Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England: Indelible Characters (Early Modern Literature in History)

Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England Indelible Characters David Coleman Early Modern Literature in H...

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Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England Indelible Characters

David Coleman

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures.

Titles include: Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A Sullivan Jr (editors) ENVIRONMENT AND EMBODIMENT IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Andrea Brady ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Laws in Mourning Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Dermot Cavanagh LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England David Coleman DRAMA AND THE SACRAMENTS IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Indelible Characters Katharine A. Craik READING SENSATIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 John Dolan POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH Tobias Döring PERFORMANCES OF MOURNING IN SHAKESPEAREAN THEATRE AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI

Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer ENGLISH HISTORICAL DRAMA, 1500–1660 Forms Outside the Canon Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN William M. Hamlin TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND Elizabeth Heale AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE Chronicles of the Self Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham (editors) THE LAW IN SHAKESPEARE Claire Jowitt (editor) PIRATES? THE POLITICS OF PLUNDER, 1550–1650 Arthur F. Marotti (editor) CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TEXTS Jean-Christopher Mayer SHAKESPEARE’S HYBRID FAITH History, Religion and the Stage Jennifer Richards (editor) EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES Marion Wynne-Davies WOMEN WRITERS AND FAMILIAL DISCOURSE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE Relative Values The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading.

Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71472–5 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England Indelible Characters David Coleman

© David Coleman 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230535831 hardback ISBN-10: 0230535836 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Mary, Niamh and Sophie

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Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1 Sacramental Communities in Pre-Reformation England: The Croxton “Play of the Sacrament”

11

2 John Bale and the Politicisation of Sacramentality

35

3 Mid-Tudor Drama and Sacramental Reform

60

4 Interrogating Sacramentality: The Drama of Christopher Marlowe

91

5 Sinful Subjects: Shakespearean Sacramentality

111

Afterword

131

Notes

134

Bibliography

158

Index

173

vii

Acknowledgements Thanks are due to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (formerly Board), who funded the period of doctoral research which formed the initial gestation period for this project. Thanks are also due to all those at Palgrave Macmillan, who have been extremely prompt and helpful in the latter stages of this project. Special mention should go to the series editors, who have undertaken demanding tasks with an astonishing level of zeal and energy. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Nottingham Trent University, who have encouraged me greatly while I have been completing the manuscript, and to former colleagues at Queen’s University, Belfast, especially those who listened and responded to sections of this book presented as research in progress. Various colleagues and friends have read all or part of the manuscript and have offered advice which has been invaluable. Special thanks must go to Mark Thornton Burnett, John Drakakis, Ewan Fernie, Andrew Hadfield and Ramona Wray, all of whom have read the work in progress extensively and have had an incalculable influence on the final shape of the book. Sections of this book have been presented as conference papers in Aberdeen, Belfast, Cork, Leicester and Stirling, and I would like to thank all those who listened, questioned and advised. I have been very lucky to undertake the writing of large sections of this book in the company of a number of friends and colleagues, who could always be relied on to share a coffee or two. I like to think that these informal chats energised and refreshed us all, and made our onerous tasks more bearable. Thanks to Raymond Cummings, Ashley Dunne, Adam Hansen, Stephen Kelly, Ryan Perry and Adrian Streete, and special thanks to Edel Lamb, who has been a constant source of support and encouragement. Apologies to anyone who I have inadvertently overlooked. Finally, and most importantly, thanks are due to my wife, Mary and my daughters, Niamh and Sophie. The levels of patience and support they have displayed are matched only by the degree of encouragement and enthusiasm I have always received. For this and, it should go without saying, for so much more, I am extremely grateful. viii

Introduction

Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched, Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhouseled, dis-appointed, unaneled, No reck’ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O horrible, O horrible, most horrible! (Hamlet I.v.74–80) The crucial event which drives the plot of Hamlet – the murder of Old Hamlet by his usurping brother – is revealed, both to the protagonist and to the audience, in the explicit language of sacramentality. The ghost’s grievances focus on the fact that he has been denied reception of the Catholic last rites: he is “unhouseled, disappointed, [and] unaneled”. A soul is “unhouseled” if it has not received the “housel”, a now unfamiliar term for the eucharist; “disappointed” if it has not received confession and absolution at the hands of a priest; and “unaneled” – a Shakespearean coinage – if it has not received the sacrament of extreme unction (Hibbard 189). These terms, mysterious to many modern ears, provide a crucial context for the apparently purgatorial sufferings of King Hamlet: they suggest that an awareness of the terminology of sacramental ritual and theology can uncover a compatibility between the metaphysical assumptions of Hamlet and the Catholic conception of the afterlife. In so doing, they suggest that these sacraments should be reinstalled as a crucial cultural context for Shakespeare’s play. 1

2

Introduction

This reinstallation of sacramentality as a critical context has the capacity to animate some of the latent tensions and dynamics of the text. Clearly King Hamlet’s last rites, even in their absent form, suggest sacramentality as a frame of reference for the play; and the play’s interest in “unction” is another case in point. In an early modern context, “unction” suggests the process of anointing, employed in Catholic rituals, including (but not limited to) the sacrament of extreme unction. When Hamlet implores Gertrude to “lay not a flattering unction to your soul” (III.iv.140–1), the implied contrast is with an efficacious, sacramental, unction; Hamlet’s explicit references to grace and to confession make this clear. James Holleran’s suggestion that “few would have missed the sacramental significance” of the play – indeed, that the final scene stages “a warped eucharistic requiem” – is telling, and suggests that the reinstallation of the sacramental context is imperative.

I The central argument of this book is that the debates and controversies over the sacraments in sixteenth-century England can be understood as a process whereby questions about the relationship between the individual and the larger community (whether imagined as a national, religious, or political community) are explored. The drama of the period engages deeply with these questions, participating and in many ways shaping the ongoing cultural debate. Yet despite Huston Diehl’s recent assertion that Renaissance plays “engage many of the key issues in theological debates about the sacraments” (Staging Reform 109), there remains a critical tendency to isolate sacramentality as an explicit concern either of the so-called medieval period, or of later “religious” writers; so, while critics read fifteenth and even early sixteenth-century drama with a sacramental frame of reference, few scholars apply such critical paradigms to the drama of the later sixteenth century.1 A good deal of fruitful scholarship has been concerned with the Corpus Christi drama, a medium tied by its origins and performance context to a particular interpretation of sacramentality (i.e. late medieval “orthodox” Catholicism). The influential work of Mervyn James emphasises how the plays and processions function together on Corpus Christi day to provide “a mythology and a ritual in terms of which the

Introduction

3

opposites of social wholeness and social differentiation could be both affirmed” (4); James highlights the complementary nature of the plays, with their “stress on equality, change and social mobility”, and the procession, “with its stress on status, hierarchy and the role of authority” (21). More recently, Lauren Lepow’s book-length study of the Towneley cycle has again emphasised the significance of sacrament for the cycle drama, arguing that “the cycle illuminates and vitalizes the orthodox ritual, sharpening the spectator’s desire for Eucharistic participation” (13). Of course, to suggest sacramentality as a paradigm for the interpretation of Corpus Christi drama is hardly to break with critical tradition; the critical challenge is to see how sacramentality relates to drama not explicitly associated with the feast. If scholars of late medieval drama are keenly aware of the significance of sacrament for their field of study, so too are critics of seventeenth-century devotional poetry. Recent years have seen a continuing interest in the sacramental significance of this poetry, particularly in studies of Donne and Herbert. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, critics like Martin Elsky, Eleanor McNees, Elizabeth McLaughlin and Gail Thomas worked at uncovering the sacramental significance of this poetry; and recent monographs by Theresa M. DiPasquale and Robert Whalen indicate that there is still scope for extending the significance of sacramentality as a critical paradigm. DiPasquale, for example, builds on the work of earlier critics by refusing to accept that sacramentality is a concern only of Donne’s “divine” poems; as she demonstrates, the “secular” poems are also shaped by sacramental concerns. Whalen, meanwhile, illustrates his debt to earlier critics with the claim that Donne’s “divine lyrics are public, performative manifestations of religious interiority, their function analogous to that of sacraments” (82), yet also adds much to the discussion via his interest in the anxiety of subjectivity, claiming of Herbert, for example, that “sacrament relieves the isolation and guilt inevitably attending an inward devotional piety” (155). So, the critical field at present, roughly speaking, divides into two camps. On the one hand, there are those critics who are interested in the interrelationships between sacrament and drama: the focus here tends to be on the “medieval” period, and on the relationship between sacrament and community. On the other hand, there are those critics interested in sacrament and poetry: these tend to be

4

Introduction

critics with an interest in the seventeenth century, and in the ways in which sacrament establishes a private union between an individual and God. The focus in this book on drama in the sixteenth century is an attempt to address some of the concerns arising from this bifurcation of critical interest in sacrament and literature. Arbitrary disciplinary boundaries between the “medieval” and the “Renaissance” have contributed to this polarisation and, as such, have suggested that the sixteenth century is a cultural wasteland, a dead zone between the achievements of Catholic medieval culture and the Italianate drama and poetry of the Renaissance. There have been critical voices striving against this denigration of the sixteenth century; John King and Greg Walker are two important examples. But “early modernity”, in literary critical terms, continues to function largely as shorthand for “Elizabethan and Jacobean”, with little reference to the upheavals of the sixteenth century. Only a handful of critics have begun to analyse the complex ways in which Renaissance drama is informed by discourses of sacramentality. Herbert Coursen’s work on the eucharist in Shakespearean drama has been superseded by the thoughtful analyses of Huston Diehl, as I have mentioned earlier, who argues that “Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies seem intent on rehearsing eucharistic controversies using the secular stage to work through the deeply divisive conflicts concerning their culture’s most meaningful religious ritual” (Staging Reform 109). Likewise, David Beauregard has traced representations of the sacrament of penance in Shakespearean drama, and, perhaps most impressively, John Cox’s The Devil and the Sacred outlines in depth the ways in which dramatic representations of the community are, throughout the sixteenth century, informed by the plays’ conceptions of the sacraments.2 The most influential of recent critical voices investigating the shared concerns of early modern drama and the sacraments, however, is undoubtedly that of Stephen Greenblatt. His seminal essay on King Lear, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists”, forms an inescapable context for this book. Greenblatt’s concern is with a practice which he terms “evacuation” or “transmigration”: the process whereby “a sacred sign, designed to be displayed before a crowd of men and women, is emptied, made negotiable, traded from one institution to another” (112). Greenblatt’s claim that the theatre stages “the evacuation of

Introduction

5

the divine presence from religious mystery, leaving only vivid but empty ceremonies” contains distinct sacramental resonance (113); and more recent writings have witnessed a theological development in his thought. For example, his work on Hamlet and the eucharist attempts to account for the felt presence of eucharistic controversy across a wide variety of cultural productions: “the point is not only that explicitly religious works are affected – as they manifestly are – but also that apparently secular works are charged with the language of eucharistic anxiety” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 151). Greenblatt’s “eucharistic anxiety”, I suggest, should be placed within a larger, more important anxiety about the scope and impact of sacramentality in general: such anxiety is a central feature of the cultural landscape of the sixteenth century. This book attempts to go some way towards exploring this larger sense of cultural anxiety by analysing dramatic engagements with sacramentality throughout the sixteenth century.

II The system of seven sacraments familiar to European Christianity at the turn of the sixteenth century – baptism, confirmation, holy orders, penance, matrimony, eucharist and extreme unction – had emerged as a result of doctrinal developments within medieval Christianity (Lindberg passim; McGrath, Reformation Thought 159–87; Pelikan 183–244). Sacraments, of course, existed within the ancient Christian church; but the history of the church bore witness to an ongoing debate over the nature and number of the sacraments, and it was not until the twelfth century that the Italian theologian Peter Lombard (c. 1100–60) established the list of seven sacraments still in use by the Catholic church today. This list received official confirmation as late as 1439 at the Council of Florence and was reaffirmed (for the Catholic church) at the height of Reformation controversies by the Council of Trent (1545–63). In English culture of the late fifteenth century, the system of seven sacraments is promulgated in a variety of forms, including visual representations on stained glass windows and baptismal fonts, and dramatic instruction in texts like Everyman and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (Nichols passim; Duffy 65–8, 96, 106–8, 305–11). Recent analyses have convincingly argued that these promulgations of official sacramentality represent not an indication that the doctrines and rituals were universally accepted, but

6

Introduction

rather an attempt to prevent and foreclose cultural interrogation of the sacramental system. Lollardy and similar localised movements not withstanding, it is with the so-called magisteral reformers of the sixteenth century that one finds the most significant interrogations of Catholic sacramentality. Martin Luther struck the first decisive reformation blow against the medieval sacramental system in his 1520 treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Initially denying sacramental status to four of the seven rites, Luther argued that only baptism, penance and the eucharist were true sacraments. By the end of the same work, however, Luther’s redefinition of a sacrament – “those promises [of God] which have signs attached to them” (124) – caused him also to refuse sacramental status to penance, since only the bread and wine in the eucharist and the water in baptism were signs in the Lutheran sense. Yet Luther was reluctant to see the eucharistic signs as merely signs, claiming that the real presence is unambiguously stated in Christ’s words of institution, hoc est corpus meum: For my part, if I cannot fathom how the bread is the body of Christ, yet I will take my reason captive to the obedience of Christ, and clinging simply to his words, firmly believe not only that the body of Christ is present in the bread, but that the bread is the body of Christ (34). The “body of Christ” is also, of course, the church: Luther’s emphasis on divine presence continues the pre-reformation emphasis on the accessibility of Christ in the sacrament. In England, Luther’s ideas were not greeted with widespread approval. Henry VIII proclaimed a strongly conservative sacramentality, composing his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (1522; Defence of the Seven Sacraments) in explicit response to Luther. After the break with Rome, however, the Ten Articles of 1536 offered some hope to early English reformers, as they dealt explicitly with only three of the seven sacraments (baptism, penance and the eucharist), suggesting that English sacramentality may have been moving towards a Lutheran model; but just a year later, the Bishop’s Book (The Institution of a Christian Man) reasserted the traditional interpretation of the sacramental system. Indeed, the Six Articles of 1539 contained an even more emphatic statement of Catholic tradition (see Chapter 2

Introduction

7

for more on Henrician sacramentality). Reformist ideas were certainly present in England in the 1520s and 1530s, but official resistance ensured that they made little headway. The England of Edward VI offered a markedly different approach to the sacraments. Official proclamations in this reign argue for a Protestant sacramentality, reduced to the two rituals of baptism and the eucharist. It was in 1547, the year in which Edward ascended the throne, that England departed most emphatically from the Roman church; as a mark of the gulf between the institutions at this point in the century, one should consider that 1547 was also the year in which the Council of Trent issued its proclamation on the sacraments, condemning as “anathema” anyone who claimed that “the sacraments of the new law were not all instituted by our lord Jesus Christ; or that there are more or fewer than seven or that one or other of these seven is not truly and in the full sense a sacrament” (Tanner 684). Edwardine proclamations, by contrast, insist on the political independence of the English nation, the 1547 “Act Against Revilers” attempting to establish a network of surveillance via which the protestantisation of England could be effected (324–6). Such protestantisation, of course, was not to take place, at least not at this point in the century; the death of Edward meant the accession of Mary and the reinstallation of Catholicism. For the Marian regime, one of the main tasks was, in the words of Eamon Duffy, “to reconstruct the ritual and sacramental framework of traditional religion” (526). Despite the regime’s incorporation of some Henrician and Edwardian reforms, the use of drama as a polemic tool was rejected by the Marian bishops (Duffy 529). It was left to the Protestant clerical playwrights of the early Elizabethan period to re-establish drama as an appropriate medium for engaging with sacramental issues; in more straightforwardly ecclesiastical terms, the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer proclaimed the Protestant sacramentality of the post-Marian government. Debate about the sacraments refused to die out in Elizabeth’s reign, however, and when James I acceded to the throne in 1603, one of his first tasks was to attempt a reconciliation between competing factions in the religious community. The Hampton Court Conference of 1604 attempted to resolve, among other things, sacramental issues still causing controversy: the sign of the cross in baptism, the ring in the marriage ceremony, the confirmation of children;

8

Introduction

all, according to the more radical of James’s subjects, were unwelcome remnants of Catholicism. The Conference, and the succeeding Canons and Constitutions Ecclesiastical, largely maintained the official sacramentality of late Elizabethan England, denying that the “rites and ceremonies of the Church of England are wicked, antichristian superstitious” (Cressy and Ferrell 127). The sacramental discord and debate which had been present throughout the sixteenth century was not, however, to be expurgated from English society in such a straightforward manner.

III This book is structured according to a chronological scheme, not to imply a necessary causality in the history of the English reformations, but rather to allow for the fact that each generation of dramatists is acutely aware of the pressures of recent history. Chapter 1 examines both the general state of English sacramentality directly before the reformations, and a particular example of a text riven by competing discourses of sacramentality, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. In this chapter, I argue that late medieval England was subject to the promulgation of a sacramental sociology, an ideological construct which imagines the rituals as perfect means of regulating individual and communal lives. The sacraments are anthropological “rites of passage”: baptism welcomes the Christian into the community, confirmation represents a further level of initiation, and extreme unction is a preparation for the journey to the afterlife. The remaining sacraments work to maintain the structure of society: matrimony supports the generation of new Christians; holy orders reinforces the hierarchisation of the Christian community; and the eucharist serves as a counterfoil, offering the promise of a radical levelling of society in line with the ideology of theoretical Christianity, and an opportunity for all subjects to assert a relationship with the divine. This sacramental sociology finds expression in a wide variety of cultural forms, from stained-glass windows and baptismal fonts within the churches to poetry and drama outside ecclesiastical confines. The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, however, bears witness to the ways in which this particular interpretation of the sacraments was subject to radical challenges in late medieval England. This chapter reads the play in the context of competing

Introduction

9

representations and interpretations of the sacraments in late medieval culture, drawing attention to the pre-reformation tensions in English sacramentality. Chapter 2 examines the dramatic output of John Bale (1495–1563), among the first examples of anti-Catholic drama in sixteenth-century England. Bale’s radical sacramentality is particularly scathing in its treatment of holy orders, matrimony and penance; over these rituals Bale forcefully accuses the Catholic church of financial and sexual corruption. Yet there are elements of Bale’s sacramentality which are comparable to that of Catholicism – much of his baptismal theology, for example – and the dramatic medium which he employs, despite its ostensibly anti-Catholic message, inherits many of its formal qualities from the sacramental drama of the middle ages. Bale’s constantly repeated rhetoric of a binary division between the true and false churches is shown by the tensions of his drama to be an intellectually untenable fabrication; the polemical schema which Bale adopts is too simplistic to deal with the complex issues at hand. As a result, the political dimensions of Bale’s own drama are foregrounded, highlighting the rhetorical strategies which the polemical voice seeks to present as “truth”. Chapter 3 builds on this analysis of Bale’s drama by exploring various Protestant attempts, from the reign of Edward VI to the early years of the reign of Elizabeth, to use drama to forge a Protestant subjectivity and society. In the late 1540s, a number of dialogues and pamphlets were printed which attacked the mass, many of them structured in dramatic terms. One finds a generic uncertainty in these pamphlets, particularly in those which straddle the borderlines between dialogue, dramatic script and prose pamphlet. Similarly, generic uncertainty is a characteristic feature of the drama of the mid-Tudor period. Protestant dramatists at this point face a dilemma comparable to that which confronted Bale: the difficulties inherent in any attempt to create a Protestant drama out of the sacramentally saturated English dramatic tradition. Plays like New Custom and The Conflict of Conscience can be understood as participating in a cultural crusade to forge a subjectivity which does not rely on the structures of Catholic sacramentality. Yet in a variety of plays of this period – including Lusty Juventus, The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene, The Trial of Treasure and Nice Wanton – there is a discernable tension in the attempt to create a Protestant identity, as the plays reveal

10

Introduction

how the disruption of Catholic sacramentality has also disrupted the conventional means of dealing with sin, a problem which affects the subject’s relationship with himself/herself and with God. Bringing such concerns to the drama of the professional theatres, while introducing a variety of preoccupations and agendas specific to its own location, is the drama of Christopher Marlowe, the subject of Chapter 4. In the context of increasing rigidification of notions of the Catholic and the Protestant, Marlowe’s drama resists categorisation, interrogating the multiplicity of sacramental ideologies in circulation. Tamburlaine’s re-imagining of the rituals of the deathbed and The Jew of Malta’s appropriation of the rituals of baptism and penance demand to be read in the context of ongoing sacramental debates; but it is in Doctor Faustus that one finds Marlowe’s most sustained engagement with a century of sacramental debate: not only is Faustus’s damnation presented as a parody of the sacramental life journey, the disintegration of his subjectivity also dramatizes the potentially catastrophic results of the loss of the sacramental system. Chapter 5 concludes the book by focusing on Shakespearean drama of the early seventeenth century, locating it in the context of early Jacobean debates about sacramentality. Measure for Measure, Othello and Macbeth proclaim Shakespeare’s distinctive sacramentality, which blends an imaginative reclamation of the Catholic rituals with a powerful sense of the spiritual implications of the proclaimed failure of Catholic sacramentality. In this post-Elizabethan religious moment, the utilisation of Catholic baptismal theology can only, it seems, have the Marlovian effect of unsettling subjectivity and proclaiming damnation; the reclamation of the sacrament of penance, however, has the capacity to produce philosophically profound drama. Shakespearean drama’s sophisticated exploration of the theological foundations of the Christian subject looks back over the past century of religious debate as it looks forward to a century in which religious debate would continue to expose the tensions in English society.

1 Sacramental Communities in Pre-Reformation England: The Croxton “Play of the Sacrament”

I Some of the most influential recent histories of the culture of English piety in the late medieval and early modern period have been concerned to stress the uniformity and popular appeal of late medieval Catholicism; for example, Eamon Duffy’s significant work on what he terms “traditional religion” has emphasised that late medieval religion in England was “vigorous, adaptable, widely understood, and popular” (5). But this revisionist school of historiography, although rightly combating a model which portrays late medieval Catholicism as a burden of corruption and a hindrance to selfexpression and individual autonomy, has at times been too quick to emphasise the opposite proposition: that there was a universal appeal to late medieval English Christianity. In fact, the answer is not as simple as either interpretation might suggest. Pre-reformation English Christianity is a complex system of public and private meaning and experience; as such, it is not a homogenous system of universal meanings, whether “good” or “bad”. The sacramental system functions in this culture as a central locus for the exploration of alternative notions of meaning and experience. The seven sacraments form the theoretical and practical backbone of late medieval Christianity; throughout the fifteenth century, their significance and character is explored and interrogated in cultural and dramatic production. A remarkable example of a dramatic text 11

12

Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England

that bears witness to this tension and dissent within the late medieval community is the text known as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, written and performed in East Anglia in the later fifteenth century (cf. Duffy 106). The Play of the Sacrament attempts to instil respect and awe in the presence of the eucharist and the sacramental system of late medieval Catholicism; but the fact that such a play was deemed necessary, and the extraordinary ways in which the drama goes about its task, bear witness to the ways in which official interpretations of sacramentality could be challenged in late medieval England.1 This chapter examines the sacramental investments of English culture at this border of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, placing the Play of the Sacrament in the context of competing representations and interpretations of the rituals; it demonstrates that there is a tension – if not a crisis – in sacramentality well before the reformations of the sixteenth century.

II The Croxton Play of the Sacrament appears to possess a clear didactic purpose: to promote the church’s authorised interpretation of sacramentality, particularly the real presence in the eucharist. According to one recent critic, “[w]ithin a doctrinal framework, the play is a simple testimony to the sacred powers of the host” (Jones 235). The banns, proclaimed some days before the performance of the play, are fairly certain as to what “the purpoos of the play” is, “to tell Of the marvellys that wer wondursely wrowght/Of the holy and blyssed sacrament” (9, 6–8). The pre-performance rhetoric, then, suggests to the audience that a miracle will be employed to demonstrate the sacramental power of the eucharist. This power is both local and universal; the text makes claims for the historical veracity of the incidents, arguing that the “miracle was don in the forest of Aragon,/In the famous cité Eraclea, the yere of owr/Lord God 1461” (1009–11), but also promotes the universal salvific power of the sacrament: not only did God create “all this wide worlde”, but he will, through the power of the eucharist, “Save all thes semely, bothe leste and moste” (2–3). The play’s sacramentality has an all-encompassing significance. This didactic purpose would suggest that the Croxton play fits snugly into a particular category of cultural production in fifteenthcentury England, the central purpose of which is to promote the

Sacramental Communities In Pre-Reformation England 13

church’s views on sacramentality.2 Canonical dramatic texts like Everyman fit into this pattern, as in the following passage: Here in this transitory life, for the[e] and me, The blessyd sacramentes seven there be: Baptim, confirmacion, with preesthode good, And the sacrament of Goddes precious flesshe and blod, Mariage, the holy extreme unccion, and penaunce. These seven be good to have in remembraunce, Gracious sacramentes of hye devinité (721–7). This speech suggests one of the ways in which drama could contribute to an ideological promotion of sacramentality in fifteenth-century England: “for the[e] and me”, the sacraments are necessary for all humans in “this transitory life”, the latter phrase drawing the audience’s attention to the promise of eternal life made available through the sacraments. The location of the sacraments within the exhortation is also noteworthy. First to be presented are the initiatory sacraments of “baptim”, “confirmacion”, and holy orders (“preesthode good”); central in the enunciation, as it is central to the life of both the individual Christian and the community of the Church, is the eucharist, “the sacrament of Goddes precious flesshe and blod”; and the trio of “marriage”, “extreme unccion” and “penaunce” complete the set. This is a significant sequence because it suggests an imaginative structuring of the sacraments according to their role in configuring community; tracing a passage from initiation, through rituals of societal maintenance (eucharist and marriage) to closure (extreme unction and penance as deathbed sacraments), Everyman promotes a notion of a sacramentally infused life. The fifteenth-century church is keen to espouse this view of sacramentality.3 In East Anglia for example (the region where the Croxton play was also produced), authorised versions of sacramentality were promulgated in churches by the installation of “seven-sacrament” baptismal fonts (cf. Duffy 65–6; Fryer, “Fonts”, passim, “On Fonts”, passim; Nichols passim). Octagonal in shape, seven of the eight fontfaces carry a relief carving representing one of the seven sacraments; the eighth face generally portrays a biblical scene with sacramental resonance, often the baptism or crucifixion of Christ. These fonts,

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one can argue, represent one of the most striking marriages of architecture, theology and popular instruction in the late medieval English church; the images surrounding the font suggest that when the infant comes to be baptised at the font, his or her initiation into the church (as community and as building) is simultaneously an initiation into a sacramental mode of life. The East Anglian fonts represent a localized attempt to promote sacramental orthodoxy in visual terms; a more widespread phenomenon which served a similar function was that of sevensacrament windows, of which the most complete extant example is Doddiscombsleigh church, Devon (cf. Duffy 108; Rushforth passim). In Doddiscombsleigh, the central figure of Christ (destroyed by iconoclasts in the sixteenth century) is surrounded by pictorial representations of the seven sacraments. Each sacrament is tied to the central image of Christ by a ray of red glass, which represents the blood flowing from the five wounds of Christ (cf. Rubin Corpus Christi 302–3). Late medieval sacramentality links the sacraments directly to the blood of Christ, using the image to support the church’s teaching both that the sacraments were instituted by Christ himself and that they are efficient conduits of divine grace. John Fisher, for example, claims that This moost holy and dere blode of Ihesu cryste shedde for our redemcyon, bought and gave so grete and plenteous vertue to the sacramentes, that as ofte as any creature shall use and receive ony of them, so ofte it is to be byleved they are sprencled with the droppes of the same most holy blode (109). This explicit link between the blood of Christ and the sacraments finds visual expression in the sacrament windows, and dramatic expression in the Croxton play, where the bleeding host needs to be understood as sacramental in a wider sense than the purely eucharistic. Textual examples of this linkage also exist: the fifteenth-century manuscript known as Langforde’s Meditations on the Mass, for example, uses red ink to highlight references to Christ’s wounds and blood. These examples all, like the Croxton play, consider sacramentality in terms of the alleged universality of its salvific power. In the windows, for example, the circularity in the manner in which the sacraments surround Christ polemically emphasises the apparent completeness


and unity of the sacramental system, its import for the life cycle of the individual and the symbolic perfection of the system as an aid to salvation.

III In the Croxton play, the assumed universality of the eucharist informs the dramatic techniques of the play to propound the idea of a sacramental community. This is in part achieved by an ideologically charged use of the playing space, which constructs the audience as a sacramentally conformist community. When, for example, the banns invite “this gadering that here is” to come to “Croxston on Monday” (73–4), the crowd is gathered not just as an audience at a play, but also as a repeatable gathering of individuals, suggesting that the audience should understand itself as a discrete, identifiable community. This sense of community is further fostered by the inclusion of the audience in the action of the drama proper. The staging is hugely significant here: most of the action of the play takes place on two scaffolds, where characters interact with each other. However, the space between the scaffolds – the platea – is also a dramatic space, since this is where characters move from one stage to another and also, occasionally, where characters meet each other, as in the initial meeting between Christians and Jews. The spilling over of the dramatic action into this liminal space – neither a playing space nor an audience space as later theatres would imagine those categories – brings the audience into a closer relationship with the dramatic action. This is further emphasised by the addresses, direct and indirect, to the audience. When the Image of Jesus, for example, scolds the Jews for their disbelief, it is also an indirect address to the “sinners” in the audience, at whom the play’s central sacramental message is most obviously addressed: “Why are ye so unstedfast in your minde? Why will ye nott beleve that I have tawght[?]” (725–7). The audience is addressed, and both actors and audience are imagined to exist in a sacramentally charged community. The scaffolds and the platea are not the only playing spaces utilised by this drama: The Play of the Sacrament also uses the church itself as a playing space.4 The church is where Ser Isodore retires to worship; it is where Aristorius ventures to steal the consecrated host; and it is also where the action of the play concludes, as the audience

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crosses the platea and enters the church to witness the confession and baptism of the Jews. This highly symbolic moment raises questions about the way in which the text understands the relationship between drama and ritual. What is important at this point is that the audience movement again constructs a community of like-minded Christians, at the same time as it dissolves the boundaries between actor and audience in the drama. The play concludes, fittingly, with a communal hymn of worship to Christ, sung by both actors and audience (1004–7). Once again, the boundaries between players and spectators are undermined by the communitas of sacramental worship.5

IV On one level, then, the play establishes a community of Christians, united by their worship of Christ as represented in the eucharist: this is emphasised by Episcopus, the representative of bishoply power, including himself in the prayer “To blisse bring us” (1004; my emphasis). But on the other hand, the sacramentality of the play necessities a hierarchy in the community, and this represents one of the tensions in the ideological structure of the sacramental community. The anthropologist Victor Turner has suggested that this kind of dual model of society exists in “all human societies”; in fifteenth-century England, I suggest, the sacramental system plays a key role in defining this ideological understanding of society (166).6 For if the eucharist represents the mystical communion of all Christians in the body of Christ, it is nevertheless the case that there is, in the late fifteenth century, a system of privileged access to the eucharist. The vision of communal worship is, then, complicated by the emphasis on the power of the priest to consecrate the sacrament, a power which the Croxton play celebrates.7 The distinct existence of the clergy is in part proclaimed by their ritualised religious lifestyle, which sets them apart from the laity. Ser Isodore, for example, lives according to a priestly timetable: “It is fer paste none; it is time to go to cherche/There to saye min[e] evynsong And sith come home ageyne, as I am wont to werche” (230–2). Isodore’s regular worship may have a counterpart in the laity’s regular attendance at mass; but if the laity can attend the sacrament, only priests like Isodore have the power to perform the


sacrament: Isodore “hath oftyn sacred, as it is skill” (363). The sacring is the consecration, the moment at which, according to fifteenthcentury theology, the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. This is the sacramental moment proper; and the “skill” of consecration is a priestly privilege. The distinctiveness of priests is so significant that it is even clear to a Jew such as Jonathas, who relates how Christ “gave Peter” the “powre” to consecrate the sacrament, “And how the same shuld be sufficient to all prechors” (405–6).8 This locates the Croxton play on one side of an ideological divide regarding priestly power in the sacrament; this play agrees with “The bisshoppys and curatys” (407) against anti-clerical objections to sacramentality. The “bisshoppys”, indeed, are given a voice in the play in Episcopus, who suggests a material barrier to eucharistic access which works as a practical counterpart to the ideological divisions between clergy and laity: the “example” of the theft of the host should inform “all yow creaturys and curatys that here be How that your pyxis lockyd ye shuld see” (924–6). “Pyxis” are the eucharistic receptacles, where consecrated hosts are stored; Episcopus advises that locking these vessels would serve as an effective means of maintaining appropriate distinctions in the sacramental community. And if Episcopus represents one authoritative voice arguing for the distinction between clergy and laity, an even more significant voice is provided by the Image of Christ: “All ye that desiryn my servauntes for to be The intent of my commandement knowe ye:/Ite et ostendite vos sacerdotibus meis” (762–5). “Go and present yourselves to my priests”;9 so Christ supports the division between clergy and laity, and the structured hierarchy of the Croxton play’s sacramental community. Indeed, the use of Latin suggests that Christ is in some way a priest himself, adopting the very language which separated the clergy from the majority of the laity. Of course, the hierarchy in this sacramental community is not just a simple division between clergy and laity; there exists a series of hierarchical divisions within the clerical category too. The banns suggest that the ultimate authority in the community is papal; Rome is the centre of the church, and at Rome the “maricle” of the appearance of Christ “was presented”, suggesting that only Rome has the authority to validate miracles. In the play itself, though, the hierarchical scale emphasises most forcefully the authority of the bishop.

