Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama

Lisa Hopkins, Regina Buccola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317100652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation of the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the 'Old Faith'? How do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm and/or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the audience?

Chapter 1 ‘Here in this garden': The Iconography of the Virgin Queen in Shakespeare's Richard II

Helen Ostovich

DOI: 10.4324/9781315593890-1

Historically, Queen Isabel’s claim to fame is her age. Most sources agree that she was born on 9 November 1389, married to Richard II on 1 November 1396 at barely seven years of age, separated when she was ten by his imprisonment and forced abdication in 1399, and widowed well before she turned eleven in 1400. Throughout this period of marriage, political separation, and widowhood, Isabel was a virgin in a prepubescent state. Iconographically, a budding virgin is a hortus conclusus, a metaphor rendered concrete at the centre of Shakespeare’s play Richard II by Isabel’s appearance within a garden. This dramatic placement gives Isabel a power, visually and verbally, that expands back and forth in the play into a kind of triptych – composed of 2.2, 3.4, and 5.1 – revealing the virgin queen’s paradoxical position as maid, wife, widow, and mother. The triptych not only aligns her generally with the cult of the Virgin Mary and the related cult of Elizabeth, but also suggests the young Isabel’s frustrated longing to rush into womanhood, explicates her fierce unswerving loyalty to Richard, and questions the political realities of the play by asserting a spiritual dimension of kingship that the Lancastrians unsuccessfully deny. ¹

¹I am grateful to Lisa Hopkins for pointing out to me the correlations that have already been made between the Wilton diptych and Shakespeare’s play. See Caroline Barron, ‘Richard II: Image and Reality’, in Making and Meaning: The Wilton Diptych, edited by Dillian Gordon (London: National Gallery Publications, 1993). The Wilton diptych, or Richard II presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund, is a portable altarpiece painted (about 1395–99) for Richard’s private devotions. It shows three saints with Richard kneeling in the left panel, in profile to the viewer, facing the virgin with child and other saints in the right panel. The virgin seems to be standing in a paradise garden; little of the ‘ground’ is visible, but flowers bloom at her feet. See the National Gallery website at <http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/work?workNumber=NG4451> or <http://www.reeddesign.co.uk/wilton1.html>.

Although Shakespeare’s usual source, Holinshed, says next to nothing about Isabel, Froissart, accessible to Shakespeare in Berners’ translation, gives several telling details about her role in Richard’s life. Three significant facts – significant, that is, to a playwright in search of a striking dramatic angle – led to Richard’s selection of Isabel as his second bride, after his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, died in 1394. First, Froissart tells us, ‘the kynge loved [Anne] so entierly. They were maryed yonge; howebeit, she dyed without issue … and there was no spekynge of remarying, nor the kyng wolde here no spekynge therof’. ² Second, when he refused other brides and insisted on Isabel, over English objections that ‘it is nat pleasaunt to the realme of Englande that he shulde mary with Fraunce [the enemy]; and it hath ben shewed hym that the doughter of Fraunce is over yonge, and that this fyve or syxe yere she shall nat be able to kepe hym company’, Richard replied ‘that she shall growe ryght well in age, and though he faste a season, he shall take it well a worth, and shall ordre her in the meane season at his pleasure, and after the maner of Englande; sayenge also howe he is yet yonge ynough to abyde tyll the lady be of age’. ³ In other words, Richard preferred the immediate role of parent to that of husband, partly because he had loved and lost one queen already, and partly because his otherwise successful first marriage was childless. The marriage to Isabel would satisfy the political necessity for a bride and the personal desire for a child; at the same time, it would allow him a tender private relationship without sexual demands. As Froissart describes her, Isabel’s demeanour during the courtship was unusually self-assured and charmingly affectionate:

²S. J. Froissart, The Chronicle of Froissart, trans. Lord Berners (London, David Nutt, 1903), 6.127. ³Froissart, 6.139–40.

The erle Marshall, beyinge on his knees, sayde to her: Fayre lady, by the grace of God ye shall be our lady and quene of Englande. Than aunswered the yonge lady well advysedly, without counsayle of any other persone: Syr, quod she, and it please God and my lorde my father that I shall be quene of Englande, I shall be glad therof, for it is shewed me that I shall be than a great lady. Than she toke up the erle Marshall by the hande, and ledde him to the quene her mother, who had great joy of the answere that she had made, and so were all other that herde it. The maner, countenaunce, and behavoure of this yonge lady, pleased greatly the ambassadours, and they sayd amonge themselfe, that she was lykely to be a lady of hygh honoure and great goodnesse. ⁴

⁴Froissart, 6.159.

After the proxy marriage ceremony in Paris, Froissart reports ‘it was a goodly syght to se her behavour: for all that she was but yonge, ryght plesauntly she bare the porte of a quene’. ⁵ The third factor in this marriage, and perhaps the most pressing, was Richard’s desire to end the war with France through a mutual alliance. Just before the formal wedding to Richard in Calais, the French king voiced a wish that his daughter were older, ‘than she sulde take my sonne with the better good wyll’, but Richard replied firmly that his will was for peace and harmony between the two kingdoms: ‘Sir, the age that my wyfe, that shall be, is of, pleaseth [us] right well; we love nat so moche her herytage than I do the love of you and of our realmes: for we two beying of one accorde, there is no kynge, Christen nor other, that are able to anoye us’. ⁶ All this emphasis on the undisturbed virginity of the child-bride, and the spiritually healing dimension of the marriage itself, personally and internationally, I speculate, inspired Shakespeare to think of Isabel in terms of the enclosed garden and its religious analogies.

⁵Froissart, 6.190. ⁶Froissart, 6.228–29.

