Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res 9781501513343, 9781501517907

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Vanessa L. Rapatz Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Gender, Performance, and Material Culture Series Editors: Cristina León Alfar (Hunter College, CUNY, USA) Helen Ostovich (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada)

Vanessa L. Rapatz

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works

In Medias Res

ISBN 978-1-5015-1790-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1334-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1314-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933700 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Mariah Gale as Isabella in Measure for Measure (2015), © Marc Brenner (Shakespeare’s Globe) Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgments While this book often focuses on the agency of individuals within times of turmoil, it also reminds us of the importance of chosen communities that support and nourish individual growth and intellect. I am extremely fortunate to have had the support of numerous strong and generous communities throughout this process. This project began its novitiate phase as a dissertation at the University of California, Davis. I must begin by thanking the English Department at Davis for the various forms of graduate and post-graduate support I received there. I am indebted to the committee that fostered my project’s growth from the very start. Frances Dolan, Margaret Ferguson, and Seeta Chaganti were tireless readers and critics during the early phases of writing and beyond. Their mentorship has been and continues to be invaluable. At UC Davis, I was also the beneficiary of summer and dissertation quarter fellowships that allowed me to dedicate myself to research and I am particularly grateful to the English and Theater departments for selecting me for a Globe Theatre exchange program in London, as it was there that I began writing my chapter on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and I received invaluable support from faculty, staff, and actors. For this reason, I was thrilled to choose my cover image from a recent Globe Theatre production of Measure for Measure, lending a lovely circularity to the book. The procurement of my cover image was made possible with the support of Ball State University and my new communities at Ball State have been integral in the transformation of this project from dissertation to book. The members of my writing group—Ben Bascom, Katy Didden, Molly Ferguson, Kristine Kotecki, Emily Rutter, and Sreyoshi Sarkar—have kept me on task and offered kind and insightful feedback throughout my revision process. I have additionally received support in the form of engaging conversation and mentorship from Patrick Collier, Joyce Huff, Deborah Mix, and Rai Peterson. I feel fortunate to have such a welcoming community at Ball State. Outside of my home institutions, I have been privileged to have my work considered by peers at a range of conferences and am especially grateful to the members of a number of Shakespeare Association of America seminars for their helpful feedback and dynamic discussions of chapter sections in process. In particular, I would like to thank the organizers of “Approaches to Aphra Behn’s The Rover,” Claire Bowditch and Elaine Hobby, as well as, Judith Peterson Clark, Taylor Corse, Alexander Paulson Lash, Shawn William Moore, and Rachel Willie. From the seminar “Margaret Cavendish Now,” I thank organizer Lara Dodds and seminar participants Jacqueline Cowan, Sonia Mitesh Desai, Kailey https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343-001

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Giordano, Jennifer Higginbotham, Katherine Hunt, John M. Kuhn, Marina Leslie, Kristen McCants, Amy Scott-Douglass, Brandie R. Siegfried, and Mary Trull. Such interactions helped me to develop my arguments and see the ways my work could contribute to ongoing scholarship. A number of close friends and colleagues have offered advice and support throughout the course of this project. Many thanks to Sara Anderson, Valerie Dennis, Andrew Fleck, Catherine Fung, Alysia Garrison, Stephanie Hankinson, Shannon Hays, Mindi McMann, Eric O’Brien, Tara Pedersen, Kyle Pivetti, and Karma Waltonen. I extend a special thank you to John Garrison, my constant cheerleader and most dedicated reader and critic, without whom this project would not be what it is today. My general editor Erika Gaffney with Arc Humanities Press has offered unmatched support and guidance, particularly to novice monograph authors like myself. I also thank the Late Tudor and Stuart Drama series editors, Cristina León Alfar and Helen Ostovich, as well as the anonymous reader, copyeditors, and staff at Medieval Institute Publications and De Gruyter for their dedication to making this book complete. Finally, this book would never have been possible without the support of my family, who have always supported my literary and writing endeavors. And I am most thankful to my partner, Kevin. His love, support, and patience kept me going through the sometimes-arduous trajectory of research and writing.

Contents List of Illustrations

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1 Introduction: How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Novice? In Medias Res 9 Novices: Neither Nuns nor Wives 12 Dissolved and Dispossessed: Convents and Nuns after the Protestant Reformation 15 Drama and Reform from the Renaissance to the Restoration 20 Stage Overview of the Chapters 22 Chapter 1: “Turn’d to a Nunnery”: Abigail’s Agency in The Jew of Malta 26 Turn, Turn, Turn: Material Manipulations Conversion: New Identities and New Knowledges 33 Slippery Legibility: Abigail’s Agency and Otherness 40 45 Reform, Resistance, and Returns

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Chapter 2: Two Houses Both Alike: Walls and Women in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure 49 “Ignominy in ransom”: Incongruous Exchanges 52 55 More Strict Restraint: The Convent and Desire Sub-Urban Exchanges: Novices in the City 60 “What’s yet behind that’s meet you all should know”: Ambivalent Endings 70 Chapter 3: Romancing the Grate in Convent Dialogues Advertising Austerity in The English Nunne Selling Seduction in Venus in the Cloister

75 79 89

Chapter 4: Beyond the Grate: Repurposing Enclosure and Reforming Pleasure 101 in Margaret Cavendish’s The Religious and The Convent of Pleasure Chastity Remodeled in The Religious 107 121 Pleasures Mediated in Cavendish’s Convent Chapter 5: “What Think You of a Nunnery Wall?”: Lifelines in Aphra Behn’s The Rover 141 Convent and Marriage by Design 143

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Open Doors and “Arrant Harlots”: Rambling on the Restoration Stage 151 164 Conclusion: A Little Wooden World Bibliography Index

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List of Illustrations Figure 1: The turn at Our Lady of Nazareth Convent in Bruges. The Augustinian nuns at Nazareth are the only English community that has retained its convent from the exile period. (Photo courtesy of Our Lady of Nazareth Convent in Bruges. Photo by Sister Mary Aline.) Figure 2: This view of the turn, located next to a convent door inside Our Lady of Nazareth, provides a sense of scale. Turn sizes vary, and you can find larger examples in convents in Italy and Spain. (Photo courtesy of Our Lady of Nazareth Convent in Bruges. Photo by Sister Mary Aline.)

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343-002

Introduction: How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Novice? What happened to convents in England in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and following the monastic dissolutions of the 1530s? What happened to young women who might have sought out a religious profession? How does the idea of the convent continue to function on a stage after it has been expunged from the landscape surrounding the stage? The physical structures were repurposed or left to ruin, and indeed we can still see the remains of convent structures in the English landscape today. Some of the women would have been absorbed into the patriarchal marital structures they may have sought to avoid. Martin Luther suggested that nuns, monks, and friars should marry and he himself married a former nun. For other nuns, age and inclination rendered marriage an unviable option for their reentry into the secular world. Still others chose exile on the Continent where they would hold fast to faith and country allegiances. While they may have been largely elided from public view, the traces of these structures and these women had a powerful afterlife in a variety of English literary texts. Andrew Marvell, for example, invokes the Nun Appleton convent and its inhabitants only to depict their absorption into secular structures. In his country-house poem “Upon Appleton House” (1650 – 1652), he writes: At the demolishing, this Seat To Fairfax fell as by Escheat. And what both Nuns and Founders willed ’Tis likely better thus fulfilled, The Cloister yet remainèd hers. Though many a Nun there made her vow, ’Twas no Religious-House till now.¹

Marvell includes a brief explanation of the history of his patron’s estate as a former convent and traces the movement of Isabella Fairfax in and out of this converted enclosure.² The poet represents the estate’s former convent days as bleak, a time when the structure was “Founded by folly, kept by Wrong” (line 218). Isabella’s entrance into the convent, according to Marvell’s speaker, is the result of subtle coercion; “The Nuns smooth tongue [had] sucked her in”

 Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House,” The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1972), lines 273 – 80. This edition used hereafter.  Isabella Fairfax (née Thwaites) was the grandmother of Marvell’s dedicatee, Thomas Fairfax. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343-003

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(200).³ But as quickly as the nuns seem to pull her into the enclosure, the poem’s hero, Lord Fairfax, jumps to action and scales the wall to “save” his future wife. While the nuns suck Isabella in, he pulls her out, after which, immediately it seems, “The wasting Cloister with the rest / was in one instant dispossessed” (271– 72). The loss of Isabella is tied directly to the convent’s subsequent loss of title and status in the wake of the Reformation. This moment of “instant” dispossession condenses the waves of monastic dissolution that occurred in England between 1536 and 1539, directly following Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and by extension from Rome. As Marvell’s summary of Appleton House’s provenance illustrates, the monastic lands and buildings like those of Nun Appleton were frequently transferred to the Tudor gentry by the king to help pay off state debts, after which the structures were often leveled and the materials used to rebuild new estates. In the poem, the razing of the convent, a space clearly aligned with waste and corruption, serves to exalt the Fairfax estate that now sits in its place. And the poem reminds us that once the convent and its land “to Fairfax fell,” the cloister was once again a space that enclosed Isabella. The novice is physically carried over the convent walls by Lord Fairfax and then brought back into the estate as his bride, a movement that suggests little or no agency on her part. She, like the building, it seems, is instantly changed by Lord Fairfax’s actions even as she stays in the same place. The poem not only reverses the order of things suggesting that the relocation of a novice led to the dissolution of the convent, it also makes the process seem simple, the transformation of novice to wife a foregone conclusion. Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res draws upon a textual archive that dramatizes lost places and modes of female agency in early modern England and complicates proposed solutions to the problems novices might face in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. The featured dramatic texts amplify a middle space or phase between girl and woman, virgin and bride, and thereby give dimension to figures such as Isabella Fairfax who serve as little more than Reformation props in texts such as Marvell’s panegyric verse. The dramatized novices actively navigate a rocky terrain at once fraught with perils and loaded with potential; along the way, they play with pre-

 I distinguish between Marvell and his speaker partly because Marvell’s own religious affiliation, like that of so many other English persons after the Protestant Reformation, is hard to pin down. While he is clearly writing about the provenance of a building now owned by his Protestant patrons, his own connections to Catholicism might suggest that he is not fully in line with his speaker in the representation of a blessed reformation of building and country. In general, when I refer to the narrative structure and content of the poem I ascribe agency to its author.

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scription, blaze new trails, and create social networks that challenge the subversion–containment models so frequently ascribed to adolescent rebellions and rituals. In this way, this study considers not only how novices might be problems for the patriarchy to solve but also how novices themselves might go about attempting to solve problems in the face of patriarchal dictums. The easy transformation of the convent Nun Appleton to the estate Appleton House instantiates much larger changes ushered in during the Protestant Reformation. The poem’s plot would have us believe that one day England was Catholic and the next it was Protestant; that convents immediately became domestic houses, and nuns wives; and that the English people just as quickly changed religious affiliations. However, in reality, none of these transitions was easy, instant, or ever complete; each one involved displacements and categorical confusion, and there were always those to whom these changes did not apply. In fact, many modern historians and literary critics have worked to dispel the myth of instant transformation following the Reformation, a myth that literary representations such as Marvell’s poem seem to imply and perhaps to promote. Frances Dolan, for example, explains that “the place of Catholics in post-Reformation England is not just a matter of shifting locations—as if Catholics were the majority before and the minority after, or at the center before and on the margins after. Rather, the relationship of Catholics and Catholicism to both conceptual and material space was disturbing because it was both embattled and murky. Catholics were everywhere and nowhere.”⁴ Peter Lake and Michael Questier urge fellow historians to resist the “still-prevalent tendency” of relying too heavily on polarizing labels such as Catholic and Protestant employed by early modern contemporaries to explain Reformation shifts. Such terms, while useful to a certain extent, they argue, become “self-sealing and self-confirming binaries, either/or choices into which all or nearly all the material under discussion must be squeezed.”⁵ In a similar vein, Gillian Woods notes the anxiety such ambiguity produced, especially when based on perceived notions of what visually distinguished Catholics or “Papists” and whether a vestment or habit hid a sinister interior. She argues, “Early modern England was peopled with subjects playing by different semiotic rules, and these differences did not fall into neat sectarian divisions.”⁶ It is the murkiness of the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath that Marvell’s poem cleans up or conceals in his account of the Appleton House es Frances E. Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4 (Spring 2002): 642.  “Introduction,” Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, ca. 1560 – 1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2000), xviii.  Gillian Woods, Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 94.

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tate’s provenance and its novice’s “recovery.” Marvell’s speaker employs a straight male Protestant gaze in his reading of the novice that undercuts the dynamics of the dissolution as he highlights Isabella’s return to the conventturned-estate as a bride. He favors this option as divinely sanctioned and ultimately beneficial to novice and estate alike; as he suggests in the line “’Twas no Religious-House till now” (280), the building is only truly religious after it has been repurposed as a secular space, the container for the newly domesticated Isabella.⁷ The speaker normalizes the Protestant Reformation through convent and novice, conditioning readers to see the divine in political shifts and to take pleasure in the novice’s conscription within this “reformed” system. This story that aligns the monastic dissolutions with redemption and the transformation of novice nun to wife with salvation might seem like a stock convention in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. If we look at Marvell’s rendering next to the plays of John Webster and Thomas Middleton or the infamous anti-Catholic polemic of Thomas Robinson that paints an English convent in Lisbon as a space of fornication and infanticide, we might be fully convinced that the Protestant gaze and polemic was the standard. Webster and Middleton clearly condemn Catholicism in their plays but avoid staging nuns or convents, a move Jenna Lay argues, “effaced the vibrancy, popularity, and literary activity of English convents, even as they critiqued the concept of female enclosure through treatments of forced chastity and confinement.”⁸ While anti-Catholic Jacobean dramas and treatises villainize Catholicism by marginalizing and criminalizing nuns, respectively, Catholic women, as Lay notes, were engaging in their  Throughout this project, I draw on case studies of women religious that document the ways in which they resisted reabsorption into the secular world in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Particularly informative are Nicky Hallet’s books Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate: 2007) and The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600 – 1800: Early Modern “Convents of Pleasure” (Farnham, Ashgate: 2013), which document the life writings of exiled English Catholic nuns in the communities of Antwerp and Lierre. While her studies examine the ways women religious presented their spiritual lives and sensual lives in exile, I pursue lines of inquiry into the ways women religious are dramatized for English audience members in the wake of the Reformation. Also see Claire Walker’s essay “Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration” in The Historical Journal 43, no. 1 (March 2000): 1– 23 and her book Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Caroline Bowden’s essay “Collecting the Lives of Early Modern Women Religious: Obituary Writing and the Development of Collective Memory and Corporate Identity,” Women’s History Review 19, no. 1 (2010): 7– 20; as well as her chapter “The English Convent in Exile and Questions of National Identity ca. 1600 – 1688,” in British and Irish Emigrants, ed. David Worthington (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 297– 314.  Jenna Lay, Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 58.

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own writings and political actions. The Protestant treatment of Catholicism in plays like The Duchess of Malfi not only marginalize such Catholic agents, but also replace nuns with the material signifiers of their demonized faith—a poisoned bible, for example—creating a conspicuously absent presence. This study explores the ways in which such recuperative narratives, effacements, and polemics could be and were dramatically challenged in texts that retain the convent as an imaginative space of retreat and profession and the novice as an agent with choice and deliberate motivations. These dramatic texts illuminate how the convent remains a durable resource in times of turmoil, not merely as a vilified location of otherness, as one might expect after the Reformation, but as a site of possibility and negotiation. The convent, when set against other locations and placements, allows the novice at least a glimpse of if not a clear avenue to alternative paths and performances that resist marriage as the only happy ending for young women, and resists the male Protestant gaze that seeks this “reform” agenda. Marvell’s example puts in sharp relief dramas that suggest a more complicated movement for young women contemplating a religious life. In fact, in a number of early modern dramas the disorientation of the Reformation is amplified and problematized through the presence of places and persons that are defined by paradox, and that we encounter in media res. Convents are contested sites demonized at times as symbolic structures of Catholic hypocrisy and excess, but they are depicted in other moments as lost sanctuaries of virginal virtue. Novices are young women on the verge of claiming an adult identity but not yet fully initiated into their future vocations. They are not nuns, nor are they wives. In Medias Res examines the way dramatic texts employ the convent and the novice, enabling an exploration of the dynamic potential of spatial and temporal positions of ambiguity during the early modern period. Like the Catholics in England during the Reformation, convents and novices in early modern plays and dialogues share interstitial positions, and there is a power in this temporal and spatial dynamism, especially when dramatized and projected back to audience members and/or readers, many of whom likely felt similarly slippery in their allegiances and stations. The texts in question, despite and/or because of their authors’ own leanings, thrive on religious and political ambiguity as they interrogate moral imperatives across affiliations. The novices’ liminal placement is essential to their problem-solving and crucial to how I define female agency in this project. The women in these texts often appear to have limited choices, and within their patriarchal settings it can be hard to image them acting as autonomous subjects. Yet, within the literal and metaphorical walls that circumscribe these figures, the women find modes of agency sometimes because of rather than in spite of their confinement. Indeed, they dramatize the ways that, as Judith Butler puts it, “the agency of the subject

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appears to be an effect of its subordination.”⁹ Butler acknowledges the fraught potential of this proposition that can easily seem like a “vicious circle” that can only ever result in a reiteration of subordination for the subject.¹⁰ She acknowledges a distinct difference between the power that creates the subject and a subject’s own power or agency; she sees a reversal in what she calls the “reiteration” of power and questions “how might we think resistance within the terms of reiteration?”¹¹ This is a key question at the heart of my study and one that speaks evocatively to the unique condition of the novice and female agency in early modern England and especially within my chosen literary case studies. How do we read resistance against a sense of containment or reiteration of the status quo that is so often implied at the conclusion of dramatic texts? For me, it comes back to the way these young women move from place to place within the play and how they experience such movements and displacements. In their dislocation from the original conditions of their subordination, novices are allowed new forms of appropriation that often mirror the patriarchal power that initially inscribes them as subjects, but not without changing the nature of the power in the process. Butler captures this dynamic nicely: “Assuming power is not a straightforward task of taking power from one place, transferring it intact, and then and there making it one’s own; the act of appropriation may involve an alteration of power such that the power assumed or appropriated works against the power that made that assumption possible.”¹² The dramatic texts in my study amplify this complicated equation of power transference not only because the women themselves change places but also because the original conditions of their subordination have been disrupted before we ever encounter them. Intriguingly, fathers in these texts are either absent or questionable authority figures. The most present father is Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, a man who begins the play as a figure displaced and dispossessed by civic authorities. Because of the marked absence of fathers in these narratives, the female characters, as we encounter them in medias res, are then already in a position to appropriate an altered form of power. The somewhat untethered position of these dramatized novices conveniently mirrors the historical contexts in which their narratives were produced and performed. The range of texts featured in this book, all published or first performed between 1589 and 1683, places them between the significant dates when the con Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 12.  Butler, Psychic Life, 12.  Butler, Psychic Life, 12.  Butler, Psychic Life, 13.

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vents were dissolved between 1536 – 1539 and the founding of the Bar Convent at York in 1686, a period when no convents existed in England.¹³ While there are plays that include references to nuns and convents before 1589, there are far fewer than we find once we cross the threshold into the seventeenth century. Furthermore, the change from the lengthy reign of Elizabeth I to that of James I and his successors in the years following his 1603 succession led to a heightened focus on the influence of both Catholic and foreign forces on the country and the threat they posed to Protestants. For while Elizabeth’s reign was not without turmoil and the threat of foreign and Catholic invasion or aggression, her long reign and refusal to marry a foreign prince provided a sense of stability for the country that the Scottish son of a Catholic easily might have threatened. And while the religious tolerance that Continental Catholics hoped for did not flourish under James or even with the accession of Charles I and his Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria, it is not surprising that in the period’s plays (and other texts), especially those set in foreign locales, convents remain (or perhaps become) significant places within the dramatic landscape. However, it might be surprising to find that the convents are not summarily vilified in the plays from this time span, but that they are presented positively even in moments of heightened anti-Catholicism. Furthermore, they create an avenue for exploring shifting perceptions of women’s religious and historical roles within and without such controlled spaces, as well as within a transforming dramatic landscape in which female actions and desires are embodied, even if only in a narrative imaginary. The convents may have disappeared from England after the Reformation, but in this collection of texts written well over a century after the dissolutions, the convent abides. As I have suggested above, the convent remains a durable resource, a touchstone in troubled times. In fact, most of the plays and even the dialogues and poems featured in In Medias Res were published during periods of upheaval and leadership change, times that would have clearly heightened English and particularly Protestant anxieties about the future of the country. The Jew of Malta (1589 – 1590) was written approximately a year following the

 Bar Convent was founded by Frances Bedingfield, a follower of Mary Ward and member of Ward’s Congregation of Jesus. Because it was still illegal to profess Catholic beliefs and congregate at the end of the seventeenth century, and particularly with the still fresh anxieties surrounding the “Popish” Plot, Bar Convent and its nuns had to operate in secret. The convent itself was erected outside of the city walls and the nuns wore plain grey dress instead of traditional habits. Accounts of Bar Convent’s history are fairly sparse; for a general account published by the Bar Convent trust, see Sister Gregory IBVM, “The History of the Bar Convent” (Bar Convent Trust, 2001).

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Spanish Armada’s attempt to overthrow Elizabeth and was first performed in 1592. Measure for Measure (1604) is dated just after James I’s accession to the throne and immediately before the Gunpowder Plot (1605). The English Nunne was published in 1642, a year that also marks the beginning of the first Civil War and a time when the theaters were closed until the Restoration. Even the poem “Upon Appleton House,” with which I began this Introduction, was probably composed during Marvell’s stay at the estate (1650 – 1652), closely following the beheading of Charles I. Cavendish’s The Religious was published in 1662 at the beginning of the Restoration, with The Convent of Pleasure following six years later in 1668. Behn’s play The Rover, to which I turn in my final chapter, is set during the Interregnum that fostered closet dramas during the closure of the public theaters. However, it was composed in 1677 on the eve of the “Popish” Plot and the Exclusion crisis that followed and figured Catholics as dangerous conspirators and threats to the English nation. Finally, the 1683 edition of Venus in the Cloister sits at the threshold of the so-called Glorious Revolution that saw the Protestant monarchs William and Mary replace the Catholic James II on the English political stage. Again, at moments of heightened anti-Catholicism in England we find depictions of convents in dramatic texts, but they do not always function as we might expect. They are not simply condemnatory, rather they create a sense of possibility and recuperation in the face of great loss. In Medias Res traces a variety of provocative sites where categories overlap or we discover interstices between categories, including: texts that fit neither one generic category nor another, spaces that are and are not convents, places that simultaneously invite and repel outsiders, and novices who are neither nuns nor wives. In troubling these traditional binaries, these liminal texts, spaces, and characters provide a venue for us to explore the ways performance in its many forms might allow unlikely subjects to appropriate power within oppressive systems of surveillance and patriarchal control. The texts collected here include problem plays such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Margaret Cavendish’s closet dramas, and seventeenth-century dialogues that include both Catholic treatises promoting women’s entrance into European convents and proto-pornographic Protestant polemics that demonize such convents. The texts slide between comedy and tragedy, romance and debate, drama and dialogue. Such generic instability is similarly reflected in the novices’ mobility and instability, which, in turn, is juxtaposed with the paradoxical function of convent architecture invoked within these plays. Each play incorporates formal monastic features such as grates, turns, and fortified walls that paradoxically invite and repel outsiders’ interest. These security features, which figure prominently as plot devices and frames, characterize an architecture of enclosure designed to define and refine religious residents. At once depicted as safety

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measures and incarcerating strictures for the convent inhabitants, this architecture of enclosure structurally enables the novice’s agency. The formal structures of the dramatic text, coupled with these formal monastic features, whether performed and presented on stage for an audience or only imagined in the mind of a reader, provide a space in which a novice might “give form” to new narratives and re-form social structures, in which she might imagine alternatives to patriarchal prescription that break down the strict binaries of both convent and marriage. Even if these possibilities are as ephemeral as performance itself, they still offer a way to reflect on things lost and imagine agential avenues within and beyond remaining structures of authority.

In Medias Res The novices in this study’s dramatic texts inhabit a middle ground, a position that Donna Haraway might describe as “full of action,” as marked by “the absence of beginnings, enlightenments, and endings.” The world itself, she suggests, “has always been in the middle of things, in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of actants and of networking and unequal collectives.”¹⁴ The dramatized novice engages in conversations and actions that are at once “unruly and practical,” especially as she navigates labyrinthine social and political networks and explores and exploits the inequalities embedded in these networks. My invocation of the “world” Haraway imagines in her formulation of an “amodern history of science” reliant on the negations of beginnings may seem a strange analogue to my own formulations of women embodying a space between places.¹⁵ However, Haraway’s project of mapping “mind-scapes” and landscapes lines up nicely with my own discussions of generic, material, and social hybridity, as well as the way the convent and novice blur boundaries and combine opposites. The book’s subtitle, in medias res, speaks to the novice’s spatial and temporal positioning within dramatic texts as well as to the general state of England during the times that the featured texts were in circulation. The Latin phrase is clearly associated with the opening of plays in which audience members meet characters and enter the plot “in the middle of things.” For dramatic novices both sacred and secular, this phrase additionally speaks to their position be Donna Haraway, “Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics of Inappropriate/d Others,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Trechiler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 304.  Haraway, 304.

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tween life phases, and also between thresholds both literal and figurative on the stage. As suggested above, they are moving from childhood to adulthood and are faced with a choice between convent and marriage. The dramas focus on these young women as they stand at a threshold, temporarily suspended in time and space; they do not yet have to cross that threshold or choose one course or another. This middle space, the moment of suspension, then, is one fraught with potential. It is the time and space of choice or agency denied figures such as Marvell’s Isabella. In the dramatic texts under consideration, the spatial and temporal nexus allows us to examine at once young women’s subjugation and their abilities to use performance as a way to appropriate and thereby alter the power that would seek to reiterate their subjugation. Homi Bhabha’s formulation of a third space, a “beyond” in which we might locate culture through differences and identities, becomes an apt trope for considering the novice within a complex early modern historical and literary context. Bhabha posits that in the “beyond,” figured in the fin de siècle, “we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation of direction … an exploratory, restless movement.”¹⁶ The dramatic novice’s movements, then, might be seen as strategies she uses not only to define herself, but also the larger shifting society around her. We can see this in the real nuns that chose exile and a new terrain as they sought to hold onto a sense of their identities as Catholics and English subjects, but also as they necessarily redefined what it meant to be an English Catholic abroad. This is reflected in the literary novices under consideration here as well, as they confront religious and moral tensions in landscapes that at once call up England’s past, its losses, and its complex sense of national identity. In Medias Res, in its meditation on middle spaces and spaces beyond, also engages with anthropologists and theorists including Victor Turner and Michel de Certeau who theorize the transformative potential of initiation rites and passages through space and time. Such thinking has provocative implications for considering the movement of novices in drama. The focus on middle spaces relates to notions of liminality; however, like Bhabha’s beyond, the exploratory strategies and processes articulated by novices also resist a teleology that liminality implies. While the term “liminality” speaks to inhabiting a threshold, it also suggests an ultimate need to cross out of or over that threshold. While the book’s novices are often positioned to make such a move, whether through

 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1– 2.

In Medias Res

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silence or their own impetus to break out of a particular prescribed trajectory, they subvert this final closure and remain in play; they begin and end their stories in medias res. Their agency resides in the performance that is at once ephemeral and repeatable. Each performance will differ, but that difference also allows us the potential to imagine new embodiments and iterations of agency, as it remains an outlet for memory and recuperation. Such performances, then, allow us to imagine everyday practices that had been lost or forbidden within early modern English communities after the Protestant Reformation. Bhabha articulates a modern push away from defining identity singularly in terms of class or gender and instead suggests modern subject positions are what we would now term intersectional. In this spirit, he calls for us to “think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood— singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”¹⁷ While Bhabha references contemporary cultural conflicts, his formulation of spaces that allow for exploration of self-hood and singular as well as collective identities resonates with the interstitial positions of Catholics and various other groups in early modern England, and is particularly useful when we think about the options for novices’ agency within this complex and shifting setting. Finally, central for our consideration of the dramatic novice, Bhabha reminds us that the “terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively.”¹⁸ This project also participates in the burgeoning interdisciplinary performance studies field. The novices on the stage, and in the texts that only imagine a stage such as Margaret Cavendish’s closet dramas, must represent figures no longer sanctioned in England. The actors, boys in Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s plays, are in a position to recuperate lost roles, but also might provide models that allow young women to imagine such lost alternatives to marriage. Joseph Roach speaks to this difficult task, as he identifies how performance “stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must vainly aspire both to embody and replace. Hence flourish the abiding yet vexed affinities between performance and memory.”¹⁹ This definition of performance and its affinity with memory is particularly poignant when we consider the female agency I ascribe to the novice  Bhabha, 2.  Bhabha, 3.  Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3.

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Introduction: How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Novice?

within a ghostly or lost Catholic context. Like Butler, Roach sees acting as a process that necessarily involves change, even as it draws on and attempts to remember a seemingly fixed past. Similarly, Diana Taylor figures performances as “vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated, or what Richard Schechner has called ‘twice-behaved behavior.’”²⁰ The novices literally become pivotal performers, as they stand perfectly positioned to embody such “acts of transfer” as they create a sense of identity potentially lost to many of their audience members, and ultimately participate in a process of cultural negotiation that Bhabha reminds us is always ongoing.

Novices: Neither Nuns nor Wives The novice category works in two interconnected ways in In Medias Res. When specifically tied to convent inhabitants, the title refers to a young woman who is in the first-year probationary period of a religious vocation, as we see the term used in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (chapter 2) and in the dialogues Venus in the Cloister and The English Nunne (chapter 3). However, implicit in this designation for first-year nuns is the term’s more general usage as the label for a neophyte, specifically a woman not yet marked by or fully familiar with the ways of the world. In the featured plays and dialogues, the novices are young women in between life phases, new to the ways of the world and almost always on the verge of being put into a position as either a nun or a wife that might shelter them from or deny them exposure to the world and its experiences. These young characters invoke a set of real women in both religious and secular novitiate phases, on the threshold of a new conscription, but they also point to the promise of alternatives and identities that consistently thwart our conceptions of what such conscriptions might entail and allow. In the case of young Catholic women seeking a religious vocation, the typical age of profession was sixteen, and taking the one-year probation that preceded profession into account, the average novice was fifteen when she first entered the convent.²¹ Convent entry requirements usually included either a small dowry or the novices providing their own habit and living essentials, such as mattresses, sheets, and towels; costs ranged from ₤5 to ₤7. As Marilyn  Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 2– 3.  Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 1998), 46. These numbers, of course, vary for different convent communities, as Oliva documents in her discussion of nuns’ ages.

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Oliva and Eileen Power both note, these entrance requirements or dowries were commensurate with what the gentry and wealthy yeomen could afford for their daughters. This is an important point because it reminds us that even before the Protestant Reformation, those women who could choose to take up a religious profession came from a limited cross-section of society. This is borne out in plays such as Aphra Behn’s The Rover (chapter 5) in which we see two wealthy young women of “quality” respectively conscripted to marriage for the eldest daughter and a convent for her younger sister. This dynamic represents the female corollary to primogeniture so clearly associated with wealthy and landed nobility. Novices’ probationary period usually lasted up to one year, after which they took their vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty during a church ceremony, which was simultaneously similar to a wedding ceremony and to a funeral procession, both theatrical in their own right. During this ceremony, presided over by the bishop, the “novice spoke her vows aloud, wrote them down, and then signed her name or made a cross on a parchment laid across the bishop’s knees. He placed the signed document in the hands of the convent’s superior.”²² The ceremony, as Oliva explains, signified the nun’s release from the secular world and the beginning of her new cloistered life. Margaret Cavendish, in fact, took part in a clothing ceremony of a novice in the English Carmelite order in Antwerp during her exile (see chapter 4). Not only were the ceremonies often elaborate affairs that involved a highly visual exchange of ornate clothing for austere religious vestments, but the novices also became part of a chosen religious family as they left their secular family ties behind. As Caroline Bowden describes, “The convent was a community created in religion by law rather than by marriage or blood ties; its identity had to be created self-consciously.”²³ For this reason, she notes, convent documents relied on appropriating “familial language”; Poor Clares did this by insisting in their annals that their superior should be considered a “true mother” provided by God.²⁴ Regardless of the order, “by entering a convent a candidate for profession was agreeing to subject herself to the discipline of the rule and the constitutions of a particular convent without question.”²⁵ To join an order meant taking on a religious corporate identity, an identity that became even more important for women entering English convents abroad, as their identity was at once associated with a specific Catholic

   

Oliva, 52. Bowden, “Collecting,” 10. Bowden, “Collecting,” 10. Bowden, “The English Convent,” 299.

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order and a sense of English nationalism that was complicated in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. When considered alongside convents, as they are in the book’s title, novices will likely call forth images of these religious probates, and to a certain extent the characters in the following chapters fit this description. This is especially true, as I have suggested, of Measure for Measure’s Isabella, who we first encounter as she prepares to enter the strict Clarissan convent in Shakespeare’s play. However, as I have noted, the young women in this group of early modern plays and dialogues are also novices in the broader sense, inexperienced women contemplating their next life phases and the roles they might play. Unlike Marvell’s Isabella, the novices of these plays are not only allowed to inhabit a threshold without yet having to cross it as they leave girlhood behind, but they also are allowed to explore and even critique the options available to them as they enter the next phases of their adult lives. The dramatic texts themselves, then, serve as a probationary space for their novice protagonists. For these female characters, neither the convent nor marriage is a foregone conclusion. This is in large part because the convent remains “in play” as an option and alternative to marriage. Even when demonized, convents create conceptual openings in dramatic texts for young women to imagine resisting the role of wife. Bringing the convent back into play in the wake of the Protestant Reformation also helps to remind us of the complicated status distinctions that were all too often tied to essentialist definitions of women based on their imagined position within a maid– wife–widow paradigm, as we see in Measure for Measure. The convent, though associated with a chaste maidenly identity, pulls women out of a trajectory or spectrum that ranks women according to their marital status. The “maid” represents the not-yet-married woman whose virginity is reserved for her husband, which pushes the nun outside the patriarchal roles prescribed for women and alongside sex workers, and single women more generally, as potentially disruptive and dangerous figures. The novice, then, as one not yet affiliated—neither nun nor wife, neither this nor that—inhabits an interstitial space that allows her to perform her potential to move either within or outside of the path traditionally mapped out for early modern Englishwomen after the Reformation. While some of the novices ultimately do align themselves with one option or the other (that is, the convent or marriage), their position between them in the space of the dramatic text suggests that, even if contested, a choice between these options remains open. In the texts featured in this study, we are allowed to imagine this movement, as novices chart new territory and create new networks in their movement between places and interactions with those outside the thresholds of the convent or the domestic household.

Dissolved and Dispossessed: Convents and Nuns after the Protestant Reformation

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Dissolved and Dispossessed: Convents and Nuns after the Protestant Reformation While convents were dissolved in England by the sixteenth-century decrees of Henry VIII, they were still available on the Continent. Some women journeyed abroad to join foreign convents, and others helped to establish English convents overseas for expatriate recusant Catholics. However, such ventures were illegal, dangerous, and expensive, which made them highly exclusive, and therefore unviable options for most Englishwomen seeking alternatives to marriage. England’s convents, as suggested above, usually underwent some sort of physical change as they were repurposed for secular uses. Those on the Continent also underwent physical changes in the wake of the Reformation. In response to the negative reputation assigned to many if not all convents during the dissolution examinations of English religious houses, the Council of Trent’s sixteenthcentury mandates called for reinforced convent rules and structures; walls were heightened and the access points such as doors, windows, and grates were fortified or closed off altogether.²⁶ The Tridentine legislation sought to keep nuns from literally and metaphorically wandering astray from their enclosures, and to reduce or to eliminate lay visitors of both genders from bringing too much of the outside world inside the convent walls. Despite their coincidence with the Protestant Reformation, the Council’s mandates were far from new, and in fact, reintroduced the regulations of the thirteenth-century Bull Periculoso introduced by Pope Boniface VIII. This papal edict with its language of enclosure and admonitions against errant nuns became a standard guide for convent regulations: Desiring to provide for the perilous and detestable state of certain nuns, who, having slackened the reins of decency and having shamelessly cast aside the modesty of their order and of their sex, sometimes gad about outside their monasteries in the dwellings of secular persons, and frequently admit suspected persons within the same monasteries to the grave offence of Him to Whom they have, of their own will, vowed their innocence, to the opprobrium of religion and to the scandal of very many persons; we by the present constitution, which shall be irrefragably valid, decree with healthful intent that all and sun-

 Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life 1450 – 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 48. Also see my chapter 3 “Romancing the Grate in Convent Dialogues,” for further discussion of the types of renovations fostered by the Council of Trent mandates.

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Introduction: How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Novice?

dry nuns, present and future, to whatever order they belong and in whatever part of the world, shall henceforth remain perpetually enclosed in their monasteries.²⁷

The very fact that such mandates for strict enclosure had to be restated and reinforced between the promulgation of the Bull Periculoso and the decrees of Trent (and well after) points to its ineffectiveness, as scholars such as Eileen Power and Claire Walker have widely noted. Indeed, in a discussion of sixteenth-century clausura, Walker concludes that “an examination of the Tridentine legislation and its application in the English cloisters suggests that early modern nuns ignored, opposed, assimilated, or modified it in much the same way as their medieval forebears had dealt with Pericoloso.”²⁸ The nuns’ resistance to papal demands for reform was certainly a response to attempts to restrict their freedoms, but it also reflected a power struggle between the female governors of convent communities and the male clerics sent in to enforce the rules. Tridentine rules, like their predecessors, called for a form of patriarchal surveillance that restricted and, in many cases, undermined the authority of abbesses and other female leaders within the convents. Also important to consider, especially in terms of female agency, was that many nuns were actively political in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and later with the advent of the English Civil Wars and eventual Restoration. In a discussion of Lady Mary Knatchbull’s and the Ghent Benedictine nuns’ relationship to King Charles II, Walker reminds us that “the nuns’ control of royalist mail, transmission of news from England, regular advice to Hyde [a Royalist plotter], and funding of the king’s cause equalled, if not surpassed, the contribution of many male supporters.”²⁹ While gender and inability to act as a public agent largely effaced these contributions that themselves would have to be mediated through multiple backchannels, these indirect means of support show the lengths women religious were willing to go to in order to ensure an eventual recuperation of Catholic identity in England and ensure their own eventual return to their homeland. They were far from passive subjects of male surveillance and enclosure mandates. The dramas under consideration make use of material restrictions and women’s abilities to subvert their intended effects and become covert social and political agents. Convent features including turns, high walls, and grates meant to  Registrum Simonis de Gandavo Episcopi Saresbiriensis (1297– 1315), ed. C. T. Flower (Canterbury and York Soc. 1914, in course of publication), 10 ff, quoted in Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 344.  Walker, Gender and Politics, 45.  Walker, “Prayer,” 2– 3.

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restrict access to nuns and nuns’ access to the outside world connect the texts and become central to the novices’ respective dramatic trajectories. The material mechanisms meant to keep subjects in check become the very mechanisms that allow these young novices to attempt to appropriate and alter the patriarchal power dynamics, at least temporarily. We see this overtly in Margaret Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure (chapter 4) in which Lady Happy seeks to improve on the convent model by closing up all access points, especially grates, to keep male authorities and voyeurs out of her perfected female retreat. However, we also see it in the way Abigail in The Jew of Malta (chapter 1) is able to act first as an agent for and subsequently a rebel against her father as she inhabits the play’s increasingly fortified convent. While nuns on the Continent were dealing with these new impositions on their previously more autonomous lives within convents, the nuns back in England had a different struggle entirely. Although convents, at least in name, may have disappeared from the English landscape, the nuns who had occupied them did not. These nuns were thrust back into the secular world, located “everywhere and nowhere,” as Dolan puts it. Oliva calculates that the average age of nuns at the time of the dissolution was forty, and this “relative youth,” she suggests “meant that they had long and uncertain futures ahead of them in a temporal world from which they had been cloistered for many, many years.”³⁰ While the Crown promised some support in the form of pensions to these turned-out nuns, any reports of misconduct against the sisters nullified these promises. As Oliva explains, “theoretically [support] was dependent on the royal commissioners’ assessments of the quality of religious life within each convent.” She reports that of the eleven female dioceses in Norwich, four were reported as “compromised.” However, the merit of such reports is dubious, as it seems many reports were “exaggerated and unfounded.” Furthermore, one of the means of justifying the dissolutions had been the use of just such reports made by country inspectors who may have received favors in return for unfavorable reports on the monasteries. These reports would have hastened the closing of particular religious houses. Oliva points to these “agents’ questionable methods of obtaining information” as casting significant doubt on the validity of official claims of incontinence and other scandalous behavior within the convents.³¹ Regardless, for those nuns who were able to secure a pension from the Crown, the amount of

 Oliva, 193.  Oliva, 193. Oliva supports the suggestion that such reports against nuns may have been highly suspect by citing David Knowles’ assessment that similar accusations made against male religious houses were exaggerated and unsubstantiated.

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that pension was minimal and reflected the impoverished state of most of the convents at the time of their dissolutions. Marvell’s speaker ignores the fate of the nuns turned out by the dissolutions in his narrative of Isabella Fairfax’s silent reinscription into an enclosure. Indeed, it takes only two stanzas to transform the space from a religious cloister to a marital household. The very expediency or compression of the poem’s trajectory draws attention to the narrowed path that a particular group of young women in England might follow after the dissolution of the convents. With the convent removed or repurposed, the marital house now seems the only option left in its place, according to the poem. Yet, the place and the novice’s containment remain the same; the nun inhabitants are replaced by a “heroic” male Protestant protagonist, who now speaks for his new bride. This displacement brings us to an important point, as Marvell’s ignored nuns also remind us of the uneven consequences for monastic inhabitants after the dissolutions.³² These are the figures that haunt early modern literary representations of convents and novices and that often remain unaccounted for, even in the dramas explored here. We might see traces of these women—the subtle nuns that Marvell’s speaker accuses of coercing Isabella into the convent—in figures such as Measure for Measure’s Francisca, the only nun in the play, or the abbess figures in the convent dialogues featured in chapter 4. Their roles are minor and in many cases they clearly stand in for an allegedly defunct Catholicism that should be cast aside by our ingénues. However, the texts leave room for a trace of the Reformation’s messy history and even play on those tensions to emphasize continuums among people of various allegiances; they each disrupt and push us to question the binaries that seek to erase those women and life phases that fall between entrenched identity categories. While some former nuns could rely on their earthly families for support, others had become so removed from this secular world that this was an unlikely option. Many of the nuns continued to live together after the dissolutions, forming their own all-female communities in smaller domestic spaces. Whether on their

 According to Oliva, in Norwich the nuns’ male counterparts, monks and canons (priests), were often provided with other ecclesiastical positions by the dukes that had taken possession of the smaller monasteries of the dioceses. Furthermore, while few nuns or monks received pensions after they were turned out, in cases where they did, men received “substantially larger” pensions. Oliva argues that this preferential treatment of male religious suggests both the higher status of men in society and the “greater value” elite society placed on them compared to their female counterparts (199 – 200). Social stratification between female religious houses and their inhabitants also informed the options for these women as they were forced to reenter a world they had forsaken.

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own or as part of a group, these nuns needed financial support to supplement their pensions, if any, which meant teaching for some and moving into cities for a wider variety of economic opportunity for others. Very few nuns chose to exchange their vows of chastity for vows of marriage after they left the convent. While the nuns were no longer tied to their vows of chastity after 1549, if they had made these vows it seems they were unlikely to break them, a fact that may have been a matter of both lack of opportunity and lack of inclination.³³ Such realities complicate the way we understand the problematic comic ending of a play like Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in which we see a novice nun’s silence in the face of a duke’s marriage proposal. The comic genre and potentially the expectations of certain audience members in the wake of the Reformation dictate her acceptance of the Duke’s offer, but her real-life corollary likely would have refused such an offer. If we consider the dearth of options available to former nuns who did not have family or wealth to support their lives after the dissolutions, we come to see the narrative hole in Marvell’s depiction of this process. For Isabella Fairfax there is no real movement; in fact, there is no real change. Her past and present turn out to be the same as she finds herself enclosed in the same place, literally in the same building, even as her status changes from novice to bride. In Foucauldian terms, we lose a sense of Isabella as an “acting subject” or agent within a constellation of power relations in this narrative. While the “Nuns smooth tongue” (200) and the novice’s initial convent entrance give us a sense of power’s seduction and her potential as an agent in her own subjection, Lord Fairfax’s role as savior reduces the appearance of potential agency for this young woman as she comes to resemble furniture removed and replaced after a thorough house cleaning. The dramatic texts, then, allow us to see such young women as potential actors. Furthermore, even if the dramas only seem to render visible the subversion and containment Stephen Greenblatt would ascribe to these women agents, the texts and performances allow us to glimpse a potential under erasure in the sanitized narratives of women’s roles after the Reformation. The conflation of the convent and marriage in Marvell’s poem illustrates what was lost after the monastic dissolution. The closing of the convents not only eliminated such enclosures as an alternative to marriage, but it also eliminated one stage in a woman’s life in which she might explore options and choose her own path towards an adult identity. We can see this double elimination in

 Oliva, 201– 4. In her section on “Post-Dissolution Life,” Oliva notes that 1549 is the year that the Statute of Six Articles was repealed by Edward VI; before this point, it seems, nuns were only released from vows of poverty and obedience.

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Introduction: How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Novice?

Isabella’s plot trajectory, which ends in her marriage and entrance into Appleton House. Her final position in the poem has all of the elements of a dramatic comedy; however, her lack of agency and independent movement between her two places of enclosure take the “play,” the dynamic middle ground, out of her plot.

Drama and Reform from the Renaissance to the Restoration Stage In Medias Res attends to the religious, social, and material changes in the century in England following the Protestant Reformation, and, particularly, to how a diverse English population came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices in the midst of these changes. The book also tracks the changing fortunes of drama, from public theaters, to closet dramas, to the Restoration stage. In this way, my continuous focus on the “drama” of the Reformation and its afterlives accompanies the changing meanings and venues of drama in the course of the seventeenth century. In terms of genre, the dramatic works featured in my project, like the novices and convents in the plays and in England after the Reformation, are themselves difficult to categorize. From the tragedy of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (chapter 1), which many critics find more comic than tragic, and Shakespeare’s problem play Measure for Measure (chapter 2) to seventeenth-century dialogues that blend romance and drama (chapter 3) and Margaret Cavendish’s closet dramas (chapter 4), these plays are all located somewhere betwixt and between traditional genres. It is this type of simultaneity, the either/or – and in many cases the neither/ nor – that ties these hybrid genres to my subject matter. The generic form of these texts, then, works with the novices’ interstitial location as they attempt to negotiate between the convent and marriage. It also accentuates the vexed position of convents in post-Reformation texts and performances; the genres of these plays, like the repurposed convent, are palimpsests with overlapping, yet legible, layers of meaning.³⁴ Within early modern dramatic texts, convents incite certain post-Reformation suspicions associated with Catholic spaces more generally.³⁵ Many of the

 In thinking about the convent as palimpsest, a site with temporal and material layers of meaning, I find fruitful Jonathan Gil Harris’s formulation of the palimpsest as a figure in which multiple time periods are co-present. See Harris’s introduction “Palimpsested Time,” in Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 1– 25.  See Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism.”