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Aristorius, for example, confesses his theft of the host to Ser Isodore, but requests Isodore to intercede with Episcopus on his behalf: “yow be my defensoure in owr diocesans sight,/For an heretike I feare he will me take” (856–7). This suggests both the hierarchical scale involved and the supreme power of the bishop. Although a priest can appeal on behalf of a penitent, the power of determining orthodoxy rests with the bishop. This is true especially of sacramental matters: Although Isodore, as a priest, is entitled to be a confessor, the fact that Aristorius has “offenddyd sorowfully in a sin mortall” changes matters somewhat (892–3). Isodore cannot forgive a mortal sin, but can only “labore for absolucion” with the bishop (861). And the meeting between Isodore and Episcopus clearly represents the degree of submission involved. Isodore addresses Episcopus thus: My fathere undere God, I knele unto yowr knee, In yowr mi[g]hty misericord to tak us in remembrance! As ye be materiall to owr degré, We put us in yowr moderat ordinaunce Iff it like yowr highnes to here owr grevaunce (888–92). The language used by Isodore emphasises the extent to which he has submitted to episcopal authority. The physical action of kneeling, as well as obviously suggesting deference, also recalls the kneeling required of the penitent in the sacrament of penance, suggesting that Isodore is undergoing a quasi-sacramental ritual on behalf of Aristorius. Isodore certainly suggests that episcopal power is necessary for spiritual health (890), and that the “highnes” of a bishop in comparison to a priest is not to be doubted. As a new convert to the sacramental community, Jonathas also works with the logic of the church hierarchy. As soon as he realises the spiritual “truth” of the eucharist, he also recognises the corresponding structuring of church positions: “The bishoppe will I goo fetche to se owr offens,/And onto him shew owr life, how that we be gilty” (796–7). Jonathas’s sense of episocopal authority even borrows the patriarchal imagery of the church: “Haile, fathere of grace!” (798), he addresses Episcopus, suggesting the bishop’s sacramental role (in the dispensation of “grace”) as much as his authoritative position. By the end of the play, Jonathas considers Episcopus “owr fathere and bishoppe that we well know” (960). But if episcopal power is partly


a result of the authority afforded by those lower down the scale (Isodore and Jonathas), it is also the case that Episcopus himself makes strong claims for the power and privileges of bishops. He adopts the role of spiritual father, addressing “all my pepull” and arranging them into a procession (808); but he also exercises power over the Image of Christ. It is characteristic of the play’s investment in episcopal power that it is only the bishop who can change the Image of Christ back into the host (825SD). This is both an image of authority and an example of the heightened sacramental power of the bishop, as a kind of reverse transubstantiation takes place at his command. Episcopus’s reaction leaves no doubt that he considers his intervention as the reason for the return of Christ to bread: “Oh th[o]u largifluent Lord Onto owr prayers thow hast applied!” (826–7). Episcopus sees a direct correlation between his prayer and the miraculous change.

V It can be seen that sacramental power both distinguishes laity from clergy (only priests can consecrate the eucharist) and reinforces divisions within the clergy (Episcopus has a “greater” sacramental efficacy than Isodore). This informs the play’s dramatic strategy to a significant extent. For example, once the powers of heterodoxy have been unleashed in the Jewish torture of the eucharist, official sacramentality needs to be proclaimed as a recuperative force. This takes the form not just of the appearance of Christ as real presence, but also in the staging of a number of sacramental rituals: a eucharistic procession, and the sacraments of baptism and penance. The location of these rituals at the end of the play suggests that they are to be interpreted as the text’s final word on the power of sacramentality.10 The eucharistic procession, for example, displays the characteristic mixture of episcopal authority and ideological community which the rest of the text has attempted to promote. It is Episcopus who arranges the procession: “I commande yow On yowr feet for to goo, bare,/In the devoutest wise that ye can” (810–3), he says, again bringing the audience into the community imagined in the performance. Episcopus’s authority is stressed – “Now will I take this holy sacrament” (834; my emphasis) – at

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the same time as the ideological image of community is promoted: “all we will gon with on[e] consent/And beare it to chirche with sole[m]pne procession” (836–7). And the procession will include all the members of the sacramental community, “all and summe both more and lesse” (838–9). This includes the newly converted Jews; “The bisshope commith [in] procession with a gret meny of Jewys”, says Isodore, adding a verbal indication of the visual import of the procession: “The sacrament so semly is borne in sight” (844, 848). This communal procession in honour of the sacrament is another instance of the ideological urge to forge a sacramental community.11 The eucharistic procession, most commonly experienced in fifteenth-century England as a Corpus Christi procession, gains its legitimacy from the sacramental power of the eucharist, but is not in itself a sacrament. The other two rituals dramatised by the Croxton play – baptism and penance – are significant sacraments in the late fifteenth-century church. Baptism is suggested by Jason’s Latin exclamation, “Lacrimis nostris conscientiam nostram baptizemus!” (749), translated by Bevington as “With our tears may we baptize our conscience”. Jason has not, at this point, fully realized the implications of sacramental baptism into the Croxton sacramental community: it requires, like all the sacraments, submission to church authority. Jonathas realises this, and pleads for baptism: “I aske cristendom with great devocion” (928). And it is Malchus who at this point most fully understands the degree of communal acceptance of episcopal authority necessary for initiation into this community: “all we with on[e] consent/Knele onto yowr high sovereinté;/For to be cristenyd is owr intent” (948–50). It is after this demonstration of submission to “high sovereinté” that the ritual is performed, according to the stage directions with gret solempnité (951SD). Presumably this means that the dramatic portrayal of the sacrament at this point is a fairly accurate reflection of the actual ritual; the fact that this part of the play takes place inside the church surely adds to the illusion of an actual baptism.12 Episcopus’s speech also draws imagery from the baptismal liturgy; invoking the “Holy Gost” and the “watere of baptime [which] shall save yow all” (52–5), Episcopus promises salvation through the sacrament: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Gost,/To save yow from the devillys flame,/I cristen yow all, both lest


and most” (957–9).13 Baptism is here used for ideological purposes similar to those ascribed to the eucharist: to promote a notion of community which argues for the submission to a hierarchical chain of authority. Baptism, however, is invoked and then dismissed reasonably quickly, since it can be of limited importance to the play’s audience of adult Christians; certainly the play may remind individuals of their own baptism, but the official exclusion of Jews from England means that the kind of adult baptism dramatised in the Croxton play would have been a very infrequent occurrence.14 More significant is the play’s stress on the sacrament of penance, which all fifteenthcentury Christians were supposed to perform regularly. According to late medieval sacramental theology, the sacrament consisted of three parts: contrition, confession and satisfaction. To these Thomas Tentler has suggested a fourth, perhaps more significant, part which was added in practice: priestly absolution (Penance 242). The Play of the Sacrament understands the sacrament of penance in terms of this division into constituent parts. The banns, for example, suggest that the integration of the Jews into the sacramental community – “our lawe” (49) – is a result of their willingness to perform the sacrament of penance: “In contricion th[e]ir hertys wer cast,/And went and shewyd ther lives to a confessoure” (51–2). Contrition and confession, the first two parts of penance, are understood here as necessary parts of the sacrament. The play dramatises the contrition of the Jews; Masphat displays his intense sorrow: “O graciows Lorde, forgife me my misdede!/With lamentable hart: miserere mei, Deus!” (756–7), and Malchas uses the exact theological term: “Lord, by the watere of contricion lett me arise” (760; my emphasis). Jonathas, meanwhile, understands both the importance of contrition and the desirability of absolution: “With repentant hart in all degrees/I aske for us all a generall absolucion” (929–30). Indeed, Jonathas’s confession follows the procedure of the sacrament closely; after demonstrating his contrition, he kneels down – a key bodily position in iconographic representations of the sacrament of penance – and confesses his sin: “we have grevyd owr Lord on ground/And put him to a new painfull Passion” (932–2; cf. Fig. 3).15 The re-enactment of the Passion is, of course, a travesty of the eucharist, the literal re-enactment of Christ’s suffering; but it is Jonathas’s act of utterance which is of significance here. The

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repentance of the Jews closely follows the procedure of the sacrament of penance; and the text suggests that that procedure is divinely ordained. Masphat relates what happened when Christ appeared to the Jews: “In contricion owr hartys he cast,/And bad[e] take us to a confessore” (946–7). The play here promotes a particular sacramentality, agreeing with the traditional view that the sacraments were instituted by Christ himself; indeed, the Image of Christ in the play makes an explicit link between the “grete contricion” of Jonathas, and the possibility of his “salvacion” (775–7). The desire for individual salvation, the play suggests, necessitates reception of the sacraments. This is significant, of course, for the play’s audience of English Christians, who may perhaps have attached more importance to the confession of Aristorius, the Christian merchant. Aristorius’s confession, like that of the Jews, closely follows the procedure of the sacrament of penance. Aristorius, like Jonathas, kneels in a physical demonstration of deference: “Holy fathere, I knele to yow undere benedicité!” (900). This is the physical symbol of his contrition; next comes the confession of sins: “I have offendyd in the sin of cov[e]itis[e]:/I sold our Lordys body for lucre of mony” (901–2). The emphasis on the individuality of sin here – the repeated “I” – accords with injunctions to confess one’s own sins only. William Lyndwood, an earlier fifteenth-century writer, advised priests to “take care that they do not enquire the names or the sins of those with whom the penitent has sinned the confession must be his own, not another’s” (108); and the advice was still followed later in the century. Aristorius’s contrition is amply demonstrated by the fact that he considers his sin an offence against the hierarchical arrangement of the sacramental community: “for that pres[u]mpcion, gretly I agrise/That I presumed to go to the autre,/There to handyll the holy sacrifice” (904–6). Aristorius’s theft of the host has violated the taboo against non-clerical access to the eucharist; this is the sin that makes him “aske penaunce now in this place” (911). And penance is exactly what he receives; Episcopus tells Aristorius what his satisfaction must be: Ever whill thou livest, good dedys for to done And nevermore for to bye nor sell; Chastis[e] thy body as I shall the[e] tell,


With fasting and pray[i]ng and othere good wirk, To withstond the temtacion of fendys of hell; And to call to God for grace looke thou never be irke (914–19). Aristorius must submit to hierarchical authority and to the logic of the sacramental community if he wishes to be saved; and his submission is apparently total: “Into my contré now will I fare/For to amende min[e] wickyd life I will go walke, my penaunce to fulfill” (972–7). The significance of Aristorius’s penance is partly to proclaim to the audience that sins can be forgiven, and salvation can be achieved, but submission to the logic of the sacramental community is necessary. The banns make this point explicitly: “Therfore, frendys, with all your might/Unto youer gostly Father shewe your sinne” (65–6). The injunction to confess demonstrates the sacramental didacticism of the Play of the Sacrament. Central to the interpretation of the confession of both Aristorius and the Jews is an understanding of the way in which, in the late medieval period, penance functions as a system of social reintegration. “Actual” penance, of course, consists of a private confession of sins, and not a public declaration in front of an audience; and although it may appear that private confession of sins is a ritual of spiritual, rather than social, reconciliation, the historian John Bossy in fact argues the reverse: “the remission of sins [is] in practice governed by an unwritten tradition that sin [is] a visible and social matter to be redeemed by acts as visible and social as the Passion of Christ” (Christianity 45). In its conjunction of penance and the suffering of Christ, this reading recalls the seven-sacrament windows with their emphasis on the source of sacramentality in Christ’s wounds; but Bossy’s insight is perhaps even more valuable for its suggestion of the public ritual which accompanies the private confession, the ritual upon which the Croxton play so heavily relies. William Lyndwood again provides evidence: “the priest should choose a common place to hear confessions, where he may be seen generally by all those in the church, and the priest shall not hear in secret places the confession of anyone” (107; my emphasis). The ritual is clearly visible; and, according to Bossy, it is communal too. Arguing that the annual practice of the sacrament (i.e. immediately prior to Easter) means that it is “a more or less communal occasion”, Bossy outlines how the penitent’s reconciliation to the spiritual community

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is accompanied by a visible sign of the reconciliation to the spiritual community: The ritual of absolution involve[s] the laying of hand by the priest on the head of a penitent, a public act by which the sinner [is] restored to the social communion of the Church, and can be seen to be so restored (47). This social ritual demonstrates the kind of procedures which the Croxton play borrows from the sacraments, and the kind of ideological implications which such rituals have. In using the sacrament of penance as a dramatically visible means of integration or reintegration into a community, then, the Croxton play draws on a popular sacramental discourse in fifteenth-century England.

VI The fact that the Play of the Sacrament, along with other examples of late medieval cultural production, argues for a particular understanding of sacramentality does not mean that this was the only possible interpretation open to late fifteenth-century England. Indeed, the opposite proposition is perhaps more likely to be the case: that the Croxton play argues so forcefully for the “orthodox” understanding of sacramentality precisely because that understanding was not universally accepted.16 The play itself, via its dramatic techniques, is forced to acknowledge this point: its closing rituals of recuperation are an attempt to control the forces of heterodoxy that have been released in the course of the play. The most obvious challenge to Christianity in the play comes, of course, from Judaism. The banns suggest that the Jews’ central problem is one of doubt, particularly doubt “iff the sacrament were flesshe and blode” (71); this implies that there exists some room to question the church’s teaching, particularly on theological matters such as the real presence. Significantly, Judaism represents an alternative religion to Christianity, suggesting the cultural space allotted to Judaism as a representation of an interrogative position. The play shows little interest in the particularities of Judaism, even supposing that Jews worship “almighty Machomet” (149); but it does acknowledge that Judaism can provide


an alternative code for living. So when Jonathas first appears, he pledges his allegiance to non-Christian religion: Now almighty Machomet, marke in thy magesté, Whose lawes tendrely I have to fulfill, After my dethe bring me to thy hyh[e] see My sowle for to save, iff it be thy will! (149–52) “Judaism” is here imagined as an alternative to Christianity: it too has an “almighty” God, a set of “lawes” which must be followed, a life after “dethe”, and the possibility of salvation of souls. “Judaism”, as an alternative to Christianity, is experienced as a threat by the dramatic community of the Croxton play. One might compare Langforde’s Meditations, which urges its readers to “remember the crueltie of the Iewys” (25). Such a suspicion of semitism leads the Croxton playwright to make the Jews responsible for a direct attack on the sacramental teaching of the Christian church: The beleve of thes[e] Cristen men is false, as I wene, For the[y] beleve on a cake – me think it is onkind – And all they seye how the prest dothe it bind, And by the might of his word make it flesshe and blode – And thus by a conceite the[y] wolde make us blind – And how that it shuld be He that deyed upon the rode (199–204). This passage is a challenge to the central sacramental teachings of the late fifteenth-century church; the “false” “beleve of thes[e] Cristen men” is a result of gullibility and a willingness to trust the claims of their spiritual superiors. This forces them to believe that “a cake” becomes the “flesshe and blode” of “He that deyed upon the rode” simply via “the might of [the priest’s] word”; Jonathas’s speech breaks down the theology of the eucharist into its simplest terms, and then rejects them outright.

VII This suggests the possibility of challenges to conventional sacramentality in the fifteenth century. If an apparently didactic piece like the Play of the Sacrament can find room for a character that rejects

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sacramentality outright, this implies that official sacramentality was engaged in a process of defining itself against challenges. It may also suggest the way in which sacraments function in complex ways in this culture. John Bossy’s work on the mass is significant here. In an influential article, Bossy has argued that the way in which the mass sustains community is much more complex than the sacramental didacticism of the fifteenth-century church might suggest (“Mass”, passim). The complication arises from the dual function of the mass in Catholic eucharistic theology; it is a sacrifice as well as a sacrament. According to Bossy, “as a sacrifice [the mass] tended to represent its social universe as a concatenation of distinct parts, while as a sacrament it represented and embodied unity and wholeness” (34–5). So key ritual moments like the fractio panis (breaking of the bread), for example, simultaneously represent the division and the reintegration of the Christian community. Bossy suggests that the tripartite division of the host was understood in the late medieval and early modern period as signifying the division of the church into three parts: the saints in heaven, the souls in purgatory and the living on earth (52). Langforde’s Meditations gives some fifteenth-century evidence for this division, as it refers to “the holly sainctes of god lyvyng people In the vaile of mysery [and] the soulys being in purgatorye” (27). This tripartite division is accompanied by a (Trinity-like) reconciliation of the three parts into one whole. The Meditations supplies another example, suggesting how the three kisses of the priest symbolise the peaceful maintenance of community: yt ys to be noteid, that the prest kyssith thre tymes In this part of the maisse. Furst the patten signyfyeing the peace betwyx god and man. Secund the prest kyssys the challesse. betokening peace in manes soule. Thyrdly the prest kyssith the Deacon or the pax which signefyeith the pease betweyn man and man (26). This ideologically charged description of how the mass functions actually, of course, mystifies and denies real tensions over the conduct of the ritual in the fifteenth century, tensions of which the Croxton play gives some indication.17 Yet even in Langforde’s description of how the mass achieves peace and harmony, there are some telling indications of a different process. Peace between god and the individual, and between individuals,


are straightforward enough; but “peace in manes soule” is a more complicated matter. For this suggests something of the sense of interiority which the ritual performance of the eucharist (and the other sacraments) contributes to, but which conventional didacticism seeks in large part to deny. The anxious subjectivity which is the opposite of a peaceful soul makes its presence felt in a number of cultural artefacts of the fifteenth century. The functions of the eucharist, of course, are significant here; for if the eucharist is constructed as the supreme manifestation of the community of Christianity, it also has a significant role to play for the individual Christian, offering him or her the potential of a personal union with Christ. Langforde’s Meditations continually asserts that spectators of the mass should memorially re-enact the passion. The way it does this is to postulate the existence of a creative interiority in the spectators, capable of achieving a relationship with Christ: “Let us haue Afore the Eyes of our soule. our Sweete Sauyour”; “Imprinte Inwardly In yor h[art] by holy Meditation, the ho[ll pro]cesse of the passyon”; “this foresaid Meditacyon should not lightly passe ouer. but rayther graueid in the soule of man and Imprintyed In his harte” (22, 24, 25). The text suggests that there is an interior and an exterior existence for the late medieval Christian. The exterior existence must achieve harmony with its neighbours and community, but it is the (privileged) interior which establishes the relationship with Christ, and with the subject itself.

VIII This assertion of a boundary between interior and exterior existence is proclaimed emphatically throughout late fifteenth-century culture by the sacrament of penance. Of obvious significance as a system of social control, the sacrament, and in particular the act of confession central to it, nevertheless offers the possibility for an extended revelation of interiority. For Foucault, the confession of the interior is linked to the discovery of one’s own sexual nature: From the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a privileged theme of confession. A thing that was hidden, we are told. But what if, on the contrary, it was what, in a quite particular way, one confessed? Suppose the obligation to conceal it was but another

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aspect of the duty to admit to it it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual subject (61). Foucault is, obviously, concerned with medieval penance only insofar as it represents a historical step towards the conjunction of subjectivity, sex and confession that he finds in modern culture. But much of what Foucault has to say about sex and confession in modern culture applies equally to sin and confession in late medieval culture.18 Sin (which is often sexual sin) and truth are equated in the sacrament of penance, as the confession gives voice to the (sinful, truthful) individual subject. The act of inquisition by the confessor establishes the penitent as secret-withholding subject in a Foucauldian sense; and since confessors were, according to Duffy, “advised to save their close enquiries for the sins particular people were likely to have committed”, the process of ascribing a particular type of identity to a particular individual was apparently reasonably well-established (60). William Lyndwood gives an idea of the kind of enquiries a fifteenth-century penitent might have experienced: The priest, in enjoining penance, should diligently note the circumstances of guilt, the quality of the person, the kind of sin, the time, place and cause, how long was the continuance in sin, and the devotion of spirit shown by the penitent (107). The “Forms of Confession” found in popular English primers, which outline a specific way in which the individual is to interrogate his or her interior depths prior to confession, further demarcate the terms and limits of individual subjectivity. Recalling the core teachings of the English church, the primers provide a checklist instructing penitents to examine themselves in terms of “the seven deadly sins, the Ten Commandments, the five wits, the seven works of mercy both corporal and spiritual, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, the seven sacraments and the eight beatitudes” (Duffy 61). The confessional, however, continues to offer a space for the articulation of subjectivity, no matter how much the apparatus of the church attempts to control the ways in which the subjectivity can be expressed.


In fact, the church’s emphasis on the inspection of interiority prior to confession may be understood as instigating the intense subjectivity associated with the confessional subject. In literary terms, Mary Flowers Braswell has suggested that what she sees as the “progress in characterization” (129) achieved in the literature of the late Middle Ages is directly related to the sacrament of penance: Poets learned a “psychology of sin” from the confessional, for the long, intense scrutiny of penitent by priest taught that penitent the advisability of self-awareness Poets went to confession, too, and they put their knowledge to work in the creation of sinful characters (13). There are two important, and quite distinct, points being made here. The first relates to the experience of the confessional, the way in which a penitent’s subjectivity is evoked by a “psychology of sin”; this, one can assume, is a widespread phenomenon in medieval culture. The second is the articulation of this subjectivity in cultural form, a process which Braswell witnesses primarily in the work of particular poets.19 Braswell tends to blur the distinction between these two points, and her discussion of the literary type of “the sinner” seems at times to refer to an experience outside literary texts. The following discussion of “the sinner”, for example, could hold true for the individual penitents (men and women) of late medieval England: until the confession is ended, until the priest has issued his order that the penitent go and sin no more, the sinner stands alone. Isolated from his environment, his will at odds with the Divine Will, he is an individual indeed. And his personality is composed of those particular sins which he has committed in his own inimitable way (13). “He [or she] is an individual indeed”: this is a powerful evocation of the formation of individual subjectivity by the act of confession, the utterance of the depths of interiority. Braswell’s moment of judgement suggests that existential identity in the later middle ages is directly tied to the ritual confession demanded by the sacramental system.

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IX The variety of alternative sacramentalities in late fifteenth-century culture means that there is often an element of tension in representations of the sacramental system; orthodoxy is never an entirely settled matter. One could plausibly claim that there are competing worldviews at work in fifteenth-century England, each of which attempts to enlist sacramental symbols to their cause. It has already been shown, for example, how the ideology of a hierarchical structuring of society uses the language of sacramentality to legitimate its ideals. One might also consider the way in which an economic worldview is explored in the Play of the Sacrament through the same discourse of sacramentality. This is suggested in the banns, where a conventional equation of Jewishness and material possessiveness – “a Jewe,/With grete richesse w[h]iche had gret plenté of precious stonys” (17–20) – gives way to an acknowledgement of the impingement of financial concerns onto the discourse of sacramentality: “Twenty pound, and merchaundise mor[e],/He proferyd for the holy sacrament” (23–4). Quickly, the relationship between merchandise and the eucharist is cemented: “the Christen merchuante therof sed nay,/Because his profer was of so lityll valewe” (25–6). In other words, the objection is economic, not ideological – only “A gret sume of gold” will serve “The holy sacramente for to bey” (32, 30). The drama elaborates on this mercantile understanding of the host. Jonathas, considering his plan to buy the host from Aristorius, is confident that the ideology of trade will prove more influential than the ideological differences of religion: “With him to bey and to sel I am of powere prest For gold and silver I am nothing agast/But that we shall get that cake to ower paye” (225–8). The scene of bargaining between Jonathas and Aristorius similarly draws heavily on the language of trade and mercantile exchange; Jonathas outlines his material wealth – “I have clothe of gold, precious stons, and spicys plenté” (275) – and approaches Aristorius as a fellow-merchant: “With yow a bargen wold I make” (276). The “marchandis[e]” under discussion is, in the words of Jonathas, “Yowr God in a cake” (84). Aristorius’s objections, as the banns had suggested, are more economic than pious: “an hundder pound” is too “littell a valew” (288–90). After the deal has been made, the two merchants continue to think in primarily economic terms: Aristorius is not worried about


the theft of the host because “that mony will amend my fare” (371); while Jonathas considers the newly acquired host in financial terms: “I shall kepe this trusty treasure/As I wold doo my gold and fee!” (381–2). Both Christian and Jew privilege an economic imperative over a sacramental worldview.

X In addition to the issues raised by competing worldviews, the Croxton play – particularly in its insistence on staging sacramental rituals – raises fundamental questions about the nature of those rituals: about the relationship between drama, ritual and sacrament. This is most obvious in the way in which the central action of the play – the torture of the host – is conceived as a re-enactment of Christ’s passion, a “newe tormentry” or “new painfull Passion” (732, 933). The banns prepare the audience for this new passion by suggesting exactly how it will happen: 1 VEXILLATOR They grevid our Lord gretly on grownd, And put him to a new Passion – With daggers goven him many a grevios wound, Nailed him to a piller; with pinsons plukked him doune. 2 VEXILLATOR And sithe thay toke that blysed brede so sownde And in a cawdron they did him boile! In a clothe full just they it wounde, And so they ded him sethe in oile. And than thay put him to a new tormentry: In an hoote ovyn speryd him fast. There he appyred with woundys blody; The oven rofe asunder and all to-brast (37–8) The torture of the host follows in detail the passion, death and resurrection of Christ. The “many a grevios wound” becomes, in the drama, “woundys five”, corresponding exactly to the five wounds of Christ (458); the nailing to a pillar is obviously a re-enactment of the crucifixion, as Jasdon’s emphasis on the tools to be used makes clear: “Here is an hamer and nailys thre Liffte up his armys on hey,/Whill I drive thes[e] nailes With strong strokys fast” (508–11); the plucking down is a version of the descent from

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the cross; the boiling in a cauldron represents Christ’s descent into hell; the thrusting of the cross into an oven, with Jonathas’s order to “stoppe” the oven, represents the entombment and the sealing of the tomb; while the appearance of Christ “with woundys blody” is obviously a recollection of the resurrection.20 On one level, then, the Jews in the Croxton play are constituents of a discourse which demonises Jews, and ascribes to them the blame for the crucifixion; the implication is that it is not enough for these Jews that Christ has been crucified once, but they need to do it again. But this is very quickly complicated by the fact that the ritual re-enactment of Christ’s Passion is also the central ritual of fifteenth-century Christianity: the sacrament of the eucharist. The Croxton play, as I have already suggested, argues for a particular interpretation of the eucharist; but in doing so, it stages a number of heterodox eucharists, suggesting something of the way in which the symbol could be appropriated and given various interpretations. The torturing of the host is one such alternative eucharist; the Croxton spectators may well have recalled the fractio panis in the mass, the moment when the priest breaks the host into three parts. As reenactment of the crucifixion (one of the ways in which the ritual could be interpreted), the fractio is really not that different from the torture to which the Jews submit the host in this play; but by presenting this as a dramatic, rather than a sacramental, ritual, the play seems to attempt a contrast between the legitimate sacramental power of an ordained priest, and the illegitimate usurpation of Jonathas. But this too is complicated by a scene which seems to suggest the priestly qualities of Jonathas; ordering a table to be dressed, laying the host on the table, Jonathas prepares for his alternative eucharist by staging another version of the sacrament. Although this preparation leads into the torture of the host, it is worth considering it in its own terms, as it has the potential to tell us much about the play’s stagecraft and sacramental ideology; at once a re-enactment both of the last supper and of the liturgy of the eucharist, this is an intensely metadramatic moment, lending support to Gallagher and Greenblatt’s claim that the “confounding of temporal logic is a central element in Christian thought and representation” (77).21 Jonathas’s appropriation of the role of priest as celebrant of the eucharist highlights the way in which the priest, in celebrating the eucharist, also imitates the


role of Christ at the Last Supper, at the same time as he calls Christ Himself into presence. Jonathas, at this point, is disbelieving Jew, Christian priest, Christ himself and actor playing all of the above: On these[e] wordys there law growndyd hath he, That he said on Shere-Thursday at his sopere: He brake the brede and said “Accipite”, And gave his disciplys them for to chere. And more he said to them there While they were together all and sum, Sitting at the table soo clere: “Comedite,[hoc est] corpus, meum” (397–404) This is perhaps the most complex, and most sacramentally resonant, moment in the play.22 Jonathas’s stage position, at a table with the host in his hands, would certainly have suggested the priestly consecration to the audience;23 his involvement in the role is such that he, like the priest, plays the role of Christ, quoting the words of institution, “Take and eat, this is my body”; yet he is also the doubting heretic who must be castigated by the play, and an actor engaged in entertaining a crowd. David Bevington has suggested that the Croxton play “deliberately confound[s] the distinction between dramatic performance and religious service” (Tudor Drama 37–8), but that is, perhaps, an understatement of the metadramatic capacities of the text.24

XI This chapter, in its analysis of the complexities of a culture with a major investment in the languages and symbols of sacramentality, has utilised two complementary theoretical frameworks; these frameworks will be referred to throughout this book, and it may be necessary to give a slightly fuller outline of them at this point. The first, the “sacramental sociology”, emphasises the communal character of the sacraments, the ways in which communities are imagined to function through an ordered series of lifecycle rituals. The striking visual sacramentality of the fonts and windows analysed earlier in this chapter are good examples of a polemical assertion of this framework. The second, the “sacramental subjectivity”,

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emphasises the possible effects of sacramental ritual and discourse on the construction of identity and selfhood. As my reading of the Croxton play suggests, these two modes of interpretation overlap and exist simultaneously in sacramental representation; moreover, the tensions and dynamism of the Croxton play strongly suggests that English culture was capable of interrogating such frameworks before the developments of the sixteenth century. Throughout the crises and reformations of the sixteenth century, then, when the sacramental system is continually remade and refashioned as a result of political, cultural and sectarian imperatives, these two schemes form a useful structure within which sacramental discourse can be analysed. The succeeding chapters of this book will build on the analysis of late medieval culture in this present, using this dual schema to explore dramatic interpretations of the sacraments throughout the sixteenth century, and demonstrating the dialectic relationship between dramatic production and the refashioning of sacramentality.

