Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) [1 ed.] 1409401162, 9781409401162

Citation preview

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Ruben Espinosa

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA Abby Zanger The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. Now approaching its tenth anniversary, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World” is an established forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this Ashgate book series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. We welcome proposals for both single-author volumes and edited collections which expand and develop this continually evolving field of study. Titles in the series English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 Edited by Micheline White Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse Pamela S. Hammons Women’s Wealth and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England Elizabeth Mazzola Biblical Women’s Voices in Early Modern England Michele Osherow Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe Edited by Allison Levy

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Ruben Espinosa University of Texas at El Paso, USA

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Ruben Espinosa 2011 Ruben Espinosa has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Espinosa, Ruben. Masculinity and Marian efficacy in Shakespeare’s England. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint – In literature. 3. Masculinity in literature. 4. English drama – Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism. 5. English drama – 17th century – History and criticism. 6. Christianity and literature – England – History – 16th century. 7. Christianity and literature – England – History – 17th century. I. Title II. Series 822.3’3–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Espinosa, Ruben, 1975– Masculinity and Marian efficacy in Shakespeare’s England / by Ruben Espinosa. p. cm. — (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes index. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Religion. 3. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint—In literature. 4. Religion in literature. 5. Religion and literature—England—History—16th century. 6. Religion and literature—England—History—17th century. 7. Religion in literature. I. Title. PR3011.E87 2011 822.3’3—dc22 ISBN 9781409401162 (hbk) ISBN 9781315594156 (ebk)

2011000712



For Melissa, Sophia, and Marcello

This page has been left blank intentionally

Contents List of Figures   Acknowledgments  

ix xi

Introduction: Fracturing Mary: The Rise and Decline of the Cult of the Virgin Mary in England  

1

1

“England, Mary’s Dowry”: Joan La Pucelle and the Impotent Fellowships and Imagined Communities of 1 Henry VI  

37

2

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure  

59

3

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear  

91

4

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder of Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale  

Afterword   Works Cited   Index  

149 173 177 189

This page has been left blank intentionally

List of Figures I.1 Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, c. 1480/85. Oil on panel. Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.352. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

23

2.1 Attributed to Filippo Bellini, Italian, c. 1550–1603. Virgin of Mercy (Madonna della Misericordia), n.d. Pen and black ink, with brush and gray wash, heightened with lead white (partially oxidized), on gray-blue paper, laid on ivory wove card. The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection, 1922.919. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

62

2.2 Workshop of Dieric Bouts, Netherlandish, c. 1410–1475. Mater Dolorosa (Sorrowing Virgin), 1480/1500. Oil on panel. Chester D. Tripp Fund; Chester D. Tripp Endowment; through prior acquisition of Max and Leola Epstein, 1986.998. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

70

3.1 Pisan, 14th Century. The Virgin Annunciate, 1325/50. Wood, polychromed and gilded. Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.98. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 106 3.2 Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, Netherlandish, c. 1399–1464. Virgin and Child, c. 1460/65. Oil on panel. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1052. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

131

4.1

165

Workshop of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, Netherlandish, 1470/75 – by 1533. Virgin and St. John the Evangelist, c. 1510. Oil on panel. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1937.1011. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Acknowledgments The generous support and encouragement of a great deal of people and institutions made it possible for me to finish this book, and I am sincerely grateful to each and every one of them. The Hispanic Scholarship Fund (The Peierls Foundation), and the Thomas Edwin Devaney Dissertation Fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado afforded me uninterrupted time to make progress on this project. I am grateful to the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Texas at El Paso for funds that facilitated travel to research and present on this project. I delivered various portions of this work at Shakespeare Association of America meetings in San Diego, CA, and Washington, D.C., and at Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association of America meetings in Reno, NV, and Snowbird, UT, and the discussion and feedback I received at these meetings was invaluable. Thanks to the SAA for awarding me a travel grant in 2007. An earlier version of the first half of Chapter 2 appeared as “Can no prayers pierce thee?”: Re-imagining Marian Intercession in The Merchant of Venice,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 35.2 (2009). Many thanks to Frances Malpezzi, EIRC, and South-Central Renaissance Conference for permission to reuse this material here. Also, I would like to thank the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the J. Paul Getty Museum for permission to reproduce the Marian images in this book. I join a long list of authors who have come before me in offering my gratitude to Erika Gaffney. Erika was my commissioning editor at Ashgate, and her insight, generosity, and affable nature made it an absolute pleasure to work with her. I would also like to thank Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger, the editors of Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, for including this book in their series. The keen eye and thought-provoking criticism of my outside reader was immeasurable, and for that I am truly grateful. The English faculty at the University of Colorado is as supportive and thoughtful a group as one is likely to find. I am especially grateful to Valerie Forman, David Glimp, and Elizabeth Robertson for their criticism, encouragement, and advice. I often say that I have been blessed with great mentors in my life, and Katherine Eggert certainly stands out among them. Katherine has been instrumental to my success, and I feel incredibly fortunate that I was able to work with someone who is as brilliant as she is kindhearted. I owe a great deal to Katherine, but here I can merely offer my sincere appreciation for her constant support and friendship. I can only strive to be so good a mentor with my own students. The advice and good fellowship from my colleagues at UTEP made finishing this project a rewarding experience. Ezra Cappell and Brian Yothers were quick to lend their friendly support when I arrived here, and I thank them for their sound direction. The gregarious nature of my colleagues in the English department makes

xii

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

it a pleasure to be on campus. Thanks to Maggie, Maryse, Marion, Carol, Lois, Deane, and Mimi for the good conversation, counsel, and laughter. Many thanks to Chuck Ambler for his advice and candor, Ben Saenz for his early support, and Richard Piñeda for his generosity in helping me to learn the ropes here. Howard Daudistel, our dean of the College of Liberal Arts, has been steadfast in his support of my research, and I thank him for this. My students here at UTEP have been wonderful, and I thank them for constantly challenging me to see Shakespeare in a different light. I am proud to call David Ruiter my chair, mentor, colleague, and friend. David not only encouraged me to keep self-imposed deadlines for completing this book, but he ungrudgingly read through inexhaustible drafts of my work. His feedback and keen understanding of Shakespeare have been critical to the completion of this book, but it is his generosity and friendship that have mattered most. I am particularly grateful to my parents, Armando and Consuelo Espinosa, who have offered unconditional encouragement. Mandis, Liz, Connie, Mary, Ruben, Joe, Debbie, Frank, and my nieces and nephews have always been there for me. Although “Why Shakespeare?” is a question they ask all too often, I am heartened by the knowledge that they find value in my work simply because of the fact that I am doing it. Patricia and Art Barba have been openhanded and kind, and I scarce believe that I can ever repay them for all they have offered me. Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Melissa. She has heard more ideas about the Virgin Mary and Shakespeare than she would care to admit, but at every turn she has listened generously and offered meaningful criticism. The support and encouragement she offers me is bottomless, and this book would not have seen the light of day without her. I will never live nor work long enough to match her goodness. I dedicate this book to her, and ask that she share the dedication with our twins, Sophia and Marcello. With eyes smarting from long hours at the computer, and Shakespeare still on my mind, it is always something wonderful to see them greet me at the door. All three of you have my gratitude and unending love.

Introduction: Fracturing Mary: The Rise and Decline of the Cult of the Virgin Mary in England Since the inception of Christianity, the Virgin Mary has played an essential part in the construction of feminine roles, and—by relation—she has been vital to perceptions of masculine identity. Although it took several centuries to develop the cult of the Virgin Mary, once established it was a remarkably popular and dominant force in Roman Catholicism. Equally remarkable, however, is the Virgin Mary’s fall from prominence within a post-Reformation framework. The abrupt decline of the cult of the Virgin Mary in sixteenth-century England gave testament to the extent of the socio-religious shift in that particular culture. Describing the “fate of the dead,” for example, Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, “The medieval will usually left the soul to a committee consisting of God, Our Lady, and ‘the holy company of heaven’ (all the saints). After the Reformation, the beneficiary was God alone” (Reformation 557). MacCulloch’s observation of the fundamental divergence between pre-Reformation and post-Reformation views of salvation not only demonstrates the gravity of that religious fissure for believers, but it also illustrates the jarring shift of the Virgin Mary’s role in English religious thought. Indeed, Mary rose to the status of heavenly queen in the medieval period, but she was largely marginalized after the Protestant Reformation. Mary’s absence in the role of salvation was analogous to her absence in the religious landscape of postReformation England. In the rampant iconoclasm of the English Reformation, the cult of the Virgin Mary was decisively fractured. However, we would be hard pressed to believe that the swift erasure of the physical markers of the cult of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England translated to an equally precipitous erasure of that Marian influence from England’s cultural psyche. In both pre-Reformation and post-Reformation Christian thought, the Virgin Mary remained. It was the degree of her importance—and the believers’ response to that importance—that was managed. As one might imagine, the influential legacy of the Virgin Mary in Christianity, and the flourishing strength of her cult over time, made marginalizing the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England an onerous undertaking. This introduction contextualizes the nascence, proliferation, and eventual eradication of the cult of the Virgin Mary in England before arriving at the design of Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England. I briefly survey here the socio-historical, religious, cultural, and gendered construction of Mary over time. After tracing the origins of the cult of the Virgin Mary, and the rise of Marian

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England



devotion in medieval England, I then examine how leading Reformers and postReformation Protestant writers negotiate the systematic marginalization of an iconic figure who is both necessary to, and yet stands to threaten, England’s new-conceived religious and national identity. Ultimately, I explore why the Virgin Mary’s religious and gendered influence mattered to Shakespeare’s culture as a means of setting the stage to examine what her influence meant to Shakespeare’s theater. I. Mary’s Incandescence: The Rise of the Cult of the Virgin Mary The precise emergence of the cult of the Virgin Mary hinges on a consensus as to what adequately constitutes a “Marian cult.” Indeed, in Chris Maunder’s edited collection, The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, scholars explore various Marian sources—topics that include fourth-century patristic writing, the controversy surrounding identifying early Christian catacomb art as “Marian,” and the Apocryphal New Testament—in an effort to scrutinize the origins of the cult of the Virgin Mary. Their intent is not to establish a firm foundation for the genesis of a Marian cult, but rather to show the fluidity of the widely accepted view of the fifth century as the origin for the cult. This collection, then, not only sheds light on the difficulty of establishing an “origin” for the cult of the Virgin Mary, but it also highlights how early interest in the Virgin Mary affected eventual views of her significance. The early Christian interest in the Virgin Mary was Christological, and not Mariological in nature. Mary’s significance had more to do with the significance of Christ himself. Maunder says, “To discover anything approaching devotion to Mary in the New Testament period is next to impossible” (23). Instead, he explains, first-century Christian literature posits Mary in “the roles that the reader might have expected her to [inhabit]: She is the mother of an important son; she is the one who sees and reflects (Luke 1, 2); she initiates momentous events (Jn 2.1–11); she is present at the moment of tragedy (Jn 19.25–7)” (26). What Maunder outlines here are Mary’s pivotal moments in the New Testament—as Virgin Mother, as an eyewitness to Jesus’ life and ministry, and as a maternal presence at her son’s crucifixion. It is Mary’s loyalty to Christ as it is outlined in Scripture, then, that is deemed significant during the early centuries. As Hilda Graef explains: “all that mattered was doing the will of the Father, hearing the word of God and keeping it. If Mary was to be praised, it was precisely for this” (23–4). The emphasis centered on Mary’s role in relation to God, and not on the figure of Mary herself. But Mary’s proximity to Christ as God certainly made her an intriguing figure. It should come as no surprise, then, how much ensuing interest Mary generated. See, for example, John McGuckin, Geri Parlby, and J.K. Elliot. The fifth-century date for the “origin” of the cult of the Virgin Mary is rooted in the

 

official recognition of the Virgin Mary as Theotokos, God bearer, which was pronounced at the Council of Ephesus in 431. I discuss the controversy surrounding this title later in the Introduction.

Introduction



This interest ultimately led to the exploration of the Virgin Mary beyond the parameters of Scripture. Indeed, the Virgin Mary makes frequent appearance in extra-canonical apocryphal works such as The Gospel According to Thomas or the Protevangelium of James (also called the Book of James). Such issues as the miraculous conception and birth of Mary (the source origin for what is known as—and what has been official Church dogma since the nineteenth century— the Immaculate Conception), her extraordinary ability to walk seven steps at six months, and the absence of pain during the virgin birth are all explored in various apocryphal works. Although Graef acknowledges that these stories had little theological significance in the early Church, she points out that the stories influenced preaching and the Liturgy. “It shows,” Graef writes, “the impact of the figure of Mary on the imagination of these early Christians, who tried to supply what was missing in the sober accounts of the Gospels” (35–6). The impulse to learn more about Mary—to know not only about Christ’s nativity, but also to learn about Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna, her childhood, and her virginal life— sparked the creation of a narrative about the Virgin Mary. However, stories about the Virgin Mary often mattered more to perceptions of Christ than they did to perceptions of Mary. Take, for example, Marina Warner’s succinct account of important attributes from the Book of James (first-century origin, and arguably the most famous of the apocryphal works): The Book of James was responsible for other assertions of Mary’s virginity, for it builds on the Gospels in order to buttress belief in the virgin birth: Joseph becomes a widower to explain away “the brethren of Jesus”; Mary, in some versions, has vowed to remain a virgin, which solves the problem of her marriage to Joseph in another way; Joseph is away when she becomes pregnant; above all, the expert witnesses are produced, with a flourish from the defending counsel— the midwife who believes, and the midwife who doubts and is then convinced. Salome provides the material, literal proof of the doctrine that Jesus was born from a virgo intacta. (33)

Despite the overt emphasis on the Virgin Mary’s story, we find that the focus on her virginity has more to do with Jesus than it does with Mary. Early Fathers connected human sexuality to original sin, and thus it was critical that the Son of God was born of a virginal and untainted mother. From a theological perspective, Mary’s perpetual virginity is vital to Christ’s sinless purity. Indeed, the matter of Mary’s perpetual virginity is an incredibly provocative aspect of Marian devotion, and a matter that is so vital to Christology that it escapes the scrutiny of leading Protestant Reformers (an issue I later examine in greater detail). Once Mary’s role in relation to Christ is imagined as increasingly valuable, her value as a woman— a feminine strength that is sui generis—also expands. In late antiquity, for example, Mary was celebrated as the “second Eve”— “the new mother of all who believed and who lived through believing in her See Hilda Graef, 31–8.



Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England



divine son” (Pelikan 52). The early Church Father Iranaeus, second-century Bishop of Lyons, formulated a narrative that juxtaposed the parallel between Adam and Christ with the parallel between Eve and Mary: [F]or Adam had necessarily to be restored in Christ, that mortality be absorbed in immortality. And Eve [had necessarily to be restored] in Mary, that a virgin, by becoming an advocate of a virgin, should undo and destroy virginal disobedience by virginal obedience. (Pelikan 43)

The crux in Iranaeus’ argument, according to Jaroslav Pelikan, is that the “disobedience of Eve and the obedience of Mary be seen as actions of a free will” (43). It is Mary’s human obedience and chastity—in opposition to Eve’s sinful disobedience—that is of absolute importance to the human believer. Mary is not only mother to believers, but also a figure to be emulated. Simply put, she was the right kind of woman. “Once introduced into the vocabulary,” Pelikan writes, “this dialectic of Eve and Mary took on a life of it’s own” (44). It was the “power of chastity over evil,” as Warner writes, which “dyed the entire fabric of the Marian cult from its official beginnings” (67). Mary would eventually become a model of virtue and faith for Christian men and women alike. Indeed, by the time we arrive at the writing of the fourth- and fifth-century Latin fathers Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, we find that Mariology is firmly in place. As Graef explains, with the writing of Augustine, “Mariology in the ancient Christian West has reached its peak. Mary’s perpetual virginity and her personal sinlessness are assured, her intimate relationship with the Church, whose prototype she is, has been recognized. Even her relation to original sin is already being discussed” (100). The steady development of Mariology meant that the Virgin Mary was being imagined to occupy various roles: loyal witness to Christ’s ministry, life, and death; Second Eve; perpetual virgin; Mary as Church; and, of course, mother of Christ. In these varied roles, the Virgin Mary was increasingly visible within the framework of the early Catholic Church. Graef also explains how the early theologians Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origin all emphasized Mary’s role as a second Eve. As opposed to Eve who “had become the cause of death,” Mary became a source of salvation “not only for herself, but for the whole human race” (40). These ideas were circulating as early as the second century.  Perhaps not surprisingly, early views of Mary as a model of emulation were aimed at young women. The fourth-century Father Athanasius wrote, “If, therefore, there is a girl who wants to remain a virgin and spouse of Christ, it is possible for her to consider the life of Mary and to imitate her; and the rule of Mary’s decision will suffice her to organize her life of virginity” (Graef 53). As Graef explains, “every age unconsciously forms its image of the Virgin according to its own ideal,” and in the fourth century, it was loyal, and solitary consecrated virgins who were idealized (51).  Graef argues that Ambrose establishes “with absolute certainty Mary’s perfect physical and moral purity, which is indeed, he says, necessitated by her divine motherhood” (88). 

Introduction



But despite such favorable views of Mary, she was hardly a preeminent figure in early Christian theology. It was a controversy surrounding Mary’s title of Theotokos, or God-bearer, that helped propel her popularity in Christianity. The use of the Marian title Theotokos was widely circulated after a fifth-century debate known as the Nestorian controversy. In 428, the Syrian monk Nestorius challenged the use of Theotokos and suggested that it should be replaced with Christokos, or Mother of Christ. Nestorius’ argument centered on the belief that Mary had given birth to Christ’s human, and not his divine, nature. He sought to exclude any misguided (i.e., heretical) Marian praise by stripping Mary of her weighty title. Cyril of Alexandria took issue with Nestorius’ reluctance to accept Mary’s title as God-bearer, and consequently Nestorius was condemned at the Council of Ephesus of 431. In the process, the Catholic Church sanctioned the use of the Marian title of Theotokos. However, as Richard M. Price explains, “Mary mattered precisely as the Theotokos, the one who gave birth to Christ, God and man. She was not yet a theme in her own right” (96). In other words, even that defining moment in the history of Mariology had more to do with Christ than with Mary. The key is that despite her ancillary position, Mary’s significance in Christian thought continued to evolve as a result of the exploration of her influential role in Christianity. This dual importance—how Mary mattered to the person of Christ and how her own person mattered—inevitably allowed for perceptions of her feminine influence to flourish. Mary did not stand to threaten God’s supremacy as a goddess in her own right, but instead she stood to establish Christ’s purity while exhibiting her own unique worth. Although Price correctly underscores the Christological significance behind the Nestorian controversy, the importance of the Council of Ephesus’ dogmatic affirmation of Mary’s profoundly important role in Christianity cannot be ignored. No less significant is the fact that Mary’s value was validated in a setting renowned for its historical connection to the Greek goddess Artemis/Diana. Indeed, the connection between Diana and Ephesus was both strong and enduring. In Shakespeare’s Pericles, for example, the reunion scene between Pericles and his wife Thaisa is set in the temple of Diana in Graef succinctly summarizes Nestorius’ argument: “So Christ is really divided into a human and mortal, and a divine and immortal part; only the human part is the son of Mary, the divine part is the Son of God and not born of her.” Devotion to Mary, Graef argues, was merely “a by-product of its outcome” (104).  Jaroslav Pelikan explains that Cyril of Alexandria went so far as to say that if anyone refused to pronounce Mary as Theotokos, “let him be an anathema” (56).  In her influential study Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, Helen Hackett explains that the chief origins for the cult of the Virgin Mary are found in pre-Christian, pagan goddesscults: the goddess-cults of Cybele, Tanit, Diana, and Venus are all arguably precursors to the cult of the Virgin Mary (14). In this regard, the cult of the Virgin Mary appears to satisfy what can be seen as a psychological desire for an influential female goddess. Even if the idea of a historical interchangeability between goddess-cults would appear reductive to some, most would agree that “the cult of the Virgin took at least some of its components from earlier goddess-cults and iconographies of the feminine” (14). 



Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Ephesus in a moment loaded, no less, with Marian undertones (a topic I explore in Chapter 4). From a historical perspective, it was in Ephesus where devotees of Diana rioted against Saint Paul and other Christian apostles (Pelikan 56). Thus, one could see how the affirmation of the Virgin Mary’s title of God-bearer in this particular setting served to establish her position as an acceptable female figure of devotion (as opposed to the pagan devotion to Diana). This is to say, the Virgin Mary is celebrated for her connection to God and not as a goddess in her own right. Still, we find that the Virgin Mary’s increasing popularity slowly solidifies her status as a Christian icon. Intentional or not, the Church’s focus on Marian significance helps secure Mary’s cultural value, and she ultimately enjoys a popularity akin to that of Diana. The decision at the Council of Ephesus served to cement the Virgin Mary’s distinct importance. The scene at Ephesus that Warner describes—one where “in torchlit procession through the city the Ephesians demonstrated their jubilation that the man who had slighted the Virgin Mary had been deposed. ‘Praise be to the Theotokos! Long live Cyril!’ they cheered”—not only demonstrates the popularity of the Virgin Mary in this early period, but it is also indicative of the cultural desire for her elevation (65).10 Given the response at Ephesus, it seems that a healthy constituency of devotees to Mary was already in place. The fact that the Ephesians responded to the conservation of Mary’s weighty title with such zeal suggests that she mattered not only in a theological context, but also in a cultural context for everyday believers. The aftermath of the Nestorian controversy resulted in a natural progression in the development of Mary’s role in Christianity. As Graef explains, “after the Council churches must have been dedicated to the Theotokos in almost every important city” (112). Not long after the Council of Ephesus, the Virgin Mary was given the title of Aiparthenos, or Ever-Virgin (both in partu and post partum) at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Fourth Ecumenical Council of the Church.11 “After the turbulence of the fifth century,” Warner tells us, “the cult of the Virgin grew more smoothly, focusing its attentions on her miraculous virginity and her divine motherhood” (66). The focus, it appears, shifted to the Virgin Mary herself. In fifth-century Byzantium, the Marian feasts of the Annunciation and a 10 Although few would deny the importance of the Council of Ephesus in 431 in the history of Mariology, there is certainly room to argue that her cult took shape before the Nestorian controversy, and that the ruling at Ephesus was merely a reflection of Marian devotion that was already in place. For example, Stephen Shoemaker writes, “it is increasingly clear that cultic devotion to the Virgin was a part of the religious landscape of the eastern Mediterranean world at least fifty years before the Council of Ephesus” (72), and Richard M. Price contends that “the expansion of Marian cult that followed the Council was the fruit not of the council itself, but of developments that were already in process before the council was convoked” (100). For a thorough outline of theological perspectives on the Virgin Mary that precede the Council of Ephesus in 431, see Graef, 32–100. 11 This title became official dogma of the Church in 649 at the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Marin I (Warner 65–6).

Introduction



commemoration in honor of Mary’s virginity were celebrated. In the following century, the feast of the Dormition and the commemoration of Mary’s Nativity and Presentation in the temple were instituted. By the seventh century, all of these feasts had reached Rome.12 In Rome, the commemoration of Mary’s Presentation in the temple was celebrated as the feast of the Purification. Warner explains the significance of this early feast: The new character the feast acquired is highly indicative of the development of the Virgin’s cult in Europe. For in the west, the accent of the feast of the Purification fell strongly on Mary’s holiness and came to celebrate the mystery of her purity. Also, it was moved to February 2, where it coincided with the ancient pagan feast of lights, when torches and candles were carried in nighttime processions to exorcize the spirits of plague and famine, of earthquake and all natural disasters emanating from the darkness of the underworld. Under Pope Sergius I, in 701, the Virgin’s feast assimilated the symbol; and to this day, on February 2, young Catholic girls walk in procession in white veils and lighted candles to pierce through night’s shadows with new light. Mary’s holiness, her incandescent purity, is the source of this power over darkness. (67)

With Marian celebrations like that of the feast of the Purification, Mary’s significance in Christianity began to take on a life of its own. As a symbol of light in darkness, Mary is fashioned as a mediator for believers—she replaces that pagan light as the figure who can “exorcize the spirits” that stand to harm humanity. But, in certain respects, Mary’s light appears to parallel, if not overtake, the light of Christ himself. The new feasts celebrating Mary’s incandescence reflected her swelling renown. As Theotokos, Mary is cast in a remarkably influential light—she is a pure, human mother who should be venerated because she “is a figure mediating between God and humankind by virtue of her ‘divine’ motherhood” (Antanassova 119). Herein lies Mary’s strength for believers: she was not a goddess, but rather a human mother ever connected to God, and a female figure willing to offer her aid. Slowly, Mary’s intercessory significance—what eventually became an incredibly profound aspect of Marian devotion in Roman Catholic thought—was being constructed. “In the history and doctrine of the Church she will continue to be at his side,” Graef writes of Mary’s relationship with Christ in Scripture, “and gradually, in the course of the historical and doctrinal growth of Christianity, she will emerge into an ever-increasing light” (31). As the influence of Christianity spread in the Western world, so too did the cult of the Virgin Mary ignite the faith and devotion of Christian men and women alike. What we find in the consistent advancement of Marian doctrine and devotion in the early middle ages is an increasing desire to fashion Mary in relation to the believer, and as such she is imagined to occupy diverse roles over time. As I See Marina Warner, 66–7.

12



Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

previously mentioned, the Church in late antiquity focused on the Virgin Mary’s role as second Eve. Early medieval iconography, on the other hand, often depicted Mary as a “heavenly queen above all temporal kings” (Hackett 23). Although Mary’s regal stoicism, a direct reflection of her perfection and grace, distanced her from everyday people, she was still imagined as an advocate for believers.13 “Even in the early Middle Ages,” Caroline Walker Bynum says of the Virgin Mary, “she was seen as mediating between souls and Christ” (136). Mary’s influential reach in the domain of the divine made her an attractive figure for Christian believers. She enjoyed a special place in heaven, but as a human believer she was connected to everyday Christians. Ambrose Autpert, for example, “blended the splendour of the Byzantine eikon of Mary the queen and mistress of earth and heaven with the new ‘Germanic’ image of the sweet mother playing with the child, and giving this maternal love and tenderness also to all his ‘brothers’” (Graef 170). The careful manipulation of Mary’s image in an effort to make her appealing in relation not only to Christ, but also believers, helped propel the popularity of her cult. As her cult proliferated, Mary did indeed become a significant “theme in her own right” (Price 96). By the time of the High Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary’s iconic stature had been secured. Between 1150 and 1250, over eighty cathedrals and five hundred churches were erected in honor of the Virgin Mary (Spurr 26). The sheer number of these churches gives testament to the spreading popularity of the cult of the Virgin Mary. Across Europe, she was celebrated by way of shrines, iconography, and poetry. Christians were devoted to this female icon, and the Church supported their avidity. The Virgin Mary was an acceptable female figure of devotion. Describing the widespread popularity of the Virgin Mary in the thirteenth century, Warner writes: Rarely has a religious movement of such fervour received approval in official circles. The Virgin Mary became an establishment prop, acceptable because, as we have seen in the symbol of her queenship, she could be used to affirm the legitimacy of the status quo. In her traditional aspect of queen, she blended in easily with the aristocratic lady of the lyricists’ passion; and as a woman who won her position through her son she did not confirm the feudal authority of an heiress who enjoyed her rank and property in her own right. Instead, she lent symbolic support to the figure of a mother, and as the model of virginity she challenged all justification of carnal love. (147)

The Virgin Mary was adored as a queen and mother precisely because that conception failed to challenge establishment ideas that defined the role of a woman. What we find since the early imagining of the Virgin Mary as Second Eve is a continual negotiation of her character—a seeming desire to construct her 13 For example, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the Virgin Mary in the early Middle Ages: “But then she was pictured as the majestic queen of heaven; closer to the people were the saints” (136–7).

Introduction



as an acceptable object of religious adoration and feminine purity. From both a theological and cultural context, the Virgin Mary was cast in a gender-appropriate light, and yet the roles of Theotokos, Virgin Mother, Heavenly Queen, and Mater Dolorosa (Mother of Sorrows) that she occupied undeniably infuse her with unique strength. Indeed, Mary’s feminine purity and religious loyalty hardly translated to docility or subservience. Everyday believers began to imagine that she could do more, and her feminine influence was an attractive quality for male believers apprehensive about their own sinfulness in relation to God’s masculine authority (Duffy, Faith 30–31). Given the multitude of roles for the Virgin Mary, it would appear that she exhibited her own level of infinite variety. Even within seemingly perspicuous roles, the Virgin Mary could mean various things to a variety of believers. For example, although the identification of the Virgin Mary as Mater Dolorosa—an iconography that focuses on Mary’s presence at the foot of the cross as a sorrowing mother—was also on the rise during the High Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary’s monarchical importance remained central in her iconography. In her brilliant study of the Virgin Mary’s swoon at the foot of the cross, “The Pain of Compassio,” Amy Neff shows how images before the thirteenth century often depicted Mary “standing upright at the foot of the cross. Her gestures are sorrowful but restrained; her fortitude and steadfast faith are emphasized in her unwavering stance” (254). Neff illustrates how this kind of iconography serves to underpin Mary’s majestic import, even as it addressed her maternal grief. There was maternal sorrow to be found in the Virgin Mary, but one could also find in her character feminine strength and stoicism. It was the artist who could fashion the myriad of meanings to be found in the Virgin Mary. As time passed, theologians confronted difficult questions about renditions of Mary’s demeanor at Christ’s death. “Would Mary in her humanity feel the natural sorrow of an ordinary mother?” Or, “[i]f she shared in furthering God’s work of redemption, would she not rejoice at its fulfillment?” (Neff 254). The answer to these questions often paralleled cultural views of Christ himself. “In the later Middle Ages,” Neff writes, “as Christ’s humanity and sufferings became central to Christian devotion, so, too, did Mary’s human suffering” (254). Once again, views of Mary were intricately connected with views of Christ. The late medieval theological move to make God more “accessible” and “like man,” as Bynum argues, was reflected in the conception of God as “mother and womb as well as father and animator” (134).14 From the writings of St. Anselm in the eleventh century to Julian of Norwich in the late fourteenth century, Jesus’ “maternity” was often connected to the Virgin Mary’s own maternal import (Spurr 76). References to God the father as mother appear to posit the “believer as child or beginner, totally dependent on a loving and tender God” (Bynum 150). The natural extension of this shift in the view of God the father as more “maternal” is the conception of the Virgin Mary not as a heavenly queen, but as a “human mother with a baby” 14 Bynum emphasizes that it was Cistercians, in particular, who employed the “God as mother” metaphor (146–66).

10

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

(Bynum 137). The gendered significance surrounding the development of God and Mary as increasingly maternal serves to underscore the cultural desire for a compassionate female figure in the realm of the divine—be it Mary or God himself. It should come as no surprise, then, that the cult of the Virgin Mary burgeons in this period, and that Mary herself is seen as an incredibly compassionate and accessible figure for believers. Indeed, Mary’s maternal grief at Golgotha drew considerable attention from both female and male believers. Neff explains how the Virgin Mary’s swoon at the Crucifixion indicates not only a moment where she “shares Christ’s passion,” but it also signals Mary’s maternal significance (255). “As Eve is the mother of mankind in sin,” Neff argues, “so Mary is the mother of mankind in salvation” (255). The shift in the view of Mary as queen to Mary as mother (both a lifegiving and grieving mother) allowed the believer an intimacy with the Virgin Mary that made her a massively influential figure. After an impressive analysis of a variety of images depicting “Mary’s Swoon” at the foot of the cross, for example, Neff remarks: Mary’s Swoon might be understood with different connotations in varying contexts and audiences, and the display of female suffering might evoke quite different gender-related responses in men and women. The central devotional message, however, of sharing Christ’s Passion, its death and rebirth, remains constant. When contemplating Mary collapsing next to the cross, the Christian viewer could feel compassion for her sorrow and understand that this sorrow enabled Mary to be the viewer’s mother, protector, and intercessor. (270)

In this regard, Mary was aligned quite closely to Christ and humanity, and yet she maintained a considerable amount of influence in the realm of heaven. For Roman Catholic believers, the Virgin Mary’s understanding and supportive nature made her an important figure of devotion, and a popular icon as a divine intercessor. As Eamon Duffy argues in Faith of Our Fathers, “prayer to the Virgin Mary has often been one of the ways in which an overauthoritarian and judgemental perception of God has been avoided or compensated for” (30). Under the imagined aegis of Mary, believers found an ally. By presenting Mary as a universal, compassionate, and grieving mother, the Roman Catholic Church placed her in a position where she inevitably absorbed a certain amount of reverence reserved for God alone. The expansion of Mary’s role as an intercessory figure in late-medieval Catholicism propelled her influential reach past that of her status as a comforting and non-challenging mother. Her popularity as a divine intercessor could be seen as threatening to God’s authority. It was a matter of time before the cult of the Virgin Mary came under scrutiny, and a call for a curbing of Marian devotion was sounded. The Protestant Reformation would eventually provide the platform for such a call.

Introduction

11

II. The Virgin Mary in Merry England Before I arrive at the way that leading Protestant Reformers managed to marginalize the Virgin Mary, I want briefly to trace the history and tenor of Marian devotion leading to the eve of the Reformation in England. The rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary in England illustrates exactly how popular her icon was in the late medieval and early modern periods. Barry Spurr goes so far as to describe Marian devotion during those periods as “the most pervasive expression of Catholic Christianity” in England (35). Indeed, the immense popularity of the Virgin Mary made the suppression of Marian devotion “the most conspicuous feature of the Reformation in England” (Spurr 35). Evidence suggests that at least four Marian feasts—the Purification, Annunciation, Assumption, and Nativity—were “gradually and sporadically” introduced into Anglo-Saxon England by the seventh and eighth centuries.15 Along with the introduction of new feasts, the liturgical practices of the period included votive masses and Offices to the Virgin Mary, and Marian suffrages to the Divine Office, prayers that were chanted daily by Roman Catholic Priests (Clayton 88–9). Despite discrepancies in dates and details surrounding these celebrations in Rome and Anglo-Saxon England, the evidence points to a steady development of the cult of the Virgin Mary in England. Although the aforementioned feasts originated in Rome, we also find Greek influence on Marian devotion in England. By the eleventh century, the feast of the Conception of Mary and the feast of her Presentation in the Temple (both of Eastern origin) were being celebrated in Anglo-Saxon England, and spread from Winchester to Canterbury and Exeter (Clayton 42). Mary Clayton notes that both feasts “were not celebrated anywhere else in Western Europe” at the time, and she argues that the willingness of the Winchester monks to “adopt the two new feasts is an important manifestation of their developed interest in the Virgin in the late Anglo-Saxon period in particular” (50–51). And although these two unique feasts seem to have been casualties of the Norman Conquest, Marian devotion in general continued to flourish in England. By the twelfth century, the influence of Anselm of Canterbury helped set the tone for Mariology in medieval England. Anselm’s Marian doctrine works on the scholastic belief that the Virgin Mary’s divine motherhood parallels God’s fatherhood, “which leads necessarily to her share in Christ’s work of redemption, and so to her being also the mother of men, whose prayers are as necessary to our salvation as the Incarnation itself” (Graef 215). This doctrine comes close to elevating the Virgin Mary to a God-like status. For example, Anselm says, “I am sure that what I have been able to receive through the grace of the Son I can also receive through the merits of the Mother” (Graef 212). Although Anselm acknowledges that only Christ can pardon, his emphasis on Mary’s divine activities positions her in a distinctly influential role. Indeed, Anselm writes: See Mary Clayton, 30–40.

15

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

12

Nothing is equal to Mary, nothing but God is greater than Mary. Every nature is created by God, and God is born from Mary. God has created all things, and Mary has given birth to God. God, who has made all things has made himself from Mary, and thus he has re-created all he created … . Therefore God is the Father of all created things, and Mary is the Mother of all re-created things. (Graef 213)

The vacillation and ambiguity in Anselm’s language here certainly bolsters Mary’s divine significance since her motherhood is seemingly commensurate with God’s divine fatherhood.16 Although Anselm’s Marian doctrine arguably borders on Mariolatry, he is careful to emphasize God’s unequivocal supremacy. Ultimately, we find that Anselm’s avid praise of the Virgin Mary was particularly influential both in England and the continent at large. While at the Benedictine monastery of Christ Church in Canterbury, Anselm was strongly influential in the doctrinal growth of Eadmer (a Saxon by birth). Indeed, Eadmer shared Anselm’s affinity for the Virgin Mary, and he wrote his own influential Marian works where he embraces and perpetuates popular twelfthcentury Marian devotion in England.17 In his design, Eadmer imagines the Virgin Mary as the “empress of heaven” or “mistress of the whole universe,” and his views do much to shape the popular Marian devotion in medieval England where prayer to Mary often superseded prayer to Christ (Graef 216). Explaining Mary’s influential import, Eadmer writes: Sometimes salvation is quicker if we remember Mary’s name than if we invoke the name of the Lord Jesus. … Her son is the Lord and Judge of all men, discerning the merits of the individuals, hence he does not at once answer anyone who invokes him, but does it only after just judgment. But if the name of his Mother be invoked, her merits intercede so that he is answered even if the merits of him who invokes her do not deserve it. (570a–b)18

Through this framework, the Virgin Mary is more efficacious where intercession and salvation are concerned. This view of Mary’s merciful nature became quite popular during the Middle Ages. As Warner explains, the medieval view of the Virgin Mary often cast her as a “supremely adorable woman who stood by humanity like a mother but loved it like a mistress” (155). Through her maternal compassion and unconditional love, the Virgin Mary offered believers the best hope for salvation. Medieval poetry often reflects this idea by positing Mary as a willing and merciful intercessor for mankind. For example, “A Song to Mary,” a fourteenth Graef acknowledges that Anselm’s “language is misleading at times and has influenced later exaggerations” (214). For the parallel between Mary’s motherhood and God’s fatherhood in Anselm, see Graef, 213–15. 17 Eadmer’s Marian works include the Liber de Excellentia Virgines Mariae (Book on the Excellence of the Virgin Mary) and the Tractatus, or a tract on her conception (Graef, 215). 18 Translated in Graef, 216. 16

Introduction

13

century poem by William of Shoreham, situates Mary as the biblical Noah’s dove who “brought the braunche of olive tre / In tokne that pais sholde be / Betwexte God and manne” (Spurr 66). The perception here is that Mary works to assuage the relationship between mankind and God. The implicit assumption, then, is that God’s judgment necessitates some mitigation, and thus the Virgin Mary is imagined as an advocate for mankind. It is the Virgin Mary who provides peace. The idea that the Virgin Mary is invested in the economy of salvation is also illustrated in “An ABC” (or La Priére de Nostre Dame), an early fourteenthcentury poem potentially penned by Geoffrey Chaucer.19 The poem opens: Almighty and al merciable queene, To whom that al this world fleeth for socour, To have relees of sinne, of sorwe, and teene, Glorious virgine, of alle floures flour, To thee I flee, counfounded in errour. Help and releeve, thou mighti debonayre, Have mercy on my perilous languor! Venquisshed me hath my cruel adversaire. (1–8)

The poem imagines the Virgin Mary as a merciful queen in its opening line, but as the stanza unfolds we witness how the speaker appeals to Mary in, as Spurr notes, “the traditions of fin amor, or courtly love” (71). Indeed, the reverential rhetoric in the first line situates Mary as an omnipotent and merciful queen, but the entire tone of the stanza offers the reader a woman who—like a courtly lover—is approachable. In the seventh stanza, the speaker appeals to the “Glorious mayde and mooder” by pleading: Help that my Fader be not wroth with me. Spek thou, for I ne dar not him ysee, So have I doon in erthe, allas the while! That certes, but if thou my socour bee, To stink eterne he wole my gost exile. (52–6)

It is evident that the speaker imagines a judgmental God, and the Virgin Mary as Mediatrix plays a prominent role in salvation (Spurr 73). If not for the Virgin Mary, the speaker faces the prospect of hell. Given the belief in the Virgin Mary as an advocate for sinners, it is relatively easy to see why Marian devotion often took on an amorous tone. As Warner says, “She was feminine perfection personified, and no other woman was in her league” (159). But it is not merely the perception of the Virgin Mary as the perfect image of a woman—a pure, and perpetual virgin, an Almighty Queen of Heaven, or a merciful mother to mankind—that is remarkable, but rather the firm belief in the Virgin Mary’s efficacy in influencing both God and mankind. The language of 19 Despite the uncertainty about its authorship, “An ABC” is considered a viable indicator of the piety of Chaucer’s age. For the authorship of this poem, see Barry Spurr, 70.

14

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

courtly love posits Mary as an object of devotion, and as such she exhibits a level of influence over her devotees, and her male believers in particular. Indeed, the popularity of the cult of the Virgin Mary during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries opens the door for consideration of attitudes about feminine influence on masculine identity. To reiterate Warner’s point, the Virgin Mary was no ordinary woman. However, the possibility that a believer was more apt to appeal to the Virgin Mary than to Christ suggests that the desire for a strong female figure was in place. Spurr writes: The cult of the Virgin responded to what was obviously a deep-seated need, in this patriarchal age and with the pervasively masculinist ideas of God and a maledominated church, for a feminine manifestation of the divine—for both men and women, learned and unlettered alike. In this guise, Mary had a preeminent place at the heart of medieval folk religion. Consequently, at the center of people’s private devotional life were prayers to her, such as the Ave Maris Stella and the Salve Regina. Not that veneration of the Virgin should be taken as indicating any modification of the dominant patriarchal character of medieval society. (28)

Although Spurr ultimately identifies the failure of Marian devotion to effect social change as it relates to the gendered hierarchy, he is clear about the influential nature of the cult of the Virgin Mary on medieval English culture. Even if the popularity of the cult of the Virgin Mary did not lead to an outright subversion of patriarchal ideologies, it does highlight certain dissatisfaction with a masculinecentered socio-religious structure. Indeed, fear of God’s judgment is one reason for the widespread veneration of Mary’s merciful nature, but the desire to come closer to the Virgin Mary through ardent devotion also underscores a certain willingness of a male believer to align himself with a strong female figure. What we find is a distinct gravitation toward the Virgin Mary’s feminine potential. The steady advancement of the cult of the Virgin Mary through devotional poetry, drama, art, and pilgrimage sites offers evidence of the Virgin Mary’s magnetism in pre-modern England. In The Stripping of the Altars, Duffy outlines how the proliferation of Marian devotion in late medieval England—and Christian Europe for that matter—meant that the cult of the Virgin Mary “came second only to that of Christ himself” (256). Indeed, Duffy explains how “Englishmen were encouraged to think of their country as being in a special way ‘Mary’s Dowry’” (256). This imagined relationship between Englishmen and the Virgin Mary rendered an enduring feeling of loyalty. For example, after the Protestant Reformation, the early modern English Jesuits at the College of Valladolid, Spain, reportedly owned a painting of the Virgin Mary “spreading out her mantle with her hands over kneeling Jesuits who are presenting her with a scroll, upon which is written Sub umbra alatum tuarum manebimus, donec transeat iniquitas (We will remain under the shade of your wings till the wickedness passes).” The superscription on this painting read, Anglia dos Maria, or “England, Mary’s Dowry” (Shell, Catholicism 206). These Jesuits appropriated Mary as an emblem for their post-Reformation cause—their struggle to convert English Protestants to

Introduction

15

Catholicism is imagined as a struggle to return England to its rightful owner, the Virgin Mary—but they also imagined England as a Christian community that had somehow lost its way.20 They imagine a past where the Virgin Mary was central to England’s (masculine) identity. That imagined past—where the Virgin Mary was intricately linked to English identity—was not overstated. The desire, it seems, was to create a link between England and the divine via an influential feminine force. The Virgin Mary, in her manifold roles in relation to the Godhead, was certainly befitting of this role, and thus the English imagined themselves as somehow belonging to her. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Virgin Mary enjoyed unique devotion in medieval England. Gail McMurray Gibson describes the tone of this Marian devotion: The Marian fervor that we associate today with Italy or Spain—or link with the Gothic cathedrals of Our Lady that glorified the plains and the Capetian politics of medieval France—was in the Middle Ages of English renown. It was not Italy or Spain but medieval England that was known by the popular epithet “the dower of the Virgin” … In the Middle Ages, it was not primarily continental theologians but English ones who were so eager to proclaim Mary’s powers and her saving grace, her freedom from original sin; not French exegets but English Benedictines like Anselm of Canterbury, Eadmer, William of Newburghe, and the Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx, who were in the twelfth century arguing passionately for the doctrine of Mary’s Immaculate Conception by St. Anne’s and St. Joachim’s chaste kiss before the golden gate of Jerusalem. English theologians were those who were insisting on a kind of quaternity of heaven, writing emotional prose that amounted to a feminization of divinity. (138)

Gibson’s description here suggests that the Virgin Mary was being re-imagined, if not reinvented, in medieval English thought. Here was a desire for a feminine divine, and the Virgin Mary was slowly ascending to a God-like status. This elevated view of the Virgin Mary was on display at various medieval Marian pilgrimage sites in England. The popular pilgrimage site of Our Lady of Walsingham, for example, was wrought with imaginative potential, and it stood as a marker of England’s devotion to Mary. This pilgrimage site had its origin in a vision experienced by Richeldis de Faverches, a twelfth-century widow of affluence. Richeldis’ visions revealed the house in Nazareth where Mary had experienced the angel Gabriel’s Annunciation of the birth of Christ, and the Virgin Mary herself instructed Richeldis to erect a replica of the holy house in Walsingham. This vision ultimately led to the construction of a pilgrimage site where miraculous healings transpired. The result, as Gibson argues, was that “Mary’s actual dwelling place, lost to the infidels who had seized the Holy Land, had seemingly transferred its spiritual powers to Walsingham, and the intercessory For an extended explanation of England as “Mary’s dowry,” see Alison Shell, Catholicism, 200–207. Although the Jesuits in Valladolid are able openly to pine for the “return” of England to the Virgin Mary, other writers were more careful in their design. For example, see my examination of “The Ruins of Walsingham” (c. 1590) that follows. 20

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

16

presence of the Virgin was, as the miracles of the Walsingham house manifested, now available on the Christian, English ground” (140). The pilgrimage house of Our Lady of Walsingham became so famous that it enjoyed the royal patronage of every English monarch from King Henry III in the thirteenth century to King Henry VIII in the sixteenth century.21 The erection of other medieval Marian pilgrimage sites in England also illustrates the spreading popularity of the cult of the Virgin Mary. But, as Gibson explains, these sites paled in comparison to the popularity of Walsingham: “The proliferation of other, lesser East Anglian Marian shrines in the late Middle Ages—at Ipswich, Thetford, Woolpit, and Long Melford, for example—was both explained and validated by proximity to Walsingham. For Walsingham attracted pilgrims like a magnet” (141). Indeed, in “The Ruins of Walsingham” (c. 1590), a poem often attributed to the English magnate and alleged Roman Catholic traitor Philip Howard, the loss of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham is lamented. In the closing lines, the poet writes, “Where were gates no gates are now, / The ways unknown / Where the press of peers did pass / While her fame far blown” (29–32). Through the poet’s regretful rhetoric, we can understand that the absent “gates” represent the absent shrine itself. Without the shrines and the community of worshippers, it is the “ways” of the new religion that are foreign. For the poet, then, Our Lady of Walsingham and her miracles are not only aspects of a remembered past laden with a sense of community, but also absent touchstones for the Catholic believer.22 The communality that the Virgin Mary inspired could be found beyond the realm of Marian shrines and pilgrimage sites. Medieval plays, for example, often emphasized Mary’s purity and prominence in Christianity. Meg Twycross writes of the medieval mystery plays: [They] were at the same time a religious festival and a tourist attraction: their players could draw on a charge of heightened religious emotion and civic pride which we can never recreate. Similarly, a great hall play was initially written for a household group who knew each other’s quirks and foibles, and who were sensitive to status and ceremony. Both were ‘community theatre’ in the true sense. (37–8)

Gail McMurray Gibson notes: “Even in 1538, only months before the famous cult statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was burned with much fanfare in the London streets, annual payments were still being made by Henry VIII on the feast of the Annunciation to maintain ‘the King’s candle’ that burned perpetually before the altar of Our Lady of Walsingham” (141). 22 I am indebted to the ideas of Gary Waller in his unpublished paper, “‘How Shall I Your True Love Know?’ Walsingham and Elizabethan Nostalgia for a Lost World,” delivered in the session, “Catholic Aesthetics and Renaissance Drama,” at the 2007 Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, April 5–7, 2007, San Diego, CA. For the assignation of the poem to Philip Howard, see Eamon Duffy, “Bare ruined choirs,” 48. 21

Introduction

17

The careful balance of devotion, festivity, and spatial settings that inspired the players appears to infuse these medieval mystery plays with an influential power over perceptions of identity. From this perspective, then, we can see how these plays had the ability to organize community, and thus it is important to examine how the Virgin Mary was an instrumental part of that organization.23 Given the Virgin Mary’s prominence and influence in medieval English culture, it should come as no surprise that medieval drama often drew on her strength and worked to guide believers in their devotion. Discussing the N-Town “Assumption of Mary” play, Gibson writes: God through Mary is made Man’s friend; the Church through Mary is made Christ’s triumphant bride. The incarnational devotion and theater of fifteenthcentury parishes and cloth towns is this: a play called corpus Christi, but a play that is also body and tabernacle of Mary, a play of politics and of angels—priests, crowned King, and Virgin Mother aloft with rustling wings, mediating the dizzy distance from heaven to earth. (175–6)

Gibson’s description of Mary’s prominence in medieval plays that otherwise focus on devotion to Christ parallels the consistent theological/cultural move to emphasize Mary’s prominent position in the scheme of divine authority. Indeed, Twycross outlines a moment in the Chester Purification where Simeon—“on rationalistic grounds”—questions Isaiah’s prophecy, “Behold a virgin shall conceive,” and thus he “attempts to emend the verse” (53). Twycross explains: He scrapes the words away, and writes ‘a good woman’ instead. An angel thereupon alters the book back to ‘a virgin’, in red letters for emphasis: when Simeon tests ‘whether this miracle be verray’ by altering the wording back to ‘a good woman’ it reappears as ‘virgin’ in the shining certainty of ‘golden letters’. Because the audience are trained to see the realities behind the stage action, the spectacle can become part of the message. (54)

Twycross emphasizes how this type of spectacle can be edifying for the believer, and the corrective nature of the event described certainly drives this point home. But this moment in the play also illustrates how views of Mary’s worldliness fall short in medieval culture. The red letters suggest a connection to human blood whereas the golden letters intonate notions of sovereignty. More significant, in my view, is the trajectory where the color of the letters not only evokes human blood, but the blood of Christ; this works to connect the Virgin Mary to Christological import, and ultimately to the divine kingdom (where the golden letters are concerned). In the face of doubtful spectators, the Virgin Mary ascends to her royal position. See, for example, Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama. In this engaging study, Goodland examines the influential role of the Virgin Mary—and the powerful nature of her emotion of grief—via medieval and early modern drama. Indeed, Goodland establishes how post-Reformation drama employs the Virgin Mary in negotiating the divided community of early modern England. 23

18

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Although this particular moment in the play could be seen as didactic, we find that the content often works on a believer’s affective sensibilities. Peter Meredith, for example, notes how Mary’s exposition on the conception of Christ is “conveyed in emotion” (13). He argues, “It is teaching but it is expressed through the over flowing joy of Mary. … Moreover, the expressions of joy are sufficient to show the ecstatic nature of Mary’s experience and hence explain her understanding of the event” (13). In other words, the didactic element is in place, but the emotive model is also at work. Mary’s recognition of the profundity of the occasion leads the believer to recognize not only the monumental event, but also the majestic import of the Virgin Mary herself. As Mary says in the Mary Play: “Of your hand-mayden, now ye have mad your modyr” (1362). Unequivocally, Mary again stresses her position as Theotokos: I cannot tell what joy, what blysse, Now I fele in my body! Aungel Gabryel, I thank yow for thys! Most meekly recomende me to my Faderys mercy. To have be the modyr of God, ful lytyl wend I! (1368–71)

Mary’s elation and gratitude are to be expected. Directly after asking Gabriel to “recomende” her to God’s mercy, she quickly identifies herself as the “modyr of God.” Her self-description works to convey the extent of her joy. The play sets up the moment to be one where Mary’s human expression of joy reflects the fact that it was Mary among all others whom God chose, and thus situates her in enviable proximity to God. That the Virgin Mary’s loyalty and chastity were employed as focal points of emulation for Christian women is manifest, but her influential role in Christianity had consequences for Christian women and men. For example, Meredith underscores how a medieval play’s attention to Mary’s human actions often explained “what the gospels did not”—they did this “in order to show what human behavior at its best can be” (13–14). Meredith goes on to argue that the play’s recreation of events function in the same way that a pilgrimage to the Holy Land functioned: “Christ and Mary’s lives become again living events of which the fifteenth-century Christian can become a part of” (14). Beyond her role as a model of emulation, the Virgin Mary also offered Christians a deeper connection to Christ. Indeed, the kind of inner “blysse” Mary relates is one that all faithful Christians desire. As Martin Luther later says, “we too must become pregnant with Holy Spirit” (Kroener 216).24 This figurative construction of becoming “pregnant” with Christ or the Holy Spirit directly aligns female and male believers with the Virgin Mary. The gravitation of male believers in particular toward the Virgin Mary is both telling and powerful. The imagined relationship between male believers and 24 Martin Luther, Werke. Kritische Gesammtausgabe, VII, 189. English translation in Joseph Leo Kroener, 216.

Introduction

19

Mary is one of seeming desire to come closer and relate to her, and one where the potential to identify with the Virgin Mary opens up possibilities where gendered identity is concerned. For example, Julia Kristeva writes: Yet even in its carnal beginnings courtly love had this in common with Mariolatry, that both Mary and the Lady were focal points of men’s aspirations and desires. Furthermore, by dint of uniqueness, by the exclusion of all other women, both were embodiments of an absolute authority that was all the more attractive because it seemed not to be subject to the severity of the father. This feminine power must have been experienced as power denied, all the more pleasant to seize because it was both archaic and secondary, an ersatz yet no less authoritarian form of the real power in the family and the city, a cunning double of the explicit phallic power. (106–7)

Kristeva’s view here crystallizes the Virgin Mary’s strength as sui generis. The Virgin Mary’s feminine power exists outside the bounds of a phallocentric authority, and yet it does not seem to threaten that masculine power structure. As Kristeva says, both the courtly Lady and the Virgin Mary were “focal points of men’s aspirations and desires,” but it was only the Virgin Mary who was forever physically unattainable. This masculine aspiration and desire, then, has less to do with attaining the Virgin Mary, but rather recognizing, and even experiencing, that kind of alternative, feminine potency. Kristeva’s view of the unique essence of Marian power brings to mind the twelfth-century devotional writing of Bernard of Clairvaux. Saint Bernard’s scriptural exegesis reveals not only his devout commitment to magnifying the Virgin Mary, but it also recognizes the gendered significance of Mary’s power. In “Homily I” of In Praise of the Virgin Mother, for example, Bernard writes: God, I repeat, to whom the angels are subject, he whom the principalities and the power obey, he was obedient to Mary. And not only to Mary but to Joseph, too, for Mary’s sake. Marvel then at these two things: the gracious kindness of the Son and the surpassing dignity of the mother. Choose which you consider more wonderful. Just imagine! Double marvel! God does what a woman says – unheard of humility. A woman outranks God – unparalleled sublimity. In praise of the virgins we sing that ‘they follow the Lamb wherever he goes’. Of what praise then do you consider her worthy, who preceded him? (11)

In no uncertain terms, Bernard recognizes God’s willing abdication of authority to the Virgin Mary, and acknowledges the gendered significance behind that act. Indeed, Bernard finds “sublimity” in the fact that a “woman outranks God.” Although future medieval devotees of the cult of the Virgin Mary did not always adopt Bernard’s zeal, the tenor of Mariolatry remained relatively fixed. From Bernard to Anselm, and from the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham to the Mary Play, the Virgin Mary was a celebrated figure and an enduring icon. Once we arrive at the Protestant Reformation, then, we discover that it was precisely this kind of Mariolatry that was seen as idolatrous. From a post-Reformation

20

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

perspective, the cult of the Virgin Mary not only absorbed reverence reserved for God alone, but it granted Mary unwarranted power. Despite the fact that the Virgin Mary could be seen as a vehicle through whom one came closer to God, the implicit influence afforded to Mary in that design was often seen as menacing. The surest way to curb desire for the Virgin Mary, then, was to fracture her image from England’s landscape and cultural psyche. Sixteenth-century iconoclasm banished the physical, but the latter design—the erasure of the Virgin Mary from the thoughts and prayers of English believers—was an immensely complicated enterprise. Nonetheless, English reformers sought to eradicate overzealous Marian devotion by emphasizing the danger of Mariolatry, and reinventing Mary’s role in a post-Reformation design. III. Marginalizing Mary It is important to note that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church did not technically allow for the worship of the Virgin Mary. Reverence for the Virgin Mary was defined as hyperdulia—an “enhanced form of veneration which was due to the Virgin Mary”—something distinctly different from latria, or adoration, “due only to God, Christ and the Holy Spirit” (Hackett 25). With that said, we know that preReformation Marian praise, like the praise of saints in general, often walked the thin line between veneration and adoration. One need only consider the widespread popularity of Marian pilgrimage sites in medieval and early modern Europe. England alone housed the popular pilgrimage sites of Our Lady of Worcester, Our Lady of Ipswich, and Our Lady of Walsingham. However, as Hackett points out, it was not the Virgin Mary’s popularity, but instead her intercessory power that “could be seen as an implication of her own divinity, suggesting that she had maternal authority over her Son” (25). The threatening nature of Mary’s intercessory power is precisely what post-Reformation writers vehemently attacked. In An Apology of the Church of England (1564), for example, English Reformer John Jewel admonishes Catholics for “shamelessly, call[ing] upon the Blessed Virgin, Christ’s mother, to have her remember that she is a mother and to command her Son and to use a mother’s authority over him” (38). Jewel’s reproach is aimed at Catholic believers, but his attack specifically addresses the Catholic view of Mary’s influential nature. Indeed, Jewel’s configuration of the Virgin Mary as an overbearing mother who misuses her intercessory authority is a theme echoed throughout various early modern polemics—polemics I explore in greater detail in the chapters that follow. However, it is also important to recognize that this anxiety did not reflect the leading Reformers’ attitude regarding the Virgin Mary. Where Reformers like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli all emphasized Christocentric devotion, they also all maintained a reverential tone when addressing the Virgin Mary’s import. For example, Luther ended his Commentary on the Magnificat (1521) by saying, “May Christ grant us this through the intercession and for the sake of His dear Mother Mary! Amen”

Introduction

21

(Works, Vol. 21 55). In The Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Articles (1523), Zwingli argues that through God’s grace, Mary is “acclaimed by everyone to be the highest and most lovely creature before God” (133), and Calvin—in The Harmony of the Gospels (1555)—says that Mary “deserves to be called blessed, for God has accorded her a singular distinction, to prepare His Son for the world” (32). Although early Protestant Reformers were still writing from the remnants of a Catholic ideological perspective, the respect that they shared for the Virgin Mary was hardly on par with the fervor of Roman Catholic Marian devotion.25 Indeed, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli’s reverence for Mary was tempered by their stance against intercessory belief. Consequently, when the Virgin Mary, along with all other saints, was stripped of her power to intercede on behalf of sinners, her theological importance was redefined in terms that were less divine and more human. The aftereffects of abolishing intercessory belief tell an interesting story of the way in which the Virgin Mary reflects—absorbs even—many of the cultural anxieties precipitated by the shifting religious atmosphere of sixteenth-century England. Once the practice of intercession was scrutinized and ultimately denounced, the ensuing iconoclasm targeted idolatrous sites of worship—sites that included the previously mentioned locales of Our Lady of Ipswich, Our Lady of Worcester, and Our Lady of Walsingham. Margaret Aston tells us that in 1537, Reformist Bishop Hugh Latimer physically stripped an image of the Virgin Mary at the pilgrimage site of Our Lady of Worcester to prove that it was “the dolledup effigy of some early medieval bishop.” The following year he “saw to it that his own dethroned Virgin of Worcester perished in the flames along with other notorious ‘idols’” (173). No “idol” was more popular than that of the Virgin Mary, explaining the reason why Latimer would hold onto his “dolled-up effigy” to drive his point home: Mary was no more powerful than the outdated medieval bishops who propped her up in the first place. Destroying iconography of the Virgin Mary was a means of progressing toward a new faith. But if iconoclastic measures against the Virgin Mary reflected the Protestant desire for change, they also reflected anxiety about her influential nature. Sixteenthcentury iconoclasm was an attempt to erase the memory of a Catholic past, but the truth is that Mary maintained an exceptional position in the Christian psyche of Protestant England. As Theotokos, she remained firmly embedded in Protestant theology. Moreover, the narrowed avenues of salvation under the new faith—where intercessory prayer and Marian influence were deemed ineffectual in the scheme of salvation—would have undoubtedly provoked a certain level of anxiety in believers.26 If the Virgin Mary could no longer provide succor, to whom would one turn? The answer, of course, ought to be Christ. Indeed, Reformers underscored the For example, Luther’s previous life as a Roman Catholic friar undoubtedly influenced his reverential view of the Virgin Mary. 26 For the enduring belief in the Catholic platform of soteriology, see Patrick Collinson, The Reformation, 128–9, and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 577–8. See, also, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation, on the reformation of funeral rites, 556–64. 25

22

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

need for a Christocentric faith. As far as the Virgin Mary was concerned, what early Reformers like Luther and Zwingli stressed after abolishing intercessory belief was Mary’s steadfast faith and loyalty. As Beth Kreitzer explains, “The Christocentrism of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin determined their stance toward Mary, while allowing them to see her as an important example of faith and humility” (9); Luther in particular, Kreitzer notes, “is willing to deemphasize the uniqueness and power of her position in favor of emphasizing her role as a good example for all Christians” (63). Under the Protestant scheme, then, Mary is the quintessential model of Christian devotion, but not an icon of devotion in her own right. Despite the Protestant emphasis on a Christocentric faith, we see that Mary does not disappear from Protestantism, which is important because she is imagined as a lingering threat to God’s supremacy. In the aftermath of the Reformation, Protestant polemicists often criticized Roman Catholic reverence for Mary, but the critique often focused on the figure of Mary herself. This opprobrium could be indicative of anxiety about the staying power of Marian devotion among post-Reformation English believers. Indeed, when early modern Protestant polemicists addressed Roman Catholic reverence for the Virgin Mary, they sometimes re-imagined her as an unruly female figure. In An historical dialogue touching antichrist and poperie (1589), for example, Church of England clergyman Thomas Rogers argues, “their [i.e., Catholics] drift is to make the Virgin Mary, I say not equal with Christ, but manie waies above, yea utterlie to exclude him from the office of mans salvation” (C4r); Rogers’ fellow clergyman William Crashaw writes in The Jesuites gospel (1610), “Is it not admirable that still they will make [Jesus] an infant, still in his mothers armes, still under her power, and still all miracles must be wrought by her … as though she had many enemies, and therefore needed miracles, and Christ none?” (E4r).27 Crashaw’s anxiety here surrounds Mary’s importance, and what he imagines as her appropriation of Christ’s power (see Fig. I.1). Their pointed critique of the Virgin Mary’s threatening nature is a means of curbing belief in Mary’s influential position. One could argue, as Frances E. Dolan has done in her remarkable study Whores of Babylon, that the configuration of Mary as a threatening mother reflects larger cultural anxieties surrounding maternal importance in the phallocentric, gendered hierarchy of early modern England. As Dolan vividly asserts, in a “social order that depends on both heterosexuality and misogyny,” one can find in Reformed Protestantism’s emphasis on the salvific Christ a near-wish “that Jesus had no mother, that the queen were a man, that sovereigns of heaven and earth could reproduce themselves without the recourse to women” (131). In other words, the Virgin Mary’s supreme importance as a powerful mother, and as a strong female figure, made her influential in both religious and gendered terms. The issue was not merely that the Virgin Mary threatened the Protestant agenda of redirecting praise to God, but that it also threatened English Protestant identity in general. In a period when England’s religious and national identity was undergoing a transformation, 27 I have normalized the orthography of the following letters throughout this book: u/v, i/j, and vv/w.