Drama and Reform from the Renaissance to the Restoration Stage

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early modern English plays that feature nunneries and/or novices, such as the plays of Middleton and Webster as noted above, take part in a long tradition of anti-monastic satire. This medieval tradition depicts convents and male monasteries as false sanctuaries; places purported to promote poverty, chastity, and charity that actually hide the opposite extremes within their walls. Such satires often conflate nunneries and brothels, a move that appears most famously in Hamlet’s “get thee to a nunnery” speech. They might also include depictions of pregnant nuns, and sexual relationships between nuns and friars, as well as among nuns themselves. While there are traces of anti-monastic satire and sentiment leveled at the convents in early modern plays, the convents also function as legitimate sanctuaries where novices might retreat from the unruly public, or as alternatives to forced marriages and unkind family members, and even as fantastic utopias that foster female agency. As a group, the convents in the featured plays cannot be placed neatly within the tradition of anti-monastic satire, nor can they be viewed as sites of sanctuary. For example, the strict Clarissan convent that Isabella wishes to enter in Measure for Measure is quite different from Cavendish’s titular convent of pleasure and Behn’s convent run by an implicitly lusty abbess in The Rover (chapter 5), not to mention the proto-pornographic enclosure of Venus in the Cloister (chapter 3). While all of the convents can be seen as alternatives to marital houses, some are imagined as hybrid enclosures that unite convent and marriage options, but that also serve as metaphors for the recuperation of lost spaces. For example, Cavendish’s convent of well-born ladies in The Convent of Pleasure, as Julie Crawford suggests, becomes a sanctuary from men, like a typical convent, but even more importantly serves as a sanctuary for Royalist women like Cavendish, where they imagine recovering the estates seized from them during the English Civil Wars.³⁶ Such a formulation underlines the way convents in dramas might reflect and/or problematize the social and political climates in which the plays were composed and produced. The convent is a common feature that appears across this wide range of dramatic texts; however, the specific convent that materializes in each text is slightly different and is presented as serving different needs.

 Julie Crawford, “Convents and Pleasures: Margaret Cavendish and the Drama of Property,” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 177– 224.

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Overview of the Chapters My first chapter considers Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (1589 – 1590), which centers on issues of conversion and dislocation, especially as its first act sees a Jewish mansion explicitly “turned to a nunnery,” and its Jewish inhabitants turned out. A variety of critics have discussed the notion of turning in reference to religious conversion and sexual promiscuity. To these discussions I add a new dimension by focusing on the material relevance of the “turn” as it relates to convent architecture, and the movement and changing identity of the play’s novice Abigail. The architectural turn, or wheel, was a feature of strictly cloistered convents, a halfbarrel device that rotated and allowed outsiders to pass alms into the enclosure without discovering the nuns inside. This material structure and its movement bring together the active and passive uses of the turn as an image of conversion and device, both in terms of utility and plot. In this play, conversion becomes a strategy for recovery and revenge, and the monastic wheel becomes the means for the destruction of the play’s novice. Abigail herself embodies the movement of the turn, as she rotates between active and passive roles throughout her narrative. Her father controls her initial return to their former mansion-turned-convent and later turns her suitors against her all for his own gain, but in the end the novice chooses a final return to the convent and a religious conversion. It is this rotation, I argue, that opens up a space that allows audience members to imagine a moment in time when a novice faced more than one direction to turn, a life stage in which she might contemplate the formation of her adult identity. The second chapter continues to explore the connection between women and walled enclosures by analyzing Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604). Like Marlowe’s Abigail, Shakespeare’s Isabella finds herself between houses at the play’s conclusion. However, I argue that rather than representing extreme options for the novice, the convent and the Duke’s palace are, in fact, too alike and Isabella’s ambiguous position at the end of the play reflects the blurred distinction between these walled options. Her agency resides both in her location between houses with the potential to choose one or the other and in her position as an actor on the stage, a figure allowed to perform verbal prowess that she would relinquish with monastic or marital vows. In other words, her agency resides in the fact that she is categorically neither this nor that. To be forced to choose one vow over another—one place over the other—would inevitably result in some form of loss, the closure of a plot that otherwise remains open. Chapter 3 juxtaposes two dialogues, The English Nunne (1642) and Venus in the Cloister (1683), both of which purport to present intimate knowledge of convent spaces but through vastly different religious and political lenses. The Eng-

Overview of the Chapters

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lish Nunne is a Catholic dialogue that aims to defend the virtues of convent life as it depicts the perils of marriage and motherhood, and Venus in the Cloister simultaneously demonizes convents as dens of fornication and exploits that very erotic potential. Despite different religious allegiances and diametrically opposed readings of the convent, both utilize convent architecture and dramatic forms to construct their arguments. Grates, in particular, stand out as features of the dialogues’ convent narratives, but they are also used in the prefatory materials of these texts as metaphorical apparatuses, fortified entrance points that at once distance readers and entice them to enter their respective texts. Additionally, these dialogues, while distinctly different from play texts in their form on the page, employ dramatic rhetoric and devices that, like the grates, are meant to usher readers into their monastic constructions and perhaps to invite them to play the novice roles—respectively chaste and illicit. Chapter 4 pairs two plays by Margaret Cavendish in which novices seek to redefine the rules of marital and monastic institutions: The Religious (1662) through a hybrid form of monastic marriage and The Convent of Pleasure (1668) in a felicitously secular cloistered life. As in chapter 3, the grate features prominently in these play texts as security feature and plot device. In The Religious, it becomes a primary access point through which the novice Lady Perfection carries out her own plots, while in The Convent of Pleasure the grate is closed off in order to deny such machinations. Through the novices’ respective treatment of the grate, Cavendish allows audience members to imagine alternatives to existing models of chastity and community. This study concludes with a chapter on Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677). While the convent never appears on stage in this play, it is immediately and frequently invoked and equated with marriage as an undesirable and forced prescription for young women. The novice Hellena verbally constructs the convent only to entice the rover Willmore to storm its walls, a prompt that recalls Lord Fairfax’s role in “Upon Appleton House” when he rescues Isabella from her smooth-tongued nuns. The equation of convent and marriage, both figured as prison-like institutions, marks a shift from the previous depictions, particularly in Hellena’s neither/nor attitude towards these binary options for young women. The reopening of the theaters, which saw women first acting on and writing for the public stage, also marks a shift in the way the novice’s choices and narratives are framed. The convent and marriage become conflated options forced upon young women by their male family members. Because of these changes, we also see a new kind of novice with new desires. Hellena, unlike novices examined in previous chapters, seems to desire not an alternate space of enclosure, nor a redefined marital union, but a freedom that might match the lives of the roving merchants that arrive in time for the city’s carnival. She imagines a kind of permanent state of

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Introduction: How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Novice?

liminality beyond the perpetual enclosure of a convent but also set apart from the restrictive closure of a forced marriage. This novice imagines a world outside the city enclosures of Behn’s Naples, a world where she might rule her own destiny, much as the actress who plays her might rule the stage. The surprisingly open ending and potentially unfettered agency is made more interesting by the fact that Behn seems to have been unable to imagine a next chapter for her novice, as the playwright kills her off before the play’s sequel. It is these open possibilities for the novice—and the impulse to foreclose those possibilities—that drive my study’s line of inquiry.

Chapter 1: “Turn’d to a Nunnery”: Abigail’s Agency in The Jew of Malta ¹ If Appleton House’s Reformation conversion is sanitized in Marvell’s countryhouse poem, much messier material and spiritual conversions haunt Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and the dispossessed that populate the play’s volatile landscape. Within the city walls, groups of strangers are both brought together and separated by their displacement. As we see in the very first act of the play, the Maltese state confiscates Barabas’s mansion and transfers it to a group of nuns. This act of conversion also symbolically reverses the English monastic dissolutions of the 1530s that often resulted in the transformation of convents into secular estates and created a new class of strangers in recusant nuns. While the Maltese officials’ conversion orders are meant to punish Barabas, his daughter Abigail feels the dispossession most acutely. She becomes a perpetually homeless figure who shuttles between the play’s reallocated houses. As Abigail’s physical and social positions alter, she becomes aligned with the convent as it too transforms physically and symbolically throughout Marlowe’s play. Like England’s nuns, who were forced to relocate themselves to foreign lands and new convents or to reevaluate their professions after the monastic dissolutions, Abigail is left to navigate new spaces and identities in a changing world when she is turned out of her home. However, this transformation is not entirely a loss for Abigail; her ability to change places and perform identities allows her modes of agency that set her apart from her displaced father. While she still finds herself hemmed in by patriarchal constrictions, she makes a space for herself that pushes back against these constrictions as well. She moves in and out of the newly converted convent in a way that raises questions about the nature of conversion itself. Like the mansion-turned-convent, she becomes changeable, and her motives questionable as we recall that like her former home she too has been “turned to a nunnery” as she agrees to act as an agent of her father’s revenge. Her movements within a rigid structure built largely on paranoia and a desire for fixity make her a potential figure for English audience members who often found themselves between identities and allegiances in their own volatile English landscape in the wake of the Protestant Reformation.  An early version of this chapter has been published as a journal article. Vanessa L. Rapatz, “Abigail’s Turn in The Jew of Malta.” Studies in English Literature 56, no. 2 (2016): 247– 264. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343-004

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Chapter 1: “Turn’d to a Nunnery”: Abigail’s Agency in The Jew of Malta

In this chapter, I reevaluate both convent and convert by aligning the structure’s transformation in the play with Abigail’s own. On the post-Reformation stage, Abigail’s position as a novice, a woman in between the play’s houses, requires us to acknowledge that the options for female agency need not be tragically limited by prescribed forms of containment. The convent, in this setting, then becomes a resource for imagining alternate life paths and forms of identity in the face of social limitations. Even if demonized, the convent comes to serve as a place of sanctuary in the midst of a Maltese state that increasingly offers few alternatives for women. Abigail’s performative conversions may not be sincere and that does undercut a sense of Christian redemption; however, her performance and ability to navigate Malta’s most intimate spaces might still represent a form of control unique to her gender. Even if we could read sincerity in her final conversion, a Jewish woman converting to Catholicism would not necessarily alleviate anxieties about ambiguous interiority in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Such a conversion, however, might be seen as a form of resistance rather than regression.

Turn, Turn, Turn: Material Manipulations The convent’s architectural conversion reflects the transformation and claims to agency that Abigail experiences as she is turned into and out of the space. Much like Appleton House’s dispossession, the take-over of Barabas’s mansion seems nearly instantaneous in the play, as we first meet Abigail in the second scene having been newly evicted from her childhood home. Yet, despite this quick turnover, directly following the state’s confiscation of the mansion, Abigail implies that this spatial conversion will involve a process that goes beyond simply enclosing nuns. As she explains to her father after her displacement, “of thy house they mean / To make a nunnery” (1.2.255 – 56), a statement that suggests the building is not yet a sufficient convent.² The implication is that turning a secular house to a nunnery involves a process or series of renovations. And, in fact, after the monastic dissolutions convents were subject to two kinds of renovation. Those in England were converted to secular uses—or razed. Those on the Continent were, as a response to Reformation critiques and the consequent decrees of the Council of Trent, remodeled to reinforce their borders and materialize enclo-

 All quotations from the play are drawn from Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968).

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sure. Such remodeling focused on entry points—grills, grates, windows—to be reinforced or closed off entirely. Much like Abigail, the play’s central building itself shows signs of conversion over time and by the third act, it seems that the new convent has been more suitably and materially converted to house its new religious inhabitants. The material change becomes evident in Barabas’s description of “a dark entry” where the nuns receive alms on a particular evening and “must neither see the messenger / Nor make enquiry who hath sent it them” (3.4.77– 81). While Barabas never names the device through which the nuns receive alms at this “dark entry,” what he describes in this scene is a turn. In monastic architecture a turn, also called a wheel, is “a rotating barrel-like device, with a vertical half-division … used to convey small items in and out of the convent without revealing the face of the nun inside.”³ Such a feature at once separates nuns from those outside the convent and facilitates exchange between them. The introduction of the turn in the play, then, at a point where we imagine some time has elapsed after the nuns’ initial confiscation of the mansion, would suggest that it has been added to the structure as a security device to make the space better equipped to “harbour many holy nuns” (1.2.131). The modes of entrance that Barabas employs as he attempts to infiltrate the convent provide evidence of not only the space’s renovation but also his need to gain access by proxy. He first relies on Abigail posing as a convert to retrieve the riches still hidden in his former mansion. Then, once he has turned her against him, he relies instead on his new Turkish slave Ithamore, a man, to gain access to the nuns through the turn. Ithamore, at Barabas’s behest, passes through the turn the poisoned porridge that seals Abigail’s and her sisters’ tragic ends. The desire to penetrate or even destroy places associated with female monasticism is quite common in English Medieval and Renaissance narratives that focus on convents. Measure for Measure’s Angelo, for example, conflates his play’s convent space and novice figure when he exclaims of his desire for Isabella, “Having waste ground enough, / shall we desire to raze the sanctuary / And pitch our evils there?” (2.2.169). In many cases, these desires are heightened by the very fortifications constructed to shield nuns from them. The threat of invasion was pervasive and, as Eileen Power explains, “violent attacks at the hands of robbers, lawless neighbors, or enemies of the realm were only too com Hallet, Lives of Spirit, 16. Other convent historians detail the turn in their descriptions of monastic architecture in the wake of Reform movements and Tridentine demands for “clausura,” a strict enclosure of European nuns. See Claire Walker’s Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe and Elissa Weaver’s Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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Chapter 1: “Turn’d to a Nunnery”: Abigail’s Agency in The Jew of Malta

Figure 1: The turn at Our Lady of Nazareth Convent in Bruges. The Augustinian nuns at Nazareth are the only English community that has retained its convent from the exile period. (Photo courtesy of Our Lady of Nazareth Convent in Bruges. Photo by Sister Mary Aline.)

mon.”⁴ Locked doors, grates, and confessionals at once separate and titillate the individuals on either side. Barabas, in fact, uses the paradoxical effect associated with such fortifications to bolster Abigail’s suitors’ affections as he turns these friends against each other, as he prompts them to imagine turning her status from maid to wife by sexualizing her through tropes of enclosure. One can see this when, before he literally encloses his daughter in his new estate, he figuratively cloisters her in his suggestion to Matthias that “she locks herself up fast; / Yet through the keyhole will he [Lodowick] talk to her” (2.3.264– 65). The image he creates once again conflates his patriarchal space with a convent,

 Power, 422.

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Figure 2: This view of the turn, located next to a convent door inside Our Lady of Nazareth, provides a sense of scale. Turn sizes vary, and you can find larger examples in convents in Italy and Spain. (Photo courtesy of Our Lady of Nazareth Convent in Bruges. Photo by Sister Mary Aline.)

as he successfully manufactures a rivalry between the suitors and uses Abigail’s enclosure—and her putting out—to his own ends. Abigail’s retreat from the convent leads her directly back to a patriarchal space, as Barabas has secured a new mansion, the purchase of which we must assume she makes possible by retrieving his hidden riches. Her re-enclosure and the language Barabas uses as he makes her a party to his revenge plot against the Maltese officials, once again draw our attention to the similarities between her father’s mansion and the nunnery and to Abigail’s positions as object and agent in her father’s designs. Once Barabas has both gold and girl back under his own secular roof, he tries to reignite the desires first fired in Abigail’s potential suitors as they saw her enter the convent. But rather than focus on her freedom from the convent, Barabas retains the cloister’s titillating imagery to paint his daughter as a rich jewel enclosed in a little room and encourages both Matthias and Lodowick to pursue a nuptial fortune. He uses this imagery and his daughter to serve his turn upon the governor’s son Lodo-

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Chapter 1: “Turn’d to a Nunnery”: Abigail’s Agency in The Jew of Malta

wick, but once Abigail shows reservations and seems to turn away from her father’s plans and the role he has scripted for her, he literally cloisters her, commanding Ithamore to “put her in” (2.3.364). In the moments leading up to this new enclosure, Abigail questions her culpability in her father’s plot that has left her betrothed to both Matthias and Lodowick. Lodowick himself notes her altered state as he questions, “Why on the sudden is your colour changed?” (2.3.323). This query from Lodowick is enough for Barabas to demand his daughter’s silence. And Abigail’s subsequent “putting in” is his response to her refusal to remain a silent party to his scheme to turn the friends against each other, as she plans to “make ’em friends again” (2.3.329) and then asserts, “I will have Don Mathias, he is my love” (2.3.363). Her attempted agency and legitimate attachment to Mathias threaten Barabas’s plot and this moment is a turning point in the play, the experience that will lead her back to the convent as a form of resistance to her father’s plots, but also as evidence of her self-determination as an active subject. Kimberly Reigle also sees this return to the convent as an act of resistance. She puts The Jew of Malta into conversation with Measure for Measure, contending that both plays “depict women’s bodies, specifically virginal bodies, as commodities (quite literally diamonds and rubies) that are exchanged between men in the city.”⁵ In Abigail’s case, her “experiences with her father demonstrate that the safest place for a woman is behind the walls of a convent, for in the city, lies are told, she is silenced, and her virginal body is used as a vessel of revenge beyond her consent.”⁶ We can once again see the close ties between and conflation of Abigail and the convent in Barabas’s plots, but we can also read agency and resistance in the way Abigail navigates her own commodification and enclosure. If we look only at Barabas’s manipulations of monastic architecture, the security devices employed to divide and protect nuns from the world seem merely to amplify the vulnerabilities of the nuns and their convent space.⁷ However, if we focus on Abigail’s movements and motivations in terms of her own potential desires, despite her tragic ending, we might imagine the ways in which the turn enables us to envision a more positive outlook for women seeking professions

 Kimberly Reigle, “Staging the Convent as Resistance in The Jew of Malta and Measure for Measure,” Comparative Drama 4, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 505.  Reigle, 505.  For discussions focused on the architecture of monastic spaces, see Helen Hills, Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and the chapter “The Convents and Physical Space” in K. J. P. Lowe’s Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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other than marriage. Indeed, her movement between spaces and the potential power of this location exemplifies Homi Bhabha’s modern conception of engaging the borderline from the periphery; he argues that socially articulating difference is an “on-going negotiation,” especially in the midst of historical shifts and when articulated against tradition.⁸ Her subject position as a Jewish woman within a Catholic setting that is complicated by its own sociopolitical affairs sets her up to pressure the authorities that would seek to singularly define her in essentialist terms. The conversion process and the introduction of the turn, for Abigail specifically, come to reflect the novice’s own changes and maturation process over the course of the play, as she seeks to define herself in the midst of social conflicts and competing communal claims. For Marlowe’s novice, the material object of the turn enables her to separate herself from her father and his machinations, at least temporarily, as she chooses a different path. Sara Ahmed reminds us of the crucial role that material objects play in how individuals build identity because “to be orientated is also to be turned towards certain objects, those that help us find our way.”⁹ In this case, the crucial object operates as a marker for change, not only enabling Abigail’s transformation but also underscoring the transitional status of the novice. As the distinction blurs between her own turning and the turning of the object on the stage, the play performs the evocative process whereby, as Jane Bennett recently has put it, “human being and thinghood overlap.”¹⁰ Indeed, whether the turn is a physically rendered structure on the stage or simply imagined when invoked in dialogue, it would strike an English audience member as curiously out of place temporally. The structure, then, falls into that category of “untimely matter” that includes stage material that “encodes a variety of temporal relations between England and its supposedly noncoeval others.”¹¹ As an object that designates barriers between physical spaces and between temporal spaces, the turn creates an apparently safe distance between not only Abigail and her father but also between Marlowe’s audience members and a Catholic convert. However, the turn and novice also have the potential to revivify structures and identities that retain familiar resonance in early modern England and that would still be in play on the Continent.

 Bhabha, 3.  Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1.  Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 4.  Harris, 23.

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Continental English convents themselves served as structures that allowed exiled Englishwomen to create a combined community built on a shared faith and sense of national identity. While Malta did not host an English convent, Marlowe’s choice of a Catholic setting for his variously displaced characters reflects the much larger numbers of Europeans who became religious exiles during the early modern period. Claire Walker points to recent research that, in addition to a large number of exiled Calvinists, has “identified thousands of Catholic émigrés seeking respite in other territories, suggesting that despite confessional differences, early modern Europeans shared a similar experience of dislocation from their homelands for reasons of faith.”¹² As I have suggested in the Introduction, choosing to emigrate to a new land to retain ones religious practices was difficult and dangerous. Englishwomen and others living abroad naturally felt isolated, and as is the case in Marlowe’s fictionalized Malta, they could find themselves navigating a new state with just as many complicated socioeconomic and religious conflicts as the homeland they left behind. As historians including Walker and Caroline Bowden explain, English convents were concerned not only with keeping their religious faith but also with keeping their national identities as Englishwomen. One of the ways that they shored up these identities was by keeping the convents almost exclusively English in membership and through a self-fashioned community created through their various forms of life writings. Bowden explains that these writings contributed to a “construction of collective memory, reworking, compressing and moulding the written lives of individuals to create corporate identities in accordance with the rules and statutes governing convents.”¹³ The writings include obituaries and conversion narratives and provide us with insight into the way women religious perceived themselves as a sacred community. Considering this form of literary self-fashioning becomes important to our examination of how the turn might function in terms of agency, conversion, and community because of one exceptional story. While there are a number of narratives, real and literary, about young women who attempt to “turn” themselves into convents against their parents’ wishes—as Abigail does in her final turn—often to avoid a forced marriage or out of a genuine desire for a religious vocation, one real-life example stands out for the way the turn lent itself to a dramatic form of agency. Chronicled in a collection of seventeenth-century English Carmelites’ posthumous life writings, Agnes Roosendaell, a native of Antwerp,

 Claire Walker, “The Experience of Exile in Early Modern English Convents,” Parergon 34, no. 2 (2017): 160.  Bowden, “Collecting,” 11.

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escaped her family, who had literally imprisoned her in their house after her several attempts to enter the convent instead of entering into a forced marriage. She would not be stopped. According to the surviving text, as Agnes contemplated another convent entrance attempt: A thought cast it self into her mind, that her only way would be to convey herself into the turn, and by that means to wind herself into the monastery without the privity of any creature in the whole world … that the Rd Mother and religious would be moved to take compassion of her when they saw what a shift she had made to get in. And now putting her self upon the exploit, and having laid her upper garments aside, [she] croweded herself into the turn, which yet she did with difficulty enough because the place is incommodious and straight, and tho she were but 16 years of age and farr from being of full growth att that time, yet she made a hard shift, and turned herself in.¹⁴

Placed next to stories of passive young women pushed into convents by their families, Agnes’s narrative is action packed. She does not simply enter the convent against her parents’ wishes but must, with extreme difficulty, “wind herself into” the cloistered space. The turn itself plays a pivotal role in her active choice to enter the convent and it certainly adds to the comic scene of her struggle to “[turn] herself in” to the fortified enclosure. Agnes’s plan works, as the reportedly surprised nuns ultimately admit the half-naked girl into their convent. Her convent admission was unique because she was not English, but her extraordinary drive to gain entrance won over the Englishwomen within the convent walls and suggests the potential of bringing strangers together through a shared sense of faith and resistance from the outside world, as we see in Marlowe’s earlier literary rendering and in the fact that the English Carmelites choose to include this story in their self-crafted representation of their religious community. Agnes’s story not only puts a positive spin on the notion of turning oneself in but also clearly serves as an inspirational story about the importance of alternatives to marriage for Englishwomen following the closure of England’s convents. For while there are certainly stories of young women, especially younger sisters, forced into European convents against their will, for some women, this form of enclosure could still be an opening.

Conversion: New Identities and New Knowledges For English women who chose to continue their professions and/or adhere to Catholicism after the Protestant Reformation and the monastic dissolutions,  Quoted in Hallett, Lives of Spirit, 80.

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the decision to enter a convent was, as I have suggested above, often a difficult project equal to Sr. Agnes’s struggles with the turn. Unlike Catholic countries on the Continent, in which convents were more readily accessible to young women whether they desired entrance into them or not, England’s Catholic recusants had to break the law to smuggle themselves or their female relatives out of the country and into convents in foreign lands. As Patricia Crawford explains, a woman’s decision “was influenced by many factors, including family of origin, marriage, social situation, and their neighbourhoods, their own individual choice and conscience played a major role.”¹⁵ Once again, the convent thus constitutes a site of self-fashioning and self-actualization rather than simply a space of confinement and restriction; to adhere to the old faith requires new spaces, new strategies, and new resourcefulness. In Marlowe’s Malta with its network of religious others, this is complicated as old faith and old spaces are brought together to make new communities that displace those that adhere to other old faiths as we find Catholics situated among Jews and Turks. The complicated nature of conversion in The Jew of Malta materializes with the appearance of the turn. The rotating device emphasizes the very notion of turning as a multivalent enterprise that may look different depending on the direction of exchange, who turns or is turned, and the circumstances under which this shift in place or allegiance is catalyzed. The word “turn” itself appears throughout this play, and its usage can be divided into two general, interconnected meanings. In its verb form, “turning” denotes conversion or shifting, while as a noun a “turn” is a strategic device.¹⁶ Beginning with conversion, the play’s examples include material changes as when Barabas’s mansion is ordered to be “turn’d to a nunnery” in the first act, and when later the Bashaw threatens to “turn proud Malta into a wilderness” (3.5.25) if it does not pay a tithe to his Turkish army. While the latter example is a metaphor for the battle-induced razing

 Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500 – 1720 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 59.  The OED’s definitions support the play’s usage of the term. Indeed, in older definitions both the verb and noun forms specifically liken the rotations associated with turning to the movements of a wheel; (n.) “The action of turning about an axis or centre, as a wheel; rotation, revolution” (1.1) and “An act of turning; a movement of rotation (total or partial); esp. a single revolution, as of a wheel” (1.2). For my purposes, the second definition’s note that the term is especially related to “a single revolution” seems to align with the desire for turning to be a limited rather than a repeated process. Such a definition would seek to erase the possibility of returns and the kind of backsliding that we might see implicated and feared in cases of religious conversion. Moreover, the verb form not only denotes actions of revolution but also can mean “To form or shape by rotation, and derived senses” (2.4). In many ways, this meaning resonates with Abigail’s character formation throughout the play; her turns shape her final character.

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of a city, both connotations suggest a change in material structures, a change that for the mansion-turned-nunnery is signaled by the introduction of the monastic wheel. The other conversion references associated with turning are more complicated, as they suggest a less tangible or legible process of spiritual, religious, or sexual conversion. In the beginning of the play, Barabas suggests he “will be no convertite” (1.2.83), yet he does later ask, “Is’t not too late now to turn Christian?” (4.1.50) before once again divulging his stubborn refusal to convert. James Shapiro and other critics of the play have noted the negative religious and racial implications of “turning,” particularly in relation to the notion of “turning Turk,” or converting to Islam.¹⁷ “Turning” also carries sexual connotations during the period, as one can see when Othello uses the term to describe Desdemona’s imagined promiscuity and infidelity, as he demands of Lodovico: Ay, you did wish that I would make her turn. Sir, she can turn and turn, and yet go on And turn again. (4.1.249 – 51)¹⁸

These religious, racial, and sexual connotations evoked by the word “turn” and the notion of “turning” are important to my discussion of Abigail’s position as a woman between institutions both figurative and literal, especially as she is presented with Christian suitors and the convent as an alternative to marriage. While I draw on this discussion of turning, I want to add to it a serious consideration of the material object and its movement, which bring together the meanings of the turn as conversion and device. In this play, conversion becomes a strategy for recovery and revenge as Abigail is employed to feign religious conversion to enter the convent and recover her father’s riches, and the monastic wheel then becomes the means for the destruction of the novice as the device is used to pass poisoned porridge into the convent. As a willing accessory and then a resistant agent to her father’s designs, Abigail herself embodies the movement of the turn, as she rotates between allegiances and navigates her complex identities throughout her narrative. By itself, the act of turning suggests a fairly sim-

 James Shapiro discusses examples of turning related to conversion in his chapter “The Hebrew Will Turn Christian,” in Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Also see Daniel Vitkus’s chapter “Machiavellian Merchants: Italians, Jews, and Turks,” in Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).  William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997).

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ple movement from one place or direction to another, from one ideology to another, or from one lover to another. The architectural feature, however, rotates and allows us to imagine the possibility of a more reciprocal exchange between places, ideologies, and even lovers. The physicality of this exchange particularly when tied to the material device also plays into the potential staging of novices like Abigail, as we picture them centrally occupying a stage between opposing structures. We can also imagine staged turning for characters such as Shakespeare’s Isabella in Measure for Measure, who is positioned between a duke’s palace and her convent. As we will see in the next chapter, her silence in the final scene renders her movements imperative to our reading of her choice or lack thereof at the play’s conclusion. The monastic turn, then, especially when considered in conjunction with the novice, becomes what Bhabha might describe as “an interstitial passage between fixed identifications”—insider/outsider, Catholic/Jew/Turk, woman/man, native/stranger—it symbolically represents the potential for hybridity, for acknowledging these differences that combined can push against existing binaries and definitions.¹⁹ The back and forth enabled by the turn, combined with its refusal of fixity, links it to a phase that is perpetually liminal. While one can turn from one direction to another, one can also return and, as Othello suggests, “turn and turn again,” just as Abigail returns to the mansion-turned-nunnery on more than one occasion. Further, the idea that someone might return or backslide becomes the cause for considerable anxiety for characters in Marlowe’s play, and, one might imagine, for certain audience members as well. Even as this prospect of backsliding may have provoked anxiety for some, the way Abigail moves back and forth may have also allowed a post-Reformation English audience to imagine a time when a novice might have more than one direction in which to turn when the convent was a viable alternative to marriage. Her movements may also have recalled a time when audience members’ own options looked very different. They too, it is important to remember, had been turned to a new religion and new allegiances in recent history. The relocation of the convent onto the English stage allows one to imagine the type of agency that a wider spectrum of life options might enable, and Abigail embodies this agency much as the convent gives it form. However, like the shifts brought about by the Protestant Reformation, the exchanges involved in formulating agency are far from clear-cut. Abigail not only turns but also is turned throughout the play. She is both an active agent in and an object of revenge, as her father uses her to “serve his turn” on those who have thrust him

 Bhabha, 5.

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out of his mansion.²⁰ This is evident in the second scene of the play, when she willingly takes part in her father’s plot. Yet, in doing so she casts herself as an object of displacement. In this scene, Abigail introduces herself to the nuns traveling en route to their new-made nunnery. She focuses on her father’s former estate to define herself as “the hopeless daughter of a hapless Jew” who was “sometimes the owner of a goodly house, / Which they have now turned to a nunnery” (1.2.316 – 19). Her autobiography positions her father’s “goodly house … turned nunnery” as a kind of patrimony and instantly connects her to the nuns who have themselves been displaced in the play. The major difference is that the nuns have a place to go, while Abigail, as she previously asserts, has been displaced through the confiscation and repurposing of her father’s mansion. Moreover, the condition of the space as “turned to a nunnery” resonates with Abigail’s own covert mission, “turned” by her father into a dissembler in order to retrieve his hidden goods from the mansion. Abigail’s turning out of her childhood home at this early point is only the beginning of her complicated movement and positioning in the play. After she is forced out of her father’s house, she reenters the mansion-turned-convent not once but twice. The first time she briefly poses as a religious convert intent on becoming a nun as a ploy to retrieve Barabas’s hidden riches. Once successful, she quickly flees. She then enters the convent again after her father pits her Christian suitors against each other, and both suitors die as a result. The converted building is clearly integral to Abigail’s movement throughout the play. Unfortunately, her final return to the nunnery, a turn brought about by her father’s orchestration of her favorite suitor’s murder, acts as a catalyst for the play and her plot to take a tragic turn. Abigail’s tragic trajectory, however, also reminds us that early modern women may have had multiple motives for entering or rejecting options prescribed for them.

 Many critics read Abigail as a mere pawn in her father’s plots, and her final turn away from him and back to the convent as an act of regression rather than agency. For Ian McAdam, the return to her former home-turned-convent is a form of retreat not only because of the convent’s “hypocritical nature” but also because this move “involves a denial of her need to cultivate an identity in the world.” Ian McAdam, The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 1999), 169. Jeremy Tambling sees Abigail’s return to the convent as an exchange of one patriarchal system for another, while Troni Grande locates Abigail in Malta’s “hollow” core, forced to navigate the “fatal Labyrinth of misbelief” that leads her to the convent. Jeremy Tambling, “Abigail’s Party,” in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1991), 107 and Troni Y. Grande, Marlovian Tragedy: The Play of Dilation (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1999), 16.

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By the end of the play, Abigail’s motivations for entering the convent become as layered as the building itself; both girl and building obscure legibility by harboring secrets behind converted façades. While we imagine that the process of enclosure that Abigail alludes to in her description of her displacement by nuns would necessarily result in an overlap of secular and religious features, the converted space, even at the point of its initial confiscation, proves to be a kind of palimpsest. It bears a new name and set of signifiers, but it retains hidden spaces and traces of the former Jewish occupants. Andrew Hiscock describes the house as having “a maze-like structure: it encloses a host of recesses designed as forms of resistance against the outside world.”²¹ What Hiscock attributes to the Jewish merchant’s need to demarcate an individual and intricately privatized space amid the play’s chaotic urban setting might also be read in relation to the history of Catholicism’s architecturally protected secrets. While nested recesses and fortifications suggest an easy translation of mansion to convent building, the hidden Jewish remains connect the mansion to Catholic domestic spaces in England as well, where one might find priest holes and other secret places that could hide religious relics, the material and symbolic remains they have been forced to closet during the Protestant Reformation, and might harbor priests as the convent promises to harbor nuns.²² These associations would once again align these Jewish figures with England’s Catholics.²³ As the space begins to change, at least in name, Abigail herself becomes a kind of relic of its Jewish past, conflated with the riches that her father sends her back to her former estate to recover. Barabas sets up this ghostly image as he mourns his “former riches” as “But bare remembrance; like a soldier’s scar” (2.1.10). And before he and Abigail acknowledge each other in the play’s balcony scene, he remembers: those old women’s words, Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales,

 Andrew Hiscock, The Uses of This World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), 55.  On secret Catholic spaces, particularly priest-holes, see Michael Hodgetts, Secret HidingPlaces (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1989) and “Loca Secretiora in 1581,” Recusant History 19 (1989): 386 – 95. Also see Julian Yates, “Parasitic Geographies: Manifesting Catholic Identity in Early Modern England,” in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 63 – 84.  Emily Bartels emphasizes this “strange” population in her assessment that “everyone—from the Christians and Jews, to the Italians and Turks—seems to be a stranger.” See Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 91.

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And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night And now methinks that I am one of those: For whilst I live, here lives my soul’s sole hope, And when I die, here shall my spirit walk. (2.1.24– 30)

In these lines, delivered while Abigail stands on the balcony holding her father’s recovered riches, ready to lower them to him, Barabas reminds the audience that the new convent still retains signs of his original ownership and in this moment these remnants are both his jewels and his daughter. His “soul’s sole hope” is visually represented for the audience as both the riches and his daughter who has become the vehicle for their restoration, a conflation that is then echoed in Barabas’s famous exclamations, “oh girl, oh gold, oh beauty, oh my bliss!” (2.1.55) as she throws his fortune down to him. When combined with this image of his spirit walking, Barabas’s phrase contemplates how walking and, in this case, poetic feet become the means by which one’s soul might turn. His allusion to himself as a “spirit or ghost” suggests another form of turning in the transition from life to death, or a liminal space between these two stages. In this instance he reminds us that he is tied to the space because part of him, his fortune, remains behind, yet Abigail haunts the house and remains behind in this early scene, if only for a brief moment. This move is anticipated in his alliterative apostrophe as his girl is easily supplanted by his gold; even in his poetic turns, she is left behind. Barabas’s haunting by proxy also foreshadows Abigail’s murder in the same building, as her father leaves her to haunt the space permanently. This negative result of conversion made possible by the mechanisms of the turn puts pressure on the idea of conversion and how we read converts and characters more generally in this play. Abigail’s position as a novice, one yet unsworn or affiliated with one institution, makes her a particularly slippery figure and her ability to move between spaces exemplifies the anxieties surrounding the identities and allegiances of converts and strangers in Malta’s diverse population, but also in post-Reformation England. She haunts the play and its enclosures much as we might imagine those not fully converted after the Protestant Reformation would inhabit the English landscape. Her motives remain questionable throughout the play and she might easily become a figure of equivocation in the midst of her own converted landscape. The adaptability that her status—or lack thereof— allows is only amplified by her initial displacement. For, while both father and daughter become victims of the state’s confiscation of the mansion, it seems that Abigail is more “put out” by this sentence. Our first introduction to Abigail comes only moments after the seizure of Barabas’s mansion, yet already she is homeless and left to report the impending

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conversion of her former residence, where she “left the Governor placing nuns, / displacing me” (1.2.254– 55). In the very way that the “placing” of the nuns displaces Abigail, one can sense a revolving quality in this central space that prefigures the way it will transform throughout the play as it converts from mansion to convent to mausoleum. In fact, Abigail’s report aligns her with the nuns as its rhetorical structure positions them as objects, pieces of furniture to be swapped as the city leaders demand the mansion’s renovation. Once inside the mansion, the nuns, unlike Abigail, remain cloistered and unseen for the play’s duration. While similarly linked to objectification and ultimately victimization, Abigail’s displacement complicates her role in the play, as it simultaneously renders her an object and allows her to be an agent. Yet, as an agent of her father’s bidding, she becomes an instrument of his revenge.

Slippery Legibility: Abigail’s Agency and Otherness The play’s reversal of the historical conversion of monastic lands to private estates complicates the dislocation of Barabas and Abigail, who could be linked both to London’s foreign strangers and its disinherited Catholic Others—the very nuns who are replacing them in the mansion—as those who straddle the statuses of foreign and familiar. Many critics have suggested a direct correlation between the Maltese state’s seizure of Barabas’s mansion and the English government’s demand for similar concessions from “‘merchant strangers’ in London to prepare for hostilities with Spain” in the late 1580s when The Jew of Malta was first performed.²⁴ The invocation of “merchant strangers” makes the connection to a Jewish merchant such as Barabas simple enough, but Simon Shepherd creates a more complicated association by alluding to the 1585 subsidy debate and notes “that popish recusants pay double rates as ‘strangers’ did.”²⁵ Such a statement aligns a merchant stranger such as Barabas with resident Catholics who were considerably more familiar to Marlowe’s Protestant audience members.²⁶ In fact, this connection between a displaced stranger and a recusant Catholic

 Hiscock, Uses of This World, 54.  Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press, 1986), 170.  A decade after the first performances of Marlowe’s play, we see Shakespeare amplify this merchant stranger figure in Shylock, his villainous creditor. Much like Abigail, Jessica in The Merchant of Venice is a questionable candidate for conversion. While the Christians in Shakespeare’s play enjoy a comic ending, it remains unclear if Jessica enjoys the easy conversion she imagines marrying a Christian will secure.

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reaches beyond the subsidy debates sparked by the threat of a Spanish invasion that looms over the play’s initial performances. Protestant spectators and readers might see the ironic structural similarities between the conversion of Barabas’s private estate into a female monastic space and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, during which monastic properties were seized primarily to pay off royal debts and then often converted to noble estates.²⁷ The play’s reversal of the trajectory of the monastic dissolution adds yet another layer to the possible associations for members of an English audience, for while they may see themselves in the depiction of a Malta threatened by foreign armies, Malta is still a Catholic place. And, while Spaniard and Turk might be interchangeable as foreign threats, so too might Spaniard and nun as Catholic opponents to a Protestant state. If Marlowe’s audience members did identify with the Maltese state as they viewed this play, the nuns’ repurposing of the convent might just suggest the kind of religious turn or “re-turn” that a Catholic Spanish invasion threatened to bring about. This is further complicated when one considers that Marranos—Jewish converts in Portugal and Spain—were thought to be connected to the Catholics in their countries as threats to England during this period.²⁸ My hypothesis of a complicated layering of associations instantiates Jeremy Tambling’s suggestion that “the stranger in Elizabethan drama cannot be taken univocally: the figure frustrates clear lines of division.”²⁹ The complication of the “stranger” status is certainly amplified in a play where “everyone—from the Christians and Jews, to the Italians and Turks—seems to be a stranger,” as Emily Bartels argues; “For to be ‘of Malta’ really means not to be, originally, of Malta.”³⁰ Yet, despite the lack of Maltese natives in the play, some characters still seem to be marked as stranger than others through their dislocation. Indeed, what complicates and perhaps necessitates the distinctions between strangers is the acknowledged similarities among “religions of the book.” As Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield remind us, early modern European authors and audiences were distinctly aware of the common ground  Julia Reinhard Lupton also connects the play’s mansion conversion to the monastic dissolutions, and reminds the reader that the dissolution would have included “urban and suburban monastic holdings (liberties) on which some of London’s public theaters, such as Blackfriars,” would have been constructed (69). See Lupton’s chapter “Marlowe’s Jew of Malta,” in Citizen Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).  For detailed discussions of Marranos as depicted in English Renaissance drama see Shapiro’s Shakespeare and the Jews and Lara Bovilsky’s chapter “Exemplary Jews and the Logic of Gentility,” in Barbarous Play: Race on the Renaissance Stage (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).  Tambling, 99.  Bartels, 91.

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among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. They aver that “the relationship between Christianity and Judaism was more intimate and consequently more fraught,” than the connection between Christianity and Islam but that the “same paradigms existed” in which common ground and religious language fostered “rivalry, suspicion, and hostility” among these religions.³¹ Citing exchanges involving scriptural interpretation between Antonio and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Dimmock and Hadfield concur, “what no Christian audience could have failed to realise was that Christians themselves were divided over exactly the same sorts of issues.”³² Malta’s dislocated figures, then, and the converted convent that remains as a material monument of such displacements haunt the play’s landscape and likely, by extension, the imaginations of English audience members. The threats of these common strangers can be seen as simultaneously foreign and familiar, displaced contemporary figures as well as remnants of England’s past. The mansion-turned-nunnery, in particular, and the effects of its conversion on Abigail and her plot, highlight the possibility of reversion or return, movements that refuse clear categorization and chronology. Abigail’s roles as agent and object of revenge are further complicated by her affiliation with a nexus of marginalized identities that render her illegible and arguably add to her ghostly ability to navigate the play’s enclosures. In Abigail, three identities that might fall under the category of “other” or “stranger”— Jew, Catholic, and woman—are brought together. This type of slippery identity creates an ambivalent subject position that we will see at the heart of the next chapter and in Isabella’s identity in Measure for Measure. The combined identities seem symbiotically connected in their marginalization and yet fundamentally opposed to each other. As I have suggested, the Jew and the Catholic are brought together in the play through the mansion-turned-convent and the competing narratives of dissolution and displacement. For Marlowe’s audience members connections between these groups would have resonated with the conspiracies surrounding Elizabeth’s Doctor Lopez and the Babington plot; as Arata Ide contends, “Catholics were easily associated with Jews under circumstances in which there was much popular sentiment against Spain and Roman Catholicism.”³³

 Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield, “Introduction: The Devil Citing Scripture: Christian Perceptions of the Religions of the Book,” in The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400 – 1660, ed. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 3.  Dimmock and Hadfield, 5.  Arata Ide, “The Jew of Malta and the Diabolic Power of Theatrics in the 1580s,” Studies in English Literature 46, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 261– 62. Margaret Ferguson also reminds us that during

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Abigail’s gender identity additionally complicates her marginalization. It at once allows her to surpass her father in terms of mobility and renders her even more suspect and dangerous than if she were a male with a similarly slippery identity. Her gender allows her convent entrance, yet her ability to enter this Catholic space is not the only way that her gender connects her to a religion that, even in its similarities, seems almost diametrically opposed to her status as a Jew. As Frances Dolan puts it, “Constructions of Catholics as both dangerously strange and intimately familiar—foreign and local—ally them to women, who like Catholics, tend to defy definition or category.”³⁴ Abigail seems to embody these connections, as she uses her multiple identities to navigate her play’s landscape and to work as an agent in her father’s plots. Furthermore, her overarching status as a novice enables her to try on different roles or habits, and this fluidity helps her adapt to Malta’s ever-changing landscape and makes her a dangerous figure to those seeking to stabilize a sense of dominant power in the play. As a Jewish daughter, Abigail is conspicuous because her status is seemingly paradoxical. While Jews and women have historically been conflated as effeminized Others, scholars including Shapiro and Matthew Biberman both argue that Jewish women cannot signify as Jewish in early modern culture because they are not marked through circumcision as their male relatives would be.³⁵ The inability to read female identity, then, becomes the impetus to depict the conversion, by way of either marriage or monastic vows, of Jewish female characters. Given the overarching vilification of Jews in England in the 1590s and emerging racial ideologies within the Christian world, Abigail, like Jessica in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, has a difficult time separating herself from her father and the bloodline they share. Lara Bovilsky argues that the common flesh, blood, and spirit shared between parent and child are not easily severed by a religious turn.³⁶ This is certainly true of Abigail, whose connections to her father and his patriarchal households seem to mark her throughout the play, however faintly. Her turns and returns between Jewish and Catholic spaces or institutions connect her to Marranos, who, Bovilsky explains, “provoked fears … of a hidden, treasonous interiority” behind an outwardly adherent Christian persona.³⁷ Furthermore,

James’s reign “both Jews and Catholics were frequently excoriated as inherently untrustworthy enemies of the English body politic.” See Dido’s Daughters (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 267.  Dolan, “Gender and the Lost Spaces of Catholicism,” 643 – 44  Matthew Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 55.  Bovilsky, 83.  Bovilsky, 82.

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her turns never seem complete and often raise suspicions. Even when the play presents her as sincere, she retains traces of her past, much like the building where she begins and ends her narrative trajectory. She can turn and turn again, but she cannot change her blood. The changeability of conversion, especially in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, may have induced anxieties among some English audience members. Thus they may have been drawn to and found comfort in the “inconvertible” Jewish figure. The church itself had gone through dizzying turns within a generation and with serious consequences, and in this context, Brett Hirsch contends that the “figure of the Jew—fixed and unchanging, unaffected by conversion—projected the desire for stability in religious identity during a time of uncertainty.”³⁸ What I find troubling about this formulation is the projection of desire onto a seemingly unified audience. As Hirsch suggests, this is a community of people who have gone through a religious tennis match of Catholic and Protestant affiliations with life-and-death consequences for the losing team. But, as I have argued in the Introduction, this process of reform was at once messy and incomplete. The ability to easily identify a Jew, converted or not, might not be a positive desire for “former” Catholics who might see themselves reflected in this demonized Other. While the instability afforded a character such as Abigail would have likely been unsettling to a large number of audience members, she might also become a model of hope for those who had been forced to hide their own affiliations and desires to survive in a post-Reformation world. The problems associated with Jewish women can be tied directly to issues of legibility. Abigail, particularly, is imagined by male characters as a text to be acquired and interpreted. While her Christian suitors figure her as a textual acquisition, Barabas imagines that only he can accurately read his daughter’s body, which Michelle Ephraim aptly describes as “the elusive scripture, a thing of value to be protected”—especially as Abigail moves between her roles as devout novitiate and “lustful maiden.”³⁹ Yet, as Reigle reminds us, in Barabas’s early conflation of his daughter with his hidden treasure and his use of the phrase “infinite riches in a little room,” he conflates his mansion and Abigail with the Virgin Mary in an allegorical allusion to Christ in the womb, setting us up to read her death at the end as a form of Christian martyrdom. Reading of the

 Brett D. Hirsch, “Counterfeit Professions: Jewish Daughters and the Drama of Failed Conversion in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice,” Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 19, no. 4 (2009): 1– 37, http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-19/hirscoun. html.  Michelle Ephraim, Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 114.