2 John Bale and the Politicisation of Sacramentality

John Bale (1495–1563) has long been granted an important place in the history of English drama. Critics have stressed how this religious polemicist and literary historian – at one stage a member of the Carmelite order, later a bishop of the Church of England – was the first dramatist to put an English king on the stage. King Johan, the play in question, has frequently been understood as introducing political concerns directly into the religious drama of medieval England. However, I would suggest that recent criticism has been overly enthusiastic in its exploration of Bale’s political stance, ignoring the way in which questions of ritual and theology inform his dramatic practice. Religion and politics are inseparable in the Henrician reformations of the 1530s: the major crises of the period – the king’s divorce and remarriage, the dispute between kingly and papal authority – represent an intermingling of ecclesiastical, theological and civic concerns. It follows that both Ivo Kamps’s contention that “Bale’s ultimate concern is not so much religious as political” (59) and David Scott Kastan’s claim that “[t]he emphasis of [King Johan] is more upon politics than theology” (269) make a distinction between fields of discourse which the play itself fails to validate.1 Indeed, it is not the substitution of politics for religion, but the dramatisation of the necessary coexistence of the two, which is most distinctive in Bale’s dramaturgy; this is also, I will argue, the pivot which demonstrates the flaws in his strategy to present Catholicism as a corrupt political institution, and which reveals the contradictory impulses at the heart of Bale’s drama. Furthermore, the critical emphasis on King Johan has overlooked the significance of Bale’s other dramatic 35

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texts; this chapter, in re-establishing these texts as a crucial context for the more familiar play, analyses the way in which Bale’s politicisation of sacramental ritual informs the dramatic and ideological assumptions of King Johan.2

I The sacramental aspects of Bale’s drama emanate from the context of the 1530s, a decade which witnessed a vigorous public debate over how the Henrician church should understand and define the sacraments. Intense theological uncertainty and controversy were a hallmark of the decade, and the sacraments occasioned some of the most protracted debates: one commentator claims that between the years 1529–1536, “ecclesiastical reform occupied parliamentary legislation to an unprecedented state” (Bryant 23). Yet this was not “reform” in the simple sense of a move towards Protestantism; as Dermot Cavanagh argues, the “period [was] undergoing a radical fluctuation of categories in discriminating the orthodox from the heretical, the obedient from the rebellious” (191). In the early 1520s, Henry VIII’s Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (Defence of the Seven Sacraments), written in response to Luther’s Babylonian Captivity, had publicly established the English king as a spokesperson for Catholic tradition and orthodoxy. Luther had argued that the system of seven sacraments be reduced to two, baptism and the eucharist; Henry’s Assertio argues for the maintenance of the Catholic system, figuring Luther as a “Serpent” for his rebellion against the “Sacraments of Christ” and “the ecclesiastical Rites and Ceremonies left by the Fathers” (15). As a contrast to Luther’s indecision over whether penance should be granted sacramental status, the Assertio is clear that, based on scriptural authority, “it is manifest that any Priest has Power to absolve Men from Sins” (17). The conservatism of the piece is perhaps most clearly proclaimed in a passage which supports papal authority via a rhetoric of historical continuity: “if any will look upon antient Monuments, or read the Histories of former times, he may easily find that since the Conversion of the World, all Churches in the Christian World have been obedient to the See of Rome” (19). There is, according to the Assertio, to be no sacramental refashioning in sixteenth-century England; the text argues for a conservative sacramentality based on the principles of tradition and orthodoxy.

John Bale and the Politicisation of Sacramentality 37

By the 1530s, following the split with Rome over the divorce and remarriage of the king, Henry’s role as upholder of papal doctrine was no longer tenable, and reformers within the church could use this situation to push for a renovation of ecclesiastical ceremony.3 The Ten Articles of 1536, a Lutheran-inspired reformulation of official religious policy, claims that the “laudable customs, rites and ceremonies” of the church are “to be used and continued as things good and laudable”, but deals explicitly with only three of the seven sacraments: baptism, penance and the eucharist (“Ten Articles” 23). Just a year later, however, the Bishops’ Book reasserted traditional interpretations of the sacramental system, while the obviously Catholic Six Articles of 1539 again reinforced the return to the Catholic system of seven sacraments. There is, then, a fluctuation in the official ideology of the sacraments in the late 1530s, demonstrated by the rapid appearance of successive official proclamations on the interpretation of sacramentality. Also composed in the latter half of the 1530s, Bale’s drama engages with this process of sacramental refashioning, making claims for an understanding of the sacraments more radically Protestant than any of the official positions.4 This radical sacramentality, like Luther’s, is distinguishable from Catholicism primarily via its reduction of the number of sacramental rituals from seven to two (baptism and the eucharist). Bryant’s claim that Bale’s drama can be seen as “supporting official documents of the early Reformation in England” is therefore not really tenable (153); insofar as official doctrine on the sacraments is concerned, Bale’s drama challenges and confronts these documents to a much greater extent than it offers ideological support. Bryant’s assumptions on the ideology of “official documents of the early Reformation” are less helpful than his accurate perception that Bale’s drama is reformist, in the sense that it is hostile to, and demands the purification of, the ceremonies of the Catholic church. This is clear in King Johan, where the “vyle cerymonyes” of Catholicism are a particular cause for concern (73). Johan himself repeats one of the reformers’ main objections to rituals, that they have no scriptural basis – “Yt was never well syns the clargy left the scriptur for menns ymagynacyons” (335–6) – while Dissimulation makes an explicit link between the rituals of the church and papal power: “[t]he Popys powre shall be abowe the powrs all Ceremonys wyll be the ryghtes ecclesyastycall” (1020–1). The

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central dichotomy in King Johan’s treatment of church ritual is the distinction between the “ceremonyes dead” of Catholicism, and the “lyvynge wurde of the Lorde” (1119), exemplifying the verbal bias of Protestantism. Bale here reverses the terms of the Croxton play’s argument; for if the truth of the eucharist was proclaimed in that context by the bleeding, bodily (and therefore living) nature of the consecrated host, Bale adopts the role of the Jewish doubter, suspicious of the material emphasis of Catholicism. This distinction between living word and empty ritual runs throughout the play, notably in Treason’s boast that “In the place of Christ I have sett up supersticyons;/For preachynges, ceremonyes, for Gods wurde, mennys tradicyons” (1823–4), and Sedition’s prophecy that “[t]he Popes ceremonyes shall drowne the Gospell styll” (2523). The suspicion of “traditions” found in Treason’s speech echoes throughout Bale’s drama and is linked to a Protestant discourse on the sacraments, stressing the primacy of scripture over authority.5 Yet there is an acknowledgement of the power of ritual in Bale’s drama. The significance attached to the ritual performance of baptism in Johan Baptystes Preachynge contrasts with the theatrical evacuation (to borrow a term from Stephen Greenblatt) of confession in King Johan. One should also consider the performance of the ritual of excommunication in King Johan, for the effectiveness of this part of the play depends on the degree of linguistic and ceremonial authenticity which Bale employs in his staging of the ritual (Happé, Complete Plays 121).6 The Pope’s “curse wyth crosse, boke, bell, and candle” is a faithful dramatisation of the ritual (1035), with each prop called on to perform the appropriate symbolic role in the ceremony. Equally precise, and more significant for this study, is the deprivation of the sacraments from John: I take from hym baptym with the othere sacramentes And suffrages of the Churche, bothe ember dayes and lentes. Here I take from hym bothe penonce and confessyon, Masse of the five wondes, with sensyng and procession (1044–7). The play’s attitude to the Catholic sacraments is, at this point, actually quite complex. Given the papal context, the sacraments are linked to Catholicism, although the only three mentioned are baptism, penance and the eucharist (recalling the sacramental


emphasis of both the Croxton play and the Ten Articles). Assuming Bale’s polemic intent, it seems fair to assume that the sacraments are tainted by the association with the Pope and his allies; certainly this is the case with penance – which the play rejects in forthright terms – and the “mass of the five wondes” which is, for Protestants, a corruption of the divinely instituted sacrament of the eucharist. But the inclusion of baptism in the list complicates matters somewhat, as Bale’s drama considers the spiritual power of baptism to be of great consequence. The problem with baptism, for the early reformers, is that it is tightly embedded in the Catholic system of the sacraments, yet is almost universally accepted as a necessary (and divinely instituted) ritual. This scene suggests the complexity of negotiating a Protestant sacramentality from the Catholic inheritance. This complexity in the new Protestant sacramentality is further demonstrated by Bale’s intervention in debates over the significatory capacities of sacraments. Both Catholic and Protestant theology asserts that the sacraments are, in some sense, signs. The cultural and religious uncertainty over the status of sacramental signs finds its way into Bale’s drama where there is a tension between the necessity and the unreliability of signs as a way to know God. So in Three Laws, the rituals of the Catholic church are condemned as simply “outward ceremonyes” (1348), and the claim that they are “good sygnyfycacyons” is put in the mouth of the obviously unreliable False Doctrine (1631). This same play uses the earlier noted contrast between living word and dead ceremony to suggest the unreliability of sacramental signs: “Christ never sent hys to shewe sygnyfycacyons,/But hys lyvynge worde to all the christen nacyons” (1636), claims Law of Christ, again privileging word over ritual. The sense that sacraments are unreliable signs, however, exists sideby-side in Bale’s drama with the sense that some signs are a necessary means for communication between God and humanity. In God’s Promises, a sign accompanies all the promises made by God to various representatives of humanity.7 God’s first promise to Adam provides the archetypal pattern: For that my promyse maye have the deper effect In the faythe of the and all thy generacyon Take this sygne with it as a seale therto connect: “Crepe shall the Serpent for hys abhomynacyon;

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The woman shall sorowe in paynefull propagacyon.” Like as thu shalt fynde thys true in out warde workynge, So thynke the other, though it be an hydden thynge (137–43). This outlines the way in which signs serve as a means of communication between God and humanity. Although God and Adam have a face-to-face conversation, such direct access is not available to Adam’s “generacyon”, who therefore need a “sygne” as the “seale” to the promise. The sign – in this case the crawling of the serpent and the woman’s pains in childbirth – serves as a visible reminder (“out warde workynge”) of the invisible truth (“hydden thynge”) of God’s promise. This structure of sign and promise runs throughout the play, with the “raynebowe” (264), “cyrcumcysyon” (395), the “passeover lambe” (527), the “temple” (653), and conception by “a mayde of Israel” (776) all interpreted as signs of God’s promises to humanity. The sacramental significance of all this is made clear towards the end of the play, where it is revealed that all the promises and signs have been leading towards the eucharist: In the womans sede was Adam first justyfyed, So was faythfull Noah, so was just Abraham. The faythe in that sede in Moses fourth multyplyed, Lyke wyse in David, and Esaye, that after cam, And in Johan Baptyst whych shewed the very lam. Though they se afarre yet all they had one justyce, One masse, as they call it, and in Christ one sacryfyce (962–8). The technique used by Bale here – tracing prefigurations of the eucharist throughout Christian history – is almost identical to that found in Catholic reflections on the eucharist such as John Lydgate’s “Procession of Corpus Christi”. But whereas Catholic versions tend to remove any trace of conflict, tension and debate from their version of eucharistic history, Bale’s play is directly confrontational: “Where is now fre wyll whom hypocrites comment?” Baleus Prolocutor demands (976), emphasising the public nature of the theological debates taking place in sixteenth-century England. The sacraments are now also a matter of political debate, and Bale’s drama seizes on the opportunity to comment.


II In general terms, then, Bale’s drama calls attention to the problematics of Catholic ceremonial, to the potential distinction between living word and empty ritual and to the uncertainty of signification and symbolism as a means of gaining knowledge. An engagement with the specific details of Bale’s refashioning of sacramentality allows a more accurate interpretation of the ideological significance of Bale’s drama. As I have argued, the sacramental system could be represented in late medieval and early modern culture as an interlocking series of rituals, presented polemically as a perfect means to salvation; the Croxton Play of the Sacrament can be seen as an exemplum of the potential contradictions entailed in such a conception of the sacraments. Considering Bale’s plays in the light of this ideology of the “sacramental sociology” illuminates what is distinctive – both dramatically and ideologically – about Bale’s drama. The locus for the similarities between sacramentality as conceived by Bale, and as conceived by late medieval orthodoxy, is the sacrament of baptism, a sacrament over which there remained much common ground among all parties in the sixteenth-century disputes. Bale’s baptismal theology is similar to that of the Ten Articles, where it was proclaimed that baptism should be retained in a form similar to that of the pre-reformation church; indeed, the article on baptism, like Henry’s Assertio, makes claims based explicitly on the power of tradition:

we will that all bishops and preachers shall instruct and teach our people that they ought and must of necessity believe certainly all those things, which have been always by the whole consent of the church approved, received, and used in the sacrament of baptism (18).

The Ten Articles share, substantially, the same view of baptism as the sixteenth-century Catholic church; it was “instituted and ordained by our saviour Jesu Christ” (18); it is “necessary for the attaining of everlasting life” (18); “infants must needs be christened because they be born in original sin” (18); and the “Holy Ghost exerciseth his grace and efficacy in them [the infants], and

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cleanseth and purifieth them from sin by his most secret virtue and operation” (19). Baptism is a significant concern in almost all of Bale’s extant drama. God’s Promises dramatises the divine institution of the sacrament, as God tells John the Baptist to “Preache to the people Doppe them in water” (868–9); in this instance of baptism, ritual performance goes hand-in-hand with preaching of the word. In King Johan, baptism stands as one of the few valuable rituals of the Catholic church; Bale’s later additions to the text make clear how far he rejected the radical challenge of the Anabaptists (cf. 2531–2, 2625ff., 2680). The Temptation of Our Lord outlines a view of baptism as a ritual of initiation into the Christian community – “we, ones baptysed,/Are the sonnes of God” (3–4) – which demonstrates the continuity of the kind of baptismal thinking which informs the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Three Laws, meanwhile, asserts that baptism is “very necessarye” (1659), but that it remains secondary to “Gods worde” (1660); the play reasserts the privileging of word over ritual as a key feature of Bale’s theology. It is in Johan Baptystes Preachynge, however, that the sacrament of baptism most significantly informs Bale’s dramatic practice. Four baptisms are staged in the play (The Common People, The Tax Collector, The Soldier and Jesus Christ), representing a series of baptismal initiations which invites comparison with the baptism of the Jews in the Croxton play. Indeed, baptism in this play is imagined in terms similar to the earlier text. Just as the Play of the Sacrament dramatises the necessity of submission to the hierarchy of the church, so too baptism in Bale is a ritual which demands deference. Baptism is something which must be submitted to, even by Christ: “Ye shall se Christ here submyt hymselfe to Baptym” (29). The onstage presence of Christ, followed by his submission to the logic of sacramentality, is a dramatic technique found in both the Play of the Sacrament and in Johan Baptystes Preachynge. Furthermore, the staged performance of the baptismal ritual also demands attention. All four baptisms in the play are performed by John the Baptist – the baptism, as in the Croxton play, is preceded by a public confession of sins in the case of the three non-divine characters (114–20, 139–46, 164–70). Unlike the Croxton play, however, this is not a version, or at least not a conventional version, of the sacrament of penance. The emphasis is on confession to God rather than to a


spiritual superior (although the staging means that the confession is actually to the audience). John baptises each with an admonishment to remember that his baptism is a “sygne” (124, 148, 171; recalling God’s Promises), and the recipients of the ritual are encouraged to repent and sin no more, a formulaic expression which does not tie the Baptist to a particular confessional commitment. The baptism of Christ, however, departs from this standard patterning. John’s reluctance to baptise Christ forces a conversation between the two as to the merits of baptism. Christ is willing to “submytt” so that “worldlye people” will “lerne gentylnesse” (372, 366). John outlines the difference between divine and human baptism – “Soch is thy baptyme as awaye all synne doth wype./I geve but water; the sprete, Lorde, thu dost brynge” (390–1) – and Christ outlines the significance of baptism as a sign of acceptance into the community: I wyll go afore, that they maye folowe me, Whych shall be baptysed and thynke me for to be Their mate or brother, havynge their lyverye token, Whych is thy baptyme, as thy selfe here hath spoken. Take water therefor and baptyse me thys houre, That thy baptyme maye take strength of hyghar poure, The People to marke unto my kyngedome heavenlye (411–17). Baptism is not just, in this case, a sign of God’s promise, but also a “lyverye token” by which one group can be distinguished from another. It functions as a “marke” which distinguishes “The People” of Christ (in this case, Protestants) from all other groups. Much of what can be said about Bale’s conception of baptism – that it is a sacrament of divine institution; that it is a ritual of initiation and serves as a mark of the community; that it is a ritual which requires confession of sins and an attitude of deference on the part of the recipient – also holds true for the way baptism is imagined in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Even the distinctive ending of that play – the communal singing of O Sacrum Convivium – is recalled in John the Baptist’s plea for a communal hymn: “Lete us synge therfor togyther, with one accorde,/Praysynge these same thre as one God and good Lorde” (452–3). Part of the reason for this dramatic similarity may be that – despite protestations to the contrary – Bale’s

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Protestant baptism is theologically not dissimilar to that of medieval Catholicism. The ritual and dramatic similarities between Bale and Croxton in this regard suggest that the techniques adequate to represent pre-reformation baptism need only minor adjustments in the 1530s. But such minor adjustments are, of course, significant in themselves. For example, although both plays emphasise the power of the sacraments to forge a universal community, Johan Baptyste differs from the earlier text in that the central portion of the play stages a debate between Catholicism (represented by the Pharisee and Sadducee) and Protestantism (represented by John the Baptist and, ultimately, by Christ). Croxton’s conflict between Christianity and Judaism becomes in Bale’s drama a conflict between opposing forms of Christianity.8 As such, the power to forge a universal community – “the nombre unyversall/Not only of Jewes but faythfull belevers all” (46–7) – is figured as an explicitly Protestant power. The Pharisee and Sadducee are, in the terms of this debate, Catholics: they “by outwarde works loketh to be justyfyed” (73) and they reject “thys newe fangeled scole” (276). John the Baptist, on the other hand, is aligned with Protestantism – he “preacheth newe lernynge” (207) and “practyseth newe lawes soch as were never hearde” (252). The victory of John the Baptist over the Pharisee and Sadducee is proclaimed to the audience – in terms similar to the Croxton play – by the onstage appearance of Christ: “I am Jesus Christ, the sonne of the lyvynge God,/The lyght of hys glorye, the ymage of hys substaunce” (338–9). Christ’s submission to John’s baptism (i.e. to Protestant baptism) illustrates that the “newe lernynge” is the victor. Protestant baptism, the play suggests, is superior to Catholic baptism. But how does the play define Protestant baptism? Peter Happé suggests an answer based on Bale’s dramaturgy: “[t]he emphasis found in the [mystery] cycles upon the ritualistic and sacramental aspects of baptism as one of the seven sacraments is avoided by Bale” (John Bale 114). Certainly, Bale’s baptism is no longer “one of the seven sacraments”; but the preceding discussion has shown that the “ritualistic and sacramental aspects of baptism” are an integral part of Bale’s representations of the ceremony. A more accurate answer may be found in a schematic piece of dramaturgy, where the central debate between John the Baptist and the Pharisee


and Sadducee is book-ended by two sermons on baptism, delivered by John the Baptist to the audience (189–206, 320–37). The first sermon is composed of a series of antithetical couplets, comparing John’s baptisms with those which will be available after Christ has instituted the sacrament. For example, “My baptyme is a sygne of outwarde mortyfyenge;/A grace is hys baptyme of inwarde quyckenyenge” (191–2). So whereas John’s baptism is simply an outward sign (and the word “outwarde” may link this to the negative connotations of Catholic ceremonialism in the play), true baptism in Christ is an interior experience of grace (Bale’s emphasis on Protestant interiority, of course, ignores the interiority fostered by the sacraments in the pre-reformation church). The second sermon works in a similar way, again foretelling the coming of Christ, but describing his mission in terms which link it to the aims of the reformers: He wyll from hys floore, which is hys congregacyon, Swepe away all fylth and false dyssymulacyon. Cleane wyll he seclude the dysguysed hypocrites, And restore agayne the perfyght Israelytes (330–3). This suggests how the formation of the “universal” community actually relies on processes of inclusion and exclusion. Disguised hypocrites (Catholics) are banished from the company of the perfect Israelites (Protestants). The ideological community, then, is forged in opposition to an alternative community. The alternative community imagined by Bale can be further differentiated from the late medieval community by the reduction of the number of sacraments available. For Bale, as for most Protestants, confirmation and extreme unction are easily divested of their nonsacramental status; there is, accordingly, no mention of either in the drama. The eucharist, so central to the sacramental sociology, presents an interesting puzzle in Bale’s drama. Although his poems and prose works allow us to confidently ascribe to him a “Protestant” interpretation of the eucharist (i.e. denial of the real presence and the doctrine of transubstantiation), the references to the sacrament in the drama are much less confrontational.9 I have already demonstrated how God’s Promises regards the eucharist as the preeminent signifier among God’s signs to humanity; this need not represent a break from the Catholic tradition. King Johan and Three

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Laws are more forthright in their criticism of the abuses which the eucharist has suffered under Catholicism: King Johan condemns the practice of masses for the dead (2124–6), the Latinity and material emphases of the mass (2564–6) and the intermingling of financial and ritual concerns (2657–8);10 while Three Laws criticises the idolatrous nature of the mass (504), the “incontynency” of priests (768) and the “lyppe labour and ydle ceremonye” of the ritual (1116). These are all familiar Protestant complaints, but they do not go to the metaphysical heart of the matter. Happé suggests that the doctrine of transubstantiation was a point on which Henry was known to be adamant, and that Bale’s chances of influencing official developments would have been severely endangered by a confrontational stance over the doctrine (John Bale 105); but the lack of theological engagement with the eucharist seems to trouble the chances of constructing a “radical sacramentality” from Bale’s extant dramatic works.11 But if there is a sense of conservatism or disengagement with Bale’s treatment of the eucharist, the same cannot be said for the consideration of the intertwined sacraments of holy orders and matrimony, the interpretation of which forms one of Bale’s most distinctive sacramental concerns. According to Catholicism, these sacraments are mutually exclusive: one cannot hold holy orders and be in a state of matrimony at the same time. For Bale, this is a mistake, theologically and practically. Bale combats Catholic doctrine in a number of ways. First, the drama is at pains to deny the special, sacramentally ordained, status of the clergy, forming a clear contrast to the elevation of priesthood in the Play of the Sacrament. When King Johan, for example, attempts to use his political power over Treason, the latter pleads his membership of the clergy as reason for exemption from punishment: “I have holy orders Ye can not towche me but ye must be accurst” (1863–4). This strategy, of putting a doctrine into the mouth of a disreputable character in order to discredit it, is repeated a few lines later, when the Cardinal criticises Johan’s attitude to the status of a priest: “Ye neyther regarde hys crowne nor anoynted fingers,/The offyce of a priest, nor the grace that therein lingers” (1875–8). There is a sacramental conception of priesthood clearly present in the Cardinal’s lines: the anointed fingers of the priest contain the sacramental grace imparted at his ordination. This sacramental grace, however, is emphatically denied by Bale’s drama.12


This is most clear in the dispute between False Doctrine and Law of Christ in Three Laws, where contrasting conceptions of priesthood are clear: PSEUDODOCTRINA: Lete me se, where are the letters of thy orders? EVANGELIUM: Where Christ hys self is, and not in these same borders. No soch pryst am I as is anoynted with oyle, But the Holy Gost, for I am non of thys soyle (1720–3). Here one can see clearly the contrast, as conceived by Bale, between Catholic and Protestant priesthood. Catholic priesthood involves anointing with oil and receiving letters of orders; Protestant priesthood rejects the Catholic sacrament in favour of spiritual motivation, assumed to be lacking in Catholic priests. Bale here establishes a dichotomy between the materiality of Catholicism and the “spirituality” of Protestantism, but it is a dichotomy which arises from a reconstruction of the Catholic position. In his construction, Bale dismisses the Catholic understanding that the material emphasis in the sacrament does not deny, indeed serves as an adjunct to, the spiritual significance of the ceremony. This sense that Catholic sacramentality is a material, as opposed to a spiritual, ideology, leads Bale to consider Catholicism in terms of outward show and, specifically, costume. If there is no grace conveyed in the ritual of holy orders, then it follows that the only thing which separates the clergy from the laity is their costumes: the drama is insistent on the theatricality of the Catholic clergy. This can be seen in England’s complaint about the clergy “In syde cotes wandryng lyeke most dysgysed players” (King Johan 67), and in Sedition’s extended metaphor of clerical offices as theatrical roles, assumed by donning particular costumes (King Johan 194–210). It is an image adopted frequently by Protestants, and one that functions according to the same interior/exterior logic as the contrast in sacramental styles noted above. Moreover, if Bale’s drama is reluctant to accept the concept of a divinely ordained clerical hierarchy, it is just as resistant to the idea of enforced clerical celibacy.13 In part, this is because of Bale’s elevation of the married state; in Three Laws alone one finds references to “just marryage” (931), to marriage as “afore

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God a state both just and holye” (1391), and to the “love [of] true matrymonye” as one of the effects of the Law of Nature (1969). This text also relates an anti-papal anecdote which associates the installation of the necessity of priestly celibacy to an apparent deal struck between Satan and Sylvester II (1601–6). Although Bale rejects the sacramental status of marriage, one finds in his writings a strong sense of the sacredness of the marital state; this sacred state should not be denied to the clergy. What is more, the denial of the sacrament of marriage to the clergy leads, in Bale’s theatre, to sexual degeneration: that is, to sodomy. Dissimulation claims that one of the ends of the Pope/Usurped Power is to “plucke downe matrimonye” (King Johan 1002), and in Three Laws, the linkage between celibacy and sodomy is made clear: “[w]ithin the bownes of Sodomye/Doth dwell the spirytuall clergye Detestynge matrymonye,/They lyve abhomynablye,/And burne in carnall lust” (729–36). This play even contains a character called Sodomy, who maintains that his continued wellbeing is dependent upon “monkysh sectes [a]nd popysh prestes” (631–2). The link between sodomy and Catholic sacramentality – particularly the sacrament of holy orders and the corresponding denial of marriage to the clergy – is a key technique for advancing Bale’s claims of a reformed sacramentality. Bale’s sacramentality, then, represents an intervention in the sacramental debates of the 1530s. Baptism, for Bale as for almost all religious thinkers of the period, is a necessary and divinely instituted sacrament. Confirmation and extreme unction are rejected by Bale, in keeping with the reformist tendencies demonstrated by, for example, the Ten Articles. Bale’s eucharistic concerns, elaborated primarily through non-dramatic texts, are beyond the scope of this chapter, but one of his most distinctive sacramental interests – the problems surrounding the mutually exclusive sacraments of marriage and holy orders – makes its presence clearly felt in the drama. Yet it is the assault on the sacrament of penance, particularly as represented in King Johan, which marks Bale’s most crucial contribution to the sixteenth-century debate over sacraments and drama.

III Penance, critics have correctly assumed, is the main focus of Bale’s attack on Catholic sacramentality;14 certainly, Bale’s assault on


penance draws attention to one of the oddities of the Ten Articles, that is, the inclusion of penance – a ritual rejected by almost all Protestants – in an apparently “reformed” sacramentality. The Ten Articles had argued strongly for the sacramental status of penance, claiming that “that sacrament was institute of Christ in the New Testament as a thing so necessary for man’s salvation that no man can without the same, be saved” (19).15 King Johan, with its insistently foregrounded parody of the confessional is, of course, the central text for Bale’s attack on penance; but others are also important. Three Laws vilifies confession in terms that echo many of the concerns of King Johan: the theatricality of the ritual is parodied, for example, in Infidelity’s advice to Sodomy to appropriate the confessorial role (675–8). And throughout the text, penance is figured as a means by which the clergy establish profit, whether financial or sexual; at “purse or arse” (1437), in the words of Infidelity. The sexual immorality of the Catholic clergy – a favoured topic of Bale’s – is established through a series of anecdotes recounting the exploitation of the confessional for sexual ends.16 Bale’s use of these anecdotes suggests that penance demands to be excluded from sacramentality on the same grounds as holy orders: just as that sacrament promotes “sodomy” among the Catholic clergy, so penance offers the opportunity for sexual degeneration and debauchery. This emphasis on the corruption of penance does not discount the possibility of genuine repentance; indeed, such acts of remorse can be shown to have a significant spiritual purpose in Bale’s drama. In God’s Promises, for example, Pater Coelestis, in terms close to Catholic penitential theology, praises the virtues of “inwarde hartes contrycyon” (639). Such contrition, moreover, has a particular, substantial effect: it “[d]oth move [God’s] stomake in wonderfull condycyon” (640). This stress on the mercy of God comes close to the Catholic insistence on the sequential nature of penance (contrition, then confession, then satisfaction), a sequence which was challenged by Luther: “Once faith is obtained, contrition and consolation will follow inevitably of themselves” (84).17 Luther’s formulation suggests that the penitent should not actively seek contrition as a state in itself, since faith is all that is necessary for the forgiveness of sins; Pater Coelestis’s formula, with its suggestion that contrition is the first in a number of steps towards forgiveness, seems closer to Catholic tradition. Moreover, if God’s Promises stresses the spiritual significance of contrition, Johan

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Baptystes Preachynge accords similar import to the practice of confession.18 The Common Crowd, the Tax Collector and the Soldier all make a public confession of sins before they are admitted to baptism; the confession is not to a priest, but to God and the audience. The extent to which either is the primary auditor, however, is not entirely clear; the stage directions for the three reveal a change in emphasis. In the first confession, Common Crowd is turned to God (Ad Deum convertitus Turba Vulgaris (113SD)); in the second, the Tax Collector acknowledges his sin in God’s presence (Publicanus coram Deo peccatum agnoscit (138SD)); whereas in the third, the soldier simply confesses his sins, with no mention of God (Milei suo confitetur scelera (163SD)).19 There is, then, a turn away from a divine audience towards a public assembly as the appropriate focus for confession. This shift is mirrored in the language of the confessions. Both the Common Crowd and the Tax Collector address their confessions to “blessed lorde” (114, 139), directing the speech to an apostrophic divinity. Both, indeed, imagine their confessions in “traditional” ways: as a visual spectacle (“I confesse in place here evident” (116)); as an occasion for contrition or “remorce” (140); and as a restitution of social wrongs (“I have been to man uncharitable” (118–19), “To my neyber I have been full untrue” (145)). All of these suggest that, although the confession may be nonsacramental, it serves similar purposes to the traditional sacrament. The soldier, however, does not implore God until the end of his confession, focusing instead on the future amendment of life, a move which nevertheless emphasises the social and communal significance of confession. If Bale’s urge to advance a revised version of penitential activity is not sufficiently clear from the drama itself, the figure of Baleus Prolocutor, onstage at the end of the play, outlines how spiritual remorse should be expressed: If ye do penaunce, do soch as Johan doth counsell: Forsake your olde lyfe and to the true fayth applye; Washe away all fylth and folowe Christes Gospell. The justyce of men is but an hypocrese, A worke without fayth, an outwarde vayne glorye. Geve eare unto Christ; lete mennys vayne fantasyes go, As the father bad by hys most hygh commaundement.


