ABSTRACT
In 1487, assailed by enemies and beset by fears that his fragile new dynasty would come to ruin, Henry VII embarked on a pilgrimage to Walsingham to beg Our Lady to preserve him “from the wiles of his enemies.” 1 Some 20 years later, his son Henry VIII would walk for two miles barefoot to this same image of maternal love to beg for her aid in his quest for a male heir. We have no reason to doubt that Henry’s early oblations were sincere. However, his love for the sacred Virgin proved as fickle as his human loves. In July 1538, in the heat of the Reformation, the image of the Virgin Mary was dragged from the chapel, brought to London, and burned along with Our Lady of Ipswich in a bonfire at Chelsea. In a dramatic wave of iconoclastic violence, one of England’s most important pilgrimage sites, “an international center of pilgrimage rivaled only by Santiago de Compostella in Spain and Rome itself,” disappeared into the realm of ruin and memory. 2
The poetic lament written by Philip, Earl of Arundel, on the ruin of the Shrine of Our Lady, discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, reveals the sense of loss, frustration, and anger that many of the English people must have felt as they watched the world that they knew being torn asunder. Although reformers desired to purge “idolatry and superstition” from every aspect of the English imagination and devotional life,3 they focused some of their harshest attacks on images and
practices related to the Virgin Mary and the female saints. Not surprisingly, the destruction wreaked on Marian shrines, images, and sacred objects lingered in the early modern imagination. Although Walsingham was destroyed almost 30 years before Shakespeare’s birth, oblique references to the famous pilgrimage site appear in Hamlet, and (as Susan S. Morrison and Alison A. Chapman note in Chapters 4 and 14) the destruction of this and other sites of Marian adoration formed a part of Shakespeare’s literary consciousness.4 In this chapter,I explore Shakespeare’s dramatic response to attacks on Marian devotional sites such as Walsingham and to the radical erasure of the feminine from official English devotional practice and iconography.
