most frequently reproduced Renaissance artworks on modern websites and in poster shops.

‘HERE IN THIS GARDEN’: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE VIRGIN QUEEN

33

of Elizabeth and the cult of Mary, Isabel projects a queenliness that is all the more impressive in the body of a child. Works Cited and Consulted Anon., The Expert Gardener (London, 1640; reprint Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1974). Bamber, Linda, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982). Barron, Caroline, ‘Richard II: Image and Reality’, in Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych, edited by Dillian Gordon (London: National Gallery Publications,1993), 13–19. Bullough, Geoffrey, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960). Camesasca, Ettore, Mantegna (Scala, c. 1992). Fleming, Laurence and Alan Gore, The English Garden (London: Michael Josephs, 1979). Froissart, S. J., The Chronicle of Froissart, translated by Lord Berners (London: David Nutt, 1903). Gibson, Gail McMurray, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Grossinger, C., Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). [Hawkins, Henry], Partheneia Sacra (Aldington, Kent: Hand and Flower Press, 1950). Holderness, Graham, ‘“A Woman’s War”: A Feminist Reading of Richard II’, in Shakespeare Left and Right, edited by Ivo Camps (New York: Routledge, 1991) 167–83. Kehler, Dorothea, ‘What the Gardener Knew: Pruning and Power in The Troublesome Raigne of King John and Richard II’, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 9 (1988): 117–29. MacKenzie, C. G., ‘Paradise and Paradise Lost in Richard II’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37.3 (1986): 318–39. McCoy, Richard C., ‘“Thou Idol Ceremony”: Elizabeth I, The Henriad, and the Rites of the English Monarchy’, in Urban Life in the Renaissance, edited by Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (Newark, London and Toronto: University of Delaware Press/Associated University Presses, 1989), 240–66. Moore, J. G., ‘Queen of Sorrow, King of Grief: Reflections and Perspectives in Richard II’, in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, edited by D. Kehler and S. Baker (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1991), 19–35.

34

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Norbrook, David, ‘“A Liberal Tongue”: Language and Rebellion in Richard II’, in Shakespeare’s Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions. Essays in Honour of W. R. Elton, edited by J. M. Mucciolo (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press / Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1996). Pearsall, Derek and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). Singleton, E., The Shakespeare Garden (New York: Century, 1922). Strong, Roy, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). ——, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979). ——, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Woodbridge, Sussex: Boydell Press, 1984). Warner, Marina, Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976). Wundram, Manfred, The Universe History of Art and Architecture: The Renaissance (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1972; reprint New York: Universe Books, 1988).

Chapter 2

‘One that’s dead is quick’: Virgin re-birth in All’s Well That Ends Well Alison Findlay Lancaster University

In her discussion of ‘Divine Women,’ Luce Irigaray complains that the absence of a ‘female trinity: mother, daughter, spirit’ necessarily ‘paralyses the infinite of becoming a woman since she is fixed in the role of mother through whom the son of God is made flesh.’1 Here, Irigaray finds the Virgin Mary an unsatisfactory model for women because she is always a secondary figure, an intermediary who alludes to or brings about the bliss of full sovereignty in male others rather than embodying this herself. Shakespeare’s play All’s Well That Ends Well (c. 1604–5) offers an unsentimental examination of the problems women encounter within such a male-centred theological tradition.2 At the same time, the play creates space to tell a different story: presenting women’s creation of a female trinity of mother, daughter and spirit, through the agency of a heroine whose imagination aims beyond her place to embrace a bright particular star (1.1.86). My essay will argue that, far from offering a limiting model to women as Irigaray suggests, Marian iconography functions as a powerful means to engage critically with a world where man is made in God’s image. Marian ‘moments’ or allusions in All’s Well That Ends Well are, naturally, more complex than the relatively explicit celebrations of the Virgin which characterized the medieval period. Promoting Marian devotion after the Reformation was an increasingly formidable challenge for preachers, both Protestant and Catholic. In Counter-Reformation Europe, refashionings of the Virgin Mary, particularly in France, presented new ways to engage with what had been the most powerful spiritual icon for women. On one hand, she became a protectress of Roman Catholic orthodoxy against Protestant heresy, a powerful figure of the Church Militant with sword in hand. Praise of the Virgin, the ‘Ave Maria’, was a weapon to distinguish the true believer from the reprobate. At the same time, after the Council of Trent, 1 Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 62. 2 William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, edited by Susan Snyder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). All quotations are from this edition and will subsequently appear parenthetically in the text.

36

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Catholic sermons of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century reconfigured her in spiritual rather than bodily terms, as a model of silence, self-control and obedience.3 In England, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation produced what Peter Lake has described as a de facto religious pluralism in which communities of believers were under increasing pressure to define themselves in ideological opposition to, or distinction from, their rivals. All’s Well That Ends Well, which combines a folktale plot with extensive Christian and Marian allusions, seems a natural product of the heterodox religious scene where, in Lake’s words, ‘variegated Christian and sub-Christian bric-a-brac was to be found all over the social, conceptual and representational landscape.’4 Marian devotion was a distinctive marker of faith amongst the ‘sundrie repugnant professions of faith lately sprung up in our Brytaine,’ as Robert Chambers argued in a dedicatory epistle to Miracles Lately Wrought by the Intercession of the Glorious Virgin Marie (1606).5 He went on to tell King James that, just as Christ listened to the intercessions of the Virgin, so he ought to extend peace to his Catholic subjects for the sake of his mother Mary. Her ‘showres of teares’ should have ‘inclined her most beloved Chylde with all dutiful reverence,’ compelling him to respect ‘the Catholik cause’.6 If All’s Well That Ends Well was indeed written shortly after James’s accession, its Marian allusions would carry an extra political charge in the climate that saw petitions from Catholics and Puritans, the Hampton Court Conference and the Gunpowder Plot. The romance plot of All’s Well That Ends Well traces the tradition of the clever low-born heroine who wins her beloved by cunning alongside a Christian narrative of miracle and redemption, as Helen Wilcox analyses.7 The pattern of Fall and Redemption it traces is female-centred, focusing on the opposing figures of Eve and Mary. Having audaciously presumed to use her father’s knowledge to win the fruits of her desire in Bertram, Helen is thrown out of the paradise she had hoped to achieve. Fallen from Bertram’s favour, she spends the rest of the play scheming to reverse that fall and redeem her husband. Her Catholic pilgrimage to St James de Compostella and her meeting with Diana and her mother lay the foundations for a feminist rewriting of the virgin birth in Act 5 Scene 3. The play’s resolution depends 3 Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 148, 208, 213. 4 Peter Lake, ‘Religious Identities in Shakespeare’s England,’ in A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 57–84, at 79. 5 Robert Chambers, ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ to Philippe Numan, Miracle Lately Wrought by the Intercession of the Glorious Virgin Maries, at Mont-aigu, trans. Robert Chambers (Antwerp: 1606), sig. B6. 6 Ibid., sig. C5v. 7 Helen Wilcox, ‘Shakespeare’s Miracle Play? Religion in All’s Well That Ends Well,’ in All’s Well That Ends Well, Routledge Shakespeare Criticism series, edited by Gary Waller (London: Routledge, 2006).

‘ONE THAT’S DEAD IS QUICK’

37

on a mutually empowering trinity of female love between the women characters that can recreate Helen from the annihilation to which Bertram’s hate has doomed her. The authority of the patriarchal Word is subverted by a tripartite representation of the Virgin Mary as virgin, mother and intercessor in the figures of Diana, Helen, the Widow and the Countess. Although the Marian icon is fragmented in the postlapsarian or post-Reformation context, the cooperative conspiracy of women in All’s Well That Ends Well goes a considerable way to meeting Irigaray’s call for a female image of the divine. The play sets up the speech of kings, fathers and husbands to be deconstructed by a Marian maternal language that prioritizes human flesh and feeling, including female desire. The Virgin’s body and its connection to Christ’s had been much celebrated in medieval Catholic worship as opening a pathway between the human and the divine. In All’s Well That Ends Well moments which celebrate virginity and maternity can be read as a secular refashioning of the cult of relics, images, and rituals in which Mary had assumed a tangible authority of her own in the lives of Christians. Such sovereignty, Catholic and female, automatically challenges the masculine Word, a god-given authority held by the play’s male characters. The first scene introduces Paroles whose name advertises his personification of a devalued masculine discourse. Helen challenges his definition of virginity as the vehicle of male reproduction, a ‘commodity’ which is more or less ‘vendible’ (1.1.142–3). Rather than being subjected to the desires of a man who will ‘undermine you and blow you up’ (1.1.113), she regards virginity as a weapon. Her question ‘Is there no military policy how virgins might blow up men?’ (1.1.115) would certainly have frisson for Catholic or Protestant spectators in any performance after 5 November 1605. At the French court, Helen challenges a more sympathetic but dangerously narcissistic all-male environment, discursively fashioned by the voices of a king, his lords, soldiers and doctors. The King’s fistula is symbolic of a pervasive disease of obsessive homosocial bonding, seen in his nostalgic longing for Bertram’s father (1.2.24–67) and repeated in Bertram’s preference for the companionship of the misogynistic soldier-braggart, Paroles. Death casts a long and heavy shadow over this post-lapsarian world; its discourse is weighted with a knowledge that ‘labouring art can never ransom nature / From her inaidible estate’ (2.1.116–17). Helen’s presence as a self-directed female subject breaks open the sterile male monopoly on learning, speech and divine authority. She brings aid into the Court to redeem the King’s life. Her intervention is seen as explicitly Christian: a miracle ‘showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor’ (2.3.22). Critics have seen references to God’s purpose as an attempt to reinscribe Helen’s power within a larger patriarchal framework.8 Such readings of the divine fail to recognize the echoes of the Virgin Mary as mediatrix in Helen’s role. The accomplishment of heavenly effects in an earthly actor are an 8 Lisa Jardine, ‘Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines: “These are old paradoxes,”’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 1–18, at 11.

38

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

accurate description of Mary as an earthly instrument whose privileged authority to access divine mercy could bring salvation to those for whom she interceded. The second sermon of Christopher Cheffontaines, for example, described Mary’s redemptive mediation between humankind and the divine as reversing that of Eve: Crudelis mediatrix Eva, per quam serpens antiquus pestiferum etiam ipsi viro virus infudit, sed fidelis Maria, quae salutis antidotum et viris et mulierabis propinavit … Securium igitur accessum habes o homo apud Deum, ubi habes filium ante patrem, ante filim matrem. [Eve was a cruel mediator, through whom the ancient serpent poured the deadly poison also into the man himself, but Mary was faithful, and she hands to women and men the antidote of salvation … You have, O man, a sure access to God. You have there the Mother before the Son and the Son before the Father.]9

It is on this Marian model that Helen bases her negotiations with the King. When her help is first refused, ‘Doctor She’ (2.1.77) bravely reproves the King and refers him to the higher authority of God: Inspirèd merit so by breath is barred. It is not so with him that all things knows As ’tis with us that square our guess by shows. But most it is presumption in us when The help of heaven we count the act of men. Dear sir, to my endeavours give consent. Of heaven, not me, make an experiment. (2.1.147)

Helen suggests that the power of royal ‘breath’ is being abused since it bars or prevents the workings of divinely-inspired merit like her own. Attributing her power to God and to her father is not as conservative as it first appears since, in claiming access to a knowledge beyond mortal understanding, Helen rewrites the condemnation of Eve by speaking from the Marian position of redemptive mediatrix. She argues that worldly patriarchal ideology allows one to see merely ‘shows’ of women through a glass darkly, and such a blinkered perspective is at best guesswork. She asks the King to make a leap of faith, to see her from God’s perspective and to trust that women have the capacity for knowledge whose effects are beneficent like Mary’s. Her success in producing a miracle gives dramatic fulfilment to the wishes of Catholic supporters who argued that if the British people looked abroad, they would see how Almightie God at the intercession of his most worthie and glorious Mother doth as it were powre down from heaven whole showres and streames of heavenly miracles, & so

9 Christopher Cheffontaines, ‘Sermo secundus, qui de Virginis Mariae invocatione agit,’ in Novae Illustrationes Christianae fideii (Paris, 1586), Part 2, 75v–76r, 77v–78r. Cited and translated by Ellington, From Sacred Body, 221.

‘ONE THAT’S DEAD IS QUICK’

39

if they be not altogether starck stone blynd they shall evidently see that miracles are not ceased.10

Further echoes of the Virgin’s role as supreme intercessor are found in the maternal figures of the Countess and the Widow. The Countess’s intuitive understanding of Helen’s desires in Act 1 Scene 3 leads to a confession – ‘the proclamation of thy passion’ (1.3.58) – and then a promise of help. It is through the Countess’s mediation that Helen gains access to the Court, the King and, ultimately, Bertram. St. François de Sales, whose teachings fostered a Marian cult amongst early seventeenth-century Frenchwomen, compared the Virgin’s role in the Church to that of a particular favourite at the court of a great prince, ‘lequel seroit en son palais, environné de plusieurs seigneurs et cavaliers.’11 The Countess and later Helen stand in just such a privileged position in relation to the King of France, especially in Act V, Scene 3 as mediators for mercy between his princely authority and the sinful Bertram. The older and younger woman’s exchange in Act I, Scene 3 introduces forms of maternal and sisterly love which are so important to the Marian role of intercessor. After Bertram’s rejection of Helen, these alternatives to the masculine, eroticized version of love have space to flourish in the bonds between Helen, Diana and the Widow. In the female solidarity which they represent, erotic love is contextualized within what Carolyn Asp calls ‘the larger sphere of female affectivity.’12 As well as providing material and emotional comforts to Helen as pilgrim, Diana and her mother actively assist her quest to redeem Bertram and resurrect her position as his wife. All’s Well offers a fragmented yet powerful imitation of the miracle of the Incarnation in the virginal Diana’s cooperation with Helen so that she can become pregnant by Bertram. Like the Christian fulfilment of the Old Testament prophets, Helen’s self-made miracle fulfils her lord’s earlier decree: ‘When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband’ (3.2.57–60). Diana, who is determined to ‘live and die a maid’ (4.2.75), remains an icon of virginal purity. Bertram tells her ‘you are no maiden but a monument’ and complains that her vow has already distanced her, made her more spiritual than earthly (4.2.6–8). Her mother’s knowledge, like that of the Countess, offers a protective love. The Widow’s agreement is the authority which activates Helen’s plan; in this female trinity she functions like the Spirit: a focus through which the will of the three women, creator and actors in the plot, is realized. Helen is the redemptive flesh born of Diana’s virginal obedience. The Virgin Mary’s body was frequently described as one with Christ’s, especially through his suffering and death, a pattern which is imitated in 10 Chambers, Miracles Lately Wrought, sig. B2v. 11 François De Sales, Oeuvres Completes II, 496–97, cited in Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul, 221–22. 12 Carolyn Asp, ‘Subjectivity, Desire and Female Friendship in All’s Well That Ends Well,’ in Shakespeare’s Comedies, edited by Gary Waller (Longman: London, 1991), 175–92 at 188.

40

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

All’s Well. Helen’s body is associated with that of Christ in an eroticized rewriting of the Passion. She is transformed by ‘death’: the orgasm which marks the death of her virginal self and rebirth into sexual knowledge, maternity and wifely status. A comment rich with innuendo reports that Helen ‘made a groan of her last breath and now she breathes in heaven’ (4.3.51). The final scene of All’s Well dramatizes a shift from death to life, from ignorance to knowledge, with women firmly in control. Diana, the Widow and Helen dominate the scene verbally, strategically and theatrically because of the superior knowledge they share with the audience. The men are helpless to counter their accusations or undo their riddles. Diana’s confident proclamation that she is still a maid, never gave Bertram her ring, and yet knows her bed ‘defiled’ re-presents the familiar mystery of the Incarnation embodied by the Virgin Mary. The male courtiers’ reactions to Diana, ‘This woman is an easy glove’ (5.3. 277) and ‘I think thee now some common customer’ (5.3.286), replay the Nativity’s illegitimate subtext in Matthew’s Gospel (1: 18–25). Joseph’s discovery that Mary is with child of the Holy Ghost and his unwillingness to make a public example of her draws attention to a story of cuckoldry that threatens patriarchal authority in the very fulfilment of divine will. It is only when an angel explains God’s purpose in a dream that Joseph is able to understand the mystery within Mary’s body. Helen is, similarly, introduced as the Marian matrix in which purity and knowledge, divinity and human flesh, mortality and resurrection combine: ‘Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick. / So there’s my riddle: one that’s dead is quick’ (5.3.302–3). Significantly, the riddle’s ‘meaning’ is not to be found in empty words but in the presence of Helen. She incarnates the ‘Word’ decreed by her husband, re-presenting it to him in mysterious, bodily terms. Her appearance as mother-to-be symbolizes the fruitful combination of erotic and maternal energies which have allowed her to achieve her goal. The women’s conspiracy is a feminine parthenogenesis that relies on the mystery of conception within the womb, always beyond the knowledge of men. The final scene’s image of maternal authority undoubtedly recalls celebrations of the Virgin as a supremely powerful mother. Robert Chambers’ translation, Miracles Lately Wrought by the Intercession of the Glorious Virgin Marie (1606), for example, noted that Mary ‘had motherly authoritie’ over Jesus ‘for he was obedient to her, yea subject unto her,’ a ‘miracle above all miracles to have in pious and reverend subjection the high Majestie of heaven.’13 Unlike Mary, Helen is not a virgin. The women’s representation of the Incarnation is a sham. It may be a re-writing of the Virgin from the Protestant perspective of companionate chaste marriage. However, this does not make its Marian iconography any less powerful. To its original English female spectators, Catholic or Protestant, the figure of Mary, divorced to a greater or lesser extent from the paternal authority of the Catholic ministry, may have had more rather than less inspirational power. The triumphant trinity of female characters – mothers and daughters infused with a spirit 13 Numan, Miracles Lately Wrought, sig. C5.

‘ONE THAT’S DEAD IS QUICK’

41

of cooperative conspiracy – can be seen as surpassing a male-centred theological model in which the Virgin Mother’s radiance is a reflection of a divine male other. It conforms more closely to Irigaray’s idea of the Virgin’s spiritual motherhood as an inspiring force. In many ways, Helen embodies Irigaray’s idea that Mary’s virginity should not be understood in literal terms. Instead, it is a mark of fidelity to the self: the virgin is faithful to her individual identity and to her gender. Additionally, she is a figure for nurturing and affirming female genealogies.14 Helen does all these things. Female knowledge and self-possession, the source of Eve’s subjection, are reconfigured in a narrative of redemption and renewal. Helen’s self-belief gives her the power to counter subjection and effacement in her own self-resurrection. She succeeds in achieving her own goal, even if that goal is an unworthy man. Her love for Bertram may be unchanging but his status as omnipotent god of her desire is not. The Marian iconography of All’s Well That Ends Well teaches much harder lessons than the concluding scene’s triumph of female solidarity. Marian examples of love as sacrifice and intercession offer a feminized image of the divine. Instead of absolute sovereignty they promote a form of subjectivity that appears to be far less powerful. As noted in my introduction, representations of the Virgin in the CounterReformation frequently shifted focus from her humanity to emphasize her spiritual purity, humility and obedience. Distancing Mary as a silent, self-controlled and dutiful woman was an effective means of elevating her as a model for a Christian life of interior piety and self-examination. Even while being honoured with holding the fullness of divinity in her womb from the moment of Incarnation, the Virgin Mary simultaneously apprehends the pain of suffering and loss that will culminate in the Crucifixion.15 Women in the play are fully conscious of these painful or less attractive dimensions of Mary’s role. In the play’s opening line the Countess acknowledges the bitter-sweet paradox of regeneration and loss that characterizes Mary’s womb as a temple of sacrifice: ‘In delivering my son from me I bury a second husband’ (1.1.1). Helen’s pilgrimage is a spiritual journey in which she learns to follow the unglamorous aspects of Mary’s example: to practise humility, accept suffering and loss. Prioritizing its spiritual significance perhaps goes some way to explain the play’s unresolved inconsistencies about its physical route: supposedly to Compostella but in fact to Florence. Long before she resolves to undertake a pilgrimage, Helen describes herself in terms of an infinitely self-sacrificing love that recalls the Virgin Mary’s example: I know I love in vain, strive against hope; Yet in the cap’cious and intenible sieve I still pour in the waters of my love 14 Luce Irigaray, Le Souffle Des Femmes, 188–89. See Alison Martin’s useful reading, ‘Luce Irigaray and the adoption of Christianity,’ Paragraph (2001), 101–20. 15 See Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul, 159.

42

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA And lack not to lose still. (1.3.201)

Bertram’s rejection of Helen replays the experience of Mary in the Gospels who keeps in her heart the truth learned in the temple at Jerusalem that, through Jesus’ life, a sword would also pierce through her own soul (Luke 2: 35). As Alice Wood notes, Jesus’ distancing himself from Mary at the Temple is the first of five Gospel occasions in which he seems to push her away, most notably at the Canaan wedding where she tells him they need wine and he responds ‘Woman what have I to do with thee?’ (John 2:4).16 Helen’s most cruel lesson occurs when Bertram refuses even to kiss her: Bertram: What would you have? Helen: Something and scarce so much. Nothing indeed. I would not tell you what I would my lord. Faith, yes: Strangers and foes do sunder and not kiss. Bertram: I pray you stay not, but in haste to horse. (2.5.84)

In spite of claiming to love in a situation of inevitable loss, Helen does not accept the Marian model of painful self-effacement until she undertakes the pilgrimage. Here she fully imagines the emotional pain of losing Bertram to a cruel death. Unlike the Virgin, she does not experience this, of course, but accepts a lesser, personal loss in order to preserve him. She determines to endure ‘all the miseries which nature owes’ rather than cause his death and vows to be gone ‘although / The air of paradise did fan the house / And angels officed all’ (3.2.119–24). In spite of Helen’s logical and emotional explanation of her behaviour, critics have complained that her subsequent motivation is shrouded in mystery, suggesting that her purported pilgrimage may disguise a more self-interested agenda, a quest for Bertram rather than the shrine of St. Jacques le Grand. Finding a more subversive narrative within this moment of indefinition is more immediately attractive from a feminist perspective. However, taking Helen at her word, and reading her as willing to assume the self-effacing dimensions of Mariology alongside the more subversive ones already explored, can be fruitful. It allows us to understand the tragicomedy of the play more effectively and to explore a more subtle understanding of female subjectivity in relation to the divine. Helen immediately assumes a subservient position to her husband: ‘Sir, I can nothing say / But that I am your most obedient servant’ (2.5.73). Obedience and humility were Marian virtues praised particularly in post-Tridentine Catholic sermons. Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), for example, encouraged Christians to imitate Mary because ‘she acknowledged her abasement, her smallness, her nothingness, her unworthiness’ in relation to God.17 Helen defines herself in such 16 Alice E. Wood, ‘Mary’s Role as Co-Redemptrix in the Drama of the Trinity,’ Maria 2:2 (2002), 42–79 at 56. 17 Cited in Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul, 182.

‘ONE THAT’S DEAD IS QUICK’

43

terms. When Bertram refuses to kiss her she responds: ‘I shall not break your bidding, good my lord’ (2.5.90). Lines like these quite understandably lead feminist critics to read Helen’s story as one of collapse. Lisa Jardine, for example, proposes that the heroine’s dangerous, secret knowledge and active sexuality are finally transmuted into the chaste duty of ‘virtuously knowing, ideal wife.’18 The death that Helen fabricates for herself as part of her pilgrimage to Compostella can certainly be seen as the metaphorical death of a self whose assertive behaviour was directed towards the achievement of sovereignty (control, knowledge, agency). Absent from the stage, she announces her pilgrimage and renounces her claim in a letter: ‘He is too good and fair for death, and me, / Whom I embrace to set him free’ (3.4.16). Of course, Helen’s vow follows the life pattern of nuns who, in dedicating themselves to obedience and interior piety, were dead to the world and reborn as sisters and brides of Christ. Until the end of the play Helen too is ‘the shadow of a wife / The name and not the thing’ (5.3.307). Helen’s self-effacement brings her close to the Marian experience of love, suffering and loss. St. Lawrence of Brindisi (1559–1619) argued that in Mary, one saw that ‘love is the measure of grief; the one who loves more, suffers more, the greatest love is the cause of the greatest grief’. This is an active love. In the late sixteenth century, St. François De Sales (1567–1622) expanded the idea that Jesus was not killed by the physical pain of the crown of thorns, whip and crucifixion but willed his death for love of humankind, and that, because Mary shared it, ‘it must be true that the Mother died of love.’19 These Marian associations provide a different way to read Helen’s long-suffering love in All’s Well That Ends Well. The play’s motif, ‘the web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together’ (4.3.71), identifies the Christian world in which suffering and salvation are inextricably bound together. Diana dedicates herself to Helen ‘Upon your will to suffer’ (4.5.29) and Helen’s response can be read in Christian terms as a knowing reference to the simultaneous experience of pain and ecstasy: ‘But with the Word, the time will bring on summer, / When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns, / And be as sweet as sharp’ (4.4.31). These symbols invoke the Madonna of the Rosary for, as Judith Brown points out, devotion to the rosary ‘with its emphasis on the joys and the sorrows of the Virgin, were increasingly depicted as flowers and thorns in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury paintings.’20 At one level, Helen looks forward to the revelation of her plot to win Bertram a second time: ‘the end is the renown’, but the play’s title ‘all’s well that ends well’ is used in a deliberately provisional sense (4.4.35–6). Whether Bertram will ever love Helen as she deserves is left in doubt, despite his protestation. The King’s idea of giving Diana a dowry to choose a husband at Court ignores her vow of chastity and 18 Jardine, ‘Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines’, 11. 19 Cited in Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul, 188. 20 Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of A Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 66. I thank Katherine Moody for drawing my attention to images of the rosary.

44

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

returns the play to the worldly context characterized, as previous events have shown, by conflict and injury rather than harmony. The conditional tense of his concluding lines does not inspire faith: ‘All yet seems well, and if it end so meet / The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet’ (5.3.34). The play is supremely conscious that a final judgement, resolution and revelation are way beyond its human or dramatic scope. Nevertheless, the Marian models of behaviour that the text offers on stage, primarily through Helen’s example, have a redemptive dimension that obliges us to re-assess idealized feminine behaviour of conformity and submission. Inhabiting a given structure such as that of Christian theological discourse does not necessarily equate with passivity, as can be seen in early modern readings of Mary’s obedience. Robert Chambers, for example, described Mary’s acceptance of her role as the instrument of divine incarnation as a creative act equalling God’s: ‘The word Fiat proceeding out of the mouth of God was the cause that the world was created: the word Fiat out of the mouth of this blessed virgin was the cause that God himself was incarnate.’21 Here, Mary’s agency co-exists with that of God, providing a model of divinity that is both male and female. Mary is not the idea of divinity proposed by Feuerbach, on which Irigaray’s arguments draw in ‘Divine Women.’ This image of intimacy with God does not produce the ideal of becoming ‘free, autonomous, sovereign.’ To know God is not to become an absolute sovereign subject; instead, it is to participate in what is other without ever being subsumed into it.22 All’s Well That Ends Well re-presents such a Marian model in order to celebrate a different model of subjectivity or ‘becoming.’ In contrast to the men, and supremely Bertram, Helen and the other female characters work through paradigms of simultaneous self-surrender and self-assertion. They promote loving relationships as sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters, and by giving themselves to each other or to their men, they paradoxically affirm their subjectivities. The play’s resolution, although imperfect, elevates inter-subjectivity of the kind embodied by Mary and practised by Helen, as a means of salvation. The influential St. Lawrence of Brindisi preached that, for all her humility and obedience, Mary was ‘able to do more for God than God could do for himself.’23 Helen’s description of pouring her boundless love into the ‘sieve’ of Bertram’s affections, where she ‘lack[s] not to lose still’ (1.3.186–8), is celebrated in the play as a human version of the same self-fulfilling plenitude that does more for men than they can do for themselves: a maternal image of the divine.

21 Chambers, Miracles Lately Wrought, sig. C4v. 22 See Alice Wood, ‘Mary as Co-redemptrix,’ 50. 23 Cited in Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul, 159.

‘ONE THAT’S DEAD IS QUICK’

45

Works Cited and Consulted Asp, Carolyn. ‘Subjectivity, Desire and Female Friendship in All’s Well That Ends Well,’ in Shakespeare’s Comedies, edited by Gary Waller (London: Longman, 1991). Brown, Judith C., Immodest Acts: The Life of A Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Chambers, Robert, ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ to Philippe Numan, Miracle Lately Wrought by the Intercession of the Glorious Virgin Maries, at Mont-aigu, trans. Robert Chambers (Antwerp: 1606). Ellington, Donna Spivey, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2001). Irigaray, Luce, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). ——, Le Souffle Des Femmes (Paris: L’Action Catholique Général Féminine, 1996), 188–89. Jardine, Lisa, ‘Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines: “These are old paradoxes,”’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987): 1–18. Lake, Peter, ‘Religious Identities in Shakespeare’s England,’ in A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Martin, Alison, ‘Luce Irigaray and the Adoption of Christianity,’ Paragraph (2001): 101–20. Shakespeare, William, All’s Well That Ends Well, edited by Susan Snyder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Wilcox, Helen, ‘Shakespeare’s Miracle Play? Religion in All’s Well That Ends Well,’ in All’s Well That Ends Well, Routledge Shakespeare Criticism series, edited by Gary Waller (London: Routledge, 2006). Wood, Alice E., ‘Mary’s Role as Co-Redemptrix in the Drama of the Trinity,’ Maria 2:2 (2002): 42–79.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3

Inverting the Pietà in Shakespeare’s King Lear Katharine Goodland CUNY Staten Island

‘… Look there, look there!’ King Lear’s final scene, in which he grieves for Cordelia and then dies, is perhaps the most devastating in all of tragic drama. Susan Snyder observes that ‘tragedy enacts our ambivalent response to death and to what death makes absolute, the failure of power and the end of hope,’ positing that King Lear’s ‘undeniable special potency may derive from this direct appeal to the very springs of tragic power. No tragedy of Shakespeare moves us more deeply, involves us, so that like Dr. Johnson we can hardly bear to look at the final catastrophe.’1 Shakespeare makes us mute and powerless witnesses to death and mourning, unmitigated by the mediating tropes he uses in earlier plays, particularly King John and Hamlet. Unlike Hamlet, whose intellectualized, wary grief for his father is drawn out for the length of the play, Lear’s impassioned mourning for his daughter, all wail, howl, and rage, is compressed into but a few lines. Unlike the Lady Constance in Shakespeare’s King John, who dies of grief over her son offstage, Lear dies before our eyes. Unlike Ophelia, whose mourning for her father is ameliorated by madness, Lear, to borrow Constance’s words, is ‘not mad / Too well, too well [he] feel[s] / The different plague of each calamity.’2 For the entire play, Lear exists at the extremes of passion, from his rage in the opening scene, to his humiliation at the hands of Goneril and Regan, to his descent (or ascent?) into madness, to his rapture upon being reconciled with Cordelia, and finally to his excruciating sorrow when she dies. His last words have been the focus 1 The present essay is an abridged version of the final chapter of my book, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). Susan Snyder, ‘King Lear and the Psychology of Dying,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1982): 449–460, at 450. 2 William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, edited by A. R. Braunmuller, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3.4.59–60. Subsequent references to King John will be to this edition, and will appear parenthetically in the text.

48

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

of much critical attention, ranging from speculation about sources to debates over the religious implications of his dying words.3 In this essay, I focus on how Lear’s mourning over Cordelia also resonates with the Virgin Mary’s laments for Jesus as depicted in the medieval English Passion plays. Visually the moment evokes an inverted pietà: instead of the bereaved mother embracing her son’s body, we witness the aged father cradling his daughter’s. There are poetic echoes as well. Lear rages, interrogates the heavens, wishes for death, and cries out for vengeance. The Virgin Mary of medieval English drama undergoes a similar arc of emotion: she angrily questions God and asks death to take her. She does not call for vengeance, but Mary Magdalene, her dramatic surrogate, does. In both instances the parents are inconsolable. Mary refuses to cease mourning for Jesus despite the admonitions of St. John and her own son. Lear’s hope that Cordelia might live to redeem his sorrow dies with her last breath. In both plays the ‘bitterness’ of the mourners, to borrow Peter Dronke’s words, ‘is unrelieved.’4 Exhausted by convulsions of passion, joy and grief overwhelming him in successive waves, Lear expires only moments later. The laments of the mourning women of medieval English drama, and especially the Virgin’s, are a surprising analogue for Shakespeare’s King Lear, one that reconceives the debates over the inscrutable power of Lear’s final lines. These debates have previously focused upon whether Lear’s last words articulate Christian hope or pagan despair, a question that has been most succinctly addressed by W. R. Elton and Arthur Kirsch. Elton reads Lear in the context of seventeenth-century theological texts on grief, using these contemporary accounts to argue against those who find in Lear’s final words a sense of redemption and Christian hope: ‘Lear’s new belief is negative and exclusive, one of abnegation, contemptus mundi, and forfeit … his “newfound faith” is pathetically and suddenly withdrawn from him by the murder of Cordelia.’5 Elton attends to Lear’s closing cries, arguing that [h]is laments against divine Providence, his insistent ‘why’, his sense of man’s reduced place in the scheme of things beneath the lowly animals, his offering of violence to ‘heaven’s vault,’ are in large part motivated by an inconsolable view that death, excluding resurrection, ends all. This view, which is the premise of the play, implicit in its beginnings and never contradicted, is by definition a pagan, not a Christian, attitude to immortality 3 See especially Steven Doloff, ‘Lear’s Howl and Diogenes the Dogg,’ Notes and Queries 48, no. 3 (2001): 292–93; William R. Elton, ‘King Lear’ and the Gods (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988); Arthur Kirsch, ‘The Emotional Landscape of King Lear,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1988): 154–170; Ben Ross Schneider, Jr., ‘King Lear In Its Own Time: The Difference that Death Makes,’ Early Modern Literary Studies 1, no. 1 (1995): 3.1–49; Susan Snyder, ‘King Lear and the Psychology of Dying,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1982): 449–460. 4 Peter Dronke, ‘Laments of the Maries: From the Beginnings to the Mystery Plays,’ in Idee, Gestalt, Geschichte: Festschrift Fur Klaus von see, edited by Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense: Odense University Press, 1988), 116. 5 William R. Elton, ‘King Lear’ and the Gods (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 262.

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

49

… For we have among others, the evidence of a Renaissance English bishop [Jewel] that Lear’s attitude was explicitly and even verbally the pagan attitude toward death, with the grief consequent upon an awareness that death ends all.6

Arthur Kirsch embraces Elton’s argument that Lear articulates pagan despair, but he implies that the issue itself is beside the point: We can spend much time gauging the level of irony in the endings of these tragedies [Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth], but when we see or read these great plays we do not construe the endings, we feel them, and what we feel is a paramount sense of suffering and loss. The distinction of King Lear is that the death of Cordelia compounds that feeling and focuses it. All of us are pagan in our immediate response to dying and death. The final scene in King Lear is a representation – among the most moving in all drama – of the universality of this experience and of its immeasurable pain.7

According to Kirsch the import of Lear’s final moments rests in its emotional rather than intellectual or theological dimensions: ‘[t]he experience of feeling – physical as well as emotional feeling – is at the core of King Lear, as the enlargement of our own capacity to feel is at the core of any persuasive explanation of why we can take pleasure in such a tragedy.’8 But the universalizing assertion that we are all ‘pagan’ in our initial response to death elides the historical religious tensions denoted by this word in sixteenth-century England. Similarly, Elton’s assurances that Lear’s sentiments are ‘pagan’ rather than Christian, and his reliance on the words of a seventeenth-century English Bishop show the need for a more developed historical framework. The Virgin Mary of medieval English drama is also inconsolable in the face of her son’s death. The resonance of Lear’s lament with that of the Virgin’s indicates that the debate itself may not properly formulated, especially in the context of the discursive practices of post-Reformation England. Early Reformers cast mourning for the dead as pagan, heathen, and therefore sinful and contrary to faith as much for political as theological reasons: it was part of a longstanding rhetorical practice of assaulting every vestige of Catholic mourning and burial ritual. Mourning for the dead in the eyes of the Reformers was bound up with England’s foreign enslavement to Catholic Rome. In his fifth Lincolnshire sermon in 1553, Hugh Latimer rewrites English history from a decidedly Protestant point of view regarding mourning customs: ‘In the time of popery, before the gospel came amongst us, we went to buriales, with wepyng and wailing, as thoughe there were no god.’9 Latimer uses ‘popery’ as a metonym for pre-Reformation, medieval England, a 6 Ibid. 7 Arthur Kirsch, ‘The Emotional Landscape of King Lear,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1988): 154–170, at 170. 8 Ibid., 154. 9 Hugh Latimer, Certayn godly Sermons, made uppon the lords Prayer (London 1562); cited in G. W. Pigman, Grief and the Renaissance English Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 32.

50

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

time when the country was, according to him, held captive to heathen mourning for the dead. ‘The Gospel’ stands for the liberating forces of Protestantism. He aligns ‘wepyng and wailing, as thoughe ther wer no god’ with the Catholic form of burial. In his sermon, he invokes Saint Paul, urging his fellow Englishmen, to weep ‘measurably as it becommeth christians,’ implying that those who mourn for the dead are not only un-English, but un-Christian as well. Seven years later Thomas Wilson interpreted his personal imprisonment in Rome as a metaphor for England’s medieval enslavement to the Catholic Church. In his ‘prologue to the reader’ of the 1560 publication of his Arte of Rhetorique, he exults: ‘God be praised, and thanks be given to him only, that not only hath delivered me out of the lion’s mouth, but also hath brought England, my dear country, out of great thraldom and foreign bondage.’10 In Reforming rhetoric, then, heathen, pagan, infidel, Catholic, and effeminacy were virtually synonymous. When Thomas Becon’s dying man in The Sicke mannes Salve asserts, ‘Let the infideles mourne for their dead: the Christian ought to reioyse, whan anye of the faithfull be called from this vale of misery unto the glorious kingdom of God,’ ‘infideles’ means Catholic as much as it means non-Christian.11 It is intriguing in this light that well into the twentieth century the Church of England was still attempting to hold out against the pagans. Phillipe Ariès relates a piece from the December 18, 1962 issue of Le Monde: In 1962 a seventy-five-year-old English woman was ordered by the Church of England to remove the sentiment ‘Forever in my thoughts’ from her husband’s tombstone. While the widow attested to the accuracy of her epitaph, ‘My husband was everything to me’, the Church responded, ‘In this age of the increasing paganization of funerals, the Church must adopt a firm Christian attitude. It is our opinion that strong expression of affection or grief are out of place.’12

The conception of a natural form of sorrow that was more sincere when independent of ritual and emotional expression appears to be tied to the nascent ideal of a unique ‘English’ identity. Ritualized sorrow was characterized as effeminate, ‘popish,’ and antithetical to the Protestant national ideal of ‘Englishness.’13 Shakespeare’s Hamlet typifies this contrast in the characters of mother and son. Gertrude’s ritualized mourning for her husband seems grotesquely short-lived and insincere while Hamlet’s unstructured grief seems endless and profound. Like Hamlet, the ending of Shakespeare’s King Lear probes the nature of grief in a society in which this vehement and debilitating passion has lost its public footing. 10 Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique (1533); cited in Rollins and Baker, 589. 11 Thomas Becon, The Sick mannes Salve (London, 1553), cited in Pigman, Grief and the Renaissance English Elegy, 31. 12 Phillippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 530. 13 On England and nationhood, see Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–9; 231–62.

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

51

The pre-Christian residual practice of lamentation for the dead which had merged with medieval Catholicism, when considered objectively, does not articulate ‘despair.’ It performs the profoundly disturbing emotions attendant upon death in order to assist the dead, the mourners, and the community in negotiating change and restoring order in society. The practice was contained within Christian teleology by being acculturated to the Virgin’s mourning over Christ which evolved into the central organizing symbol of the complex emotions of bereavement prior to the Reformation. Despite religious corruption (sometimes exaggerated by reforming zeal), the pre-Reformation system of intercessory prayer had served important psychological and communal functions in England: it had kept the memory of the deceased alive in the community; it gave the living a sense of spiritual agency in the destiny of their loved ones; and it provided a cyclical pattern of cathartic ritual for the bereaved. Other public forms of consolation were emerging, but in the first generations after the Reformation, the Reformed dispensation seems to have made the end more dreadful. Christopher Marlowe provokes a questioning of this excruciating new system of justice in Doctor Faustus when his hero, who is at once sublime and ridiculous, but not malevolent, begs for a place of punishment that no longer exists: ‘Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, / A hundred thousand, and at last be saved’ (5.3.164–65).14 For Faustus there is no reprieve because he is unable to utter the proper words in his final moments on earth. While Faustus cannot utter the proper words, those in the audience may not have known what the proper words were. The prayers that once assisted the dead and might have had the salutary effect of also healing the living were no longer legitimate. Michael Neill perceives this ‘profound source of post-Reformation angst’ in Hamlet’s ‘preoccupation with death, decay, and the sovereign preservative of memory.’15 From this vantage point, might not Lear’s dying voice be a critique of the emerging post-Reformation construction of mourning and death? With the eradication of the theology of intercession and its supporting rituals, the complex emotions of the bereaved were torn loose from their religious and spiritual moorings. Richard L. Greaves observes, ‘controversy and uncertainty surrounded burial practices in the Elizabethan period, when anxiety was probably already intensified by repudiation of extreme unction, purgatory and satisfactory masses.’16 Similarly, Bettie Ann Doebler, in her study of the Ars Moriendi tradition in Shakespeare’s drama, writes that ‘towards the end of the sixteenth century, the temptation to despair dominates the other temptations as the major obstacle

14 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. David Scott Kastan (Norton Critical Edition. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005). 15 Michael Neill, ‘“Exeunt with a Dead March”: Funeral Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage,’ Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, edited by David M. Bergeron (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 180. 16 Richard Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 698.