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Jewish daughter as illicit text only legible to her Jewish father once again connects her to Catholics and reiterates the Jew-Catholic-woman triumvirate in these groups’ shared reputations as bearers and readers of “illicit knowledges.”⁴⁰ However, it also shows once again the common scriptural roots that here create hidden messages and open Abigail up to become a figure of Christian redemption. For my purposes, Ephraim’s figuration ties Abigail back to the mechanics of the turn, a feature specifically designed to control enclosure and disclosure as it allows items in and out of the convent, both enabling and limiting visual and bodily exchanges between those on either side of its revolving door. Before Abigail’s knowledge becomes a threat to Barabas and he uses the turn against her, he clearly capitalizes on her illegibility and tries to control the way others—nuns, priests, suitors—read her. Abigail’s multiple identity options, then, make her a figure both useful and potentially dangerous, much like the wheel and the convent building to which it is attached.

Reform, Resistance, and Returns Barabas reacts to his daughter’s conversion as a treasonous affront and suspects that, if “she varies from [him] in belief” (3.4.10), she may also reveal his treacherous deeds. He then uses his knowledge of the space, and one of its security features, to penetrate and haunt its “maze-like” passages by way of poisonous proxy (more specifically porridge). While we would expect Barabas to have intimate knowledge of features original to his mansion, his description of the “dark entry way” suggests that he also has detailed information about the convent’s security features that we must imagine have been added to the building during its renovation. His instructions to the slave Ithamore about using this mechanism to deliver the porridge with which he will poison his daughter and her religious sisters, then, show his cunning and knowledge of the “turned” space. However, these instructions also might remind English audience members of former Catholic customs and a feature of monastic architecture that had been lost or hidden during the Protestant Reformation. In a more basic sense, Barabas’s plot to use the convent’s security devices to serve his turn upon his own daughter and the community that has harbored her emphasizes his fear that she will turn on him and divulge his tortuous plots.

 Margaret Ferguson also adds educated women to her discussion of a Catholic–Jewish nexus, as all are figures associated with “illicit transmission of illicit knowledges” (Dido’s Daughters, 267).

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The resemblance of Abigail’s movements throughout the play to the rotation of the turn produces anxiety in both of the novice’s father figures—Barabas and Friar Jacomo—as she attempts her final convent entrance. While Barabas worries that she will reveal his part in the murders of Lodovick and Matthias, an anxiety actualized on Abigail’s deathbed, the friar questions Abigail’s sincerity in this second conversion. At this point, she has already entered and forsaken the convent once. Both men fear the potential of return, be it retribution or backsliding, as they implicitly associate Abigail with a revolving door that cannot be controlled. Her mobility and role as double agent throughout the play make her conversion questionable. Shapiro suggests that such “dizzying turns” created a suspicion of apostasy, “that lurking within every earnest Jewish convert to the Christian faith is an apostate, counterfeit Christian.”⁴¹ Such a stigma may have been a product of a tradition of Marranos dissimulating conversion, and the performance of conversion in the context of a theatrical production may have further underscored the potential for inauthentic claims to new faith. And Abigail, by this point in the play, has tried on and put off several identities ranging from Jewish daughter to monastic convert to Christian wife before settling back on a religious vocation. Because of the fraudulent nature of Abigail’s initial religious conversion and her coerced betrothal to Lodovick, it is not unusual that her final choice to enter the convent raises questions about the authenticity of this identarian choice, especially when we consider that it is a move likely motivated by the frustration of a marriage to her “true” love Matthias, an alliance that also would have arguably secured a Christian conversion.⁴² The very way the friar uses Abigail’s past to question her true devotion to a life of religious seclusion suggests that she cannot so easily leave her Jewish lineage behind. Further, the friar’s critical response

 Shapiro, 155 – 56.  In her discussion of Jessica in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Janet Adelman emphasizes the importance of blood lineage and an increasing sense of national identity that would render Christian conversion through marriage for Jews a fraught endeavor. She reminds us that Jessica’s conversion is never completed in the play and also notes the ways in which Jessica is often othered by the play’s Christian characters. See Janet Adelman, “Her Father’s Blood: Race, Conversion, and Nation in The Merchant of Venice,” Representations 81, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 4– 30. Mary Janell Metzger also points to the importance of race in a post-Reformation England that hinged on the promise of conversion. She argues that considering Jessica and gender alongside class and religion allows us to see the way “the problem of the Jew in Christian England intersected with an emerging ideology of race to affirm a notion of English identity in which color, nation, and class converged.” Mary Janell Metzger, “‘Now by My Hood, a Gentile and No Jew’: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern Identity,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998): 53.

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suggests that if she can return, she may also backslide. And her father and her former identity will continue to haunt her, and the convent as she chooses to return to it. Abigail’s questionable conversion is reflected in the play as the religious sanctuary turns from a place of “harbour” to a space conspicuously violable. The characters in Marlowe’s Malta invoke Protestant rhetoric to demonize the new nunnery and its religious inhabitants, and Barabas depicts it as a den of fornication when he alludes to interactions between nuns and friars, who, “not idle, but still doing” (2.3.84), manage despite their vows of chastity to “increase and multiply” (2.3.90). This particular convent depiction resembles the problematic portrayal of convents in other plays such as Measure for Measure and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. They are at once havens for innocents (who tend to be in short supply) and places for pretend innocents to hide from their indiscretions. Just as a young novice, such as Abigail, might seek refuge within the confines of the convent, so too might the less innocent. However, the latter are disproportionately highlighted within early modern plays and indeed by modern critics who often discount convents as viable alternatives to marriage. The continued negative assessment of the convent as a choice for young women could be due in part to lingering anti-Catholicism, and in part to a limited understanding of the complexities of post-Reformation convents and the alternatives they provided for women. While the play certainly supports such a reading of the convent, the negative associations tied to the space are largely provided by Barabas, the owner of the mansion-turned-nunnery and author of the most deceitful actions in the play. If we turn from the polemical descriptions of convents, or at least look at alternative views of post-Reformation convents, we might find that in some ways such a “harbour” could provide a positive sanctuary and adult identity for women who desired an option outside the institutional boundaries of marriage. Furthermore, one must consider the reasons particular novices had for entering convents and the way individual convents were managed to get a more complete picture of post-Reformation monastic life. For Abigail, the convent looks like a safe harbor from the manipulative schemes of her father. And if we look at her return to this space as a retreat from the experience and grief that Ian McAdam marks as necessary elements for human development, then perhaps she does refuse an adult identity.⁴³ However, I question what such an identity would look like, particularly in Marlowe’s Malta. Even if Abigail were to go out on her own in the world, it seems she would still resist clear categorization.

 McAdam, 169.

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Chapter 1: “Turn’d to a Nunnery”: Abigail’s Agency in The Jew of Malta

The alternatives to the convent seem to be either a traditional marital path, a choice already once foreclosed for this novice, or life as a single woman, a status potentially even more vexed than that of a nun during the early modern period.⁴⁴ We will see these limited options outlined throughout this study, and perhaps most explicitly in chapter 5 where Aphra Behn’s precocious novice Hellena prefers to imagine her sister a nursemaid to lepers than a forced bride. The power and danger of Abigail’s character lie in her slippery illegibility and her potential to turn in more ways than one, to plot her own course. The real issue, then, is an inability to read Abigail, an issue addressed by Friar Jacomo when she seeks reentrance. Like the convent nuns, who are largely a mystery throughout the play because they are hidden behind convent doors, Abigail remains a mysterious figure of questionable identity even in her final role as sacrificed daughter and potential Christian martyr. Abigail’s final decision to turn back to the convent is a tragic one, but not, as the characters in the play, early Protestant polemicists, and even many modern critics of the play might have us believe, because a convent is invariably a tragic outcome for a novice. Her return to the convent, despite her limited options, is an active choice, which is turned tragic by her father’s knowledge of the converted space and his fear of his converted daughter turning against him and divulging his secrets. Her movements and ability to play different roles that once served Barabas so well now become dangerous because she has the power to turn the tables on him and use her illicit knowledge of his schemes to make him legible to the Maltese state. Where he once sought to control access to her body through literal and figurative forms of enclosure, he ultimately seeks to use the same forms of access to close her down, significantly attempting to stop her mouth by infiltrating the convent device that regulates the transmission of food and conversation into the enclosed sanctuary. In fact, despite the tragic outcome of Abigail’s final turn to the nunnery, the extreme measures her father takes to ensure her body’s regulation show power in her final choice to turn away from him and turn herself in to her former residence. If, as I suggest, we choose to read the play as something other than a straight tragedy, we must recognize how the architectural features of the convent’s renovation not only enable Abigail’s religious conversion but also restructure the space so that it might foster forms of legitimate agency.  On the status of the single-woman, see Amy Froide’s Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Natasha Korda’s chapter “Singlewomen and Poverty in Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 159 – 91.

Chapter 2: Two Houses Both Alike: Walls and Women in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure The production is flourish-filled. To distraction. Yet the final tableau is utterly telling. It has become usual for Isabella to look aghast when the Duke tells her she will be shackled to him for life. Hill-Gibbins goes further. The Duke lines up the whole cast in pairs, as if at some terrible team-picking event. Everybody looks hangdog, awkward or appalled. Order may have been restored but happiness has been banished.¹

Susannah Clapp’s review of Joe Hill-Gibbins’s notoriously radical 2015 production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Young Vic Theatre highlights the problems that face any performance’s rendering of the play’s final scene. Originally listed under Shakespeare’s comedies, the play should end in marriage and it does, but as this description above suggests, the matches ordered by the Duke are far from felicitous and thus aligning the play more clearly with its current designation as a “problem” play. The clown Lucio is forced to marry a sex worker; Angelo must marry the fiancée he once jilted; and, perhaps most shockingly, the novice nun Isabella is expected to pair off with the Duke himself. The particular problem of pairing Isabella, the woman on the verge of taking her convent vows at the beginning of the play, with its representative of secular authority (who up to this point has disguised himself as a friar) is amplified by Isabella’s silence in response to the Duke’s marriage proposal. While almost all productions pause over this silence, some check it with revelry and comic dancing and others, especially more recent productions, as Clapp suggests, play up Isabella’s potential dismay at the thought of trading religious vows for wedding vows. Clapp’s implication that accepting the Duke’s marriage proposal is a form of imprisonment stands in opposition to those critics that see Isabella’s original choice of a convent life as a more explicit form of shackling. Her scripted silence makes it difficult to discern which option—convent or marriage—is more punitive. However, perhaps this impetus to read her choice as the lesser of two evils rather than as a real choice that assumes positive attributes of both convent and palace unfairly restricts our ability to read agency in her position at the play’s conclusion. The play’s preoccupation with substitutions and inequitable

 Susannah Clapp, “Measure for Measure Review: A 21st-Century Vision of a Medieval Hell,” The Guardian, October 18, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/oct/18/measure-for-mea sure-review-young-vic-romola-garai. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343-005

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exchanges sets us up for the more restrictive reading; however, even in the negative pairings attributed to Hill-Gibbins’s production, we get the sense that there is an attempt to balance the scales of justice at the play’s end, and Isabella’s central position suggests that, at least on the stage, she possesses the power to tip those scales in her own favor. The potential of this position is evident in Bill Rauch’s 2011 Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Measure for Measure. In Rauch’s updated version of the play set in 1970s Los Angeles, a notably agitated Isabela² (Stephanie Beatriz) approaches a press conference podium to respond to the Duke’s (Anthony Heald) marriage proposal. As she leans into the microphone, she seems to weigh her options as her eyes shift from one side of the stage to the other. She then audibly exhales into the microphone as the play concludes with a sudden blackout. Once again center stage, Rauch’s Isabela sets us up to imagine a speech that Shakespeare’s script denies an audience and reminds us that even if silent, this novice has something to say. It also reminds us, as she looks from one side of the stage to the other, that details about her options—the true nature of the convent and the palace—like her speech, have been withheld. If we relocate the convent back to Shakespeare’s post-Reformation England, the question of the convent’s place becomes crucial, forcing us to consider how the idea of the convent continues to function on a stage after it has been expunged from the landscape surrounding that stage. Critical assessments of the convent in Measure for Measure range from those who read it as a clear representation of Protestant anti-monastic sentiment, a place and profession to be rejected outright, to those who argue that its even-handed depiction suggests Shakespeare was sympathetic to Catholicism, that the convent could remain an imaginative alternative to marriage. They also range from those who see the space as an ineffectual sanctuary to others who imagine its potential as a space of female agency. The convent, then, serves as a space that plays on the tensions inherent in Shakespeare’s play; the lost space potentially signifies multiple identities and modes of being in a play that draws on Catholic aesthetics without conveying a clear religious political agenda. That critics push to read the convent in polarized ways that align with one religion or another, suggests a desire to overdetermine the space’s dramatic potential on the stage. Readings that attempt to find agency in Isabella’s initial entrance into the convent often suggest the convent as her only option—and perhaps not even a wholly appealing one—thereby undercutting the agency associated with choice in the first

 The spelling of Isabella’s name is original to Rauch’s production, most likely to reflect his Isabela’s Hispanic heritage in this adaptation.

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place. Even the positive critical readings of Measure for Measure’s convent often frame it as ineffectual. Barbara Baines, for example, problematically describes Isabella’s choice to enter the convent as a “form of self-castration.”³ Such readings ignore the fact that for some early modern women, even after the Protestant Reformation, entering a convent was not an option of last resort or a mere alternative to marriage, but was instead a desirable profession. Gillian Woods calls out such overly simplistic readings, especially those that would read Isabella’s convent designs and refusal to give into Angelo’s “sex-bribe” as sexually repressive, as she argues, “It is as if the misreading of Catholic identity that Shakespeare interrogates in his post-Reformation play (whereby nuns are either sexually wayward figures or fair romantic game) are simply accepted in modern critical discourse. Refusing sex is not a valid decision, but rather a perversion of unacknowledged desire.”⁴ This can be extended to Isabella’s choice to “consent” to non-consensual sex with Angelo and the Duke’s later proposal that seems to put her in a similar if less threatening position. The Duke may seem a solid choice after earlier rape threats, yet to choose him still suggests that Isabella must naturally yield to sex in some form and fails to locate the potential that convent life might allow for different kinds of desire and ecstatic devotion. Isabella’s position at the end of the play and her refusal to clearly and audibly accept the mantel of nun or wife allows us to consider the paradox of her situation and of what defines agency in the face of subjection. She serves, then, as a performative case study of Judith Butler’s ambivalent subject, a character that becomes intelligible through her subjection to the patriarchal system that seeks to place her and other women into discreet categories defined by their sexual use and at the same time uses that position to resist this subjection.⁵ Her silence muddies the intelligibility that the patriarchy requires to interpolate her as a subject; her subversion is not fully contained, even if the play’s generic dictums suggest that it will be. I argue that female silence and the restrictions of a convent life in Measure for Measure can be seen as forms of agency and resistance, particularly when set against the backdrop of a patriarchy in chaos.

 Barbara Baines argues that Isabella’s freedom from Vienna and its laws that would force her to submit to men is “not without a price,” for it still requires her to submit to a patriarchal law under which “a woman’s control of her body necessitates a form of self-castration. Her chastity is deprived of its social, political, and psychological power through isolation and renunciation.” Barbara J. Baines, “Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure,” Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900 30, no. 2 (1990): 287.  Woods, 106.  Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 10 – 18.

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Shakespeare’s novice protagonist moves between vocal performance and silence as she navigates a landscape of discordant exchanges in a play clearly engaging with the zeitgeist of the Protestant Reformation. The convent in this play has a problematic temporality as well as a problematic geographical proximity to Vienna’s suburban brothels especially as we might struggle with “how to read its pre-Reformation setting within its post-Reformation context.”⁶ We should resist over-simplified notions of how an early modern audience would have perceived the convent. A Protestant audience would not necessarily disdain wholeheartedly the convent and expect Isabella to choose the Duke and his palace at the play’s conclusion. Some audience members would see her desire for extreme asceticism as a hyperbolic response to Vienna’s corruption and her seeming indifference to her brother’s death sentence as a response that mirrors Angelo’s cold, Puritanical enforcement of the laws. However, other audience members in Shakespeare’s London, a population with varying kinds of religious and political allegiances, might have been sympathetic to Catholicism and the desire for retreat from a corrupted state. As I have suggested, the critical response to the role of the convent in Measure for Measure is broadly divided between those who read it as a demonized Catholic place to be clearly rejected and those who see it as a legitimate sanctuary still available to the novice at the play’s end. Ultimately, where I differ from other critics in my reading of Isabella’s performance is that rather than focusing on her final choice, or a containment–subversion schema of choosing between palace or convent, I locate Isabella’s agency in her placement between these spaces and in the silence that allows us and a diversely populated early modern audience to imagine alternatives. I am interested in the way she navigates the treacherous terrain of a corrupted city and the patriarchal dictums that would have her perform and speak according to a script meant to match perceived gender roles and categories.

“Ignominy in ransom”: Incongruous Exchanges From early on in the play, Isabella is asked to negotiate between options that, at least on the surface, seem extreme, and we can see her exasperation as she grapples with such exchanges. Most notably, Angelo recommends she trade her chastity for her brother’s life, to which she responds:

 Korda, 176.

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Ignominy in ransom and free pardon Are of two houses; lawful mercy is nothing kin to foul redemption. (2.4.112– 14)⁷

Her chiasmic statement juxtaposes disgrace and mercy as she argues that the exchange he offers is incongruous, “of two houses.” By materializing this juxtaposition in a two-house figuration, Isabella calls up the play’s overwhelming preoccupation with substitutions and questions of equity.⁸ Angelo himself is a substitute for the “absent” Duke, and it is this deputation that puts him in a position to bargain with Isabella for the life of her brother, who has ironically been charged with fornication. Isabella points to the difference between the abstractions of Angelo’s proposed exchange; however, as Katharine Maus acutely observes, many of the play’s substitutions rely on the resemblance of one thing to another, particularly those that involve confusing one body for another, as is the case in the bed-trick.⁹ I would add that these resemblances are largely rendered visible through the play’s preoccupation with bodies and characters located in medias res, a state that the novice Isabella emblematizes. While Isabella’s clear distinction between “ignominy in ransom” and “free pardon” in her “two-house” figuration highlights the way she seems to find herself placed between extreme opposites as she navigates Vienna, the play is largely structured around substitutions of things that turn out to be functionally the same. Such similarity is born out in her reference to two houses. More than a mere turn of phrase, her architectural construction of her options sets us up to read the material and categorical exchanges as associated with Vienna’s enclosed spaces—convent, brothel, grange, garden, prison, palace—many of which can be seen as simultaneously similar and different. Furthermore, the play’s women are closely associated with these structures even as they are displaced from them. This is particularly true of the play’s novices, women on the verge of making vows be they monastic or marital, who are forced to navigate enclosures and make substitutions that threaten or promise to change their place within the play’s essentialist paradigm for women: maid–wife–

 All citations from William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004).  Katharine Maus cites the play’s bed-trick and “sleight-of-heads” as only two of the most obvious cases of what she and other critics see as “a pervasive and complex pattern of substitutions, deputations, and interchanges by which one person or thing is ‘taken for’ or made to stand in the place of another.” Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 172.  Maus, 171.

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widow or “punk.” These movements and exchanges culminate in the play’s famously problematic conclusion where Isabella is, in fact, positioned between two houses: the convent and the Duke’s palace. At this moment, she might seem to face “the classic female choice: ‘aut virum, aut murum,’ a husband or a wall.”¹⁰ However, the problem at the play’s end is not that Isabella’s options represent extremes, but rather that, because of the way these two enclosures are framed for her and the audience members, the enclosures are too alike. Isabella, then, is faced with a much less dynamic exchange: aut murum, aut murum, a wall for a wall. While the dynamism of her choice may be muted in this formulation it is this similarity that at once reflects the reduction of options for women in the wake of the Reformation and sets the stage for her final performance in which she refuses to locate herself within the frames of either power structure. The inescapability of enclosed spaces is born out in Vienna’s suburbs where the convent’s location geographically aligns it not only with Mariana’s moated grange but also with Mistress Overdone’s brothel. Angelo’s decree that “all houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down” (1.2.76) clearly refers to the brothels on the outskirts of town. At the same time, it reminds us that all domestic spaces ultimately come under the purview of patriarchy, especially as represented by this surrogate political father figure. This move also highlights the ways in which changes in location and name do not necessarily signify changes in affiliation. Pompey comforts Overdone, explaining, “Come fear not you, Good counselors lack no clients. Though you change your place, you need not change your trade; I’ll be your tapster still” (1.2.86 – 88). Overdone will simply move her house of “resort” within the city limits and loosely disguise it as a “public” house, as we might infer from Pompey’s “tapster” retort, itself an obvious euphemism for his place as Overdone’s bawd. This nominal exchange suggests that despite patriarchal displacement and mandates, women in the play still have modes of agency at their disposal if they can move between zones of private and public. For Isabella, even if her opposing houses seem similar, the process of relocating from suburbs to city and the performance this movement involves could force her to change her “trade” or intended religious profession. The way she navigates between walls and the incongruous exchanges of the urban city highlights the importance of place and profession and forces us to think about the status of the other women in the play and how they are respectively displaced

 Maureen Connoly McFeely, “‘This Day My Sister Should the Cloister Enter’: The Convent as Refuge in Measure for Measure,” in Subjects on the World’s Stage, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 200.

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and put in their place by male authority figures, figures that we might align with the tapster Pompey in their attempts to pimp these women out in the name of order and to fulfill male imperatives and desires. Furthermore, we are reminded that as much as walls in Shakespeare’s plays and elsewhere signify containment and division, they are also always porous and can represent insurance of as well as threats to the subjects and ideals they circumscribe. In Richard II, England is naturally fortified by a sea wall and yet it is susceptible not only to the “envy of less happier lands” (2.1.49) but to the threat of mismanagement from within the “sceptered isle” (2.1.40).¹¹ In Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream’s play within a play, walls are scalable and penetrable and even comically become characters in their own right in the case of Midsummer. In Measure for Measure walled enclosures are explicitly gendered and this serves to magnify the conflation of buildings with women’s bodies and the network of exchanges that muddy the identities of the novices and subjects they purportedly protect. The porousness at once allows women to redefine themselves against essentialist ideals and threatens to re-essentialize them in the process of changing places. The imaginative potential of walls as barriers or thresholds that can as easily be breeched as they can contain and fortify women will echo throughout the dramatic texts in this book, as we trace the way novices navigate architecture and archetypes of various religious and political landscapes.

More Strict Restraint: The Convent and Desire In Measure for Measure, the convent represents a private space startlingly outside of patriarchal surveillance and control. Regardless of the convent’s designation as a legitimate sanctuary (indeed, it was not in England, and few could or would make it to Vienna or another European city to join a Continental convent), the way it continues to haunt the English imagination and function on Shakespeare’s stage sets up a complicated tension among desires—be they religious, political, or personal—as it frames our reading of Isabella and her movement through Vienna’s potentially perilous urban landscape. Where audience members locate desire and what options they afford the novice directly relate to questions of performance and how our reading of Isabella’s plot, her movement between the options that frame the central acts of the play, contributes to the way

 William Shakespeare, Richard II in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997).

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we interpret the play’s ending and women’s agency in the seventeenth century more generally. The possibility that Isabella might actually desire a convent life for its own merits is a crucial consideration as we interpret her silence when she is faced with the choice between the convent or marriage at the end of the play. If she does not actively desire the refuge and religious vocation a convent offers but instead turns to the place as the only escape from a perilous and corrupt city, then the Duke’s offer of marriage at the end of the play could easily be read as an equally viable alternative for her. And indeed, critics on both sides of the convent question suggest that she would choose to enter the palace rather than the convent at the play’s end. For example, Darryl Gless reads the convent as inextricably linked to the prison and a theme of incarceration that pervades Measure for Measure. ¹² Other critics interpret the convent as the remnant of an ever-decaying culture of Catholicism. In either reading, the space certainly could be neither a legitimate sanctuary nor viable option for Isabella at the play’s end. By focusing on performance possibilities, we can productively complicate both of these interpretations of the space. Performance allows us to think about Isabella’s potential for liberation not in spatial terms but rather in the way she stubbornly refuses to be relegated into binary, essentialized categories. Furthermore, if we think about this performance in terms of desire and/as agency, we can see the farreaching implications of Isabella’s position at the end of the play. Butler defines desire in terms of a need for recognition and argues that in its relation to social norms “it is bound up with the question of power and with the problem of who qualifies as the recognizably human and who does not.”¹³ Throughout this play we see women struggling against social definitions that threaten their recogni-

 Gless suggests that the convent and its rules are a form of “sterile bondage,” which he imagines Isabella ultimately rejects at the play’s end. He argues that juxtaposed against the scene of Claudio’s incarceration for fornication, Isabella’s opening scene, the only convent scene in the play (1.4), “realizes in deft and original fashion the idea that monasteries are prisons where young Christians become slaves to needless and trivial regulations.” Inherent in both Baines’s and Gless’s readings of the convent is a critique of reproductive denial. The convent as a form of “castration” and sterility highlights the perceived social duty of a young woman, especially after the Reformation, to become a sexual subject and to procreate. Isabella is expected to reject the convent and its religious habit by, as Angelo avers, “putting on the destined livery” (2.4.139) of womanhood. Of course, the play also presents us with the negative outcomes associated with donning this livery, as we see characters such as Mistress Elbo (accused of prostitution) and Juliet (pregnant with Claudio’s child) become representatives of problematic fecundity and face subsequent legal ramifications. Darryl J. Gless, Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 212.  Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2.

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tion as humans. Isabella, particularly, sets up her desire in the opening act of the play as a wish for restraint, the very attribute she performs in her silent conclusion. In some ways, Isabella’s own treatment of the convent in 1.4 invites audience members to question its attractions. That she seeks “a more strict restraint” upon the already famously ascetic Order of St. Clare suggests that perhaps the strictures we imagine the nun Francisca has been describing to Isabella are not stringent enough for the potential novice. Isabella: And have you nuns no farther privileges? Francisca: Are not these large enough? Isabella: Yes, truly. I speak not as desiring more, But rather wishing a more strict restraint Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare. (1.4.1– 5)

Isabella’s response seems to echo the Catholic reformers and Tridentine Council, who in the wake of the Protestant Reformation sought to rein in their European monastic communities, imposing and in some cases reimposing rules that were meant to literally and symbolically extend and strengthen convent walls. While many members of convent communities fought against these mostly male-mandated reforms, Isabella seems a candidate likely to embrace the “strict restraint[s]” such as clausura called for by church reformers. Of course, in this way, the reform movements within the Catholic Church, particularly in regard to European convents, can be projected onto Vienna as a whole in this play and the parallel attempts of officials to regulate an increasingly lax and licentious Catholic community. Lucio’s interruption of Isabella’s conversation with Francisca closes the audience members out of Isabella’s ultimate assessment of the order’s rules and accommodations, leaving us to question whether its restraints will be strict enough for Isabella. This limited access to the convent also limits our abilities to read Isabella’s silence at the play’s end and to imagine whether she will choose to enter the convent or the palace door. Indeed, Shakespeare opens the radical possibility that she may choose not to make a choice. Her motivation remains elusive in this scene and suggests that she ponders other opportunities and alternative outcomes. Might her desire for strict restraint mark her as a reformer called to serve or a Viennese subject in need of reform herself? Rather than reading the convent as a potentially corrupt extension of Shakespeare’s chaotic Vienna, we can interpret its largely invisible presence on the stage to imply a place of legitimate sanctuary that promotes female agency and sisterhood behind its fortified walls. Whereas critics such as Gless see the convent as tainted by its proximity to the prison, others suggest that this connection favors the convent and confirms

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the virtue of a life removed. David Beauregard suggests that Shakespeare’s Catholics (both in this play and others), specifically those most clearly associated with the contemplative life of monasteries, embody “the virtue of virginal chastity.”¹⁴ When we consider Shakespeare’s depictions of convents in his larger corpus, especially in plays such as The Comedy of Errors and The Winter’s Tale, we begin to see him embrace a strand of Reformation thought that valorizes visions of monastic sanctuary rather than anti-monastic sentiment. For McFeely, though “ultimately ineffectual,” such spaces are not equated with prisons but rather adduce small “green worlds, the remnants of the medieval tradition of monastic sanctuary.”¹⁵ For her, the convent is as much a retreat for Isabella as the moated grange is for Mariana. And while she acknowledges that Isabella is not allowed to benefit from this sanctuary, she argues that “in choosing convent over marketplace, Isabella opts for self-determined chastity over masculine controlled sexuality.”¹⁶ To this positive assessment of the convent, I suggest that not only is the convent a potentially powerful space for female self-determination, but also the convent and the chastity associated with it are not Isabella’s only options for female autonomy. Even for those critics who theoretically view the convent as a legitimate choice and a place of sanctuary, it is often relegated to the lesser of two evils rather than a desirable choice in its own right. By acknowledging how Isabella’s status as a novice and as a highly articulate woman who chooses silence disrupts binary categories, we open alternatives to more conventional readings of the play’s resolution. Even Mario DiGangi, who specifically argues for the pleasure of “reading [Measure] oppositionally, with the purpose of discovering the kind of female agency” the play’s masculine terms push us to resist, imagines that to an early modern audience Isabella must accept the Duke’s offer. He sees the play as defining and manipulating female sexuality against male anxieties about female pleasure and control over the sexualized body as the rationale behind its foregrounding of “female sexual desire only to deny the desirability of seeking pleasure for pleasure’s sake.”¹⁷ In this reading, rather than suggesting that a character like Isabella would choose the palace in the end, DiGangi implies that this assumed choice in the play signals

 David Beauregard, “Shakespeare on Monastic Life: Nuns and Friars in Measure for Measure,” in Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, ed. Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 315.  McFeely, 201. In this statement, McFeely directly refutes Northrop Frye’s argument that Measure for Measure is a play without a green world.  McFeely, 206.  Mario DiGangi, “Pleasure and Danger: Measuring Female Sexuality in Measure for Measure,” ELH 60, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 590.

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the male anxiety over female pleasure and the ability of women to control their own bodies and sexuality. The Duke successfully manipulates Isabella to enforce the comic ending that brings her back under male control, at once pointing to a potentially pleasurable alternative to marriage and requiring her to choose the Duke instead of this alternative. Such critical readings, whether they allow for the convent as a legitimate option in Shakespeare’s Vienna or not, ultimately rein in the possibility that Isabella has agency and that the process of choosing could potentially be played as positive. Perhaps the most provocative argument that allows us to imagine a legitimate form of agency embedded in a life removed and Isabella’s silence concerning it comes from Jessica Slights and Michael Morgan Holmes, who push the idea of reading oppositionally a step further. They align themselves with Maus who imagines the possibilities of “unorthodox interpretation of Isabella’s aspirations” that are opened up by the unruliness of sexual desire. For Slights and Holmes, “Isabella’s spiritual desires (which may possess an erotic or sexual component) more precisely empower her to resist marital disciplinary measures.”¹⁸ And they see the early modern convent, even after post-Tridentine reform measures, as a space that “could offer an intelligent woman like Isabella outlets for creative expression.” They not only want to afford Isabella the potential for a non-normative ending, but they also ultimately want to afford her a sense of playful humor befitting the play’s problematically comic form. Developing the claim that Isabella’s spiritual desires have erotic potential, Woods cites the novice’s adamant suggestion that “Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies, / And strip myself to death as to a bed / That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield / My body up to shame” (2.4.101– 4) as evidence of such potential. She notes, “The sensuality of religious rhetoric and practice, even when pain is involved, might be seen as an alternative form of sexual expression, significantly removed from the realm of human relationships.”¹⁹ Woods’s reading of this scene considered within a context of Catholic devotional practices of mortification that were in fact a regular part of the Clares’ lives, not a hypothetical practice as Isabella frames flagellation, reminds us that Isabella’s convent desires need not be understood as repressed or perverted, and such rituals could be a mode of setting sexual feelings free. These alternatives could push us to trouble a sense of Isabella’s proper place as predetermined by patriarchal and/or Protestant dictums. In order to do this

 Jessica Slights and Michael Morgan Holmes, “Isabella’s Order: Religious Acts and Personal Desires in ‘Measure for Measure,’” Studies in Philology 95, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 265.  Woods, 107.

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we must understand Isabella as a subject partially aware of her place within the power structure of Vienna’s patriarchy. Rather than suggesting her agential effacement and the impossibility of reading the convent as an effectual sanctuary, then, we might see how the convent helps to frame Isabella as an active agent in her own final placement in the play. She does, after all, prove that she is a performer who can play with reason and discourse, both tools wielded by those in power. Why reduce our reading of her options for a continued performance and resistance at the play’s end, especially when faced with the Duke’s miraculous reanimation of her dead brother that precedes his marriage proposal? Raising the dead and refusing the Duke are almost equally impossible in the realworld context of Shakespeare’s play, but they both allow audience members a way to imagine their own modes of agency and desire in the face of their own subjection.

Sub-Urban Exchanges: Novices in the City By setting aside the need to place Isabella solidly in either the Duke’s palace or the convent, we can avoid readings of the play that flatten agency and instead open possibilities by refusing a coherent conclusion for the play. Isabella’s silence pushes us to focus on the movements that Shakespeare enables for her in the space between her convent exit and the Duke’s proposal. Unlike more traditional depictions, such as Andrew Marvell’s that I discussed in the Introduction, Shakespeare’s depiction does not reduce her journey to a set of thresholds. Instead, we are allowed to see how a novice might navigate a volatile and, in this case, urban landscape and how removing herself from the convent affects her agency and status. Bill Rauch justified his choice to set his 2011 production in 1970s Los Angeles by explaining, “you go from power to prostitutes to prison—this is such an urban play.”²⁰ The urban for Rauch is alliteratively defined by a combination of profession, place, and authority; you can draw a straight line of declension in his suggested descent from “power” to “prostitutes” and finally to “prison,” one of the play’s most frequented places. While many of the male inhabitants of Vienna, especially in the wake of the enforcement of formerly “sleeping” fornication laws, might find themselves on such a path, the more dynamic movements

 Candace L. Brown, “Review: Ashland’s ‘Measure for Measure’ Doles out Pleasure,” aNewsCafe.com, March 7, 2011, http://anewscafe.com/2011/03/07/review-ashlands-measure-for-mea sure-doles-out-pleasure/.

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and exchanges of the city are often carried on the backs of the play’s women. As these women move from the suburban locations—convent, brothel, and moated grange—to the city proper, they find ways to navigate and manipulate the urban power structures. This movement allows us to see the potential for play within this urban environment and for modes of unexpected agency for women who at the same time occupy a middle position associated with economies of exchange. In some cases this exchange is nominal, as we see Mistress Overdone exchange her suburban house of ill-repute for a “hothouse” (2.1.60); in other cases we see figures legitimize their statuses, as the jilted Mariana does in covertly exchanging her chastity for a wifely title in the play’s bed-trick; and finally, we have our novice Isabella faced at the end of the play with an exchange of her intended religious vows for marital vows, both of which hinge on her refusal to ignominiously exchange her body for her brother’s life. The central city setting at once threatens incongruous exchange rates for women and allows them to explore a world of public and private spaces and to perform identities that allow them to chart their own winding paths and create new urban networks. In many early modern narratives, the nun’s path is one of simple conversion as she leaves behind her Catholic devotions and religious habit for a husband. Isabella, a novice both in terms of her proposed convent profession and her ingénue status allows us to envision a different type of trajectory, in this play a particularly urban one, but one perhaps more dynamic than Rauch’s concise description seems to allow for. Her movements emphasize that Shakespeare’s Vienna is not merely a setting defined by its iconic places (palace, prison, convent) but a city in Michel de Certeau’s sense, created through networks of passage, the traces of people moving from one place to another. De Certeau defines movement itself, the act of walking in the city, as an “indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.” The city itself, he claims, is “an immense social experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersection of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric.”²¹ While Shakespeare’s Vienna does not fully call up the modern city network described by de Certeau—its places being more generic than those of early modern English city comedies, for example—the experience of his female characters add dimension to and in many ways create the cityscape that we imagine at the center of its iconic places of political and religious authority. Indeed, de Certeau’s description of the city might just as well be applied to the dynamics of stage performance.

 Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steve Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 103.

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Measure for Measure’s staging of Isabella and Mariana, in particular, unmoors them from their “proper” places, and their “displacements and walks” lead them to new (potentially improper) places that emphasize their lack of defined social titles and status, aligning them with real English nuns and Catholic women desiring religious professions after the Protestant Reformation. We see this most readily in the Duke’s assertion that Mariana’s inability to claim her place as a maid, widow, or wife after the bed-trick leaves her place-less, relegated to “nothing” (5.1.183) in the eyes of the Duke and therefore the civic legal system. Lucio’s cheeky response to the Duke’s essentialist suggestion that a woman who does not fit the maid–widow–wife paradigm might “be a punk!” not only adds a fourth option, but also reminds us of those other women (and by extension men) outside the city, the recently rezoned suburbanites who threaten the neatly ordered social definitions the authorities try to rein in. While the Duke’s assessment that Mariana lacks legitimate status implies that she also lacks agency, it seems that such negations allow for experimental play. Such movement between proper places and designations potentially affords types of agency that professed nuns or wives, for instance, might not enjoy. This seems true of the only wife in the play, Mistress Elbow, who becomes a figure of rumor and ridicule when she is “misplaced” (2.1.77), according to her husband’s malapropism, at Overdone’s bathhouse craving stewed prunes, an implication of her own profession as a sex worker. Isabella, although potentially better defined than Mariana and certainly less suspect than Mistress Elbow because of her initial identity as a Clarissan novice, finds her status similarly questioned as she enters Vienna, and her ability to play a certain role both connected and seemingly contrary to her future vows is a quality her brother Claudio banks on as he seeks her help. It is her status as a novice that allows her the agency not only to leave the convent walls for those of the city, but also to turn the keys of the convent door when Lucio seeks her out. As Francisca explains, Isabella may “know his business of him,” because she “Is yet unsworn” (1.4.8 – 9). The nun elaborates and gives Isabella and the audience a preview of the convent’s mandates: When you have vowed, you must not speak with men But in the presence of the prioress; Then if you speak you must not show your face, Or if you show your face you must not speak. (4.1.10 – 13)

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Francisca outlines the rules implemented to enforce the effects of the convent walls and grates that limit access to the nuns inside.²² The effects of this reinforcement, however, simultaneously mark Isabella’s current status as less restrained than if she had already made her convent vows and hint at the dangers that might accompany the “free” movement and speech of an ambiguous status. Claudio seems acutely aware of the power Isabella might wield if she gives voice to his suit, but he credits her appearance and presence as his potential saving graces more than her oratory skills. As he assures Lucio: in her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect Such as move men; besides, she hath prosperous arte When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade. (1.2.155 – 59)

He highlights her “prone and speechless dialect” and places it before her “prosperous arte” to “persuade.” Claudio’s description prepares us not only for Isabella’s interactions with Angelo, the way her very virtuous appearance will incite violent lust, but also for the play’s ending in which her speechless dialect and silent performance must speak volumes. His directions to Lucio also prepare us for the way Isabella’s actions will be directed as she leaves the convent, for once she leaves this female suburban space she finds herself under the tutelage of the play’s male characters as they try to capitalize on the paradoxical potency of her chaste character. Isabella’s movement into the city and its enclosures becomes her initiation process in the world of the play and marks her as a liminal figure, as she inhabits a threshold that we might see as the city itself (and by extension the stage), and this threshold is flanked by the doors of the convent and the palace as the two alternatives for her next life phase. Isabella’s agency ultimately becomes a both spatial and temporal enterprise as she navigates the Viennese setting that has been rendered unruly through an extended period of liberty and patriarchal neglect. The play’s middle marks the height of her resistance and amplifies moments of paradox associated with the carnivalesque. Mario DiGangi and Kathryn Schwarz offer useful ways to think about the importance of middle ground and the space between life phases in this play. According to DiGangi, “Isabella occu The Nun’s Rule or the Ancrene Riwle mandates that a nun learn the identity of visitors via an intermediary lest she speak to “some one [she] ought to shun,” (241) and its advisement “let an Anchoress, whatsoever she be, keep silence as much as she can and may” (242) (as cited in Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts, ed. Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber (New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2004)).

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pies the space of resistance and loss between ‘virgin’ and ‘wife’—a space that is collapsed by the apparently seamless passage from ‘maid’ to ‘wife.’”²³ Schwarz adds nuance to DiGangi’s claim, noting, “As that image of a spectral and volatile ‘between’ suggests, being, for Isabella, is not a fixed state of truth but a mobile process of engagement. She continually reconstitutes virtue through acts—both interventions and performances—that validate the exigencies to which she responds.”²⁴ We can extend these claims to apply not only to the play as it appears on stage but also to the performance of the play, as well as to how the play points to performance in the social sphere outside the theater. Both DiGangi’s and Schwarz’s theories of a space “between” that allows for resistance and agency call up Victor Turner’s theories of liminal space, especially in terms of his anthropological readings of rites of passage. This space, aligned with the movement between life phases, is particularly marked by a paradoxical nature that collapses binaries of gender, species, and various other categories. Turner depicts the limen as a “long threshold, a corridor almost, or a tunnel which may, indeed, become a pilgrim’s road or passing from dynamics to statics.”²⁵ In the initiation process, liminal figures are characterized in several different ways and their invisible status is often marked through ambiguous clothing and vocabulary, but “the most characteristic midliminal symbolism,” according to Turner, “is that of paradox, or being both this and that.”²⁶ The limen is both a spatial passage and a representation of a process that takes time to complete. The stage itself then allows a novice to experience or perform a potentially protracted movement within a theatrical space. For Isabella, this allows her to fill space and time as she experiments with the role of supplicant to Vienna’s deputy, and muddies her own novitiate status as she experiences the machinations of the city. While Measure’s Vienna does not plot out a specific shared city with iconic features and landmarks it still figures an “expanding metropolis,” and its women, I argue, are still engaging in practices that Nina Levine might figure as creating an audience awareness of experimentation “with new forms of alliance and association, sometimes collaboratively and sometimes at odds with each other.”²⁷

 DiGangi, 591.  Kathryn Schwarz, What You Will: Gender, Contract, and Shakespearean Social Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 169.  Victor Turner, “Variations on a Theme of Liminality,” in Secular Ritual, ed. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977), 37.  Turner, “Variations,” 37.  Nina Levine, Practicing the City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 10.

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When Isabella is first admitted to speak with Angelo in Act 2, her status is somewhat uncertain and she sees herself as divided between identities at odds with each other. The Provost describes her to Angelo as “a very virtuous maid, / And to be shortly of a sisterhood, / If not already” (2.2.23 – 25). While he confirms Lucio’s initial assessment that Isabella is “virtuous,” he is not certain whether she is yet a nun. Isabella further complicates her own status as she explains her ambivalent feelings about her brother’s suit: There is a vice that most I do abhor, And most desire should meet the blow of justice, For which I would not plead, but that I must, For which I must not plead, but that I am At war ̍twixt will and will not. (2.2.32– 36)

Isabella presents herself as one in conflict, a woman caught between her duties as a secular sister and the moral beliefs that push her to sever such ties and enter the sisterhood of the convent. She performs this liminality by first accepting Angelo’s condemnation of her brother and then taking Lucio’s direction as he coaches her: To him again, entreat him, Kneel down before him; hang upon his gown. You are too cold. (2.2.46 – 48)

Lucio’s staging of her continued performance draws on Claudio’s earlier affirmations of Isabella’s “prone and speechless dialect” as Lucio directs her to take a literally prone position, thereby physically signifying her supplication both to Angelo’s will and her brother’s suit. This physical coaching seems to work as Isabella’s speeches grow longer and more persuasive, and she seems, in part, to enjoy her own verbal license and the power that comes with discourse. At one point she even exclaims to Angelo, “I would to heaven I had your potency, / And you were Isabel” (2.2.67– 68). Although the men in this scene may circumscribe Isabella, she exhibits the paradoxical power of performance that her ambiguous status allows. While Lucio and Angelo frame the novice’s performance in this first scene, her position within this frame is still important, as she takes direction and then makes the performance her own. Lucio’s initial directions are limited to her physical posturing and general affect, not to the content of her speech. She gains power from her initially ambivalent position as she seems to become invigorated by the role she can play because she is yet unsworn to the convent. In fact, for a moment she does reverse the power dynamic between her and Angelo, as she

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takes over the scene, causing Lucio to respond with admiration to her verbal power. “That’s well said” (2.2.114), Lucio admits as she pushes Angelo on the use of his borrowed authority. Although Angelo may respond on some level to the physical supplications that Lucio imposes on Isabella (advice that the novice may or may not act upon), he is clearly moved by her speech in this first exchange, as he expresses in an aside, “She speaks, and ’tis such sense / That my sense breeds with it” (2.2.147– 48). Her rhetorical “sense” elicits his sensual urges and confirms the dangers of sight and speech that Francisca alluded to in her recitation of the convent’s mandates. As Angelo takes back the control of his office—here both his temporary position and his room at court—he shows the power of his place in the city, as he seeks to reduce the young novice and aligns her with all women that he sees as available for his sexual use. Faced with the incongruous exchange of her chaste body for her brother’s incarcerated one, Isabella must take part in the play’s urban economy of reversals and a different type of body exchange. Isabella’s only way out of a situation that would erase her chaste identity and trap her in a space between maid and wife is to give over control to another man and enter yet another space of enclosure, as she participates in the Duke’s bed-trick. However, this is also a moment where we see two relocated women collaborate as they use their suburban knowledge of spaces and status to undermine civic authority and form new alliances. Isabella’s compliance with the Duke’s plan might seem to push her in the direction of marriage and away from the convent wall, but it also puts her and her accomplice Mariana in control of Angelo and actualizes the reversal she desired in their first meeting. Following the Duke’s suggestion, Isabella accepts Angelo’s proposition to exchange her body for her brother’s life, but only at a place convenient, secure, and dark. He willingly conforms to the stipulations providing, “a garden circummured with brick” (4.1.27), a location that mirrors both Isabella’s convent and Mariana’s moated grange, but also signals another reversal of power between Angelo and Isabella; Baines suggests that “as conventional sexual symbols, the key is masculine or phallic; the lock, gate and garden are feminine. Yet here Isabella possesses the phallic keys that open the locks of Angelo’s enclosed garden; she is the caller, he is the one who passively waits.”²⁸ As Baines notes, Isabella now holds keys to both the garden and the convent. I would add that more important than access is her knowledge of these spaces. Both seemingly reside off the public grid, and her control over them will allow her to create new sub-urban networks within Vienna’s walls.

 Baines, 294.