Introduction

23

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Fig. I.1 Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, c. 1480/85. Oil on panel. Samuel H. Kress Collection. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

24

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

there was not only a rise in anxiety about Roman Catholic influence, but there was also a rise in anxiety about an effeminized national identity under a female monarch.28 Hackett describes the atmosphere in 1590s’ England when “the Inns of the Court students were perceiving in the demise of the Queen the welcome end of an unduly feminised, extravagant culture” (226). Feminine authority—whether divine or monarchical—was imagined as an impediment to England’s masculine sense of self. The Protestant design in England often emphasized the wayward feminine nature of the Catholic Church as a means of implicitly establishing its own masculine, spiritual maturity. In terms of the theological perspective of Mary’s feminine influence, not only do we need to consider the move to refashion Mary as “humble, modest, and even plain” (Peters 224), but also the Protestant design of emphasizing God’s poly-gendered parental compassion and the growth of English subjects—as God’s children—into spiritually mature English Protestant soldiers. Christine Peters, for example, explains that post-Reformation views of God’s maternal nature often imagine this compassion as “beyond human measure, whilst the maternal response which Mary is allowed is a childlike delight in the toddler” (231). “The Reformation validated the super-maternal as a way of envisioning the reaction of God,” Peters continues, “but it advocated for the christian a development from the dependent frailty of the child to the strength of the christian warrior” (232). The dual design not only situates Mary alongside the childlike Christian believer, but it grants God full responsibility as mother and father— a divine parental figure who is both compassionate and authoritative. The English Protestant subject, then, can mature and grow strong only under the care of this quintessential parent. Implicit within this scheme is the view of Roman Catholics as callow followers of the wrong divine parent. However, this theme of a composite parental figure in the realm of the divine was explored in both early modern Protestant and Catholic literature. In the Song of Mary Mother of Christ (1601),29 for example, the author imagines Christ’s nature as the “sword” and “speciall weapons” necessary to fight the “flesh, the world, the devil or suttle foe” (12). To counterbalance this view of Christ’s strength, the poet imagines God’s parental binary: “The one doth shew his goodness and his love, / The other doth our grateful patience prove / … / When danger comes, we run to him for ayde, / We try his grace, and feele our feebleness” (9).30 There is no equivocation here about God’s graceful compassion and supreme authority. 28 For example, Hackett contends that Englishmen may have seen “subjugation to a female ruler” as an “unsettling aberration” (240). For an extended study of the way anxiety about an effeminized national identity is portrayed on the English stage, see Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation. 29 Quoted in Helen C. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs, 293–4. 30 For an impressive reading of this poem, see Christine Peters, 231–3. See also, George Gifford, A Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (London, 1593), where he explores God’s dual nature as mother and father.

Introduction

25

We can compare this to the English Jesuit Henry Garnet’s influential tract, The Societie of the Rosary (1596), which encouraged the membership of English Catholics in a society where they could gain indulgences by saying a daily rosary. The Virgin Mary had long been imagined as a compassionate maternal figure pleading on behalf of sinners, but Garnet draws on her specific role as an assertive ally for sinners—he imagines the Virgin Mary’s strength in a more combative light. In this instructional and devotional treatise, Garnet argues that like weapons, “so the beades must be to our afflicted brethren,” and he describes Marian prayer as a type of combat: “Which perswasion of mine unto those which shall duely weigh the perfection and excelencies of this most glorious Virgin, cannot any way be judged false: for therfore is she called a well setled array of a pitched armie, because she mightily overcometh, not only her owne, but also her devout clients adversaries” (A5v–A6r).31 Garnet fashions the Virgin Mary as a protective warrior, and urges prayer of the rosary as a means of emboldening oneself. In the way that anti-Papists may have seen Mary as a symbol of blasphemous Catholic practice, Jesuits like Garnet appropriated the Virgin Mary as a source of power. In this forceful light, Mary functions as “a source of hope and strength for all who struggle for freedom from oppression” (Duffy, Faith 37). Given the tone of polemics like these, it may seem that the early modern Protestant design was gravitating toward a less masculine conception of God while Garnet’s Catholic design was adopting a more masculine view of the Virgin Mary. However, post-Reformation self-fashioning was hardly this clear cut. The Protestant move to emphasize God’s compassionate nature was aimed not only at softening views of God, but softening the Protestant view of masculine authority. Deborah Willis explains: The reformers used this vision of God to authorize new versions of identity which limited aggression, inculcated increased self-regulation and restraint, and mandated a more thoroughgoing internalization of the biblical text and submission to it. To triumph over Satan is to triumph over his violent masculinity … Moreover, draining the maternal from the supernatural realm might have positive as well as negative consequences for women, opening up possibilities for cross-gender identifications with the Father and for the construction of roles for women that move them beyond the narrow confines of their maternal function. (108–9)

This, of course, was the design. How this actually played out in sixteenth-century England is rather difficult to gauge. Peters scrutinizes Willis’ claim on the grounds that the maternal is imagined along the narrow terms of “reproduction and nurture” (233). In this regard, the “cross-gender” possibilities of Willis’ argument are rather ambiguous. On the other hand, Peters argues, “Medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary could interact with gendered understanding, but, as we have seen, it clearly was not gender specific. The apparently hostile male supernatural realm For a detailed discussion of the Society of the Rosary, see Lisa McClain, 90–100.

31

26

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

of the Reformation Church provided a reference point of parental guidance for both sexes” (233). What we find, then, is that gender-specific emulation of, or identification with, Christ/God or the Virgin Mary through either a Protestant or Catholic perspective is somewhat fluid.32 Amid these perceptions of God and the Virgin Mary’s nebulous gendered identity, we find a desire for a feminine component within a monotheistic design— whether it is an actual dimension of God, or the presence of an influential female in the realm of heaven. Given the impulse to incorporate feminine compassion into views of God as a means of curbing one’s own “violent masculinity,” it would appear that feminine influence would be embraced. Yet despite theological structures that sought to foster inclusive views of maternal compassion, feminine influence in postReformation England was hardly valued. The key behind arguments that sought to engender God as a “super-maternal” entity is that the manifestation of this feminine influence was contained in a masculine father. At the end of the day, the design was to appropriate maternal strength for the father while marginalizing the actual mother. Feminine influence was fine so long as the influential female remained absent. In early modern Protestant England, hostility toward Catholicism and Catholic iconography often translated to hostility toward the female gender. Indeed, Huston Diehl links sixteenth-century iconophobia to gynophobia. She argues that sixteenth-century Protestants “bewhore” images as a means of eliciting disgust for Catholic iconography: Invoking a symbolic order that aligns the masculine with the spirit, the feminine with the body, they identify all the images with women and therefore denounce them because they are of the flesh and not the spirit. In their repudiation of a late medieval incarnational theology that focused on the body of Christ and even feminized that holy body, the reformers assert that the image seduces and deceives, drawing believers away from an invisible God rather than giving access to the divine. (160–61)

The vilification of graven images as promiscuously feminine in nature demonstrates that the Protestant scheme embraced a masculinist perspective. As Frances Dolan says, “depicting a threat as feminine was a quick and dirty way to invest it with a whole range of qualities, to insist on it as simultaneously familiar and apocalyptic, and to place it within an even broader sense of anxiety about the gender order” (85). In other words, some reformers would have the English believe that where Roman Catholicism employed the Virgin Mary (and a host of female saints, for that matter) to assuage anxiety about God’s masculine authority, the Protestant design was clear about the import of masculinity within its gender hierarchy. The “masculinization of piety” in post-Reformation England often consisted of defining the Catholic believer as an aberrant, feminized “other” (Eire 315). 32 For her part, Peters suggests that believers ultimately emulate worldly figures of sainthood. Mary Magdalene, for example, is better suited as an object of emulation than the Virgin Mary. See Peters, 234–9.

Introduction

27

Protestant polemicists, like many sixteenth-century iconoclasts, sought to eradicate images of, and devotion to, the Virgin Mary as a means of drawing attention back to the supreme grace of God. On the surface, the enterprise was largely successful, and yet the lingering desire for feminine influence remained. Perhaps it was the shift to a masculine-centered religiosity that provoked anxiety about the absence of feminine compassion; or, perhaps it was merely nostalgia for a religious tradition that valued feminine influence that kept the Virgin Mary embedded in the cultural psyche of post-Reformation England. Despite the marginalization of Mary, and despite the belief that the cult of Queen Elizabeth I replaced the fractured cult of the Virgin Mary in sixteenth-century England, desire for the Virgin Mary remained. Ultimately, the popularity of the cult of the Virgin Mary in England suffered, but her importance remained, because, unlike all worldly females, including Queen Elizabeth herself, the Virgin Mary was alone of all her sex. IV. Virgin Mothers: The Virgin Mary and the Virgin Queen For the better part of Shakespeare’s life, the most influential female icon was not the Virgin Mary, but instead Queen Elizabeth I. Indeed, a common assumption is that when England’s Protestant identity was secured through the accession of Queen Elizabeth I, she replaced the Virgin Mary in England’s cultural psyche.33 Much has been made of the fact that the date of Elizabeth’s birth fell on the eve of the Marian feast of the Nativity, and that her death fell on the eve of the Marian feast of the Annunciation. As Helen Hackett proposes, this coincidence “could be invoked as signs of the divine purpose behind the progress of Protestant England” (218). In other words, the Virgin Mary of Catholic tradition slowly fades as Queen Elizabeth emerges as the model of the new Protestant nation. Indeed, Frances Yates contends that early modern propaganda glorified Queen Elizabeth I as “the Virgin representative of imperial reform”—a champion of “Sacred imperialism” (Majesty 17). The “Virgin Queen,” it would appear, overshadowed the “Virgin Mother.” However, the notion that Queen Elizabeth I appropriates Marian devotion has come under critical scrutiny. Hackett, for example, dispels the idea that Elizabeth absorbed Marian worship, and instead suggests that “the extreme praise of Elizabeth can be seen as typical of the feverish adulation of figures of female power which patriarchal societies tend to produce, in reaction to repressed anxieties at the disruption of hierarchy and the physical otherness which a powerful woman represents” (240). In another vein, Hackett argues that the cultural tendency to liken Queen Elizabeth I to the Virgin Mary was not so much a compensation “for the psychological trauma of losing the Virgin as an object of worship, but [instead] to erect Elizabeth as a figurehead of militant nationalistic Protestantism” (237). See, for example, Frances Yates, Astrea, and Roy Strong.

33

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

28

The early modern English strategy, then, appears to be shaping a masculine, Protestant identity for England, and not shaping Elizabeth I as a Marian figure. In her analysis of Elizabethan portraiture, Susan Doran suggests that depictions of Elizabeth I had more to do with rendering the queen as a “Protestant ruler rather than a virgin queen” (172). Indeed, both Doran and Hackett establish that the iconography that Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary share are the emblems and symbols employed to infuse the figures with specific attributes of authority—one divine, the other Protestant.34 The issue, then, is not so much that Elizabeth I replaced the Virgin Mary in England, but rather that she functioned as an icon of Protestant reform and England’s newly imagined identity. The marginalization of the Virgin Mary was not intended to clear a space for the ascension of England’s Protestant queen; instead, it was as a means of clearing a space for the Protestant religion itself. As an icon of Roman Catholicism, the Virgin Mary was associated with a tradition undergoing erasure. Perhaps the tendency to imagine Elizabeth I as a replacement for the Virgin Mary is rooted in the unusual fact that prominent and influential women functioned as instrumental facets of the changing religious atmosphere of post-Reformation England. On the one hand, the Virgin Mary is stripped of her power to intercede and the English Catholic Queen Mary dies in 1559, and on the other hand Queen Elizabeth I restores England to Protestantism, and is thus championed as the head of England’s rightful church. The idea was to forget the former, and to make memorable the latter. In large part, it was the scrupulous writing of John Foxe that emphasized the “providential” nature of Queen Elizabeth’s ascension as the head of the English Church. In the various editions of Acts and Monuments (or Book of Martyrs) published throughout his lifetime, Foxe helps establish views of Queen Elizabeth I as a chosen representative of God leading England toward the true faith. Despite the pervasive influence of Foxe on views of Elizabeth’s providential responsibility, Thomas Freeman warns that one must acknowledge the prescriptive element to Foxe’s writing. Examining the second edition of Foxe’s influential work, Freeman says: The emphasis on Elizabeth’s pastoral responsibilities was further underscored in the opening words to the new dedication: ‘Christ, the Prince of all princes, who hath placed you in your throne of majesty, under him to govern the Church and realm of England, give your royal highness long to sit and many reign over us.’ … Certainly, Foxe was affirming Elizabeth’s authority over Church and State, but he was also saying that this authority stemmed from God and imposed profound obligations on Elizabeth; it may even be that Foxe was hinting that the length of her reign depended on how well she fulfilled these obligations. In what

For his part, Stephen Hamrick offers a unique study of texts that “deployed the Catholic imaginary in disparate and variously effectual attempts to reject the Queen’s authority or to extend her agency” (12). Although Hamrick does not focus specifically on Marian influence, he provides an interesting reading of the way Catholic concepts were employed in constructing various cults of Elizabeth I. 34

Introduction

29

was arguably the most significant change of all, Foxe who had hailed Elizabeth seven years earlier as the ‘supreme governor’ of the Church, now called her its ‘principal governor’, declaring that she ruled ‘under Christ the supreme head.’ (38–9)

However much Elizabeth functioned as an icon of the English Church, her iconography was not self-fashioned, but rather created by English reformers who sought to promote their view of a Protestant England. As Freeman notes, the subtle warning that Foxe includes here, and the move to emphasize Christ’s supremacy over Elizabeth, suggests that Elizabeth’s agency as the queen of England only went so far. Like the Virgin Mary, then, Elizabeth was often defined along the lines of ideological constructs of religion and nation. Where English reformers presented the Virgin Mary as the subject of Catholic idolatry, they portrayed Elizabeth as the Virgin Queen of England.35 Moreover, Elizabeth was at times imagined “as the mother of the Church,” and one who had “specifically given birth to the true faith in England” (Hackett 226). On the surface, one can see how Elizabethan rule appears to appropriate Marian devotion. However, Queen Elizabeth I and the Virgin Mary were not in competition with each other, but instead they were often maneuvered as a means of bolstering or defining a specific religious ideology. In the case of the Virgin Mary, this often transpired in the form of anti-Catholic polemic, and for Elizabeth it often came across through subtle reminders of her responsibility to the new religion. Indeed, Freeman sharply identifies Foxe’s writing as “prescriptive medicine under a sugar coating,” but he is quick to note that Elizabeth “sucked off the coating and spat out the pill” (47). In large part, it was England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the failed assassinations of Queen Elizabeth I, that helped secure perceptions of both Elizabeth’s providential rule and England as a country under God’s care. Where Elizabeth was keen in her ability to navigate her way through expectations of her role in the new religion, the immateriality of the Virgin Mary left her susceptible. Clearly, there was no room for self-fashioning where the Virgin Mary was involved. Mary was necessary within the Christian design of post-Reformation England, but she was rendered suspect because of her magnetic role within Protestant views of Catholic idolatry. Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins outline this friction: Reformation iconoclasm struck out at Marian devotion with particular vigor, categorically denying her devotional status as an ‘honorary member’ of the Holy Trinity, a human incarnation of the ambiguous Holy Spirit. However, Mary’s role in the narrative of Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection remained current in the Church of England, producing tension between belief and devotion, and retaining faith without lapsing into idolatry. (4) 35 See, for example, Thomas Freeman and Susan Doran. Freeman outlines Foxe’s pervasive influence in shaping perceptions of Queen Elizabeth I’s providential responsibilities in both early modern writing, and contemporary views of Elizabeth (28–9).

30

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

The result, as I previously indicated and as the chapters that follow will illustrate, was hostility toward Marian devotion via attacks against Roman Catholicism. But, as Arthur Marotti argues, the Virgin Mary’s position as an “idealized woman, a mother who was seen as an endless source of love and compassion, an image of perfect piety and holiness,” made it “hard to replace [her] in the lives of English Christians” (“Forward” xvi). Where the English may have been clamoring for what Katherine Eggert calls “unimpeded masculine authority” at the tail-end of Elizabeth’s rule (18), the desire for something feminine in the realm of the divine seemed to be in place in both Elizabethan and Jacobean English culture. Shakespeare—so attuned to the sympathies and antipathies of his English audience—maneuvers Mary in his own way to gauge the value of Marian influence on perceptions of England’s religious and masculine sense of self. V. Shakespeare’s Virgin In Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama, Buccola and Hopkins make a strong case for the continued study of the staging of “Marian moments” in early modern drama as a means of understanding the position of women within domestic, political, and religious spaces (17). Although I am spurred by their call for further study of the Virgin Mary in early modern drama, my emphasis here is firmly fixed on Shakespeare’s attention to the enduring efficacy of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England where masculinity is concerned. The varied essays in Marian Moments provide invaluable insight into the “conflicted attitudes toward Mary within both Catholic and Protestant dogma and popular practice” via early modern drama, including Shakespeare (3), but my aim is to offer the first sustained analysis of Shakespeare’s attention to Marian influence on perceptions of masculine identity. Masculinity and Marian Efficacy interrogates how socioreligious attitudes about the Virgin Mary and gendered identity both shape, and are shaped by, Shakespeare’s work.36 Recent criticism has argued that Shakespeare’s theater appropriated preReformation rituals and re-imagined them in secular terms.37 But other critics like Anthony Dawson in The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England and Jeffrey 36 Shakespeare’s religious inheritance has undergone considerable scrutiny, and while the general current sentiment is that he was raised Catholic, his religious inclination as an adult playwright is much more difficult, if not impossible, to discern. It is not my intention to unearth Shakespeare’s proclivity for the Protestant or Catholic cause, but instead I attempt to situate his creation of character, and his treatment of Marian undertones, within the religious incoherence of his world. For some examples of studies addressing Shakespeare’s Catholic upbringing, see: E.A.J. Honigmann; Eric Sams; Jeffrey Knapp; Gary Taylor; Peter Milward, “Religion in Arden”; Donna Hamilton; and Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World. 37 See, for example, C.L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, Louis Montrose, and Huston Diehl. However, Diehl is clearly concerned with illustrating how the theater buttresses Protestant habits of thought.

Introduction

31

Knapp in Shakespeare’s Tribe, instead offer the possibility of a Shakespearean theater that appropriates and re-imagines Catholic rituals to give the theater a kind of religious efficacy. As Knapp suggests, the “spectacles of the theater are presented as better than demystifying: they are made to seem sacramental” (119). In a less forceful, but no less provocative way, Dawson suggests that in Shakespeare’s theater, one finds “a gap between presence and representation, but it is precisely in the space between disbelief and passionate conviction that the ritual of participation, Anglican-style, has both its roots and its efficacy” (27). In a similar vein, John Cox challenges the notion of the secularization of the early modern English theater in his study The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642.38 Cox notes that “many elements of traditional dramaturgy, including specific features of the morality play, persisted into the commercial theatres,” and he cautions against the assumption that the “predominantly secular subject matter in drama” indicated “a change of mental habit in the culture as a whole” (107–9). Although Masculinity and Marian Efficacy has less to do with the way Shakespeare’s theater negotiates competing views of religious ritual than the studies of Knapp, Dawson, and Cox, I am indebted to their work for introducing a way to consider how Shakespeare’s theater both challenges and draws on Catholic and Protestant systems of belief to infuse the theater with religious efficacy. This book argues that Shakespeare draws on Marian influence (from both Catholic and Protestant perspectives) as a means of exploring perceptions of masculinity—both in individual and in cultural terms—and masculine identity formation to offer his audience new avenues of exploring both religious and gendered subjectivity. Keeping in mind Judith Butler’s assertion that gender identity is an act, a performance, reinforced through the “stylized repetition of acts through time,” I explore the promise behind her view of a “groundlessness” where gendered identity is concerned (192). More specifically, I interrogate the way that views of the Virgin Mary often destabilize the already unstable, socially constructed view of masculinity. Indeed, Bruce R. Smith succinctly outlines the way that early modern masculinity is often forged against otherness: Masculinity, like anything else, is knowable only in terms of the things it is not. In the case of early modern England, we can identify four such points of contrast, each of them involving a major social issue: women, foreigners, persons of lower social rank, and sodomites. With respect to gender, England was ruled until 1603 by a female monarch. The power she enjoyed at the apex of the social hierarchy caused anxieties about male privilege up and down the line. With respect to nationhood, London in 1600 was an international metropolis in which foreigners of various kinds lived in close proximity to people who could

38 In a less pronounced manner, Jean-Cristophe Mayer, and Thomas Rist in Revenge Tragedy and “Shakespeare Now and Then” also address the issue of the secularization of Shakespeare and early modern drama.

32

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England claim to be Englishmen by birth…. To this socially diverse audience plays offered models of masculinity that critics of the theatre treated with disdain, suspicion, and fear. (104)

The very anxiety that Smith points to is also an anxiety that serves to bolster masculine superstructures. As Mark Breitenberg has persuasively argued, masculine anxiety “reveals the fissures and contradictions of patriarchal systems and, at the same time, it paradoxically enables and drives patriarchy’s reproduction and continuation of itself” (2). In this regard, then, I align myself with Breitenberg who posits masculinity “as the site of contestations and contradictions that were perceived on a broadly social level as well as in the bodies and psyches of individual men” (19). Again, given the many entry points to disrupt masculine identity, I explore the role of Marian influence—from both a cultural and theatrical perspective—in the destabilization of masculinity. By gauging the value of Marian influence on Shakespeare’s plays, and more specifically on the relations between his characters, we can see how this feminine influence speaks to the cultural anxieties—anxieties about salvation, feminine strength, gendered identity, religious identity, and religious legacy—that were brought about by the changing religious atmosphere of sixteenth-century England. When Shakespeare deploys Marian symbols to infuse certain characters or certain situations within his plays with Marian-like influence, he is drawing attention to the Virgin Mary as an alternative to otherwise masculine-centered perceptions of both religious and gendered identity. By deploying Marian strength, I argue, Shakespeare’s theater is indeed infused with what both Knapp and Dawson see as “religious efficacy”—but it is a religious efficacy that is brought about via feminine strength. To arrive at this Marian influence in Shakespeare’s plays, we must first consider exactly what the Virgin Mary had to offer a culture that, in many ways, was securing its own religious identity sans Marian reverence. To begin, Mary helps manage the unease that stemmed from the (relatively) newly configured view of a salvation that depended on God’s grace alone. To be certain, “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns” (Hamlet 3.1.81–2) must have given believers pause.39 From a Catholic perspective, then, the Virgin Mary offered broader avenues of salvation. She offered herself as an understanding and compassionate ally, and as a mother whose influence over her son was seen as positive. The impossibility of measuring the degree to which early modern subjects subscribed to Protestant or Catholic views of salvation (or Catholic or Protestant models of faith for that matter) makes it difficult to suggest exactly how influential Marian intercession remained. However, what is certain is that attacks against intercessory belief continued well into the seventeenth century. In some circles, as Chapter 2 will show, Mary was still being called upon for intercessory purposes. 39 All quotations from Shakespeare’s work are taken from The Norton Shakespeare, and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. These parenthetical references are to act, scene, and line number.

Introduction

33

Beyond her intercessory potential, the Virgin Mary also existed as the only childbearing woman who remained perpetually virginal throughout her entire life. The fact that Protestants continued to subscribe to the belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity despite the absence of scriptural evidence on the subject bears repeating here. What, one might ask, does Mary’s virginity offer? In both Catholic and Protestant systems of belief, it offers the fathers of the Church a way to address the issue of chastity. From a Catholic perspective, the issue of Mary’s virginity is argued in very literal terms: celibacy is idealized, and the Virgin Mary is a perfect example of the way physical virginity is a marker of inner purity. From a Protestant perspective, it is argued in symbolic terms: Mary’s virginity is a reflection of her loyalty and obedience, and thus she is a model for all unmarried individuals to remain virginal, and for all married individuals to remain chaste.40 In both camps, Mary’s purity is epitomized as a way for a believer to show his/her commitment to God. As I illustrated earlier with Crashaw’s critique of Marian devotion, the Virgin Mary’s maternal import was often scrutinized after the Reformation. But it was Mary’s role as God’s mother that allowed her to remain a significant figure in postReformation thought. Despite the Protestant polemical attempt to cast Mary as an overbearing mother, the long-held view of the Virgin Mary as a compassionate mother appears to endure. Given the cultural emphasis on a masculine-centered ideological structure and theology, the compassionate dimension of the Virgin Mary could be seen as an attractive alternative to that phallocentric world. This book seeks to uncover how Mary’s maternal compassion continues to matter in post-Reformation England, and how Shakespeare explores the value of that alternative compassion. Finally, I suggest that the Virgin Mary offered a bridge of sorts during a period when Christianity was decisively split. This is a paradox, of course, because many Protestant polemicists viewed the Virgin Mary as a symbol of Roman Catholic idolatry—a token of their enemy’s faith. Roman Catholics, of course, were unafraid of holding up the Virgin Mary as a symbol of their faith. In The English Spanish Pilgrime (1629), for example, English government official (i.e., spy) James Wadsworth outlines how a secret Jesuit society at St. Omer would “sing Vespers and Letanies to our Lady for Englands conversion, having written on their Church and Colledge doores in great golden letter, Jesu, Jesu, converte Angliam fiat fiat [Jesus, Jesus, convert England, let it be done, let it be done]” (D2r). The final refrain of fiat here is reminiscent of Mary’s own fiat, “Behold the handmaid of the lord, be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). The Jesuits here cast Mary as an emblem of both their Catholic faith and their desire to see England transformed to Catholicism. This example speaks to both the Protestant anxiety about Mary’s strength, and the Catholic belief in that strength. But as the mother of Christ, Mary remains important to both Protestants and Catholics. Despite disagreement about 40 Mark Breitenberg explains: “As Protestantism increasingly valorized the nuclear family as a microcosm of the state, women were more likely to be idealized as chaste and obedient wives rather than as virgins – formerly the paragon of Catholic femininity” (26).

34

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Marian reverence, the Virgin Mary’s significance in Christianity offered believers common ground for religious identity. As a Catholic intercessor or as a model of Protestant devotion, the Virgin Mary was imagined as a vehicle through whom one could come closer to God. Shakespeare, I argue, both recognizes and explores the Virgin Mary’s role in fostering faith across the religious divide. My first chapter, “‘England, Mary’s Dowry’: Joan La Pucelle and the Impotent Fellowships and Imagined Communities of 1 Henry VI,” examines how Marian strength is explicitly employed in 1 King Henry VI as a way of staging England’s post-Reformation anxieties about its religious and gendered identity, and as a means of scrutinizing the value of the Virgin Mary’s role in organizing community in the face of that anxiety. Indeed, in a move that is reminiscent of Roman Catholic belief in Marian miracles, Joan La Pucelle says of the Virgin Mary, “Her aid she promised, and assured success” (1.3.61). The French rally behind that Marian source of strength, and for the better part of the play they are successful. For Shakespeare’s English audience, however, the Virgin Mary’s association with the French is seen as menacing. But even if Joan is ultimately vilified, her distinctly feminine source of power affords Shakespeare’s audience a glimpse of the way Marian strength could be utilized as a means of securing potency. In Chapter 2, “Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure,” I turn my attention to the Virgin Mary’s intercessory role to interrogate how Shakespeare—through Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Isabella in Measure for Measure—negotiates the concurrent desire for, and perceived threat of, feminine influence. Amid an atmosphere of masculine dominance in these plays, both Portia and Isabella effectuate intercessory influence akin to that of the Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition; in this way, the plays draw attention to the promise of feminine intercession, and the value of the Virgin Mary as an advocate for mankind. Portia descends from Belmont to low-lying Venice to save Antonio at the hour of his death, and this parallels the final refrain of the Ave Maria—“Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” For her part, Isabella is called upon to intercede for her brother, and through her intercessory role she illustrates both the capacity and the limits of Marian mercy. The simultaneous desire for and perceived threat behind female influence in Shakespeare’s plays finds its correlation in the polemical ambivalence about Marian influence in Shakespeare’s England. The parallel discourses of religions and drama, I argue, situate the female intercessor as both remarkably valuable and dangerously subversive. I explore Shakespeare’s attention to the theological import and equivocal nature of the Virgin Mary’s dual identity as Theotokos (God-bearer) and perpetual virgin in my third chapter, “Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.” Drawing on both Roman Catholic and post-Reformation views of the Virgin Mary’s purity and motherhood, I measure how these ideals of femininity influence the construction of both masculine and religious identity in Shakespeare’s work and culture. Through perceptions of purity surrounding Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia—and through the maternal strength behind Gertrude and the handkerchief

Introduction

35

in Othello—Shakespeare stages nostalgia for the Virgin Mary’s steadfast virtue and capacity for compassion. In the process, Mary is rendered an unlikely, but promising, identificatory object for the male heroes in these plays. The Virgin Mary’s enduring aura also makes its way into my final chapter, “Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder of Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale,” where I explore how Shakespeare utilizes elements of monuments and Marian miracles to secure the lasting feminine influence of Cleopatra, Marina, and Hermione. Indeed, Cleopatra “strikes the pose” of the Virgin Mary at the play’s end (King 449), Marina evokes the affective quality of the Mater Dolorosa in her reunion with Pericles, and Hermione’s “miraculous” transformation from a statue to a living woman gestures at the power (and perceived danger) of religious iconography. Although sixteenth-century iconoclasm effaced Marian iconography, narratives of Marian miracles endured in post-Reformation England. In these relatively late plays, I argue, Shakespeare re-inscribes aspects of Mariolatry through both visual and rhetorical constructions of Marian iconography as a means of buttressing the religious and gender-related efficacy of the theater itself. By exploring the role of Marian influence in Shakespeare’s plays, I not only enter into dialogue with previous cultural, religious, and gender studies in Shakespeare, but I also offer a new way of considering how feminine strength— via the Virgin Mary—augments the religious efficacy of Shakespeare’s theater. Within the various moments in Shakespeare’s work where female characters are either explicitly or implicitly associated with the Virgin Mary, I locate a distinctly feminine alternative capable of mitigating post-Reformation anxieties about religious and masculine identity that permeate both the plays and Shakespeare’s England. By examining plays of varied genres over the span of Shakespeare’s career, I demonstrate how Shakespeare consistently glances at the value of Marian strength when gendered identity is at stake. Indeed, Marian symbolism can also be found in plays like Twelfth Night, All’s Well That Ends Well, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, but my design has been to choose a range of plays that best illustrate Shakespeare’s attention to the efficacious strength of the Virgin Mary. To that end, however, there is much left uncovered and unexamined where Marian influence in Shakespeare is concerned. My hope, then, is that Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England kindles interest in the Virgin Mary’s vital role in the work and culture of Shakespeare and early modern England.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 1

“England, Mary’s Dowry”: Joan La Pucelle and the Impotent Fellowships and Imagined Communities of 1 Henry VI The sixteenth-century marginalization of an iconic figure like the Virgin Mary during a period in England’s history when its religious and national identity was being re-imagined warrants analysis of the cultural and literary response to her demotion. Indeed, we must question what the post-Reformation alteration of the Virgin Mary—that is, stripping Mary of her prominence and influential power to intercede—reveals about early modern conceptions of self and gender. Although Protestant polemicists who took aim at the Virgin Mary most often attacked her enduring popularity as a divine intercessor, these attacks were almost always argued in gendered terms. As Frances E. Dolan explains in Whores of Babylon, the configuration of Mary as a threatening mother in early modern England reflected cultural anxieties about the female threat to the gendered hierarchy (131). Indeed, post-Reformation Protestant polemicists often imagined Mary as a lingering threat to God’s supremacy and the new religion. However, as I explain in the Introduction, the Virgin Mary’s supreme importance as Theotokos, or God-bearer, and as a woman who remained a perpetual virgin, both in partu and post partum, made her miraculously exceptional in both religious and gendered terms. Shakespeare’s deployment of Marian strength in 1 Henry VI, then, would appear to speak to the cultural ambivalence surrounding the Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition in post-Reformation thought. In this chapter, I suggest Dolan also addresses England’s anxiety about the feminine rule of Queen Elizabeth I, and the absence of an heir to the kingdom. However, the thrust of her argument here is that women in prominent positions effectively provoked masculine anxiety, and the Virgin Mary and Queen Elizabeth I were arguably the most prominent icons in sixteenth-century England. As I mention in the Introduction, a common assumption is that when England’s Protestant identity was secured through the accession of Queen Elizabeth I, she replaced the Virgin Mary in England’s cultural psyche. However, Helen Hackett, who addresses a long tradition of connections and substitutions made between the cult of the Virgin Mary and the cult of Elizabeth I, convincingly dispels the idea that Elizabeth I filled a psychological gap in the aftermath of the “loss” of the Virgin.  For the etymological construction of Theotokos, or God-bearer, and the history of this title to describe Mary, see Pelikan, 55–65. As early as the fourth century, the Catholic Church addressed Christ’s unity as man and God. For the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, see Warner, 64–6. 

38

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

that Shakespeare draws on Marian strength in 1 Henry VI—via Joan La Pucelle— as a means of scrutinizing England’s post-Reformation anxieties about its religious and gendered identity, and as a way to consider the value behind utilizing the Virgin Mary to organize community in the face of that anxiety. As Leah Marcus says about the play, in “fighting the French” and “destroying Joan,” the English “fend off the specter of what England itself could become if it were absorbed back into popery … they banish the dread vision of a debased French Catholic Elizabeth” (74). But as Katherine Eggert notes, we must consider “the theater’s motives for dwelling upon those fears” (57). In 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare is not merely reflecting his culture’s anxiety about female strength or religious identity, but instead he is interrogating the very basis for that anxiety. Although the play appeals to Protestant sensitivities, it also potentially provokes “nostalgia or longing for an older manner of worship issuing from a positive identification with saints and saints’ miracles” (Tricomi 7). In other words, the play’s ambivalence about England’s religious and gendered identity (an ambivalence that includes the Virgin Mary herself) appears to be on display. For Shakespeare’s theater—a theater that, as some have argued, empties religious ritual of meaning—the staging of Marian miracles re-infuses an emptied system of belief with imaginative potential. In the way the Chorus in King Henry V urges its audience to “Play with your fancies,” “Grapple your minds,” and “Work, work your thoughts” (3.0.7, 18, 25), 1 Henry VI invites us to imagine Joan La Pucelle’s Marian source of strength. The play (re)presents the Virgin Mary as an efficacious figure in the organization of community. This attention to a collective faith anchored in Marian strength, and the ability of the French to rally successfully behind that strength, accords an efficacious element to both the play and the Virgin Mary: it opens the door for Shakespeare’s audience to re-imagine the old world of Marian miracles as one—like Shakespeare’s theater—full of wonder and vigor. Before I arrive at Joan La Pucelle’s invocation of Marian strength in 1 Henry VI, and the gendered implications behind that potency, I first survey England’s cultural anxiety surrounding its religious identity. England’s move toward a Protestant identity, I argue, was wrought through an imagined self-impotence— an impotence that could only be rectified once England broke from the Roman Catholic Church. But belief in that Protestant potency belies the larger cultural disquietude surrounding England’s religious and national identity. In postReformation England, no one ever felt adequately “Christian,” and thus the  However, Katherine Eggert is less concerned with the religious anxiety provoked by Joan La Pucelle. Where Eggert offers a rich reading of the significance of “feminine theatricality as a mode of seduction” (58), I instead consider the religious implications behind that feminine strength.  For the emptying of ritual and sacrament in the early modern theater, see Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, and Louis Montrose.  The First Part of Henry the Sixth will be referred to as 1 Henry VI throughout this chapter.

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

39

feeling of impotence persisted. As a symbol of the old faith, the Virgin Mary was ensnared in that cultural anxiety, and both Protestants and Catholics manipulated her character to undermine the opposing faith, or to bolster one’s own belief. As I will ultimately show, Shakespeare draws on cultural views of the Virgin Mary to measure the value of her (unavailable) influence. I. An Impotent Fellowship In A Supplication for the Beggers (1529), religious controversialist Simon Fish urges King Henry VIII to take action and help the needy. He writes: Most lamentabley compleyneth theyre wofull mysery unto youre highnes youre poore daily bedemen the wretched hidous monsters (on whome scarcely for horror any yie dare loke) the foule unhappy sorte of lepers, an other sore people, nedy, impotent, blinde, lame, and sike, that live only by almesse. (412)

The reason for this destitute populace, Fish argues, is because of “an other sort” who has “craftily crept” into the English realm over generations: “an other sort (not of impotent but) of strong puissaunt and conterfeit holy … the Bisshoppes, Abbottes, Priours, Deacons, Archedeacons, Suffraganes, Prestes, Monkes, Chanons, Freres, Pardoners and Somners” (412). Fish juxtaposes the English populace—one who, among other illnesses, finds itself in a state of impotence—with Catholic clerics who possess a strong puissance in their ability to offer “counterfeit” hope to the needy. By casting Catholic clerics as the potent entity in the English kingdom, Fish implicitly undermines King Henry VIII’s own potency. Fish’s provocation of anxiety about emasculation of the English is a call for Henry to reclaim authority, and strip the clerics of their potency. Indeed, in the closing moments of A Supplication, Fish argues that once King Henry VIII can “tye these holy idell theves to the cates to be whipped naked … . Then shall not youre swerde, power, crowne, dignite, and obedience of your people, be translated from you” (422). According to Fish, Henry stands to lose all symbols of power. The author follows this call to arms with his vision of a reformed England:

 Although one could argue that Protestants who believed that they were part of the elect (under the doctrine of predestination) were certain of their salvation, and thus confident in their identity as Christians, the issue of predestination in sixteenth-century England was hardly clear-cut. Paul Whitfield White keenly underscores an “anomalous feature of Reformation religious drama” in that it sought to “evangelize” even as it insisted on the view of predestination (98). He writes, “However emphatically the concept is presented – that God and not man is the only effective agent in man’s salvation – the very activities of an intensely proselytizing and evangelical church, as early Protestantism was, are directly contradictory, in terms of simple logic, to strict predestinarian doctrine” (99). The fact that English reformers were teaching believers to trust in that particular doctrine illustrates that confidence was not yet in place.

40

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England Then shall you have full obedience of your people. Then shall the idell people be set to worke. Then shall matrimony be moche better kept. Then shall the generation of your people be encreased. Then shall your comons encrease in richesse. Then shall the gospel be preached. Then shall none begge oure al-messe from us. Then shal we have ynough and more than shall suffice us, whiche shall be the best hospitall that ever was founded for us. Then shall we daily pray to god for your most noble estate long to endure. (422)

The movement from stagnation to action, weakness to strength, and figurative impotence to potency will ultimately result in an active and fecund England. Strikingly, Fish suggests that once Henry reclaims potency from the Catholic clerics, only then can he grant potency to his subjects. In return, the English will sustain the king’s potency through their prayers. He imagines a reciprocation of potency between Henry and his subjects. But the king’s ability to eradicate illness, poverty, and impotence is no less spurious than the belief that Catholic clerics could do the same. Indeed, the dissolution came down to a matter of the redistribution of the Church’s land and wealth, not from the rich to the poor, but from the Roman Catholic Church to the English elite. In what John Guy describes as “the largest confiscation and redistribution of wealth since the Norman Conquest,” the dissolution was “appreciably in favour of the nobility and gentry” (148–9). Just how, one might ask, did the dissolution restore potency to the English poor, sick, and weak? The answer, one could argue, was to be found in the unmasking of the Roman Catholic belief in purgatory—a system where indulgences were sold as a means of mitigating a believer’s fear of a purgatorial existence, and where saints could intercede for sinners. The revelation of this Roman Catholic mendacity cleared a space for leading Reformers to imagine a true faith that offered the believer a genuine, and potent spiritual fulfillment. Indeed, discussing the “principal exercise of faith,” John Calvin writes that man, who is “utterly destitute … of every good,” can find strength in God alone: It has been subsequently stated, that the Lord voluntarily and liberally manifests himself in his Christ, in whom he offers us all felicity instead of our misery, and opulence instead of our poverty; in whom he opens to our view the treasures of heaven, that our faith may be wholly engaged in the contemplation of his beloved Son, that all our expectation may depend upon him, and that in him all our hope may rest and be fully satisfied. (76)

Calvin emphasizes the need for one to place all of one’s faith in God and no one else. Prayer, Calvin goes on to say, is necessary: “as faith is produced by the gospel, so by faith our hearts are brought to invoke the name of the Lord … so that [our spirits] venture to pour out their desires before God, excite ‘groanings that cannot be uttered,’ and cry with confidence, ‘Abba, Father’” (77). Through this visceral response, where one can appeal directly to God, prayer is indeed a potent act for the believer.

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

41

In his exposition of the “Sermon on the Mount” (c. 1532), Martin Luther also discusses the necessity of prayer to the bolstering of one’s faith. When one’s “flesh and blood is always putting obstacles in the way of faith,” Luther writes, it is difficult to consider oneself “worthy enough” to pray. But when one feels this inadequacy, Luther urges the believer: “Then hold on to the Word and say: ‘Though I am sinful and unworthy, still I have the commandment of God, telling me to pray, and His promise that He will graciously hear me’” (Works, Vol. 21, 141). Both Calvin and Luther contend that direct prayer to God assuages a believer’s feeling of inadequacy. Where Calvin and Luther make the point that God alone commands one’s prayers, early modern Protestant polemicists often perceived Roman Catholic prayer as muddled with intercessors that included not only the saintly, but also the earthly “sort” who were, as Fish says, “counterfeit holy.” The vilification of the Catholic clerics, then, is to be expected. As we know, however, Fish’s vision of a fellowship of English subjects afforded healthcare, riches, fruitful marriages, and an otherwise utopian existence was hardly realized after the English Reformation. Indeed, the feeling of inadequacy remained regardless of the shifting theological apparatus. The threat of Roman Catholicism endured, and thus English Protestant polemicists bolstered their cause by attacking Catholics. As Arthur F. Marotti boldly claims, “English nationalism rests on a foundation of antiCatholicism” (Religious Ideology 9). The very existence of anti-Catholic literature in post-Reformation England reveals a lingering anxiety about the threat of Catholic influence. This anxiety, of course, existed on both ends of the theological divide. English Protestants and Catholics alike feared one another, and thus no real fellowship could materialize. The result, I believe, is an impotent fellowship—a nebulous identity constructed through the consistent slander of the opposition without any true obtainment of power for either side. In his Defence of English Catholics (1584), for example, Catholic apologist William Allen entertains the idea of a concord between English Catholics and Protestants. Although he idealizes England’s return to Catholicism, he concedes that a mutual existence between both faiths would benefit England: The next best were in respect of their [Protestant’s] own security and perpetuity (if the first may not take place [i.e., a return to Catholicism]) to desist from

The chief purpose of Allen’s Defence, however, was to refute William Cecil, Lord Burghley’s The Execution of Justice, and specifically the execution of the Catholic Edmund Campion and his fellows. Robert M. Kingdon explains that Allen challenges “Cecil’s contention that English Catholics were being put to death for treason alone” (xxv). Indeed, Allen outlines how treason had been expanded to include the conversion of “any Anglican back to Roman Catholicism. It had become difficult, and then illegal, to go abroad for advanced study. It had become illegal to bring into England any religious object obtained in Rome—any crucifix, any rosary, any ‘Agnus Dei’ or cake of wax stamped with a figure of a lamb and blessed by the Pope” (xxv). 

42

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England persecuting their Catholic subjects and brethren, and to grant some liberty for exercise of their consciences, divine offices, and holy devotions; that so they may pray for her majesty and councillors as their patrons, whom now they pray for only as their persecutors. (113)

In Allen’s view, Queen Elizabeth’s toleration of English Catholic practice would result in prayers for her potency, instead of prayers asking God to forgive her tyrannical acts. But if Allen gestures at a unified Christian tolerance, he soon underpins the Catholic cause: “In whose holy name, word and promise, we confidently tell them, and humbly even in Christ’s blood pray them, to consider of it; that by no human force or wisdom they shall ever extinguish the Catholic party, overcome the holy church, or prevail against God” (113). Although Allen posits an imagined Christian fellowship here, this imagined affinity falls by the wayside once he reinforces the enduring strength of English Catholics. Ironically, by finding it necessary to stress the strength of Catholicism, Allen appears to reveal an anxiety about the impotence of English Catholics. Indeed, many Catholics in England— including Allen’s fellow priest Edmund Campion—were in fact “extinguished” (Bossy 158). Moreover, if English Catholics were truly confident that they could never be eliminated from England, would they need to say so? Given the Virgin Mary’s distinction in Roman Catholicism, her role in this post-Reformation theological debate would appear to shed light on the gendered anxiety underlying England’s religious identity. Where English Catholics like the prominent Jesuit Henry Garnet claimed the Virgin Mary as a warrior working on their behalf—“for therfore is [the Virgin Mary] called a well setled array of a pitched armie,” he writes in The Societie of the Rosary (1596), “because she mightily overcometh, not only her owne, but also her devout clients adversaries” (A5v–A6r)—others like English Reformer John Jewel found her to be a threatening figure. In An Apology of the Church of England (1564), for example, Jewel admonishes Catholics for their belief in Mary’s maternal influence: “But besides this also, they do not only wickedly, but also shamelessly, call upon the Blessed Virgin, Christ’s mother, to have her remember that she is a mother and to command her Son and to use a mother’s authority over him” (38). Similarly, English Clergyman William Crashaw argues, “And yet now after 1600. yeares, she must still be a commaunding mother, and must shew her authority over him, and he must receive our prayers by her meanes, and stil she must beare him in her armes, or lead him in her hand, and her picture must worke all the miracles, but his none: and she must be saluted as a Lady, a Queene, a Goddesse, and he as a childe” (F2v). While Jewel and Crashaw admonish the Roman Catholic believer in particular, both men impress upon their audience the dangerous nature of Mary’s authority. Where Garnet is unafraid to embrace, if not lay claim to, the Virgin Mary’s power, Crashaw reveals anxiety not only about the Virgin Mary’s authoritative nature, but also her subversive potential as the exclusive miracle worker. Indeed, post-Reformation stories of Marian miracles drew attention to Mary’s prominence, and in turn heightened anxiety surrounding her enduring popularity.

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

43

In 1604, reports of Marian miracles at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin in Montaigu began to surface in England. Philip Numan, the city clerk of Brussels, recorded the incidents in a book entitled Historie des Miracles, which was translated into English by the Roman Catholic priest Robert Chambers. Chambers’ translation, Miracles Lately Wrought By The Intercession of the Glorious Virgin Marie (1606), includes a lengthy dedication to King James I that begins, “I doubt not (Dread Soveraine) but that by some meanes the reporte of the straunge, and wonderfull things which lately have happened in these Netherlands are come to your grace, knowledge, where at all the world bere [sic] sta[n]deth so much amazed and astonished” (A2r). Shortly after, Chambers explains that he has been given “occasion to suspect” that James has been insufficiently informed of these miracles, “for other wise, it is not to be imagined … that your Royal wisdom would passe over these things as though your grace had no apprehension or esteeme thereof” (A2v). Given King James’ “singuler prudence, and lite[-]arure,” Chambers cannot fathom that James would “passe over” stories of Mary’s miracles without regard for their value. But when Chambers explains the reason for translating the text out of French— “not that I thinck your Majestie ignorant of that language, but that by the way I might also satisfy the greedie desire of many your majesties loving subjects” who have not yet “the assured & certain knowledge of the matter” (A3r)—he introduces his larger design. By arousing curiosity through stories of presentday Marian miracles, Chambers anticipates the “apprehension and esteeme” for the Virgin Mary’s power from not only King James I, but also the larger English audience. As one might imagine, Chambers’ translation generated much more than curiosity. Stories of these miracles led to skepticism, if not rebuke, from Protestant polemicists. Indeed, Chambers likely envisioned this kind of debate: “I know as they blesh not to deny so evident a truthe as is the continuance of miracles so wil they not be ashamed to conteme [sic], disgrace, and scorne al such as have recorded them” (A6v). Despite the inevitable “scorne” he stood to face, Chambers ensured that the stories of the Virgin Mary’s miracles would, at the very least, be heard. Ultimately, Chambers goes so far as to present the Virgin Mary as a miracle in her own right: For in one word she is the mother of God, who did beare in her sacred wombe the second person in Trinitie our lord and Saviour Jesus Christ the Soveraine King and Judge of Men & Angels. With whom this blessed Virgin had not onely domestical familiaritie for many yeares, but had motherly authoritie over him, for he was obedient unto her, yea subject unto her, yea subject to Joseph for her  See Peter Milward, “Shakespeare’s ‘Miracles’ in the Context of Religious Controversy,” 37. Milward writes, “These reports aroused considerable interest not only in the Low Countries, but also in England, where they led to a further outbreak of the old controversy.” The “old controversy” in question here was the Roman Catholic continued belief in the working of miracles, and the Protestant position that “with the passing of the apostles and the writing of the books of the New Testament, the need for miracles had ceased” (37).

44

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England sake, which truly was a power above all power, a miracle above all miracles, to have in pious and reverend subjection the high Majestie of heaven, the author and supreme worker of all miracles. (C5r)

By emphasizing the Virgin Mary’s importance in the realm of heaven—her “domestical familiaritie” with, and her maternal “authoritie,” over, Christ— Chambers unequivocally challenges the Protestant marginalization of the Virgin Mary’s power. Chambers addresses the post-Reformation anxiety about Mary’s maternal authority, and imagines that strength as miraculous. The risk that he runs in exalting the Virgin Mary, of course, is the inevitable alienation of his would-be English Protestant audience. In response to Chambers’ account of Marian miracles, for example, Robert Tynley preached the following at the Spittle: [We] have from [“learned writers”] an answer to [Chambers’] demand, and prooved out of them, which he saith can never be done, not only that true miracles and wrought by the finger of almighty God, are ceased in the Church, and the time when, (namely, when the world was generally brought to the faith of Christ;) but further, that such as in the cleere Sun-shine light of the Gospell, yet require miracles still, as the Papists doe, doe tempt God in so doing, that they are infidels, without faith and beleefe, that they love not Christ as they ought to doe, that they are false Christians, and hunters after vaine glorie. All which convince Chambers of much ignorance, both in the ancient Fathers, and in his owne moderne Writers; and argue much folly in him, to conceive not only of his Majestie (whose wisdome and learning all that know, admire) but of any of us, that we should be so simple and credulous, as to believe those miracles, which the most learned amongst them reject as fabulous and foolish, as hath been shewed. (K1r)

By identifying the miracle-believing Catholics as “infidels,” Tynley isolates them from the Christian world. One might expect this response, but shortly after this, Tynley re-imagines the very idea of a miracle: “if with a single eie they will looke upon our Church, they may in it, and amongst us, behold such miracles as make greatly for Gods glory, our private comfort, and the true honor of our Church” (K1v). It is a point in the sermon where Tynley appropriates the miracles of the “false Christians” as a means of creating an imagined, and miraculous, English Protestant unity. It is the faithful English subjects, and not the Virgin Mary, who epitomize God’s miraculous work. However, this imagined unity is at odds with the religious controversies that largely define early modern England. When Tynley seeks to identify the English Church as a true miracle, he does so only after casting Catholics as “false Christians, and hunters after vaine glorie.” Within this divisive construct, we witness an  For a brief, but insightful explanation of the religious controversy surrounding Catholicism in early modern England, see MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 125–62.