52

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

to salvation, because the balance between fear and hope was in jeopardy.’17 She demonstrates the ‘disturbance of the theological equilibrium’ caused by the ‘religious turbulence’ of the English Reformation.18 With our benefit of hindsight, Richard Houlbrooke’s hypothesis that the ‘denial of the existence of purgatory … may in practice have made the prospect of punishment in the hereafter less widely credible’ seems foreordained.19 For those living through this period of change, however, the curtailment of mourning and burial ritual attendant upon the abolition of purgatory appears to have intensified the emotions surrounding death for both the dying and the bereaved. While the dying hoped that sermons and stones would be stays against the sea of oblivion, the living were left to cope with a new sense of impotence for their grief was no longer shaped by rituals directed towards the well-being of the dead. Instead, grief became a way to measure the moral strength and inner virtue of the living. Mourning was still a performance, but the rules of that performance were in the process of radical change. On the one hand sorrow was considered natural, an expected, even obligatory response to the loss of a loved one. On the other hand, sorrow could be excessive, self-indulgent, and construed as contrary to faith because it was believed to stem from doubt about the resurrection. As Dennis Kay points out, Shakespeare’s Lafew of All’s Well That Ends Well concisely states the nature of the problem of grief in post-Reformation England: ‘Moderate Lamentation is the right of the dead; excessive grief, the enemy to the living’ (1.1.51).20 Exactly what constituted ‘Moderate Lamentation,’ however, in the absence of theological justification and ritual outlets for the aggregate of anger, fear, despair, and sorrow attending death, was highly subjective and elusive as Renaissance poets and prelates searched for new explanations and patterns in which the living could come to terms with irrevocable loss. Monuments, brasses, funeral sermons, elegies, and processions became the sanctioned forms of communal expression for the experience of death. But the poetics of these activities differ markedly from the participatory rituals that had gone before. Publication of funeral sermons and elegies became popular from Elizabeth’s reign onward. The published text of the sermon and the memory of the preacher’s passionate speech would have assisted in the mourning process for the bereaved, but there remained a gap between the former practice and its substitute. The bereaved were now spectators rather than agents, holding back tears and grieving vicariously as the prelate wept decorously during the delivery of their sermons. Dennis Kay observes that ‘[t]he focus of funeral observances shifted radically towards the secular. Ceremonies became, on the one hand, representations 17 Bettie Anne Doebler, ‘Rooted Sorrow’: Dying in Early Modern England (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), 171. 18 Ibid., 172. 19 Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘Death, Church, and Family in England between the late Fifteenth and the Early Eighteenth Centuries,’ in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, edited by Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989), 40–41. 20 See Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 7.

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

53

of the status of the deceased at the time of death and, on the other, expressions of the reactions of the survivors.’21 This change in focus seems to have turned the bereaved inward. In a society in which the performance of mourning might betray Catholic sympathies, the death of a loved one also became an occasion for self-scrutiny. Well into the seventeenth century, people were deeply concerned about the fate of their souls and the souls of their loved ones. Anne Laurence’s study of seventeenthcentury diaries and spiritual autobiographies shows that people not only feared God’s punishment after death, they often considered the loss of loved ones as indicative of God’s stern judgment.22 Two wives wrote of the losses of their husbands: ‘all this was to weane me from my sinnes and too much doting upon an Husband and other worldly injoyments’; and, ‘The Lord discovered to me, that I had loved my husband in a fleshly love, making an idoll of him.’23 Mrs. Alice Thorton wrote on the death of her son that she ‘had many sad thoughts of God’s afflicting hand,’ and on the death of her daughter, ‘ I shall not repine at this chastisement of the Lord.’24 Mrs. Veitch said that her eldest son’s death was caused by her ‘having been too peremptory with God in desireing to have all my Sons Ministers.’25 Henry Newcome wrote of his erring son: ‘how sad it may be with me if he die in a sad uncertainty for his soul.’26 These are not the writings of people for whom the prospect of God’s judgment and punishment seemed remote. Even in the privacy of their thoughts people felt self-conscious about their mourning to the point of guilt. In this context grief is, by definition, a selfish emotion because it has no objective outside the self. In David Cressy’s words, ‘[g]rief was, perhaps, a necessary form of self-indulgence, benefitting not the dead but the people left behind.’27 This is a marked shift in meaning from the grief manifested in the Virgin’s lamentations, where her heroic mourning denoted instead a form of selflessness: a ‘suffering for’ and ‘suffering with,’ the very meaning of the technical name for her mourning – Compassion. When sorrow turns inward, when it can only denote selfishness, when it is construed as the very premise of subjectivity, is it possible for communal empathy – compassion – to continue to exist? Lafew’s description of grief as the ‘enemy to the living’ is not mere metaphor. Shakespeare did not invent the idea that a person could die of grief in his depictions of the Lady Constance of King John and King Lear. In the early seventeenth century 21 Kay, Melodious Tears, 3. 22 Anne Laurence points out that ‘[p]arents seem to have felt that a particular lesson was intended when God took their children from them,’ 69. ‘Godly Grief: Individual Responses to Death in Seventeenth-Century Britain,’ in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, edited by Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989), 62–76. 23 Ibid., 74. 24 Ibid., 68. 25 Ibid., 70. 26 Ibid. 27 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 393.

54

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

the Bills of Mortality show that London officials attributed an average of fourteen deaths to grief each year.28 Michael Macdonald’s analysis of the 60 volumes of medical notes made by the famous Anglican healer Richard Napier demonstrates that ‘[s]orrowful occasions were so common that the causes of such misery and the mood they provoked were both described by the single word, grief. The supple phrase, to take a grief meant more than to have felt some sudden sadness; it also implied that one had been assailed by a sickness or a loss, a grief.’29 Bereavement, or the condition of ‘taking grief,’ was the third most common ailment for which Napier treated the thousands of patients who flocked to him over the course of nearly 40 years.30 Exactly how to perform ‘moderate lamentation,’ therefore, was a genuinely troubling question, particularly for women. Nearly twice as many women as men visited Napier, seeking help in coping with grief: ‘Women in seventeenth-century England were subjected to contradictory advice and antithetical passions.’31 Their entire world was circumscribed by their family; they were encouraged to focus all of their love and self-esteem on their relationships with their children and their husbands. On the other hand, they were warned that excessive grief was the result of excessive love: ‘Clergyman and physicians cautioned against excessive mourning, and even advised their congregations and clients to moderate their affections for their intimates to protect themselves against unbearable pain when they perished … excessive grief was considered the harvest of excessive affection.’32 In Shakespeare’s King John excessive affection is precisely the sin that Constance is guilty of according to Cardinal Pandulph. Constance’s ambiguous, if perfunctory, death of grief a few scenes later, casts her as both victim and agent of her equivocal demise. Lest we feel smug about the backward and superstitious medical beliefs of the past, it is worth considering in this light a recent front-page article from The New York Times. The article explains that Sudden emotional stress – from grief, fear, anger or shock – can cause heart failure, in a little known and poorly understood syndrome that seems to affect primarily women, researchers are reporting today. The victims are generally healthy, with no history of heart disease … The new research on the condition, nicknamed broken heart syndrome by the doctors, suggests that there may be some truth to the old idea that people can be scared to death or die from sorrow like character in a romantic novel or a country song. ‘It’s important for people to know that this is something that emotional stress truly can do,’ 28 Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 182. 29 Ibid., 159. 30 Napier’s practice was in the tiny hamlet of Great Linford, Buckinghamshire. He treated patients during the years 1597–1634. The demography of his patients included citizens of London, common villagers, and landed gentry and aristocrats. The cross-section of his patients corresponds remarkably well with Shakespeare’s audience. 31 Ibid., 85. 32 Ibid., 77.

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

55

said Dr. Ilan S. Wittstein, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the lead author of the article. ‘How exactly it occurs is not clear … why nearly all the victims were female is also unknown.’33

Ralph Houlbrooke observes that ‘[t]he emotional and psychological consequences of the abolition of the doctrine of purgatory and curtailment of prayers for the dead constituted one of the great unchartable revolutions of English history.’34 It is difficult to measure how each individual responded to the loss of purgatory and its mediating rites, but, as we have seen, it is possible, especially in the drama of a culture, to discern patterns that reveal the anxieties of a society in transition, a society in which every aspect of funerary ritual was scrutinized, to include the behavior of the bereaved, who were often criticized either for grieving too much or too little. Embedded in the attacks and defenses of mourning ritual is a more general distrust of grief, and the public expression of grief in particular. Over the course of the century from 1552, when the body was removed from the burial rite, to the closing of the theaters in 1642 there appears to have been a change in the severity of the denunciations against grief. There also seems to have been a shift toward more open expressions of sorrow by the bereaved. In his study of the English elegy, G. W. Pigman argues that the ‘rigorism’ which censored all forms of grief and was especially strong during the reign of Edward VI, when the Reformation gained its first foot hold, had largely dissipated by the beginning of the seventeenth century.35 Such a trend seems to make sense in light of the turbulent history in the first years of the Reformation when England alternated between Protestantism and Catholicism until the first uncertain years of Elizabeth’s reign. The Anglican compromise retained aspects of ritual that offered at least the appearance of stability and community. But well into Elizabeth’s reign iconoclasm, controversy over burial rites, and inspections by Ecclesiastical officials continued. Pigman does not connect what he sees as a relaxation in attitudes toward grief to the emergence of new forms of consolation that altered the nature of the expression itself. By the beginning of the seventeenth century written works of mourning – elegies, published sermons, and treatises – had replaced the communal rituals of mourning of pre-Reformation England. The impassioned utterances of grief that Pigman finds in the elegy are themselves dependent upon the form which mediates and contains them. A written work of mourning, although it might partake of the same rhetorical devices, is quite different from an oral performance of grief. Outbursts of anger and tears when expressed in writing are metaphorical; they are not somatic, nor do they have the force and energy of the sound of spontaneous raging and wailing. Written treatises, elegies, and published sermons sublimate and intellectualize these potent aspects of an oral performance. They are by definition less immediate, less ritualistic, 33 Denise Grady, ‘Sudden Stress Breaks Hearts, A Study Shows,’ The New York Times Thursday, 10 February 2005, sec. A, p. 1. 34 Houlbrooke, ‘Death, Church, and Family,’ 36. 35 See his Grief and the English Elegy, 27–39.

56

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

more private forms of mourning. As Patricia Phillippy argues, ‘[i]n the absence of corporate, active, external forms through which to mourn, post-Reformation grief is rendered individual, static, and internal by the acknowledged pointlessness of prolonged or repetitious commemorative acts and by the transgression implied by stubborn grief.’36 This shift is perhaps best exemplified in a Protestant work of paternal mourning that is contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s tragedy. ‘… thou hast shot … Father and childe starke dead both at one stroke’ Translated into English by John Healey in 1609 within a year of the time that King Lear was written and produced, Philippe de Mornay’s Teares for the death of his Sonne, from which the above quote is taken, navigates among his age’s turbulent attitudes to grief to find sanction for sorrow in the Psalms of David and in David’s mourning over Absalom. Mornay was a staunch Calvinist, whose support for the cause in which his twenty-six-year-old son was fighting when he was fatally wounded by a musket shot in the chest may have caused Mornay to feel some responsibility for his son’s death, as King David, Constance, and Lear are implicated in the fates of their own children. Like David, Constance and Lear, Mornay faced that most cruel of deaths – that of the child before the parent. As he observes in his treatise, ‘Here is a sad breach of natures order, for the father to prepare the funerall of the Sonne: for the father to be the sons survivor.’37 In his work he weaves into his narrative verses from the Old Testament, resulting in an intensely personal and devout meditation on mourning and death. Because he frames it within the scriptural precedents provided by Job, Jonas, the Psalms, and King David’s mourning for Absalom, his grief is an act of devotion. Like Job and Jonas, whom he echoes throughout, and like David, to whom he compares himself, he mourns and rages over the loss of his son. But these are gestures that question God’s will in order that, like his Hebrew exemplars, he may ultimately be subdued by it. Patricia Phillippy observes that Mornay’s treatise is ‘perhaps the most coherent and programmatic work of paternal mourning in the period.’38 As such, it serves as a touchstone for illuminating the cultural contours embodied in Lear’s paternal grief. In the lines quoted above, Mornay rails against God, accusing him of killing father and child with a single blow: the son dies of a battle wound, and the father dies of grief. Mornay’s use of death as a metaphor to express his anguish over the loss of his son evokes what happens at the end of King Lear, except that Shakespeare’s grizzled father, like Constance before him, actually does die of grief. 36 Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9. 37 Philippe De Mornay, Philip Mornay, Lord of Plesis his Teares for the Death of his Sonne. Unto his Wife Charlotte Baliste, trans. John Healey (London: G. Eld, 1609), sig. B2V. 38 Women, Death and Literature, 161.

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

57

The purpose of Mornay’s exploration of the nature and spiritual ramifications of his grief is not simply to examine his own sense of sorrow, but, also, and perhaps, more importantly to serve as an example and means of consolation for his wife. At the beginning of the treatise Mornay offers his tears to his wife. In this intimate and loving gesture, Mornay ‘suffers’ for his wife. His tears are for her benefit rather than his: Heere then are our teares for thee to use, if it bee inflamed, to coole it; if it bee ranckled, to supple it: put it from us, nay shake it off us we cannot, & wicked were we truely if wee could; we are deprived of a sonne (deare wife) an onely sonne: and ah how good a sonne! our God the true comforter, be our comfort: he that hath caused our sorrowes, conclude them: bee hee our cure, that hath procured our hurt: onely comforter, onely Chirurgian.39

At the conclusion of his treatise Mornay again offers the tears he has wept before God to his wife, for her comfort and use: In these teares (beloved wife) and in this manner of sorrow, it is no sinne to take our orders and proceed graduates: wee may weepe lawfully thus, as long as the streames that raine from our eyes, do not make the river of our griefes over flowe their bankes, so then, keeping this channell, let them droppe from our cheekes eternallie: Let us make us pearles of them, which no bloud, no vinegar may ever dissolve. Wee must say, adieu the worldes comfort: needes must we then lay faster hold upon that in Heaven.40

Mornay’s treatise illuminates several of the patterns I have been tracing in the course of this essay. Mornay takes upon himself the task of working through the stages of mourning in order to teach and console his wife in her grief. This gesture reflects two interrelated shifts in the construction of mourning from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, changes that are especially evident in King Lear. First, the exemplar of mourning is now male rather than female. King David’s mourning over Absalom from the Old Testament supplants Mary’s mourning over Jesus, for which there was traditional, but not scriptural authority. Not only is the exemplar male, but the interpreter of mourning is also male. Mornay, like a preacher, elegist, and tragic protagonist, teaches his wife how to grieve. At first it seems paradoxical, that this shift from female to male, what Carlos Eire dubs the ‘masculinization of piety’ which characterizes the symbolic transformation at the heart of Protestantism, was enabling for women writers.41 Yet, these early women poets remained largely in the background of an emerging written communal culture of grief that was controlled by the pens of male poets. Just as Mornay’s wife is a silent presence in his work of tears, so a female figure of mourning is a palimpsest in male authored works of grief.

39 Ibid., sig. A4V–A5. 40 Ibid., sig. E3V–E4. 41 Carlos M. N. Eire, The War Against the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 315.

58

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

As Phillippy shows, the increasingly classicized, aestheticized, and silent figure of female sorrow underwrites these male endeavors.42 The second shift evident in both Mornay’s work and Shakespeare’s tragedy is the easing of attitudes toward grief in general. In his treatise, Mornay is free to rail and weep because the written form moderates what would otherwise be cast as excessive and extreme, even given the Hebrew exemplars upon which he models himself. His mourning also serves as an example for his wife. Mornay’s treatise thus signals the transformation of mourning into a private family affair – one that husband and wife perform together by placing it in the context of God’s word. Grief is no longer something that belongs in the rituals of the Church: it occurs in the home in the presence of God’s Word. The act of publishing establishes a sense of community, but its essence, to apply Benedict Anderson’s adept conceptualization, is largely an imagined one.43 The poetics of Mornay’s written treatise are both strikingly similar to, and entirely different from the poetics of the mourning in medieval English drama. What remains unchanged is the urgent desire to experience and express grief in an aesthetic form that is grounded in ritual, sanctioned by Christianity. But this similarity also illuminates the differences between the medieval and post-Reformation constructions of mourning – from female to male, from public performance to written text, from communal tradition, to the confines of scripture, from public ritual to private prayer. The writing and publication of Mornay’s treatise may have helped him to cope with his grief, but whether or not it assisted his wife remains a mystery. Charlotte d’Arbalest de Mornay may have had a chronic disease, the timing of which was mere coincidence, but, as Phillippy notes, she ‘died three weeks after her son’s funeral.’44 The diagnosis, as Phillippy relates, ‘was that the melancholic humor spreading in the intestines eroded the colon, causing the insupportable colic that tormented her. Madam de Mornay, in effect, dies of grief.’45 This emergent form of consolation – the writing and contemplation of a text on sorrow as opposed to a communal ritual performance – is similar to medieval contemplative texts on the sorrows of the Virgin or the Passion of Christ. Yet the post-Reformation forms of consolation embody a completely different relationship to the dead, a difference that alters the function and nature of the emotion itself, which increasingly focuses upon the character of the individual mourner. David Cressy argues that ‘[t]he evidence reveals diversity and dialogue within a continuing contested conversation about religious and secular solemnities, rather than a simple linear progression from medieval to modern.’46 He defines his approach against Clare Gittings’s earlier study of death and burial in early modern England, which he 42 Women, Death, and Literature, 6–8. 43 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Books, 1991). 44 Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature, 164. 45 Ibid. 46 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 379.

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

59

believes oversimplifies the complexity of the process that Gittings sees as revealing ‘a growing sense of individualism’ in burial customs.47 But it seems to me that both historians are correct in their assessments. As Cressy shows, ‘[c]hanges in the theology of salvation produced profound alterations in attitudes to death and led to radical revision of the conduct of funerals and burials,’ a process that was neither simple, nor linear.48 Nevertheless, the outcome, as Gittings argues, does show a discernable shift in focus upon the individual rather than the community. The rituals of grief in pre-Reformation England were directed to the dead, who functioned as both subject and object of the bereaved’s prayers and tears. After the Reformation, these rituals turned toward the living, and in doing so became more individualized. For, as Cressy explains, ‘[t]here were now only two realms beyond the earth, the realms of salvation and damnation, heaven and hell. Neither was accessible to intercessory effort; in the one case all prayer for the dead was superfluous, in the other it was hopeless and forlorn.’49 Yet, the emotions attendant upon death still required an object. Cressy explains that these emotions were redirected towards the mourner: ‘Deprived of the catholic remedy of prayers for the dead, these selfconscious Protestants harnessed the process of grief to the art of living and dying’, a process which shapes the self.50 As Kay observes of John Donne’s Anniversaries, ‘Elizabeth Drury … is the occasion, rather than the subject [of the work].’51 In other words, death becomes the occasion by which the poet explores the geography of his own subjectivity. This altered relationship between the living and the dead is made piercingly clear in the oddly discordant ending of King Lear when Edgar, Albany, and Kent react to the death they have just witnessed. Their hushed and curt responses convey a sense of helpless reticence. Edgar states their obligation to ‘obey’ the ‘sad time’ and ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say’ (5.3.393), implying that this expression of genuine feeling, in contrast to the ‘ought’ of convention, is a moral imperative.52 But these men do not have much to say, nor are they able to speak directly. We know that Kent is in deep mourning, but he distills his emotion – his wish for death – into a poetic conceit: ‘ I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me. I must not say no’ (5.3.390–91). The real moral imperative here – the new ‘ought’ – is no more natural or genuine than the old. It is simply a new convention, one that requires grief to be hidden, either in language where it is concealed within a metaphor, or taken physically from view where the mourner weeps in private. They ‘ought’ to say nothing, even though they feel deeply; 47 Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (1984, Reprint, London: Routledge, 1988), 13. 48 Ibid., 380 49 Ibid., 387. 50 Ibid., 395. 51 Kay, Melodious Tears, 104. 52 William Shakespeare, King Lear, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (The New Folger Library Shakespeare. New York and London: Washington Square Press, 1993). All subsequent parenthetical citations are to this edition.

60

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

indeed, it is their silence that denotes a depth of feeling so profound that it cannot be fathomed in language. The contradiction embodied in Edgar’s declaration suggests that all emotion and therefore all speech evoked by death is now solipsistic; for, in this new construction of mourning, the past, figured as the body of the deceased, serves only to illuminate the grieving subject. ‘Then away she started / To deal with grief alone’53 In the medieval English Passion plays the Virgin’s mourning over Jesus articulates the tragic pathos of his suffering and death. In King Lear, by way of contrast, the mourning father’s grief takes center stage, while his daughter’s decorous tears occur offstage. Whereas the medieval plays celebrate the Virgin’s heroic, public suffering for her son, Cordelia’s tears are ‘unseen,’ mediated through the dramatic device of a male gentleman-messenger who narrates them. It is the restrained and invisible nature of Cordelia’s tears that renders them moving, in contrast to the Virgin’s visible and abundant lamentations. A sermon preached by John Donne sometime between April and June 1623 expresses the orthodox ecclesiastical position on the appropriate expression of grief, underscoring the perspective that, like Cordelia’s tears, the most sincere tears are those that only God sees. Donne begins assuring his audience that: ‘Here is an admirable readiness in God, that hears a voice in that, which hath none.’54 He relates the story of Hezekias from Isaiah 38:2–5, noting that ‘When Hezekias wept, he was turned to the wall (perchance, because he would not be seen) and yet God bade the prophet Isaiah tell him Vidi lacrymam (I have seen your tear).’ Donne points out that, though Hezekias ‘wept sore … God saw every single tear, his first tear, and was affected with that. But yet this is more strange; God heard his tears.’ Next Donne tells the story of the raising of Lazarus, observing that Christ went to Lazarus’s house ‘as soon as [Mary] had wept’ and ‘before [she] had asked anything’ of Christ. He emphasizes that ‘Christ was affected by Mary’s weeping,’ citing the scriptural passage from John 11:33–35, ‘He groaned in the spirit, he was troubled and he wept too.’ But Donne, like the medieval priests before him, alters scripture to his own end, asserting that Christ raised Lazarus before Mary asked him: ‘her eyes were his glass, and he saw her desire in her tears. There is a kind of simplicity in tears, which God hearkens to, and believes.’ But in order for tears to ‘speak aloud in the ears of God,’ they must be ‘Devout, and simple tears, which cannot speak … nay tears which we cannot utter; not only not utter the force of the tears, but not utter the very tears themselves.’ These unseen tears are the most sincere. They are cast as 53 I am grateful to Lynne Dickson Bruckner, whose excellent unpublished paper on Cordelia’s tears brought to my attention their significance in the play. 54 John Donne, ‘XVII Meditation,’ in The Oxford Authors: John Donne, edited by John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 329. All subsequent citations to Donne are to this source and page.

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

61

natural and therefore sincere. They emerge spontaneously, like the spring renewal: ‘As God sees the water in the spring in the veins of the earth, before it bubble upon the face of the earth; so God sees tears in the heart of a man, before they blubber his face; God hears the tears of the sorrowful soul, which for sorrow cannot shed tears.’ Unlike Donne’s tears, unuttered and unseen except by God, the tears of the Virgin had been, prior to the Reformation, intensely visible. Donne’s sermon demonstrates the change in what the tears themselves signify. The glistening tears of the Virgin, which once enhanced the beauty of her piety, pouring fresh balm on her son’s tortured flesh, served a pedagogical, spiritual purpose. In post-Reformation England, these tears are now excess foam, swelling and marring the face of a seductress, one who will lead God-fearing Christians into the snare of idolatry. Shakespeare’s King Lear, like Donne’s sermon, indicates that woman’s tears have become a site of cultural volatility and contention. In King John, Richard III, The White Devil, Titus Andronicus, and Hamlet, women mourn openly and at length, and their grief is subject to intense scrutiny and disparagement. In King Lear, by way of contrast, Cordelia’s most extensive mourning occurs offstage. It is presented to us through a dialogue between Kent and a gentleman-messenger. The few tears she does weep on-stage when she and Lear are first reunited are interpreted for the audience by her father. Unlike the mourning women of these earlier plays, Cordelia does not speak her grief; first Lear and then the Gentleman messenger speak it for her. When Lear sees his daughter again in Act Four, he exclaims, ‘For as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia’ (4.7.79). Apparently weeping, Cordelia replies, ‘And so I am; I am’ (4.7.80). Then Lear ‘reads’ her tears for us, insuring us that they are sincere: ‘Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not’ (4.7.81). Cordelia’s tears are sincere precisely because they are ‘unseen’ and mediated for us by men who control the expression and reception of her mourning. A few scenes later, a dialogue between Kent and a Gentleman-messenger informs us of how Cordelia responded with anguish when she learned of her father’s suffering. Kent asks the Gentleman if Cordelia wept when she received letters regarding Lear’s condition: ‘Did your letters pierce the Queen to any demonstration of grief?’ (4.3.10). The Gentleman replies, ‘Ay, sir, she took them, read them in my presence, / And now and then an ample tear trilled down / Her delicate cheek. It seemed she was a queen / Over her passion, who, most rebel-like, / Fought to be king o’er her’ (4.3.11–17). This reversal of the conventional gendering of reason and passion in the Gentleman’s description of Cordelia’s struggle to control her grief shows his admiration for her. He emphasizes her status as a true lady: her stoic control of sorrow reveals her inner nobility. Kent’s somewhat redundant observation, ‘O, then it moved her,’ (4.3.18), cues the Gentleman to clarify the precise manner in which she was moved: Not to a rage. Patience and sorrow [strove] Who should express her goodliest. You have seen Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears

62

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA Were like a better way. Those happy smiles That played on her ripe lip [seemed] not to know What guest were in her eyes, which parted thence As pearls from diamonds dropped. In brief, Sorrow would be a rarity most beloved If all could so become it. (4.3.19–27).

Cordelia’s ‘ample’ tears contrast with the ‘excessive’ weeping decried by the Reformers. She exemplifies the post-Reformation construction of sorrow as private, inward, and restrained. Kent queries the messenger further, ‘Made she no verbal question?’ (4.3.28). To which the Gentleman responds, Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of ‘father’ Pantingly forth, as if it pressed her heart; Cried ‘Sisters, sisters, shame of ladies, sisters! Kent, father, sisters! What i’ th’ storm, i’ th’ night? Let pity not be believed!’ Then she shook The holy water from her heavenly eyes, And clamor moistened. Then away she started, To deal with grief alone. (4.3.29–37)

Cordelia’s impulse to grieve in private signals the sincerity, profundity, and sanctity of her sorrow. Like the Virgin, Cordelia shakes ‘holy water’ from her heavenly eyes, but this holiness is contingent upon their invisibility to the audience. They are described rather than performed. Like the frozen, voiceless figures of mourning women on funeral monuments, Cordelia is transformed into an aesthetic image of grief by the men who narrate her mourning to the audience, thereby assuring us of its authenticity. In the medieval English Passion plays, especially the N-Town, the Virgin Mary earns the titles Queen of Heaven and Mother of God because she mourns openly and at length. In contrast Cordelia earns the appellation of queen and her tears have healing powers like the Virgin’s for the opposite reason: because she grieves in private. Of course, ample and excessive are opposing ways to describe the same thing: an amount that is more than enough. But they denote differences in value that register the shift from ritualized, public, communal mourning to naturalized, private, individualized mourning. The private, reformed nature of Cordelia’s grief is reinforced by the image of her in the act of reading: she mourns in silent, sorrowful contemplation of a text. Moreover, Cordelia’s tears are not a response to death, they are elicited by her sorrow over her father’s predicament. In a complete reversal of the dynamic of medieval drama, in which the Virgin, a woman, guides the communal response to death, the role of the mourner who responds to and interprets death for the community in King Lear now belongs unequivocally to the male tragic protagonist.

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

63

‘Do you see this?’ In King Lear we have come a very long way from the passionate laments of the Virgin Mary of medieval drama. But we have also come full circle. The resonance of Lear’s mourning with the laments of the Virgin indicates that even as Shakespeare’s tragedy manifests a post-Reformation view that female mourning, with its associations with England’s medieval, Catholic past, becomes too volatile for public display, it also strains to touch the outermost limits of human suffering. Whatever one might profess to believe about various doctrines of eternal life, the loss of a child before the parent is the worst kind of death and the most difficult to comprehend. Mary’s sacrifice is all the greater because her son Jesus is in the prime of life; she must watch him suffer and she must live on after he dies. But in medieval English drama, Mary mourns and her mourning guides the audience and the larger community in their grief. She wails, she weeps, and she prays within the sanction of the Church. Lady Constance and King Lear experience the wrenching loss of their children as well. But, as Shakespeare so vividly demonstrates in these plays, there is no framework to justify their sorrow. In early modern England, the absence of a recognized communal religious system permitting the expression of such anguish makes this all too cruel fate all the more bitter, and, as Shakespeare shows in the deaths of Constance and Lear, it is literally unbearable. In King Lear, Shakespeare takes this worst kind of death – the death of the child before the parent – and pierces us with it. He makes us watch as the enfeebled and wracked father mourns over his daughter as those on stage stand helplessly by. As we sit in the audience, equally helpless, we find ourselves in collusion with those ‘hard-hearted’ witnesses. And as we watch the father die of his grief, utterly bereft and utterly alone, Shakespeare dares us to find words that articulate this experience more aptly than Lear’s ‘howl, howl, howl, howl.’ Michael Neill observes that No … ritual consolations … are allowed to modify the starkness of Lear’s ending – the brutal termination that James Calderwood calls its ‘un-end’. Although the final ‘Exeunt with a dead march, carrying the bodies’ bespeaks a funeral procession of sorts, it is one which requires to be staged with a bareness fitting to a world laid waste. There is no talk here of ‘princely burial’ or ‘degree’, no attempt at the formal magnanimity of a funeral oration, only Albany’s terse ‘bear then from hence’, and Edgar’s painfully insufficient ‘speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’ [V.iii.318, 325].55

And perhaps this is precisely the point. What does one say in the face of death? In the absence of cathartic rituals, in the absence of a space where the dead live on in the community of the living, what is the fate of the dead? If one does not die of grief isn’t it more bewildering that grief does eventually subside? Perhaps more tragic than

55 Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 297.

64

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

dying of grief is surviving, for implied in that survival is a forgetting, an evacuation of emotion and memory – the ultimate betrayal of love. I agree with Neill that there are no ritual consolations depicted in the world of the play. However, for the play in the world, the ritual is there if we listen and look carefully. Lear’s mourning over Cordelia is haunted by the Virgin’s mourning over Jesus. When King Lear enters carrying Cordelia in his arms, he indicts all spectators, both on stage and in the theater audience for the hard hearts that enable them silently to watch the performance of mourning and death before them: ‘Howl, howl, howl! O (you) are men of stones! / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / that heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever’ (5.3.308–10). Similarly, in the NTown Passion play, when the Virgin Mary learns that her son has been betrayed and will soon die, she lets forth an impassioned wail that employs the image of the hard heart: ‘A, A, A, how myn hert is colde / A hert hard as stone / how mayst þou lest / Whan þese sorweful tydyngs Are þe told / So wold to god hert þat thou mytyst brest’.56 Instead of chastising the bystanders as Lear does, however, she turns upon herself for her hard heart that can endure hearing the woeful news of her son’s capture. The hard, stony heart, as we have seen, is a common image in medieval English literature. It appears in meditative treatises, medieval drama and poetry, and sermons, usually in conjunction with the Virgin Mary’s sorrow. Auditors were expected to identify with Mary’s tears and weep, experiencing compassion for Christ’s suffering, a process that would melt their stony hearts and lead to compunction for sin. Lear’s cry registers a similar call for communal weeping. His performance of mourning encourages the audience to empathize with his grief and weep with him. In the medieval plays, the Virgin’s laments follow a ritual sequence. In King Lear, by way of contrast, the motifs of ritual lament are fragmented, not only by Lear’s disjointed thoughts, but also because Shakespeare distributes them among different characters. This naturalizes the portrayal of mourning, for it suggests spasms of intense feeling rather than a performance. But from the audience’s perspective this is, of course, a performance, and it carries with it the ritual power that is unique to the experience of drama. The weeping of the audience is sanctioned, even expected. The audience is encouraged to weep with Lear, just as they had once been encouraged to weep with Mary for her sufferings over her lost child. Mary’s wish for her heart to burst, (‘So wold to god hert that thou mytyst brest’) is echoed, not by Lear, but by Kent when Lear dies. As Kent looks upon the bodies of Lear and Cordelia, he exclaims, ‘Break, heart, I prithee, break!’ (5.3.378). In King Lear, as in the medieval 56 Parenthetical citations to the medieval cycle plays are to the following editions: The York Plays, edited by Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982); Ludus Coventriae, or The Plaie called Corpus Christi, edited by K. S. Block (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1922. Rpr 1960, 1974); The Chester Mystery Cycle, R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills eds (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1974); The Towneley Plays, edited by Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley, 2 vols (Published for the Early English Text Society by Oxford University Press, 1994).

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

65

Passion plays, the heart is among the most prevailing images, and it performs an analogous function in both. The imagery of the heart evokes a shared sense of suffering, not only in the protagonist, but also in the theater audience. The Virgin’s mourning was expected to elicit tears and a vivid comprehension of Jesus’ suffering. As Richard Levin shows, the eliciting of tears was also a generic expectation of Renaissance tragedy.57 The resonances in structure between the medieval Passion plays and Shakespeare’s King Lear suggest that the taboo pietà, which had once served as catalyst and emblem of communal empathy in the English place of worship, is resuscitated in the breath of the tragic actor on the English stage. Both King Lear and the Virgin Mary incite their onstage spectators to join in their mourning, and by implication, the theater audience as well. In the Towneley Crucifixion, the Virgin Mary invokes the women who accompany her to join in her laments: ‘Madyns, make youre mone! / And wepe, ye wyfes, euerichon, / With me, most wrich, in wone, / The childe that borne was best! / My harte is styf as stone / That for no bayll will brest’ (23.418–23). In the tradition of female lament, several mourners would support the principal lamenter with a refrain of shrieks and wails. Lear’s criticism of his mute witnesses obliquely alludes to this former practice. But instead of inviting them to weep, he bitterly rebukes them for not doing so: ‘Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / that heaven’s vault should crack’ (5.3.309). Lear’s allusion to the breaking of heaven’s vault evokes the belief that ritual weeping had the power to commune with the supernatural realm. The belief in this power was articulated by cries for vengeance and ritual cursing in both residual lamentation and in medieval popular Christianity. This power is voiced in the York cycle when Mary Magdalene decries Jesus’ torturers, ‘This signe schall vengeaunce calle / On yowe holly in feere’, and the Virgin Mary calls her son’s torturers ‘traytors and theeves,’ asking them to take her in place of her son (24.196–97). In the N-Town Crucifixion, Veronica chastises the onlookers, calling them ‘synful pepyl’ (32.718). In the medieval plays the women curse and cry out against those who are guilty of executing Jesus. Lear, in contrast, expresses undifferentiated anger, lashing out at the most innocent of his companions. When Kent tries to comfort him, the grieving king angrily rebuffs his loyal friend: ‘A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!’ (5.3.325). Lear’s thoughts tumble and meander from one idea to the next as he grapples with his emotions. His general indictment of the bystanders as ‘traitors’ leads him to consider that he ‘might have saved’ his daughter (5.3.326). This causes him finally to admit that ‘she’s gone forever’ (5.3.326), which, in turn, makes him speak directly to her. For an instant, he believes he hears her speak: ‘Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. Ha! / What is’t thou sayst? – Her voice was ever soft, / Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman’ (5.3.327–29). Several elements of this passage are suggestive of residual practice

57 Richard Levin, ‘The Relation of External Evidence to the Allegorical and Thematic Interpretation of Shakespeare,’ Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 1–29, at 12, 14.

66

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

of lament: the call for vengeance, the direct address to the dead, and the elegiac commemoration of the virtues of the deceased. In the medieval Passion plays, these features appear in a more ritualized way. Mary addresses her son and recalls his virtues in lyric passages. In the Towneley version, she contrasts his mutilated body with his previous physical beauty: ‘Thi face with blode is red, / Was fare as floure in feylde’ (23.330); ‘thyn een as cristall clere, / That shoyn as son in sight, / That lufly were in lyere / Lost thay haue thare light, / And wax all faed in fere – / All dym then ar thay dight! / In payn has thou no pere / That is withoutten p[l]ight’ (23.367–74). Mary’s laments draw attention to her son’s suffering and death, as well as the intensity of her own suffering as she mourns for him: ‘How shuld I stand in sted / To se my barne thus blede!’ (23.331–32). Mary gazes intently on her son’s bruised, pierced, and bleeding body and bids the audience to do the same. This intense looking brings her to the point of physical collapse. In The Towneley Crucifixion, for example, her last words suggest that, like Lear, she is about to die of grief. She exclaims, ‘My ded now comen it is / My dere son, have mercy!’ (23.501–502). King Lear’s final words follow a similar pattern. As he finally acknowledges Cordelia’s death, his emotions seem to exhaust and suffocate him: ‘No, no, no life? / why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all? / Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never. – / Pray you undo this button’ (5.3.369– 73). As we have seen, scholars still debate the meaning of Lear’s mysterious last words. Some see them as a last expression of hope, others as a statement of love, and still others, like W. R. Elton, see them as the final gasp in a despairing, pagan response to death. I have argued that, in their articulation of the painful separation between the living and the dead, they might also embody a critique of the Protestant construction of death. But it seems to me that Shakespeare’s depiction of mourning in King Lear transcends or collapses these debates into a different, more urgent challenge. As Lear sinks to the ground beside his daughter, he exhorts the audience, ‘Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips. / Look there, look there!’ (5.3.374–75). Whatever these words might mean, the effect of them is unequivocal. It recalls the intense looking upon the dead and dying that characterizes the relationship between mourner and audience in the medieval Passion plays. It is a demand to look at death – to experience it – freed of the platitudes that distract us from its unadorned truth. Just as Mary repeatedly draws attention to the sight of her son’s suffering and dying body, so Lear bids us to look upon the dead body of his daughter, and to feel, in every part of our being, his suffering as he cradles her and wails. The moment calls for us to allow the experience of grief to open up the dimensions of our existence.58

58 The idea that emotions reveal a form of knowledge to us that cannot be experienced any other way comes from Philip Fisher’s provocative book, The Vehement Passions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

67

The human body in King Lear, like the bodies of Lazarus and Christ in medieval drama, is in perpetual pain, pain that the mourner forces into the spectator’s vision. As Caroline Spurgeon pointed out long ago, Shakespeare’s tragedy keeps the body forever in the audience’s awareness: it is ‘tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack.’59 Elaine Scarry points out that as he nears death, Lear’s ‘voice becomes a final source of self-extension; so long as [he] is speaking, the self extends out beyond the boundaries of the body, occupies a space much larger than the body.’60 His ‘howl,’ pure sound, ‘makes an assertion of that which cannot be rationalized,’ to borrow Fox-Good’s observation about the somatic nature of music.61 Through the power of his grieving voice Lear extends his pain beyond the boundaries of his body into the bodies and minds filling the theater. It is pain that cannot be rationalized or ignored. The taboo corpse, banned from the English funeral service where parishioners once collectively looked upon and wept over it, is thrust upon our sight in the final moments of King Lear. As if we might avert our eyes, the playwright, via his dying king, bids us to look at it: ‘Do you see this? Look there, look there!’(5.3.375). Works Cited and Consulted Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); 2nd edn, revised by Dimitrios Yatromanolakis and Panagiotis Roilis (New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London: Verso Books, 1991). Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981). Baker, Donald C., John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall Jr. eds, The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS. Digby 133 and E Museo 160. (Oxford: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1982). Baker, Herschel, Introduction to King John, in The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin 1974), 765–8. ——, Introduction to King Lear, in The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1974), 1249–54.

59 Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 342–3. 60 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 33. 61 Jacquelyn A. Fox-Good, ‘Ophelia’s Mad Songs: Music, Gender, Power,’ in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by David C. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 232.

68

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Barrow, Henry, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church, in The Writings of Henry Barrow, edited by Leland H. Carlson (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1962). Beadle, Richard ed., The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1982). —— and Pamela King eds, The York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Becon, Thomas, The Sick Mannes Salve (London, 1553). Bennett, Josephine Waters, ‘The Storm Within: the Madness of Lear,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1962): 137–55. Berger, James, ‘Trauma and Literary Theory.’ Review of Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, by Cathy Caruth; Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, by Dominick LaCapra; and Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma, by Kali Tal, Contemporary Literature 38, no 3 (1997): 569–82. Bevington, David, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1975). Bloch, Maurice and Jonathon Parry eds, Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Block, K. S. ed., Ludus Coventriae, or The Plaie called Corpus Christi (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1922. Repr. 1960, 1974). The Booke of the Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church after the use of the Churche of England, (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1549). Boughner, Daniel C., ‘Retribution in English Medieval Drama,’ Notes and Queries 198 (1953): 506–508. Boyd, Brian, ‘King John and The Troublesome Raign: Sources, Structures, Sequence.’ Philological Quarterly 74, no. 1 (1995): 37–56. Braunmuller, A. R., Introduction to The Life and Death of King John by William Shakespeare, edited by A. R. Braunmuller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–93. Brown, Cedric C. and Arthur F. Marotti eds, Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). Browne, Thomas, Urn Buriall, in Thomas Browne: The Major Works, edited by C. A. Patrides (London: Penguin, 1977). Bruckner, Lynne Dickson, ‘Cordelia’s Ample Tears: Affect and Gender in King Lear,’ paper presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Tempe, AZ, April 2001. Bullough, Geoffrey, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, volume IV (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). Carnovsky, Morris and Peter Sander, ‘The Eye of the Storm: On Playing King Lear,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1977): 144–50. Cawley, A. C. ed., The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958).