Heare neyther Frances, Benedyct nor Bruno, Albert nor Domynyck, for they newe rulers invent. Beleve neyther Pope, nor prest of hys consent (479–90). This is a concise explanation of the play’s reformist attitude towards “penaunce”. Using John the Baptist as an authority, the play makes conventional appeals to the amendment of life (“Forsake your olde life”) and the re-enactment of baptismal cleansing (“Washe away all fylth”); yet there is also an urge to promote the new “true fayth” of Protestantism. More explicitly, there is a compulsion to excoriate the rituals and authority of the Catholic tradition. So the rituals of the Catholic church are figured as “outwarde vayne glorye[s]”, and “vayne fantasyes”; and the authorities of the church are contrasted with the divine authority of God’s commandments. Yet if Johan Baptysytes Preachynge attempts to rescue something from the sacrament, King Johan – which, for modern critics, represents Bale’s most familiar and widely read views on confession – portrays the sacrament in terms more akin to those of Three Laws. The extended ridicule and dismissal of penance in King Johan is one of the crucial dramatic techniques employed in the play’s polarization of Catholicism and Protestantism; for Happé, it is a “remarkable dramatic tour de force” (“Introduction” 15), while for E.S. Miller, “the sacrament centers a structural and didactic motif throughout” (805).20 Repeated stagings of confession perform a theatrical evacuation of the ritual akin to that claimed by Stephen Greenblatt in his studies of the Elizabethan theatre. For Greenblatt, King Lear “is haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that have been emptied out” (“Exorcists” 114); this is the result of a process in which “a sacred sign, designed to be displayed before a crowd of men and women, is emptied, made negotiable, traded from one institution to another” (“Exorcists” 112). This can stand as a formulation of Bale’s dramatic practice: the emptying out of the sacredness of the confessional ritual forms a dramatic principle of the play, highlighting the text’s understanding both of its own theatricality, and of its situation in a significant religio-political moment. King Johan figures the problem of the confessional in two significant ways. The first is to imagine the confessional as part of a panopticon, a network of confessional acts and knowledge which leads at its zenith to the Pope: this gives the Pope an all-seeing knowledge and

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the associated temporal power. Confession is, in this sense, a system of “government” as described by Foucault – one of the “techniques and procedures designed to direct the behaviour of men [sic]” (History of Sexuality 154). For Foucault, speaking of confession in a slightly different context, “the verbal manifestation of the truth that is hidden deep inside oneself appears as an indispensable part of the government of men by each other” (157; my emphasis). I have argued that Foucault’s understanding of the interiority produced by confession could inform readings of subjectivity in late medieval culture; here it is necessary to consider Foucault’s notion of confession as an instrument of political domination. In this context, Bale’s understanding of confession is almost identical to Foucault’s – the interiority of the Christian individual (and specifically the English Christian individual) is, in its act of utterance, subsumed under the authority (“government”) of the Catholic hierarchy.21 This recalls both Luther and, perhaps more significantly for Bale, Tyndale. Luther’s Babylonian Captivity argued that “penance has been transformed into the most oppressive despotism, being used to establish a sovereignty which is more than merely temporal” (83); for Luther, the papacy has exploited the political power available through penance. Sedition states this explicitly, claiming that “by confessyon the Holy Father knoweth/Throw owt all Christendom what to his holynes growyth” (272–3). This idea of the confessional as a network of knowledge is then further claimed to be an unwanted imposition on the Christian masses: “eare confessyon”, as Dissimulation calls it, is “a matere nessessary” (1020), as of course it was after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which proclaimed that “all the faithful of both sexes shall after they have reached the age of discretion faithfully confess all their sins at least once a year to their own priest” (Schroeder 512). Furthermore, it is an imposition which has nothing to do with the spiritual health of the penitent: Bale’s Pope claims that “eare confessyon” is one of “the ceremonyes many/Wherby owre bysshopes and abbottes shall get mony” (1076–9). The stress on the financial benefits available to the church is a different claim than the emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge available through the confessional; but both establish the confessional as a means whereby the church – and ultimately the Pope – profits. The second way in which the confessional is figured is similar to, and in some ways grows out of, this vision of a network of


informational and financial transfers, but in this instance, the focus shifts from the Pope to the secular rulers of realms. For Bale, the power of the confessional has established the Pope as a threat to “legitimate” secular rulers, and the confessional can therefore be used as a means to foment treason and sedition within and between political realms: this is stressed frequently in King Johan. Part of the effectiveness of the Pope’s method (as the text conceives it) is in the spiritual power of absolution. Luther had argued against the Pope’s assumption of superiority in this matter: “it is a wicked usurpation of power to claim the power of the keys for the pope alone” (83). Luther’s formulation of the Pope as a usurper of power is proleptic of Bale’s theatrical Pope.22 By claiming the power of absolution from sin, the Pope can command any political act in return for spiritual salvation. Thus, Sedition claims that “[f]or clene remysson one kyng wyll subdew another” (980), while the Pope grants “[r]emyssyon of synnes to so many men/As wyll do ther best to slee hym [i.e. Johan]” (1071–2), both suggesting that questions of political expedience have come to overrule spiritual concerns.23 The mock-stagings of acts of confession in the play are also explicitly linked to ideas of political upheaval. Nobility’s confession to Sedition, for example, is an instance of the confessional as a site for the instigation of treasonous impulses. The import of this staging is enhanced by the alterations which Bale makes to the language of the confessional. Although Miller claims that “[t]he parody consists, not of mutilating liturgy, but of applying it to a context so trivial as to make it mock heroic” (809), Bale does make significant changes to the language employed in the rite. Miller, despite the claim made above, provides a useful list of the changes made to the Latin formula of confession and absolution: In the parts retained the parody consists of substitution of “the lord pope” for “almighty God”, of “all his cardinals” for “all the saints”, of “in exacting from the Church the tribute” for “in thought, word, and deed”, of “the holy lord the pope” for “the blessed Mary ever Virgin”, and of “all his prelates” for “all the saints” (813). As Miller states, the effect of all this is to suggest that the Catholic church is “usurping the power of God and the saints” (813). This self-conscious rewriting of liturgy lends strength to Cavanagh’s recent claims that “[a]t the centre of Bale’s ideological exposure

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of Catholicism is a concern with delinquent language Bale’s play imput[es] the corrupting effect of sinful speech to the sacramental practices of the church that should correct and absolve them” (173). That is, sacraments – particularly the sacrament of penance – have, through the use of “sinful speech”, been employed as instruments of political domination.24 Almost all of the dramatic techniques employed by Bale in his representation of the confessional labour this point explicitly. One might claim, then, that Bale’s objections to the sacrament of penance concern its function within the political sacramentality of the Catholic church. This is, I suggest, a more accurate claim than the suggestion that “Bale’s strongly political objections to this practice [i.e. of confession] do not seem to have been based upon a criticism of the sacrament of penance” (Happé, John Bale 10).

IV For Bale, as for other reformers, the only scripturally ordained sacraments are baptism and the Eucharist; the others are all innovations of the medieval church. King Johan, giving voice to a common Protestant concern, rails against the process by which “the clargy left the scriptur for menns ymagynacyons” (334–5). Not only are the sacraments innovations, they are for Bale innovations with an oppressive function. The sacramental sociology is an excellent example of this. Instead of the spiritual freedom which Protestants claim is offered by baptism and the eucharist, the sacramental system emphasises order and regulation, conforming all individual lives to a set pattern, and demanding the conformity of this pattern across the entire Christian church. For example, the inclusion of “rites-of-passage” ceremonies as a defining feature of sacramentality (in addition to baptism, one can include confirmation, marriage, holy orders and extreme unction) highlights, from a Protestant point of view, the schematic, rigid nature of the ideological construct. For Bale, then, the sacramental sociology outlined by the late medieval church is an invalid political construct. While Bale’s sacramentality does retain certain elements of the sacramental sociology – baptism as a ritual of initiation is perhaps the most obvious example – most of the tenets of the ideology are explicitly rejected. The patterning of the life cycle suggested by sacraments like


confirmation and extreme unction is abandoned, as is the hierarchical arrangement of society imagined in the mutual exclusivity of marriage and holy orders. Perhaps most significantly of all (and this is where Bale differs most from mildly “progressive” documents like the Ten Articles), penance is explicitly and repeatedly stigmatised as a means of political domination: Bale’s “exposure” of the political significance of the sacramental system results in the rejection of that system. Bale’s dismissal of Catholic sacramentality means, of course, that an alternative form of structuring individual and communal lives needs to be formulated. Bale does not suggest that Christians should have unlimited freedom, or that they should not be subject to laws and regulations. Neither does he place a significant stress on the autonomy of the individual conscience – his drama is much more schematic and general than that. Indeed, the avowed purpose of King Johan is to teach subjects where they owe their allegiance, not to deny that they have allegiance to owe. Johan’s opening speech sets the tone for the rest of the drama, claiming that “all pepell shuld shew there trwe alegyauns/To ther lawfull kyng” (5–6). In King Johan, allegiance to the sovereign overrules allegiance to the Pope, but the arguments for each are the same: Bale’s king is a divinely appointed and sanctioned figure just as much as Catholicism’s Pope. England supplies one of the play’s clearest expressions of this argument: Trwly of the devyll they are that do onything To the subdewyng of ony christen kyng. For be he good or bade he is of Godes apoyntyng (101–3). The problem, then, becomes how to distinguish Bale’s new Protestant sacramentality from its corrupt, medieval predecessor; does Bale’s drama imagine a different relationship between the individual and society than, say, the East Anglian seven-sacrament fonts? Or does Bale’s “demystification” of the political patterning of sacramentality actually leave that patterning intact, albeit in a “secularized”, de-sacramentalized form? One way of getting to grips with the ideological location of Bale’s drama within these configurations is to analyse the way in which the plays utilise a discourse of polarisation, whereby Catholicism is given exclusively negative characteristics, and Protestantism

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is glorified.25 This is especially clear in Bale’s biblical drama: in Johan Baptystes Preachyng, for example, both John the Baptist and Christ are given Protestant doctrines to preach, while the Pharisee and the Sadducee are identified with late medieval and early modern Catholicism. The Pharisee claims that “thys fellawe [i.e. John the Baptist] preacheth newe lernynge” (207), while John criticises the “pestylent tradycyons” of the old religion. This strategy of polarisation informs King Johan as well, associating Catholicism with a negatively materialistic discourse of money, excrement and sodomy. For example, Dissimulation claims that “[t]he profytable lucre cummyth ever in by me [w]e lacke noyther golde, nor sylwer girdles, nor rynges” (696–712); Sedition claims “I wyll beshyte yow all yf ye sett me not downe softe” (804), and “I wold thow haddyst kyst his ars for that is holy yt hath an hole evyn fytt for the nose of yow” (893–5). Bale’s technique is to establish a series of binaries whereby Protestant doctrines and behaviours are clearly distinguishable from those of Catholicism. It follows that the refashioned sacramentality imagined in Bale’s drama takes shape largely through a refutation of the undesirable aspects of Catholic sacramentality. But there is a problem with this strategy of polarisation. Thomas F. Mayer has suggested that Bale “had too Pauline a view of the world to be a successful ideologue” (113); and certainly, the complexity of Bale’s drama – particularly King Johan – troubles the sharp binaries demanded by ideological polemics. Equally, Dermot Cavanagh has drawn attention to King Johan’s “divided, rather than uniform, representation of incendiary speech”, relating this to the fact that “dissent and orthodoxy, treachery and loyalty, were prone to alarming changes in definition and confessional commitment could be identified in the seditious terms that had once characterized only one’s opponents” (174). This demonstrates the inherent problems in adopting a strategy of polemic in an uncertain cultural context: the Catholicism demonised by Bale could be – indeed, to a great extent was – reinscribed as official religious policy.26 There are further problems with Bale’s strategy. In suggesting that Catholic sacramentality is corrupt because of its entanglement with a political worldview, Bale chooses not to admit his own political agenda.27 The dichotomy in which Catholicism represents a political sacramentality, Protestantism a personal or spiritual one, is in trouble from the beginning.


This is true especially of King Johan, which has a political polemic purpose – to argue for the supremacy of regal sovereignty over papal – and which adopts a political rhetoric at all times, in its characterisation of both “Protestant” and “Catholic” characters. Johan is praised, for example, not just for his “valeaunt and godlye” nature (2194), but more often, and more significantly, because “in hys owne realme a kynge is judge over all” (2347); that is, because of his political position as the monarch. Bale’s attempts at polarization overlook the fact that church reform in England in the 1530s is as politically motivated as anything instigated by the medieval Catholic Church. The political/spiritual dichotomy, then, is troubled by the fact that both Catholicism and Protestantism are “political”; but they are both, of course, “spiritual” as well.28 Following recent historical scholarship, it is a central contention of this study that there was an active culture of piety and spiritual awareness in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England, a culture against which Bale’s demonisation of Catholicism appears shallow and one-sided. Eamon Duffy’s contention that “late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people” (4) has been qualified somewhat in recent years, but still stands as a useful corrective to earlier work which stressed, like Bale, an interpretation of the widespread corruption of Catholicism. Late medieval Catholicism was more than capable of appealing to individual interiority, for example, as a personal, spiritual realm of existence. The Ten Articles stress the importance of interior examination, claiming that everyone should “religiously try to search his own conscience, before he shall receive [the eucharist]” (20), demonstrating the continuing link between sacramentality and interiority. This exaltation of the interior is clearly a very different sacramentality to the distortion of penance polemically presented by Bale. This, of course, troubles Bale’s polemic strategy: the interiority produced by Catholic sacramentality, particularly the sacrament of penance, threatens Bale’s portrayal of that sacrament as simply a means of achieving political dominion. That the sacrament of penance could serve as an instrument of oppression and domination is clear enough, and Bale dramatises this forcefully; that it is also a ritual which allows for the assertion of a subjectivity perhaps granted little opportunity for alternative expression, is an interpretation possibly too radical for Bale’s strategies to contain.

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V The historian Lucy Wooding has recently argued that the terms “Catholicism” and “Protestantism” are of relatively little use in attempting to understand religious changes in England in the 1530s; this is because the “Henrician Reformation was a thing in itself; neither failed Catholicism, nor inadequate Protestantism, but a vigorous movement based on a particular vision” (51). This may suggest some explanations for the apparent troubling of polemic within Bale’s drama; but it does not fully answer those who have found in the plays a self-conscious revision of English Catholic drama and historiography. This discussion of Bale’s sacramentality, I suggest, allows us to see some of the ways in which early attempts were made to forge such confessional identities in Henrician England. Bale’s attempts, of course, were not always successful: the strategies employed by the playwright require the elimination of certain important features of religious identity, most notably the interior significance of the Catholic sacraments. Moreover, I have stressed throughout this chapter a variety of ways in which Bale shares similar dramatic and, at times, ideological concerns with the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. That play, I argued in Chapter 1, can be read as an intervention in competing discourses about the experience and representation of the individual and society; and it seems that Bale’s drama – in a different religious and political context and informed by a different ideology – does something similar. The broader significances of this similarity challenge attempts to read Bale as a straightforward spokesperson for a radical Protestantism, just as Bale’s insistent portrayal of the corruption of Catholicism reveals fully the fragmented and divided ideology of the plays. This complicates Cavanagh’s recent reading of King Johan, that the text is “a powerful instance of ideological critique” because “it deciphers how the vested interests of the medieval church obstruct a just estimation of the truth and recovers persecuted voices that have attempted to promote a fuller vision of human community” (172). This reading, it seems to me, too readily accepts the problematic assumptions of Bale’s polemic strategy. Any persecuted voice that King Johan recovers demands the silencing of a Catholic subject’s expression of interiority through the confessional; any vision of human community that the text promotes entails


the suppression of the sacramental sociology as a viable structure for society; and any vested interests which it reveals in the medieval church must exist side by side with the play’s own political interests, and its urge to form a new, Protestant subjectivity and society.

3 Mid-Tudor Drama and Sacramental Reform

The urge to form a Protestant subjectivity and society demonstrated in Bale’s drama re-occurs at various points throughout the sixteenth century. The accession of Edward VI may have seemed, to radical Protestants, to offer the perfect opportunity to fully develop a newly reformed realm; conversely, the years of Marian reign may have seemed to offer hope, for Catholics, of the reinstitution of a sacramental sociology. Marian Catholicism, however, is not particularly concerned with the use of drama as a vehicle for religious ideology, differing in this regard from both pre-Reformation Catholicism and sixteenth-century Protestantism.1 This chapter, accordingly, examines texts from two critical moments in the promulgation of Protestantism in sixteenth-century England: the printed attacks on the mass in early Edwardian England, and the continually adaptive morality plays of Edwardian and early Elizabethan England. These texts demonstrate the ways in which post-Henrician Protestantism, drawing in some ways on the influence of Bale’s example, adopts drama as a means of promoting a reformed sacramentality and, in doing so, suggests the possibility of a reformed society and subjectivity.

I Edwardian processes of reform pushed England further towards a clearly definable Protestantism than the activities of the Henrician church. In the same year that Edward ascended the throne, 60

Mid-Tudor Drama and Sacramental Reform 61

continental Catholicism, in the shape of the Council of Trent, was actively reaffirming the system of seven sacraments. “De Sacramentis”, the first decree of Session Seven of the Council (3 March 1547), states as its aim “the removal of errors and the rooting out of heresies, which have arisen at the present time concerning the most holy sacraments” (Tanner 684). Explicitly confronting critics of Catholicism, the decree affirms that all seven sacraments – defined as “baptismum, confirmationem, eucharistiam, poenitentiam, extremam unctionem, ordinem et matrimonium” (684) – are of Christic institution. The decree continues with other assertions antithetical to the new Protestant teaching: that sacramental grace is conferred “ex opere operato” (685; that is, through the sacramental action itself); that the received rituals of the church should not be altered (685); and, of course, that there should be no distinction between signifier and signified in the sacraments: Si quis dixerit, sacramenta novae legis non continere gratiam, quam significant, aut gratiam ipsam non ponentibus obicem non conferre, quasi signa tantum externa sint acceptae per fidem gratiae vel institiae, et notae quaedam christianae professionis, quibus apud hominess discernuntur fideles ab infidelibus: a.s. (684) [If anyone says that the sacraments of the new law do not contain the grace which they signify; or do not confer that grace on those who place no obstacle in the way, as if they were only external signs of grace or justice received by faith, and some kind of mark of the Christian profession by which believers are distinguished from unbelievers in the eyes of people: let him be anathema.] (*684) There is no separation of sign and signified here; the sacraments are not external signs, but instead “contain the graces which they signify”. A sacrament is a sign that causes and contains that which it signifies (that is, grace). This was not how the new regime in England understood sacramentality. A series of official documents issued around the time of Edward’s accession outline a conception of the sacraments markedly different to that of Trent. The difference, generally speaking, stems from a desire to “nationalize” the English church: in place of Trent’s language of ecclesiastical authority, the documents

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promote a politicised vision of the well-ordered commonwealth. So, in the 1547 “Act Against Revilers, and for Receiving in Both Kinds” (an act which condemns criticism of the eucharist, and institutes reception of both bread and wine as the standard practice of the English church), the emphasis is on the desire that the king’s “most loving subjects shall study to do their duties nourishing concord and love amongst themselves” (322). No less concerned with authority and hierarchy than the Tridentine decree, this Act even puts in place a system for policing sacramental conformity, giving elaborate instructions for the inquiry, trial and punishment of offenders (324–6). A variety of official documents of the period argue for a reformed understanding of sacramentality. The Visitation Articles of 1547, for example, deny the Tridentine assertion of the congruence of signifier and signified, claiming instead that “the true use of ceremonies” is “that they be no workers nor works of salvation, but only outward signs and tokens to put us in remembrance of things of higher perfection” (Qtd. Spurgeon vi). The “official” English sacramentality, as represented in this example, adopts a position antithetical to the Catholic conciliar consensus, at least as far as the significatory potential of sacraments is concerned. In the same year, an act dissolving the chantries was proclaimed, as the Edwardian understanding of the mass renders them at best irrelevant, at worst spiritually harmful (“Act Dissolving the Chantries”). This is an example of how a material change in the structure of society can be informed by the changing ideologies of sacramentality. By 1552, the Second Edwardine Act of Uniformity is able to claim that “due using of the sacraments” (i.e. the sacraments as promulgated by the Edwardian church) is one of the ways by which “the mercy, favour, and blessing of almighty God is readily and plenteously poured” upon “this realm” (369). This is a clear example of the political and communal emphasis of Edwardian sacramentality: sacraments become a means by which the realm, rather than the individual, can achieve a state of grace. On one level, this is similar to the vision of a well-ordered society imagined in the late medieval sacramental sociology; but that conception of sacramentality coexists with an extensive ritual system designed to conform to the pattern of individual lives. Edwardian sacramentality, reduced to just baptism and the eucharist, does not: that is, Edwardian sacramentality privileges the commonwealth over


the individual, rhetorically drawing together the mass of individuals into a “unified” whole. It is part of the nation-building strategies of the Edwardian regime, and suggests another example of how sacramental ideologies are employed at various points throughout the century to configure the relationship between the individual and society. Such documents suggest that the eucharist in the 1540s is a site of public dissent and discord: according to the Act Against Revilers, “the said Sacrament has been of late marvellously abused such manner of men in their sermons, preachings, readings, lectures, communications, arguments, talks, rhymes, songs, plays, or jests, name or call it by such vile and unseemly words, as Christian ears do abhor to hear it rehearsed” (323–4). Drama – “plays” – is just one of a number of performative genres in which sacramental theologies can be challenged or affirmed; and the list of potentially dissident modes certainly suggests a vigorous public debate. Of course, the official promulgation of sacramentality represents only one facet of the competing sacramental discourses in circulation. Not only were the late 1540s years in which the ideology of sacramentality was vigorously debated, they were also years in which the traditional congruence of sacramentality and drama was called into question, with a resultant cultural impact equal to anything achieved by Bale’s polemic drama. In 1548, the feast of Corpus Christi was abolished, and so the traditional occasion for the performance of mystery plays was discredited; around the same time, identifiably Catholic sacramental elements – references to transubstantiation and the seven sacraments – were removed from the Towneley cycle (King 293). That this is a significant moment for the concerns of this study is further supported if one accepts Dickie Spurgeon’s calculation that 27 works attacking the Mass were printed in 1548 alone (xxvii). Spurgeon suggests that the “absence of any opposing body of literature comparable in size indicates that these works against the Mass were probably officially sanctioned, if not encouraged” (v). Certainly the fact that such quantities of material were published may suggest an attempt at ideological persuasion; but it is the case, nevertheless, that one of the common forms of publication – the dialogue – allows the expression of a Catholic viewpoint at the same time as it strives to condemn it. An example comes from William Turner’s Newe dialogue wherin is conteyned the examinati¯o of the

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messe, which contrasts the Catholic Mass with the Protestant Supper of the Lord: Now haue I proued bi y very words of y messe, that the end of y messe is to purchase remission, by offring of bread & wine, to desrue euerlasting life by receuing & offerynge of Christes body, to make faire wether & rain, to heale al sicknesses, to bring soules fr¯ o hell & to deliuer the fr¯ o tormentes, to honor saintes, & to make a memorial of saintes deathes, and natiuties of the receiuynge of Christes bodie and bloude, and other whyles to make the same of the offerynge of breade and wyne. These are y operations, intentes, and endes of the messe and the same are not the endes & operati¯ os of the supper of the Lords, for the ende of christes supper is to rem¯eber christes death to giue thankes for our redempti¯ o and to remember, that we all are membres of one bodye, and ought therfore one to loue another (Qtd. Spurgeon xv). Catholic sacramentality is here equated with superstition – changing the weather and healing sickness – and with specifically Catholic doctrines of purgatory and the cult of the saints; Protestant sacramentality, on the other hand, is represented as a memorial, a thanksgiving and, in an image that encapsulates the Edwardian communal conception of the sacraments, as a ritual of community membership. A closer focus on two of these texts can clarify some of the issues at hand. The first text, John Bon and Mast Parson, is a dialogue that argues against Catholic eucharistic doctrine. The second, William Punt’s A New Dialoge Called the Endightment agaynst Mother Messe, imagines a trial format in which the Mass is found guilty of heresy. Both texts, although apparently intended to be read rather than performed (although there is some ambiguity about Punt’s text), nevertheless adopt an inherently dramatic form, and have intriguing things to suggest about the relationship between drama and the eucharist. John Bon, for example, makes much of the theatricality of the Catholic Mass, describing the celebration of the Mass in terms that suggest a dramatic performance. First, the parson dons a costume appropriate to the role: “Then come we in, and ready us dress,/Full solemnly to go to Mess” (165; emphasis in original). The parson then outlines the structure of the Mass in the manner of a theatrical


script, enunciating in order “Confiteor and Miseriatur”, “the Pistel and Gospel”, “the Canon, that is holiest”, “the Memento, even before the sacring” (165–6; emphasis in original). The sacramental moment itself must take its place in a sequence of events: “And after that, we consecrate Very God and Man” (166). The Parson stresses that every element of the Mass “lieth in an order” (168), but the text’s reader is encouraged to identify with the critical attitude of John Bon, whose simple rusticity stands as a foil to the theatricality of Catholicism: “though I have no learning, yet I know cheese from chalk,/And each can perceive your juggling, as crafty as ye walk!” (168).2 “Juggling” again emphasises the theatrical and performative qualities of the Mass, more particularly associating them with a type of immoral or fraudulent exhibition. The Endightment Agaynst Mother Messe is equally interested in dramatic structure; but whereas John Bon castigates Catholic clerics for too rigid an adherence to liturgical outlines, The Endightment employs the dramatic setting of a trial as a weapon against the mass. Spurgeon succinctly outlines the congruence between printed text and dramatic strategy in this document: The Endightment is exceptional (but not unique) among the dialogues of the time in its closeness to drama. The identification of the opening speakers in their own speeches, the easy separation of the dialogue into scenes, the attempt to account for the passage of time while Wisdom is “off-stage” the judge’s address to the “gentle audience”, and finally, the allegorical apparatus all reflect practices in the drama (xx). Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is John N. King’s suggestion that this text may have been, if not staged, at least performed. King claims that “Punt’s auxiliary role in the court revels suggests that costumed readers could have recited his dialogue Punt’s phrase [i.e. “gentle audience”] may refer both to the apostolic jury within the work and to an audience of aristocratic auditors” (290). Despite this possibility, however, King argues that the mass-dialogues, in general, “lack dramatic structure and could not have been performed”: The prolix wordiness of their tractlike speeches precludes representation with physical action, music, and spectacle. Lack of

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rhetorical shaping places the extensive prose arguments and scriptural paraphrases of these dialogues only one step away from nonmimetic sermons and pamphlets (290). There seems to be a narrowing of the notion of “performance” at work here. By equating “performance” with “physical action, music, and spectacle”, King denies the possibility that a costumed recital in front of an audience can be constituted as “performance”. But if such an event did take place – and such pondering is necessarily speculative – it certainly would seem to conform to any adequately inclusive definition of “performance”. Moreover, and more importantly, such speculation confirms that performative possibilities exist within the structure and rhetoric of the text itself. The sacramental significance of these texts, however, does not exist solely in the way in which they configure the relationship between drama and the eucharist. Rather, both texts are centrally concerned with questions of sacramental ritual and theology. For example, one finds throughout John Bon and Mast Parson an emphasis on the emptiness and hypocrisy of Catholic ritual. The title page foregrounds this interest, with an illustration of a Corpus Christi procession. The host, clearly visible in a monstrance, is carried in an elaborate procession surrounded by clerics in extravagant costumes. In an explicit illustration of the contest between word and image, the ideology of the procession is literally undercut by a verse stanza which ridicules the Catholic investment in ostentatious display: “Alas, poor fools Make of it, what ye will, it is a Wafer Cake” (159). There is here, in the injunction to “make of it, what ye will” a jibe at the ineffectual nature of the ritual of consecration, highlighting the emptiness of the procession and the spiritual emptiness of the monstrance, around which both the procession and the composition of the illustration are arranged. This reversal of the traditional dichotomy – Catholic sacramentality creates spiritual absence rather than presence; it drives God away – structures the text’s attitude to ritual. John Bon outlines how it is necessary to reject Catholic sacramentality to achieve spiritual presence: “leave your devilish Mass, and the Communion to you take! And then will CHRIST be with you” (168; emphasis in original). The mass is to be replaced with a reformed communion service; only then will spiritual presence be accessible.