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

45

impotent fellowship of Christians who never feel sufficiently “Christian.”10 This kind of isolation inevitably results in a persistent anxiety surrounding religious identity. It was Shakespeare’s theater, a community of “good fellows” as Knapp argues, that “strove to dramatize true Christian fellowship as larger than any one nation” (55). In this regard, then, it was Shakespeare’s plays that offered relief from this religious anxiety, and envisioned a kind of potent fellowship. Indeed, it seems that the miracles were not to be found in the English Church, after all, but instead in the English theater. Shakespeare’s deployment of the Virgin Mary’s miraculous power, then, not only infuses his theater with religious imagination, but it also speaks to the potential behind utilizing the Virgin Mary to organize belief and community. In the remainder of this chapter, I shift attention to Joan La Pucelle’s association with the Virgin Mary in 1 Henry VI as a means of gauging her ability to forge community, and to consider the gendered implications behind the promise she affords.11 Both Joan’s miracles, and the negation of those miracles by her English counterparts, serve to bolster masculinity on both ends of the spectrum. Joan’s connection to the Virgin Mary makes her ability to render her audience potent/ impotent incredibly provocative. The key, I find, is the necessary inclusion of the Virgin Mary (via Joan) in that imagined potency, and the manner in which the play appears to underscore that necessity to bolster its own efficacy. II. “Be not dismayed, for succor is at hand”: The Potency of Joan La Pucelle If, as Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin argue, the history play functioned “as an ideological apparatus for the construction of an emergent national consciousness,” then the force behind the monarch’s potency (if not the nation’s potency) is an intricate part of that ideological apparatus (47). Even when Howard and Rackin As Jeffrey Knapp explains, “the English schism had effectively insularized the English church; how were English Protestants to differentiate this isolation from Romish particularism, or maintain that, by breaking with Rome, they had helped to restore a properly supranational church?” (85). 11 Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI was staged as early as 1592, and thus precedes the controversy that Robert Chambers’ translation provoked. However, debates about the threat of the Virgin Mary precede Shakespeare’s play—as shown through the examples of William Crashaw and John Jewel. Indeed, the prominence of the Virgin Mary in Christianity, and the Catholic culture that persisted in post-Reformation England, provide an atmosphere where the Virgin Mary’s importance was being re-imagined. Both Warner and Pelikan carefully examine the changing role of the Virgin Mary through the sixteenth century. Hackett also presents detailed views of the Virgin Mary throughout the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. For an interesting study of the religious atmosphere of Shakespeare’s England, see Collinson, Elizabethans. Although Shakespeare’s religious sympathies could be argued one way or the other, I believe that the importance can be found in the co-existence of Protestant and Catholic ideologies surrounding his plays. For an interesting discussion of this amalgamation, see Maurice Hunt. 10

46

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

admit that the “ideology was not monolithic … and neither were the conceptions of national identity and masculine authority it produced,” they maintain that the history play “attempted to rationalize” the “conception of masculine authority based on personal achievement” (47, my emphasis). Indeed, the masculinity of the monarch would, in no uncertain terms, reflect the masculinity of the nation. With King Henry V dead, and with Henry VI a marginal figure throughout the better part of the play, the world of 1 Henry VI finds itself in a state of seeming impotence. I follow Howard and Rackin’s lead here by examining the play’s rationalization of “personal achievement” as a way of thinking about England’s national identity. By focusing on the play’s exploration of male impotence and potency—in sexual, religious, and political terms—and Joan La Pucelle’s ability to influence that impotence/potency via a Marian source of strength, I find that Shakespeare negotiates a male individual’s anxiety about his ineffectuality within the larger network of religious influence, and specifically the belief in, and eradication of, Marian miracles within that religious network. There is a consistent attempt by the men in the play, both English and French, to display potency, and it is only through the “miraculous” that this potency can be achieved. My interest, then, centers on the relationship between the miraculous and the obtainment of power, and its effect on the view of England’s own religious and gendered identity. Religious anxiety is introduced at the onset of 1 Henry VI. As Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester and future Cardinal, reminisces about the late King Henry V, he remarks, “The Church’s prayers made him so prosperous” (1.1.32). Gloucester immediately retorts: “The Church? Where is it? Had not churchmen prayed, / His thread of life had not so soon decayed” (1.1.33–4). Gloucester’s pun on “prayed” and “preyed” serves to depict the Church as opportunistic, and introduces competing notions of potency. However, Gloucester’s contention that Winchester desires an “effeminate prince” to “overawe” (1.1.35–6) implies that there is some truth to Winchester’s view of the Church’s influential power. The Church’s role in the politics of nationhood is rendered suspect from the very start. The argument between Winchester and Gloucester introduces opposing views of Church power, but underlying the entire opening scene is an anxiety about England’s weakness. More often than not, fear of weakness forces the men in the play to turn to otherworldly powers as a way of invoking strength. Shortly after Bedford intercedes to stop the argument between Winchester and Gloucester, he imagines an effeminized England where “none but women [are] left to wail the dead” (1.1.51). As if to erase the image of that kind of world, Bedford exclaims, “Henry the Fifth, thy ghost I invocate: / Prosper this realm” (1.1.52–3). Only through nostalgia—or invoking spirits like saints—can the men of 1 Henry VI imagine England’s strength. As we soon find, however, it is not Henry V’s ghost but rather Lord Talbot who becomes the icon of English masculinity. From the start, Talbot is cast in a divine light. Describing a battle between the English and the French, an English Messenger claims, “valiant Talbot above human thought / Enacted wonders

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

47

with his sword and lance” (1.1.121–2). Talbot’s performance in battle is akin to miraculous strength, and it is enough to stir fear since, as the Messenger continues, “The French exclaimed the devil was in arms” (1.1.125). From both ends of the divide, Talbot’s miraculous actions are imagined as otherworldly. The belief that miracles derived from the devil was not uncommon in early modern England. For example, when Tynley refutes Chambers’ account of the miracles at Montaigu, he links belief in the miraculous to the demonic: As for the miracles of the latter ages, wee answer with S. Augustine … either they are not true, such as are many the Legendarie Fables, and the miracles wrought amongst the Indians, by Franciscus Xaverius, and others of that crew, as the Jesuites report: Aut Si heretico-rum aliqua mira facta sunt, or some of them are true, as Heretikes and Imposters in all ages have wrought some, and still doe by the assistance of Satan; and then we are to be the more wary of them. (12v)

The surest way to counterattack claims of miracles was to associate them with the work of Satan. In this way, then, Shakespeare has the French demonize that which they cannot explain—Talbot’s heroic, if not wondrous, potency in battle. This move is reciprocal throughout the play: where the English laud their miraculous Talbot, the French connect his power to the devil; and where the French celebrate their miraculous Joan, the English demonize her power. It is as if each camp finds it necessary to lay claim to potency via individual warriors—based on the personal achievement of those warriors—and in the process Joan and Talbot are fashioned as supernal. Inevitably, the gendered identity of Talbot and Joan will be a sign of the gendered identity of their respective nation. Although the criticism addressing Joan’s gendered ambiguity often focuses on the significance of her appropriation of male strength, I find her alignment with a female source of strength more provocative.12 Indeed, I tend to agree with Eggert’s contention that it is not merely a “confusion of gender categories” that provokes anxiety, but rather that “it is the prospect of a purely feminine authority, freely wielded, that is truly threatening” (57).13 By identifying the Virgin Mary as the sole source of strength for Joan La Pucelle, the play appears to speak to the post-Reformation fear of the Virgin Mary’s “purely feminine authority.” This is to say, the play deliberately underscores not only Joan’s, but also the Virgin Mary’s unrestrained power. When the Bastard of Orléans introduces Joan, he says to Charles, “Be not dismayed for succour is at hand” (1.3.29). As a source of relief from the English threat, Joan could be construed as an intercessory

For the issue of Joan’s gendered ambiguity, and the cultural anxiety that this kind of ambiguity provokes, see, for example: Gabriele Bernhard Jackson, 40–65; Leah Marcus, 51–96; Kathryn Schwarz, 82; Nina S. Levine, 32–3: and Eggert, 57–68. 13 My own argument deviates from Eggert insofar as I see the Virgin Mary as the source of that “purely feminine authority.” 12

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

48

character—much like the Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition.14 However, Joan’s intercession is not on behalf of God, as we might expect, but instead she explains that she is working on behalf of the Virgin Mary herself: God’s mother deignèd to appear to me, And in a vision, full of majesty, Willed me to leave my base vocation And free my country from calamity. Her aid she promised, and assured success. (1.3.57–61)

Joan’s entire enterprise for the French, as she outlines, is both prompted and sustained by the Virgin Mary. The alignment of Joan La Pucelle with the Virgin Mary, of course, is historically inaccurate since Joan of Arc was said to have heard voices from Saint Michael, Saint Gabriel, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret. Indeed, Joan claimed that she received a revelation from God by an angel’s voice teaching her how to behave. She was only thirteen when she heard this voice, and it was then that she vowed to remain a virgin. When she was on trial, Joan identified the voice as that of Saint Michael, and she claimed that Saint Gabriel, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret later came to her under the command of God.15 The fact that Joan is visited by an angel and remains a virgin because of that initial visit aligns her with the Virgin Mary, but there is no historical indication that the Virgin Mary herself appeared to Joan. In 1 Henry VI, then, Shakespeare explicitly constructs the Marian apparition to underscore the connection between Joan and the Virgin Mary. Indeed, Joan’s humble origins as a “black and swart” (1.3.63) shepherd’s daughter who tends lambs is reminiscent of the Virgin Mary’s own position before the Annunciation. And where Mary is transformed into a regal figure (by Roman Catholics, at least) for being chosen by God, Joan is literally transformed from her “black and swart” image into a “beauty” after the Virgin Mary’s visitation (1.3.63–5). In this regard, Joan La Pucelle is both aligned with, and transformed by, the Virgin Mary. However, Joan’s desire to be Charles’ “warlike mate” (1.3.71) appears to be at odds with popular notions of Marian humility. How, then, do we legitimize her “warlike” enterprise? To arrive at the answer to this question, I find it necessary to pause at the play’s focus on transformation precipitated by a divine encounter. On the one hand, the encounter lends a kind of credibility to the miraculous event at hand, but it also draws attention to the transformation into national icons that both Joan and Talbot will undergo. Moreover, by introducing Joan’s literal transformation in connection with the Virgin Mary, the play is also drawing attention to the alteration of the Virgin Mary herself. From a post-Reformation perspective, the Virgin Mary’s “transformation” into an interceding, regal figure lending her strength in battle is I address the topic of intercession in greater detail in Chapter 2. For a thoughtful reading of Joan’s trial, and the historical/cultural significance of

14 15

the saints she invokes, see Charles T. Wood, 125–51.

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

49

a result of Roman Catholic idolatry. Indeed, it brings to mind Henry Garnet’s use of the Virgin Mary in The Societie of the Rosary (1596) that I discussed earlier where he sees Mary as one who “mightily overcometh, not only her owne, but also her devout clients adversaries.”16 Joan’s concurrent warlike and Marian identity, then, gives Shakespeare’s audience a reason to suspect the source of her power. In both Garnet and Joan’s account, the Virgin Mary is the sole source of feminine strength, since there is no mention of God or Christ behind that power. The Virgin Mary is presented as a figure whose strength is sui generis. This is consequential from both ends of the religious divide: from the believer’s perspective, you get a Virgin Mary who can offer one potency; and from the doubter’s perspective, you get a Virgin Mary who oversteps her boundaries, and thus becomes an easy target for vilification. The very fact that Joan’s potency derives from a female source is enough to create uneasiness where masculinity is concerned, but the fact that she is employing a maternal source of strength that overmatches the men in the play—if not Christ himself, in some anti-Catholic polemical attacks—heightens the sense of masculine anxiety in the play. Joan identifies Mary as “God’s mother” (1.2.78) and later “Christ’s mother” (1.2.106), drawing attention to Mary’s maternal significance. For Shakespeare’s English audience, Joan’s references to Mary’s maternal position might also serve to introduce the view of her would-be authority over Christ (as I illustrate with Jewel and Crashaw above). In point of fact, Joan’s mention of Mary’s maternal role occurs during her own “unnatural” display of strength. By invoking the Virgin Mary as the source of her power as she is overpowering the men around her then, Joan also invites the English audience to include the Virgin Mary in that triumphant act. In the process, she opens the door for her audience to view the Virgin Mary as a threat to English Protestant masculinity once the French battle the English. I return here to Crashaw’s The Jesuites gospel (1610) to underscore how the Virgin Mary’s maternal influence over Jesus was often deployed to provoke masculine anxiety about female influence in post-Reformation England. Crashaw writes: And beholde, the Jesuits as though the Mother were a woman and the Sonne but an Infant: or as though they had gained mercy by Christ already, and would now see what they could get by the Mother, began to call in question his merits and mediation, and the dignity of his wounds and sufferings, & at last pronounce that his wounds and her paps, his blood and her milke, are either all one, or else that the milke is better. (E3v)

The blurring of Christ and Mary’s gendered identities is a way for Crashaw to arrive at the ultimate threat that Mary posed: she was capable of effeminizing Christ and usurping his authority. Crashaw’s conflation of the Virgin Mary’s 16 For a reading of the way Marian piety has fashioned Mary as a warrior, see Duffy, Faith 33–4.

50

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

“paps” with Christ’s “wounds”—suggesting that they are all “one”—to emphasize her unnatural nature derides female strength. In her reading of Crashaw’s view of Mary as a “commanding mother,” or even worse a “bossy woman,” Dolan contends, “Protestant attacks on Mary’s miraculous images draw on a tradition … that denigrated women’s agency by associating or conflating it with violence” (110–11). The Virgin Mary’s authority, in other words, ultimately leads her to exercise her power. This is precisely where the opening of 1 Henry VI situates both Joan La Pucelle and the Virgin Mary—as women placed in positions of authority, and thus set on violence against the English. Joan’s warlike identity, then, stands to be denigrated from the start. Where the English desire to lay claim to authority via a masculine figure—whether it be King Henry V’s ghost, or Lord Talbot—the French embrace their Marian warrior. “Let me be thy servant,” Charles tells Joan, “and not sovereign be” (1.3.90). Although Charles means to glorify Joan, he also implies an abdication of his sovereign position. Thus, Joan is bestowed with authority as she begins her enterprise of granting the French potency. “The Dauphin, with one Joan La Pucelle joined,” an English Messenger tells Talbot, “A holy prophetess new risen up, / Is come with a great power to raise the siege” (1.6.80–81). The rhetoric of ascendancy—where Joan is “risen up” and her strength helps to “raise the siege”—also suggests an increase, or a symbolic phallic expansion. Where Joan’s potency swells, however, Talbot is quick to admonish it by slandering Joan as whorish: “Pucelle or pucelle, Dauphin or dogfish / Your hearts I’ll stamp out with my horse’s heels” (1.6.85–6). Talbot puns on “pucelle” and “puzzle” (English slang for whore), but even worse, he could be punning on “pucelle” and “pizzle,” in which case Joan is not only whorish, but also unnaturally masculine. Indeed, Talbot’s pun on Joan’s sobriquet works in a way similar to Crashaw’s conflation of the Virgin Mary’s “paps” with Christ’s “wounds”—in both cases, English identity (be it religious or gendered) is bolstered by denigrating female strength as unnaturally masculine. “It is as though, in 1 Henry VI,” Marcus writes, “despising female dominance is a necessary part of being male, English, and ‘Protestant’” (76). Talbot’s transfiguration of Joan from a “maid’ to a “whore” comes as no surprise then. However, Joan exhibits dominance over Talbot and the English from their first encounter, and this illustrates the efficacy of her Marian source of strength. Talbot questions, “Where is my strength, my valor, and my force? / Our English troops retire; I cannot stay them. / A woman clad in armor chaseth them” (1.7.1–3). From his first battle with Joan, Talbot is rendered impotent. But where Joan mocks Talbot’s inefficacy—“Go, go, cheer up thy hungry starvèd men” (1.7.16)—Talbot expresses only brief shame before indeed cheering up his “starvèd men” by distancing himself as a figure “above human thought.” In other words, Talbot recognizes that he must align his side—the English—with its own source of masculine strength: God himself. Once Talbot re-conceptualizes the English source of potency, we find that despising female dominance is not the only “necessary part of being male, English, and Protestant.” One must also have a common fellowship under God.

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

51

Talbot says of the French, “Well, let them practice and converse with spirits,” and then adds in regard to the English, “God is our fortress” (2.1.25–6). Exploiting the gendered and religious dichotomy at hand, Talbot attempts to re-imagine the English as subjects under God’s care.17 But his sense of a Christian fellowship is, of course, insular. Although the English appeal to God as their source of potency to organize community, Shakespeare’s first tetralogy belies belief in this kind of Christian fellowship. Directly after what is arguably Talbot’s quintessential appeal for English unity—where Talbot identifies himself to the Countess of Auvergne as a “shadow of himself” whose true “substance, sinews, arms, and strength” (2.3.62–3) are the English soldiers—the audience is granted access to an argument between the York and Lancastrian factions (2.4), and they are reminded that England itself is fragmented (both within the play and in Shakespeare’s England). As Knapp notes, “Shakespeare never ceases to drive home the point that international wars ‘boil down to civil wars’” (56). The broken community on the international front is directly correlated to the broken community on the domestic front, and in this regard England remains largely impotent. Joan’s connection to the divine via the Virgin Mary, then, exists as an alternative source of potency within the play. Without a doubt, the English ultimately vilify Joan, but her ability to influence the French who have “played the men” (1.8.16) is incredibly poignant in its own right. She gains Charles’ utmost trust (3.7.9–11), and in an impressive act she lures Burgundy away from the English: As looks the mother on her lowly babe When death doth close his tender-dying eyes, See, see the pining malady of France; Behold the wounds, the most unnatural wounds, Which thou thyself hast given her woeful breast. (3.7.47–51)

Already bolstered by the strength of the Virgin Mary, Joan appears to invoke Marian imagery in her appeal to Burgundy. More impressive, perhaps, is the manner in which she amalgamates qualities of the Madonna and the Mater Dolorosa. In this hybrid Marian image, we see a Madonna holding the Christ child, but we are also reminded of Christ’s eventual death. The “wounds” at the “woeful breast” evoke both Christ’s wound as he is pierced through the heart, and the famous “piercing” of the Virgin Mary’s soul in Simeon’s prophecy.18 And in the same way that the 17 I am reminded here of Marcus’ argument that 1 Henry VI “is virulent in its scorn for the claptrap of Catholic ritual, and yet it creates a quasi-ritual pattern of its own. It is a markedly iconoclastic play, a ceremony against ceremony” (83). Talbot’s scorn for the French working under the auspices of a woman, who has been called to arms by the Virgin Mary herself, is countered with a belief that the English are working under God’s divinity. 18 When Mary and Joseph travel to Jerusalem shortly after Jesus’ birth, Simeon delivers his famous prophecy to Mary: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also” (Luke 2:35, my italics). Most theologians argue that the fulfillment of this prophecy

52

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Mater Dolorosa functions for the believer—as a medium for the believer to feel a deeper sorrow for Christ—the image Joan evokes is meant to work on Burgundy’s empathy.19 “I am vanquished” (3.7.78), Burgundy concedes as he is converted through Joan’s intercession (via the Virgin Mary’s intercession) for the French. Given that the Virgin Mary was seen as an emblem of Catholicism in postReformation England, Joan’s ability to lure Burgundy away from the English would, in all likelihood, be construed as menacing by Shakespeare’s audience.20 But Joan’s appeal for Burgundy to return to his motherland, to this maternal Marian symbol that she evokes, re-imagines masculine potency: a united brethren under maternal compassion. “See, then,” Joan tells Burgundy, “thou fight’st against thy countrymen / And join’st with them will be thy slaughtermen” (3.7.74–5). In this sweeping statement, Joan appeals to Burgundy’s sense of fellowship and casts the English in the lot of Cain (since they slaughter their Christian brothers), whereas France is the nurturing mother awaiting the return of her son. But identifying with a maternal figure like the Virgin Mary inevitably works against the male desire to be masculine. Indeed, the English must break away from that kind of maternal world—one sans the Virgin Mary, or, as Marcus argues, the Virgin Queen.21 English masculinity and potency depends upon uniting under a masculine emblem, and ideally, this emblem is paternal, be it God, the king, or in 1 Henry VI, Talbot. For Shakespeare’s audience—an audience who had been under the rule of Queen Elizabeth I for approximately forty years—paternal rule could only be imagined and/or desired.22 And as much as Joan’s potency is illustrated through her crossis the pain Mary endures when she witnesses her son’s crucifixion at Golgotha. Simeon’s prophecy resulted in one of the most influential of Marian cults—the Mater Dolorosa, or Sorrowing Mother, which forms the impetus for Mary’s intercessory significance. See, for example, Pelikan, 25–36, and Warner, 216. I discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 2. 19 For a detailed account of the origin and influence of the cult of the Mater Dolorosa, see Warner, 206–23. 20 We cannot assume, however, that everyone in Shakespeare’s audience viewed Catholics as threatening. For example, Tricomi presents a convincing case for the nostalgia that Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI evokes by drawing on characteristics of the medieval saints plays. He writes, “Indeed, inasmuch as 1 Henry VI presents richly poetic descriptions of the saint worship it seeks to impugn, it generates the very iconography it holds up to ridicule” (19–20). 21 Marcus argues that Elizabeth’s subjects “were far better acquainted than we are with her complex balancing of male and female attributes, but not necessarily comfortable with their strategies. In 1 Henry VI, Joan La Pucelle functions in many ways as a distorted image of Queen Elizabeth I. She, like Elizabeth, is a woman who ‘acts like a man.’ She collects about her a markedly similar set of idealized symbolic identities. Yet she belongs to the enemy camp. The figure of Joan brings into the open a set of suppressed cultural anxieties about the Virgin Queen, her identity, and her capacity to provide continuing stability for the nation” (53). For a detailed reading of this connection, see Marcus, 51–96. 22 For example, Eggert convincingly argues that the anxiety surrounding Elizabeth’s refusal to name a successor was not simply about “the hope of having a ruler after Elizabeth, but rather the desire to have a ruler instead of Elizabeth” (81). See Eggert, 76–99, for a

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

53

dressing “maleness” in battle, the Virgin Mary is behind that strength. Thus, through Talbot’s purely male heroism, Shakespeare’s theater seems to appeal to England’s desire for masculine authority. The play underscores reverence for paternal rule through young John Talbot’s loyalty to his father, and in the process showcases English masculinity as father and son fight side by side against the French. But what I find significant is Talbot’s description of John’s rite of passage into manhood: “The ireful bastard Orléans, that drew blood / From thee, my boy, and had the maidenhood / Of thy first fight, I soon encounterèd” (4.6.16–18). Where the French fight under Joan La Pucelle’s Marian might, the English here are imagined as working under the care and supervision of the father. Moreover, where the French depend on a “pucelle,” or virgin, Talbot finds delight in his son’s loss of his “virginity” in battle. This violent penetration of young Talbot is deemed positive. However, the other side of that coin is that John’s initiation into manhood is imagined in a feminine light. This is to say, the imagined loss of John’s “maidenhood” comes about through Orléans’ drawing blood from John. The would-be loyal son to an English hero-father is cast as the penetrated, and bleeding virginal woman. When we trace the source of Orléans potency, then, we find that the figure doing the penetrating is the Virgin Mary herself.23 Through the Virgin Mary, Joan lends her “succor” to the French soldiers, and through this infusion of potency they are strong enough to penetrate the English. Indeed, later John dies drenched in a “sea of blood” (4.7.14), and Talbot has no recourse but to die along with him. In her ongoing Marian miraculous intervention for the French, Joan consistently undermines any tint of English potency. However, through the image of Talbot’s death, where his “old arms are young John Talbot’s Grave” (4.7.32), we witness a reconfiguration of the kind of Marian strength that the French have embraced. Through this image, the play deploys Marian iconography to convey the strength of the English. The image of Lord Talbot holding his dead son is an appropriation of the Pietà, but it both skews the image and magnifies the emotional dimension behind the image of Mary holding her dead son. Like the Virgin Mary, Talbot is the parental figure holding a dead son, but the compassionate dimension is paternal and not maternal. Moreover, where Mary can merely feel Christ’s suffering, Talbot’s affliction is so great that he suffers the fate of his son. Thus, the image takes Mary’s maternal compassion, re-imagines it as paternal, and one-ups the Virgin Mary’s empathetic potential. As Sir William Lucy claims, the “ashes” of the father and dead son “shall be reared / A phoenix that shall make all France afeard” (4.7.92–3). Even the symbol of the “phoenix” here is reclaimed as an emblem for an imagined wonderful reading of the cultural desire for a king, and Shakespeare’s attention to this issue in the Henriad. 23 Joan emphasizes her Marian sources of strength in battle early on in the play. When she overpowers King Charles, she tells him, “Christ’s mother helps me, else I were too weak,” and Charles responds, “Who’er helps thee, ’tis thou that must help me” (1.3.85–6).

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

54

male, English heroism, since the phoenix was widely associated with both Queen Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary.24 Through Talbot’s death and imagined resurrection, maternal influence is erased, and the father and son are united in a promised return where they will be England’s source of potency. If we believe Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Nashe, the image of dying Talbot was powerful enough to provoke “the teares of ten thousand spectators at least” (113). We recognize, however, that the restoration of English potency is slow in coming. Indeed, it takes Shakespeare’s return to King Henry V in his second tetralogy to arrive at the closest idea to the strength of English “unity” that his histories offer. But the key, it seems, is set down in 1 Henry VI. In an exchange between King Henry VI and Gloucester where they discuss the Pope’s appeal for peace between France and England, Henry says: Ay, marry, uncle; for I always thought It was both impious and unnatural That such immanity and bloody strife Should reign among professors of one faith. (5.1.11–14)

Although Knapp views Henry’s supranationalism here as naïve (56), I find Henry’s sentiment rather compelling since it scrutinizes religious difference/sameness. The bloodshed is among Christians, but the play divides the countries into gendered categories—categories that divide Christianity itself. Where the feminine French work under the auspices of the Virgin Mary, the English imagine themselves under God himself (it makes it rather facile to substitute Catholic for French and Protestant for English). However, although the image of Talbot and John’s death anticipates the return of paternal strength under God, the play certainly presents France’s alignment with the Virgin Mary as fruitful and potent in its own right (temporary as that potency might be). Why not reconcile and make use of both sources of potency? In this vein, it is interesting to note that as Henry tells Gloucester about the need to be united as Christians, he opens his statement with “Ay, marry,” or the original oath, “by the Virgin Mary.” By making reference to the Virgin Mary before his appeal to united Christianity, Henry seems to remind the audience that the “one faith” in question contains both Christ and the Virgin Mary.25 For the English, however, the moment that Joan calls on the spirits “Out of the powerful regions under earth” (5.3.11), she appears to effectuate the threat of feminine strength, and the argument that Marian miracles were in fact the work of the devil. This is perhaps the most supernatural moment of the play where actual fiends appear, and it is also the first moment in the play where Joan fails to effect potency. She pleads for help, but the fiends “hang their heads,” and then she attempts to entice the fiends with her body, but they merely “shake their heads” See, for example, Doran, 178. While Marian worship was suppressed in Elizabethan England, we cannot assume

24 25

that veneration simply ceased. Stories of surviving Marian icons provide at least some evidence of continued intercessory prayer. See Duffy, Stripping 490, and McClain, 86.

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

55

(5.3.18–19). Both the fiends and Joan are rendered impotent, but from a theatrical standpoint, the play is very much invigorated by the spectacle onstage.26 It is as if the argument used to negate belief in miracles—that is, the anti-Catholic polemical tendency to align miracles with the devil—is appropriated to give life, to give potency both to the theater and the English. Where Joan’s potency within the play fails, the play’s potency thrives because England’s seeming impotence can now be explained away with physical, albeit theatrical, proof of the demonic. Joan clearly remains an essential dimension of that theatrical potency. Although the play denigrates Joan by playing into every fear of feminine influence—she is overbearing, demonic, and ultimately whorish—when Joan capitulates and describes France’s loss of potency, she once again gestures at Marian significance by re-appropriating the image of the Pietà: “Now the time is come / That France must vail her lofty-plumèd crest / And let her head fall into England’s lap” (5.3.24–6). Although the flaccid plume implies a kind of impotence, the image of France’s head falling into England’s lap once again evokes the Marian image of the Pietà. In this regard, England is the Virgin Mary where France is the dead Christ. By deploying this Marian image one final time, the play appears to offer its audience the vision of Christian unity under both the mother and the son after all. III. England’s “Effeminate Peace” As I mention in the Introduction, the Jesuits in Valladolid, Spain pined for the day when England would be returned to its rightful owner as they embraced the motto, “England, Mary’s Dowry.” They expressed their faith in the Virgin Mary’s ability to save England. Of course, such a recovery of England’s Catholic past was never realized in early modern England, but the very fact that the Virgin Mary figures prominently in the Jesuit struggle, and the fact that she figures prominently as a source of strength in 1 Henry VI, is indicative of her enduring significance in England’s cultural psyche. Perhaps the Virgin Mary is never able to unify the English, but, as I hope this chapter has shown, she was certainly employed—for better or worse—in that particular struggle.

26 Obviously, not everyone will share my opinion that the spectacle strengthens the play. For example, Eggert writes, “Joan’s power has been precipitated from an active, circulating linguistic and sexual energy into a gaggle of stagy fiends, whose dumb departure drives Joan to admit, ‘My ancient incantations are too weak’ (5.3.27)” (67). But as Tricomi points out, the revelation makes a crucial point about Joan’s source of power because it “bears a striking, inverted relationship to pre-Reformation saints plays representing conversions, miracles, and martyrdom” (21). However, where Tricomi emphasizes the inversion—that is Joan conjures devils instead of casting them out—I would like to emphasize the fact that the play is invoking not only medieval saints plays, but anti-Catholic polemics that aimed to demonize the invocation of saints.

56

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Ultimately, there is no easy union between the French and English in 1 Henry VI, just as there was no easy union between Catholics and Protestants in postReformation England. Joan is irrevocably vilified before the English claim power, and thus her Marian strength is nullified because she is rendered a fraud. However, where the ideological power shift comes about through Joan’s loss of potency, the miraculous dimension behind her strength is hardly explained. The play leaves ambiguous the very existence of miracles. Whether it was the Virgin Mary or the fiends who give Joan strength, something “miraculous” transpires throughout the play. What is brought to light, however, is the way that Marian strength is utilized as a means to gain potency—whether through reverence, or defamation. One need only look at Joan in captivity to witness both Marian and anti-Marian sentiments. Joan pleads: First, let me tell you whom you have condemned: Not one begotten of a shepherd swain, But issued from the progeny of kings, Virtuous and holy, chosen from above By inspiration of celestial grace To work exceeding miracles on earth. I never had to do with wicked spirits; But you, that are polluted with your lusts, Stained with the guiltless blood of innocents, Corrupt and tainted with a thousand vices – Because you want the grace that others have, You judge it straight a thing impossible To compass wonders but by help of devils. No, misconceivèd Joan of Arc hath been A virgin from her tender infancy, Chaste and immaculate in very thought, Whose maiden-blood, thus rigorously effused Will cry out for vengeance at the gates of heaven. (5.6.36–53)

Although this is Joan’s speech to her captors, we can easily recognize the Marian undertones in her speech. Indeed, Joan’s description of herself could easily be seen as a description of the Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition (lines 37–41 in particular). And although the play clearly vilifies Joan through both the revelation of her conjuring evil spirits, and her ensuing confession that she is pregnant with either Alençon’s or Reignier’s child, her attention to her Marian-like qualities must have given Shakespeare’s audience pause. Was Shakespeare’s audience indeed lacking “grace” when they condemned the Virgin Mary by condemning accounts of Marian miracles? By reminding the audience that they are “stained” with lust, and “corrupt and tainted” with sin, the play appears to employ the same tactics of provoking anxiety utilized by polemicists like William Crashaw. If it is the Virgin Mary, and not Joan of Arc, whose “maiden-blood” is being “effused” by

“England, Mary’s Dowry”

57

disbelievers, is she apt to “cry out for vengeance at the gates of heaven?” It is an imagined anxiety that we cannot possibly gauge.27 It is York’s final insult to Joan as she is being carried away that is perhaps the most telling example of the irreversible connection between masculine potency and the need to enact violence to bolster this potency. “Break thou in pieces and consume to ashes,” he tells Joan, “Thou foul accursèd minister of hell” (5.6.92–3). His statement brings to mind both the violent iconoclasm of the sixteenth century, and, as Albert H. Tricomi suggests, “the strategy of ridicule combined with righteous judgment” that was a hallmark of early modern Protestant polemicists (24). More important, perhaps, is York’s incredulous response to the news that the French and English have reached a compromise: “Shall we at last conclude effeminate peace?” (5.6.107). It is as if potency cannot be imagined unless it consists of a complete overthrow of feminine identity. The violence and aggression behind war seems to provide the male with an imagined potency, and perhaps for this reason, the Virgin Mary’s enduring aura of compassionate strength was fashioned as threatening to a masculine culture in search of its identity. If, little by little, anti-Catholic polemicists could convince the emerging English Protestant subjects that the Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition was, as the chapters that follow will demonstrate, an overbearing mother, an overzealous intercessor, a figure, like Satan, invoked by the wicked, then the overthrow of that feminine strength was in sight—always just enough out of reach to continue the fight, but nevertheless in sight. The end, it seems, would be a potent Christian fellowship under God alone. But that too, Shakespeare’s theater seems to show us, is simply out of reach.

27 This view of the Virgin Mary as an unmerciful being is also explored at the end of Othello, as I illustrate in Chapter 3.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 2

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure The aftereffects of eradicating intercessory belief during the Protestant Reformation tell an interesting story of the way in which the Virgin Mary reflects—even absorbs—many of the cultural anxieties precipitated by the shifting religious atmosphere of sixteenth-century England. As the previous chapter illustrates, the fear of unbound feminine potency undeniably influenced the post-Reformation view of the Virgin Mary as a threatening figure. Indeed, once the practice of intercession was scrutinized and eventually denounced, the ensuing iconoclasm targeted idolatrous sites of Marian worship—sites that included the previously mentioned locales of Our Lady of Ipswich, Worcester, and Walsingham. Destroying the Virgin Mary, it seems, was a means of progressing toward a new religion, and a new identity. But if iconoclastic measures against Marian pilgrimage sites reflected the Protestant desire for change, they also reflected anxiety about the Virgin Mary’s enduring influential nature in postReformation England. In this chapter, I interrogate Shakespeare’s attention to Marian themes and female intercession in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure to show how he negotiates both religious and gendered identity in plays rife with religious and gendered anxiety. Given the religious incoherence of Shakespeare’s England, intonations of positive Marian influence within these plays speak to the enduring symbolic capital of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation thought. Indeed, although masculine dominance is showcased in these two plays, the correlation between the rhetorical function and ethical valence of Portia, Isabella, and the Virgin Mary serves to magnify the efficacy of, and promise behind, feminine intercession. What we witness in the parallel discourses of religion and Shakespearean drama, this chapter will show, is how the underlying problem of the loss of masculinity fuels ambivalent feelings toward a female/Marian intercessor as both immensely powerful and potentially promiscuous. Before I arrive at the intercessory function of both Portia and Isabella, however, I first examine early modern cultural and literary responses to the erasure of the Virgin Mary’s intercessory power. This chapter will first demonstrate how the polemical backlash against Mariolatry reveals a lingering anxiety not only about the enduring popularity of Marian intercession in post-Reformation England, but also about the threat Mary poses to a masculine culture. After contextualizing post-Reformation cultural attitudes surrounding the Virgin Mary, I then examine

60

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

how The Merchant of Venice not only employs, but also reinvents Roman Catholic Marian strength, and how the limits of that particular strength are imagined in Measure for Measure. I. Mary’s Intercessory Promiscuity In Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), John Calvin notes that Scripture is “perfectly silent” regarding the intercessory power of the Virgin Mary and the saints: “Certainly, when the human mind thus seeks assistances for itself, in which it is not warranted by the word of God, it evidently betrays its want of faith. Now, if we appeal to the consciences of all the advocates for the intercession of saints, we shall find that the only cause of it is, an anxiety in their minds, as if Christ could fail of success, or be too severe in the business” (Vol. II 103). Calvin’s principal design here is to emphasize Christ’s role as sole mediator. But in calling out Roman Catholics as lacking in faith because of their desire for intercession, Calvin underscores a very rational fear: what if God is too severe in the business of judgment? For those who lack Calvin’s unfaltering confidence, the fear of judgment is rather germane. Like Hamlet, one might ask, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping?” (2.2.529–30). Saint Anselm argues that when anxiety of mind leads to fear, “So the accused flees from the just God to the good mother of the merciful God” (112), but this long-held view of Mary as a merciful intercessor was scrutinized during the Reformation. While Reformers continued to value Mary’s faith and persona, they found belief in her intercessory ability dangerous and unsubstantiated. Thus, they revisited Saint Augustine’s view of God’s majestic justice as something “arbitrary and mysterious, a reflection of his unchallengeable will” (MacCulloch, Reformation 106). By emphasizing God’s immutability, Reformers rendered Marian intercession null. Christ alone mediated for sinners in the face of God’s mysterious justice. Despite the eradication of intercession, the Virgin Mary’s pre-eminence allowed her a special place in Protestant theology. Indeed, Martin Luther’s reverence for Mary endured after his break from the Roman Catholic Church, and both Luther and Zwingli continue to address the Virgin Mary in a deferential, if not adoring, tone. Later in the century, the vehemently anti-Papist Protestant Hugh Latimer writes in his “Sermon of the Plough” (1548), “so our blessed lady, which conceived and bare Christ in her womb, did ever after resemble the manners and virtues of that precious babe that she bare” (58). However, in dissolving intercession and delimiting Marian devotion, even Reformers who continued to revere Mary indirectly compromised her status.  For a discussion of Calvin’s own difficulty in explaining the mystery of God’s justice and mercy, see Debora K Shuger, 66.  Peters, for example, scrutinizes the idea of a “loss” of the Virgin Mary, and explores how Mary and saints were cast in the role of exemplars (207–45).

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

61

Later Protestants exploited Mary’s destabilized position by arguing that Marian reverence posed a threat to God’s supremacy. In an anti-Catholic tract printed in 1583, for example, Gray’s Inn Lecturer William Charke argues, “And what sacrifice could you yeeld greater unto the Virgin Marie, then that you have given her? when in a manner you have preferred, and laboured to preferre a service unto her before the service of God” (G4v). Like many early modern Protestants, Charke fashions the Virgin Mary as an emblem of misdirected Roman Catholic worship, and in turn situates her in competition with God. As I mention in Chapter 1, English Reformer John Jewel berates Catholics for calling on the Virgin Mary to use “a mother’s authority over [Christ]” (Apology 38), and English Clergyman William Crashaw identifies Mary as a “commaunding mother” who is saluted as a “Queene, a Goddesse,” while Christ is merely a “child” (F2v). These polemical attacks against Marian prayer not only imagine the Virgin Mary’s subversion of God’s authority, but they also anchor Mary’s threatening nature in her maternal position. Through this maneuver, these Protestant polemicists both rely on, and reinforce, the cultural anxiety surrounding maternal and feminine influence. Paradoxically, it was Mary’s pre-eminence as Christ’s mother that both set her apart from other saints and made her a central target in anti-Catholic polemics. In a poem entitled “The popish kingdome, or reigne of Antichrist” (1570), the virulently anti-papist German cleric Thomas Naogeorgus takes it a step further by fashioning Mary’s intercession as promiscuously indiscriminate. Naogeorgus argues that the Papacy has no faith in God, but instead that “Their chiefest trust and hope, they in the Virgin Marie lay” (L3v). In a rather ironic tone, Naogeorgus describes Mary using many of her popular titles—Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, Light of the World, and Mother of Grace—drawing attention to Catholic excess of praise. He begins by presenting traditional views of Mary’s intercessory strength: “From handes of every wicked sprite, and devils tyranny, / And with hir gowne shée covers Kings, and Popes, and people all, / From wrath of God, and vengeance due, that on their heads would fall” (L3v). The image of Mary enveloping everyone with her gown alludes to the icon of Mary as Mother of Mercy encompassing all her children with her veil (see Fig. 2.1). However, Naogeorgus’s evocation of this image is derisive, and he scoffs at Mary’s willingness to intercede for anyone: “Shée helpeth children at their bookes, and gives them wits withall. / Shée helpes yong maides to husbandes both of living faire and face, / Shée helpes the wofull sutor, to obtaine his Ladies grace” (L4r). Mary is not only imagined as a tutor but also a procuress of sorts. In addition to these answered prayers, the Virgin Mary cures coughs and shortness of breath, brings rain to the farmer, guides the sailor home, helps the merchant gain money, and answers the greedy man’s prayer to gain success. By underscoring Mary’s  Born in Straubingen, Germany, Naogeorgus was a fervent anti-papist. After disagreeing with the Lutheran view of the doctrine of election, he adopted a Calvinist theology. The English translation of this tract is attributed to Barnabe Googe, 1570.  For an analysis of this Marian icon, see Sally Cunneen, 189.

62

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Fig. 2.1 Attributed to Filippo Bellini, Italian, c. 1550–1603. Virgin of Mercy (Madonna della Misericordia), n.d. The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection, 1922.919. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

63

predisposition to answer any and all prayers, Naogeorgus delineates the Virgin Mary’s intercessory promiscuity. This kind of post-Reformation polemical scrutinization of Marian influence can be seen as a reactionary measure against the possibility that Mary was still called upon for intercessory purposes. Despite such polemical condemnation, placing one’s finger on the pulse of Marian devotion in post-Reformation England is hardly an easy task. Although the iconoclasm of the sixteenth century sought to eradicate the material memory of Catholicism—“The progress of the visitations [i.e., Elizabeth’s progresses],” Eamon Duffy writes, “would be marked out by the smoke of bonfires of images and books in market-places and church greens throughout the lands” (Stripping 596)—what eludes us is the extent to which Catholic sympathies were also eradicated. While Marian worship was suppressed, we cannot assume that veneration simply ceased. As I discuss earlier, stories of surviving Marian icons provide at least some evidence of continued intercessory prayer. In St. Mary, Samford, for example, churchwardens walled the image of their patron the Virgin into an alcove of the church where it went undiscovered until the nineteenth century (Duffy, Stripping 490). This act of quiet subversion under lawful pressure illustrates the endurance of Marian devotion in at least one locale. Anxiety surrounding Mariolatry induced Elizabeth’s commissioners to outlaw any images capable of inciting Catholic tendencies. Although the story of Elizabeth I ordering the burning of an image of the Virgin Mary in a fire while on a progress through Suffolk and Norfolk was carefully documented, it is unclear to what extent this act was staged, or if the Marian image was deliberately planted. At the very least, these incidents suggest that Marian reverence, and anxiety surrounding such reverence, survived the Reformation in England. Other kinds of evidence also demonstrate the psychological and spiritual staying power of the Virgin Mary. Since most forms of pre-Reformation Marian worship were precluded, rosary beads gained popularity among English Catholics as a means to invoke Marian intercession through private prayer. Often smuggled Naogeorgus finishes his tirade by exclaiming: “For if shée have such force, and can do all that hath béene tolde, / What doth remaine to Christ the king, that Scepter chiefe doth holde?” (L4r). Ultimately, Mary threatens to be the “Scepter chiefe” herself. Like Charke, Jewel, and Crashaw, Naogeorgus transforms Mary into an emblem of inappropriate female strength. As for Shakespeare, there is no shortage of intercessory promiscuity in his plays. Consider, for example, not only Portia’s willingness to help in The Merchant of Venice and Isabella’s intercessory role in Measure for Measure, but also Viola’s intercession in Twelfth Night, Desdemona’s plea for Cassio in Othello, Paulina’s intervention in The Winter’s Tale, and perhaps most visibly—at least where intercessory promiscuity is concerned— Pandarus’s role in Troilus and Cressida. Indeed, after calling Pandarus a “bawd,” Cressida says of him, “Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love’s full sacrifice / He offers in another’s enterprise” (1.2.260–61). Shakespeare’s attention to intercession is widespread.  Other accounts, of course, offer examples of more forceful resistance to reform. See, for example, Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath.  See, for example, Hackett, 1–3. 

64

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

into England from the continent, rosary beads were the primary objects sought by Protestant officials when accumulating evidence against suspected recusant Catholics. Along with rosaries, copies of the Office of the Blessed Virgin also made their way into Protestant England; although scarce, other kinds of Marian devotional literature were also available. Henry Garnet’s The Societie of the Rosary (1596), as I previously mention, was circulated in England as a means of encouraging English Catholics to join a society where they could gain indulgences by saying a daily rosary. The combative tone of this treatise identifies Mary as “a well setled array of a pitched armie, because she mightily overcometh, not only her owne, but also her devout clients adversaries” (A5v–A6r). In the way that anti-Papists may have seen Mary as an emblem of Catholic sacrilege, Jesuits like Garnet appropriated Mary as a source of power. Indeed, Garnet fashions Mary as a protective soldier. As a shared object of Protestant and Catholic thought, Mary is maneuvered, used, and reconceived by competing factions. It seems that finding a middle ground for Marian devotion in the atmosphere of post-Reformation England required careful design. Garnet’s fellow Jesuit Robert Southwell takes a more delicate approach to Marian devotion in his book of poems and spiritual hymns Moeoniae, published in London in 1595. Although Southwell does not outwardly proclaim Mary’s intercessory significance, he does come close in a poem entitled “The Visitation”: With pilgrim foote, up tiring hils she trod, And hevenly stile with handmaids toile acquaints Her youth to age, her selfe to sicke she lends Her heart to God, to neighbours hand she bends. (B3r)

Overtly, the poem suggests that through toil, Mary acquaints her youth with the troubles of age and sickness, but the enjambment also allows us to see a Mary who “lends” her youth to those who are aging, her self to those who are sick, her heart to God as a neighbor reaches his/her hand out to Mary. She is portrayed as one who is willing both to empathize and help. Shortly after, the lines “Word to the voice, song to the tune she brings, / The voice her word, the tune her dittie sings” come remarkably close to insinuating that the Virgin Mary makes the word/ worship of others strong through her own voice (B3r). Mary adds eloquence to a believer’s prayers.

 See McClain, 86. Praying a rosary consisted of reciting fifty “Hail Marys”—each imploring the Virgin Mary for merciful intercession. For the early history of praying the rosary, see Cunneen, 189.  In a similar tone, Thomas Lodge gestures at the Virgin Mary’s intercessory potential in Prosopopeia (1596). Lodge describes Mary looking at her dead, and silenced son: “She betrothed her tongue to complaint, and thus most pensively lamented. O my god, lend mine eyes a well of teares, for they must weepe a world of wrongs. Let the voice of my complaints pearce the heavens, and let the centre shake, to hear my shriks” (B3r). Given

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

65

Although the publication of Garnet and Southwell’s work illustrates that there were outlets in England for praying to the Virgin Mary for intercession, publishing and obtaining Marian devotional literature in post-Reformation England remained a hazardous enterprise. In the dedication to The Widowes Mite (1619), a book of Marian praise, the author, identified as A.G. and thought to be the courtier Sir Tobie Matthew, laments his inability to praise his patron for fear of incriminating him: “But insteed of doing you service, I would be sure not to do you displeasure: and we are fallen into so miserable tymes, as werein I might better cheape intreate you to protect some thiefe or outlaw, then to patronize a worke that tends to the hounour of our B. Lady” (*2v). It appears that protecting “some thiefe or outlaw” was as inculpating as patronizing a work of Marian praise. The simultaneous existence of Marian devotional literature and the awareness that discretion was necessary when publishing/obtaining such literature indicates that the Virgin Mary was still called upon in private prayer. To what extent this Marian worship and belief existed among a generation “which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world” (Duffy, Stripping 593)— Shakespeare’s generation—is unknown. And yet when Hamlet ponders “[t]he undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns,” he ultimately requests intercession on his behalf: “Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered” (3.1.81–2, 91–2). In that moment of crisis, in the contemplation of death and afterlife, it seems best to keep an open mind about the power of intercession. For Shakespeare’s audience, then, Portia’s intercession at the moment that Antonio stands to lose his life could call to mind the lost intercessory power of the Virgin Mary. As the remainder of this chapter will illustrate, Portia’s efficacy not only underscores the inefficacy of male intercession, but it also establishes a reconceived system of intercession where the Marian-like figure comes to one’s aid without supplication. The promise behind Portia’s unsought intercession evinces pre-Reformation Marian strength to an audience who could no longer pray to the Virgin Mary. At the same time, however, Portia’s self-driven act could be construed as threatening to the gender hierarchy, and in this regard her intercession is akin to the dangers of Mariolatry that some Protestant polemicists imagine. Whether one conceives of Portia’s act as appealing or portentous, her persuasive potency is certainly put on display. II. Portia, Piercing Prayers, and Impotent Intercessors Although critics of Portia seem to recognize the threat she poses to the gender hierarchy in The Merchant of Venice, they often find that Portia’s efficacy is undermined by the play’s masculine superstructure. Anne Parten, for example, sees Portia as “self-sufficient in both the feminine and masculine roles,” but Lodge’s Catholic affinity, it is likely that Mary’s immediate “complaints” represent the supplications of her faithful believers.

66

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

she determines that “the future the comedy points to is in no way threatened by Portia’s superhuman and superfeminine gifts” (153). Similarly, Carol Leventen suggests that the cultural anxieties that are “intensified by Portia’s formidable intelligence and spirit,” are also “neutralised by her deference to and internalisation of patriarchal norms and values” (62).10 Portia’s subversive nature, it seems, does little to alter the masculine world of Venice. Perhaps it is Karen Newman who, in seeking to find in Portia’s “unruly” womanhood an ability to “pervert authorized systems of gender and power,” recognizes Portia’s vital disruption of the gender hierarchy (33). But even Newman admits that Portia’s “verbal quibble” in the courtroom resembles Launcelot Gobbo’s quibble elsewhere in the play, and as such “woman and servant” are linked as “marginal groups that are oppressed under the Elizabethan class/gender system” (30).11 In that particular design, Portia’s persuasive capacity is showcased, but she remains a marginal figure in a masculine world. As opposed to readings that see Portia as an object reinforcing masculinity, this chapter locates in Portia a power to destabilize the system of masculine dominance through her intercessory influence—a feminine influence evocative of the emotional and religious strength behind the Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition. By deploying Marian potency, I argue, Shakespeare not only invests the figure of Portia with affective and rhetorical strength, but he also draws attention to England’s cultural ambivalence about the value of Marian intercession amid postReformation views that saw Marian strength as a threat to masculinity. Indeed, Portia’s intercession in the courtroom renders the Christian males in the play reliant on her power of persuasion while simultaneously underscoring the ineffectuality of male intercession. Similarly, early modern Protestant polemicists often argued that the Virgin Mary’s intercessory strength rendered Christ impuissant. What we find within the corresponding polemical and literary discourse surrounding the Virgin Mary, then, is that while the female intercessor is incredibly important, she also undermines masculinity and is consequently presumed to be promiscuous because of her influential strength. But by underpinning Portia’s dramatic function with the residual symbolic power of the Virgin Mary, Shakespeare is able to re-imagine the potency of female intercession, and present that strength as sui generis. Early in the play, we find that Portia exists as an iconic presence in Belmont: “From the four corners of the earth they come / To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint” (2.7.39–40). Further, Portia’s intervention to prevent Antonio’s 10 The internalization of patriarchal norms, Leventen concludes, presents a didactic structure where Shakespeare’s audience is instructed “that daughters who submit, who know their place, will ultimately fare better than daughters who rebel” (75). 11 Newman goes on to argue that “Portia’s linguistic play … resists the social, sexual, and political system of which she is a part and provides a means for interrogating its distribution of power along gender lines” (31). I am indebted to Newman’s insightful interrogation of the way in which Portia challenges notions of gender hierarchy even though she is often conceived as marginal “other.”

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

67

death designates her, at base, as an intercessory character. Her very name calls to mind the Latin Porta, “gate” or “entrance,” and in this way Portia symbolizes an intermediate space. But it is Portia’s decision to descend from Belmont into lowlying Venice to aid Antonio at the hour of his death—in an act that symbolically fulfills the final words of the Ave Maria: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, Amen”12—that makes her mediation reminiscent of the Virgin Mary’s intercession. I do not mean to suggest that Portia is the Virgin Mary any more than I would suggest that she explicitly gives Bassanio the answer to the casket riddle, but I do believe that the Marian undertones surrounding Portia point to Marian aura, if not strength, found in the play, and that the play builds on this strength to amplify the potency behind feminine intercession. Not only is the potency of feminine intercession amplified in The Merchant of Venice, but the Marian aura evoked also appears to be deliberate. In Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (The Dunce)—the story thought to be Shakespeare’s source for The Merchant—Portia’s prototype, the Lady of Belmonte, is hardly reminiscent of the Virgin Mary. Where Portia is likened to a “saint,” the Lady is described as “capricious” (465). Unlike Portia, the Lady devises her own plan to defraud suitors of their riches by drugging them. The Lady of Belmonte, then, is a mercurial figure whose active presence in the play is self-serving. Portia’s selfdetermination, on the other hand, is not only outwardly benign, but it is surrounded by Marian undertones, and thus it seems that Shakespeare modifies his source material to add a Marian dimension to his play. Before I arrive at Portia and the play’s reconfiguration of “Marian” strength, however, I first scrutinize Antonio’s own failed attempt at intercession to illustrate how the play calls attention to the potency of female intercession. Although Antonio is in a self-limiting state of melancholy where he believes his role in the world to be a “sad one” (1.1.79), he attempts to be himself an intercessor for Bassanio. However, Antonio’s worth, like his merchandise, is out to sea—an intangible entity. It is thus ironic that when Bassanio comes to ask for his assistance, Antonio responds, “My purse, my person, my extremest means / Lie all unlocked to your occasions” (1.1.138–9). Since all of Antonio’s “fortunes are at sea” (1.1.177), we know his purse to be empty; since he is a self-ascribed melancholic, we know his person to be hollow—and thus only his “extremest means” are available to Bassanio. In a sense still available in Shakespeare’s time, a “mean” is “[a] person (as a saint, priest, etc.) who mediates or who acts as a channel of communication between God and mankind.”13 Antonio’s offer of his “extremest means,” then, is one of intercessory potential, but it is also one that is doomed to failure: Antonio offers Bassanio everything he has, which at this point—in the opening act of the play—is already nothing. See Warner, who notes that these final words to the Ave Maria were included in the reformed Roman Breviary of 1568 (306). Cunneen suggests that these final “nonbiblical words” were added as early as the late Middle Ages (190). 13 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mean.” The latest example the OED gives of “mean” utilized in this way is by Richard Hooker in 1597. 12

68

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

However, once Antonio accepts the terms of Shylock’s bond he appears to have something to offer, since he can sacrifice himself for Bassanio. Even if Antonio does not believe that he is in mortal danger when he enters the bond (1.3.176–7), his inclination to agree to Shylock’s malevolent terms signifies his willingness to die on Bassanio’s behalf.14 It is as if Antonio attempts to occupy a Christ-like role—one where his death will result in Bassanio’s “salvation.” Indeed, when Antonio finds himself in a state of imminent death where he himself is the one in need of an intercessor, he refuses to pray for intercession (3.3.19–24). His refusal compels others to pray on his behalf. Although Antonio’s friends make a concerted effort to help him, they fail, and thus male intercession is deemed ineffectual. To be sure, Shylock’s refusal to “be made a soft and dull-eyed fool, / To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield / To Christian intercessors” (3.3.14–16), not only casts intercession in a religious light, but also empties the power of male intercession. Antonio, for his part, seems to prefer intercession to fail, requesting that Bassanio be present only as another impotent figure: “Well, jailer, on. Pray God Bassanio come / To see me pay his debt, and then I care not” (3.3.35–6). He goes so far as to implore others to refrain from interceding (4.1.69–83), and later says, “I am a tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death. The weakest kind of fruit / Drops earliest to the ground; and so let me” (4.1.113–15). As a weakened and emasculated man, a castrated ram, Antonio believes death to be inexorable and finds himself in a state of impotence. Even though Antonio’s despondence elicits a desire for an alternative on the part of his friends, before Portia’s arrival, all Christians stand impotent. Indeed, Antonio follows his argument by saying, “You cannot better be employed, Bassanio, / Than to live still and write mine epitaph” (4.1.116–17), abandoning hope for divine salvation and defining the afterlife merely as remaining within the memory of others. Despite his fatalism, however, Antonio’s desire to be remembered opens the door to a late-medieval intercessory rite: praying to the Virgin Mary and the saints for the souls of the dead—a practice that faded in post-Reformation England, when the emphasis was no longer on the memory of the dead, but instead on the faith of those living.15 Later, when his death is more immediate, Antonio tells Bassanio: Commend me to your honourable wife. Tell her the process of Antonio’s end, Say how I loved you. Speak me fair in death, And when the tale is told, bid her be judge Whether Bassanio had not once a love. (4.1.268–72)

By asking Bassanio to “commend” him to his “honourable wife,” Antonio not only creates a space for Portia to be his intercessor, but also offers instruction for keeping his name in mind through his third-person account of himself. Granted, 14 For Antonio’s melancholy and apparent death wish, see, for example, Bernard J. Paris, Lars Engle, and Cynthia Lewis. 15 See Duffy, Stripping of the Altars 328, 475.

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

69

Antonio makes no mention of prayer, but intercessory prayer is on the minds of the other men in the courtroom. Before the formal trial begins, Gratiano asks Shylock, “Can no prayers pierce thee?” (4.1.125), to which Shylock responds, “No, none that thou hast wit enough to make” (4.1.126). Gratiano’s chosen metaphor of prayers that “pierce” is distinctively associated with the Virgin Mary. When Mary and Joseph travel to Jerusalem shortly after Jesus’ birth, Simeon delivers his famous prophecy to Mary: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also” (Luke 2:35, my italics). Most theologians argue that the fulfillment of this prophecy is the pain Mary endures when she witnesses her son’s crucifixion at Golgotha.16 Simeon’s prophecy resulted in one of the most influential of Marian cults—the Mater Dolorosa, or Sorrowing Mother, which forms the impetus for Mary’s intercessory significance (see Fig. 2.2). Mary shares in Christ’s suffering at his crucifixion, and thus her mercy for mankind is rooted in her empathetic potential. Describing the late medieval view of this role, Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, “At the moment that Christ died on the cross, said preachers, the whole remaining faith of humanity was concentrated in her unwavering faith alone” (Reformation 21). That a believer can feel Mary’s pain and, conversely, that she can feel a believer’s pain, elicits confidence to request heavenly assistance—whether for the salvation of a loved one or for help in a courtroom—because mercy is possible through her empathetic nature. Gratiano’s use of the word “pierce” in relation to prayer, then, brings to mind not only the Virgin Mary’s pain, but also her merciful nature. It is a call for Shylock to empathize. However, Shylock’s unfaltering sense of justice, and the ineffectuality of male intercession, amplifies his audience’s anxiety. With Antonio confronting the hour of his death, this anxiety parallels the larger cultural disquietude—one grounded in Protestant thought—surrounding the narrowed avenues of salvation.17 When Reformers dissolved belief in Marian intercession, they acted in accordance with their platform of scriptural purity—that is, they relied on the written word, and the written word made no mention of the Virgin Mary’s power to intercede. When Shylock emphasizes his bond, then, he too relies on his audience adhering to the written word, and his desire for strict interpretation of the bond provokes anxiety. The fear of harsh judgment, and the impotence of all male intercessors, ultimately culminates with Gratiano’s frustrated questioning, “Can no prayers pierce thee?” As if on cue, Portia enters the courtroom as the unexpected answer to their prayers. Unlike Marian intercession, however, Portia’s mediation comes unsolicited. Moreover, Portia must disguise herself as Balthazar to enter the courtroom, and thus her “feminine” power is severely undermined by a patriarchal society where women are marginalized. But despite Portia’s need to cross dress, and despite the fact that a For further explanation of the theological view of this prophecy, see Pelikan, 125–36. Elizabethan society subscribed to Calvin’s soteriology where predestination allows

16

17

an elect to win eternal life through the merits of Christ’s suffering. For this discussion, see MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 65–81.

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

70

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Fig. 2.2

Workshop of Dieric Bouts, Netherlandish, c. 1410–1475. Mater Dolorosa (Sorrowing Virgin), 1480/1500. Oil on panel. Chester D. Tripp Fund; Chester D. Tripp Endowment; through prior acquisition of Max and Leola Epstein, 1986.998. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

71

boy actor would have played Portia’s part in Shakespeare’s England, the imagined source of intercession in The Merchant of Venice remains female. In this female source of intercession, I locate incredible potency: Portia is able to destabilize the masculine structure of control. Marian intercession, in particular, opens an intermediary space that allows the male worshipper simultaneously to request and to surrender control. The courting of the female intercessor unveils a fault-line in the otherwise unilateral structure of early modern masculine identity formation, one where, as Mark Breitenberg tells us, “masculinity requires the governance of one’s desire rather than enslavement to it” (162).18 Association with, and desire for, women compromises the masculine agenda of control and domination. By aligning himself with the Virgin Mary in his intercessory request, a male believer compromises his masculinity. However, in the intercessory request, not the female intercessor but rather the specific request is the object of desire. Through this structure of intercession, then, the Virgin Mary is working on behalf of the male believer, and in this regard the male believer retains control. With Portia, however, there is no direct supplication, and thus no control on the male’s part. She alone is the means to Antonio’s salvation, and she alone decides to intercede on his behalf. From a religious perspective, then, this kind of female intercession realizes the post-Reformation fear about the Virgin Mary’s threat to God’s supremacy— a threat where, as I illustrate above with Jewel and Crashaw, the Virgin Mary exerts authority over Christ. The key to curbing this threat in post-Reformation England, it seems, was reminding believers that the Virgin Mary was an earthly woman. In his “Fruitfull Sermons” (1562), for example, Latimer went so far as to criticize Mary for vanity in her desire to be recognized as Christ’s mother while Christ gave the sermon at the Temple: “she was pricked a litle with vain glory, she would have ben knowen to be his mother, els she wold not have ben so hasty to speake with him” (E6r). Although Mary was a model for emulation in post-Reformation thought, her human fallibility compromised her reverential role. In other words, Mary might be God’s mother, but as a woman she inevitably succumbs to vainglory. Indeed, Latimer’s perception of Mary reinforces cultural anxiety about the subversive threat of women in early modern England.19 In contrast to the Virgin Mary, however, Portia’s feminine strength is actually bolstered once she is cast in a human light. As I previously mention, Portia is initially labeled as a “shrine” and a “breathing saint” (2.7.40), and thus she is not only fashioned as an icon, but her figure also calls to mind the saintly images found at Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites. Indeed, Bassanio’s endeavor to Belmont is described as a “secret pilgrimage” (1.1.120). From a post-Reformation perspective, then, Portia’s presence in Belmont is reminiscent of the graven images I realize that intercessory requests are not exclusively male, but my focus is on feminine influence over masculinity. For a psychoanalytic study of male/female Marian desire, see Michael P. Carroll, 49–74. 19 For the early modern anxiety about women (including Mary) as threatening figures, see Dolan, 45–156. 18

72

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

of Catholic idolatry. But as Bassanio chooses the leaden casket in an act that reveals his understanding of the correlation between representation and culturally specific religious practices, Portia’s iconic status appears to fade.20 When Portia acknowledges that she is no longer “Queen o’er [her]self” (3.2.169), her feminine strength is seemingly absorbed by the masculine superstructure. However, what follows in the wake of Bassanio’s selection of the leaden casket is the vivification of the would-be “shrine” into an active intercessor—an incredibly provocative concept for Shakespeare’s predominantly Protestant audience. Given the religious undertones surrounding Portia, her ensuing intercessory act not only evokes the Virgin Mary’s pre-Reformation power, but it also provokes religious and gendered anxiety about that Marian/feminine strength. When we take into account the confidence and benevolence that leads Portia to help Antonio without invocation, we also bear witness to her subversive potential. Before Portia descends from Belmont to intercede, and with Bassanio gone to Venice, she tells Lorenzo, “How little is the cost I have bestowed / In purchasing the semblance of my soul / From out the state of hellish cruelty!” (3.4.19–21). The “semblance of [her] soul” is Antonio—Bassanio’s “bosom lover” (3.4.17). In a Catholic paradigm, redemption can indeed be bought through the purchase of indulgences, and in this sense it is Portia who is supplying the payment. Of greater importance, perhaps, is the fact that Antonio cannot be purchased out of “hellish cruelty.” Portia must physically intercede on his behalf. In some eastern Apocalypses, the Virgin Mary is able to travel directly to hell to plead mercifully for the souls of those sinners (Warner 320–23). In these stories, Mary is personally involved and not merely praying on behalf of others; thus she usurps the position reserved for God, and specifically Christ’s harrowing of hell. Although there is no Latin source for this story in existence, Warner explains that versions of this story had reached Ireland by the ninth century (322). And even if Shakespeare was unfamiliar with these eastern Apocalypses, he would have certainly been familiar with the long tradition that emphasized Mary’s role in salvation. Warner explains that in the West, “there was an overwhelming, widespread, and complete confidence that the Virgin’s pity could pierce, like the light of Bernard’s star, into the abysses of darkness, illuminate even the blackest soul, and save him from damnation by inspiring a deathbed repentance” (322). In other words, whether it was a literal or metaphorical harrowing of hell, the belief was that Mary would descend into darkness for the sake of sinners. Portia’s decision to help Antonio parallels this scenario as she intends physically to travel to help Antonio “out of the state of hellish cruelty” without any direct request. However, Portia’s overt confidence in her influential might is tempered as she says, “This comes too near the praising of myself, / Therefore no more of it” (3.4.22–3). I find this a wonderfully crafted moment where Portia’s humility is overshadowed by a warranted self-confidence. It is a saintly benevolence made 20 For a fascinating study of Bassanio’s advantage in choosing the correct casket in The Merchant due to his experience and knowledge of European cultural thought and practice, see Geraldo U. de Sousa, 80–81.