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

69

Chambers, E. K., The Medieval Stage. 1903. Reprint (2 vols in 1), (New York: Dover Publications, 1996). Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Daniell, Christopher, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997). De Mornay, Philippe, Philip Mornay, Lord of Plesis his Teares for the death of his Sonne. Unto his Wife Charlotte Baliste, trans. John Healey (London: G. Eld, 1609). Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation (London, 1989). Doebler, Bettie Anne, ‘Rooted Sorrow’: Dying in Early Modern England (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1994). Dolan, Frances E., Whores of Babylon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Doloff, Steven, ‘Lear’s Howl and Diogenes the Dogg.’ Notes and Queries 48, no. 3 (2001): 292–93. Donne, John, From a Sermon preached April–June 1623, in The Oxford Authors: John Donne, edited by John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). ——, ‘AXVII Meditation,’ in The Oxford Authors: John Donne, edited by John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Dronke, Peter, ‘Laments of the Maries: From the Beginnings to the Mystery Plays,’ in Idee, Gestalt, Geschichte: Festschrift Fur Klaus von see, edited by Gerd Wolfgang Weber (Odense: Odense University Press, 1988). Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols (New York: Pantheon, 1973). Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400– 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Dusinberre, Juliet, ‘King John and Embarrassing Women,’ Shakespeare Survey 42 (1990): 37–52. Eire, Carlos M. N., The War Against the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Elton, William R., ‘King Lear’ and the Gods (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988). England, George and Alfred Pollard, The Towneley Plays (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1897). Fisher, Philip, The Vehement Passion.(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Fox-Good, Jacquelyn A., ‘Ophelia’s Mad Songs: Music, Gender, Power,’ in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by David C. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995). Geertz, Clifford, ‘Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought’ in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

70

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

——, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Gittings, Clare, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England, (1984. Reprint, London: Routledge, 1988). Goodland, Katharine, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). Gosson, Stephan, Playes Confuted in Five Actions, in The Medieval Stage, E. K. Chambers (1903. Reprint (2 vols. in 1), New York: Dover Publications, 1996). Grady, Denise, ‘Sudden Stress Breaks Hearts, A Study Shows,’ New York Times, Thursday, 10 February 2005, sec. A, p. 1. Graham, Kenneth, J. E., ‘“Without the Form of Justice”: Plainness and the Performance of Love in King Lear,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1991): 438–61. Granville-Barker, Harley, Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947). Greaves, Richard, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981). Gregerson, Linda, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Guiboory, Achsah, ‘A “rationall of old rites”: Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Buriall and the Conflict over Ceremony,’ The Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991): 229–41. Haigh, Christopher ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Hazlitt, William, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817. Reprint, London, 1906). Heberle, Mark, ‘“Innocent Prate”: King John and Shakespeare’s Children,’ in Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature, edited by Elizabeth Goodenough, et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995). Hooker, Richard, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (New York: Dutton, 1965). Hotine, Margaret, ‘Lear’s Fit of the Mother,’ Notes and Queries 28, no. 2 (1981): 138–41. Houlbrooke, Ralph, ‘Death, Church, and Family in England between the late Fifteenth and the Early Eighteenth Centuries,’ in Death, Ritual and Bereavement, edited by Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989). ——, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Huntingdon, Richard and Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). James, Mervyn, ‘Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town,’ Past and Present 98 (1983): 3–29.

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

71

——, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). ——, Family, Lineage, and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics, and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). James, Susan, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). Jameson, Frederick, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). Kaufman, Nikolai, ‘Laments from Four Continents: Europe, Asia, Africa and America,’ International Folklore Review 7 (1990): 22–9. Kay, Dennis, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Kirsch, Arthur, ‘The Emotional Landscape of King Lear,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1988): 154–70. Klause, John, ‘New Sources for Shakespeare’s King John: The Writings of Robert Southwell,’ Studies in Philology 98, no. 4 (2001): 401–427. Laurence, Anne ‘Godly Grief: Individual Responses to Death in SeventeenthCentury Britain,’ in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, edited by Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989), 62–76. Latimer, Hugh, Certayn Godly Sermons, made uppon the lords Prayer (London, 1562). LeGoff, Jaques, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986). Levin, Richard, ‘The Relation of External Evidence to the Allegorical and Thematic Interpretation of Shakespeare,’ Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 1–29. Lindenberger, Herbert, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1975). Litten, Julian, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450 (London: Robert and Hale, 1991). Llewellyn, Nigel, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, 1500–1800 (London: Reaktion, 1991). Lumiansky, R. M. and David Mills eds, The Chester Mystery Cycle (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1974). MacDonald, Michael, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). MacDowell, Douglas M., The Law in Classical Athens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus, edited by David Scott Kastan, Norton Critical Edition. (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005). Marotti, Arthur F. ed., Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999).

72

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

McGuire, Brian Patrick, ‘Purgatory, the Communion of Saints, and Medieval Change,’ Viator 20 (1989): 61–84. Montrose, Louise A., ‘The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,’ Helios 7 (1980): 51–74. Neill, Michael, ‘“Feasts Put Down Funerals”: Death and Ritual in Renaissance Comedy,’ in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and his Age, edited by Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). ——, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). ——, ‘“Exeunt with a Dead March”: Funeral Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage,’ Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, edited by David M. Bergeron (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985). Nussbaum, Martha C., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ——, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Reprint 1993). Paster, Gail Kern et al. eds, Reading the Early Modern Passions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Paxton, Frederick S., Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (1990. Reprint, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Phillippy, Patricia, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Pigman, G. W., Grief and the Renaissance English Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie (1586) (Facsimile Reproduction Kent State University Press, 1988). Puckle, Bertram S., Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1926). Rollins, Hyder E. and Herschel Baker, The Renaissance in England: Non-Dramatic Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company, 1954). Rosmarin, Adena, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Saint Mary Magdalene, in The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian Mss. Digby 133 and E Museo 160, edited by Donald Baker, John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Scarisbrick, J. J., The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

INVERTING THE PIETÀ IN SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

73

Schiesari, Juliana, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr., ‘King Lear in Its Own Time: The Difference that Death Makes,’ Early Modern Literary Studies 1, no. 1 (1995): 3.1–49. Electronic publication. Available from URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/01-1/schnlear.html. Shakespeare, William, The Life and Death of King John, edited by A. R. Braunmuller, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). ——, King Lear, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, The New Folger Library Shakespeare (New York and London: Washington Square Press, 1993). Snyder, Susan, ‘King Lear and the Psychology of Dying,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1982): 449–60. Soellner, Rolf, ‘The Four Primary Passions: A Renaissance Theory Reflected in the Works of Shakespeare,’ Philology 55 (1958): 549–67. Spurgeon, Caroline, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us (New York: Macmillan, 1936). Stevens, Martin and A. C. Cawley, The Towneley Plays, 2 vols. (Published for the Early English Text Society by Oxford University Press, 1994). Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Routledge, 1971). The Towneley Cycle, Facsimile of Huntingdon MS HM. Vanita, Ruth, ‘Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,’ SEL 40, no. 2 (2000): 311–37. Warren, Michael, ‘King Lear, IV. vi. 83: The Case for “Crying”,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1984): 319–21. Weever, John, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London: Thomas Harper, 1631). Weil, Judith, ‘Visible Hecubas,’ in The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, edited by Naomi Conn Liebler (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 51–69. Weimann, Robert, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ——, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, edited by Robert Schwartz (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Westney, Lizette I., ‘Hecuba in Sixteenth-Century English Literature,’ College Language Association Journal 27, no. 4 (1984): 436–9. Whaley, Joachim, Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982). Wickam, Glynn, The Medieval Theatre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974). Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553). Winn, Colette H., ‘Early Modern Women and the Poetics of Lamentation: Mourning, Revenge, and Art,’ Mediaevalia 22 (1999): 127–55.

74

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Wolf, Amy, ‘Shakespeare and Harsnett: “Pregnant to Good Pity”?’ SEL 38, no. 2 (1998): 251–64. Woodbridge, Linda and Edward Berry eds., True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992). ——, ‘Afterward: Speaking with the Dead,’ PMLA 118 (May 2003): 597–603. Woodward, Jennifer, The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997). Wryley, William, The True Use of Armorie (London, 1592). Young, Karl, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933).

Chapter 4

‘Black but Beautiful’: Othello and the Cult of the Black Madonna Lisa Hopkins Sheffield Hallam University

It has often been observed that the language of Othello crucially intersects with that of early modern theological and eschatological debate.1 Particularly relevant for my purposes in this essay is Michael Neill’s remark that in the iconography of early modern maps, as John Gillies has observed, “Africans seem to be interchangeable with skulls” – a tradition apparently echoed in the “carrion Death” discovered by the tawny Prince of Morocco in Portia’s courtship trial … The medieval identification of Death as “der schwarze Mann” seems to have been reinforced, as William Engel has pointed out, by a sixteenth-century habit of punning on Moors-Mors.2

Death, then, is in our sights from the outset of Othello (and is fundamentally associated with blackness). However, as in the wider world of Renaissance England with its bifurcated confessions, what happens after death is uncertain. One possibility which receives here an emphasis unusual in Shakespeare is that the ideas put forward in Calvinist theology might be correct. Cassio says, ‘there be souls must be saved, and there be souls must not be saved.’3 An earlier remark of Cassio’s might also point in this direction, when he says: but he, sir, had th’election And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof At Rhodes, at Cyprus and on other grounds, Christian and heathen, must be be-leed and calmed By debitor and creditor. (1.1.26–30) 1 See for instance Robert N. Watson, ‘Othello as Reformation Tragedy’, in In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, edited by Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), 65–96. 2 Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 147. 3 William Shakespeare, Othello, edited by E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 2.3.99–100. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text.

76

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Here the reference to election might well evoke the Calvinist system of predestination, according to which some souls were elect and others were damned. It is thus made plain that in the microcosm of Othello, as in the macrocosm of the early modern world as a whole, two religious systems jostle for pre-eminence. Again as in early seventeenth-century England, women tend to adhere to the older one: Desdemona pleads for Cassio ‘By’r lady’ (3.3.74), and Emilia would ‘venture purgatory’ (4.3.76). This essay proposes that Othello’s interest in theology and spiritual destinies should be read in the light of early modern Mariology. It has already been suggested by Huston Diehl that the play may profitably be read within a paradigm which assumes that ‘The violence against beautiful and beloved women that is repeatedly enacted in these plays may in fact be informed by the iconoclastic violence against beautiful and beloved images that was such a significant and disruptive dimension of the English Reformation.’4 I want to suggest, however, that Othello draws in particular on the devotion paid in many parts of the early modern world to Black Madonnas. This is not the first time the suggestion has been made; Lynda Boose has pointed out that On the continent, where a medieval tradition of “le bon éthiope” apparently at least existed, some space seems to have been opened up within literature and religious art for representation of figures like the Black Madonna (especially prevalent in France). But though the tradition existed, depictions of the figure – whose origin is shrouded in mystery and legend – apparently split into two distinctly racial representations, the less frequent, definably Negro one apparently suppressed (perhaps intentionally supplanted) by the other, dominant practice of imaging a madonna who was black-skinned but nonetheless Caucasian.5

Boose, however, does not explicate here the full associational force of the Black Madonna. There were many notable examples of these in Europe, and they aroused considerable interest and strong passions, ranging from veneration to hostility. A recent study notes that There are more than four hundred Black Madonnas all over the world … Some of the most famous are attributed to the workmanship of St. Luke and are believed to have been brought to Europe one way or another. The Black Madonna of Czestochowa was, according to tradition, painted by St. Luke on a table made by Jesus and discovered by St. Helena, Mother of Constantine. Other Madonnas also claim such distinguished origins,

4 Huston Diehl, ‘Bewhored Images and Imagined Whores: Iconophobia and Gynophobia in Stuart Love Tragedies,’ English Literary Renaissance 26.1 (1996), 111–37; the quoted material appears on page 113. 5 Lynda E. Boose, ‘“The getting of a lawful race”: Racial discourse in early modern England and the unrepresentable black woman,’ in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 35–54; the material referenced appears on pages 46–7.

‘BLACK BUT BEAUTIFUL’

77

and pious tradition keeps alive the faith that many of them were brought back by the Crusaders when they returned from the Holy Land.6

One of the most famous of all Black Madonnas was Our Lady of Loreto, in Italy, where even the sceptical Montaigne was moved enough to leave a votive candle when he spent three days at the shrine in 1581.7 This prominent shrine seems to me to be referred to in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, when the (black?) Dido says ‘Drive, if you can, my house to Italy’ (the shrine at Loreto being centred on the house of the Virgin, which had allegedly been carried by angels from Palestine),8 and it is certainly mentioned by Webster in The Duchess of Malfi, which, though a text which generally has little time for Catholicism, presents the shrine at Loreto as something which is indeed holy, and should not be jested with: In my opinion, She were better progress to the baths At Lucca, or go visit the Spa In Germany, for, if you will believe me, I do not like this jesting with religion, This feigned pilgrimage.

Webster’s Cariola may present this as her opinion only, but the play as a whole certainly bears out her forebodings, and also offers other testimony to the importance of Loreto when the First Pilgrim says ‘I have not seen a goodlier shrine than this, / Yet I have visited many.’9 Loreto had a particular significance for English readers and audiences because the original statue of the virgin at Walsingham, England’s holiest shrine, had been a copy of Our Lady of Loreto.10 Shakespeare certainly knew of Walsingham, which was described by Ogygius in Erasmus’s account of it as ‘the most celebrated place throughout all England,’11 and Ophelia in Hamlet sings a song whose words and music are both based on a popular ballad about it;12 however, this, like many other black virgins, had been destroyed, because black Madonnas were attracting 6 Stephen Benko, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), 215. 7 D. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3. 8 Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage, in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett (London: Everyman, 1999), 4.4.129. 9 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, edited by John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 3.2.313–18 and 3.4.1–2. 10 Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin (1985; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 165–6. 11 Desiderius Erasmus, Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham and Saint Thomas of Canterbury, trans. John Gough Nichols (Westminster: John Bowyer Nichols and son, 1849), 12. 12 See William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), 531 and 533.

78

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

growing controversy. Though the reformer Ulrich Zwingli had preached in front of the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln in 1516,13 many other Reformers looked on them unfavourably: ‘Superstition, idôlatrie, tels sont les grands reproches que les Réformés en hommes de la Renaissance, adressent au culte de Vierges Noires. Elles symbolisent aux yeux de ces humanistes l’aspect “gothique” de la religion catholique, dans l’acception la plus péjorative du terme’ (‘Superstition, idolatry – these were the prime reproaches which the Reformers, as Renaissance men, levelled at the cults of Black Virgins. In the eyes of these humanists, they symbolised the “Gothic” aspect of the catholic faith, in the worst sense of the term’), and many famous black virgins were publicly burned in France during the wars of religion.14 Of particular interest was the question of the origins of black virgins. It used to be thought that the smoke from devotional candles was responsible for their blackness, and indeed this is asserted as recently as 1990 in Fred Gustafson’s The Black Madonna,15 but Stephen Benko observes that ‘This explanation, usually given by Roman Catholic scholars, does not explain why the whole body of the statue turned black, even under the clothing, and not just the face and hands,’16 while Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet remarks that ‘Aucune action chimique, si forte et si durable soit-elle, n’aurait suffi à les enténébrer d’un noir si profond et si homogène tout en préservant la dorure de leur robe. Les Vierges Noires ont donc été peintes de la main de l’homme’ (No chemical action, however powerful or long-lasting, would have achieved in darkening them to a black so profound and so homogenous while preserving the gilding of their clothes. Black Virgins have therefore been painted by the hand of man’).17 Benko suggests instead that ‘they are black because they represent earth, the mother of all,’ and both he and Gustafson propose a link to Isis.18 But during the Renaissance itself, a rather different explanation was advanced: Pour le père jésuite Van Steen (1556–1637), si les statues de la Vierge sont noires, c’est que les femmes de Palestine ont, elles-mêmes, le teint bronzé. Il en donne la preuve, dans ses Commentaires de la Bible, en s’appuyant sur le fait que l’icône que la légende attribue à saint Luc, conservée à l’église Sainte-Marie-Majeure de Rome, présente un portrait d’une Marie au visage noir. Pour d’autres auteurs, ce n’est point la Vierge qui était noire, mais les artistes qui auraient sculpté ses premières statues. Ainsi, des chrétiens coptes auraient été, en Egypte, à l’origine des représentations de la Vierge au teint sombre.19

13 Fred Gustafson, The Black Madonna (Boston: Sigo Press, 1990), 114. 14 Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, Vierges Noires: Regard et Fascination (Rodez: Editions du Rouergue, 1990), 246. 15 Gustafson, 38. 16 Benko, The Virgin Goddess, 213. 17 Cassagnes-Brouquet, 176. 18 Benko, The Virgin Goddess, 214; Gustafson, 87. 19 Cassagnes-Brouquet, Vierges Noires, 138.

‘BLACK BUT BEAUTIFUL’

79

[For the Jesuit father Van Steen (1556–1637), the blackness of the Virgins was due to the fact that the women of Palestine were dark-skinned. He offers proof of this in his Commentaries on the Bible, relying on the fact that the icon which legend attributes to St Luke, kept in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, shows a dark-faced Mary. For other authors, it was not at all the Virgin who was black, but the artists who they thought had made the first statues. So the Coptic Christians in Egypt were at the root of the darkskinned Virgins.]

There was certainly a correlation between country of origin and skin colour in the case of the most famous Black Virgin of the New World, Our Lady of Guadalupe, allegedly imprinted by miracle onto the cloak of the peasant Juan Diego in 1531, which was dark-skinned and of clearly indigenous features.20 The fame of this supposedly miraculous image spread rapidly, and certainly reached England; in 1568 Miles Philips, a member of the expedition led by John Hawkins, was taken captive and taken to Mexico City, where he saw Our Lady of Guadalupe, though he did not mention her colour.21 It is, I think, also worth pointing out in connection with an analysis of Othello that at least as early as Miguel Sánchez’s 1648 Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Guadalupe Juan Diego is seen as the Santiago (St James) of Mexico. (Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s History of the Conquest of Mexico [1552] similarly associated Mary with Santiago in the conquest of Mexico).22 As many critics have pointed out, ‘Santiago Matamoros’ (St James the Moor-killer) was surely an influence on the naming of Shakespeare’s Moor-persecuting Iago. Black Virgins, then, raised a number of issues: the relation of the appearance of the image to the appearance of the thing imaged; the race of the Virgin (and by implication Christ) and its relation to the racial identities of other Christians; the extent to which what is seen is influenced by the condition and preconceptions of the seer – and hence whether man is indeed made in God’s image or whether the process is in fact the other way about; the nature of proof and faith; and the cultural significances of blackness. All of these are clearly of direct significance for a play about a black Christian with an idolised white wife, whose virginity he has been thought by several critics to fetishise but whom he eventually comes to doubt because he is persuaded to take something on trust by a man called Iago – a name which is, I think, especially significant given that Othello hinges its plot on a handkerchief which, as has often been pointed out, clearly recalls the tradition of miraculous cloth images and vernicles of which Our Lady of Guadalupe forms part. Othello is able to use the story of the virgin to talk about its hero in this way because the play taps into a complicated representational nexus in which femininity and blackness are parallel concepts. As Karen Newman argued in her influential analysis of the play, ‘femininity is not opposed to blackness and monstrosity, as white is to black, but identified with the monstrous, an identification that makes 20 Begg, Cult, 247. 21 Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 2. 22 Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 5 and 41.

80

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

miscegenation doubly fearful.’23 This is a connection which other critics have been quick to explore. Patricia Parker, for instance, writes that What is striking in these early modern texts – of ‘monsters’ shown to the eye of the curious or the ‘privities’ of women opened simultaneously to scientific ‘discovery’ and the pornographic gaze – is thus not only the crossings they negotiate between domestic and exotic or, in the references to Africanus, between Europe and ‘Barbarie,’ but the shared language of opening, uncovering or bringing to light something at the same time characterized as ‘monstrous’ or ‘obscene.’

And she suggests that ‘Desdemona the white Venetian daughter becomes … the sexually tainted woman traditionally condemned as “black,” part of the representational schema that gives ironic resonance to the choice of the name “Bianca” (“white”) for the character most explicitly linked to that taint and that releases the “demon” within her own name.’24 Most recently, Dympna Callaghan has argued that ‘femininity … is itself used to trope racial difference – whiteness – and plays a pivotal if problematic role in the relation of race and sexuality,’ because Whiteness, especially when complemented by red, was ‘the color of perfect human beauty, especially female beauty’ … That is, in its chromic opposition to blackness, what allows whiteness to be represented at all is ‘a certain conceptualization of sexual difference’ … Race – black and white – thus becomes cosmeticized, but in the case of whiteness, also feminized.25

In this essay, then, I argue that Othello reproduces the concerns and emotions generated by Black Virgins by similarly bringing together and exploring images of blackness, virginity, identity and salvation, in order to situate its ostensibly domestic tragedy within a much wider epistemological and eschatological context. Ultimately, I suggest, Othello presents a world in which the loss of the rich heritage and complex possibilities of Mariology is perceived as imposing stark limitations on human behaviour and self-image. Othello intersects with the stories of two separate Black Virgins. Firstly, as I have suggested, its use of the motif of the handkerchief might well seem to recall the tradition of miraculous imprinting of religious images onto cloth, of which Our Lady of Guadalupe was the most recent example. Secondly, we might also hear echoes of 23 Karen Newman, ‘“And wash the Ethiop white”: femininity and the monstrous in Othello,’ in Shakespeare Reproduced, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (1987; reprint, London: Routledge, 1990), 142–62; the material cited appears on page 145. 24 Patricia Parker, ‘Fantasies of “Race” and “Gender”: Africa, Othello and bringing to light,’ in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 84–100; the material referenced appears on pages 87 and 95. 25 Dympna Callaghan, ‘“Othello was a white man”: properties of race on Shakespeare’s stage,’ in Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2, edited by Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 1996), 192–215; the material referenced appears on pages 195 and 198.

‘BLACK BUT BEAUTIFUL’

81

Montaigne’s account of his visit to Loreto. Amongst other details, Montaigne notes that All property which is lost there – and I speak of articles of silver or others not only worth picking up, but worth appropriating by people thus inclined – is deposited by the finders in a certain public receptacle provided for the purpose. Any one who may be so minded may abstract whatsoever he may desire from this receptacle without any cognisance being taken thereof. When I was there I saw many articles thus displayed, paternosters, handkerchiefs, and purses, such as none would own, all at the disposal of the first claimant.26

The idea of the lost handkerchief will of course be central to Othello. Another detail from Montaigne’s account will also resonate with the play: I may say that my visit coincided with that of M. Michel Marteau, Seignieur de la Chapelle, a rich young Parisian travelling with a large following. I received from him and from certain of his suite a careful and detailed account of the cure of a diseased leg, which he affirmed had been brought about during a former visit of his to this place, and the account given to me of this miracle was as exact as could be. (II, p. 205)

Michael Cassio will suffer from a similar leg injury, which is at first thought to have damaged him severely – he himself cries ‘My leg is cut in two!’ (5.1.71) – but later proves to be insignificant. Most of all, Othello is, I think, fundamentally structured round pairs of contrasts very similar to those encapsulated in Black Virgins. Foremost among these is the standard Renaissance opposition of blackness to beauty, so ably and thoroughly explored by Kim F. Hall.27 The Petrarchan tradition fetishised fairness, leading to a dominant language of red and white in which blackness can have value only as a source of contrast.28 Othello himself seems largely to subscribe to a value system very like this when he assumes that his blackness may be a cause of Desdemona’s supposed infidelity, but if we remember the importance of Black Virgins, we will see that it need not be so: that which is black can also be beautiful. To have remembered the cult of the Black Madonnas might therefore have afforded Othello a means to develop a more positive self-image. Another significant pair of oppositions in the play, also echoing the paradoxes encapsulated in the image of the Black Virgin, is made up of virginity and motherhood. From the outset, Iago associates his scheme with motherhood, saying 26 Michel de Montaigne, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581, 3 vols, trans. and edited by W. G. Waters (London: John Murray, 1903), vol. 2, 202–3. All further quotations from Montaigne will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text. 27 See Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), passim. 28 See for instance Linda Woodbridge, ‘Black and White and Red All Over: The Sonnet Mistress Amongst the Ndembu,’ Renaissance Quarterly 40:2 (summer, 1987): 247–97 and 299.

82

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

‘There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered’ (1.3.370–71). He then goes on to exclaim: ‘I have’t, it is engendered! Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light’ (1.3.402–3). Similarly when he jokes with Emilia and Desdemona about women he declares that ‘my muse labours / And thus she is delivered’ (2.1.128–9), and his sarcastic definition of the ideal woman is also structured round the idea of motherhood. He maintains that, ‘She never yet was foolish that was fair, / For even her folly helped her to an heir’ (2.1.136–7). And the culmination of his list of woman’s attributes is that she is fit ‘To suckle fools, and chronicle small beer’ (2.1.160). On a symbolic level, it seems that the darkest secret Iago can reveal about any of the women in play is their capacity for motherhood, which is figured as actually or latently monstrous. Othello himself also images the revelation of Iago’s event in terms of a hideous bringing forth, saying to him Think, my lord! By heaven, thou echo’st me As if there were some monster in thy thought Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something, I heard thee say even now thou lik’st not that When Cassio left my wife: what didst not like? And when I told thee he was of my counsel In my whole course of wooing, thou criedst ‘Indeed?’ And didst contract and purse thy brow together As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain Some horrible conceit. If thou dost love me Show me thy thought. (3.3.109–119)

Iago is imaged by Othello here in quasi-Jovian terms, big with an Athena-like thought which, Othello half hopes and half fears, is about to leap forth fully formed. Birth imagery continues to accrue to almost anything associated with Iago’s plot. Othello assures Iago that ‘I know thou’rt full of love and honesty / And weigh’st thy words before thou giv’st them breath’ (3.3.120–22), where the idea of speaking becomes figured effectively as an act of giving birth. Othello also evokes the idea of the menstrual cycle, which governs women’s fertility, when he protests, ‘Think’st thou I’d make a life of jealousy / To follow still the changes of the moon / With fresh suspicions?’ (3.3.180–82). Finally, birth becomes an emblem of the thing which Othello most fears and loathes when he exclaims ‘O thou weed / Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet / That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born!’ (4.2.68–70). Indeed so strongly is the fear of birth present in the play that even the language of Emilia, who knows nothing of Iago’s scheme, is coloured by parodic birth imagery whenever she mentions anything which has resulted from her husband’s manoeuvrings. She assures Desdemona that ’Tis not a year or two shows us a man. They are all but stomachs, and we all but food:

‘BLACK BUT BEAUTIFUL’

83

They eat us hungerly, and when they are full They belch us. (3.4.104–7)

Similarly, she says to her mistress, ‘Pray heaven it be / State matters, as you think, and no conception / Nor no jealous toy concerning you’ (3.4.155–7). And finally she declares of jealousy that ‘It is a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself’ (3.4.161–2). Given this persistent association of motherhood with the monstrous, it is perhaps unsurprising that Othello seems to have a marked distaste for anything associated with female fertility, and indeed to fetishise virginity. The Clown remarks ‘But, as they say, to hear music the general does not greatly care’ (3.1.16–17); given the standard Renaissance association of love with music, and the propensity of clownish characters for innuendo (virtually advertised here by ‘they say’), this certainly looks very like a declaration of Othello’s celibacy, and Othello himself says, ‘when I have plucked the rose / I cannot give it vital growth again, / It needs must wither’29 (5.2.13–15). He similarly elevates virginity when he says of the handkerchief, ‘The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk, / And it was dyed in mummy, which the skilful / Conserved of maidens’ hearts’ (3.4.75–7). By contrast, his view of the place of life is far darker: Where either I must live or bear no life, The fountain from the which my current runs Or else dries up – to be discarded thence! Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there, Patience, thou young and rose-lipped cherubin, Ay, here look, grim as hell! (4.2.59–65)

For Othello, then, virginity and motherhood are antithetical, and the rift between them leaves all women who are not virgins irrevocably tainted in his eyes. Again, it is the figure of the Black Virgin, mystically both mother and maid, blackened and pure, who would offer a way to reconcile and transcend these tensions, and to allow for a positive imaging of motherhood and its processes. The figure of the Black Virgin is also associated with another aspect of Othello’s views on love. Both Walsingham and Loreto are near the sea, and for this reason ‘Our Lady of Walsingham was known to Erasmus as Diva Parathalassia;’30 ‘Stella Maris,’ ‘Star of the Sea,’ was of course a common title of the Virgin. Othello is unusually interested in the sea, but instead of representing it as a source of reconciliation and miraculous rebirth, as so often in Shakespeare, it figures it as a threat. Throughout 29 For the argument that this alludes directly to Desdemona’s virginity, see Michael Hattaway, ‘Fleshing his Will in the Spoil of her Honour: Desire, Misogyny, and the Perils of Chivalry,’ Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994): 121–35; see in particular page 132. 30 See ‘Santa Casa di Loreto’, New Advent Encyclopedia. Online: http://www.newadvent. org/cathen/13454b.htm

84

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

the early scenes of Act Two, we are made constantly aware of the ‘high-wrought flood’ (2.1.2) which rages so strongly that the Second Gentleman observes, ‘I never did like molestation view / Of the enchafed flood’ (2.1.9), with the doubled reference to ‘flood’ inviting us to read events not in terms of the classicising view of the sea so often adopted, as in the choice of the name ‘Marina’ in Pericles, but in the specifically Old Testament eschatological sense of Noah’s Flood. Othello imagines both his suffering and his potential revenge in terms of the sea: Like to the Pontic sea Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne’er keeps retiring ebb but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont: Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up. (3.3.456–63)

Indeed at the close of the play he envisages his whole life as a sea-voyage: ‘Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt / And very sea-mark of my utmost sail’ (5.2.265–6). On this perilous voyage, he would certainly have benefited from a benign guiding force to watch over him – exactly what generations of sailors had found in the figure of Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Othello’s sea-mark, however, is dead, killed as a result of his demonisation of the very qualities which, I have argued, are most closely identified with the figure of the Black Madonna. Finally comes the question of proof and faith. The dilemma here is, I think, encapsulated by a complex nexus centred on the apparent incompatibility and actual melding of the figures of Christian and Turk. This too is something which could have been mediated through the cult of the Black Virgin. For Othello, to be a Turk is to be fundamentally incompatible with Christianity, as we see when he images himself in his guilt as a Turk. But Montaigne, having first noted that ‘Loreto is a small village enclosed with walls and fortified against attack by the Turks’ (II, p. 196), subsequently says that ‘Among the other rich and rare offerings left there I saw a candle recently sent by a Turk who had made a vow to Our Lady when he was in sore straits, and ready to seize upon any rope which might offer help in gaining safety’ (II, p. 199). Montaigne’s Turk could, it seems, operate on nearly as many levels of cognition and ratiocination as Montaigne himself, and we too need to be able to do so to appreciate all the levels of irony which play about Erasmus’s innocuous-seeming account of how at Walsingham ‘I inquired, as civilly as I could, by what proofs he was assured that this was the Milk of the Virgin … the canon, as if possessed by a fury, looking aghast upon us, and apparently horrified at the blasphemous inquiry, replied, “What need to ask such questions, when you have the authentical inscription?”’31 Shakespeare’s play similarly shows itself well aware of 31 Erasmus, Pilgrimages, 25.

‘BLACK BUT BEAUTIFUL’

85

the multiplicity and flexibility of mental processes and modes of apprehension, but its title character does not. For him, black and white, virginity and motherhood, truth and falsehood, and innocence and guilt are forever polarised as mutually exclusive antitheses; he has no concept of the mystical transcendence in which contraries may meet. The Virgin, however, is a figure who eradicates and transcends such differences, and can even reverse the racialising process, as in the story told by Sir Kenelm Digby of an ‘Ethiopian queen who gave birth to a white child because a picture of the blessed Virgin hung over her bed.’32 Above all, Othello bears testimony to the attractiveness of the idea of the miracle almost as strongly as does The Winter’s Tale. The surviving characters’ understanding of the truth is finally clinched when Cassio says of Roderigo that ‘even but now he spake, / After long seeming dead’ (5.2.325–6). Desdemona too comes back to life, even if only briefly. Othello, by contrast, presents himself – in terms notably evocative of the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, if ‘base Indian’ rather than ‘base Judean’ is indeed the correct reading (5.2.344–6) – as one who shies away from the iconography of the miracle. But the play makes it very clear that that is his loss. Despite the intensity of the recent debate on the subject, it seems to me impossible to know finally whether Shakespeare himself was a Catholic, but there seems little doubt he was sympathetic to those who mourned the exchange of its certainties and comforts for the greater austerity of Protestantism. In Othello, I think we see the scars of the loss of Catholicism, and most particularly the wide embrace of the rich and various figure of the Virgin Mary, particularly in her incarnation as a Black Madonna. Works Cited and Consulted Begg, Ean, The Cult of the Black Virgin (1985. Reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). Benko, Stephen, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993). Boose, Lynda E., ‘“The getting of a lawful race”: Racial discourse in early modern England and the unrepresentable black woman,’ in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 35–54. Brading, D. A., Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Callaghan, Dympna, ‘“Othello was a white man”: properties of race on Shakespeare’s Stage,’ in Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2, edited by Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 1996), 192–215.

32 Ernest B. Gilman, Recollecting the Arundel Circle: Discovering the Past, Recovering the Future (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 120.

86

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Cassagnes-Brouquet, Sophie, Vierges Noires: Regard et Fascination (Rodez: Editions du Rouergue, 1990). Diehl, Huston, ‘Bewhored Images and Imagined Whores: Iconophobia and Gynophobia in Stuart Love Tragedies,’ English Literary Renaissance 26.1 (1996): 111–37. Erasmus, Desiderius, Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham and Saint Thomas of Canterbury, trans. John Gough Nichols (Westminster: John Bowyer Nichols and son, 1849). Gilman, Ernest B., Recollecting the Arundel Circle: Discovering the Past, Recovering the Future (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). Gustafson, Fred, The Black Madonna (Boston: Sigo Press, 1990). Hall, Kim F., Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Hattaway, Michael, ‘Fleshing his Will in the Spoil of her Honour: Desire, Misogyny, and the Perils of Chivalry,’ Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994): 121–35. Marlowe, Christopher, Dido, Queen of Carthage, in Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett (London: Everyman, 1999). de Montaigne, Michel, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany in 1580 and 1581, 3 vols, trans. and edited by W. G. Waters (London: John Murray, 1903). Neill, Michael, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Newman, Karen, ‘“And wash the Ethiop white”: femininity and the monstrous in Othello,’ in Shakespeare Reproduced, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor, (1987. Reprint, London: Routledge, 1990), 142–162. Parker, Patricia, ‘Fantasies of “Race” and “Gender”: Africa, Othello and bringing to Light,’ in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 84–100. ‘Santa Casa di Loreto’, New Advent Encyclopedia. Online: Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982). ——, Othello, edited by E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997). Watson, Robert N., ‘Othello as Reformation Tragedy,’ in In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, edited by Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), 65–96. Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi, edited by John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Woodbridge, Linda, ‘Black and White and Red All Over: The Sonnet Mistress Amongst the Ndembu,’ Renaissance Quarterly 40:2 (summer, 1987): 247–297.

Chapter 5

Desdemona and the Mariological Theology of the Will in Othello Greg Maillet Atlantic Baptist University

Early in the second act of Othello, Cassio recounts Desdemona’s voyage to Cyprus, and admiringly describes how the tempestuous seas, ‘having sense of beauty do omit / Their mortal natures, letting go safely by / The divine Desdemona’ (2.1.72–74).1 Though clearly hyperbolic, in the broad tradition of Renaissance blazons of female beauty, Cassio goes on to praise Desdemona in language that more specifically likens her to the one woman, before Elizabeth I, whom English culture had often regarded, in many senses, as a mediator of divine presence: the Virgin Mary. In remarkably traditional terms that recall the most commonly known Mariological elements of the recently banned ‘old faith,’ Cassio announces Desdemona’s arrival with nearbiblical wonder: O, behold, The riches of the ship is come on shore! You men of Cyprus, let her have your knees. Hail to thee, lady, and the grace of heaven Before, behind thee, and on every hand Enwheel thee round! (2.1.83–88)

This side of heaven, one is unlikely to know Shakespeare’s confessional affiliation, but it is highly probable that both he and his audience would have here heard clear echoes of Catholic biblical and liturgical praise of Mary, translated simply from the Latin. Mary, in this tradition, is the lady before whom one should kneel to say ‘Ave’ or ‘Hail,’ for solely by ‘the grace of heaven’ she becomes ‘plena gratia,’ or ‘full of grace,’ and hence a ‘stella maris,’ or star of the sea, a Lady Wisdom who guides the ship’s safe passage through the storms of fortune by binding her will to the wheel of providence. Though obvious, the likening of Desdemona to the Virgin Mary in these lines has received very little critical attention. Partly this is because Marian imagery is but one 1 William Shakespeare, Othello. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 819–854. All subsequent references will be to this edition, and will appear parenthetically in the text.

88

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

of many motifs that Shakespeare uses to depict Desdemona’s exceptional virtue, but more commonly it is because so many critics dismiss her goodness as simply a naïve innocence fated to be tragically destroyed by the conflict of Iago and Othello, the ‘real’ dramatic subject of the play. What would happen, by contrast, if we seriously ask why Shakespeare so clearly invited us to compare Desdemona to Mary? Further, how does it change our view of the play if we bring a sympathetic, theologically developed view of Mary to our understanding of Desdemona’s character? Immediately, to address the legitimate fear that Marian theology might be an external concept imposed upon and hence a distortion of the play’s content, it is worth stating some ways not to answer these questions. Critics should not regard Desdemona as an allegory of Mary, or Christ, precisely because crucial to the role of these figures in medieval and Renaissance Europe was their absolute uniqueness. Even in Medieval and Renaissance literature that is clearly allegorical, very seldom does one meet any single character who is Mary or Christ ‘in disguise’ in the way that the latter, for example, is embodied by C.S. Lewis’s Aslan. All Christians are called to be like Christ, and both men and women are encouraged to model their lives after the saints; it is thus unsurprising to find literary characters who imitate Christ in various ways, and who live lives at least partially comparable to the saints. Such characters can be said to typify or be ‘types’ of religious figures, in an inexact analogy to typology, the Christian biblical hermeneutic which regards Old Testament figures as prefiguring New Testament characters and events. Typology, in contrast to allegory, makes no attempt to efface or disguise the obvious contrasts or differences between human characters and the holy personages they partly remind us of; hence, it is a much more flexible and widely used way for faithful Christian writers to draw on Biblical tradition and add depth, meaning, and perhaps even authority to the characters composed by their own imaginations.2 Acknowledging Desdemona, then, as a ‘type’ of Mary in no way elides the obvious differences between them, nor does it ask us to ignore aspects of her role— particularly as disobedient daughter or as romantic lover and wife—that clearly make her a unique, individual, and in many ways realistic human character. Nor, either, does it require us to strain for parallels between Desdemona and many of the complex theological dogmas peculiar to Mary’s unique role in salvation history. But it should move us to respect, if not reverence, the highly ethical, indeed apparently immaculate goodness portrayed by Desdemona in this play, particularly as it contrasts and comes into conflict with the nearly demonic evil of Iago. Such an attitude would rule out, for example, the cutting of Desdemona’s lines in performance, both on stage and screen, which directors commonly use to focus attention on the relationship 2 See Robert Hollander, ‘Typology and Secular Literature: Some Medieval Examples and Problems,’ in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Earl R. Miner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 3–19. See also Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Typological Symbolism and the “Progress of the Soul” in Seventeenth-Century Literature,’ in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Earl R. Miner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 79–114.

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

89

of Iago and Othello. Further, it would help us avoid the sort of critical oversight that causes, for example, even the modern Arden editor, M.R. Ridley, to agree with Thomas Rymer, the seventeenth-century critic and noted curmudgeon, that their argument immediately after Cassio’s blazon (2.1.103–67) is nothing more than a ‘long rabble of Jack-pudding farce.’3 In fact, this scene includes the one moment, before the play’s tragic conclusion, where anyone actually states what the allegedly ‘honest Iago’ truly is, as Desdemona calls him a ‘slanderer,’ and a ‘profane and liberal counsellor’ (2.1.116, 166–67). While brief, and primarily comic, it is not true, as Ridley claims, that ‘all we gain from’ this scene ‘is some further unneeded light on Iago’s vulgarity’;4 rather, the scene reminds us that the clear, quiet ray of truth offered by Desdemona is the only antidote to the loud, destructive lies of Iago. Critics have often seen a dramatic medieval structure within Othello, a ‘psychomachia’ in which Desdemona and Iago embody, respectively, a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ angel vying for the soul of Everyman, Othello. Many elements of the play suggest this basic structure, even details such as the ironic nature of the central characters’ names. ‘Iago’ is the Spanish form of St. James, Spain’s patron saint, and thus a dual suggestion, for a primarily Protestant English audience, that his outwardly ‘honest’ form hides the demonic interior which his soliloquies reveal. One could trace the meaning of our heroine’s name to ‘dysdaimon,’ Greek for ‘unfortunate,’ but given the familiarity of Shakespeare and his audience with romance languages, it is also likely that ‘Des-demona,’ suggests ‘of the female devils,’ which again is the opposite of her true character. These names are part of a general ‘hermeneutic of antonyms’ within the entire play, which mainly derives from the perverted perspective created through Iago’s evil; but, it also allows us to surmise the true identity of Othello. Both orally and visually, his name reminds us of the ‘Ottoman’ empire, and hence all that is ‘other’ to Christian civilization, but actually he is an Everyman figure subject to the kinds of trials faced by most human beings. Unwittingly, and again ironically, the simplest gull in the play, Roderigo, reminds us of this identity by calling Othello ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger, of here and everywhere’ (1.1.138–39). Othello— who is most likely a Christian convert, since in sixteenth-century Venetian society he would need to have been baptized to marry Desdemona, and since he does rebuke his own soldiers, ‘for Christian shame,’ at having ‘turned Turk’ (2.3.163–65)5—can even be seen as a Christian Everyman, an Augustinian ‘stranger and sojourner’ forced to choose between the love of God embodied in Desdemona, and the Satanic deception woven by Iago.

