Mothers and meaning on the early modern English stage

Felicity Dunworth

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847796936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en el arte dramático

Mothers and meaning on the early modern English stage is a study of the dramatised mother figure in English drama from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. It explores a range of genres: moralities, histories, romantic comedies, city comedies, domestic tragedies, high tragedies, romances and melodrama and includes close readings of plays by such diverse dramatists as Udall, Bale, Phillip, Legge, Kyd, Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker and Webster. The study is enriched by reference to religious, political and literary discourses of the period, from Reformation and counter-Reformation polemic to midwifery manuals and Mother's Legacies, the political rhetoric of Mary I, Elizabeth I and James VI, reported gallows confessions of mother convicts and Puritan conduct books. It thus offers scholars of literature, drama, art and history a unique opportunity to consider the literary, visual and rhetorical representation of motherhood in the context of a discussion of familiar and less familiar dramatic texts.

1
The transformation of tradition in the sixteenth century

This fine and lovely word Mother is so sweet and so much its own that it cannot properly be used of any but Him, and of her who is his own true Mother – and ours. In essence, motherhood means love and kindness, wisdom, knowledge, goodness.¹

Julian of Norwich

Motherhood and meaning

Julian of Norwich, whose meditation is quoted above, was one of several late medieval Christian mystics who used maternity as a complicated and flexible concept, informed by a tradition of exegesis that allowed her to describe spiritual experience that was both deeply affective and intellectually sound. The aim of this chapter is to explore the operation and significance of this ‘fine and lovely’ word ‘mother’ in the dramatic expression of popular and affective piety in pre-Reformation England to show that, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, motherhood had accumulated a complex range of meanings that had already become established as dramatic tradition. This multiplicity of meanings ensured that motherhood developed as an important trope in the polemical strategies of religious and political reform in England. The dramatic deployment of the mother figure in Catholic theatre and its appropriation by Protestant propagandists attests to its central function in a battle to assert political and religious ideology which appealed on the basis of intellectual rigour and emotional satisfaction.

From at least the fourteenth century the processes of reform engendered and enriched an awareness of tradition that was fundamental in the construction and representation of proto-Protestant and, later, Reformation and Counter-Reformation ideology. For early reformers such as Wycliffe, ‘veyn tradicioun’ referred to an outmoded and morally dubious system of belief.² Under pressure from both this use of the term to derogate, alongside reformist pressure for biblical evidence to support ecclesiastical ‘tradition’, the term was, according to Alister McGrath, later understood to refer also to ‘a separate, distinct source of revelation, in addition to scripture’. Such revelation was in a continuous process of transmission, ‘a stream of unwritten tradition, going back to the apostles themselves [which] was passed down from one generation to the next within the Church’.³ Tradition, then, and the means of its transmission, was both contested and appropriated long before the Reformation.⁴ Meanings and representations of motherhood were central in this. Motherhood had become a traditional focus of religious and political meaning; asserted by conservatives, alienated, ironised and challenged by reformers, yet simultaneously appropriated by each to promulgate their competing ideologies.⁵

Julian’s concern to fix maternal meaning upon the figure of Jesus reminds us that ‘mother’ asserts a human figure as much as a metaphysical idea. The word always foregrounds its material meaning – the individual person, the mother figure; so that ‘mother’ is always signifier as much as signified. This quality had informed an allegorical tradition which allowed the concept of motherhood both to focus and to represent a complicated and shifting set of meanings. Christian veneration of the mother of Christ had led to a celebration of the Holy Virgin as a maternal archetype from which, as Marina Warner has shown, a typology of divine maternity developed that combined Mary’s incarnations as Virgin, Bride and Mother into one flexible whole that was, as Ann Astell says, ‘primarily maternal in orientation’.⁶ Astell shows, importantly, how this is the consequence of ‘the fusion of two histories’: that of the evangelical biography of Mary, and the literal meaning in the Song of Songs, leading to the construction of a figure where the literal bleeds into the allegorical, enhancing her affective power. Thus in twelfth-century exegesis Mary the holy mother was the garden where God sowed the seed that bore Jesus as fruit. She was also described as the holy fleece soaked with dew from heaven at the moment of the Conception.⁷

Mary’s body, which had housed Jesus, also figured the church through the personification Ecclesia, the bride of Christ. Warner describes fourteenth-century Hildegarde of Bingen’s vision of the mother church as ‘the “image of a woman” of large size, as big as a great city, with a crown on her head and splendour falling from her arms like sleeves’: a fascinating version of the trope which imagines the mother of God in terms of a flourishing city and an image which accommodates secular, as well as religious, power.⁸ Cycle plays of the story of Noah use similar flexibility of meaning. In the Chester Noah’s Flood, the ark with its boundless capacity represents mother church, but it is also the image which dominates the celebration of a secular community of townsfolk who work together towards both material prosperity and spiritual salvation. The allegory of church as mother is enhanced in this and similar plays by the presence of her comic antitype, Noah’s wife, who works against both God and community by refusing to enter the ark in favour of the society of drunken gossips.⁹