This sense of a system of alternative and competing rituals is supported by documents of the period; the Second Edwardine Act of Uniformity (1552), for example, decrees that no-one should “willingly and wittingly hear and be present at any other manner or form of common prayer, of administration of the sacraments or of any other Rites contained in the book annexed to this Act, than is mentioned and set forth in the said book” (372). What this suggests is that there was at least a possibility of attending alternative (that is, non-“official”, unsanctioned) versions of the sacraments in the early 1550s. There were harsh punishments outlined too: rising from “imprisonment for six months” to “imprisonment for one whole year” to “imprisonment during his or their lives” (372). Alternative sacraments were apparently considered enough of a threat to justify such deterrents. If John Bon outlines the danger of Catholic ritual, The Endightment emphasises the typical Protestant claim for the pre-eminence of scripture. The text stages a debate about the scriptural authenticity of the mass. The mass, for example, argues that she has been instituted by Christ: “I am she that hath ben of a long continua¯ uce, instituted & made by christ and his apostles & aprouid by diuers, holy doctors” (10r ). The mass continues with a rehearsal of the scriptural support claimed for the ritual: No what though the nam be not m¯ecioned in the Scriptures yet the thing itselfe is mencioned there for in me is Christ hym selfe in ye form of bread and wine made by such wordes as is taken out of ye scripturs which christ lefte for us, as in Mat. xxvi. Mar. xiiii. & Lu. xxii. & also as paul declareth in the i. Epistell to ye Cor. xi. chap wherin he saith ye the lord Jesus the sam night in which he was betrayed toke bred and th¯aked and brake & said take ye & eat ye thys is mi bodi which is brok¯e for you now then if Christ doth saye, this is my body will you sai it is not his body (13r ). The mass here draws attention to the four scriptural accounts of the institution of the eucharist, paraphrasing Paul’s account in order to utilise the authority of Christ’s words. In this, and in Verity’s response which offers a different interpretation of the words of institution, the text rehearses a common early modern debate on the exegesis of the Christic words, “hoc est corpus meum” (“this is my body”).3

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The theological implications of this are not insignificant, but in this case, it is primarily necessary to appreciate the text’s investment in the analysis of scripture, as such analysis is assumed to have the capability to prove or disprove the claims of the mass. The claims of the Catholic mass, of course, are primarily represented in discourses of the period in terms of two doctrines. The first is the doctrine of Real Presence, which states that, in the words of Trent, “our lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is truly, really and substantially contained in the propitious sacrament of the holy eucharist” (Tanner *693).4 The second is the related, though distinct, doctrine of transubstantiation, which explains, via the appropriation of Aristotelian terminology, how the Real Presence is achieved: “by the consecration of the bread and wine, there takes place the change of the whole substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood the holy catholic church has suitably and properly called this change transubstantiation (Tanner *695)”.5 Both doctrines, of course, were hotly debated in early modern England. Adopting a similar line to Trent, for example, was Thomas Watson, composer of the play Absalom, and like Bale one of a number of clerical playwrights in the period.6 On 3 December 1551, Watson vigorously upheld transubstantiation in a disputation against Sir William Cecil, John Cheke, Edmund Grindal and others (Smith 23); after the Marian accession, Watson preached before the queen on the Real Presence (Smith 26; cf. Watson, Twoo Notable Sermons); neither did the Elizabethan accession dent his enthusiasm, as in 1558 Watson’s popular volume (issued ten more times), Holsome and Catholyke Doctryne Concerninge the Seuen Sacramentes of Chrystes Church, was published (Smith 27). If Trent and Watson agree on the Real Presence, John Bon and The Endightment are united in their opposition to the doctrine. John Bon, with its emphasis on the “Wafer Cake”, consistently emphasises a materialist interpretation of the mass. The Parson, John Bon’s rhetorical opponent, highlights the consecration as the moment at which transubstantiation occurs: “turn the bread to flesh, with five words we can with words holy and good,/Even, by and by, we turn the wine to blood” (166–7). John Bon, as befits his rustic simplicity, refuses to believe doctrine contrary to the evidence of his eyes and ears: “With five words alone,/To make both God and Man; and yet we see none! except your mouth be better tasted than mine,/I cannot feel


it other but that it should be wine” (167). In fact, John Bon’s response to the Parson does not really engage with the doctrine of transubstantiation, which accepts that the bread and wine continue to appear as such to human senses.7 It is a theologically ineffective argument, then, but it contributes to the text’s emphasis on the simple and familiar over the elaborate and theatrical. The Endightment contains a more elaborate version of John Bon’s “common-sense” argument: VERYTIE: Well then when the Descyples had receyued the breade of the bodye that the Vyrgynne marye bare, where was that bodye then, had they Eate it vp, or was it styl presente before them That same bodye after it had Suffred death and rose agayne yt assended vp to heauen and set hym downe on the ryght hande of his father nowe that bodye is in heauen Howe chanse it th¯e that you wyll make the People beleue that ye Substa¯ uce of bred and wyne is turned frome hys kynde vnto the verye Bodye of Chryste that the Vyrgyn marye bare (14r ) Even a Protestant text like this is interested in a locatable body of Christ, arguing – to put it simply – that if Christ is in heaven, he cannot be in the eucharist. And even though the Endightment does at least touch on the key concept of “Substa¯ uce”, one finds little originality or novelty in its arguments against the Real Presence at this point. There is, however, an interesting passage in the text which points to a possible contradiction in the mass. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that Christ may be present in the sacrament, Knowledge continues: if he be ther as this woman saith as I know he is not, let this nam sacramente be cleane abolisshed for he maketh yt but a synificacion of the deathe of christ & not christe hym selfe but rather you must proue the Scripturs false which callithe yt a sacramente or ells proue your selfe to be the Antechrist that Christe byd vs beware of (16v –17r ). In other words, disagreement about the Real Presence is also disagreement about the correct way to define a sacrament. A Catholic

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sacrament, as we have seen, causes and contains that which it signifies; a Protestant sacrament, however, simply signifies. There are, in this issue, three points, not all of which can be held to be true at the same time. First, both Catholics and Protestants agree that a sacrament is a sign. Secondly – this is the “Protestant” proposition – a sign signifies something but does not contain it (a sign is “but a synificacion”). Thirdly – the “Catholic” proposition – Christ is present in the eucharist. If the first two propositions are true, the third cannot be; if the second and third are correct, the first cannot be. In many ways, it is the second proposition – a sign signifies something but does not contain it – which is at the heart of the matter. This is where the philosophical disagreements between Catholic and Protestant arise, and it is certainly significant, for a study concerned with drama, that the culture is involved in such a debate about the nature of signs. To return to the Endightment for a moment, however, it is of considerable importance that this semi-dramatic text closes with a plea for exactly the thing that purely significatory sacraments deny: union with Christ. let vs therfore repente and be feruente to open the dore oure hartes I meane which is locked vp in vnbeleue that he may enter in and there is no dout then but that he wyll suppe wyth vs and we with him vnto the which supper I beseche the lord bringe vs all vnto, Amen (21r ). This apparent shift of genre, from semi-dramatic trial situation to quasi-liturgical (even, given the emphasis on supper, quasisacramental) concluding prayer draws attention to a key concern of the period: what might be called the sacrament-drama-subject nexus.

II Despite the reinstallation of Catholicism in the 1550s, it was midTudor Protestants who most consistently utilised drama as a means of promoting religious ideology. Of course, traditional mystery cycles continued to be performed throughout the middle decades of the


sixteenth century; these were heavily infused with a Catholic understanding of sacramentality, and it should always be kept in mind that these plays were performed concurrently with those analysed in this chapter.8 Yet if the mystery plays survive through the midcentury, critics have long been aware that the morality play – that other most “sacramental” of medieval dramatic genres – undergoes a significant change (some might be tempted to call it a “protestantization”) in the period.9 This book has argued earlier that Everyman, for example, represents a “Catholic” congruence of sacramentality and morality genre: Everyman’s best interests are served by a complete submission to the demands of the sacramental system. Moreover, Everyman’s subjectivity, I have argued, is constructed in terms of that system. “Protestant” drama of the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, however, has an altered understanding of both sacramentality and subjectivity. The Elizabethan interlude New Custom (c. 1570–3), for example, dramatises the replacement of Catholic sacramentality with a reformed version. The Catholic characters who first appear on stage – Perverse Doctrine and Ignorance – are trenchant in their ideology and reject the “new custom” of the Protestant preachers. Perverse Doctrine recalls with apparent horror a Protestant sermon in London: “Up stert the preachers,/I think not past twenty years old,/With a sounding voice and audacity bold,/And began to revile at the holy sacrament and transubstantiation” (2). The characteristically Protestant denial of transubstantiation echoes the other Protestant characteristics of youth and oral ministry (Perverse Doctrine, in contrast, refers to Ignorance and himself as “us ancients” (1)). Ignorance, too, maintains a Catholic understanding of the sacraments, rejecting the claims of Protestants who reject “transubstantiation and the mass” because “by scripture they cannot be brought to pass” (10). The text, then, rehearses a familiar Protestant trope: that Protestant sacramentality is scripturally authentic. New Custom, a Protestant minister, rejects his appellation, preferring to be called Primitive Constitution, and narrating a version of church history which reaches a nadir with the veneration of the mass: “Then brought they in their monsters, their masses, their light,/Their torches at noon to darken our sight” (17). The criticism of the mass is related in part to its elaborate ritual – the “torches at noon” are joined a few lines later by “Their smoking of the church and flinging of coals” (17) – yet it is also “monstrous”

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because it overturns the natural (and therefore divinely ordained) use of the senses: just as the Real Presence would deny the value of sense-perceptions, so Catholic lights and torches obscure rather than illuminate.10 New Custom goes on to announce his rejection of the mass in no uncertain terms: “the mass, and such trumpery were flat/Against God’s word and primitive constitution” (19). Soon, New Custom outlines his Protestant sacramentality in greater depth: he complains about Catholicism’s “Abuse of the sacraments”, particularly as “in number have you made them more/Than Christ ever made” (20); in addition, he takes another opportunity to revile transubstantiation, this time drawing on apostolic authority: “Th’apostles never taught your transubstantiation/Of bread into flesh” (20). Of particular interest in this text is the way in which Protestant sacramentality is sacramentality by negation: we are told that Catholicism accepts too many sacraments, but never explicitly told how many Protestantism should have; we are told that transubstantiation is theologically invalid, but never given an alternative. Light of the Gospel claims that Catholics are “devoid of all grace” (26); but it is, rather, this text’s understanding of sacramentality which seems to be defined by a void. Perhaps this is why the conclusion of the play – the repentance and conversion of Perverse Doctrine – so forcefully recalls the sacramental conclusions of medieval drama. Both Everyman and the Play of the Sacrament, for example, conclude with incorporation of the spiritual Other into the ritual community: Everyman finally succumbs to the sacraments, while the Croxton Jews undergo the rite of adult baptism. In New Custom, however, the conversion is from Catholicism to Protestantism, and the ritual apparatus is lacking. Nevertheless, much of the dramaturgy and vocabulary is reminiscent of pre-Reformation drama. The following passage is an excellent example: PERVERSE DOCTRINE: I repent my sins, and for them am sorry heartily; But how shall I be sure mercy for to obtain? LIGHT OF THE GOSPEL: Credit me truly, for my words are not vain, I am Light of the Gospel, and have full authority


To pronounce to the penitent forgiveness of iniquity, So that, in asking, you put your assurance to speed: Then no doubt you have obtained mercy indeed (46). The structure of this exchange is exactly that of the corresponding passages in pre-Reformation drama. First, the social and spiritual Other (in this case a Catholic priest) repents his sins and bows to the authority of the representative of sacnctioned sacramentality. But whereas, in medieval drama, the sacrament of penance and the associated keys of power give the priest divinely ordained authority to forgive sins, this cannot be available to Light of the Gospel. He does not claim to forgive sins, but instead to “have full authority/To pronounce to the penitent forgiveness of iniquity”, yet the dramatic structure nevertheless casts him in the role of a Catholic confessor. There is, to be sure, an attempt to “protestantize” this role: Light of the Gospel is so certain of forgiveness because of “faith”, and he even gives a scriptural reference (“Hebrews, the eleventh chapter and the first line”) (46). Nevertheless, the dramatic similarities continue, as Perverse Doctrine requests integration into “society with the Light of the Gospel” (47; emphasis added), is renamed “Sincere Doctrine” (47; the renaming of course recalls baptism), and, like the Jews in the Croxton play, can enter a new community only by rejecting the old one: “all wicked company you must clean forsake,/And fly their society as a toad or a snake” (47). In New Custom, then, even as late as the 1570s one can find evidence, both of the drive to fashion a new form of sacramentality and of the persistence of earlier ways of thinking about drama and the sacraments. Roughly contemporary with New Custom (but not published until 1581, thus in circulation in the era of commercial public theatres), Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience offers a more sustained and sophisticated exploration of a Reformed Everyman. The text exists in two issues of the same edition, with divergent generic and ideological assumptions. The first issue names the historical personage on whom the play’s plot is based, the Italian lawyer Francis (or Francisco/Francesco) Spira (or Spiera). Spiera, according to one critic, “is said to have been a devout Protestant who was forced by threats of punishment and loss of property to abjure his beliefs and return to Catholicism. He died in 1548, under

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circumstances not clearly understood, but evidently suffering from remorse” (Oliver 1).11 The second issue of the play, however, removes the explicit references to Spiera, focusing attention on Philologus as a version of the Everyman figure.12 (The ending of the play, too, differs between versions). The second-issue prologue, then, outlines its morality technique: And here, our Author, thought it meete, the true name to omit, And at this time, imagine him PHILOLOGVS to be, First, for because, a Comedie, will hardly him permit, The vices of one priuate man, to touch particulerly, Againe, nowe shall it stirre them more, who shall it heare or see, For if this worldling had ben namde, we wold straight deeme in minde, That all by him then spoken were, our selues we would not finde (Iss.II, ll. 36–42).13 There are a number of complimentary impulses behind Woodes’s claimed decision to “universalise” his central story, and the passage – offering, as it does, a rationale for certain creative choices – is an interesting example of the rhetorical relationship between an author and a text. Woodes’s sense of drama is that of a medium suited to the general, unable to deal with specific circumstances and instances to the same degree as it can offer general moral advice; the genre will “hardly” allow him to confront the “vices of one priuate man”.14 This sense of the general appeal of drama, coupled with the moralising impulse clearly detectable in the prologue, leads to a focus on the audience as the primary concern of the play. Those “who shall it heare or see” are those who will, the text hopes, be stirred into moral reflection and repentance. The strategy for watching (or hearing) this play is a strategy of identification: because Philologus is a general character, with all historical specificities flattened out the audience can see themselves in him, and change their lives accordingly. This sense of Philologus as an everyman character is repeated throughout the text. Horror, for example, tells the protagonist that “thou art a patterne true, of Gods iust indignation:/Whereby eche man may warned be, the like sinnes to eschew,/Least the same


torments they incurre, which in thee they shall view” (1987–1990). This is the same interpretation of Philologus’s character as outlined in the Prologue. His individuality is subsumed within his function as “a patterne true”, a moral and spiritual example for the benefit of the audience. Philologus himself comes to realise the logic of the play when convinced of his damnation, claiming that “I shall be a president, most horrible to see:/To Gods elect, that they may see, the price of abiuration” (2039–40). “President” here functions in the same way as “patterne”, suggesting that the character is an exemplum; and the emphasis on the visual spectacle of Philologus’s spiritual punishment (note the repetition of “see” in the lines quoted) establishes again the theatrical nature of the example. Again, Philologus later claims that “I may be a president, in whom all men may view,/Those torments, which to them, that wil forsake the Lord, are due” (2206–7). The text, like New Custom, argues against the Catholic understanding of sacramentality; and, as in New Custom, one of its central techniques is the identification of Catholic sacramentality with corrupt characters. So, for example, it is the ungodly triumvirate of Hypocrisy, Tyranny and Avarice which proclaims that sacramental Catholicism is to be re-established in the realm. Catholic sacramentality is equated with its material circumstances and modes of celebration: Avarice mentions “Aulters chalice and booke,/Vestments for Masse, sacraments, and prosession” (889–90), all of which are to be re-instituted at the demands of the Lord Legate. The scene in question is reminiscent of Bale’s drama in its ascription of a political imperative to Catholic sacramentality: the Lord Legate is a representative of the political power of the international Catholic Church.15 For example, his is the authority which demands that the reinstallation of Catholicism “must presently be practised” (882), while he also establishes a system of “inquisition” and “punishm¯et” (888, 894). In this scene, then, the political imperative of Catholic sacramentality is equated with the morality characters of Hypocrisy, Tyranny and Avarice, as each is portrayed as dependent on the others. Catholic sacramentality relies on Hypocrisy, Tyranny and Avarice for its implementation; yet all three are corrupt. Avarice claims that the correct way to “performe your office aright” is “For fauour or money to spare the offendent” (851–2); while Tyranny claims that he “will fauour such as will my hand greaze” (856). This emphasis on the corruption of Catholicism – and specifically on the economic imperative behind

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Catholic sacramentality – is common in Protestant discourse of the period.16 These ideas are further developed in the portrayal of Caconos, a Catholic priest. Speaking in a stage-Scottish accent, Caconos welcomes the reinstallation of Catholicism. His joy that “new ayen within awer lond installed is the Pope,/Whese Legat w authoritie tharawawt awr c¯ utry goth” (907–8), recalls and contrasts with Bale’s assertion of the political independence of England: Caconos welcomes a kind of national invasion by Catholicism. Again, Caconos welcomes the reinstallation of the mass – “Far hally Masse in ilke place, new thea auters de prepare” (914) – and the return of the sacramentals associated with Catholic ritual: “Hally watter, Pax, Crosse, Banner, Censour and Candill,/Cream, Crismatory, hally Bred” (915–16). This emphasis on the material aspects of the ritual is balanced by an awareness that the spiritual effect of the mass is non-existent: “Awr hally Masse, thaw thea bay dere, thea de it but in vayne,/Far thaw ther frends frea Purgatory, te help thea dea beleue,/Yet af ther hope, gif need rewhayre it wawd theam all deceue” (921–3). Alongside the spiritual inefficacy of the mass in this passage, one also finds an emphasis on the economic benefits of the reinstallation of Catholicism: The Sacraments, gif we mowt sell, war better than thea all, Far gif the Jewes gaue thratty pence, te hang Chrayst on a tree, Gude christi¯a folk thrayse thratty pence wawd co¯ ut a price but smal Sea that te ete him with ther teeth delayuered he mawght be (933–6). There are a number of features of this passage which serve as an implicit criticism of Catholic ritual. The similarities between “Gude christi¯a folk” and “the Jews” draws on an equation between Jewishness and sacramental heterodoxy which goes back to the eucharistic miracle stories of the middle ages (including, of course, the Play of the Sacrament);17 the “thratty pence” recalls Judas’s thirty pieces of silver; and the general sense of an economic abuse of ritual recalls other Protestant criticisms of Catholicism, including those espoused in Bale’s drama. Just as the Catholic characters are portrayed as abusing their sacramental role for financial gain, so too the play portrays a more general


abuse of positions of authority within the Catholic church. This is most evident in the scene in which Philologus is questioned by the Cardinal and the Vices; as a trial scene in which a “heretic” is on trial, this scene recalls interrogations and reports of interrogations which were in circulation in the period: Bale’s version of the interrogation of Anne Askewe is an excellent example.18 Philologus’s heresy, as outlined by his inquisitors, initially takes the form of an accusation of the disruption of community: “be you he that doeth thus disturb,/The whole estate of our fayth Catholike?” (1102–3). This general interrogation soon shifts to a more explicitly sacramental interrogation: “Of the body and bloud of Christ, what is thine opinion?” (1184), asks the Cardinal. Philologus’s reply is too long to quote in full, but is one of the fullest examples of a midTudor dramatic character outlining a sacramental ideology.19 For Philologus, the sacrament is “a signe of vnion”, pointing out its significance for the ritual community (in this Philologus agrees with Catholicism) and its primarily significatory capacity (in this he does not). The bread and the wine are, for Philologus, significantly symbolic: “as the bread is of many Cornells compounded,/And the Wine from the Juce of many Graps do discend,/So we should cease to contend” (1194–7).20 This is, however, only one of many reasons for the institution of the sacrament. The “cheefest cause” concerns “the infirmitie of our outwarde man”, and the corresponding need to add a visible symbol to the word of Christ so that weak-willed humans can achieve faith (1201–2). This emphasis on the visual nature of the sacrament again highlights its status as a symbol, as does Philologus’s sense of the “analogy” of the sacrament: “in the Sacrament there is this Analogy:/That Christ feedes our soules as the bread doth our body” (1213–14). This separation between soul and body is significant for analysing the way the text understands Philologus’s subject-position. Philologus’s subjectivity comes to the fore, not just in the interrogation scene, but also more significantly in the two scenes which draw on the dramatic tradition of psychomachia.21 Philologus takes centrestage in both of these scenes, the first between Spirit and Suggestion, and the second between Conscience and Suggestion. This appropriation of a familiar model from the morality genre suggests that the play constructs subjectivity in a manner not dissimilar to that of pre-Reformation drama.

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There are, however, significant ways in which The Conflict of Conscience differs from traditional pre-Reformation drama. If one takes Everyman as a representative example, the climax of that play is Everyman’s repentance and forgiveness. It is necessary that this takes place on stage, to be visible to the audience; and it is necessary – given the play’s religious ideology – that the repentance and forgiveness take place within a sacramental framework. It has already been shown that New Custom stages a Protestantised version of this scheme, shorn of the ritual apparatus of Catholic sacramental forgiveness. The Conflict of Conscience goes even further than New Custom, however: not only is Philologus’s reintegration no longer sacramental, it is also not performed. Instead, the repentance and conversion is, in the second issue, narrated by Nuntius: Oh ioyfull newes, which I report, and bring into your eares, Philologus, that would haue hangde himselfe with coard, Is nowe conuerted vnto God, with manie bitter teares, By godly councell he was woon, all prayse be to the Lorde, His errours all, he did renounce, his blasphemies he abhorde: And being conuerted, left his lyfe, exhorting foe and friend, That do professe the fayth of Christ, to be constant to the ende (2411–17) Structurally – both in terms of the configuration of the repentance and its function in the dramaturgical sequence of the play – this conversion is similar to most others in sixteenth-century drama. Philologus, like his dramatic predecessors, repents his sins and is welcomed into the Christian community. But the contrast with preReformation drama is clear: whereas such texts rely on the performance of the sacraments to illustrate the gracious state of the repentant, here such grace is, rather, a matter of faith on the part of the audience. In some ways, this is a symptom of the larger sacramental shift from Catholicism to Protestantism – faith in visible ritual is reconstructed as faith in an unseeable word/Word. This is, of course, a theological shift, and from a Protestant point–of–view, it is both desirable and necessary. In dramatic terms, however, it is not at all clear that the strategy of The Conflict of Conscience is as successful as that of Everyman. For if Everyman draws on the cultural capital of late medieval Catholicism, and


if Everyman’s repentance leads to a settled, secure interiority, The Conflict of Conscience operates in a more radically unsure religious climate. Perhaps as a result of this, Philologus’s interiority is frequently imagined in terms of anxiety. Indeed, it is only in the second issue of the text that Philologus survives: the corresponding lines from the first issue demonstrate the way in which the absence of sacramental absolution can increase the despair of the sinner: Oh dolefull newes, which I report, and bring into your eares, Philologus by deepe dispaire hath hanged himselfe with coard, His Wife for dolor and distresse, her yellow haire she teares, His Children sigh and weepe for griefe, lyfe is of them abhorde: (2411–14). If the second issue suggests the possibility of dramatising repentance and forgiveness in a sacramentally altered context, the first issue implies that such repentance may no longer be available.22 Whereas pre-Reformation Catholic drama can promote the sacraments as a means of reconciliation between God and man, The Conflict of Conscience, in its divergent textual versions, bears witness to the tensions involved in sacramental reform. In this, the play is not atypical: rather it demonstrates, like many other examples of Tudor drama, the disruptive impact of sin in the mid-Tudor conception of the sacramental subjectivity.

III In the Catholic sacramental system, penance is the ritual which deals most effectively with the problem of sin; the grace achieved by the removal of original sin in baptism can be restored, after it has been removed by actual sin, by submission to the sacrament of penance. The reformed version of sacramentality, however, is unwilling to accomodate penance, and this has a number of potential effects: one of the most significant is that baptism becomes the prime sacramental means by which sin can be tackled. Of course, baptism is an essential component of the Catholic system for the forgiveness of sins: Trent’s canons on baptism affirm its necessity for all Christians, yet also proclaim the need for another ritual to remove postbaptismal sins.23 The first of these tenets is acceptable to a reformed

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sacramentality; the second is not. Baptismal ideology informs much dramatic output of the sixteenth century; in George Buchanan’s Latin drama Baptistes, for example, John the Baptist outlines a scripturally authentic baptismal ideology: “I am a voice crying on the distant ridges of the mountains I baptize the people with water in the name of him whose slippers I his servant would be unworthy to remove, of him whom no man acknowledges though he lives and continually roams amongst you” (151).24 Similarly, Malchus’s nonChristian nature is suggested by his criticism that John “has the effrontery to purge sins with water” (136). This baptismal imagery – the symbolic removal of the stain of sins – is also locatable in Jephtha, another of Buchanan’s plays, where spotlessness is equated with virtue. The text imagines this both as an exterior spotlessness – “How much better that we keep our hands unspotted with blood” (82) – and an internal spotlessness – “the safest remedy, I think, is enjoyment of an unspotted conscience” (75).25 The baptismal capacity to remove sin concerns, of course, the ability to remove original sin; and a baptismally unspotted conscience is thus a conscience free from original sin. Yet perhaps because of anxieties surrounding sacramental reform, the spectre of original sin is frequently imagined in drama of the period as a sinful carnality which taints the innocence of the soul – this is what Hypocrisy, in Lusty Juventus, refers to when he says, “I wyl infect hym wyth wicked company,/Whose conuersation shalbe so fleshly,/Yea, able to ouercome an innocent” (502–4; my emphasis). John King has argued for the importance of original sin to the dramaturgy of the period: for King, Lusty Juventus, like Wager’s Mary Magdalene and other plays, partakes in a “convention of dramatizing original sin as stage licentiousness” (317). This “convention” explains, as King suggests, the appellation and behaviour of certain characters in the drama. But more than a convention, the prevalence of original sin may be seen in the frequent employment of imagery which links appetitiveness and sin. Appetite is a significant signifier of original sin for two main reasons. The first is that the originary transgression in the Garden of Eden could be construed as a sin of gluttony as much as a sin of ambition;26 the second is that the way in which original sin is contracted – through sexual reproduction – is frequently also imagined in terms of (sinfully) excessive appetite.27 In a move which may owe something to this logic of sinful appetite, the Elizabethan Injunctions of 1559


denied communion – that is, a regulated, ordained act of consumption – to those obviously in a state of sin.28 Certainly one can find an association between appetite and sin in the drama of the period. One of the Vice characters in The Trial of Treasure (c. 1567), for example, is called Greedy-Gut, suggesting a link between sinfulness and appetite. Moreover, Lusty Juventus’s exuberantly sinful nature is proclaimed linguistically by phrases like, “By the masse that meaet I loue aboue al thynge,/You may drawe me aboute the toune w a puddynge” (713–14). Such phrases suggest the conjunction of appetite and sin, while at the same time – via the opening oath – suggesting a sense of sacramental heterodoxy. There is, then, a significant connection between appetite and (original) sin in the drama of this period, a connection which has important ramifications for our understanding of the performance of subjectivity in early modern England. One of the most common ways to imagine subjectivity in the period is via a soul/body dichotomy, with the soul elevated to the position of privileged interiority, and the body imagined as a corruptible exterior.29 In Lusty Juventus, for example, Juventus comes to realise the privileged existence of his “own secret conscience” (100); and this relationship between body and soul is traceable in many other examples of mid-Tudor drama. Sapience, in The Trial of Treasure, claims that “treasures here gotten [i.e. in the flesh] are uncertain and vain,/But treasures of the mind do continually remain” (275): again the interior aspect of the subject is privileged over the exterior. In Lewis Wager’s The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene (c. 1550–6), Knowledge of Sin outlines an instance in which the privileged interior has become corrupt: “The body is whole, but sick is the conscience,/Which neither the law nor man is able to heale” (1207–8). A similar figuration of a corrupt interior can be found in The Conflict of Conscience, where Philologus contrasts the apparent contrition of his outer surface with the lack of repentance in his inner self: “you only see the outward part My lips have spoke the words indeed: but yet I feel my heart/With cursing is replenished, with rancour, spite and gall” (127). Both of these examples continue to rely on a construction of interiority as superior to exteriority, of the interior as answerable only to higher laws than the body. This is developed further in Philologus’s claim that “I fear I should kill/My soul for ever, if against my conscience/I should to the Pope’s laws acknowledge obedience” (87). The dichotomy here is not explicitly

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figured as interior versus exterior, but rather as interior (conscience) versus external obedience (the Pope’s laws). The equation of externality with corrupt bodiliness becomes, in this example, an equation of externality with Catholicism. The privileged interior is, in this case, a privileged Protestant interior. The significance of this equation of externality with Catholicism becomes clearer when one considers that, in this type of Protestant drama, the exterior of the subject is frequently associated with sin. The Devil in Lusty Juventus resolves to corrupt Juventus by turning him towards “carnal pleasures”: “I will go haste to infect this youth That he may lead his life carnally” (63). The imagery of bodily disease (“infect”) is noteworthy here, suggesting as it does that sin is an external, physical phenomenon; not only is the type of sin imagined physical (carnal), it is also figured in terms which owe much to physical frailty and the malfunctioning of the body.30 The discussion between Good Counsel and Juventus leaves little doubt as to the physical nature of Juventus’s sins: one finds references to “fleshly Capernite”, “fleshly swinish lusts”, “fleshly fruits”, “fleshly liberty”, “the flesh [which] rebelleth against the spirit”, “your own flesh [which] is your most utter enemy”, “sinful flesh” and “the flesh I did not tame” (91–9), all of which contribute to the forceful assertion of a link between physicality/externality and sin. In a remarkable formulation which captures vividly the physicality of sin, Juventus relates how “Satan did me deceive,/And wrapped me in sin, many a fold” (99). It is clear that here Juventus is imagined to be speaking from the interior core of his subject-being, having overcome the temptations of the flesh; the sin is an external force deriving from Satan, but the image also allows the possibility that the “me” is Juventus’s privileged interior, and the “wrapping” of sin is his bodily externality. The second-issue Prologue to The Conflict of Conscience contains a thoroughly comparable image: A cruell Conflict certainly, where Conscience takes the foyle, And is constrained by the flesh, to yelde to deadly sinne, Whereby the grace and loue of God, from him, his sinne doeth spoyle This Hystorie here, example showes, of one fast wrapt therein (57–61).31


The image of Philologus wrapped in sin is obviously similar to the complaint of Juventus; more significant, perhaps, is the correspondence of the relationship between interiority and exteriority imagined by the two texts: as in Lusty Juventus, so in The Conflict of Conscience the privileged interior is endangered by association with the corruptible exterior. All of this is, on one level, perhaps to be expected; the soul–body dichotomy, with its attendant privileging of the soul, is a familiar trope in cultures with a strong Christian influence. Where mid-Tudor drama is more deeply engaged with the ideological function of the dichotomy is in the suggestion that the interior core of being can also be corrupted. This troubles the binary logic of the soul–body distinction at the same time as it proclaims religious ideology’s capacity to pronounce damnation. In Marie Magdalene one can find examples of an anxious interiority, an unsettled interior core which is therefore open to further corruption. The Lawe, for example, claims that “my office is to fyll the mynde with affliction” (1058), and, later, that “By the Lawe commeth the knowledge of synne Whiche freate and byte the conscience within,/Causyng the same euermore to lament” (1103–6). This example is of particular interest because it suggests the religious necessity of unsettling interiority, creating anxiety in order that sin can be identified and the subject can repent. According to the logic of the Catholic sacramental system, this is an ideologically coherent manoeuvre, as it forces the penitent to seek refuge (and a restitution of an untroubled interior) via the ritual of penance. For Protestants, the internal anxiety of Mary Magdalene – “In my conscience I am so greuously perplexed” (1229) – may have the capacity for a more profound sense of subjective anxiety. According to The Trial of Treasure, taming the lustful instincts of the flesh – “our inclination to bridle and subdue” (262) – can be a means towards achieving an easing of such interior anxiety: “a mind well content/Is great riches” (285). This, of course, suggests a greater dependence between interiority and exteriority than the model of the privileged soul is willing to allow; it also reiterates the proposition that the interior can be as corruptible as the exterior. Again, Hyprocrisy, in Lusty Juventus has “bene busyed, since the world began,/To graffe thy [i.e. Satan’s] lawes in the heart of man” (64); Iniquity, in Nice Wanton (1547–53), threatens to “be your servant and your master Yea, creep into your breast” (179). Such invasions of the interior acknowledge the