3 Qtd. in M.R. Ridley ed., Othello, by William Shakespeare, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, edited by Harold F. Brooks and Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1958), 54. 4 Ibid. 5 Anthony Hecht, ‘Othello,’ William Shakespeare’s Othello: Modern Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 125.

90

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Iago, the Augustinian Theology of the Will, and Satan The simplicity of this underlying medieval structure, in contrast to the complexity of the actual play, has discouraged its utility in contemporary Othello criticism. Yet there is little doubt that Shakespeare does present Iago and Desdemona as polar opposites, and that devotion to either his wife or his soldier determines Othello’s spiritual state. Numerous lines and examples from the play can be cited to support this central point, but most of these have a fundamental intellectual foundation: the Augustinian theology of the will. Though my focus is Desdemona, her theological role in the play can be clarified by a brief review of Roy Battenhouse’s pioneering discussion of Iago’s theology of the will.6 Battenhouse demonstrates that Iago’s speeches contain a number of direct verbal allusions to the writings of a fourthcentury British monk, Pelagius, who taught that we lose or gain our own salvation solely by the power of our own will (380–84). Pelagian ideas are particularly clear in the lengthy speech encouraging Roderigo’s lust for Desdemona, where Iago tells him that ‘tis in ourself that we are thus or thus,’ and that ‘our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners’ (1.3.319–21). St. Augustine famously opposed Pelagius by arguing for the necessity of grace in human salvation, but even more familiar to Shakespeare’s audience would be the profane argument that Iago makes in further claiming that ‘we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts; whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion’ (1.3.329–32). Here Iago, in the name of a rationality controlled by the human will, refers to St. Augustine’s famous opposition of caritas vs. cupiditas but inverts the orthodox status of both. Augustine’s Latin terms are often translated into English as ‘love’ and ‘lust,’ though they broadly apply to all human endeavor rather than sexuality alone, and most precisely to both the temporal and eternal human relationship to God; only things used in caritas to further divine love lead to enjoyment of God’s triune life, while things enjoyed for selfish reasons, in cupiditas, lead only to the death of one’s self. Contrary to Iago, St. Augustine affirms that divine, unselfish love is the metaphysical and ethical foundation of good will both in the human person and society, and is in fundamental and irreconcilable opposition to lust, or the love of self: two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God: the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord.7

6 Roy Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). 7 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Ch. XIV.28, trans. Marcus Dods, Great Books of the Western World, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 127–618.

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

91

Camille Wells-Slights argues that, rather than illustrating ‘an Augustinian concept of two kinds of love,’ it is more compelling to see Iago as representative of a ‘Cartesian ideal of rational control in which one’s desires are objectified and strength of will is the central virtue.’8 Pelagianism is itself a naïve rationalism, however, and was long regarded by Christian orthodoxy as a polite cover for the human willfulness that soon leads to destruction of others, and oneself. Shakespeare demonstrates his familiarity with this Augustinian tradition so frequently that it is worth reviewing his other dramatic illustrations of this concept in order to understand its relevance to Othello. In Measure for Measure, for example, the condemned Claudio offers an apt image for Luther’s view of the bondage of the human will by likening ‘our natures’ to ‘rats that raven down their proper bane’ and then ‘die’ (1.2.120–22).9 Claudio also cites the central Calvinist scripture on the sovereignty of the divine will (Romans 9:14–21)10 when, on the way to prison, he says that ‘Authority’ can ‘make us pay down for our offense’ because of ‘the words of heaven: on whom it will, it will; on whom it will not, so; yet still ’tis just’ (1.2.112–15). Yet Measure for Measure as a whole does not take any clear, precise position on divisive Reformation issues such as the relationship of free will and grace. ‘Grace is grace, despite of all controversy’ (1.2.24–25) affirms Lucio, the play’s fool, while the serious human counterpoint to this truth is supplied by Angelo, the play’s villain, whose name also hides an interior will enslaved to sin; almost quoting, again, from Romans 8:19, he laments his lecherous pursuit of the nun, Isabella, by saying, ‘Alack, when once our grace we have forgot, / Nothing goes right; we would, and we would not’ (4.4.31–32). Shakespeare’s central point, the basic opposition of divine grace and human will, is also stressed in Romeo and Juliet when Friar Laurence foreshadows the hero’s downfall by seeing, ‘in man as well as herbs, grace and rude will; / And where the worse is predominant, / Full soon the canker death eats up that plant’ (2.2.38). It is within this Augustinian theological context, as Battenhouse rightly argues, that the profound errors in Iago’s discussion of the will are most clearly seen. If Battenhouse errs, it is in failing to stress the full danger of Iago’s lies, and their true source. For Iago, of course, is not really a ‘reasonable’ man arguing for two loves, but rather, in the broad, power-hungry sense that is too self-centered to be sexual at 8 Camille Wells-Slights, ‘Slaves and Subjects in Othello,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1997): 384. 9 William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 789– 818. All subsequent references to Shakespeare’s works are to this edition, and will appear parenthetically in the essay. 10 The Bible: Authorized King James Version. 1611. Introduction and Notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). All subsequent biblical references are to this edition, and appear parenthetically in the text; though the KJV is published about seven years after the first performance of Othello, its poetry is more resonant with the play, in my view, than is the Geneva Bible or other earlier editions.

92

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

all, Iago perfectly portrays Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, where lust is described as ‘perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,’ an illusory ‘heaven that leads men to this hell’ (3–4, 14). Hell, for Augustine and, apparently, Shakespeare, is the consequence of the human will being separated from God, a point made even in the comic context of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Puck speaks of ‘damned spirits’ who ‘willfully exiled themselves from the light’ (3.2.383–87). Puck also suggests here the true source of hell, for it lies in the perverted will to exile found in Isaiah’s account of Lucifer (14:12–15). His desire to be God cast him into hell and turned him into Satan, who in turn deceives Adam and Eve by appealing to their own will to ‘be as gods’ (Gen. 3:5), and then gives them a knowledge of evil which, cut off from the only living God, must recreate hell on earth rather than resting in Eden. Iago does not allegorically represent but rather acts as a type of Satan. Initially, he reminds us of Satan simply by his angry pride over Cassio being promoted ahead of him, and by his unwillingness to serve anyone other than himself (1.1.42). But when he closes this admittance of duplicity by saying, ‘I am not what I am’ (1.1.65), Iago straightforwardly negates the name of God, who from the burning bush in Exodus calls himself ‘I AM THAT I AM’ (Exodus 3:14).11 In doing so, Iago presents himself as being, however falsely, a self-sufficient principle of evil much like that believed in by the Manicheans, another heretical sect whom St. Augustine also opposed. Evil, the great Bishop explained, derives solely from the temporary, illusory choice of creatures; despite the ensuing physical pain, evil thus lacks the eternal being that alone gives lasting substance;12 but, temporarily puffed up with pride, evil falsely represents itself as independent and, in its own perverted sense, ‘free.’ Whereas God brings good out of evil, Iago uses Desdemona’s ‘own goodness’ to ‘make the net / that shall enmesh them all’ (2.3.351–52). In executing this plan and becoming another ‘father’ of lies (John 8:44), Iago explicitly counts himself among ‘all the tribe of hell’ (1.3.356) who ‘their blackest sins put on’ by first presenting ‘heavenly shows’ while actually being guided by ‘divinity of hell’ (2.3.341–43). Later in the play, after Iago tells him sensual tales of Desdemona and Cassio committing adultery, Othello falls into ‘a trance’ that Iago explains as ‘an epilepsy,’ but closer to the truth may be the Moor’s concluding term of address before he loses consciousness: ‘O devil!’ (4.1.42–50). Othello seems to intend this for Desdemona, but the audience recognizes it as a reference to the perverted, Satanic character of Iago’s ‘medicine,’ particularly since Renaissance audiences commonly saw mental illness as a form of demonic possession.13 11 S.L. Bethell, ‘Shakespeare’s Imagery: The Diabolical Images in Othello,’ Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952): 62–80. 12 Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, Ch. VII, trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey. Great Books of the Western World, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 1–125. 13 For another example of the commonly perceived link between insanity and demonic possession, see 3.4. 48–58 of William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, edited by Gary

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

93

Critics can restrict their interpretation to a solely symbolic, mythological reading of this demonic imagery, but Shakespeare’s own conclusion in Othello seems to weigh against such a reading. For after Iago’s arrest, Othello looks ‘down towards his feet,’ checking whether they are cloven, and first remarks, ‘that’s a fable.’ Metaphysical reality then seems to be tested, however, when Othello says, ‘If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee’ (5.2.292–93), before stabbing Iago. A devil, being a fallen angelic spirit, could not be killed by material means, and that seems the point of Iago’s ensuing taunt: ‘I bleed, sir, but not killed’ (5.2.2294). Iago is taken to be tortured, but unlike almost every other major Shakespearean villain we never see him killed. Like Marlowe’s Faustus, who begins with the belief that ‘hell’s a fable’ (2.1.127) before finally falling straight into it,14 Othello, and by extension the readers of Othello, are through Iago introduced to what Catholics traditionally call ‘the mystery of iniquity.’ Fundamental evil on this level cannot be explained, but Shakespeare does trace it—through image, analogy, parallel, and allusion—right back to its original source: Satan. It is also worth noting that critics who reject ‘demonic’ interpretations of Iago usually do so by painting him as a typical human criminal, and thus also oppose Coleridge’s famous observation on the ‘motiveless malignancy’ of Iago’s actions. These critics point to Iago’s stated motives, such as his anger over Cassio’s promotion (1.1.7–32), or his suspicion that Othello slept with his wife (1.3.377–82), but fail to appreciate that Coleridge was not denying motives in Iago, but only their rational foundation.15 It is the malignancy of his hatred that is motiveless, for even after being promoted to lieutenant, he still hates both Othello and Cassio. Iago himself admits, of his charge of adultery against the Moor, ‘I know not if’t be true / But I for mere suspicion in that kind, / Will do as if for surety’ (1.3.380–82); on Cassio, Iago later ‘explains,’ just before attempting to kill him, that ‘he hath a daily beauty in his life / that makes me ugly’ (5.1.19–20). Foundationally opposed to ethics, truth, or beauty, Iago’s ‘reasons,’ ultimately, have no more substance than the motive he repeats several times in the play’s opening scenes: ‘I do hate him as I do hell-pains’ (1.1.156). At play’s end, one must affirm that Iago seems to have spent at least some time in hell, and is at least partly demonic, but Othello’s concluding question remains unanswered: ‘Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil / Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?’ (5.2.307–308). Nevertheless, the profoundly realistic and deeply Christian portrait of evil that Shakespeare presents in Iago’s will to power and destructiveness does cause us to ask many other questions. First, it recalls the mysterious reality of original sin— Taylor, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1065–98. 14 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Drama of the English Renaissance: The Tudor Period, edited by Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 295– 322. 15 See John Wain, Shakespeare: Othello, A Casebook (1971; Reprint Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994), 21.

94

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

not just the capacity of Adam and Eve to be deceived by Satan, but moreover the more fundamental question of why any creature would hate a God who is beauty, truth, and goodness in His very being. Yet further, since irrational hatred of this kind does exist, what lasting substance does it have? If evil can be described, as St. Augustine proposes, as an absence of being, why are its effects so painful? What lasting effects does it have? Put another way, with reference to Othello, what are the ultimate effects of Iago’s deceptions? Is Othello, to take one oft debated question, ultimately damned? Closer to my topic, what is the importance of Desdemona’s goodness within the play? Given her eventual murder, and Othello’s suicide, is her will to love, finally, utterly futile? On this question, it is worth remembering Iago’s confident prediction, in the long speech on the will to Roderigo, that ‘it cannot be long that Desdemona should continue her love to the Moor,’ for ‘when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice’ (1.3. 341–42, 349–51). What difference does it make, in our understanding of Othello, that Iago is proven wrong on this point, since clearly Desdemona’s will to love Othello never does change? To answer such questions, one must understand that Shakespeare’s portrayal of a Mariological will within Desdemona is every bit as profound, and ultimately far more powerful, than the Satanic will embodied by Iago. The Mariological Theology of the Will To appreciate Shakespeare’s theological sophistication, however, it is necessary to briefly review the major Marian concepts relevant to Desdemona. Mary’s obedient response to Gabriel, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word’ (Luke 1:38), is of course central in any Christian theology of the will, whether or not one accepts the ensuing Catholic doctrines of Mary as the ‘second Eve,’ Mother of the Church (John 19:26–27), or so uniquely ‘blessed … among women’ (Luke 1:42) that she becomes the supreme human model of faith.16 Yet one also should not assume that doctrines dogmatically defined much after Shakespeare’s time—such as the Immaculate Conception of the Assumption—are irrelevant either to a Renaissance audience or to an understanding of the period’s literary characters. Both dogmas had supporters long before the seventeenth century, and were part of a linked iconography of Mary that could subtly suggest and reinforce other elements of her character without being explicitly stated. Mary as ‘second Eve,’ for example, implies a pre-fallen character, but it is crucial to realize that this in no way negates or trivializes the importance of her obedience. Mary’s ‘immaculate conception,’ or freedom from original sin, allows her nothing more, nor less, than the divinely intended, fully human freedom of choice enjoyed by the first Eve; however, just as Christ suffers physically in working out our salvation on the cross, so Mary, we can assume, suffers the curse of childbearing. As well, 16 See Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 39–52.

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

95

Simeon’s prophetic warning to Mary, that ‘a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also’ (Luke 2:35), foretells her extraordinary pain during her son’s crucifixion; for both, saying to God, ‘thy will be done,’ (Matt. 6:10) entails spiritual anguish, and physical agony. Mary thereby further acquired the name ‘mater dolorosa,’ mother of sorrows, and became famous for an extraordinary caritas towards all the weak and suffering of the world.17 Further, rather than the extreme passivity sometimes attributed to her, Mary’s bravery in facing suffering also earns her the title of ‘mulier fortis,’ or the ‘virtuous woman’ (Proverbs 31:10).18 Similarly, the dogma of the Assumption implies Mary’s coronation as Queen of Heaven and the critical apocalyptic role assumed by her eventual identification as the woman wearing ‘a crown of twelve stars’ who joins with her child to destroy the ‘great red dragon’ (Rev. 12:1–3). But far from being a contemporary innovation, Mary’s role in opposition to Satan had long been established through reference to Genesis 3:15, where God tells the serpent, ‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed,’ the seed whose victory on the cross becomes the ultimate act of human submission to the Divine will. As the ‘second Eve’ who bears this seed and nurtures His growth, Mary’s unique relation to the fulfillment of the Divine will allows her to become known as ‘the seat of wisdom.’ Since this wisdom is always given through and ever leads back to Christ, Mary also becomes portrayed, even by many Protestant reformers and artists, as the most faithful reader, the finest interpreter, of the Word who filled her womb.19 Even when Christians disagreed over their own interpretation of that word, such as on the question of whether Mary was ever-virgin or rather began sexual marital relations after the virgin birth of Christ, Mary’s wisdom makes her an exemplar of chastity in both Catholic and Protestant traditions; in England, for example, the virgin Queen Elizabeth I was often praised in Marian terms.20 Helen Hackett doubts a direct connection,21 and of course poetic or political Marian imagery is bound to be indirect in post-Reformation England, but it is hard to read the poetry of ‘Gloriana’ without expecting that many in Shakespeare’s time would also be reminded of the Queen of Heaven.22 The doctrine perhaps most relevant to Desdemona, however, may also be the most controversial: Mary as ‘mediatrix,’ or intercessor before God for mercy toward humanity.23 The Ave Maria, certainly the most famous prayer to Mary and perhaps the prayer spoken more than any other except the Our Father, repeats Gabriel’s 17 Ibid., 125. 18 Ibid. 19 See, for example, the emphasis on Mary as ‘reader’ in David Lyle Jeffrey’s People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996). 20 Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 16. 21 Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of Mary (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995). 22 Pelikan, Mary, 161–63. 23 Ibid., 125–38.

96

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

addresses to her, but then moves to a key, present tense affirmation of Mary’s current status: ‘The Lord is with thee.’ From there, the request for intercession, ‘pray for us,’ is a reasonable step of faith, though one sometimes embellished in heretical ways. For the humble way of Mary requires her subordination to Christ, but their common theology of the will and constant union does explain why so many believers have felt that one could move from a vision of the face of Mary to the face of Christ and then on further to an experience of the holy, ineffable mystery who is God the Father—the experience shown most famously, perhaps, in the final canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Protestant Reformation interpreted St. Paul stating that there is ‘one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 2:5) as excluding all other forms of mediation with God, but Orthodox and Catholic Christians understand Paul to be including all forms of mediation that Christ has sanctified. Indeed, Jesus’ first miracle provides the basic pattern of Marian intercession, for when his Mother asks Jesus to turn water into wine, he at first appears unmoved; rather than arguing, Mary reveals the simple but crucially important precondition for wisdom: ‘Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it’ (John 2:5). Then, in a supernatural miracle that prefigures the transubstantiation of the eucharist, human hands touch, taste, drink, and become branches of the joy-giving fruit of the Vine (John 15:1–5). This is the authentic fruit and character of Mariological intercession, which never occurs independently, but always in and through Christ. Literary critics must also remember that much of Mary’s influence depends on writers seeing her faith as a fruitful fountain of true beauty. Mary’s spirituality thus becomes the primary model not only for women, but also for the kind of woman whom men’s souls should love. Most famously, Dante’s devotion to the selfless Beatrice allows her to lead him to the very pinnacle of heaven; there, she directs him to a beautiful garden in which blooms Mary, ‘the Rose / in which the Word became incarnate.’ Mysterious music then provides this description of Mary to Dante: ‘I am the Angelic Love that wheels around / the lofty ecstasy breathed from the womb’ where Christ was born.24 Regardless of whether or not Shakespeare had read Dante, passages such as this one are so typical of medieval artistic imagery that they give in microcosm the thematic vocabulary, for example, of Cassio’s already cited account of how the sea, ‘having sense of beauty,’ will not harm ‘the divine’ woman through whom the ‘grace of heaven’ will ‘enwheel thee round.’ The key organizing image in Cassio’s blazon, Desdemona as ‘stella maris,’ ‘star of the sea,’ is in fact the most famous medieval Marian image of all, ‘a name that was said to be given her from on high.’25 The term derived from St. Jerome’s etymology for Mary as ‘a drop of water from the sea,’ which Isidore of Seville changed from ‘stilla’ (‘drop’) to ‘stella’ (star).26 The apparent mistake might be justified through reference to Revelation 12, where Mary is crowned with stars, but Dante’s most 24 Canto 23: 73–74 and 103–104 of Paradiso in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 1321. Trans. John Ciardi (New York: Norton, 1977.) 25 Pelikan, Mary, 93. 26 Ibid.

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

97

famous line provides another clue to its importance. In Canto 3 of Paradiso, the blessed Piccarda, once a ‘virgin sister in the world,’ now a soul in bliss, explains her contentment through a long discourse on the will. Piccarda emphasizes that ‘the essence of this blessed state of being / is to hold all our will within His will,’27 for, as Longfellow would brilliantly translate Dante’s most famous line, ‘his will is our peace; this is the sea / To which is moving onward whatsoever / It doth create, and all that nature makes.’28 Mary as the model of human submission is, one could say, a humble drop from the divine sea; but, ascended to a heavenly star, her merciful will becomes a guiding light that illumines the path to God. Desdemona as a Type of Mary It is unsurprising, certainly, that few have attempted to link the sublime and utterly unique theological doctrines of Mary with any literary character. Still, if one accepts Shakespeare’s clear invitation to do so, while avoiding simplistic identification of their characters, a knowledge of Mary does help us to appreciate Desdemona’s crucial role in Othello, even elements of their characters that at first seem opposite. For example, her elopement with Othello, against her father’s wishes, could be taken as the very sort of willful rebellion that devotees of Mary would abhor. Peter Davison, a twentieth-century critic, after citing Iago warning Othello that, ‘She has deceived her father and may thee’ (1.3.293), rightly notes that ‘there can be little doubt that not a few in Jacobean England would have nodded approval.’29 More surprisingly, Davison himself goes on to argue that the elopement, for Othello, is a ‘serious error,’ and reveals Desdemona to have not only ‘a spirited independence,’ but also a ‘certain willful irresponsibility’ or at least an unfortunate ignorance of adult life.30 The couple is wise enough to know, however, that though Brabanzio did first invite the Moor over to his house (1.3.128), he is too racist ever to accept Othello into his family. Yet in explaining her decision to the Venetian senators, Desdemona specifically appeals to the ideal of obedience, telling her father, ‘I do perceive here a divided duty,’ for ‘so much duty as my mother show’d / To you,’ so she must also show her husband, Othello (1.3.180–88). This argument has biblical support in that it applies to a woman, to a second Eve, the part in Genesis where God explains that He creates two genders, and institutes marriage, so that a man will ‘leave his father and his 27 Canto 3: 79–80 of Paradiso in Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 1321. Trans. John Ciardi (New York: Norton, 1977.) 28 Canto 3.85–87 of Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, vol. XI of The Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867; Reprint, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904). 29 Peter Davison, Othello, The Critics Debate, edited by Michael Scott (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 69. 30 Davison, Othello, 69–71.

98

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh’ (2:24). Though still bitter, Brabanzio immediately accepts this argument, saying ‘God b’wi’you, I ha’ done’ (1.3.189). By still speaking respectfully to her father yet affirming the submission of her will to a husband, Desdemona does display the self-abnegation characteristic of Mary. Yet in boldly speaking publicly to defend her marriage, and then insisting that she be allowed to accompany her husband to face the war in Cyprus, she also becomes ‘mulier fortis,’ a ‘woman of valor’ or, as Othello calls her, ‘my fair warrior’ (2.1.182). One should also note, however, that Desdemona’s submission is not devotion to an abstract ideal; when a man such as Iago is clearly unworthy of such devotion, she does tell his wife, ‘Do not learn of him, Emilia, though he be thy husband’ (2.1.164–65). Appreciating the complexity of Desdemona’s goodness is far less common, however, than doubting or simply denying both the wisdom and even the validity of her marriage to Othello. The general argument here is Samuel Johnson’s claim, according to Boswell, that ‘we learn from Othello this very useful moral, not to make an unequal match.’31 Sometimes their age difference is cited, or their differing cultural background, but always central has been their ‘racial’ or ‘colour’ difference, with critics dividing between those who believe, with G.K. Hunter, that the deeds of Othello are designed to eventually confirm ‘the prejudice that his face at first excited,’32 and those, like Karen Newman, who think Shakespeare’s play as a whole ‘stands in a contestatory relation to the hegemonic ideologies of race and gender in early modern England.’33 Part of this ideology usually presented blacks as ‘peculiarly sexual men’34 (Jordan 38), but, again, the play also offers the opposite reading. Stephen Greenblatt even bases his argument for the lovers’ incompatibility on Othello’s ‘young affects’ being ‘defunct’ (1.3.263–64) making him unable to answer Desdemona’s passionate announcement, in the quarto of the play, that her ‘heart’s subdued / even to the utmost pleasure of my lord’ (1.3.250–51); this is the reason, supposedly, for their marriage not being consummated, apparently, until their reunion on Cyprus. Whereas some might see Othello subverting Renaissance stereotypes, Greenblatt by contrast goes on to argue that Desdemona’s ‘frank acceptance of pleasure and submission to her spouse’s pleasure is … as much as Iago’s slander the cause of Desdemona’s death, for it awakens the deep current of sexual anxiety in Othello, anxiety that with

31 Qtd. in W.K. Wimsatt ed, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 114. 32 G.K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978), 55. 33 Karen Newman, ‘“And Wash the Ethiop White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,’ Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 157. 34 Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550– 182I (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 38.

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

99

Iago’s help expresses itself in quite orthodox fashion as the perception of adultery.’35 Regardless of how her motives are analyzed, for such critics the act of Desdemona marrying Othello is not only unrelated to Marian ideals, but simply a tragic error, an act that should never have happened. Though all of the arguments just cited against the validity of the marriage are without rational foundation, Davison is quite right to see that in Othello, ‘Shakespeare dramatises characters tempted to hate and destroy rather than accept such a love,’ and ‘he tempts the audience to do the same.’36 That this temptation is largely created by the racist, misogynist, demonic perspective of Iago does to some extent justify Davison’s further claim that the play enables us ‘to purge something of that will to destruction within us as we see Othello destroy himself.’37 However, the critical record, as just noted, suggests that often such purgation does not happen; for it do so, in my opinion, one must realize not only the pain of Othello’s error, but also the error of Iago’s whole perspective on love and its resulting view of the play’s central marriage. Following but diverting from the approach of Carol Thomas Neely, who calls herself an ‘Emilia critic,’38 one should instead become a ‘Desdemona critic,’ and try to see the play’s events through her eyes rather than Brabanzio’s, Othello’s or, especially, Iago’s. Explaining this perspective with reference to the ethical virtues of one who not only never married but who, in Catholic tradition, is ‘ever virgin,’ may sound implausible today, but not within the context of Renaissance European culture. For example, the virtue of chastity exemplified by Mary traditionally extended far beyond the ordained life. Mary’s chastity was not passive, but rather essential to her being a ‘woman of virtue,’ and a model for a historical figure such as Elizabeth I or for a literary character like Britomart in Spenser’s The Fairie Queen, who remind us that chastity is a virtue crucial for leadership. This, in turn, is part of why Othello can publicly call Desdemona ‘my fair warrior,’ without expecting any sniping about how ‘our leader’s led’ (3.7.68), as occurs in Antony’s public engagement with the less chaste Cleopatra. Conversely, chastity allows Desdemona to be a gracious hostess, to warmly welcome other males without arousing any valid anxiety from anyone; contra Greenblatt’s claims, the sane Othello clearly recognizes that ’Tis not to make me jealous To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company, Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances well; Where virtue is, these are more virtuous. (3.3.183–86)

35 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Improvisation of Power,’ William Shakespeare’s Othello: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 55. 36 Davison, Othello, 60. 37 Ibid., 60. 38 Carol Thomas Neely, ‘Women and Men in Othello,’ William Shakespeare’s Othello: Modern Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom. (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 81.

100

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Within the marriage, conversely, chastity also does the opposite of what Greenblatt claims, for its restriction of passion to intra-marital activity creates security, not anxiety; as Othello continues in the same speech, ‘Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw / The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt, / For she had eyes and chose me’ (3.3.187–89). Othello’s doubt comes not from Desdemona’s passion, but from adopting the perspective on the marriage of Iago, who is convinced her will must change. By contrast, a spiritual mastery of chastity, though marital, is clearly expressed later in the play when Desdemona tells Emilia that she would not commit adultery ‘for all the world’ (4.3.69). If this virtue is appreciated, the tension allegedly created by the delayed consummation becomes as irrelevant as it appears to be for the couple within the play. Further, it is also worth remembering that though fairly rapid consummation is the human norm, it is not essential for marriage, as Catholic theologians had to confirm, given Mary’s ever virgin yet holy marriage to Joseph.39 Jesus, it is crucial to recall, taught that married couples are those whom ‘God hath joined together’ (Matt. 19:6); God, in the sacrament of matrimony, unites man and woman as one flesh before any sexual act occurs. Sex can be a pleasurable ‘profit’ of this union, as Othello calls it just before the consummation (2.3.10), but to make it essential reduces love to a physical experience or, in Iago’s terms, to ‘a lust of the blood’ (1.3.334). Rather than lust, the love of Othello and Desdemona is based on mutual compassion, as their own account of it before the senators makes clear. Othello says, ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed / And I loved her that she did pity them’ (1.3.166–67). In the folio version of her already cited marriage defense, Desdemona employs the standard translation of the biblical term for the will, the heart, to explain: ‘My heart’s subdued / Even to the very quality of my lord’ (1.3.250–51). ‘Very quality’ here means ‘true nature,’ ‘true value,’ or ‘true greatness,’ but this quality is seen, she then makes clear, not through any exterior appearance or accomplishment, but rather by looking inwards: ‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind’ (1.3.252). This anti-racist statement, which sees past the color of Othello’s skin and into the reality of his interior world, contrasts sharply not only with Iago’s, Roderigo’s, or Brabanzio’s perspective, but also with many elements of Renaissance society, and may appear to have little to do with Mariology. However, one should not forget the importance in Renaissance culture of the Black Madonna, attributed to Saint Luke, which came to Poland in 1382 and which Pelikan calls ‘the most revered sacred image in Central Europe.’40 Precisely because Desdemona is so clearly presented as a white, upper class, married Venetian woman, it would fit the play’s hermeneutic of antonyms to see her also as a poor black virgin. Even if one cannot see this, Desdemona’s stand against the racism of Venetian culture may yet be said to imitate the Bride in the Song of Solomon, often interpreted typologically as being Mary: ‘I am black, but comely’ (1:5). Without question, and apart from typology, although Desdemona’s 39 Pelikan, Mary, 122. 40 Ibid., 78.

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

101

external skin color is white, her interior spiritual compassion allows her to see the beauty of Othello’s black face. Whatever the reasons for their marriage, the most important fact about it is that Desdemona and Othello are married, in the fully sacramental sense normative in an Italian, Catholic society such as sixteenth-century Venice. Though the ceremony itself takes place off-stage, before the play begins, from a Catholic viewpoint the refusal of men like Brabanzio or Roderigo to acknowledge or even speak of this marriage, like the similar refusal to publicly acknowledge the sacramental marriage of Romeo and Juliet, is deeply sinful. Once the free choice essential to sacramental marriage is demonstrated before the Venetian Governors, they must acknowledge it for ecclesial as well as military reasons, especially since one of the primary, longstanding reasons that Christian Europe opposed the Islamic Ottoman empire was the insistence that marriage is monogamous, not polygamous. It is therefore unsurprising that Desdemona should twice refer to the sacramental character of her marriage in affirming its validity before the Governors. To Othello, she says, ‘Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate’ (1.3.254), a phrase that succinctly states the sacred pledge of both eternal soul and temporal life that sacramental marriage entails. Then, objecting to being separated from Othello as he goes to Cyprus, Desdemona laments that ‘the rites for why I love him are bereft me’ (1.3.257), probably a dual reference to the ‘rite’ of marriage that gives her the ‘right’ to live with her husband. In the couple’s happiest moments together, such as their reunion on Cyprus, Shakespeare stresses the extraordinary joy possible only through the intimate unity of their souls, a unity whose divine strength should be able to withstand any blows. ‘O my soul’s joy!’ Othello exclaims, feeling that his ‘soul hath her content so absolute’ that no subsequent time could possibly be happier; Desdemona, though, refers him to eternity, whose joy even united souls cannot fathom, and promises: ‘The heavens forbid / but that our loves and comforts should increase / Even as our days do grow!’ (2.1. 185–96). This moment ‘is too much of joy,’ Othello says, explaining that he cannot continue speaking, and then the couple form ‘one flesh’ by kissing (2.1.198– 99). In moments as romantic as any in literature or life, Shakespeare attempts to convince the audience that this marriage is consecrated, holy, sacramental, grounded in the divine. It is a marriage, indeed, just as sacred and honorable as that between the holy family, Mary and Joseph, which was also seen, one recalls, as unlikely, controversial, and possibly a mismatch in terms of age. As Othello is being deceived by Iago, Shakespeare provides many reminders of the couple’s sacramental marriage. When Othello initially doubts this deception, it is through reference to his marriage’s divine foundation: ‘If she be false, O then heaven mocks itself! / I’ll not believe it’ (3.3.283–84). But, even as he drifts toward jealous suspicion, Othello often seems aware that his very soul, because united to Desdemona, is at stake. ‘Perdition catch my soul but I do love thee,’ he rather carelessly begins, before more honestly adding: ‘and when I love thee not, chaos is come again’ (3.3.91–93). Dimly, unconsciously, Othello recognizes that his marriage has brought him into an eternal communion with the same holy Spirit that ‘moved

102

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

upon the face of the waters’ and formed order out of chaos (Genesis 1:2). There is also evidence that Othello has caught something of the disease of possessiveness that not infrequently infects married males, as when he describes the ‘curse of marriage’ as meaning that ‘we can call these creatures ours, / and not their appetites’ (3.3. 272–74); however, perhaps we should also accept his claim that it is not only dishonor but rather something more fundamental, the very divine gift of life itself, that makes Desdemona’s supposed adultery cause such intense pain, ‘there, where I have garner’d up my heart, / Where either I must live or bear no life’ (4.2.57–58). Rather than speculating, then, on Othello’s past cultural experience, as many critics do to explain his alienation from Desdemona, seeing his wife as a type of Mary reminds us of theologically existential reasons as to why Othello, as a Catholic convert, feels so keenly that the fate of his eternal soul depends on his marriage. Conversely, of course, the sacramentality of the marriage here reminds us that one should not break apart what God has joined together (Matt. 19:6); in doing so, Iago is committing a sin which, Othello warns him, ‘nothing canst thou to damnation add / Greater than that’ (3.3.377–78). Iago had long since sold his soul, however, in pledging, despite ‘sanctimony,’ to destroy ‘a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian’ (1.3.355–57). Eventually, of course, Iago himself is revealed to be that Venetian and, like Satan, ‘more subtil than any beast of the field’ (Gen. 3:1), an irony Shakespeare drives home in one of the most chilling, anti-sacramental moments of the play. At the end of 3.3, the long, crucial scene in which Othello goes from almost strangling Iago to pledging to kill both Desdemona and Cassio, there is a mock marriage in which first Othello kneels and, ‘in the due reverence of a sacred vow,’ tells Iago, ‘I greet thy love, / Not with vain thanks, but with acceptance bounteous,’ and finally makes him his ‘lieutenant’ in the proposed murders (3.3.463–81). United now in death, Iago simply affirms, ‘I am your own forever’ (3.3.482), concluding a rite that stunningly perverts every element of the holy marriage that Othello had contracted with Desdemona. Which rite yet proves to be the ‘frail vow,’ however, is not made clear until two acts later, when Iago’s betrayal and deception is brought to light. The revelation of this deception is directly related to the unchanging will of Desdemona, as evidenced through the fulfillment of her marital vows. Shakespeare stresses this via a strikingly parallel, though vastly different moment, two scenes later, in a speech worth citing at length. After being subjected to cruel taunts from Othello and then being ‘comforted’ by the false, hypocritical couple that is Emilia and Iago, who both here know but refuse to speak about the lost handkerchief that Othello demanded, Desdemona yet has the incredibly innocent, child-like faith to be able to kneel in front of Iago and pray: Good friend, go to him; for by this light of heaven, I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel: If ever my will did trespass against his love, Either in discourse of thought or actual deed, Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

103

Delighted them in any other form; Or that I do not yet, and ever did, And ever will (though he do shake me off To beggarly divorcement) love him dearly, Comfort forswear me! Unkindness may do much, And his unkindness my defeat my life, But never taint my love. (4.2.153–64)

From another person, this entire speech might sound at best sentimental, at worst melodramatic; from Desdemona, at this point in the play, it stands as an honest, courageous statement of her unchanging love, whose purity contrasts Othello’s error and Iago’s evil and shines like the pearl to which her husband will later compare her. It can be criticized as naïve, but her apparent inability to understand evil or, as she puts it later in this speech, to even ‘speak the word … whore’ (4.2.165–66) is a consistent part of her character. In contrast to Iago, who admits to being ‘nothing if not critical’ (2.1.122), Desdemona calls herself ‘a child to chiding’ (4.2.114), and replies to Othello’s abuse by asking: ‘Upon my knees, what doth your speech import? I understand a fury in your words, / But not the words’ (4.2.34–35). Like the immaculately conceived Mary, Desdemona is not unintelligent, but seemingly cut off, by her own nature, from any understanding of evil. She does have a very clear knowledge of the goodness conferred by God, as Eve did before the fall, and even in the face of abuse she calmly tells Othello that she is his ‘true and loyal wife’ (4.1.36), and strongly answers his accusations by saying, ‘No, as I am a Christian … No as I shall be saved’ (4.1.85, 89). To accept the accuracy of these statements one need not affirm that Desdemona never sins at any point in her life. It is necessary to admit, though, as with Mary, that there is no evidence of her sinning; to fabricate such evidence or twist her goodness into error of some kind, as some do in criticizing her aid to Cassio, is to follow Iago down a nihilistic, self-destructive path that is ‘nothing if not critical’ (2.1.122). In helping Cassio, Desdemona again shows a very clear understanding of the reasons for her actions by explaining, ‘If I do vow a friendship, I’ll perform it / To the last article’ (3.2.21–22). Mary, as ‘mater dolorosa,’ has the Christ-like compassion, the self-sacrificing love, that accepts the need to ‘lay down [one’s] life for [one’s] friends’ (John 15:13). It is this ethic that one must keep in mind in trying to understand why, even after the savage threats of 4.2, Desdemona tells Emilia to bring her original wedding sheets to her bedchamber for 5.2, the eventual murder scene. However imprudent one would find such a request from one’s own relative or friend, Desdemona’s choice here represents the unchanging vow of friendship given, in sacramental marriage, to Othello. However extreme, or even inhuman, the choice is necessary to maintaining the Marian ethic that Desdemona embodies. In making the request to Emilia, Desdemona herself speaks of ‘how foolish are our minds’ (4.3.22), but the scene continues by making clear that this foolishness, as in the many other plays where Shakespeare follows Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and

104

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

1 Corinthians 1, is the wisdom of Christ, the wisdom to which Mary becomes ‘seat of’ through humble obedience. While the ‘song of willow’ that Desdemona here sings is in part simply a lament for love lost after ‘he she loved proved mad, and did forsake her’ (4.3.26–27), within the play’s hermeneutic of antonyms it can also be taken as an imitation of Christ’s ‘low will,’ which though equal to God humbles itself to become human. That, perhaps, is why Desdemona seems to change the text of the song to say: ‘Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve’ (4.3.50). As a saintly, Marian imitator of Christ, Desdemona here acts as ‘mater dolorosa,’ weeping for the pain caused by sin, yet joining with Christ in offering mercy to heal the wounds. The ‘willow’ song thus dramatizes the painful emotions and shared suffering that a humble, foolish will must endure, but as the scene progresses a scriptural theology of the will becomes more obvious. Clearly, it is Christ’s question—‘what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (Mark 8:36)—that Desdemona imitates in twice asking Emilia whether she would commit adultery, or ‘do such a deed,’ ‘for all the world?’ (4.3.63, 66). Herself filled by the grace of a ‘heavenly light’ and hence incapable of considering mortal sin, Desdemona rejects Emilia’s famous speech on the potential for women to act like men, and sin like monkeys, by herself pledging to become a Marian instrument of divinity who can be used, in imitation of the divine image to which our wills must conform, to bring good out of evil: ‘God me such uses send, / Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend’ (4.3.104–105). The murder scene itself suggests several other ways in which, from the perspective of a foolish wisdom, Desdemona does bring good out of evil. First, though, it is worth concluding our typological account of her character by noting how her ‘low will,’ like Mary’s, manifests itself not through dour, muted tones, but rather by being a soul who can ‘magnify the Lord’ (Luke 1:46) through a beauty not based on physical characteristics. It is quite striking that Desdemona is never described through physical detail, though she is a woman admired or desired by several men throughout the play. Though Cassio speaks of how even the seas have ‘sense of her beauty,’ he himself describes her in spiritual rather than sensual terms. Likewise, the much baser Roderigo, though exhorted by Iago to ‘put money in [his] purse’ (1.3.339), a probable bawdy reference, describes Desdemona as being ‘full of most blessed condition’ (2.1.249), and his clear goal is always to marry rather than just enjoy her physically. Even Iago, who speaks of how Cassio ‘hath a beauty in his life that doth make me ugly,’ says of Desdemona that, ‘I do love her too,’ and ‘not out of absolute lust’ (2.1.291–92). Othello, we have already noted, also falls in love with her heart, her compassionate Marian will, and even as jealousy darkens and distorts his perceptions he still sees, in her face, typical Marian virtues and angelic beauty: ‘Turn thy complexion there, / Patience, thou young and rose-lipp’d cherubin’ (4.2.64–65), before his insanity likens this look to ‘hell,’ its opposite condition. In the murder scene, Othello again uses rose imagery in a medieval manner to describe Desdemona as the source of heavenly light; clearly distinguishing the physical light of a candle from the spiritual light embodied in Desdemona, he will ‘put out the

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

105

light, and then put out the light’ (5.2.7), but once out, he cannot take it again from heaven, for I know not where is that Promethean heat That can thy light relume. When I have pluck’d thy rose I cannot give it vital growth again, It needs must wither. I’ll smell thee on the tree. (5.1.12–15)

Having been deceived by the alleged knowledge of Iago’s tree of evil, Othello now vainly kisses Desdemona, hoping to again taste the divine tree of life which, in this life, she had been for him. Given the ensuing anguish, what further difference does it make to see Desdemona as a type of Mary? Desdemona as Marian Intercessor To answer this question, recognizing Desdemona as a type of Marian intercessor becomes crucial. Even before the murder scene, Shakespeare offers ample poetic suggestion of this possibility through Desdemona’s relationships with Cassio and Emilia. Desdemona’s intercession on behalf of the disgraced Cassio, seeking to restore not just his rank but moreover his friendship with Othello, is the central act of ‘virtue’ which Iago seeks to turn ‘into pitch’ (2.3.351). She herself describes this virtue in a manner that would have reminded Shakespeare’s audience of the central act of intercession in history, the atonement of Christ: ‘I would do much / T’atone them,’ she says, ‘for the love I bear to Cassio’ (4.1.229–30). This line inflames the hidden Othello, but Desdemona certainly means the latter phrase only in the sense Christians have of the need to ‘bear ye one another’s burdens’ (Gal. 6:2); conversely, it is hard to imagine any Christian directly comparing her own actions to Christ’s unique atonement, at least not in the manner of critics who, on the basis of lines from Act 5 that I will shortly consider, do ordain Desdemona a ‘Christ figure.’ Yet here one must also ask, since Desdemona fails to reconcile the two men, what positive, Marian-like effect does her intercession have? In a general sense, one can argue that Desdemona’s merciful support for Cassio helps to revive his spirits—which had seemed so broken when he lamented the loss of his ‘reputation’ (2.3.256)—and allows him to be the courageous person who, at play’s end, is crucial to withstanding Iago’s murderous attack and then confirming the villain’s guilt. In a more specifically theological sense, however, we must also recall a conversation between Iago and the drunken Cassio which, incongruously, recaps the familiar concept of Calvinist predestination, a concept that minimized the importance of the human will: Cassio: Iago:

Well, God’s above all, and there be souls must be saved, and there be souls must not be saved. It’s true, good lieutenant.