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Most critics agree that the part Isabella plays in the garden scene, even though Mariana takes her place with Angelo during the bed-trick, pushes her out of the ambivalent location between houses—convent and palace—and towards a marital conclusion.²⁹ She is tarnished by her association with the plot that renders her accomplice more ambiguous than she seemed to be in the grange, and this, seemingly for many, forces Isabella to the Duke’s door to take part in his marital mandates and to make the reinscription of Vienna’s “out-laws” complete.³⁰ Such readings fall back upon a subversion–containment model that undercuts Turner’s conception of “play” and the liberation afforded to communities during festivals. Turner not only allows for the play that would be reinscribed at the end of a festival or set of initiation rites (both of which have the potential to transform the participants), but also suggests that a limen “may cease to be a mere transition and become a set way of life, a state, that of the anchorite, or monk.”³¹ In this way, to be “more” than woman, as Angelo suggests of her role as a nun, to choose permanently to remove oneself from the sanctioned definitions and “proper” places, could afford a novice like Isabella a kind of perpetual liminality, rather than a temporary threshold that forces the initiate to move towards one predetermined end.³²  Robert N. Watson, for example, emphasizes the garden setting as “a version of the hortus conclusus that is the iconographic home of the Virgin Mary,” but also notes that “Angelo’s markedly virginal garden—nowhere evident in Shakespeare’s sources—is also strikingly similar to the trysting places of Elizabethan fornicators.” Isabella, then, according to Watson, “is positioned as a holy virgin only to be displaced into an object of sexual and reproductive desire, her symbols degradingly recontextualized.” Robert N. Watson, “False Immortality in ‘Measure for Measure’: Comic Means, Tragic Ends,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 425 – 26. Watson marks the parallels between Angelo’s garden and the hortus conclusus associated with the Virgin Mary as he explains, “Medieval depictions of the Annunciation often place Mary in front of a garden surrounded by walls and vineyards; sometimes the descended angel holds the key to its portal” (426).  This kind of subversion–containment model, for critics such as Christy Desmet, makes it difficult to read agency in Isabella and other women who find themselves positioned between houses. For Desmet, while paradox might allow for slipperiness and therefore potentially liberating moments of play, its ambiguity can just as easily work to reconfine the women it seems to liberate. Christy Desmet, “‘Neither Maid, Widow, nor Wife’: Rhetoric of the Woman Controversy in Measure for Measure and The Duchess of Malfi,” in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1991), 71.  Turner, “Variations,” 37.  Before Mariana is called upon by the disguised Duke to participate in the bed-trick, she has taken up such a space when she sought refuge after her marriage to Angelo was thwarted; she retreats to this space to assert and protect a chastity called into question by Angelo’s rejection of her and seems to have resigned herself to this “set way of life.” Natasha Korda argues that her

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De Certeau, like Turner, sees a playful power in the muddying of status markers; in fact, he allows for this kind of agency in everyday life rather than merely within the parameters of carnivals and initiations. For de Certeau, the very process of naming, or what he figures as clothing places with words, allows for movement, and the “erosion” of the labels ascribed: By a paradox that is only apparent, the discourse that makes people believe is the one that takes away what it urges them to believe in, or never delivers what it promises. Far from expressing a void or describing a lack, it creates such. It makes room for a void. In that way, it opens up clearings; it “allows” a certain play within a system of defined places. It “authorizes” the production of an area of free play (Spielraum) on a checkerboard that analyzes and classifies identities.³³

The essentialist rhetoric of Measure for Measure’s Vienna, in this case, does not limit the field of possibilities for its subjects so much as it “creates” the necessity for those who do not fit the proper names provided. The maid–wife–widow paradigm creates the “nothing”; the definitions of “woman” generate the idea of the more-than-woman. Angelo, in particular, tries to establish his authority through such definitions. Slights and Holmes emphasize this as they argue that his notions of womanhood “associate the life of a woman with servitude and demand that Isabella adopt a costume that signifies her subjection. He emphasizes his conviction that the outside of a woman—her anatomical ‘external warrants’— must conform to a predetermined inward narrative of sexual desire that confirms his own limited notion of identity and coherence.”³⁴ They go on to argue that “the gender aporia” that Angelo’s discourse belies “encourages playgoers and readers to ponder what other identification options might exist for Isabella,” particularly because of the doubleness of his assertion that if she is “more” than woman she is “none”; the nun option slips into the space his attempts to define Isabella open up, and that may push her to make use of her ill-defined status as she takes part in the bed-trick that will level his authority. In de Certeau’s terms, the movements of individuals—their walking and particularly the meandering and shortcuts they make within the city grid—are tactics that work against the strategies of structural order constructed by local authorities. The slipperiness of signification, as I have noted above, is a particularly

removal to this enclosure “distances her as a potential threat to the play’s patriarchy,” and reminds us that “during the five years of her seclusion there, Mariana is ‘bestowed … on her own lamentation’ (3.1.228); her ‘brawling discontent’ (4.1.3) is turned inward.” Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies, 187.  De Certeau, 105 – 6.  Slights and Holmes, “Isabella’s Order,” 282.

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fertile space for individuals to explore their own agency against and within the parameters established by the authorities. Indeed, resistance tactics and slippery signification of place and subject are further complicated by the convent and Isabella’s relationship to it as a Catholic subject in this play. The convent represents a religious authority with its own rules and daily practices set in opposition to the lapsed and reforming local authorities. Isabella, as a clear subject of this alternate authority, also stands out both for her supposed virtue within Vienna’s unruly landscape, and as a Catholic figure who might be understood by some English audience members to already be illegible, whose outer appearance and performances, vocal or silent, might be hiding an internal identity and faith. As Woods reminds us, in an England where confessional viewpoints were varied and shifting, “false seeming both protected the integrity of the self and manifested inner corruption. How individuals seemed mattered; but how seeming mattered and what seeming meant was under dispute.”³⁵ The potential for Catholic equivocation further complicates how we might read Isabella’s movements and silences, even when it seems that Isabella herself, with the exception of her role in the bed-trick, strives to essentialize her spiritual identity. Performance, especially in its silent dimensions as exhibited by Isabella at the play’s conclusion, provides a vehicle for agential exploration in Measure for Measure. Drawing on Keir Elam’s work on the semiotics of theater, Christina Luckyj articulates the significance of movement in challenging accepted orders; “The theater,” she explains, “is always a ‘semiotic’ and bodily experience—for actors and audience alike—and as such it invariably challenges the symbolic order of language.” She goes on to argue, “the actor who retreated into silence could render himself inaccessible and inscrutable.”³⁶ Performing silence, then, could be seen as a potential threat to local authorities whose order is dependent on labels that maintain dominant structures. Isabella’s silence in the face of a final exchange from maid to wife and her slippage, even if fictional, between the labels of maid and punk, are the most obvious ways in which order is subverted in Vienna. And this slippage resembles the Catholic subject that equivocates in order to survive in a hostile environment. We are also reminded that forced silence, as exhibited by Isabella’s response, “To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?” (2.4.172– 73) in the face of Angelo’s refutation that his “false o’er weighs [her] true” (2.4.171) as she threatens a rape accusation, contrasts starkly to performed silence that obfuscates personal de-

 Woods, 97.  Christina Luckyj “A Moving Rhetoricke”: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 79.

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sire. Additionally, Measure for Measure also more generally emphasizes the interplay between the strategies of dominant authority to order a community and the tactics of the people who move within this system, naturally subverting their containment. Once again, we see this when Pompey suggests that Mistress Overdone may circumvent the legal authority that seeks to shut her down by simply renaming her place of business as she moves her trade within the city walls. The middle space of the play’s plot that falls between the initial evacuation of the liberties and the final attempts to bring the play to a potentially comic order resembles the city as a whole as well as the central novice Isabella. As a space open to play and resistant to clear modes of signification, the middle plot space, like the city, blurs the boundaries that would delineate the lawful and licentious in opposition to each other. Nowhere is the ambiguity created within this space more evident than in the conclusion that divides playgoers, directors, and critics as extremely as Isabella herself is divided when she is positioned between two proper places, the convent and the palace. Her final placement is urban, but does she still long for her suburban beginnings and has her subversive performance allowed her the potential to step off the grid once more?

“What’s yet behind that’s meet you all should know”: Ambivalent Endings At the close of Measure for Measure, the Duke continues his role as patriarchal matchmaker when he offers his hand to Isabella. He inserts himself into the happy reunion between brother and sister and concludes the play with a seeming supplication: Dear Isabel. I have a motion much imports your good, Whereto if you’ll willing ear incline. What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine. So, bring us to our palace, where we’ll show What’s yet behind, that’s meet you all should know. (5.1.532– 37)

Isabella’s silence is the most obvious problem for those seeking to clarify her final placement; it suggests a possible resistance to the Duke’s proposal, but in no way gives us a sense of an alternative choice to this proposal. She has no lines after the Duke releases her brother and there are no stage directions to tell the reader whether Isabella exchanges her intended convent vows for wed-

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ding vows. Many critics suggest that Jacobean audiences would see this silence as obedience.³⁷ The Duke’s “motion” is not necessarily a question, after all. As I have suggested above, even those who wish to read the play oppositionally argue for Isabella’s relocation. Yet, there are critics and directors of the play who imagine Isabella’s return to the convent, who imagine a defiant Isabella turning on her heel and walking off the stage away from the Duke and towards the convent.³⁸ We also find critics opting for the via media, the ending that leaves the novice’s choice ambiguous. According to Baines, for example, one possible reading of this scene is that “Isabella does not lose, but only holds, her tongue; she is not silenced but, instead, chooses silence as a form of resistance to the patriarchal authority and to the male discourse within which this authority operates.”³⁹ This alternative would allow Isabella to reassert control over her body, which she had lost after leaving the convent and in her negotiations with Angelo, by holding her tongue. The agency associated with holding her tongue also reminds us that Isabella now holds another pair of phallic keys, the literal key to the convent and the figurative key to the Duke’s palace. Baines reads Isabella as retaining some form of agency at the end of the play, and her reading asserts Isabella’s power even over the audience who cannot read her mind. Beauregard puts the agency in the hands of a “heterogeneous audience” in his argument that Isabella’s silence is “a calculated ambiguity” on Shakespeare’s part that “would have done double service by not offending Catholics in the audience and by pleasing Protestants with an ending implying marriage.”⁴⁰ Equally unhappy with either a fully changed Isabella who takes the Duke’s hand and curtsies off the stage or the proud, cold novice turning abruptly back to the convent, Slights and Holmes ask the reader to imagine an alternative performance. They argue that “a knowing, self confident, and somewhat amused Isabella—rather than one who is either docile or self-righteous—would be in keeping with her desires and character as they have been revealed throughout

 Gless imagines that for Isabella, marrying the Duke would be the release from the “sterile bondage” that he argues the convent represents (213). While McFeely herself acknowledges the desire of modern audiences to read Isabella’s silence as a return to the monastic order of the convent, she argues that her complicity in the bed-trick taints her virtuous desires and pushes her toward a new form of enclosure (210).  Katharine Maus points to “‘unorthodox’ readings” of the play that read defiance in Isabella at the conclusion, imagining that “Isabella flees in horror from the Duke” (180), which she suggests are “possible” if not plausible readings for a staging of Measure for Measure.  Baines, 299.  Beauregard, 330.

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the play. Rolling her eyes heavenward, Isabella might direct at audiences an exasperated and conspiratorial smile. The joke is, after all,” they explain, “on the men of the play who have yet to understand the weakness of the normative foundations on which their claims to authority are constructed.”⁴¹ Yet, despite their triumphant reclamation of a comic ending that also allows for Isabella’s agency, Slights and Holmes still affirm that while their reading allows the novice self-definition, “the war for the control of women’s bodies and minds is far from over.”⁴² Admittedly, I favor the combination of “conspiratorial” humor and agency Slights and Holmes’s ending affords Isabella, though I am content to see agency in Isabella holding her tongue as Baines proposes. My larger issue with reading her silence one way or another is that at the end of the play, I argue, we still do not know enough about the options presented to her. Like Isabella, we are left suspended between two walled enclosures and their closed doors. We know that the convent has restrictions that ban nuns from being seen and speaking at the same time, but we never get an answer to Isabella’s question about the level of “restraint” she desires from the convent nor are we privy to the allowances Francisca delineates for Isabella before the convent scene opens. Similarly, the Duke’s “motion” that Isabella join him in his palace cuts us off as he concludes by proclaiming: So, bring us to our palace, where we’ll show What’s yet behind, that’s meet you all should know. (5.1.536 – 37)

His invitation is, of course, empty and excludes the audience from a scene that would allow us into the palace where we might learn Isabella’s real choice. As with the convent, we are faced with a closed door, and we have little way of knowing which of the keys Isabella might employ. Much like Isabella’s positioning throughout the drama, we begin and end the play in medias res. While we may have heard Isabella’s impassioned speeches that favor her chastity over her sisterly bond, we know very little of what Isabella might truly desire. Like the men of the play, we are left primarily to assess her outward showings, the roles she chooses to perform and the descriptions of her “cheek roses,” much as we are left with the façades of convent and palace at the play’s conclusion. At the end of the play, if we do not know the inclinations of our main characters, we certainly know little more about the two houses set before Isabella. They are alike in their obscurity, and in the way their “external warrants” (or lack thereof) are presented to us, but not in their internal attrib Slights and Holmes, 288.  Slights and Holmes, 288.

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utes. However, while convent doors had been closed for the real novices in Shakespeare’s England, merely naming the place on stage creates an opening that allows the audience to experience the powerful play its utterance helps to frame. Even if not a viable option, the convent, like de Certeau’s phantom that evades the containment of a signifier, opens up a clearing, a space that resists traditional closures and forms. Performance can then be seen in Kim Solga’s formulation as a “cultural doing, a historical doing, but also [as] a means of cultural and historical intervention.”⁴³ In terms of our desire to know what Isabella will choose at the end of the play, Schwarz contends that the problem is not that her answer is withheld from the audience, but that she might be imagined to answer at all.⁴⁴ This brings us back to the power of silence as performance and the potential Luckyj ascribes to the silent actor who “could render himself [or herself] inaccessible and inscrutable.”⁴⁵ The implications of this “inaccessible” façade directly threatens patriarchal order; because, as Luckyj goes on to assert, “even as they expand the potential for female agency, powerfully silent women can exceed their dramatic functions to become emblems of unruly chaos.”⁴⁶ Taking this assertion into account, we can add two more pairs of categories to the list that Isabel threatens to collapse: actor and audience, past and present.

 Kim Solga, Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3.  Schwarz, What You Will, 177.  Luckyj, 79.  Luckyj, 91.

Chapter 3: Romancing the Grate in Convent Dialogues When a young woman entered a convent, she signified her metaphorical worldly death in many ways, including the exchange of her family name for a religious one, and generally refraining from talking about matters pertaining to the outside world. However, at the most basic level, to enter a convent was to impose physical separation between oneself and the world beyond the convent’s walls. Convent rules detailed building construction and fortification and established regulations for the limited access of outsiders to the convent and the nuns themselves. All meetings between outsiders and nuns were to take place at a grate, a barred door or window that limited both physical and visual interactions between the nuns and their visitors. Furthermore, these visits were to be supervised by an abbess or nun of high standing in the convent. In the wake of the Reformation, these rules of separation became even more important, as the Catholic Church sought to fight off the rumors of impropriety in Continental monasteries like those that had so recently been dissolved in England. In her descriptions of the new English convents founded on the Continent following the monastic dissolutions, Caroline Bowden emphasizes the amplified importance of strict enclosure and its fortifications. She explains that “a priority in all building programmes was arranging the separation between women religious inside the enclosure and lay people outside,” a separation “theoretically possible with the construction of a high perimeter wall with only one carefully guarded way in.”¹ This separation of religious women from the world was materially manifested in the grates and grills that covered windows and doors, and in the more complicated architectural convent features. For example, intricate devices such as turns, or wheels, allowed food and goods to be passed into the cloister without exposing the nuns inside, or the visitors outside for that matter, as I have detailed in my discussion of the turn in my first chapter on Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. While such devices were meant to exclude the world, they also made the fortified structures resemble prisons rather than sanctuaries. As Bowden suggests, “some outsiders were disturbed by the concept of enclosure

 Caroline Bowden, “Community Space and Cultural Transmission: Formation and Schooling in English Enclosed Convents in the Seventeenth Century,” History of Education 34, no. 4 (July 2005), 373. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343-006

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and found it hard to accept that anyone should have positive views on the practice.”² The architecture of separation dictated by the convent rules, while established to protect nuns and control sexuality, cannot help but draw attention to the very openings and access points it seeks to fortify. Helen Hills emphasizes this paradox in her discussion of the architectural response in early modern Italy to the Council of Trent’s demands for greater lay-religious separations. According to Hills, the rhetoric of fortification “was focused on those areas of the convent where contact between inmates and outsiders was most possible—doors and windows—the symbolic orifices—even covered walkways raised high above city streets to create separate passages of circulation. Paradoxically, then, apertures and points of access thereby became the most conspicuous parts of the convent.”³ Hills explains how heightened fortifications draw the laity’s attention towards access points, especially because these grills, bars, and grates are designed to keep them out. Her reference to women religious as “inmates” also brings us back to the prison imagery that Bowden claims disturbed outsiders. In fact, Hills describes the “elaborate gilt irons” that framed nuns’ windows as “resembling the elaborate cages of exotic birds”; according to Hills, convent architecture, at least in early modern Italy, was not that of “modest enclosure, but a fabulously advertised confinement.”⁴ Hills’s assessment that grills and grates advertised the very women, depicted as caged “exotic” animals, who sought removal from the world, is borne out in seventeenth-century English and French dialogues and dramas of the cloister. Texts ranging from treatises designed to encourage young women to devote themselves to religious service to pornographic dialogues that beckon readers to imagine sexual exchanges behind the grate emphasize the fortifications and guarded access points of the convent. Even the texts’ own formal structures highlight these features with their rhetorically sophisticated prefaces that imitate the grates and guarded apertures of the convents they anatomize. Such front matter at once invites the reader into fictional cloisters and their private inner workings and pushes him or her away or excludes him or her, simultaneously allowing and limiting the intimate explorations the texts advertise. The dedications

 Bowden, 376. Critics of the convent in Measure for Measure such as Darryl Gless also see the space as a type of prison from which Isabella is freed at the end of the play when, as Gless imagines, she accepts the Duke’s marriage offer.  Helen Hills, “Architecture as Metaphor for the Body: The Case of Female Convents in Early Modern Italy,” in Gender and Architecture, ed. Louise Durning and Richard Wrigley (Chichester, UK and New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000), 78.  Hills, “Architecture,” 78.

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warn the reader against violating the private space of the convent, but they do so within a preface that publicly advertises this intimate content. In this chapter, I look at two dialogues that make use of this architecture of separation to advertise very different types of “religious” retreats. Combined, they set up a polarized, but typical representation of convents as either safe retreats for religious vocation or disguised dens of sexual experimentation. The English Nunne (1642) is a self-proclaimed “feigned dialogue,” in which the author N. N. purports to “perswade” young Catholic women “to abandone this Wicked World, and to imbrace a Votary and Religious life” within an English convent.⁵ In contrast, Venus in the Cloister, or The Nun in Her Smock (1683) is a set of three dialogues anonymously translated from the French and usually grouped together with proto-pornographic texts deemed “whore dialogues.”⁶ Venus’s particular group of dialogues also combines Protestant polemic with its erotic content, as the dedication’s narrator, the Abbot du Pratt, suggests that his text will penetrate the cloistered space of female retreat to disclose the illicit actions of its inhabitants. Despite their clearly opposite ends, the male presenters of both dialogues introduce their texts with structural metaphors that are analogous to convent architecture. Indeed, the grate becomes a key feature within their dialogues as well as in the way they frame this content for their readers. Both dialogues include dedications that the respective narrators set up as grate-like thresholds that at once distance the reader from the nuns within the tracts and entice those

 Lawrence Anderton, The English Nunne (St. Omers: English College Press, 1642), sig. A2v. This edition used throughout; hereafter citations will appear parenthetically by page signatures.  Venus in the Cloister is an English translation of Jean Barrin’s 1683 Venus dans le cloître, ou la religieuse en chemise, a dialogue often paired with other texts translated from French such as The School of Venus (1680) that include explicit sexual content usually involving experienced women instructing young novice figures. While such texts are often termed “whore” dialogues, James Grantham Turner argues that Venus, in particular, combines three different generic traditions: “the soft-core narrative of sex in holy orders, the ‘University of Love’ with its facetious curriculum and library catalogue, and the two-woman dialogue of initiation and seduction.” See Turner’s Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England 1534 – 1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 345. The edition of Venus I use here is an early translation dated 1683 without a credited translator. A modified translation was published in 1725 by Edmund Curll, who was one of the most prominent publishers of libertine materials and was later prosecuted. His edition includes two additional dialogues, extended scenes of graphic acts involving flagellation, and is even more overtly anti-Catholic. Curll’s infamous trial and prosecution became the precedent for obscene libel law in England for two hundred years. See the textual notes in When Flesh Becomes Word: An Anthology of Early Eighteenth-Century Libertine Literature, ed. Bradford K. Mudge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For more on eroticized education in Venus also see Mita Choudhury’s Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 129 – 54.

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readers to enter the texts’ convents. Taken together, these works and the architecture of their dialogue forms exemplify the paradox of enclosure. They highlight the security features of convents, which may be designed to protect and/ or conceal the bodies and actions of the nuns inside, but they also suggest, as Cary Howie attests, that enclosure “is doubly permeable; there’s no such thing as just one entrance … where there’s a window, there’s a gate.”⁷ The texts invite us to peek voyeuristically through the barred orifices, to catch a glimpse of the protected bodies within the convent and the protected narratives that lay just outside the boundaries of the dialogues’ textual bodies. That these convent dialogues are introduced by male figures only further emphasizes the potential permeability of their enclosures. The way these male presenters are introduced in the title pages at once aligns them with the authors, whom we imagine are also male and simultaneously obscures the roles of the authors in the main body of the texts. In Venus, the male presenter is introduced as an abbot addressing an abbess, specifically the Abbess of Love’s Paradise; clearly these are pseudonyms at the very least. James Grantham Turner refers to du Pratt as a narrator, who abdicates his role to a set of invented female speakers. Turner not only sees the narrator figure in this text as a “role,” but also notes how quickly the female-centered text “is marked by intrusive signs of satirical intention” and argues that such anti-clerical moments “remind us of the ventriloquizing male author.”⁸ Du Pratt, whether directly aligned with the author or not, not only mediates access to the convent as he introduces it to the reader, but he also sets us up for its penetration by the author and lascivious clerics alike. Although The English Nunne’s dedicatory presenter is unnamed and therefore easily tied to the anonymous author N. N.—often cited as the Jesuit Lawrence Anderton—he clearly plays the role of the fictional Confessarius within the feigned dialogue. And even more overtly than in Venus, we find that The English Nunne’s exchanges are also ventriloquized, as the main female character often reminds us that she speaks for her father in her debates with the Confessarius. These male mediators rhetorically build up their convents’ constructions, complete with gilded security features that invite readers to imagine penetrating them, in a way that seems to uphold Howie’s assertion about the paradox of enclosure. However, in these dialogues, the windows and grates are textual and generic features of texts that take the material and conceptual frames of the con-

 Carrie Howie, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 14.  Turner, Schooling Sex, 346.

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vent as subject matter to be simultaneously proffered and denied to readers seeking window access.

Advertising Austerity in The English Nunne Convent fortifications and regulations are key features in The English Nunne, a Catholic treatise published in 1642 in order to “draw yong & vnmarried Catholicke Gentlewomen” into a life of religious removal and devotion on the Continent (A1). Published over a century after the monastic dissolutions, the treatise and its “feigned dialogue” are clearly set in opposition to Protestant polemics such as Venus and Thomas Robinson’s Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon that paint convents as either dismal tombs where young women are forced to waste their fertile years in strict solitude or as equally detestable houses of hypocrisy where nuns and their male superiors use their fortifications to hide illicit escapades. From the very title page of the treatise, the anonymous author N. N. seeks to recuperate the convent from these negative associations and reframe it as a positive alternative to marriage for young Catholic women. He begins this project with a quotation from Matthew that beckons “Enter you by the narrow Gate (meaning austerity) that leadeth vnto Life: because large is the Way that leadeth to Perdition” (A). The scriptural passage uses an architectural metaphor that in the context of the dialogue’s topic is closely aligned with both convent enclosures and the formal organization and dimensions of the treatise itself. The “narrow Gate” that leads to “life” resembles the fortified convent door that would lead to a life of austerity inside an enclosed religious structure, but it is also the title page and preface, the compact literary gateways that advertise the dialogue and prepare readers for its argument. Like a grate, the title page is designed to give the reader a limited glimpse of the treatise’s inner contents, but not fully to disclose its body. We get a sense that the dialogue beyond the title page will elaborate on the way a woman willing to “Present [her] selfe a chast Virgin vnto Christ” might avoid perdition and embrace the “Life” promised beyond the “Gate”; however, the details of this process remain vague at best.⁹ Even the author of the treatise is masked with a cryptic set of initials, N. N., standing in for a name and perhaps suggesting “no name.” What we do know is that the subject is an English nun and that a “short Discourse (by way of conclusion)” attached to the end of the treatise is

 The passage from 2 Cor. 11 directly succeeds the passage from Matthew at the bottom of the title page.

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specifically directed to all the abbesses and religious women in the Low Countries and France. The reader must enter the text to find out more, but even then she may not be promised the keys to the convent. The title page’s architectural metaphor prepares the reader for the way N. N. will persuade novices to contemplate religious vocations. Like Isabella at the end of Measure for Measure, the narrator’s “vnmarried Catholike Gentlewomen” are placed in a position to choose between two doors, one leading to a convent and the other to a marital household. As the reader moves past the title page, the correspondence between the Biblical reference and these options becomes clear. The “narrow Gate,” as I have suggested, corresponds to the life path leading to the convent, while the larger doorway refers to the more popular marital choice, a choice the author sets up as the road to “Perdition.” The challenge N. N. takes on is to undermine the reader’s imagined predisposition to choose the more popular marriage route, and instead to sell the attractions of the more restrictive convent option. His strategy, rather than simply adumbrating the benefits of convent life, is to turn the seeming limitations of the convent to his advantage and to repurpose popular generic forms to make his case. The English Nunne uses convent features as well as its own dialogic form to excite and entice readers. In N. N.’s dedicatory epistle to the treatise, he explicitly states that he used the form of “a feigned Dialogue” in hopes that the reader “will be sooner induced to the reading and perusing it at full; then if it were written in one long continued speach, without any vicissitude, or change of Persons” (A3v). He utilizes the dynamic aspects of a fictional exchange, the back and forth of conversation and debate, to win an audience. In fact, he draws on two specific generic forms—prose romance and drama—as he advertises his dialogues to an explicitly female audience. He concedes that if he were writing a romance, “a second Syr Philip Sidneys Arcadia,” he would no doubt entertain a wider audience. But he goes on to suggest that if the reader could conjure just enough “spiritual feruour … to cast a curious eye here & there” on his treatise she might find it is much like the Arcadia, as both texts take up the same subject, “to wit of Love” (A6 – A6v). The narrator plays on the reader’s curiosity as he persuades her to peruse his dialogue, itself set up as a form of penetration, an invitation to enter the convent itself. He does this by connecting a love of Christ, a “spiritual feruour,” to the themes and exchanges of romantic fiction. Prose romance was a genre associated with women readers; indeed, Sidney’s Arcadia is dedicated to his sister Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, whom he positions as his primary if not sole reader in the text’s front matter. It seems important, then, that N. N. uses the same dedicatory and generic conventions of the prose romance to help potential nuns see the romance of embracing a spiritual life by entering the convent. N. N. prefaces his dialogue, like a romance, with

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a frame story that sets up his themes, and introduces the characters who comprise the family behind his religious drama. This “Argument, or Suiect” (A8) includes an explication of the family’s allegorical Greek names laid out much like a dramatis personae. In this overview we find that Orthodoxus (man of faith) “an imaginary Catholike Knight in England” (A7v) and his wife Gynecia (Womanhood) originally had three children, one son Monadelphus (one/only brother) and two daughters Cælia (heavenly life) and Cosmophila (world lover). The family composition is important because the presence of a male heir is the reason the eldest daughter Cælia is allowed to enter the English monastery in Belgiopolis (a city in Belgium). Naturally, the only brother dies and significantly he does so during Cælia’s “Nouiship, or yeare of Probation” (A7v) at the convent. The narrator insinuates that as a novice—one who has entered the convent but has not completed her religious vows—Cælia may return to her earthly family. Subsequently, her sister Cosmophila is sent to retrieve her in hopes that she will marry and secure an heir to carry on the family name. While a courtly romance would invariably center on a knight errant and the trials and adventures he must experience as he makes his quest to find a beautiful maiden and often save her from perilous danger, N. N. has taken this traditional plot, featured in romances such as Sidney’s Arcadia and La Roman de la Rose, and recast it to fit his own religious romance and implicitly impressionable, young Catholic woman reader. In fact, as the reader peruses N. N.’s text, she would find that it is much like Sidney’s romance, but not only in its subject matter. N. N.’s family-centered romance certainly corresponds to the family drama in Sidney’s Old Arcadia, specifically the story of the prince Basilius and his wife Gynecia who flee their court for the seclusion of the country to protect their two daughters from an oracle’s prediction that they will be stolen away by unworthy men and that Basilius will lose his throne. The sisters, like those in The English Nunne, are divided, the younger living with her parents and the elder heir to the throne, in this case, living with a foppish shepherd’s family. At one point, Philanax, the lord whom Basilius has left in charge in his absence from court, writes a letter admonishing the Prince for his decision to isolate his daughters and to keep them unwed until his death. In his letter, Philanax suggests that Basilius’s “fatherly care hath been … most fit to restrain all evil; giving [the daughters’] minds virtuous delights.” He then goes on to warn that “straightning” his daughters will only “stirr vp the mind to thinke, what it is from which they are restrained,” and as a comparison he asks the Prince to consider “whether a cage can pleas a bird; or whether a dog grow not fiercer with tying.”¹⁰ Basilius,

 Sir Phillip Sidney, The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (London, 1662), sig. C.

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however, continues with his sequestration, which contributes to a somewhat typical romance plot that describes suitors’ attempts to gain access to the forbidden daughters and the complications that ensue. In The English Nunne, N. N. seems to spin the story into a version that champions the isolation Philanax warns against; in some ways he becomes the oracle who warns against the marrying of daughters to unworthy men. Instead of fantasizing about the knight errant who will storm the castle and carry off the damsel to a life of marital bliss, the reader of N. N.’s story may cast herself as the novice errant, and take on the role of Cosmophila, tasked with retrieving her sister from a walled enclosure, guarded by a Confessor. Like the knight errant, Cosmophila does have to endure trials; however, for her these come in the form of the debates with the Confessarius that the dialogues stage. And in the end N. N. reverses the traditional outcome of a romance. Instead of Cosmophila saving the damsel from the grips of the convent, the Confessarius “saves” the errant novice, convincing her to convert and join her sister in the convent. In the end, Cosmophila trades her worldly identity for a religious one, and exchanges a marriage to man with a marriage to Christ, all of which is signified in her change of name from Cosmophila to Christophila. In contrast to romances such as Sidney’s Arcadia, which N. N. casts as a story of “sensuall and vayne Love, attended on with sinne, and Repentance,” The English Nunne advertises a different brand of “chast, and holy Love, whereby a Soule by solemne vow espouseth herselfe to Christ her Bridegroome” (A6). His dialogues, additionally, suggest an alternative plot to “the frequent dangers, griefes, and afflictions of mynd commonly accompanying Marriage” (A5v). He suggests that becoming a nun rather than a wife is the true prescription for pure love and happy endings for young women. While he admits that some married women may secure themselves a seat in heaven, he echoes Saint Paul as he claims “Virginity to be more honourable” and “the most secure way to come to Heauen, and escape Hell” (A3v). He goes on to take all the romance out of marriage and childbirth with dire warnings of how often marriage includes a husband, who “becomes vnkind, withdrawing his loue and affection, from whence it is due, & placing it on others where it is not due” (A5), and death in childbirth. Or worse, a wife might be blessed with an abundance of children and a husband who gives them too much liberty, thereby sentencing the whole brood to “eternall Damnation” (A5v). The narrator turns the traditional end of romance into a nightmare, while using a traditional prose form to promote a religious romance that ensures eternal bliss; the convent is heaven on earth as well as a guarantor of heaven in the afterlife. As N. N. repurposes prose romance and images of marital life to fit his theme of chaste love, he also figures his treatise as a drama in which he asks his ideal

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reader to play the role of a novice. He specifically calls on his reader to emulate the worldly Cosmophila, the young woman who will trade her love of the city for a love of Christ within the course of his treatise. He hopes his “feigned young Gentlewoman” will encourage his real young Catholic women readers to “act her [Cosmophila’s] Scene, in [their] proceedings” and “happily to Cloyster [themselves] in some deuout Monastery” (A6v – A7). Like his invocation of romance as an intriguing generic model, the narrator understands the utility of dramatic form as a way to excite readers and potential nuns. His decision to cast the treatise as a dialogue itself is geared to break up the monotony of monologue delivery. As I have noted, dialogues with their back and forth have long been tied to dramatic form, particularly to closet dramas; N. N. banks on the power of a fictional dialogue set against a family drama to sell his convent proposal to young women who might see themselves in his novice characters. And what better role for such young women to try out than the novice errant, who must navigate her way between her parental home and the convent during a liminal life phase? From the beginning of the treatise, Cosmophila is positioned between her parents’ desire to promote profitable marriages for their daughters and her elder sister’s convent and its promise of safety and a title to heaven. She becomes the family representative charged with the task of relaying their tragic story and thereby persuading her sister Cælia to return home with her. Cælia’s status as a convent insider, but one not fully accepted or indoctrinated in the ways of her religious vocation, is highlighted throughout the text and is often paired with her sister’s own status as a young woman who has not yet chosen a life path or taken vows of her own. This allegorical family and their fairly traditional storyline emphasize the divide between one’s earthly kinship ties and a desire to join a religious family removed from the world. We have seen this process interrupted for Measure for Measure’s Isabella in the previous chapter as she is taken away from her potential religious sister at the convent door and reoriented to fight for her earthly brother’s life. While The English Nunne stages novices choosing between these familial alliances, N. N.’s “Argument” prepares the reader for the triumph of religion, for not only does Cosmophila trade her love of the city for a devotion to Christ and join her sister in the convent, but her mother and father also abandon their worldly affairs for religious retreats. That N. N. discloses this triumphant ending with its family conversion before launching into his lengthy dialogue suggests that the dramatic process of debate itself is a better advertisement for religious vocation than simple allegory and anecdote. However, the way he stages the debate also suggests that he understands the seductive power of things left undisclosed. While the treatise through its narrator and the convent’s Confessor continually promises to “enlarge” the advantages of life in a convent through the feigned dialogue, the dialogue begins and

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ends at the grate and often emphasizes the importance of convent fortifications, material features that simultaneously promote and obscure the promises of a religious life. For those outside the convent, particularly young women who are still unclear about their life paths, the fortifications keep them from penetrating the cloister and exploring it as a vocational option, but for this reason the same fortifications also help to advertise the space as a safe haven, guarded from the vulgar eye seduced by these very safeguards. N. N. spends a good deal of time accentuating the fortifications and architecture of the convent. The dialogue begins as we follow Cosmophila in her quest to retrieve her sister from the European convent. When she presents herself to the convent’s Confessor and the Abbess she highlights her status as “a stranger, and English” (Bv), as she is situated at the grate to await her sister’s entrance from inside the convent. Cosmophila at first denounces the material divisions of the convent as she laments to her sister and the Abbess the utility of “this vnkind, or rather enuious Iron-grate (through which I only yet but see you),” and questions why the grate must “barre vs from mutually imbracing one another, now after my wearisome journey” (B2v). Cosmophila, in fact, is granted “free access” to the convent as she speaks with her sister. However, the function of the grate and other security features becomes part of the ongoing dialogue as the Confessor, Abbess, and her sister Cælia try to sell the attributes of a religious life to her. These convent security features, according to the Confessor, become accessories of liberation, as “Religious women are freed from all outward occasions, and allurements of Temptations: Since there is a continuall watch, and ward kept ouer them. For their outward Senses (as their eares, and eyes, and the rest) are barred and restrayned from all such dangerous obiects, as may occasion temptation” (C2v). The Confessor calls up the mandates for cloistered nuns in the medieval guide the Ancren Riwle that advises women on interactions with outsiders, warning “when you have to go to your parlour window, learn from your maid who it is that is come; for it may be some one whom you ought to shun.”¹¹ It goes on to advise women to have witnesses when speaking to men and likens the dangers of speech to Eve’s “cackling” conversation with the serpent in Eden. One should emulate the Virgin Mary, whom only spoke four times, according to the guide. The convent’s architecture helps to enforce self-abnegation and chastity so closely tied to speech. Unlike Philanax in Sidney’s Arcadia,

 The Nun’s Rule or the Ancrene Riwle, modernized by James Morton, Introduction by Abbot Gasquet (New York: Cooper Square Publication, 1966) (as cited in Measure for Measure: Texts and Contexts, ed. Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber, 241).

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the Confessor imagines that a bird might actually be pleased with a cage, or, in his positive terms, a liberating, protective enclosure. He credits convent rules and government as protecting women from outer temptations, but just as importantly claims that “the very wals themselues within which they are inclosed do guard them from all such dangerous and spirituall incursions” (C2v). The very surveillance and barring of the senses, “eares, and eyes, and the rest,” suggest a fortification of the body’s orifices, openings that Peter Stallybrass reminds us were often collapsed with household thresholds in the early modern period. The “production of a normative ‘Woman,’” he explains, “is rigidly ‘finished’”: her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house.”¹² In convents, both the woman’s body and the building within which they are enclosed are to resemble a hortus conclusus, “an enclosed garden walled off from enemies.”¹³ In emphasizing these correlations with an extended defense of convent rules, N. N. follows in the long tradition of conflating women’s bodies with enclosures. Indeed, we find such allegorical imagery in the romances he claims to emulate, especially Roman de la Rose with its extended ekphrastic depiction of an impenetrable walled garden, its maze of hidden spaces and central rose garden. The speaker’s desire to access the garden is perhaps purer than Angelo’s desire to “raze” Isabella’s body as sanctuary, but it certainly suggests a related desire associated with the virginal, cloistered woman. Such a conflation of building and body works perfectly for N. N. as he loads with multiple associations the images he uses to advertise religious enclosure and its access points and simultaneously to call up the very threats that necessitate the rules and rigid structure of the convent. We can see the bodily implications of the architecture specifically in N. N.’s introduction and his emphasis on the austere “narrow Gate that leadeth vnto Life” (A1). It is hardly a stretch to read this imagery as vaginal if we read the passage to “Life” as a reference to reproduction. In fact, this gendered “duty” is often used against women seeking to enter convents, as reflected in literary texts that bemoan the loss of ripe, fruitful ladies to a religious order and freely associate older nuns with rotten and withered fruit in reference to their unproductive wombs. However, N. N. turns the reading of this architectural

 Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discovery of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 127.  Stallybrass, 129. Hellen Hills also discusses the tradition of conceiving virginity spatially, and notes that “metaphors of porta clausa, claustra, hortus conclusus, fons signatus used to describe virginity and its protection are themselves architectural, evoking a space defended, enclosed and sealed” (“Architecture,” 78).

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image and uses it instead to advertise the advantages of a young woman maintaining her chastity, “the most precious Iewell, that God & Nature hath bestowed vpon you” (A4v). He beckons women to enter the convent and to guard the entrance by removing their bodies from sexual circulation. The “Life” he refers to is the reader’s own, a physical and spiritual life that he claims will be put into jeopardy if the body is not safeguarded against the riskier endeavors he associates with marriage and childbirth. The Abbess supports his position on childbirth, emphasizing its physical dangers, when she inquires: How many women are there in the world (though otherwise of most strong, and healthfull constitution of Body) who have in the compasse of a day, or two in the deliuerance of their children, lost their liues? … Now, Religious women, who euer remaine shut vp in their Monasteries from the sight of men, are thereby exempted from this danger, by the which Laywomen do oftentimes come to a sudden and vnexpected death. (C5v – C6)

Not only does she paint a bleak picture of the perils of childbirth, but she also contrasts the horrors associated with a vulnerable, open female body with the advantage of being “shut up” in a monastery cut off from the male gaze and the dangerous intimacies that such ocular penetration might provoke. Later in the dialogue, the Abbess underscores the security of a religious life, the fortifications which she claims keep women “out of the trafficke and commerse of the eyes of men, and from all worldly aduancements,” as a result of which “we rest in a holy and wholesome place of Refuge; we being by this meanes made meere strangers to the World, and the World to vs” (G3v). The grate, then, divides two sets of strangers, those outside the convent walls, but also the religious who have closed themselves off from this first set of strangers and the rest of the world. In this formulation, Cosmophila remains a “stranger” throughout the dialogue. What changes is what side of the grate she is on. However, as important as the surveillance mechanisms are to keeping strangers, particularly “strange” men, out of the convent, one must remember that convents and their female inhabitants also depended upon letting “familiar” men into the enclosure. Cosmophila, like the young women to whom The English Nunne is directed, is positioned throughout most of the text as somewhere between the groups labeled “strange.” While the narrator as Confessor, and “familiar” male mediator, spends what seems like an excessive amount of time outlining the attributes of convent life, elaborating on its functions, rules, and tenets, the reader is still left at the front entrance of the enclosure until she chooses to take religious vows over marital ones. The dialogue, in this respect, focuses much more on the way religious life is structured than on detailing the actual daily life of the nuns inside. The reader gets a sense of what is supposed to go on in the convent, a mis-

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sion statement of sorts, but not a realistic picture of the relationships and human interactions fostered by this female-centered enclosure. We get the prescriptions for the convent drama, basic plot points, but none of the implicit actions that would make it a truly dynamic space. While the dialogue may, in fact, invite a curious eye and advertise the convent life, its exchanges still keep the reader at a distance from the intimate spiritual inner chambers of the convent; the dialogue reinforces rather than penetrates fortifications like grates that exclude strangers. For Cosmophila’s and Cælia’s worldly family, the elder sister’s probationary status suggests flexibility in her choice of vocation. Cosmophila delivers her father’s opinion to Cælia that because “as yet you haue not made any Vow of a Religious lyfe, nor yet in conscience stand obliged to any such spirituall course, you being only in your Noviceship; … that you return presently into England” (B3). Because the family assumes that Cælia has not officially vowed herself to the convent, Cosmophila suggests that her first duty is still to her “natural” family as she urges her sister: “conforme your selfe to our Father herein with all promptitude and readines of Resolution” (B3v). For her part, Cælia laments the loss of her brother, but that “his death should be the occasion of my forsaking my intended (and now entered into) course of life,” she attests, “I infinitely loath” (B3v). Cælia’s aside makes her novitiate status somewhat ambiguous, suggesting perhaps that she has taken her vows during the course of Cosmophila’s journey from England to Belgiopolis. Whether still a novice or a newly avowed nun, Cælia’s role is still that of ingénue in the dialogue. We see this as the Abbesse praises the response of her young pupil, affirming “Sister Cælia; you haue spoken well” (B4), and in the interactions between Cælia and her new father figure, the Confessarius. Indeed, her status paired with Cosmophila’s own as a young woman unaffiliated and generally new to the world creates an opening for the Confessarius to instruct them. At the beginning of the treatise, the debate seems to center on the choices that divide two sisters, with Cosmophila solely defending the necessary devotion to one’s lay family. Yet, while the dialogue primarily consists of back and forth between a religious patriarch and Cosmophila, with lengthy speeches by the Confessarius and much shorter contributions and contestations from the worldly novice, it is important to note that Cosmophila is, in fact, speaking on her father’s behalf. She is presented as a messenger who parrots “diuers of [her] Fathers speaches” against religious vocations, making such objections as “I haue herd my Father talk of the dangerous state of a Religious life; and how it is beset with many difficulties” (B5 – B5v). However, she qualifies her performance by suggesting that she will represent her father’s arguments “so far as my weake memory will serue” (B5v), undercutting her authority and thereby emphasizing

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her own ingénue status. The Abbesse embraces her discourse “hoping” that the “Father Confessarius will lay open and display the weaknes of all [her] Reasons and Motiues impygning a Religious life” so that she will learn to accept her “Sisters already imbraced Resolution” (B5v). The Confessarius, equally open to the debate, condescends to his audience, proclaiming, “Women out of their want of reading, and specially young Nouices (such as our Sister Cælia is) are perhaps not able to solue all the obiected Arguments, made by sensuall men against the votary lyfe: Therefore I being the Confessarius to this vertuous Monastery, hould it my duty and function, to refute all such Reasons” (B6). The Confessarius establishes his authority over the young novices, and within the convent as a whole. For Cosmophila, her role as messenger highlights her own inexperience and seems to justify the way the Confessor quickly wins her over. Furthermore, despite the treatise’s ratio of three women to one man, one can see that the dialogue is truly a debate between two father figures, both defending their respective forms of patriarchy. With the religious father winning out, even ultimately inspiring the sisters’ earthly father to enter a monastery, the treatise seems to offer an alternative patriarchal authority figure for young women readers, who, like Cælia, want something other than an arranged marriage. The dialogue’s model suggests that instead of simply going against their father’s wishes, they might replace him with a surrogate, religious father. However, while this exchange comes fairly easily in N. N.’s fictional dialogue, the author leaves room for the reader who might remain impervious to his argument. In his conclusion, we return to the dedication’s speaker as he moves from the impressionable reader with curious eye, open to the idea of the convent, to the resolute ladies of fortune unmoved by his dialogue. To these “ladies of Worth and Dignity,” particularly those who have “great portions left them by their Parents,” he pleads: If so you cannot brooke to be Religious in profession; yet at least resolue to be Religious, in disposall of part of your temporall meanes. O what spritituall treasure, and riches might you hoard vpto yourselues, by distributing to good uses a reasonable portion of your Worldly treasure? (L4)

He goes on to call up the images of the many English Catholic women who “most gladly thirst after a Votary life, and yet want sufficient portions” (L4). For the sake of these women, he prevails upon more fortunate women to act as benefactors and sponsor women who desire the religious life that they would shun. In this final plea, he returns to the rhetoric of his initial gateway metaphor, assuring those willing to part with their “Worldly treasure” in an

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act of charity that they will gain entrance to “the narrow Gate” and access to its “sprituall treasures.” As N. N. closes the door on his dialogue, he advertises the advantages of a religious life not only to those who desire to enter an English convent, but also to those women who would remain strangers on the other side of the grate. His romanticization of the convent is meant not only to bring in inhabitants, but also to solicit patrons who might produce the dowries for young women unable to play the role of novice errant without financial support. Furthermore, as Caroline Bowden explains, the text “served as a manual to families living in England, unused to seeing convents in their neighbourhood and unable otherwise to access practical knowledge.”¹⁴ Throughout the dialogue, the presenter figure plays to both sides of the grate, bringing in the voices of opposition to refute and reform them. This is not an uncommon strategy for a dialogue, but he delivers his defenses in a way that actually seeks to revise the reception of the dialogic form itself; by infusing his treatise with drama and romance, he seeks to change the way young women see the convent, as he asks them to imagine the bars of the grates and windows not as cages to restrict their freedom, but rather as frames that encompass a new world that frees them from the dangerous structures of marriage contracts and patriarchy, that allow them to imagine new versions of old stories.

Selling Seduction in Venus in the Cloister While The English Nunne’s dialogue keeps the reader at the main entrance of its convent, barely moving past its initial grate, Venus in the Cloister, or The Nun in Her Smock (1683) exploits the paradox of enclosure. Living up to Howie’s assertion that “where there’s a window there’s a gate,” Venus’s convent dialogues emphasize the alternative access points to a “detestable grate.”¹⁵ Venus’s presenter, the Abbot du Pratt, plays with the double utility of convent security devices as he prepares to relate “secret conferences,” which if they were made public, he claims, “would Occasion no small scandal” both to himself and the Lady Abbess of Love’s Paradise, to whom the “curious” dialogues are addressed. His feigned hesitation to relate the details of the defrocked nun in his dedication is clearly designed to excite the reader by suggesting the scandalous nature of the dialogues’ subject matter. The Abbot du Pratt does usher the reader inside his con-

 Bowden, “The English Convent,” 309.  Howie, 14, 16.