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potential corruption of the soul, and indicate the instability of the soul–body system. For sixteenth-century Catholicism, the potential corruption of the soul is compensated for by the sacramental system. Baptism initially removes original sin from the soul, while penance is available to remove the guilt of actual sin. Protestant sacramentality, however, has a number of problems with this ideology of sin. First, of course, penance is no longer considered a sacrament in Protestant churches, so there can be no ritual means to remove actual sin from the soul. This is troubling enough, but a more considerable problem concerns the intricacies of baptismal theology. A significant theological conundrum arises around sin: if the baptised soul is innocent and pure, why does the subject sin in later life? The answer, according to Catholicism, is concupiscence. Trent defines concupiscence as follows: Concupiscence or a tendency to sin remains [after baptism, but] the catholic church has never understood it to be called sin in the sense of being truly and properly such in those who have been regenerated, but in the sense that it is a result of sin and inclines to sin (667*).32 Concupiscence, then, remains on the soul after original sin has been removed, but, while it is responsible for sin, it is not sin in itself. Such was the Catholic consensus; but many Protestants, John Foxe among them, did not agree: this original sin the pope’s doctrine doth not deny and holdeth that this inward concupiscence and vicious affections are no mortal nor damnable sin and say moreover, that this “concupiscentia” in us is no deprivation of the higher, but only of the lower, parts of man, being a thing adiaphora, indifferent, and no less natural in us, than is the appetite to eat and drink (Acts and Monuments 77). Foxe’s rhetoric proclaims the sinfulness of concupiscence, denying Catholic interpretation of the doctrine.33 For Foxe, concupiscence is something to be strived against and resisted, not meekly to be accepted. This is not an insignificant theological subtlety, as understandings of concupiscence are central to conceptions of identity


in the period. For Catholicism, concupiscence impels the subject towards its own potential dissolution in sin.34 For Foxe and others, concupiscence is itself a sin. But there is a tension in Foxe’s argument: in arguing that concupiscence is a sin, Foxe seems to suggest either that baptism is ineffective (it leaves sin on the soul), or that it has an alternative function (it creates sin on the soul). Foxe’s stress on the sinfulness of concupiscence therefore leaves the possibility that baptism leads to sin; to put it another way, that Christian subjectivity is essentially sinful, that identity is founded on sin.35 Concupiscence is, I suggest, a major concern of drama of this period. In The Conflict of Conscience, Hypocrisy delivers a (hypocritical) prayer that God “would giue/To ech of you present, a harty good will That by the aide of spyrituall assistance,/You may subdue your carnall concupiscence” (274–8). Although Hypocrisy is clearly speaking as a dissembler at this point – he does not “really” want the audience to be free from sin – his formulation provides a clue as to the religious ideology of the play. Woodes uses the traditional body–soul dichotomy (“spiritual” and “carnal”, in this instance), and recalls Foxe in his identification of concupiscence with the purely bodily, thereby ignoring the fundamental incoherence in Protestant thought. Protestant interest in concupiscence is conspicuous also in Wager’s Mary Magdalene, evidenced most clearly by the dramatic persona of Carnal Concupiscence. Concupiscence in this text receives the familiar association with sexuality and appetite; it is resolutely “fleshly concupiscence” (178); “My name is carnall concupiscence or desyre,/Which all the pleasures of the fleshe doth require” (287–8). Recalling Foxe’s “appetite to eat or drink”, Carnal Concupiscence revels in pleasures of ingestion and consumption: “the fleshe to nourishe with drinke and meate,/Without abstinence like a beast always to eate;/To quaffe and drinke when there is no necessitie” (299–301). This excess of appetite is accompanied by an urge towards sexual sin: “I containe in my selfe all kynd of lecherie,/Fornication, whoredom, and wicked adulterie,/Rape, incest, sacrilege, softnesse, and bestialitie” (303–5), the inventory of sins acting as a signifier of concupiscence’s role as the originary source of sin (the sins are contained within Carnal Concupiscence). But if sins of the flesh are provoked by concupiscence, the play also acknowledges that an interior version of sin can result: “in hir I haue kindled such a fyre,/That she beginneth

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to burn in carnall desyre” (279–80), claims Carnal Concupiscence of Mary Magdalene. So, although at first glance the figure of Carnal Concupiscence appears to function simply as an embodiment of lust (so equating the character with the non-theological sense of “concupiscence”), there are clearly ways in which this figuration is located within contemporary theological disputes. This complication of the notion of concupiscence may, in turn, allow us to complicate the notion of Lust, certainly as regards the character of that name in The Trial of Treasure. Lust, who has onstage battles with another character named Just, may also be considered as a dramatisation of the notion of concupiscence. If this is the case, then the play argues for the suppression of concupiscible instincts, suggesting the need for a taming or suppression of the exterior – ideologically similar to a mortification of the flesh – as a means towards taming an anxious interior. Sapience, for example, provides an instance of the type of suppression of interior sin that is necessary: such as are led by their lust, To incline evil are always appropriate: They have not, as you have, battle and combat Against the cogitations that inwardly spring (276). Here one can see that, unlike in Lusty Juventus and The Conflict of Conscience, sin is not an external, Satanic substance in which one becomes entwined; rather, it is a cogitation that springs from the interior depths of one’s own subjectivity. There is, furthermore, an acknowledgement in the play, concurring with Catholic theology, that concupiscence is present in all, even the just; yet the just control and suppress their inclinations, and the play’s avowed purpose is to extend the number of successes in that respect: “Even so may all men learn of me again,/Thy beastly desires to bridle and restrain” (297), claims Just. The explicit appropriation of the theology of concupiscence for dramatic purposes, however, is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the Prologue to Lusty Juventus: For as much as man is naturally prone, To euil fr¯ o his youth, as Scripture doth recite


It is necessary, that he be spedyly wdrawen, From concupiscence of sin, hys naturall appetite For youth is frayle and easy to drawe, (By grace) to goodness: (by nature) to yll: That nature hath ingrafted, is harde to kyll (1–14). This is an excellent example of the dramatic interest in anxieties surrounding concupiscence. The theological notion of concupiscence as a post-baptismal inclination to sin is accepted in vague terms (disguised by the rhetoric of nature) but Protestantised by a claim to scriptural authority; there is an emphasis on the need to overcome concupiscence, similar to that found in Protestant texts from Foxe to the drama; and the telling phrase “concupiscence of sin” reveals an anxiety as to the exact nature of concupiscence. The final contrast between nature and grace suggests the need for faith as a means of achieving grace in a non-sacramental context – penance is no longer available as a means of combating sin. All of this, then, suggests that concupiscence is a central concern of this drama, and that it complicates the text’s attempts to forge an alternative to Catholic modes of regulating individuals and society. But one can also trace in the drama the spectre of abjection: the sense that this congruence of concupiscence and sin, the unsettling of the interior– exterior dichotomy, and the reform of sacramentality, makes possible not just the re-fashioning, but perhaps even the dissolution, of the self. At this point, it is worth recalling Kristeva’s formulation of the relationship between Christianity and abjection. For Kristeva, Christianity’s approach to abjection is significant because the religion establishes “a new arrangement of differences” in which “abjection is no longer exterior. It is permanent and comes from within” (113). This focus on the unsettled interior of the subject is a properly Christian mode of configuring the subject’s relationship with God: abjection “endures through the subjection to God of a speaking being who is innerly divided” (113); that is, the unsettling of interiority contributes to the Christian logic of regulation and submission (and to the possibility of a redemptive grace). This crisis of interiority is captured most forcefully in mid-Tudor drama in two moments

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of abjection, when the central characters experience the despair of dissolution. Juventus complains as follows: O sir, this state is so miserable the which I lye in, That my comfort and hope from me is seperated, I would to god I had neuer bene, Wo worth the time that euer I was created (1032–5). Here the crack in the construction of subjectivity has fissured, and Juventus’s subject-position is in danger of disappearing. His utterances are fragmenting: note “the which I lye in”, referring, in its entirety, to the previous phrase (“this state is so miserable”), and the awkward syntax of the second line. In particular, the disjunction between “my comfort and hope” and “from me is separated” highlights the disjunction of being and identity which Juventus undergoes at this point. The result, in the immediately following lines, is a pair of utterances which, in the act of speech, attempt to destroy the speaking subject. To be un-created, to be never-been, is exactly what – given the text’s investment in his constructed subjectivity – Juventus cannot be: he can never never be, and the tension forces him into a position of abjection.36 Something similar happens to Philologus in The Conflict of Conscience, in the final psychomachia scenes. Horror (“Confusion and horror of the mynde” (1969)) appears to Philologus, assuring him of his reprobation and lack of grace: “thou hast extinguished, the holy Spirit He will no lenger in thy soule, and spirit make abode” (1977–9). The appearance of Horror suggests a loss of self for Philologus.37 The Christian sense of identity, represented by the dwelling of the Holy Spirit within the protagonist, is erased because of sin (in this case, then, sin can destroy a sense of subjectivity just as it can help to forge one in other instances). The departure of the Holy Spirit is matched by the arrival of “The Spirit of Sathan” (1983), representing the corrupt core of Philologus’s subjectivity. And Philologus’s abjection is clear from his response: O painfull paine of deepe disdaine, oh griping greefe of hell, Oh horror huge, oh soule supprest, and slaine with desperation, Oh heape of sinnes, the sum wherof, no man can number well:


Oh death, oh furious flames of hell, my iust recompensation, Oh wretched wight, oh creature curst, oh childe of condempnation (1991–5). The images here are simultaneously of emptiness (note the repeated “O/Oh”) and of enormity (“horror huge”); of the end of life (“slaine”) and of the vivid reality of pain (“O painfull paine”); of the singular (the intense focus on the individual fate of Philologus) and the grossly plural (“heap of sins”). It is, this chapter suggests, the tension in the mid-Tudor attempt to forge a reformed sacramentality, and the resultant tension in the sacramental subjectivity, which forces, to borrow Trent’s phrase on original sin, this “death of the soul” (666).38

IV For Kristeva, the Christian investment in, and answer to, the possible dissolution of the self caused by the processes of abjection is emphatically sacramental: [T]he body of Christ, assuming the guise of a natural food (bread), signifies me both as divided (flesh and spirit) and infinitely lapsing. I am divided and lapsing with respect to my ideal, Christ, whose introjection by means of numerous communions sanctifies me while reminding me of my incompletion (118). The sacraments – in this case, particularly the eucharist – maintain the regulation and subjection of the Christian subject by suggesting the incompleteness of that subject, while at the same time offering the possibility of radical change via the “introjection”, to use Kristeva’s phrase, of grace or, in this case, of Christ Himself. This view of the sacraments is, I suggest, similar to the pre-Reformation conception of the sacraments outlined earlier in this book: the simultaneous existence of a mode of social control (the sacramental sociology) with the possibility of a personal, individual spiritual experience (the sacramental subjectivity). But this, it seems, is substantially different to sacramentality as conceived by mid-Tudor drama. A parallel may be found in the manner in which the official proclamations of the Edwardian church refuse to acknowledge the individual implications of sacramentality, focusing instead on communal discipline. Such

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religious reforms, both Edwardian and Elizabethan, have affected the dramatic structure of these “morality” plays: the conventional sacramental patterning remains, but the final sacramental recuperation – the ritual reconciliation between the desires of the individual and the desires of the society – is necessarily absent. This is why the spectre of abjection, in this context, is more threatening and problematic than that examined by Kristeva: sacramental anxiety, as experienced in the mid-sixteenth century, creates a context in which the conventional modes of representing the self (as an individual, as a member of society and as a salvation-seeker) are, even as they are evoked, shown to be inadequate.

4 Interrogating Sacramentality: The Drama of Christopher Marlowe

If The Conflict of Conscience dramatises the possible dissolution of the self, critics have not been slow to see a similar process at work in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; indeed, the critical consensus has long been that Woodes’s play functions as a “source” for Marlowe’s.1 Yet this should not lead us to neglect the wide variety of approaches to the sacraments in Marlowe’s drama; in addition to Faustus’s despair, for example, we can find Barabas’s manipulation of ritual and Tamburlaine’s assumption of the role of the divinity. This chapter argues that Marlowe’s drama forms a part of the process by which major cultural questions surrounding the sacraments continue to be explored and interrogated at the end of the sixteenth century. Jonathan Dollimore, in an influential reading, has characterised Faustus as an “interrogative text” (Radical Tragedy 109), and it may be useful to think of Marlovian drama more generally in these terms. The sophistication and technical skills brought by Marlowe’s experience as a professional dramatist mean that this drama, unlike most of its predecessors, does not attempt to promote sacramentality in one of its various forms – rather, it interrogates the multiplicity of forms, thereby reflecting the culture’s continuing preoccupation with the sacraments.

I In the late sixteenth century, when Protestantism seemed finally to be established as the official state religion, one of the most frequently imagined menaces in English culture was the projected threat of 91

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Catholicism, whether constructed as an external, aggressive force, or as a site of possible discord and corruption internal to the country. This menace, of course, was ideologically managed and manipulated, as the figure of the Catholic, constructed and vilified across a range of cultural texts, became an easy way of defining what English Protestantism emphatically was not.2 Contemporary political proclamations which may have contributed to a popular sense of anti-Catholicism include the Act Against Jesuits and Seminarists (1585) and the Act Against Recusants (1593).3 Michael Questier claims that “by the end of the 1580s [t]he political conflict between the churches was clarified and intensified, and alteration of a man’s religious allegiance became an extreme step” (4).4 In this context of increasing rigidification, one of the most striking features of Marlowe’s drama is its refusal to adopt a straightforwardly identifiable religious position; this may suggest a dramatic method attuned to interrogating, perhaps to overturning, symbolically loaded cultural images of “the Catholic” and “the Protestant”. On one level, of course, Marlowe’s drama participates in a discourse of anti-Catholicism prevalent in late-sixteenth century English culture. This discourse, deriving from earlier reformers like Bale, stresses the political independence of England, painting Rome as the originary site of undesirable foreign intervention; allied to this, of course, is a demonisation of the Pope as the ultimate political representative of the Catholic threat.5 So, when Marlowe’s English king rails against the “superstitious taperlights” and “antichristian churches” of “Proud Rome,” vowing to “fire thy crazèd buildings and enforce/The papal towers to kiss the lowly ground” (Edward II, I.iv.97–101), one may detect an appeal to popular anti-Catholicism.6 Faustus’s duping of the Pope is, of course, another example of this; and one should also ascribe some significance to the glee with which Marlovian characters relate tales of papal overthrow and assassination. Techelles, for example, narrates his conquest of “the mighty Christian priest/Called John the Great” as a version of papal deposition: “[his] triple mitre I did take by force/And made him swear obedience to my crown” (2 Tamburlaine I.iii.187–91). Barabas, meanwhile, at one point models himself on the alleged murderer of a Pope: “And with her let it [i.e. Barabas’s poisoned pottage] work like Borgia’s wine,/Whereof his sire, the Pope, was poisonèd!” (The Jew of Malta III.iv.99–100).7 These characters are markedly different in their

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religious, geographic and ideological positions: but they are united by their employment of a discourse of anti-Catholicism. This is not, however, the end of the story. For Marlovian antiCatholicism is merely one of a number of attitudes espoused by various characters throughout the dramatic corpus. For many readers and audiences, the dominant Marlovian approach to Catholicism – and to Christianity in general – may be aptly summarised by Machevil’s “I count religion but a childish toy” (Jew Prologue 14–5);8 but a more adequate approach to the drama’s ways of conceptualising religion may be encapsulated in Meander’s telling uncertainty as to the supernatural status of Tamburlaine: “Some powers divine, or else infernal, mixed/Their angry seeds at his conception” (1 Tamburlaine II.vi.9–10). The slippage between the binary opposites of divine and infernal suggests the manner in which Marlovian drama is engaged in a process of negotiating borderlines: in addition to the borders of divinity and diabolism, the texts cross boundaries between Catholicism and anti-Catholicism, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Nowhere, perhaps, are the results of this binary-slippage as visible as in the history of critical responses to Doctor Faustus.9 For every critic like Irving Ribner, who claims that Faustus “is not a Christian morality play, for it contains no affirmation of the goodness or justice of the religious system it depicts” (109), one can find a critic like Leo Kirschbaum, arguing that “Doctor Faustus is wholly conventional in its Christian values and is in no sense iconoclastic” (77). Perhaps, one can claim, it is the equilibrial suspension of these systems of binary opposition which gives Marlovian drama its peculiar force; such a formulation clarifies the ways in which Marlowe differs from a playwright like Bale, whose ideological worldview is based on the establishment of a system of binary oppositions (see Chapter 2).10 This chapter, then, suggests that the subversive potential of Marlovian drama is a result of this subtle balance of nugatory impulses; the Marlovian treatment of the Catholic sacramental system is an excellent microcosm for drawing attention to this dramatic technique.

II Sacramental concerns are rife in Marlovian drama. Faustus’s moments of religious clarity, for example, are marked by a concern to acquire the salvific power of Christ’s blood – “One drop would save my

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soul, half a drop” (V.ii.70–1) – traditionally available through the eucharist. Furthermore, the eruption of the divine into the prosaic, a central feature of Catholic sacramentality, is a crucial component of Tamburlaine’s vigorous self-assertion: “Jove himself will stretch his hand from heaven/To ward the blow and shield me safe from harm”; “Legions of spirits fleeting in the air/Direct our bullets and our weapons’ points/And make your strokes to wound the senseless air” (1 Tamburlaine I.ii.179–80; III.iii.156–8).11 These examples may suggest a non-ritual sacramentality still present in the dramatist’s worldview – grace can be achieved, but not through ecclesiastically ordained ceremonies. However, the Marlovian canon also contains displays of conventionally sacramental situations from which the sacraments have been removed; a good example of this is the portrayal of the deathbed. In sixteenth-century England, death was often constructed as a spectacular experience, a drama in which the deathbed plays the part of the stage, and the dying Christian theatrically performs his or her trust in the salvific power of Christ. The deathbed is also, in pre-Reformation society, the last contact between the individual Christian and a representative of the church; as such, it offers the ideal location for the administration of the three last sacraments of penance, eucharist and extreme unction. Among the most popular of late medieval representations of death was the text known as the Ars Moriendi, derived from the Speculum artis bene Moriendi (composed, according to Eamon Duffy, in the early fifteenth century under instruction from the Council of Florence) and progressively simplified and shortened to the point where the final chapter, dealing with the deathbed temptations of the devil, was “reduced to the vivid form of eleven pictures with a brief accompanying text,” a visual emphasis which led to “an immensely popular and influential blockbook accessible even to the illiterate” (Duffy 317). The cultural influence of this text was high in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the ideology it espoused still held influence as the sixteenth century turned to the seventeenth: the historian Ralph Houlbrooke highlights, for example, how “the tradition of sacramental deathbed ministry was alive and vigorous in the early seventeenth century” (169). There are noteworthy parallels between Marlovian drama and the Ars Moriendi tradition: in 2 Tamburlaine, for instance, Act Two, Scene Four opens with the drawing of the curtain to reveal, in the


discovery space, a tableau which strongly resembles the illustrations of the deathbed Christian in the earlier text: “The arras is drawn, and Zenocrate lies in her bed of state, Tamburlaine sitting by her; three Physicians about her bed, tempering potions. Theridamas, Techelles, Usumcasane, and the three sons” (II.iv.0SD). The characteristic mobility of Tamburlaine is, in this tableau, arrested by the unstoppable approach of death. Crucially, however, Marlowe alters the Ars Moriendi tradition even as he invokes it: there is, for example, no priest or spiritual counsellor at the deathbed. The presence of a religious representative by the side of a dying person was a feature of early modern Protestantism as well as of Catholicism, although by the time of George Strode’s Anatomie of Mortalitie (1632), the practice was apparently not universally followed: “it is a thing much to be misliked that in all places almost the Physitian is first sent for, and comes in the beginning of the sicknes, & the Minister comes when a man is half dead” (107). Strode’s perception of the rise in importance of the physician might be related to the rise of “science” in the seventeenth century, but Marlowe’s use of the physicians may have a longer ancestry: Michael Neill identifies the physicians in a later scene as a fairly explicit borrowing from the tradition of the dance of death (58). Of course, the lack of a priest in this scene means that the crucial difference between Marlowe and the Ars Moriendi is in the ritual performance of the last sacraments: for the Ars Moriendi, the last sacraments are a necessary part of a Christian death; yet they are entirely absent at Zenocrate’s deathbed.12 Zenocrate’s death suggests that continuing disputes over interpretations of the sacraments can form a context for reading Marlovian drama: Marlowe’s invocation of the Ars Moriendi tradition suggests a Catholic presence in the drama, even as the removal of the priest from the scene troubles that presence, and makes a sacramental deathbed a theatrical impossibility. The sixteenth-century controversies over ecclesiastical ritual have by no means diminished by the final decades of the century; as Michael Questier argues, Protestants and Catholics in late Elizabethan England found it almost impossible to imagine a Christianity without a form of sacramentality: “If the pursuit of true faith meant a personal experience and outward effectual signification of conversion and repentance, this had to be given formal expression through the liturgy and sacraments of a true and particular institutional church” (10). Moreover, Eamon Duffy has argued

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that the “rites of passage” associated with Catholic sacramentality continued to be performed well into the later sixteenth century (589– 91).13 Yet it is the case that any simple notion of Catholic “survival” is insufficient to explain the processes at work in the period; more useful is the notion that individuals and communities were negotiating changes between – and articulating identities via – a number of competing ritual forms.14 Indeed, it may be argued that the staging of ritual in Marlowe’s drama represents a sustained exploration of the effect on individuals and societies when alternative ritual forms become available. C.L. Barber claims that Faustus is a “special case” in Elizabethan England, “where religious ritual, and blasphemous substitutes for ritual, are central in a drama” (98); but it may be more accurate to follow the lead of Harry Levin, who sees in Marlovian drama generally “an antireligious fascination with ceremonial” (148).15 Indeed, in some cases Marlovian ritual does appear “antireligious”, or anti-Christian at the least. In The Jew of Malta, for example, Barabas views circumcision as a mark of an alternative, anti-Christian community: “Both circumcisèd, we hate Christians both” (II.iii.216), he claims of himself and Ithamore.16 For Christian theologians, the circumcision of the ancient Hebrews was a foreshadowing of the baptismal covenant made available through the new testament; George Abbot, Professor of Divinity at Oxford, for example, writes circa 1600: “Circumcision was to the Israelites, as Baptisme is to the Christians, an admission into the flocke” (176). In Marlowe’s play, however, circumcision is figured as a contemporary alternative to baptism, one which proclaims a disenfranchisement from conventional Christian ideals. Comparable to this is the succession of alternative sacraments imagined in Faustus. According to the Chorus, for example, scholarship can be an alternative means of achieving grace: “So soon [Faustus] profits in divinity,/The fruitful plot of scholarism graced,/That shortly he was graced with doctor’s name” (Prologue 15–17). The “grace” imagined here is a substitute for the divine grace available through the sacraments, a substitution which the play makes not infrequently. Similarly, Cornelius’s emphasis on the significance of both “words” and “ceremonies” recalls debates about the relative importance of word and ritual in the sacraments, suggesting that magic may be imagined as an alternative sacramentality (I.i.160–1).17 Later, Faustus’s performance of magic, through its use of Latin, holy water and the sign


of the cross, allies him with a Catholic approach to ritual; but the invocation of diabolic spirits suggests a Satanic sacrament.18 Further instances of Faustus’s heterodox sacramentality are available: perhaps drawing on the Catholic doctrine of indelible characters, he twice invokes “characters” which are sacramentally inappropriate (I.i.53; I.iii.12; cf. Chapter 5 for more on characters); again inverting Catholic doctrine, he is persuaded by Mephistopheles that “marriage is but a ceremonial toy” (II.i.149).19 Even more significantly, a chance of sacramental recuperation at the emperor’s court is ignored by almost all the characters; in this episode, the Knight perceives a “sign of grace” in Faustus, if only he would “confess the truth” (IV.i.46–7). The sign of grace is, on one level, simply a suggestion that Faustus can repent; this sentiment is voiced throughout, notably by the Good Angel and the Old Man. The term, however, is also inescapably loaded with sacramental reference (the 39 Articles, for example, claims that “Sacramentes be certaine sure witnesses and effectuall signes of grace and Gods good wyll to-wardes vs”; Articles, Article 25). Its association with confession here suggests that, within the worldview of the text, some characters still cling to an older, perhaps a Catholic, form of sacramentality, against which Faustus’s ritual experiments are contrasted. Marlowe’s drama, then, invokes a multiplicity of ritual and sacramental forms and ideologies.

III If Marlovian drama is interested in the sacraments in general, it also displays a series of specific interests, not least in the eucharist.20 C.L. Barber, in a well-known essay, has traced the currents of eucharistic thought in Faustus; Barber’s chief hypothesis is expressed with relation to cultural interpretations of drama and ritual: Tragedy involves a social perspective on individual experience; frequently this perspective is expressed by reference to ritual or ceremonial acts, acts whose social meaning is felt immediately and spontaneously. The hero one way or another abuses the ritual because he is swept away by the currents of deep aberrant motives associated with it, motives which it ordinarily serves to control. In Doctor Faustus this public, social ritual is Holy Communion (“Form” 108).

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There are problems with this reading, most notably in Barber’s insistence that the “social meaning” of the eucharist would be “felt immediately and spontaneously”; on the contrary, the eucharist in the late sixteenth century continued to be a site of potential and actual discord. Yet Barber is correct in his view of ritual as a socially ordained means of containing subversive energies; and his reading of various episodes in the play – the moment when Faustus stabs his arm, the vision of Christ’s blood in the firmament, and the kiss between Faustus and Helen – as indications that “Faustus’s despair and obsessive hunger go with his inability to take part in Holy Communion” (107) is, despite recent challenges, persuasive.21 What is more, other parts of the text reveal eucharistic anxieties which Barber seems not to have considered. For example, when Faustus wishes to be “a spirit in form and substance” (II.i.97), his conflation of spirit and substance may suggest something of the cultural anxieties arising from concerns over transubstantiation (i.e. the impossibility of determining the substantial structure of a given thing from its outward appearance). His inability to summon the bodies of Alexander and his paramour is couched in similar terms: “it is not in my ability to present before your eyes the true substantial bodies of those two deceased princes But such spirits as can lively resemble Alexander and his paramour shall appear” (IV.i.43–51; emphasis added). This may be a similar type of spiritual substance to that which Faustus earlier invokes. Nevertheless, in a further example of the problematisation of visual evidence proclaimed by the play, the emperor claims to perceive exactly that which Faustus denies the ability to perform: “Sure, these are no spirits but the true substantial bodies of those two deceased princes” (IV.i.65–6).22 Certainly, a sense of eucharistic heterodoxy seems to have attached itself to Marlowe; among the various charges ascribed to Marlowe in the infamous Baines note are claims of the superiority of Catholic ritual: if there be any God or good religion, then it is in the papistes because the service of god is performed with more Cerimonies, as Elevation of the mass if Christ would haue instituted the sacrament with more Ceremoniall Reverence it would haue bin in more admiration, it would haue bin much better being administered in a Tobacco pipe (143).


Regardless of the reliability of such claims telling us anything about Marlowe’s own opinions (and the Baines note is a notoriously unreliable document in that regard), it does suggest that the Marlovian interest in ritual and religious ceremony was perceived by his contemporaries, and that it was a potentially controversial and subversive mode of dramaturgy.23 Faustus is by no means the only Marlovian text in which the eucharist is interrogated: both parts of Tamburlaine, for example, engage with eucharistic anxieties. In Part One, Act Four, Scene Four stages a banquet with repeated references to cannibalism; despite the exotic context, these references are tied to sixteenthcentury eucharistic debates. For example, Zabina hopes that “this banquet [may] prove as ominous/As Procne’s to th’adulterous Thracian king/That fed upon the substance of his child” (4.4.23–5). This classical image of cannibalism, evoked commonly in the Renaissance, is here tied to current concerns by the use of the word “substance”: this functions in the same way as in Faustus, establishing eucharistically carnal echoes in the scene’s language of cannibalism. Similarly, Tamburlaine’s instructions to Bajazeth – “Take it up, villain, and eat it” (4.4.43) – deliberately echo the biblical account of Christ’s words of institution.24 In Part Two, Orcanes’s ripping of the contract between himself and the Christians is figured as a sacrifice to Christ – “Take here these papers as our sacrifice” (II.ii.45) – which cannot fail to recall the Catholic doctrine of the eucharistic sacrifice. Indeed, the analogy may be pursued further, as Orcanes’s ripping of the paper suggests the fractio panis in the mass, and his invocation of the “strange infusion of [God’s] sacred vigour” may suggest a Christian conception of grace (II.ii.52). As the Baines note may suggest, these invocations of the eucharist are actually invocations of the Catholic mass, and the ritual and supernatural power associated with that ceremony. Yet the Baines note contains two versions of how the Protestant eucharist could be improved. The first is to return to a Catholic system of “Elevation of the mass”, with all the “Ceremoniall Reverence” associated with that; the second, however, is the irreverent suggestion that the eucharist would be “much better being administered in a Tobacco pipe”. And if Tamburlaine’s interest in yoking the supernatural and the mortal draws on the first conception of the eucharist, The Jew of Malta’s more expressly political view of religion draws on the second. The placing of a eucharistic oath – “Corpo di Dio!” (I.ii.91) – in the mouth of the anti-Christian Barabas establishes

100 Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England

the play’s evacuation of religious ritual, as does Mathais’s desacralization of Abigail’s imagined attendance at mass: “better would she far become a bed,/Embracèd in a friendly lover’s arms,/Than rise at midnight to a solemn mass” (I.ii.372–4). In this play, the sacred aspects of the mass, emphasised in Tamburlaine’s rhetoric of divinity, are replaced with the worldly emphases of financial, political and sexual conquest. The eucharist, then, functions in a plurality of ways in Marlovian drama, its inscription in a variety of contexts reflecting the way in which the sacrament performs multivocal significatory work in late sixteenth-century culture.

