ABSTRACT
In St. Mary’s Priory, Binham, Norfolk, the base half of the medieval rood screen that once divided the nave from the sacristy now fronts the choir. Sixteenth-century reformers cut it down and whitewashed over the figures of the saints, burying them deeper beneath black-lettered words from Tyndale’s translation of the Bible. The lime mixture has deteriorated over the centuries, and, like the dead rising from their graves, “the original figures are reappearing through the fugitive wash,” as if in defiance of the text that attempts to conceal them (Phillips, Figure 24b). This eerie image, which blends residual medieval Catholicism with emerging Anglican nationalism, is an apt frontispiece for my study of female mourning in early modern English drama. The grieving holy women of the medieval past, like ghostly figures surfacing through evanescent paint, form a palimpsest for the mourning women on the early modern stage. Scholars have long attended to the classical heritage of these characters, a tradition that is often explicit in Renaissance texts. But this classical garb, I propose, only barely disguises their more urgent kinship with the English equivalents of the classical Mater Dolorosa: the Virgin Mary and her sisters in sorrow of medieval drama, and the pre-Reformation mourning rituals that they embodied. I consider how these spectral resurrections of classicized Marian pity in the plays of Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, and John Webster might “be the site[s] of symptomatic acting out combined with the critical, playful working through” (Berger, 570) of cultural trauma of the Reformation, especially that associated with the eradication of the doctrine of Purgatory, the suppression of Catholic mourning ritual, and iconoclasm against the pietà and female saints. Situating my readings within the resulting tensions over funerary ritual, I note repetitive narratives and tropes whose inherent contradictions manifest cultural angst: the positive association of female mourning with justice; the negative association of grieving women with an unending cycle of vengeance; the insincerity and changeability of mourning widows; the female mourner’s physical separation from the person for whom she grieves; and the attenuation of the integral relationship between the genre of female lament and the shape of tragedy. These discursive patterns probe the dimensions of female grief, constructing it as pervasive yet intangible, excessive yet inadequate, shunned and feared, yet necessary and efficacious. In the past ten years there have been numerous studies of death and mourning in early modern England. But as Patricia Phillippy demonstrates, they overlook the central literal and figurative roles played by women (4-6). This omission is surprising since the Virgin
Mary’s mourning over Christ was the most prevalent and resonant cultural symbol of mourning prior to the Reformation and the focus of the most vitriolic assaults by reformers after the eradication of the doctrine of Purgatory. Recent works by Steven Mullaney, Michael Neill, Huston Diehl, and Stephen Greenblatt in particular illuminate how anxieties over iconoclasm and the altered topography of the afterlife play out in the representations of male protagonists in early modern English drama. But just as the early modern stage is stalked by berserk, anguished, and violent men, so it is also frequented by monstrous, mad, and dangerous grieving women whose excesses elicit a complex mixture of loathing and wonder. Their sorrow is given theatrical emphasis, appealing to both the on-stage and theater audiences to gaze upon them, just as the English had once been encouraged to gaze upon statues of the pietà and upon Mary’s Compassion in the medieval plays and treatises. But on the early modern stage these moments most frequently elicit sharp criticism from the other characters, inviting the audience’s scrutiny as well as its empathy. Like the symbolic presence of the Virgin Mary in the cultural fabric of post-Reformation England, female mourning in early modern drama is a spectral force, often threatening, that shapes the unfolding action and seems to vanish as soon as it is perceived. Sorrowful women on the early modern stage are not simply literary reincarnations of the lamenting women of classical drama. Rather, they emerge from and interrogate the ruins of England’s recent Catholic past, a past in which the figure of a woman weeping for a man who is at once her son, husband, and father orchestrated the society’s comprehension of bereavement.1