Mary is also the queen of heaven, a status which endows her with powers of intercession and mediation and especially with the authority to be what Astell calls a ‘maternal informatio’,¹⁰ a good and reliable guide. In the Chester Purification play, for example, it is Mary who instructs Joseph that Jesus must be taken to the temple because ‘I wote well that it is Godes will’, and it is she who determines the subsequent action.¹¹ Such typology operates in the poem Piers Plowman where, in the narrator’s apocalyptic dream vision, Lady Holy Church descends from a castle dressed in white linen to address him as her ‘sone’ and to teach him about charity and truth, in a powerful combination of bride, instructress and mother. M. Teresa Tavormina draws attention to the importance of the trinity which is present not only in the three qualities of Holy Church above, but in the ‘loving Unity’ of ‘Christ and Christendom and Holy Church the mother’.¹² But motherhood is double-edged in this text. The world of Will’s dream is turned upside down in both political and religious terms, and Holy Church is under attack.¹³ Maternity is thus associated not only with power, but, paradoxically, with vulnerability; the mother figure acts as protectress but is also in need of protection for herself and for her children. The meaning of ‘mother’ insists upon literal humanity as well as metaphysical transcendence, so that the mother figures frailty as much as she figures authority. The paradox is dramatised at the end of the Wakefield Second Shepherd’s Pageant where, following Mary’s authoritative exposition of the nativity to her visitors, one shepherd notices how Jesus ‘lies full cold’ in anticipation of the Passion and Mary’s bereavement.¹⁴ The pageant Herod the Great in the same cycle demonstrates maternal vulnerability most clearly when the desperate and brave defence of the mothers of the innocents is ineffectual against the policy and the might of Herod’s men in their ‘armour full bright’.¹⁵ Here, the mothers’ humanity is shown to be inadequate in their physical inability to fend off attack. This exposes a crucial aspect of maternal frailty: the mother is vulnerable because she is always human, because ‘mother’, whatever else it signifies, always also refers to the physicality and vulnerability of the maternal body. The mothers of the innocents provoke an affective response from audiences by reformulating the consequences of evil and of public conflict in terms of private and personal experience and grief and by figuring the tragedy that is inscribed in the condition of being merely human.

The limits (and the complexity) of this paradox are clear in a need to emphasise the extraordinariness of Mary’s maternity, particularly in relation to those aspects of the maternal body which offer a troubling reminder of original sin. In the N-Town Nativity a version of the apocryphal story of the doubting midwife makes explicit the gap between the blessed human flesh of the Virgin and that of all other mothers.¹⁶ In this tale, the Virgin is attended by two midwives, one of whom insists upon a detailed physical examination of the post-parturate Virgin because she does not believe in the immaculate birth. She is inflicted with a withered hand when she touches Mary’s body to investigate. Her immediate repentance is rewarded by the arrival of a new hand, brought down from heaven by an angel. Jesus is born, extraordinarily, ‘withouten spot or any pollution’. And yet Mary’s milk – another indication of her humanity – is associated with her cleanliness and purity. Both physical phenomena offer related expressions of her holiness and her important difference:

Be-holde the brestys of this clene mayd

Full of fayr mylke how thei be;

And her chylde clene as I fyrst sayd,

As other ben, nowth fowle arayd,

But clene and pure, bothe modyr and chylde.¹⁷

Mary’s body is shown to be absolutely material and ordinarily fleshly. She invites the midwives in turn to undertake an intimate investigation of her body: ‘I am clene mayde and pure virgyn; / Tast with your hand your-self al-on’.¹⁸ That this is done in full view of the audience is evident from the stage direction that follows, ‘Hic palpat Zelomy Beatam Mariam Virginem’. Simultaneously, though, Mary’s apparently fleshly body is mystifying; it is, and is not, like ‘others’. This is emphasised by the second midwife’s challenge to Mary’s proclamation of her purity, which draws attention to the gap between what the midwife understands motherhood to mean, and what Mary is:

Maria:	Yow for to putt clene out of dowth, Towch with your hand and wele a-say, Wysely ransake and trye the trewthe owth, Whethyr I be fowlyd or a clene may. Hic tangit Salome Marie et cum arescerit manus eius ululando et quasi flendo dicit.
Salome:	Alas, Alas, and wele a-waye! For my grett dowth and fals beleve Myne hand is ded and dre as claye.^19

The tension in this and other versions of the nativity in this genre is structurally generated by the juxtaposition of a kind of comic realism alongside explicit symbolism, setting the mythic against the material (and one aspect of the maternal body in contest with another). The universalising significance of the event is placed in tension with the dangerous ignorance of the midwife who cannot distinguish between the fact of the blood, leakage and mess of human childbirth, and the symbolism of this mother’s full breasts.²⁰ Mary’s body becomes the site of both a promise of eternity and a premise of tragedy, highlighting the gap between human understanding and the ways of God, emphasised by a typology which read the nativity as a prefiguration of the passion. The Virgin’s lactating body figures God’s mercy by reference to Christ’s blood; her function is thus to symbolise both the power of an omnipresent Father-God and the sacrifice of his Son: the ultimate objectives of such representations.²¹ The doubting midwife is, of course, associated typologically with other comic female challengers to God’s authority from Eve to Noah’s wife in all existing versions of the flood pageant and the alewife who remains in hell after the harrowing in the Chester cycle.

The corporeal qualities of motherhood are celebrated in another way in the early fourteenth-century Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun, where Dame Nature represents, according to Warner, ‘the biological necessity of the race to reproduce, the carnalit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: The transformation of tradition in the sixteenth century
• 2: Motherhood and the classical tradition
• 3: Motherhood and history
• 4: ‘Pleasing punishment’: motherhood and comic narrative
• 5: Motherhood and the household: domestic tragedy and city comedy
• 6: Typology and subjectivity in Hamlet and Coriolanus
• 7: Dead mothers among the living
• 8: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index