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

73

worldly by the recognition of the act as benevolent—a human pride similar to what Latimer believes the Virgin Mary exhibited in the Temple. In this moment, then, Portia’s intercessory strength comes close to recalling the Virgin Mary’s own strength while realizing the danger that English Reformers like Jewel and Crashaw felt an overzealous praise of Mary might trigger—that is, that Mary herself might be overzealous in her willingness to intercede. Indeed, through Portia’s intercession, we can imagine a Virgin Mary who will come to one’s rescue when needed, not only when requested. Like the Virgin Mary of Catholic thought, Portia is merciful, but like the Virgin Mary of anti-Catholic polemics, she is also potentially subversive. Once she arrives at the courtroom, Portia’s role initially resembles the Virgin Mary as “the Mediatrix of Law and Grace,”21 because she is the route to Antonio’s salvation. Her intercessory plea is for Shylock, the man in control of Antonio’s fate, to be merciful. She describes mercy as a quality that “seasons justice” and without it “none of us / Should see salvation” (4.1.193–5). However, Shylock is not persuaded by Portia’s poetic rendering of the powerful quality of mercy. “I crave the law,” Shylock says, and later adds, “By my soul I swear / There is no power in the tongue of man / To alter me” (4.1.201, 235–7). It is evident that no prayers will pierce Shylock’s soul, and thus the frightening scope of severe judgment is a vivid element in this scene. Initially, it appears that female intercession is presented only to prove its inefficacy since Shylock remains unconvinced. However, through legal maneuvering, Portia displays the varied range of her influence by keeping Antonio from shedding “[o]ne drop of Christian blood” (4.1.305). When her unassuming call for mercy fails, Portia persists in her keen argumentation, inhabiting the role of judge herself. Paradoxically, it is at the precise moment when Portia is the most valuable figure in the courtroom (at least where Antonio’s life is concerned) that she is also fashioned as a common figure. Bassanio tells Antonio, “life itself, my wife, and all the world / Are not with me esteemed above thy life. / I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all / Here to this devil, to deliver you” (4.1.279–82). However endearing the sentiment, Bassanio’s worldly possessions are worthless in this matter. As far as Antonio’s fate is concerned, only Bassanio’s wife bears importance. But when Portia is grouped with “all the world,” she is both universal and too common, like Naogeorgus’ view of the Virgin Mary herself. Bassanio’s depreciation of Portia’s value subtly evokes the “demotion” that the Virgin Mary suffered during the Reformation, to a common procuress willing to intercede on anyone’s behalf. What I suggest, then, is that the play deliberately undercuts Portia’s value at the precise moment that she is most effective to underscore how a masculine-centered perspective undermines the value of feminine influence, even when that influence is necessary. Indeed, the contestation of the Virgin Mary’s strength in postReformation thought exposes the cultural anxiety surrounding feminine influence at large. Frances E. Dolan, for example, has argued that anti-Catholic polemics often See Pelikan, 131.

21

74

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

appealed to the cultural fear of an inversion of the phallocentric gender hierarchy by presenting Catholics and Catholicism as subversive women. “Especially in the case of the Virgin Mary,” Dolan argues, “the female figure is literally larger than the male, dwarfing him” (8). In a sense, then, the play provokes this kind of anxiety when Portia oversteps her boundaries by passing judgment while it simultaneously foregrounds the potency of an unrestrained feminine influence. In her unrestricted role, Portia saves Antonio’s life, but she begins to take Shylock’s life. When Bassanio attempts to grant Shylock “thrice” the principal, Portia responds, “The Jew shall have all justice. Soft, no haste. / He shall have nothing but the penalty” (4.1.316–17). The swift breakdown of Shylock is at the hands of Portia, and initially it appears that she compromises her own “merciful” role as intercessor. However, through Portia’s rhetorical canniness, she succeeds in influencing her wider audience to act mercifully. Whereas Gratiano tells Shylock, “Beg that thou mayst have leave to hang thyself” (4.1.359), revealing his desire for Shylock’s death—a desire that parallels the humor Elizabethans found in Roderigo Lopez’s dying words at the scaffold—both the Duke and Antonio learn from Portia’s opening speech on the quality of mercy.22 In this way, then, Portia is able to save Antonio’s life and keep others from exhibiting mortal revenge. I recognize that Shylock’s forced conversion is tragic since he undeniably suffers a spiritual loss, but from the Christian perspective of both Catholicism and Protestantism—insular as that perspective might be—Shylock’s conversion will ultimately allow him a chance at salvation.23 Be that as it may, I would be hard pressed to exculpate Portia from her anti-Semitic behavior toward Shylock simply because her actions are evocative of Marian intercession. On the contrary, I find that Portia’s intolerance is in line with the post-Reformation tendency to assuage anxiety about Christianity “by juxtaposing universally accepted Christian values with those of the stubborn, criminal, and misbelieving Jews” (Shapiro 107). Indeed, once Shylock is alienated as the callous enemy, the play appears to tender something akin to an Erasmian middle ground where an imagined universal Christianity—one inclusive of Marian power—is of value to Portia’s Christian audience. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism and xenophobia underwrite the imagined strength of merciful Christianity. In the end, there is no mercy—Marian or otherwise—where Shylock’s conversion is concerned. But by focusing on the gravity of Shylock’s religious identity, the play indirectly draws attention to the precarious nature of Christian identity in post-Reformation England. Indeed, the inclusion of Marian intercession as a dimension of the larger Christian apparatus is quite provocative, because Portia’s feminine intercession efficaciously opens an alternate route to salvation. In this reconceived view of intercession, the female intercessor has the power to aid at the hour of one’s death in 22 For an interesting reading of the significance of Roderigo Lopez’s execution and dying words, see Greenblatt, Will in the World, 256–87. 23 For an insightful analysis of the early modern issue of Jewish conversion, see James Shapiro, 131–65.

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

75

the absence of supplication. This offers Shakespeare’s audience (in particular, those anxious about salvation and the absence of intercessory prayer) a hopeful alternative— an imagined scenario where salvific intercession endures despite the eradication of Marian intercessory prayer. Where Shylock’s bond serves to underscore the danger of a one-dimensional, all-male interpretation of the written word, feminine intercession is set up as an alternative to that interpretation. Without doubt, Portia succeeds by calling attention to what is absent in the written word of the bond, and after the “hellish cruelty” of the trial, all walk away alive. But Portia’s need to cross-dress to intercede illustrates the limits of influence that any woman, let alone the mother of Christ, has in a masculine-dominated society. In post-Reformation England, God’s preeminence was emphasized, and there was no need for Marian influence if God was indeed conceived as merciful. One could only hope so, but perhaps uncertainty led some believers to carry rosary beads just in case. If, as Jeffrey Knapp and Anthony Dawson have argued, people were in fact looking to Shakespeare’s theater for the comforting ritual of a Roman Catholic past, then the Virgin Mary’s influential strength would be a logical component of that past.24 The Merchant of Venice, then, seems to appeal to an enduring desire for Marian intercession by drawing on a popular Marian theme when Portia symbolically descends from above to intercede for Antonio at the hour of his death. Further, Gratiano’s powerful question—“Can no prayers pierce thee?”—also calls to mind Simeon’s prophecy, and its Marian connotation. As I mention above, I do not mean to suggest that Portia is the Virgin Mary, but rather my intent has been to show how the play employs Marian undertones to point to the enduring desire for, and efficacy of, female intercession. But Portia comes to Antonio’s defense without invocation, and thus Shakespeare appears to highlight her Marian potential while emphasizing her would-be usurpation of the male judge’s role. He offers his audience a conflicting, and re-imagined view of both female and Marian intercession, and grants them an opportunity to weigh the value of that efficacious influence. III. Revisiting the Ring Where Portia’s success in the courtroom establishes her persuasive aptitude, the ensuing ring trick serves either to buttress her ingenuity, or mar her feminine strength. In a male-dominated society, any influential strength granted to the female must be constrained, and anxiety surrounding a woman’s fidelity is a certain way to achieve this end. The masculine superstructure requires an abiding anxiety in order for masculine identity to persevere, and this brings to mind Cynthia Marshall’s theory of the early modern “paradoxical wish for self-shattering” where, “[i]n the pursuit of pleasure, the subject, in other respects so eager to build up and maintain conscious control, seeks a dissolution of boundaries” (Shattering 50). The male 24 See Knapp, 119, and Dawson, 27. As I mention in my previous chapter, I aim to see how the Virgin Mary’s own efficacy functions within the theological-psychological framework that Knapp and Dawson explore.

76

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

subject seeks this “dissolution of [self] boundaries” in order to arrive at an anxious existence, one that both maintains and justifies his masculine identity. In this vein, Portia’s ring trick serves to provoke masculine anxiety, and this propels the men to exert control over their wives as a means of reaffirming their masculinity. While Portia’s ring symbolizes her physical and emotional worth as she describes it in the casket scene (3.2.171–4), it is also of course a bawdy pun for genitalia in the closing act of the play. When the ring moves from Portia to Bassanio to Gratiano to Balthasar to Antonio and back to Bassanio, then, we find that Portia is being passed around. In its travels, Newman argues, the ring “accumulates other meanings and associations: cuckoldry and thus female unruliness, female genitalia, woman’s changeable nature and so-called animal temperament, her deceptiveness and potential subversion of the rules of possession and fidelity that insure the male line” (31). This is enough to make any husband anxious. It comes as no surprise, then, that Gratiano’s closing lines—“Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring” (5.1.305–6)—evince masculine misgivings about feminine sexuality, and reveal his intent to control Nerissa’s “ring.” While Portia’s intercession is fruitful, and while she exhibits canniness in devising the ring trick, some critics feel that the play ultimately reinforces masculinity. By the play’s end, Leventen argues, Portia exhibits “gender-appropriate behavior” (74), and Parten contends that, as an audience, we have a “guarantee” that Portia will “behave herself” (154). These critics would have us believe that Portia’s subversive power is for naught. Indeed, even though M. Lindsay Kaplan argues that Portia “effectively subsumes everyone to her control,” she goes on to say that the “strength of Portia’s position is undermined by the final lines of Gratiano” (356). In the end, Kaplan says, “woman’s sexuality is commodified into an object that her husband controls” (356). But Jean Howard points to a very interesting dimension of Portia’s power in the ring trick. Although Portia’s actions “hardly dismantle the sex-gender system,” Howard argues, her “ability—through her impersonation of a man—to remain a married virgin and to set the terms for the loss of her virginity is a remarkable feat” (“Crossdressing” 433). Of course, this “feat” is only possible through the ring trick. Thus, the play’s quandary regarding Portia’s sexuality in light of her clear success as a female intercessor potentially speaks to the cultural ambivalence regarding feminine strength and female, if not Marian, intercession. Although the Virgin Mary’s own intercessory availabilities allow her to be construed as indiscriminate—as I illustrated earlier in this chapter—her sexuality is a different matter. I return, then, to Calvin’s assertion that Scripture is “perfectly silent” respecting intercession, to demonstrate how Reformers were forced to undermine their own platform of scriptural purity. Scripture is perfectly silent respecting Mary’s perpetual virginity as well, and yet this tenet survives the Reformation. Because Mary is the only guarantor of Christ’s Incarnation, the early Christian church emphasized her physical purity despite the absence of scriptural evidence on the subject. Erasmus criticized the Catholic tendency to allegorize the Bible to justify

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

77

belief in the Virgin Mary’s intercessory power, but he was never able to validate the tenuous allegorical claim that Mary had remained a perpetual virgin all her life. On this issue, Erasmus simply conceded, “We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is not expounded in the sacred books” (Halkin 225). His stance was taken by all leading Reformers, including even avowed scriptural purists like Calvin who discounted Catholic efforts to read Mary into multiple scriptural sites, since the simultaneity of Christ’s human and divine nature hinged on Mary’s perpetual virginity. For this reason, MacCulloch tells us, leading Reformers treated the Virgin Mary with “kid gloves,” and Calvin himself “shared the insistence of all Protestant Reformers on one very surprising reaffirmation of traditional Catholic doctrine, that Mary had remained a virgin not only in the birth of Jesus Christ but throughout her life: She was ‘ever virgin’” (Reformation 592). It was a rather soft approach in an otherwise hard-line attack against Catholic manipulation of Scripture. I point to this post-Reformation view of the Virgin Mary to show how even her sexuality is a matter of debate. The Virgin Mary’s power traverses the divine and earthly, and this simultaneous preeminence and accessibility provides fodder for the believer and the skeptic alike. Although Reformers took strides to restrict the Virgin Mary’s influence, her unique and enduring status as a perpetual virgin despite childbearing infuses her with extraordinary power.25 Mary’s title of Theotokos, “God-bearer,” affords her a puissance unavailable to Portia or any other female. Thus, Mary’s exceptional status leaves only the earthly female vulnerable because where the Virgin Mary’s virginity cannot be questioned, the ordinary female— however virginal she might be—can always be denigrated by being fashioned as promiscuous. In this promiscuous light, female influence appears to be lost. But when we take into account, as Howard does, “Portia’s ability … to remain a married virgin,” we find something incredibly provocative about Portia’s strength. Indeed, both Portia’s intercessory strength and sexual autonomy are celebrated in the closing moments of the play: Antonio acknowledges the positive value of Portia’s intercession—“Sweet lady, you have given me life and living” (5.1.285)— and then Bassanio expresses his desire to be Portia’s “bedfellow” (5.1.283). And although Bassanio’s remark could insinuate his intent to have sex with Portia, it also suggests equality between the two characters. As Bassanio’s “bedfellow,” Portia is imagined to be on equal gendered footing with her male counterpart, even if she is clearly above him. As an audience we recognize that Portia’s is a strength, as I mention earlier, that is sui generis—a self-generated intercessory strength, and one where the subversive dimension of her sexuality is not anchored in the fact that she might be unfaithful in marriage, but rather that, through the ring trick, she maintains the right to be virginal in marriage. Thus, Shakespeare accords Portia persuasive power and sexual autonomy. In this regard, Portia’s puissance is akin to that of the Virgin Mary, and, for a post-Reformation audience, her strength (what Parten describes as a “superfeminine” gift) could be construed as threatening I discuss this “extraordinary power” in greater detail in the chapter that follows.

25

78

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

to the masculine superstructure. Portia, like the Virgin Mary, has the power to destabilize that structure, and thus both Bassanio and the audience must believe in her gracious nature—we must trust in her willingness to consummate the marriage and relent control—in order for the comedy to succeed.26 In the end, Portia is left holding all the cards. IV. “Grace is grace despite of all controversy”: Influence, Inefficacy, and Isabella As in the case with Portia, my intent here is not to posit Isabella as the Virgin Mary, but rather as a vehicle through whom Marian and feminine influence is measured. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare revisits the role of the female intercessor and underwrites Isabella’s influence with Marian strength only to gesture at the futility of the system of intercession in the face of the larger providential framework. When Lucio quips, “Grace is grace despite of all controversy” (1.2.23), he not only draws attention to the post-Reformation mercurial response to competing views of predestination, but he also highlights the unequivocal nature of God’s grace. This latter view of God’s grace, of course, renders Marian intercession inessential. We find this parallel in the play, then, since Duke Vincentio’s ostensible omniscience suggests that the outcome is predetermined—that Claudio’s deliverance is sealed, as it were—and thus Isabella’s intercession is for naught. But, as the remainder of this chapter will show, the play consistently glances at the cultural desire for, and belief in, the potency of feminine intercession in the seeming absence of masculine mercy. In this way, then, the play stages the ambivalence about the Virgin Mary’s delimited role in post-Reformation thought by scrutinizing the perceived value of female intercession in a world anxious about masculine control and providential design. There is no shortage of intercessors and acts of intercession in Measure for Measure. Characters who either stand in the place of, or mediate for, others include Angelo (who represents the person of Duke Vincentio in his absence), Lucio (who acts as a go-between for Claudio and Isabella), Mariana (who stands in the place 26 In “Merry, Marry, Mary: Shakespearean Wordplay and Twelfth Night,” Thomas Rist raises a remarkable argument addressing the path to marriage in Shakespearian comedy. By scrutinizing wordplay in Twelfth Night that evokes Marianism, Rist arrives at the possibility that the play’s end offers a vision of a “spiritual marriage”—one where “virginity might be preserved” (90). Rist presents a convincing case for the way Shakespeare imagines an idealized return to the “Golden Age” where the play leaves us “two pairs of four virgins” (90)—Viola, Orsino, Olivia, and Sebastian. In other words, even through the lens of a virginal marriage, that comedy succeeds. In the case of The Merchant of Venice, however, I see the explicit attention to sexuality at the close as an indication of desire for consummation. The sexual wordplay at the play’s end is in stark opposition to the spiritual discourse that Rist locates at the close of Twelfth Night. However, like Rist—who sees in the potential for a spiritual marriage an “answer to the conflict” that Viola and Olivia feel about marriage and love—I also feel Shakespeare opens the door for Portia to have an option. Indeed, she has the ability to “choose.”

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

79

of Isabella), and Escalus and the Provost (who both argue for leniency where Claudio’s fate is concerned). But the two chief intercessors, of course, are Isabella and Duke Vincentio. If The Merchant of Venice juxtaposes the efficacy of Portia’s intercession with the inefficacy of male intercession, Measure for Measure appears to empty the entire system of intercession of power. Both Isabella and the Duke are adept in their intercessory arguments, but in the end Isabella’s influence is worthless because the outcome has been predetermined, and the Duke’s own intercession, as Friar Lodowick, is essentially inconsequential since he is the actual authoritative figure and judge. The play’s end, then, is of absolute importance since the many characters in the play are transformed in significant ways, but any hope and/or anxiety surrounding the efficacy of intercession is ultimately neutralized when we recognize that the events were outwardly preordained.27 However, by drawing attention to the issue of intercession—and the mutable nature of masculine authority in Vienna—the play appears to highlight the enduring desire for, and belief in, the influential nature of female intercession in the face of masculine intolerance. In large part, as this chapter will show, Isabella’s willingness to intercede is not only showcased, but is also rendered acutely efficacious where perceptions of the power of mercy are concerned. At the outset of this chapter, I noted that Calvin’s insistence that those who advocated for saintly intercession only did so because they feared “Christ could fail of success, or be too severe in the business.” Most early modern Protestant preachers, Beth Kreitzer notes, repeatedly warned: “Mary is not our mediator or intercessor before God … rather, Mary has received grace from God, and this story [i.e. the Annunciation] should make us thankful for God’s graciousness toward us” (35). The consistent argument was that veneration to Mary—including continued belief in her intercessory potential—usurped Christ’s power (Peters 217–18). The crux, then, was trusting in God’s grace. Primers produced in the early stages of the English Reformation adapted the Marian prayer, “Salve Regina, Mater Misericordiae” to read, “Hail Holy King, father of Mercy” (Duffy, Stripping 445). To what end the inculcation of faith in God’s paternal grace was accomplished in post-Reformation England is difficult to assess. But, as Marotti argues, “the Marian presence in English culture was hard to eliminate, given some of the human psychological and emotional needs it satisfied” (“Forward” xvi). Indeed, Mary’s compassion at the hour of one’s death had a long tradition in the lives of Christians. In this regard, then, Shakespeare takes the reader to the brink of Claudio’s death in Measure for Measure—as he did with Antonio in The Merchant of Venice—to illustrate how the feminine form of compassion often overshadows, and offers more than, patriarchal grace. Unlike the scenario in The Merchant of Venice where Marian intercession is re-imagined through Portia’s unsolicited intervention, in Measure for Measure 27 I say “outwardly preordained” because the Duke, as Carolyn Brown suggests, is “not a flawless providential figure” (194). Although his omniscience only goes so far, the idea of a providential design is certainly in place.

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

80

Isabella is called upon to intercede. Claudio urges Lucio to employ his sister as an intercessor, describing her as one with “a prone and speechless dialect / Such as move men,” and adding that when it comes to reason and discourse, “well she can persuade” (1.2.160–63). Isabella’s visual appeal and rhetorical skill, it seems, position her as a natural advocate. Lucio greets Isabella by saying, “Hail, virgin” (1.4.16), and this closely parallels the Angel Gabriel’s greeting to the Virgin Mary: “Hail, thou that are highly favored” (Luke 1:28)28—a salutation that also marks the opening of the Ave Maria: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” As a virgin who is described as “enskied and sainted” (1.4.33), then, Isabella is invested with Mary’s symbolic strength at the moment that she is employed to intercede on her brother’s behalf.29 In this intercessory role, however, Isabella is maneuvered and fashioned according to the will of the men of Vienna. Calling to mind the danger that Jewel, Crashaw, and Naogeorgus point to—where Catholic reverence for the Virgin Mary inevitably casts her in the role of a commanding mother, or even worse, a promiscuous intercessor—I find that the play undercuts Isabella’s intercessory strength by collapsing her rhetorical potency with her perceived seductiveness. For instance, although Lucio initially appeals to Isabella’s “grace” and “power” (1.4.68, 75), he focuses on her visual allure during her actual intercession. When Angelo—who has been entrusted with the laws of Vienna and the fate of Claudio— first denies Isabella’s request to spare Claudio’s life, she answers, “Oh, just but severe law! / I had a brother, then. Heaven keep your honour” (2.2.41–2). This is hardly the fervor one would hope for his/her intercessor to exhibit, but Lucio insists, “Give’t not o’er so. To him again; entreat him! / Kneel down before him; hang upon his gown. / You are too cold” (2.2.43–5). He urges a balance of ardor and humility—subservient posturing mixed with passionate speech. Lucio attempts to fashion Isabella as a visual icon of sorts, and he appears to rely on the strength of her physicality rather than her rhetorical power. As Isabella continues, Lucio persists in providing cues as if he were in control of the would-be intercessor.

I have used the King James Version (1611) here, but most Reformation/postReformation English bibles translate the line in a similar manner. Both the Bishop’s Bible (1568) and the Geneva Bible (1587) read, “Hayle, thou that art freelie beloved” with minor spelling differences. Pre-Reformation versions, however, seem to keep the traditional, “Hail, full of grace.” For an example, see Tyndale’s New Testament (1525). 29 Barbara J. Baines writes, “Even Lucio’s somewhat blasphemous salutation, ‘Hail, virgin,’ suggests that through her chastity Isabella mirrors heaven’s queen, the Virgin Mary.” Further, she finds that the males in the play perceive chastity as a prelude to charity, which “operates like grace and is, in turn, protected by grace” (288). Grace is thus imagined as reciprocal between the intercessor and the figure of authority—akin to the Roman Catholic view of the relationship between God and Mary where, through God’s grace, Mary is a granted intercessory power. Although one can argue that Lucio’s lines are invested with irony (since it would be in his character), the rhetorical construction of Isabella is fraught with saintly descriptions that evoke a Marian element to her character. 28

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

81

However, the force of Isabella’s intercession is hardly anchored in her visual appeal or in Lucio’s direction, but rather in the substance of her argument.30 As a female intercessor, Isabella undertakes an approach that resembles Portia’s own initial argument in the courtroom scene—she focuses on the power of mercy (2.2.60–65). But where Portia abandons her appeal to Shylock only to outmaneuver him, Isabella persists in her attempt to transform Angelo. “I would to heaven I had your potency,” Isabella says to Angelo, “And you were Isabel!” (1.2.69–70). Beneath the flattery, we find that Isabella imagines simultaneously appropriating Angelo’s strength and casting him in the role of the female. Isabella’s move resembles the female intercessor’s conceptual usurpation of the authoritative figure—she threatens to be the “Scepter chiefe” of Naogeorgus’ imagination (L4r).31 But Isabella’s immediate audience is not threatened by her feminine strength. Lucio urges Isabella, “Ay, touch him; there’s the vein” (2.2.73), and later the Provost adds, “Pray heaven she win him!” (2.2.128). The men espouse Isabella’s persuasive potency because her success in assuaging Angelo’s strident authority—indeed, his “precise” (1.3.50), or puritanical disposition—not only affects Claudio, but the community at large. In other words, in the face of that puritanical and obdurate worldview, the community appears to rally behind a merciful advocate. In the role of advocate, Isabella’s initial argument aims at conceiving of a fellowship under God’s merciful rule, and this move appears to be in line with the Protestant platform. However, as I argued in Chapter 1, the early modern English desire for a Christian fellowship was often undermined by the conflicting views of Christianity, and often undercut by pointing at Catholic superstition and Mariolatry. For example, English clergyman Thomas Rogers—who was sympathetic to the Puritan movement early in his career—discusses the idolatry of Catholicism in his tract, An historical dialogue touching antichrist and poperie (1589).32 In this work, two professors of the gospel, Timothie and Zelotes, discuss the erroneous nature of the “faith professed in the church of Rome” (C3v). Timothie argues: [T]hrough th’intercession of sainct Marie, by Christ we obtaine mercie at th’andes of God; in hir is an infinite treasure of wisedome and grace for them that will seeke and sue for the same unto hir; Shee is of soveraigne glorie and majestie with God; shee the conquerour and over-commer of th’infernall enemies; & shee

Indeed, Jessica Slights and Michael Morgan Holmes argue, “Rather than deploying the ‘speechless dialect’ of body language—rather than throwing herself at Angelo’s feet and hanging upon his gown—Isabella attempts to win over the deputy by appealing to his reason and faith, relying on rhetorical skill and ethical argument instead of on physical seduction to persuade him” (227). 31 See footnote 5 in this chapter. 32 For Thomas Rogers’s affinity for Puritanism, see John Craig, “Rogers, Thomas (c. 1553–1616),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. At the time that this tract was written, Rogers was still sympathetic toward the Puritan movement, and he also adopted a platform of anti-theatricalism. 30

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

82

our Advocate, to make request, and to pleade for mercie on behalfe of mankind. And what is this els, than to say that shee is our Saviour? for these offices, and averie of them are due onelie and alwaies to the Saviour of man. (C3v–C4r)

Shortly after, Zelotes affirms the weight of this argument: “If to say that sainct Marie is th’originall of our salvation, the recoverer of grace and forgivenes; our hope, our salvation, our resurrection, be to make her, and not Christ the saviour of mankinde: the Papistes maker her, and not Christ our Saviour. For those be their wordes of the Virgin Mary.” Timothie responds, “O Antichristian impietie!” (C4r). Given their belief in Marian intercession, Rogers argues, Catholics exhibited a form of godlessness. From this view, it was either God’s grace and authority alone or nothing at all. As “a man of stricture and firm abstinence,” then, Angelo’s “absolute power” in Vienna affirms a similarly stringent view of patriarchal authority (1.3.12–13). As I previously note, he is aligned with a precise/puritanical form of thought. Isabella’s attempt to soften Angelo’s strict justice, then, would likely be embraced by theatergoing Englishmen and women who were obviously unconvinced by a “puritan” sense of strict discipline.33 However, despite her intercessory and/or Marian significance, Isabella’s argument points directly to the potency of God’s mercy: Why, all the souls that were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy. How would you be If He which is the top of judgment should But judge you as you are? O, think on that, And mercy then will breathe within your lips, Like man new made. (2.2.75–81)

By invoking the fall of man only to emphasize Christ’s redemption of mankind, Isabella invites Angelo to imagine himself as part of that larger community under God’s divine grace. The key, it seems, is trust in God’s merciful nature, and in believing in the potential of the men of Vienna to be “new made.” This, of course, revisits the controversy surrounding divine grace—is one’s salvation predetermined, or do one’s actions in life matter where salvation is concerned? In the face of this uncertainty, it would appear that grace is not always grace. In the Roman Catholic tradition, Mary is the final intercessor before death, and therefore it is not surprising to find that in England’s Reformed funeral practice, the omission of prayers to the Virgin Mary and the regulation of the service through sanctioned prayers was “one of the areas where feeling remained most conservative” (Duffy, Stripping 578). The Reformed funeral service, Duffy I argue “obviously unconvinced” because, as Paul Whitfield White argues, the attempt to displace the theater was identified as a “puritan” campaign (166). However, White also argues that leading up to James’s accession, Protestant church leaders “came around to accepting playgoing as suitable recreation … . This is why it was possible for Renaissance theatre historians to speak of ‘Puritan’ stage patrons, playwrights, and audiences” (173). 33

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

83

explains, “required the minister to declare of every one he buried that they died ‘in sure and certain hope’ of salvation” (Stripping 590). Dissent arose because ministers refused to read over the bodies of drunkards and adulterers, and we can infer that traditionalists feared that all sinners might not have “certain hope” of salvation. Indeed, the Catholic practice of “the ringing of peals both before funerals and on All Souls’ eve, to elicit prayers for the dead” continued well into Elizabeth’s reign (Stripping 577). For those who lacked Calvin’s confidence and found themselves anxious about the afterlife, the promise behind the Virgin Mary’s intercession must have been of incredible importance. If, as Claudio says, man’s nature leads him to pursue and drink a “thirsty evil” like “rats that raven down their proper bane” (1.2.108–10), then the merits of merciful grace are certainly brought into question. It is as though the play highlights the ubiquity of sinfulness so as to disrupt confidence in merciful rule, or even worse, to fracture confidence in God’s grace. For his part, and rather ironically, Angelo cannot conceive of a fellowship with that kind of poisonous man. “Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son,” Angelo says, “It should be thus with him. He must die tomorrow” (2.2.83–4). Angelo’s unbending authority evinces a heightened sense of masculinity, and a God-like control. He seems to redefine, or reinforce, notions of stern masculine authority, and herein we find the limits of feminine influence since Isabella is never able to convince Angelo to exercise mercy. Paradoxically, it is Isabella’s intent to employ a female community in an intercessory practice reminiscent of Roman Catholic tradition that ultimately convinces Angelo to entertain her suit. Isabella says she will “bribe” Angelo (2.2.148), and then swiftly explains her intent: Not with fond shekels of the tested gold, Or stones, whose rate are either rich or poor As fancy values them; but with true prayers, That shall be up at heaven and enter there Ere sunrise, prayers from preservèd souls; From fasting maids whose minds are dedicate To nothing temporal. (2.2.152–7)

She means to bribe Angelo with the intercessory prayers of the nuns of Saint Clare. It is important to note that Isabella draws attention to the absence of material offerings as a part of that intercessory act, and thus she clears a space to imagine the value of intercessory prayer alone. Through her invocation of a female community of intercessors, Isabella’s appeal for mercy begins to work. Where her physical intercession fails (despite Lucio’s incessant direction), the promise of divine intercession appears to appease Angelo. “Well,” Angelo ultimately says, “come to me tomorrow” (2.2.159). As critics have pointed out, Isabella’s connection to the nuns of Saint Clare, and her desire to disassociate herself from the world of Vienna, affords her a subversive strength. Marc Shell, for example, suggests that Isabella sublimates her “sisterly fear of earthly incest” by entering a Sisterhood of spiritual incest, but he is quick

84

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

to acknowledge that even her conceptual incest threatens to subvert the patriarchal hierarchy (70). Janet Adelman points to Isabella’s chastity as a seeming “solution” to the problem of Vienna’s sexuality only to recognize that “the embodiment of sanctuary in the person of Isabella awakens the desire it would suppress” (Suffocating Mothers 90). And Jessica Slights and Michael Morgan Holmes argue that Isabella’s “spiritual desires” are a source of power to “resist marital disciplinary measures”— resistance that ultimately unearths the potential of religion to offer a “dynamic zone of self-assertion and cultural critique” (265, 292). Apparently, and unlike the critical view of Portia that I outline earlier in this chapter, there is no end to Isabella’s subversion.34 But where these critics seek to measure Isabella’s subversive power in her desire for “a more strict restraint” (1.4.4), I instead seek to measure the potency and/or ineffectuality of Isabella’s active intercession within the world of Vienna. It is in her confrontation with, and not her abandonment of, the masculine superstructure in Vienna that her potency is to be found. Although Isabella intends to employ the intercessory prayers of the Catholic nuns of Saint Clare (almost certain to have hit a nerve for Shakespeare’s Protestant audience), it is her own intercessory role that threatens patriarchal omniscience. This is to say, Isabella’s intercessory success stands to undermine Duke Vincentio’s design where Angelo will “strike home” in judgment (1.3.41). She poses a challenge to Vienna’s imagined return to lawful order, and yet the community at large does not view her as a threat. Instead, it is Angelo’s strict interpretation of the law and his ensuing “desire to raze the sanctuary” (2.2.175) that is deemed hostile, and thus he is the one who provokes the audience’s hope that feminine intercession will indeed prove efficacious.35 In this way, then, the play gestures at the cultural ambivalence about the simultaneous threat and allure of feminine and/or Marian intercession. Angelo’s hypocritical actions illustrate the dangers of overzealous authority, and this in turn arouses the hope that female intercession has the potential to mitigate such tyranny. The very rhetoric employed where Angelo stands to “raze the sanctuary” invokes the sixteenth-century iconoclasm where Marian icons and shrines of worship were indeed razed. But, as I have illustrated with the post-Reformation polemical response to Marian strength, the Virgin Mary was not erased from 34 On the other hand, Jonathan Dollimore explains that the play’s treatment of Isabella unveils a conflict within the patriarchal order—Church-sanctioned renunciation versus subjugation by secular authority. “The latter wins,” Dollimore argues, “and it is Isabella’s fate to be coerced back into her socially and sexually subordinate position” (83). This, of course, depends on the belief that Isabella is indeed “coerced” into marriage. As I argue later in this chapter, Isabella’s silence is incredibly important to our understanding of seeing secular authority as the ultimate victor. In other words, we simply do not know if the coercion is successful. 35 For example, Kathleen McKluskie writes, “Through Lucio and the provost the text makes us want her to win. However, the terms of her victory are also defined by the rhetoric and structure of the scene. A woman pleading with a man introduces an element of sexual conflict which is made explicit in the bawdy innuendo of Lucio’s remarks (II.ii.123–4)” (96).

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

85

England’s cultural psyche; instead, she remained a topic of controversy long after her images had been broken—she was re-imagined as both dangerous and incredibly provocative. Aligning the Virgin Mary with what is “false, and untrue” was a means of calling into question, if not outright delimiting, her enduring influence. Thus, when Angelo admits, “Never could the strumpet, / With all her double vigour—art and nature—/ Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid / Subdues me quite” (2.2.187–90), his words identify both the fraudulent nature of the promiscuous female and the seductiveness of Isabella’s chastity, but they also gesture at a more general view of the powerful essence of virtuous virgins. Given the religious intonations of the play, the potent nature of the v/Virgin’s influence is recognizable. For her part, Isabella unwittingly seduces Angelo with her purity, and his immediate impulse is to rape her. Indeed, the play itself repeatedly fractures the initial image of Isabella as “a thing enskied and sainted” intent on a life of celibacy by emphasizing her seductive nature. As in the case of the Virgin Mary, where Protestant polemicists sought to diminish her strength by stressing the danger of her seduction, Isabella’s intercessory strength is severely undermined by the men who seek to fashion, if not defile, her by emphasizing her physical value. Angelo’s tyrannical ultimatum parallels the transgressive dimension of a society that partially built its foundation on iconoclasm—on metaphorically hurting the seeming idol.36 It is not enough for Angelo simply to reject Isabella’s intercessory request, but instead he must transform Isabella into the whore that he fears he might become.37 Angelo appears genuinely confounded by the sexual desire that Isabella provokes within him. He admittedly takes pride in his “gravity” (2.4.9–10), but he proceeds in his design to rape Isabella with the knowledge of his hypocrisy insofar as God is in his “mouth” while in his “heart the strong and swelling evil” of original sin (2.4.4–6). What I find particularly provocative is the way Angelo describes how Isabella’s virtue and presence fracture his own stringent devotion. “When I would pray and think, I think and pray / To several subjects,” Angelo says, “heaven hath my empty words, / Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue, / Anchors on Isabel” (2.4.1–4). In other words, Angelo is unable to focus his devotion on God alone. In her role as intercessor, Isabella begins to absorb reverence due to God— reverence that Angelo specifically identifies as prayer. This appears to parallel the The violence behind sixteenth-century iconoclasm had profound consequences for the early modern conception of self. See, for example, Cynthia Marshall who argues, “The violence accompanying the establishment of new forms of religious and state authority gives vivid testimony to the uneasiness or even terror with which many people in the early modern era confronted their autonomous existence… . In fact, the contradiction between autonomy and instability defined the emerging subject” (Shattering 14). 37 This reminds me of Bynum, who argues that “the attitudes of a man toward the feminine (as distinct from women) may reflect not so much his attitudes toward his mother, his sister, females in his community, what attracts him sexually, and so forth, as his sense of the feminine aspects of himself” (167–8). 36

86

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

post-Reformation views of the way Marian devotion subsumes reverence to God. Interestingly, though, the onus is placed on the would-be believer and not on the seductive nature of the virtuous virgin. Angelo is aware of what is ethical, and yet he is unable to curb his desire for Isabella. In no uncertain terms, Angelo describes his sinfulness and corruption as being anchored in his misplaced devotion to Isabella. However, instead of rectifying his own splintered religious righteousness, Angelo proceeds in his intent to corrupt Isabella. He willingly wears the mark of “‘good angel’ on the devil’s horn” (2.4.16). I recognize that Angelo is at the extreme end of the misogynistic spectrum, but his treatment of Isabella is indicative of the way in which the men of Vienna exploit Isabella’s virtue. For example, when Claudio confronts his finite existence— when, like Antonio, he faces the hour of his death—he urges Isabella to submit to Angelo’s demands: “Sweet sister, let me live. / What sin you do to save a brother’s life, / Nature dispenses with the deed so far / That it becomes a virtue” (3.1.134–7). At that particular moment, Claudio desires any kind of intercession, and in this way he corrupts a tradition that—however banal personal petitions may have been under the Roman Catholic practice—once enjoyed the utmost reverence. Claudio bewhores his intercessor, and in the process he perverts the entire practice of intercession. In his desire to redefine and debase the act of merciful intercession, Claudio in turn corrupts the intercessor herself. In the aftermath of that near perversion, Isabella tells Claudio, “I’ll pray a thousand prayer for thy death, / No word to save thee” (3.1.147–8). Isabella aims to intercede through prayer, but these prayers are unmercifully aimed at the hope of ending her brother’s life. But in her extremity of speech, Isabella forces Shakespeare’s audience to contemplate the worth of intercession—indeed, to consider the very value of the female intercessor—and one’s own role within or without that intercessory design. Claudio pleads, “Nay, hear me, Isabel,” and later, “O hear me, Isabel” (3.1.149, 154), but his petitions fall on deaf ears. In the absence of feminine compassion, the prospect of deliverance from death in this scene is rather bleak. Indeed, the disguised Duke says to Claudio, “Do not falsify your resolution with hopes that are fallible. Tomorrow you must die” (3.1.169–70). Like the early modern believers who were urged to subscribe to a Calvinistic outlook, Claudio must, at this point, put his trust in God’s grace. I return once again to Calvin’s idea of intercession being born from anxiety surrounding severe judgment because Measure for Measure appears to showcase that particular anxiety while seemingly allaying this fear by the play’s end. In its comedic form, the play restores order (or disorder), and yet one can hardly argue that the play values mercy or intercession. When Isabella says to Claudio, “Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd” (3.1.152), she calls attention to the way in which the play trivializes notions of mercy and female intercession. Her view is akin to Naogeorgus’ claim that Roman Catholic believers bewhored the Virgin Mary by believing that she would promiscuously answer any and all prayers. However, as I previously explain, even in the “Order for the Burial of the Dead” from the 1559 Book of Common Prayer—the prayer book of Shakespeare’s England—believers

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

87

are assured that everyone is buried in “sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life” (310). In this light, God appears somewhat liberal in his own mercy. The crux, of course, is the inclusion of “hope” in that promised “resurrection to eternal life,” for it leaves ambiguous the guarantee at hand while subtly reinforcing the Calvinist view of predestination. Hope is a far cry from certainty, and thus the anxiety surrounding salvation could very well remain. By creating an atmosphere of uncertainty in Measure for Measure, then, the Duke appears to set the stage to reveal the potency behind his grace, and to emphasize the grandeur of his own mercy. On the surface, the Duke “intercedes” to help Isabella out of her bind, to secure the marriage of Angelo to Mariana, and to save Claudio from Angelo’s harsh judgment. But his intercessory role is a fallacy. He has the power to affect the outcome without his imagined intercessory design. What we find within that patriarchal design is deception, scheming, and the exploitation of both Isabella and Mariana to arrive at a desired end. Despite the ultimate “deliverance” of Claudio, the world of Vienna is hardly rectified by the play’s end. Angelo is forced to marry the woman he has scorned, Lucio must marry a whore he has impregnated, and Isabella must marry the Duke despite her desire to enter a cloister. When the Duke says, “That life is better life, past fearing death, / Than that which lives to fear” (5.1.389–90), then, he gestures at the very disquietude of life itself. Indeed, the aforementioned characters would appear to fear the life before them, and thus the only comfort to be found seems to be the Duke’s own comfort. However, against the backdrop of confusion in the closing moments of the play we also bear witness to the empathetic nature, and merciful capacity of Isabella as a willing intercessor. Her unfailing mercy is set against the distorted version of the Duke’s “merciful” design.38 In desperation, Mariana turns to Isabella for succor, and urges her to argue in behalf of Angelo. Incredulously, the Duke says to Mariana, “Against all sense do you importune her” (5.1.425). He cannot imagine a merciful nature of that quality. But against all sense, Isabella forgives the “adulterous thief” and “virgin-violator” (5.1.40–41), as she exemplifies the very mercy that she herself initially promotes. Of significance is the fact that Isabella is, once again, employed as a visual icon when Mariana says, “Sweet Isabel, do yet but kneel by me. / Hold up your hands; say nothing; I’ll speak all” (5.1.429–30). Mariana, too, seeks to maneuver the intercessor as she finds fit. And yet, it is Isabella and not Mariana who speaks to intercede for the man who was intent on violating her: Look, if it please you, on this man condemned As if my brother lived. I partly think A due sincerity governed his deeds, Till he did look on me. Since it is so, Let him not die. My brother had but justice, In that he did the thing for which he died. 38 In a similar vein, Brown argues that the Duke “has sacrificed [Isabella’s] image as a saint to preserve his image as a glorious ruler” (216).

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

88

For Angelo, His act did not o’ertake his bad intent, And must be buried but as an intent That perished by the way. Thoughts are no subjects, Intents but merely thoughts. (5.1.436–46)

As in the case with Portia’s interpretation of Shylock’s contract, Isabella here underscores that which is absent—that is, Angelo’s non-act of violation. But unlike Portia, Isabella extends compassion to include even the worst sinner as she seeks to redeem the man she cast as the “devil” himself (5.1.29). In line with Warner’s depiction of the Virgin Mary, Isabella is—at least in this moment—the “true champion of sinners.” Illustrating the full capacity of her empathetic potential, Isabella recognizes that Angelo’s acts were sincere until he did “look on” her. The play’s emphasis on the influential nature of Isabella’s visual magnetism cannot be overlooked. Again, Isabella is lauded for her “speechless dialect” before she enters onstage, and it is rather fitting, then, that she herself recognizes her ability to engender falseness based on her visual appeal in the closing moments of the play. To some extent, the play’s attention to the corruptive nature of the visible female body speaks to the Reformation anxiety surrounding the affective power of images.39 Shakespeare glances through the lens of antitheatricalists who saw the physical body of the actor as a source of sexual temptation. Given the affective capability of the image of the body, as Michael O’Connell provocatively questions, “What could the eye look upon with impunity?” (33). In her speech, Isabella recognizes this danger, and yet it is not her seductive physicality that captivates the audience in these closing moments, but rather the very weight of her willingness to forgive. In line with the Protestant platform of valuing the word over the image, Isabella’s verbal response is what matters most. We are asked to look past the kneeling image, and consider the promise of mercy—“against all sense”—that the female intercessor offers. Amid what Slights and Holmes describe as the “troubling points of resistance to closure” (285) that the end of Measure for Measure presents, Isabella’s compassion challenges the forceful tone of patriarchal authority. She seems to offer hope by concurrently exhibiting and encouraging forgiveness. And even if her intercession is rendered, as the Duke says, “unprofitable” (5.1.448), Isabella is ultimately afforded the opportunity to state her case, and to show, first hand, how potent true forgiveness and mercy can be. Her mercy in the closing moments offers hope that is reminiscent of the Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition— one where, as Thomas Lodge suggests in Prosopopeia (1596), the Virgin Mary will say to God, “Let voice of my complaints pearce the heavens, and let the centre shake” (B3r). She is the kind of advocate that sinners, like those in Vienna, need. To silence Isabella, as the play does in the end, is seemingly to close the door to feminine influence. On the one hand, it is as if Shakespeare offers his audience a glimpse of the promise behind Isabella’s intercessory efficacy, only to suppress See, for example, Michael O’Connell, 30–33.

39

Marian Intercession and Intercessory Promiscuity

89

it and render it inefficacious. And yet, as we must trust in Portia’s willingness to consummate her marriage at the end of The Merchant of Venice, we must entertain the idea that Isabella will indeed renounce a life of chastity—an entry into what was, for Shakespeare’s audience, an imagined past—and comply with the Duke’s coercion for secular, patriarchal authority to succeed. Isabella must, as the Duke admits, “a willing ear incline” (5.1.529)—she must be receptive to his entreaty. This is more than we know, and in the end, it would appear, Isabella herself is also left holding all the cards.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 3

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear And the angel said unto her, Feare not Marie, for thou hast found favor with God. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy wombe, and bring forth a sonne, and shalt call his name Jesus. (Luke 1:30–31) Then sayde Mary vnto the angele, How shall this be, seeing I knowe not man? (Luke 1:34)

The reliance of the Gospel on Old Testament prophecy to shape the myth of Jesus’ genesis is as remarkable for its unfounded historicity as it is for its success in mythmaking. Through a network of careful design, Matthew links Jesus’ birth to Old Testament messianic divination. In a less obvious, and arguably more important way, Luke does the same while allowing Mary actual voice. One result is a nativity grounded in credible foretelling, but the second myth born of that story is that of the Virgin Mother. Although the Evangelists make brief reference to a virgin birth in an effort to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy—“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (Isaiah 7:14)—Mary’s virginity became central to Catholic dogma in the centuries that followed. The humanity of Christ hinged on Mary alone. Early debates surrounding Mary’s perpetual virginity arose because of the crucial question of Jesus’ dual nature—both human and divine; thus, the Catholic Church was forced to define Mary’s role in that dynamic. “Her unbroken virginity suspended the law of nature,” Marina Warner writes, “and thus manifested the presence of the divine, but her full parturition of Christ served to prove his manhood” (64). What appears to have been a psychic requirement for Mary’s purity slowly developed into Catholic dogma. The doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity was explored during early Catholic debates against Gnosticism, which argued that Jesus was a divine phantom, and Arianism, which believed Jesus to be merely an adopted son to God. Early in the fourth century, the Catholic Church found it necessary to clarify the issue of the Virgin Mary’s purity to define better Christ’s human and divine essence. The increasing importance placed on the purity of the Virgin Mary as early as the fifth

See, for example, Warner, 3–33. As I outline in the Introduction, Mary’s perpetual virginity was proclaimed at the

 

Second Council of Constantinople in 381, and ultimately declared official Church dogma under Pope Martin I in 649 (Warner 64–6).

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

92

century smoothed the way for the development of the cult of the Virgin Mary in the subsequent centuries. One might imagine that the steady development of Mary’s virginal status as extending beyond virginity in childbearing to virginity throughout life would provide Reformers with plenty of ammunition to attack a role developed sans scriptural foundation. However, Mary’s exceptional position as perpetual virgin endured in post-Reformation thought, since she was the only guarantee of Christ’s Incarnation. MacCulloch notes that all leading Protestant Reformers insisted that Mary was “ever-virgin” (Reformation 592). In a post-Reformation framework, Mary’s virtue and chastity in marriage are qualities worthy of female emulation. However, Mary’s physical virginity, and not her mere chastity, posits an interesting paradox—she is both faithful, and yet not quite a dutiful wife where Joseph is concerned. Although Reformers take strides to relegate the Virgin Mary to a marginal role, the unique, and certainly unnatural, quality of virginity in childbearing and married life infuses her with extraordinary power. More extraordinary, of course, is the Virgin Mary’s role as Theotokos. Mary herself understood the significance of having been chosen to bear Christ: “For hee hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for behold, from hencefoorth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). Indeed, Mary’s maternal dimension was something revered by Catholics and English Protestants alike. Through her exceptional position as Theotokos, Mary inhabits the transcendental role of mother to all Christians. In the way that Jesus’ death redeems the sinner, Luther argues, Mary’s motherhood redeems the mortal mother: “Therefore Eve the first mother is not my mother, for the same birth must totally die and fade away, since there is no more sin there; there must I place that mother Mary against the mother from whom I was born in sin” (Kreitzer 111). The psychological substitution of the maternal—where the Virgin Mary is capable of refashioning her symbolic, and sinful, sons—allows us to consider the strength of the Virgin Mary’s influence over the male believer. It is with the myth of the Virgin Mary’s extraordinary nature in mind that this chapter seeks to measure how early modern cultural views of the Virgin Mary, The debate over the Virgin Mary’s purity did not simply cease after her perpetual virginity became an official dogma of the Catholic Church in the seventh century. In Reforming Mary, Beth Kreitzer explains that Mary’s own genesis—that is, her immaculate conception—was the topic of debate in the thirteenth century when the highly influential Thomas Aquinas “objected to the immaculate conception on the grounds that she could not have been purified from sin until animation, and then her purification was still redemption through Christ” (14). The debate appears to have focused on limiting Christ’s universal redemption through the belief that Mary was free of any taint of sin. Franciscan theologian William of Ware defended Mary’s immaculate conception and launched a long-lasting debate on this issue, primarily against Dominicans. In the fifteenth century, the council of Basel (1431–1449) upheld the doctrine of Mary’s immaculate conception, but the debate apparently continued because the papacy forbade further discussion of the issue on pain of excommunication in 1482, 1483, and again in 1503 (Kreitzer 12–15). 

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

93

maternity, and virginity not only shape ideals of femininity, but also speak to the role of the Marian and feminine in the construction of masculine and religious identity. In Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, I argue, Shakespeare gestures at the influential nature of virgins, mothers, and the Virgin Mother as a means of interrogating otherwise phallocentric views of masculine identity. By examining anatomical theories of virginity, polemics outlining the role of chaste women and Protestant mothers, and Shakespeare’s own attention to misogynistic views of chaste women and mothers, I seek to uncover how perceptions of Marian purity and motherhood in Shakespeare’s great tragedies afford us a glimpse of the value of this kind of feminine influence on masculinity. The design of this chapter is to gauge the effect of Marian virginity and maternal strength on masculine identity in two parts. Part 1 examines perceptions of Marian purity and the early modern cultural preoccupation with idealized virginity through the “chaste” characters of Hamlet’s Ophelia, Othello’s Desdemona, and King Lear’s Cordelia. Like the Virgin Mary’s perpetual virginity in relation to Christ, the virginity of Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia—even if it is only imagined—is also employed as a means of shaping the masculine identity of their respective male counterparts. However, I suggest that the reconstruction of a woman’s identity to constitute virginity grants a specific power to these women since their imagined virginal status either suggests subversive subjectivity because they are not necessarily virgins, as in the case of Ophelia, or suggests subversive subjectivity because they are fashioned as such even in the state of matrimony, as in the ambiguous virginity of Desdemona and the evaded sexuality of Cordelia. In the case of the latter, I not only gesture at the way Cordelia’s imagined “purity” influences Lear’s manhood, but I also glance at the strength behind her imagined maternal dimension as a way of drawing attention to the Virgin Mary’s maternal efficacy—the focal point of the second part of this chapter. In Part 2, I shift attention to early modern views of maternal influence, and return to Othello and Hamlet to examine the enduring desire for Marian compassion. In direct dialogue with Janet Adelman’s landmark study, Suffocating Mothers, I deviate from Adelman by presenting the maternal not as a site of a male’s conceptual “fantasy of overwhelming contamination” (10), but instead as a liberating site of origin. I aim to uncover a masculine self-understanding absent of the fictive construction of the feminine as threatening. In the way that Luther re-imagines a self-liberation through maternal substitution of the Virgin Mary, I locate the potential for a positive maternal force through the rubric of Mary’s consummate maternal compassion. By confronting the maternal—either in her physical person or physical representations of the maternal body—Shakespeare’s male heroes Othello and Hamlet are able to locate a concurrent originating and ending maternal embrace that parallels the prevalent view of the Virgin Mary’s role in late medieval and early modern Catholic thought. I explore Othello’s nostalgia for his mother through the symbolic handkerchief, and situate that desire in his longing for maternal compassion. Thereafter, I revisit Hamlet—a play that Adelman believes to be the initiating Shakespearean moment in whose aftermath

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

94

“all sexual relationships will be tinged by the threat of the mother, all masculine identity problematically formed in relationship to her” (35)—to examine Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude. I suggest that maternal sexuality—although initially harrowing for Hamlet—ultimately leads Hamlet toward an identification shaped by the maternal and grounded in the Virgin Mary. Part 1 Virgins: “Woman was womb and womb was evil” The traditional Christian emphasis on the purity of virginity can be traced to God’s penalty in the Fall of Man where Eve, and all women thereafter, must endure the pangs of childbearing. In the early Catholic Church, flesh and sexuality were associated with sin, and virginity slowly grew into an antithesis to this tainted existence. In tracing the ideas of Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome on virginity, Marina Warner is led to deduce: “Woman was womb, and womb was evil” (57). It was only fitting, then, that the mother of the Son of God who came to save man from sin be set apart as virginal, and in direct opposition to Eve’s sinful sexuality. This view of virginity persisted throughout the centuries and became a founding facet of the ascetic movement in Catholicism. When Erasmus wrote to the Benedictine nuns of the Convent of the Machabees in Cologne, for example, he praised their celibacy at some length. This letter grew into his 1537 treatise entitled, “The Comparation of a Vyrgin and a Martyr.” In it, Erasmus makes a clear distinction between nubile virgins who will eventually marry and women who choose a life of perpetual virginity: These worldely virgyns settynge a syde the garlande of virginitie, do take and put uppon theym the mantell of mariage, without dout (as saynt Paule saythe) a playne token of bondage and thraldome. But virgins dedicate to god, be alwaye kepte close for theyr spouse, leste the worlde and aduoutrer shuld se theym. For Jesus is a jelous lover, he can not suffre to have his dere derlynges sette and shewed forthe to the syght of the worlde. But whether is it more plesante and more welthy to be the hande mayde of a maried manne, or the hande mayde of Christe? Ecce inquit, ancilla domini, Beholde (sayth she) the hand mayde of our lord. Who so ever is truely the hande mayde of our lorde, is lady of the world. (33–4)

Here, Erasmus carefully positions the worldly virgin as one who will be in thrall to her husband once she becomes his wife. In a similar vein, the virginal nun is also carefully watched over by a jealous Jesus eager to keep her from the sight of other men; however, the nun’s “bondage” is deemed positive because she is in a virginal state that resembles that of the Virgin Mary. Erasmus uses a woman’s physical  Desiderius Erasmus’s “Virginis et Martyris Comparatio” was first translated into English by Thomas Paynell and published in London in 1537.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

95

virginity to gauge her fidelity to Christ, and as a perpetual virgin who experiences Christ as a husband, the nun’s position is clearly “more plesante” than that of an ordinary, married wife. Indeed, through devoted virginity, a nun gains the world because her husband is Christ. Interestingly, Erasmus goes on to describe marriage as a state comparable to “worldly bondage” where young brides often marry men who “are froward and never contented, upon such as be curst and knavishe, upon dycers, drunkerdes, riotttous spenders … uppon fyghtyers, besydes many other more grevous and wycked condicions or diseases, which I speake not of” (34). If the fathers of the Church anchor the origin of sin in Eve, Erasmus appears to redirect that sin and evil to the husbands awaiting the chance to defile and oppress the worldly virgin through marriage. The husbands Erasmus describes are in a state of pollution and aligned with the sin of the world. In his design, man, and not woman, is the cause of evil sin, and virginity is the means to thwart that evil. Although Erasmus, like the Reformers who followed him, was critical of the cult of the Virgin Mary, he appears to place Mary at the pinnacle of virginal value (MacCulloch, Reformation 96–7). Even when Erasmus was quick to scoff at the Catholic tendency to allegorize the bible to justify belief in the Virgin Mary’s intercessory power, he was never able to rectify the tenuous allegorical claim that Mary had remained a perpetual virgin all her life. On this issue, as I quote in Chapter 2, Erasmus simply conceded, “We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is not expounded in the sacred books” (Halkin 225). His admission reveals that Mary’s perpetual virginity was a fracture in an otherwise firm belief in the purity of the word. It proved to remain a fracture throughout the Reformation that followed. The value of Mary’s virginity both to Catholics and Protestants remained fairly consistent during the sixteenth century, but the emphasis placed on physical virginity underwent significant change. The shift, Patricia Crawford argues, resulted in “some misunderstanding of the Catholic doctrine of virginity” where, by the late medieval period, “this was understood less as a physiological than a spiritual state” (46). For example, early in the sixteenth century the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives defines virginity as “integrity of the mind, which extends also to the body,” and he goes on to state that “the terrestrial and brute body is only the servant of the will, and God does not look to it or have any care for it … but attends only to the mind, of a nature similar to his own and to some extent close to it” (80). Vives suggests that God is more concerned with the purity of the mind than the purity of the body. Later Reformers employed a similar argument and sought to censure the Roman Catholic practice of vowing celibacy by defining it as aberrant.

 Juan Luis Vives was friend to Erasmus, and employed as the tutor to Princess Mary under King Henry VIII. However, due to his opposition to Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Vives ultimately left the English court.

