Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England (review)

In this book's lengthy introduction, "Fracturing Mary: The Rise and Decline of the Cult of the Virgin Mary in England," Ruben Espinosa charts the birth in patristic times, growth through the Middle Ages, and lapse in the Protestant Reformation of theology and art associated with Mary, the mother of Jesus. He charts her history in thirty-five pages so as to explain why she mattered to William Shakespeare's culture "as a means of setting the stage to examine what her influence meant to Shakespeare's theater" (p. 2). But knowing the author's argument right away would have helped the reader evaluate the long history he recapitulates. Espinosa could have eliminated, or made more concise, his history of Mariology before the Reformation so as to emphasize his later, fine comments about Mariology's effect on early-modern masculinity.

Feminist commentators on Shakespeare's plays have explored Espinosa's subject, but they have done so to show how the patriarchal thrust of the Protestant Reformation devalued the many faces of the Virgin Mary as part of its assault on women, their imagined rights, and their purported nature. Espinosa examines Mary's effect on early-modern masculinity, as Shakespeare registers it in selected plays. This effect, the author argues, is double. On the one hand, "views of the Virgin Mary often destabilize the already unstable socially constructed view of masculinity" (p. 31). On the other, Mary is "[a positive] alternative to otherwise masculine-centered perceptions of both religious and gendered identity" (p. 32). Mary has this positive value because she never really lost her mystical, notably intercessory power, as a female counterpart to Christ in Protestant imagination. Espinosa shows Mary's double effect in French Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) in Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI, who is repeatedly linked with the Virgin Mary, communes with demons, emasculates English heroes, and yet bears the Dauphin's child while, saint-like, she is a triumphant warrior, energizing individual French warriors and generally forming a community. Likewise, Portia in The Merchant of Venice intercedes unsolicited to save Antonio from death in Venice, yet she does so by playing on the letter of the law after she fails to make the law, located in Shylock, merciful. Isabella plays the Marian intercessor in Measure for Measure, but she fails because her physical beauty seduces the men around her (thus parodying, according to Espinosa, the Reformation Protestant stereotype of a Mary promiscuous in granting all kinds of prayer for mediation while rejecting few or none).

The author's longest chapter is in two parts. The first concerns the Virgin Mary's relevance for understanding the purity of Ophelia's, Desdemona's, and Cordelia's virginity (or lack thereof) and its effects on Hamlet, Othello, and Lear, who in different ways destabilize virginity. (Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear are, after all, tragedies). The second part of the chapter focuses on Mary as nurturing (or not-so-nurturing) mother in Othello and Hamlet. Gertrude and Othello's nameless mother, associated with the exotic handkerchief, are featured here. The readings in this chapter are generally persuasive, except for those in the second part involving, first, Cordelia and the Virgin Mary; and, second, Gertrude, the Mater Dolorosa, and the nurturing Mary. Lear is in fact—as Espinosa recognizes—associated with Mary when he cradles in his arms the dead Cordelia who, in her sacrificial love for him, could be better likened to Christ than to Mary.

"In the spectacle and miraculous nuances that surround Cleopatra [in Antony and Cleopatra], Marina [in Pericles], and Hermione [in The Winter's Tale]—and the theater's invitation for the audience both to witness and imagine the 'miracles'—" Espinosa in his last chapter "locates the reciprocal flow of potency between the heroine and her male counterparts, Shakespeare's theater and its audience, and the Virgin Mary and England itself" (p. 152).