IV The Jew of Malta represents one of Marlowe’s most sustained explorations of Catholic sacramentality: the Maltese setting of the play, with its convents and monasteries, allows Marlowe to explore in more detail the Catholic system of the sacraments. This is true not just of baptism (which is, of course, a sacrament for Protestants as well as for Catholics), but also for the exclusively Catholic sacrament of penance. This is not to say that The Jew is the only Marlovian play concerned with penance; in Edward II, for example, Mortimer Junior offers a grim pun to Maltrevis: “if thou now growest penitent, I’ll be thy ghostly father” (V.vi.3–4). (Mortimer offers both to serve as confessor to Maltrevis, to be a spiritual counsellor to his “penitent” state, but also to be the “father” to his ghost; that is, to kill him.) Marlowe’s Maltese society, however, is the clearest example in the dramatist’s oeuvre of a society subject to the constant surveillance established by a network of confessions and confessors (in this, the play shares some of the preoccupations of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure; see Chapter 5). This emphasis on the confessional network is strongest in the various relationships of power presented throughout the play, as confession comes to function as a tool of negotiation. The penitential aspects of this are only suggested in the secular threat of confession voiced by Pilia-Borza and Ithamore (IV.ii.77–9), and in the fulfilment of that threat achieved by Ithamore’s confession to Ferneze (V.i.28ff.); they are explicit, however, in Abigail’s final confession to Friar Barnadine. This scene opens with explicit invocation of sacramental confession, thereby establishing the practice as a key


concern of the dramatic moment (III.vi.3–4). Abigail’s penitential relation to the Friar is made concrete by her claim that he is her “ghostly father” (III.vi.12). Following Catholic theology and practice, Abigail first establishes her contrition as an inward fact, made externally objective through enunciation: “know/That I lived religiously much sorrowing for my sins” (III.vi.12–14). Her confession of sin is actually a confession of her father’s sin (the plot to kill Mathias and Lodowick), yet is framed in terms which suggest the familiar unsettling of interiority caused by sin, and the according relief and harmony achieved by submission to the sacraments: “one offence torments me To work my peace, this I confess to thee” (III.vi.19, 31). Friar Barnadine clearly understands this to be an acceptable form of sacramental confession, claiming that this utterance is susceptible to “canon law,” and therefore “must not be revealed” (III.vi.33). Abigail’s sacramental death, in contrast to the non-sacramental demise of Zenocrate, proclaims her new religious identity: “witness that I die a Christian” (40). Abigail, one may say, utilises sacramental confession as a means of taming anxiety and securing identity: the tormented soul of the nun is a cause for concern, but death as a Christian has the effect of reification, of establishing Abigail’s Christianity as a fixed, immutable identity.25 (This is simultaneously undercut and supported by the Friar’s grievance that Abigail died “a virgin, too” (III.vi.41); for if the salacious tone of Barnadine injects an inappropriate note of eroticism to Abigail’s autobiographical attempt at statuary immobility, his recognition that her virginity is also now a fixed condition has the effect of beatifying Abigail as a saintly figure.) It is significant, moreover, that Abigail experiences her sacramental absolution as one of the system of sacraments; for, at the moment when she receives the sacrament, she prays that such grace may also be extended to her father: “Convert my father that he may be saved” (III.vi.39). Conversion of a Jew, as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice well know, means using the sacrament of baptism. Barabas himself also knows this well: his feigned desire “to turn Christian” traces the pattern of sacramental initiation which it would be necessary for him to follow: suspecting that “penance” alone would not “serve for this my sin” (IV.i.62), he offers a financial incentive “to some religious house,/So I may be baptized and live therein” (IV.i.78–9). The Friars,


convinced by Barabas’s act, draw on the same sense of the sacraments as interlocking rituals: “Barabas, who shall be your godfathers?/For presently you shall be shrived” (IV.i.112–13). Jacomo here draws attention to the interdependence of baptism and penance, as well as suggesting the ritual order of sacramentality (the shriving will precede the baptism). The notion of conversion from Judaism is significant here because The Jew of Malta, in common with other texts of the period, portrays Jewishness itself as a state of sin, a corrupt condition which requires sacramental cleansing;26 this may go some way towards accounting for James Shapiro’s observation that “the fantasy of Jews rejecting their own beliefs in favour of Christian ones was so strong [in early modern England] that it gave rise to stories of deathbed confessions by rabbis” (153). Such narratives suggest the way in which the structure of the sacramental sociology still functions (imaginatively, at least) as a method for dealing with sinfulness. Abigail, early in the play, gives voice to this equation of Jewishness and sin: Fearing the afflictions which my father feels Proceed from sin or want of faith in us, I’d pass away my life in penitence And be a novice in your nunnery To make atonement for my labouring soul (I.ii.322–6). Abigail here draws a contrast between two types of Jews: those who persist in their corrupt ways, and those who wish to convert to Christianity. Using a technique familiar from religious polemic, the passage claims that Jews – it can be Protestants, Catholics or Muslims, depending on the text under consideration – do not have an alternative faith, but suffer from a “want [i.e. a lack] of faith”.27 This is, of course, the type of binary fostered by monotheistic religions; but the suggestion of movement here – the penitential journey which Abigail is willing to undertake – strongly suggests the life cycle emphasis of sacramental Catholicism. The utilisation of the future conditional tense and extended enjambment call to mind the sacramental journey which Abigail, at this point, is proposing to undertake: The Jew of Malta, although it elsewhere professes an open cynicism to religious structures, at this point linguistically evokes the sacramentally structured composition of the Catholic life cycle.28


V Baptism and penance, as the initial steps in the process which this book has described as the sacramental sociology, are clearly a key concern of The Jew of Malta. Doctor Faustus extends this interest in the rites of passage of Catholicism, as Faustus’s damnation is presented as an ironic parallel to the Catholic sacramental system. In terms of the structural dynamics of the play, critics have often paid attention to the drama’s adaptation of the psychomachia structure; the good and evil angels are the obvious representatives of this genre, and Faustus’s exasperated realisation that “Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast” is a succinct statement of the generic dilemma faced by the subject of psychomachia (V.i.64).29 More significantly, however, the structure of Faustus’s damnation demands to be read as an adaptation of the Catholic sacramental structure of salvation.30 The preliminary aspects of this damnation – Faustus’s initiation into a diabolic anti-church – may be called an inverse mystagogy. Clinton Allen Brand, in an analysis of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, has demonstrated that “Spenser’s allegory of sacramental initiation functions as a kind of mystagogy, a term denoting the liturgical initiation through the mystery of the sacraments to the sacramental mystery of the church itself” (141). If this is the case, one can argue that Marlowe creates a parallel process of initiation, an anti-sacramental mystagogy for an anti-sacramental church. The play’s interest in the structure of Faustus’s life is proclaimed by the Prologue, which frames the outline of Faustus’s “tragical history” in sacramental terms: To patient judgements we appeal our plaud, And speak for Faustus in his infancy. Now is he born, his parents base of stock, In Germany, within a town called Rhode. Of riper years to Wittenberg he went,31 Whereas his kinsmen chiefly brought him up. So soon he profits in divinity, The fruitful plot of scholarism graced, That shortly he was graced with doctor’s name, Excelling all whose sweet delight disputes In heavenly matters of theology;


Till, swoll’n with cunning of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And melting heavens conspired his overthrow (Prologue 9–22) The Chorus here speaks, at first, as a kind of godparent, “speak[ing] for” Faustus in the absence of his parents. If these first lines deal with Faustus’s birth and baptism, the next line – “Of riper years to Wittenberg he went” – is a type of confirmation, Faustus’s spritual career progressing as he reaches his “riper years,” an equivalent to the years of discretion required for reception of the Catholic sacrament. The middle part of this passage, with its frequent puns on “grace,” is clearly playing games with theological and non-theological (primarily academic) meanings of the word, suggesting again that Faustus’s sacramentality may not be a conventional one; while Faustus’s sin against the sacramental community, and his presumption to realms of knowledge – and to illicit access to realms of grace, normally achievable only through the sacraments – results in an Icarian tragedy “conspired” by the “heavens”. Moreover, the prologue’s preliminary outline is matched by the structure of the play, which follows, both in broad terms and in telling details, the structure of the sacramental life journey. The indelible characters imprinted on the soul by the Catholic initiatory sacraments of baptism, confirmation and holy orders, for example, are replaced for Faustus by the “Lines, circles, signs, letters, and characters” of “necromantic books” (1.1.53, 52). Faustus’s initial summoning of Mephistopheles can be seen as a diabolic adaptation of baptism: the “circle” within which Faustus places himself is a parodic equivalent of the baptismal font; the reorganization of the saints’ names (“Forward and backward anagrammatised,/The breviated names of holy saints” (1.3.9–10)) suggests the breakdown of order in traditional sacramentality; and the “characters of signs and erring stars” (12) again recall the indelible characters of Catholicism. Similarly, Faustus’s ritual actions – he uses holy water (“consecratum aquam” (20)) and the sign of the cross (“signumque crucis” (20)) – rehearse the ritual action of the baptismal ceremony. If this scene dramatizes Faustus’s anti-sacramental initiation – his anti-church mystagogy – the rest of the play places the protagonist


in situations which echo the post-initiatory aspects of the sacramental sociology. I have already, for example, demonstrated the text’s investment in eucharistic discourses. In terms of the rites of passage of Catholicism, after receiving indelible characters in baptism and confirmation, there are three options open to Faustus: to become a member of the clergy, receiving the third character in the sacrament of holy orders; to marry and receive the lay sacrament of matrimony; or to live a celibate life. Faustus, of course, chooses the second of these: “let me have a wife” (II.i.140). Faustus’s reasons for wanting to marry – “I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife” (II.i.140–1) – are theologically sound, recalling the Pauline conception of marriage as a means of controlling rebellious lust.32 Mephistopheles, of course, rejects Faustus’s idea, highlighting his diabolical anti-sacramentality: “marriage is but a ceremonial toy” (II.i.149).33 This irreverent attitude to the rituals of Catholicism is soon adopted by Faustus, as he and Mephistopheles mock the “bell, book, and candle” of the excommunication ritual (not a sacrament, but significant nevertheless as a means of exclusion from the sacramental community) (III.i.81–7). Similarly, even when Faustus “means to die shortly” (V.i.1), Wagner is shocked by his failure to adopt a correct ritual approach to dying: “methinks that if death were near/He would not banquet and carouse and swill with such belly-cheer/As Wagner ne’er beheld in all his life” (V.i.3–6). Faustus, then, works through the entire life cycle of Catholic sacramentality, unaware or unable to accept the subjection necessary for salvation. The individual aspect of the sacramental sociology exists, of course, alongside a communal aspect, a means of ritual maintenance of the social order; and if Faustus rejects the Catholic sacramental system, it seems that the diabolic system which he accepts must also have its communal aspects: instead of the salvation of the soul offered by the Catholic sacraments, Faustus “surrenders up his soul” to the hellish society of Lucifer (I.iii.91). What we can trace in Faustus, then, is Marlowe’s exploitation of the culturally recognised capacities of the sacraments to create and ideologically manage “community”. The conventional community formed by the sacraments is one of communal harmony, whether imagined in the terms of Catholic sacramentality, of the Edwardian political commonwealth, or in Thomas Cooper’s Elizabethan sense of the sacramental forging of community: “the sacrament of the Lordes supper is a linke of vnitie,


that knitteth vs together, as members of one misticall bodie” (5). Kenneth Borris has emphasised how “the term ‘sacrament’ implies membership in a united group on account of its etymological relation to the Latin sacramentum, the Roman soldier’s oath of military allegiance and integration” (145). But the initiation of Faustus is an initiation into a diabolic community, an energetically subversive location where individuality is not subsumed within the greater scheme of the community, but is given full rein to express its – ultimately spiritually damaging – ambitions.34 There are other examples in Marlowe of this interest in staging religious communities: the Christians in The Jew of Malta, for example, stigmatise the Jews as “cast off from heaven” (II.iii.159), emphasising their alienation from the earthly Christian community. In a similar vein, Cooper claims that faithful reception of the eucharist necessitates the admission that “I detest the religion of Jewes, Turks, Infidels, Heretiques, and all other that denie saluation to come by the death of Christ” (4). Faustus is unique among Marlovian drama, however, in the degree to which it creates a schema of perverse sacraments; it is, perhaps, this overarching structure which lends such force to the final damnation of the protagonist.

VI Given this initiation of Faustus into an anti-church, one can more fully appreciate the significance of the experience of exile from the “true” church felt by Faustus in the play’s closing scenes. Here we may follow the lead of Anthony Low, and his recent suggestion that “[m]ore often than not, the determining experience that forces the individual toward subjectivity has been “exile” – that is, expulsion of the individual person from being or from feeling himself to be part of the community in one way or another exile strikes at the core of a person’s sense of identity in relation to society” (3). This lends weight to Nicholas Brooke’s assertion that “Faustus’s Hell is an extreme of anti-God Heaven is the subjection of self, Hell in this sense is the assertion of self” (118). In this reading, it is the onset of damnation – the final release from the stifling forces of Christianity – which allow for the emergence of Faustus’s subjectivity; the argument relies on an essentially positive view of the iconoclastic potential of individuality.35


However, if in broad terms exile/hell forces an individual towards subjectivity, something more complex happens in the case of Faustus. Barber suspects that what he terms the “perversion” of Faustus has something to do with unconventional sacramentality: “Perversion can be equivalent to a striving for a blasphemous communion The perverse has an element of worship in it” (106). A more accurate way of confronting this issue, I would suggest, is to acknowledge that the absence of the structure of the sacramental sociology in the play – or, at least, the replacement of a salvific sacramental structure by a schema of damnation – has a destabilizing effect on Faustus’s subjectivity.36 Specifically, he misconstrues the relationship between, and the relative importance of, his body and soul. The potential reconciliation between body and soul in early modern culture owes much, as Kenneth Borris argues, to the “sacramental investments” of that culture (152); for instance, the ritual emphasis on the body in the sacraments allows the possibility of bodily access to spiritual grace, thereby suggesting a mode of reconciliation between the dual aspects of the subject. Thomas Cooper’s Briefe Homily on the Lord’s Supper (1580) draws a comparison between the dual existence of the sacrament and the dual existence of the human subject: This Sacrament vsed according to the institution of Christ, consisteth of two parts, that is, the outwarde signes, which are Bread and Wine: and the inwarde thing, whiche is the body and bloud of our Sauiour Christe, the true foode of our soules, which onely nourisheth vs to eternall life. Now as man consisteth of two partes, body, and soule: so the body feedeth vpon the outward elements of the Breade and Wine, but the soule feedeth in deede, and truly, vpon Jesus Christ crucified (2). The implication here is that the nature of the sacrament as understood by Cooper – an outward sign and an inward “thing” – is particularly suited to the split nature of humanity, identified as a similar construction of exterior and interior. The power of the sacrament is such that it appeals to both parts of the subject (Cooper later claims that the sacrament “preserueth both soule and body to eternal life” (4)). Nevertheless, in the general schematic binaries of salvation and damnation most visible in the culture, it is the soul which retains paramount importance. It is all the more significant,


then, that Faustus’s bargain involves both parts of his identity, “body and soul, flesh, blood”, as the eucharistic echoes of the contract have it (II.i.110–11). The conflation of body and soul into a single commodity here – perhaps anticipating a secular turn in the construction of the subject – does not afford the “correct” Christian significance to the soul. Mephistopheles, who despite his infernal nature is a physical embodiment of the “truth” of Christianity, refuses to make the same mistake as Faustus, attaching different values to the constituent parts of the Old Man’s identity: “I cannot touch his soul./But what I may afflict his body with/I will attempt, which is but little worth” (V.i.78–80). Here Mephistopheles rehearses the familiar soul/body split, with the attendant privileging of the soul.37 It is not until the end of the play, when damnation is near, that Faustus realises the significance of the soul–body distinction: addressing the stars, he prays to be drawn up into the skies, so that in the resultant storm, “My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,/So that my soul may but ascend to heaven” (V.ii.86–7). This is the familiar Christian separation of body and soul, as Faustus is willing to let his body fragment and dissipate, in order that his soul – now firmly imagined as the core of his being – may be preserved.38 This privileging of the soul, however, occurs very late in the play; Faustus’s primary attitude is to underestimate the soul’s significance. So, he speaks of “vain trifles of men’s souls” (I.iii.62), claims that “Had I as many souls as there are stars,/I’d give them all for Mephistopheles” (I.iii.103–4), and rhetorically convinces himself of a false supposition, “Is not thy soul thine own?” (II.i.68). This constant diminution of the significance of the soul follows the pattern of Faustus’s morality predecessors, as worldliness is emphasised over the more significant spiritual life; but the absence of a sacramental ending leads Faustus to damnation rather than salvation. Faustus’s spiritual blindness is emphasised by a re-enactment of his position in one of the comic scenes, when Robin and Wagner discuss the appropriate price for the sale of a soul, Robin concluding that he would not give his “soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton I had need have it well roasted, and good sauce to it, if I pay so dear” (I.iv.10– 12). The accent on consumption and on sensory excess here forms a correlative to the sins of Faustus. The disintegration of the structures of the sacramental sociology, and the dramatic reinvention of that disintegration as an inverted


mystagogy, has, then, a negative effect on Faustus’s attitude towards his soul, and may even be said to contribute to his damnation. Just as the uncertain religious context of mid-Tudor drama is traceable in the plays’ anxieties of subjectivity, so Faustus’s rehearsal of an individual’s uncertain relationship to overriding religious structures leads to a profound sense of anxiety. Such anxiety is present from an early point in the play, as when Mephistopheles conjures a pageant of devils to “delight [Faustus’s] mind” (II.i.82), suggesting an anxious interiority which can be superficially calmed by diabolic invention; Faustus himself rehearses the same idea, when he considers how “sweet pleasure conquered deep despair” (II.iii.25). Yet as the play draws nearer to its close, and Faustus realises that he is “a man condemned to die” (IV.i.126), anxiety and despair make more frequent appearances: “Despair doth drive distrust unto my thoughts” (IV.i.128).39 By the final act, Faustus’s soul is both “distressèd” and “hopeless” (V.i.58, 61); William Empson saw the disintegration of Faustus’s subjectivity reflected in his verbal utterances – “Faustus is being broken; the depths of his mind are being churned to the surface; his meanings are jarring in his mouth” (41) – in a similar way to that which I have analysed in The Conflict of Conscience (see Chapter 3).40 The lack of any sacramental cleansing in the final scenes of Faustus is, as in The Conflict of Conscience, an illustration of the possibility of despair caused by the dissolution of Catholic sacramentality; and unlike the earlier play, neither text of Faustus offers scope for salvation.

Conclusion The public stage of the late sixteenth century clearly functions as an arena for the elaboration of competing ideological views in a way that earlier English stages do not. The political (in the widest sense of the word) significance of Marlowe’s treatment of the sacraments varies from play to play: Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta are cynical, conscious of the manipulation of religion and ritual for political (in the narrow sense) ends. Faustus, however, is qualitatively different in its approach to the sacraments: the cynicism is still present, but one finds also an emphasis on the power of belief, the impact that religious ideology can have on an individual’s sense of identity and on their mental well-being. This complicates


the romantic view of Marlowe and Faustus as harbingers of a postRenaissance secular modernity. John D. Cox emphasises how this tension between cynicism and belief makes Marlowe’s drama both more sophisticated and more ambiguous than the drama of Bale and of the mid-century playwrights: Despite its slapstick anti-Catholicism, Dr. Faustus is not openly sceptical about ritual in the accustomed Protestant manner because when Faustus utters his blasphemous charm, the devil indeed appears Dr. Faustus is sceptical in a different way from Protestant anti-Catholic drama, because it leaves so much room for metaphysical terror (126). This captures well the Marlovian tension between scepticism and belief: of the varieties of sacramental interrogation found in Marlowe, it is perhaps this Faustian terror that proclaims most powerfully the cultural significance of the sacraments.

5 Sinful Subjects: Shakespearean Sacramentality

This is a subtle whore. A closet, lock and key, of villainous secrets (Othello IV.ii.21–2) Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hands? (Macbeth II.ii.57–61) New Historicist and Cultural Materialist critics have subjected Shakespearean rituals to a process of Greenblattian evacuation over the past number of decades. Any spiritual significance in Shakespeare’s dramatisation of religious ceremony has been emptied out by a critical focus on the political imperative of ritual.1 In part, of course, this is supported by the texts themselves: the marriages which close Measure for Measure, for example, suggest no prospect of a sacramental impartation of grace akin to that for which late medieval and early modern Catholics argue. Katherine Eisaman Maus has noted how marriage in Measure for Measure is “a form of discipline an alternative to capital punishment” (179); in the words of Lucio, “marrying a punk is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging” (V.i.515–16). Sacraments, according to this critical viewpoint, function in Shakespeare in non-spiritual ways.2 Yet any reduction of sacramentality to a single function (the political rather than the spiritual, for example) loses sight of the plurality of sacramental 111


functions in the late medieval and early modern period. This chapter, then, reasserts this plurality, analysing a trio of early seventeenthcentury Shakespearean plays – Macbeth, Othello and Measure for Measure – for evidence of the continuing significance of sacramental discourse on dramatic production as the sixteenth century turns to the seventeenth.

I Measure for Measure, as David N. Beauregard has insisted, contains Shakespeare’s “most complete and explicit representation of the sacrament of penance” (42). As the comparative thrust of Beauregard’s comment make clear, penance is a recurring concern in Shakespearean drama, invoked or partially staged a number of times, but of particular interest to the dramatist in the early seventeenth century. The scene in question (the sacramental confession of Juliet to the Duke, who is disguised as a Friar) does indeed, as Beauregard suggests, stage the Catholic ritual (43). According to the correct ritual form, Juliet pronounces her contrition – “I do repent me as it is an evil” (II.ii.35) – and the Duke pronounces a blessing which suggests absolution: “Grace go with you; Benedicite” (II.iii. 39).3 But the sacrament is interrogated even as it is fully staged. The Duke, of course, has no authority to hear confession or to pronounce absolution: he has not been ordained, and is merely disguised as a friar. The realm of the expressly political, then, usurps the role of the sacramental here, as the Duke exploits confessional networks to non-clerical ends (in this, of course, Shakespeare simply makes apparent onstage the political rhetoric of sixteenth-century sacramental discourse, rhetoric which I have analysed earlier in this book; cf. Chapters 2 and 3).4 Perhaps more significant, however, are the class and gender dynamics at work in this scene. As Elizabeth Hanson has argued, the visibility of Juliet’s pregnant body eliminates the need for a confession of sin: “Juliet’s incontinent body pre-empts the Duke’s attempt to form her as a confessional subject [h]er body is an unerring signifier” (Discovering the Subject 67–8). Hanson’s reading stresses the inequality of the class and gender dynamic in this version of penance: if Juliet is to become a subject, it will be one, Hanson claims, moulded and shaped consciously by the confessional superior. Juliet’s body, however, troubles the claims of the confessional: for if the play’s

Sinful Subjects: Shakespearean Sacramentality 113

rhetoric asserts that the pregnant body is, as Janet Adelman contends, “the visible sign [which] makes legible sin” (89), then penance has in some sense failed. Juliet, obviously, remains pregnant, so her visible “sin” is not removed: her bodily femininity resists the rhetorical claims of the ritual.5 For Hanson, the bodily nature of femininity in the play results in the text’s refusal to award a rhetoric of interiority to women: “the play insistently circulates discourses about women, what their bodies are like and their functions are, which preclude investing the female characters with the hidden depths that Angelo comes to possess” (63). If this is the case, it is all the more strange that the play subjects female characters to the sacrament of confession; for, as I have argued earlier in this book, the ritual of confession is one of the principal ways in which sacramental societies (such as that represented in the play) allow for the articulation of a subjective interiority. In Othello, for example, one can find a simultaneous assertion of the hidden depths of individual interiority and the confessional call to reveal those depths. Iago’s villainous nature is partly proclaimed by his refusal to reveal the profundity of his interiority to other characters, notably Othello himself. Act Three, Scene Three represents a good example of this. Assuming a confessorial role, Othello demands access to Iago’s internal machinations: “I prithee speak to me, as to thy thinkings and give thy worst of thoughts/The worst of words” (III.iii.134–6). This incitement to discourse, to appropriate a Foucauldian phrase, is confronted by Iago’s assertion of his interiority as personal property: Utter my thoughts? Why, say they are vile and false? As where’s that palace whereinto foul things Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure But some uncleanly apprehensions Keep leets and law-days and in session sit With meditations lawful? (III.iii.139–44). Iago’s imagery stresses the sanctity of individual interiority. The architectural locales imagined – palaces, courts – are sites of authority, and places of limited external access. Iago’s interiority is a precious space of which he must perform the task of custodian. And if it is impossible to vet every thought that desires access to the privileged


scene of decision-making and consciousness – “where’s that palace whereinto foul things/Sometimes intrude not?” – Iago can at least choose which thoughts he makes known to others. This is the rationale for refusing to “utter my thoughts”; for refusing, in other words, to submit to the logic of the confessional. Othello, like all good confessors, presses further, using the gently persuasive rhetoric of friendship to try and assure Iago’s confession: “Thou dost conspire against thy friend If thou mak’st his ear/A stranger to thy thoughts” (III.iii.145–7). Eventually, when persuasion fails to work, Othello adopts a more forceful approach: “By heaven, I’ll know thy thoughts!” (III.iii.164). Iago’s reply reasserts, more forcefully this time, the sanctity of interiority: “You cannot, if my heart were in your hand,/Nor shall not whilst ‘tis in my custody” (165–6). Iago’s assertion relies on a contrast between mental and material interiority: the material, corporeal interior of Iago is, ultimately, open to appropriation by external viewers. Iago’s heart could – in an image which foregrounds the visceral nature of bodily interiority – conceivably be in Othello’s hand. All the same, even this exploration into the hidden depths of Iago’s body would not give Othello access to the inner workings of Iago’s mind, soul or consciousness. Iago’s steadfast refusal to participate in the confessional logic of the play paradoxically reveals the existence of a secret in the unseen, innermost parts of his being. The sacrament of penance, as the example above suggests, functions in Othello in a rather different way than in Measure for Measure; if the comedy represents Shakespeare’s most explicit dramatisation of the ritual, the tragedy, one may say, is haunted by penance, the relationship between confessor and penitent suggested in the relationships between various characters, but never staged as conspicuously as in Measure. The play’s treatment of the deathbed confessional also follows this pattern. I have argued earlier that the final confession and absolution of the dying Christian is a significant part of the Catholic sacramental sociology, granting the pardoned soul the chance of integration and acceptance into a new, heavenly community of Christians. The deathbed confession, shorn of sacramental status, continues to carry a deep resonance in Protestant culture. Something of this can be seen in Shakespeare’s Elizabethan drama: Williams in Henry V, for example, advises the King that “every soldier in the wars [should] do as every sick man in his bed: wash every mote


out of his conscience” (IV.i.165–6); Montjoy agrees, urging Henry to “mind/Thy followers of repentance, that their souls/May make a peaceful and a sweet retire” (IV.iv.84–6). This text clearly imagines a deathbed repentance (a verbal utterance is not specifically stipulated in this case) that cleanses the soul in preparation for the afterlife. The final confession is also invoked explicitly (albeit briefly) in Measure for Measure, when Angelo gives the order to “Bring him [i.e., Claudio] his confessor, let him be prepared” (II.i.35); the preparation for death is both a psychological acceptance of the necessity of mortality, and a readiness to undertake the last sacramental rituals of the church.6 It is this scenario that is invoked in the final scenes of Othello, where the protagonist assumes the role of a parodic confessor (parodic in so far as he intends to kill his penitent rather than undertake her spiritual regeneration). Approaching Desdemona, Othello persistently demands of her a process of self-examination and spiritual assessment: “Have you prayed tonight, Desdemon?” (V.ii.25); “Think on thy sins” (V.ii.40); “confess thee freely of thy sin” (V.ii.53). Othello’s spiritual guidance, he suggests, is for one purpose only: to prevent Desdemona from suffering in the “sulph’rous and tormenting flames” of Old Hamlet’s purgatory (Hamlet. I.v.3), the “thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice” of Claudio’s afterlife (Measure for Measure III.i.126), or the “steep-down gulfs of liquid fire” that Othello himself imagines in hell (V.ii.278). Rather, Othello asserts the efficacy of a confession to heaven: he denies that he would kill Desdemona’s “unprepared spirit” or “soul” (V.ii.31–2), and insists that she commence the procedure of absolution: If you bethink yourself of any crime Unreconciled as yet to heaven and grace, Solicit for it straight (V.ii.26–8). This cannot be a valid sacramental ritual, of course, as there is no priest present. Othello, like Duke Vincentio, plays the role of priest himself; and this may imply that there are eucharistic overtones in his claim that the killing of Desdemona is not a “murder”, but a “sacrifice” (V.ii.65). If this is an invocation, however ironic, of the doctrine of the eucharistic sacrifice, it indicates a plurality of ways in which Othello’s sacraments are severely distorted versions of the Catholic rituals.7


II Part of the sixteenth-century Catholic conception of the ritual is that the sacrament of penance functions as a ceremony of reconciliation, working as an act of some effective power within the rules of a functioning Catholic society. This is a rather different claim than the suggestion that the ritual of reconciliation is a locus for power in a Foucauldian sense. For if this latter sense of power courses through institutions, individuals and culture, the sacramental power of confession is unidirectional, coursing from the divinity, through His representative, and into the soul of a penitent. It is more properly termed grace. What, then, is the relationship between power and grace? And more urgently, how does this affect readings and stagings of these plays? Perhaps the easiest way to define the relationship between power and grace is to claim that grace, as understood and elaborated by theologians, is a mystification, a deliberate use of spiritual language to obfuscate the hierarchical discipline inherent in the ritual. From this point of view, to speak of power is preferable because it allows us to define more accurately the terms of engagement between confessor and penitent, and the relations of domination between them. But it seems to me that this analysis is not quite sufficient, nor will it serve as an adequate reading of the Shakespearean moments of confession. Certainly the moments of ritual confession in these plays are inflected with elements of the relationships of domination and submission contained in the rest of the text. But if power courses through and in part constitutes these individuals and their relationships, grace has the capacity for something much more radical: in its use of the established hierarchy of the church to instil grace in the lowest members, grace has a radical levelling quality, a capacity to exalt the lowly in line with the ideology of theoretical Christianity. Thomas Tentler, the historian of late medieval and early modern attitudes to the sacrament of penance, makes a dual thesis of “discipline” and “consolation” central to his major study: “In practice, as in theory, discipline and consolation can be complementary [s]ocial control and the cure of anxiety are accommodated in one institutional system” (Sin 349). I do not deny that this is often the case; but it is important to appreciate that there exists the potential for a less unified and coherent version of the ritual. In this form, there is a clear contradiction in the sacrament of


penance: on one hand obviously and always a mechanism for social control and discipline, it nevertheless justifies itself by an appeal to the autonomy and individual worth of even the lowliest of subjects, offering a utopian promise of exaltation to the lowly. However, this is not always immediately clear in Shakespeare. In Measure for Measure’s appropriation of the ritual of sacramental confession, relations of dominance and submission are still much in evidence. The Duke uses his disguise as a friar to exercise influence over one of his most vulnerable subjects, the imprisoned and pregnant Juliet. I have already argued for the necessity of understanding the significance of Juliet’s pregnant body as a sign of her sin, but it is worth recalling at this point, if only to more forcefully draw the comparison between a woman “falling in the flaws of her own youth” and sexuality (II.iii.11), and an apparently celibate holy father. This assumption of spiritual and moral dominance is further emphasised by the Duke’s gendered and political dominance. He takes it upon himself to display his authority to Juliet, adopting the role of a spiritual teacher: “I’ll teach you how you shall arraign your conscience/And try your penitence, if it be sound/Or hollowly put on” (II.iii.21–3). The Duke’s assumption of the role of teacher and spiritual superior is matched by a sense of masculine gender superiority: even though the “most offenceful act” of Claudio and Juliet was “mutually committed”, the Duke asserts that Juliet’s “sin” was “of heavier kind” than Claudio’s (II.iii.26–8). The Duke’s language and costume call to mind the type of confession prevalent before the reformations of the sixteenth century, when confessors were instructed to pry into the precise details of sins, especially sexual sins, and judge them accordingly. Tentler’s study of late medieval confessional literature argues that “the best illustration of the penchant for grading sins is the rank ordering of sexual transgressions moralists and pastoral theologians found it almost impossible to refrain from presenting the varieties of lust listed in ascending or descending order of vileness” (Sin 140–1). Although the Duke does not present as extensive a list as Tentler’s authors, the same assumptions are clear: some sins are more serious than others. In the Duke’s explicitly gendered terms, female sexual faults are graver than their male equivalents. As for Juliet, she accepts unquestioningly the submissive role ascribed to her by the political and spiritual authority of the Duke. Told that she will be taught, she replies “I’ll gladly learn”