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vent construction. Indeed, after the dedication, the reader is taken across or through a series of thresholds—walls, keyholes, doors, grates—that clearly do little to impede visitors’ (whether sexual suitors’ or readers’) penetration into the increasingly intimate spaces of the cloister. Through this anatomized depiction of the convent’s erotic interior, the Abbot invites us to question, as many did during the period, whether convents protect or conceal their inhabitants.¹⁶ The progression of impediments overcome in Venus is sequenced as a form of titillation that at once excites the readers, inducing them to read further, and critiques the same “private” activities that cause such excitement. Venus’s dialogues also use the hierarchical structure of convents to create their conceits of erotic instruction. While The English Nunne directs its “Gentlewomen” readers on how to use the convent as a means to maintain chastity and secure a title to heaven, Venus depicts the instruction of a novice in how to use the convent to freely embrace and quench carnal desire without discovery. The tone of the English Nunne is sincere, whereas Venus reads like a parody, an irreverent depiction of a convent meant to simultaneously warn against the evils of Catholic enclosure and entertain readers with its graphic evidence against such spaces. Furthermore, although dedicated to a Lady Abbess (of Love’s Paradise), it is likely that Venus is intended for adult male readers rather than impressionable young gentlewomen trying to choose a vocation.¹⁷ Despite the authors’ disparate depictions of convents in The English Nunne and Venus in the Cloister, they both draw on the architecture of enclosure to advertise their respective dialogues. One striking similarity between the texts is their use of gateway metaphors within their front matter. However, much like the purposes of these texts, the imagery of their respective openings is reversed. While The English Nunne’s narrator invites readers to enter a world of austerity marked by a “narrow gate,” which I argue refers simultaneously to the convent door, the treatise’s preface, and the vagina, the Abbot du Pratt refers to his own prefatory dedication as “a long Letter to a Small Work and a great door to a little

 Drawing on discussions of contained female sexuality in the scholarship of Laura Gowing and Claire Walker, Frances E. Dolan explains, “when the containment of the female body is presumed to be impossible, then the walls of the convent become not reinforcements of chastity but barriers to surveillance.” See “Why Are Nuns Funny?,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2007), 517. On issues related to women’s bodies kept secret and distrust of Catholic privacy see Gowing’s chapter 1, “Uncertain Knowledge,” in Common Bodies: Women Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 17– 52.  Gowing argues that the circulation of these pornographic texts translated out of French and Latin was “probably limited to affluent, educated men.” See Common Bodies, 84.

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House.”¹⁸ These images suggest his introduction is excessive, particularly when one considers the subject matter that follows. Like the title page image that introduces The English Nunne, this pair of images also refers to the restrictive size and scope of the convent. However, while the English Nunne’s presenter celebrates such limitations as openings to a heavenly afterlife, the Abbot du Pratt implicitly critiques them by suggesting that not only is the structure restrictive, but the very subject matter is insignificant or somehow unworthy of the space he allows it, a “Small Work.” At the very least, he presents it as a text not to be widely circulated, but that he has written as a personal favor to his dedicatee. He highlights this at the end of the dedication when he admonishes the Lady Abbess, “Impart to your and my most intimate Friend, what you think fitting they should know of this matter” (A3v). This final warning recalls the Duke’s parting lines at the end of Measure for Measure when he directs Isabella and the audience members to follow his marital proposal, as he motions, “So bring us to our palace, where we’ll show / What’s yet behind, that’s meet you all should know” (5.1.541– 42). The Duke’s “meet” and the Abbot’s “fitting” suggest a division between private and public knowledge of what goes on inside an enclosed structure. Such statements remind us that relations of happenings behind closed doors must always be mediated and are subject to the interpretation and decorum of a messenger. Both Venus’s Abbot and The English Nunne’s presenter order our experience of their respective dialogues, suggesting a manner in which a reader should proceed, if that reader should proceed at all. Their dedicatory frames create doors that simultaneously invite readers to enter and force them to realize that they are outsiders to the space, advertising the contents of their respective convents while pointing to their mediation of the reader’s experience of the text. Like the very grates that frame the convent’s access points, such mediation at once limits readers’ and audience members’ knowledge of internal workings and arouses their imaginative construction of those workings. While the Duke’s statement closes the play, leaving the audience members suspended, unable to follow the party to his mansion, the Abbot’s closing address to the Abbess invites us along as he remembers the enclosure’s secrets. This final statement sets the reader up as either the “most intimate Friend” who will be allowed “fitting” access to an eyewitness account of the convent’s erotically charged inner workings, or as the set of wrong hands that will covertly rifle through the secret pages. In either case, the Abbot emphasizes limited access both to

 Venus in the Cloister (London, 1683), sig. A3. Hereafter citations from this text will appear parenthetically by signature pages.

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the dialogues and the convent itself as a way to seduce the readers and induce them to cross the gilded threshold of the dedication and enter the text. Fittingly, the reader’s voyeuristic journey through the convent via the dialogues between two nuns in Venus begins with a breached door. As the reader leaves the Abbot at the introductory grate, the dialogues are set up as instantly intimate. Unlike the exchanges of The English Nunne, the back and forth between these two religious sisters is not orchestrated by a confessor or even an abbess. That we join Sister Angelica as she surprises our Venus in her bedroom suggests that the reader has been brought to an inner sanctum of the convent. Sister Agnes’s shock at this entrance implies her expectation of security in her bedroom cell, a response that seems justified. Yet, Angelica insinuates that Agnes’s surprise is more than the modest protestations of an innocent caught simply changing clothes. Angelica takes exception to Agnes’s reaction, claiming her bashfulness is “a great hurt indeed, to have found thee changing thy Smock, or doing something better; Intimate Friends ought not in any wise to conceal themselves from one another” (A4– A4v). She not only suggests that Agnes is doing “something better” than disrobing, a statement clearly designed to spark the readers’ imaginations, but she also refers to an “Intimate” friendship that hearkens back to the Abbot’s designation for the Lady Abbess and her retinue of friendly readers. As the Abbot specifies that the information he discloses should be shared with “intimate friends,” Angelica also prepares the novice nun for intimate instruction about life in the convent, suggesting that its fortifications conceal more than they exclude. The power dynamic between the two nuns clearly favors Angelica, who is presented as a mentor figure, more knowledgeable about the ins and outs of convent life than Agnes because of her seven years’ residency compared to Agnes’s three. Significantly, while Angelica is set up as older and wiser, she establishes early on that she is only twenty years old, having entered the cloister at thirteen. Her age is important because while she is the authority figure in the opening exchanges of the dialogues, she is still set apart from the old deteriorating nuns so often ridiculed for their attempts to seduce novices in anti-convent literature and similarly derided as sadly comical figures in this text.¹⁹ Agnes’s three years in the convent are also important because they imply that she is well past the probation period required of the novitiate, but they still factor  In Andrew Marvell’s poem “Upon Appleton House”, the “subtle nuns” are charged with “pulling” the young novice in with their seductive charms. The emphasis placed on Angelica’s age in Venus also calls up the implementation of minimum age requirements included in the Council of Trent’s various reform measures. For more on convent age requirements see Walker, Gender and Politics.

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into her portrayal as a naïve ingénue, unused to the convent’s customs and desperately negotiating its restrictions. The initial exchanges between the two nuns reflect this dynamic as Angelica redefines the role of a convent inhabitant and Agnes struggles to adapt her own understanding of the convent’s politics. The opening exchanges between the nuns introduce the duplicity that will mark the majority of the text’s instructions and seductions. In this first conference the vulnerably smocked nun clearly fills the role of ingénue as she grapples with the perceived hardships of convent life. She finds curbing her nature to win the “affections” of her fellow nuns particularly difficult, for she explains “I have never been able to Bridle my self in my affections, nor endeavor to engage those to be my Friends, who are naturally indifferent to me; It is the imperfection of my Genius which is an Enemy of Constraint, and will in all things act freely” (A5). Angelica concurs that it is difficult to work against one’s nature, but she instructs that in order to survive the politics of the cloister individuals must “divide themselves, and to do often out of prudence, what they cannot do out of inclination” (A5v). So while she admonishes Agnes in one moment for her desire to conceal herself, she instructs her in the art of a different kind of concealment in the next. And when the justifiably dubious Agnes counters Angelica’s lesson in deception, suspecting she might be a victim of such a “Policy,” and only “possess the painting” of Angelica’s affection, Angelica responds with physical intimacy, embracing Agnes as proof of her affections as she assures her that “dissimulation has no share in such strong friendship” as theirs (A5v). Angelica uses the idea of dissimulation to admonish Agnes for her coyness in their private exchanges, but she also suggests she will teach her pupil how to wield dissimulation as a tool in her interactions with other less intimate friends. Despite Angelica’s protestations against “dissimulations,” she will teach her young apprentice how to play the “Prudent Nun,” a role that she explains is not defined by “Austerity and Scrupulous wisdom, which is only nourish’d by fastings, and only coverd with Hair Cloth,” but rather by a “less savage” set of guidelines “which all understanding persons make profession of following, and which has no small affinity to thy Amorous Nature” (A6 – A6v). Agnes does not immediately accept this new definition of prudence, particularly because she rejects Angelica’s reading of her nature, which she suggests is far from amorous. It is significant that at this point Agnes is also attempting to resist Angelica’s physical advances and questioning the level of intimacy and affection their friendship condones. Her protestations of innocence and suggestion that she has lived passion-free her three years in the convent, however, provide Angelica with the opening she needs to break her pupil’s resolve. At this point in the dialogue, dissimulation opens the door to surveillance. For it is at this moment as Agnes attempts to resist her mentor’s advances

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with claims to sexual innocence that Angelica reveals her knowledge of the “something better” in which our scantily smocked Venus was engaged before her entrance. She refutes Agnes’s claims of innocence by alluding to the actions “which I perceived through the Key-hole of the Door before I came into the Room.” This, she exclaims, “makes me know that thou art a dissembler” (A7). Rather than simply confessing to her private actions, Agnes interrogates Angelica about what she spied through the keyhole, creating the opportunity for extended passages of masturbation innuendo as the mentor completes her seduction, acting out the scene she witnessed by replacing Agnes’s hand with her own “to do thee the Office” that she interrupted (A7v). She concludes by revealing that this amorous nature is common to all convent inhabitants, and that they are all only decked with a “shew of Sanctity,” an art in which she will continue to instruct the novice nun. The erotic scene introduces both novice and reader to the secret life inside the convent, initiating both parties in the education of carnal disclosure. Ultimately, the novice concludes that “faults concealed are half pardoned” (B9), a possible mission statement for the text’s religious community. The revelatory masturbation description not only exposes Angelica’s surveillance, but also reminds the readers of their own voyeurism as they imagine the seduction scene framed for them. However, this reminder also makes us question the intended audience for Venus, as we might also for The English Nunne. By extension we might also consider what roles reader-participants might be expected to play within these extremely different convent settings. The dialogues can be distinguished, in fact, by the role that their respective readers are either explicitly or implicitly directed to play as they engage with the texts. The English Nunne, which N. N. specifically marks as a text meant for female readers, asks these young women to play the parts set before them. Venus’s dialogues, however, while dedicated to a Lady Abbess, are most likely aimed at a male reader, as I suggest above. The female reader of The English Nunne might interact with the text as a script, both as she reads the roles designed for her and then as she enacts the script it lays out for her by entering a convent, or by funding a young woman’s entrance into one; the female reader might just as easily be an older patron as a young potential convert. In contrast, the male reader of Venus might also read the dialogues as scripts, but cannot enact them as such, partly because there is no real role for him in the exchanges between the nuns other than that of voyeur. The English Nunne prepares the reader for a role still largely undisclosed, not “fit” for the unprofessed, while Venus, despite its initial rhetoric of exclusivity, creates more dramatic scenes of secret actions that the male reader might imagine watching through the keyholes, grates, and various chinks and openings that the text emphasizes as potential surveillance points. Furthermore, despite the assumed male readership, Venus sets us up to imagine a female voy-

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eur responding to the pornographic scenes of the text through its depiction of Angelica witnessing Agnes’s auto-eroticism. Venus’s exchanges, while not explicitly dictated as stage directions, provide just enough direction for a reader to stage the erotic scenes in his or her mind. Angelica is a more dynamic director than the Confessarius, as she implicitly shows as much as she tells when she instructs her ingénue nun. We see this specifically in moments such as the voyeuristic masturbation scene as recalled by Angelica and replayed for the accused, as well as in other scenes where Angelica directs Agnes to disclose her most private secrets. Before one particular disclosure, Angelica positions Agnes on the bed and dissuades her from dressing as she orders her “Hug me, My Dear Agnes, before [thou] beginnest, and confirm by thy kisses the mutual Protestations We have interchanged of loving one another Eternally” (A8v). Such instructions are then followed by exclamatory sighs that imply Agnes’s compliance. The experienced nun establishes physical intimacy with her directions and implies the consummation of an emotional bond as her reactions suggest Agnes indeed holds up her end of these eternal love vows. The reader’s experience is multiply mediated as scenes are dictated by a character who has been spying on another through the convent’s apertures, and, with the many exclamations that accompany inexplicit actions, it is as if the reader is only able to listen at the door. However, the dialogues still allow the reader to penetrate a private world, and in some ways to personalize the effects of that penetration by himself casting and blocking the erotic exchanges. The seductive power of Venus’s exchanges lies in the very way they limit the explicit exposure of the young nuns, a reality exemplified when the scenes between Angelica and Agnes are set against more detailed descriptions of nuns that seem engineered to elicit laughter rather than lust. While Angelica dominates the first dialogue, she is far from the only director of Venus’s convent activities. Both nuns represent their incarceration in the cloister as a result of male coercion and seduction. Angelica, for example, explains, “I should never have taken the vows, if a Jesuite, who at that time governed this Monastery, had not undertook the matter” (B10). She goes on to explain that her family’s financial state factored into her final decision, but she circles back to the Jesuit, confirming that above all it was “the Cunning of him that drew me in” paired with his learned doctrine and discourse of salvation that ultimately “did very much dispose my mind to suffer it self to be seduced” (B10v – B11). She depicts herself as a passive participant in her own enclosure, drawn in by the smooth talk and religious rhetoric of a man whom she will later label a “Quack.” Subsequently, Angelica actually attributes all of her knowledge of religious dogma and sexual endeavors to male authority figures, as she notes “the Cares and Pains several Great Men have taken” to “render me perfect”

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(A11). She also accompanies her own seduction story with those of other more or less fortunate nuns similarly wooed into the cloister. Much like our introduction to Agnes, these stories feature breached or penetrable convent fortifications—confessionals, little “Chinks” leading into private alcoves, and of course grates. Angelica herself remembers spending three hours at a grate as the Jesuit persuaded her to enter the convent, a detail that almost mirrors Cosmophila’s discourse with the Confessarius in The English Nunne. However, the seductions in Venus are generally depicted as duplicitous, with the victims left to make the best of their confinement by entertaining themselves and engaging in all manner of erotic activity. The polemical tone of Venus emphasizes that the nuns are objects of seduction, victims of the grate and its mediators. The homoerotic exchanges between Angelica and Agnes in the first dialogue seem like empowering responses to the women’s exploitation by the male sponsors who drew them into the convent. However, as we learn at the end of this dialogue, Angelica also plans to prostitute her companion to other male clerics so that she might be similarly perfected. She explains to Agnes, the self-proclaimed “Novice” of amorous exchange: “I fancy thou wilt play thy part, as well as any one I know, when I have put thee into the hands of true honest Fryers,” and while she laments that she must part from Agnes at this convent induction, she suggests “I shall comfort my self with the account thou’lt give me of all that passes, namely, Whether the Abbot performs better than the Jesuite, or the Fryer than the Monk, and in short, if all the whole Priesthood is able to give thee full satisfaction” (B7v). The second dialogue, in fact, consists of Agnes’s reports about her dalliances with various men, stories Angelica eagerly encourages. The men in these stories are placed in contest with one another, and the sisters seem to bond as they compare their experiences and rate the men’s sexual performances. However, despite the bonding that this intimate sharing seems to promote, this aspect of Agnes’s sexual education seems to undercut the erotic friendship between our two nuns, a common trajectory in such texts. As Kate Chedgzoy explains, in Venus “as in other pornographic works of the period, sexual activity involving two women is presented essentially as an initiatory prelude to heterosexual activity, the kind of orgiastic encounter between monks and nuns that was for so long a staple of anti-Catholic satire.”²⁰ Furthermore, convent architec Kate Chedgzoy, “‘For Virgin Buildings Oft Brought Forth’: Fantasies of Convent Sexuality,” in Female Communities 1600 – 1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities, ed. Rebecca D’Monte and Nicole Pohl (London: Macmillan, 2000), 54. Gowing also notes that “tribadism and penetration between women were represented in erotic and medical literature, and they were mostly treated as a preliminary to heterosexual intercourse” (Common Bodies, 68).

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ture once again plays a major role in Agnes’s induction into this convent’s world of heterosexual encounters, as we discover just how penetrable fortifications might be. From the beginning of the dialogue we see the seductive powers of unsecured doors and keyholes as the reader is introduced to Agnes in her smock, and we hear from Angelica how she spent three hours at the grate while a Jesuit worked his wiles on her. As we move deeper into the dialogue, the manipulation of such fortifications and apertures only becomes more elaborate, particularly as Angelica relays anecdotes about convent surveillance. Perhaps the most detailed and intricate example she provides involves two nuns spying on a pair of unfortunate lovers, a nun and a priest, through a “Chink.” The chink itself is simple compared to the lovers’ navigation of the grate: they grasped one anothers hands, and with languishing looks spake some tender words, which departed more from their Hearts than from their Mouth. This Amorous Contemplation followed with opening a little four square Casement, which was toward the midst of the grate, and which served for pretty big Packquets to pass through of such as made presents to Nuns: Then it was that Virginia, received and gave a thousand Kisses. (C5 – C6v)

The scene escalates, as one might imagine, with the priest coercing Virginia to exchange more than kisses, and while not explicit the emphasis on the square aperture’s ability to let in “pretty big Packquets” euphemistically stands in for the type of exchange the priest desires. The depiction of the grate as a site for sexual intercourse is not unusual for pornographic texts set in convents, particularly those that are overtly anti-Catholic.²¹ In other scenes, the nuns use architectural metaphors to stand in for their own bodies as they relay their sexual experiences. Agnes, for example, explains how a priest responds to her concerns “that the follies we two committed would be followed with a third” by supplying her with a book entitled “Remedies against dangerous swelling” and then proceeds to “put himself in the posture of attacking the Pillars of Hercules” (D9). Such images of penetrable closures, paired with the concerns about the outcome of heterosexual intercourse, namely pregnancy in Agnes’s case, emphasize the notion that female bodies need to be contained; however, once again they simultaneously problematize the danger of the wrong type of container. Long before Venus was translated into English, Thomas Robinson offered his salaciously hyperbolic Anatomy of an English Nunnery (1623), which includes

 For another description of Robinson’s confessional see Dolan’s “Why Are Nuns Funny?,” 518. Nancy Bradley Warren reproduces the Title Page and accompanying verse in The Embodied Word (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2010), 226 – 27.

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an even more complicated depiction of a confessional, illustrated as a triptych on the manuscript’s title page. The accompanying text explains that initially a nun appears to be praying at the confessional grate with the priest on the other side. The second panel, however, reveals something more: But if you looke vpon the other side, A sleighter grate doth such a wall diuide; Which vp and downe is lifted at their leasure, As Nuns and Friers one another pleasure. (D)

The top right panel designated with a “D” correspondingly shows the confessor lifting half of the grate from the middle and the nun ducking as if to walk through. As Nancy Bradley Warren has explained, Robinson’s vilified convent description was “a strategy for turning the troubling nexus of fears raised by the Spanish Marriage [Charles I’s proposed marriage to the Spanish Infanta] to their advantage.”²² She goes on to argue, “playing off widespread Protestant representations of the Catholic Church as the ‘whore of Rome’ or the ‘whore of Babylon,’ … Robinson portrays the Brigittine community of Syon in Exile [supporters of the Spanish marriage] as a nest of sexual vice.”²³ Warren draws our attention to Robinson’s clear interest in focusing on women’s bodies, especially as associated with Catholicism to denigrate a long English lineage associated with the convents and potential future claims to the English throne. His tactics resemble those used by Henry VIII in the monastic dissolutions that lead to the exile of communities including the Brigittines. In addition to the political impetus behind such Protestant polemics, Robinson’s title page illustrates the textual framing of the nuns’ bodies. We are reminded that the penetration of the cloister is literary as well as erotic, as we are beckoned to turn pages in our discovery of the convent’s secrets. Robinson, in fact, plays up the literary in his demonization of the convent hierarchy, arguing that the books circulated by the confessor Seth Foster were directly related to the defiling of the nuns, women depicted as passive victims to the confessor’s vices. Foster is cited as reading “scurrilous” materials to the nuns, including Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Jenna Lay notes that from his perspective as copyist and compiler of Foster’s works, “Robinson treats Foster as the source of a ‘false doctrine’ of obedience that is able to flourish because the priest alone controls Syon’s book production. As a result, the corruption of the book,

 Warren, 225.  Warren, 226.

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accomplished through the insertion of leaves and sowing of false doctrine, leads directly to the corruption of the nuns’ bodies: deviant textuality anticipates and prefigures deviant sexuality.”²⁴ Books, including his own, then, at once invite penetration and have the power to defile through their own corruption. Robinson’s Anatomy, perhaps ironically, becomes a clear intertext for the works of his contemporary readers, as his polemical depictions of Jesuits seducing and trafficking young nuns, for example, become a plot point in Thomas Middleton’s A Game of Chess. ²⁵ In the process, Robinson, much like Venus’s narrator, effaces the nuns’ agency and ignores the fact that real-life nuns were writers and compilers of their own stories. While the sexual escapades depicted in Venus’s Catholic space, in and of themselves, suggest the Protestant polemical undercurrents of its dialogues, the nuns also explicitly voice the type of arguments Protestants might level against their enclosure. Agnes, after her first dalliance with Angelica and despite her willingness to use the convent to further her sexual education, acknowledges “that Fathers and Mothers would never suffer their Children to come into our Houses, if they but knew the Disorders that are committed there” (B9v). Similarly, after her exploits with several clergymen she attests, “We must own, that there are many abuses practised in our Religion, and I am not now at all surprized, that so many Nations have separated themselves from our Church, to apply themselves litterally to the Scriptures” (D8). This last statement, which appears near the end of the second dialogue, is more specifically Protestant with its reference to the literal application of scripture practiced by those separated from an obviously Catholic church. After this second dialogue, Venus exemplifies the polemics that Chedgzoy describes as introducing female homoerotics as a prelude to heterosexual intercourse, an assessment that itself emphasizes the architectural structure of the dialogues and suggests that female homoeroticism serves as a gateway to heterosexual education in the convent, an induction phase to the main mission of the male mediators. However, I find it significant that this move from homoerotic to heterosexual exchange is not terminal, but instead the text contains another dialogue where the two nuns are reunited after their escapades with the male clergy. Ultimately, however, the dialogues conclude with Agnes embracing reform and leaving the convent, apparently moved by the polemic she has briefly

 Jenna Lay, “The Literary Lives of Nuns: Crafting Identities through Exile,” The English Convents in Exile, 1600 – 1800, ed. Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelley (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 75.  Lay, “Literary Lives,” 71.

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voiced throughout the text as she leaves the “little House” and its concealed secrets and seductions behind. In the end, both The English Nunne and Venus in the Cloister seem to close the doors of their respective convents, reinforcing the grates that separate their readers from their inmates. The English Nunne shuts its novices, as well as the entire family of its romantic drama, within the safe confines of a religious enclosure. And in Venus, the novice Agnes shuts the door herself, as she reenters the world from which she was originally seduced. However, despite their differences, both hint at the potential of the convent space as a female alternative to marriage. For even if the novices’ inductions are controlled by male mediators, the space beyond the grate still offers an opening to subvert these strictures from within. In The English Nunne this potential lies in the unseen, the inner works and daily life of the convent that remain closed off to the reader. In Venus, in contrast, the opportunity for the nuns to create their own worlds, further removed from the seductions of the grate, suggests a potential agency over their own desire. They are displayed for the reader’s erotic pleasure, and yet they are also depicted as subjects with their own pleasures. Both dialogues remain problematic because the women’s stories are ventriloquized by male authors with their own agendas; however, in some ways, the texts themselves resist the full control of their mediators, much like Venus’s nuns. Furthermore, it is the women’s novitiate position that makes them available either to be pulled out of these convents and into erotic lives or to be pulled in and to experience a life that is obscured to the public. Their novice status, precisely because it allows them to occupy a space between affiliations, aligns these women with the architectural possibilities of moving in and out via the grate and with the generic liminality of the dialogue form. It is this potential, the very ability of texts and subjects alike to move in and out and to resist the frames established to contain and control them, that Margaret Cavendish plays with in her closet dramas featuring religious enclosures, as we will see in the next chapter. She uses the frames of patriarchy to transform existing cages into structures through which to more fully imagine a space of female agency, a space where women might exert control over their own containment and desire.

Chapter 4: Beyond the Grate: Repurposing Enclosure and Reforming Pleasure in Margaret Cavendish’s The Religious and The Convent of Pleasure The publication dates of The English Nunne and Venus in the Cloister, one just on the eve of the English Civil Wars and the other two decades after the Restoration, make them appropriate book-ends for Margaret Cavendish’s closet dramas. Incidentally, The English Nunne’s 1642 publication date also marks the closure of the public theaters in England. This closure ushered in a golden age for closet dramas, plays not necessarily written with public, commercial performance in mind.¹ As I have shown in the previous chapter, the convent dialogues draw on dramatic conventions as they attempt to persuade their respective readers to enter their convents and play specific roles once inside. Closet dramas, similarly, often include lengthy speeches and debates that tie them back to the oratory exchanges of dialogue form more than to the dynamic, quickpaced exchanges we might expect from a stage drama. Throughout the Interreg-

 The term “closet drama” is problematic when used as a classification for early-modern plays, particularly because it is an anachronistic label first applied to dramatic texts in the nineteenth century. The term is also confusing because it plays into a conception of public/private binary that suggests “closeted” dramas were never intended for the public stage. As Marta Straznicky explains, “closet drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not understood as antithetical to the stage, regardless of performance history or authorial intention, nor was it in any fixed sense a private mode” (417). For more on the rationale behind a closet drama that might have been intended for performance see the rest of Straznicky’s chapter on closet drama in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 416 – 30. I use this label as well as the terms “public” and “private” to analyze the intimacies and erotics of Cavendish’s dramas, not simply as a way of distinguishing between on and offstage performances. Critics such as Anne Shaver and Katherine Kellet have taken issue with the closet drama designation as applied to Cavendish’s plays. See Shaver’s introduction in “The Convent of Pleasure” and Other Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 8. Similarly, Kellet sees The Convent of Pleasure not as a “closet” drama but rather as a play that blurs generic distinctions by bringing together theatrical conventions such as pastoral romance, masque, and cross-dressing. Katherine R. Kellet, “Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure,” Studies in English Literature 48, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 420. For another argument about Cavendish’s dramatic form and her plays’ resistance to a stable taxonomy, see Andrew Hiscock’s “‘Here’s No Design, No Plot, nor Any Ground’ : The Drama of Margaret Cavendish and the Disorderly Woman,” Women’s Writing 4, no. 3 (1997): 401– 20. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343-007

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num during which England’s commercial theaters remained closed, closet dramas became a forum for authors to privately explore public issues. Much as the fortifications of the convents draw attention to the divide between public and private, closet dramas seem to emphasize this divide while simultaneously undermining this apparent opposition. Margaret Cavendish plays with the very notions of the public and the private in her closet dramas that feature female retreats. Cavendish revises existing literary forms and specific dramatic precursors, as well as the material and social constructs of her contemporary environment to create her new worlds. In The Religious (1662) and The Convent of Pleasure (1668), Cavendish draws on traditional depictions of convents as she creates her own retreats that modify convent rules and materials to accommodate characters we might term “exotic” novices. While at first Cavendish’s two dramatic convents might appear to align nicely with the extreme depictions of the previous chapter’s dialogues—The Religious with the strict rules of chastity and devotion laid out in The English Nunne and The Convent of Pleasure with the more titillating sexual liberties of Venus—the playwright seems to want it both ways. Her constructions at once aim to perfect and reform the convent, and her drama invites readers into these reconstructions and asks us to imagine a space where women have agency over their own containment, where they have the potential to transform the gilded cages of patriarchal institutions into new orders from within. Cavendish, instead of using the standard features and rules of the convent, repurposes these formations to break down binaries and create spaces where one might imagine an order of chastity in marriage or even a convent devoted to pleasure rather than restraint. Cavendish does not seek to revive Catholic convents, but rather to create new spaces for Protestants, and perhaps more explicitly Royalists, who felt out of place during the turbulent times of the Interregnum. Such individuals found themselves between governments, straddling alliances, and ultimately, in the case of Royalists like Cavendish, exiled from their homes and country. Her project is a reclamation of place, but not of one specific place. It is instead a reclamation that attempts to bring together the best of the sanctuaries represented in convents and former Royalist estates, and in a larger scheme the best aspects of marriage and religious vocation. Cavendish, then, does not simply imagine convents as alternatives to marriage, but plays with the boundaries of both institutions as she creates new hybrid enclosures that bring together paradoxical elements of both worlds, combining sacred and secular under one roof in ways that challenge traditional categorizations. Much as convents were relocated to the Continent or to the recesses of the imagination following the monastic dissolutions of the 1530s, during the English Civil Wars commercial theater performances were also exiled, pushed indoors to

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the domestic spaces of rural residential estates in England and onto the published page.² The English plays written during this Interregnum period were not the first dramatic works unintended for commercial performance. However, the legal ban on such performances paired with the outlaw status of many of the plays’ Royalist authors, themselves exiled from the public and political spheres, clearly affected dramatic content.³ Royalists needed to establish a sense of control over their environments and project a sense of agency even if it was from a marginalized position. The closet drama serves as a perfect hybrid for such a Royalist project, blurring the boundaries of public and private, it is a form that advertises its own exile and uses that sequestration to champion new forms of community and political agency. For Cavendish, the form becomes a vehicle for reform, as the exiled playwright adapts existing generic models and makes the closet drama her own, much as she will adapt existing models of the convent to serve her novices’ purposes and plots. One way that Cavendish makes the restrictions of exile serve her own vision is by repurposing existing textual, conceptual, and material structures as she creates her literary worlds. The very figuration of Cavendish’s own literary world incorporates the language of exile and metaphors that suggest the way that she, like the authors and narrators of the dialogues examined in chapter 3, will transform barred fortifications and use them against, or in spite of, those who have required her retreat. Erin Bonin points to a specific example of this remodeling in a 1663 epistle addressed to Oxford and Cambridge scholars in which Cavendish depicts female scholars and writers such as herself as “[b]irds in cages … not suffered to fly abroad to see the several changes of fortune.” Bonin shows how in other texts “Cavendish transforms such ‘cages’ into arenas of civil possibility for women,” repurposing the once restrictive bars to create “new ‘publics.’”⁴

 The publication of these plays led to changes in their presentation on the page. More than simply reflecting the difference between forms associated with print and those meant for performance, the published closet dramas of the Interregnum, in many ways, reflect the social and political changes experienced by their exiled authors and their potential readers. For more on such formal alterations and the ways they allow authors to frame their readers’ experience of the drama, see Straznicky as referenced above.  As Hero Chalmers explains, “The experience of enforced exile or dispossession fostered the royalist need to produce representations of voluntary retreat from the traditional public sphere as contented and self-sufficient” (81). Hero Chalmers, “The Politics of Feminine Retreat in Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure,” Women’s Writing 6, no. 1 (1999): 81– 94.  Erin Lang Bonin, “Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender,” Studies in English Literature 40, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 339. Bonin groups Convent of Pleasure with Bell in

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This chapter focuses on how Cavendish repurposes the “elaborate cages” of two distinct types of female monastic structure by pairing The Convent of Pleasure with her more obscure play The Religious. Taken together, these two plays exemplify the way Cavendish draws on multiple formal structures, revising models of containment and/or retreat that range from former and Continental monastic structures and her own dispossessed estates to literary forms and conceptual spaces. Cavendish repurposes well-known dramatic predecessors such as Shakespeare’s plays as she reimagines spaces of exile and reconstructs the boundaries of marriage and chastity. Religious enclosures, in particular, seem to provide just the type of voluntary retreat an exile like Cavendish might require as she imagines new forms built out of their foundations, new modes of existence specifically for women who find themselves partially outside of the patriarchal boundaries prescribed for their sex. Cavendish was no stranger to the idea of repurposed buildings, or the new modes of existence fostered by retreat and exile. The estates in which Cavendish grew up and lived as a married woman were repurposed convents. Her Lucas family household at St. John’s Abbey in Colchester and Welbeck Abbey, her home with her husband William, were themselves the spoils of the monastic dissolutions of the Protestant Reformation in England.⁵ Cavendish’s sense of home and security is necessarily complicated by this provenance, as well as the number of homes that may have influenced her as she moved between several households, especially during her exile. It is for this reason, Alison Findlay proposes, that “Cavendish’s plays employ a shifting coalition between the three-dimensional, material surroundings of the buildings where she lived, memories of English public theatres and private theatricals, and imaginative visions for future performances.”⁶ Her connection to home spaces is implicitly tied to a tradition of remodeling religious retreats and turning them into what, for her, would ulti-

Campo and The Female Academy in her assessment of Cavendish’s utopian dramas. Linda Payne notes that Cavendish’s innovative reworking of traditional structures extends to the formal qualities of her writing as well. Linda R. Payne, “Dramatic Dreamscape: Women’s Dreams and Utopian Vision in the Works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,” in Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater 1660 – 1820, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 18 – 31.  For more on the provenance of Margaret Cavendish’s homes and their connection to her dramatic portrayal of convents, and the enclosed estate in The Convent of Pleasure in particular, see Crawford’s “Convents and Pleasures.”  Alison Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 54. Findlay suggests that The Religious, in particular, “demonstrates the seductive power of home as a cradle of security,” which may be a “reworking of Margaret’s memories of her childhood home” (55).

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mately become lost or remote sanctuaries, as she in turn suffered a form of dispossession familiar to the buildings’ previous tenants. Like the religious women who lived in these spaces before her, Cavendish becomes part of a continuum of exile. Her place on this continuum might further elucidate her connection to convents and her need to reclaim them. However, it also suggests her need to improve them not only by adapting the rules they espoused, but also by reforming the methods by which they are secured as institutions. In addition to these historically lost and repurposed English spaces, Nicky Hallett notes that while exiled in Antwerp (1648 – 1660), the Cavendish couple resided at Rubenshuis, “only a garden away from the English Carmelite Convent. The boundaries of the two properties abut.”⁷ Hallett also reminds us that Cavendish became witness to and participant in the convent’s practices when she took part in Mary Cotton’s clothing ceremony, a process that involved exchanging “often very elaborate clothing for religious vestments.”⁸ Such ceremonies, as I have suggested in the Introduction often resembled wedding ceremonies and were “often accompanied by sumptuous food, music and entertainment,”⁹ not altogether unlike the sensual pleasure with which Lady Happy furnishes her convent. Even in exile, or perhaps especially in exile, Cavendish found influences in Catholic spaces and traditions for her own recuperative fancies. Despite their differences, the enclosures in both The Religious and The Convent of Pleasure clearly draw on actual monastic spaces whether demolished, dispossessed and converted, or remade on the Continent. Furthermore, in their building plans, the novices who contract their construction and/or remodeling simultaneously draw on nostalgia for the safety these spaces might have provided and the imagined possibility of perfected retreats less susceptible to the very forces that render them out of reach for contemporary English readers. The structures and novices as dramatically rendered highlight connections regardless of religious affiliation between exiled nuns and Royalists; both groups create their own English communities on the Continent, and also actively attempt to support the monarchs that they hope will bring about a restoration of their lives and estates in the England they have been respectively forced to flee. As have the texts in previous chapters, The Religious and The Convent of Pleasure allow us to interrogate the paradoxical operations of convent security devices, particularly grates that simultaneously allow and obscure visibility on

 Hallett, The Senses, 13.  Hallet, The Senses, 15.  Hallet, The Senses, 15.

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both sides of the convent wall. Cavendish, like the narrators of the convent dialogues, is clearly preoccupied with the architectural design of her dramatic convents. As suggested above, these access points become even more conspicuous in her closet dramas than in the dialogues discussed in chapter 3, as she depicts novices who seek to improve on existing models of religious retirement, refortifying their enclosures and emphasizing their own control over the mediation of these spaces. However, the novices in these perfected enclosures still rely on outside mediation, a reality that the closet drama form highlights. This is particularly true in The Religious, a play largely comprising reports of off-stage action and gossip about the main characters rather than their own direct interactions. Furthermore, even though the Convent of Pleasure seems to remedy the potentially oppressive effects of mediation by replacing male mediators with women, we find that in this play as well as in The Religious, external mediators still threaten to reinscribe the novices into the patriarchal systems they wish to quit by establishing their own reformed retreats. Cavendish reforms two distinct types of female religious retreat in these plays. In The Religious, Lady Perfection remodels a compact domestic space originally designed for pleasure into an anchoritic cell, which, despite its implicit solitude, paradoxically allows other characters access to the novice through the grate and audience members through the grate-like prefatory material of the text. Lady Happy of The Convent of Pleasure, by comparison, orders the construction of a large compound complete with lavish gardens and a hefty retinue of servants likely modeled after medieval monastic precincts with their staff of workers and self-sufficient grounds designed to limit necessary interactions with the world outside their religious community as her space of retreat. Refusing, however, to vow herself to a “Cloister of restraint,” Lady Happy seeks to establish a new kind of cloister, “a place for freedom, not to vex the Senses but to please them” (1.2).¹⁰ In both plays, the novice contractors seek to create a place to separate themselves from the world and specifically the marriage market. The ability, or necessity, to create these retreats depends on the unconventional status of these young women. At the play’s opening, we discover that Lady Happy, the only daughter of Lord Fortunate, has inherited a fortune after her father’s death. She is left wealthy and free from patriarchal control, a single woman in possession of her own property and therefore in control of her future vocation. Rather than choose a marital partner or an alternative life in a re Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure, in Paper Bodies, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Peterborough, ON and Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2000), 101. All Convent of Pleasure citations are taken from this edition and hereafter will appear parenthetically by page number, act, and scene.

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ligious convent, the traditional options available for a woman of her age, Lady Happy comes up with a third option, her elaborately furnished convent of pleasure. Lady Perfection is less fortunate in her unique social standing. A young woman whose early marriage at the age of ten is forcibly annulled by her husband’s uncle, she is left in a confusing state because, as she explains, having consummated her marriage she now can be categorized as “neither Maid, Virgin, Widow, nor Wife” (Vvvvvv).¹¹ Her status clearly borrows from and revises Mariana’s nothingness in Measure for Measure, adding virginity to the list of negations, as does her somber solution to her new state of placelessness. While the “maid” and “virgin” categories may seem synonymous, their distinctions become significant in terms of Perfection’s decision to shut herself up in a tower. Like Mariana, she seeks refuge from the world in an enclosure, and like Isabella she desires a “more strict restraint” than a traditional convent might offer. Both of Cavendish’s novices choose to reform the fortified bars of traditional enclosures that would “fabulously advertise” them in order to create something new, a space removed from the problems of their respective marriage markets. It is important to remember that while Lady Happy’s choice to remove herself from the world is certainly depicted as more pleasurable than Lady Perfection’s melancholy decision, both novices also have the advantage of family wealth to support their unusual movements against tradition. Furthermore, while both novices ultimately find themselves positioned on the threshold of marital alliances at the end of their respective plays, the markedly different hybrid constructions that they foster within their dramatic plots suggest that Cavendish imagines creative and unconventional alternatives to the limited convent/marriage binary.¹²

Chastity Remodeled in The Religious In The Religious, Cavendish borrows and revises Shakespeare’s essentialist maid–widow–wife paradigm associated with Mariana in Measure for Measure, and adds virginity as a fourth term that destabilizes the paradigm. Lady Perfection’s complicated status after her forced annulment is similar to Mariana’s status following the bed-trick; however, Perfection amplifies the importance of her lost virginity and sets it apart from the “maid” identity that stands in for virginity  The Religious appears in Plays (London: John Martin, James Allestrye, and Thomas Dicas, 1662). Hereafter, all references to this play will be cited parenthetically by signature.  For more on hybrid figures and structures in Cavendish, see Tara Pedersen, “‘We Shall Discover Our Selves’: Practicing the Mermaid’s Law in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5 (2010): 111– 35.

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in Measure for Measure. Perfection’s enclosure in a tower on her father’s estate after she is stripped of her status as Lord Melancholy’s wife resembles Mariana’s retreat to the moated grange connected to St. Luke’s after Angelo breaks their betrothal. However, despite Angelo’s defamation of her character, Mariana’s maiden status is not revoked until she leaves her sanctuary near the end of the play and takes part in the Duke’s bed-trick plot. For Perfection, her loss of virginity motivates her actions throughout The Religious and the specific kind of enclosure she chooses for her sequestration. She introduces her retirement plans to her mother, Lady Gravity, as she explains: though I cannot vow Virginity, nor a single life, having a Husband, and been used as a Wife, yet I can vow Chastity and retirement; and I could be permitted into a Nunnery, as perchance I cannot, yet I would not go into any of them, for there is too much Company in ordinary Nunneryes, and I love solitariness; wherefore I will live a kind of Hermits life, only my Nurse and I; and that little Tower my Father built for pleasure, shall be my Cloyster. (Yyyyyy)

Because she has been “used as a Wife,” Lady Perfection questions whether she would be able to enter a convent, but she suggests that even if members of a female community would allow her into their precinct, she would prefer a life even further removed from the world. She implicitly critiques the traditional convents and the “company” they might afford, as she seeks an isolated sanctuary, and a solitary life that she ties directly to her vow of chastity. While Perfection emphasizes her lack of virginity as she evaluates her “annulled” status and future options, she denies a metonymic relationship between virginity and chastity. She still sees herself as a wife, as “having a Husband,” in her formulation of her social position. The dissolution of her marriage by the play’s legal authorities does not alter Perfection’s dedication to her marital vows. Her resolve exemplifies a separation of chastity from virginity, a separation Kathryn Schwarz points to in her argument that conceptions of chastity differ from “the narrowest constructions of virginity not only in encompassing sanctioned sexual experience but also in yoking theory to practice; as an abstraction driven by tremendous literalism, it asserts both social and bodily truths, deriving theoretical arguments from somatic plausibilities.”¹³ Perfection’s claim to chastity is linked to her decision to retire from the world, in part because she is seeking to regain control over the way her body and social standing are read or perceived. For while she may still claim to have a husband, the play’s authorities

 Kathryn Schwarz, “Chastity, Militant and Married: Cavendish’s Romance, Milton’s Masque,” PMLA 118, no. 2 (2003): 271.

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do not recognize this claim. The annulment, which essentially reverses her marital vows, might also render her “sexual experience” unsanctioned, at least by some of the play’s patriarchal authorities. So, while she may still claim chastity without virginity, she seems to need the material separation of her retreat to facilitate a somatic understanding of her vows. While Perfection may not be able to rejuvenate her virginal status, her return to her childhood home and her position behind the tower grate suggest her desire to recreate or at least control her “chaste” body through cloistral architecture. Her choice of retreat, the remodeled tower attached to her father’s estate with its single grate, resembles the rigidly enclosed hortus conclusus. Her Isabellaline desire for strict restraint and extreme seclusion is an attempt to shut herself off from the world that has denied her marital happiness, but it also seems to be her attempt to redefine herself as the “normative woman” that Peter Stallybrass associates with the fortified household. The grate specifically becomes a kind of reconstructed hymen, a thinly veiled barrier that at least theoretically impedes access to the novice anchorite. However, like the architectural constructions of the convent dialogues that I have argued are similarly vaginal, Perfection’s cloister is still susceptible to the paradox of enclosure that simultaneously conceals and advertises the walled-off occupant, much as does the very conception of chastity during the early modern period. In each case, the paradox hinges on control of and access to the female body. Indeed, perhaps an architectural hymen becomes especially comforting in the face of the somatic unknown, that missing maidenhead that is so central to Perfection’s narrative. The repurposing of the “little Tower” into a “Cloyster” where Perfection might secure her chaste body recalls a medieval model of religious retreat whereby a young woman would divorce herself from the world and live as an anchorite in a small cell. She chooses this alternative to a traditional convent, it seems, because it allows her more control over her containment and who has access to her. Yet, while such an enclosure is extremely limited in size and stripped of nearly all material comforts other than shelter, it actually makes the inhabitant even more conspicuous than a convent nun. For, as Christopher Cannon explains, the rules of anchoritic enclosure “point [to] and confront a paradox,” one shared by medieval forms of Christian devotion, in general: the injunction to separate oneself from worldly things the better to devote oneself to God was itself a means to denying those connections with other people (that “community”) which a better spirituality was itself meant to perfect. This is true of the anchoritic life in the most practical sense: even though the anchorite withdrew from the common life of the town or village where she had lived, she was still at its physical centre (because attached to its church) and, precisely because she could not move, she both required contact

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with others (in order to obtain food) and had no means to escape anyone who sought her out.¹⁴

Cannon notes the paradox that others regularly attribute to all religious enclosure, but his depiction of anchoritic life suggests a dependence on the outside world that would render the hermit or solitary inhabitant more vulnerable to the public from which she seeks to retreat than a community of religious devotees would be. Anchorites, it should be noted, are also both privileged and dependent in that they had servants bringing them food and emptying their chamber pots. These paradoxes are clearly exemplified in the case of Lady Perfection, who, as her name suggests, strives for a kind of spiritual and somatic perfection, as she steadfastly holds to her vows of chastity, refusing to remarry once she has given her virginity to one husband, and even refusing to return to that husband once she has taken her religious vows. Her choice to remove herself from the world, however, does keep her at the center of the play, as she becomes the main topic of gossip, and her tower, also a sign of her privilege because of its attachment to her father’s noble estate, becomes a kind of tourist attraction for those who want to catch a glimpse of the newly habited recluse. Like an anchorite, she remains connected to the world in her seclusion. Perfection’s tower renders the grate a central plot feature; it is the only point of exchange between her and the outside world and a vital component of the stage directions from the moment of her confinement until the end of the play. Once enclosed, she becomes an object of fascination and desire, more enticing because not readily seen. One report describes the limited access to the new anchorite: “she will not be seen, unless to some particular persons, or neer friends.” She is also, by this report, “far handsomer in her Pease habit; than when she was drest with all the Arts of Vanityes” (Yyyyyy2). Perfection’s new confinement also draws suitors to her grate: both the Arch-Prince and her former husband Lord Melancholy (newly widowed) reportedly seek her out and try to persuade her to reenter the world and remarry. And in a truly strange plot turn, because the Lady will not stray from her new religious vows, the grate becomes the location of a proposed double suicide plot between Perfection and Melancholy. The grate that should separate the novice from the public becomes the means to access her more directly and leaves her partially exposed not only to public view but also to varied public interpretations of her status and reputation.

 Christopher Cannon, “Enclosure,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 110.

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We can see this particularly in the distinct responses of the Arch-Prince and Melancholy’s father Lord Dorato to the enclosed Perfection. While the ArchPrince compliments Perfection on her chastity as he attempts to woo her, Dorato, who demanded the annulment, casts her aside as his son’s whore. Like the complicated understanding of chastity during the early modern period, the grate’s utility can be seen in different ways depending on whether one stands behind or in front of it. Conceptions of women’s chastity resemble the grate’s function as a convent fortification, for, as Schwarz explains, it is a virtue “at once transparent and opaque; transparent, because its advantages seem self-evident to a patrilineally organized society; opaque, because its layers of meaning do not allow a clear line of sight.”¹⁵ Additionally, like the grate, whether chastity is associated with a woman’s agency over her own body or with the imposition of social standards on her depends largely on a sense of perception, which is easily obscured. “Formulated in terms of self-control,” Schwarz argues, “chastity stands in an odd relation to the presumption of control by others; it is not a straightforward mechanism of hierarchical imposition but a complicated and always potentially contested interplay of constraint and will.”¹⁶ The power and problem for the patriarchy comes not from a woman who merely embodies the virtues of sexual restraint and/or abstinence, but from the woman who can control and “enforce” it. “As such figures parse their own bodily meanings, defining, defending, enforcing, and even reclaiming the condition of virtue,” Schwarz explains, “they suggest that chastity may be most problematic when invested with the will to perform itself as true.”¹⁷ As I have already suggested, Perfection’s removal to the tower is highly motivated by her desire to redefine or “parse” her “own bodily meanings” after her marriage is forcibly annulled, and throughout the play as she is forced to define, defend, and enforce such meanings, particularly her sense of chastity, as the play’s male authority figures question her asceticism and challenge her determination to remain outside of their marital economy. Lady Perfection makes the contest between constraint and will more explicit in her debate with the Arch-Prince shortly after her sequestration in the tower. To his marriage proposal she steadfastly maintains, “both my Love and Person have been wedded unto another man, and though the Law hath made a divorce, yet Death hath not dissolved the marriage” (Xxxxxxv). Her own reading of her annulled state shows just how complicated is her perception of chastity. While

 Schwarz, “Chastity, Militant and Married,” 270.  Schwarz, “Chastity, Militant and Married,” 270.  Schwarz, “Chastity, Militant and Married,” 270.

