ABSTRACT
It has, however, denied the husband-and the religious and cultural structures that upheld his rights over the female body-the promise of endurance.75 As critics have noted, Shakespeare departs from his sources in failing to include Gower's and Twine's closing comments that the couple will have more children. There will be no "second Epithalamie" upon the churched mother's return from the "Temple" in this tale. Although one can read this final dramatic engagement with the Temple of Diana at Ephesus and the Protestant churching ritual as a successful ritualistic taming of the reproductive female and the paganism it represented, the play's inconsistent treatment of the maternal body suggests that we read the ending as a failure of the new church to find its own legs to stand on. Rather than playing her part in the drama of familial salvation, Thaisa will, as Pericles himself affirms, "be buried / A second time within these arms" (5.3.43-44). Their reunion evokes the superstitious muck of Thaisa's burial at sea-a final commentary, perhaps, on the reformed English church's unsuccessful attempts to build its new doctrine on idolatrous foundations. Burying herself in her husband's arms, Thaisa embodies more than ever the backsliding goddess and her temple that colored the rhetoric of Protestant ideology and figured its own toppling church. Neither Thaisa, the church, nor the temple that an early modem audience knew had sunk into the marshy ooze are ever fully recovered from the darkness of their Ephesian pasts: "the ruines of that wonder," preached one of Shakespeare's Protestant contemporaries, "are intombed within the entrails of the Earth."76