106

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA Cassio:

For mine own part—no offense to the general, nor any man of quality—I hope to be saved. Iago: And so do I too, lieutenant. (2.3.95–101)

Regardless, again, of Shakespeare’s own religious affiliation, it is unlikely that these characters speak for the author or give an argument affirmed by the play itself. Cassio himself is possessed, due to Iago, by the ‘devil drunkenness’ (2.3.296) and surely it counts against the argument, within the play’s hermeneutic of antonyms, that Iago says it is true. Apart from showing Iago’s obvious resentment of Cassio, perhaps the passage, like many others in the play, is also intended to question the fate of the eternal soul, and of the deep-seated and perhaps legitimate human fear of damnation, which only an ‘inhuman dog’ (5.1.64) like Iago can so ironically mock. Though Cassio is not guilty with Desdemona, what of his relationship with Bianca? If he is telling the truth in calling her a ‘customer’ or prostitute (4.1.119), and mocking the idea of marrying her, he is guilty of adultery; if she is right to deny that she is ‘a strumpet’(5.1.124)—and there is no objective evidence in the play to confirm otherwise—then Cassio, like Iago, is a slanderer. Othello does not provide conclusive evidence either way, but there is a significant portion of the play in which the fate of Cassio’s eternal soul must be questioned; but, after his courageous speaking of the truth at play’s end, it finally seems just that ‘Cassio rules in Cyprus’ (5.2.341), and it is plausible that his reign offers hope for the potential renewal often found at a tragedy’s conclusion. The relationship thus suggested, between courageously speaking truth and the fate of one’s eternal soul, is expressed much more explicitly through Emilia, who is initially shown in a state of mortal sin. For though she has been justly praised by recent criticism for her solidarity with Desdemona and final bravery against Iago, and though she never knew the true nature of Iago’s motives, Emilia was neither a completing unwitting nor unwilling accomplice to her husband’s crimes. While Iago snatched the handkerchief from her, she did steal it, did dangle it in front of him, and she did not report its whereabouts to Desdemona, even when she could see that it was driving both her mistress and Othello mad. Such is the practice behind the ethical theory outlined in 4.3, where in their famous conversation on adultery, Emilia admitted that she would do this ‘small vice’ for ‘all the world’ (4.3.67–68). The mortal danger to her own soul only seems to hit home after Emilia realizes the full extent of Iago’s crime, and becomes so repulsed at their marital union that she repeatedly asks, ‘My husband?’ (5.2.155–57). By then speaking truth, however, truth inspired by the love of Desdemona, Emilia achieves much good. First, she frees Othello from his blind pride, and then ensures that Iago is captured and tortured, a ‘slave’ living a life that Othello rightly suggests is worse than death, the life promised biblically for all devils. One should note, here, that it is not primarily Iago’s failure to kill Cassio that ‘fordoes’ him (5.1.132), as many critics claim, but rather his inability to silence Emilia, who is the only one who can explain how he has slandered Desdemona and deceived Othello. It is highly doubtful whether Emilia would have spoken out as she did if not for

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

107

her close friendship with Desdemona, the ‘seat of wisdom’ who taught her that it is better to die than live in a state of mortal sin. Finally, Emilia becomes willing to lose the whole world to ‘report a truth,’ even telling Othello: ‘I care not for thy sword, I’ll make thee known, / Though I had lost twenty lives’ (5.2.172–73). As with Cassio, Desdemona thus inspires a will to truth that helps cause not only temporal justice, but also hope for mercy on an eternal soul, Emilia’s, that had once seemed in mortal danger. Just before she dies, Emilia joins Desdemona in singing a song of ‘Willow, willow, willow,’ and prays, as her mistress did on her death bed, ‘So come my soul to bliss, as I speak true’ (5.2.255–58). It is, of course, the play’s main death scene wherein Desdemona’s most important act of intercession on behalf of Othello occurs. Here the atonement imagery seems so explicit that, combined with Othello’s closing comparison (in the Folio) of himself to Judas, ‘the base Judean,’ who ‘threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe’(5.2.356– 57), one almost seems justified in describing Desdemona as a Christ figure. Not only is she smothered and then, some 39 lines later, is miraculously resurrected, her words at that time clearly remind us of Christ on the cross. Initially she calls herself ‘falsely murdered,’ and says, ‘A guiltless death I die’ (5.2.126, 132); but, when Emilia asks, ‘who hath done this deed,’ Desdemona speaks what appears to be a foolish lie: ‘Nobody, I myself’ (5.2.134). Both claims, however, are true of Christ on the cross, who though guiltless himself yet willingly, or rather via the submission of his will, bears the sins of humanity. This possibility seems confirmed by Desdemona’s dying words: ‘Commend me to my kind Lord. O, farewell’ (5.2.125). While this could be a farewell to her Lord Othello, it might also be addressed to the triune God to whom she called earlier in the scene, ‘O Lord, Lord, Lord’ (5.2.83), especially since these final words closely parallel Christ’s last words on the cross: ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit’ (Luke 23:46). Given these parallels, does Desdemona transform in this scene from a type of Mary into an allegorical representation of Christ? One could take that view, but there are compelling reasons for not doing so. First, the apparent death and resurrection could be seen as a Marian assumption, and the final offer of mercy might be seen as Marian mediation, in which Othello gazes on the face of Christ by looking into the eyes of a woman like Mary. As for Othello’s final speech, it should also be remembered that in the medieval period a pearl, as the modern editor of the poem Pearl notes, was an image ‘used especially of maidens and maidenhood.’41 If, as seems clear, other parts of the play definitively link Desdemona to Mary, and if its final act can also be described in Marian terms, it seems incoherent not to do so. Moreover, if we are to take seriously Desdemona crying out to the triune Lord, how can she do so if she herself is supposed to represent the one incarnate Son? Finally, if Desdemona is taken to represent Christ, then her dying forgiveness of Othello must mean that he is certainly not damned. The play, however, does not offer this level of certainty, but instead gives strong hope for Othello’s ultimate salvation. This is the 41 E.V. Gordon, ‘Introduction,’ Pearl (1953; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), xxvii.

108

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

kind of hope that follows from a Marian intercession, in and through Christ, rather than the absolute forgiveness that can be granted only by Christ himself. Many critics, most notably Paul Siegel and Paul Ramsey,42 do not feel such hope, and are as convinced as Othello himself, at play’s end, that when he ‘shall meet [Desdemona] at count,’ or judgement day, then ‘this look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven’ (5.2.280–81). At this moment, Othello already feels himself in hell, and in anguish exclaims: ‘Whip me ye devils … Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!’ (5.2.284–86). On this view, Othello’s final suicide, and comparison of himself to Judas, is the final confirmation that he is certainly damned. Anyone who can see these events through the eyes of Desdemona, however, has the option of drawing a different conclusion. She, above all others, knows that Othello might be absolutely wrong about what his emotions tell him is the absolute truth. Further, any compassionate Christian knows, as historically the Christian Church has generally taught, that suicides in which mental illness or emotional distress have deprived a person of free will are not mortal sins. Shakespeare himself had earlier depicted a clear example of such a case in Ophelia, and the conclusion of Othello offers another important parallel to Hamlet. For when Lodovico asks, ‘where is this rash and most unfortunate man’ who killed Desdemona, Othello replies, ‘That’s he that was Othello. Here I am’ (5.2.289–90). Though much briefer, this surely recalls Hamlet’s repentance to Laertes; regarding his murder of Polonius, Hamlet claimed, ‘Hamlet does it not,’ for rather it was an act caused by Hamlet’s ‘madness’ (5.2.182–83). Othello is in too much agony to formulate the lengthy syllogisms spoken by Hamlet in this passage, but his other concluding lines could also be taken as an attempt to repent. Rather than seeing self-justifying pride in Othello’s famous explanation that he was one ‘that loved not wisely but too well’ (5.2.353), a charitable, Augustinian reading could interpret the latter phrase as meaning, ‘with too much cupidity,’ and therefore as signifying the repentant sorrow he clearly feels. In his last words after stabbing himself, Othello recalls his Judas–like kiss before killing Desdemona, and then concludes, ‘No way but this / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss’ (5.2.368–69). Although applying an eye-for-an-eye justice to himself, Othello here clearly repents, and desires a return to the full unity with Desdemona that their kisses once signified. It is the rash, deceived Othello, convinced that he is a Judas, whom the noble Othello feels he has no option but to slay, yet in doing so we are also reminded of the man whom Desdemona once loved. A Marian perspective on Desdemona, however, must amend this last sentence to ‘still loves.’ Othello is certainly wrong to imagine that her face would, on judgement day, cast him into hell, for her last look into his mad eyes offered mercy, not damnation. One can accept Desdemona as a type of Marian intercessor, and see in her forgiveness the face of Mary, inextricably linked to the face of Christ, united eternally to God the Father; then, it may be a truth authorized by the Holy Spirit to 42 Paul Siegel, ‘The Damnation of Othello,’ PMLA 68 (1953): 1063–78; Paul Ramsey, ‘Othello: The Logic of Damnation,’ The Upstart Crow 1(1978): 24–35.

DESDEMONA AND THE MARIOLOGICAL THEOLOGY OF THE WILL

109

hear not a damning critics’ chorus, but rather the wise song of one who can ‘sing the savageness out of a bear’ (4.1.185), and whose low will humbly asks that ‘nobody blame’ her ‘false love’ (4.3.50, 53). On an Augustinian, Marian interpretation of Othello, a reading strongly supported by the text of the play itself and apparently invited by Shakespeare, one can retain hope that the loving, unchanging, merciful will of Desdemona, together with ‘flights of angels’ (Hamlet 5.2.313), may yet sing Othello to his rest. Works Cited and Consulted Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, trans. Edward Bouverie Pusey, Great Books of the Western World, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 1–125. ——, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, Great Books of the Western World, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 127–618. Battenhouse, Roy, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). Bethell, S.L., ‘Shakespeare’s Imagery: The Diabolical Images in Othello,’ Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952): 62–80. The Bible: Authorized King James Version, 1611. Introduction and Notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 1321, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Norton, 1977). ——, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, vol. XI of The Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867. Reprint, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904). Davison, Peter, Othello, The Critics Debate, edited by Michael Scott (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988). Gordon, E.V., ‘Introduction,’ Pearl (1953. Reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Greenblatt, Stephen, ‘The Improvisation of Power,’ William Shakespeare’s Othello: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 37–59. Hackett, Helen, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of Mary (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995). Hecht, Anthony, ‘Othello,’ William Shakespeare’s Othello: Modern Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 123–41. Hollander, Robert, ‘Typology and Secular Literature: Some Medieval Examples and Problems,’ in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Earl R. Miner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 3–19. Hunter, G.K., Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978).

110

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Jeffrey, David Lyle, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996). Jordan, Winthrop, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550– 182I (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, ‘Typological Symbolism and the “Progress of the Soul” in Seventeenth-Century Literature,’ in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Earl R. Miner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 79–114. Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus. Drama of the English Renaissance: The Tudor Period, edited by Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 295–322. Neely, Carol Thomas, ‘Women and Men in Othello,’ William Shakespeare’s Othello: Modern Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 79–104. Newman, Karen, ‘“And Wash the Ethiop White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello,’ Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 142–62. Pelikan, Jaroslav, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). Ramsey, Paul, ‘Othello: The Logic of Damnation,’ The Upstart Crow 1 (1978): 24–35. Ridley, M.R. ed., Othello, by William Shakespeare, The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare, edited by Harold F. Brooks and Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1958). Siegel, Paul, ‘The Damnation of Othello,’ PMLA 68 (1953): 1063–78. Shakespeare, William, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Strong, Roy, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). Wain, John, Shakespeare: Othello, A Casebook (1971. Reprint, Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994). Wells-Slights, Camille, ‘Slaves and Subjects in Othello,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48.4 (1997): 377–90. Wimsatt, W.K. ed., Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960).

Chapter 6

The Wonder of Women: Virginity, Sexuality and Religio-Politics in Marston’s The Tragedy of Sophonisba1 Thomas Rist King’s College, University of Aberdeen

Stories of pagan and early Roman virgin martyrs were of ‘extraordinary popularity’ in late Medieval England, perpetuating a cult of female virginity which emphasised not only the virginity of its heroines, but also ‘the attempts of their persecutors to defile or degrade it’.2 Fundamental to such cult was the Virgin Mary, the outstanding example of female virginity in Christian history to whom all the medieval primers and Horae prescribed prayers in her character as inviolable virgin.3 Typically, such stories presented virginity both as a model for imitation and as ‘a symbol of sacred 1 For those unfamiliar with this little-studied play, I here append a plot-synopsis derived from the edition of the play in Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays: Sophonisba, The Witch, The Witch of Edmonton, edited by Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1986). The Prologue tells us that the play is set in Libya during the Hannibalic war. Two Carthaginians, Massinissa and Syphax, both love Sophonisba, but the action opens on the night of Sophonisba’s wedding to Massinissa. Spurred by jealousy, Syphax takes the opportunity of the Roman invasion following Hannibal’s defeat to join forces with Rome against Carthage. Meanwhile, the invasion of Carthage takes Massinissa from Sophonisba before they can consummate their marriage. The pair swear loyalty to one another, but Carthage decides to give Sophonisba to Syphax in return for his military support. However, Sophonisba evades Syphax – who pursues her implacably, threatening rape and eventually conjuring the sinister Erictho to give Sophonisba to him; instead, Erictho tricks Syphax and sleeps with him herself. Undeterred, Syphax continues his pursuit of Sophonisba. Meanwhile, dismayed by Carthage’s duplicity, Massinissa joins the invading Roman forces led by Scipio and – meeting Syphax as he pursues Sophonisba – defeats him in single combat, presenting him to Scipio. But Syphax speaks of the wonder of Sophonisba, enticing Scipio to claim her for Rome. Just as Sophonisba and Massinissa are reunited, Massinissa learns he must hand Sophonisba over to Rome and she – to help him keep faith with Scipio but avoid ‘Roman bondage’ herself (5.4.78) – kills herself. Massinissa condemns this and mourns her death, but finally remembers her as ‘Women’s right wonder, and just shame of men’ (5.1.60). 2 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400– 1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 171 and 172. 3 Duffy, 174–5.

112

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

power, a concrete realization within this world of the divine spirit’.4 John Marston’s The Tragedy of Sophonisba presents all the features of this tradition: its titular heroine is a woman whose inviolable virginity is both a model for imitation and a symbol of her sacred power – and her extraordinary status of married virgin associates her with the Virgin particularly; following her opening marriage, moreover, the plot revolves around Sophonisba’s staunch resistance to the attempts of Syphax to seduce or rape her, and thus in outline as in emphasis the play recalls the medieval cult of the Virgin, illustrating that the advent of the English Reformations did not bring this to an end.5 As we shall see, however, the play presents such cult in a world of moral and political relativity in which ‘the honour of the saints’ could no longer be taken for granted, reflecting challenges to the cult of Mary which the Reformations brought to the fore and which themselves render Marston’s ‘Marianism’ self-consciously political.6 Highlighting a feminine ideal, the title heading the 1606 edition of Marston’s play is The Wonder of Women; although it is now critically normal to refer to The Tragedy of Sophonisba, that is only the edition’s subtitle. This suggests a difference of perceived priorities between the printers of Marston’s play and its critics which is also emphasised in the style in which each of the titles is printed: ‘The Wonder of Women’ appears in substantially larger print than ‘The Tragedy of Sophonisba’. Notably, ‘wonder’ is by far the most prominent word in the 1606 title-page: of both the titles, it is the only word which appears in capital letters, the only word to be given a line of print to itself, and its lettering is about twice as large as that of the next complete, largest word. The ‘wonder’ of women was clearly important.7 4 Duffy, 174–5. Interestingly, Duffy considers that virginity was of greater importance as a ‘symbol of sacred power’ to late medieval Christians than it was as a model for imitation: Marston stresses the two equally. 5 The cult of the Virgin also continues in Shakespeare’s ‘romances’, where virgins are regularly associated with ‘wonder’ and, indeed, redemption; in what we shall notice is the style of Sophonisba, the romances are also concerned with Reformation issues of ‘superstition’. Among Shakespeare’s romances, the cult of the Virgin is particularly marked in Pericles, where – as in Sophonisba – a central feature is the attempt to violate a ‘wondrous’ woman’s virginity and the means by which the woman (Marina) resists such violation. I discuss these features in regard to contemporary attitudes to ‘magic’ in Shakespeare’s Romances and the Politics of Counter-Reformation, Renaissance Studies 3 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 117–71. 6 Peter Ure emphasises the play’s ‘ethical debate’ in ‘John Marston’s Sophonisba: A Reconsideration’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: Critical Essays by Peter Ure, edited by J.C. Maxwell (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1974), 74–92; see especially 80. His interpretation of the play as a whole, however, is quite different from the one I offer here as it takes no account of the implications of the title ‘The Wonder of Women’ or of its Marian associations. 7 For a photostat of the 1606 title page, see Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays: Sophonisba, The Witch, The Witch of Edmonton, edited by Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1986), 33. All following textual citations are from this edition.

THE WONDER OF WOMEN

113

Of the two titles, The Wonder of Women is also the more telling in describing the unfolding focus of the narrative. Informing us that ‘the scene is Libya … / Whilst Carthage stood the only awe of Rome’ (Prologue, 1–2), the Prologue quickly recounts a plot in which rivalry between Rome and Carthage during the Punic wars mirrors rivalry between ‘potent Syphax’ and ‘well graced Massinissa’ (Prologue, 10; 11) for the hand of Sophonisba, before further informing us it is now Massinissa’s weddingnight as ‘the lot / Of doubtful favour Massinissa graced’ (Prologue, 12–13). It is at this early point that, in a suitably portentous and adoring language, the ‘worthier minds’ of the audience are introduced to the import of Sophonisba: Lo, The instant night! And now, ye worthier minds, To whom we shall present a female glory, The wonder of a constancy so fixed That fate itself might well grow envious, Be pleased to sit, such as may merit oil And holy dew ’stilled from diviner heat. (Prologue, 18–24)

Emphasising that his is no ribald entertainment of the open-air theatre, Marston will re-emphasise the select nature of his drama to those that ‘sit’ at the Blackfriars: ‘For just worth never rests on popular frown’ (Prologue, 27) – a refusal only to entertain further emphasised in his address ‘To the General Reader’: ‘if ought please thee [in the play], thank not me; for I confess in this it was not my only end’.8 Investigating the nature of what Marston calls ‘just worth’ will become a principal object of the play. After the Prologue, however, ‘worth’ is associated with Sophonisba, whose self-consciously dramatic function is to ‘present a female glory’. More particularly, Sophonisba’s glory is in reference to a constancy more ‘fixed’ than Fate’s, combining the sacred (‘holy dew’, ‘diviner heat’) with the physical and sensuous (‘oil’, ‘heat’). From the opening, thus, Sophonisba focally combines many of the attributes of the Virgin: womanhood, holiness, female constancy and ‘glory’. To this list is quickly added virginity – consciously defined by Sophonisba not as insipid but as a source of power: A modest silence, though’t be thought A virgin’s beauty and her highest honour; Though bashful feignings nicely wrought Grace her that virtue takes not in, but on her; What I dare think I boldly speak. After my word my well-bold action rusheth; In open flame then passion break! Where virtue prompts, thought, word, act, never blusheth. (1.2.43–50)

8

See ‘To the General Reader’, Sophonisba, 34.

114

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Challenging widespread expectations of the period, attributes associated with female virginity such as blushing modesty and ‘nicely wrought’ behaviour are unambiguously rejected as ‘feigning’; recalling the heroines of the medieval cult of virgin martyrs, boldness (twice), action (twice) and ‘passion’ are Sophonisba’s gloriously contrasting virgin attributes. Yet Sophonisba’s deliberate definition not only highlights virginity as a concept, it presents a conceptual psychology for her heroism in the course of the play. As she will heroically go on to present a ‘thought, word, act’ which ‘never blusheth’, so she will continuously present the ‘virtue’ of a virginity properly understood. Virginity, thus, is not just an attribute of Sophonisba, it is the defining feature of her heroism, represented to us again and again in Sophonisba’s successive heroic acts. Act One, Scene Two further emphasises Sophonisba’s virginity in the development of what seems, on the face of it, an improbable plot: Sophonisba’s wedding-night is interrupted as Massinissa is called to war, and the couple are not allowed time even to consummate their marriage. Rather than playing down this dramatic contrivance, however, Marston emphasises it and its consequences for his heroine’s virginity: Sophonisba points out that hers is ‘the most ill-graced hymeanal bed / That ever Juno frowned at’ (1.2.172–3) and – lest we still miss the point – that ‘my lord leave[s] his wife a very maid’ (1.2.159). That this development is sexually unwelcome is also pointed: undressing for her wedding-night in a scene playing bawdily on the ‘undoing’ of garters, Sophonisba has already criticised the social decorum in which ‘the bride must steal / Before her lord to bed; and then delays / Long expectations, all against known wishes’ (1.2.8– 10). Firmly establishing Sophonisba’s status as a heroic virgin, however, is integral to the plot which will follow: when Sophonisba declares that ‘no low appetite / Of my sex’[s] weakness can or shall o’ercome / Due grateful service unto you or virtue’ (1.2.175–7), she invites her constancy to her husband, her virginity and to her heroic ideal to be put to a test which seems the realer because not of a prude. The subsequent action is a trial to decide whether Sophonisba is indeed a ‘wonder of women’ or whether she suffers from ‘my sex’ weakness’. Eventually emerging from the trial with her virginity intact to proclaim herself ‘a virgin wife, tried to my glory’ (5.1.103) and ‘of female faith the long-lived story’ (5.1.104) – this last setting her within the history of ‘female faith’ – Sophonisba passes the test with flying colours. However, in framing the action subsequent to Act One, Scene Two as a test of Sophonisba’s virginity, the matter of virginity remains before us throughout. The final lines of Act One, Scene Two clinch the association of Sophonisba’s wonder with her virginity and, more particularly, with the Virgin Mary. Instructing Massinissa to ‘Vent thy youthful heat / In fields, not beds’ (1.2.13–14), and stating that ‘By thee I have no lust / But of thy glory’ (1.2.220–21), Sophonisba sublimates her sexuality to an ideal of female constancy so extraordinary it will forgo carnal relations even within marriage: ‘a virgin wife’. Massinissa recognises in this the defining and titular wonder:

THE WONDER OF WOMEN

115

Wondrous creature! Even fit for gods, not men. Nature made all the rest of thy fair sex As weak essays to make thee a pattern Of what can be in woman. (1.2.224–7)

Linking her especially with the Virgin, it is not Sophonisba’s virginity alone which guarantees her wonder, but her status as a married virgin: in Christian history, the Virgin is without rival the pre-eminent example of married virginity. That the married virginity of Sophonisba presents a ‘pattern’ to ‘all the rest of thy fair sex’, moreover, recalls the biblical Mary hailed by Elizabeth as ‘Blessed … among women’ (Luke: 1.42). Since even Christian marriage normally assumes consummation in the sexual union of a couple, Sophonisba’s Marianism also suggests the ‘Cult of the Virgin,’ in the medieval form of which ‘Marriages of the Virgin with her votaries take place frequently’.9 Yet the Reformation’s widespread rejection of the medieval cult of the saints as ‘superstition’ especially included rejection of the Virgin, whose images and ‘cult’ were destroyed across Reformed Europe.10 Thus ‘Sophonisba’ is implicated in historical matters of religio-political difference themselves suggested in Marston’s presentation of war between Carthage and Rome. As Alison Shell has recently emphasised, despite ‘dehistoricised critics’, ‘Rome’ regularly invited contending Catholic and anti-Catholic responses in the contemporary drama11 – and this in a play presenting ‘a deep-rooted desire to retain the half-understood practices of Roman Catholicism’.12 For the purpose of the discussion following, notice that associating Rome with Roman Catholicism in Sophonisba suggests that ‘Carthage’ entails Catholic Rome’s national enemies – including England. However, before considering the implications of this juxtaposition, Sophonisba’s treatment of unease regarding its ‘cult of the virgin’ – reflecting the historical controversy of Mary – requires comment.

9 Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1990), 156. Here Warner also discusses ‘a general tendency’ in Marian stories ‘to organise the realm of heaven according to the customs of earth’: we should not be surprised, then, that Sophonisba exudes occasional ‘earthy’ qualities – besides being key to Marston’s broader treatment of sexuality, as we shall see, they are of the cult. 10 The rejection of Mary and the destruction of Marian images by Reformers across Europe was fully illustrated by Reformation historian Diarmaid McCulloch in his lecture ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Protestant Reformation’ to the Centre for Early Modern Studies, (University of Aberdeen, Scotland, April 24, 2004). See also Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 207–45. 11 See Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23–55. 12 Corbin and Sedge, xiii.

116

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Intimations of such unease are already visible in the opening speech of the play, in which Syphax, finding himself rejected by Sophonisba, angrily decides to turn against Carthage as a means of revenge. For Syphax, the loss of Sophonisba is an injury to what he will call his ‘high name’ (1.1.20); meditating on this, however, Syphax highlights the danger of an over-emphasised heroic code: Reputation, Thou awe of fools and great men, thou that chok’st Free’st additions, and makes mortals sweat Blood and cold drops in fear to lose, or hope To gain thy never-certain seldom-worthy gracings. Reputation! Wert not for thee, Syphax could bear this scorn, Not spouting up his gall among his blood In black vexations. (1.1.7–12)

Syphax’s over-valuation of reputation is the cause of the injuries he will offer both to Carthage and to Sophonisba. Yet in thus subverting heroic ideals, Syphax implicitly also raises questions about the value of Sophonisba’s ‘high name’ as the ‘wonder of women’ and, thus, about her valuation of virginity itself.13 Undressing for her wedding-night in Act One, Scene Two, Sophonisba also attacks the heroic code of honour, contributing to the instability of the heroic ideal she will herself embrace: I wonder Zanthia, why the custom is To use such ceremony, such strict shape, About us women. Forsooth, the bride must steal Before her lord to bed; and then delays Long expectations, all against known wishes. I hate these figures in locution, These about-phrases forced by ceremony. (1.2.6–12)

Sophonisba, as I have noticed previously, is here impatient for her wedding-night. However, her outspokenness against ‘custom’ (1.2.6) and ‘ceremony’ (1.2.7; 12) destabilises traditional codes of behaviour attendant on honour, as Zanthia implies: ’Las, fair princess, those that are strongly formed And truly shaped may naked walk, but we, We things called women, only made for show And pleasure, created to bear children 13 This reading implies that we do not dismiss the view of Syphax outright; I shall substantiate this claim further in discussing the play’s view of ‘villainy’ below. As we have seen, however, Syphax’s analysis of it is not the only challenge to honour: underlying the analysis itself is a society apparently over-valuing honour. Finally, notice that at the point of presenting these arguments, Syphax’s full ‘villainy’ has yet to be established.

THE WONDER OF WOMEN

117

And play at shuttlecock, we imperfect mixtures, Without respective ceremony used, And ever complement, alas, what are we? Take from us formal custom and the courtesies Which civil custom hath still used to us, We fall to all contempt. O women, how much, How much, are you beholding to ceremony! (1.2.18–29)

In the course of the play, Sophonisba will show that Zanthia is wrong to consider women only ‘created to bear children / And play at shuttlecock’, while in presenting Sophonisba as a ‘pattern’ to her sex, the play dissents from Zanthia’s reductive view. Yet in a heroic world such as Zanthia assumes, in which only the ‘strongly formed’ and ‘truly shaped’ can do as they please, the weak (in which Zanthia reductively includes ‘the weaker sex’) benefit from and require the ‘courtesies’ of ‘formal custom’. Thus, although the ‘ceremony’ of honourable behaviour may seem superficial, formal codes of honour serve a necessary social purpose as defences for the weak. Zanthia claims that honour is particularly beneficial to women, but so far the play’s analysis of honourable behaviour and a ‘high name’ only bears on the matter of Sophonisba’s virginity by implication. However, Act Three, Scene One brings ‘virginity’ and ‘honour’ together: Syphax’s threat that unless she complies he will rape Sophonisba while ‘two black knaves / Thy limbs all wide shall strain’ (3.1.10– 11) shows graphically that a cult of honour is necessary to a cult of virginity. The scene thus presents a dramatic crux, giving further emphasis to the play’s first direct challenge to Sophonisba’s virgin ideal. That challenge is voiced by Zanthia, who believes Sophonisba will comply with Syphax rather than suffer his more brutal violation. She says: I feared a superstitious virtue would spoil all; But now I find you above women rare. She that can time her goodness hath true care Of her best good. Nature at home begins; She whose integrity herself hurts, sins. (3.1.70–77)

In view of the defence of customary behaviour and roles she offered previously, this advice to Sophonisba willingly to give way to Syphax seems surprising, yet as in Act One, Scene Two, Zanthia is here guided by a pragmatic attitude to those who are ‘strongly formed’. Pragmatism, thus, is the play’s first direct challenge to Marian virginity – as Zanthia considering women constant to the point of death spells out: Such faith is praised, then laughed at, for still know Those are the living women that reduce All that they touch unto their ease and use. Knowing that wedlock, virtue or good names, Are courses and varieties of reason, To use or leave as they advantage them. (3.1.80–85)

118

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

In ironic contrast to Sophonisba’s fixed virgin ideal, ‘virtue’ and ‘good names’ are here malleable and a matter of choice. Recalling Massinissa’s claim that Sophonisba is a pattern for her sex, Zanthia’s view that to choose her sexuality will make Sophonisba ‘above all women rare’ re-iterates the theme of female ‘wonder’ by presenting it as a matter of difference. However, Zanthia here also introduces a second type of objection to Sophonisba: that her constancy to her virgin ideal is ‘superstitious’ (III.i.70) – a criticism with inevitably Reformed connotations in the period. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformers axiomatically considered Roman Catholic ‘ceremony’ superstitious, and thus Zanthia’s criticism of Sophonisba’s adherence to virginity implies a critique of Catholic ceremonial most evident in her cult of the virgin. Moreover, in presenting the Reformed objection that such Catholicism implies an over-valuation, Marston also here delineates differences between Reformed and Catholic regarding value and ‘the holy’ itself: the Reform-minded Zanthia, as we have seen, values traditional customs and ceremonies for pragmatic reasons, but is prepared to abandon them on similarly pragmatic grounds; after her vow to Massinissa, by contrast, the ‘holy’ Sophonisba is unconditional in her customary (because Marian) evaluation of virginity. Contrasting religious perspectives on the value of the virgin wife are visible elsewhere in the play. Considering Sophonisba dead, Massinissa is stricken with grief; when Laelius tells him to be calmer, Massinissa’s worshipful love verges on idolatry: Laelius: Massinissa: Laelius: Massinissa:

Cease your strife, She is a woman. But she is my wife. And yet she is no god. And yet she’s more. (3.2.50)

The Christian implications of Massinissa’s worship of Sophonisba emerge almost immediately after: condemning his own adoration as excessive, Massinissa exclaims, ‘My grief, my grief / Would make a saint blaspheme’ (3.2.65–6; my emphasis).14 Yet Massinissa also offers an extensive and reasoned defence of such ‘blasphemy’, inhibiting any such easy condemnation. Insisting that his wife is ‘more’ than a god, Massinissa explains, I do not praise god’s goodness, but adore. Gods cannot fall, and for their constant goodness, Which is necessitated, they have a crown Of never-ending pleasures. But faint man, 14 Although I only pursue the matter indirectly in this essay, the question of how to express ‘grief’ for the dead was focal in debates over correct and incorrect ‘religion’ in the period. For relevant discussion, see G.W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), as well as Katharine Goodland’s essay in this collection.

THE WONDER OF WOMEN

119

Framed to have his weakness made the heavens’ glory If he with steady virtue holds all siege That power, that pleasure, that full sweets, A world of greatness can assail him with – Having no pay but self-wept misery – And beggars treasure heaped; that man I’ll praise Above the gods. (3.2.50–61)

Especially in the context of ‘blasphemy’ and ‘saints’, Massinissa’s allusions to ‘gods’ suggest the very ‘superstition’ Reformers rejected in traditional religion, re-enforcing the un-Reformed ‘idolatry’ of his outlook. However, Massinissa here presents a reasoned defence of his worship. Indeed, the scene not only presents divergent perspectives over what is correct worship and what is idolatry, but it also highlights the matter of controversial difference itself by illustrating how reasoning minds can change. In the altercation between Laelius and Massinissa cited previously, it is initially Scipio who demands ‘Temperance by Scipio’s honour’ (3.2.48), in enforcement of which Laelius reminds Massinissa ‘She is [only] a woman’. Both these speakers imply that Massinissa’s grief is disproportionate to its cause, but after the reasoning defence by Massinissa cited previously, Scipio says ‘The Lybian speaks bold sense’ (3.2.61): he both acknowledges that Massinissa’s worship of Sophonisiba is ‘sense’ and he changes his mind about the mistakenness of Massinissa’s grief. Before condemning himself for blasphemy, Massinissa will further emphasise the reasonableness of his outlook: ‘By that which is all, proportion, / I speak with thought’ (2.2.62–3). Thus, Reformist condemnation of idolatry is present in the dispute, but so too is the claim that such alleged ‘idolatry’ is a reasonable Christian worship. Differences over correct worship and ‘superstition’ come to a head in Marston’s presentation of the enchantress, Erictho. Just as Marston’s previous ‘political theory’ – of which more – invoked contexts not prominent in the medieval cult of the virgin, so his presentation of Erictho also invokes an unusual frame of reference. Critical tradition has considered Erictho evidence of an artistic failing on Marston’s part as she has no lasting impact on the plot: her one action is to seduce Syphax, but the shock of sleeping with this figure of horror does not deter him from pursuing Sophonisba, so Erictho seems unnecessary. However, Erictho embodies qualities that are the very opposite of those presented in Sophonisba, which qualities serve to bring Sophonisba’s Marian status into still sharper focus: Erictho presents a combination of ‘superstition’, ‘dishonour’ and ‘un-chastity’ writ large.15 The ‘superstition’ of Erictho is pervasive. When Syphax introduces her in Act Four, Scene One, he dwells repetitively on her horror. Thus, in the first 16 lines alone, we are told that ‘Forsaken graves and tombs, the ghost forced out, / She joys 15 For such critical tradition, see Corbin and Sedge, 5–7. My Marian emphasis develops the more general observation that ‘Marston opposes Sophonisba, “the wonder of women”, who rises above the baseness of human passions, against Erictho’ (Corbin and Sedge, 13).

120

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

to inhabit’ (4.1.101); that she ‘From naked graves stalks out’ (4.1.107–8); that ‘she bursts up tombs, / From half-rot cerecloths’ (4.1.110–11). Nor is she only associated with the desecrated dead; she is also from ‘deepest hell’ (4.1.96); ‘Dreadful Erictho’ (4.1.98): ‘A loathsome yellow leanness spreads her face, / A heavy hell-like paleness spreads her cheeks’ (4.1.1001–3); her entrance is accompanied by ‘Infernal music’. Yet it is a mistake to dismiss Erictho as ‘a well-articulated string of ghoulish detail’.16 Such description – and there is plenty more of it – makes Erictho unambiguously sinister; by contrast, the alleged ‘superstition’ of Sophonisba is insignificant. Dishonour is similarly prominent in Erictho. Introducing her as an inhabitant of ‘this desert’ (4.1.97), Syphax adds that her ‘dismal brow / Contemns all roofs of civil coverture’ (4.1.98–9). As we have seen, her rejection of civil canons of behaviour is repeatedly visible in her dishonouring of graves – a train of images which come to a head in the opening description of her dwelling-place: Where tombs and beauteous urns of well-dead men, Stood in assurèd rest, the shepherd now Unloads his belly; corruption most abhorred Mingling itself with their renowned ashes. (4.1.156–9)

Erictho is at home where the rustic behaves uncivilly: where he dishonours or desecrates human monuments. Her disrespect for the dead, moreover, contrasts pointedly with the attitude of Sophonisba, who previously insisted on performing ‘Due rites unto the dead’ (3.1.143), even linking her love of virginity with a proper post-mortem memorial: ‘All that I crave / Is but chaste life or an untainted grave’ (3.1.129–30). Moreover, highlighting the dead as ‘renowned’, ‘well-dead’ and in ‘assurèd rest’ suggests that these graves belong to saints: suggestively in a play presenting a cult of Mary, undervaluing the saints is a definition of evil. ‘Chaste life’ is the final difference between Sophonisba and Erictho. Just as the predominant feature of Sophonisba’s ‘wonderful’ character is her Marian virginity, so the sacred Sophonisba and hellish Erictho contrast starkly over sexuality. Thus, Erictho presents an un-apologetically predatory sexuality – not only in her succubuslike seduction of Syphax, where it is visible, but in her open and contemptuous acknowledgement to him: More ignorant thing, Know we, Erictho, with a thirsty womb, Have coveted full threescore suns for blood of kings. We that can make enraged Neptune toss His huge curled locks without one breath of wind; We that can make heaven slide from Atlas’ shoulder; We, in the height and pride of covetous lust, Have wished with woman’s greediness to fill Our longing arms with Syphax’s well-strung limbs. (5.1.7–15) 16 See Corbin and Sedge, 5–7.

THE WONDER OF WOMEN

121

In Erictho’s unrestrainedly ‘thirsty womb’, her overt appreciation of ‘well-strung limbs’ and her ‘woman’s lust’, her contrast with Sophonisba is absolute. Suggesting distinctions between sainthood and damnation, indeed, a principal difference between these ‘wonderful’ and ‘hellish’ females is that, unlike Erictho, Sophonisba sublimates her sexuality to an ‘honour’ supposed to survive death. Notice that the play invites the contrast between Sophonisba and Erictho in a manner above and beyond the thematic ones I have highlighted: in Act Four, Syphax mistakes Erictho for Sophonisba. Having conjured Erictho, Syphax instructs her to give Sophonisba to him, but what Erictho brings is herself, whom Syphax takes for Sophonisba. The first stage direction in the procedure makes the link between Erictho and Sophonisba explicit: ‘Enter ERICTHO in the shape of SOPHONISBA, her face veiled, and hasteth in the bed of SYPHAX’. The second stage direction re-enforces the parallel: ‘SYPHAX hasteneth within the canopy, as to SOPHONISBA’s bed’ (4.1 s.d., my emphasis). Thus, the episode implies that ‘Sophonisba’ and ‘Erictho’ can be mistaken; but when Syphax discovers he has suffered a ‘loathed delusion’ (5.1.3), it also illustrates that the two characters are different, distinguishing properly superstitious from properly holy. That distinction bears on the controversial matter of ‘Rome’ in seventeenthcentury England. Contrasting the ‘female glory’ of Sophonisba with ‘too forward Venus’ (Prologue 18), the Prologue has already intimated a distinction between pagan and Christian Rome which is based on their distinct cultures of sexuality. Having conjured forward Erictho to serve his own forward sexuality, Syphax also (echoing the Prologue) seeks to ‘Raise active Venus’ (4.1.207). Thus, both the Prologue and Syphax imply that ‘active’ or ‘forward’ sexuality is a feature of the Roman religion of antiquity – which claim is also embodied in Erictho – ‘the great soul of charms’ (4.1.97) – as she emerges from ‘ruins’. In describing her habitat, Erictho begins by presenting an ancient site reduced to ruins, ‘Whose very rubbish like the pitied fall / Of virtue most unfortunate, yet bears / A deathless majesty’ (4.1.145–7). In its fallen virtue as in its ‘deathless majesty’, the site is like Erictho herself; but Erictho’s place of origin is also telling in regard to her sexuality. She originates Where statues and Jove’s acts were lively limned Boys with black coals draw the veiled parts of nature And lecherous actions of imagined lust … (4.1.143–55)

Like the Prologue and Syphax, the association of ‘actions of imagined lust’ with ‘Jove’s acts’ implies that rampant sexuality is a matter of pagan cult, implying that the distinctions between Erictho and Marian Sophonisba also entail differences between Rome in its pagan and Christian forms. Controversially in post-Reformation England, this distinction further implies that Christianised Rome – especially its focal cult of the Virgin – is free of the demonic or ‘superstitious’ traits of antiquity.