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

96

Martin Luther took a wife to show that Church legislation outlawing clerical marriage was unbiblical, and his view of marriage sparked criticism of the doctrine of celibacy. In 1549, the English parliament passed the Act to Take Away All Positive Laws Against the Marriage of Priests. As in the case with the Virgin Mary’s power of intercession, the issue of Mary’s perpetual virginity was also susceptible to criticism because it was directly associated with the Catholic Church via the doctrine of celibacy. In a tract written in 1545, and reprinted in London in 1570, John Bale attacks the celibate life arguing that Abraham, Moses, David, Zachary, Peter, and Philip all had wives. He writes, “It is a greate mervayle they admit Mary Christs mother to it, bicause she had a husband. Oh ignorat asses, & very beastly Idiotes. I think you follow Judas which had neyther wyfe nor child,” and goes on to argue that God respected only Mary’s faith, “and not hyr virginity” (M4r). Bale had first-hand experience in a monastery among the “ignorat asses” and “beastly Idiotes” he describes, but he abandoned the monastic life, became a Reformer, and fervently attacked the Roman Catholic Church. His argument here anticipates the ideological shift concerning postReformation views of virginity. In Bale’s estimation, perpetual virginity is not only Catholic in nature, but also resembles Judas’ evil being. By stressing Mary’s own married state among other prophets and apostles, Bale presents matrimony as exemplary. Mary should be imitated not for her virginity, but instead for her dutiful role in marriage. Bale’s attack of a virginal life illustrates the increased emphasis placed on the value of marriage during the Reformation. Early Protestant views of marriage analogized the hierarchal structure of a nuclear family to that of the state. A wife should obey her husband in the same way that a subject should obey his/her king. This model marked an intricate shift from valuing virginity to valuing the concept of chastity both before and after marriage. Theodora Jankowski argues that for Protestants in early modern England, chastity and virtue function as substitute signifiers for virginity, and are terms defined almost exclusively in relation to married women or the way women should approach the “marriage paradigm.” She writes, “Virgins and virginity are focused on to indicate flaws in Catholic theology. These conditions are deviant, without biblical justification. Marriage is considered normative, and the condition of all right believing, married Christians is chaste” (100–101). Protestants utilize the ideals of Catholic virginity by identifying it as “chastity” and extending its scope beyond the consummation of marriage. The free will behind a woman’s decision to live a “chaste” life is appropriated, defined, and made “normal” by men in instructing women to remain chaste before marriage only to enter into a contract where they

This statute was repealed in 1553 under Mary I, and Elizabeth I decided not to reinstate it because she, too, disapproved of clerical marriage. The law was not reinstated until 1603 by which time the marriage of clergy was generally accepted in the Church of England. See Documents of the English Reformation, ed. Gerald Bray, 279–80. 

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

97

must willingly remain chaste after marriage. This design, of course, allows the patriarchal structure to persist. However, the attempt to control women with the principles of chastity and virtue also reveals the subversive potential of a woman’s “virtuous” decision to remain physically chaste. In this way, then, the enduring view of the Virgin Mary as a perpetual virgin appears to threaten the post-Reformation program of promoting marriage. The key in post-Reformation thought, as Bale’s argument above suggests, was emphasizing Mary’s marriage to Joseph. By focusing on Mary’s married state, Reformers were equipped to argue that God endorsed marriage. However, the emphasis on Mary’s marriage did not mean that her perpetual virginity was marginalized (Kreitzer 36–8). On the contrary, and paradoxically, Mary’s virginity remained a critical assertion in Reformation thought because the purity of Jesus’ human body rested on that principle. Mary’s perpetual virginity under the Protestant scheme is retained by evasion. Like Erasmus, leading Reformers simply decide not to contest this issue. The transcendence of Mary’s virginity from the old religion to the new, then, opens a space to reconsider the masculine construction and utilization of idealized virginity. The definition of virginity in early modern England was, in many ways, antithetical to the view of the female body as permeable—what Gail Kern Paster describes as a “leaky vessel” (24). From a masculinist standpoint, a virginal woman is permeable inasmuch as a man could penetrate her, but virginity is precisely what kept her intact. This view neatly develops into what Peter Stallybrass defines as the “production of a normative ‘Woman.’” For Stallybrass, this normative woman is, in Bakhtin’s terms, a “finished” body: “her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house” (127). She is, in short, property to be protected, but also property to be used and thus permeable where a husband is concerned. As a homeowner, a husband is free to unlock the house and open windows at will, but beyond her relationship with her husband a woman should remain a closed body. Even the state, Stallybrass claims, is seen as a virgin, “a hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden walled off from enemies” (129). Like a virgin, however, the porous borders of a state need to be protected, and herein we locate anxiety about For example, Patricia Crawford writes, “Since Protestants regarded celibacy as unnatural, they viewed all unmarried women with disfavour. The lot of the unmarried woman, or spinster, as the term came to be, was worse under Protestantism. She had no special social role. Compulsory marriage and child-bearing and, it could even be argued, a destiny of breeding and cleaning was that which the Protestant church attempted to enforce upon women” (47).  In the obvious case of Queen Elizabeth I, for example, she is able to maintain a great deal of autonomy as a result of her decision to remain unwed. Warner argues, “For although she may have been technically chaste, her virginity principally indicated she could not be subjugated or possessed. In Christian times, however, virginity only rarely preserved the notion of female independence” (48). Given the Protestant elevation of marriage, however, I feel that the mere decision to remain a virgin (or unwed) reflects a certain level of independence. 

98

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

female sexuality. As Leontes says about protecting his wife’s “gate,” there is “No barricado for a belly” (The Winter’s Tale 1.2.198–205). Keeping one’s wife chaste was one task, but keeping the virgin physically virginal was something altogether different. A woman’s unbroken hymen, in particular, was seen as the best indicator of a woman’s true virginity. The hymen was, in a sense, the only ocular proof that a virgin had never been penetrated. As a seal, then, the unbroken hymen physically represents a perfectly “closed” body, and yet the reliability of the membrane as an indicator of virginity was often contested. Marie Loughlin argues that while early modern leading physicians such as Helkiah Crooke and J. Berengarius “adamantly assert either that they have seen [the unbroken hymen] and that they believe in its material existence,” others such as Ambroise Paré and Andreas Laurentius “just as adamantly assert that they have never seen it and that the whole belief in the hymen is a dangerous and … primitive myth” (30). Even the most tangible of indicators is left in doubt, and consequently the only certain indicator of a woman’s virginity is the virgin’s word. In the way that Christianity relies on one’s faith in Mary’s account of the virgin birth, the integrity (in a strictly physical sense) of a nubile woman must rely on one’s faith in her account. When this faith falters, anxiety closely follows. I turn, then, to Shakespeare’s account of masculine anxiety against the concept of virginity by addressing what are, arguably, three of his most famous “virginal” characters: Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia. Only Ophelia remains in an unmarried state throughout, but the virginal dimension of the three women is similar when their sexuality is the focus of male attention. This is to say, even if it is only Ophelia who is expected to remain a virgin, the virginity of Desdemona and Cordelia comes under scrutiny by the principal men in their lives. In all three cases, the result is an atmosphere of masculine anxiety where virginity is expected, constructed, and perpetuated at all costs. I. The Fair Ophelia The importance of Ophelia’s virginity is addressed the moment she enters onstage. Laertes’s lengthy advice concerning Hamlet’s feelings as being “Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting” (1.3.8) centers on the vulnerability of Ophelia’s chastity in the face of male desire. He instructs Ophelia to weigh the loss her “honor may sustain” if her “chaste treasure” is opened to Hamlet’s “unmastered importunity” (1.3.29–32). As her brother, Laertes is concerned with keeping Ophelia virginal, but as a man he seems to understand both lust and sexual persuasion. “Fear it, Ophelia,” Laertes says of Hamlet’s sexual affection, “fear it, my dear sister” (1.3.33). Laertes’s warning to Ophelia is echoed later in the scene by Polonius, and the initial perception of Ophelia’s role is that of a young woman burdened by overprotective men. Indeed, visual renditions of Ophelia, popular culture, and critics alike often portray Ophelia as a naïve victim of male oppression; routinely,

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

99

these studies of Ophelia focus on her quintessential mad scene. The result is a sympathy-laden view where she is resigned to exist as a victim whose identity is muddled in madness. However, even if our initial impression of Ophelia is dominated by an older brother’s lesson on the importance of chastity, her early response to Laertes’s advice is anything but naïve. Ophelia tells Laertes that she intends to keep “the effect” of his “good lesson” in her heart, but retorts: Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, Whiles like a puffed and reckless libertine Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And recks not his own rede. (1.3.45–51)

Ophelia underscores Laertes’s hypocrisy, and employs an interesting correlation to emphasize his pretension. By comparing Laertes to an “ungracious” pastor who preaches goodness but resembles a “libertine,” Ophelia draws the audience’s attention to the sexual desire of irreverent ministers who dictate the very importance of chastity. Masculine hypocrisy about virginity and sexuality extends all the way through to church Fathers. In this opening moment, then, I do not see innocence so much as I see a young woman bringing into question the very foundation for the construction of chastity as an ideal. Indeed, Hamlet’s emphasis on Ophelia’s physical virginity, the subtle Marian undertones that eventually surround her character, and the ultimate ambivalence about her chastity, all serve to underscore and destabilize a religious structure that fashioned female chastity as an ideal that—like the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary—was always just out of reach. As I indicated earlier, clergy were allowed to marry in the Reformed Church, and Article thirty-three of the Thirty-Nine Articles defines this as “lawful.” However, Article twenty-six, “Of the unworthiness of the ministers, which hinders not the effect of the sacrament,” allows the Church to wipe its hands clean of immoral ministers: “Neither is the effect of Christ’s ordinance taken away by [the minister’s] wickedness, nor the grace of God’s gifts diminished from such as by faith and rightly do receive the sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because  Bob Dylan presents Ophelia as an old maid of twenty-two in “Desolation Row,” and Natalie Merchant makes Ophelia into an everywoman of sorts who succumbs to madness in her song, “Ophelia.” In many ways, Ophelia has become a poster-child for female adolescent/pubescent depression amid identity formation. Recent books such as Mary Pipher’s bestselling Reviving Ophelia, Sara Shandler’s Ophelia Speaks, and Cheryl Dellasega’s Surviving Ophelia all use Ophelia as a model for the difficulty of early feminine identity formation. In The Myth and Madness of Ophelia, Carol Solomon Kiefer catalogs visual representations of Ophelia—typically focusing on her death—since the eighteenth century. The body of work on Ophelia is both extensive and impressive, and in terms of considering the significance of Ophelia’s mad song, I have the following in mind: Carol Camden, Leslie Dunn, Sandra K. Fischer, Carol Thomas Neely, and Elaine Showalter.

100

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

of Christ’s institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men” (Cressy 60). Although the particular “wickedness” or “evil” of these men remains indefinite, the recognition that ministers are susceptible to human evil compromises their authority. According to this article, the potential for “wickedness” does not reflect negatively on the grace of God. Nevertheless, it does allow one to glance askance at the grace of ministers. Ophelia’s opening remark on the hypocritical nature of pastors, then, also allows one to consider the ineffectuality of unworthy ministers in their attempt to buttress belief in idealized chastity. The initial religious metaphor continues as Polonius chastises Ophelia for being too “free and bounteous” (1.3.93) in her meetings with Hamlet, and she replies by defining Hamlet’s importunity as “honourable” and his love confirmed with “almost all the holy vows of heaven” (1.3.110–14). Unlike the correlation between Laertes and an “ungracious” pastor, Ophelia fashions Hamlet as a man sincere in his vows. Polonius dismisses the vows as manifestations of the “prodigal” soul and later compares the vows to “brokers” and “mere implorators of unholy suits” (1.3.116, 127–9). The entire structure of deceit and hypocrisy—both elements that surround Ophelia’s perceived virginity—is anchored in religious rhetoric. In a play with Catholic overtones, the notion of “ungracious” pastors and “unholy suits” in direct relation to sexuality draws attention to reconceived views of virginity, celibacy, and chastity.10 By introducing Ophelia’s virginity against this religious rhetoric, Hamlet draws attention to socio-religious perceptions of sinful sexuality and female virginity. In the way some Protestants felt that vows of celibacy “led to abuses and whoredom” (Crawford 45), the advice Laertes and Polonius give to Ophelia seems to suggest that masculine sexual desire ultimately wins out regardless of vows. Indeed, later in the play Hamlet identifies himself as heaven’s “scourge and minister” (3.4.182), and he, like Laertes, is thus indictable under the umbrella of clerical lust. Ophelia’s initial response to Laertes, then, indicates that she understands the irony of a sexually lustful man warning a woman about sexually lustful men. If all men desire to defile the virgin, what value is there in trying to protect her? Despite the early modern debates concerning clerical marriage and sex, we find that a woman’s role in that reconstructed program undergoes little change. In other words, the female remains the source of, and outlet for, temptation. “Prior to the Reformation,” Crawford argues, “the church believed that men’s powerful sexual impulses needed to be accommodated, and so the existence of brothels had been condoned” (42). Reformers connected the tolerance of this behavior to the doctrine of celibacy, and so consequently brothels in most cities were shut down during the Reformation. However, the prohibition of prostitution did not result in an ideological shift in the view of female sexuality. Instead, Crawford writes, “All women’s social conduct came under scrutiny. Any women, even if they were in business or trading, who received men at their houses, were regarded as whores” (43). 10 For the Catholic overtones in Hamlet, see Roy Battenhouse, Christopher Devlin, Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, and Thomas Rist, “Religion, Politics, Revenge.”

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

101

A similar intolerance extended into the post-Reformation household where a female’s behavior directly reflected the godliness of the male head of household. The key was to delimit a woman’s independence. Following Crawford’s line of argument, then, Catholics valued virginity only to allow prostitution as a necessary outlet for men, while Protestants emphasized marriage as the rightful path for Christians while disallowing vows of celibacy.11 Where young women were concerned, choice was increasingly limited. Indeed, when Hamlet tells Ophelia “Get thee to a nunnery” (3.1.122) in the middle of his misogynous tirade, he reveals the exact limits of choice. Either Hamlet urges Ophelia to join a convent and remain virginal—a choice that young women in postReformation England no longer had—or he intends “nunnery” to mean a brothel; thus, Ophelia’s choices on the surface are that of becoming a virgin or a whore. The proper choice for both Ophelia and young women in Shakespeare’s England was marriage, of course, but through the tainted union of Claudius and Gertrude, Hamlet temporarily undercuts the institution of marriage. If we return to Laertes’s warning to Ophelia, “fear it, my dear sister,” we find that the dangerous sexual desire is inherent in men, and therefore all he wants Ophelia to do is keep “[o]ut of the shot and danger of desire” (1.3.35). This, we come to find, is not so easy a task for Ophelia. Ophelia’s first interaction with Hamlet is revealed in a version of events that she communicates to Polonius. Ophelia explains that she has been “affrighted” (2.1.76) by Hamlet, and thus she appears to heed Laertes’s advice. She describes the confrontation: My lord, as I was sewing in my chamber, Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced, No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, Ungartered, and down-gyvèd to his ankle, Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosèd out of hell To speak of horrors, he comes before me. (2.1.78–85)

To read Ophelia’s story on the surface is to uncover the start of Hamlet’s feigned madness. However, her tale is loaded with sexual innuendoes despite her careful self-positioning in the innocent space of her “chamber.” The act of “sewing” has been used as a metaphor for sex elsewhere in Shakespeare, and consequently her story begins with an image of phallic needles and penetration.12 What follows is less 11 J.A. Sharpe explains that the last licensed brothel in England was in the Southwark stews and was abolished in 1546. However, this is not to say that prostitution ceased to exist. The business of prostitution thrived in Shakespeare’s England, and brothels were kept outside of the city walls of London (45–6). 12 In King Henry V, the Hostess tells Pistol, “for we cannot lodge and board a dozen or fourteen gentlewomen that live honestly by the prick of their needles, but it will be thought we keep a bawdy house straight” (2.1.28–31, my emphasis). The Hostess is formerly Mistress Quickly of the first two parts of King Henry IV, and a reputed brothel-keeper.

102

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

symbolic, but no less sexual. She describes Hamlet in half-dress: his unbuttoned doublet, his soiled stockings around his ankle, and his bare knees. Even the image of Hamlet released from hell to “speak of horrors” allows us to interpret the pun on “horrors” and “whores.” Ultimately, Hamlet “comes” before Ophelia, and here I find undertones of flowing or sexual orgasm. Given a literal reading of Ophelia’s version of accounts, Polonius has no reason to suspect sexual play. Indeed, it is merely a half-dressed, dirty, pale, and distracted Hamlet who is being described. Nevertheless, when Polonius asks Ophelia what Hamlet said, she replies: He took me by the wrist and held me hard. […] And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He raised a sigh so piteous and profound As it did seem to shatter all his bulk And end his being. (2.1.88, 94–7)

Hamlet does not say anything, but he does appear to do quite a bit. He holds Ophelia by her arms and his “up and down” rhythmic movement leads to a “profound” sigh and a “shattering” of his being. The “death” that Hamlet experiences is akin to a sexual orgasm, and as such I believe that beneath the fearful image Ophelia presents is the undercurrent of a sexual encounter with Hamlet. Indeed, the sexual wordplay between Hamlet and Ophelia during the staging of The Murder of Gonzago—a topic I explore later—suggests a mature sexual relationship. Here, Ophelia presents the dichotomy of choice that the play appears to allow women: either she is innocently sewing in her bedroom (i.e., virgin), or the sewing is a metaphor for something more sexual (i.e., whore). At the very least, the play leaves the issue of Ophelia’s sexuality ambiguous. Although the early modern view of whoredom was most often associated with adultery in marriage, the Elizabethan Homily “A Sermon Against Whoredome” defines a “whore” along a broader spectrum: [Yet] thereby is signified also all unlawfull use of those parts, which bee ordeyned for generation. And this commandement (forbidding adultery) doeth sufficiently paint and set out before our eyes the greatnesse of this abhorred of all honest and faythfull persons. And that none of us all shall thinke himselfe excepted from this commandement, whether wee bee old or young, married, or unmarried, man or woman. (Certaine Sermons 78)

Given this view, any type of sexual activity for Ophelia, or Hamlet for that matter, would constitute whoredom. Laertes and Polonius fashion Ophelia as a virgin in need of protection/instruction, and yet the incident she relates evokes a sexual encounter. Where others work to model her as a virgin, she effectively allows herself to be imagined along the socio-religious lines of “whoredom.” In either case, however, her sexuality is merely conceptual. We will never see the sexual act, and as such it becomes an evasive element of her character. The encounter allows

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

103

for virginity to be of great importance without allowing any means of accurately assessing her virginal status. Her physical state of virginity is the unbroken hymen that will never be inspected. I signal to the ambiguity of Ophelia’s virginity because it is intricately connected to the general male anxiety about female sexuality, their own desire, and their perception of feminine virtue. In the way that Ophelia can be read as both “virgin” and “whore,” any female’s virginity—because of the husband, father, and/or brother’s inability to control her or the man intending to sleep with her—becomes equally unreliable. It is always a man’s sexual desire, and not the woman as an object of temptation, that creates the anxiety. Mark Breitenberg explains: “[sexual desire] impels the masculine subject toward conquest and possession, but at the same time, it threatens to dissolve the very subjectivity that desires in the first place” (128). The desire becomes self-destructive, and herein I locate the heartbeat of masculine identity formation. “To know oneself as a man,” Breitenberg argues, “to be interpellated by early modern culture as a male subject, is already to embody that culture’s paradoxes—one of which is the self-destructiveness of desire” (128). The way a man responds to that desire allows for a self-revelation—an indicator of the manner in which that man will exist in a world structured by masculine anxiety. Unless the man relents and acquiesces to true self-destruction, he must confront and contend with this anxiety in order to exist in his world. For Laertes, protecting Ophelia seems the proper outlet to manage his own masculine desire. The case with Polonius is a bit more difficult to measure. As a father, his own masculine desire should provoke a response similar to Laertes’s where he would want to protect Ophelia from Hamlet’s sexual advances. Early on, he appears to do this. But after hearing Ophelia’s story outlined above, Polonius is set upon using Ophelia as bait to uncover the reason for Hamlet’s lunacy. His utter disregard for his daughter’s safety in this act brings his own identity into question. Polonius not only desires to control his daughter’s sexuality, but to utilize it to his advantage. What we begin to find, then, is that Ophelia’s virginity says more about the men around her—and the structure of patriarchy, for that matter—than it actually says about her own character. Indeed, something is rotten in Denmark, and it begins with the figure of the father. When Hamlet first encounters Polonius, he identifies him as a “fishmonger” (2.2.175), and in all likelihood Hamlet does not intend the term to mean fish merchant, but rather a pimp. In Elizabethan England the term “fishmonger” was interchangeable with “pander,” and elsewhere in Shakespeare fish is used to reference female genitalia.13 Hamlet goes on to warn Polonius, “For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion,” but then pauses to question, “Have you a daughter?” (2.2.182–3). The question appears artificial For the discussion on the term “fishmonger” see J. Dover Wilson, 105. In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio tells Romeo, “O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified” (2.3.33–4) once Romeo is in good spirits after his encounter with Juliet. Bevington defines this passage as Romeo having been “sexually spent” (1025). 13

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

104

since Hamlet knows Polonius to be Ophelia’s father and Claudius’s counselor. Hamlet’s warning, then, likely begins with Ophelia in mind, and once Polonius affirms that he does have a daughter, Hamlet continues, “Let her not walk i’th’ sun. Conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive. Friend, look to’t” (2.2.185–6). Hamlet is every bit as culpable as Polonius and Laertes in shaping Ophelia as a virginal woman in need of protection. Nevertheless, Hamlet sees the danger arising from every angle. Hamlet’s exhortation essentially addresses the danger of Ophelia’s becoming pregnant, and that danger—like the “sun” that helps “breed maggots in a dead dog”—is the sun/son himself. Hamlet’s famous reply to Claudius’s question, “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” is, “Not so, my lord, I am too much i’th’ sun” (1.2.66–7). Hamlet caustically puns on “sun” and “son,” since he is not only his father’s son, but also his uncle’s son. It is also a moment that metaphorically connects the idea of “sun” to Hamlet. Thus, when he warns Polonius using the metaphor of “sun,” he essentially warns that Polonius should protect Ophelia from the likes of Hamlet. The irony, of course, is that Hamlet identifies Polonius as a “fishmonger” prior to this warning, and Hamlet’s view appears to suggest that, for Ophelia, the danger of masculine sexual desire awaits everywhere. Hamlet depicts Ophelia as a young woman being prostituted by her father and in danger of becoming pregnant by Hamlet, but to my mind it is the allusion he employs shortly thereafter that is most compelling. Before the players enter, Hamlet calls Polonius “Jephthah” twice in the span of eight lines (2.2.385, 392). The Old Testament story relates how Jephthah was inadvertently forced to sacrifice his virginal daughter to God in return for divine intervention in helping him defeat his enemies to become the head of Gilead (Judges 11).14 Considering Polonius’s desire to use Ophelia to obtain favorable position with King Claudius, Hamlet’s intimation of a sacrificial daughter is clear. However, the biblical story also involves Jephthah’s bastard identity as the son of a harlot, his subsequent banishment from his father’s house because of his status, and his ultimate redemption at the expense of his virginal daughter (Judges 11). Beneath the battle fought and won, the story is one of a man who originates from a whore and sacrifices a virgin to reinsert himself into the family and state. Behind the harlot mother and virginal daughter in the story of Jephthah is the man whose identity is shaped by the two, and thus I believe that the allusion to this story speaks to a greater theme in Hamlet, surrounding the influential role of mothers and virgins in the construction of masculine identity.15 In Part 2 of this chapter I explore how Hamlet negotiates maternal influence, but here I seek to In the story of Jephthah, the father vows to sacrifice “whatever comes out of my house to meet me when I return in triumph” (Judges 11:29). To his profound disappointment, his unwed, virginal daughter rushes out first to meet him upon his return. 15 Some examples of studies of the maternal in Shakespeare include: Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers; Stephen Orgel, “Prospero’s Wife”; and Mary Beth Rose, “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare?” 14

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

105

examine how the would-be sacrificial virgin affects perceptions of masculinity. As shown, Hamlet first positions Ophelia as her father’s prostitute, and then alludes to the story of Jephthah to cast Ophelia in the role of the virginal victim. In the symbolic prostitution and/or sacrifice of Ophelia—when she is put on display as bait for Hamlet—Marian undertones begin to surface as a means both of countervailing the imagined threat of maternal promiscuity, and drawing attention to the influential power of the v/Virgin. Polonius and Claudius undeniably aid in the iconography of Ophelia by giving her a prop so as to suggest “devotion’s visage” (3.1.49). She reads from a prayer book as Hamlet approaches her, and he famously responds, “The fair Ophelia!— Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered” (3.1.91–2). The posturing of Ophelia resembles Annunciation iconography (see Fig. 3.1), and her imagined role as intercessor adds another Marian element to the scene. However, as R. Chris Hassel argues, the statement reads more like a parody than a reverential example since a nymph evokes pagan and sexual connotations (“Painted Women” 48). For a post-Reformation audience, Hassel contends, Hamlet’s reference to intercessory potential is derisive.16 Given Hamlet’s uncertain take on death and salvation, however, I believe that the scene has more to offer than merely presenting a positive/negative dichotomy of the Virgin Mary’s position in post-Reformation England. Instead, I feel that by beginning this encounter with Marian undertones surrounding Ophelia, Hamlet is forced to fracture the evocation of the orchestrated Marian-like iconography. Hamlet’s invective against Ophelia begins when he instructs her to go to a nunnery. The dual significance of the nunnery, as I previously establish, leaves Ophelia with little choice, and the tirade that follows reveals his own anxiety and fractured self-perception: Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. (3.1.122–31)

Although Hamlet raises doubts about Ophelia’s virtue, the better part of the attack is aimed at his own self—he casts himself as a sinner, and catalogs a list of negative self-attributes. However, when Hamlet imagines Ophelia as a “breeder” of sinners, he substitutes any Marian iconography that was in place with the image of Eve as the female source of sin. In this way, then, he shatters the image of Marian virtue and all that stands is woman as a would-be vessel for sin. It is only the Virgin Mary 16 In “Painted Women: Annunciation Motifs in Hamlet,” Hassel compares this scene to Annunciation iconography to examine both post-Reformation attitudes about the Annunciation and the negotiation of Hamlet within the grace and acquiescence of the Virgin Mary.

106

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Fig. 3.1 Pisan, 14th century. The Virgin Annunciate, 1325/50. Wood, polychromed and gilded. Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.98. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

107

who stood to give birth to something sinless, but even she was not exempt from masculine anxiety about a woman’s influence in the act of creation. Although Mary’s purity was imperative to the nature of Christ’s divinity, the physical matter that she undoubtedly imparts on Jesus often made church fathers uneasy. Consequently, the Virgin Mary was often imagined as a mere vehicle for the birth of Christ. One popular analogy had its origins in the eighth century where Constantine V utilized the “vessel” theory of Mary: “When she bore Christ within her womb, she was like a purse filled with gold. But after giving birth, she was no more than an empty purse” (MacCulloch, Reformation 182). Hugh Latimer also utilized the vessel theory in his “Sermon of the Plough,” but instead of a purse filled with gold the Virgin Mary was seen as a saffron bag. Finding himself under attack, Latimer later found it necessary to explain that he meant no dishonor to the Virgin Mary: For I might have said thus: as the saffron-bag that hath been full of saffron, or hath had the saffron in it, doth ever after savour and smell of the sweet saffron that it contained; so our blessed lady, which conceived and bare Christ in her womb did ever after resemble the manners and virtues of that precious babe that she bare. (Sermons 60)

Despite Latimer’s corrective formula, the object of most significance is clearly Christ, and in both analogies the Virgin Mary’s generative influence is severely undermined. However, when it comes to imagining human sin, the worldly woman’s role in that creation takes center stage. It would appear, then, that a woman’s physical virginity frees her from this kind of slander. In post-Reformation England, this simply is not the case if that virginity results in a life of celibacy. When Hamlet addresses Ophelia’s virginity in marriage, he says, “If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny” (3.1.135–7). The plaguing dowry Hamlet offers renders Ophelia’s purity inconsequential—regardless of how chaste Ophelia remains, she will still be slandered. However, Hamlet could also intend the plague to be that Ophelia will actually be as “chaste as ice” and “as pure as snow” in marriage, and thus be slandered because she is not fulfilling her marital duty. Even though chastity and purity connote an idealized femininity, Hamlet utilizes these attributes to gesture at the fact that a woman is always rendered suspect. When Hamlet follows this statement by reiterating “Get thee to a nunnery” (3.1.137), he re-establishes the virgin/whore dichotomous alternative. Hamlet’s forward-looking dowry is meant to resemble a dual blessing/curse where Ophelia will not enter the ranks of Gertrude-like sexuality. It appears that emulation of the Virgin Mary is problematic in post-Reformation England when one takes into consideration her virginal status in wedlock—it is an exceptional status that will forever set the Virgin Mary apart from worldly women. For Protestant Reformers, then, it was specifically Mary’s faith, humility, and chastity that were seen as qualities to be desired. Chastity did not always translate to virginity, but it always implied duty to one’s father or husband. Reformers

108

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

allowed the Virgin Mary a unique position of perpetual virginity and motherhood that could never be duplicated (Kreitzer 109–36). In the case of Ophelia, however, Hamlet focuses on her reproductive potential, looks forward at her married state, and ultimately fashions her as an icy virgin. He appears to emphasize Ophelia’s sexuality only to underscore the ambivalence surrounding cultural perceptions of female virginity. Although the scene initially employs Marian iconography, that image is fractured once Hamlet brings Ophelia down to human size. Hamlet further complicates the perception of Ophelia’s virginity, and subverts popular Marian iconography, during the staging of The Murder of Gonzago by delivering his most sexually charged remarks to Ophelia. Hamlet declines to join Gertrude and opts instead to sit by “metal more attractive” (3.2.99): Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? Ophelia: No, my lord. Hamlet: I mean my head upon your lap? Ophelia: Ay, my lord. Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters? Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord. Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. Ophelia: What is my lord? Hamlet: No thing. Ophelia: You are merry, my lord. (3.2.101–10)

Hamlet’s desire to lie in Ophelia’s lap not only begins the sexual wordplay that dominates their conversation, but it also evokes an image reminiscent of the Pietà. The iconographic staging of Ophelia with devotional literature in hand, and Hamlet’s subsequent attempt to fashion her as virginal, directly precedes this scene, and thus Hamlet’s physical placement of his head upon Ophelia’s lap here reintroduces Marian undertones. If anything, however, this scene perverts the image of the Mother of Sorrows holding the dead body of Christ because of the sexual undertones. Hamlet’s sexually charged rhetoric does not appear to make Ophelia uncomfortable, but instead works to fracture perceptions of her virginal status. With the image of the Pietà in mind, Hamlet asks Ophelia if she misunderstood his request as “country matters.” The term suggests sexual intercourse, with a bawdy pun on the first syllable of “country.” However, “matters” also serves as a pun for the Latin “mater” in which case the statement could imply: cunt-ry mothers.17 This misogynous perversion of the Marian maternal image leads directly to the “nothing” as female genitalia that immediately follows. Hamlet no longer obsesses with Ophelia’s reproductive potential—she is no longer a “breeder of sinners” but instead a sexual being whose vaginal “nothing” elicits desire. However, it is not

17 For an insightful reading of the double entendre of country matters/cunt-ry maters as it relates to Queen Gertrude and the question of succession, see Eggert, 102–19.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

109

only Hamlet’s desire, per se, that corrupts the image of Ophelia’s purity, but also her own insouciant response to Hamlet’s unabashed sexual innuendo.18 Ophelia’s initial response to Hamlet, “You are merry, my lord,” hardly suggests that she is offended by his innuendo. Indeed, she appears unfazed by his “merry” wordplay, and later when Hamlet implies that if Ophelia is not ashamed to “show” all of herself the Prologue will “not shame to tell [her] what it means,” Ophelia merely responds, “You are naught, you are naught” (3.2.130–32). Thereafter, Hamlet’s “naughtiness” escalates into what is arguably his most vulgar rhetoric: Ophelia: You are as good as a chorus, my lord. Hamlet: I could interpret between you and your love if I could see the puppets dallying. Ophelia: You are keen, my lord, you are keen. Hamlet: It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge. Ophelia: Still better, and worse. (3.2.224–9)

The dialogue is rife with sexual language, and Ophelia appears a willing participant. When Hamlet implies that it would “cost [Ophelia] a groaning to take off [his] edge” or sexual appetite, she potentially suggest that his wordplay is “better” while the vulgarity grows “worse.”19 Although this scene offers no more proof of a sexual relationship than Ophelia’s rendition of the scene in her closet, it serves to illustrate, yet again, a keen dimension to Ophelia’s otherwise naïve character. More importantly, Ophelia’s sexuality works against the virginal iconography that has been constructed, and her active role in both constructing and counteracting that iconography grants her a subversive potential. Hamlet’s manipulative shaping of Ophelia as virginal or sexual, however, indicates that a male’s own perception of a female’s sexuality is enough to shape her one way or the other—virgin or not, she “shalt not escape calumny.” In spite of that, Ophelia appears to escape slander—she defies the virgin/whore dichotomy—because not only is her physical purity left ambiguous, but she also survives the play as its most enduring visual icon. Through Gertrude’s famous description of Ophelia’s drowning, Ophelia is conceptualized as a figure in a perpetually serene state of being. In the visual description of that tragedy, any tint of Ophelia’s sexuality is erased, and any sense of her madness is made marginal. In the “weeping brook,” Ophelia is described as “mermaid-like” chanting “snatches of old tunes, / As one incapable of her own distress, / Or like a creature native and endued / Unto that element” (4.7.146–51). 18 Rebecca West suggests that “[Ophelia] was not a chaste young woman. That is shown by her tolerance of Hamlet’s obscene conversation, which cannot be explained as consistent with the custom of the time” (19). 19 Bevington succinctly explains the sexual meaning in his footnotes to this scene: “245 puppet dallying (With suggestion of sexual play, continued in keen, ‘sexually aroused,’ groaning, ‘moaning in pregnancy,’ and edge, ‘sexual desire’ or ‘impetuosity.’),” and later, “249 Still … worse More Keen, always bettering what other people say with witty wordplay, but at the same time more offensive” (549).

110

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

She is, symbolically, restored to the childlike innocence that overshadows any sense of strength that she once had. But behind that sympathy-laden view of a fractured woman—the broken image of the would-be-virginal daughter/sister and Hamlet’s future wife, “the fair Ophelia” (5.1.226)—Ophelia demonstrates that she is capable of understanding masculine hypocrisy and a male lover’s whimsy while acknowledging the destructive potential of that masculinity. Nonetheless, what remains is the memory of Ophelia driven to madness, and the image of her enduring purity via death is the only means of making her an influential absent presence. However, like images of the Virgin Mary of post-Reformation England, the iconography of Ophelia’s serene drowning stands to be shattered. After Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death, the First Clown questions, “Is she to be buried in Christian burial that willfully seeks her own salvation?” (5.1.1–2). This suspicion about suicide is reiterated by the Priest presiding over the burial when he claims that Ophelia’s “death was doubtful,” and adds, “Yet here she is allowed her virgin rites, / Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home / Of bell and burial” (5.1.209, 214–16). Ophelia’s “maimèd rites” (5.1.202) underscore the ambivalence about respecting the memory of her maidenhood and acknowledging the dubious nature of her death. Indeed, her burial is a moment where her purity is defended, while her role in salvation is left ambiguous. Fittingly, it is the Priest—the emblem of the hypocritical patriarchal structure Ophelia calls out at the onset—who gauges Ophelia’s virtue and dictates the amount of reverence that is due.20 In the effort to establish Ophelia’s purity, Laertes and Hamlet align themselves with Ophelia to secure their manhood. Laertes chastises the “churlish priest” to defend Ophelia’s “fair and unpolluted flesh” (5.2.222–3), and then leaps into the grave. Not to be outdone, Hamlet emerges, identifies himself as “Hamlet the Dane,” leaps into the grave, and says: “I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers / Could not, with all their quantity of love, / Make up my sum” (5.1.242, 254–6). Hamlet’s devotion to Ophelia is offered as a challenge to Laertes, but it also functions as a means of measuring his own masculinity: What will thou do for her? […] ’Swounds, show me what thou’lt do. Woot drink up eisel, eat a crocodile? I’ll do it. Dost thou come here to whine, To outface me with leaping in her grave? Be buried quick with her, and so will I. (5.1.256, 259–63)

20 Despite the fact that a Catholic priest would uphold Marian reverence, from both Protestant and Catholic perspectives, the priest delineates who is deemed worthy of reverence and who is not.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

111

The fact that the men themselves have maimed the funeral ceremony becomes secondary, for what is at stake is their self-perception.21 Indeed, Hamlet affirms his identity through his self-referential statement, “This is I, Hamlet the Dane,” and thereafter works to construct his masculinity. Through this design, Hamlet is able to imagine scenarios—the drinking of vinegar, fighting with crocodiles, and dying for his love—where his masculinity is manifest. But we know that Hamlet’s acts of masculinity, like Ophelia’s purity, are merely imagined. In the way that belief in the Virgin Mary’s purity is preserved as a means of better identifying Christ’s nature, the preservation of Ophelia’s purity matters precisely because it allows Hamlet and Laertes to reinvent themselves as defenders of her “unpolluted flesh.” However, the fact is that both men fail Ophelia in life— Laertes through his absence, and Hamlet through his disregard. Her physical chastity is susceptible to vilification throughout the better part of the play, and it is only through death that her “purity” is seemingly secured. Although Ophelia functions as a symbol of purity to be employed by Hamlet and Laertes, she also successfully effectuates a level of devotion that strips the Priest of his power to undermine her significance. From lover to brother to religious Father, the issue of Ophelia’s virginity ultimately allows us access to the faultlines and fractures of the masculine and patriarchal design in Hamlet. Indeed, as much as the men struggle to construct the iconography of the chaste Ophelia, ultimately it is the image of Ophelia’s purity that shapes the men. II. Chaste Virgins and Chaste Wives: The Question of Desdemona’s Virginity When Othello remarks, “to be once in doubt / Is once to be resolved” (3.3.183–4), he conveys the influential nature of doubt in a play where faith in the female is central.22 His inability to trust in Desdemona’s chastity is tantamount to the tragedy, and thus Desdemona’s virginity is, in many ways, the drama’s focal point. Unlike Ophelia, whose virginity is compromised, Desdemona’s virtue and virginity in wedlock demonstrate a level of chastity akin to that of the Virgin Mary. Her reputation survives Iago’s opening slander, and her elopement with Othello is her chief offense in the play. Desdemona’s elopement—although a sign of disobedience to the father—still illustrates the trajectory of a virgin into marriage. And despite Brabanzio’s parting advice to Othello—“Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. / She has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3.291–2)—Othello

21 In his exploration of this scene, Rist argues that for Laertes, “maximizing remembrance is the only response to death appropriate” (Revenge Tragedy 70). Rist locates in the play a desire for “sustained performances of remembrance for the dead” (72). In this light, the men do not mean to mar the ceremony, but rather prolong it. It is a compelling argument, but I see the emphasis on Ophelia’s memory as a means for the men to re-member their own masculine identity. 22 See, for example, Stanley Cavell’s fascinating study of Othello’s “refusal of knowledge,” 125–42.

112

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

is willing to wage his life on her fidelity when he responds, “My life upon her faith” (1.3.293). Othello’s faith ultimately falters, but Desdemona’s faithfulness endures. Desdemona’s virginity in wedlock—and the absence of faith in her chastity— allows me to examine how Othello negotiates the fragile nature of male trust in female chastity as a means of drawing attention to post-Reformation perceptions of the value of, and diminished faith in, the Virgin Mary’s own virtuous strength. The crux, as I see it, is that Desdemona’s virginity is never guaranteed, but her imagined perpetual purity is ultimately constructed through her death. In that final deathbed scene, I argue, Othello secures the image of a Marian-like purity for Desdemona, but in the process the play underscores both masculine and postReformation religious anxiety surrounding the fractured identity of the Virgin Mary in Shakespeare’s England. Desdemona possesses a virtue resembling that of the Virgin Mary, and this only helps highlight the significance of her chastity. I do not mean to suggest that Desdemona is an allegorical representation of Mary, but rather I follow Greg Maillet’s lead in imagining her character as a “type” of Mary (88).23 The salutation that she receives upon arriving in Cyprus, “Hail to thee, lady” (2.1.86), is only one of many moments in the play associating her with the Virgin Mary. Critics have acknowledged Desdemona’s Marian connection since she is described as being full of “grace” (2.1.86–7) and “blessed” (2.1.241), and serves as Cassio’s intercessor (3.3.1–2).24 Marian imagery clearly makes its way into Othello, and this opens the door for us to consider how the enduring respect for the Virgin Mary’s perpetual virginity in a post-Reformation culture that valued sex in marriage complicates the value of Desdemona’s own virginity in wedlock. The fissure in Desdemona’s virtuous strength is not an inherent one, but instead one caused by ideological intricacies involving the definition of virginity. Since Desdemona is married, the Protestant emphasis on her virtue would be defined as “chastity”—that is, a faithful and obedient wife. “Virgin” was a term to be applied to unmarried women, but was also commonly associated with Roman Catholic dogma. The Protestant use of “chaste” to describe both married and unmarried women, Jankowski argues, “reinforces the fact that these two estates are not really different, merely ends of the same social and spiritual continuum” (101). Spiritual purity remains even after physical virginity is effaced within the marriage paradigm. 23 Greg Maillet explains: “Typology, in contrast to allegory, makes no attempt to efface or disguise the obvious contrasts or differences between human characters and the holy personages they partly remind us of; hence, it is a much more flexible and widely used way for faithful Christian writers to draw on Biblical tradition and add depth, meaning, and perhaps even authority to the characters composed in their own imaginations” (88). For my part, I seek to interrogate how Desdemona’s virginity in wedlock—a state that resembles the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity—draws attention to Mary’s unique virtuous strength to an audience that was told celibacy was aberrant while sex in marriage was normative. 24 For some examples of readings connecting Desdemona to the Virgin Mary, see: Milward, Biblical Influences in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies; Robert G. Hunter; Hassel, “Intercession, Detraction, and Just Judgment in Othello”; and Maillet.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

113

The problem with Desdemona, however, is that there is some indication that she remains physically virginal throughout the entirety of the play, in which case her chastity—the very quality that warrants Othello’s faith—is transformed into an aberrant quality directly opposed to the Protestant program of sexual unions.25 In the way that Desdemona’s elopement could be read as a disobedient or an “unchaste” act, her virginity/chastity in marriage also marks her as disobedient. Mary’s obedience is the central tenet in the Protestant view of the Virgin Mary as a female model of emulation. When Protestant Reformers preached on the Virgin Mary, they felt that her external manners and behaviors, and not her physical virginity, were the best indicators of her chastity. Reformers often stressed that young women should emulate Mary’s obedience and avoid licentious acts by remaining in the household (Kreitzer 55–9). In this sense, then, Desdemona initially falls short of Marian behavior since she “escapes” from her father’s house. But Desdemona’s movement away from her father is directly into the arms of her husband, and in this way she follows the Protestant design of a natural path toward marriage. Taking it one step further, Desdemona does not need to move away from her father’s household to meet her future spouse, since it was Brabanzio who invites Othello into their home (1.3.128). By remaining indoors, Desdemona subscribes to the ideals of feminine chastity, and under the Protestant program, “Chaste virgins will inevitably become chaste wives” (Jankowski 101). I draw attention, here, to Desdemona’s “chastity” in marriage to consider how emulation of the Virgin Mary inevitably leads women into a position where they cannot possibly match the ideal set before them. In Othello, however, Desdemona comes remarkably close to matching the Virgin Mary’s virtue, and yet she is still slandered. The fracturing of Desdemona, then, serves to illustrate how the early modern Protestant agenda of “chastity” is flawed since female sexual autonomy is always rendered suspect precisely because a married woman is obligated to be sexual. The Marian associations surrounding Desdemona are presented prior to her entrance onstage. Shortly after Othello enters the play, Cassio asks Iago whom Othello has married, and Iago responds, “Marry, to—Come, Captain, will you go?” (1.2.53). The caesura serves to isolate the word “Marry” from the rest of the line with wordplay on the word as in “married” and the original oath, “by the Virgin Mary” (Bevington 615). But phonetically, Iago’s answer reads that Othello is married to Mary.26 I do not intend to cast Othello in the role of either Joseph or God, but instead I want to emphasize the play’s symbolic rendering of a newly married woman who is associated with the Virgin Mary, and whose sexuality soon comes under scrutiny.27 For some examples addressing the debate concerning Desdemona’s ambiguous virginity, see: Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 38–75; Cavell, 125–42; and Edward A. Snow, 384–412. 26 For more on Shakespeare’s use of “Mary” in his homophonic play, see Rist, “Merry, Marry, Mary.” 27 For the comparison between Othello and Joseph, see Hassel, “Intercession, Detraction, and Just Judgment in Othello,” 49–62. 25

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

114

When Othello is given instructions to go to Cyprus, this interrupts the potential to consummate his marriage to Desdemona. After meeting again in Cyprus, Othello says to Desdemona, “Come, my dear love, / The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue. / That profit’s yet to come ’tween me and you” (2.3.8–10). However, we are never certain whether the “profit” actually “comes” since the night is interrupted by the fight between Montano and Cassio. Later, when Desdemona instructs Emilia, “Lay on my bed my wedding sheets, remember” (4.2.108), she raises doubts as to whether the marriage has been consummated.28 If the sheets were stained with a virgin’s blood, then Othello would have little reason to distrust Desdemona, but if the wedding sheets in question are unstained then the cultural belief that virgins bleed when first penetrated would give Othello a reason to doubt Desdemona. Either way, there is no certain proof, but the potential of Desdemona as a perpetual virgin creates a space for us to scrutinize the marriage and the underlying Marian significance behind what should be a sexual union. The play’s language initially informs us of Othello’s sexuality juxtaposed against Desdemona’s purity. In the opening scene Iago tells Brabanzio, “an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1.88–9), and later he describes Othello and Desdemona as “making the beast with two backs” (1.1.118). The bestial Othello is contrasted to a Desdemona who is described as “fair” (1.1.123), “a maid so tender, fair, and happy” (1.2.67), and “a maiden never bold” (1.3.94). However, after the marriage is deemed honest, we see the sexually laden language surrounding descriptions of Othello in a more positive light. In Cyprus, Cassio says: Great Jove, Othello guard, And swell his sail with thine own powerful breath, That he may bless this bay with his tall ship, Make love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms, Give renewed fire to our extincted spirits, And bring all Cyprus comfort. (2.1.78–83).

The language of swelling and the phallic imagery of Othello’s “tall ship” in relation to “love’s quick pants” evoke a potent Othello who will penetrate Desdemona. Although it is Othello’s arrival that will give “renewed fire” to the dying spirits of Cyprus, the construction of the passage allows for a reading where Othello’s lovemaking with Desdemona—and the conceivable offspring that they stand to produce—will bring “all Cyprus comfort.” The language of “blessing,” “renewal,”and “comfort” surrounding the imagined sexual union subtly evokes something akin to a divine union. Indeed, Maillet suggests that Othello and Desdemona’s marriage is “grounded in the divine” and “just as sacred and honorable as that between the holy family” (101). I would be remiss, however, to ignore the fact that it is the pagan god Jove guiding Othello, and thus the entire structure here works to corrupt the Marian imagery that follows. See T.G.A. Nelson.

28

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

115

Although the Marian description of Desdemona that immediately follows underscores the view of the marriage as something similar to the holy family, the physical sexuality that Cassio imagines inevitably works to taint any sense of Desdemona’s Marian purity. When she arrives in Cyprus, Cassio says: Oh, behold, The riches of the ship is come on shore! You men of Cyprus, let her have your knees. [Montano and the Gentlemen make curtsy to Desdemona.] Hail to thee, lady! And grace of heaven Before, behind thee, and on every hand Enwheel thee round! (2.1.84–9)

The Marian description of Desdemona set against the sexuality of Othello makes the idea of “love’s quick pants” sacrilegious. Indeed, the imagined sexual relationship between Othello and Desdemona when she is cast in a Marian light works to demonize Othello, to make him the would-be sexual aggressor in the relationship and perpetuate the sexual anxiety that Iago triggers in the opening scene of the play. However, it is only after Iago manipulates Othello to internalize his own “otherness,” and to see Desdemona as a sexual creature, when doubt begins to transform him. Perhaps the doubts about the Virgin Mary’s character that I outlined in Chapter 2 result from a believer confronting an iconic woman who becomes increasingly human under the Reformed faith. Indeed, Robert Whiting notes accounts during the Protestant Reformation in which the Virgin Mary was denounced as sexual or even whorish. In 1536, a man named Philip Gammon declared that Mary was no virgin and that Jesus was conceived by the “actual deed of man” (82). The following year, a citizen in Rye went so far as to say, “If Our Lady were here in earth, I would no more fear to meddle with her than with a common whore” (82).29 Denouncing Marian devotion was one thing, but presenting Jesus as the offspring of human sexual intercourse was something altogether different. The view of Mary as an ordinary, sexual woman inevitably casts her into the lot of whores where at least one man was unafraid to “meddle” with her. When the man from Rye groups the Virgin Mary with a “common whore,” he articulates the quickest way to fracture a woman’s virtue: construct her as a whore. Although transforming Mary into a whore was never an agenda for Reformers, the increased emphasis on masculine authority, and the conception of the Virgin Mary’s intercessory potential as an indicator of inappropriate female strength, allows for masculine anxiety to settle in. It is this anxiety, perhaps, that informs Neogeorgus and Charke in their view of the Virgin Mary as threatening to God’s authority that I discuss in Chapter 2. Perceiving the Virgin Mary as a woman 29 More famously, when Robert Baines accused Christopher Marlowe of heresy, he alleged that Marlowe opined “[t]hat Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest” (Honan 374).

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

116

who intends to overstep God’s authority accentuates the fine line between being disobedient and being unchaste. Iago, then, understands the intricacy of conceiving chastity as a set of behaviors and is able to exploit this concept to make Othello “see” an adulterous Desdemona, one who is physically unchaste. Early on, Brabanzio advises Othello to “look to” Desdemona since she was deceptive, but this makes no impression on Othello. Iago, on the other hand, makes Desdemona active by utilizing intercession. Iago is the catalyst in employing an intercessory structure, and after Cassio asks for Desdemona’s intercession, Desdemona answers, “Be thou assured, good Cassio, I will do / All my abilities in thy behalf” (3.3.1–2). She then approaches Othello and says, “If I have any grace or power to move you, / His present reconciliation take” (3.3.48–9). By acting as Cassio’s intercessor, Desdemona is aligned with the Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition, and it is this particular act that initiates her certain downfall. Indeed, Desdemona’s intercession gives Iago the “ocular proof” (3.3.365) he needs to cast her in a promiscuous light. Unlike the polemical gesture at the Virgin Mary’s intercessory promiscuity that I addressed in Chapter 2, Iago does not imply that Desdemona is too liberal in her mediation. Instead, he utilizes her mediatory role to construct a physical connection between Cassio and Desdemona: first, Iago describes a dream where Cassio would “grip and wring [Iago’s] hand … then kiss [him] hard” thinking it was Desdemona (3.3.425–6), and later he uses the handkerchief as proof that Cassio slept with Desdemona (4.1.9–160). By psychologically manipulating Othello’s thoughts against the perceived actions of Desdemona, who argues on Cassio’s behalf, and Cassio, who unwittingly possesses Desdemona’s handkerchief, Iago is able to pervert the intercession as adultery. Through her intercessory role—a residual Catholic quality—Desdemona’s positive association with Marian virtue becomes fractured. The point I aim to make is that in questioning the Virgin Mary’s intentions in intercession—even if intercession is a quality born out of human imagination without biblical grounding—her character inevitably comes under scrutiny. As I outlined earlier in this chapter, Mary’s virginity is a quality that both Catholics and Protestants respect in early modern England. However, when Protestants position themselves as champions of marriage so as to define themselves against the Catholic idealization of virginity, a certain backlash against perpetual virginity is bound to occur. In this way, the praise and adoration that surrounds Desdemona early in the play meets its end in Othello’s tirade against her purity. To be clear, however, premarital virginity remains fetishized in post-Reformation thought, and the sexually realized wife represents the end of that ideal.30 Keeping the virgin virginal after marriage is accomplished by keeping the un-virginal wife chaste. A wife’s sexuality becomes a physical marker of her newfound identity in marriage. This, of course, should be seen as positive, and even when Erasmus writes to the Benedictine nuns of the Convent of the Machabees praising them for See, for example, Theodora A. Jankowski, 75–110.

30

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

117

being like the Virgin Mary, elsewhere he addresses marriage in a very positive way: “I do not think it is a dangerous thing to praise especially when the marriage I praise is very similar to virginity, a marriage in which one has a wife for the production of offspring, not the satisfaction of lust” (Works 93). Clearly, this marriage differs from the one Erasmus details before where husbands are, “curst and knavishe … dycers, drunkerdes, riotttous spenders … scabbed and scurvy … besydes many other more grevous and wycked condicions or diseases, which I speake not of” (Comparation 34). It is the lustful passion of the husband that makes the marriage unfavorable. We might recall, however, that in wanting to consummate his marriage, Othello says, “the fruits are [yet] to ensue,” perhaps indicating that he seeks offspring through that consummation. Nevertheless, once Desdemona’s physicality is imagined, that positive view of marriage falls by the wayside. After Othello is convinced that Desdemona is unfaithful, he seeks to fracture her identity by subverting her strongest qualities. As Othello strikes Desdemona, he calls her, “devil” (4.1.239), and instructs her, “Out of my sight!” (4.1.242). When she begins to leave, Lodovico remarks, “Truly, an obedient lady. / I do beseech Your Lordship, call her back” (4.1.243–4). Desdemona’s obedience and loyalty are pushed to the limit through Othello’s violence, even as others emphasize her positive qualities. Othello, however, undermines her obedience when he says: “Sir, she can turn, and turn, and yet go on / And turn again; and she can weep, sir weep, / And she’s obedient, as you say, obedient, / Very obedient” (4.1.250–53). It is a moment where obedience and sorrow are scrutinized to showcase Desdemona’s physical autonomy—a quality of her being that Othello can never control. Desdemona fulfills all the expected and idealized qualities that are required from a chaste, married, and obedient woman; however, Othello’s masculine anxiety serves to dismantle these qualities and make them dangerous insofar as Desdemona is the only person who knows the sincerity of her own actions. He believes she sheds “crocodile” tears (4.1.241), and her turning is akin to turning tricks with any man. When Othello finally accuses Desdemona of being unfaithful as she kneels before him, he describes her as a “fountain from the which [his] current runs / Or else dries up—to be discarded thence, / Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in” (4.2.61–4). Othello underscores Desdemona’s procreative role, but her womb is imagined as a dry fountain, a cesspool of sorts. He transforms her generative potential into a perverse body. Othello asks thereafter, “Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write ‘whore’ upon?” (4.2.73–4). Othello’s diatribe is a re-inscription of Desdemona’s identity, and the use of “goodly book” to describe her becomes a striking juxtaposition for the insolent use of “whore” that follows. Othello’s creation of Desdemona as a blank slate upon which he can create her into the “whore” he believes her to be illustrates the project at hand. Desdemona is, like a goodly book, a revered object, and it is Othello’s passionate and lustful imagination that defaces her purity. Desdemona can merely deny Othello’s charges, and in the process she says, “If to preserve this vessel for my lord / From any other foul unlawful touch / Be not to be a strumpet,

118

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

I am none” (4.2.85–7). Like views of the Virgin Mary, Desdemona presents herself as a “vessel”—one who has been preserved for her “lord”—and yet it is precisely the capacity for that vessel to be explored that renders her suspect. Indeed, the attention shifts to the secular, and sexual, lord that Desdemona marries, and this complicates the paradigm of virginity. In an ironic tone, Othello finally concedes, “I cry you mercy, then. / I took you for that cunning whore of Venice / That married with Othello” (4.2.92–4). Desdemona’s “merciful” ability is mocked, and it is only Othello’s fictional version of the truth that can reconstruct her identity. In the end, however, we find that Othello is unable to alter Desdemona’s untainted reputation because she is granted a death reminiscent of iconic significance. When Othello murders Desdemona—as was the case with Ophelia’s suicide/death—the virgin is kept perpetually virginal because her physicality ceases to matter. Like Gertrude’s well-crafted imagery surrounding Ophelia’s melodious death, Desdemona is also fashioned as an iconic figure in the closing moments of the play. Before Othello murders the sleeping Desdemona, he says, “Yet I’ll not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster” (5.2.3–5). What he appears to fashion here is a lifeless body. Desdemona’s white skin likened to “monumental alabaster” shapes her as a kind of statue. If Desdemona embodies the virtuous essence of the Virgin Mary in Othello, then the moments leading to her death seem to transfer that essence into an enduring monument. Desdemona maintains her innocence, and her loyalty, in the moments leading up to Othello smothering her, but once the attempted murder transpires she is able to “return” to life to speak again.31 She begins by saying, “Oh, falsely, falsely murdered!” (5.2.126), and then remarks, “A guiltless death I die” (5.2.132). Her statements appear to set up a chance at incriminating Othello, but when Emilia asks, “who hath done this deed?” (5.2.127), Desdemona’s answer exemplifies both her forgiving and obedient nature: “Nobody, I myself. Farewell. / Commend me to my kind lord. Oh, farewell!” (5.2.132–3). She does not implicate Othello, and instead lies to save him at the moment of her death. In one final attempt to transform Desdemona’s honesty, Othello says, “She’s like a liar gone to burning hell! / ’Twas I that killed her” (5.2.138–9). However, Othello’s act of murder clearly trumps Desdemona’s lie, and his villainy is set against her kind nature. “Oh the more angel she,” Emilia says, “And you the blacker devil!” (5.2.140). Desdemona’s unfaltering chastity is for naught in Othello, since it is only after her death that Othello truly appreciates it. Through death, Desdemona’s virginal 31 Maillet explores the Christological dimension to Desdemona’s character in this final scene, but ultimately he argues that it would seem “incoherent not to” link Desdemona to the Virgin Mary given the definitive link established in the other parts of Othello (107). Desdemona’s language and resurrection are certainly reminiscent of Christ, but I align myself—to some degree—with Maillet who feels that as a Christ-like figure, Desdemona’s forgiveness would mean Othello is not damned. As I argue later, I see the play taking a much different direction where Othello’s salvation is concerned.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

119

purity transcends physical boundaries and shapes her as an exceptional being. Realizing his mistake after learning of Iago’s machinations, Othello speaks to Desdemona’s lifeless body: “When we shall meet at count, / This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, / And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl? / Even like thy chastity” (5.2.280–83). The coldness of Desdemona’s body symbolizes her chastity, but Othello’s description of their meeting at judgment day is riveting given the Marian undertones that surround Desdemona. Although Othello now reimagines Desdemona as chaste, he also imagines her as an unmerciful being with the power to send him to hell.32 It is a distorted description of the Virgin Mary’s power to persuade God where instead of mercy, the Virgin leads him toward punishment. The use of “cold,” then, could denote: Desdemona’s cold body; Desdemona’s chastity; or the coldness of Desdemona’s imagined act of banishing Othello to hell. Othello’s commentary, although reestablishing Desdemona’s chastity, serves to re-introduce another uncertainty about the Virgin Mary’s re-imagined role in post-Reformation thought. Without the power of intercession, will she merely stand by with a “cold” look and watch sinners cast into hell on the day of reckoning? It is yet one more element to provoke anxiety. The answer to that question, like the answer to all potential perceptions of the Virgin Mary’s role in salvation, depends upon the believer. The Virgin Mary, like Desdemona, appears to remain constant—it is the men who re-fashion ideals and ideas about the Virgin Mary in the way that Othello constructs and reconstructs Desdemona’s identity. It is a matter wrought through one’s own insecurity, guilt, and anxiety. When believers were asked to stop believing in the Virgin Mary’s power to intercede, they were also asked to continue to hold her in high esteem because of the purity of her being and her special relationship to God. It was a fine balance that had to be struck, and one that was difficult to manage—it called for skepticism, but not too much of it. Mary’s intercessory power was ungrounded because it was not found in scripture, but neither was her perpetual virginity. Believers were supposed to discard one ideal, but not the other. When uncertainty settled in, perhaps it was best for the Reformer, worshipper, or husband alike to merely ignore certain doubts about feminine virginity. III. Cordelia and the Evasion of Virginal Sexuality The evasion of female sexuality reaches an emblematic high point in the opening moments of King Lear. When Cordelia delivers her famous response to Lear—“Nothing” (1.1.88)—she introduces into discourse her symbolic and For his part, Maillet has a more hopeful reading of Desdemona’s Marian intercessory capacity as he locates in these final moments “a strong hope for Othello’s ultimate salvation” (107). Indeed, Maillet makes a strong case for seeing “events through the eyes of Desdemona” as a means of retaining “hope that the loving, unchanging, merciful will of Desdemona” saves Othello (108–9). While I think the play certainly allows for that interpretation, I do feel that the value of Marian intercession to Shakespeare’s audience is less clear. The “hope” might be in place, but from my perspective, anxiety about salvation— including that of the tragic character of Othello—seems to remain. 32

120

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

concurrent value/limitations as a virginal daughter about to be given away into marriage.33 By verbalizing her decision not to flatter Lear, Cordelia disallows her father a final ownership over her person.34 In her self-possessed response, Cordelia displays her chastity—unlike her sisters whose superfluous speech could be considered licentious—and in the process emulates the role of a postReformation Virgin Mary whose own speech was praised for being “short and to the point” (Kreitzer 59). However, in the familial structure a daughter’s duty was to her father, and in this way Cordelia’s refusal to flatter could be perceived as subversive. Either way, she stands to be recognized. Cordelia’s chastity is a source of tension in this opening scene, and the repetition of the word “nothing” five times in four lines underscores its significance (1.1.85–8). Cordelia’s “nothing” marks the term, and her character in the subsequent acts of the play, as an absent presence. On another level, as David Willbern contends, “the language of Cordelia’s defense alludes to the hidden genital significance of her ‘Nothing’” (246). It is a means of concurrently showcasing her humility and sexuality. Unlike Ophelia and Desdemona, Cordelia takes control of the way in which her character will be imagined. “Why have my sisters husbands,” Cordelia questions, “if they say / They love you all?” (1.1.98–9). In no uncertain terms, Cordelia understands the insincerity of her sisters and positions herself on higher ground. Lynda E. Boose, for example, argues, “Because the [marriage] ritual is sacred, Cordelia dispassionately refuses to follow her sisters in prostituting it” (215). A critical part of that sacred union, of course, is the consummation that follows. Although Cordelia defines herself as “young … and true” (1.1.107), she also draws attention to her sexuality by invoking the image of “nothing” in that opening scene. The brilliance of Cordelia’s “nothing” is the multiplicity of meaning that proliferates, and the consequent need for Lear to evade—on one level or another—certain facets of her sexuality. Given the Marian tropes that I follow, I find Cordelia’s decision to remain true to herself as a way to help Lear, and the audience at large, to understand that emulation of the Virgin Mary’s chastity is impossible when the marriage paradigm is at stake. Cordelia, or any young woman for that matter, cannot match Mary’s extraordinary nature. Cordelia makes this clear when she describes her role after marriage: “That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty. / Sure I shall never marry like my sisters, / To love my father all” (1.1.100–103). Cordelia describes a divided duty, one that shows the exact limits of virginal daughters 33 I have opted to follow the conflated version of King Lear from in The Norton Shakespeare simply because it offers readers an edition that incorporates elements of both Q1 and Folio versions. The Marian tropes I trace can be found in both the Q1 and Folio editions. 34 For example, Claire McEachern writes, “Lear’s insistence that his daughter flatter him for her dowry is ostensibly his last act of ownership over her, but it is designed to retain control” (285).