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the “Law” has technically freed her from the constraints of her marital vows, she uses the language of that law to support her willful refusal to abandon marital restraints. Only “Death,” according to Perfection, can free her from her vows; her argument clearly foreshadows her suicide plan that would reunite her and Melancholy through death. The Arch-Prince, however, counters Perfection’s dismissal by focusing on her innate virtue, which he claims: like a precious Diamond doth remain; for though it hath or should have several purchasers, yet doth it lose nothing of its value or worth; and though you have been wedded to another man, your Virtuous Chastity, is still as pure as in your Virgins Estate, and by the Laws your person is set free; and for the Love you gave, may be called back, or drawn away since ’tis not entertained. (Xxxxxxv)

His argument for her retained chastity mirrors Perfection’s own conception of her status in her statements that directly precede her secession from the world. For him, her virtue is something that is not diminished by the physical loss of virginity. He highlights the conceptual nature of chastity, as well as her control over it. Yet, his distinction between physical and spiritual chastity only fuels Perfection’s resolve as she affirms, “’Tis true, I am Chast, and so I will remain, and though the law hath set my person free, my conscience is not yet at liberty, nor will that love I gave away return” (Xxxxxxv). She once again turns the language of the law back on itself, reiterating that while she may be physically “set free,” her “conscience” remains bound to her original husband and vows. She controls her own containment by holding her conscience above patriarchal law. Even when the Arch-Prince resorts to threatening her by asserting his will, which he argues allows him “to have [her] without [her] consent,” she flatly denies his authority over her, claiming “You have no power, the power lives within my self; for I can take away my life, and a dead Mistriss, or a dead Wife, would neither be conversable nor pleasurable” (Xxxxxxv). While she may have split freedom and containment between somatic and psychic controls as she first countered his proposal, she now confirms her control over both by threatening suicide, an extreme form of agency and a complicated act of self-control that once again foreshadows the death pact she will direct later in the play. The different readings of Perfection’s status, particularly after she cloisters herself, confirm Schwarz’s observation that “the activity of restraint generates its own contradictions: inspiring praise and reflecting anxiety, presented both as an egregious aberration and as a pattern of the every day.”¹⁸ Before he visits Perfection at the grate, for example, Melancholy expresses relief over her con-

 Schwarz, “Chastity, Militant and Married,” 279.

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tainment, admitting “it will be some ease, and rest unto my restless Soul, that she is safe and well secured” (Yyyyyy2v). To him, the retreat ensures his beloved’s safety, and probably just as importantly, her fidelity to him despite the dissolution of their marriage. For the Arch-Prince, on the other hand, the convent is a mere obstacle to his plans to woo Perfection, as he imagines “saving” her from her self-imposed incarceration. Even members of the community at large voice their opinions, as one gentleman proclaims, “there are more enter into Religious Orders out of Discontent, than Love to God” (Zzzzzz), a statement his neighbor finds “uncharitable.” These male assessments of Perfection’s retreat as well as religious enclosure in general once again highlight the dual nature of such spaces, which at once suggest security and the ability to violate that security, as we see in the responses of Perfection’s suitors. Furthermore, in a response we might imagine in an anti-Catholic polemic like Venus in the Cloister, the community questions the motives a woman might have for taking up a religious vocation. Given the circumstances of Perfection’s choice to take up religious orders, such a response is not wholly unjustified since she enters the cloister to recover from her bad luck on the marriage market and to escape the laws that govern it. Such an escape is exactly what The English Nunne offers to women to persuade them to enter convents on the Continent, and in this case the negative outcomes of entering the marriage market are positive motives for religious retreat. In fact, N. N. seems to spend more time anatomizing the evils of marriage and childbirth in his preface than he does promoting the benefits of joining a convent. We see similarly negative depictions of marriage in The Religious following the young couple’s forced annulment. While Perfection retreats to her cloister, Melancholy finds himself in a loveless marriage to a Princess, who from Perfection’s mother’s reports is “illfavoured, foolish, and peevish” (Xxxxxxr). Melancholy himself suggests that he is imprisoned by his “Princesses Shackels,” and he is only released after his new wife dies in childbirth, yet another side effect of marriage that treatises such as The English Nunne use to warn against the institution. Such negative assessments of marriage, at least of forced marriage, are also mirrored in the observations of Mistriss Odd-Humour, Perfection’s foil in the play’s subplot. Throughout the play, Odd-Humour clings to the family home as it is materially manifested in her favorite childhood chair, while her father negotiates her betrothal, a process she decries as “a Merchants Trafficking.” Upon hearing the news of Perfection’s enclosure she proclaims, “I think the happiest life is to be a Devote” and despite her nurse’s remonstrations she imagines “a Devotes life is the most peaceable and quiet life that is; so as there is as much difference in the course of a Married life and an Incloystered life, as between Heaven and Hell” (Tttttt2v). As in The English Nunne, to Odd-Humour a cloister is tied to eter-

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nal salvation, while marriage clearly paves the road to Perdition. Claire Walker confirms that while many early modern women did embrace convents as their primary life choice, “in the absence of alternatives, women who were reluctant to marry chose the religious life as their only viable option.” Walker provides examples such as Catherine Holland, a young Protestant woman who converts and joins a convent, a decision Holland attested made her “truly content,” because, as she explains, “I was out of danger of ever being in the Slavery of Marriage for which I had so great an aversion and there was no other way to avoid it, but in embracing the State of Religion.”¹⁹ Despite the reality that many women were drawn to convents to avoid marriage, particularly those arranged by their parents, Cavendish does not hold these religious enclosures up as the model alternatives for her female characters. When the choice is limited to a cloister or a marriage, neither is satisfactory for Cavendish’s novices. We see this exemplified in the outcomes of both OddHumour and Perfection. Odd-Humour is portrayed as the ridiculous foil so childishly attached to her chair that at one point the full-grown woman describes a scene in which she runs around with the prop stuck to her posterior. And while Perfection holds fast to her anchorite’s tower throughout the play, she still chooses to attempt suicide with Melancholy rather than stay in the religious refuge. In this tragicomedy, the comical Odd-Humour’s eventual forced marriage is clearly the tragic conclusion.²⁰ However, the comic conclusion is not simply a set of renewed marriage vows between Perfection and Melancholy. The real innovation in this play comes not from the renovation of the little tower, but rather from Perfection’s attempt to control the paradoxical enclosure even after it has been breached, and ultimately from a union of the two opposed ideological structures—convent and marriage. We see Perfection’s attempts at control from the moment she proposes to remove herself from the world and the marriage market. Furthermore, despite the heightened attention brought to Perfection as she closes herself up in the tower, she certainly seems less vulnerable than the anchorites Cannon describes. At least in the early cloister scenes, Cavendish avoids staging or even reporting exchanges that show the new nun’s dependence on others for staples such as food and chamber pots. Instead, the reader is presented with a young woman who is very much the agent of her own enclosure. Not only does she “put her self into a Religious Order” (Yyyyyy2r), but immediately after she does so, she limits access  Walker, Gender and Politics, 35.  Significantly, Odd-Humour’s forced marriage follows direction on the heels of the “martyrdom” of her chair, which her father burns upon discovering it hidden in a fireplace nook that itself calls up images of priest holes and other secret Catholic spaces.

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even to the grate. She reportedly turns away the Arch-Prince’s messenger, refusing to be seen in a moment reminiscent of Olivia’s response to Orsino’s messengers in Twelfth Night. While she does allow Melancholy access to speak with her through the grate, she still directs their exchanges. We see this first in a set of stage directions that motion Melancholy to “the Grate of the Cloyster,” after which Perfection “draws the Curtain before the Grate, and appears to him” (Zzzzzz2r), implicitly allowing him to gaze upon her only when she chooses. Refusing to break her religious vows even to honor her annulled marriage vows, she orchestrates the erotically charged and intricate suicide plot at the grate. While Melancholy initiates the death pact by refusing to live in a world from which Perfection has removed herself, she quickly takes the directorial reins. The grate’s position as main access point, in fact, seems to inspire Perfection, as she uses its paradoxical function to recommit herself elaborately to her love through their simultaneous deaths. She instructs: Let me advise you concerning the manner of our Deaths, get a Sword pointed sharp at both ends, and when we are to dye put one end of the Sword through this grate, and just when you set your heart to the end towards you, I will set mine to the end towards me, and thrusting forward as to meet each other, the several points will make several passages or wounds into our several or rather our own united hearts, and so we dye just together. (Zzzzzz2)

In this set of sexually charged suicide instructions, the grate both divides and unites the lovers. It is the material object that divides them, but with the thrusting of a phallic object through this aperture, it becomes the site of unity, as the double-edged sword unites the divided hearts through death. The ability to pass the sword through the grate’s openings also suggests that if the lovers could successfully orchestrate this violent scheme, they might also achieve sexual penetration through the grate, a feat we might expect of the inhabitants of Venus’s cloister. The elaborate penetration design certainly reinforces the metaphorical association I have drawn between the grate and the vagina, and Perfection’s role as director here suggests that she controls both sites. Perfection presents death as a consummation, a kind of second marriage that will reunite the hearts severed by forced annulment. The instructions, then, recall a physical union that Perfection would likely associate with her marriage bed and with the sexual act that, now unsanctioned, has driven her to her current resolution to leave the world first symbolically and then literally. The association between her suicide plan and marital consummation is reinforced in the actual attempted suicide scene, as Melancholy struggles to undo his doublet to make way for the sword’s entrance and complains, “These Buttons are like troublesome guests at Marriage Nuptials” and then asks, “but are you ready Wife for our second Marriage?” (Aaaaaaa). Melancholy’s question also

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foreshadows the play’s conclusion, in which the two holy fathers interrupt the death pact after spying on the couple from an ancillary space attached to the tower. The grate once again becomes the means of this couple’s union, as Lady Perfection, with the priests’ help, invites her former husband to join her in founding a new religious order “of Chastity in Marriage.” The holy fathers’ deus ex machina entrance further emphasizes the ways even enclosures with the most limited access points can be breached. Perhaps more importantly for my purposes, it also suggests how easily agency can be subverted when one chooses to define one’s self within existing structures originally delineated by patriarchal authorities. In this case, Perfection’s tower is attached to her father’s house in much the same way that anchoritic cells were attached to churches; both are appendages that rely on the “father” house or structure for certain types of support and that can therefore also be monitored by the authorities aligned with the parent structures. The holy fathers make this even more evident as they disclose the secret to the perfect timing of their fortuitous intrusion, as one father advises Perfection: thank your Nurse, who hearing your cruell, and as I may say irreligious design, informed us, and placing us within a Loby, we heard you, and saw you, though you knew not that we did so, for you had barr’d the outward Door, but being within we were ready to come forth and hinder you as we did. (Aaaaaaa2)

The father reminds us not only that Perfection has continued to rely on her nurse, a mediator, to help her control her cell but also that she is still quite literally attached to the patriarchal structures from which she tried to divorce herself, since the holy fathers have positioned themselves in a “Loby” that we imagine connects her to her father’s estate but over which she seems to have no control. The ancillary lobby helps to frame Perfection, positioning her, like the novices in the convent dialogues, as the object of the voyeur’s gaze and reminds us of the many ways in which her actions are framed through report and rumor throughout the play. Much like Abigail’s turn in The Jew of Malta, which both reflects and undermines the agency of the novice, Perfection’s extra security measures have been turned against her. The turn, a device that allowed the Maltese nuns in Marlowe’s play to accept alms while denying visible access on either side, also becomes the means of their destruction as they can only control their side of the exchange thus rendering them vulnerable to Barabas’s poisonous plot. Similarly, it is Perfection’s inability to control her grate, another mechanism meant to limit physical and visible access to her body, that allows the fathers to take control of the space and foil her suicide plot. Again, as in Marlowe’s play, the architectural

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feature limits her ability to see the outside world as much as it limits the world’s access to her, thereby allowing the priests to hide from her view and disrupt her plans. However, unlike Barabas’s usurpation of Abigail’s agency, the fathers’ intrusion prevents the tragic conclusion of Perfection’s plot, and ultimately allows her to regain control over her final containment within the play. Perfection, who, as we have seen, is rendered “neither Maid, Virgin, Widow, nor Wife” (Vvvvvv) in the play’s beginning, refuses the absolution the holy fathers offer her as a means to “legally” reunite with her former husband. She counters the fathers’ very invocation of the Church’s power to perform such a reversal with the retort: Yes, such power as the Laws had to dissolve our Marriage; but the Churches absolving can no more acquit my Conscience from my Devoted Vow, than the Laws could from my Marriage Vow. (Aaaaaaa)

Having been once victim of the law, Perfection refuses its power to undo either of her vows. While her placelessness positions her outside the law like Measure for Measure’s Mariana, her convictions, as noted earlier, align her more clearly with Isabella. However, while Cavendish clearly borrows from Shakespeare’s problem play as she creates her own novice, she refuses to subject her to the same legal system that in Measure doles out marriage as punishment and finally leaves Isabella straddling the choices between her intended religious vocation and a marriage to the Duke. Rather than forcing Perfection to choose one vow over another, Cavendish allows her to have it both ways with the introduction of a new “Order of Chastity in marriage.” The new order’s defined parameters are the product of collaboration between the holy fathers and Perfection, who, living up to her name, will not accept half measures where her vows are concerned. Because of Perfection’s dedication to a solitary life that she has linked to her performance of chastity, the church officials must come up with creative means to redefine both convent and marriage to fit her requirements. After reiterating Perfection’s vows of “Chastity, and a retir’d Incloystered life,” the Religious Father provides a solution: Why, then marry this Lord again, and let him make the same Vow, and enter into the same cloyster, and into the same Religious Order of Chastity, and being man and Wife you are but as one person, so that if you be constant and true to your selves, you keep the Vow of Chastity; for what is more Chast than lawfull Marriage, and Virtuous Man and Wife? (Aaaaaaa)

The nature of this vow of chastity that both Perfection and Melancholy accept as a condition of their renewed marital union, has led to divided critical interpretations about how we should read the rules of this marriage–convent hybrid. Fin-

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dlay suggests, “The tragedy resolves when they reject a future of parenthood and are admitted to the cloister as a chaste married couple.”²¹ She reads chastity in its most restrictive sense as sexual abstinence, implied by her reference to a rejection of “parenthood.” However, I contend that the father actually suggests a broader definition for chastity by using the rhetoric of marriage to imply that the couple vow to remain chaste to each other, promising marital fidelity rather than sexual abstinence. This reading is more in line than Findlay’s is with the way Perfection has presented her chastity throughout the play, as a virtue tied to her conscience and her fidelity to her original marriage vow rather than to an unused body. Her understanding of her own chaste status brings us back to Kathryn Schwarz’s suggestion that chastity is a much more complex and contested ideal than its close relative, virginity, especially in early modern texts. In fact, Schwarz argues that chastity “extends beyond the virginal body to implicate the social roles played by women both outside and inside marriage. As a willed assumption of sexual identity,” she continues, “chastity claims responsibility not only for the body but also for the social negotiation it inhabits.”²² Perfection’s retreat to an anchoritic cell, as I have argued, is a direct attempt to negotiate her social identity, which has been rendered questionable by the decisions of patriarchal figures, her stepfather who facilitates her marriage and then her father-in-law who subsequently nullifies it. She does not simply wish to replace one vow with another, the “Laws” for the “Churches,” as neither clearly has the ability to define her status properly. Her status is murky, like Mariana’s, and her ambiguous legibility necessitates a newly defined order, one that allows her to retain both sets of vows on her own terms. While the holy fathers’ proposal requires some tricky logic, it seems the best compromise for Perfection and her slippery social status. Furthermore, defining chastity in terms of marital fidelity and thereby separating it from celibacy would make this resolution more palatable for readers and audiences. This innovation, Erna Kelly avers, “allows Cavendish’s play to move away from what might be seen by an English audience as an unnatural state for women of a certain age, being unmarried and not bearing children.”²³ Cavendish turns patriarchal prescription around on itself as she uses the holy fathers to once again frame her novice, but to do so by creating a new legitimate identity for her. She also  Findlay, 56.  Schwarz, “Chastity, Militant and Married,” 274.  Erna Kelly, “Drama’s Olio: A New Way to Serve Old Ingredients in The Religious and The Matrimonial Trouble,” in Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections, ed. Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 52.

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uses these priests to impose and articulate what might be called a post-Reformation ideal of married chastity. While the combination of religious and patriarchal law implicitly joined in this new “Order of Chastity in marriage” may seem to reinscribe Perfection into a system of containment that would undercut her agency, the terms of the new order might allow her more control than either institution would alone. As they establish the new order, the religious fathers call on both partners to make a vow of chastity as they enter this union. Not only does Perfection agree to be a “chaste wife,” but Melancholy also agrees to be a “chaste husband” when he confirms “I am all will to that Vow and life” and then requests that the Father perform the new marriage ritual, which we find will follow the groom’s official vows and the donning of his own religious habit. He is, in essence, agreeing to join Perfection in an order that she has more or less founded. The religious fathers’ only real contribution to the order is to allow Melancholy to join her in a life of solitude and chastity to which she already subscribes. Furthermore, Cavendish’s collaboratively redefined union takes place at the tower grate, a site where Perfection has previously asserted her control over Melancholy as they made their suicide pact. The stage directions that accompany the couple’s second marriage and retreat from the world dictate that “the Curtain is drawn, and there appears the Lord Melancholy, and the lady Perfection his Wife, as two Religious Devotes, both in Religious Habits like to the Normitans; they bow like the Religious, with their heads downwards, and bodyes bent” (Aaaaaaa2). In the end, they are each depicted as equal in their habits and posture, as perhaps they might be in marriage, though the novelty of the order leaves the agency and control over their final containment paradoxically open. The community response to the new order founded by Perfection suggests that the convent–marriage hybrid is wholly unheard of at least in the world of the play; however, there were real cases in which married couples entered monastic retreats, the most famous case being that of John and Trevor Warner. The couple already had children when Lady Warner entered a convent, taking the children with her; and John, consenting to his wife’s desire to trade wedding vows for convent vows, subsequently became a Jesuit.²⁴ We also see a similar ac-

 Edward Scarisbricke details Warner’s decision to enter the convent in his biography The Life of Lady Warner in Which the Motives of Her Embracing the Roman Catholick Faith Quiting Her Husband and Children to Become a Poor Clare at Graveling, Her Rigorous Life and Happy Death Are Declared (London, 1691, 1692, and 1696). Frances E. Dolan includes descriptions of Trevor Warner’s profession as a nun in her essay “Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies,” English Literary Renaissance 33 (2003): 328 – 57. Also see Frances E. Dolan’s “Why Are

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count in the frame story of The English Nunne, in which the parents join their daughters as converts to the monastic life, the mother joining Cælia and Christophila in the convent and their father joining a monastery. The novelty in Cavendish’s order is to allow the husband to remain with his wife and to reframe their conjugal marriage rights within the parameters of chastity, as a monogamous union. While we might imagine that Perfection and Melancholy successfully adhere to their renewed vows, the community response to their second marriage and the foundation of the new order again remind us that chastity and marital fidelity can be contested just as easily as virginity, and are similarly open to violations and varied scrutiny. As one gentleman responds to the news of the couple’s new vows, “That’s a new Order indeed, never heard of before, at least not practiced; but this Order, if it continue, will make marriage as Religious in life as the marriage of Saints” (Aaaaaaa2). The reaction seems to be more cynical than sincere, as he suggests that while the notion of chastity in marriage is not completely new, it is also “not practiced.” Nor does he suggest that the future of such an order will survive with his “marriage of Saints” simile that undercuts the likeliness of “religious” marriages among those not as saintly as Perfection seems to be. Mistriss Odd-Humour’s response to her arranged marriage only enhances this sense of incredulity, as she asserts, “Faith if I marry the same Gentleman that my Father sayes I shall, I shall run beyond the bounds of Matrimony” (Aaaaaaa2r). Her statement simultaneously emphasizes her conception of matrimony as a strictly bound institution and suggests that if forced into it she will not adhere to a vow of marital fidelity, a point her maid Nan makes explicit in her translation of Odd-Humour’s assertion; “That is to run into your Neighbours Bed” (Aaaaaaa2r). Odd-Humour’s irreverent response to marriage also emphasizes that she has not received the same privileges as Perfection has in the play. For the comic foil there is no new order, nor room to negotiate a hybrid institution. Instead she is left to call attention to the remaining unaltered structures of patriarchy that still dictate the statuses of early modern readers and women in particular. Mihoko Suzuki reads Odd-Humour as a female satirist figure who “demystifies” the mercantile processes behind the marital bargains struck by her father, but also by the parents of Melancholy and Perfection respectively. While Perfection and Melancholy ultimately marry, Suzuki argues that the frequent appearances of OddHumour, with her bawdy retorts about marriage and her physically comic disruptions (as we see with the chair), “satirize, subvert, and delay the progression and

Nuns Funny?” in which Dolan uses the account as an example of the “interplay of authority and jest in a convent” (531).

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resolution of the main plot.” Her subversion, significantly is located in her womanly body.²⁵ To expand on this, I suggest that the depiction of Odd-Humour’s adult body that has outgrown the bounds of her childhood chair prefigures the continued restrictions that will be placed on her through what she sees as the bondage of the marital institution, the only option truly available for an English woman of her social standing. The tragedy of this comic foil, Cavendish highlights, is that unlike both Lady Perfection and Happy, she does not have the means to build herself a new form of containment, a new chair that fits her. Through her, Cavendish remind us that in this society only women of ample means can reform the social structures that inscribe them. Cavendish herself has such means, and perhaps it is for this reason that we see her using her position as a woman within a patriarchal economy, but also exiled from her home, to experiment with material and generic forms. She creates new enclosures more fitting to her place and aspirations within a post-war world. Still, her tragicomic plays constantly threaten, like Odd-Humour’s bottom, to exceed the bounds of traditional dramatic form and to reform the institutions that comedy supposedly circumscribes through traditional marriage and that tragedy might regulate by killing off those characters who do not desire the normative constructions of patriarchy.

Pleasures Mediated in Cavendish’s Convent The cloisters that Lady Perfection and Lady Happy respectively construct seem diametrically opposed to each other; Perfection’s promotes marital chastity and Happy’s fosters sensual pleasures. However, they both share interstitial positions as orders that do not strictly fit the existing frameworks of convents or marital institutions. Similar to Mistriss Odd-Humour who would rather retreat from the world than be subjected to the marriage market, Lady Happy in The Convent of Pleasure imagines that “a Marry’d life [would] have more crosses and sorrows then pleasure, freedom, or hapiness,” and concurs that for “those that are virtuous [it] is a greater restraint then a Monastery” (p. 98, 2.1). However, like Perfection, she is not satisfied with the current foundations of either convent

 Mihoko Suzuki, “Margaret Cavendish and the Female Satirist,” Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900 37, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 485. Drawing on Patricia Parker’s identification of “the woman’s body as the principle of ‘dilation’ in narrative that seeks a masculine ‘point’,” Suzuki suggests that Odd-Humour’s body, specifically her “bottom[,] stands for that principle of dilation” that “links the satirical energies that undermine the idealizing, romantic plot to the materiality of the woman’s body” (485).

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or marriage and instead sets out to contract her own hybrid, the convent of pleasure of the play’s title. While Cavendish has designed a space that is a far cry from Perfection’s ascetic cell in her depiction of Lady Happy’s pleasure-filled convent, Happy’s building plans align her convent with another model of monastic retreat. Rather than denying the company found in traditional convents as Perfection does, Happy embraces the type of community that was fostered in medieval monastic precincts. Happy’s capacious enclosure relies on traditional monastic security features. Such retreats, as Marilyn Oliva explains, “enclosed a complex of outbuildings—granges, stables, a bakehouse, and sheds for brewing, tools and equipment—as well as more domestic spaces: kitchens, gardens, latrines, parlors, a chapel or church, and the cloistered rooms of the religious inmates.”²⁶ These compounds were designed to be self-sufficient and to limit the need for the nuns to venture outside of their confines. Lady Happy has created a similarly self-sufficient space; “her House, where she hath made her Convent,” Madame Mediator reports, “is so big and convenient, and so strong, as it needs no addition or repair: Besides, she has so much compass of ground within her walls, as there is not only room and place enough for Gardens, Orchards, Walks, Groves, Bowers, Arbours, Ponds, Fountains, Springs and the like” (pp. 103 – 4, 2.1). Mediator’s description of the expansive grounds points to the way in which Lady Happy seems to have drawn on the general blueprint of the monastic precinct and translated the plans into a workable space for her own mission. This translation becomes even more apparent as we note the minor differences between Oliva’s detailed list and Mediator’s. Instead of focusing on the material necessities of daily life such as “latrines” and, for “religious inmates,” chapels and churches, Lady Happy’s world is more focused on natural features that promote leisurely activities and the sensual pleasures that her convent is designed to promote. Madame Mediator’s description of the convent presents it as a truly utopian construction that relies heavily on the fantasy of a fully fortified, impervious structure that will seemingly never need further improvements or corrections. Not only is it “convenient,” but more importantly, it is also “strong.” The innovation of Lady Happy’s pleasurable design is not limited to its sensual attractions as she seems to realize that such a retreat will still clearly depend on constructing a fortified enclosure with access points even more restrictive than they would be in the religious models from which she draws her basic building plan. She implicitly contracts with someone to build the convent’s “Yard-thick” walls

 Oliva, 75.

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made of brick and stone and free of traditional access points (p. 108, 1.4) to safely house her community of “Noble Persons,” women whose “Births are greater then their Fortunes, and are resolv’d to live a single life, and Vow Virginity.” Happy proposes a state of “retiredness” that “bars the life from nothing else but men,” whose gazes she claims only jeopardize women’s reputations (p. 101, 1.2). Happy’s championship of birth over fortune in her community might remind us of N. N.’s call for charitable contributions to support those who desire but cannot afford a retired life in The English Nunne; however, one must remember that Happy is only able to construct her self-sufficient and well-fortified convent because she herself is self-sufficient, having gained a large inheritance upon her father’s death. The Monsieurs’ animated reactions to her retirement, which are amplified by her uniquely fortunate status, seem to justify her impetus for perfected enclosure as these would-be wooers continue to seek access to Lady Happy and her newly cloistered sisters after Monsieur Courtly announces that “Lady Happy hath incloister’d her self, with twenty Ladies more” (p. 103, 2.1). The suitors draw on knowledge of religious cloisters to support their attempts to secure visitation privileges as they imagine soliciting the clergy to aid their efforts. Even after Madam Mediator informs the suitors that Lady Happy is “not a Votress to the gods but to Nature,” they still suggest that they might induce the Lady-Prioress to grant them visitation to the nuns. To this Madam Mediator explains: Not but at a Grate, unless in time of Building, or when they are sick; but howsoever, the Lady Happy Is Lady-Prioress her self, and will admit none of the Masculine Sex, not so much as to a Grate, for she will suffer no grates about the Cloister; she has also WomenPhysicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries, and she is the chief Confessor her self, and gives what Indulgences or Absolutions she pleaseth. (p. 103, 2.1)

As Lady Happy has in her construction of the convent, the male suitors draw on religious models to inform their approaches to this new convent. They seem to know that there was at least some limited form of access to religious enclosures and their inhabitants, and presumably, male clergy members traditionally would initiate such access. Furthermore, that Lady Happy’s mandate against grates is tied to her barring of members of the “Masculine Sex” suggests that these entrances were seen specifically as sites of male/female congress, as they are in The Religious and Venus in the Cloister. Happy seems to have easily rectified the paradoxical problems associated with the architecture of enclosure by simply ridding her convent of traditional access points and replacing the male media-

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tors such as clergy and medical advisors with women, all of whom report directly to her.²⁷ As in The Religious, the convent that Cavendish constructs in The Convent of Pleasure is a site of contested control, particularly because it too is the focal point of the play and for its surrounding male community from its very inception. “Like real-world convents,” Horacio Sierra argues, “Lady Happy’s commune functions more as an other within than a truly marginal, outsider population since it still deals with the would-be suitors, disguised princes, and gossiping gentlemen, much as abbesses and their nuns still had to deal with the Catholic Church’s male hierarchy and their inexorable intrusions into their community.”²⁸ Julie Crawford, however, distinguishes the English convent as perhaps the most appropriate existing model for Cavendish’s utopian project. According to Crawford, “given its history first as a women-only property and then as material sign of royalist favor,” the convent “is a particularly apt site both for royalist women’s coteries and for their claims to intellectual and material power.” Crawford views convents as counterpoints to “country homes, including reclaimed convents” which, she explains, “were rarely utopias for women” since “women’s property rights, including inheritance and residence, were almost always mediated through men.”²⁹ Crawford makes this distinction in reference to the novel situation of Royalist women, who, during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, often fought for these property rights while their husbands were forced to remain in exile. The issues surrounding property rights and Cavendish’s own struggle to secure these rights for Welbeck Abbey certainly factor into her depiction of the female cloisters in both The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious, as she clearly seeks to imagine reclaiming spaces lost during the wars and repurposing them, at least textually, in ways that allow such dispossessed women control over their environments. Crawford’s assessment overlooks the fact that the original convents on which these plays’ enclosures are modeled were also subject to certain kinds of male mediation. In The Convent of Pleasure, Cavendish seeks to overwrite this type of mediation in the construction of her convent utopia. While Si-

 Hero Chalmers also argues that Lady Happy’s mandate barring grates challenges the “gender dynamics of female display associated with the Caroline court.” According to Chalmers, “the assured authority of Lady Happy and her women is not dependent on manipulating male onlookers through visual display. Instead Cavendish suggests that it is the men whose stability relies on being able to gaze rather than the women who need to be gazed upon” (86).  Horacio Sierra, “Convents as Feminist Utopias: Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure and the Potential of Closeted Dramas and Communities,” Women’s Studies 38, no. 6 (2209): 652.  Julie Crawford, 183.

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erra implies that a more marginal position, removed from men, might be preferable to women who really wanted to escape the world, he also suggests a kind of power in the way Cavendish centers her convent and manages the men around it. In this case, Madam Mediator becomes a means for Happy to disseminate her own value systems to those outside the convent, as Mediator’s ventriloquized reports to the Monsieurs “[force] the external world to take notice of a matriarchal alternative.”³⁰ Rather than simply removing Happy from the world, Cavendish makes this removal a central strategy in an attempt to reform the patriarchal management associated with the real convents and lost estates on which she models her pleasurable precinct. While Oliva is quick to point out that the mother superior and nun inhabitants of monastic precincts were ultimately in charge of the lands and properties encompassed within their religious compounds, and particularly the inner chambers of the cloister, she also notes the ample support staff required to maintain the expansive grounds and the daily tasks that allowed the convents to sustain themselves. She explains that these “hired manorial officials, agricultural laborers, and domestic servants,” many of whom would have been men, “acted as the nuns’ agents in the temporal world.”³¹ In addition to these agents who assured the communities’ physical welfare, the nuns also relied on male clerics, another set of “semi-permanent support staff,” made up of priests, chaplains, and confessors, who provided for the nuns’ spiritual welfare.³² This clerical mediation is clearly displayed in the convent dialogues both in the figure of the authors whose introductions mediate our experience of the texts and our conceptions of the convents, and even more directly in the significant roles of the confessor figures. The English Nunne’s Confessarius, as I have shown, establishes himself as an authority figure and mediator between the convent’s nuns and the outer world. Similarly, the Jesuit figures and various male “sponsors” and church officials in Venus establish themselves as expert instructors, albeit in skirting convent chastity rules and justifying their sexual escapades. And while less formidable, the two holy fathers in The Religious use their position at the grate to prevent the lovers’ death pact and they use their

 Sierra, 653.  Oliva, 75.  Oliva, 111. In addition to the “semi-permanent staff” of manual laborers and clerics, Oliva also reminds us that monastic communities, such as those she studies in medieval Norwich, might house a number of charity tenants, including “almsfolk, pensioners, and corrodians [also lay pensioners],” as well as other paying borders who enjoyed the hospitality required by the commands of the Benedictine order to which nuns belonged.

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religious authority to aid Perfection in her creation of a new convent–marriage hybrid.³³ The male mediators in these texts, then, can be seen as extensions of the grate, its wardens who control both who and what enters into and is disseminated out of the religious enclosures.³⁴ Those who introduce the dialogues, though they cannot directly control their readership, target groups to whom they wish to advertise the benefits of their respective convent texts. Once past the threshold of the introductions, the texts themselves are obviously framed by the authors’ arguments and/or memory of events. While these dialogues make female-centered communities their focus, they manipulate the reception of these spaces and within the texts their male mediators show the extent to which the authority and agency of these female communities might be undermined as well as facilitated by the presence of men, even if the mediators are positioned to protect the enclosures’ inhabitants. Even in Cavendish’s The Religious, though the holy fathers’ intrusion into Lady Perfection’s tower leads to the play’s happy ending, they still usurp Perfection’s control over her cloister, at least temporarily. In The Convent of Pleasure, Lady Happy’s solution to patriarchal control over female spaces is to get rid of the paradoxical convent features that seem to enable this male mediation. By refusing grates and other access points, she attempts to shut off all potential outlets for male control over or interventions in the convent’s daily operations. Her solution of perfecting the convent and her control over it by limiting such access points, however, seems to replicate the Council of Trent’s sixteenth-century mandates for strict cloister, while at the same time it resembles the backlash of certain nuns against these male-imposed sanctions. In response to criticisms waged against Catholic convents during the Reformation, the Council of Trent called for “all existing windows, gates, grilles, or holes facing the public street … to be walled up, including the doors connecting the convent to the church.”³⁵ However, such mandates often met with resistance from nuns who did not want their lives dictated by male authorities.³⁶ Lady  The collaboration between male clerics and female convent inhabitants points to a heterosocial alliance, supporting arguments such as Frances E. Dolan’s in Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), that anti-Catholic polemicists were actually right in seeing Catholicism in general, and convents in particular, as heterosocial. Also see Dolan’s “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism.”  Madame Mediator, I will argue, also takes up this role as an extension of the grate, particularly near the play’s end when she attempts to discipline Lady Happy.  Evangelisti, 48.  Elissa Weaver notes that while Pope Boniface VIII’s thirteenth-century Periculoso constitution decreed strict enclosure for all convent women, “those whose houses had never been sub-

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Happy, then, co-opts the architectural tactics of Trent to reclaim the convent as a space fully run and ruled by women as she replaces the male mediators with female counterparts. In addition to the “Women-Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries” and her own position as “chief Confessor,” Lady Happy appoints “Women for every Office and employment: for though she hath not above twenty ladies with her,” Mediator explains, “yet she hath a numerous Company of Female Servants, so as there is no occasion for men” (p. 103, 2.1). Homogenizing this general support staff that in real convents would include cooks, maids, and butlers, as well as seasonal laborers in charge of harvests, shearing, and slaughtering, seems important for the security of Happy’s convent as she seeks to improve on the existing precinct model. For, as Oliva explains, “these servants,” who also would have boarded at the convent, “would have been more likely than resident priests to bring the outside secular world into the nuns’ cloistered one.”³⁷ Oliva notes that, while not necessarily frequent, such intrusions of seculars into convents at times led to violence, including rape and murder, against nuns and their boarders.³⁸ While simply replacing male servants with female ones would not necessarily impede the intrusion of outsiders into convents, in Cavendish’s fictional world, Happy’s exchange, paired with her denial of traditional entrances such as grates, does initially seem to keep the general male population from physically penetrating the convent. Yet despite her innovative designs, Happy cannot completely shut off communication between her convent and the outside world.³⁹ Sierra suggests that the very claim that Happy “will suffer no grates” suggests “how easy it can be to penetrate the convent.” He goes on to remind us of the ease with which Mediator enters and exits the enclosure, as well as on the Prince[ss]’s ability to visit the convent as proofs that “just as the convent’s walls are not truly intact [because of fictional constructions], the women’s heterosexual virginity is threat-

ject to restriction often ignored the wishes, sometimes with papal dispensations allowing them to do so” (23). This was a pattern repeated during the Council of Trent’s attempts to reinforce enclosure in the sixteenth century.  Oliva, 115.  Oliva specifically cites the case of a woman servant raped by an intruder and a male boarder murdered by a man indicted for breaking and entering, both at Markham Abbey in Norfolk (115). While Oliva finds no evidence of scandalous interactions between the clergy members and nuns in the Norwich Diocese, Eileen Power documents instances of impropriety between nuns and rectors, chaplains, as well as lay persons. See Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 398 – 403.  Nor can she control the violent impulses that her heavily secured convent incites, as the Monsieurs imagine burning down the convent at one point.

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ened.”⁴⁰ Sierra’s juxtaposition of fictional walls with a virginity in peril brings us back to the conjectural nature of hymen and somatic signs of virginity as he reads the convent inhabitants as “queerly embrac[ing] heterosexual virginity,” while rejecting “a sober sexless lifestyle” in a grate-less convent that, he argues, makes room for “lesbian relationships.”⁴¹ His qualification that the virginity threatened is “heterosexual,” however, also sets one up to consider homosexual virginity, and what that might entail in a play where issues of gender, sexuality, and desire are interwoven in ways that make them nearly impossible to read. In any case, Sierra’s formulation also reminds us that Happy’s cloistered pleasures are still mediated to outsiders, despite her construction of a grate-less enclosure solely populated by female novices and staff. Among Happy’s entourage of female servants who tend to the convent property, the aptly named Madame Mediator clearly stands out as the central negotiator between the convent and the outer world. She resembles the male narrators of the dialogues discussed in the previous chapter, as she sets up the fortifications, detailing them for the men outside the convent and the readers, and then stands witness-like inside the cloister as Happy describes the lavish interior spaces. It falls to Mediator to shoot down the suitors’ attempts to enter the cloister; yet, she also counsels them on their best course of redress, which she suggests “is to make [their] Complaints, and put up a Petition to the State,” advice they consider sound (p. 104, 2.1). However, compared to her male counterparts, Madame Mediator has a different type of relationship to the convent’s Abbess, one that I argue is distinctly female, and complicated by the dynamics of age and experience. Despite her gender and privileged access to Lady Happy and the convent, Mediator seems to serve both sides of the convent wall and perhaps thereby stands in for the convent’s missing grate, as she chooses what information to let in and out of the precinct. Her movement between these two worlds allows the reader mediated access to each. Andrew Hiscock sees Mediator specifically as a character regularly “employed to signal the cultural discrepancies between the convent’s value systems and those diffused in the outside world.”⁴² And Katherine Kellet notes that “the male characters interpenetrate the scenes in these first two acts, reasserting the unnaturalness of [Happy’s] actions and attempting to regain authority over women” through their discussions with Mediator and their designs to gain access to the convent either by means of disguise

 Sierra, 659.  Sierra, 658 – 59.  Hiscock, “‘Here’s No Design,’” 416.

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or violence.⁴³ In both of these critical assessments, Mediator stands as a pivotal person who allows us to evaluate both sides in the battle of the sexes catalyzed by the convent’s foundation. Furthermore, the male suitors’ failed attempts, as Kellet puts it, “to incorporate Lady Happy and her followers back into their heterosexual economy” works to marginalize “the representatives of dominant heterosexuality.”⁴⁴ The reversal of center and margin suggests that Happy’s security measures are working, at least at this early point in the play. For while Mediator may take on this masculine role, her brand of mediation still excludes the men from penetrating the convent; her interactions bring them into the scenes but succeed in leaving them out of the convent itself. Although the men are frustrated because they cannot penetrate the cloister, Mediator seems to placate them even as she excludes them; however, with Lady Happy, her counsel seems less persuasive. Unlike the Confessarius of The English Nunne who instructs all the female devotees including the Abbesse and is the clear authority figure in the dialogue, Madame Mediator is reduced to the role of devil’s advocate in her early conversations with Lady Happy. Her role at the beginning of the play is much more like Cosmophila’s than that of the implacable confessor, as she questions the rationale behind Lady Happy’s choice to “incloyster” the tenants of her pleasurable retreat and her gynocentric doctrine that excludes men from the abundance of nature that will serve to delight these noble virgins. And while Mediator’s pithy objections establish her as knowledgeable, and we imagine she has more worldly experience than her Prioress mistress, she is easily dismissed as Lady Happy forges ahead with her plans. While Lady Happy initially ignores Madame Mediator’s advice and experience, once the Prince[ss] enters the convent Mediator’s authority as an experienced woman becomes more useful. We see this first when she discovers her mistress “Musing like a disconsolate lover” after one of the convent entertainments. While Lady Happy, who in her founding of the convent vowed to honor nature over religion, suggests that she is contemplating “Holy things,” Mediator responds: “whether your Contemplation be of Gods or of Men, you are become lean and pale since I was in the Convent last” (p. 124, 4.1). In this scene, Mediator establishes her ability to read the female body, despite the Prince[ss]’s attempt to undermine Mediator’s perception by claiming her “eyes become dim with Time,” after Mediator slyly accuses her of having “sported too much” with the Lady Happy (p. 124, 4.1). It is unclear what Happy’s new complexion and gaunt appearance portend in this scene. The nature of this “off-stage” activity is compli-

 Kellet, 425.  Kellet, 425.

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cated because it is unclear whether Lady Happy has discovered the Prince[ss]’s “true” identity before it has been disclosed to the reader and the rest of the community. However, it is easy to read Mediator’s accusation of excessive “sporting” as sexual innuendo despite this ambiguity, especially because, as Venus in the Cloister has reminded us, such sporting need not be heterosexual. In this exchange, Cavendish seems to position Mediator as a fictional representation of generic “older” women in early modern society. The authority of such women, as Laura Gowing explains, “might be manifested in roles of caretaking, supervising, and nursing of the community’s bodies.” According to Gowing, “older women were the best guides to the body,” because of “their life experience, their sober maturity and their freedom from childcare responsibilities.”⁴⁵ Mediator’s assessments of Happy’s appearance paired with the Prince[ss]’s implications that she is at least older than her mistress support such a reading. At the very least, her counsel seems weightier at this moment in the play and her proximity to Lady Happy and position within the convent emphasize that her gender is an important factor in the type of mediation she provides to Happy. Sierra actually refers to Mediator as Happy’s lady-in-waiting, a label that fittingly equates her with women who closely attended female monarchs, including Cavendish herself, as she served as lady-in-waiting to Henrietta Maria.⁴⁶ Indeed, if we imagine Lady Happy, the self-proclaimed Lady-Prioress and chief Confessor, as ruler of the convent, we might easily see Mediator as a lady of the privy chamber, a woman of high standing set apart from menial staff and allowed to keep close counsel with the abbess.⁴⁷ However, although Mediator is certainly a close confidant to Happy, she is still one step removed from the most intimate position for a servant to the queen. The role of lady of the bedchamber that some monarchs such as Elizabeth I enjoyed, then, might be a position reserved for the Prince[ss] alone in this play.

 Gowing, 76.  Sierra, 648.  While an abbess would not necessarily enjoy the same type of retinue as a queen would, convents like courts comprised a somewhat stratified network of clerical and lay inhabitants often based on class and social rank that varied by region, and Lady Happy’s convent seems to combine the monastic precinct’s system of ranked devotees and servants with a palace’s luxuries, allowing us to imagine that she might be seen to enjoy a council fit for a queen. See Oliva’s chapter “The Monastic Community: Clerical and Lay Residents” in The Convent and Community, particularly 121– 24. Eileen Power also notes the typically high rank of prioresses in convents: “It usually happened that the head of a nunnery was a woman of some social standing in her own right. All nuns were Christ’s brides, but an earthly father in the neighborhood, with broad acres and loose purse strings, was not to be despised” (42).

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Despite Mediator’s role as counselor throughout the play, like her male counterparts she is still somewhat detached from the convent’s inhabitants. In fact, there is no evidence that Mediator herself is allowed into the convent’s inner chambers or much further than the main entrance until her participation in the second play performed within the convent. She listens with “admiration and wonder” as Happy details the lavish furnishings, particularly those that adorn the women’s chambers. Mediator reports to the married women who demand details about the convent and admits “I had rather be one in the Convent of Pleasure, then Emperess of the whole World”; however, she explains that the convent’s pleasures are too vast and variable to know fully without devoting one’s life to their enjoyment (p. 107, 2.3). While she may enter the convent, as the women point out, because she is a widow, she clearly has not devoted her life to Happy’s new order. Therefore, by her own estimation she has limited and seemingly mediated knowledge of the convent’s inner workings.⁴⁸ Her status as a widow paired with her role as mediator relegates her to a space between two worlds; however, she was at one point firmly part of the patriarchal marriage system, as is apparent in the knowledge of this system she displays in her early exchanges with Lady Happy. While Mediator’s scenes provide readers with the reactions of those outside the convent and insight into Lady Happy’s character, it is not until the doors are opened to another potential mediator, the masculine-featured Prince[ss], that the reader and Mediator herself move inside the convent’s more private quarters. Significantly, this movement inward also invites the reader to take part in the convent’s own closet dramas and to witness private backstage activities. What is interesting about the pairing of on- and off-stage exchanges, for my purposes, is that they seem to reflect the arguments for and against convents that we might associate with The English Nunne and Venus in the Cloister respectively. Cavendish mixes patriarchal threats of the world outside her convent with potential threats from within the same convent both of which are introduced either directly or indirectly through the medium of performance. The first performance at the end of Act 3, for example, depicts the trials and tribulations of marriage and childbirth in scenes Valerie Traub describes as deriving from “the tradition of female lament, giving powerful voice to female dis-

 As Erin Bonin suggests, “Madame Mediator’s discourse provides only partial access to the utopian cloister”; Bonin notes Mediator’s “‘enticingly vague’ language” that suggests her “limited capacity to describe the convent’s rituals and pleasures to those firmly ensconced within the patriarchal economy: men, wives, and sometimes even the play’s readers,” to which I would add Mediator herself (348).

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content” with their depictions of “physical abuse at the hands of alcoholic husbands, poverty caused by male gambling and whoring, and the horrors of repeated childbirth and infant mortality.”⁴⁹ Such scenes, however, could have been pulled straight from the pages of The English Nunne as a justification for a life removed from men and marriage. So, while they may recall a “tradition of female lament,” they also closely match the polemical dissuasions of a male-authored treatise in which such fears and complaints are mediated in order to sway women away from marriage and into the convent. The dialogue still gives “voice to female discontent,” but it is a ventriloquized voice, as are those voices of the two sisters in their dialogue exchanges, each representing a father figure. To a certain extent, one could argue that Cavendish’s voices of lament are also ventriloquized, as they are mediated through performance. Particularly in this first play within a play, the women actors bring the voices of troubled “mean women” and other married ladies and gentlemen to their audience members and Cavendish’s readers. These women performers, though never distinguished among Lady Happy’s generic entourage, I imagine are a part of her elite group of twenty virgins and therefore are not performing personal experiences of the marriage market, but rather are performing their conceptions of such female lament in varied situations. Furthermore, they are also introducing male characters into the female convent through their performance, an act of mediation that further demonizes the men who seek access to the convent inhabitants. Katherine Kellet makes a similar claim in her suggestions that “as opposed to the buffoonery of the Monsieurs, these male characters (of course, ostensibly played by female ones) inflict tangible suffering onto their spouses, breathing validity into the threat of being ‘tortured with a deboist [debauched] Husband’ that Monsieur Advisor makes to Lady Happy (p. 233, III.x).”⁵⁰ While Kellet notes the players’ gender in an aside, when we consider the modes of mediation that permeate this play, it seems vitally important that the harshest depictions of men in the play are presented to us by female performers. In this first play, and even in the pastoral and masque entertainments that follow, the women portray male characters that reflect patriarchally prescribed gender roles, and their performances clearly present these depictions for critique. However, before the reader is allowed access to the convent’s plays and made privy to the cross-dressed novices and these critical portrayals of male characters, the Prince[ss] signals that cross-dressing and cross-gender role-play-

 Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 178.  Kellet, 426.