122

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

In a drama already depicting a geographical war between Rome and Carthage, such distinctions are especially resonant, but as we have seen, the play opens with ‘Rome’ as the enemy of both Carthage and Sophonisba. It has been observed that the ethos of Marston’s Carthage ‘is Roman in its ceremonies and values’,17 so the association of Marianism, as presented by Carthaginian Sophonisba, with Rome is not problematic. But what of the political division between Rome and Carthage – emphasised by the state of war in the play and encouraged among anti-Catholics by the contemporary division of Rome from England? Overt hostility to Rome is visible in the play. At the close, for example, we encounter the following: Massinissa: Wreathe back thine arms, bend down thy neck, Practice base prayers, make fit thyself for bondage. Sophonisba: Bondage! Massinissa: Bondage, Roman bondage. Sophonisba: No, no! (5.4.76–8)

Especially in the context of ‘prayers’ the objection to ‘Roman bondage’ suggests Reformed England, Sophonisba’s following decision to take poison rather than become a Roman slave suggesting anti-Catholicism. Yet implicitly and explicitly, Marston suggests that Sophonisba’s extreme reaction to Rome is a mistake – her first in the play and one which is fatal. Implicitly defying the Christian ‘cannon ’gainst self-slaughter’, Sophonisba’s suicide presents the values of pagan rather than Christian Rome; implicitly, also, Sophonisba breaks with Marian convention: her un-Christian suicide contrasts starkly with Mary’s Assumption. Explicitly, even as he aids and admires her, Massinissa calls Sophonisba a ‘Covetous, / Famegreedy lady’, indeed one without ‘reasonable proportion of goodness’ (5.4.107–8; 109). The holistic suggestion of these implicit and explicit claims is that, although Sophonisba has admirably sublimated the Roman sexuality of Venus, in other respects she insufficiently distinguishes Marian from pagan honour; in regard to anti-Catholicism, however, the suggestion is that Sophonisba’s dislike of Rome is confused and disproportionate. That is attested elsewhere. In what is itself a religio-political intervention, the play’s larger response to its division with Rome is to collapse the division. Illustrating that allegiances to one’s country need not be binding, Syphax abandons Carthage for Rome in the opening scene, returning to it as quickly when it offers him Sophonisba as a sweetener for his allegiance. This suggests a further mark of Syphax’s villainy, but it also suggests the ‘villainy’ of Carthage, showing that political allegiances may be misplaced. Presenting the process of decision-making of the Carthaginian Senate, Act Two, Scene One especially suggests the villainy of Carthage by illustrating Machiavelli’s dictum that ‘good politics’ often means bad morality. Thus, Carthalo argues that 17 Corbin and Sedge, 5. See also Ure, 78.

THE WONDER OF WOMEN

123

despite her marriage to Massinissa, Carthage ought to give Sophonisba to Syphax to protect itself, his argument being that the ends justify the means: ‘Prosperous success gives blackest actions glory; / The means are unremembered in most story’ (2.1.33–4). However, to Gelosso, his adversary in this debate, such ‘morality’ is unacceptable: specifically, the allegiance of the individual to the state is determined and delimited by the virtue of the state: I am bound to lose My life, but not my honour, for my country. Our vow, our faith, our oath, why they’re ourselves, And he that’s faithless to his proper self May be excused if he break faith with princes. (2.1.81–5)

Indeed, Gelosso not only implies that subjects only owe allegiance to states if the state itself is virtuous, he further implies that ‘princes’ will eventually suffer themselves if their subjects do not behave honourably. Moreover, he also implies that Gelosso’s pragmatic view of politics is itself immoral – a view he reiterates in calling him ‘Politic lord’ (2.1.49; my emphasis): ‘politic’ implies both ‘political’ and ‘devious’. Thus, Marston’s controversial presentation of political decision-making, Gelosso’s argument that allegiances to states should not be assumed, and Gelosso’s suggestion that ‘politics’ – especially the politics of Carthalo – implies deviousness each serve to diminish the claims of political allegiance in general and the claims of allegiance to Carthage against Rome in particular. When Carthage decides to follow Carthalos’ advice and give Sophonisba to Syphax, therefore, the ‘villainy’ of Carthage is in question. Continuing Gelosso’s line of reasoning, Scipio makes the villainy of Carthage – and the innocence of Massinissa in eventually ‘betraying’ it – explicit: … to leave A city so ingrate, so faithless, so more vile Than civil speech may name, fear not. Such vice To scourge is heaven’s most graceful sacrifice. Thus all confess, first they have broke a faith To thee most due, so just to be observed That barbarousness itself may well blush at them. Where is thy passion? They have shared thy crown, Thy proper right of birth, contrived thy death. Where is thy passion? Given thy beauteous spouse To thy most hated rival … (3.2.12–22)

According to Scipio, as Massinissa abandons Carthage for Rome, a state which betrays its citizens should not only be abandoned, it should be ‘passionately’ disliked. Being set in a self-consciously Marian drama, and especially as Carthage is exchanged for ‘Rome’, Scipio’s claim is a challenge to Reformed England – one

124

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

which Massinissa echoes and enlarges. Asking that ‘not the virtue of the world suspect / Sad Massinissa’s faith; nor once condemn / Our just revolt’ (3.2.1–3), he admits his debt to the place of his birth but argues, ‘The earth was made for men, not men for earth’ (3.2.5; italics from the text). Speaking to the world at large, he adds, ‘Men, be not fooled / With piety to place, tradition’s fear’ (3.2.9–10). Massinissa not only rejects the idea that states deserve automatic allegiance, he pointedly condemns the claim to such allegiance as superstition – ‘tradition’s fear’. Yet if ‘piety to place’ presents an inadequate allegiance, what ‘piety’ is worthwhile? Standing over Sophonisba’s body at the close, Scipio and Massinissa present similar answers. Receiving her body, Scipio intones: ‘The glory of thy virtue live for ever. / Brave hearts may be obscured, but extinct never’ (5.1.42–3). Despite her ‘brave’ suicide, Sophonisba’s ‘glory’ – the only glory the play presents as unambiguous – is her virginity,18 cherished against would-be takers with a zeal that recalls Marian devotion in its fervour. Instructing the removal of the body in the play’s final lines – and having chosen not to follow Sophonisba in suicide – Massinissa reasserts the uniqueness of this glory, simultaneously pointing to the significance of the play’s true title, The Wonder of Women: ‘Heave gently then, / Women’s right wonder, and just shame of men’ (5.1.59–60). Works Cited and Consulted Corbin, Peter and Douglas Sedge (eds), Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays: Sophonisba, The Witch, The Witch of Edmonton (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1986). Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400– 1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). McCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Protestant Reformation’, lecture to the Centre for Early Modern Studies (University of Aberdeen, Scotland, April 24, 2004). Peters, Christine, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History edited by Anthony Fletcher and others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 207–45. Pigman, G.W., Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Rist, Thomas, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Politics of Counter-Reformation, Renaissance Studies 3 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999).

18 Though possibly Scipio’s lines are spoken to Massinissa rather than over Sophonisba; even if so, however, the tenor of my argument still applies: although only by Massinissa, and only in the final line of the play, Sophonisba’s ‘glory’ as virgin wife (though not her ‘bravery’ as suicide) is nevertheless praised.

THE WONDER OF WOMEN

125

Shell, Alison, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Ure, Peter, ‘John Marston’s Sophonisba: A Reconsideration’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: Critical Essays by Peter Ure, edited by J.C. Maxwell (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1974). Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1990).

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 7

Easter Scenes from an Unholy Tomb: Christian Parody in The Widow’s Tears Alice Dailey Villanova University

Let me begin by sketching a scene. At center stage sits a large stone tomb with a boulder set by to cover the entrance. The tomb itself is vacant but is attended by two weeping women who lament the death of a man whose body is not there. Outside, the tomb is surrounded by a group of full-sized crosses, some empty and some displaying the bodies of crucified offenders. Soldiers commissioned to guard the bodies from unlawful removal pass in and out of the scene. Clearly this is a familiar religious tableau. But what I have described is in fact not a scene from the gospel accounts of Christ’s resurrection, nor is it a page out of the liturgical or vernacular Easter drama of the Middle Ages. Rather, it is the setting for the last two acts of a Jacobean comedy, George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears, first performed in 1605. What is intriguing about The Widow’s Tears is not only its unusual adaptation of religious models but the fact that no published scholarship on the play has recognized a relationship between these scenes and the story of Christ’s Resurrection. This essay argues that the final two acts of The Widow’s Tears comprise a parodic version of the scenes at Christ’s empty tomb on Easter morning and that the Easter parody is integral to an understanding of the play’s moral and thematic concerns. The play is set in ancient Cyprus. Its main characters are two brothers of good family, Tharsalio and Lysander, and Lysander’s wife Cynthia. The play opens after the recent death of Tharsalio’s employer, a wealthy lord of Cyprus. His beautiful and rich widow, Eudora, vows to honor her husband’s memory by never remarrying. Under the guidance of the goddess Confidence, whom Tharsalio takes as his patron deity in rejection of the fickle Fortuna, Tharsalio determines to woo and win his former mistress through a series of brash and unconventional interviews that ignite Eudora’s passion. He is successful and marries her by the start of the third act.1

1 Tharsalio’s marriage to Eudora marks the conclusion of the subplot in this unusually structured play in which subplot and main plot are sequential rather than simultaneous. This feature of the play is the subject of an essay by Richard Corballis, ‘The Widow’s Tears: Two Plays or Two Parts?’ Parergon 20 (1978), 34–39.

128

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

As he sets about wooing Eudora, Tharsalio is subjected to the mocking taunts of his elder brother Lysander, who expects he will fail miserably. Lysander earnestly trusts in the chastity of Eudora’s widowhood; like Eudora, Lysander’s own wife Cynthia has publicly vowed to remain unmarried if he should die before her. Irritated by Lysander’s insults, Tharsalio determines to undermine Lysander’s smug assurance of Cynthia’s constancy by subtly suggesting that she cannot be trusted. As Tharsalio predicts, Lysander takes the bait eagerly, becoming utterly distracted by jealousy. The only way to be sure of his wife, Tharsalio suggests, is for Lysander to die. With the help of Tharsalio and his servant Lycus, Lysander enacts the perverse plan of faking his own death. He leaves town on a pretended matter of state; Lycus tells Cynthia of her husband’s murder by thieves along the road; and an empty casket is placed in the family tomb. When we find Cynthia at the opening of Act IV, she has been weeping at Lysander’s tomb for five days, accompanied by her waiting maid. She has had neither food nor drink in that time, and Tharsalio fears she may be near death from grief and starvation. Lysander hears reports of her constancy and comes to the cemetery in disguise to offer his wife food, breaking his agreement with Tharsalio to remain in hiding. Dressed as a soldier of the watch, Lysander convinces Cynthia and her maid to eat and drink, offering them wine and promising to return the next evening. When he does return, he finds his wife not only fully recovered but open to his amorous advances. Believing Lysander still to be in hiding, Tharsalio spies Cynthia and the soldier kissing on the coffin and determines to play a trick on the lusty soldier by removing one of the crucified bodies he is commissioned to guard. When Lysander later sees the empty cross, he returns to the tomb to hide, telling Cynthia that he will be executed for allowing a body to be stolen on his watch. She eagerly offers her husband’s corpse, which she believes to occupy the coffin, to be hung up in place of that which has been stolen. The disguised Lysander tries to dissuade her from this offer by telling her that he was the man who killed her husband, but Cynthia says she loves him nonetheless and insists that he use her husband’s body to save his own life. Continuing to play along with the ruse, though quite disheartened by Cynthia’s suggestion, Lysander leaves to get the equipment needed for the swap. When he does, Tharsalio recognizes his brother and the soldier he observed kissing Cynthia as one and the same. Tharsalio then surreptitiously enters the tomb and tells Cynthia of what her husband has done. Lysander returns, and Cynthia angrily discovers him. Lysander is left alone in the tomb, thinking that his wife knew all along that he was the soldier and has trapped him in his own jealousy. The play ends with the appearance of a ridiculous Governor who arrives on the scene to dispense absurd justice. The lost body is returned to its cross, Lysander is revealed to all to be alive, and the next generation, Lysander’s son and Eudora’s daughter, are joined in marriage. Critics agree that Tharsalio is the central character of the play, and it is his world view that is finally confirmed with the downfall of Lysander and Cynthia. His time abroad has developed him into a confirmed Machiavel, a cynic who is confident

EASTER SCENES FROM AN UNHOLY TOMB

129

in nothing but the gross imperfections of human nature. His desire to spread this new-found wisdom—to disabuse others of their naïve idealism and prove himself right—drives the action of the play forward. Scholars have disagreed about whether Tharsalio voices Chapman’s point of view or is a representative of the world Chapman criticizes.2 The play’s rather disparaging portrait of womanhood has raised similar questions about Chapman’s attitudes toward his material.3 And scholars have disagreed over whether or not this last of Chapman’s comedies is in fact funny, a question that probes the feeling of unsettling dissatisfaction—even disgust—with which many readers are left.4 But none of these readings has recognized its Easter parody, a feature of the play that does a great deal, I will argue, to resolve critical questions of its moral message, its relationship to genre, and its authorial point of view. As many scholars have noted, the action between Lysander and Cynthia is derived from Petronius’s bawdy Satyricon.5 But Chapman’s handling of the story of the Ephesian Widow is unique. As Thomas Parrott has observed, ‘the coarseness of [Chapman’s] comedy is not inherent in its subject.’6 In the Petronian version, the woman’s husband is actually dead. After weeping in his tomb for several days and nearly starving herself, the widow is approached by a sympathetic soldier charged with guarding crucified bodies. He revives her with food and drink and then successfully seduces her with the help of the widow’s pandering maid. While the soldier sports with the widow inside the tomb, the family of one of the crucified men steal away his unguarded corpse. To prevent the death of her new lover, the widow 2 Samuel Schoenbaum, ‘The Widow’s Tears and the Other Chapman,’ Huntington Library Quarterly XXIII (August 1960), 325–30, is the most forward proponent of a symmetrical relationship between Chapman and Tharsalio, while Henry Weidner, ‘Homer and the Fallen World: Focus of Satire in George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963): 519, argues that ‘Tharsalio stands for everything Chapman denounces.’ 3 See, for example, Renu Juneja, ‘Widowhood and Sexuality in Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears,’ Philological Quarterly 67.2 (1988), 157–75. 4 Weidner suggests that the play represents a dark vision of the world, as does Thomas Parrott, ed., The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961). Marilyn Williamson, ‘Matter of More Mirth,’ Renaissance Papers (1956), 34–41, argues for the play as unquestionably comedy, relying for evidence on the treatment of women’s infidelity and ‘widow’s tears’ in popular comedy of the period. Thelma Herring, ‘Chapman and an Aspect of Modern Criticsm,’ Renaissance Drama 8 (1965), 153–79, also finds the play comic. Charlotte Spivak, George Chapman (New York: Twayne, 1967), 104, describes the play as ‘a transitional piece between the comic and tragic phases of its author’s career.’ 5 See especially Arnold W. Preussner, ‘Chapman’s Anti-Festive Comedy: Generic Subversion and Classical Allusion in The Widow’s Tears,’ Iowa State Journal of Research 59, no. 3 (1985), 263–72; and Lee Bliss, ‘The Boys From Ephesus: Farce, Freedom, and Limit in The Widow’s Tears,’ Renaissance Drama 10 (1979), 161–83. 6 Parrott, 806.

130

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

insists that her husband’s body be used as a replacement. The story ends with all the townspeople musing at ‘how a dead man had managed to mount the cross,’ and the audience listening to the narrative roar with laughter.7 It is in Chapman’s revision of this basic plot that the Easter parody arises and where, I suggest, the ‘coarseness’ described by Parrott originates. In consciously altering Petronius’ narrative, Chapman creates a parallel between the CynthiaLysander plot and Mary Magdalene’s Easter morning discovery of Christ’s empty tomb. Chapman’s play shares with the Easter story more than just the surface parallel of the presumed-dead tomb occupant who is revealed to be alive; additionally, it probes some of the same underlying themes: the function of faith, the desire to know the unknowable, and the repercussions of human death. While the Petronian story is merely a farcical comedy about women’s fickleness, the plot of The Widow’s Tears has elements of tragedy, relying on an elaborate deceit that produces the disintegration of an idealized marriage. In the process, the play employs religious parody to interrogate the notion of idealism itself, ultimately concluding that it has no place in the fallen world Chapman describes. Early in the play, upon announcing his intent to woo Eudora, Tharsalio suggests that widows’ vows of constancy are something of an inside joke among women— ‘a kind of female-designed conspiracy,’ as Jennifer Panek puts it.8 According to Tharsalio, women make such vows in order to set themselves up as ‘saints’ to be adored by their husbands (1.1.103).9 Tharsalio’s remark inaugurates one of the play’s repeated and gradually dismantled tropes: that of the chaste woman as a saintly figure worthy of worship. Hearing of Lysander’s jealousy, Lycus reassures him that he has nothing to worry about: ‘The world hath written your wife in highest lines of honor’d fame,’ he says, ‘her virtues so admir’d in this isle as the report thereof sounds in foreign ears, and strangers oft arriving here (as some rare sight) desire to view her presence, thereby to compare the picture with the original’ (2.1.60–64). Cynthia has become a mythical figure, a story, an art piece—her home a shrine or pilgrimage destination. Her status only grows as she mourns her husband, shut up in the tomb with no food or drink. Tharsalio believes this is an artificial ploy aimed specifically at increasing others’ awe of her: For this does she look to be deified, to have hymns made of her, nay to her; the tomb where she is, to be no more reputed the ancient monument of our family, the Lysandri, but the new-erected altar of Cynthia, to which all the Paphian widows shall after their husbands’ funerals offer their wet muckinders for monuments of the danger they have pass’d, as seamen do their wet garments at Neptune’s temple after a shipwrack. (4.1.114–21)

7 Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 101–104. 8 Jennifer Panek, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 78. 9 George Chapman, The Widow’s Tears, Regents Renaissance Drama Series, ed. Ethel M. Smeak (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966). All subsequent references to this text will be parenthetical.

EASTER SCENES FROM AN UNHOLY TOMB

131

If she successfully lasts out her trial, Tharsalio complains, Cynthia will become a deity in her own right: the patron saint of widows. References to Cynthia’s sainthood coupled with her weeping at the tomb of her dead lord suggest a likeness to the figures of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. In Tharsalio’s narration of the constant vigil Cynthia keeps at her husband’s tomb, we hear echoes of St. John’s account of the Magdalene weeping at Christ’s grave as well as the other gospels’ stories of the several Marys’ visits to the site.10 But while the Magdalene weeps over a tomb that has been vacated by Christ’s miraculous resurrection, Cynthia weeps over what is essentially a practical joke at her expense—an empty tomb that signifies Lysander’s faithless jealousy. And whereas the Magdalene has been converted through faith from a whore to a saint, Cynthia’s lust for the smooth-talking soldier, Lysander disguised, transforms her from a saintly, goddess-like paragon of marital chastity into a woman eager, as Tharsalio so crudely puts it, to ‘prostitute herself upon her husband’s coffin’ (5.1.121–2). The etymology of this transformation uncovers a constellation of interests in desire, appetite, and the continuum between divinity and humanity. Cynthia’s fall begins with the breaking of her fast. About to concede that he was wrong about Cynthia’s chastity, Tharsalio expresses his surprise that she has stood the test, ‘Grief and all want of food not having wrought / Too mortally on her divine disposure’ (81). Even for Tharsalio, Cynthia’s rejection of food functions as a marker of more-thanmortal status. Lysander takes Cynthia’s starvation as evidence of her divinity in an apostrophe to his goddess-wife: O Cynthia, heir of her bright purity Whose name thou dost inherit, thou disdain’st (Severed from all concretion) to feed Upon the base food of gross elements. Thou all art soul, all immortality. Thou fasts for nectar and ambrosia, Which, till thou find’st and eat’st above the stars, To all food here thou bidd’st celestial wars (4.2.179–86).

Cynthia’s rejection of food renders her a pure, disembodied spirit; she is ‘Severed from all concretion’ and has become ‘all […] soul, all immortality.’ Her starvation is the physical manifestation of her chastity—of her complete repudiation of the body and its needs. By this same logic, Cynthia is transubstantiated from goddess back into mortal through the introduction of food. When Lysander asks the help of Cynthia’s maid, Ero, to induce Cynthia to eat, Ero responds, ‘It shall go hard, sir, / But I will make her turn flesh and blood, / And learn to live as other mortals do’ (4.2.173–5). This is indeed what Ero accomplishes, much to Lysander’s surprise and dismay. Cynthia is remarkably transformed by her meal, coming out of the tomb for the first time in 10 Matthew 28:1–10, Mark 16:1–14, Luke 24:1–12, and John 20:11–18.

132

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

several days to breathe the fresh air. Lysander immediately notes the change in her and cunningly encourages her to indulge further, arguing that ‘To live freely is to feast our appetites freely, without which humans are stones’ (4.3.61–2). One appetite leads to another, and within a matter of minutes Lysander has kissed her and the tomb has been shut up to conceal their lovemaking. The dissolution of Cynthia’s will to starve functions more broadly as a dissolution of all inhibition; her physical hunger quickly gives way to other hungers of the flesh. Throughout these scenes, Lysander comes to act as a parodic double for Christ. Like Christ, he is the missing occupant of the empty tomb, returning unrecognized to the place of his own burial to offer comfort to those who mourn him. But Lysander’s ‘death’ serves precisely the opposite purpose of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, for while Christ selflessly offered his life for the salvation of others, Lysander invents his death to serve his own ruthless, short-sighted ends. Lysander’s tomb is empty not because human death has been transcended but because the most ruinous qualities of human nature—jealousy, selfishness, deceit, and the desire for self-magnification— have been indulged to the full. Through parody, the play’s implicit comparison between Lysander and Christ acts to highlight Lysander’s example of human deceit and debasement. The Easter scene parodied by Chapman had a long history in English drama. Mary’s visit to the tomb and her encounter with the risen Christ, whom she mistakes for a gardener, formed the basis of an untold number of early medieval church plays and evolved over time into some of the most widely dramatized events of the liturgical calendar. The earliest of these proto-dramas were the Visitatio Sepulchri or Quem quaeritis plays, the latter named for the angel’s question to the women who visit the tomb, ‘Quem quaeritis in sepulchro?’ (Whom do you seek in the sepulchre?).11 These embellishments on the Easter liturgy consisted of little more than choral antiphons and simple action, such as the displaying of Christ’s discarded shroud. By the twelfth century, the Easter celebration dramatized the events of the Resurrection more fully with plays that included stage directions to cue the participants’ histrionic displays of sorrow and joy, more elaborate use of action, and larger casts of characters. In the Resurrection drama from the Fleury playbook, for example, the four gospel accounts were combined into a composite rendering of the events of the Resurrection, forming a continuous drama that incorporates elements from each of the Evangelists. Later, the vernacular Corpus Christi cycles of the late Middle Ages would feature Resurrection plays that weave this liturgical tradition with apocryphal legends to present a popular dramatization of the event that, along with the Passion, formed the centrally important moment in the dramatic cycles as well as in Christian history. What this rich history of Easter plays explores is the very crux of Christian belief: the tension between God’s requirement of faith and fallible humankind’s need to see, hear, and touch in order to believe. The Resurrection is the one moment in 11 From John 20:15.

EASTER SCENES FROM AN UNHOLY TOMB

133

Christian history devoid of this crisis. It is a moment of fulfillment in which those of little faith—those who have imperfectly understood and even less perfectly believed Christ’s promise of resurrection—are confronted with the miraculous, undeniable truth. Seeing and believing—proof and faith—are instantaneously brought in line with one another. Mary and the apostles are able to assume the role of proselytizers because they have obtained ocular proof: they can act as Christian witnesses because they have in fact witnessed. The early Easter dramas suggest the value of this visible proof through their emphasis on the physical props of Christ’s resurrection: the cross, the shroud, the kerchief that covered Christ’s head—all displayed for the congregation in evidence of the miracle.12 The drama works to negotiate the tension between God’s requirement of faith and the pressing human desire for proof by reenacting the moment in Christian history when belief in Christ’s resurrection and incontrovertible knowledge of the Resurrection were one and the same. Like the apostles and Mary, the congregation become witnesses to Christ’s glory and can go forth confessing their faith. But implicit in these dramatic representations of confirmed faith is the depiction of doubt—of humans’ stubborn failure to apprehend the truth when that truth conflicts with preconceived notions of what is real and possible. Christ’s message to the doubting apostle Thomas, ‘Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed’ (John 20:29), reasserts the necessity of faith over proof for the generations of Christians to follow who will not have the benefit of conversing with the risen Lord or probing his wounds. The Easter story dramatizes not only the moment when faith and proof are one but the inauguration of faith as the spiritually superior epistemological mode for apprehending Christ. At the heart of the Easter story and its medieval dramatic representations is a meditation on this tension between God’s requirement of faith and the human desire for proof. For Chapman, this tradition acts as a template for a play that engages these same thematic concerns. The Widow’s Tears constitutes a reoccupation of traditional Easter plays for dramatic effect. Lysander and Cynthia’s reinhabitation of the scene of the Resurrection dramatizes the profound distance between the sacred moment and the profane—between a world in which faith is justified and Christ’s godhead is revealed and one in which faith is cataclysmically undermined and humanity is exposed as hideous and perverse. The power of Chapman’s play arises from the dramatized distance between itself and its models. Chapman was not the only playwright of his era who adapted religious templates to explore the secular world. The conclusion of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale likewise makes use of familiar religious models to dramatize the operation of faith. A more familiar and canonical play, The Winter’s Tale provides a useful comparison for illuminating Chapman’s specific use of religious material. The main plots of

12 See, for example, the Visitatio Sepulchri from St. Lambrecht in David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 36–38, which makes use of several such props.

134

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

both plays center on the husband’s loss of faith in the once-stabilizing institution of female chastity. Leontes and Lysander are utterly undone by the notion of their wives’ infidelity and require incontrovertible proof that their suspicions are justified. Both men are maddened by the frustration of not knowing; as a result, each applies the machinations of reason to a problem that ultimately requires faith. While Lysander’s ruin occurs in the last scenes of the play, Leontes’ crisis of faith produces disaster by the second act, which allows him to redeem himself through religious devotion to Hermione’s memory. Through penance and renewed faith, Leontes makes himself once again worthy of his wife. Hermione and Cynthia also share some important traits, though their trajectories are opposite. Hermione is suspected by her husband to be a whore and traitor and is only redeemed from these slanders by the oracle’s divine intervention and the death of Mamillius. After her death and Leontes’ discovery of his wrongful accusations, Hermione is elevated to the status of ‘sainted spirit,’ a woman of matchless perfection whose only near-equal is the daughter to whom she herself gave birth.13 As the final scenes of The Winter’s Tale unfold, Hermione evolves into an art piece and idol, the crown jewel of Paulina’s collection. When the statue comes alive, Hermione does not slip from her position of goddess and reified object but takes on an even rarer role: she is a woman come back from the dead, a marvel of nature. She defies categorization altogether. The arc of Hermione’s development through the play moves consistently upward, from accused criminal to saint to idol and miracle. Cynthia’s development, as I have noted, is the reverse. She begins the play as a model woman, ‘unparagon’d’ (3.2.30), ‘rare’ (3.2.80), and ‘matchless’ (5.1.22). Her grief and starvation elevate her further to the position of saint and goddess. From this place, she falls rapidly—and, it would seem, inevitably—to the base position of whore. The religious template underlying this movement is integral, I suggest, to both plays. In each, the culmination of the main plot is a scene of strikingly familiar religious symbolism. We are told in the second-to-last scene of The Winter’s Tale that everyone has departed to Paulina’s house to view the statue of Hermione: ‘Thither with all greediness of affection are they gone, and there they intend to sup.’14 When they arrive at Paulina’s they are taken on a tour of her expansive gallery but do not find Hermione’s statue among Paulina’s other pieces. Paulina’s explanation and the manner in which Hermione’s statue is housed and displayed suggest, as Darryll Grantley has argued, that Hermione is intended to figure the Virgin Mary, whose statues would have been venerated by the Catholic faithful.15 The way in which Hermione is displayed is similar not only to saints’ statues but to the consecrated Corpus Christi, which was elevated on an altar and often hidden by a curtain or screen. The scene’s religious undertones are reinforced by Paulina’s reference to the 13 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. J.H.P. Pafford (New York: Routledge, 1963) 5.1.57. 14 The Winter’s Tale 5.1.101–103. 15 Darryll Grantley, ‘The Winter’s Tale and early Religious Drama,’ Comparative Drama 20, no. 1 (1986): 33.

EASTER SCENES FROM AN UNHOLY TOMB

135

gallery as a ‘chapel,’ by Perdita’s kneeling before the statue, and by the music that accompanies Paulina’s incantation.16 Most important to this liturgical scene is Paulina’s instruction to Leontes, ‘It is requir’d / You do awake your faith,’ before she concludes the ceremony that will render Hermione alive.17 For the redemption of Leontes to be complete, he must set aside all doubt and embrace the impossible: he must believe that stone can become flesh. Paulina operates as a priest figure who leads her congregation in a ritual of Holy Communion that has already been suggested by the party’s intent ‘to sup’ at her house. In The Winter’s Tale, transubstantiation acts as a model for representing the fantastic and miraculous; it is a way of exploiting the redemptive power of faith and the beauty of being free—if only for a moment—from reason and doubt, which the play represents as potentially maddening and destructive. The Winter’s Tale solves the problem of faith through its reference to a doctrine that depends entirely on faith. Doubt destroyed Hermione and Leontes, but faith redeems them, turning stone into flesh and death into life. The appropriation of religious models is an integral part of the play’s story of resurrection and of its confirmation of a benign world order. In much the same way, the Easter parody of The Widow’s Tears is foundational to the broader concerns of the play. But in The Widow’s Tears, it is difference, not likeness, that communicates these concerns. The ironic distance between the story of Lysander and Cynthia and the Easter story suggests how far human beings have fallen from the world described by the gospels, where human death yields redemption, resurrection, and divine revelation. The climax of the play affects the characters in a manner precisely the reverse of Christ’s resurrection. This effect is most evident in the scene of recognition between Lysander and Cynthia. Once Tharsalio informs Cynthia that her husband is alive and masquerading as the soldier to test her widow’s chastity, she determines to beat him at his own game. Returning to the tomb with a rope, Lysander tries to dissuade Cynthia from giving up her husband’s body for crucifixion by painting a gruesome picture of the decomposing corpse they will find when they open the coffin and by reminding her of the great public disgrace she will incur if her deed is found out. To provoke him further, Cynthia claims she is not at all bothered by these obstacles and snatches up the tools to do the job herself. When she finally confronts him, this comic scene darkens. Turning on him in a rage, Cynthia describes herself as the ‘Ill-destin’d wife of a transform’d monster, / Who to assure himself of what he knew, / Hath lost the shape of man!’ (5.1.479–81). Lysander’s death acts as a movement not from human to divine, as Christ’s does, but from man to monster. Cynthia continues: Poor soldier’s case; do not we know you, sir? But I have given thee what thou cam’st to seek. Go, satyr, run affrighted with the noise Of that harsh-sounding horn thyself hast blown. 16 The Winter’s Tale 5.2.86, 43, 98. 17 The Winter’s Tale 5.3.94–95.

136

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA Farewell; I leave thee there my husband’s corpse; Make much of that.k(5.1.482–7)

In the moment that he is recognized to be alive, Lysander confronts the death of his marriage and of himself as Cynthia’s husband. Instead of a ‘resurrection,’ the reverse is effected: the living are brought to ruin by deceit and faithlessness, and the man who was alive is transformed by faithlessness from husband to a ‘husband’s corpse.’ The play’s Christian parody is further emphasized by the crucified bodies that comprise the plot’s eerie backdrop. Under Chapman’s hand, the Easter story’s solemn crucifixion and burial of Christ and the reverent treatment of his sacred body by his faithful followers become burlesque. Tharsalio’s practical joke of taking a corpse on and off the cross and Cynthia’s offer of her husband’s five-day-old carcass in its place show us that in this drama—unlike the Easter drama—nothing is sacred. The man whom, but a day earlier, Cynthia revered and honored to the point of her own near-starvation becomes an instrument for promoting her newly awakened lust as she offers his body to be dragged to the cross and nailed up in place of a convicted criminal. In the world of Chapman’s play, the solemnity of Christ’s death is transformed into black comedy. Through this process, Tharsalio’s cynical estimation of human nature proves itself true. Cynthia turns out to be not a saint but, like all human beings, a ‘poor naked sinner’ (3.1.94); instead of a goddess, she renders a poignant example of ‘human frailty’ (1.2.204). The play suggests that if Cynthia, paragon of women, falls so far so fast, then the world it represents is indeed devoid of saints altogether—perhaps devoid of anything pure and true. The last act of the play, Albert H. Tricomi has argued, ‘is finally the revelation that religious and ethical values exist everywhere only in illusion and hypocrisy.’18 In Chapman’s Cyprus, the Magdalene’s reformed constancy is shown to be a myth: the weeping woman’s spiritual longing is corrupted into a lust of the flesh, and chastity erodes into debauchery as soon as the lord has been buried. The tragic undoing of the idyllic marriage between Lysander and Cynthia finds little relief in the play’s awkward comic resolution. As in Shakespeare’s later comedies, one senses here that more has been broken than can be fixed by the tropic devices of revealed identities, judicial intervention, and marriage plans. In Chapman’s play, these devices are themselves broken. When identities are revealed, they are shown to have altered drastically in the time that has passed, so that Cynthia and Lysander are no longer recognizable to one another as the once loved and trusted spouse. The play’s figure of justice is corrupted and drunk with his own power, dispensing punishment according to whim. And the underhanded means by which Tharsalio won Eudora, coupled with the destruction of the idealized union between Lysander and Cynthia, cast a dark shadow over the impending nuptials of 18 Albert H. Tricomi, ‘The Social Disorder of Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 72 (1973), 356.

EASTER SCENES FROM AN UNHOLY TOMB

137

the next generation. This unsatisfactory resolution and the play’s disturbing parody of the Christian Easter story ensure that it cannot finally be resolved into comedy’s satisfying mirth. The Widow’s Tears explores the tragic repercussions of probing too closely into matters that should be left to faith, something Tharsalio warns his brother about when Lysander proposes his trial of Cynthia. He reminds Lysander of the story of Actaeon, whose curiosity to see Diana naked led to his gruesome death. To enjoy contentment, Lysander should simply trust that his wife is true. ‘Ignorance and credulity are your sole means to obtain that blessing,’ Tharsalio tells him (1.2.231–2). While Christ’s death and ascension inaugurate the need for true faith—for belief without physical evidence, Lysander’s requirement of ocular proof epitomizes the cataclysmic effects of a loss of faith. Unlike Christ’s loving self-sacrifice, Lysander’s ‘death’ is a cruel and selfish deceit; consequently, instead of solidifying faith as Christ’s death does, Lysander’s ‘death’ throws his universe into irrevocable chaos. At the same time, the failure of Cynthia’s famed chastity represents the failure of virtue itself, which cannot finally hold up in the world Chapman represents. Tharsalio thinks that the myth of female chastity is necessary to the happiness of lesser men like his brother who rely on such trifles as myth and faith and idealism to maintain their fantasy view of the world. If Cynthia were to prove true to her widow’s tears, Tharsalio would be forced to revise his pessimistic view of his fellow creatures. But Tharsalio is proven correct, and when Cynthia falls, all virtue falls with her. James Parsons has called Cynthia ‘the sacred guarantor of all virture,’19 and Tricomi remarks that ‘in Cynthia’s fall from the pedestal of virtue, Chapman records the failure, or rather illusory nature, of an entire system of belief which is made to fall with her.’20 Indeed, female chastity acts in the play as a touchstone for the moral status of human society at large, as Lysander points out. He accuses Tharsalio of returning from Italy with corrupted notions ‘of womanhood, of all humanity, / Nay, deity itself,’ exposing a vision of womanhood and humanity as ultimately microcosmic representations of God. This metaphysical model of hierarchical interconnectivity suggests that Cynthia’s fall has repercussions for the very notion of divinity and for its continuing viability in Chapman’s Cyprian world. What does this mean for the persistent critical claim that the play offers a negative portrait of women? Indeed, ‘widows’ tears’ form a proverbially misogynistic trope, as editor Ethel M. Smeak has noted.21 However, I would like to suggest that Chapman’s meditation on this trope within the broader moral structure of the Resurrection complicates a simple reading of the play as misogynistic. The treatment of chastity in 19 From James Parsons’ unpublished dissertation, ‘The Animate Glass: Chapman’s Dramatic Evolution,’ University of Rochester, 1964. Cited in Tricomi 358. 20 Tricomi, 355. 21 See Smeak’s introduction to the play, especially pp. xiii–xiv. By contrast, Panek’s study of the representation of widows in early modern comedy persuasively argues that the stereotype of the lusty widow is part of a complex cultural negotiation of the widow’s financial and social independence, one that ultimately encourages and sanctions her remarriage.

138

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale again provides an illuminating contrast. Hermione’s response to the accusation of whoredom is no proto-feminist argument for active feminine sexuality but, rather, the transformation of herself into stone. Leontes’s crisis demonstrates an inability to accommodate simultaneously notions of his wife’s sexuality and decency; Hermione solves this problem—and ratifies this anxiety— by becoming a saint, a statue, a piece of art. In this way, she chooses for herself (for sixteen years, at least) the catastrophically misogynistic ideal represented by Desdemona’s motionless corpse at the end of Othello: she becomes ‘whiter […] than snow / And smooth as monumental alabaster.’22 Thus what Hermione finally suggests is that a figure like Mary Magdalene is an impossibility—that there is no space in the play for a woman who is both sexually experienced and holy. Hermione can only return to the world as the miraculous Mother, a statue of the Virgin transubstantiated into animated flesh. When she does, she confirms Leontes’ troubling construction of feminine sexuality, as does the play, which provides nothing akin to Othello’s demise to challenge the ideal new Hermione. Chapman’s play laments precisely this construction of feminine virtue by creating a world that is undone by the very binarisms this notion of ideal femininity presents. The Resurrection is what makes Mary Magdalene possible: it is the event in Christian theology that redeems sinners, giving the impure and pure—the virgin and the whore—equal access to heaven. By staging the non-Resurrection, The Widow’s Tears makes an argument for what the world would look like without the possibility of redemption. In that world, there is no middle ground between Cynthia, the saint and goddess who lives up to the unspotted chastity of her name, and the fallen woman who ‘prostitute[s] herself upon her husband’s coffin’ (5.1.121–2). Lysander’s seduction of his wife through food, specifically through the argument that ‘To live freely is to feast our appetites freely, without which humans are stones’ (4.3.61–2), voices the very tension between desire and impassivity that Hermione’s body represents. Unlike The Winter’s Tale, however, Chapman’s play sets this tension within a larger tragicomic structure that insists on the destructive and absurd nature of Lysander’s binary formulation. The Widow’s Tears represents a society where faith in the capacity for goodness and redemption has failed completely, a failure that ensures the destruction of any notion of the sacred. Chapman’s rather disturbing burlesque of Easter, with Cynthia and Lysander cast as grotesque doubles of Mary Magdalene and Christ, communicates more clearly than any other element in the play the tragic consequences of the decadent world represented, where all that can thrive are lascivious saints and perverse saviors and where what ought to be sacred is made ridiculous, bitter, and hideous. In a period of English drama when the Resurrection itself could not be staged—when Puritan anxieties over religious imagery had driven Easter drama from church and street alike—Chapman’s play creates the tableau of an ironic, dystopian resurrection 22 William Shakespeare, Othello, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann (New York: Routledge, 1996) 5.2.4–5.

EASTER SCENES FROM AN UNHOLY TOMB

139

to communicate the utopian moral message of Christ’s rising from the dead. The Widow’s Tears is a photo negative of the Resurrection that exposes the dense, black spaces of a faithless world. Works Cited and Consulted Bevington, David, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). Bliss, Lee, ‘The Boys from Ephesus: Farce, Freedom, and Limit in The Widow’s Tears,’ Renaissance Drama 10 (1979): 161–83. Chapman, George, The Widow’s Tears, Regents Renaissance Drama Series, ed. Ethel M. Smeak (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966). Corballis, Richard, ‘The Widow’s Tears: Two Plots or Two Parts?’ Parergon 20 (1978): 34–39. Grantley, Darryll, ‘The Winter’s Tale and early Religious Drama,’ Comparative Drama 20.1 (1986): 17–37. Herring, Thelma, ‘Chapman and an Aspect of Modern Criticism,’ Renaissance Drama 8 (1965): 153–79. Juneja, Renu, ‘Widowhood and Sexuality in Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears,’ Philological Quarterly 67.2 (1988): 157–75. Panek, Jennifer, Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Parrott, Thomas, ed., The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961). Parsons, James, ‘The Animate Glass: Chapman’s Dramatic Evolution.’ Unpublished Dissertation (University of Rochester, 1964). Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. P.G. Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). Presson, Robert K., ‘Wrestling with This World: A View of George Chapman,’ PMLA 84 (1969): 44–50. Preussner, Arnold W., ‘Chapman’s Anti-Festive Comedy: Generic Subversion and Classical Allusion in The Widow’s Tears,’ Iowa State Journal of Research 59.3 (1985): 263–72. Schoenbaum, Samuel, ‘The Widow’s Tears and the Other Chapman,’ Huntington Library Quarterly XXIII (August 1960): 325–30. Shakespeare, William, The Winter’s Tale, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. J.H.P. Pafford (New York: Routledge, 1963). ——, Othello, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann (New York: Routledge, 1996). Spivak, Charlotte, George Chapman (New York: Twayne, 1967). Tricomi, Albert H., ‘The Social Disorder of Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 72 (1973): 350–59. Weidner, Henry.,‘Homer and the Fallen World: Focus of Satire in George Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963): 518–32. Williamson, Marilyn, ‘Matter of More Mirth,’ Renaissance Papers (1956): 34–41.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 8

Virgin Fairies and Imperial Whores: The Unstable Ground of Religious Iconography in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon Regina Buccola Roosevelt University

Thomas Dekker’s 1607 play The Whore of Babylon invokes Catholic-inflected Marian imagery in complex and contradictory ways that are revelatory of the increasingly fractured nature of reform Christian sectarianism in seventeenthcentury England. A mere four years into the reign of James I, the virgin and ‘fairy queen’ identities that had been attached to Queen Elizabeth I in laud and admiration had come unfixed from their Protestant moorings as James decried both Catholic traditions, such as veneration of the Virgin, and folk superstitions, such as belief in a female fairy monarch,1 as equal rivals to his brand of state-based orthodoxy. By the time that Dekker revisits Spenserian fairy allegory in The Whore of Babylon, the politico-religious winds through which fairies flitted had shifted quite dramatically, rendering his play and the virgin fairy monarch who stands at its center ideologically problematic. Indeed, as Huston Diehl has compellingly demonstrated, Protestant iconoclasts had gone so far as to conflate the Virgin Mary with the Whore of Babylon by the time that Dekker attempts to stage characters modeled on them as mortal enemies.2 Relatively little critical attention3 has been paid to Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon, a formal curiosity both in the sense of the work’s own structure and in terms of the Jacobean socio-cultural structures which it alternately interrogates and 1 Julia Gasper notes that ‘Dekker’s plays draw on a broad spectrum of culture, learned and unlearned, making them catholic in the true sense.’ See The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1990), 14. 2 See Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 170–172. 3 Jean Howard’s discussion of it in The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994), Julia Gasper’s excellent chapter devoted to the play in The Dragon and the Dove, and Marianne Gateson Riely’s lengthy introductory matter to the critical edition of the play are noteworthy exceptions.