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

121

entering into a sexual union—but Lear refuses to see that. In the end, I argue, the evasion of Cordelia’s sexuality and the emphasis on her maternal benevolence is akin to the post-Reformation view of the Virgin Mary. However, Cordelia’s agency—like the varied agency of the Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition— is concurrently employed and marginalized. Lear’s paradoxical desire for both Cordelia’s maternal empathy and her symbolic Marian purity disrupts his ultimate reaffirmation of masculinity. In the face of that fractured masculinity, and through the play’s final gesture at the value of Marian compassion, the Virgin Mary’s absence in post-Reformation English culture is vividly underscored. In a play where Lear’s unanswered prayers are deafening, Cordelia’s departure positions her as a hopeful alternative to the world of King Lear—a figure not unlike the Virgin Mary of post-Reformation English thought. Janet Adelman, for example, locates in Cordelia’s return her capacity to redeem the nature that Goneril and Regan have corrupted—Cordelia is “in essence remade as the second Eve, the Virgin Mother who can undo harm” (Suffocating Mothers 119). Coppélia Kahn, too, likens Cordelia to the Virgin Mary where “she intercedes magically, her empathy and pity coaxing mercy from nature” (“Absent Mothers” 47). But the view of Cordelia as a redemptive Marian figure is chiefly imagined by Lear as a means of fulfilling his wish—of undoing the separateness that Cordelia initiated in her opening lines; and her death, as Adelman argues, allows for a “recuperation of threatened masculinity” (127). For her part, Kahn focuses on Lear’s enduring fantasy where “a prison can be a nursery in which Cordelia has no independent being and exists solely for her father as part of his defensive strategy against coming to terms with women who are as human, or as inhuman, as men” (49). However, Kahn suggests, Cordelia’s death prevents him from fulfilling this fantasy, and her certain absence is symbolic of the erasure of female goodness from the world. Cordelia, then, is as a sacrificial figure for Lear’s manhood—a woman who abnegates her independence to demonstrate the power of mercy. As Peter Erickson notes, she is “subsumed in the escapist vision Lear constructs,” and Lear’s “appropriation of Cordelia is not an act of love but a violation of it” (114). Any Marian-like goodness, then, is seemingly lost by the play’s end. Although critics disagree about Lear’s capacity to learn form Cordelia’s benevolence, the very potential for that kind of goodness should give us pause. Indeed, in her brilliant study “Inverting the Pietà in Shakespeare’s King Lear,” Katharine Goodland offers the possibility that the “taboo pieta, which had once served as catalyst and emblem of communal empathy in the English place of worship, is resuscitated in the breath of the tragic actor on the English stage” (65). And when Goodland gestures at the potential of both Lear and the Virgin Mary to incite the audience (both onstage and in the theater) to “join in their mourning” (65), she articulates fully the loss at hand. The very grief surrounding the loss of a child is likened to the grief Mary feels at Golgotha, but we are also being asked to imagine the loss of the Virgin Mary. In the case of Shakespeare’s audience, this loss was all too real. Thus, the play itself works to affect a longing for the presence of Marian purity, compassion,

122

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

benevolence, and redemption. It renders that feminine virtue stronger than any form of paternal honor, or masculine dignity. Before her departure, Cordelia defends her reputation by imploring Lear to make known that it is “No unchaste action or dishonored step” (1.1.229) that led to her banishment. When Burgundy refuses to take Cordelia without dowry, France interjects: “Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich being poor; / Most choice, forsaken, and most loved, despised!” (1.1.251–2). In stressing Cordelia’s value despite her deficiency, France utilizes familiar descriptions often used to describe the Virgin Mary’s own humble origins. During the Annunciation, for example, the Virgin Mary describes herself saying, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). Early theologians did not focus on the Virgin Mary’s use of “handmaid” to denote her social stature, but St. Francis of Assisi was able to transform Mary’s spiritual state into a “physical and social condition” (Warner 179). Over time, St. Francis helped shape the myth of the Virgin Mary to make her poverty and humility into positive virtues. Christ came from these humble origins—what St. Francis imagines as a roofless manger occupied by livestock where Mary gave birth—and this served to stress both his humanity and the sheer scope of Christ’s ascension to the kingdom of heaven (Warner 177–91). Thus, the Virgin Mary’s poverty is rendered positive, because it makes her rich insofar as it makes her humble. France finds similar value in Cordelia’s insufficiency. Cordelia’s departure in the opening scene creates an absent presence where her lingering influence uncovers an alternative to Lear’s masculine identity. In her absence, Lear’s antagonistic response to Goneril’s and Regan’s newfound authority illustrates a standard, albeit misogynistic, view of women as the source of a male’s “frustration” that perpetuates masculine anxiety. Goneril and Regan are set up as “scapegoats, as if it were possible to ‘cleanse’ masculinity by debasing women” (Breitenberg 25). Lear asks nature to “convey sterility” (1.4.255) into Goneril’s womb, and later groups her with Regan and calls them both “unnatural hags” (2.4.273). This escalates into a misogynistic view of women in general: “Down from the waist they are centaurs, / Though women all above. / … . / Beneath is all the fiends’; there’s hell, there’s darkness, / There’s the sulfurous pit, burning, scalding, / Stench, consumption! Fie, fie, fie! pah! pah!” (4.6.121–6).35 Lear fashions all women as unnatural, and he specifically focuses on their genitalia, on their “nothingness,” as the source of that abnormality. However, interspersed within Lear’s misogynistic tirades, we encounter moments where he recalls Cordelia: “Oh most small fault, / How ugly didst thou in Cordelia show!” (1.4.243–4); “I did her wrong” (1.5.20); 35 It is worth noting that in the Q1 edition, the lines read “There’s the sulphury pit, burning, scalding, / Stench, consummation” (Scene 20, 122–3). In the Folio version, “consummation” is replaced with “consumption.” The image of a disease-ridden womb is in place through both descriptions, but the Q1 version gestures directly at the completion of a marriage through sexual intercourse. Given my argument surrounding the evasion of Cordelia’s sexuality, the line works to highlight Lear’s anxiety about her consummation.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

123

and at one point Lear aligns himself with Cordelia when he says, “No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing” (3.2.36). Cordelia’s absent presence provides Lear an alternative to his otherwise misogynistic, masculine identity, one where the feminine is deemed positive if only because it remains unseen. In juxtaposing the absent Cordelia with Goneril and Regan, the play draws attention to the role of the female in wedlock while allowing for Cordelia to exist in a perpetual state of unmarried virginity. That is to say, when Cordelia departs she has not entered into the sacrament of marriage, and thus her unmarried virtue is a residual element of her character. Her sexuality is something that remains elusive. Because Goneril and Regan are the only women we encounter in the play after Cordelia’s banishment, disloyalty, inflexibility, and adultery become qualities that define the female. Marriage, then, is presented as a corrupt state of being— something akin to Erasmus’s description in his letter to the nuns of the Convent of the Machabees. But unlike Erasmus’s view where men corrupt the institution, it is the women who are to blame in King Lear. As a character reminiscent of Marian virtue, Cordelia is a salient savior whose inevitable return will redeem the power of femininity. In this vein, however, I do not mean to suggest that through their seemingly “masculine” existence, Goneril and Regan are inadequate females.36 Instead, I feel that they are intentionally set up in striking opposition to Cordelia to evoke the Eve versus Virgin Mary dynamic that previous critics of King Lear have addressed. In The blessednes of the Virgin Marie (1618), Church of England clergyman John Shaw describes the enduring view of Mary as a second Eve: Eva, the mother of us all, when she had conceived, and borne a son, thankfully acknowledged Gods love therein, saying: I have obtained a man by the Lord. Yet had she no comfort of him, For he was of that wicked one, and slue his brother: but Maries joy was sound, full, and lasting; for she did not onely obtaine a man of the lord, but a man which is the Lord. (B3v)

As I have mentioned before, the belief that Mary was a second Eve come to redeem womankind was a common one, and even the salutation, Ave Maria, was often noted as Eva spelled backward (Pelikan 44). The incongruity, however, is that Goneril and Regan are childless, and Cordelia’s procreative potential ends in her death. Cordelia’s strength, then, is found in her physical chastity as opposed to Goneril and Regan who are both married and yet desire to be with Edmund. To what degree Cordelia’s virginal identity persists after her return is arguable given her married state. However, France’s absence allows Cordelia’s role as a daughter to supersede her role as a wife. It is upon Cordelia’s decision to return that her Marian dimension is firmly established. A Gentleman describes Cordelia’s reaction to the news of Lear’s plight:

36 For an interesting account of the masculine versus feminine qualities of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, see Catherine S. Cox, 143–57.

124

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England ’Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of “father” Pantingly forth, as if it pressed her heart; Cried, “Sisters! sisters! Shame of ladies! sisters! Kent! father! sisters! What, i’ the storm? i’ the night? Let pity not be believed!” There she shook The holy water from her heavenly eyes, And clamor moistened, then away she started To deal with grief alone. (4.3.24–31)

The comparison of Cordelia’s tears to “holy water from her heavenly eyes” evokes a divine quality, and the heaving of the name “father” situates her as one in prayer. Through her grief and empathy, Cordelia demonstrates characteristics akin to the Virgin Mary as Mother of Sorrows. Cordelia’s return begins a seeming reconstruction of her character in an undeniable Marian light in which her virginal virtue is only one of many qualities that associate her with the faithful Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic thought. Cordelia arrives in England to intercede, and hereafter we witness a proliferation of Marian undertones that inform not only her character, but also her relationship with Lear. She pleads to her audience, “he that helps [Lear] take all my outward worth” (4.4.11), and thus renders faith more important than any material possessions. As Cordelia looks upon her father, she prays to the gods, “Cure this great breach in his abusèd nature! / The untuned and jarring senses, O, wind up / Of this child-changèd father” (4.7.15–17). Lear as a “child-changèd” father is a man who has been weakened because of his children, but the syntax also implied that he has changed into a child himself. Cordelia’s maternal role in this transformation begins to take a life of its own. In the ensuing action, Lear attempts to solidify an ambiguous relationship with Cordelia where he can posit himself as both father and son. As Lear awakens, he describes Cordelia as a “soul in bliss” (4.7.46), and says later, “For as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia” (4.7.70–71). Lear imagines Cordelia to be celestial, but he also recognizes her as his child. When Lear and Cordelia are ultimately defeated, Cordelia tells Lear, “Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?” (5.3.7). Lear answers: No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask thee forgiveness. (5.3.8–11)

In this imagined relationship, there is no authority or gendered anxiety to contend with. A daughter’s supplication is answered with a father’s penitence, and in the absence of a hierarchal structure, Lear can exist as a man without fear or distrust of the female. Cordelia has returned as his daughter without her husband, and Lear’s initial imagined end, one where he “thought to set [his] rest / On her kind nursery” (1.1.123–4), shapes her as a virginal mother with absolute loyalty to the father/son.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

125

We are not allowed insight into Cordelia’s viewpoint on this issue as her voice is never heard again, but through her death Lear not only perpetuates her imagined purity, but he also emulates her empathy. Unlike Hamlet and Othello, Lear has no self-referential death speech. He does not ask for others to report his cause nor to speak of him in any particular way, but instead the entirety of his concentration focuses on the possibility that Cordelia could be alive: “Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there” (5.3.308–9). Goodland addresses the Marian parallel in this final scene: Mary repeatedly draws attention to the sight of her son’s suffering and the dying body, so Lear bids us to look upon the dead body of his daughter, and to feel, in every part of our being, his suffering as he cradles her and wails … The taboo corpse, banned from the English funeral service where parishioners once collectively looked upon and wept over it, is thrust upon our sight in the final moments of King Lear. (66–7).

Goodland’s attention to the inversion of the Pietà in this moment, and its symbolic power in post-Reformation England, is anchored in an impressive analysis of mourning in Protestant England. More germane to the present study, Goodland’s reading of the final scene allows us to consider how Lear—and not Cordelia—is ultimately aligned with the Virgin Mary. Cordelia’s virginal purity and Marian benevolence are overshadowed by Lear’s capacity to surrender masculine control to grieve the loss of that feminine strength. Holding his dead daughter in his arms, Lear finally illustrates how compassion, humility, and empathy—the very hallmarks of the Virgin Mary’s own virtue—are more enduring signs of love and loyalty than mere “words of love” professed (1.1.186). IV. Coda: Claiming Christic Status When we reflect on Hamlet, Othello, and Lear, we witness a common thread where the men are invested in constructing women as perpetual virgins, if not Marian figures. On the one hand, the limits of the Virgin Mary as a model of emulation appear to be defined through her exceptional status as perpetual virgin in marriage and childbirth, but on the other hand, the male desire to re-imagine one’s lover, wife, or daughter as Marian seems to reveal an underlying desire for the male to re-imagine himself. What purpose is served by re-fashioning these women as Marian? The answer, perhaps, is found in the male desire to reach a type of Christic status. Hamlet, Othello, and Lear are all grappling with the destabilization of their positions of prominence, and the destabilization of their masculine identities. What Shakespeare seems to explore through these characters’ reactions to that destabilization, then, is the influence that the feminine has on those reactions. Critics like Janet Adelman have convincingly argued that the female poses a threat to the constitution/re-constitution of masculinity, and that imagining one’s mother as a Marian figure is a way to uncover the male’s fantasy of a pure maternal origin (Suffocating Mothers 17). In this way, the male hero imagines himself as a son born

126

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

of an untainted mother. When we take into account the woman’s Marian identity, then, we can logically recognize that the male is making an indirect claim to Christic status. This claim—like the emulation of the Virgin Mary—is always out of reach. In moving from Hamlet-as-lover, to Othello-as-husband, to Lear-as-father, we see the trajectory toward a God-like claim. But Lear’s tyranny and downfall serve to illustrate that human omnipotence is impossible. Lear is no more God than Cordelia is the Virgin Mary. The claim to Christic status, however, is hardly confined to perceptions of an authoritative God. As Caroline Walker Bynum has shown in Jesus As Mother, Christ was often construed as feminine. Thus, the re-conception of masculine identity that Hamlet, Othello, and Lear undertake does not necessarily entail a claim to a masculine authority. Instead, their claim to Christic status, and their desire to imagine the chief women in their lives as Marian emblems, could be seen as a way to assuage their anxiety about their destabilized masculinity. It is a way, perhaps, for these men to embrace the instability of gendered identity by aligning themselves with the most prominent, and the most compassionate—and potentially most feminine—of male heroes that a Christian culture has to offer. Ultimately, Lear’s identification with the Virgin Mary allows us to glance backward to see how Othello and Hamlet themselves identify with the Virgin Mary when her maternal compassion is accentuated. Where Lear can merely imagine himself as a son, Othello and Hamlet actually occupy this position within their respective plays. With the Virgin Mary’s maternal capacity in mind, I revisit Othello to examine the nostalgia for, and idealization of, Othello’s maternal origins before returning to Hamlet to see how the Virgin Mary’s maternal dimension affects what is arguably the most salient example of mother/son relationships in Shakespeare. Before arriving at these plays, however, I first examine both Roman Catholic and post-Reformation socio-religious views of the Virgin Mary’s maternal significance, and explore how early modern cultural and anatomical views of maternity influence gendered perspectives of Marian motherhood. In the end, I argue, the maternal— and the Marian, for that matter—bear positively on notions of, and the promise behind, masculine subjects in Shakespeare and early modern England. Part 2 Liberating Mothers In pre-Reformation England, emphasis on the Virgin Mary’s maternal strength was predominantly meant to influence the female. Mary was often called upon in prayer during pregnancy and childbirth, and her maternal qualities were seen as exemplary. “Women were encouraged to identify with the Virgin Mary while pregnant,” Mary Fissell writes, “and used saints’ relics and items associated with her to try to ensure a safe delivery” (14). One common practice involved wrapping a girdle around a Marian statue, and then wearing that girdle during pregnancy. Elizabeth of York, wife to King Henry VII, was said to have observed

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

127

this practice (Fissell 14–15). Superstitious acts like this led Lollards to attack the cult of the Virgin Mary by ridiculing belief in Marian mediation in childbirth. Utilizing what came to be known as the “vessel theory” that I discussed earlier, Lollards often referred to the Virgin Mary as a “sack,” a “saffron bag,” and in 1534 a priest at Yorkshire described her as “pudding when the meat was taken out” (Fissel 25). Ignoring belief in the Virgin Mary’s divinity, Lollards instead focused on Mary’s physical nature, and reduced her to an empty container. Like the iconoclastic backlash against pilgrimage sites and statues, the Virgin Mary’s maternal popularity drew considerable controversy. With the dissolution of intercessory prayer during the Protestant Reformation, the Virgin Mary’s influence over pregnant and childbearing women deteriorated, but this process was slow in coming. The importance of the Virgin Mary’s maternity to Christ’s humanity led to a careful guarding of this particular role. In 1550, under the reign of the Catholic monarch Queen Mary I, Joan Bocher was burned at the stake for her belief that the Virgin Mary was born in sin and that God took no essence from her being. Instead, Bocher argued that “as a light passes through glass” so it was that God passed through Mary. Even the devout Protestant Hugh Latimer found himself describing Bocher’s argument as “foolish” (Fissel 37). The belief in Christ’s incarnation kept the Virgin Mary’s maternity central to Christianity, and even those who scorned Roman Catholic Mariolatry were quick to acknowledge the unique value of the Virgin Mary’s maternity. As the Reformation approached, popular medieval images of the Virgin Mary suckling the Christ child were slowly being replaced by images of the Pietà (Peters 74–5). This iconographical shift was important because it devalued the moment of birth, and underscored the significance of the adult Christ. The late medieval Christocentric focus on Christ’s crucifixion set the tone for the alteration of the iconography, but behind it all the Virgin Mary’s maternal compassion remained fixed. In Christ’s nativity and crucifixion, the Virgin Mary was at hand, perhaps paralleling traditional views of a female’s role in birth and death rituals. The importance of the female in birth is self-evident, but women were also expected to pray for the deceased’s soul and prepare the dead body for burial.37 One’s origin and end, then, were bound to the feminine, and this relationship with the maternal seems to posit the paternal figure outside the scope of these defining moments. The difference between an image of a mother at one’s birth and an image of a mother at one’s death is the degree of solace that each particular image generates. The nurturing quality of a mother suckling her infant child is gentle and life giving, while the maternal embrace of a dead son reveals her empathetic capacity in the face of mortality and grief. “The attractive vulnerability of the child,” Christine Peters writes, “made possible by the fact that its wants are cared for, is now the suffering of a man who is an instrument of his father’s will and whom his mother cannot assist” (82). Peters’s emphasis on Christ as an instrument of his “father’s will” potentially provoked the anxiety that bred desire for intercession that I See Peters, 17, and Lucinda M. Becker, 32.

37

128

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

discuss in Chapter 2. In this way, the Virgin Mary exists as a substitute for God the father whose unmistakable ability both to create and destroy life reveals a rather haunting patriarchal presence. The mother is there to hold and comfort Christ at both ends of the mortal spectrum, and images of the Virgin Mary with Christ buttressed belief in this kind of maternal compassion. Unlike her intercession, the Virgin Mary’s maternity was a quality to be celebrated in post-Reformation England. In The Widowes Mite, for example, the author emphasizes how the Virgin Mary’s role as mother of God clearly separates her as an instrumental figure in Christianity:38 There be holy, & learned men that affirme (& it is full of reason) that if the Scripture had sayd no more of her, but these only words, Maria de qua na’us est Jesus, Mary of whome Jesus was borne, it had sayd sufficiently of her, or rather that it had sayd so much, as to which no point of dignity could be added. For to affirme, that the Virgin was the Mother of God, is to give a title which evidently involveth supreme excellency; & which is so great in regard of the alliance, and the conjunction it hath with God himselfe, as that no power of mind created, no man, no Saint, no Angell, nor they alto-geather are able entirely, and exactly comprehend what dignity it is to be the Mother of God. (A5v)

The author’s belief in the Virgin Mary’s due dignity is supported by her incomprehensible conjunction with God; indeed, Mary’s “supreme excellency” is a mystery that only God can understand. This author’s particular veneration is likely rooted in his Catholic affinity, but even leading Protestant Reformers acknowledged the extraordinary nature of the Virgin Mary’s maternity. As I indicate in the Introduction, leading Reformers continued to speak about the Virgin Mary in a reverential tone. Both Luther and Zwingli “treated the Mother of God with genuinely deep reverence and affection” (MacCulloch, Reformation 592). Reverence for the Virgin Mary derived from the belief in the incarnation of Christ, and thus even the hard-line Reformer John Calvin found it necessary to clarify the role and importance of the Virgin Mary in the creation of Christ as man: “It is properly inferred, therefore, from the language of Matthew, that inasmuch as Christ was begotten of Mary, (Matthew, i.16) he was procreated from her seed” (434). Evidently, Calvin was a proponent of a two-seed theory. Although Calvin’s affection for Mary is beyond this reader’s ability to discern, he does locate significance in her role as Christ’s physical mother. Indeed, Mary’s role as Theotokos was unique and one to be envied. Luther was more forthright in his affection for the Virgin Mary, and he even sees her pregnancy with Christ as an analogy for one’s spirituality where “it must happen in our hearts as it happened to her” (Kroener 216). As the mother of God, the Virgin Mary is in the closest possible position to “receiving” and understanding Christ.

38 As I mention in Chapter 2, the author A.G. was thought to be the courtier Sir Tobie Matthew.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

129

Enviable as her maternity might have been to Luther, not everyone shared his perspective on the Virgin Mary. Luther was writing in the early stages of the Protestant Reformation after which the ensuing iconoclasm and emphasis on the all-male trinity resulted in shifting viewpoints on the importance of Mary’s maternity. Oddly enough, it was easier for Reformers to attack Mary’s maternal strength than her non-scriptural perpetual virginity. With maternity, the central debate dealt with the amount of matter the mother passed on to the male child. As I outline below, anatomical theories typically argued that both male and female seeds were necessary in conception, but the male was thought to be dominant. Nonetheless, the threat to a male’s gendered make-up stemmed beyond the womb, and a mother’s role in breastfeeding, religious indoctrination, and child rearing was often seen as menacing. This threat even permeated perceptions of religious and national identity. In Whores of Babylon, for example, Frances E. Dolan writes about anti-Catholic polemics: Sometimes the mother is the Whore of Babylon, her pregnancy revealing her sinfulness and deflating her pretensions to virtue. In such cases, the whore mother transmits her own corruption to her offspring. Elsewhere, polemic casts England itself as the mother, harboring Catholicism as a monstrous child that grows inside its parent but is not like it. (38)

What we find, then, is that masculine anxiety concerning female chastity and maternal influence inevitably affected the way the Virgin Mary’s feminine strength was perceived. In The Jesuites gospel, for example, William Crashaw scrutinizes the Jesuits’ use of Marian iconography and imagines that “the common people might have occasio[n] to imagine, that looke what power of overruling and commanding the Mother hath over her little childe, the same hath She over her sonne Jesus” (E4r). Crashaw’s consternation centers on the unbalanced relationship where the Virgin Mary threatens the male hierarchy through her overwhelming maternal influence. Later, Crashaw emphasizes the Virgin Mary’s rightful place: [C]ompare this with holy scriptures, they indeede speake both of him and her, but of him as God and Savior, of her as a creature; the mother onely of his humanity (although the mother of him that was God) and exercising power onely over his humanity, and that onely during his infancy and privatenes, but not after he tooke upon him the Propheticall office of the mediator, for then he said (in a certaine case) woman what have I to do with thee? and again, being tolde shee was without to speake with him, hee answered that hee had more Mothers, tho not in the same, yet in a better sence: for whosoever did the will of his father, the same saith he is my mother: thus the scripture proceeds to describe him in his propheticall, and afterward in his priestly office, and leaves him not till al last he be ascended into heaven, and have taken possession of his kingdome, and then the scripture leaves him in his glory. (F2r–F2v)

130

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Crashaw deliberately works to marginalize the Virgin Mary’s maternal authority— first by emphasizing her human nature, and thereafter by underscoring how Christ himself rebuked Mary and replaced her with a universal sense of maternity. By breaking away from the human mother who exercised power in “infancy and privatenes,” Jesus is able to ascend to his glorious kingship. As for the Virgin Mary, she is seemingly left behind. In this light, then, we can begin to understand the decreased emphasis on renditions of Mary holding or suckling her infant son in post-Reformation England (see Fig. 3.2). Although other factors also led to the decline in this Marian iconography—such as cultural views of breastfeeding as immodest, and thus associated with the lower class—some Reformers exploited the idea that such renditions favored Mary’s authority over God’s.39 Even if such images are meant to capture the Virgin Mary’s compassionate and nurturing dimension, they also portray a Christ child who is at the mercy of his mother. This enduring reverence for, and anxiety about, the Virgin Mary’s motherhood might have influenced a similar ambivalence about the maternal in reproduction theory. Early modern English anatomical theories typically argued that both male and female seeds were necessary in conception, but as was often the case in most gendered theories, the male was thought to be dominant over the weaker female.40 Although these theories appear to be based on hierarchy rather than physiology, the common belief was that the female seed was necessary for reproduction (Gowing 18). In The Byrth of Mankynde, for example, English physician Thomas Raynalde describes the maternal womb in a strikingly active light.41 Writing in the face of anatomical theories that utilize the Galenic “one-sex” model where the male is the more perfect sex, Raynalde places ample importance on the female.42 He says, “God has to institute that women shoulde be the vessels, wherin the seede of mankinde shold be conceaved, efformed or fashioned, augmeted, nourished & brought to perfectio[n]” (H4r).43 Although the maternal womb is initially presented as a mere habitation for the fetus, he goes on: Wherefore prudent lady nature ful wisely hath provided that there shulde be always pres[en]t and ready, a continual course and resort of blud in [the] vaynes of the matrice as a very naturall source, spryng, fontayne, or wel evermore redy to arouse, water, & nourishe [the] feature [fetus] so sone as it shal be conceaved. (H4r–H4v) 39 For discussions surrounding the shift in emphasis away from Mary as nursing mother, see Peters, 82–3, and Warner, 202–5. 40 For some studies in early modern theories of reproduction, see Thomas Laqueur; Gail Kern Paster, 168–84; and Laura Gowing. 41 Raynalde’s writing is an early modern snapshot of an imagined maternal influence in the process of creation; given its multiple editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we can assume that The Byrth of Mankynde had a wide audience (Adelman, “Making Defect Perfection” 32). 42 For a thorough investigation of the “one-sex model,” see Laqueur. 43 For a discussion of the religious influence of this work, see Mary Fissell, 33–43.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

131

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Fig. 3.2

Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, Netherlandish, c. 1399–1464. Virgin and Child, c. 1460/65. Oil on panel. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1933.1052. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

132

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

The womb as habitation is transformed into a source of nourishment where the mother’s blood becomes a “spring” of life for the unborn child. In other words, the maternal body is more than a mere vessel. In describing the male and female roles in procreation, Raynalde writes: And allthough that man, be as princypall moovar and cause of the generatio[n] yet (no displeasure to men) the woman dothe confer and contribute much more what to the encresement of the chyld in her womb, & what to the nourysshment therof after the byrth, then doth the man. And doutlesse if a man wold demaund to whome the chylde owith moost his generation: ye may murthely make answere that, to the mother: whether ye regarde the paynes in bearing, other elles the conference of most matter in begettyng. (D3v)

Raynalde acknowledges not only the mother’s instrumental role in nourishing and strengthening the fetus, but also the pain she endures in childbirth. In turn, the child owes the most to the mother and not the father. To keep things honest, however, Adelman points out that Raynalde “rescues women from infamy only at the cost of excoriating men in whom he finds ‘woman lyke’ qualities” (“Making Defect Perfection” 34). Whatever value Raynalde places on the female in reproduction, that value vanishes once masculine identity becomes the subject at hand. Regardless of Raynalde’s positive evaluation of the maternal, pregnancy was often “inscribed as disease even as it was required for most women” (Paster 184, her italics). Gail Kern Paster, for example, describes “how thoroughly early modern reproductive theory was permeated by the ideologies of class and gender,” and within this ideology she locates a misogynistic “discomfort with the fluids and processes of female physiology” (173). Paster explains that the maternal body was seen not only as different from the male body, but also different from itself, and thus able to threaten both itself and the unborn child. The “otherness” of the maternal body was used to justify masculine anxiety about maternal influence. After childbirth, a woman was considered “unclean” and various bodily fluids— including colostrum, the earliest breast milk—had to be expelled (Paster 194). The endpoint to this cleansing process was the mother’s first visit to church for blessing after childbirth known as the “churching of women,” or simply as “churching.” The churching of women has its roots in the Judaic ritual purification of women after the birth of a child, as required under Mosaic Law. The Virgin Mary obeys this law in the New Testament (Luke 2:33–40), but in Roman Catholic Christianity the emphasis shifts from purification to giving thanks to God for the safe delivery of the child (Warner 75). Mary’s obedience to this law is celebrated in the Feast of Purification, or Candlemas, on February 2, where the Virgin Mary’s holiness and “incandescent purity” are celebrated (Warner 67). The churching of women was closely connected to this feast, and a similar ceremony was enacted in the blessing of candles, the mother, and the newborn child. New mothers followed in the footsteps of the Virgin Mary in their thanksgiving to God. The credit given to God for the Christ child best explains why both the feast and the churching practice survived the Protestant Reformation. Under Reformed

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

133

practice, the “superstitious” rituals behind the blessing of candles and holy water were rejected. Luther stressed that although the Virgin Mary did not need to be purified because she was a virgin, she should be praised for obeying the law (Kreitzer 67). Similarly, the new mother does not need to be purified because she has given birth, but instead she should practice churching as a way to give thanks to God. In the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, a new mother is instructed to kneel as the priest says the following: “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his goodness to give you safe deliverance, and hath preserved you in the great danger of childbirth: ye shall therefore give hearty thanks unto God and pray” (314). All emphasis is placed on thanking God the father, and no remnants of the Virgin Mary are to be found in this Reformed churching process. The endurance of this ritual, Paster argues, could be attributed to an underlying symbolic feeling of bodily restoration for the woman. This is to say, even if female “impurity” is no longer a facet of the ritual, the underlying fear of the unstable maternal body, and the fluids emanating from that body, is indicative of the “social return (however temporary) to the nonpregnant state of wholeness” (Paster 195). Like the Virgin Mary’s continued purity, a mother could symbolically feel unashamed and even self-congratulatory about having survived childbearing and the life she has created. In this intricate network of anatomical/reproductive theory and the religious shaping of the maternal, we find a concurrent acknowledgment of the importance of the maternal in reproduction and an inherent male fear of the level of maternal influence on the newborn male. Unlike the Virgin Mary who has created the incarnate Christ, everyday mothers gave birth to everyday men. Re-fashioning the maternal, then, was a means for the “everyday man” to see his escape from the womb as a sign of his first successful mark on the environment. This is to say, if the maternal womb is re-fashioned as dangerous and negligent, and birth as an “entrance to death,” then the male’s backward glance at his precarious origin shapes him as dominant, if not heroic in his own right.44 Indeed, the churching of women, and the underlying purification that once surrounded that rite, points to certain early modern beliefs that saw birth and maternal nourishment of the infant child as potentially hazardous. A mother could strangle her fetus in the womb, poison the baby once it was born, or inadvertently harm the baby with noxious breast milk (Adelman, Suffocating Mothers 7). Even though reproductive theorists like Raynalde find the positive in maternal nourishment of the child, other existing theories connected menstrual blood to breast milk, both thought to be contaminating sources of matter in the growing baby. Consequently, Adelman tells us, cultural practice “formalized both the ‘femaleness’ of the boy-child and the need to leave that femaleness behind in order to become a man… . Until the little boy came of age as a man, he was dangerously close to the maternal body” (Suffocating Mothers 7). I believe the prelude to that 44 For an insightful study of the womb as “the site of mortality,” see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 6–7.

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

134

formalization of the boy child is a cultural practice in its own right, one where the maternal is constructed as a dangerous site of origin. If the male child is active in that site of origin—exposed to danger and enduring those hazards—then he also enjoys his first moment of dominance in the mortal world he has entered. Shakespeare, I feel, draws attention to the way the male shapes his masculine identity by positioning himself against the contamination of the maternal womb. As an example, here, I offer a brief reading of the way the men of 1 King Henry IV imagine the maternal as a perilous site of origin as a means of establishing their masculine dominance. When Glyndwr attempts to construct the myth of his origin, for example, he claims: “At my nativity / The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes, / Of burning cressets; and at my birth / The frame and huge foundation of the earth / Shaked like a coward” (3.1.12–16). It is Glyndwr’s way of explaining the root of his extraordinary masculinity, but Hotspur is quick to trivialize the event by claiming it would have happened anyway if a cat “[h]ad but kittened” (3.1.17–19). Instead, Hotspur transfers credit to the “beldam earth” whose “womb, which for enlargement striving,” shakes and “topples down / Steeples and mossgrown towers” (3.1.29–31). Hotspur, too, glances backward, but his emphasis is on grandmother earth whose “[d]iseasèd nature” (3.1.25) within her womb causes destruction. The images of “steeples” and “towers” that Hotspur evokes, and that grandmother earth destroys, are both phallic in nature. Striving for “enlargement,” or more liberty, the maternal threatens the masculinity of the men around her.45 Hotspur’s understanding of the world and its maternal origins as dangerous allows him to underscore his keen ability to survive the perils of that particular world. By fashioning the earth’s womb as destructive, Hotspur can then underscore his capacity to endure as a dominant masculine persona despite any threat from the female. Indeed, during Hotspur’s brief interaction with his wife, he refuses to let Lady Hotspur in on the machinations of masculine violence and would-be regicide. Hotspur merely says, “This is no world / To play with maumets and to tilt with lips. / We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns, / And pass them current, too” (2.4.83–6). It is no accident that the cultural capital Hotspur describes is juxtaposed against the trivial feminine playthings, for without that imagined childlike existence, his violent reality would not seem so powerful. Even if Hotspur conceives of the maternal womb as influential, if not potent, that strength is erased as he explains how the world is not meant for kissing or playing with “maumets,” with a pun on the Latin mamma, meaning breasts.46 For Hotspur, there is no place for the maternal in the world, and thus he can ride away into the inevitable masculine end that is his death in battle. It is not “beldam earth” that conquers him—at least not directly—but instead it is young Hal whose own masculine identity arguably takes shape the moment he kills Hotspur. However, Hotspur’s narrow view of the world’s importance is not lost on the perceptive Hal. Instead, Hal matures and appropriates Hotspur’s masculinity. For “enlargement,” see OED, definition 5a. See Bevington, 799 (fn. 92).

45 46

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

135

Leading his men in battle in King Henry V, and growing into the “mirror of all Christian kings” (2.0.6), Henry ultimately slips into the pitfalls of masculine insecurity where the maternal must be minimized as much as possible. With all his battles won, Hal turns his sights on Katherine of France in hopes of marrying and producing offspring: “Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half-French half-English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?” (5.2.193–6). As Katherine Eggert contends, “Katherine’s part in this process is minimized… . It is almost as if Henry himself, with the help of the soldier-saints Denis and George, can produce an heir, one who will finally carry out the crusading dream of Henry’s father” (92). Through this design, the maternal is flushed out, so that a masculine Henry V, a masculine England, and a masculine theater are all created with little or no feminine influence. The irony, Eggert insightfully notes, is Katherine’s instrumental importance in England’s royal genealogy through her marriage with Owen Tudor after Henry’s death: she was the great-great-grandmother of Queen Elizabeth I.47 In the real world, the masculine ideal of procreation without female involvement proves impossible. For all of Glyndwr’s self-aggrandizement, Hotspur and Hal/Henry seek a similar way to fashion themselves—or in King Henry V’s case, fashion their offspring— as dominantly masculine. More important, perhaps, is that the masculine world idealized by Glyndwr, Hotspur, and Henry V is realized in the dreary and violent memory of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy—the very world of Joan La Pucelle. Nevertheless, the anxious masculinity that dictates the male construction of the maternal ultimately meets its end in Shakespeare’s tragedies. In his tragedies, any conception of the maternal as threatening never leads to true heroes, but instead to tragic ends. Before the hero meets that end, however, I locate the moments where he is able to re-conceive of the maternal as not only active in creation, but influential to his own sense of identity. I. “There’s magic in the web of it”: Materializing the Maternal in Othello The emblematic significance permeating the handkerchief in Othello is evident the moment that it appears in the play. As Desdemona accidentally drops the handkerchief in her attempt to use it to ease Othello’s headache, Emilia retrieves it and describes it as a “token” that Desdemona “reserves … evermore about her, / To kiss and talk to” (3.3.297–300). Emilia explains that the handkerchief was Desdemona’s “first remembrance from the Moor” (3.3.295), and thus the handkerchief functions as a signifier from the very start. For Desdemona, the handkerchief is a material reminder of Othello, and her expressions of love through physical kisses and speech indicate the significance of this particular material representation.

47 For a wonderful reading of the enterprise of creating a masculine theater and national identity through Shakespeare’s Henriad, see Eggert, 76–99.

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

136

The origin of the handkerchief’s symbolism is rooted in the maternal, since Othello explains that an Egyptian charmer first gave it to his mother (3.4.53).48 Adding representational weight to this token is the embroidery of spotted strawberries on the handkerchief (3.3.440). For a sixteenth-century audience, Boose tells us, the strawberry “had a time-honored association with the Virgin” (56).49 Given both the maternal and Marian significance of the handkerchief, it exists as a material reminder of an enduring maternity rooted in Mariology. Its physical presence onstage allows Othello to connect to that maternal essence in moments that both define and destabilize his masculine identity. Indeed, the first reference to the handkerchief is at the precise moment when Othello’s confidence is shaken because of his insecurity and jealousy. Feeling that he does not have “those soft parts of conversation” that romance requires because he is black, and positioning himself declining “[i]nto the vale of years” (3.3.268–70), Othello ultimately believes that the “forkéd plague [cuckoldry] is fated to us” (3.3.280). Feeling those figurative forked horns, Othello experiences a headache, and Desdemona produces the handkerchief in an attempt to bind his head (3.3.290). It is interesting that as Othello’s faith in Desdemona—a figure associated with the Virgin Mary herself—begins to wane, the handkerchief is introduced both as an emblem recalling the maternal and as the “ocular proof” (3.3.365) that Iago will use to convince Othello of Desdemona’s infidelity. The handkerchief, then, is linked both to the maternal and the perceived unfaithfulness of Desdemona, but in the process it is stripped of its positive, symbolic Marian value. When Emilia intends to have “the work ta’en out” (3.3.300) of the handkerchief, she renders the embroidery common. For his part, Iago claims that he saw “Cassio wipe his beard” (3.3.443) with the handkerchief as a means of drawing attention to the defilement of that symbolic token. In the way that iconoclasts sought to empty Roman Catholic iconography of symbolic value, Iago trivializes the significance of the handkerchief by emphasizing its commonality. However, like the ring in The Merchant of Venice, the handkerchief retains its emblematic dimension. Significantly, the symbolic value of the handkerchief is related only after the item has been defiled. When Desdemona cannot supply the handkerchief, Othello explains how an Egyptian charmer gave it to his mother, and that while his mother kept it, “’Twould make her amiable, and subdue [his] father / Entirely to her love” (3.4.57–8). To counter Desdemona’s disbelief, Othello explains: ’Tis true. There’s magic in the web of it. A sibyl that had numbered in the world

Edward A. Snow describes the handkerchief as “a thoroughly patriarchal fantasy object. Through it woman seeks power over man only as the object of his desire” (404, fn. 23). Addressing the strawberry spotted handkerchief, Snow argues that it is both a symbol of purity and, for Othello, visible proof of Desdemona’s adultery (390–91). 49 For a discussion of the association of the strawberry with the Virgin Mary, see: Lynda Boose, “Othello’s Handkerchief,” 56; and Lawrence J. Ross, 225–40. 48

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

137

The sun to course two hundred compasses In her prophetic fury sewed the work. The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk, And it was dyed in mummy, which the skillful Conserved of maidens’ hearts. (3.4.67–73)

The elaborate history of the handkerchief consistently informs us of the feminine construction of the token. The origin of the handkerchief goes back to the Egyptian charmer who first gave it to Othello’s mother, and further back still to the sibyl who first crafted the napkin. Moreover, the description is laden with feminine references beginning with the needlework involved in the embroidery.50 The prophetic attributes of both the sibyl and the charmer infuse the handkerchief with their own feminine psychic energy, and the “hallowed” silk dyed in “mummy”— with a pun on “mum” or “mommy”—preserved out of virgins’ hearts ascribes a virginal motherhood to the token. This final connection of the handkerchief to virginal mummy/mommy circuitously establishes a Marian connection, and the strawberry spotted embroidery reinforces the Marian significance. The comprehensive description of the handkerchief’s origin details a solely feminine material construction, but its subtle Marian undertones provide us with a means to consider the handkerchief as reminiscent of a Marian relic. In Othello’s description of, and reverence for, the handkerchief we witness how the play attaches affective significance to a material object—hence the description of Desdemona speaking to and kissing the inanimate handkerchief. Desdemona’s act is akin to the Roman Catholic reverence for items such as stone statues or saint relics insofar as the token represents the object of devotion. “These are commonplaces of the human heart,” Warner writes of Roman Catholic reverence for religious iconography, “and need describing at all only because the legacy of Reformation horror has branded the Catholic method as myopic superstition and empty externals, missing its simple humanity” (290). Indeed, the “simple humanity” entails a desire to connect to, or identify with, the saint—to express one’s love for that being. Similarly, behind the elaborate and rather outlandish history of the handkerchief, one finds not only the endearing desire of Othello’s mother to keep her husband in love with her, but also Othello’s touching memory of his mother presenting him with this token at her death (3.4.61). Through the extraordinary history of the handkerchief, maternal and amorous love are synthesized, and Othello employs this feminine token as a symbol of his own love for Desdemona. Othello’s reverence for the handkerchief parallels the enthusiasm of believers to seek out relics like the Virgin Mary’s veil. It was not idolatry that spurred a Catholic believer to pray before a material icon or relic, but instead it was her/his desire to come close to the Virgin Mary or saint represented in that image. Although Warner describes the popularity of the various Marian paintings often attributed to St. Luke as “pathetically childish,” she also acknowledges the “crucial function” that they 50 For a discussion of the gendered implications of the production of the handkerchief in Othello, see Dympna Callaghan, 53–81.

138

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

perform: “The time continuum is not interrupted, for the believer finds himself contemplating the face of the Virgin as she really was, living in an eternal present in which she still abides” (292). Visiting relic sites was a way for a believer to connect to the Virgin Mary, and over time the desire to seek out this iconography grew. Not surprisingly, as the desire for relics grew, the discovery of physical relics also increased. In the medieval period, the Virgin Mary’s hair, nail parings, breast milk, clothing, and even her wedding ring from Joseph could be found at various relic sites across the continent (Warner 294). As I mentioned in the Introduction, the pilgrimage site of Our Lady of Walsingham in England originated because of an apparition of the Virgin Mary to the widow of Walsingham Richeldis de Faverches in the twelfth century. Henry VIII had endowed this site early in his reign, but in 1538 he had the house razed and the miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary was transported to London and burned (Warner 294–8). This kind of iconoclasm was meant to illustrate the absence of power that the icons or relics held, but it hardly arrested the human tendency to recollect a loved one—or the Virgin Mary or saint for that matter—through material artifacts. However much Othello’s handkerchief might smack of Catholic superstition, it is also sentimentally valuable in the way that Shylock believes Leah’s ring to be more precious than a “wilderness of monkeys” (3.1115–16).51 For Othello, the handkerchief is a material link to maternal love. In this sense, then, Othello’s mother is valued the most in the moment that Iago inspires in him a relentless anxiety of mind. And yet, Othello is never truly able to reconnect with that maternal representation. After the nostalgic moment when Othello recounts the origin of the handkerchief, the item is always kept just out of reach for him. Desdemona cannot produce it because it has been lost, and once Othello does encounter it again, it is only visually as Bianca—a person whose name translates to “white” or pure, but a courtesan no less—returns the handkerchief to Cassio (4.1.148). However, the handkerchief is consistently remembered through Othello’s rhetoric at various moments of self-destabilization. It begins when Othello demands the handkerchief of Desdemona, as he says, “Fetch me the handkerchief. My mind misgives” (3.4.87). Othello demands it three more times ignoring anything Desdemona attempts to say (3.4.89, 91, 93). Later, when Iago reminds Othello of the missing handkerchief, Othello says, “O, it comes o’er my memory / As doth the raven o’er the infectious house, / Boding to all!—he had my handkerchief” (4.1.20–22). The handkerchief is transformed from an object signifying a powerful femininity and tender maternity to an ominous sign; it exists as a psychological reminder of the imagined infidelity of Desdemona. In other words, despite the rich maternal dimension of the handkerchief, the masculine culture is able to transform that significance and make it a symbol of falsity. In the way that iconoclasts sought to strip icons and relics, and the Virgin Mary or saints those relics represented, of their spiritual importance, Iago is able to corrupt the very meaning of the handkerchief. 51 For a connection between the handkerchief and the “sensual rituals and material artifacts of the Roman church,” see Robert N. Watson, 65–96.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

139

Through the transformation of the symbolic handkerchief, the maternal is made malleable, and it is no coincidence that the marginalization of the maternal, and the demonization of the feminine, lead Othello toward an overwhelming anxiety that appears to inform masculine identity at large. He believes that he has lost control of Desdemona, and as he begins to lose self-control he fashions the female as false. All the while, his own mother’s ability to control his father’s love is distorted within his own psychological construction of the feminine. We witness the lost essence of the handkerchief as it is called upon haphazardly: “Handkerchief—confessions— handkerchief… . Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!” (4.1.36, 40–41). Later, in a perversion of the image of the strawberry spotted handkerchief, Othello describes how the white linens of Desdemona’s bed will “with lust’s blood be spotted” (5.1.37). That act is never realized because Othello chooses instead to smother Desdemona. But the handkerchief is ultimately stripped of its feminine essence when, after Desdemona’s murder, Othello remarks: “I saw [the handkerchief] in [Cassio’s] hand. / It was a handkerchief, an antique token / My father gave my mother” (5.2.222–4). The feminine origin of the handkerchief evaporates in this new narrative as it now originates with Othello’s father—its maternal origin is erased, and in this sense I see Othello absorbed by the masculine world around him. As the quintessential “other” in this play, if not in all of Shakespeare’s canon, Othello joins the lot of Shakespearean male heroes who are consumed by their own violent masculinity: Hotspur, Macbeth, Lear, and Leontes, to name a few. His “otherness” is lost in general masculinity/misogyny. It is Othello’s regard for the maternal, I believe, that informs his initial unbending faith in, and respect for, Desdemona, and which gives him the “soft parts of conversation” that he cannot see in himself. According to his narrative, Othello was thrown into the violence of the masculine world early on as he suffered “battles, sieges” and was even “sold to slavery” (1.3.129–37). It is the memory of his mother who herself had faith—even if it was thought to be rooted in the mystical dimension of a handkerchief—that Othello employs in his own love for Desdemona, but ultimately that memory is lost like a relic in an iconoclastic fire. The maternal essence of the handkerchief, then, makes its presence in the play incredibly poignant. Stripped of that physical and psychological connection, with the handkerchief’s true essence muddled in Iago’s machinations, Othello has no maternal touchstone to go back to. Only the distorted echo of the influential mother remains. For us to witness the full scope of maternal influence, and the masculine connection to that influence, we must return to Hamlet. Through Hamlet’s connection with his physical mother, he is able to reconstitute his own identity and reveal the power of the maternal in the menacing world of masculinity. II. “Unmixed with baser matter”: Revisiting the Womb in Hamlet As dawn arrives and Old Hamlet’s ghost vanishes in Hamlet’s opening scene, Horatio remarks that the ghost “started like a guilty thing” once the cock’s crow awoke the “god of day” (1.1.129–33). Marcellus’s reply delineates the ghost’s disappearance within a Christian framework:

140

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England It faded on the crowing of the cock. Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes Wherein our saviour’s birth is celebrated, This bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planet strike, No fairy takes, nor witch has power to charm, So hallowed and so gracious is the time. (1.1.138–45)

Marcellus’s account is a psychological maneuver to shift emphasis from the inexplicable apparition to the allegorical purity and supernatural strength surrounding the birth of Christ. This narrative relating to the divine power behind Christmas anticipates the power of the son/Son. Janet Adelman reads Marcellus’s passage as a “purifying fantasy” where “the female body of the night can be cleansed only as the guilty father gives way to the sun-god, allowing for the emergence of the purified Son” (Suffocating Mothers 19). It predicts Hamlet’s necessity to re-invent Old Hamlet as Hyperion, Adelman argues, making him “benignly and divinely distant … his sexual power analogous to God’s power to impregnate the Virgin Mother” (19). In the process, the “Son born of a bodiless father and purified mother [is] the only antidote to her power” (19). For Adelman, Marcellus’s allegory functions perfectly since Christ the Son is actually the Father who has dominion over his Virgin Mother. It becomes a way for Hamlet to recreate his identity by imagining masculine authority over the maternal. In this design, Marian influence is important only insofar as it affects the father/son’s identity and potency. Adelman argues that “the main psychological task that Hamlet seems to set himself is … to remake [Gertrude] in the image of the Virgin Mother who could guarantee his father’s purity, and his own, repairing the boundaries of selfhood” (31). It is a maternal substitution akin to Luther’s use of the Virgin Mary to replace the mother from whom he was “born in sin.” As in the case with the post-Reformation stance on the Virgin Mary, maternal influence is necessary, but also marginalized. However, I want to entertain the possibility that instead of purifying Gertrude in order to identify with a guiltless Old Hamlet, Hamlet’s reinvention of Gertrude as a Marian character is indicative of his desire to identify with the Virgin Mary herself. In this way, then, the play underscores the strength behind Marian influence while undercutting the call for paternal memory and patriarchal dominion. Early on, the play illustrates that paternal nature—represented by Old Hamlet, Claudius, and Polonius—is violent and duplicitous. When the ghost induces Hamlet, “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.25), he invites Hamlet to enter into that violent fellowship. It is a call to arms where all that Hamlet must do to be “like” his father is to murder Claudius. However, Hamlet defers, and as René Girard notes, “To seek singularity in revenge is a vain enterprise, but to shrink from revenge in a world that looks upon it as a ‘sacred duty’ is to exclude oneself from society, to become a nonentity once more” (284). Hamlet’s

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

141

vacillation, then, allows him to enter into the periphery to examine selfhood. In these moments of doubt and isolation, Hamlet’s uncertainty about identifying with the father at all destabilizes the play’s masculine superstructure. After the ghost famously tells Hamlet, “Remember me” (1.5.91) before disappearing, Hamlet resolves to “wipe away all trivial fond records” (1.5.99) from his memory to remember/re-member his father. Perhaps Hamlet’s most striking statement in his resolution comes when he says, “And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain / Unmixed with baser matter” (1.5.102–4). His determination to act out the revenge is disrupted in this moment as his pun on matter and mater reminds him of Gertrude. He follows his resolve to focus on the father with the exclamation, “Oh, most pernicious woman! / Oh, villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!” (1.5.105–6). Katherine Eggert explains: The villain is Claudius, we assume; but unjustly so, since the syntax offers no certain referent for villainy but the pernicious woman herself. Gertrude’s presence revises revenge tragedy: the woman, and her willful villainy—for which the Ghost urges Hamlet not to take revenge—are indeed the matter of the play. Remembering his father becomes not the impetus for Hamlet’s becoming Hieronymo, but rather the occasion for Hamlet’s endless revisions of the parts he and others are to act. And in his punning and his plotting, one of the parts Hamlet takes on is what he perceives as Gertrude’s own: “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” (1.5.108). (114)

Thus, at the exact moment where Hamlet is given all opportunity to identify with his masculine father, he instead recalls his mother and, as Eggert notes, takes up her part. It is the mother whom Hamlet remembers. To be certain, Hamlet laments the loss of maternal compassion from the very start. Before he even learns of his father’s ghost, Hamlet remembers his parents in a loving light, and then says about Gertrude: “a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer!” (1.2.150–51). What he desires, it seems, is a mournful mother. Indeed, later in the play, as Hamlet listens to the player’s rendition of Aeneas’s tale to Dido, he urges the player, “Say on, come to Hecuba” (2.2.481) so as to hear of Hecuba’s sorrow surrounding her husband, Priam’s, murder.52 When the player’s speech arrives at Hecuba, she is described wearing a robe and “About her lank and all o’er-teemèd loins / A blanket in th’alarm of fear caught up” (2.2.488–9). By describing Hecuba’s loins as “o’erteemèd,” the player draws attention to her maternal quality—through the many births she has suffered—before describing the “instant burst of clamor that she made” (2.2.495) upon seeing her husband murdered. We know that Hamlet is familiar with the scene since he recites the first dozen lines from memory. Thus, Hamlet’s inclination to hear the story of Hecuba reveals his psychological desire to hear about a sorrowing mother who has witnessed the death of her husband instead of focusing on Pyrrhus’s violent action—an action that Hamlet should be undertaking himself. 52

142

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Hecuba is the sorrowful mother/wife Hamlet wishes Gertrude would be, and the story of her maternal sorrow has the power to affect the actor and the audience. Where the description of Priam’s murder leads Polonius to remark, “This is too long” (2.2.478), the description of the sorrowful mother affects Polonius quite intensely: “Look whe’er he has not turned his colour, and has tears in ’s eyes. Prithee, no more” (2.2.499–500). It is so moving that Polonius wants the actor to end the speech. In other words, the play emphasizes the affective power of maternal sorrow, and in this way the play seems to point to the absence of a compassionate mother as a way to underscore the lingering desire for that alternative in the face of the larger disquietude about violent masculinity and ultimately salvation. For Shakespeare’s post-Reformation audience, the Mater Dolorosa—the sorrowful mother of Hamlet’s desire—was no longer available. Hamlet’s struggle, then, not only centers on remembering the father, but also learning to forget the compassionate mother. That maternal compassion—like the empathetic Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition—is made absent. But it is clear that nostalgia for that kind of compassion remains. Indeed, when Hamlet wants the actor to “come to Hecuba,” he is presumably aware of the emotion that Hecuba’s grief will inspire.53 However, Hamlet feels that grief is the wrong kind of emotion for a man set to act out revenge.54 He notes how the actor wept for Hecuba whereas he, “A dull and muddy-mettled rascal … can say nothing—no, not for a king” (2.2.544–6). It is anger he desires to feel, but even the violent description of Priam’s murder is inconsequential. As a result, Hamlet sees himself as a “whore … a very drab” (2.2.563–4) who speaks too much. Ultimately, Hamlet even raises doubt regarding the nature of Old Hamlet’s ghost: “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil” (2.2.575–6). It is far from the redemption of the father via purification of the mother that he sought, and instead Hamlet seems to stretch himself out between the paternal and maternal poles. Instead of gravitating toward his father, Hamlet remains preoccupied with his mother. As he contemplates existence in his quintessential “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet explains that uncertainty of afterlife keeps most from committing suicide: “But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns, puzzles the will” (3.1.80–82). With a pun on both country/cunt-ry and bourn/born, Hamlet appears to fashion death as a return to the maternal womb. Adelman addresses the “fusion of the sexual with the maternal body” and argues that “Shakespeare’s punning equation of death and the maternal body [is a] reformulation of the Biblical source of danger 53 In Female Mourning and Tragedy, Katharine Goodland offers a compelling reading of the deployment of Hecuba in Hamlet, and Hamlet’s deep ambivalence about female mourning and its dramatic efficacy (171–99). The play, it seems, draws on the way Hecuba’s grief “evokes the lamenting Virgin of medieval drama who witnesses the slaughter of Christ” (185) as a means of engendering nostalgia for Mary’s maternal sorrow. 54 For an insightful reading of the “extravagant performances of remembrance” in relation to the issue of grief in this scene, see Rist, Revenge 62–6.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

143

… the deadly woman of Proverbs—‘thei that go unto her, returne not again’” (Suffocating Mothers 27). For Adelman, this maternal body is “always threatening to swallow up her children, to absorb them back within her bourn, undoing their own boundaries” (27). Ultimately, Adelman tells us, “the female will always succeed in transforming the male, remaking him in her image,” and for this reason Hamlet must “remake his mother … in the image of the Virgin Mother” (28–31). However, I do not see Hamlet’s reinvention of Gertrude as a way to de-sexualize her maternal body, but instead I find Hamlet’s association of the maternal womb with death as an indication of his desire to confront that unknown “otherness.” Hamlet does not so much fear the “undiscovered country” as much as he desires to discover it, and his preoccupation with the maternal womb is not a sexual exploration—the “incestuous nightmare” of Adelman’s argument (28)—but instead is a metaphorical attempt to locate in that maternal image an escape from the violent world that surrounds him. In this vein, then, I see the play provoking anxiety about afterlife—through purgatorial imagery, notions of sin and salvation, and through Hamlet’s contemplation of death—as a way of drawing attention to the desire for a feminine alternative. Although one could argue that Hamlet strives to fill that lacuna through fashioning Ophelia as virginal, or through reconfiguring Gertrude as pure, that alternative cannot be located in earthly females. Ultimately, Hamlet must look to the divine. Before identifying with the Virgin Mary, however, Hamlet must confront his physical mother. I see the would-be purification of Gertrude in the closet scene—a womb-like space in its own right—as a moment where patriarchal influence is being scrutinized, if not erased. It is not Gertrude’s sexuality in and of itself that Hamlet finds repulsive, but instead the way Claudius exploits that sexuality. In point of fact, Hamlet ultimately instructs his mother: “Refrain tonight, / And that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence, the next more easy— / For use almost can change the stamp of nature” (3.4.151.5–51.8). If Claudius’s “use” of Gertrude has transformed her into a whore, then—Hamlet believes— Gertrude’s chaste “use” or habit can change her back into the maternal being he remembers. It is the closest we come to a son influencing the maternal in a way reminiscent of Christ’s profound infusion of Mary with grace—albeit a distortion of that influence. This role-reversal where a son intends to influence his mother corresponds to some religious polemics coming out of post-Reformation England. In A Conference Betwixt a Mother a Devout Recusant, and Her Sonne (1600), for example, Francis Savage offers a dialogue between a mother and her son who has just returned to the country from the university. The son suggests that his father sent him to the university for his “safetie,” and when his mother presses him to explain his meaning, he replies: “Surely, upon your kind promise of pardon, I confesse I meant safetie from mis-instruction in religion, whilest I was young aud [sic] easy to be led by these whome I reverenced” (A2r). Although careful not to offend, the adult son establishes his newly discovered knowledge above the “mis-instruction”

