Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama: From the Raising of Lazarus to King Lear (review)

Early modern English drama, according to Katharine Goodland, is "a kind of cultural Purgatory: a social space that preserves, interrogates, and transforms communal memory" (28). And the lamenting women who appear so often in this drama are figures of mediation, fictional personages who aid their nonfictional auditors in negotiating the complex emotional demands of adaptation to post-Reformation England. So runs the basic argument of Goodland's wide-ranging new book. Following the lead of Eamon Duffy, Frances Dolan, Michael Neill, and others who have concerned themselves with the traumatic cultural disruptions of the English Reformation, Goodland extends this concern by tracing connections between female mourners in early modern tragedy and their predecessors in English medieval drama. Her book is impressive not only in its breadth of coverage but in the tenacity with which it pursues its claims.

Because lamentation for the dead has always been viewed with ambivalence by official Christian culture, Goodland's task is complex: she must demonstrate the relatively greater resistance to such expressions of grief among post-Reformation religious authorities, then make sense of the varied ways in which English Renaissance tragedy responds to this resistance. Generally speaking, she does this very well. Noting such basic historical shifts as the elimination of the doctrine of Purgatory, the curtailment of intercessory prayer, and the removal, in 1552, of the corpse from burial services within the English Church, Goodland demonstrates the extent to which participatory rituals were abolished or deemphasized in Reformation England, and she suggests that the culture's construction of grief involved trajectories "from female to male, from public performance to written text, from communal tradition to the confines of scripture, from public ritual to private prayer" (210). Yet her treatments of the ways these cultural shifts manifest themselves in dramatic fictions vary considerably in their persuasiveness.

Goodland begins by examining female mourning in English medieval drama, specifically in the Digby plays and the Corpus Christi cycles. The "topos of the excessively grieving woman," she observes, "simultaneously threatens and legitimizes Christian eschatology" (35). Her first three chapters demonstrate how this is so, focusing sequentially on female lamentation in the Lazarus plays, in nativity and passion plays, and in plays about Christ's resurrection. Chapter 1 is particularly strong in its insistence that the Lazarus plays "attempt to resolve the inherent opposition between the residual practice of lament and the dominant Christian eschatology, redirecting and containing the potentially subversive ethos of this construction of female grief" (52). The mourning of women is acknowledged as culturally necessary, yet also understood as a phenomenon demanding reconception and assimilation in order to coexist comfortably with late medieval Christianity.

Goodland then moves to early modern drama, and in the introduction to the second half of her book describes in detail the attitudinal shifts toward grieving which attended the English Reformation. Tears for the dead were no longer the "sanctifying tears of the Blessed Virgin," but the "manipulative tears of the Whore of Babylon"; mourning became "effeminate, heathenish, popish, and contrary to reason" (101). Protestant England offered significantly less tolerance for ritual expressions of sorrow, and the result was "profound cultural angst over the nature and propriety of grief" (109). This angst is well illustrated in Goodland's discussions of King John and Richard III, especially the former. Constance, as a grieving widow and mother, is a descendant of the mourning Virgin Mary of medieval drama, and through her sorrow Shakespeare "probes the psyche of a traumatized society," a society "where nothing can be legitimized in external terms, beyond what is guaranteed by passion" (133).

After a suggestive but insufficiently developed chapter on The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and The White Devil, Goodland turns to Hamlet, offering an account that — like the play itself — is simultaneously fascinating, ambitious, and maddening. A superb discussion of relations between post...