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ing are common practices in Happy’s convent, as s/he notes how “some of [Happy’s] Ladies do accoustre Themselves in Masculine-Habits, and act Lovers-parts” (p. 111, 3.1). According to Brandie Siegfried, the freedom to cross roles and habits suggests, “though males are barred from entering the convent, masculinity and femininity—as performative iterations—are both acceptable modes of social discourse in the convent.”⁵¹ Therefore, Happy’s convent that physically excludes men does not prohibit masculinity, but rather potentially allows women to experiment with their identities and to pursue pleasures and embrace desire in ways that were traditionally only sanctioned for men. Indeed, the convent “sports” that Mediator will eventually deem too much for her mistress reflect Cavendish’s own experience and description of Shrovetide festivities in Antwerp. She documents the carnival atmosphere that precedes Lent, remarking that people “think it Lawful to Commit what Sins they can, or plese, before a Confession, Penance and Pardon”; however, she ultimately finds these activities Harmless Sports, consisting only of several Attires, or Accoustrements, as to wear Vizrds, &c. and some of the Women do Accoustre themselves in Mens Habits, and the Younger sort of Men in Womens Habits, where the Women seem to be well Pleased, and take a Pride to be Accoustred like Men, but the Men seem to be more out of Countenance to be Accoustred like Women, as count it a Disgrace to their Manhood.⁵²

Cavendish highlights gender performance licensed in this festive atmosphere, an atmosphere we will see repeated and more threatening in the next chapter in Aphra Behn’s The Rover. Cavendish clearly notes the pleasure this role-play provides for women. In her dramatic rendering of a similar scene, she seems to play against the stigma of threatened masculinity that she notes in her Shrovetide observations, yet the Prince[ss]’s choice to play the masculine part to Happy’s feminine might seem to normalize gender performance. The performance potential, or what we might see if the convent plays were staged, Theodora Jankowski suggests, “is not a number of virgins exploring natural or unnatural pleasures, but groups of lovers who look like traditional ‘heterosexual’ lovers, namely men and

 Brandie R. Siegfried, “Dining at the Table of Sense: Shakespeare, Cavendish and The Convent of Pleasure,” in Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections, ed. Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 79.  Margaret Cavendish, CCXI sociable letters written by the thrice noble, illustrious, and excellent princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: Printed by William Willson, M.DC.LXIV [1664]), 403. Ann Arbor, MI and Oxford: Text Creation Partnership, 2003 – 01 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1). “Links to Digital Texts.” Digital Cavendish Project, June 7, 2016. May 27, 2019. http://digital cavendish.org/text-archive/links-to-digital-texts/.

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women, prototypes of what would be called ‘butches’ and ‘femmes.’”⁵³ Both Siegfried and Jankowski see the cross-dressing and cross-gender play as destabilizing and, in some ways, dematerializing bodies; such theatrical ambiguity seems to work directly against the overtly material descriptions of the convent.⁵⁴ Kellet, in fact, convincingly argues that the primacy of performance in The Convent of Pleasure works to dematerialize the convent, despite all the detail given to its material benefits, and the bodies that inhabit it. For Kellet, the women who are “never named and never exert their own identities,” appearing only in their performative roles, and the convent itself, which “comes into being only through utterance,” are discursive constructions that ultimately resist the reproduction of the oppressive power structures of patriarchy because they cannot be pinned down or identified, deriving power from their very instability as coherent structures and bodies.⁵⁵ Both Siegfried and Kellet see a power in the slipperiness of shifting categories, a trait that I associate with both convents and novices in this period as bodies and institutions that cannot be fully subverted because they are not fully traceable or stable. Performance, on one hand, can be seen as the most powerful type of mediation in Cavendish’s play. It shows the reader a version of the world outside the convent, critiquing this world through performance and simultaneously subverting the authority figures and systems it portrays. This is as true of the first play within a play that shows abusive and negligent husbands as it is of the pastoral scenes that end with phallic maypole pageantry and marriage and the mythological masque that depicts an omnipotent Neptune ruling over all the seas and women creatures in them. These plays allow the actors to present a particular picture and to adapt their own identities as they play with forms, habits, and gender roles. On the other hand, these performances also emphasize and potentially recodify the very forms, institutions, bodies, and roles that they subvert, as they temporarily rematerialize them on stage, or at the very least in the reader’s mind.⁵⁶

 Theodora A. Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 181.  For an extended and convincing discussion of the labor of creating a masculine presentation in The Convent of Pleasure, see Simone Chess’s chapter “Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labor” in Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), especially 143 – 47.  Kellet, 427.  Kellet sees this as the danger of “the materialized body,” and particularly “the female body, with its reproductive capacity, its objectified status in relation to men, and its vulnerability to violence,” which, she suggests, “necessarily leads to its oppression” (435).

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The power of performance in this Cavendish play, then, is directly related to the possibilities fostered by the convent structure that theoretically houses these entertainments; both are defined by paradox. The material and its mediators can both protect and threaten the safety of this exploratory space where the physical looms as both a vehicle for pleasure and a potential force of destruction. For even while critics such as Kellet and Siegfried remind us that the convent exists only as utterance and that the actors themselves are disembodied, and Lady Happy herself suggests that “Words vanish as soon as spoken, and Sights are not substantial” (p. 99, 1.2), they cannot help but acknowledge the powerful effect when words and sights are paired, when the utterance is given body and that body is allowed to penetrate an enclosure even if it is only established in the mind. It is the potential danger of this combination of sights and words that inspires the construction of features such as grates that limit the direct views of speakers and auditors alike. This danger clearly plays into the rules of convent visitation that Measure for Measure’s nun Francisca invokes when she explains to Isabella “When you have vowed, you must not speak with men / but in the presence of the prioress; Then, if you speak, you must not show your face, / Or if you show your face, you must not speak” (1.4.10 – 13). We see a complicated example of this “threat” in The Convent of Pleasure in the homoerotic scenes between Happy and her Prince[ss] and the marital conclusion that follows. The exchanges between Happy and the Prince[ss] that precede the convent’s pastoral play read like an episode cast in Venus’s cloister, or at least in its opening dialogue, full of homoerotic potential. As in Venus, the scene’s language constructs intimate frames that ask the reader to imagine illicit acts that might take place off-stage or behind the scenes. It serves as another type of gateway that teases us—both engaging and denying our full understanding of the physical relationship between Happy and the Prince[ss]. We can see this particularly in a romantic exchange between Happy dressed as a shepherdess and the Prince[ss] dressed in “Masculine Shepherd’s Clothes,” in which the two lovers question how “harmless Lovers please themselves” (p. 118, 4.1): Prin.: Why very well, as to discourse, imbrace and kiss, so mingle souls together. L. Happy: But innocent Lovers do not use to kiss. Prin.: Not any act more frequent amongst us Women-kind; nay, it were a sin in friendship, should not we kiss: then let us not prove our selves Reprobates. (p. 118, 4.1)

One can imagine the Prince[ss] advancing on Happy as this scene unfolds and she encourages physical intimacy, much as Angelica implicitly does with Agnes as the experienced nun confirms the “Pure and Innocent” (A9) nature of their kisses. Not only does the Prince[ss] suggest that their intimacies are nat-

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ural, playing into Happy’s role as “votress to Nature,” but she also implies that they are necessary signs of true friendship for “Women-kind.” The Prince[ss], in fact a cross-dressed man, is able to use her/his position within the convent and physical proximity to Happy, as well as an assumed gender identity, as s/he persuades her to see such physical intimacy as natural. It is also significant that only the reader is privy to this particular scene of intimacy. The Prince[ss] in this scene becomes the advisor, the confidant that Mediator strives to be throughout the play; however, unlike Mediator, the Prince[ss] succeeds in challenging Happy’s rational ideology. While Happy can hold her own against the widow, who after all is figured as a kind of servant or subordinate, when faced with the reality of desire and the physical ability to express it, she cannot resist. Again, as in Venus, the imagined physicality is erotically charged, but what is masked or left unseen is also important here, particularly when we consider critical assessments of this scene. This is true both for the Prince[ss]’s hidden gender identity and for the alleged “sports” that potentially lead to the bodily changes that Mediator detects once she is reunited with the two lovers. Happy’s altered appearance following the escalation in her relationship with the Prince[ss] suggest that sights unseen might matter. ⁵⁷ Lady Happy’s description of her well-ordered convent with her special emphasis on “Chambers” encourages the reader to imagine the material spaces within the convent and what type of sights access to such chambers might afford. These backstage locations in Happy’s convent come to function much as early modern bedchambers do; such spaces, Traub reminds us, although not “private” in the modern sense, “nevertheless seem to have functioned as a space between visibilities.”⁵⁸ The Prince[ss]’s access to such hidden enclaves further supports her potential role as Happy’s lady-in-waiting, a position that would lead to bed sharing, but also points to her/his own position between normative gender roles. For even when accepted as a woman in the play, the Prince[ss] is still described in masculine terms. In her chapter on the “(in)significance of lesbian desire,” Traub discusses how femme–femme erotic relationships only become “significant” or overtly “visible” when they threaten to disrupt the mandated roles of women as wives and mothers. However, if, as she puts it, “same-gender erotic practices could exist conterminously with the marriage contract and husbandly authority, there would be little cause for alarm.”⁵⁹  For a discussion of the importance of matter and material bodies in Cavendish’s philosophical and scientific writings see John Rogers’s, “The Commonwealth of Matter” in his chapter on Cavendish in The Matter of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 190 – 203.  Traub, 62.  Traub, 181.

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Such practices are rendered “insignificant” and essentially invisible as long as they do not threaten socioeconomic order. The reasons the implicit eroticism between Happy and the Prince[ss] become “significant” and visible may be multiple. At this point in the play, the Prince[ss]’s disguise obscures the potential for a marital conclusion, thereby rendering the relationship remarkable. Furthermore, since the Prince[ss] is depicted as more homme or in modern terms as more “butch” than femme, we could read her/his body as mattering more in terms of potential penetration or physical disruption to the Lady Happy. The Prince[ss] before disclosure, in Traub’s terms, could potentially represent the figure of the tribade or hermaphrodite. Of course, such readings of the Prince[ss]’s body are complicated further if a body is actually produced on the stage rather than cast in a reader’s mind. The emphasis on the homoerotic in the critical debate over how much is known about the Prince[ss]’s identity and by whom is complicated by the manipulation of visibility. A scene in which a man disguised as a woman dresses in “masculine” attire, Traub suggests, is “faithful to Shakespeare” in its exploitation of “the eroticism afforded by transvesticism”; she argues that “Cavendish explicitly explores the attractions of homoeroticism among women, only to reaffirm the necessity of marital alliance as the price of a harmonious dramatic conclusion.”⁶⁰ As in proto-pornographic texts like Venus, then, the homoerotic scenes between two women would once again serve as a transitional precedent to heterosexual alliances. Of course, as noted above, Traub has argued that marriage and homoeroticism could coexist, and therefore one would not necessarily have to supersede the other. That the readers/audience members are not privy to the Prince’s wooing plot or initial scene of cross-dressing before his entrance into the convent, complicates our understanding his relationship with Happy. His “true” identity is only hinted at with descriptions of his masculine features and subtle innuendo. Jankowksi takes this line of questioning even further by reminding us of the potential cast of female performers as she questions whether “the overwhelming number of women actors effectually render the Prince(ss) queer, somehow ‘unreadable’ in terms of gender in a way that Viola and Rosalind never were/are.”⁶¹ Cavendish, then, could be seen as repurposing Shakespeare’s transvestite roles in ways that further destabilize our ability to read bodies and gender performances. The unanswerable nature of questions concerning the way these convent bodies might have been read if staged also significantly highlight the ways in

 Traub, 177.  Jankowski, 183.

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which Cavendish destabilizes even the most unstable constructions of her male predecessors. Opening the door of her convent for subversions similar to those achieved by Shakespeare’s cross-dressed characters, Cavendish simultaneously closes the door on a simple containment model that would re-conscript her novices. On Shakespeare’s stage it might be quite obvious that a male player was dressing as a woman dressed as a man. However, if Cavendish’s play was performed or read aloud, it would have been in a private residence and perhaps by a coterie of women. Therefore the Prince[ss] might really be a woman playing a man cross-dressed as a woman, and then once again cross-dressed as a man. Furthermore, despite references to the Prince[ss]’s masculine nature, our lack of knowledge about this character’s identity aligns us with Lady Happy, who we have no evidence suspects the Princess is anything but a woman, even after Madame Mediator accuses them of excessive “sporting.”⁶² The possibility that the play may have been read aloud or performed by a coterie of women reinforces the homoerotics of these scenes. Furthermore, if Cavendish had simply planned to normalize her lovers by re-containing them within a “natural” heterosexual union, why, as Jankowski questions, is the Prince[ss]’s gender reveal delayed, and why ruminate on the license of female friends to embrace and kiss if not to destabilize the heteroerotic imperative of the play’s ending? Despite this critical impulse to read against a return to normative gender dynamics at the play’s end, the marital conclusion that results from the Prince’s inevitable unveiling and the implicit return to a patriarchal economy can be difficult for readers to accept. However, while several critics acknowledge the problems of the play’s conclusion, they prefer to see the potential of shift-able identities and roles promoted by the convent and its performances as extending beyond the bounds of the convent itself.⁶³ While Lady Happy’s convent at first seems to take Howie’s assertion about windows and gates a step further by implying that even in an enclosure sans

 Hero Chalmers suggests that “Lady Happy’s desire focuses on the Princess as a woman in her own right,” and argues that “despite the Princess’s dressing up in male costume to facilitate the wooing, the non-performative nature of Cavendish’s text allows the reader to imagine an encounter between two women” (84).  Though Kellet admits that it is easy to see the end of the play as a reinscription of female pleasure into a patriarchal oppressive system, she argues that “Cavendish also makes it clear that the convent doors do not slam shut after Lady Happy’s marriage, but remain indeterminately open” as the debate between Mimick and the Prince over the convent’s future is left suspended and unresolved (435). Correspondently, Siegfried also sees the conclusion as unresolved and suggests that Cavendish “dramatizes the possibility that the very instability of sense-perception,” fostered by the play with its complicated cross-dressing, “might function as the medium of mutability whereby social transformation and reconciliation takes [sic] place” (83).

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windows or grates penetration is still always possible, the play itself also reminds us that such security devices can be negotiated and used for different ends. In some ways, Happy’s mission to fully exclude men by denying the traditional access points for visual and oral exchange between the convent and the outside world makes her convent even more vulnerable than Perfection’s, or the convents in the dialogues, as it reminds us that visibility works both ways. Like the turn in The Jew of Malta, Happy’s convent not only denies the men outside a view into the convent, but masks her view of them as well. Furthermore, rather than restricting the role of mediator to one guardian of the grate, Happy’s convent, despite the centrality of Madame Mediator, seems to allow and require multiple mediators, thereby increasing the potential for penetration. The sights associated with the grate then can be interpreted as simultaneously hazardous and crucial to the women who seek to use such devices to control the freedom fostered by their chosen forms of retreat. It becomes just as important to see those who might threaten the security and sanctity of enclosures as it is to keep the inhabitants of such enclosures out of the view of these same threatening figures. However, while Happy and her convent may be more susceptible to penetration because of the way she has limited traditional access points, we can still appreciate the utility of the way she has framed her enclosure. Not only does her innovative construction foster critique of the patriarchal structures that threaten to reinscribe her and her retinue, but it also suggests the ability of the inmates themselves to negotiate the grate and take control of the narratives behind such patriarchal frames. The performative slipperiness at the center of The Convent of Pleasure emphasizes the potential of enclosure, a potential directly tied to the power of closet dramas that allow a woman playwright to enter a male-dominated world and to trans/reform existing models of textual and material institutions. While some critics point to William Cavendish’s interventions at this play’s conclusion, as written contributions that seem to undermine his wife’s utopian construction and usher in the traditionally patriarchal conclusion, his appearance at the end of the play also highlights her innovations. For his interjections remind us that Cavendish herself is married and therefore is imagining alternatives from a position, even if collaborative, that is still within the existing patriarchal hierarchy. Rather than her husband subverting her authority, then, we see her ability to work from within such traditional structures to subvert the oppressive power of institutions by metaphorically dismantling them—using their own structures, forms, and language to destabilize and reimagine the convent. In both The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious, Cavendish allows women to imagine ruling and ordering their own enclosures, truly controlling their own

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bodies, discourse, and the way in which they are advertised to the outside world —destabilizing their gilded cages from within. Her discursive constructions also invite us to reconsider the female communities featured in the convent dialogues. For while these women may seem oppressively penned in by male mediators who seek to control the female body as they ventriloquize their voices, these women’s stories in many ways still resist complete containment, as they use the paradox of enclosure to their own advantages, to protect or liberate their own respective pleasures and desires. They control both the grates and windows and the substantial sights that such features simultaneously reveal and obscure.

Chapter 5: “What Think You of a Nunnery Wall?”: Lifelines in Aphra Behn’s The Rover In her meditation on lifelines, Sara Ahmed delineates between two types of life path rooted in social investments and returns. She specifies, “in a way, thinking about the politics of ‘lifelines’ helps us to rethink the relationship between inheritance (the lines that we are given as our point of arrival into familial and social space) and reproduction (the demand that we return the gift of the line by extending that line).”¹ Ahmed goes on to note the ironic double meaning of the term “lifeline,” which can also be used as “an expression for something that saves us. A lifeline thrown to us is what gives us the capacity to get out of an impossible world and an unliveable life.”² At once an inherited futurity replete with “the social pressure to follow a certain course, to live a certain kind of life, and even to reproduce that life,” lifelines can serve as both deeply entrenched paths and the means to escape those paths.³ This combination of inheritance and the need to escape the predetermined future that inheritance prescribes articulates the dilemma Aphra Behn’s novice Hellena faces at the beginning of The Rover, Or the Banished Cavaliers (1677). As a daughter in a rigid patriarchal system, Hellena laments the tragic inheritance that would place her older sister into a forced marriage and her into a convent. Her father’s absence and her brother’s borrowed and questionable authority in response to this absence, however, open a door for her to imagine salvation in the form of Naples’ carnival with the help of the play’s eponymous rover Willmore. In her attempts to break away from patriarchal authority and write her own future, she seeks a lifeline or salvation from a life she deems “unliveable” and ultimately unfit for young women. This conception of such lines also maps neatly onto the way the other texts under consideration in this book explore women’s liminal location within prescribed trajectories. We have encountered tragic results for Abigail in The Jew of Malta when she finally breaks free from the tortuous pathways of her father’s various plots, the ambivalent conclusion to Isabella’s plot in Measure for Measure that leaves her lifeline uncertain, and the potentially more successful examples of forging new paths in the convent dialogues and Cavendish’s closet

 Ahmed, 17.  Ahmed, 17.  Ahmed, 17. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343-008

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dramas. In each of the previous chapters, we have seen the way novices are positioned to draw new lines and to find new lifelines in alternative spaces. Even when such texts equate the convent to marriage, they ask us to imagine new possibilities for their novices. The playing space itself, whether real or imagined, becomes a spatial threshold in which these novices can explore options, enter and exit different enclosures as we see in The Jew of Malta and Measure for Measure, or create new forms of convents, marriages, and/or hybrids of these institutions as Cavendish’s novices do. The dilation of this space between life phases opens up the possibility for agency, and the convent and its architectural devices reintroduce some notion of choice or alternatives to marriage into the novices’ plots.⁴ Behn’s play is the perfect concluding piece within this textual trajectory precisely because she exploits the new conventions of the Restoration stage in ways that magnify these models of patriarchal containment through a lens of sharp critique. Indeed, the “politics of ‘lifelines’” is perhaps best dramatized, and the dual association of lifelines rendered most palpable in Aphra Behn’s Restoration play with its pressure of inheritance and the need for salvation from the patriarchal prescriptions of convent and marriage. In this play, we see novices trying to draw their own lines of salvation in a setting in which men are constantly moving the lines as they seek to define or erase status markers to serve their own patriarchal desires. And, while the sisters could be seen as relying on their respective future husbands to save them from their family inheritance, I argue that they ultimately serve as each other’s lifelines, saving themselves from such prescribed plots. Hellena, in particular, becomes a character through whom Behn challenges patriarchal prescription and female containment. The novice depicts the traditional options of convent and marriage as parallel evils, equating them as equally restrictive options for young women, as she attempts to reorient the lines that demarcate her. The way Hellena aligns these structures with each other calls attention to their limits and also highlights the unevenness of gendered honor and desire, as rambling inconstancy proves dangerous for women like her sister even as it is presented as desirable in the male cavaliers, who pose the threat. Through Hellena’s carnival plots, in which she tries to undermine male desires and designs, we see an attempt on Behn’s part to imagine an option for women not tied up in enclosure. This option is open and chaotic like the play’s carnival setting; it is at once the sea and the stage with women masquerading in traditional  Ros Ballaster analyzes the connections between dramatic plots and scheming in her essay “Fiction Feigning Femininity: False Counts and Pageant Kings in Aphra Behn’s Popish Plot Writings,” in Aphra Behn Studies, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 50 – 65.

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male roles of rover and writer, supplanting male authority with female agency, even if only temporarily. Using the innovations of the Restoration stage, Behn presents options for female agency and dramatic plotting for public visual consumption in a way that Cavendish could not. She problematizes the paradox of enclosure and double standards of female honor, destabilizing identities tied up in these institutions and definitions by utilizing the new spectacle of women actors on the stage and discovery spaces that invite a new kind of voyeurism. Not only does the novice in this setting and on this more material stage move between enclosures and options, she and the actress who plays her embody liminality in a way that allows us to examine inherited lifelines and to imagine women’s ability to save themselves from such an inheritance.

Convent and Marriage by Design Despite the convent’s physical absence from Behn’s stage, it becomes an important conceptual space for Hellena as she fights against patriarchal prescriptions and attempts to stake out alternative spaces to enact her own plots. Florinda introduces the convent in the very first line of the play as she admonishes her inquisitive younger sister Hellena: “What an impertinent thing is a young girl bred in a nunnery!” (1.1.1).⁵ In this first scene and throughout the play, the nunnery is invoked to put Hellena in her place, to emphasize that she is prescribed for a convent life and therefore is certainly not versed in worldly matters such as love, using both senses of the term “novice” to undermine her agency. Florinda states this clearly as she reemphasizes her sister’s lot in life: “Hellena, a maid designed for a nun ought not to be so curious in a discourse of love” (1.1.27– 28, my emphasis). The language of “design” that Florinda introduces here reminds us that young women like Hellena regularly had their futures planned out for them by their families, their lifelines established for them at birth. While Florinda refers to their brother’s or father’s design in order to admonish Hellena, she also pushes back against Hellena’s inquiries about the elder sister’s own future, as Hellena tests whether Florinda might desire a suitor of her own choosing rather than the forced marriage her father has orchestrated for her. Before Pedro enters the scene to reiterate firmly these designs, this intimate conversation between the sisters creates a sense of female community that critics

 All Rover citations from Aphra Behn, The Rover, New Mermaids, ed. Robyn Bolam (London: A & C Black, 1995).

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such as Brenda Liddy and Margarete Rubik suggest serves as a counterpoint to the banished cavalier brotherhood plot of the play. In this initial exchange, Liddy sees the sisters as creating a kind of covenant, “a space in which to negotiate an alternative destiny from the one that has been planned for them by their father.”⁶ Not only does this community counter the fraternal cohort’s sexual machinations and patriarchal prescriptions, it also marks a clear divergence from Behn’s source text Thomaso. Thomas Killigrew’s closet drama opens with the cavaliers and features one idealized woman of quality facing a choice between convent and forced marriage. Behn multiplies women’s voices and subsumes the cavalier plot to this sororal scene in which, even when admonishing each other, we witness women sharing intimate desires and countering the clear patriarchal narratives championed in Killigrew’s play. As Elaine Hobby reminds us, “cooperation between women is one of Behn’s key inventions” in her transformation of Thomaso. ⁷ The sisters’ attempts to reorient patriarchal paths, in fact, might reflect Behn’s own reorientation of gender dynamics in Restoration drama. Critics have often seen a balance between Willmore’s cavalier disdain for “bourgeois values” and Hellena’s dynamic ability to hold her own among such men; however, Hobby argues that far from buying into a libertine model of equality, in her textual transformation, Behn “demonstrates that the definitions of femininity available in Restoration Britain are all bad news for women, however much men may present themselves as allied to conflicting social or political groups when they make demands of their women.”⁸ Pedro and Florinda both refer to the convent to remind their younger sister of her proper place; however, Hellena employs the image and mechanisms of the convent to critique the patriarchal designs for both sisters. She makes it quite clear that while she may be “designed” and “bred” for a life of solitude in the convent, she is “fit” for the “discourse of love.” She claims she will not be a nun, at least, she avers not “till I’m so old, I’m fit for nothing else” (1.1.37); she then demands of Florinda: what dost thou see about me that is unfit for love—have I not a world of youth? a humour gay? a beauty passable? a vigour desirable? well shaped? clean limbed? sweet breathed? And sense enough to know how all these ought to be employed to the best advantage; yes I do and will, therefore lay aside your hopes of my fortune by my being a devote,

 Brenda Josephine Liddy, Women’s War Drama in England in the Seventeenth Century (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 106. Also see Margarete Rubik, Early Women Dramatists: 1550 – 1800 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 44.  Elaine Hobby, “No Stolen Object, but Her Own: Aphra Behn’s Rover and Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso,” Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to the Victorian period 6, no. 1 (1999): 118.  Hobby, 114.

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and tell me how you came acquainted with this Belvile [Florinda’s English love interest]? (1.1.46 – 53)

Despite her sequestered convent upbringing, Hellena clearly has her own ideas about the value of her status as a young, virtuous woman, and she also knows that her “designed” devotion is based on financial considerations rather than any inherent “fitness” for a religious profession. Her derision of the convent as a place incongruous with her youthful visage replicates anti-monastic sentiment that saw convents as a waste of potential fertility. She is also simultaneously critiquing the female analogue to primogeniture, as her dismissal of breeding echoes the second sons’ attacks on patriarchal institutions that place birth order over any sense of fitness in terms of family inheritance. While convent critics called up fertility to vilify convent life as wasteful containment for sexually viable women, Behn’s frequent incorporation of convents and nuns in her plays and prose fictions complicates this notion of female design by divorcing youthfulness from procreative potential. Susan Goulding suggests that “Behn’s use of the figure of the nun is deliberate, designed to entertain, but also to subvert the limitations on women in seventeenth-century society by creating characters who resist even the most obvious and recognizable containments”⁹ For Behn, the idea of vows themselves are at issue for women too young to make informed choices about their futures. Goulding argues that the fates of the tragic nuns in Behn’s prose works “demonstrate the failure of society to accommodate the desires and indeed lives of women who can’t be contained, whose very vows are suspect because the vows are imposed, implicitly or explicitly, upon a ‘subordinate group.’”¹⁰ The moral of these tragic tales is that “without real choice, women cannot take—or make—vows, and within the patriarchal system, there is no choice.”¹¹ Dividing designs between two sisters rather than creating a choice between convent and marriage for one woman, as does Killigrew’s play, Behn highlights the foreclosure of choice within the patriarchy and suggests in her comic treatment of Hellena that vows are not possible, the only way to avoid the tragic results of her prose nuns is to refuse vows in favor of inconstancy. In this way, she maintains the potential of the nun figure in Behn’s other texts in which, as Goulding maintains, “the ‘stories of nuns’ are not stories of young women dedicating themselves to the true service of

 Susan Goulding, “Aphra Behn’s ‘Stories of Nuns’: Narrative Diversion and ‘Sister Books,’” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 10, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 39.  Goulding, 43.  Goulding, 47.

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God on earth; rather, they are subversive stories, agitating from the bottom of the power structure, that demonstrate women’s power and offer models where women are active, and where patriarchally defined restrictions lead only to failure.”¹² Hellena, in her railing against fitness rhetoric, calls up Ahmed’s argument that the lifelines associated with family inheritance are reliant on a reproduction of such social expectations. In scoffing at the design forced upon her, the novice rejects the patriarchal path and demands a reorientation of the lines associated with her youth and desires. Florinda, emboldened by her sister’s defiance, learns from her sister’s rhetorical examples and objects to her “fortunate” match to Old Don Vincentio, “Let him consider my youth, beauty and fortune; which ought not to be thrown away on his age and jointure” (1.1.88 – 89). The language of design in this opening scene not only sets up the play’s plot, but it also provides a context against which Hellena can debate her own notions of fitness. This distinction becomes important as Hellena plans to plot her own conclusion using the carnival as a vehicle to enact her agency. In her first encounter with Willmore, Hellena attempts to cast her own lifeline as she invokes the nunnery as an obstacle and challenge for anyone who will woo her. Disguised as a gypsy, Hellena deploys images of violent penetration as she coaches Willmore in their early exchanges. Confirming that her rover can “storm,” she questions and affirms, “What think you of a nunnery wall? For he that wins me must gain that first” (1.2.164– 65). Her tone is flirtatious, yet her language of storming recalls the violent history of convents under siege and the continually perilous landscape for women even when seemingly well-contained. As discussed in chapter 1, convents were often subject to attack and violent invasion attempts from robbers and “lawless neighbors,” and from foreign enemies during times of war.¹³ Hellena’s reference to the convent in the context of her flirtatious advances reminds us of the way the convent and by extension its female inhabitants have been paradoxically figured as sanctuaries from and sites of sexual intrigue. Willmore emphasizes this dual nature as he responds to Hellena’s promised profession, “A nun! Oh how I love thee for’t! There’s no sinner like a young saint—nay, now there’s no denying me, the old law had no curse (to a woman) like dying a maid” (1.2.166 – 68). Like the prototypical Catholic schoolgirl, the novice’s projection of herself as a woman destined for the convent entices Willmore, who in return willingly

 Goulding, 49.  See Power, 422.

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casts himself as her savior. He will scale the convent walls and save Hellena from a life of unwilling containment. While the image of storming a convent suggests a violent attack on the structure, Willmore’s comically heroic gesture of saving Hellena from her convent fate is also reminiscent of Marvell’s treatment of Isabella Fairfax’s rescue story in “Upon Appleton House.” In Marvell’s country-house poem, as we have seen, the valiant “Young Fairfax through the [convent] wall does rise” (line 258) to deliver his future bride Isabella from the sharp-tongued nuns who are depicted as having bewitched her. Hellena and Willmore create a similar picture, casting the rover as a Fairfaxian figure primed to scale the convent wall, though not with marriage as an ultimate goal. The correspondence of Marvell’s and Behn’s convent fantasies becomes more evident when we consider that Behn sets her Restoration drama during the English Interregnum, the very period during which Marvell composed his poem about the nunnery-turned-estate. In both of these texts, the authors bring the convent into their plots only to leave it behind—seemingly. The abandonment of the convents also plays into the nostalgia built into these narratives that look back on fraught histories. Marvell’s poem celebrates Appleton House’s history, making it a material embodiment of the progress of the Reformation as it and its novice Isabella are transferred from the hands of the manipulative Catholic nuns to those of Lord Fairfax.¹⁴ Behn retains her source text’s setting, a time during which plays were banned from the stage. In fact, she repurposes a closet drama into a stage play that seems to remember fondly the “banished cavaliers” of her subtitle, men displaced from England for their loyalty to the Crown during the Interregnum.¹⁵ However, as discussed above, she also centralizes the women characters in her adaptation, pushing her audience to consider the place of women within the context of the turbulent changes of the Interregnum at the same time that actresses are taking the public stage in her own Restoration context. The treatment of the convent is strikingly similar in Marvell’s and Behn’s texts, particularly in the connection one might draw between Marvell’s “smooth”-

 Marvell himself resided at Appleton House as Mary Fairfax’s tutor and composed the laudatory country house poem during the English Civil Wars at a time when his benefactor was sitting out Cromwell’s Scottish campaign, despite his pro-Parliament allegiances.  Behn’s play adapts Thomas Killigrew’s closet drama Thomaso. Accused of plagiarism, she famously defends herself in a postscript to The Rover claiming her only “stolen object” is the courtesan Angellica Bianca. For specific discussions of Behn’s source adaptations see Nancy Copeland’s chapter on The Rover in Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women’s Comedy and the Theatre (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 18 – 46; also see Elin Diamond, “Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn’s The Rover,” ELH 56, no. 3 (1998): 519 – 41.

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tongued nuns that “suck [Isabella] in” (200) to Nun Appleton convent and Hellena’s suggestive assertion that “I should have stayed in the nunnery still, if I had liked my lady Abbess as well as she liked me” (3.1.37– 38). Both sets of nuns, implicitly a good deal older than their respective novices, are cast as rhetorically savvy and their advances homoerotically charged. Their advances at once highlight the convents’ waste of youthful fitness or procreative potential and the threat of unproductive desire, as projected on these mature nuns by their respective authors. This comparison also reveals, however, that Hellena has a much more active relationship to her lifeline than Isabella does. As we have seen in the Introduction, Marvell’s version of Isabella’s history, the way she is carried over the convent threshold and then back over the same wall into a marriage with Lord Fairfax, creates a closed circuit, a story of a strangely symbolic return to containment. Her novitiate life phase is foreshortened, and her story becomes the cornerstone of a building whose history over-writes any agency she may have had in her initial choice to enter the convent and erases any evidence of her choice regarding Fairfax’s rescue and their subsequent marriage. Hellena prolongs her novitiate in her carnival escapades during which she continues her defense in the debate over design and fitness by playing up her fertile potential, arguing that “a handsome woman has a great deal to do whilst her face is good, for then is our harvest-time to gather friends, and should I in these days of my youth catch a fit of foolish constancy, I were undone; ’tis loitering by daylight in our great journey” (3.1.199 – 202). Not only does Hellena protest that she is too young to be locked up in a convent, but she also suggests that a monogamous relationship is a similar waste of youth. Instead, she aligns her carpe diem attitude and proclaimed desire for “inconstancy” with the cavaliers’. More than anything, she seems to desire openness, a freedom from all forms of constraint. Her inclusion of harvest imagery, while consistent with the images of youth and ripeness that might suit her roving desires, calls up images of female fertility. Hellena’s reliance on such imagery to relay her own desire and her ability to perform it at carnival becomes particularly vexed when we consider her negative views of pregnancy and childbirth, which she aligns with a “cradle full of noise and mischief” (5.1.473 – 74). Her allusion to the consequences of childbirth reminds the reader that inconstancy, and sexuality in general, are riskier for women than for men. Such consequences by extension point to the seemingly ever-present double standard of gendered honor and chastity that underlie the patriarchal designs that would mandate convents and marriages for wellborn young women. Furthermore, the play pits male desire unevenly against female choice; so, while Hellena might figure herself as similar to the cavaliers, she, via Behn, seeks to reorient the gendered conditions of desire.

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Protecting a young woman’s honor goes beyond simply policing chastity, as the family’s honor is also wrapped up in the way this chastity should be spent in terms of a daughter’s final placement. Installing a daughter in a convent or a marriage could help a family build or maintain its good name by controlling her chastity and upon whom it is bestowed. In The Rover, the binary choice of convent versus marriage is divided between the two sisters, thereby reducing an already reductive set of options for these young women. The different designs for the sisters point to a trend prevalent among early modern European families with multiple daughters. As Claire Walker notes, the increase in convent populations during the early modern period in Europe is most often attributed to “exponential dowry inflation”; however, Walker also suggests that factors other than economic explanations must be taken into account. In particular, a sense of honor might persuade a family to place a daughter in a convent rather than marry her off to one below her rank.¹⁶ Both dowry and family pride appear to be at issue in the patriarchal designs of father and brother for the novices in Behn’s play. The younger Hellena is consigned to a convent to free up money for her sister’s dowry to ensure that this elder daughter can marry a suitor profitable and appropriate to the family, as Florinda is expected to do. Thus, the different designs for each sister form part of an overall dynastic strategy. Throughout the play, the convent and marriage are yoked as prescriptions forced upon young women. Despite their equation, the convent seems a marginally better option than an arranged marriage. Even Hellena, who squarely rejects her convent career, derides her sister’s forced marriage to the Old Don Vincentio as “a worse confinement than a religious life” (1.1.105). She rebukes her brother for his part in this match, proclaiming, “I had rather be a nun than be obliged to marry as you would have me, if I were designed for ’t” (1.1.157– 58). The convent still remains an alternative to marriage, albeit an unappealing one; however, the emphasis on patriarchal plotting and the reduction of choice recalls what most English girls lost as a result of the Reformation and the dissolution of the convents, as their already limited and not necessarily free choice between a convent or marriage was eliminated. While Hellena may seek salvation from the convent

 Walker, Gender and Politics, 10. Walker cites Jutta Sperling’s analysis of Venetian convent growth and the importance of “honour” as a factor in the decision to “sequester daughters” in place of marrying them below their rank. See J. G. Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Also particularly pertinent to my discussion of Behn’s play, Walker records that “in Naples, the number of female religious communities increased from 25 in 1591 to 37 by 1650,” the convents growing to take up full city blocks (9).

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walls prescribed for her, convents themselves had once served as lifelines for young women seeking an alternative profession to the roles of wife and mother. The option of the convent remains in Behn’s Naples; however, it is not cast as a choice for a young woman such as Hellena. For, when she suggests she would prefer life in the hated convent over her sister’s forced marriage to an old, wealthy suitor, her brother Pedro responds, “Do not fear the blessing of that choice. You shall be a nun” (1.1.159 – 60). Pedro’s casting of choice as simultaneously fearsome and a blessing is strangely telling of patriarchal strategies throughout this play that invoke choice only to emphasize the fearful consequences of female agency. This statement also foreshadows the traumatic “choice” Pedro will allow the disguised Florinda in an attempted gang rape scene later in the play. Pedro’s penetration of the female space in this first scene and his rhetoric of force both in terms of Hellena’s intended religious profession and Florinda’s arranged marriage strips the novices of any notion of choice and sets the stage for the way the threat of force, more specifically the threat of rape, will pervade the play’s setting as the novices enter the world of the play’s carnival to regain a sense of agency. Pedro’s patriarchal imperatives echo the critics of the convent in Measure for Measure, as they align both convent and marriage with prison sentences for his sisters. While Pedro also seems to desire an alternative to his father’s designs, at least for Florinda, Behn suggests that his intervention is only to supplant his father’s will with his own plot to marry Florinda off to one of his friends rather than the old Don. Indeed, his desire to incarcerate his sisters within similarly undesirable containers becomes clear as he orders the nurse Callis to take Hellena, the more unruly of the two, “and lock her up all this carnival, and at Lent she shall begin her everlasting penance in a monastery” (1.1.154– 56). The monastery is literally figured as a penitentiary, and Hellena is to be denied the liminal period that should precede her ultimate and specifically Lenten incarceration. Like Marvell’s Lord Fairfax, Pedro would very much like to close the circuit of the sisters’ life phases and safely keep them within surveilled parameters, ready for their respective labels of nun and wife. Also similar to Marvell’s conflation of nunnery and marital estate, the way the convent and marriage are equated throughout this first scene underlines Pedro’s attempts to deny female agency. Hellena’s desire to enact her own plots as she strives to prove that she does not have an “excellent humour for a grate” (1.1.163) are catalyzed by her brother’s dictums, and it is at this point that Behn’s carnival setting and the conventions of the new Restoration stage become tools for the playwright to present a third option for young women, an option that she and the actresses playing these novice roles embody. Behn casts Hellena as playwright as the younger sister takes

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the reins, in a move reminiscent of As You Like It’s Rosalind, and directs Florinda and cousin Valeria; “be ruled by me this carnival” (1.2.199). She even provides the gypsy costumes that will aid their escape into the carnival and punctuates her plan with a fitting call to arms: “let’s ramble” (1.2.202). Hellena’s stage directions for her companions prepare us to draw connections between these novices and the actresses that play them, as well as to the play’s other unmoored women, Naples’ infamous courtesans. Taking control of the stage and the direction of the play’s plot, she seeks to prove that she too can manipulate her own future design, as we enter the theatrical space of the carnival, a performance space and setting that blurs the boundaries of female identity.

Open Doors and “Arrant Harlots”: Rambling on the Restoration Stage Even if the convent and its nuns are not materialized onstage in The Rover, women’s bodies were. The reopening of the public theaters in 1660 introduced a new stage, complete with moveable painted scenes and discovery spaces, material sets, and flourishes associated with court masques to London’s public audiences.¹⁷ Along with the introduction of such new scenic machinery, the Restoration saw actresses make their debuts on the public stage. Like the new discovery spaces, the actresses themselves represent a new visibility on the stage, replacing cross-dressed boys with female bodies. This replacement did not mean that gender or sexual ambiguity were erased on stage; rather, it allowed women to cross-dress and to continue to play with and blur the boundaries of gendered, social, and potentially even political identities. At the same time this new visibility reminds us of the costs of blurring certain lines within a patriarchal system that looks to men to define female boundaries.

 The technology employed on the new London stages—specifically The Duke’s Theater, and Dorset Garden where The Rover was first performed—had been in use for some time in French and Italian courts, as well as in the English court masques. For Londoners, Elin Diamond explains, these new theaters provided a: “first view of movable painted ‘scenes’ and mechanical devices or ‘machines,’ installed behind the forestage and the proscenium arch. Actors posed before elaborately painted ‘wings’ (stationary pieces set in receding rows) and ‘shutters’ (flat painted scenes that moved in grooves and joined in the center). When the scene parted, their characters were ‘discovered’ against other painted scenes that, parting, produced further discoveries” (521). This new technology created a dramatic difference on the stage, as audience members were allowed to see rather than imagine private spaces, the parameters of which could now be constructed and/or represented for them with these moveable panels.

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These materialized enclosures and bodies are integral to The Rover, especially as women venture into the city and its carnival, during which these enclosures and bodies become conspicuously susceptible to sexual violence much like the convent with which Hellena will tantalize Willmore. The carnival setting with its masquerade and topsy-turvy spirit troubles the visuals associated with status and gender even further, lending to misreadings of bodies and intentions. In this setting, then, much as Restoration actresses were aligned with sex workers, our errant novices are easily aligned with “arrant harlots” (3.6.22) as we see their agency juxtaposed against individual and group performances of masculinity. The liminal space of the theater enacts an alternative to rigid gender norms and their attendant bodies and intentions. Performing gender within this context, then, vivifies Judith Butler’s concept of this “doing” as “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint.”¹⁸ The Rover emphasizes the familiar conflation of female bodies with buildings in scenes that disconcertingly juxtapose comic conventions and rape culture.¹⁹ In Measure for Measure, as we have seen, Angelo imagines defiling Isabella with his self-loathing reproach, “Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary / And pitch our evils there?” (2.2.178 – 79). The convent–novice conflation—which sounds strikingly similar to Hellena’s storming reference—draws on Angelo’s desire to “raze the sanctuary” and ravish a chaste female body, but it also reinforces the idea of the novice’s closed boundaries. Similarly, in Cavendish’s The Religious, Lady Perfection’s double suicide plot at the grate suggests the type of physical penetration her enclosure might afford, but her plot also reconstructs a rigid definition of her vows and her chastity. In The Rover, it is Florinda’s body that is most often aligned with the play’s buildings, but without a building’s protections, her gates are perpetually open. Furthermore, her would-be violators do not suffer the ethical dilemma that plagues Measure’s Angelo. Like the threat of female inconstancy that Hellena’s rhetoric of ripeness invokes, the imperiled position of Florinda’s unsecured body seems to lead us back to a sense of the usefulness of enclosures as protections for women at least to patriarchal

 Butler, Undoing Gender, 2.  The “Preamble” to Transforming a Rape Culture defines rape culture as “a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women and presents it as the norm. In a rape culture, both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, as inevitable as death or taxes.” Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth, eds., Transforming a Rape Culture, revised ed. (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2005), xi.

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stakeholders. At the same time, her easily replicated peril highlights the irrelevance of such protections in a world where men are constantly redefining the terms of quality and sexual violation. The new technologies and personnel of the Restoration stage provide the perfect platform for Behn’s carnival chaos that relies so heavily on conflation and confusion of spaces and bodies. Restoration audience members are granted visual access to enclosures in the form of discovery spaces, and therefore much as the respective readers of The English Nunne and Venus in the Cloister were beckoned to follow their novices into the recesses of the convent, Behn’s audience members are allowed to enter spaces along with the cavaliers and novices as they make their stage discoveries. Behn’s discovery spaces amplify the dangers inherent in such voyeuristic invasion, as they become the settings for the most violent moments in the play, the attempted rape scenes involving Florinda. Each of the three rape attempts, which escalate in their violent rhetoric and bodily threats against Florinda, draws our attention to notions of security in enclosure and the importance of female identity, especially when pitted against masculine performance. While some critics might downplay such violence in favor of the comic potential of the scenes and cavalier predators, the repetition and visibility render these scenes particularly well-suited to a call to restore readings of rape, as Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver phrase it, “to the literal, to the body: restoring that is, the violence and the sexuality back into texts where it has been deflected.”²⁰ Behn has made it difficult to ignore the literal and as we see the repeated threats against Florinda, the scenes refuse readings that would turn them into “metaphor or a symbol” or represent them “rhetorically as titillation, persuasion, ravishment, seduction, or desire.”²¹ Indeed, Behn highlights the cavaliers’ contrived desire to view their own predation as female seduction. In this way, she pushes us to consider the very real threats imposed on women as they seek to construct their identities within a world that prizes masculine conquest over their subjectivity. The men in these confrontations manage to reframe their predation as harmless, because, as Anita Pacheco avers, in these exchanges rape is not called rape, but instead “seduction, retaliation, and ‘ruffling a harlot’ (228),” respectively. Pacheco emphasizes Florinda’s attempts to render herself a subject; however, “in presuming to make her own choices, she enters a world where rape has

 Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver, “Introduction,” in Rape and Representation, ed. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4.  Higgins and Silver, 4.