The hortus conclusus image derives from the Christian reading of the Song of Songs, in which the enclosed garden, shut off from the earthly world, is symbolic of virginity, and all its plants testify to the purity of the virgin’s enclosed womb. As a subject for paintings, the paradise garden of the early fifteenth century shows the virgin in the company of saints, meditating in an enclosed garden of spiritual peace, a contrast to carnal gardens of love, where physical and emotional delight is the focus. ⁷ Stefano da Verona’s Madonna in the Rose Garden, c. 1410, ⁸ shows the Virgin and Child, Mary Magdalene, and several almost incorporeal angels among flowers and birds in a garden. The painting announces its spirituality by offering little suggestion of spatial illusion or perspective. The German Paradise Garden, c. 1435, ⁹ influenced by Stefano da Verona, depicts the same innocent fruitfulness, which Shakespeare also duplicates in his garden scene. The rich colours and overlapping figures in Stefan Lochner’s Madonna of the Rose Bower, c. 1445, ¹⁰ echoed in Master E. S.’s copper engraving, Virgin of the Lilies of the Valley, c. 1450, ¹¹ and in Martin Schongauer’s Madonna of the Rosehedge, 1473, ¹² indicate the familiarity of such depictions (especially the link between the virgin and the rose) in the popular imagination. The symbolism of the paradise garden persevered in later treatments of the Tudor rose and specifically in the cult of Elizabeth, whose eglantine rose frequently appeared in her portraits and portraits of her courtiers, as in the border of Nicholas Hilliard’s Young Man Amongst Roses, 1588. ¹³ Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books like Henry Hawkins’ Partheneia Sacra, 1633, render the garden images more explicit by presenting them within a devotional text praising the Virgin Mary, whom Hawkins defines as the quintessential ‘HORTUS CONCLUSUS; wherein are al things mysteriously and spiritually to be found, which even beautifyes the fairest Gardens: being a place, no lesse delicious in winter, then in Summer, in Autume, then in the Spring; and wherein is no season to be seen, but a perpetual Spring.’ ¹⁴ Hawkins lists the fruits and flowers which demonstrate aspects of her virtues, ending with a description that suggests a link between Mary’s suffering at ‘the bitternes of her Sonne’s passion’ and Isabel’s tears at seeing ‘My fair rose wither’ (R2, 5.1.8) in her farewell to Richard: for each virgin feels ‘the bitternes of compassion for the affliction of the miserable; and the sweetnes of devotion was in Her mind.’ ¹⁵ Once Shakespeare places Isabel within a model garden in which planting, flowering, and fruition are unseasonally simultaneous, it is virtually impossible to dissociate her from spiritual values traditionally understood in a hortus conclusus.

⁷C. Grossinger, Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 9. ⁸Also called Madonna in the Rosary, the painting (tempera on wood) by Stefano da Zevio, known as Stefano da Verona, is owned by the Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona. It is posted on the internet at <http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/s/stefano/m_rosary.html>. ⁹Or Garden of Paradise, owned by the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, is beautifully reproduced online at <http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/m/p-middlerhine1.htm>. The Virgin and Child with Angels in a Garden with a Rose Hedge (painting on panel, c. 1430), attributed to Stefano da Verona, is owned by the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, which posts a good reproduction on its website at <http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/European/1912.63.html>. ¹⁰Also called Madonna of the Rose Bush (oil on panel), held by the Wallraf-Richartz-museum, Cologne, and online at <http://gallery.euroweb.hu/html/l/lochner/madonna.html>. ¹¹See Manfred Wundram, The Universe History of Art and Architecture: The Renaissance (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1972; rpt New York: Universe Books, 1988), 184, Plate 198. Unfortunately, this item is not reproduced online. ¹²Or Madonna of the Rose Bower (tempera on wood), owned by the Church of St Martin, Colmar, France is shown at <http://www.abcgallery.com/S/schongauer/schongauer11.html>. ¹³Roy Strong comments briefly on this famous miniature in The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 46, and extensively in The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 56–83. Young Man amongst Roses, owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, appears on several websites, including the Haverford course on Shakespeare’s sonnets showing the Hilliard miniature and a photograph of Joseph Fiennes posing as that young man at <http://www.haverford.edu/engl/WebPage/jrsemlinks/hilliardfiennes.html>, and the Santa Clarita Valley Rose Society’s pictorial essay on ‘Roses in Art, Part One’ at <http://www.scvrs.homestead.com/RoseArt1.html>. ¹⁴[Henry Hawkins], Partheneia Sacra (Aldington, Kent: Hand and Flower Press, 1950), 11. ¹⁵[Hawkins], Partheneia Sacra, 15.

Isabel’s implicit Marian associations challenge readings in which a harsh critique of Richard enables approval of Bolingbroke; instead, a reading of the play that looks at Richard through Isabel establishes Richard as God’s vicar on earth, the true king anointed in God’s name. Shakespeare’s presentation of Isabel selectively imitates the apocryphal biography of Mary, from the virgin-birth imagery ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Editor Preface
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Here in this garden’: The Iconography of the Virgin Queen in Shakespeare’s Richard II
• 2 ‘One that’s dead is quick’: Virgin re-birth in All’s Well That Ends Well
• 3 Inverting the Pietà in Shakespeare’s King Lear
• 4 ‘Black but Beautiful’: Othello and the Cult of the Black Madonna
• 5 Desdemona and the Mariological Theology of the Will in Othello
• 6 The Wonder of Women: Virginity, Sexuality and Religio-Politics in Marston’s The Tragedy of Sophonisba
• 7 Easter Scenes from an Unholy Tomb: Christian Parody in The Widow’s Tears
• 8 Virgin Fairies and Imperial Whores: The Unstable Ground of Religious Iconography in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon
• 9 Not kissing the (He)rod: Marian Moments in The Tragedy of Mariam
• Index