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

Katharine Goodland's remarkable study of female mourning in medieval and early modern drama opens with the memorable image of a medieval rood screen in St. Mary's Priory, Binham, Norfolk, whose saints, whitewashed by sixteenth-century reformers, have begun to reappear, "like the dead rising from their graves," through the deteriorating lime mixture concealing them (1). As Goodland observes, this "apt frontispiece" illustrates the argument of her book, that "the grieving holy women of the medieval past, like ghostly figures surfacing through evanescent paint, form a palimpsest for the mourning women of the early modern stage" (1). In eight substantial chapters, arranged in two sections, Female Mourning and Tragedy assesses the powerful presence of women mourners in medieval drama and then traces their legacy in some of Shakespeare's tragedies and histories (King John, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and King Lear) and the narrative poem "The Rape of Lucrece," Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and Webster's White Devil. Viewing the early modern stage as "a kind of cultural Purgatory: a social space that preserves, interrogates, and transforms communal memory" (28), Goodland delineates the cultural work performed by female mourners on the pre- and post-Reformation stage. Her innovative reading of these dramas places these contentious and contradictory figures in a central role in "the difficult passage from a medieval Catholic culture to a modern, Protestant one" (28).

Two characteristics enhance and strengthen Goodland's formidable scholarship in this study. Her research is unfailingly meticulous, and her critical thinking is wonderfully vast and synthetic. The three chapters comprising part 1 of her study, for example, discuss the four medieval Corpus Christi cycles and the Digby plays, carefully responding to the local characteristics of each pageant while seeking out and supporting similarities in their portrayals of mourning women (the mothers of the innocents of the Herod plays, Mary and Martha of the Lazarus plays, and the Virgin and Three Maries of the Resurrection plays). In her turn to early modern drama in part 2, Goodland's precision and attention to detail enable her not only to describe the compelling connections between the female mourners of early modern tragedy and their medieval counterparts but also to document a shifting and elusive history of emotions in the wake of the Reformation that complicated and redefined the meanings of grief, funeral rituals, and their dramatic representations. Casting her interpretations of the early modern plays within a consideration of specific aspects of the Reformation (the eradication of Purgatory, the suppression of Catholic mourning ritual, and iconoclasm against the pietà and female saints) and their impact on attitudes toward and expressions of grief, Good-land shows how residual Catholic mourning rituals—already sites of conflict in the medieval cycles and treated with increasing ambivalence by Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster—emerge from and articulate the " 'cultural trauma' " (24) attending the Reformation.

While Goodland's discussion of the changing face of women's grief in pre- to post-Reformation England is fascinating in itself, the value of this book to a wide readership lies in its ability to position Renaissance tragedy within the cultural field established by Goodland's description of female mourning as "at once threatening and elusive, feared and desired, excessive and insufficient" (117). Chapter 6, "Monstrous Mourning Women in Kyd, Shakespeare, and Webster," for example, demonstrates through close readings of The Spanish Tragedy, "Lucrece," Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and The White Devil that the cultural trauma of iconoclasm precipitates early modern playwrights' devaluation of women's mourning and ritual lamentation as unproductive and effeminate. Chapter 5, "Mourning and Communal Memory in Shakespeare's Richard III," considers the difficult performances of that play's female mourners, arguing that these characters derive power and agency from the contested practice of ritual lament. Goodland considers the ample body of literary and documentary evidence describing pre...