ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the presumptive deadly status of mothers in Shakespeare's romances: their mid-state, or better their transition from one state and place to another. It explores the ways Renaissance visual art and theory, medicine, and divinity combined to influence this cathartic/purgational representation of the maternal. The chapter presents both the sanitization of Shakespeare's late family plots and the Bard's recovery of female 'grace' as the lost grace of representation. The practice of the confinement and churching of women after childbirth has been variously explored by critics to suggest the pattern according to which Shakespeare devises his sanctified return of mothers in his late plays. In foregrounding the post-Reformation inflections of such a ritual in the playwright's times, Caroline Bicks has also interestingly brought to the fore the complex ways in which Ephesus, a site of ancient and hybridized forms of devotion, might relate the figure of a multifaceted Diana to a reconceptualized maternal body as both sacred and sexual.