144

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

he received from his Catholic mother during childhood. The scene, then, grants the son an authoritative role over his mother. The son proceeds to instruct his mother on the value of Protestantism while decrying the Roman Catholic Church. When the mother accuses the son of having been “possest” by his new teachers, he retorts: Good Mother, the Lord hath mooved your heart to heare me speake who am yours and of you. If I speake amisse, as you thinke, and so as you cannot consent unto me & with me, leave we it both to the working power of a mighty God, who in further time can give further light and understanding to his children that humbly crave it, and are not lifted up with an high hand to withstand his offered grace. (B4r)

While the son acknowledges that he is his mother’s flesh and blood, he goes on to level the playing field by situating his mother in the position of God’s child. Where the son is humbly willing to learn from God the Father, his mother haughtily refuses God’s grace. In this design, then, the mother is the impertinent child, and it is the son’s obligation to lead her toward religious truth. In the end, the son implores his mother: “open your eies, and regard your soule.” As the son is given his mother’s blessing, he returns to meet his father while his mother goes to her “closet” to weep. The mother prays: “O my God and gracious father, thou hast raised out of mine owne bodie a teacher for me that I might not scorne him, and who by me received life concerning his bodie, he by thee hath offred me life concerning my soule” (I1r–I2r). The role reversal is complete as the son’s Protestant, authoritative knowledge is aligned with God. Where the mother is able to give the son physical life, the son is able to offer a spiritual life to his mother. In a later tract, The Advise of a Sonne (1616), Sir Anthony Hungerford similarly seeks to instruct his Roman Catholic mother on the error of her religious beliefs. He discusses his own motivation to leave the Roman Catholic Church upon studying St. Augustine’s view of scriptural purity: “The consideration of this gave me occasion to forsake my communion with the Church of Rome, in whose bosome I received the first instruction for matter of my salvation, as you your selfe (dear Mother) can well remember” (B1r). Hungerford demarcates a line that separates the instruction he acquired on his own from the instruction he received from both his mother and the maternal Roman Catholic Church in whose “bosome” he learned. He offers his view of the falsity of the maternal Roman Catholic Church: [B]ut this Church that teacheth us to worship God, by like authority wil then require us to worship Images. Shee that teacheth us to pray to God, wil command us likewise to pray to our blessed Ladie, and the Saints. She that teacheth us, that Christ by one offring of his body, once made in sacrifice upon the Crosse, hath purchased remission for our sinnes, requireth us likewise to believe that she offers dayly unto God the same reall body of Christ in sacrifice (which himselfe offered upon the Crosse) as a propitiation for the sinnes of the quicke and the dead. (B1v–B2r)

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

145

Hungerford highlights the false doctrines of the Catholic Church—namely belief in both the intercessory power of the Virgin Mary and saints, and transubstantiation— and because his mother first instructed him in this dogma, she is complicit in his miseducation. Although the last thing that Hungerford and Savage want to do is recover the maternal Virgin Mary of Roman Catholic tradition, they do seem to suggest that even overbearing mothers can learn. Conversion for these mothers, it seems, requires them to adopt Marian humility and learn from the son/Son. After highlighting the many inaccuracies of the Roman Catholic theology, for example, Hungerford remarks, “So that by this (deare Mother) if you weigh it wel, you may plainely see, that howsoever my masters of Rome dazell your eyes with the churches name, the Pope alone beareth away the game” (B4v). Like Hamlet, Hungerford seeks to uncover the false father—the Roman Catholic Pope himself—and guide his childlike mother toward the truth. For his part, then, Hamlet intends to “speak daggers” to his mother as a means of instructing her; however, before Hamlet confronts his mother, Gertrude’s amenability is already being explored. Polonius fashions the mother as naturally inclined to empathize with the son—“Since nature makes them partial” (3.3.32)— and thus he feels that he must be a witness to prevent any potential falsehood from Gertrude. As Polonius leaves, Claudius exclaims: “O, my offense is rank! It smells to heaven. / It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murder” (3.3.36–8). In direct juxtaposition with maternal compassion, Claudius embodies a violent, Cain-like masculinity in the play. It is not the Fall of Man—where we are led to believe that Gertrude is an Eve-like persona—that resounds in Hamlet, but instead it is the Cain and Abel allegory that resonates throughout.55 Like Cain’s murder of Abel, Claudius’s fratricidal/regicidal murder of Old Hamlet is the preamble to the dark world of Denmark. It is precisely this dark world that Hamlet appears to understand, and he intends to reveal the frightening specter of this world to his mother. After literally piercing the hidden body of the deceitful Polonius, Hamlet turns his attention to piercing figuratively his mother’s conscience. “What have I done,” Gertrude asks, “that thou dar’st wag thy tongue / In noise so rude against me?” (3.4.38–9). Unlike the sons of Savage and Hungerford’s polemics, Hamlet is forceful in chastising his mother. However, Gertrude refuses to be forced into the role of the child. She rebukes Hamlet, but he persists in fashioning her as an over-sexual mother—one In Suffocating Mothers, Adelman argues that the story of the Fall overshadows the story of Cain’s killing of Abel: “Beneath the story of fratricidal rivalry is the story of the woman who conduces to death, of the father fallen not through his brother’s treachery but through his subjection to this woman; and despite Gertrude’s conspicuous absence from the scene in the garden, in the psychologized version of the fall, the vulnerability of the father—and hence of the son—to her poison turn out to be the whole story” (24). Convincing as Adelman’s argument is, Gertrude’s malignant influence is clearly less overt than the obvious villainy of the dual fratricide/regicide that Claudius commits. In this sense, I believe, the story of Cain and Abel clearly takes center stage. 55

146

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

who commits “mutine in a matron’s bones” (3.4.73). Even though Gertrude admits to Hamlet, “Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul, / And there I see such black and grainèd spots / As will not leave their tinct” (3.4.78–81), she continues to instruct Hamlet to “speak no more” (3.4.77, 84, 92). It is ultimately the apparition of Old Hamlet’s ghost that both silences Hamlet and re-casts him in the role of the son. However much Hamlet struggles to be the parental figure in the encounter, he falls short in his approach. Gertrude maintains her maternal role when she attempts to mollify Hamlet as he speaks to the invisible being: “O gentle son, / Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper / Sprinkle cool patience” (3.4.113–15). Patience does indeed prevail, and Hamlet’s antagonistic declaration of disgust with his mother’s sexuality is transformed into a calm request for her to “Repent what’s past” (3.4.141). Ultimately, Hamlet preaches “abstinence” (3.4.154). Gertrude listens, and in the end she promises not to “breathe” what Hamlet has said to her in private (3.4.182–3). In this sense, then, Gertrude realizes Polonius’s fear—“nature” does indeed make this particular mother “partial” to her son. In his mother, Hamlet finds the empathy he sought from the start. As Jessica Benjamin argues, “Recognition is the essential response, the constant companion of assertion. The subject declares, ‘I am, I do,’ and then waits for the response, ‘You are, you have done.’ Recognition is, thus, reflexive; it includes not only the other’s confirming response, but also how we find ourselves in that response” (170). Through Gertrude’s attention to Hamlet’s lesson—she ultimately asks, “What shall I do?” (3.4.164)—she recognizes her son’s desire to instruct and allows him to advise her in that moment. Once Gertrude is willing to take the chaste route where, as Hamlet believes, she will be “desirous to be blest” by God, then Hamlet can inhabit the child’s role and “blessing beg of [Gertrude]” (3.4.155–6). By recognizing Gertrude’s Marian/maternal potential, Hamlet can reconstitute his own identity without the father’s involvement. As Hamlet departs from the womb-like enclosure of Gertrude’s closet, he drags Polonius’s dead body behind him. The ghost has irrevocably disappeared from the play, and the devious father Polonius is also gone. Hamlet’s encounter with his mother appears to be the crux of the play. Where Old Hamlet’s ghost was never truly able to prompt Hamlet into revenge, his mother’s influential nature—via her apparent understanding of her son’s consternation—appears to mitigate his anxiety about inactivity. As much as Hamlet might feel that he entered Gertrude’s closet to instruct her, he departs with a composed perspective about the machinations of the male-world enveloping him beyond the borders of that maternal womb. Because Hamlet does not seek to transform Gertrude into a Marian figure—but instead recognizes her value as his physical origin despite her fallibility—he looks to the sublime maternal essence of the Virgin Mary to finalize his identificatory process. The centerpiece in this Marian identity formation entails the Virgin Mary’s first divine connection: the Annunciation. When the Angel Gabriel reveals that the Virgin Mary will give birth to God’s son, she questions how that is possible.

Virgins, Mothers, and the Virgin Mother

147

Gabriel responds, “For with God shall nothing be unpossible” (Luke 1:37).56 In her response to this call to faith, the Virgin Mary delivers her famous fiat, “Behold the servant of the Lord: be it unto me according to thy woorde” (Luke 1:38). Mary’s response demonstrates her ability to surrender self-control to God in a moment that empties her of doubt and fills her with grace. It is, in a sense, the Virgin Mary’s own negative capability. When Hamlet feels “a kind of fighting” in his heart, he is able to accept that “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.4, 10). In a providential society like Shakespeare’s, one was taught to trust in God’s divinity. In his own self-surrender, then, Hamlet illustrates an acquiescent identity that infuses him with the strength unmatched by the “strength” behind masculine violence. A Lord tells Hamlet that the Queen desires Hamlet to apologize to Laertes, and Hamlet responds, “She well instructs me” (5.2.146.13). Hamlet accepts his deferential role as Gertrude’s son, taking instruction from his mother. Soon after, when Horatio tells Hamlet that he will lose the match against Laertes, Hamlet replies, “I shall win at the odds” (5.2.149). In an otherwise fleeting comment, Hamlet concurrently accepts his potential and his limitations. This understanding reveals a humility that is strikingly different from the masculine overconfidence of the many men of Denmark. Where Claudius and Laertes seek to shape the course of things, Hamlet positions himself as a handmaid to God, and understands that when facing the unknown, “The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes, let be” (5.2.160–61).57 Hamlet’s “let be” echoes the Virgin Mary’s fiat in a moment where he, like the Virgin Mary accepting the grace of god, relinquishes self-control. As Hamlet steps onto the masculine stage of battle—oblivious to the mortal dealings of Claudius and Laertes—his mother finally occupies a nurturing maternal role where she hands him a handkerchief, toasts her son, and wipes the sweat from his face. Gertrude’s final act parallels the apocryphal story of Veronica who wipes the face of Christ on his way to Calvary. It is an act that grants Hamlet a Christ-like dimension, but his identification is not altogether Christological. After learning of Claudius’s conspiracy, and killing him to avenge his mother, and not his father, Hamlet forgives Laertes, bids “adieu” to his mother, and again surrenders control as he is on the verge of death saying, “But let it be. Horatio, I am dead” (5.2.280). Indeed, he draws attention to the Virgin Mary’s own forbearance. There is no purification of Old Hamlet that takes place, no paternal identification. Hamlet does not remember his father in the closing moments of the play, but he does re-member Fortinbras the elder by giving young Fortinbras his dying voice. It is his father’s victim who Hamlet redeems, and not his own father. And as the poison “o’ercrows” Hamlet’s “spirit” (5.2.295), one cannot help but remember the nocturnal crowing of the cock of Marcellus’s allegory of Christmas. “So hallow and so gracious is that time,” Marcellus claims at the play’s opening, imagining the 56 I have used the Geneva translation (1587) since it is the most likely version that Shakespeare could access. 57 Hamlet’s final phrase, “let be,” is included in the Q2 edition of the play.

148

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

grace of God made manifest in his infant son—remembering, perhaps, the hope behind the Virgin birth and, from a Roman Catholic perspective, Mary’s maternal embrace at one’s death. As Hamlet reaches the mortal end of his spectrum, it is the mother who seems to matter most. *** Where the Virgin Mary’s singular identity as perpetual virgin and God-bearer generated both reverence and wariness, her feminine virtue and influence were often drawn upon to reinforce aspects of Christ’s divinity and religious identity in early modern thought. As I hope this chapter has demonstrated, Shakespeare is carefully attuned to both cultural and religious attitudes about female chastity and maternal influence, and he often draws on Mary’s symbolic capital to explore these issues. The perpetuation of imagined virginity to mitigate masculine anxiety in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear often involves the idealization of Marian purity, but it also reveals the inevitable limitations of the would-be virgins. As objects of imagined purity, Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia are able to exhibit an influential nature anchored in Marian-like virtue—an influence capable of destabilizing the masculinecentered socio-religious design. The Marian/feminine influence within these plays ultimately includes motherhood, and herein we see how maternal influence can bear positively on notions of masculine identity. The male heroes gravitation toward the maternal body—in Lear’s final embrace of Cordelia, Othello’s reverence for the maternal strength of the handkerchief, and Hamlet’s identification with the Virgin Mary—recovers, if only for a moment, the positive affective value of Marian motherhood. But the Virgin Mary was, of course, largely absent in Shakespeare’s England, and thus only nostalgia remained. Indeed, the nostalgia that these plays provoke registers the unmistakable loss of the compassionate motherhood and substantial comfort that the Virgin Mary once offered.

Chapter 4

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder of Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale In the Church of England’s Visitation Articles of 1559, the second article addresses “false miracles”: “Item, whether in theyr Churches and chapels, all ymages, shrines, all tables, Candelstickes, tindelles, or rolles of ware, pictures, payntynges, and all other monumentes of fayned and false miracles, pilgrimages, ydolatry, and superstition be removed, abolished, and destroyed” (A2r). The idea behind this destruction, Eamon Duffy tells us, was to “bulldoze away [the] material memory” of a Catholic past (“Bare ruined choirs” 45). The eradication of Roman Catholic iconography in sixteenth-century England was a logical starting point for the erasure of sympathies for the old religion. Although iconoclasts sought to extinguish this memory, in the process of destruction they seem to acknowledge the power of iconography to enkindle enduring belief in miracles. For English Protestants, Marian iconography and pilgrimage sites were seen as touchstones of Roman Catholic idolatry. As the Church of England clergyman Thomas Becon argues in 1566, Catholics who believe in the miracles of shrines like Our Lady of Walsingham “are all redy snarled with the bondes of idolatrie and superstition … All such miracles, synes, and wonders, are wrought by the Devyl, and are lying, false, and untrue” (Z1v). Lincoln Bishop Thomas Cooper, too, urges English Protestants to “carefullye take heede, that by Wonders and Myracles and Apparition of Spirites, wee bee not Seduced” (L4r). To this end, English Reformers sought to empty stories of Marian or saintly miracles by aligning them with Satan and Roman Catholic superstition. Indeed, Cooper goes on to reprove Roman Catholic believers: Let them looke therefore carefully to themselves, which, by suche Myracles, are Induced or confyrmed to believe the corrupte errours, of Pilgrimages and worshypping of Images, of praying to Sainctes departed, of Purgatorie, of Masses and Trentalles, of praying and offering for the synnes of the Deade, and suche other infinite errours, as hath beene brought into the Churche by Monkes, Fryers, and other false Teachers of the Churche of Rome. (L4r)

Cooper establishes the connection between belief in miracles and a host of other Roman Catholic “errours”—pilgrimages, saint worship, belief in purgatory, and masses and systemized prayer for the dead. The argument, then, was that Roman Catholics employed stories of miracles to seduce the English into superstitious belief and idolatry.

150

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

English Reformer John Jewel sought to unveil the mechanism whereby the Roman Catholic Church appealed to believers through the proliferation of Marian iconography, and the careful localization of such images. Like “Pagan poets” who invoke multiple gods, Jewel argues, the Roman Catholic Church offers myriad views of the Virgin Mary: And where one saint hath images in dyvers places, the same saint hath dyvers names thereof, moste lyke to the Gentiles. When you heare of our lady of Walsingham, our Lady of Ipswich, our Lady of Wylsdon, & such other: what is it but an imitation of the Gentiles idolaters’ Diana Agotera, Diana Coriphea, Diana Ephesia & c. Venus Cipria, Venus Paphia, Venus Gnidia. Whereby is evidently meant, that the saint for the image sake, shoulde in those places, yea in the images themselves, have a dwelling, whyche is the grounde of theire idolatrie. For where no images be, they have no such meanes. (The Second tome G2r)

By linking the various English Marian sites of worship to the various names for the pagan goddesses Diana and Venus, Jewel demonstrates not only how the Marian images are idolatrous and unexceptional, but also how the Roman Catholic Church beguiles believers into feeling a sense of connection to the Virgin Mary through her diverse regional namesakes. Indeed, the magnetism of the Virgin Mary was without doubt an instrumental asset for the Roman Catholic practice of pilgrimages, and reformers were quick to point to the economic motivation behind this practice. The deceptive nature of Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites was something English Protestants learned to mistrust. Addressing the Catholic exploitation of saints and miracles in The Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, Robert Burton writes: What a deal of money by musty relics, images, idolatry, have their mass-priests engrossed, and what sums have they scraped by their other tricks! … If they can get but a relic of some saint, the Virgin Mary’s picture, idols or the like, that city is for ever made, it needs no other maintenance. (377–8)

Although Burton is correct about the economic potential behind Marian shrines, he fails to acknowledge that the demand for religious iconography was in place. Believers were willing to travel to these sites of worship as an expression of their faith. It was the desire to connect to the divine via rituals, pilgrimages, or mere worship before the statue of “some saint” or the Virgin Mary that made these sites of worship successful in the first place. The key to curbing this desire, then, was to inspire incredulity from the English. Beneath these arguments, however, is the undercurrent of fear that stories of Marian miracles and enduring Roman Catholic ritual have the power to seduce the English subject. In The Jesuites gospel, for example, Crashaw imagines the “mervailous, miraculous, and incredible things” that Jesuits would say to their novices in private, and surmises that they would contend “that Christ layeth nothing to their charge unlesse it be an extremity of devotion, to his

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

151

blessed mother” (K4r–K4v). Despite the self-contained nature of the Jesuit Mariolatry here, Crashaw immediately warns: O beloved contrymen, be not seduced by such impostors! let not such vipers eat out your hearts; but discover the hypocrites and send them home unmasked to hell where they were hatched, for they that dare thus dally with our Saviour, no marvaile tho they be so bold with your soules and your consciences, your children, and your estates and all that belongs to you. (K4v)

The idea, here, is that the English stand to be inveigled. More intriguing, to my mind, is the way Crashaw aligns the Jesuits with the Virgin Mary, while appropriating Christ—“our Saviour”—for the English. The Catholic threat runs deep since Jesuit seduction would entail philandering with Christ, English children, and England itself. The polemical provocation of masculine anxiety is a sure way to produce hostility against an imagined threat, and thus Crashaw appeals to English sensibilities about religious, patriarchal, and national identity. If one could not inspire incredulity, fear was the next best thing. The alignment of England with Christ, of course, is part of a greater belief in what David Cressy calls an “Anglophile divinity”—a carefully constructed narrative that outlined “God’s special interest in his Protestant nation” (62). Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant reign, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the unmasking of the Gunpowder Plot were all used as propaganda for nationalism. Cressy writes: Prayers and sermons, statutes and proclamations, almanacs and chronicles, set forth a pattern of providences that served as a reminder of the nation’s distinctiveness, of God’s mercies, and of England’s particular religious and dynastic good fortune. Taken together, they set forth a view of English identity, with historical, religious, and dynastic dimensions, that transcended regional and local loyalties. (62)

Instead of various, regional versions of Our Lady of Walsingham, Protestant England offered a single, united nation under God. But this nationalistic view of England’s “good fortune” also appealed to belief in divine providence—something akin to miraculous intervention. This, too, entailed story telling, and this early modern narrative was, according to Cressy, “Reiterated in every town and parish, and reinforced by annual ritual commemoration” (71). The stories were meant to reinforce belief in England’s rightful religious design. However, the use of story telling to validate religious ideology continued on both sides of the religious aisle. Accounts of “signes, wonders, visions, and miracles,” as  Keith Thomas, for example, writes: “Their teachings on the subject of divine providence show that the Protestant reformers believed the God might of his own volition intervene in earthly affairs so as to help his people. They also maintained that there was no benefit which the pious Christian might not obtain by praying for it” (133). In the way Roman Catholics might appeal to a saint for miraculous intervention, early modern English Protestants, Thomas suggests, were urged to pray to God for intervention. See Thomas, 133–78.

152

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Marotti points out, were “meant to keep alive the very elements of the ‘old religion’ that Protestantism wished to eradicate” (Religious Ideology 85). As with the Marian miracles at Montaigu that I previously explored, the idea was to invite the English to consider the enduring faith in, and power behind, the Virgin Mary. Clearly, stories and warnings about Marian miracles were designed to inspire belief or disbelief. As I illustrate in Chapter 1, Shakespeare explores affinity for, and anxiety surrounding, Marian miracles as early as 1 King Henry VI, where he draws on cultural polemics that attempted to sway believers one way or the other. Once he arrives at his late plays and romances, I argue, Shakespeare gives way to a very explicit exploration of the efficacy of Marian miracles. In this final chapter, I turn my attention to Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale, to explore how Shakespeare draws on the enduring sense of threat behind, and imaginative power of, miracles in post-Reformation England to demonstrate how Marian efficacy holds a greater seat in his distracted globe. Following Knapp’s argument that “the spectacles of the theater are … made to seem sacramental”—that “Shakespeare appears to believe that his audience can draw spiritual strength from their experience of the theater” (119)—I measure how the staging of “miraculous” events with Marian undertones imbues Shakespeare’s theater with a markedly feminine religious efficacy. In the spectacle and miraculous nuances that surround Cleopatra, Marina, and Hermione—and the theater’s invitation for the audience both to witness and imagine the “miracles”—I locate the reciprocal flow of potency between the heroine and her male counterpart, Shakespeare’s theater and its audience, and the Virgin Mary and England itself. I. Striking the Pose of the Virgin Mary: The Iconography of Cleopatra At first glance, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is an unlikely choice for a study aimed at Marian influence. Cleopatra’s renowned sexuality and “infinite variety” (2.2.241) are in stark opposition to the Virgin Mary’s constancy. Given Antony’s extramarital affair with Cleopatra—and given that she has children with both Antony and Julius Caesar—we know that she is neither virginal nor chaste. But Cleopatra’s influential nature, and the threat she poses to the all-male triumvirate, makes her a fascinating study alongside the fear of Marian influence over the Holy Trinity in post-Reformation England. Indeed, where Cleopatra is able to transform the “triple pillar of the world … Into a strumpet’s fool” (1.1.12–13), the Virgin Mary of Crashaw’s account was thought to make Christ an impotent infant. As Laura Severt King argues, “In Rome, women are whores or saints, not both” (445). Cleopatra is certainly situated in the former category, and King finds it tragic that Cleopatra ultimately collaborates with Rome’s divisive program by “strik[ing] the pose” of the Virgin Mary at the play’s end (449). Although King presents a compelling case for the tragedy behind Cleopatra’s repudiation of a “supernaturally potent eroticism” (429), I find Cleopatra’s movement toward a Marian iconography less tragic.

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

153

By examining the anxiety that Cleopatra provokes in the world of Roman masculinity, I find that her sexuality ultimately empties male potency. This is a paradox, of course, since Antony sleeps with Cleopatra. But the play appears to conceive of Antony and Cleopatra’s sexual relationship as capable of weakening Antony’s masculinity. Although he can rise to the occasion, he becomes less of a man in the process. We need not look far to find examples of the scrutinization of Antony’s manhood: Enobarbus confuses Cleopatra for Antony (1.2.66); Cleopatra describes how she dressed Antony in her “tiles and mantles” (2.5.22); Maecenas relates how Antony has given “his potent regiment to a trull” (3.6.95); Scarus explains how Antony’s manhood “[d]id violate so itself” (3.10.22–3); and even Antony acknowledges that his “sword” was “made weak by [his] affection” (3.11.67–8). As critics before me have noted, Antony’s amorous desire for Cleopatra is what leads to his effeminacy. In this regard, Cleopatra is indeed potent, but not a source of potency for the male. It is only when Cleopatra is imagined as an enduring monument, and when she begins to imagine herself as an icon reminiscent of the Virgin Mary, that her feminine potency infuses Antony’s masculine identity. The movement toward the iconography of Cleopatra begins early in the play. Philo describes how Antony’s “goodly eyes” have turned the “office and devotion of their view / Upon a tawny front” (1.1.5–6). Philo is derisive here since his focus is on Antony’s neglectful attitude toward Rome and Roman politics, but the rhetoric of “goodly eyes” and “devotion” also hints at Cleopatra’s divine status at the start of the play. Where Cleopatra is cast in this iconic role, Antony is immediately conceived as a “dissolving warrior” (Levine 45). However, Laura Levine notes that in these early scenes, Cleopatra’s “effeminizing power” is not being “channeled explicitly in Antony’s direction,” but instead that it is “diffused onto a whole landscape”—that is, Egypt itself (47). Conversely, one can question whether it is Cleopatra who infuses Egypt with an “effeminizing power,” or whether it is Egypt that infuses Cleopatra with this power. This relationship between Egypt and Cleopatra finds its parallel in the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Virgin Mary. Does the Virgin Mary as an emblematic figure grant the Roman Catholic Church an effeminizing power in sixteenth-century Europe, or does the Protestant conception of Catholics as “disorderly women” (Dolan 4) inevitably influence the perception of the Virgin Mary’s power/threat? One can readily answer that  For some examples, see: Laura Levine, 44–72; Patricia Parker; Shigeko Sujaku; and Marshall, “Man of Steele Done Got the Blues.”  Either way, I believe that the importance of “otherness” is being stressed through the conflation of Cleopatra with Egypt. Indeed, in her impressive study, Ania Loomba recognizes the nebulous nature of Egyptian identity in early modern Europe, but stresses that Cleopatra’s embodiment of Egypt works to create a “dichotomy between Rome and Egypt in which each is defined by its difference from the other” (116).  For a wonderful study of the effeminization and effeminizing power of the Catholic Church in Jacobean England, see Dolan.

154

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

the relationship does both. However, in the case of both Cleopatra/Egypt and the Virgin Mary/Roman Catholic Church, the threat of their effeminizing strength does not necessarily result in impotence for the males. In other words, aligning oneself with the feminine does not necessarily translate to impuissance, and thus feminine strength can be imagined alongside masculine power. I find that like in most, if not all, of Shakespeare’s work, masculine anxiety persists in Antony and Cleopatra regardless of Rome’s dominance. What strikes me as different, however, is that through Cleopatra’s feminine strength, as Katherine Eggert has argued, “Shakespeare emphasizes … the solely, incontestably feminine nature of that power” (138). She alone is the most visible emblem of potency. And despite the many instances where her power is deemed threatening to masculinity—indeed, a threat where, as Patricia Parker has noted, the idea of “cutting” or castration is underscored throughout the play (Parker 54–90)— Cleopatra’s efficacy throughout the better part of the play is self-evident. Her feminine puissance, then, stands to influence both Antony’s and Rome’s masculinity. To curb that influence, of course, the Romans incessantly attempt to undermine her power by bewhoring her. The key, as I see it, is that the slander is ineffective. The vilification of Cleopatra resembles the polemical attacks against Roman Catholics who venerated the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England—attacks that, although they potentially generated anxiety/distrust over the Virgin Mary’s prominent role, did nothing really to fracture her strength. As an iconic figure in Christianity, the Virgin Mary’s significance endured despite the absence of her iconography in England. Even Crashaw acknowledges that the English Church does “willingly honour [the Virgin Mary] as the most blessed of all Saints” (C4r). “This blessedness,” Crashaw continues, “farre be it from us to impeach” (C4v). Iconography or not, the Virgin Mary continues to hold a prominent role in post-Reformation Christian thought. Cleopatra, too, possesses an influential essence, and the play fashions her as an iconic figure well beyond the reach of those who would have her brought down to a highly promiscuous human size. Enobarbus’s famous account of Cleopatra’s meeting with Antony on the river Cydnus—perhaps more so than any other description in the play—shapes the iconography of Cleopatra: The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumèd that The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, It beggared all description. She did lie In her pavilion—cloth of gold, of tissue— O’er-picturing that Venus where we see The fancy outwork nature. (2.2.197–207)

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

155

The overall description here moves well beyond the material ornamentation of gold and silver. Enobarbus’ account strives to work on all the senses, and the iconography is far from a still image. One is not only asked to see the “burnished throne” floating over the water, but also to smell the perfume of the sails, to listen to the “tune of flutes” that guides the strokes of the oars. When Enobarbus arrives at the description of Cleopatra, we are invited to imagine her, since she “beggared all description.” The portrayal is evocative insofar as the audience must work together with Enobarbus to imagine the scene. We are given markers—the golden deck, silver oars, purple sails, melodious music, perfumed air—but like the poet of “The Ruins of Walsingham,” we can behold Cleopatra only in our imagination. The description evokes a monument of the mind, and when Enobarbus claims, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety” (2.2.240–41), he casts her as statuesque while granting her the power of change. Although Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” can conjure notions of inconstancy, it can also signify her universal appeal. In the way that the Virgin Mary’s influential nature was perpetuated through various Marian shrines in medieval and early modern Europe, Cleopatra’s infinite variety is directly linked with the universality of her imagined “iconography.” It is precisely this power of infinite variety that allows Cleopatra both to emasculate and to invigorate Antony. For the better part of the play, Antony is in a passive position where his leadership is concerned. However, after the events surrounding Antony’s “cowardice” at sea (3.10) and his speech to his soldiers where he inspires tears instead of courage (4.2)—events that seem to highlight the full scope of his would-be effeminization—it is Cleopatra who works to fashion his masculinity. Although we witness Antony mustering his own manhood after his humiliation— as Cleopatra continues to compromise his masculinity (“Sleep a little” (4.4.2), Cleopatra says to Antony as he readies for an early morning battle)—he is ultimately unable to find the strength to win in battle. In a supernatural moment, a noise is heard beneath the stage as a Soldier remarks, “’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, / Now leaves him” (4.3.13–14). As Philo tells us at the opening of the play, Antony has placed his devotion on the wrong figure. Indeed, Bruce Smith explores the haunting nature of effeminacy and argues, “As the repository of all the traits that make a man not a man, women threaten to undermine masculine self-possession from within. The problem facing man is, then, a matter of selfdefence” (108). In his relationship with Cleopatra, Antony does indeed let his guard

 In Men in Women’s Clothing, for example, Laura Levine explores how Cleopatra “conceives of reality itself as a scenario waiting to be improvised and shaped, conceives of reality as a script she is in the process of fashioning” (48). In this regard, then, Cleopatra is able to adapt and shift in ways that keep men—according to Levine—hungry for more.  For example, in Gender and Heroism, Mary Beth Rose writes of Antony: “Not only does he share the stage with a powerful woman, she outlives him and has the last word, which she uses to eulogize, characterize, and, it could be argued, mystify him” (21).

156

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

down. Once he fails to safeguard his masculine identity, he inevitably lays blame on the threatening nature of Cleopatra—the “Triple-turned whore” (4.13.13). But in that inevitable fall of Antony, Cleopatra refuses to be transformed into a strumpet—to allow “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy [her] greatness / I’th’ posture of a whore” (5.2.216–17)—and she refuses to allow Antony to suffer similar defamation. To achieve this end, she must willingly sacrifice herself as a means of attaining an iconographic status. Indeed, in her imagined slander, she employs the language of the theatrical power to create lasting images as the boy threatens to render Cleopatra a “whore” through his “posture” or pose. The inverse effect, of course, is the theatrical power to render her a powerful woman. By traveling to the monument to feign death, then, Cleopatra begins the process of immortalizing herself. The vitality of this is that Shakespeare’s theater itself is working to achieve this end. Indeed, Shakespeare draws on the power of a Marian image to lend strength to the most unlikely of his female characters. Before she arrives at that Marian end, however, Cleopatra ensures that Antony’s potency is restored before his death. As she holds Antony in her arms—an image reminiscent of the Pietà—he sees himself as “Valiantly vanquished,” or potent in the issuing of his “spirit” (4.16.60–61). When Antony dies, Cleopatra says: “O, withered is the garland of the war. / The soldier’s pole is fall’n. Young boys and girls / Are level now with men” (4.16.66–8). In Antony’s death, both the height and the end of potency are conflated to relate a leveling force; indeed, Cleopatra’s language conjoins the strength of men and the feminine world of youth where the “odds is gone” (4.15.68), or as Bevington notes, “the distinction between great and small has disappeared” (1376). Although Cleopatra’s statement certainly implies an end to potency as the phallic “pole is fall’n,” it also gestures at the precarious nature of masculinity. Indeed, Caesar’s response to Antony’s death— “The breaking of so great a thing should make / A greater crack” (5.1.14–15)— indicates that the living, potent hero meets a death as ordinary as anyone else’s. In other words, masculine potency ultimately comes to the same end for every male. In this vein, the threat of effeminacy is rendered inconsequential. By evoking the Marian image of the Pietà at Antony’s death, then, the play offers a divine view of feminine and masculine greatness. In Marian iconography, the Virgin Mary’s efficacy is determined by the way Jesus is placed in relationship to her. Holding her dead son, Mary’s strength is located in her empathetic potential and ability to lead the believer closer to Christ. If she holds the infant Christ, however, Mary carries clout as God’s mother as she is able to influence him. For her part, Cleopatra is able to have it both ways. She holds the dead Antony in her arms, and like Talbot with John, her empathy is so great that she appears to die the moment that Antony is gone (4.16.71–4). Of course, her death is only temporary, and thus she offers her audience a second Marian image to secure her singular greatness. Later, she comes closer to the image of the Madonna with child. “Now from head to foot / I am marble-constant” (5.2.235–6), Cleopatra

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

157

says as she resolves to kill herself. She fashions herself as an enduring statue, and the final image Cleopatra gives her audience is that of a woman with an asp at her breast, like a “baby.… That sucks the nurse asleep” (5.2.300–301). By evoking the iconography of the Madonna with child, Cleopatra impedes Rome’s masculine threat of casting her in the “posture of a whore.” Through this final impression, Antony and Cleopatra evokes one of the most popular of Marian images, and resists the would-be iconoclastic breaking of Cleopatra by demonstrating the efficacy of theatrical spectacle. Where King locates the loss of Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” through the heroine’s alignment with the “quintessential woman saint” (449), I see Cleopatra’s deployment of Marian iconography as a moment that augments her ability to influence her audience. To be certain, the “supernatural potent eroticism” that King finds valuable in Cleopatra is hardly erased in her final moments, but instead it is paradoxically invested with a Marian valence to secure its immutability. This is to say, although the images of Cleopatra holding the dead Antony in her arms and the asp sucking at her breast are evocative of Marian iconography, they are also independently, and secularly erotic. Her feminine strength remains, and in her association with Marian efficacy, Cleopatra is able to influence her audience’s view of Antony. Indeed, when Caesar says of Antony and Cleopatra’s burial, “No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous” (5.2.349–50), he acknowledges their enduring eminence, and effectuates Cleopatra’s own “Immortal longings” (5.2.272). Cleopatra’s deliberate self-posturing—employing both the image of the Pietà and the Madonna with child—ultimately envelops Antony in her greatness and immortality. Like the unseen iconography of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England, Antony and Cleopatra’s monument can only be imagined. But the images of Cleopatra holding the dead Antony in her arms, and then holding the asp at her breast are monumentalized in the play itself, and in this way the Virgin Mary’s immortal essence is deployed to bolster the theater’s own power to ensure the enduring influence of these images. As I will show, Shakespeare casts the influential Laura Severt King argues, “Being ‘marble constant’ means rejecting the infinite variety for which she was earlier celebrated and assuming the statue-like quality of Octavia” (448). Although King locates a self-fragmentation for Cleopatra in the final moments of the play, I believe that the Marian iconography she appropriates constructs her with a different kind of feminine power. Moreover, the enduring image secures the idea that “age cannot wither her.”  “Suckling a creature that is divine but deadly,” King writes, “[Cleopatra] simultaneously travesties the Madonna and child and acknowledges their ascendancy as models” (449).  King reads Cleopatra’s iconic death as a concurrent perversion of the Madonna and child, and acknowledgment of “their ascendancy as models,” and she ultimately sees Cleopatra’s Marian stance at the play’s end as a moment that undermines the “triumph of [her] escape from humiliation” because she collaborates with “Rome’s divisive program” (449). However, I feel that Cleopatra is hardly rendered saint-like by the Romans, and thus I find her subversive suicide as less tragic. 

158

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

nature of Marian iconography in a more visible light in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale to demonstrate the full scope of Marian efficacy. Indeed, in these romances, the power of Marian spectacle explored in Antony and Cleopatra is transformed as something closer to miraculous wonder. II. Marian Incest and the Merits of Incest in Pericles In his poem “Annunciation” (c. 1608), John Donne illustrates how the Virgin Mary occupies various roles in relation to Christ—and God in Christ—that accord her distinct power: Ere by the spheres time was created, thou Wast in His mind, who is thy son and brother; Whom thou conceiv’st, conceiv’d; yea thou art now Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother. (9–12)

Although Donne’s idea of Mary as God’s “maker” realizes the fears of Protestant polemicists like Crashaw, the absence of a fixed role for Mary also serves to neutralize her imagined threat. She might be God’s mother, but she is also his sister and daughter. However, Christ’s authoritative position is also in flux since he is simultaneously a father, brother, and son. Any sense of gendered dominance in this construction, then, is dissipated and rendered inconsequential by the absence of fixed subject positions. Behind these fluctuating relationships is also the undeniable trace of incest, and in this regard the incest theme allows us to re-imagine gendered identity where fathers are not always dominant and where daughters can figuratively be their “Father’s mother.” Through subtle intonations of incest that helped shape the cult of the Virgin Mary, I argue, Shakespeare employs a positive and spectacular view of Marian incest in his exploration of gendered identity in Pericles.10 Although Antiochus’s relationship with his daughter is the most salient example of incest in Pericles, the father/daughter relationships between Thaisa and Simonides, and later Marina and Pericles, also intimate undertones of incestuous desire.11 In the miraculous reunion 10 Although I identify Shakespeare as the author of Pericles, I am aware of the authorship controversy surrounding the first two acts of the play. See, for example, MacD. P. Jackson, who contends that George Wilkins is the play’s co-author. Although my design does not deal with attribution, even if one is convinced that the first two acts of Pericles are non-Shakespearean, I hope that one can appreciate the nuances of the incest strain throughout the play. This is to say, if Shakespeare did not author the first two acts—facets of the play that boldly place incest as the chief subject matter—he appears to pick up the incest theme in the acts that follow, and complicates the matter with undertones of Marian significance. 11 For an insightful study of Shakespeare’s exploration of father/daughter incest, see Mark Taylor. Studies of incest in Pericles include: Barber, “Thou that Begets’t Him That Did Thee Beget”; Coppélia Kahn, “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family”; Boose, “The Father and the Bride”; and Susan Frye.

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

159

at the play’s end, the issue of incest surprisingly offers an escape from phallocentric parameters. The incestuous model of the divine family—and the Virgin Mary’s role as an identificatory object in that family—provides a medium through which Pericles can reconstitute his masculine identity within the space of his human family.12 The initial introduction to the incest theme comes from Gower who, standing before a row of “impaled heads,” describes Antiochus’s provocation of his daughter toward incest: “Bad child, worse father, to entice his own / To evil should be done by none” (1.27–8).13 But if incest is introduced against the foreboding act of decapitation, it is only done so to underscore the grotesque nature of that “evil”—we learn that the bodiless heads are not those of incestuous transgressors, but instead those of suitors unable to infer that Antiochus was committing incest. As the play opens, the incestuous “evil” is an ongoing act that symbolically severs the hope of any man attempting to marry Antiochus’s daughter. Alongside the issue of incest is the distorted Marian description of Antiochus’s daughter. Gower describes her as “buxom, blithe, and full of face / As heav’n had lent her all his grace” (1.23–4). The opening line of the Ave Maria reads, “Hail Mary, full of grace,” and thus the rhyming of “full of face” lent by “heaven’s grace” parodies the Marian prayer. It is fleshly “grace” that Antiochus’s daughter possesses, and not a spiritual one. Her virgin-like qualities take on a divine similitude—she is described “clothèd like a bride,” “appareled like the spring,” a “celestial tree,” “Herispedes,” and finally, “her heav’n-like face enticeth thee to view / Her countless glory …” (1.49–74)—but these descriptions hardly situate her beyond the realm of earthly flesh. Focusing on her physicality, Pericles explains that the gods “have inflamed desire” in him “[t]o taste the fruit of yon celestial tree” (1.63–4). Where the Ave Maria reads, “blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus,” the “fruit” that Pericles aspires to taste is hardly Christic. Although Pericles corrupts Marian devotion here, the Virgin Mary’s persona was certainly not beyond the reach of a sexually charged rhetoric.14 At times, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux’s Marian devotional writing is consciously or unconsciously laden with sexual undertones. In his “First Sermon for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin,” Bernard writes, Happy, doubtless, were the kisses which the Mother received from the lips of her suckling Babe whilst she fondled Him on her virginal lap. But ought we not to regard as still happier those which He gives her to-day in loving salutation in his seat at the Father’s right hand, when she advances to the throne of Majesty, singing her epithalamium and saying, with the Spouse in the Canticle, ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of His mouth’ (Cant.i.I)? (Sermons 170)

If, as Barber contends, Shakespeare is in “search for equivalents of the Holy Family of Christianity in the human family” (188), we must then question the value of incest in that familial dynamic. 13 In the Norton Shakespeare, Pericles is divided into scenes without acts. All references to Pericles will be by scene and line number. 14 See, for example, Hackett 13–18; and Warner 121–76. 12

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

160

While Bernard’s exaltation of Mary is reverential, the images of suckling, fondling, and kissing on the mouth that he employs are charged with a certain sexual energy. The shift from mother to spouse is paralleled by the “Babe’s” adulthood implying a kind of mature love that exists between God and his mother/daughter/ wife. Bernard’s reference to the Song of Songs serves to reinforce this sense of mature love. Warner credits Bernard’s “intensely personal love” as a starting point for medieval devotion that saw Mary as an “inspirer of love and joy, the private sweetheart of monks and sinners” (130–31).15 In The English Spanish Pilgrime (1629), for example, English spy James Wadsworth details how the Jesuits at St. Omers had a secret society chosen by the school’s prefect, a society who— “swering fidelity, and stiling themselves the Virgins slaves”—“sing Vespers and Letanies to our Lady for Englands conversion” (D2r). The self-fashioned physical bondage evokes the idea of Mary as a dominatrix of sorts—a dominatrix called upon to convert the English.16 This, of course, reinforced the Protestant view of “a radical and blasphemous reorientation” of the Virgin Mary through ardent, and sometimes sensuous, Roman Catholic devotion (Dolan 102). The sensuality surrounding Marian devotion was seen as a marker of the Roman Catholic tendency to corrupt and blaspheme the Virgin Mary. The perversion of Marian devotion surrounding Antiochus’s daughter’s carnality at the play’s opening, then, already points to an aberrant quality in that father/daughter relationship. In other words, there should be no sensuality where a father and daughter are concerned, and this includes Christ and the Virgin Mary. Indeed, the corruption of the Ave Maria is situated within the play’s broader issue of father/daughter incest that is rendered most unnatural. The deviant nature of this relationship is evidenced by the fiery death that Antiochus and his daughter suffer—a death occasioned by divine punishment (8.1–13). However, their incestuous relationship is an overture to a more conceptual depiction of the incest theme amid increasingly positive views of Marian strength in Pericles. In the relationship between Simonides and Thaisa, for example, we find that the road to Simonides’ incestuous desire goes through Pericles. In an aside, Simonides Warner goes on to argue that the Virgin Mary was the “focus of many Catholics’ sublimated desire”—an unchecked desire that lasted until the Counter-Reformation brought awareness to the danger of reading the marriage between God and his bride as literal (132). Indeed, MacCulloch explains that the reason images of Mary suckling her infant son were phased out of Counter-Reformation art was because it “was too physical and indecorous” (Reformation 617). 16 Dolan explains that “many seventeenth-century English writers, Protestant and Catholic, male and female, could not so comfortably dismiss Marian devotion, especially men’s abasement before their dominatrix, as a ‘continental’ extravagance. Instead, they attacked Mariolatry as a central practice in English Catholicism, as a paradigmatic example of where Catholics invested power and directed adoration …” (102–3 my emphasis). Wadsworth’s account of the secret society in St. Omers, then, speaks to the larger cultural anxiety about Catholicism and Mariolatry that threatened England. 15

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

161

comments on Pericles: “By Jove, I wonder, that is king of thoughts, / These cates distaste me, he but thought upon” (7.26–7). Immediately, and in her own aside, Thaisa says, “By Juno, that is queen of marriage, / I am amazed all viands that I eat / Do seem unsavory, wishing him my meat” (7.28–30). Both father and daughter find their food unappealing, and instead express an appetite for Pericles. Where Pericles longed to “eat the fruit of yon celestial tree” that was Antiochus’s daughter, he now becomes the desired object of consumption.17 But if Pericles is Simonides’s and Thaisa’s object of desire, his own thoughts on the father complicate the imagined relationship. Pericles sees Simonides as one “like to [his own] father’s picture,” which reminds him of a father who was a “sun for [princes] to reverence” (7.36, 39). Pericles, of course is a son/sun himself (7.42), and through the comparison he employs, both his father and Simonides inhabit that sun/son dynamic. It is a moment in the play when the distinction between parent and progeny begins to fracture, much like the Virgin Mary’s position as mother/daughter to her son/father. Pericles will soon be Simonides’s son, and through that design, incestuous undertones are evinced. For example, in Simonides’s overzealous endorsement of his daughter’s sexual union with Pericles—“Nay come, your hands and lips must seal it too” (9.106); and, “It pleaseth me so well that I will see you wed, / Then with what haste you can, get you to bed” (9.113–14)—Simonides imagines the joining of hands, lips, and bodies in bed. Simonides’s hunger for Pericles can only be satisfied through his own daughter’s appetite. His vicarious enjoyment of this sexual union is provocative insofar as he potentially desires to enjoy his “son” via identification with his daughter. Gendered substitution and the disruption of patriarchal hierarchy, then, are made possible through the rubric of the incest theme. I pause here briefly to examine the Virgin Mary’s simultaneous roles as identificatory object and object of desire to gauge the value of an imagined incestuous space on gendered identity. Michael Carroll differentiates between a male’s desire for the Virgin Mary (as repressed sexual desire) and a female’s desire for the Virgin Mary (a desire to identify with Mary so that the female can vicariously fulfill her desire for a sexual encounter with her father), but his Freudian distinction between the two kinds of desire posits a rather straightforward heterosexual attraction. Following Richard Rambuss’s lead in his exploration of John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three person’d God”—where he cautions against taking for granted the speaker’s heterosexual subject position—I find the distinct possibility that a believer’s Marian desire goes beyond his/her earthly repressed heterosexual desire for his/her physical mother/father. Given the absence of fixed roles in the divine family, identifying with the Virgin Mary allows for multigendered subject positions for men and women alike. The fluidity of these gendered subject positions reveal a certain value in polyamory.

17 Incest itself is figured as a kind of self-consumption throughout the play. For a reading of the association between incest and consumption, see Lewis.

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

162

Although Simonides’s relationship with Thaisa and Pericles may appear a rather marginal example of this polyamorous desire, the play’s incestuous set-up ultimately finds its way to Pericles’s relationship with his own daughter Marina, and in this kinship Marian influence over masculinity is key. Marina’s name derives from the Latin marinus, indicating her oceanic origin, but it also calls to mind the popular Marian title, Stella Maris or Star of the Sea. This Marian title enjoyed so much popularity in late medieval and early modern England that it earned Erasmus’ ridicule in “The Shipwreck” (1523): Adolf: There you’d have seen what a plight we were in—the sailors singing Salve regina, praying to the Virgin Mother, calling her Star of the Sea, Queen of Heaven, Mistress of the World, Port of Salvation, flattering her with many other titles the Sacred Scriptures nowhere assign to her. Antony: What has she to do with the sea? She never went voyaging, I believe. Adolf: Formerly Venus was protectress of sailors, because she was believed to have been born of the sea. Since she gave up guarding them, the Virgin Mother has succeeded this mother who was not a virgin. (355)

Erasmus derides Mary’s title by grounding it in a pagan origin. More importantly, perhaps, is the connection between the sensuous Venus and the virginal Mary. The latter takes the place of the former, and yet the seemingly arbitrary succession positions the two “goddesses” as interchangeable beings. Erasmus’ primary point appears to be the non-Scriptural source of Mary’s titles, and yet he also acknowledges Mary’s vast popularity. Unfounded as those titles might be, the sailors in question here continue to place their hope in the “Star of the Sea.” Marina not only shares the Virgin Mary’s title, but she is also rendered powerful because of her purity. Her concurrent sensuality and virginity mark her as both Marian and distinctly earthly. Bevington argues that she legitimates the sexuality of women because “she dwells for a time in a house of prostitution and is eminently desirable to men, and yet at the same time so pure that she can teach men the way to control their own libidinousness” (1440). Like the Virgin Mary, who—as Carroll notes—was an “acceptable” outlet for a male’s repressed sexual desire (56), I find that Marina’s edifying essence is anchored in her virtuous strength. Her physical virginity makes her an influential force in the obscene world of the brothel, a world rife with sexual desire where the prostitutes are “as good as rotten” and their children are brought up “poor bastards” (16.7, 11–12).18 Although Marina’s virginity renders her a valuable would-be prostitute, it also gives her the ethical valence to amend the nature of the men who inhabit that world—“She’s able to freeze the god Priapus,” Bawd says, “and undo the whole of generation” (19.6.3–4). Through her purity, Marina mitigates the men’s sexual desire, and her ability to convert them is so powerful that Boult ultimately suggests they “ravish” her else For an interesting study of the disease-ridden brothel in Pericles, see Margaret Healy.

18

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

163

she will “make … swearers priests” (19.19–20). In this regard, Marina’s virginity is a valuable currency, but not in the way Bawd and Boult wish it would be. In an act that recognizes the value of Marina’s virginal currency, and also arguably complicates her immaculacy, Lysimachus tenders payment for her virtuous influence. Giving her a “piece of gold for [her] virginity,” and “twenty to relieve [her] honesty,” he says, “Fare thee well. Thou art a piece of virtue” (19.125–30). Gift-giving of this kind to a figure who resembles the Virgin Mary smacks of the Roman Catholic practice of leaving gifts at Marian altars; however, it also exposes the natural human feeling of indebtedness to those who aid in helping one to become a “better” person. This is to say, if Reformers allow for the Virgin Mary to exist as a model of emulation for believers—in the way that Marina seems to function in the brothel—and yet restrict the reverence that she is afforded, one’s sense of indebtedness is transferred to God. Mary can still guide believers, but all the praise and reward goes to God. Like Bawd, God is made pander in this scenario. What is undeniable in the case of both Marina and the Virgin Mary is that their purity is deemed extraordinarily powerful. Marina’s steadfast virtue is enough to overwhelm Bawd, and in language invoking iconoclastic measures, Bawd instructs Boult, “Use her at thy pleasure. Crack the ice of her virginity and make the rest malleable” (19.143–4). Given Marina’s Marian associations, Thomas Rist finds in the “iconoclastic wit” of Bawd and Boult a “form of Reformist disgust at (Catholic) superstition” (Shakespeare’s Romances 127).19 And although the Virgin Mary is made “malleable” in post-Reformation thought, her purity is never “cracked” despite rampant sixteenth-century iconoclasm.20 Similarly, Marina’s virginity also remains unbroken. In frustration, Bawd says, “Would she had never come within my doors.—Marry, hang you!—She’s born to undo us.—Will you not go the way of womenkind? Marry, come up, my dish of chastity with rosemary and bays” (19.163–6). The use of the oath “Marry” here—as in the case with its use in Othello that I discuss in Chapter 3—presents interesting homophonic possibilities: Bawd conjures Mary to hang Marina; and later, she sardonically identifies Marina as Mary, a “dish of chastity.”21 The Marian associations here are meant to be derisive, but at the end of the episode, Marina never goes the way of “womenkind,” and thus retains her Marian-like chastity. In her own way, Marina is rendered extraordinary for deviating from the sexuality that is found in the world of the brothel. 19 See Rist, Shakespeare’s Romances, 117–71, for a fascinating reading of Shakespeare’s attention to post-Reformation hostility toward magic and Catholicism. 20 By “malleable” here, I mean that the Virgin Mary’s influence is re-imagined in the Reformation. Once Mary is stripped of her intercessory potential, her influence is severely limited. As I mentioned before, the doctrine of the Virgin Mary’s perpetual virginity survives the Protestant Reformation. 21 See Rist, “Merry, Marry, Mary,” 82, for a reading of the widespread use of this oath in Shakespeare.

164

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Because of this purity, Marina is ultimately called upon to influence Pericles, and therein we find the extent of her efficacious strength. Upon meeting Pericles, Marina says, “I am a maid, / My lord, that ne’er before invited eyes / But have been gazed on like a comet” (21.72–4). Likening Marina to a “comet,” the play reaffirms her association with the Virgin Mary’s title as “Star of the Sea.” When Marina describes the grief she has endured, Pericles responds, “I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping. / My dearest wife was like this maid, and such / My daughter might have been” (21.94–6). Although one can argue that this father’s gaze upon the daughter lacks perversion insofar as it is the thought of his wife that entertains his mind, at the heart of this episode is a father who desires his daughter. But beyond the tint of incest is the coalescence of Pericles’s heterosexual desire for his wife and his love of the daughter who “might have been.” As T.G. Bishop notes, “By the end of this speech, it is not clear whether Pericles is speaking of Thaisa or Marina, and as the two merge he evokes a dynamic kind of erotic and emotional economy, of filling and emptying at once” (115). The scene presents polyamorous desire where—through the attractive and “anonymous” being before him—Pericles imagines both his wife and would-be daughter, and then allows for a re-imagined sense of his gendered identity. Where Pericles evokes concurrent love for his absent wife and daughter, his self-description is anchored in a maternal identity. Pericles employs the language of pregnancy to describe his sorrow—he is “great” (pregnant) with woe and thus “shall deliver” (give birth to) weeping. Although his language potentially points to the absence of a physical mother here, it also evinces the idea of birth—or, in the case of Pericles, a type of rebirth. Indeed, he urges Marina to tell her story as a means of contemplating his own tragic narrative: If thine, considered prove the thousandth part Of my endurance, thou art a man, and I Have suffered like a girl. Yet thou dost look Like Patience gazing on kings’ graves and smiling Extremity out of act. What were thy friends? How lost thou them? Thy name, my most kind virgin? (21.123–8)

Marina’s “endurance” is on par with Pericles’s suffering—if not exceeding it— and thus she is imagined as a “man” while Pericles takes on the feminine part of a “girl.” He monumentalizes Marina by likening her to a statue of “Patience,” and evokes the Virgin Mary’s title when he addresses her as “my most kind virgin.” Beyond these Marian associations, Pericles longs to hear of Marina’s suffering, and thus the play posits Marina as a figure reminiscent of the Mater Dolorosa— one who both inspires grief, and lends her empathy to sinners (see Fig. 4.1). In his desire to experience her suffering, Pericles aligns himself with a feminine source of compassion; he wants to feel her pain, and perhaps this is a way for him to cope with his own suffering. Once Pericles realizes Marina is his daughter, he says, “O, come hither, / Thou that begett’st him that did thee beget” (21.181–2). He recalls the incest riddle that structures the play, but in this “incestuous” possibility

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

165

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Fig. 4.1

Workshop of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, Netherlandish, 1470/75 – by 1533. Virgin and St. John the Evangelist, c. 1510. Oil on panel. Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, 1937.1011. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

166

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

of a daughter begetting her father, Pericles is able to re-fashion his gendered identity outside the bounds of phallocentrism—a phallocentrism that seems to structure most of Shakespeare’s work, and, for that matter, Shakespeare’s England. There is no father/daughter relationship to contend with, no patriarchal structure in place here, and the reciprocal flow of suffering and compassion leaves the difference between “man” and “girl” immaterial. Indeed, the emotional awakening of a broken man is brought about by the tender virtue of a suffering virginal daughter. The undercurrent of efficacy like that of the Mater Dolorosa is found in this scene even in the absence of an actual mother. Where Marina’s Marian-like virtue positions her as the vehicle for Pericles’s awakening, her mother’s “miraculous” reappearance in Ephesus reveals the full potential of Marian influence on masculine identity. Thaisa has remained hidden at the temple of Diana at Ephesus in the role of a “nun” (22.35), but Cerimon’s description of Thaisa’s recovery constructs her as a rich, iconic presence: “I oped the coffin, / Found there rich jewels, recovered her, and placed her / Here in Diana’s temple” (22.42–4). Although the setting is the temple of Diana in Ephesus, Shakespeare’s audience would likely recognize the Marian significance of that locale. As I mentioned in the Introduction, Ephesus was the city where the Virgin Mary’s title of Theotokos was proclaimed, and it is also where Mary was said to have died.22 The physical setting, then, infuses the entire scene with a distinctly feminine, and explicitly Marian, significance. When the “voice of dead Thaisa” (22.55) is heard, the undercurrent of miraculousness pervades the scene. It draws attention to a supernatural element to that locale. Like a Roman Catholic pilgrimage site, Ephesus is imbued with something otherworldly. Through the spectacle of Thaisa’s return, the familial reunion results in an imagined fusion of the father, mother, and daughter. Pericles tells Thaisa, “That on the touching of her lips I may / Melt and no more be seen.—O, come, be buried / A second time within these arms” (22.64–6). He desires to envelop Thaisa like a grave—allowing her flesh to disintegrate into him. Looking on as they kiss, Marina longs to be a part of that union: “My heart / Leaps to be gone into my mother’s bosom” (22.67–8). Like Pericles, Marina desires to become part of her mother again, for her heart to beat in her mother’s bosom as her father kisses her. Acknowledging Marina’s desire, Pericles says, “Look who kneels here! Flesh of thy flesh, Thaisa” (22.69), and Thaisa responds, “Blest, and mine own!” (22.70). The emphasis on physical kinship here is structured within the greater theme of actual fusion. The interconnection between the three characters functions not as a perverse incestuous relationship, but a polyamorous reunion where subject and object become interchangeable. The overflow of love, and imagined disintegration of physical boundaries evokes a relationship similar to that of God and his daughter/mother Mary. 22 The Virgin Mary was said to have died in Ephesus. For the Marian significance of this scene, see Richmond, 164. For the various religious meanings surrounding Ephesus, see Sara Hanna.

