ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s King John and Richard III engage in searching, if oblique, explorations of the consequences for England’s communal memory of the suppression of mourning practices associated with the Virgin Mary and Purgatory. In these history plays about England’s medieval past we find figures of mourning women that resonate with the depictions of mourning women in medieval English religious drama which were also England’s original history plays. King John and Richard III are also tragedies, and their tragic nature owes as much to the laments of the mourning women as it does to the character studies of flawed men in power whose greatest strengths bring about their downfalls. They are tragedies of community as much as they are tragedies of powerful individuals. In their hybrid tragic structures these plays manifest different visions of history: the one symbolized by the forward drive of political will embodied in the men; the other, articulated in the wails of the mourning women, looks back in anger and anguish as it sounds out the immeasurable loss of a single human life. In these plays female lamentation opens up dimensions of experience and articulates values that cannot be known any other way. The passion of these mourning women preserves a particular kind of knowledge and a particular kind of truth despite the palpable disjunction between their lamenting voices and the world around them, a world that denounces and distances itself from their cries. In contrast to King John and Richard III, which investigate the moral efficacy of female mourning, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Titus Andronicus, and Webster’s The White Devil portray mourning women as at best impotent, and at worst, dangerous instigators of revenge. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as I will argue in greater depth in the next chapter, depicts a complex range of attitudes to female mourning. If King John and Richard III, like the medieval Herod plays, associate female mourning with justice, The Spanish Tragedy, Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, The White Devil, and Hamlet associate female lament with revenge. Justice and revenge, of course, are both jural actions, and, especially during times of social upheaval and transition, the line between them is often indistinct. Michael Neill explains that Renaissance “revenge drama shows vengeance to be no more than memory continued by other means” and that “the role of the revenge is essentially that of a ‘remembrancer’ in
two senses of that once potent word: he is both an agent of memory and one whose task it is to exact payments for the debts of the past” (247). Placing the genre of revenge tragedy in the context of England’s suppression of burial ritual, Neill argues that “the terrible frenzies of the revenger, that berserk memorialist, can be understood as a fantasy response to the sense of despairing impotence produced by the Protestant displacement of the dead ...” (246). He asks, “[w]hat, after all, is its Ghost but an incarnation of those tormenting memories which ‘bite the conscience’?” (246). Like Greenblatt’s reading which overlooked the relationship between the women’s laments and the ghosts in Richard III, Neill’s analysis does not address the fact that the male revenger’s actions are often connected in a significant way to a mourning woman. The association between female mourning and male revenge has a long history, which I demonstrated in the introduction. This history is conjured up and signaled as an expectation of the genre in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy which personifies “Revenge” as a woman, a trope that is repeated with a sardonic twist in Titus Andronicus when Tamora dresses up as “Revenge” and Titus plays along even though he recognizes her. In The Spanish Tragedy, Lucrece, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, and The White Devil grieving women provoke revenge inadvertently as well as intentionally. Bel-Imperia and Tamora willfully enkindle vengeance through the performance of their grief. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Webster’s Brachiano repeatedly denounce mourning women as manipulative and hypocritical. Ophelia and Cornelia, in their grief-stricken madness, inadvertently provoke violence. As Horatio says of Ophelia’s “nothing,” the “unshaped use of it doth move the hearers to collection” who “botch the words up to fit their own thoughts” (4.5.7-10), and Laertes finds justification for revenge in Ophelia’s mad distress, though she urges none. Similarly, the image of Lavinia moves Titus to revenge, while Lucrece consciously stages her own death in order to impel her husband to avenge her rape. Flamineo finds in himself “a strange thing” called “compassion” after seeing his mother Cornelia’s “superstitious howling” (5.4.65-6). Instead of eliciting compunction, however, the tableau confirms Flamineo in his determination to murder his sister Vittoria. Webster’s staging of this moment also evokes the iconography of the pietà, suggesting that there is more to these evocations than a simple nod to generic tradition. Huston Diehl demonstrates that “reformers associate the devotional gaze” of Catholic spirituality “with the erotic gaze ... they liken sacred images to the sexualized woman who, although beautiful, is dangerously seductive ... they assert such images portray the female body in such a way as to arouse carnal desire” (159). Throughout England, the iconoclasts “decapitate, dismember, torture, and even crucify offending images” (162). In his Survey of London John Stowe records such an act of iconoclasm in West Cheape on 24 December 1600: “the Image of our Lady was again defaced, by plucking off her crowne, and almost her head, taking from her her naked child, & stabbing her in the breast” (266-7).1