142

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

inverts. The published version of the play includes a preface by Dekker titled Lectori which refers to the work as a ‘dramatical poem,’ but Whore also has affinities with both history plays and morality plays, as well as both verse and prose Protestant panegyric, not to mention the fact that it attempts to stage the epic homage to Elizabeth accomplished in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Dekker’s primary inspiration. Evincing its mishmash of genres from the outset, the play begins with a dumb show, almost like a morality play, and many characters have allegorical names, like Truth and Plain Dealing.4 The Whore of Babylon focuses on conflicts which derive both their origins and their resolutions from fairy lore. Titania, the Queen of Fairyland, is explicitly aligned with Queen Elizabeth I.5 Dekker depicts the numerous attempts on Elizabeth’s life in this play as the handiwork of the Empress of Babylon, the play’s titular whore, and her loyal followers.6 Titania is engaged in an increasingly pitched battle with the Empress that begins as a feud over a changeling, ‘Ireland,’ allegorized as a child stolen from Fairyland by the Empress. Since the Empress and her realm are intended to represent the Catholic Church, this kidnapping symbolizes the conversion of the Irish to Catholicism and, hence, rebellion against both England’s political and religious sovereignty. The play concludes with an allegorical depiction of the British defeat of the Spanish Armada. In keeping with the feminine, maternal metaphors employed throughout the play, this final, decisive battle between Titania and the 4 See Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon, Critical Edition by Marianne Gateson Riely, Garland Series Renaissance Drama, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980). Deviating somewhat from Dekker’s own conception of his play as a ‘dramatical poem,’ Gasper labels it instead a ‘comoedia apocalyptica’ which, she explains, ‘differs from the history play since it aims to interpret events in terms of Protestant historiography derived from the Book of Revelation and other biblical texts. It organizes events by means of allegory, and has as its fundamental theme the struggle of the True Church against the Antichrist.’ See The Dragon and the Dove, 62–63. 5 The dramatis personae does not leave the audience to figure out the political allegorical significance of Titania, defining her as ‘the Faerie Queen, under whom is figured our late Queen Elizabeth.’ Marianne Gateson Riely’s footnote to this name acknowledges that ‘Shakespeare was the first to apply this name to the queen of the Fairies; in the Metamorphoses it is one of the titles of Diana. A comment by King James makes clear the connection: “That fourth kinde of Spirits … by the Gentiles was called Diana, and her wandring court, and amongst vs was called the Phairie” (Daemonologie, III, v; Workes, 1616 p. 132). Dekker is apparently the first, however, to apply the name to Elizabeth, associating Titania the fairy queen with Elizabeth the Faerie Queene.’ See The Whore of Babylon, Critical Edition by Marianne Gateson Riely, 96 and fn. to ‘Titania.’ 6 Susan Krantz argues that extant court records suggest that ‘Dekker’s simplistic and singular identification of Roman Catholicism with every assassination attempt in England since the Reformation and his conflation of Roman Catholicism with Spain contradicts both court policy and the evidence amassed on the conspiracy.’ See Susan E. Krantz, ‘Thomas Dekker’s Political Commentary in The Whore of Babylon,’ Studies in English Literature 35 (1995): 273.

VIRGIN FAIRIES AND IMPERIAL WHORES

143

Whore relies heavily on images of pregnancy, childbirth and infancy – aspects of daily life over which early modern superstition gave fairies precedence.7 Both Dekker’s seventeenth-century viewing and reading audiences would have brought a number of assumptions about Fairyland and fairies themselves to the play. The central assumptions of relevance in understanding the failed contrast that Dekker draws between Titania and the Empress of Babylon are the widespread belief in a female fairy monarch and the popular associations of fairies with maternity (i.e. – leaving changeling children, blessing bride beds to make them fruitful and bestowing blessings on newborns). Fairyland was often imagined to be in the East – in Babylon itself, at times, as a matter of fact.8 Just as the behavior Dekker ascribes to Titania and the Whore of Babylon is paradoxically conflated in the context of popular belief about fairies, their realms are conflated, too. Like fairy belief, sustained devotion to Mary constituted popular culture resistance to politically-prescribed religious hegemony. By the time of Dekker’s writing, reform Christians traded in a pernicious, two-sided coin featuring a positive and a negative image of femininity – the Virgin Mary and the Whore of Babylon, respectively – both related to Catholicism.9 In its turn, Catholicism had been lumped in with superstitions such as veneration of a female fairy monarch. The laws of Scotland specifically identified fairies as spirits of the devil.10 This Scottish legal understanding of fairies is significant when one turns to consideration of Dekker’s Whore, since the play was performed and published in the Jacobean era under a Scottish monarch who wrote on the demonic. Though he was notoriously condemnatory of witches, in his Daemonologie King James refers dismissively to the ‘Phairie’ as ‘one of the sort of illusiones that was rifest in the time of Papistrie.’11 James goes on to scoff that fairy belief is hardly ‘anie thing that ought to be beleeved by Christians.’12 James’s perceived need to address belief in fairies indicates that faith in them persisted among his Christian subjects, regardless of his firm refusal to 7 For a discussion of the relationship that the play’s maternal metaphors bear to its treatment of venereal diseases, see Sarah Scott, ‘The Empress of Babylon’s “carbuncles and rich stones”: The Metaphorizing of the Pox in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon,’ Early Theatre 7.1 (2004), 67–95. 8 See Michael Murrin, ‘Fairyland,’ The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A. C. Hamilton (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press 1990). 9 See Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and SeventeenthCentury Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 30. 10 See Minor White Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 58. Latham also reports that, in 1576, ‘Edinburgh witnessed the burning at the stake of a Scotch woman for “repairing” with the fairies and the Queen of Elfame, a spectacle which was to be repeated until 1640 and later.’ See The Elizabethan Fairies, 16. 11 James I, Daemonologie, The English Experience: Its Record in Early Printed Books Published in Facsimile no. 94 (1597; reprint New York: Da Capo Press, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1969), 73–74. 12 Ibid., 74.

144

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

countenance it. More specifically, Protestants should not fall prey to such ‘illusions’ since they are linked directly to Catholicism – ‘the time of Papistrie.’13 One of the ways in which reform Christians attacked Catholicism in early modern England was to feminize it. Protestants did away with the Catholic significance attached to Mary, the saints (many of whom were women), the religious sisterhood, and scoffed at the elaborate ostentation of the Catholic mass, with its emphasis on ornament and artifice. In leaving all of these female elements (or elements such as costuming and ‘cosmetics,’ which were negatively linked to women in the culture at large) to Catholicism, reform Christians in effect feminized the entire religion.14 The connection forged between fairy belief and Catholicism simply reinforced this trend, as fairies were associated with women, their work, and stereotyped images of their physique and moral vicissitudes.15 The notion of the Catholic Church as a whore constitutes a link in this ideological chain. Even before The Whore of Babylon begins, Thomas Dekker problematically invokes fairy associations with changeling children and the maternal metaphors that prove anathema to the success of his play. In the preface to the readers of the drama (written, presumably, because its disastrous stage appearance assured there would never be another theater audience for it), Dekker rails on the actors who have so poorly realized his dramatic genius. He likens himself to a mother who has labored long to bring his/her play-child to birth, only to have it marred in its upbringing by irresponsible performers/wet nurses. Dekker complains: The labors therefore of writers are as unhappy as the children of a beautiful woman, being spoiled by ill nurses within a month after they come into the world. What a number of throes do we endure ere we be delivered! And yet even then, though that heavenly issue of our brain be never so fair and so well limbed, is it made lame by the bad handling of them to whom it is put to learn to go. If this of mine be made a cripple by such means, yet despise him not for that deformity which stuck not upon him at his birth but fell upon him by misfortune.16

13 Such distinctions are important to keep in mind since Julia Gasper identifies The Whore of Babylon as ‘the definitive militant Protestant play.’ See The Dragon and the Dove, 9. 14 For example, Arthur Marotti notes that, ‘Protestant iconoclasm and misogyny shared a set of basic assumptions about the senses, about the place of the body in religious practice, and about the seductive dangers of the feminine. Woman and Catholicism were both feared as intrinsically idolatrous, superstitious and carnal, if not also physically disgusting.’ See ‘Alienating Catholics in Early Modern England: Recusant Women, Jesuits and Ideological Fantasies,’ in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 4. 15 For a recent overview of early modern fairy beliefs, see Diane Purkiss, At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 16 The Whore of Babylon, Critical Edition by Marianne Gateson Riely, 105–106. Future references to the play will be provided parenthetically in the text.

VIRGIN FAIRIES AND IMPERIAL WHORES

145

In an era in which infant mental and physical debilities were charged to the sins of their parents, belief in fairy power over natural occurrences ranging from cleft palates to cradle deaths helped assuage guilty consciences, particularly among the women most frequently held accountable, as in Dekker’s metaphorical excuse for his play’s poor public showing. The Whore of Babylon – written, as many critics have noted, hot on the heels of the Gunpowder Plot17 – is remarkably slow-paced considering the triple marriage proposals, assassination attempts, and efforts to suborn Titania’s ministers that it depicts, not to mention its climactic account of the failed Armada invasion, figured here as a conspiracy among the Empress of Babylon and her Roman Catholic peerage. As Jean Howard has noted in her analysis of the play in The Stage and Social Struggle, Dekker’s portrayal of the two central female characters often, paradoxically, seems designed ‘to undermine the absolute distinction between [Titania] and her Satanic double.’18 One of their vexing similarities is Dekker’s persistent association of both characters with a mystic maternity, a state bound up with both fairy belief and Christian – particularly Catholic – tradition in early modern British culture. The scenes in which both monarchs are introduced rely on maternal metaphors. The Empress’s first speech describes her reign as ‘fruitful as the vine in sons and daughters’ (1.1.4). She notes that her children, by whom she is figuring the territories of her Empire, acknowledge her ‘With universal Aves, shouts and cries’ (1.1.12), suggesting a direct association between herself and the Catholic Queen of Heaven also addressed with Aves, Mary. This reference is problematic since Elizabeth I and, therefore, implicitly Titania are also associated with Mary.19 Indeed, later in the play a herald introduces the Empress as ‘the mother of nations’ (4.3.34–35); she then sweeps into the court and demands: Why is not Babylon, In a contorted chair made all of stars, Wound up by wheels as high, nay ’bove the thrones Supernal, which with Jove’s own seat stand even, That we might ride here as the queen of heaven. (4.4.7–11) 17 See Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England; Susan E. Krantz, ‘Thomas Dekker’s Political Commentary in The Whore of Babylon,’ Studies in English Literature 35.2 (Spring 1995): 271–92; and Garry Wills, ‘Instruments of Darkness,’ Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35–49. 18 See The Stage and Social Struggle, 54. 19 John Watkins notes, ‘In dying, Elizabeth finally provided her admirers a way to complete their fifty-year identification of her with Mary, the Virgin Mother. But perhaps because the implicit equation of James with Jesus might seem blasphemous, most poets represented James’s miraculous virgin birth from Elizabeth through allusions to the Phoenix rather than to the Holy Family.’ See “‘Out of her Ashes May a Second Phoenix Rise”: James I and the Legacy of Elizabethan Anti-Catholicism,’ Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 120.

146

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

The Empress here falls prey to an almost Marlovian brand of hubris, imagining herself reigning on a par with Jove. Julia Gasper suggests that the Biblical imagery in the play allegorically equates the Empress with the Woman Clothed with the Sun from Revelations. Since the Woman Clothed with the Sun gives birth to the child of God in that passage,20 this further problematizes the maternal imagery in the play, rendering the Whore the Virgin Mary, assumed bodily into heaven.21 Meanwhile, the biblical identification of the Whore of Babylon as ‘the mother of whoredomes and abominations’22 gives the Whore an insidious maternal role, too. As Frances Dolan demonstrates in Whores of Babylon, by the early seventeenth century the Whore of Babylon had been to some degree conflated with the Virgin Mary in the post-Reformation assault on Catholicism.23 What these seemingly opposed female icons held in common was a power that threatened to overwhelm and overturn patriarchal religio-political structures. Fairies had begun to be caught up in the process of undermining Catholicism as well, and were, like the figures of the Whore and the Virgin, associated with women, the domestic sphere and, in particular, the maternal in ways that stymie Dekker’s attempt to deploy all of these figures in 20 The passage in the Geneva Bible reads: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven: A woman clothed with the sunne & the moone was under her feete, and upon her head a crowne of twelve stares. And she was with childe and cryed travailing in birth, and was pained readie to be delivered. And there appeared another wonder in heaven: for beholde, a great red dragon having seven heads, and ten hornes, and seven crownes upon his heads: And his taile drue the third parte of the stares of heaven & cast them to the earth. And the dragon stode before the woman, which was readie to be delivered, to devoure her child when she had brought it forthe. So she broughte forthe a man childe, which shulde rule all nations with a rod of yron: and her sonne was taken up unto God and to this [sic] throne. See The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 ed., edited by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), ch. 12 verses 1–6. For a discussion of the Protestant tendency to equate the Pope with the Whore of Babylon, see Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25 and 31. See also Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 177 for the Roman Catholic resonance of this association, and Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 256–7 for its pagan implications. 21 See Ruth Vanita, ‘Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,’ Studies in English Literature, 40.2 (Spring 2000): 311–37 and Warner, 93–4. 22 See The Geneva Bible, ch. 17, verse 5. 23 As Patricia Crawford also explains: ‘The false church was most usually symbolised by the female metaphor of “the whore.” The whore tempted men to illicit and dangerous sex. She brought forth no healthy, lawful children, but was said to be infertile or to spawn monsters. Her infected milk poisoned rather than nourished.’ See Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 15.

VIRGIN FAIRIES AND IMPERIAL WHORES

147

a Protestant dramatic allegory. However, published writings and court documents from the late sixteenth century make it clear that connections were made between fairy belief and Catholicism by religious reformers even in Spenser’s day.24 Early in the Reformation period, public accounts of the testimony given by people who professed to have had contact with fairies conflated Catholic tenets with fairy superstition. In an early nineteenth-century recapitulation of one such trial, the editorial commentary seizes on the significance of this fusion without recognizing its full import. In Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, R. Pitcairn transcribes the court testimony of one Bessie Dunlop, called in on suspicion of witchcraft in 1576 for invoking spirits of the devil, including the ghost of one Thom Reid and the Queen of the Fairies.25 It is the ghost of Thom Reid who introduced Dunlop to the Fairy Queen, but the exact nature of the relationship that he bears to the fairy monarch and to Fairyland generally is never clear. Regardless, Dunlop testifies that when she first met Thom, he greeted her by saying ‘Sancta Marie.’26 As Pitcairn observes in a footnote: ‘It seems not a little singular that these personages, whether “gude wychtis,” “brounies,” or “ympis,” et hoc genus omne, nay, even “Sathanas” himself, uniformly make use of the most pious salutations … No doubt these were the common salutations of the Catholics of the Church of Rome of this period, but assuredly not lightly to be pronounced by such questionable characters as Thom.’27 Pitcairn misses the obvious point here – it is precisely because these were the common salutations of the Catholics that it is easy for a jury comprised of Protestants to accept the claim that they proceeded from the mouth of a spirit of questionable nature who professed allegiance to the Queen of Fairies. The tendency to regard Catholic and fairy beliefs as mutually damning had only increased between 24 See, for example, the accounts of Alisoun Pearson’s case (1588) in John Jay Smith’s Celebrated Trials of All Countries and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence, (Philadelphia: L. A. Godey, 1836) and R. Pitcairn’s Ancient Criminal Trials of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1833). 25 Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, vol. 1, pt. 2, 51. See also Alec Derwent Hope, A Midsummer Eve’s Dream: Variations on a Theme by William Dunbar (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), esp. 90–93 and Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001), esp. 84–5. For a complete list and synopsis of the 133 Scottish witchcraft depositions that involve fairy beliefs, see Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, ‘Survey of Scottish Witchcraft,’ University of Edinburgh, Jan. 2003 . Popular culture provided numerous explanations for the origin of the fairies that called the spirits’ status into question, including claims that aligned Fairyland in some way with purgatory, the Catholic-conceived intermediary zone between heaven and hell. One theory – explicitly aligned with religious conceptions of purgatory – maintained that Fairyland was a space reserved for the souls of those dead who as yet belonged neither in heaven nor hell, suspended between the poles of eternal salvation and damnation until Last Judgment. Thom Reid is an example of such a trapped soul. 26 Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, vol. 1, pt. 2, 52. 27 Ibid.

148

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

the 1580s, when Spenser used Fairyland as an allegorical representation of Protestant England, and Dekker’s resurrection of this connection in 1607.28 Like the monarch whom she is intended to commemorate, Titania of The Whore of Babylon exercises extraordinary punitive restraint in the face of repeated assaults on her person. However, she emphasizes her ability to order the execution of every assailant whom she ultimately pardons. This emphasis on her power to crush those who oppose her, which reaches its zenith in the play’s rendition of Queen Elizabeth’s militaristic appearance at Tilbury, constitutes a fissure in the fairy queen’s character that threatens to widen, revealing her similarity to the consistently menacing Whore. The Empress begins by identifying as simultaneously motherly and ‘counterfeit’ her authority to grant royal pardons; this places her in seeming contrast to Titania, who opens Act II by pardoning Paridel (Dr. Parry) against the better judgment of her fairy counselors. The Empress tells the three kings: Our royal signet With which we, in a mother’s holy love, Have signed so many pardons, is now counterfeit. From our mouth flow rivers of blasphemy And lies; our Babylonian synagogues Are counted stews, where fornications And all uncleanness sodomitical, Whose leprosy never touched us, are now daily acted; Our image, which, like Rome’s Caesar’s, stamped In gold, through the whole earth did current pass, Is now blanched copper or but gilded brass. (1.1.31–41)

Dekker invokes some of the key distinguishing marks of mariolatry in the Empress’s double-edged self-depiction: the sanctity of maternal love, and her graven image, figured here as a coin, but suggestive of the gilded images of the Virgin so sacred to Catholic worship in churches as well as on rosaries.29 These remarks are doubleedged because the Empress is presenting them as lies about herself, but they are lies 28 Christopher Marsh connects witchcraft belief to fairy belief and links both superstitions in turn to Catholicism. He writes: In the seventeenth century, conjuring and sorcery came to be associated particularly with remote areas of Catholic survival, and even a fairly humble Lancashire apprentice could write of surviving charms as if they belonged to a different world. … Intriguing glimmers of popular scepticism concerning the supernatural are revealed in pamphlet accounts of witchcraft cases, though this subject has not been systematically investigated. See Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England, Social History in Perspective, ed. Jeremy Black (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 152. 29 See, for example, Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 30–31.

VIRGIN FAIRIES AND IMPERIAL WHORES

149

that serve as a subtle subterfuge to keep her followers from discerning the truth: given the manipulative deception that characterizes her every move, her image, once taken for gold, is, in fact, ‘blanched copper or but gilded brass.’ Like the Empress, Titania invokes maternal metaphors in her first stage appearance, though, initially, she does so in the context of recalling her own childhood, void of adequate maternal protection. As with the Empress, we first encounter Titania holding war council. While Titania acknowledges ample justification for attacking Babylon, she firmly refuses to do it. In her first speech she rhetorically demands of her fairy counselors: ‘How many plots were laid to bar us hence, / Even from our cradle!’(1.2.3–4). She identifies ‘that bad woman, Babylon’s proud Queen’ (1.2.9) as the author of at least some of these plots. Given the maternal metaphors that Dekker uses to describe both Titania and the Empress, it is interesting that the Empress is depicted here as old enough to be Titania’s mother (presumably, if she has been plotting against her since her birth) and as having menaced Titania in her infancy. The image of the fairy Titania threatened in her cradle invokes fairy changeling custom, which is figured here as practiced upon a fairy, rather than the norm, which is the other way about. Thus, assaulting infants in cradles is something that both fairies like Titania and evil crones like the Empress do. Dekker is undercutting his own portrayal of the virtuous Fairy Queen by linking behavior popularly attributed to her supernatural species to her nemesis, the witchy Whore of Babylon. Dekker’s construction of monarchs and/or the kingdoms they rule as infants vulnerable to infanticide or kidnapping recurs throughout the play, including later in Act I, scene ii when the Empress’s emissaries enter to attempt to woo Titania. The three kings appeal directly to the maternal aspect of Titania’s monarchical self in their courtship speeches in a form of biological blackmail. Satyran (King of Spain)30 identifies Ireland as Titania’s son – ‘Rebellious, wild, ungrateful, poor’ (1.2.147) – and goes on to claim, ‘This child of yours is by adoption / Our mother’s now … This your lost sheep / We home again will bring, to your own fold, / Humbly to graze upon your Fairie plains, / Provided that you sow them with such seed / On which your whole land wholesomely may feed’ (1.2.154–155, 159–162). As in Lectori, this passage activates a whole constellation of metaphors and allegorical associations that do not cohere well. The ‘international’ conflict being staged between Babylon and Fairyland suggests a way to construe the infamous fairy infant switch in military terms. Fairies performing an infant switch, in essence, ‘invade’ the home of a mortal, steal a desirable infant 30 Satryan is the only king given a name (seemingly borrowed from Spenser, though Satyran is a good knight in The Faerie Queene). Satyran hides out in Fairyland to try to undermine Titania’s power, adopting numerous disguises to obscure his identity. He sends Campeius (the scholar, by whom Dekker intends Campion) and Paridel (Dr. Parry) to Babylon, where they are showered with gold to fortify them for a return trip to Fairyland with the assassination of Titania in view. Ultimately, it is proposed that Satyran return to Babylon, marry the Empress and join forces with her to attack Fairyland. Their combined naval forces are meant, of course, to be the Spanish Armada.

150

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

and replace it with a deformed or vapid piece of fairy offspring. If one considers the property value of children – particularly male heirs, those most prized by infantthieving fairies31 – the infant switch becomes, in essence, a territorial conquest.32 Second, this is an interesting passage to examine in the context of my argument because it pits Titania and the Empress against one another in a ‘territorial’ battle as mothers, specifically. Furthermore, the battle fought over this ‘child’ is a spiritual one. The ‘seed’ which Satyran asks Titania to sow is, of course, the Catholic religion. Dolan notes that the Protestant British Parliament had made a sustained attempt to seize Papists’ children from 1593 to 1603; ‘In almost every Parliament under James, proposals to force Catholics to send their children to Protestant households or schools were renewed and debated.’33 Thus, in recent memory for Dekker’s audience, the religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics had been fought with children on the ideological front lines. Maternal love and saving grace were perceived as inextricably conjoined. Titania’s virgin mother status is repeatedly underscored, paradoxically, by virtue of the assaults launched on it by the Empress’s minions. Arthur Marotti notes that one of the ways in which nationalist, Protestant anti-Catholicism staked its terrain in opposition to international Catholicism was via ‘the Protestant masculinization of Christianity and misogynistic assault on a feminized Catholicism, whose modes of “carnal” thinking were related to women’s supposed susceptibility to conversion by Catholic missionaries and their husbands’ “seduction” by their wives into the religion of the “Whore of Babylon.”’34 In Dekker’s play, Titania is the one that the Whore attempts to seduce, by proxy, via the Cardinals that she sends to woo her. Act II presents a virtual revolving door of people entering the fairy court seeking either pardon or succor from Titania. Significantly, she is repeatedly appealed to in terms of the maternal. Fideli35 pleads on behalf of one succor-seeking group, the seventeen virgins of the Netherlands, ‘the nation / With whom our Fairies interchange commerce, / And by negotiation grown so like us / That half of them are Fairies’ (2.1.275–278). Riely notes here, and I completely agree, that ‘Fairies’ in this context seems to mean ‘Protestants’ specifically. However, in seventeenth-century England, fairies are associated not with Protestants but, rather, with practitioners of the ‘old 31 Katharine Briggs notes that changelings are most often substituted for male children. See An Encyclopedia of Fairies (New York: Pantheon, 1976). 32 Eleanor Hull quotes a passage from Historical and Statistical Account of the Isle of Man which describes the ‘warfare’ enacted between the May Queen (representing rebirth, regeneration and the coming spring) and the men cross-dressed as the Queen of Winter and her hag-like contingent. The faux fight between the two has interesting parallels with the fairy/ witch fight Dekker depicts in Whore. See Eleanor Hull, Folklore of the British Isles (London: Methuen and Co., 1928), 252. 33 See Whores of Babylon, 137. 34 See ‘Preface,’ Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), xiv. 35 Fideli represents Lord Charles Howard.

VIRGIN FAIRIES AND IMPERIAL WHORES

151

Faith.’36 The ‘hurtful Spirits’ (2.1.279) who oppose the Fairies of the Netherlands have laid ‘barbarous siege against their chastity’ (2.1.289).37 Therefore, Fideli says: They pray to have their virgins wait on you That you would be their mother and their nurse, Their guardian and their governor. When princes Have their lives given ’em, fine and golden threads Are drawn and spun for them by the good fates, That they may lift up others in low states. (2.1.293–298)

Fideli see-saws back and forth in his characterization of Titania here, between her female, motherly role and her male, monarchical one. She is figured as mother/nurse and guardian, governor and prince.38 Finally, her fairy role is directly invoked since fairies could, like the good fates, bestow favor on newborn infants just as easily as they could snatch them from their cradles. Also worthy of note is the semi-pagan emphasis here on virgins willing to serve a Titania who will save them for the favor. They seem to be proposing service to her as either pagan vestals or cloistered nuns – neither coherent with the reform Protestantism supposedly championed here, but 36 John Webster explicitly links fairies to Catholicism: ‘In a few ages past when Popish ignorance did abound, there was no discourse more common (which yet is continued amongst the vulgar people) than of the apparition of certain Creatures which they called Fayries, that were of very little stature, and being seen would soon vanish and disappear.’ See The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London, 1677), 283. 37 Gasper’s commentary on the term ‘militant Protestant’ goes a long way to addressing the significance of the seventeen virgins of the Netherlands who come begging protection of Titania. Gasper notes: This [militant Protestant] refers to those Protestants who were determined to defend the Reformation and made this their highest political priority. They regarded the Reformed Church as the only True Church, and conceived of it as a single, international body. They emphasized its common beliefs, whether Lutheran or Calvinist, and thought that a unified, active defence was necessary in order to survive in the struggle against their great adversary, Rome. In practical terms this meant seeking alliances with Protestant powers abroad, such as the United Provinces, the Scandinavian kingdoms, and the Evangelical Union, as well as welcoming Protestant refugees in England. Military intervention on behalf of other Protestant groups under Catholic attack, such as the Huguenots or the Dutch, was seen as imperative. See The Dragon and the Dove, 2–3. Gasper goes on to add later that ‘Dekker … was probably the offspring of refugees from Catholic persecution in the Netherlands.’ See The Dragon and the Dove, 7. In other words, Gasper is figuring Dekker as just such a religious refugee as those depicted in Whore pleading for Titania’s aid. 38 Louis Montrose offers one aspect of Queen Elizabeth’s identity that may illuminate the logic of this scene, the fact that she accepted the role of godmother to numerous infants over the course of her reign. See ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,’ Representations 1.2 (Spring 1983): 61–94.

152

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

both consistent with Catholic appeals to Mary as mediatrix with God on behalf of the devout. When two of the kings (those representing France and the Holy Roman Empire) return to Babylon to report their ill success in persuading Titania to marry them, the Cardinals who counsel the Empress advise her to be less subtle in her attack on Fairyland. 1 Cardinal relies on a maternal metaphor to make this point. He notes that the Empress has been ‘Too cold in punishment, too soft in chiding, / And like a mother, ’cause her years are green, / Have winked at errors’ (3.1.33–35). He advocates instead that the Empress pursue a course of ‘Sharp chastisement: leave the mother / And be the stepdame. Wanton her no more / On your indulgent knee’ (3.1.39–41). The Empress is being urged to reject the maternal role as 1 Cardinal stereotypes it, but she does not. Not only do maternal metaphors continue to attach to the Empress as the play wears on, but the Armada she sends to attack Fairyland is also linked to maternal imagery, being twice figured as a pregnant woman about to give birth. The Empress orders the kings and cardinals to go forth on their massed fleet: ‘And let our galleons feel even childbirth pangs / Till their great bellies be delivered / On the soft Fairie shores’ (4.4.123–135). This innocuous image of Fairyland as a pleasant place to deliver a child is immediately undercut by the Empress’s order that, once Babylon’s demon spawn have spewed out of the galleons onto the fairy shore, they should ‘snatch babes from breasts, / And when they cry for milk let them suck blood’ (4.4.130–131). Dekker here evokes the ludicrous spectacle of a galleon giving birth to soldier ‘infants’ who will wage a gruesome attack on the ‘babes’ of Fairyland. Dekker sustains the image of a pregnant Armada fleet in the initial reports of the Babylonian attack on Fairyland. Fideli (Lord Charles Howard, High Admiral during the Armada invasion): ‘swears the winds have got the sails with child, / With such big bellies, all the linen’s gone / To find them linen, and in Babylon / That there’s not one rag left’ (5.2.17–20). Of course, figuring her fleet as ‘pregnant’ is in perfect keeping with the Empress’s identity as the Whore of Babylon. Of the scholars who have examined The Whore of Babylon in any detail, most concur that the Gunpowder Plot was the current event to which Dekker was responding in writing it. So, for example, John Watkins sees Dekker as one among many panegyrists who depicted James as the quasi-Elizabethan ‘defender of embattled Protestantism against Catholic insurgency.’39 Like Susan Krantz and Julia Gasper, Watkins sees this religio-political agenda played out most directly in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot: ‘the governing elite used the plot to seal James’s identity as a second Elizabeth protected by God against papal intrigue. Within the historical myth that they perpetuated, the defeat of the Gunpowder conspirators repeated Elizabeth’s

39 John Watkins, “‘Out of her Ashes,”’ 118.

VIRGIN FAIRIES AND IMPERIAL WHORES

153

1588 triumph over the Armada.’40 In his view, Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon is a perfect example of this historical myth-making enterprise.41 As Dolan points out, Catholic conspiracies were frequently – and confusingly – figured as monstrous births: Sometimes the mother is the Whore of Babylon, her pregnancy revealing her sinfulness and deflating her pretensions to virtue. In such cases, the whore mother transmits her corruption to her offspring. Elsewhere, polemic casts England itself as the mother, harboring Catholicism as a monstrous child that grows inside its parent but is not like it.42

In Dekker’s formulation, not only the Babylonian invaders, but the British defenders are figured as infants monstrously born of male galleons made pregnant by order of powerful female rulers. Florimell (Leicester) turns the pregnant woman image to the use of the fairy court as they begin their defensive attack on the Babylonian fleet (Armada). Of Titania’s ‘goodly ships,’ Florimell asserts that: ‘their wombs are full / Of noble spirits; each man in his face / Shows a king’s daunting look’ (5.2.189–192). In a conflation of religious imagery and fairy ritual that would not only have seemed contradictory to his audience but might well have offended his monarch, Dekker has Florimell tell Titania that, were she to behold her fairy soldiers massed on the decks of her fleet: … you would judge ’twere Pentecost, And that the jolly youngsters of your towns Had flocked together in gay multitudes For May games and for summer merriments, They look so cheerly. In such little room So many Fairies never dwelt at once. Never so many men were born so soon. (5.2.195–201)

These last lines about the capacity of malleable fairy bodies to fit into small spaces in multitudes almost directly flout the views of Dekker’s monarch. In his Daemonologie, James I dismissively compares the fairy capacity to ‘contract a solide bodie within so little roome’ to the Catholic belief in transubstantiation: ‘I thinke it is so contrarie to the qualitie of a naturall bodie, and so like to the little transubstantiat god in the Papistes Masse, that I can neuer beleeue it.’43 As if that were not enough, Dekker here slides from Pentecost, the Christian feast day that marks the apostles’ infusion with the Holy Spirit, to the traditional, pagan May games associated with both fairies and ritual dancing around the Maypole.

40 41 42 43

Ibid., 127. Ibid., 128–129. Whores of Babylon, 39. James I, Daemonologie, 40.

154

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

At the outset of the play, in direct proportion as the Empress is depicted as martial, war-like, etc., Titania is depicted as maternal. Gradually, maternal metaphors come to be applied to the Empress and Titania begins to modify the maternal, merciful role, becoming increasingly the wise woman warrior.44 This process culminates in the Tilbury/Beria scene, where the Empress is waiting impatiently at home to hear how her fleet fares while Titania joins her troops on the battlefield and offers to lead them as captain. The metamorphosis of Titania produces a corresponding inversion of gender roles among the militaristic men who surround and advise her over the course of the play, particularly the allegorical Plain Dealing.45 The men in this play are effeminated at precisely the moment when the safety of the realm and the salvation of the souls of its inhabitants hinge on their stereotypical masculine military might. One of the reasons that reform Protestantism sought to sharply reduce the attention paid to Mary in Catholic worship was that she was perceived as a threat to the supremacy of God46 – she threatened to overshadow him, to take over, to emerge as heaven’s central figure, just as the fairy queen was the principal ruler of her kingdom in popular belief. In their eagerness to defend Fairyland from the Whore’s invading force, Fideli notes that ‘women sued to us they might be pressed’ (5.2.215).47 While the context certainly suggests that Fideli means ‘pressed into military service,’ pressing to death was a punishment meted out to convicted female recusant Catholics in the late

44 Gasper also discusses Titania’s transformation over the course of the play, though she focuses on the religio-political implications of this alteration from a monarch desirous of avoiding war with Babylon at any cost to ‘a dynamic leader willing not only to send aid but to take the offensive.’ In Gasper’s view, this change is wrought by ‘The implacable hostility of Babylon’ which ‘gradually persuades her that a conciliatory stance is unrealistic.’ See The Dragon and the Dove, 98–99. 45 As Dolan notes: Titania, like Elizabeth, challenges gender conventions and hierarchies as much as the Empress does. The play further muddies the ideological waters because Titania stands not only for Elizabeth, seen, once safely dead, with nostalgic reverence, but also, at moments, for James. In the show-down between the ‘rival queens,’ The Whore of Babylon shores up the gender hierarchy threatened by Catholicism by masculinizing the winning queen. See Whores of Babylon, 55. 46 As Dolan puts it, ‘in the case of icons of the Virgin Mary, the female figure is literally larger than the male, dwarfing him. The problem with Catholicism, from this point of view, is that it inappropriately empowers women, spiritually, symbolically, and socially.’ See Whores of Babylon, 8. 47 Krantz suggests the way in which this scene threatens to effeminate James I: ‘In rekindling the militaristic spirit of the last generation … Dekker implies the inadequacy of King James … the pacifistic James lacks the martial spirit present in even the oldest crippled female in Fairie Land.’ See ‘Thomas Dekker’s Political Commentary,’ 279.

VIRGIN FAIRIES AND IMPERIAL WHORES

155

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,48 a potential implication of this line out of all compass with Dekker’s ‘militant Protestant’ agenda. Since the verb ‘press’ could refer to sexual intercourse as well as being called to active military duty in the early modern period, Dekker may – inadvertently or not – have created a seamy double entendre here, suggesting a lasciviousness more in keeping with the Whore and her forces than the virgin fairy’s empire. The call to arms thus renders the citizens of Fairyland ‘men’ whether they were originally (in years or in gender) or not: ‘Never so many men were born so soon.’ One of the men ‘born’ at the latter end of the play is Titania herself, reborn from her vulnerable roles of infant menaced by an imperial Whore and too tolerant mother of rebellious children to that of a powerful, masculinized monarch. When Titania appears on the battlefield in a stage rendition of the popular account of Elizabeth’s inspiring appearance at Tilbury, Fideli tells her that her ‘breath’ inspires ‘flames through all our blood’ (5.6.15). She quickly dismisses this as the reason for her presence, saying, ‘For that we come not; no breast here wants fires – / ’Twas kindled in their cradles: strength, courage, zeal’ (5.6.16–17). Titania is an odd mix here of fairy godmother and military leader, championing the zeal of her warriors with a doting reference to hanging over their cradles. Belying her assertion that her presence is not necessary to inspire her troops, Titania goes on to claim that she rests secure in the knowledge that they will ‘fight/ To the last man, your Captain being in sight’ (5.6.12–13). Titania opens the scene by slipping out of her feminine role in self-identifying as a captain with a taste for masculinized military regalia. However, Plain Dealing quickly restores the body of a woman to this fairy monarch with the puissance of a prince by assigning the part of midwife to the very male military leader whose role Titania has just appropriated – the captain. After the surprise birth of a boy in the military camp, Plain Dealing enters to announce the arrival of the infant, proposing that a captain ‘Instead / of a midwife’ should bear the newborn to the fort. The lying-in of a pregnant woman was the exclusive responsibility of Elizabethan and Jacobean female midwives. Male physicians were only summoned to the bedside of a woman in labor if she and/or her infant fell into grave danger.49 In an earlier moment in the play, Plain Dealing acknowledges as much when he sarcastically refers to debt collectors (or serjeants) as ‘certain men-midwives, that / never bring people to bed but when they are sore in labor / that nobody else can deliver them’ (2.1.71–73). Elizabeth Harvey notes that, ‘Although in England women were not actually replaced by men as the primary birth attendants until the eighteenth century, 48 See Ruth Vanita, ‘Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,’ 321 for a discussion of Margaret Clitherow’s case. 49 See Richard Wilson, ‘Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays,’ in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 121–150 and J. H. Aveling, MD, English Midwives: Their History and Prospects (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1872).

156

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

the term “man-midwife” enters the language for the first time in the early 1600s … and the ideological conditions for this transposition of childbirth management were definitively laid in the seventeenth century.’50 When Plain Dealing first refers to a ‘man-midwife’ it is in the first sense of the term, as one who assists at a particularly difficult birth. Fairies were quite complexly gendered in early modern popular belief. The gender ambiguity of the fairies is manifested in part by the fact that their conduct does not serve as a clear index to their gender. Culturally, it was women who served as midwives, searched young brides to determine their fertility at marriage and played the ‘gossips’ at infant baptisms in this period; however, the ‘sprites’ believed to govern these and related actions (such as blessing bride beds and leaving women with changeling children) were not always gendered feminine in the popular imagination. Even when gendered (by virtue of names [i.e. – Titania] or personal pronouns), fairies in this period are depicted indiscriminately as engaging in activities socially ascribed to men or women specifically.51 This gender complexity riddles the triumphal scene set in Fairyland in the play’s last act. Plain Dealing enters immediately after Titania’s celebratory speech to her victorious troops, crying ‘News! News!’ (5.6.35). Plain Dealing announces: A woman, sweet mistress, is brought to bed of a man child i’th’ camp, a boy that looks as if he would shoot off already! The bed they have swaddled him in is the piece of an old torn ancient; his blankets are two soldiers’ mandilions; his cradle is the hollow back-piece of a rusty armor; his head lies in a murren that’s quilted to keep him warm; the first thing that ever he laid hold on was a truncheon on which a captain leaned to look upon him. He’ll be a warrior, I warrant! … Instead of a midwife, a captain shall bear him to the fort; and if there be any women to follow it, they shall either trail pikes or shoot in calivers. Who would sweat thus to get gossips for another man’s child? (5.6.37–46, 51–55)

The obvious answer to Plain Dealing’s final question is, ‘Not a man, nor a soldier in war time,’ yet that is precisely the spectacle that Dekker presents: women carry the artillery while men carry the baby; women are soldiers, men are midwives. 50 See Elizabeth D. Harvey, ‘Matrix as Metaphor: Midwifery and the Conception of Voice,’ ch. 3, in Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Routledge, 1992), 83. 51 This paragraph reprises in brief material explored in much greater depth in Regina Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006).

VIRGIN FAIRIES AND IMPERIAL WHORES

157

Plain Dealing’s specific suggestion that a captain take on the midwife role invokes not only the far different, destructive role that the fairy troops have just been engaged in playing (since the allegorized representation of the Armada assault was figured in metaphors of childbirth)52 but the earlier speech by the Faerie Queen, Titania, about changing the effeminate court for the masculine camp. Counterbalancing Titania’s adoption of a masculine role, Plain Dealing instructs his men to adopt responsibilities socially ascribed to women. As soon as the tension between the feminine and masculine, the maternal and the militaristic aspects of the queen’s persona seems to have been placed in balance, Plain Dealing tips the scale again by proposing that since the captain will take care of the task of tending the infant, the women ‘shall either trail pikes or shoot in calivers’ (5.6.55). This suggestion, in its turn, aligns the women in the camp (including Titania) with the masculine not only in the most obvious way – in the adoption of male, military activities – but also on the level of the play’s imagery, since Plain Dealing has described the newborn as ‘a man child i’th’camp, a boy that looks / as if he would shoot off already!’ (5.6.38–39). Plain Dealing describes the boy as having been born armed and at the ready – indeed, there is again a potential double entendre here. The way that Plain Dealing characterizes the child’s military readiness, as prepared to ‘shoot off already,’ could be taken to mean that he is sexually viable. He then proceeds to designate the women of the camp as the ones who will handle the artillery even this infant is prepared to fire. It is of no little significance that it is also a ‘man child’ to which the Woman Clothed with the Sun, Mary, gives birth in Revelations. While a number of critics have explored the gender ambiguity of this scene, no one that I am aware of has noted the relationship it bears to a quite similar birth narrative under strained circumstances, that of the Christ child. Both Matthew and Luke provide narratives of Christ’s nativity. It is the latter account that is most widely referenced in allusions to the Savior’s birth: ‘And she broght forthe her first begotten sonne & wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a cratche, because there was no roome for them

52 It likewise invokes the infanticidal fantasies the Empress had of the Babylonian assault on Fairyland, if only to counter them with a positive, nurturing image. As Dolan points out: Catholic plots were widely described as monstrous births; Catholics from Guy Fawkes to Elizabeth Cellier were described as ‘midwives’ who presided over the travails through which Catholics’ plots were born. In anti-Catholic polemic, as elsewhere, images of pregnancy and childbirth are more versatile than one might expect, and therefore more confusing. Sometimes the mother is the Whore of Babylon, her pregnancy revealing her sinfulness and deflating her pretensions to virtue. In such cases, the whore mother transmits her corruption to her offspring. Elsewhere, polemic casts England itself as the mother, harboring Catholicism as a monstrous child that grows inside its parent but is not like it. See Whores of Babylon, 39.