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

167

Paradoxically, the incest motif is key to Pericles’s comic ending. The reprehensible account of Antiochus’s act of incest with his daughter at the play’s opening would seem to necessitate a move away from the abhorrence of an incestuous world. Instead, the play ushers us toward it in the discovery that Pericles can only find a positive outcome through the imagined incestuous encounter at the play’s end.23 Marina’s Marian nature mollifies anxiety about this conceptual desire, because as a woman who embodies purity akin to that of the Virgin Mary, she resists any tint of sexual corruption. The physical embrace of the father, daughter, and mother at the end of Pericles symbolically fuses parental and spousal love where the varied love objects become almost indistinguishable. In this coalescence, gendered authority appears to dissolve. It is an amalgamation that Gower underscores in the epilogue: In Pericles, his queen, and daughter seen, Although assailed with fortune fierce and keen, Virtue preserved from fell destruction’s blast, Led on by heav’n, and crowned with joy at last. (22.110–13)

And although it is only Pericles who enjoys the earthly king’s crown, all three are crowned with heaven’s joy. Through the impression that Gower inspires at the end of Pericles, the image of “impaled heads” seen at the onset of the play is replaced by the divine, coronal image of Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina. By drawing on the efficacy of Marian virtue, Shakespeare’s theater is able to redefine the value of incestuous desire and erase notions of patriarchal tyranny. Only by envisioning a shared coronation analogous to that of the divine family in heaven—one defined by virtue and unconditional love—can the audience recognize the promise behind this particular human family. III. Awakening Faith in The Winter’s Tale Where Shakespeare explores the power of iconography in Antony and Cleopatra and Pericles, in The Winter’s Tale he situates a living statue as the centerpiece of what is arguably the most miraculous moment in his canon. Undeniably, Hermione’s resurrection scene is loaded with Roman Catholic and Marian significance. Velma Bourgeois Richmond writes, “It is not difficult to see Shakespeare’s introduction of the Queen’s statue as a bold enactment of Old Roman Catholic practice—and a wish-fulfillment in the habit of romance” (199). Without question, it strikes a nostalgic chord for the old religion. Ruth Vanita links Paulina’s preservation of Hermione to sixteenth-century cultural practice whereby recusants preserved outlawed images of the Virgin Mary (320). Nostalgia for the Virgin Mary, then, is employed in The Winter’s Tale, and this ultimately recalls aspects of her affective 23 For a rich, psychoanalytic reading of Shakespeare’s attention to incestuous desire, and his emphasis on that desire at the end of Pericles, see Ruth Nevo.

168

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

power and influence. The play’s miraculous end underscores the efficacy of feminine and Marian influence over not only Leontes and the onstage spectators, I argue, but also Shakespeare’s larger audience and the very theater itself. If the first half of The Winter’s Tale immerses us in masculine structures of patriarchal tyranny, the return to Bohemia in the second half of the play situates us in an atmosphere of male passivity and nostalgia. “Unlike Henry V’s epic theater or Hamlet’s revenge tragedy,” Eggert notes, “The Winter’s Tale does not promote a kind of masculine theatricality to supplant the feminine” (166).24 Indeed, Dion’s fear that Leontes’s “fail of issue” (5.1.127) stands to weaken the kingdom is anchored in perceived masculine/national impotence. In the face of this fear, Leontes merely defers to Paulina saying, “We shall not marry till thou bidd’st us” (5.1.83). This inactive tenor permeates the theatrical apparatus as well. Throughout the play, the action is often “described” rather than “performed.” What would otherwise be the most climactic scenes—the revelation of Perdita as Leontes’s daughter, the reunion between Polixenes and Leontes, Polixenes’s acceptance of Florizel’s marriage to Perdita, and the fate of Antigonus—are all narrated by three gentlemen (5.2). As the Third Gentleman says to another man who, like the audience, did not bear witness to the reunion: “Then have you lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of” (5.2.38–9). This veiled joy that transpires during the play, but out of the audience’s sight, sets the stage for the ensuing spectacle. We need remember that the audience is not privy to Hermione’s “living” status. Like Leontes’s long sexual drought, the play suppresses the audience’s participation in “joy” as a means of making the final miraculous spectacle all the more edifying.25 As I indicate in Chapter 1, stories of Marian miracles in early modern Europe made their way into England to inspire reverence for the Virgin Mary by arousing wonder. In Miracles Lately Wrought (1606), Robert Chambers explains how all people—natives and foreigners, commoners and nobility, uneducated and learned—were moved to “unspeakable admiration and astonishment” by the recent Marian miracles in Montaigu (E3r). The play, too, gives access to the feeling that an encounter with the celestial might provoke. When Cleomenes returns from Delphos, he describes how the “ear-def’ning voice o’th’oracle, / Kin to Jove’s thunder, so surprised [his] sense / That [he] was nothing” (3.1.9–11). Juxtaposing Leontes’s reduction of “all the world outside himself to nothing—the sky, Bohemia, 24 Given the redemption, reprieve, and restoration of crown and family to Leontes, Eggert argues, “on the level of plot such supplantation certainly takes place” (166). Eggert’s analysis here centers on the way the “mourning and joy” of lost queenship informs, if not creates, Shakespeare’s tragicomic form. In a slightly different vein, I follow her lead in interrogating how feminine influence results in what she describes as “the dream of romance’s happy endings” (168). 25 Shakespeare amends his source material for this play—Robert Greene’s Pandosto— by bringing Hermione back to life. In Greene’s version, Pandosto [Leontes] kills himself after “calling to minde … that contrarie to the lawe of Nature hee had lusted after his owne Daughter” (121). As with the issue of father/daughter incest in Pericles, Shakespeare here re-imagines that desire along a more positive light.

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

169

his wife,” Marjorie Garber writes, “Cleomenes does the opposite, feeling himself rendered insignificant by the voice of the god” (837). In this miraculous encounter, Cleomenes is imagined as immaterial in the presence of the divine. The play, then, gives the audience markers for the emotion such an experience might produce, but the actual encounter with the spectacular is postponed. The deferral of disclosure situates the audience in storytelling akin to the kind Shakespeare’s very culture heard—stories of religion and miracles, old and new. In The Winter’s Tale, these narratives are contained within the action that is being staged. In some ways, it is like the lived experience of storytelling and daily recounting of significant events. “We are bound,” Stanley Cavell says, “at some point to feel that this theater is contesting the distinction between saying and showing.” Cavell locates in the final scene the reconstitution of knowledge—“a use of the concept of telling as fundamental as seeing for oneself” (204). The theater’s efficacy in recounting is as instrumental as its efficacy in showing. But in no uncertain terms, the play’s invitation for us to experience first hand the spectacle of Hermione’s awakening provokes a separate kind of reaction. For first-time viewers of the play, it ignites uncertainty through revelation. Indeed, perhaps we might remember our own reaction to the vivification of Hermione’s statue the first time we saw or read the play—confusion, wonder, disbelief, disappointment, delight. For the onstage audience, the mere sight of Hermione’s statue is enough to inspire awe. Although Leontes initially stands in silent “wonder” of the statue, he eventually says, “Hermione was not as much wrinkled, nothing / So agèd as this seems” (5.3.22, 27–8). Where age could not wither Cleopatra, the same cannot be said about Hermione. However, even if Hermione is not immutable, her statue strikes a chord before she comes to life. Were she alive, Leontes says, she could provide “So much to my good comfort as it is / Now piercing to my soul” (5.3.33–4). As before in Shakespeare, the “piercing” of one’s soul recalls Simeon’s prophecy to the Virgin Mary, and the suffering she endured. Through Leontes’s encounter with his wife’s statue, we are allowed access—indeed, we share in his encounter since we are not yet aware of the life behind the statue—to his suffering. As Kenneth Gross notes: The statue also has a more gently elegiac air; the scene registers, in fact, especially in its odd interest in the figure’s wrinkles, not just the loss of a young bride but the loss of an older woman, that is to say, the loss of a space of time in which a husband and wife could grow old together. (101)

The nostalgia and sorrow that the statue inspires is enough to make Leontes confess, “I am ashamed. Does not this stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it?” (5.3.37). Herein we see the affective power of iconography to lead one toward self-understanding in the hope for self-recovery. The very sight of the statue forces Leontes to consider not only his worth, but also the value of that which has now been lost. His nostalgia reveals the very weight of having lost Hermione’s love for so long.

170

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

The efficacy of feminine strength in this final scene is underwritten with the call to faith, and in this regard the theater is drawing on religious rhetoric to ensure the success of the play’s “miraculous” end. When Paulina instructs, “It is required / You do awake your faith” (5.3.94–5), she emphasizes the importance of belief in the miraculous. Asking those in the audience who will accuse her of being assisted by “wicked powers” to leave the chapel (5.3.86–91), and reiterating that “those that think it is unlawful business / I am about, let them depart” (5.3.86–98), Paulina dismisses the skeptics and clears a space for the faithful. Although the play recognizes the post-Reformation association of witchcraft with Roman Catholic miracles, it does so with the intent of going through with the “miraculous” act. Indeed, Rist goes so far as to suggest that here, “Paulina proposes the awakening of a benevolently magical religion [i.e., Catholicism] which, she says, currently lies dormant” (Shakespeare’s Romances 144). As Hermione “awakens,” the audience’s faith must also be awakened. Leontes’s first words to Hermione are telling: “Oh, she’s warm! / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (5.3.110– 12). Given the spiritual and emotional fulfillment for Leontes’s and Paulina’s audience, the ideas of “witchcraft” and “magic” are made inconsequential—only Paulina’s power and Hermione’s revival are of import.26 The power of the female guides the thoughts and emotions of all the spectators—men and women alike. And where Leontes is given physical access to the figure represented in the image, Shakespeare’s audience was given access to the visual rendering of miracles that could only be told in recent memory. For Roman Catholic sympathizers, bearing witness to a scene highly reminiscent of Mariolatry must have been incredibly influential.27 If only for a moment, those believers could experience near-Marian iconography that was long absent in post-Reformation England. On a fundamental level, Chambers argues, religious iconography was meant to be edifying: “And when we reveretly [sic] kneeling pray before it, we offer our prayers to that person in heaven, whose presence by the picture is the more settled & imprinted in our myndes” (D5r). The Virgin Mary’s power to affect change—her power to influence and help organize belief and self-perception—is incredibly provocative in a post-Reformation culture that had undergone monumental changes. Shakespeare draws on this provocative and edifying power by deploying Marian iconography at the end of The Winter’s Tale. It is key for the audience to witness that spectacle, and not merely hear about it. As Paulina says, “That she is living / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (5.3.116–18). As if to guarantee that this “old tale” will be “settled and imprinted” in the minds of his audience, Shakespeare showcases the Virgin Mary’s unremitting magnetism through the image of Hermione’s statue coming to life, and through this design he demonstrates the power and efficacy of the very theater itself. 26 For a fascinating reading of the religious elements in this scene, and the power of a naturalistic aesthetic in The Winter’s Tale, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, 175–220. 27 For the Roman Catholic overtones surrounding this scene, see Ruth Vanita, 320–21.

Marian Miracles and the Theatrical Wonder

171

*** Where English reformers increasingly marginalized the Virgin Mary, Shakespeare kept her visible within his theater. Through the Marian iconography in Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare underscores how the efficacious strength of the Virgin Mary not only endured in post-Reformation England, but how that strength could be employed to reconstitute perceptions of masculinity and community. The effeminized hero, the broken man, and the remorseful father/husband are all re-imagined through the lens of Marian influence, and in the process notions of love, family, fatherhood, and masculine power are all redefined in a liberating light. At every turn these Marian images work to recall the influential strength of empathy, compassion, and fundamental hope. And although the image that comes to mind is that of a Roman Catholic Virgin Mary who covers all her children with her veil, the sentiment that resonates in this reader’s mind comes from leading Protestant Reformer Martin Luther: But see to it that you make [Christ’s] birth your own, and that you make an exchange with him, so that you rid yourself of your birth and receive, instead, his. This happens, if you have this faith. By this token you sit assuredly in the Virgin Mary’s lap and are her dear child. This faith you have to practice and to pray for as long as you live; you can never strengthen it enough. That is our foundation and our inheritance; on it the good works are to be built. (Works, Vol. 52 16)

Imagining this kind of faith is the cornerstone for Christianity—the “foundation” and “inheritance,” Luther writes, for one’s “good works.” The enduring influence of the Virgin Mary for Roman Catholic and Protestant believers alike allowed Shakespeare to draw on this strength and infuse his theater—his “insubstantial pageant” (The Tempest, 4.1.155)—with a feminine and Marian efficacy that is profoundly substantial.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Afterword The Virgin Mary endured as a vital aspect of early modern Protestant theology because of her incontrovertible position as Christ’s mother. When we consider the post-Reformation “loss” of the Virgin Mary, then, what we actually encounter is the loss of something greater—a feminine essence that offered believers mercy, compassion, aid, and miraculous hope. For early modern English Protestants, the Virgin Mary was revered from a distance; she continued to matter, but her import was always anchored in Christ’s supreme significance. While considering the humanity of Christ in his tract The happines of the church (1619), for example, Church of England clergyman Thomas Adams writes: Christ had therefore the materials of his bodie from the virgin Mary; though not his Formale principium: for the holy Ghost was agent in this wonderfull conception.… Christ hath a father in heaven without a mother, a mother on earth without a father. Here is then the wonder of his Humanitie. The everlasting Father is become a litle child.… The Sonne of God calls himself the Sonne of man. (Sf9v–Tt1v)

Following in the tradition of leading Reformers, Adams acknowledges that Christ did indeed take matter from Mary—this, of course, establishes his human nature. However, in describing the “little child” as the “everlasting Father,” Adams is also able to re-establish God’s/Christ’s dominance over Mary since he is her creator. Adams stresses this divine, patriarchal hierarchy in his sermon, The Sacrifice of Thankefulness (1616) where he accuses Papists of giving “the Mother more honour then her Maker.” He writes, “Some (setting the Cart before the Horse) have written (Laus beatae virgini, et Jesu Christo,) Prayse to the virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ: And they have enjoyned ten Avemaries, for one Paternastor. It is to be feared at last, they will adore her for their Saviour, as they have done for their Mediatour, and shut Christ quite out of dores” (N1r). His argument here is something that can be traced in most post-Reformation polemics that address the role of the Virgin Mary in the Reformed religion: a heightened level of anxiety when the Virgin Mary’s presence threatens to absorb reverence reserved for God alone. The reaction, then, is to redirect the reverence back to God by stressing his absolute authority. Indeed, shortly after his admonishment of Roman Catholic Marian devotion, Adams says of Christ’s nativity: “They behelde … that this little Child was a great King, yea a great GOD, yea a great King above all Gods” (N1v). Once God subsumes all due reverence, the Virgin Mary is thrust into a marginal role. As I hope this study has shown, she simply did not remain there. At the outset of Masculinity and Marian Efficacy, I tried to convey the provocative nature of the post-Reformation attempt to marginalize an iconic figure like the Virgin Mary, and Shakespeare’s keen awareness of the implications behind

174

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

such a move. Shakespeare’s plays often underscore the Virgin Mary’s importance in the shifting religious atmosphere of early modern England. As I have attempted to demonstrate, Shakespeare often draws on the long tradition of Marian influence to illustrate how she offers an alternative to masculine-centered views of religious and gendered subjectivity. But what I also came to find during the course of this study is that Shakespeare’s use of the Virgin Mary not only offered the individual a way to re-conceive of himself, but also offered England as a community a way to re-imagine its own identity. The post-Reformation debate surrounding the Virgin Mary’s importance, and the anxiety that some Protestant polemicists express about the reverence that Mary might take away from God, is an argument aimed at inspiring a masculine identity for English Protestants. However, such a move inevitably introduces insecurities about England’s insularity, and provokes fear, perhaps, that the larger Christian community saw England as a more effeminate, less religiously devoted version of its Catholic counterpart. Searching for a common mother, rather than relying on a common God, might have offered the hope of co-existence. Shakespeare, I have argued, often employed various forms of Marian strength not only as a way of reflecting his culture’s concern with the role of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England, but also as a way to register the enduring value of the Virgin Mary to religious, gendered, and national identity. More so than any other female character in this study, Joan La Pucelle’s influential power is directly aligned with the Virgin Mary. In this regard, I see Shakespeare making more explicit use of Marian strength early on: Joan is a Marian warrior, Portia is a powerful intercessor, and Hamlet chooses the Virgin Mother over his father. Given the uncertainty about England’s future monarch (since Queen Elizabeth I refused to name an heir)—or anxiety about the threat of a religious shift back to Catholicism—perhaps Shakespeare’s early deployment of Marian strength speaks to this concern. Could the Virgin Mary help English subjects in search of their religious, gendered, and national identities organize a sense of self? Do characters like Joan, Portia, Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia speak to the positive value of Marian-like influence? My hope is that this study has shown how these women, and these plays, do indeed demonstrate the promise behind both feminine and Marian strength. But in the plays that define Shakespeare’s latter career—plays staged in a period when, as Cynthia Marshall argues, “the eschatological concerns of a culture [were] heavily imbued with apocalypticism” (Last Things xiv)—the Marian connections seem to be concerned with the establishment of a lasting iconography. With the accession of King James I, the promise of a lasting legacy of Protestantism appeared secure. But the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 reminded the English that the Roman Catholic threat was very real. Anxiety about England’s unstable religious identity shifted to anxiety about the threat of outside forces and terror. And in this regard, there also seemed to be overcompensation about England’s masculinity— Roman Catholics, and the Virgin Mary herself, were imagined as unruly women. As Frances Dolan says, “depicting a threat as feminine was a quick and dirty way

Afterword

175

to invest it with a whole range of qualities, to insist on it as simultaneously familiar and apocalyptic, and to place it within an even broader sense of anxiety about the gender order” (85). Was Shakespeare’s theater in this period attempting to deploy pre-Reformation views of the Virgin Mary as a means of interrogating this cultural misogyny? To be certain, the plays often locate something valuable in the promise of Marian strength. Marian moments in Shakespeare’s relatively late plays are often surrounded with nostalgic undertones. Lear imagines a utopian existence with Cordelia, Othello remembers his mother through the handkerchief, Cleopatra’s self-fashioned Marian iconography at the play’s end points to her desire to be an enduring icon, and Hermione’s absent presence through the better part of the play makes her Marianlike “return” incredibly memorable not only in The Winter’s Tale, but also in Shakespeare’s canon at large. Was Shakespeare, perhaps, lamenting the inevitable loss of Marian influence as England’s Protestant identity became firmly connected with an absolutist masculinity? I do not mean to suggest that Shakespeare was lamenting the loss of Catholicism, but instead that he saw waning the kind of feminine influence—the Marian comfort—that could make a positive difference to one’s sense of individual self and religious identity. Indeed, in certain dramatic moments, Shakespeare’s plays seem to recover that Marian essence. It was after Shakespeare’s death—with the arrival of the French Henrietta Maria into the English court in 1625—when both the popularity and insidious nature of the Virgin Mary took center stage. Henrietta Maria boldly practiced her Catholic faith, and, as Dolan tells us, her “elaborate new chapel at Somerset House was dedicated to the Virgin and became the center for the Arch-Confraternity of the Holy Rosary, which the queen led” (121). Once again, England found itself fearing Roman Catholic influence from within: an English queen (albeit the first uncrowned consort in English history) who unapologetically brought to England her steadfast loyalty to Roman Catholicism, and her devotion to the Virgin Mary herself. Henrietta Maria’s religious audacity was the stuff of Shakespearean plays. However, this particular religious threat was beyond Shakespeare’s life, Shakespeare’s work, and beyond the scope of this book. It portended future civil strife, future insecurities about England’s religious and gendered identity, and the future fracture in England’s conception of community. In the controversies that surrounded the seventeenth century, Shakespeare’s world was a distant past. Perhaps Shakespeare’s consistent deployment of the Virgin Mary’s efficacious strength was a means of leaving his audience a Marian legacy during a time in English history when the Virgin Mary was out of sight, but certainly not out of mind. It is my hope that this study has brought attention to the fundamental value behind recovering this facet of Shakespeare’s legacy, and the worth of considering the enduring promise of the Virgin Mary in the works and the world that followed Shakespeare.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Works Cited A.G. The widowes mite. Saint Omer, 1619. Adams, Thomas. The happines of the church. London, 1619. ———. The Sacrifice of thankefulness. London, 1616. Adelman, Janet. “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One Sex Model,” Enacting Gender on the Renaissance Stage. Ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russel. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1999. 23–52. ———. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays: Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge, 1992. Allen, William. A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholics. Ingolstadt, 1584. Reprinted in Religion and Society In Early Modern England: A Sourcebook. Ed. David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell. London: Routledge, 1996. Antanassova, Antonia. “Did Cyril of Alexandria Invent Mariology?” The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Ed. Chris Maunder. London: Burns and Oates, 2008. 105–26. Aston, Margaret. England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Baines, Barbara J. “Assaying the Power of Chastity in Measure for Measure.” Studies in English Literature 30.2 (1990): 283–301. Bale, John. The image of both Churches. London, 1570. Barber, C.L. Creating Elizabethan Tragedy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. ———. “The Family in Shakespeare’s Development: Tragedy and Sacredness,” Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 188–202. ———. “‘Thou that Begets’t Him That Did Thee Beget’: Transformation in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 59–67. Battenhouse, Roy W. “The Ghost in Hamlet: A Catholic ‘Linchpin’?” Studies in Philology 48.2 (1951): 161–92. Becker, Lucinda M. Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Becon, Thomas. A new postil. London, 1567. Benjamin, Jessica. “The First Bond.” The Women and Language Debate. Ed. Camille Roman, et al. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. 165–98. Berger, Harry Jr. “Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice: The Casket Scene Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 155–62. Bernard of Clairvaux and Amadeus of Lausanne. Magnificat: Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Trans. Marie-Bernard Said and Grace Perigo. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1979. ———. St. Bernard’s Sermons on the Blessed Virgin Mary. Trans. By a Priest of Mount Mellary. Devon: Warwick Printing Company, 1984.

178

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th ed. New York: Longman, 2003. Bishop, T.G. Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book. Ed. John E. Booty. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1976. Boose, Lynda E. “The Father and the Bride.” Shakespeare’s Middle Tragedies. Ed. David Young. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. ———. “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,’” Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello. Ed. Anthony G. Barthelemy. New York: G.K. Hall, 1994. Bossy, John. Christianity in the West, 1400–1700. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Bray, Gerald, ed. Documents of the English Reformation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994. Breitenberg, Mark. Anxious Masculinities in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Brown, Carolyn E. “The Wooing of Duke Vincentio and Isabella of Measure for Measure: ‘The Image of It Gives [Them] Content.’” Shakespeare Studies 22 (1994): 189–219. Buccola, Regina, and Lisa Hopkins. “Introduction.” Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 1–20. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy, Vol. 3. London: John C. Nimmo, 1886. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1982. Callaghan, Dympna. “Looking Well To Linens: Women and Cultural Production in Othello and Shakespeare’s England,” Marxist Shakespeare. Ed. Jean Howard and Scott C. Shershow. London: Routledge, 2001. 53–81. Calvin, John. A Harmony of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. Grand Rapids, MI: Saint Andrews Press, 1972. ———. Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. I & II. Trans. John Allen. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath-School Work, 1911. Camden, Carol. “On Ophelia’s Madness,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 247–55. Carroll, Michael P. The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge In Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Certaine Sermons or Homilies: Appointed to be Read in Churches In the Time of Queen Elizabeth I, 1547–1571. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968.

Works Cited

179

Chambers, Robert, trans. Miracles Lately Wrought by the Intercession of the Glorious Virgin. By Philippe Numan. Antwerp, 1606. Charke, William. An answeare for the time, …. Contayning a maintenance of the credite and persons of all those woorthie men: namely, of M. Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Beza, and the rest of those godlie ministers of Gods worde. London, 1583. Church of England. Articles to be inquired in the visitacion. London, 1570. Clayton, Mary. The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Collinson, Patrick. Elizabethans. New York: Hambledon, 2003. ———. The Reformation: A History. New York: The Modern Library, 2003. Cooper, Thomas. Certaine Sermons (London, 1580). Cox, Catherine S. “‘An Excellent Thing in Woman:’ Virgo and Viragos in King Lear,” Modern Philology 96 (1998): 143–57. Cox, John D. The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Crashaw, William. The Jesuites gospel. London, 1610. Crawford, Patricia. Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720. London: Routledge, 1993. Cressy, David. “National Memory in Early Modern England.” Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Ed. John R. Gillis. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 61–73. ———, and Lori Anne Ferrell, eds. Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 1996. Cunneen, Sally. In Search of Mary: The Woman and the Symbol. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Dawson, Anthony and Paul Yachnin. The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Dellasega, Cheryl. Surviving Ophelia: Mothers Share Their Wisdom in Navigating the Tumultuous Teenage Years. New York: Ballantine, 2001. Devlin, Christopher. Hamlet’s Divinity: And Other Essays. London: Rubert HartDavis, 1963. Diehl, Huston. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Dolan, Frances E. Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and SeventeenthCentury Print Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Dollimore, Jonathan. “Transgression and Surveillance in Measure for Measure.” Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd ed. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 72–87. Donne, John. “Annunciation,” John Donne’s Poetry. Ed. Donald R. Dickson. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. 133. ———. “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Shorter 5th ed. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. 208.

180

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Doran, Susan. “Virginity, Divinity, and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I,” The Myth of Elizabeth. Ed. Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 171–99. Duffy, Eamon. “Bare ruined choirs: Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare’s England,” Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Ed. Richard Dutton, et al. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. 40–57. ———. Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition. London: Continuum, 2004. ———. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. ———. The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Dunn, Leslie. “Ophelia’s Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine,” Embodied Voices. Ed. Leslie Dunn and Nancy A. Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 50–64. Eadmer, Liber de Excellentia Virginis Mariae. Patrologia Latina. Ed. JacquesPaul Migne. Paris, 1844. Vol. I, Part 59. 557–80. Eggert, Katherine. Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Eire, Carlos M.N. The War Against the Idols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Elliott, J.K. “Mary in the Apocryphal New Testament.” The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Ed. Chris Maunder. London: Burns and Oates, 2008. 57–70. Engle, Lars. “‘Thrift is blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 20–37. Erasmus, Desiderius. Collected Works of Erasmus, Volume 71. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974. ———. The Comparation of a Vyrgin and a Martyr (1523). Trans. Thomas Paynell. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970. ———. “The Shipwreck,” Colloquies, Vol. 39. Trans. Craig R. Thompson. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Erickson, Peter. Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare’s Drama. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. Fiorentino, Giovanni. Il Pecorone. 1558. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. 1. Ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bullough. New York: Columbia UP, 1964. 463–76. Fischer, Sandra K. “Hearing Ophelia: Gender and Tragic Discourse in Hamlet,” Renaissance and English Literary History 44 (1977): 60–74. Fish, Simon. A Supplicacyon for the Beggers. Reprinted in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Vol. 7, Appendix B. Ed. Frank Manley, et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Fissell, Mary E. Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Works Cited

181

Freeman, Thomas S. “Providence and Prescription: The Account of Elizabeth in Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs.’” The Myth of Elizabeth. Ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 27–55. Frye, Susan. “Incest and Authority in Pericles, Prince of Tyre.” Incest and the Literary Imagination. Ed. Elizabeth Barnes. Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 2002. 39–58. Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. Garnet, Henry. The Societie of the Rosary, Newly augmented. London, 1596. Gibson, Gail McMurray. The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Gifford, George. A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes. London, 1593. Girard, René. “Hamlet’s Dull Revenge.” Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts. Ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. 280–302. Goodland, Katharine. Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. ———. “Inverting the Pietà in Shakespeare’s King Lear.” Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama. Ed. Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 47–74. Gowing, Laura. Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in SeventeenthCentury England. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Graef, Hilda. Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion. London: Sheed & Ward, 1985. Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. ———. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. ———. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Greene, Robert. Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, The Descent of Euphues: Three Elizabethan Romance Stories. Ed. James Winny. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1957. Gross, Kenneth. The Dream of the Moving Statue. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Guy, John. Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. Hackett, Helen. Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Halkin, Léon E. Erasmus: A Critical Biography. Trans. John Tonkin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Hamilton, Donna. Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1992. Hamrick, Stephen. The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, 1558–1582. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.

182

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Hanna, Sara. “Studying Pericles through Sacred Geography, or Sailing to Paradise,” Selected Comedies and Late Romances of Shakespeare From a Christian Perspective. Ed. E. Beatrice Batson. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Hassel, Jr., R. Chris. “Intercession, Detraction, and Just Judgment in Othello,” Comparative Drama 35 (2001–2002): 43–67. ———. “Painted Women: Annunciation Motifs in Hamlet,” Comparative Drama 32 (1998–1999): 47–84. Healy, Margaret. “Pericles and the Pox,” Shakespeare’s Romances. Ed. Alison Thorne. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. 53–70. Honan, Park. Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Honigmann, E.A.J. Shakespeare: The “Lost Years.” Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. Howard, Jean E. “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 39.4 (1988): 418–40. ——— and Phyllis Rackin. Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hungerford, Anthony. The Advise of a Sonne. London, 1616. Hunt, Maurice. Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Hunter, Robert G. Shakespeare and the Mystery of God’s Judgments. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1976. Jackson, Gabriele Bernhard. “Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 40–65. Jackson, MacD. P. Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. Jankowski, Theodora A. Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Jewel, John. Apology of the Church of England. Ed. J.E. Booty. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1963. ———. The Second tome of homilies. London, 1571. Kahn, Coppélia. “The Absent Mother in King Lear.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, et al. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 33–49. ———. “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family.” Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 217–43. Kaplan, M. Lindsay. “Others and Lovers in The Merchant of Venice,” A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Dympna Callaghan. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 341–57. Kiefer, Carol Solomon. The Myth and Madness of Ophelia. Amherst: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, 2001. King, Laura S. “Blessed When They Were Riggish: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and Christianity’s Penitent Prostitutes,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992): 429–49.

Works Cited

183

Kingdon, Robert M. “Introduction.” The Execution of Justice in England and A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of Catholics. Ed. Robert M. Kingdon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1965. xii–xxxvii. Knapp, Jeffrey. Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. Kreitzer, Beth. Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater.” The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. 99–118. Kroener, Joseph Leo. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Latimer, Hugh. Fruitfull sermons. London, 1562. ———. “The Sermon of the Plough,” The English Sermon: An Anthology, Vol. 1. Ed. Martin Seymour-Smith. Cheshire, UK: Carcanet Press, 1976. 56–74. ———. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop of Worcester, Martyr, 1555. Ed. Rev. G.E. Corrie. Cambridge: Parker Society, 1844. Leventen, Carol. “Patrimony and Patriarchy in The Merchant of Venice,” The Matter of Difference. Ed. Valerie Wayne. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. 59–79. Levine, Laura. Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Levine, Nina S. Women’s Matters: Politics, Gender, and Nation in Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. Lewis, Cynthia. “Antonio and Alienation in The Merchant of Venice,” South Atlantic Review 48 (1983): 19–31. Lodge, Thomas. Prosopopeia containing the teares of the holy, blessed, and sanctified Marie, the Mother of God. London, 1596. Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Loughlin, Marie. Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1997. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works, Vol. 21. Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1956. ———. Luther’s Works, Vol. 52. Ed. Hans J. Hilerbrand. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974. McClain, Lisa. Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642. New York: Routledge, 2004. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. ———. The Reformation: A History. New York: Viking, 2003.

184

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

McEachern, Claire. “Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare’s Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 269–90. McGuckin, John. “Early Cult of Mary and Inter-Religious Contexts in the FifthCentury Church.” The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Ed. Chris Maunder. London: Burns and Oates, 2008. 1–22. McKluskie, Kathleen. “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure.” Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd ed. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 88–108. Maillet, Greg. “Desdemona and the Mariological Theology of the Will in Othello.” Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama. Ed. Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 87–110. Marcus, Leah. Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Marotti, Arthur F. “Forward.” Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama. Ed. Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. xii–xx. ———. Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2005. Marshall, Cynthia. Last Things, Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. ———. “Man of Steele Done Got the Blues: Melancholic Subversion of Presence in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 385–422. ———. The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. The Mary Play From the N. Town Manuscript. Ed. Peter Meredith. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1997. Maunder, Chris. “Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary in the New Testament.” The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Ed. Chris Maunder. London: Burns and Oates, 2008. 23–40. Mayer, Jean-Cristophe. Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith: History, Religion, and the Stage. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Meredith, Peter. “Introduction.” The Mary Play From the N. Town Manuscript. Ed. Peter Meredith. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1997. 1–23. Milward, Peter. Biblical Influences in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. ———. “Religion in Arden,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 115–21. ———. “Shakespeare’s ‘Miracles’ in the Context of Religious Controversy,” Renaissance Bulletin 29 (2002): 35–44. Montrose, Louis. The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Naogeorgus, Thomas. The popish kingdome, or reigne of Antichrist. London, 1570. Nashe, Thomas. Pierce Penniless, The Unfortunate Traveler and Other Works. Ed. J.B. Steane. New York: Penguin Books, 1972.

Works Cited

185

Neely, Carol Thomas. “‘Documents in Madness’: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991), 315–38. Neff, Amy. “The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 80 (1998): 254–73. Nelson, T.G.A., “Othello’s Unconsummated Marriage,” Essays in Criticism 33 (1983): 1–18. Nevo, Ruth. “The Perils of Pericles.” Shakespeare: The Last Plays. Ed. Kiernan Ryan. London: Longman 1999. 61–87. Newman, Karen. “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 19–33. O’Connell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in EarlyModern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Orgel, Stephen. “Prospero’s Wife,” Representations 8 (1984): 1–13. Paris, Bernard J. “The Not So Noble Antonio: A Horneyan Analysis of The Merchant of Venice,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (1989): 189–200. Parker, Patricia. “Barbers, Infidels, and Renegades: Antony and Cleopatra,” Center or Margin: Revisions of the English Renaissance in Honor of Leeds Barroll. Ed. Lena Cowen Orlin. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2006. 54–90. Parlby, Geri. “Origins of Marian Art in the Catacombs and the Problem of Identification.” The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Ed. Chris Maunder. London: Burns and Oates, 2008. 41–56. Parten, Anne. “Re-Establishing Sexual Order: The Ring Episode in The Merchant of Venice,” Women’s Studies 9 (1982): 145–55. Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Cornell, UP, 1993. Pelikan, Jaroslav. Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Peters, Christine. Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Phillippy, Patricia. Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Putnam, 1994. Price, Richard M. “Theotokos and the Council of Ephesus.” The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Ed. Chris Maunder. London: Burns and Oates, 2008. 89–104. Rambuss, Richard. Closet Devotions. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Raynalde, Thomas. The byrth of mankynde. London, 1545. Richmond, Velma Bourgeois. Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance. New York: Continuum, 2000. Rist, Thomas. “Merry, Marry, Mary: Shakespearian Wordplay and Twelfth Night.” Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 62: Close Encounters With Shakespeare’s Text. Ed. Peter Holland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 81–91.

186

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

———. “Religion, Politics, Revenge: The Dead in Renaissance Drama.” Early Modern Literary Studies: A Journal of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century English Literature 9 (1): 1–20. ———. Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. ———. “Shakespeare Now and Then: Communities, Religion, Reception.” Writing and Religion in England, 1558–1689: Studies in Community-Making and Cultural Memory. Ed. Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. 109–26. ———. Shakespeare’s Romances and the Politics of Counter-Reformation, Renaissance Studies, Vol. 3. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. Rogers, Thomas. An historical dialogue touching antichrist and poperie. London, 1589. Rose, Mary Beth. Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. ———. “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare?: Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 291–314. Ross, Lawrence J. “The Meaning of Strawberries in Shakespeare,” Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1960): 225–40. Rudnytsky, Peter L. “‘The Darke and Vicious Place’: The Dread of the Vagina in King Lear,” Modern Philology 96 (1999): 291–311. “The Ruins of Walsingham.” The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse. Ed. Emrys Jones. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. 550. Sams, Eric. The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Savage, Francis. A Conference Betwixt a Mother a Devout Recusant, and Her Sonne. Cambridge, 1600. Schwarz, Kathryn. Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. 2nd ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Shandler, Sara. Ophelia Speaks: Adolescent Girls Write About Their Search for Self. New York: Harper, 1999. Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Sharpe, J.A. Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Shaw, John. The blessedness of the Virgin Marie the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ. London, 1618. Shell, Alison. Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Shell, Marc. The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.

Works Cited

187

Shoemaker, Stephen. “The Cult of the Virgin Mary in the Fourth Century: A Fresh Look at Some Old and New Sources.” The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Ed. Chris Maunder. London: Burns and Oates, 2008. 71–88. Showalter, Elaine. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker. New York: Methuen, 1985. 77–94. Shuger, Debora K. The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Slights, Jessica, and Michael Morgan Holmes. “Isabella’s Order: Religious Acts and Personal Desires in Measure for Measure.” Studies in Philology 95.3 (1998): 263–92. Smith, Bruce. Shakespeare and Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Snow, Edward A. “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384–412. Sousa, Geraldo U. de. Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters. New York: Palgrave, 1999. Southwell, Robert. Moeoniae. London, 1595. Spurr, Bary. See the Virgin Blest: The Virgin Mary in English Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, et al. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1986. 123–44. Strong, Roy. The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry. London: Thames & Hudson, 1977. Sujaku, Shigeko. “Cleopatra as ‘Hero’ and Antony as ‘Heroine’: ‘Gender’ and ‘Sexuality’ in Antony and Cleopatra,” Studies in English Literature 73 (1996): 15–28. Taylor, Gary. “The Fortunes of Oldcastle,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 85–100. Taylor, Mark. Shakespeare’s Darker Purpose: A Question of Incest. New York: AMS Press, 1982. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Penguin Books, 1971. Tricomi, Albert H. “Joan La Pucelle and the Inverted Saints Play in 1 King Henry VI,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 25 (2001): 5–31. Twycross, Meg. “The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Ed. Richard Beadle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 37–84. Tynley, Robert. Two Learned Sermons. London, 1609. Vanita, Ruth. “Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 40 (2000): 311–37. Vives, Juan Luis. The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual. Ed. Charles Fantazzi. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Wadsworth, James. The English Spanish Pilgrime. London, 1629.

188

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage, 1976. Watson, Robert N. “Othello as Reformation Tragedy,” In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans. Ed. Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster. London: Associated UP, 2002. 65–96. West, Rebecca. The Court and the Castle. New Haven: Yale, 1957. White, Helen C. Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1963. White, Paul Whitfield. Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Whiting, Robert. Local Responses to the English Reformation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Willbern, David. “Shakespeare’s Nothing,” Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays. Ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 244–63. Willis, Deborah. Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Wilson, J. Dover. What Happens in Hamlet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1956. Wood, Charles T. Joan of Arc and Richard III: Sex, Saints, and Government in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. Yates, Frances. Astrea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1975. ———. Majesty and Magic in Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach to Cymbeline, Henry VIII, and The Tempest. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1978. Zwingli, Huldrych. Selected Writings of Huldrych Zwingli, Volume I. Trans. E.J. Furcha. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984.

Index Acts and Monuments 28–9 Adams, Thomas 173 Adelman, Janet 84, 93–4, 104n15, 113n25, 121, 125, 130n41, 132–3, 140–43, 145n55 Allen, William 41–2, 41n7 Ambrose Autpert St. 4, 4n6, 8, 94 An Apology of the Church of England 20, 42, 61 Anselm of Canterbury St. 9, 11–12, 15, 19, 60 Antanassova, Antonia 7 anti-Semitism 74 anti-theatricalism 81n32, 88 Antony 152–8 Apocrypha 2–3, 147 Arianism 91 Aston, Margaret 21 Augustine, St. 4, 47, 60, 94, 144 Baines, Barbara J. 80n29 Bale, John 96–7 Barber, C.L. 30n37, 158n11, 159n12 Battenhouse, Roy W. 100n10 Becker, Lucinda M. 127n37 Becon, Thomas 149 Benjamin, Jessica 146 Berengarius, J. 98 Bernard of Clairvaux 19, 72, 159–60 Bevington, David 103n13, 109n19, 113, 134n46, 156, 162 Bishop, T.G. 164 Bocher, Joan 127 The Book of Common Prayer 86–7, 133 Boose, Lynda E. 120, 136, 136n49, 158n11 Bossy, John 42 Breitenberg, Mark 32, 33n40, 71, 103, 122 Brown, Carolyn E. 79n27, 87n38 Buccola, Regina 29–30 Burton, Robert 150 Butler, Judith 31

Bynum, Caroline Walker 8–10, 9n14, 85n37, 126 Cain and Abel narrative, 52, 145, 145n55 Callaghan, Dympna 137n50 Calvin, John 20–22, 40–41, 60, 60n1, 69n17, 76–7, 79, 83, 86–7, 128 Calvinism 61n3, 69n17, 86–7 Camden, Carol 99n9 Campion, Edmund 41n7, 42 Carroll, Michael P. 71n18, 161–2 Catholicism asceticism 94 belief in miracles 22, 47, 55, 149–52, 170 celibacy 33, 94–6, 100–101, 112n23, effeminization of 26, 74, 144–5, 153–4, 153n4 iconography 26, 35, 52n20, 127, 136, 137, 149–52, 170 idolatry 29, 33, 49, 72, 81–2, 137, 149–50 indulgences 25, 40, 64, 72, intercession see intercession; Virgin Mary nostalgia for 15n20, 16, 27, 35, 38, 52n20, 62–5, 148, 167 recusants 64, 143, 167 Cavell, Stanley 111n22, 113n25, 169 Chambers, Robert 43–5, 47, 168, 170 Charke, William 61, 62n5, 115 chastity 4, 18, 80n29, 84–5, 98–100, 111–13, 116, 118–20, 123, 129, 148, 163 marriage and 89, 92, 96, 112–13 virginity and 33, 92, 96–7 Chaucer, Geoffrey 13, 13n19 churching of women 132–3 Clayton, Mary 11, 11n15 Cleopatra 35, 152–8, 169, 175 Collinson, Patrick 21n26, 45n11 convents 94, 101, 105, 116, 123

190

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

conversion, religious 33, 41n7, 55n26, 74, 145, 160 Cooper, Thomas 149 Council of Chalcedon 6 Council of Ephesus 2n2, 5–6 Counter Reformation 160n15 Cox, Catherine S. 123n36 Cox, John D. 31 Crashaw, William 22, 33, 42, 45n11, 49–50, 56, 61, 62n5, 71, 73, 80, 129–30, 150–52, 154, 158 Crawford, Patricia 95, 97n7, 100–101 Cressy, David 100, 151 Crooke, Helkiah 98 Cunneen, Sally 61n4, 64n8, 67n12 Dawson, Anthony 30–32, 75 Defence of English Catholics 41–2 Desdemona 34, 62n5, 93, 98, 111–20, 135–9, 148, 174 devil, threat of 47, 54–6 Diana 5, 5n9, 6, 150, 166 Diehl, Huston 26, 30n37 dissolution of the monasteries 40 Dolan, Frances E. 22, 26, 37, 37n1, 50, 71n19, 73–4, 129, 153, 153n4, 160, 160n16, 174–5 Dollimore, Jonathan 84n34 Donne, John 158, 161 Doran, Susan 28, 29n35, 54n24 Duffy, Eamon 9–10, 14, 16n22, 21n26, 25, 49n16, 54n25, 62, 62n6, 65, 68n15, 79, 82–3, 149 Dunn, Leslie 99n9 Eadmer 12, 12n17, 15 Eggert, Katherine 30, 38, 38n3, 47, 47n12– 13, 52n22, 55n26, 108n17, 135, 135n47, 141, 154, 168, 168n24 Eire, Carlos M.N. 26 Elizabeth I 27–30, 42, 52, 54, 96n6, 97n8 135, 174 English nationalism and 27–9, 151 Protestantism and 27–9, 62, 151 Virgin Mary and 27–9, 37n1, 54 England as “Mary’s Dowry” 14–15, 15n20, 55 Engle, Lars 68n14 The English Spanish Pilgrime 33, 160

Ephesus 5–6, 6n10, 166, 166n22 Erasmus, Desiderius 76–7, 94–5, 94n4, 95n5, 97, 116–17, 123, 162 Erickson, Peter 121 Eve 4, 4n4, 10, 92, 94–5, 105, 123 145 female authority 17, 24–6, 47–50, 71, 81–5 Fish, Simon 39–41 Fissell, Mary E. 126–7, 130n43 Foxe, John 28–9 Francis of Assisi, St. 122 Freeman, Thomas S. 28–9, 29n35 Frye, Susan 158n11 funeral rites 21n26, 82–3, 110–11, 125 Garber, Marjorie 168–9 Garnet, Henry 25, 42, 49, 64–5 gender fluidity of 19, 24–6, 47, 49–50, 73–4, 158, 161, 164–7 patriarchal structures and 9–10, 14, 19, 22, 25–6, 37, 50–51, 65–6, 73–4, 76–7, 124, 174–5 sexuality and 22, 76–8, 97–103, 108–9, 116–17, 119–23, 143, 146, 152–3, 162–3 social construction of 25, 31, 76, 129–32 Gertrude 34, 94, 101, 107–10, 118, 140–47 Gibson, Gail McMurray 15–17, 16n21 Gifford, George 24n30 Girard, René 140 Gnosticism 91 Golgotha 10, 51n18, 69, 121 Goodland, Katharine 17n23, 121, 125, 142n53 Gowing, Laura 130, 130n40 Graef, Hilda 2–8, 3n3, 4n4–6, 5n7, 6n10, 11–12, 12n16–18 Greenblatt, Stephen 30n36, 38n4, 74n22, 100n10 Greene, Robert 168n25 Gross, Kenneth 169 Gunpowder Plot 151, 174 Guy, John 40 Hackett, Helen 5n9, 8, 20, 24, 24n28, 27–9, 37n1, 45n11, 62n7, 159n14 Hamilton, Donna 30n36

Index Hamlet 32, 60, 65, 93–4, 98–111, 125–6, 139–48, 168, 174 Hamrick, Stephen 28n34 Hanna, Sara 166n22 Hassel, Jr., R. Chris 105, 105n16, 112n24, 113n27 Healy, Margaret 162n18 Henrietta Maria 175 Henry VIII 16, 16n21, 39, 95n5, 138 Hermione 35, 152, 167–70, 175 Holmes, Michael Morgan 81n30, 84, 88 holy family 114–15, 159, 159n12 Honigmann, E.A.J. 30n36 Hopkins, Lisa 29–30 Howard, Jean E. 24n28, 45–6, 76–7 Howard, Philip 16 Hungerford, Anthony 144–5 Hunt, Maurice 45n11 hyperdulia 20 iconoclasm 1, 20–21, 29, 35, 57, 59, 62, 84–5, 127, 129, 138–9, 163 iconophobia 26 idolatry see Catholicism Il Pecorone 67 images, affective power of 88, 137–8 incest 83–4, 143, 158–62, 158n10–11, 159n12, 161n17, 164–7, 167n23, 168n25 indulgences see Catholicism intercession 20, 48, 52, 66–81, 83–9, 116; see also Virgin Mary Ipswich, Our Lady of 16, 20–21, 59, 150 Iranaeus 4 Isabella 34, 59, 62n5, 78–89 Jackson, Gabriele Bernhard 47n12 Jackson, MacD. P. 158n10 James I 43, 82n33, 174 Jankowski, Theodora A. 96, 112–13, 116n30 Jephthah 104–5, 104n14 Jesuites gospel 22, 49, 129, 150 Jesuits 14–15, 15n20, 25, 33, 49, 55, 64, 129, 150–51, 160 Jesus Christology 2–5, 8, 12, 17–18, 20, 22, 26, 37n2, 40, 60, 79, 92, 118n31, 128, 171

191

emasculation of 20, 22, 42, 49–50, 61, 71, 81–2, 129–30, 152 as lover 94–5, 159–60 maternal nature 9, 126 nativity 91, 51n18, 69, 122, 128, 140, 158, 173 Passion 9–10, 51, 69, 127, 142n53, 144 purity of 3, 5, 76–7, 91, 97, 107, 111, 115, 127–8, 173 Jewel, John 20, 42, 45n11, 49, 61, 62n5, 71, 73, 80, 150 Joan of Arc 48, 48n15, 56 Joan La Pucelle 34, 38, 45–57, 135, 174 Julian of Norwich 9 Kahn, Coppélia 121, 158n11 Kaplan, M. Lindsay 76 King, Laura S. 152, 157n7 Knapp, Jeffrey 30–32, 30n36, 45, 45n10, 51, 54, 75, 152 Kreitzer, Beth 22, 79, 92, 92n3, 97, 108, 113, 120, 133 Kristeva, Julia 19 Kroener, Joseph Leo 18, 18n24, 128 La Priére de Nostre Dame 13 Laqueur, Thomas 130n40, 130n42 Latimer, Hugh 21, 60, 71, 73, 107, 127 latria 20 Laurentius, Andreas 98 Lear 93, 119–26, 139, 148, 175 Leontes 98, 139, 168–70 Leventen, Carol 66, 66n10, 76 Levine, Laura 153, 153n2, 155n5 Levine, Nina S. 47n12 Lewis, Cynthia 68n14, 161n17 Lodge, Thomas 64n9, 88 Lollards 127 Loomba, Ania 153n3 Lopez, Roderigo 74, 74n22 Loughlin, Marie 98 Lupton, Julia Reinhard 170n26 Luther, Martin 18, 20–22, 21n25, 41, 60, 92–3, 96, 128–9, 133, 140, 171 McClain, Lisa 25n31, 54n25, 64n8 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 1, 21n26, 44n9, 60, 69, 69n17, 77, 92, 95, 107, 128, 160n15

192

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

McEachern, Claire 120n34 McKluskie, Kathleen 84n35 Maillet, Greg 112, 112n23–4, 114, 118n31, 119n32 Marcus, Leah 38, 47n12, 50, 51n17, 52, 52n21 Marina 35, 152, 158, 162–7 Marotti, Arthur F. 30, 41, 79, 151–2 Marshall, Cynthia 75–6, 85n36, 153n2, 174 Mary I 96n6, 127 The Mary Play From the N. Town Manuscript 17–19 masculinity conceptions of God 9, 25 English identity and 15, 24, 26, 28, 30, 46, 50, 52–3, 57, 59, 126, 135, 168, 174 masculine anxiety 32, 37n1, 49, 76, 85n37, 94, 98, 103, 107, 112, 115, 117, 122, 129, 132, 135, 139, 148, 151, 154–5 masculine authority 9, 30, 25–6, 46, 53, 73, 79, 83, 115, 140 masculine potency 34, 52, 57, 59, 65–6, 71, 125, 134, 154, 156, 171 misogyny and 22, 123, 139 religion and 14, 19, 26–7, 32–3, 75, 78, 99, 159 sexual desire and 19, 100, 103–4, 110 theater and 53, 135, 168 violence and 26, 57, 134, 139, 147 maternal identity Catholic Church and 144–5 maternal authority 7, 19–20, 32–3, 42, 44, 49, 54, 61, 104, 129, 136, 139–40, 143–5, 148, 156 maternal compassion 8, 10, 12, 26, 30, 52–3, 121, 127–8, 138, 141–2, 145–6 maternal grief 9–10, 69, 141–2, 142n53 nurture and 52, 147 reproduction and 129–33 sexuality of 94, 104–5, 108, 125, 140, 143, 146, 160 as threatening 22, 26, 33, 37, 42, 44, 49–50, 61, 71, 80, 94, 129, 133–5, 139, 143 Maunder, Chris 2 Mayer, Jean-Cristophe 31n38

mercy 13, 18, 34, 49, 60n1, 69, 73–4, 78–9, 81–3, 86–8, 119, 121, 173 Meredith, Peter 18 Milward, Peter 30n36, 43n8, 112n24 miracles see also Virgin Mary Shakespeare’s theater and 35, 45, 56, 152, 170 Montrose, Louis 30n37, 38n4 monuments 35, 118, 149, 153, 155, 157, 164 mystery plays 16–17 Naogeorgus, Thomas 61–2, 61n3, 62n5, 73, 80–81, 86 Nashe, Thomas 54 Neely, Carol Thomas 99n9 Neff, Amy 9–10 Nestorian Controversy 5–6, 6n10 Nevo, Ruth 167n23 Newman, Karen 66, 66n11, 76 nostalgia 27, 35, 38, 46, 52n20, 93, 126, 142, 148, 167–9 nuns 83–4, 94–5, 116, 123, 166 O’Connell, Michael 88 Ophelia 34, 93, 98–111, 118, 120, 143, 148, 174 Orgel, Stephen 104n15 Othello 93, 111–19, 125–6, 135–9, 148, 175 Paré, Ambroise 98 Paris, Bernard J. 68n14 Parker, Patricia 153n2, 154 Parten, Anne 65–6, 76–7 Paster, Gail Kern 97, 130n40, 132–3 paternal influence 24, 52–4, 79, 89, 103–4, 113, 128, 139–44 Paulina 62n5, 167–70 Pelikan, Jaroslav 4, 5n8, 6, 37n2, 45n11, 51–2n18, 69n16, 73n21, 123 Pericles 5, 35, 158–67 Peters, Christine 24–5, 24n30, 26n32, 60n2, 79, 127, 127n37, 130n39 phoenix, symbolism of 53–4 Pietà 53, 55, 108, 121, 125, 127, 156, 157 pilgrimage Catholic practice of 18, 71–2, 49–50, Marian sites 14–16, 20–21, 59, 138 Pipher, Mary 99n9

Index Portia 34, 59, 62n5, 65–79, 81, 84, 88–9, 174 Price, Richard M. 5, 6n10, 8 priests 11, 17, 39, 67, 110–11, 110n20, 133, 150, 163 marriage and 96, 96n6 prostitution 100–101, 101n11, 105, 138, 162–3 Protestantism anti-Catholic polemic 27, 33, 37, 41, 49, 55, 55n26, 57, 61–2, 66, 82, 85, 129, 153, 174 English identity and 24, 28–9, 38–9, 45n10, 49–50, 174–5 marriage and 96–7, 96n6, 112–13, 116 predestination 39n6, 69n17, 78, 87 Protevangelium of James 3 Purgatory 40, 143, 149 Puritan movement 81–2, 81n32 anti-theatricalism and 82, 82n33 Rambuss, Richard 161 Raynalde, Thomas 130–33 Richeldis de Faverches 15–16, 138 Richmond, Velma Bourgeois 166n22, 167 Rist, Thomas 31n38, 78n26, 100n10, 111n21, 113n26, 142n54, 163, 163n19, 163n21 Rogers, Thomas 22, 81–2, 81n32 Rose, Mary Beth 155n6 “The Ruins of Walsingham” 15n20, 16, 155 salvation anxiety surrounding 32, 39n6, 69, 75, 83, 87, 142 post-Reformation and views of 21–2, 32, 39n6, 82–3, 110, 144 Virgin Mary and 1, 4n4, 10–13, 22, 69, 72, 82, 119, 119n32, 162 Sams, Eric 30n36 Savage, Francis 143, 145 Schwarz, Kathryn 47n12 “A Sermon Against Whoredom” 102 Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well 35 Antony and Cleopatra 35, 152–8, 167, 171, 175 Catholic upbringing 30n36 Coriolanus 35

193

Cymbeline 35 Hamlet 32, 34, 60, 65, 93–4, 98–111, 125–6, 139–48, 168, 174 Henry IV, Part 1 101n12, 134–5 Henry V 38, 54, 101n12, 135, 168 Henry VI, Part 1 34, 37–9, 45–57, 152, 174 King Lear 93, 34, 119–26, 148, 174–5 Measure for Measure 34, 59–60, 62n5, 78–89 The Merchant of Venice 34, 59–60, 65–78, 89, 136, 174 Othello 34–5, 57n27, 62n5, 93, 111–19, 125–6, 135–9, 148, 163, 174–5 Pericles 5, 35, 152, 158–67, 168n25, 171 authorship controversy of 158n10 religious identity 30n36, 45n11 The Tempest 35, 171 theater and religious ritual 30–31, 30n37, 38, 38n4 Troilus and Cressida 62n5 Twelfth Night 35, 78n26, 62n5 The Winter’s Tale 35, 62n5, 98, 152, 158, 167–71, 175 Shapiro, James 74, 74n23 Sharpe, J.A. 101n11 Shaw, John 123 Shell, Alison 14, 15n20 Shell, Marc 83–4 Shoemaker, Stephen 6n10 Showalter, Elaine 99n9 Shuger, Debora K. 60n1 Shylock 68–9, 73–5, 81, 88, 138 Simeon, prophecy of 51, 51n18, 69, 75, 169 Slights, Jessica 81n30, 84, 88 Smith, Bruce 31–2, 155 Snow, Edward A. 113n25, 136n48 The Societie of the Rosary 25, 42, 49, 64 Song of Mary Mother of Christ 24 “A Song to Mary” 12–13 Sousa, Geraldo U. de 72n20 Southwell, Robert 64–5 Spurr, Bary 8–9, 11, 13–14, 13n19 Stallybrass, Peter 97 Strong, Roy 27n33 Sujaku, Shigeko 153n2

194

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England

Talbot 46–8, 50–54, 156 Taylor, Gary 30n36 Taylor, Mark 158n11 Thaisa 5, 158, 160–67 Thirty-Nine Articles 99 Thomas, Keith 151n1 Tricomi, Albert H. 38, 52n20, 55n26, 57 Twycross, Meg 16–17 Tynley, Robert 44, 47 Vanita, Ruth 167, 170n27 Venus 5n9, 150, 154, 162 Virgin Mary Annunciation 6, 11, 15, 16n21, 27, 48, 79, 105, 105n16, 122, 146, 158 Assumption 11, 17, 159 Ave Maria 34, 67, 67n12, 80, 123, 159–60 cathedrals in honor of 8 Christokos 5 courtly love and 13–14 Dormition of 7 Ephesus and 6, 6n10, 166, 166n22 history of cult 1–30 iconoclasm 1, 20–21, 29, 35, 59, 84, 138 iconography 8–9, 21, 28, 35, 53, 105, 108, 127, 129–30, 138, 149, 150, 152, 154–8, 170–71, 175; see also Catholicism Immaculate Conception 3, 15, 92n3 intercession 12–13, 20, 32–4, 59–76, 78, 81–9, 96, 116, 119, 127–8, 145, 163n20 Joseph and 3, 19, 43–4, 69, 92, 97, 138 Madonna and Child 51, 156–7, 157n8–9 Marian devotion 3, 6n10, 7, 11–15, 20–21, 29–30, 60–65, 75, 82, 160, 173 Mariolatry 12, 19–20, 35, 59, 62, 65, 81, 127, 151, 160n16, 170 Mariology 4–5, 6n10, 11, 136 Mater Dolorosa 9, 35, 51–2, 51n18, 52n19, 69, 142, 164, 166 maternal role see maternal identity Mediatrix 13, 73 miracles and 15–16, 22, 34–5, 38, 42–6, 54, 56, 149–52, 168

as model of emulation 4n5, 8, 18, 71, 92, 107, 113, 125, 163 Nativity 3, 7, 11, 27, 91, 127, 173 oaths in Shakespeare 113, 113n26, 163 perpetual virginity 3–4, 6–7, 33, 37n2, 77, 91–2, 92n3, 96–7, 99, 108, 119, 129, 163n20 Presentation in the Temple 7, 11 Purification 7, 11, 92n3, 132 as Queen of Heaven 8, 12–13, 61 relics 126, 137–8, 150 role in salvation see salvation rosary 25, 25n31, 41n7, 62, 64, 64n8, 75, 175 as Second Eve 3–4, 8, 121, 123 as Stella Maris 14, 162 Theotokos 2n2, 5–7, 9, 18, 21, 34, 37, 77, 92, 128, 166 vessel theory 107, 127 as warrior 25, 42, 49n16 virginity anatomical theories and 98 Catholicism and 33, 91, 94–5, 101, 116 early modern view of 97–8, 100, 103 Protestantism and 92, 95–7, 97n7, 100, 107, 112–13, 116 Vives, Juan Luis 95, 95n5 Wadsworth, James 33, 160, 160n16 Waller, Gary 16n22 Walsingham, Our Lady of 15–16, 19–21, 59, 138, 149–51 Warner, Marina 3–8, 6n11, 7n12, 12–14, 37n2, 45n11, 51–2n18, 52n19, 67n12, 72, 88, 91, 91n1–2, 94, 97n8, 122, 130n39, 132, 137–8, 159n14, 160, 160n15 Watson, Robert N. 138n51 White, Paul Whitfield 39n6, 82n33 Whiting, Robert 115 The widowes mite 65, 128 Willbern, David 120 Willis, Deborah 25 Wood, Charles T. 48n15 Worcester, Our Lady of 20–21, 59 Yates, Frances 27, 27n33 Zwingli, Huldrych 20–22, 60, 128