Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama (review)

This volume of essays effectively deploys the resources of intellectual history, materialist critique, and historical formalism in order to reconsider the critical purchase of reservoirs of Marian allusion and symbolism in dramatic texts composed under the aegis of the dominant Protestant culture in Tudor-Stuart England. The conceptual limits to the triumphalist narrative of English Protestant history have been recognized for some time, but the reach of that perception for literary critics and historians includes much uncharted territory, particularly in arenas that bear less on the theopolitical issues per se than on surrounding questions concerning social life, negotiations of gender, and the ideological force of poetic and aesthetic imagination. Addressing these arenas, Marian Moments draws its critical energy from a productive encounter between classic studies of Marian iconology in Christian social and theological history (by Marina Warner and Jaroslav Pelikan) and influential recent work in English Catholic studies (by Frances Dolan, Arthur Marotti, and Alison Shell, among others).

The restriction to dramatic literature may seem unnecessarily narrow, but within the chosen compass the choice of plays is nicely balanced between canonical Shakespeare plays and a host of non-Shakespearean plays that acquire fresh topicality and critical interest under the volume’s penetrating scrutiny of Marian “moments.” Arthur Marotti’s foreward and the editors’ introductory essay present a well-judged overview of Romanist survivalism and the “residual presence” (xiii) of Marian devotion and habits of thought in reformed England. This prefatory matter underscores the essays’ collective investment in demonstrating how the Marian palimpsest in early modern British drama exploits the supple semantic range and cultural provocations to be found in the notion of the residual.

The first three essays suggestively map a range of tactical deployments of Marian traces in Shakespeare. Helen Ostovich makes an eloquent case for identifying Isabel in Richard II as the child-bride the historical figure was in order to understand more clearly how the Marian resonance of the hortus conclusus in Isabel’s scenes emphasizes the theopolitical cost of Bolingbroke’s rebellion. Alison Findlay complicates Luce Irigaray’s critique of Marian theology by showing how the interactive bonds among Helen, the Countess, and the Widow in All’s Well That Ends Well stage a provocative fantasy of a “female trinity of mother, daughter and spirit” (35) that both recognizes the cultural force of patriarchal Trinitarian identity and presents a radical model of intersubjectivity expressed through “simultaneous self-surrender and self-assertion” (44). Katharine Goodland’s essay argues, compellingly, that the devastating scene of Lear’s howling over the corpse of Cordelia presents neither a universal nor “pagan” (66) response to death but instead a peculiarly modern one, an “inverted pietà” (48) founded on the double death Shakespeare’s audience would likely have intuited in the catastrophe of Lear: the loss not only of a person but also of remembered rhythms of ritualized, communal mourning, and intercessory prayer, as encoded in Marian iconology and staged in medieval Passion plays.

Two essays on Othello share a common liability: each makes ambitious claims that are frustrated by space limitations. Thus Lisa Hopkins’s interesting argument — that the catastrophic sequence of events in the play is symptomatic of the loss of the Catholic world’s embrace of the “rich and various” (85) figurations of the Virgin Mary and particularly of the Black Madonna — is not supported with sufficient textual detail to account for the traumatic endgame in the play. Greg Maillet’s essay on the “Mariological theology of the will” (87) in Othello usefully fleshes out the theological underpinning of Mary’s identity as intercessor and mediator, but the reliance on typological exegesis to locate the Marian theology behind Desdemona’s role carries with it a fundamentally static conception of character unable to account for the perverse motions of will that deform and neutralize Desdemona’s Marian aura in the play-world.

The non-Shakespearean repertoire is given...