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no meaning.”²² The lines that render a woman legibly chaste are blurred and her subjectivity at once blamed and denied in scenes that appear to prize male desire over women’s choice. Furthermore, we see the ways in which men draw the lines of definition differently based on context. Whereas the line that protects women of “quality”—especially sisters, mothers, and daughters—against violation might be clear, the line becomes blurred when there is not a distinct connection between a woman and her family lineage or if her quality and chastity are not rendered legible in some way. Without such legibility and an old definition that aligns rape with property theft,²³ men all too easily conflate victim with seductress. Ellen Rooney speaks to this type of victim-blaming move as part of a larger discourse that “establishes the distinction between rape and seduction, violence and sex, only to articulate a feminine complicity that renders such distinctions irrelevant.”²⁴ This erasure might be most obvious in Florinda’s experiences with Blunt, but his extreme misogyny only emphasizes the prevalence of such conflations within the larger rape culture of the play and within the patriarchy more generally. Florinda seems quite literally to set the stage for the first attempted rape scene as she unlocks the garden door of her family estate, explaining to the audience members, “I have by good fortune, got the key of the garden back-door. I’ll open it to prevent Belvile’s knocking: a little noise now will alarm my brother” (3.4.4– 6). While this is all part of her plan to supplant her family’s preselected suitors with her beloved Englishman, to choose, in the words of Hellena, “he that I like” (3.1.44), the convenience she creates for Belvile is exactly what draws the roving Willmore into her enclosure: A Garden! A very convenient place to sleep in.—Ha, what has God sent us here? A female— by this light, a woman! I’m a dog if it be not a very wench! (3.4.15 – 17)

 Anita Pacheco, “Rape and the Female Subject in Aphra Behn’s The Rover,” ELH 65, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 323.  While we might turn to several sources for a history of rape law, Karen Bamford succinctly articulates the fact that “historically, and until very recently, rape has been defined in law as a crime of property” (2), a crime perpetuated against the woman’s male relatives. Furthermore, although evidence points to a shift in the conception of rape from a crime of property to a crime against a person, that women are still largely treated as property during the late seventeenth century undercuts this sense of legal progress in rape cases. See Karen Bamford, “Introduction,” Sexual Violence and the Jacobean Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 2– 3.  Ellen Rooney, “Criticism and the Subject of Sexual Violence,” MLN 98, no. 5 (1983): 1270.

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Willmore clearly translates the convenience of the garden to his access to the woman. The opening of her gate, he suggests, has left Florinda open to this reading of her status, which seems to have no correlation to the estate itself or her quality. The open door renders Florinda a common woman, a “wench” open to the desires of roving men. Anthony Kaufman suggests that with the basic movement from female to wench in Willmore’s assessment, his “inclination is to strip to the essentials,” a move that might remind us of Duke Vincentio’s reductive “maid, widow, wife” or “nothing” categorizations in Measure for Measure. ²⁵ In Willmore, however, Kaufman argues that the “basic English” that leads him to the equation “female; woman; wench, I’m a dog” captures his cavalier charm, and “is intended to captivate the delighted approval of the audience.”²⁶ While Willmore’s cavalier attitude towards sex and status would likely have garnered laughs from a Restoration audience, his inability to read Florinda and, moreover, his threats of violence, however bumbling, also leave him open to critique. The bawdy cavalier’s attempts to convince Florinda that their fornication would be as innocent and convenient as the garden setting fail when she responds with the threat, “I’ll cry Murder! Rape! or anything!” The violent potential of the scene becomes clear in his response; “No, not you—why at this time of night was your cobweb door set open dear spider—but to catch flies?” (3.4.58 – 60). Such a defense seems again to echo Measure for Measure and Angelo’s malicious retort, “Who would believe thee, Isabel?” (2.4.155), as well as his assertion, “Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true” (2.4.171) when she threatens to reveal publicly his indecent proposal. In both of these scenes, the would-be rapists are able to blame their respective victims largely based on dynamics of status and place. While Angelo uses his role as interim deputy and the security of his own office to silence Isabella, Willmore is able to play on the openness of Florinda’s home space to reverse power dynamics despite her retention of the garden key. In his formulation, her agency in unlocking the door has rendered her the spider and he the helpless fly drawn into her web. The only thing that saves Florinda is Belvile’s arrival on the scene, during which he chastises his licentious friend for his inability to distinguish a woman of quality from a woman the men in the play would designate as an “arrant harlot” (3.6.22). This scene at once forces us to acknowledge the gender dynamics that so easily silence rape survivors and reminds us of the class distinctions at play in the very definitions of sexual assault. “Were Florinda the ‘harlot’ who Will-

 Anthony Kaufman, “‘The Perils of Florinda’: Aphra Behn, Rape, and the Subversion of Libertinism in The Rover, Part I,” Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 11, no. 2 (1996): 4.  Kaufman, 4.

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more, and later, nearly every male character in the play believe her to be, she could not be raped, only ‘ruffle[d]’ (4.1.648),” Peggy Thompson reminds us. “This heroine is thus the near victim not only of mercenary marriage, but of a gender- and class-based construction of feminine virtue that sanctions abuse of women who are perceived as sexual and economic agents.”²⁷ As suggested above, Willmore’s failure to separate Florinda from a harlot would have been reinforced by the actresses on stage. The novelty of women on stage brought with it celebrity status for the actresses, who in addition to being on the public stage were often engaged with powerful men off-stage. Nell Gwynn, who came out of retirement to play the Rover’s courtesan Angellica Bianca, was famously King Charles II’s mistress; and the Earl of Rochester’s protégé and lover Elizabeth Berry played the intrepid Hellena to Anne Bracegirdle’s Florinda. The actresses’ on- and off-stage fame, as Cynthia Lowenthal explains, “generated for them both power and hazards: because they participated in an event that displayed their bodies onstage, this visual availability, so essential to their representations of characters, translated into a communal, extratheatrical discourse filled with speculations about the offstage activities of their bodies.”²⁸ Because their roles onstage required the actresses to “feign desire” and because of the high-profile dalliances they enjoyed off the stage, they were equated with sex workers. The real tension, however, according to Lowenthal, was not this simple equation based on staged desire, but rather “the very fact of female presence that evidenced pretense,” and “confirmed the fear that a woman was capable of division or multiplicity.”²⁹ This tension, she notes, resonates with the Renaissance correlation that Peter Stallybrass marks between “‘speaking’ women (harlots, whores, and other public women) and their ‘silent’ counterparts (chaste women, invisible within the domestic sphere),” and open versus closed bodies tied directly to open versus closed mouths and other orifices.³⁰ The verbal license that the novices enjoy, emphasizes that it was not just women’s bodies that were loosed on the Restoration stage, but their mouths as well. As we might remember, Pedro’s decision to keep the sisters enclosed throughout the carnival is in direct response to Hellena’s impertinent speech. Her verbal threats to subvert the patriarchal dictums that would neatly transfer her and her sister from paternal house to convent and marital estate, respective-

 Peggy Thompson, Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 64– 65.  Cynthia Lowenthal, Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 112.  Lowenthal, 114.  Lowenthal, 114.

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ly, pushes their patriarchal representative to materially reinforce their chaste identities by keeping them walled up at home. Containing their bodies and speech, Pedro attempts to shore up his family’s reputation and legacy, albeit to his own ends. We must remember that he too is working to undermine his father’s designs for Florinda—replacing one unwelcome husband with another—in the service of his own fraternal bonds. Pedro’s immediate focus—“how came the garden door open?” (3.6.95 – 96)—upon discovering his sisters have escaped their confines, echoes the reprimand evident in Willmore’s own depiction of Florinda’s “cobweb door set open.” The open doors and mouths not only accentuate the vulnerability of female bodies, but also the agency in opening doors and speaking that threaten patriarchal imperatives. This hearkens back to Schwarz’s contention that the problem at the end of Measure for Measure is not Isabella’s withheld answer to the Duke’s proposal, but that she might be imagined to answer at all.³¹ The novices unintentionally align themselves with the play’s sex workers by entering the carnival and role-playing below their class; and, like the actresses who play these ingénues onstage, the novices’ foray into the theatrical world of carnival and their attempts to control their bodies bring both “power and hazards.” The simultaneous vulnerability and agency attached to the open garden door are reiterated in another discovery scene that leads directly to the second and third rape attempts against Florinda. While Willmore’s indiscretion might be shrugged off by audiences as a benign example of “boys being boys,” it sets a precedent for the rape culture rhetoric that permeates subsequent scenes and perpetuates a sense that the natural result of female speech and agency is the reification of what we might now term toxic masculinity. In the second scene of attempted rape, Blunt echoes and amplifies Willmore’s victim-blaming response as he attempts to punish all women through his attempted rape of Florinda. She becomes a victim of his wounded pride. In this and the subsequent attempted gang rape scene, we see how the audacity of women’s speech apparently threatens a vulnerable male identity bound up in individual and group performances of masculinity. In these situations, woman’s vulnerability becomes a projection of man’s own fragile masculinity. The gullible English country gentleman is the perfect representative of the fragile masculinity threatened by female agency in this play. Easily duped by the whore Lucetta and her pimp Phillipo, Blunt’s comical discovery scenes, in which we find him bereft of his money, naked and vulnerable after a bedtrick, are juxtaposed with Florinda’s own scenes of vulnerability. She continu-

 Schwarz, What You Will, 177.

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ously ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and finds herself as easily drawn into conveniently open doors as the play’s cavaliers seem to be. Running away from her brother, Florinda happens upon Blunt’s lodgings and exclaims: Ha, here’s a door open; I’ll venture in, since nothing can be worse than to fall into his hands. My life and honour are at stake, and my necessity has no choice. (4.4.2– 5)

Necessity here strips her of the choice she has entered the carnival to pursue, and entering another convenient place, along with the audience, she discovers Blunt half-dressed in his bedchamber. When she first enters, despite her earlier carnival impersonations as a saucy gypsy, she represents herself to Blunt as “a harmless virgin, that takes your house for sanctuary” (4.5.44– 45), pleading for pity. Blunt, already fuming from his run-in with the dissembling Lucetta, dismisses her claims of “quality,” reducing her once again to a common woman as he retorts, “a harmless virgin with a pox; as much one as t’other” (4.5.47– 48). Blunt reverses the roles on her, much as Willmore did in the garden: “Why, what the devil can I not be safe in my house from you, not in my chamber, nay, even being naked too cannot secure me: this is an impudence greater than has invaded me yet—come no resistance” (4.5.49 – 51). He defends his own attempt at rape by drawing on the image of a breached sanctuary, setting himself as the victim in order to condone his attempted violation of Florinda’s body. He reinforces this image later when he describes the scene to Frederick, claiming “she assaulted me here in my own lodgings, and had doubtless committed rape upon me, had not this sword defended me” (5.1.76 – 78). Florinda’s attempts to assuage his wrath only provide him ammunition. When she tries, in an Isabelline move, to set herself apart from “the crimes of the most infamous of [her] sex,” his response reminds us of her role-playing and deception. He mocks her: “Do, persuade the fool you love him, or that one of you can be just or honest … A generation of damned hypocrites to flatter my very clothes from my back! dissembling witches!” (4.5.66 – 74). His description once again conflates sex workers and actresses, providing a metatheatrical moment for the audience members who are watching women enact desire on stage and who have just witnessed Lucetta’s performance, which left Blunt in his vulnerable and enraged state. The threat of multiplicity to which Lowenthal alludes is enacted in this scene, as the actor playing Blunt might as easily be leveling a charge against Anne Bracegirdle as Blunt is against Florinda and women in general. Indeed the qualification of a woman as “arrant” becomes just as damning as the label “whore,” as it suggests that any wandering or deviation from the prescribed path that demands female constancy is deeply threatening not only to their perceived honor, but also to the construction of

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masculine identities that rely at once in this play on shoring up and defiling female virtues. Furthermore, such interactions suggest, according to Rooney, “if all feminine behavior can be read as seductive, women cannot avoid complicity, and the male rapist … appears double: the object of women’s ravishing appeal and the only subject who can act.”³² While the scene has comic potential, especially with the half-dressed Blunt ranting and raving, the heightened rhetoric of violence moves us away from the comic and into a savage realm more akin to a revenge play than a comedy. We see this clearly in Blunt’s sneering response to Florinda’s pleas: no prayers or tears shall mitigate my rage; therefore prepare for both my pleasures of enjoyment and revenge, for I am resolved to make up my loss here on thy body. I’ll take it out in kindness and in beating. (4.5.89 – 92)

Of the earlier scene with Lucetta that motivates Blunt’s desire for revenge, Ann Marie Stewart suggests, “symbolically, the vulnerability of the male body juxtaposes, and even balances to some degree, the vulnerable female body.”³³ With his own juxtaposition of revenge and pleasure, Blunt tries to tip the scales back in his favor, and tellingly also uses economic language that suggests a debt owed to him in the form of sex. Stewart confirms, “here, rape is clearly articulated as an act of male aggression, punishing the female body. Blunt symbolically regains control over women in general by reasserting male authority previously lost. He perceived himself as a victim due to the loss of funds”; Stewart continues, “however, his intended punishment of Florinda is a true victimization —the sexual violation of her body coupled with public humiliation.”³⁴ The symbolic control clearly shifts to Blunt in this scene, as we once again are left to think about just how vulnerable Florinda seems to be when not shut up in her family home, especially in the heightened liminal setting of the carnival. However, it is also important to remember that despite these violently symbolic threats, Blunt does not ultimately achieve his goal. Florinda, whose name lends itself to suggestions of defloration, remains intact. However, his play on “kindness” in his revenge threats still resonates and is layered with kinship ties as Florinda escapes a near rape only to find herself in an even more threatening encounter with Blunt’s cavalier companions and her own brother.

  NJ: 

Rooney, 1275. Ann Marie Stewart, The Ravishing Restoration: Aphra Behn, Violence, and Comedy (Cranbury, Associated University Presses, 2010), 90 – 91. Stewart, 91.

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In his vitriol that puts the comic under erasure, Blunt might seem an incongruous figure among his fraternal cohort, the exception to the rule. However, as much as the other characters might want to claim such an exception in their own defense, their complicity in the scene of attempted gang rape that finds them all together on stage, prepared to “enjoy” Blunt’s revenge calls that exceptional innocence into question. Even before this final rape threat we can see clear similarities between Willmore’s and Blunt’s scoffing at Florinda’s resistance. Thompson suggests that Behn “uses Blunt to draw attention to the power relations between men and women, particularly the vicious sexual power hiding behind claims of libertine freedom and pleasure.”³⁵ Kaufman speaks to this gang mentality as he describes the justification in the attempted group rape scene as “a homosocial activity rather like a fraternity orgy,” and because Florinda’s identity in this moment is not disclosed, “the immediate assumption made by all these men, Belvile included, is that if a woman is faceless, nameless, without caste, and thus powerless, she is fair game.”³⁶ Performing hesitation after his previous reprimand, Willmore cautions, upon hearing Blunt has a woman secured in his room, “How, a wench? Nay, then we must enter and partake no resistance—unless it be your lady of quality, and then we’ll keep our distance” (5.1.29 – 31). He tries to toe the line established by Belvile that separates a woman based on socioeconomic status from other common women, the line, especially in this context applied to wives, daughters, and sisters. But as we see, even among the seemingly heroic men, those most devoted to protecting women in whom they have a vested interest, the lines are constantly being moved, redrawn, and redefined. The lifelines Ahmed associates with inheritance, then, are perpetually threatened by a male desire to control female sexuality and subjectivity, to reorient women to men’s wills. Because the lines drawn for family members in this context reflect not only kinship ties, but a complicated interest in status and affiliation, Pedro becomes the most disturbing participant in the attempted gang rape. The representative of patriarchy in the play and the supposed guarantor of his sisters’ intact statuses, his unwitting participation in this scene and his recommendation that his disguised sister should show “kindness” to her would-be rapists ironically render him a clear and present threat to the family honor he spends most of the play suggesting he will protect via enclosure mandates and carnival prohibitions. Much as his sisters are reduced to common wenches once loose in the city,  Peggy Thompson, “Closure and Subversion in Behn’s Comedies,” in Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama, ed. Katherine M. Quinsey (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 79.  Kaufman, 6.

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within this carnival setting Pedro becomes one of the boys. However, he maintains a high position within this fraternal gathering, the performance of which is tied up in his supposed ability to read women’s bodies in this scene. He boasts to his English companions, “I can soon discover whether she be of quality, or for your diversion” (5.1.93 – 94). Although he never makes an official declaration of quality, his admonition that Florinda should be “kind” to the gentlemen suggests that like the rest he reads her as a woman for “diversion,” rather than as another man’s property and therefore off limits. The clear irony, of course, is that in her unmarried state, Florinda is in effect his property and his urging her kindness towards his pack of friends would necessitate that she act out of “kind” as she relinquishes the virtue upon which the family relies. Adding insult to threatened injury, when Willmore suggests that Florinda might want to “choose her man” in this gang rape scenario, Pedro affirms, “I am better bred than not to leave her her choice” (5.1.128). While the irony of his statement might elicit a laugh from Restoration audience members, since it is in fact his breeding that pushes him to force his sister into a profitable marriage that might bring honor to his family, it also highlights how horrifying this situation is for Florinda. Furthermore, that this threat is enacted against a woman’s body on the stage might heighten an audience’s uncomfortable sense of complicity as they witness the scene. They might actually feel some real relief at Pedro’s speedy exit directly following this claim that allows Florinda to discover herself to Belvile and provides them the time to marry and ultimately subvert the patriarchal designs of father and brother, even if she remains within the patriarchal system itself. Unlike Willmore, the audience members are aware that it is Florinda behind Blunt’s door and behind her mask, which is an important accessory in this scene of mistaken identity, yet if we consider the conflation of novice, actress, and “whore,” then the ability of the audience members to distinguish Florinda as a “lady of quality” might be on the same level as that of the cavaliers that pursue her. In fact, if we consider Elin Diamond’s formulation of a new “scopic epistemology” as licensing a kind of group voyeurism, then the audience members might be conflated with the cavalier gang as they wait for the disclosure and potential rape of Florinda. The technology of the stage that now invites the spectators into the intimate spaces associated with vulnerable bodies creates a situation in which the “seated and unruly” Restoration “spectators” become witnesses to and symbolic participants in attempted rape.³⁷ The crucial difference between the spectators and the cavaliers, however, is that the audience members

 Diamond, 521.

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know Florinda’s identity and status that should protect her from such predation. The spectators anticipate Florinda’s discovery that ironically involves breaking down a door and unmasking the novice in order to reaffirm her security within the safe barriers this status provides her. The resolution of this scene, particularly Pedro’s part in it, suggests the complicated ideology of choice at work in The Rover. The patriarchal designs that refuse choice to Hellena and Florinda at the play’s outset are bound to a sense of family honor and dynasty that is tied up in female virtue. Choice, as we recall from Pedro’s assertion that Hellena will enter a nunnery after carnival, is figured as simultaneously a blessing and something to fear. Ladies of quality are not afforded the blessing of choice for fear they will wander off their prescribed paths and undo their virtuous status, proving themselves unkind. In these later scenes, choice is simultaneously proffered and rescinded. A woman without status markers is only afforded the chance to choose whether she will “kindly” submit to sex with the cavaliers, or, if she will not, then to choose in which order she will be violated. While Florinda manages to temporarily reverse the patriarchal order in this scene as she elopes with her beloved Belvile, the threat of violent status erasure that precedes her happy ending reminds us of the difficulty women face in their attempts to subvert prescribed plots, to, as Ahmed puts it, create “new lines and textures in the ways in which things are arranged.”³⁸ The attempted rapes remind us of the very real dangers of attempting to subvert the patriarchal system. In fact, Florinda’s rambling demonstrates that there is no way to escape fully the patriarchal system in this play. The threats of violence against Florinda highlight the real costs to women who might enjoy an experimental ramble around the carnival. To rove outside of one’s quality and away from male protection, to masquerade as a common woman alone, leaves one subject to male assault. This seems especially true for a woman who actually desires to resubmit herself to patriarchal control in the form of marriage. Despite Hellena’s engineering of the escape plot and her use of storming images associated with razing and ravishing, Florinda becomes the stock virgin in distress. Even her history with Belvile sets the couple up as the true Fairfaxian analogues, as she recalls: I knew him at the siege of Pamplona; he was then a colonel of French horse, who when the town was ransacked, nobly treated my brother and myself, preserving us from all insolences; and I must own, besides great obligations, I have I know not what that pleads kindly for him about my heart, and will suffer no other to enter. (1.1.55 – 61)

 Ahmed, 9.

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Belvile has already saved her once in the midst of a siege and she, in turn, conflates herself with a locked sanctuary she will open only to him, a strategy that has clearly left her open to the threat of other seizures throughout the play. In the play’s conclusion she refers to Belvile as her “dear preserver” (5.1.150), even as she tries on her sister’s role as director as she forgives her would-be rapists and “reconciles” Fredrick by instigating his marriage to Valeria. Florinda still attempts to work within the patriarchal system, subverting when necessary, fighting for her choice of marital partner rather than to overturn the system. She reaches for a lifeline in Belvile but does not subvert the overarching trajectory expected of a woman of quality. Indeed, Behn indicates that it is Florinda’s desire to remain a part of this somewhat secure system that depends on rigid status identification that leaves her open to violation threats. Like the convent building that incites the male desire to storm its secured walls, the play suggests that unavailability makes Florinda a ripe figure for attempted rape, affirming the old adage that one always wants what he or she cannot have. Hellena, despite her marriage to Willmore in the end, desires instead to blur the very boundaries of status and gender norms on which Florinda and the patriarchy rely. For critics such as Stewart, it is Hellena’s more active pursuit of a future outside of the patriarchal circuit that seems to safeguard her from the same bodily threats with which Florinda is plagued. Hellena, Stewart argues, “is unlike Florinda in a number of ways: she is a dissembler, outspoken and daring, eager to explore the world of romantic/sexual love.”³⁹ For Stewart, Hellena’s more active agency is aided by her choice of disguise, specifically her choice to cross-dress as a page, thereby taking on a male role and refusing the more vulnerable female role that her sister continually enacts. Much like Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines then, Behn still reminds us that in many ways, controlling the lines is easier if you are a man. Throughout the play, however, Hellena also equates herself with the errant actresses and directors of the Restoration stage as she engages in a kind of symbolic cross-dressing, taking on active roles as she directs the women to enter the carnival, and even proposes marriage to Willmore. Hellena’s project necessitates breaking the identity her father and brother have designed for her. Even her marriage suggests that while she cannot work completely outside of the patriarchal system, she will attempt to undermine it from within, taking a roving husband and vowing to maintain inconstancy and play to her own desires. Like Aphra Behn and the playwright’s often-purported analogue in the play, Angelica Bianca, Hellena wants to control her own lifeline and reorient the lines that demarcate “quality” as she chooses to write

 Stewart, 93.

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her future on the open sea as she envisions a life beside the seafaring Willmore on his ship.

Conclusion: A Little Wooden World Like many of this book’s previous plays, The Rover’s comic ending is ambiguous. The multiple marriages seem more amicable than those brokered as penance in Measure for Measure. However, despite their respective rants against the marital institution, Hellena and Willmore still enter into this nuptial enclosure. This conclusion, like that of The Convent of Pleasure, seems a strange return to patriarchy. Critics such as Lowenthal point to the famed courtesan Angellica Bianca as “the singular, near-tragic part of the comedic plot that Behn never successfully resolves.”⁴⁰ In Angellica Bianca, the courtesan who claims the right to a “virgin heart” (4.2.157), Lowenthal sees Behn presenting “a character who forces an audience to examine the ways it ‘reads’ women, to be self-conscious about the relationship between representation and reality as it functions to construct female identity.”⁴¹ A corollary of seeing Angellica as a near-tragic character who forces us to question how we read female identity is to see Hellena, the virgin who claims the right to inconstancy, and whose marriage will lead her to a watery death before the play’s sequel, as a character equally able to incite questions about our readings of female identity in this play. Throughout the play, Hellena pushes the boundaries of gender and status identity as she attempts to act as agent of her own destiny by resisting her family’s dynastic designs. While the marriage she negotiates with Willmore keeps her within a patriarchal circuit like the rest of the play’s women, she still manages to subvert her original convent prescription, thereby winning a minor victory over her brother and father. The carnival becomes a space in which she, unlike her constantly threatened sister, can enjoy the type of agency that would seem reserved for the play’s freewheeling cavaliers. Rather than placing herself in a position as a vulnerable woman open to violent sieges and ravishment, she attempts to take on more masculine roles and scoffs at the quality that seems both to damn and to save her sister Florinda. Hellena successfully escapes her brother throughout carnival, and still cross-dressed in breeches in the play’s final scene, she draws on the aforementioned “cradle full of noise” that signals the unequal threat of unlicensed desire for women to secure her marriage to Will-

 Lowenthal, 119.  Lowenthal, 119.

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more. She wears the pants and controls the scene suggesting that she might become captain of Willmore’s “little wooden world” (5.1.532– 33). In this moment, on the verge of the marital threshold, she once again resembles a director and playwright, as she seems to cast her own lifeline. However, as critics like Kaufman suggest, we might also read this marital conclusion as calling “into question woman’s ability to acquire real power, except through marriage and a strong social identity.”⁴² Hellena’s marriage, in this light, implies a more limited control over the way she might plot her course from atop Willmore’s little wooden world. While she might avoid “A cradle full of noise and mischief, with a pack of repentance at [her] back” (4.1.473 – 75) by entering into a sanctioned marital arrangement, her future is tenuous at best. The play’s sequel drives this point home, as Willmore “with a Sham sadness,” as a stage direction indicates, relays Hellena’s death. “Ay, she was too good for mortals” (1.1.124), he sighs, and then confirms, she died: “Faith, e’en with a fit of Kindness, poor Soul-she would to Sea with me, and in a Storm-far from Land, she gave up the Ghost-’twas a Loss, but I must bear it with a Christian Fortitude” (1.1.126 – 28).⁴³ His “sadness” soon abates as Hellena’s death in a storm at sea leaves the rover free to woo a new courtesan (played by Elizabeth Berry, the same actress who played Hellena). Willmore, in the last lines of The Rover, part 1, foreshadows this tragic outcome as he ushers Hellena off the stage, chanting: Lead on, no other dangers they can dread, Who venture in the storms o’th’ marriage bed. (5.1.597– 98)

So, while Hellena may have stormed the stage, in the end she falls victim to the harsh consequences of a storm on the open sea. This fatal venture on the marriage bed reinforces the play’s agential location within the threshold between maid and wife. A married woman, Behn seems to suggest, cannot be the protagonist of a comedy (at least while her husband is alive), nor can a married cavalier (a contradiction in terms), as Willmore begins another narrative path, without leaving his wife at sea. Killing off her female lead between the thresholds of two comedies, Behn indicates that for a female playwright, agency is located within dramatic structures and on the stage. For Behn, crossing the marital threshold and by extension the dramatic threshold, as comedies rarely stage their marital conclusions, is tanta-

 Kaufman, 7.  Citations from Aphra Behn, The Second Part of The Rover, vol. 6 in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996), 223 – 98.

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mount to a death sentence for the novice. Without the stage and her role as director and author, Hellena implicitly loses her agency. The precarious nature of life beyond the dramatic threshold for this playwright figure might correlate to Behn’s own questionable and potentially threatening social position as the first professional woman writer in England. While Behn had a good deal of success, as the long production run of The Rover and the demand for its sequel make evident, she also met with harsh opposition and was plagued by the same gender paradoxes as her novices.⁴⁴ Diamond reminds us that “Aphra Behn wrote plays when female authorship was a monstrous violation of the ‘woman’s sphere.’” “Indeed,” she explains, “that she could earn a living writing for the theater was precisely what condemned her.”⁴⁵ Diamond highlights this point, quoting Robert Gould’s often-cited slander against Behn: “For Punk and Poetess agree so Pat, / You cannot be This and not be That.”⁴⁶ Like her actresses, Behn is here conflated with sex workers because of her profession; also because, like her novices, she does not quite fit in any of the available categories, in the words of Shakespeare’s Lucio, “She may be a Punk!” (5.1.184).⁴⁷ The position Gould puts Behn in is one of inevitable correspondence, one “cannot be This [a poet] and not be That [a punk].” In dramatic treatments, however, the ambiguity of residing between labels, of being suspended in medias res, as it were, resists the constrictions patriarchal authority figures try to place on women through essentialist rhetoric. Hellena’s death between The Rover and its sequel emphasizes the dangers of attempting to move outside of comic and patriarchal prescriptions. As in the other plays in this project, female agency can only be located safely within the drama, a space suspended that leaves novice and playwright in control of the wooden

 Margaret Ferguson, in fact, sees “multiple figures of the author” in the female characters of Behn’s dramas. Ferguson specifically focuses on Behn’s new world dramas in her assessment that “each of these female characters dresses as a man at some point in the play and each alludes to the playwright through the lens of an emergent and titillating set of cultural discourses about English women in the colonies, discourses that emphasize the danger of liberating women’s nature from the restraining conventions of home.” Although The Rover is not set in the colonies, its Neapolitan carnival is certainly an apt “other world,” and Hellena fits nicely into Ferguson’s depiction of the cross-dressing female author figure whose “new world” desires threaten the domestic designs prescribed for women. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, 337. For further discussions of Behn as a woman author and her literary authorial figures also see Ferguson’s “The Authorial Ciphers of Aphra Behn,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650 – 1740, ed. Steven Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 225 – 49.  Diamond, 520.  Diamond, 520.  Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, ed. Kamps and Raber.

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world they attempt to construct and re-form, in this case, the Restoration stage. However, this safety space is not the only means of measuring success for our novices, the very acts of transgression whether successful or not push against the power structures that conscript them. Ahmed depicts grasping for the lifeline of salvation in similar terms; the lifeline is the kind of gift “that is thrown without expectation of return in the immediacy of a life-and-death situation. And yet, we don’t know what happens when we reach such a line and let ourselves live by holding on.”⁴⁸ Whether their endings are comic or tragic, each of the novices in these plays takes a risk in her attempts to forge her own path, each one attempts to “live by holding on,” and these very attempts even if not fully actualized represent agency. As Butler reminds us, the transference of power is not straightforward; “appropriation may involve an alteration of power such that the power assumed or appropriated works against the power that made that assumption possible.”⁴⁹ We see this at work in Behn’s and by extension Hellena’s attempts to rework patriarchal narratives, as they work within and against the power structures that threaten their attempts to save themselves, to cast and create their own lifelines. Slander aside, Behn, like Hellena is trying to navigate her own little wooden world and the cultural shifts and storms that accompanied the advent of the Restoration stage, as she attempts to script a space that works within, but also resists the pre-scripted ends of patriarchal design that would see her penned in. The stage, then, becomes her lifeline of resistance.

 Ahmed, 18.  Butler, Psychic Life, 13.

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Index Ahmed, Sara 31, 141, 146, 160, 162, 167 Anchorite 67, 109 – 110, 114 Antwerp 4 f., 13, 32, 105, 133 Appleton House 1 – 3, 8, 20, 23, 25, 26, 92 f., 147 – Nun Appleton 1 – 3, 148 Baines, Barbara 51, 56 f., 66, 71 – 72 Bar Convent 7 Bartels, Emily 38 f., 41 Beauregard, David 58, 71 Behn, Aphra 8, 13, 21 – 24, 48, 133, 141 – 145, 147 – 150, 153, 159 f., 160, 163 – 167 – The Rover 8, 13, 23, 133, 154 f., 155 f. – Angellica Bianca 147 f., 156, 164 – Belvile 145, 154 – 155, 160 – 163 – Blunt 154, 157 – 161 – Florinda 143 – 146, 149 – 151, 153 – 164 – Hellena 23, 48, 141 – 152, 156, 162 – 167 – Pedro 143 – 144, 150, 156 – 157, 160 – 162 – Willmore 23, 141, 144, 146 – 147, 152, 154 – 158, 160 – 161, 163 – 165 Bennett, Jane 31 Bhabha, Homi 10 – 12, 31, 36 Biberman, Matthew 43 Bonin, Erin 103, 131 f. Bovilsky, Lara 41 f., 43 Bowden, Caroline 4 f., 13, 32, 75 – 76, 89, 99 f. Brigittines 98 Butler, Judith 5 – 6, 12, 51, 56, 152, 167 Cannon, Christopher 109 – 110, 114 Carnival 23, 63, 68, 133, 141 – 142, 146 – 148, 150 – 152, 156 – 164, 166 f. Catholic 2 – 38, 40 – 47, 50 – 52, 56 – 62, 69, 71, 75 – 79, 90, 98 – 99, 102, 119 f., 124, 126, 146 – anti-Catholic 4, 7 – 8, 37 f., 47, 77 f., 96 – 97, 113, 126 f. – Catholic identity 16, 38 f., 51 – Catholic spaces 20, 38 f., 43, 105, 114 f. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513343-010

– Catholic women 4, 12, 62, 77, 79, 83, 88, 119 f. Cavaliers 142, 144, 147 – 148, 153, 155, 158 – 165 Cavendish, Margaret 8, 11, 13, 17, 20 – 21, 23, 100 – 107, 114, 117 – 127, 130 – 139, 141 – 143, 152 – Convent of Pleasure, The 8, 17, 21, 23, 101 – 107, 121, 124, 126, 131, 134 – 135, 139, 164 – Lady Happy 17, 105 – 107, 121 – 139 – Madame Mediator 122 – 131, 133, 136, 138 – 139 – Prince 127 – 138 – Religious, The 8, 23, 102, 104 – 108, 113, 118 f., 123 – 126, 139, 152 – Lady Perfection 23, 106 – 122, 126, 139, 152 – Lord Melancholy 108 – 120 – Mistriss Odd-Humour 113 – 114, 120 – 121 – St. John’s Abbey in Colchester 104 – Welbeck Abbey 104, 124 Cavendish, William 139 Charles I, King 7 – 8, 98 Charles II, King 16, 156 Chaste 14, 23, 63, 66, 82, 109 – 110, 118 – 119, 152, 154, 156 – 157 Chastity 4, 13, 19, 21, 23, 47, 51 f., 52, 58, 61, 67 f., 72, 84, 86, 90, 102, 104, 108 – 125, 148 – 149, 152, 154 – chastity in marriage 102, 116 – 117, 119 – 120 Chedgzoy, Kate 96, 99 Choice 3, 5, 10, 14, 23, 32, 36, 46 – 60, 70 – 72, 80, 87, 107 – 114, 117, 129, 133, 142 – 154, 158, 161 – 163 Christianity 42, 58 f. Convent architecture 8, 22 – 23, 76 – 77 – confessional 28, 96, 97 f., 98 – grate 8, 15 – 17, 23, 27– 28, 32, 63, 75 – 79, 84 – 98, 100, 105 – 106, 109 – 116, 119, 123 – 128, 135, 139– 140, 150, 152

Index

– grill 27, 75 – 76, 126 – turn 8, 16, 22, 25 f., 27 – 36, 39, 45, 75, 116, 139 – wheel 22, 27, 34 f., 35, 45, 75 Conversion 22, 25 – 27, 31 – 35, 39 – 47, 61, 83 – religious conversion 22, 34 f., 35, 46, 48 Convert 26 – 27, 31, 37, 39, 41, 46, 94, 120 Council of Trent 15 – 16, 26, 27 f., 57, 59, 76, 92 f., 126, 127 f. Crawford, Julie 21, 104 f., 124 Crawford, Patricia 34 Cross-dressing 101 f., 132, 134, 137, 138 f., 163, 166 f. De Certeau, Michel 10, 61, 68, 73 Desire 7, 23 – 30, 32, 34, 44, 47, 50 – 52, 55 – 60, 65 – 73, 83, 85, 90, 93, 100, 109 – 111, 119, 128, 133, 136, 140, 142 – 146 Diamond, Elin 147 f., 151 f., 161, 166 DiGangi, Mario 58, 63 – 64 Dimmock, Matthew 41 – 42 Dolan, Frances 3, 17, 20 f., 43, 90 f., 119 f., 126 f. Dowry 12 – 13, 89, 149 Elizabeth I, Queen 7 – 8, 42, 130 Enclosure, – paradox of 78, 89, 114, 140 – garden 53, 66 – 67, 85, 106, 122, 154 – 158 – hortus conclusus 67 f., 85, 109 – religious 85, 100, 104, 110, 113, 114, 123, 126 – clausura 16, 27 f., 57 English Carmelite 4 f., 13, 32 – 33, 105 English Civil Wars 16, 21, 101 – 102, 147 f. English Nunne, The 8, 12, 22, 77 – 83, 86 – 97, 100 – 102, 113, 120, 123 – 125, 129, 131 – 132, 153 Ephraim, Michelle 44 – 45 Exclusion crisis 8 Exile 1, 4 f., 10, 13, 32, 98, 103 – 105, 124 Fairfax, Isabella 23, 124

1 – 2, 4, 10, 14, 18 – 20,

177

Fairfax, Lord 1 – 2, 19, 23, 147 – 148, 150 Female Agency 2, 5 – 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, 50, 57 – 58, 73, 100, 143, 150, 157, 166 Ferguson, Margaret 42 f., 45 f., 85 f., 166 f. Foucault, Michel 19 Genre 19 – 20, 80 – anti-monastic satire 21 – closet drama 8, 11, 20, 83, 100 – 103, 106, 131, 139, 144, 147 – comedy 8, 20, 121, 156 f., 159, 165 – country-house poem 1, 147 – dialogues 5, 7 – 8, 12, 14, 18, 20, 22 – 23, 76 – 78, 80, 82 – 83, 89 – 92, 94 – 95, 99 – 103, 106, 109, 116, 125 – 126, 128, 139 – 141 – life writings 4 f., 32 – problem play 8, 20, 49, 117 – romance 8, 20, 80 – 82, 85, 89, 101 f. – tragedy 8, 20, 37 f., 48, 118, 121 Gless, Darryl 56 – 57, 71 f., 76 f. Glorious Revolution 8 Goulding, Susan 145, 146 f. Gowing, Laura 90 f., 96 f., 130 Greenblatt, Stephen 19, 35 f., 55 f. Hadfield, Andrew 41 – 42 Hallet, Nicky 4 f., 27 f., 33 f., 105 Haraway, Donna 9 Harris, Jonathan Gil 20 f., 31 f. Henrietta Maria, Queen 7, 130 Henry VIII, King 2, 15, 41, 98 Higgins, Lynn 153 Hills, Helen 30 f., 76, 85 f. Hirsch, Brett 44 Hiscock, Andrew 38, 39 f., 101 f., 128 Hobby, Elaine 144 Holmes, Michael Morgan 59, 68, 71 – 72 Honor 115, 129, 142 – 143, 148 – 149, 158, 160 – 162 Howie, Cary 78, 89, 138 In medias res 5 – 7, 9, 11, 53, 72, 166 Ingénue 18, 61, 87 – 88, 93, 95, 157 Interregnum 8, 102 – 103, 124, 147 Islam 35, 42 Italy 27 f., 30 f., 76, 77 f.

178

Index

James I, King 7 – 8, 43 f. James II, King 8 Jankowski, Theodora 133 – 134 Judaism 42 Kaufman, Anthony 155, 160, 165 Kellet, Katherine 101 f., 128 – 129, 132, 134 – 135, 138 f. Kelly, Erna 118 Killigrew, Thomas 144 – 145, 147 f. Knatchbull, Lady Mary 16 Lake, Peter 3 Lay, Jenna 4, 98, 99 f. Levine, Nina 64 Liddy, Brenda 144 Liminality 10, 24, 36, 64 f., 65, 67, 100, 143 Lowenthal, Cynthia 156, 158, 164 Luckyj, Christina 69, 73 Marlowe, Christopher 6, 11, 25, 31 – 33, 36, 37 f., 38 f., 40 – 42 – The Jew of Malta 6 – 7, 17, 20, 22, 25, 30, 34, 40, 75, 116, 139, 141 – 142 – Abigail 17, 22, 25 – 48, 117, 141 – Barabas 6, 25 – 30, 34 – 35, 37 – 41, 44 – 48, 116 – 117 – Ithamore 27, 30, 45 – Jews 34, 35 f., 37 f., 41 – 43, 46 f. – Malta 26, 32, 34, 39, 41 – 43, 47 – Marranos 41, 43, 46 – Turks 34, 35 f., 38 f., 41 Marriage, – alternatives to 10, 14, 19, 21, 31, 33, 35 – 36, 47, 50 – 51, 59, 79, 88, 100, 102, 132, 142, 149 – arranged 88, 120, 149 – 150 – dissolution of 108, 111, 113, 115, 117 – forced 21, 24, 32 – 33, 113 – 114, 141, 143 – 144, 149 – 150 Marriage market 106 – 107, 113 – 114, 121, 132 Marvell, Andrew 1 – 5, 8, 18 – 19, 25, 60, 92 f., 147 – 148 – “Upon Appleton House” (see Appleton House)

Maus, Katherine 53, 59, 71 f. McFeely, Maureen Connoly 54 f., 58, 71 f. Mediators 78, 86, 96, 99 – 100, 106, 116, 125 – 127, 131, 135, 139 – 140 Middleton, Thomas 4, 21, 99 – A Game of Chess 99 Monastic dissolutions 1 – 2, 4, 7, 17 – 19, 25 – 26, 33, 41, 75, 79, 98, 102, 104 Naples 24, 141, 149 f., 150 – 151 Novice Nun 4, 19, 49, 92, 94 – Novitiate 12, 44, 64, 87, 92 – Probation 12 – 13, 87, 92, 100, 148 Nunnery 16 f., 21 – 22, 25 – 26, 29, 34 – 37, 42, 47 – 48, 108, 130 f., 143, 146 – 148, 150, 162 Oliva, Marilyn 12 f., 13, 17, 18 f., 19 f., 122, 125, 127, 130 f. Pacheco, Anita 153, 154 f. Patriarchy 3, 51, 54, 60, 68 f., 88 – 89, 100, 111, 120 – 121, 134, 145, 154, 160, 163 – 164 Performance 5, 7, 9 – 12, 26, 46, 52, 54 – 55, 60 – 65, 69 – 71, 73, 87, 96, 117, 131 – 138, 158 – gender performance 132 – 133, 137, 152 – 153, 157, 161 Penetration 78, 80, 86, 90, 95, 96 f., 98 – 99, 115, 137, 139, 146, 150, 152 Poor Clares 13, 57, 59, 119 f. Popish Plot 7 f., 8, 142 f. Power, Eileen 13, 16, 27, 28 f., 127 f., 130 f., 146 f. Primogeniture 13, 145 Prioress 64, 123, 129 – 130, 135 Prison23, 53, 56 – 58, 60 – 61, 75 – 76, 150 Protestant 2 f., 3, 5, 7, 8, 18, 40 – 41, 48, 50, 52, 71, 99, 102, 114 Questier, Michael

3

Rape 51, 69, 127, 150, 152 – 163 – rape culture 152, 154, 157 – ravishment 153, 164 Recusants 15, 25, 34, 40

Index

Reformation 1 – 5, 7, 11, 13 – 20, 25 – 26, 33, 36, 38 – 39, 44 – 47, 50 – 52, 54, 56 f., 57 – 58, 62, 75, 104, 119, 126, 147, 149 Reigle, Kimberly 30, 44 Religion 13, 15, 34 f., 37, 41 – 43, 46 f., 50, 83, 99, 114, 129 Religious life 5, 17, 77, 84, 86 – 89, 114, 149 – religious profession 1, 13, 54, 62, 145, 150 Resistance 6, 16, 26, 30, 33, 38, 51, 60, 63 – 64, 69 – 71, 101 f., 126, 158, 160, 167 Restoration, The 8, 16, 144, 147, 151 Restoration drama 142, 144, 147 – Restoration stage 20, 142 – 143, 150, 153, 156, 163, 167 – actresses 147, 150 – 152, 156 – 158, 161, 163, 166 – Berry, Elizabeth 156, 165 – Bracegirdle, Anne 156, 158 – Gwynn, Nell 156 – discovery spaces 143, 151, 153 Retreat 5, 17, 37 f., 47, 52, 58, 67 f., 77, 83, 102 – 110, 113, 118 – 119, 122, 129, 139 Roach, Joseph 11 – 12 Robinson, Thomas 4, 79, 97 – 99 – Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon 79, 97 Roman de la Rose, Le 81, 85 Rooney, Ellen 154, 159 Roosendaell, Agnes 32 – 34 Royalist 16, 21, 102 – 103, 105, 124 Rubik, Margarete 144 Sanctuary 21, 26 – 27, 47 – 48, 50, 52, 55 – 58, 60, 85, 108, 152, 158, 163 Schechner, Richard 12 Schwarz, Kathryn 63 – 64, 73, 108, 111 – 112, 118, 157 Seduction 19, 77 f., 93 – 95, 100, 153 – 154 Shakespeare, William 11, 14, 35 f., 40 f., 49 – 51, 53 f., 55 f., 58, 67 f., 104, 137 – 138, 163, 166 – As You Like It 151 – Comedy of Errors, The 58

179

– Measure for Measure 8, 14, 14, 18 – 22, 27, 30, 36, 42, 47, 49 – 56, 58 f., 62, 67 f., 69 – 71, 76 f., 80, 91, 107 – 108, 117, 141 – 142, 150, 152, 155, 157, 164, 166 f. – Angelo 27, 49, 51 – 54, 56 f., 63, 65 – 69, 71, 85, 108, 152, 155 – Duke Vincentio 19, 22, 49 – 54, 56, 58 – 60, 62, 66 – 67, 70 – 72, 76 f., 91, 108, 117, 155, 157 – Francisca 18, 57, 62 – 63, 66, 72, 135 – Isabella 14, 21 – 22, 27, 36, 42, 49 – 73, 76 f., 80, 83, 85, 91, 107, 117, 135, 141, 152, 156 – 157 – Lucio 49, 57, 62 – 63, 65 – 66, 166 – Mariana 54, 58, 61 – 62, 66 – 68, 107 – 108, 117 – 118 – Overdone, Mistress 54, 61 – 62, 70 – Merchant of Venice, The 40 f., 42 – 42, 44 f., 46 f. – Midsummer Night’s Dream 55 – Othello 35, 37 – Richard II 55 – Romeo and Juliet 55 – Venus and Adonis 98 – Winter’s Tale, The 58 Shapiro, James 35, 41 f., 43, 46 Shepherd, Simon 40 Sidney, Sir Phillip 80 – 82, 84 Sierra, Horacio 124, 125 f., 127 – 128, 130 Siegfried, Brandie 133 – 135, 138 f. Silence 11, 19, 30, 36, 49, 51 – 52, 56 – 60, 63 f., 69 – 73, 155 Silver, Brenda 153 Slights, Jessica 59, 68, 71 – 72 Solga, Kim 73 Spain 29, 40 – 42 Speech 21, 50, 63, 65 – 66, 72, 84, 87, 156 – 157 Stallybrass, Peter 85, 109, 156 Stewart, Ann Marie 159, 163 Subject 3, 5 – 6, 8, 10 – 11, 16 – 17, 31, 51, 55, 56 f., 57, 60, 68 – 69, 100, 153 – acting subject 19, 30, 159 – ambivalent subject 42, 51 – subjectivity 11, 153 – 154, 160

180

Index

Surveillance 8, 16, 17, 55, 85 – 86, 90 f., 93 – 94, 97 Suzuki, Mihoko 120, 121 f. Syon Abbey 98 Tambling, Jeremy 37 f., 41 Taylor, Diana 12, 58 f. Theater 8, 20, 23, 41 f., 49, 64, 69, 101 – 102, 104, 151 f., 152, 166 Thompson, Peggy 156, 160 Traub, Valerie 131, 136 – 137 Turner, James Grantham 77 f., 78 Turner, Victor 10, 64, 67 – 68 Utopia

21, 103 f., 104 f., 122, 124

Venus in the Cloister 8, 12, 21 – 23, 77 – 79, 89 – 102, 113, 115, 123, 125, 130 – 131, 135 – 137, 153

Virgin 2, 64, 79, 107, 117, 129, 132 – 133, 158, 162, 164 Virginity 14, 82, 85 f., 107 – 110, 112, 118, 120, 123, 127 – 128 Vows 53, 83, 95, 109 – 110, 117 – 120, 145, 154 – marital vows 19, 22, 43, 61, 71, 108 – 109, 112, 114 – 115, 119 – 120 – religious vows 13, 19, 43, 47, 49, 61 – 63, 70, 81, 86 – 87, 95, 110, 115, 119 Walker, Claire 4 f., 16, 27 f., 32, 90 f., 92 f., 114, 149 Warren, Nancy Bradley 97 f., 98 Weaver, Elissa 27 f., 126 f. Webster, John 4, 21 – Duchess of Malfi 5, 67 f. Woods, Gillian 3, 51, 59, 69