158

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

in the ynne.’53 One of the central characters in this narrative is, of course, the Virgin Mary. She is implicitly present in Dekker’s play not as the child’s actual mother, but as the victorious Titania, who has just defeated the self-professed ‘queen of heaven.’ On the general seventeenth-century vilification of Mary, Dolan writes: Post-Reformation suspicion of Mariolatry conjoined a historical association of the name Mary with Catholic female rule. The ‘monstrous regiment of women’ that John Knox maligned was exemplified for him in the reigns of Mary Tudor and Mary Stuart, whom he called ‘our mischievous Maryes’ … From this perspective, all of the commanding ‘Maryes’ run together: queens of heaven and earth, of Scotland and England, of the past and the present, queens regnant and queens consort.54

One might add to Dolan’s list queens virgin and queens whore. Watkins finds it curious that Dekker is so focused on the Armada invasion as an analogue to the Gunpowder Plot, when that conspiracy actually mirrored much more closely the Babington Plot – an assault starring another Mary, James’s mother, Mary Stuart,55 a woman also vilified as a whore for her presumed role in the murder of her husband, James’s father. Dekker’s play is plagued from the outset by too many conflicting genres, traditions, and religio-political weathercocks. He disastrously invokes the figure of the Fairy Queen and changeling belief in a stalwart defense of Protestant righteousness in an era when fairies were becoming increasingly associated with the false, Catholic Church. Dekker compounds this set of ideological associations by portraying a fairy queen (superstition) as a paragon of chaste virtue and moral leadership (like the Catholic Virgin Mary) set off against a nightmare vision of Catholic carnality (the Whore of Babylon). The two female characters threaten repeatedly to collapse into one another, imploding the distinctions between the warring factions of Christianity and revealing them for what they might, horrifyingly, be: the same thing. Works Cited and Consulted Aveling, J. H., MD, English Midwives: Their History and Prospects (London: J.& A. Churchill, 1872). Briggs, Katharine, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (New York: Pantheon, 1976). Buccola, Regina, Fairies, Fractious Women and the Old Faith: Fairy Lore in Early Modern British Drama and Culture (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006). Crawford, Patricia, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (New York: Routledge, 1993). 53 Berry, The Geneva Bible, ch. 1 verse 7. 54 Whores of Babylon, 101. 55 See Watkins, ‘“Out of her Ashes,”’ 131 and Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 26–7.

VIRGIN FAIRIES AND IMPERIAL WHORES

159

Dekker, Thomas, The Whore of Babylon, Critical Edition by Marianne Gateson Riely, Garland Series Renaissance Drama, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980). Diehl, Huston, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Dolan, Frances E., Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and SeventeenthCentury Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Gasper, Julia, The Dragon and the Dove: The Plays of Thomas Dekker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 ed., edited by Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Goodare, Julian and others, ‘Survey of Scottish Witchcraft,’ University of Edinburgh, Jan. 2003 . Haigh, Christopher, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Harvey, Elizabeth D., ‘Matrix as Metaphor: Midwifery and the Conception of Voice,’ ch. 3, in Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Routledge, 1992), 76–115. Henderson, Lizanne and Edward J. Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001). Hope, Alec Derwent, A Midsummer Eve’s Dream: Variations on a Theme by William Dunbar (New York: The Viking Press, 1970). Howard, Jean, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994). Hull, Eleanor, Folklore of the British Isles (London: Methuen & Co., 1928). James I, Daemonologie, The English Experience: Its Record in Early Printed Books Published in Facsimile, no. 94 (1597. Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Ltd., 1969). Krantz, Susan E., ‘Thomas Dekker’s Political Commentary in The Whore of Babylon,’ Studies in English Literature 35 (1995): 271–92. Latham, Minor White, The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare (New York: Octagon Books, 1972). Marotti, Arthur, ‘Alienating Catholics in Early Modern England: Recusant Women, Jesuits and Ideological Fantasies,’ in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti, 1–34 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). ——, ‘Preface,’ Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), xiii–xvii. Marsh, Christopher, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England, Social History in Perspective, edited by Jeremy Black (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Montrose, Louis, ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,’ Representations 1.2 (Spring 1983): 61–94.

160

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Murrin, Michael, ‘Fairyland,’ The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A. C. Hamilton (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press 1990). Pelikan, Jaroslav, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Pitcairn, R., Ancient Criminal Trials of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1833). Purkiss, Diane, At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Scott, Sarah, ‘The Empress of Babylon’s “carbuncles and rich stones”: The Metaphorizing of the Pox in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon,’ Early Theatre 7.1 (2004): 67–95. Shell, Alison, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Smith, John Jay, Celebrated Trials of All Countries and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence (Philadelphia: L. A. Godey, 1836). Vanita, Ruth, ‘Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,’ Studies in English Literature, 40.2 (Spring 2000): 311–37. Warner, Marina, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). Watkins, John, ‘“Out of her Ashes May a Second Phoenix Rise”: James I and the Legacy of Elizabethan Anti-Catholicism,’ in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, edited by Arthur Marotti, 116–36 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). ——, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Webster, John, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London, 1677). Wills, Garry, ‘Instruments of Darkness,’ Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Wilson, Richard, ‘Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays,’ in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 121–50.

Chapter 9

Not kissing the (He)rod: Marian Moments in The Tragedy of Mariam Stephanie Hodgson-Wright University of Gloucestershire

This essay will explore the ways in which Elizabeth Cary’s play The Tragedy of Mariam1 generates a strongly argued debate about submission to and resistance against tyranny. The debate is played out in terms that directly engage with the spiritual position of women within Protestant doctrine and practice under the rule of James VI and I, especially pertinent after the failure of the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 to establish a roadmap for religious toleration of both Catholics and Puritans.2 Throughout, the essay will consider the play’s invocation of ‘Marian moments’ to underpin its key points. The title of the essay is derived from a phrase which had become proverbial by the time Elizabeth Cary wrote The Tragedy of Mariam. One of the earliest identifiable uses is by the Protestant writer William Tyndale, in The Obedience of a Christian Man. He counsels his readers not to take revenge upon the ‘rodde which is the evill rulers,’ because ‘(i)f he knowleage his faute and take the correccion merely and even kysse the rodde and amende him selfe with the lerninge and nurtoure of his father and mother then is the rodde taken away and burnte.’3 Later, he argues that ‘(i)f we submitte our selves unto the chastenynge of god and merely knowleage our sinnes for which we are scourged and kysse the rodde and amend oure livinge: then will God take the rodde awaye that is he will geve the rulers a better herte.’4 To ‘kiss the rod,’ then, does not simply imply an acceptance of just punishment, but also the unjust tyranny of a ruler, and with it the hope that tyranny will dissolve. Shakespeare uses the phrase in Richard II, where it is uttered by the Queen, outraged at her husband’s attitude to the usurper, Bolingbroke: What! Is my Richard both in shape and mind Transformed and weakened! Hath Bolingbroke depos’d Thine intellect? Hath he been in thy heart? 1 All quotations are taken from Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, edited by Stephanie Hodgson-Wright (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000). 2 My thanks to Prof. Alison Findlay of Lancaster University for alerting me to the importance of this particular event as a context for The Tragedy of Mariam. 3 William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christen Man (1528), fol. xlvi. 4 Tyndale, fol. xlvii.

162

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA The lion dying thrusteth forth his paw And wounds the earth, if nothing else, with rage To be o’erpowered; and wilt thou, pupil-like, Take the correction mildly, kiss the rod, And fawn on rage with base humility, Which art a lion and a king of beasts?5

Here, the idea of kissing the rod is invoked to emphasise the inappropriateness of such behaviour in an anointed king. With a clear reference to Tyndale, it is the anointed Richard who should wield the rod in order for it to be kissed and then destroyed. Whether or not an anointed queen should behave in such a way is a rather more problematic question, and provides the central dramatic conflict in The Tragedy of Mariam. Whilst the precise phrase ‘kiss the rod’ is not spoken in The Tragedy of Mariam, the sentiment is evoked by Sohemus, who urges Mariam to renounce her ‘solemn vows’ (3.3.16) to abstain from sexual relations with Herod, and to be ‘mild’ and ‘temp’rate’ in his company (3.3.15, 13 and 31). In Act 4 the play clearly articulates the sentiment without actually uttering the words, by dramatising through on-stage action Mariam’s refusal to make herself attractive for, or smile at, and (implicitly, given her resolution in 3.3) to kiss the rather fortuitously and somewhat phallogocentrically named He-rod. In 4.4 she greets the newly-returned Herod wearing ‘dusky habits’ which reflect the lack of ‘cheerful colours’ in her thoughts (4.4.4, 6). Later in the scene he implores her to ‘smile my dearest Mariam, do but smile, / And I will all unkind conceits exile’ (4.4.56–7). She refuses and this proves to be the catalyst for her wrongful condemnation and eventual execution as an adulteress. Mariam herself, in her final soliloquy, assesses her situation thus: Had I but with humility been graced, As well as fair I might have proved me wise. But I did think because I knew me chaste One virtue for a woman might suffice. (4.8.35–8)

Mariam’s words constitute a belated, and somewhat superfluous, epiphany. The pragmatic solution to her problem would have been to dissemble humble submission to Herod. But this humility would have meant betraying her integrity, and so would not, in any event, have been a feasible course of action for her. Chorus 4 offers a rather highly-wrought counter-argument to Mariam’s assessment. It suggests that her integrity could have remained intact by tortuously reworking wifely humility into ‘pride’ in the sense that the truly virtuous are too proud to act against their wrongdoers and are satisfied simply with being better than they are: Had Mariam scorned to leave a due unpaid, She would to Herod then have paid her love, 5 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, edited by Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 5.1.24–34.

NOT KISSING THE (HE)ROD

163

And not have been by sullen passion swayed. To fix her thoughts all injury above Is virtuous pride. Had Mariam thus been proud, Long famous life to her had been allowed. (Chorus 4.31–5)

This Chorus demonstrates a sophistry that echoes Tyndale – if a tyrant’s rule is willingly accepted by the subject, the rule is, by definition, no longer tyrannical. Whether the choice is driven by pragmatics (as recommended by Sohemus and eschewed by Mariam) or ethics (as argued by Chorus 4), Mariam must kiss the (He)rod if she is to survive. Mariam is the queen by birth, through her descent from King David, whereas Herod is the de facto ruler who has gained the throne by military might and married Mariam in order to strengthen his claim; she is a queen regnant, as opposed to merely a queen consort. The beheading of a divinely appointed queen regnant had, of course, been a troublesome issue to the late monarch, Queen Elizabeth, who in 1587 had eventually and reluctantly signed the death warrant for her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, perceived as a Catholic threat to the Protestant throne of England. The process leading up to and then the final act of Mariam’s execution have distinct echoes of that of Mary, Queen of Scots. The play extensively dramatises Herod’s vacillations, firstly over the precise nature of Mariam’s crime and whether or not to arrest and imprison her in 4.4, and then in 4.7 over whether or not to have her executed. He is goaded into finally issuing the command by Salome (who has her own reasons for wanting to see Mariam dead) and, like Elizabeth I, is not present at the execution itself, but has the event reported to him. Significantly, the precise means of execution – beheading – is Cary’s invention; it is not specified in her source material, Thomas Lodge’s translation of Flavius Josephus’s The Antiquities of the Jews and The Wars of the Jews (1602). Furthermore, the spelling chosen by Cary for her central character clearly links her to Mary, Queen of Scots, and, most significantly for the purposes of this essay, the Catholic Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Mary herself. Cary has changed the spelling from her source material, where the name is spelt ‘Mariamme.’ Cary has dropped the second ‘m’ and the terminal ‘e’ in order to give the precise spelling of ‘Mariam,’ which could be punningly read as ‘Mary-I-am.’ Moreover, as any well-educated Renaissance man or woman would be aware, ‘Mariam’ is the Latin form of Mary when the proper name is used in the accusative case. Readers of Miles Coverdale’s 1538 Latin/English New Testament, or any theological text in Latin that referred to the Virgin Mary, would have seen the resemblance; those who had worshipped as Catholics when prayers were offered ‘ad beatissimam Mariam’ would have heard it. Cary’s spelling might be passed off as coincidental were it not for the fact that other writers throughout the Early Modern period opt for spellings that distinguish the name from the Latin form of Mary in the accusative case, for example Sir John Hayward in The lives of the III Normans, Kings of England (1613) and John Hagthorpe in The visions of things. Or Foure poems (1623), who both use the spelling ‘Mariamne.’ Even Gervase Markham and William Sampson, whose spelling is the closest to that

164

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

of Cary, add an extra ‘r,’ making ‘Marriam’ the heroine of their True Tragedy of Herod and Antipater (1622). The character of Mariam herself can, therefore, be read as a Marian ‘moment’; or perhaps, more correctly, she is of Marian moment, for she signifies as strongly offstage as onstage. Throughout the play, Mariam is described using terms that link her to the Virgin Mary, such as ‘heavenly,’ ‘unspotted’ (immaculate), and ‘grace.’ In 1.6 Constabarus refers to her as ‘the sweet-faced Mariam as free from guilt / As heaven from spots!’ (1.6.113–14). Later, he puts her above all women in his bitter diatribe against the sex: ‘You had but one to give you any grace, / And you yourselves will Mariam’s life bereave’ (4.4.34–5). Sohemus, who is executed for his fidelity to Mariam (as opposed to Herod) emphasises her purity: But fare thee well chaste Queen. Well may I see The darkness palpable, and rivers part The sun stand still, nay more, retorted be, But never woman with so pure a heart. Thine eyes’ grave majesty keeps all in awe, And cuts the wings of every loose desire. Thy brow is table to the modest law, Yet though we dare not love, we may admire. And if I die, it shall my soul content, My breath in Mariam’s service shall be spent. (3.3.87–96)

Herod constantly describes Mariam’s appearance in celestial terms. As he awaits her arrival in 4.1, he scorns the sun: Muffle up thy brow, Thou day’s dark taper! Mariam will appear, And where she shines we need not thy dim light. (4.1.7–9)

Even as he berates Mariam, he invokes images of heaven and light, demanding ‘Where could thou get thy stars that served for eyes / Except by theft?’ (4.4.62–3). The prospect of losing Mariam to the prison cell prompts Herod again to associate her with the sun: ‘What, meant I to deprive the world of light?’ (4.4.78), an image he reiterates once Salome has conveyed Herod’s orders to the executioner: Is’t possible you can command so soon A creature’s heart to quench the flaming sun, Or from the sky to wipe away the moon?’ (4.7.38–40)

The magnitude of Mariam’s prospective execution is expressed in yet more celestial imagery, as Herod asks: But shall I let this heaven’s model die, Which for a small self-portraiture she drew?

NOT KISSING THE (HE)ROD

165

Her eyes like stars, her forehead like the sky, She is like heaven, and must be heavenly true. (4.7.93–6)

Herod’s particular association of Mariam with heaven and the celestial bodies therein evokes the ‘woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’ in Revelations 12:1, generally interpreted as a reference to the Virgin Mary. Once he has realised his error of judgement, Herod reaffirms her status in 5.1, echoing both the words and sentiments of Sohemus and Constabarus. Having been told by the Nuntio that ‘to heav’n her heav’nly soul is fled’ (5.1.86), Herod asks forgiveness of her ‘pure unspotted ghost’ (5.1.115). Herod then sets Mariam above all women: ‘Upon your sex’s forehead Mariam sat, / To grace you all like an imperial crown’; later in the scene he calls her ‘matchless’ (5.1.172) and ‘fair and spotless’ (5.1.198). Significantly, as part of this posthumous eulogy, Herod refers to Mariam as a ‘precious mirror’ (5.1.125) that he kept ‘fast folded in [his] heart’ (5.1.127). The beloved-as-mirror is a trope which has its origins in Marian imagery, as Philippa Berry explains: Just as Mary was seen as a selfless material mirror of heavenly purity … so the idealised women of the love discourses were the nurses of new men, intermediaries between their lovers as they were, and as they hoped to be.6

Finally, Herod understands, as Sohemus did, that beauty and chastity are not mutually exclusive, but twin markers of Mariam’s superiority: Her heav’nly beauty ‘twas that made me think That it with chastity could never dwell, But now I see that Heav’n in her did link A spirit and a person to excel. (5.1.243–6)

Chastity is Mariam’s most dearly-held virtue; in modern parlance one might call it her trademark. At the very start of the play, as Mariam wrestles with the issue of how she ought to react to Herod’s death, she expresses it as her lynchpin of selfdefinition: ‘But yet too chaste a scholar was my heart / To learn to love another than my lord’ (1.1.27–8). When Alexander suggests that she might have used her beauty in a similar manner to Cleopatra, and forged an (albeit adulterous) alliance with Mark Antony, Mariam replies: Not to be Empress of aspiring Rome, Would Mariam like to Cleopatra live: With purest body will I press my tomb, And wish no favours Antony could give. (1.2.121–4)

6 Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), 9.

166

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

In 3.3, her vow to break off sexual relations with Herod is couched in similar terms, suggesting that she views any further relationship with him as similarly compromising her purity. She also expresses the conviction that the mere fact of her innocence will be enough to protect her from Herod’s inevitable wrath: To be commandress of the triple earth, And sit in safety from a fall secure, To have all nations celebrate my birth, I would not that my spirit were impure. Let my distressed state unpitied be, Mine innocence is hope enough for me. (3.3.57–62)

Mariam’s decision to retreat into chastity upon Herod’s return, from her internal emotional wranglings in 1.1 to her outspoken determination in 3.3, is consistently presented as a matter of conscience. To continue marital relations with him would be to continue to be complicit with his tyrannical regime, which has resulted in the deaths of her brother and grandfather, as well as a threat to her own life. This retreat into chastity is thereby politicised as it becomes Mariam’s method of articulating her protest against Herod’s tyrannical regime. In Catholicism, complete chastity was seen as superior to the monogamous marital state, which arguably inflects Mariam’s choice with resonances of contemporary recusancy. Coupled with that, Herod’s ironically unfounded conviction that Mariam is an adulteress is, perhaps, a reference to the fact that Protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric was incongruously riven with references to sexual incontinence such as ‘the Whore of Babylon.’ If Mariam’s decision to reject Herod is a matter of political conscience, the other characters who die at his command may be read in the same light. The play’s plot turns upon a quite simple premise – Herod is mistakenly believed to have been executed by Octavius Caesar, but then returns with greater power than before. The characters we meet in the first two acts explore the possibilities of their new-found freedom. Mariam’s hatred of Herod, with which she struggles in 1.1 finally finds legitimate expression. Sohemus has already committed himself to Mariam before the start of the play, by revealing Herod’s instructions to have her executed if he were killed abroad. Constabarus finally allows his two friends to come out of hiding, expressing the conditions of their confinement in terms that suggest a priest-hole: Now may you from your living tomb depart, Where Herod’s life hath kept you over long; Too great an injury to noble mind To be quick-buried. (2.2.31–4)

When matters of conscience are forced to a conclusion by Herod’s return, the play reiterates two mutually exclusive courses of action: one either dissembles and survives or remains true and dies. Salome and Pheroras have also taken advantage of Herod’s absence, but in 3.2 they agree to speak for each other and pacify Herod to avoid incurring his wrath. Sohemus, Constabarus, and Mariam herself die because

NOT KISSING THE (HE)ROD

167

their consciences have revolted against Herod’s tyranny. They stand out in the play as characters of integrity, which is a considerable change from the characters as they appear in Cary’s source material, where each is motivated mainly by self-interest.7 Interestingly, Cary adds an extra ‘n’ to the character name Constabarus. In the sources he is ‘Costobarus;’ Cary’s addition creates a name that underpins his characteristics, suggesting ‘constancy.’ Given that the Marian references appear most prominently in the scenes involving these characters of integrity, the play might be seen to invite a reading that invokes the contemporary context of the matters of religious conscience affecting the country in the early seventeenth century. Whilst Elizabeth I’s execution of Mary, Queen of Scots may have constituted the single most forceful expression of Protestant power against the politically powerful Catholic interest in England, the effects of the Reformation imposed upon the private spirituality of the entire country. Read in this context, the comparison between Mary, Queen of Scots and Mariam that the text invites might be interpreted as a dramatic device that directs the reader towards understanding the play as a rather more encompassing commentary upon the threat of Protestant tyranny which had newly emerged since the failure of the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, made all the more poignant by the fact that the new face of Protestant tyranny was the son of its most celebrated victim. Herod’s excision of the queen regnant from the Judean body politic might be read as analogous to the theological excision not only of a spiritual female presence in religious observances, but also of the spiritual autonomy of the individual female subject, by the Protestant Reformation in England. Whilst Sherrin Marshall Wyntjes has suggested that the reformed, Protestant attitude to marriage was liberating for women: ‘Perhaps because established institutions were being forced to justify their very existence, women had the opportunity to assume different roles from those that were time honoured,’8 Lisa Jardine takes this attitude to task, arguing that: The ‘freedom of conscience’ which the reformed Church gave the wife gave her the added burden of taking a share in the responsibility for how the marriage turned out. At the same time, her acknowledgedly subordinate role gave her no real means of controlling the state of affairs.9

In Puritan tracts, she says, ‘[j]ustifications for subjugation’ were metamorphosed into ‘sophisticated mutual consent theories.’10 This idea is borne out by Arthur Winnet’s study of divorce and remarriage, which shows how changing attitudes 7 For further discussion of Cary’s use of sources, and the relevant extracts from Josephus, see my edition of The Tragedy of Mariam, 16–20 and 145–62. 8 Sherrin Marshall Wyntjes, ‘Women in the Reformation Era,’ in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 167. 9 Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: women and drama in the age of Shakespeare, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1983), 42–3. 10 Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, 43.

168

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

to marriage during the Reformation put even more restrictions upon women.11 He assesses and analyses the writings of major sixteenth-century divines, which had an effect upon the legal and cultural status of marriage in post-Reformation England. The Continental reformers denied the sacramental nature of marriage, the principle of indissolubility was abandoned, impediments were swept away, a severe limit was set on grounds of annulment, and divorce a vinculo was allowed for adultery and other causes with Scriptural precedent. Adultery was viewed as a crime as well as a sin and the early reformers, including Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, advocated the death penalty. In England, numerous Protestant writers expected women to subject themselves to their husbands, as if to God. For example, Thomas Becon in his Book of Matrimony (1564) said that the union of husband and wife was like the union of Christ and the Church. John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, in Declaration of the Ten Holy Commandments (1548), said that in marriage, the man is the head and the woman should acknowledge this superiority gladly.12 This doctrine became fully established as part of Protestant doctrine in England via the Elizabethan Homily on Matrimony (1563): For thus does St Peter preach to them: ye wives be ye in subjection to obey your own husband [1 Peter 3:1]. To obey is another thing than to control or command, which they may do to their children and to their family. But as for their husbands, them must they obey, and cease from commanding and perform subjection … And they shall not do this only to avoid strife and debate: but rather in the respect of the commandment of God, as St Paul expresseth it in this form of words: Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the woman, as Christ is head of the Church [Ephes. 5:22–23].13

Such sentiments were reiterated in the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer (1603), which expands upon the same scriptural authority: Therefore as the Church of congregation is subject unto Christ, so likewise let the wives also be in subjection to their own husbands in all things [Ephes. 5:22–24]. And again he saith: Let the wife reverence her husband [Ephes. 5:33]. And in his Epistle to the Colossians, St. Paul giveth you this short lesson: Ye wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is convenient in the Lord [Col. 3:18]. 14

Protestant reformation of the marriage laws in particular effectively fused all forms of authority over women, both spiritual and temporal, into the figure of the husband.

11 Arthur Robert Winnett, Divorce and Remarriage in Anglicanism (London: Macmillan, 1958), Chap. 1, 11–31. 12 Winnett, 22–6. 13 Cited in Hodgson-Wright, ‘Appendix B: Selected Didactic and Polemical Texts,’ in The Tragedy of Mariam, 166–7. 14 Cited in Hodgson-Wright, ‘Appendix B: Selected Didactic and Polemical Texts,’ 170–71.

NOT KISSING THE (HE)ROD

169

Indeed, as Mendelson and Crawford note, the Protestant doctrine allowed no spiritual space to women whatsoever: The trappings of Protestant symbolism also reinforced a general sense of male spiritual hegemony. Lacking the feminizing aura of the Virgin Mary, Protestant writers laid great stress on the fatherhood of the godhead, as well as the masculine traits and appearance of Christ … with the exception of the queen regnant, women could claim no formal magisterial role in the religious establishment.15

Whilst the Catholic wife owed certain duties to her husband, particularly sexual fidelity to ensure legitimate heirs, her relationship with the Church was essentially separate, affording her a limited amount of spiritual autonomy. As Marie B. Rowlands notes, quoting from Henry Garnet’s Treatise on Christian Renunciation (1593) ‘your husbands over your soul have no authority and over your bodies but limited power’; the Catholic authorities in England encouraged women to disobey their husbands in their observance of their religion.16 The problematic third chorus, which appears by turns to both advocate and challenge extreme restrictions upon women, can also be read as a commentary upon the problems caused when matters of religious conscience are forced. The hypothetical ‘wife’ of the Chorus is always referred to as unequivocally being pure, chaste, virtuous, honourable, and full of good intentions, but is warned that she stands to lose the reputation for being so if she behaves in a way which might attract suspicion. This behaviour is described first as acting to the limits of her allowed freedom, then speaking a ‘private word to any second ear’ (Chorus 3.15), then sharing her mind with others by seeking ‘to be by public language graced’ (Chorus 3.26), and finally by speaking to any ‘ears but one’ (Chorus 3.33). The most conventional interpretation of ‘one’ would be the husband; it could also mean the wife herself, which is both logical and radical, suggesting a wife’s right to privacy, even from her husband. ‘One’ could also refer to God, thereby counselling the wife to keep her devotional thoughts private. If this is the case, one could read the Chorus as offering a covert caution to recusant wives not to indulge in overt rebellion against the established Church, or against its authority as manifested in their husbands – hence the admonition to eschew ‘public language’, no matter how glorious, pure and enlightened the motivation. The ‘private word to any second ear’ is suggestive of both the discourse of the Catholic confessional, and prayers for intercession to the Virgin Mary – spiritual relationships that the Catholic wife enjoyed without the authority of her husband. If the Chorus is read in this way, then the strange elision between the chaste mind and the chaste body becomes yet another reference to the Protestant rhetorical strategy of associating Catholicism with sexual incontinence. The incongruity of the Chorus’s conundrum is summed up 15 Sara Mendleson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31–2. 16 Marie B. Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640,’ in Women in English Society 1500–1800, edited by Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 165.

170

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

in the final line, which claims that if Mariam had followed its advice she would have ‘Been free from fear, as well as innocent’ (Chorus 3.35–6). Mariam’s refusal to submit to Herod, and his decision to have her executed, are matters of state, as well as of domestic and sexual politics. His anger is initially inflamed by her refusal to accept that he is the source of all authority and truth in Judea, as she revisits Herod’s version of his ascent to the throne, in order to challenge its validity. Fabricated poison plot and suspected adultery aside, Herod makes several telling references to his position of arbiter of truth, and his fear of Mariam’s challenge to it. Throughout their first encounter, he insists that she accept his version of events, finally expostulating ‘I will not speak, unless to be believed!’ (4.3.52). Once the Butler has brought the ‘poison’ cup, Herod, in terms redolent of Chorus 3, accuses Mariam: Oh thine eye Is pure as heaven, but impure thy mind, And for impurity shall Mariam die. (4.4.32–3)

Mariam’s offences are, to borrow terminology from George Orwell’s 1984, thoughtcrime rather than sexcrime. The rest of this scene, together with 4.7, dramatises the transmogrification of the former into the latter, as Herod increasingly conflates Mariam’s outspoken ideological opposition with infidelity. For example, Salome says: She speaks a beauteous language, but within Her heart is false as powder and her tongue Doth but allure the auditors to sin, And is the instrument to do you wrong. (4.7.73–6)

Herod’s response switches the focus directly to sexual misbehaviour, and then equates this with the outspoken dissent described by Salome: ‘It may be so. Nay, ’tis so! She’s unchaste! / Her mouth will ope to ev’ry stranger’s ear’ (4.7.77–8). Doris’s triumphant encounter with Mariam might be read as analogous with an attempt to persuade a recusant subject (or indeed any other thought criminal) to renounce their beliefs before execution. Doris questions the grounds upon which Herod divorced her because she is not guilty of any act that might justify it. As is appropriate to the setting of the play, Doris challenges Mariam over the precise nature of Mosaic law, yet Doris actually argues from an orthodox Protestant position. Her claim that Mariam is, indeed, an adulteress, not because she has been unfaithful to Herod, but precisely because of her relationship with him, stems from Protestant marriage law. Doris certainly robs Mariam of her triumphant moment onstage as the martyr-in-waiting, entering just after an assertion that echoes Garnet (see above): And therefore can they but my life destroy; My soul is free from adversary’s power. You princes great in power and high in birth

NOT KISSING THE (HE)ROD

171

Be great and high, I envy not your hap. Your birth must be from dust, your power on earth, In heav’n shall Mariam sit in Sara’s lap. (4.8.45–50)

Mariam’s final words are more nihilistic: ‘Now earth farewell. Though I be yet but young / Yet I methinks have known thee too, too long’ (4.8.103–4), which suggests that Doris has at least momentarily shaken Mariam’s beliefs, but whether Doris actually succeeds in permanently altering Mariam’s perception of herself remains unclear. In Act 5, the Nuntio’s report of Mariam’s death suggests not, as Mariam is portrayed as meeting her fate with equanimity, whilst still maintaining her innocence. Ultimately, if somewhat belatedly, Mariam’s reputation is restored. In Act 5, the Nuntio’s report of Mariam’s death forces Herod, ironically rather like Mariam herself, to undergo a final scene of self-realisation, ending in a nihilistic welcoming of death. He quickly admits his political culpability: ‘… I was her lord, / Were I not made her lord, I still should be’ (5.1.69–70). By the repeated use of the word ‘lord,’ Cary scrutinises the social and political position that the husband was supposed to occupy in the household. One of the central tropes in James VI and I’s particular brand of Protestant hegemony was that the domestic household and the State should mirror each other in structure and governance. James I styled himself the husband of the state, with his subjects as his children. In Basilikon Doron, ‘James claims Divine Right, and the language of paternal love and willing obedience becomes the language of “fatherly authoritie” on which absolutism rests.’17 Similarly, the husband in each household, whilst being subject to the King, wielded absolute power in his domestic domain, and could, in turn, expect complete subjection from his wife. Herod’s apparently illogical language – if he were not her lord, he would still be her lord – is, when read in this context, a succinct exposé of the dangers unleashed by the unchecked imposition of Protestant hegemony in both household and State. The character of Herod illustrates that when both spiritual and temporal power are put into the hands of the husband and the King, this does not, in practice, generate an effective form of government but simply subjects the family and the State to his failings, with no form of redress, and is therefore both morally questionable and legally inadequate. Mariam’s execution not only constitutes the indefensible beheading of an anointed queen, but also the erasure of the pure Hasmonean dynasty.18 Throughout the play, reference is made to the purity of this dynasty, and their direct descent from King David. For example, Alexandra, horrified that Mariam is showing sorrow for Herod’s death, says:

17 Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 117. 18 Mariam’s children are, of course, also Herod’s, and therefore constitute his success in appropriating the dynastic power of the Hasmoneans.

172

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA … Who can claim from Alexander’s brood That gold-adorned lion-guarded chair? Was Alexander not of David’s blood? And was not Mariam Alexander’s heir? (1.2.8–11 and 65–8)

In historical terms, about 30 years after he has Mariam executed, Herod will face another, and more potent, threat from one of King David’s dynasty. The Herod of The Tragedy of Mariam is the scriptural Herod who appears in Chapter 2 of St Matthew’s Gospel, and orders the slaying of all male children under two years after he hears about the birth of Christ in Bethlehem (Matt. 2:16). By extension, and dramatically-speaking, Cary’s Herod is the same Herod as the ranting twodimensional figure of the Corpus Christi play. For example, Cary’s character’s petulant outburst ‘I will not speak unless to be believed!’ recalls ‘Ah devil! methink I burst for anger and for teen.’19 Through the character of Herod, then, Cary makes direct reference to a form of Catholic cultural production suppressed as a result of the Protestant Reformation in England. Interestingly, Herod’s inability to recognise Mariam’s especial virtue and constancy also has parallels with the elderly Joseph’s initial misrecognition of Mary’s pregnancy as the result of sexual misdemeanour rather than a sign of her outstanding virtue. Of course, hailing from within the Catholic Church, and being a mere carpenter, the Joseph of the medieval drama has no jurisdiction over his wife’s spiritual state, and can be argued out of his errant judgement. Whilst dramatising much in the way of virtuous suffering, the Corpus Christi play is essentially comic, with Herod and his ilk ultimately vanquished and the main Christian protagonists, including Mary, triumphant. Recasting Herod as the antagonist in a tragedy that dramatises the unjust destruction of a quasi-Marian figure allows for no such redemptive ending. The play self-consciously foregrounds itself as a cautionary tale in Chorus 5: ‘This day’s events were certainly ordained / To be a warning to posterity’ (Chorus 5.31–2), leaving the audience in no doubt that they have something to learn from this tragedy, which has proved destructive to both victim and tyrant, protagonist and antagonist. But the precise nature of the lesson is unclear. This ‘school of wisdom’ (Chorus 5.36) may counsel that the wise course of action would be to kiss the (He)rod, but whether or not it is a conscionable act is for the audience to decide and then, presumably, let their thoughts ‘to none but one be known’ (Chorus 3.23).

19 Herod the Great in The Complete Plays of the Wakefield Master, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Heinemann, 1983), 102, ln. 118.

NOT KISSING THE (HE)ROD

173

Works Cited and Consulted Berry, Philippa, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989). Brown, John Russell ed., Herod the Great in The Complete Plays of the Wakefield Master (London: Heinemann, 1983). Cary, Elizabeth, The Tragedy of Mariam, edited by Stephanie Hodgson-Wright (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000). Goldberg, Jonathan, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). Jardine, Lisa, Still Harping on Daughters: women and drama in the age of Shakespeare, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1983). Mendleson, Sara and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Shakespeare, William, King Richard II, edited by Andrew Gurr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Tyndale, William, The Obedience of a Christen Man (1528). Rowlands, Marie B., ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640,’ in Women in English Society 1500–1800, edited by Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 149–80. Winnett, Arthur Robert, Divorce and Remarriage in Anglicanism (London: Macmillan, 1958). Wyntjes, Sherrin Marshall, ‘Women in the Reformation Era,’ in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 165–91.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Anderson, Benedict 58 Asp, Carolyn 39 Ariès, Philippe 50 Augustine of Hippo, St. 90–92, 109 Bamber, Linda 26 Barron, Caroline 21 Battenhouse, Roy 90–91 Becon, Thomas 50 Bellarmine, Robert 42 Berry, Philippa 165 Bethell, S. L. 92 Bliss, Lee 129 Boose, Lynda 76 Briggs, Katharine 150 Brown, Judith 43 Bruckner, Lynne Dickson 60 Buccola, Regina xvii Bullough, Geoffrey 31 Callaghan, Dympna 80 Cary, Elizabeth xx The Tragedy of Mariam xviii–xix, 161–73 Chambers, Robert Intercession of the Glorious Virgin Marie 36, 38, 40, 44 Chapman, George The Widow’s Tears xviii, 127–39 Cheffontaines, Christopher 38 Corballis, Richard 127 Crashaw, Richard xv Crashaw, William xv–xvi, xviii Crawford, Patricia 146, 169 Cressy, David 53, 58–9 Cuffe, Henry xiv Dailey, Alice xvii–xviii Dante 96–7 Davies, Eleanor xx Davison, Peter 97, 99

Dekker, Thomas The Whore of Babylon xvii, 141–60 Diehl, Huston 76, 141 Doebler, Bettie Ann 51–2 Dolan, Frances E. 143, 146, 153–54, 158 Doloff, Steven 48 Donne, John xiv–xv, 59–61 Dronke, Peter 48 Duffy, Eamon xiii, xx, 111–112 Eire, Carlos 57 Elizabeth I xiv, xvii, xix, 21, 23, 31–2, 95, 99, 142, 145, 148, 152, 155, 167 Ellington, Donna Spivey 36, 46 Elton, William R. 48–9, 66 Erasmus, Desiderius 77, 84, 103 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of xiv Findlay, Alison xviii, 161 Fisher, Philip 66 Fox–Good, Jacquelyn 67 Gasper, Julia 141–2, 144, 146, 151–2, 154 Gerard, John Herbal 30 Gibson, Gail McMurray 24–5, 31 Gittings, Clare 59 Goldberg, Jonathan 171 Goodland, Katherine xvii, 118 Grantley, Darryll 134 Greaves, Richard 51 Greenblatt, Stephen 25, 98–9 Gregerson, Linda 50 Hackett, Helen 95 Haigh, Christopher xiii, xx, 148 Hall, Kim F. 81 Hattaway, Michael 83 Hawkins, Henry Partheneia Sacra 24 Hecht, Anthony 89

176

MARIAN MOMENTS IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Henry VIII xiii, 25, 28 Herring, Thelma 129 Hodgson-Wright, Stephanie xviii–xix Holderness, Graham 26 Hollander, Robert 88 Hopkins, Lisa xix, 21 Houlbrooke, Ralph 52, 55 Howard, Jean 141, 145 Hunter, G. K. 98 Irigaray, Luce 35, 41, 44 James VI and I 36, 142–4, 152–3, 158 Jardine, Lisa 37, 43, 167 Juneja, Renu 129 Kay, Dennis 52–3, 59 Kehler, Dorothea 28 Kirsch, Arthur 48–9 Klawitter, George xv Krantz, Susan 142, 145, 152, 154 Lake, Peter 36 Latham, Minor White 143 Latimer, Hugh 49 Laurence, Anne 53 Levin, Richard 65 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer 88 Loreto, Our Lady of xix, 77–8, 81, 83 Macdonald, Michael 54 Marlowe, Christopher Doctor Faustus 51, 93 Marotti, Arthur xix, 144 Marsh, Christopher 148 Marston, John Sophonisba xix, 111–125 Mary I xiv, 145 Mary, Queen of Scots xviii, 158, 163, 167 May, Steven W. xiv Mazzola, Elizabeth xix McCoy, Richard 25 McCulloch, Diarmaid 115 Mendelson, Sara 169 Montaigne, Michel de 81, 84 Montrose, Louis Adrian 151 Mornay, Philippe de 56, 58 Murrin, Michael 143

Napier, Richard 54 Neely, Carol Thomas 99 Neill, Michael 51, 63–4, 75 Newman, Karen 79, 98 Norbrook, David 28 O’Connell, Michael xvii Ostovich, Helen xix Panek, Jennifer 130, 137 Parker, Patricia 80 Parrott, Thomas 129 Parry, William 148 Parsons, James 137 Pelikan, Jaroslav xiv, 94–6, 100, 146 Petronius Satyricon 129–130 Phillippy, Patricia 56, 58 Phillips, John xiv Pigman, George W. 55, 118 Preussner, Arnold W. 129 Purkiss, Diane 144 Ramsey, Paul 108 Ridley, M. R. 89 Riely, Marianne Gateson 141–2 Rist, Thomas xix Sales, St. Francis de xviii, 39, 43 Scarry, Elaine 67 Schoenbaum, Samuel 129 Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr 48 Scott, Sarah 143 Shakespeare, William xiii All’s Well That Ends Well xviii, 35–45 Hamlet 47, 49–51, 61, 77, 108–109 King Lear xvii, 47–74, 92–3 Life and Death of King John, The 47, 53–4, 61 Macbeth 49 Measure for Measure 91 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 92 Othelloxix, 49, 75–110, 138 Pericles 84, 112 Richard II xix, 21–34, 161–2 Richard III 61 Titus Andronicus 61 Winter’s Tale, The 85, 133–5, 138

INDEX Shell, Alison 115, 146 Siegel, Paul 108 Smeak, Ethel M. 137 Snyder, Susan 47–48 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene 99, 142, 147–9 Spivak, Charlotte 129 Spurgeon, Caroline 67 Strong, Roy 24, 28–9, 32, 95 Trapnel, Anna xx Tricomi, Albert H. 136 Tyndale, William 161 Ure, Peter 112, 122

Warner, Marina 24, 115, 146 Watkins, John 145, 152, 158 Watson, Robert N. 75 Webster, John Duchess of Malfii, The 77 White Devil, The 61 Weidner, Henry 129 Wells-Slights, Camille 91 Wilcox, Helen 36 Williamson, Marilyn 129 Wills, Garry 145 Wilson, Richard 155 Wilson, Thomas 50 Wood, Alice 42, 44 Wundram, Manfred 23 Wyntjes, Sherrin Marshall 167

Vanita, Ruth 146, 155 Zwingli, Ulrich 78 Walsingham, Our Lady of xiii, xix, 25, 77, 83

177