(II.iii.23); informed of the gravity of her sin, she replies “I do confess it, and repent it, father” (II.iii.29), the final term highlighting the deference to authority; and when told that she must be truly sorry for her sin, she claims that “I do repent me as it is an evil,/And take the shame with joy” (II.iii.35–6). The sacrament of penance, in this case, works to maintain the existing structures of power within Viennese society. The gendered nature of the confessor–penitent relationship is even clearer in Othello, where there are no ecclesiastical garments to hide the masculine dominance. Othello is at once the enraged husband and the spiritual avenger (so he thinks); Desdemona, in bed and on display, is an eroticised object, alluring Othello – “O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade/Justice to break her sword!” (V.ii.16–17) – at the same time as the bed calls to mind her (imagined) sexual sins. The marriage bed, and the erroneous belief that its secrets have been shared, mingle sex, sin and femininity in the same way that Juliet’s pregnant body functions in Measure. Othello’s dominance as husband over wife is directly tied, in this scene, to his dominance as confessor over penitent, and murderer over victim. The eroticised body of Desdemona is killed for its apparent violation of the rules by which a hierarchical society functions (indeed, the violation is not purely imaginary: Desdemona violates patriarchal rules when she chooses her own husband). The version of the sacrament of penance here is a bloody and uncommon one; but it demonstrates the way in which the ritual can maintain structures of dominance and relations of power. This, then, is how power, whether crudely understood in terms of a force exercised by one party over another, or more subtly considered as a network of forces constituting a given culture, can be seen to function in the sacrament of penance. Grace, we will see, functions in a rather different way: it combines with the practice of interior examination necessary for a good confession to allow the possibility of a sacramental subjectivity. The sacramental subjectivity formed in the sacrament of penance relies on the concrete procedures of the sacrament itself, most notably the act of confession: for confession assumes the existence of a truth that is hidden within the interior depths of a subject. The act of confession produces some degree of individual awareness and autonomy, thereby working against the disciplinary function of penance. Foucault is especially interested in this subject-forming


quality of confession. The confession, he claims, is “one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” (History of Sexuality 58). And if confession and “truth” are intimately linked, so too are confession and the processes of individualisation and subjectivisation: “[t]he truthful confession [is] inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power” (58) and represents, historically, “[a]n immense labour to which the West has submitted generations in order to produce men’s subjection: their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word” (60); that is, the construction of the philosophically viable, individual subject, and the production of the politically useful, subordinate subject. Truth, confession and subjectivity: this is the kind of theoretical triad that can be usefully applied to analyses of the operation of the sacrament of penance. Bearing in mind the Catholic conception of the sacrament, however, perhaps one may consider replacing Foucault’s “individualization by power” with an “individualization by grace”: power certainly has a role to play in constituting subjectivity in the confessional act, but so too does the assumed force of grace.8 The attempt to fix the interiority of Iago and Juliet is an attempt to force the confession of something hidden within. And the thing hidden within – Iago’s feigned knowledge of the dishonesty of Cassio and Desdemona, Juliet’s sexual sin and resultant pregnancy – is in both cases sexual. Sex, sin and subjectivity is a triad which sits alongside the trinity of truth, confession and subjectivity. For Shakespeare as much as for Foucault, confession of truth is almost always the truth of sex; and the tradition of late medieval and early modern Christianity means that Shakespearean notions of sex are always inflected with an anxiety about sin. It is in this complex way that one can say that sexual sin, for Shakespeare, creates the subject.9 Such an assertion is similar to Julia Kristeva’s claim that “sin is subjectified abjection.” Kristeva’s formulation emphasises that sin exists only when the subject exists. The disruptive effects of desire lead to abjection; in Christian societies, “abjection” becomes “sin” (more precisely, the sense of having sinned) in order to be placed within a comprehensible system of signification. Kristeva’s claim that “abjection becomes the requisite for a reconciliation between the flesh and the law” can be understood as suggesting that the sense of having sinned functions as a mediator between the forces of desire and the Christian prohibition of lust (125–6). When Angelo experiences desire for the


first time, therefore, his “abjection” forces him to reconceive and reformulate the terms of his subjectivity: “What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?” (II.ii.176). Angelo’s discovery of sexual desire alerts him to the hidden depths of his interiority, the secret hidden within which Isabella imagines as a “natural guiltiness” which his “bosom” must “confess” (II.ii.138–41).10

III The effect of the sacramental subjectivity on our understanding of the ways in which early modern identities are imagined is, I suggest, of some significance. But a thorough interpretation of the sacramental subjectivity needs also to pay attention to the way in which a sacramental psychology functions in the late medieval and early modern period; that is, the way in which sacramental ritual and theology affect conceptions of the soul. The Catholic sacraments of initiation (identified earlier in this book as baptism, confirmation and holy orders) have a twofold material effect on the soul. First, baptism removes the stain of original sin, understood in such a way as to suggest that the stain is not simply metaphorical (cf. Chapter 3); secondly, and more obviously materialistic, baptism, confirmation and holy orders imprint a mark on the soul, an indelible character. The Council of Trent asserted that a character was “a spiritual and indelible mark”, and strongly emphasised its permanence, insisting that it “cannot be deleted or removed” (Tanner 685, 742). In the terms of a sacramental sociology, the mark is equivalent to a brand that identifies the individual as a member of the church. This apparently repressive image is balanced by the promise of salvation which the character offers; characters, depending on one’s viewpoint, have a potentially liberatory as well as a potentially repressive capacity. This allows us to complicate a critical trend that views early modern religion as almost exclusively repressive. For example, Jonathan Dollimore’s influential reading of Measure for Measure emphasises and supports a particular early modern proposition, that “religion [is] a form of ideological control which work[s] in terms of internalised submission” (“Transgression” 81). In support of this assertion, Dollimore quotes Richard Hooker’s distinction between the outer submission accorded to the state and the internal submission accorded to religious dogma and doctrine; Dollimore’s interest in


“internal submission” is a post-Foucauldian interest in techniques of surveillance and discipline. The critic follows this consideration of submission with an analysis of the imagery of stamping in the play, asserting that “the stamp metaphor signifies the formative and coercive power of authority” (82). If Dollimore’s argument on the authority imposed by an act of stamping is combined with the “Machiavellian” proposition that religion is a form of internalised submission, one can construct a theoretical model of how sacramental characters work in initiatory terms: as a sign of initiation and integration into a community (albeit a sign visible only to the divine observer), sacramental characters function (in theory) as a means of regulation and repression, organising a Christian community into a composed whole. A new kind of “character criticism” is necessary to analyse the sacramental import of the term in early modern literature.11 In Measure for Measure, for example, the term is frequently associated with Angelo: in the opening scene the Duke tells Angelo that “[t]here is a kind of character in thy life/That to th’observer doth thy history/Fully unfold” (I.ii.27–9). There is an analogy here between sacramental characters, dramatic characters and the secular sense of characters as writing or signs.12 The secular characters which the Duke perceives in Angelo signify something about his personality; this also holds true for sacramental characters, where God, “th’observer”, examines the soul, and where the presence or absence of sacramental characters “fully unfold[s]” the spiritual “history” of the individual. As the play progresses, however, the semiotic significance of the character as a guide to knowledge is subjected to intense scrutiny. Angelo’s imagery of counterfeiting contributes to this process, as he imagines stamping and the impressing of characters as an essentially fraudulent activity: sinners “do coin God’s image/In stamps that are forbid” (II.iv.46). In the same scene, Isabella gives voice to a misogynistic emphasis on the frailty of women, borrowing Angelo’s imagery to insist that “we are soft as our complexions are,/And credulous to false prints” (II.iv.129–30). If this imagery of counterfeiting establishes the uncertainty of any knowledge gained from the visual apprehension of a character, then the significatory capacities of characters have been entirely evacuated by the final scene. The Duke’s insistence that Angelo’s “desert deserves with characters of brass/A forted residence ‘gainst the tooth of time/And razure of oblivion” (V.i.9–13) is


significant on two counts: first, that the grossly material characters of brass are now imagined as indelible instead of the truly indelible sacramental characters; second, that the Duke’s awareness of Angelo’s lust makes all talk of characters as signs of merit hollow. This is explicitly addressed in Isabella’s assertion that Angelo, despite his “dressings, characts, titles, forms,/[Is] an arch-villain” (V.i.567; emphasis added). The characters, which at the start of the play could fully unfold the history of an individual, have by the play’s close become a semiotic failure, signs that no longer signify their ostensible referent. Sacramentality, then, is a crucial paradigm for understanding the way in which the term “character” performs multivocal semiotic work in Measure for Measure. Nowhere is this more decisive than in a pun that plays on the ambiguous visibility proposed in the doctrine of sacramental characters. When Claudio relates his crime – pre-marital sex with Juliet, his betrothed – to Lucio, he outlines the only way in which the crime could be known, Juliet’s visible pregnancy: “The stealth of our most mutual entertainment/With character too gross is writ on Juliet” (I.ii.131). Clearly this refers – like Maus’s example – to the common sense of character as writing; yet it is also a sacramental parody. The baptismal descent of the Holy Spirit is replaced by a material impartation of semen into the body of Juliet, recalling traditional misogynistic conceptions of generativity, which stress that the spirit – contained in the father’s semen – fuses with the base material matter of the mother. Juliet’s pregnant body, a “character too gross”, replaces the sacramental character, and the meritorious sacramental character is transformed to a bodily sign of sin. The doctrine of indelible characters, and the implied refusal to fully distinguish between the spiritual and the physical, complicates both critical notions of Renaissance selves, and the confessional subjectivity that I have outlined. For example, Elizabeth Hanson argues that Juliet’s “character too gross” contributes to a gendered process in the formation of subjectivity, where the experience of having a self is linked to the capacity to possess an inner “truth” which can be regarded as a secret (55–91). Juliet’s pregnant femininity, the visibility of her sin, excludes her from the category of the secret-withholding subject. The secret depths of masculine subjectivity are defined against the readability of the feminine body. Subjectivity here, as in the sacrament of penance, is related to depth and interiority: women cannot be subjects because they are only


bodies. Yet this argument relies to some extent on a body–soul dualism which is complicated by the doctrine of indelible characters. Certainly the Catholic soul is “interior”, but it is not necessarily as exclusively metaphysical as Hanson’s conception of “secrets” and “truths”. The focus on interiority ignores the way in which the doctrine of indelible characters fuses both aspects of the self.13 It may be, then, that the increased interest in selfhood and subjectivity attributed to the early modern period is a result of the uncertainty surrounding the formation of a sacramental subjectivity; while the corporeal spirituality of the sacramental soul fuses the subject’s sense of existing in separate spheres, the reform of sacramentality opens up room for competing versions of subjectivity. Measure for Measure, via its interrogation of the sacraments, explores the growing trend to separate the physical and the spiritual and, as I shall argue, suggests that a world in which sacramental characters (and subjectivity) are grossly material is a world without divine grace.14

IV In his discussion of Christian ritual and Shakespearean tragedy, Herbert R. Coursen senses the Fall as an organising principle in Macbeth, arguing that “Macbeth’s fall draws on the combined archetypes of the falls of Lucifer and Adam” (319).15 The problem, however, with seeing Macbeth’s tragic fall as a re-enactment of the Adamic Fall is that the society of Macbeth already seems to be a fallen world. In Macbeth’s Scotland, the nightmares, portents and magical apparitions all point to a world in which divinely sanctioned modes of experience have gone awry. But it is not Macbeth’s fall that has created this world: it has existed to some extent from the beginning of the play, when the weird sisters are already active and rebellion is rife. So, when Duncan laments in an early scene that “there’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face” (I.iv.11–12), the play encourages the audience to feel that Duncan refers not to an inescapable condition of human existence, but a problematising of vision and knowledge in the specific circumstances which the play dramatises. This is not to say that there is no awareness of the damning power of sin in Macbeth’s kingdom; indeed, sin is conceived in the same explicitly visual terms that characterised political interpretations of the body of Juliet in Measure. It is this notion of the visibility of sin


that convinces Macbeth that marking the servants with Duncan’s blood will ensure the apprehension of their guilt among the gathered nobility: “Will it not be received,” he asks, “When we have marked with blood those sleepy two [t]hat they have done’t?” (II.i.74–7). For Macbeth, as for Duke Vincentio, sin is visible and apparent; but the bloodied hands of the servants will in fact be a deception showing no guilt. As in Othello (III.iii.365), “ocular proof” is no guarantee of truth and knowledge. What links both Macbeth and Measure for Measure most insistently to early modern religious controversies is their dramatisation of the possible inefficacy of sacramentality; in this, they dramatise the potential existence of a world without grace. For example, just as Claudio’s image of the “character too gross” figures a parodic movement of the Holy Spirit in the sacramental action, so too Lady Macbeth’s invitation to possession suggests the kind of demonic motivation which forms the antithesis of spiritual communion: Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty (I.v.38–41). Here the wish to be filled like a vessel certainly suggests a grotesque parody of the process of the Spirit. But the Spirit fills with grace and spiritual gifts, not with “direst cruelty”; and to be filled by the Spirit is also to be fulfilled, not to be mutilated in the way that “unsex” suggests. Moreover, there are further instances of the inversion of sacramental rhetoric in the play. Earlier in the play, for example, Macbeth imagines an “even-handed justice” which “commends the ingredience of our poisoned chalice/To our own lips” (I.vii.10–12). The poisoned chalice is an apt image of sacramentality in Macbeth; the blood of Christ in the eucharist, like the waters of baptism, is an image of death and resurrection. The Christian must die in Christ in order to be reborn; Macbeth, who earlier had seemed to “memorize another Golgotha” (I.ii.40), re-enacting the death of Christ, apprehends the death offered by the sacraments, but misses the crucial element of rebirth. Macbeth’s sins have “poisoned” the sacred blood of the eucharist.


Something of this sense of graceless sacramentality can be seen in Measure for Measure’s appropriation of baptismal theology: sacramental failure is proclaimed specifically by the play’s focus on original sin. Whereas baptism removes original sin from the soul, insistent references in Measure for Measure suggest that original sin has not been eradicated.16 The locus for the representation of original sin in the play is the same site that provides the locus for the exploration of sacramental characters: Juliet’s pregnant body. Janet Adelman’s reading of the play has emphasised the significance of the physical portrayal of a pregnant body on stage, in a context where it serves as a powerful visual icon representing the commingling of sex and sin: pregnant bodies could be interpreted literally as signs of original sin. For Adelman, Juliet’s body, “the visible sign of maternal origin and of female generative power”, remains “wordlessly present”, haunting the play, and “making legible the origin that can never quite be suppressed, as it makes legible the play’s originating sin” (89). There is much evidence to support Adelman’s assertion that the play is suspicious of female sexuality and generativity; but if original sin is a moral and spiritual concern in the play, it is not restricted to female characters alone. In Adelman’s reading of Angelo’s discovery of the “strong and swelling evil/Of [his] conception” (II.iv.6–7), Angelo’s discovery of original sin in himself is related to the discovery of femininity in the masculine body. The evil of Angelo’s conception is not just the plan formulating in his mind, but also the original sin he has inherited by virtue of being conceived in a female womb. For Adelman, Angelo becomes “equivalent to Juliet, female and soiled, pregnant with his own sexuality”; his discovery of original sin is “equivalent to the discovery of the indissoluble link to the maternal body” (93). While I do not wish to deny the misogyny apparent in late medieval and early modern discussions of original sin, I do suspect that the power of the doctrine is in its capacity to damn the potentially saved subject just as much as its capacity to feminise the masculine subject: the “discovery” of original sin in oneself does not only trouble gender boundaries, it also raises doubts as to the efficacy of the sacraments. Recalling the discussion of original sin in Chapter 3 of this book, however, one may wonder if, despite Adelman’s reading, it is not original sin that is dramatised by the play, but concupiscence, the remainder left behind after the erasure of original sin. Again Henry V


provides a useful contrast, as that play’s theology of baptism demonstrates no apparent concern with concupiscence: Henry can only wish that Canterbury’s “conscience” could be “washed/As pure as sin with baptism” (I.ii.31–2). What is crucial about the radical Protestant insistence on the sinfulness of concupiscence, as I have shown in Chapter 3, is its suggestion that baptism leaves a sin behind: in this, it disrupts the binary of sin and sinlessness central to Catholic soteriology. Trent had proclaimed the sinlessness of the baptised soul, asserting that those who are “truly buried with Christ by baptism into death become innocent, stainless, pure, blameless and beloved children of God” (Tanner 667; emphasis added); but if concupiscence is a sin, this dialectic between the baptized and the unbaptized no longer holds. Measure for Measure, then, dramatizes a Catholic society striving to maintain a distinction between purity and pollution, but finding such maintenance is increasingly difficult. Even as late as the Fourth Act, Isabella’s description of the walled garden, “circummured with brick” with a “planckèd gate” and “little door” draws on traditional figurations of the female virgin as a sanctified and unpolluted space (IV.i.25–9), but the dialectic between purity and pollution is disrupted by Angelo’s awakening concupiscence, his “desire to raze the sanctuary,/And place our evils there” (II.ii.175–6). The central theological question is whether or not Angelo’s “concupiscible intemperate lust” (V.i.98) is a sin; although various characters assert the traditional Catholic notion that only the submission to concupiscence is a sin – Angelo himself, invoking the Adamic lapse, claims that “ ‘Tis one thing to be tempted [a]nother thing to fall” (II.i.17–18) – the dualism of stain and stainlessness has been irrevocably shattered by an awareness that baptism might leave a stain behind. Isabella attempts to maintain the distinction, arguing that to give in to Angelo’s demands would be to “stoop/To abhorred pollution” (II.iv.182–3); but Angelo, admittedly in the role of one whose concupiscence has got the better of him, suggests that there may be a “charity in sin,” and demands that Isabella give her body up to a “sweet uncleanness” (II.iv.54, 62). The Christian overtones of the language – recalling, especially, the sweetness of grace – imply that the text is working out questions related to the role of religion in an altered (“post”-reformation) context: the competing versions of the sacrament of baptism reveals the emergence of the sacramental tensions in Viennese society.


It is significant, too, that baptism is the sacrament most frequently parodied in Macbeth. For example, Lady Macbeth’s need for the spiritual action of baptism is explicitly stated towards the end of the play: discussing his wife with the doctor, Macbeth asks the physician: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the fraught bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? (V.iii.42–7). The language here calls to mind the sacramental removal of original sin in baptism, with the insistent emphasis on the possibility of the removal (“pluck”, “raze”, “cleanse”) of something unwanted but seemingly permanent (“rooted sorrow”, “written troubles”, “perilous stuff”) from the identity-giving part of a person (“mind”, “memory”, “brain”, “bosom”). The echo of characters in “written troubles” suggests the mark which baptism imprints in place of original sin, and the “sweet oblivious antidote” clearly suggests the sweetness of grace. Macbeth’s apparent realisation of the need for spiritual cleansing for his wife (and perhaps, by implication, for himself) is tempered by the fact that he applies to a physician rather than a divine. And this is not the only example in the play of baptismal potential gone awry. I opened this chapter by quoting Macbeth’s fear of an indelible mark on his hand, an indelible sin that contrasts with the meritorious indelibility of the characters imprinted in the sacraments of initiation. The indelibility of Macbeth’s stain/sin is such that all the water in the world will not wash it away. For many Protestants, this was a theological necessity: suspicious of the Catholic practice of blessing the baptismal water, they emphasised that it was not the water which washed away sin, but faith in Christ. Luther states this explicitly: “A great majority have supposed that there is some hidden spiritual power in the word and water, which works the grace of God in the soul of the recipient [s]uch views, however, must be carefully avoided and shunned it is not baptism that justifies or benefits anyone, but it is faith in that word of promise to which baptism is added” (64–6). Luther’s justification by faith means that


the water, in itself, is of no spiritual value; but Macbeth goes further than this, imagining not just that the blood will remain on his hand, but that it will even colour the seas red. One should not overlook the spiritual significance of the colour red, and it may be useful to draw a comparison with John Donne’s address to his “black soul”, in his “Divine Meditations”: Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack; But who shall give thee that grace to begin? Oh make thyself with holy mourning black, And red with blushing, as thou art with sin; Or wash thee in Christ’s blood, which hath this might That being red, it dyes red souls to white (IV.9–14). For Donne, red is the colour of sin, yet it is also the colour of Christ’s blood, which possesses the paradoxical power to whiten red souls; one should recall the late medieval emphasis on the sacramental power of Christ’s blood, promulgated in the seven-sacrament windows, as well, perhaps, as Faustus’s desperate pleas for a single drop of sanguinary grace. Macbeth’s hand has the opposite effect to Christ’s blood, incarnadining, rather than whitening, the green of the sea. The (anti-Mosaic) red sea then becomes an image akin to a sea of Christ’s blood, contrasting with Faustus’s absent drop, but still failing to cleanse Macbeth because of his lack of faith. Lines 9–10 of Donne’s poem, however, outline succinctly the theological complexity of this: repentance will ensure grace, but the divine gift of grace is needed for repentance to occur. In one reading of this paradox, Macbeth’s damnation is, like Faustus’s, ultimately attributable to the failure of Christ to intervene; unlike the political mercy and reprieve at the end of Measure for Measure, there is no pardon for Macbeth.17 Lady Macbeth seems to have as little chance of salvation, and her fate can be traced along similar lines to that of her husband. For Lady Macbeth, the blood on her hands is at first literal blood, which will be washed off with water: “A little water clears us of this deed” (II.ii.65), she claims, ironically contrasting with Macbeth’s stress on the failure of even global volumes of water to effect the cleansing. Earlier, Lady Macbeth urged her husband to wash his hands because the blood was a visible sign of sin, recalling both the plan to smear the servants with Duncan’s blood, and the revelation of sin proclaimed by Juliet’s


pregnant body: “Go get some water/And wash this filthy witness from your hand” (II.ii.44–5). The “filthy witness” is this play’s equivalent of the “character too gross” in Measure for Measure, and in both cases, the image resonates with the sacramental understanding of the doctrines of original sin and indelible characters. In the final analysis, Lady Macbeth’s sin is just as indelible as her husband’s: “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand” (V.i.42–3). The physician’s desperate plea, “God, God forgive us all!” (V.i.65) emphasises the submission needed to achieve a measure of divine grace. His deference to ecclesiastical authority – “More needs she the divine than the physician” (V.i.64) – indicates a respect for hierarchy and authority that has been a feature of dramatic portrayals of sacramental communities throughout the sixteenth century but is overturned both in Macbeth’s Scotland and in Vincentio’s Vienna.18

V There is an apparent tension in Shakespeare’s highly distinctive appropriation of sacramentality in the early seventeenth century. On one hand, sacramentality is demonstrated to have the potential to create, or at least to give force to the experience of, subjectivity. The re-evaluation of the Catholic doctrine of indelible characters suggests a way in which the subject can fuse his/her sense of existing in separate, that is both spiritual and corporeal, spheres at the same time. Shakespeare’s appropriation of the Catholic sacrament of penance is even more forceful in this regard, as the triad of sex, sin and subjectivity forms a key to understanding the Shakespearean conception of the confessional constitution of the subject. But on the other hand, the subject created via sacramental rituals and theology does not appear to have the chance of salvation promised by the pre-reformation Catholic sacraments. The failure to wash away sin in Macbeth is the most forceful example of this, but the failure of deathbed confessionals in Hamlet and Othello, and the sinfulness of concupiscence in Measure for Measure, are equally important in this regard. All this, one may suggest, speaks volumes about the continuing lack of religious hegemony in early seventeenth-century cultural production. As the early Jacobean Church of England was trying to reintegrate radical Protestants at Hampton Court and in the


Canons and Constitutions Ecclesiastical, the drama which Shakespeare produced for the London stage explored deep issues of sacramental anxiety and identity in a manner which refused to exclude anything on the grounds of either a “popish” or a “godly” nature. It is perhaps significant that the sacramental practices with which official pronouncements were centrally concerned in these years – baptism, confirmation, confession and absolution – are central to Shakespeare’s sacramentality.19 But Shakespearean drama is, like the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the other texts examined in this study, situated on a precarious borderline between the Catholic and the Protestant, and between the “medieval” and the “modern”.20 The texts, accordingly, are multivocal in their treatment of sacramentality, performing simultaneously a demystification of the rituals and a re-inscription of the mystical power of the sacramental.21

Afterword

The genesis of this book took place in a political climate markedly different to that of contemporary Western religio-political discourse. Although the historical criticism of the 1980s began with some groundbreaking studies of Renaissance religion in the work of Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield and Stephen Greenblatt, new historicism and cultural materialism in the 1990s seemed unable to sensitively explore the intense theological uncertainty of the early modern period, or to deal with the challenges posed to the materialist historicist project by that level of “spiritual” intensity. In the uncertain intellectual climate of the new millennium, I began the early stages of the project which would become this book with a desire to recuperate the study of religion and early modern drama, but to undertake that enquiry in the spirit of a historical materialism which could engage with ritual, theology and, to some extent “spirituality”, on an intellectually generous and sophisticated level. The events of 11 September 2001, of course, propelled religion into the global media spotlight in a way which could not have been anticipated. Religion suddenly became hot intellectual (and, one must say, pseudo-intellectual) property: the extent to which Anglophone Western culture has seen the dismantling of many of its secular liberal bases as a result of a political messianic fervour has been both astounding and alarming. The direct effect of 9/11, the “War on Terror” and the media spotlight on religious violence and alterity on early modern studies, however, is hard to pinpoint. Certainly, the first decade of the new century has seen an explosion of interest in the study of early modern religion in “literary” journals and monographs; but I would suggest that this is partly a result of dissatisfaction with the failure of earlier historicist critics to illuminate the ideological overlap of religion and drama in the early modern period. But, of course, the work of those of us who study the development of sectarian identities, of religious intolerance, and of the “spectral” relationship between the “religious” and the “secular” has assumed a new urgency of late. The effect of this combined impetus – the religious insensitivity of historicist criticism and the desecularisation of global politics – has manifested itself most strongly in early modern studies, unsurprisingly, in a renewed attention to the religious aspects of Shakespearean drama. The effects of this can be traced in a number of different critical methodologies. On the one hand, the “Catholic Shakespeare” hypothesis has trundled along pretty much as normal, causing the usual controversy in the usual places, and generally being (as always) received according to the critical temper of the reader. This is not the place, I think, to take full stock of this phenomenon; suffice to say, that the movement is more complicated than its (vociferous) detractors will allow. Of course, the theoretical underpinning of much of this work – that there is 131

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a historical “truth” that critical detectives can uncover, that Shakespearean biography will provide a “key” to the religious politics of the plays, that there is a continuing “mystery” at the heart of Shakespeare – is oddly nostalgic, withdrawn to some extent from the pressing issues facing global culture. On the other hand, it is exactly the return to the local, the sense that regional identities can express a valuable heterogeneity, which is most valuable in this work, a point which I will engage with in some depth below. So, on one side, the “Catholic Shakespeare”, the playwright tied to his own sectarian identity, immersed in the politics of his own culture, and traceable through a rather conservative critical methodology of biographical research. On the other side, the “Messianic Shakespeare”, the playwright–philosopher who demands to be read in the context of post-structuralist and postmodern theories of religion, the playwright who, despite his historical alterity, has meaning and significance now, if “now” is understood not as a static present, but as a present conditioned by the structures of futurity, a messianic moment in which the eruption of a radical otherness is always a potential event. Again, now is not the time to engage in a full discussion of this school of thought, except to say that it, too, has its strengths and weaknesses. Although there seems to be little desire on the part of critics to acknowledge this, the “messianic” structure of time has much in common with the sacramental structure of time: sacramental theology, too, stresses the eruption of a radical alterity, in this case divine grace, into the structures of human temporality. Sacramentality, unlike the messianic as conceived by most contemporary critics (but, I would suggest, remarkably similar to how most theologians might imagine it), relies not on the eruption of the future into the present, but on the yoking of the “now” with an alterity which is outside temporality proper, and which derives much of its radical difference from that very factor. This mode of specifically theoretical criticism, then, offers a useful vocabulary for conceptualising the alterity of the sacramental moment; but it fails, as my earlier comments may have suggested, in its lack of attention to historical difference, to the alterity inherent within temporality. The problem, then (and here we are remarkably in tune with early modernity again), comes down to the distinction between the “spiritual” and the material. The material must take precedence. The “spiritual” exists, in so far as “literature”, “theology” and “experience” exist; as such, we have a responsibility to it, and the messianic critics are right to suggest that this responsibility has been neglected. But none of these things exist prior to the material bodies which create them. We can only know these things culturally, as we can only know our bodies culturally; a materialist criticism must be aware of this. But it must also acknowledge that the materiality of existence precedes culture, even though that materiality can never be experienced outside culture. It is this that the messianic movement fails to explicitly acknowledge, and this is, I suggest, the most urgent task facing future criticism. What, one might well ask, are the practical implications of this: what should critics do? I have no intention of suggesting that we disengage with the

Afterword

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present; that would be foolhardy. But our ethical responsibility to the present must arise from a materialist engagement with the very temporality of the present: its place in history (whether past or future). To take a specific example: how does one respond to the recent developments in Northern Ireland, which seem to buck the trend of global politics by suggesting a potential resolution of religious, sectarian conflict? This is, after all, a conflict which the media has generally presented in religious terms, as a divide between “Catholic” and “Protestant”. The Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of Northern Ireland’s main Unionist party, is also spiritual leader of one its main Protestant churches. The man who famously denounced the Pope as antichrist (and here again early modernity seems an important context) now seems prepared to share power with a party traditionally identified with the “Catholic” population of Northern Ireland. In a context like this, only an avowedly materialistic engagement with history will suffice to explain why this conflict may seem to be drawing to a close while other “religious” conflicts seem to be escalating. If this seems remote from sixteenth-century drama, a historical materialism allows us to answer emphatically: it is not. It is the tangled network of discourses surrounding religion, ethnicity and culture which emerge in the early modern period, largely as a result of the religious crises discussed in this book, which form the appropriate context for thinking about this contemporary issue. In turn, this should cause us to reflect on the most appropriate ways of reading early modern literature. Reading sixteenth-century religious reform as a context for contemporary Ulster should alert us to the still overlooked fact that reading sixteenth-century Ulster as a context for the early modern London stage is also crucial. And not just Ulster, of course: the emergence of a discourse of religious ethnicity is occurring in other parts of Ireland, in Scotland and Wales, in the too-often-ignored regional differences of England (which is where the idea of a “Lancastrian” Shakespeare begins to suggest some profitable ways of conceptualising early modern identities), to say nothing of the wider European context. This book, of course, has only begun to explore the development of discourses of religious ethnicity in the early modern period: but it is my conviction that this represents the most fruitful future strategy for early modern literary studies.

Notes

Introduction 1. The historian Miri Rubin has compiled a brief overview of the most significant scholarly work on the Eucharist (“Whose Eucharist?” 93–4). Her list – which includes the work of Sarah Beckwith, Eamon Duffy, David Aers and Stephen Greenblatt – ranges across disciplinary distinctions between medieval and Renaissance, and between history and literature. Extremely useful as her discussion is, Rubin’s solely Eucharistic focus does not allow her to mention those critics who deal with the plurality of sacraments in late medieval and early modern culture. 2. To this list one may add Elizabeth Mazzola’s The Pathology of the English Renaissance, with its stress that “sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (3); however, Mazzola’s attempts to forge a eucharistic context for Renaissance drama seem, at times, forced and incoherent. For example, her claim that part of the appeal of the dumb show in Renaissance drama “was probably related to the parallel theatrical experience offered by the mass” is unconvincing (107). The parallels which Mazzola invokes here are neither elaborated nor supported with telling evidence: the claim is an assertion without appropriate evidence, and seems rather unconsidered. See also Paul Dean’s reading of Twelfth Night, the central assertion of which is that “important aspects of the play’s meaning depend upon recognition of allusions to eucharistic theology” (“Twelfth Night and Transubstantiation” 281); I find some of Dean’s arguments less than persuasive. For example, his attempt to prove that “Feste’s choice of name in his clerical disguise, Sir Topas, has tantalising eucharistic associations” relies heavily on very inconclusive evidence (283); his reading of Olivia, face hid behind a veil, as a “reserved host” is likewise unconvincing (288). What is more, his terminology is not always appropriately focused: he ignores distinctions between “this” and “that” (hugely significant for eucharistic theology) and confuses the “elements” of the sacrament (bread and wine) with the commonplace “four elements” (that is, earth, air, fire, and water) of Twelfth Night (but cf. Chapter 5 for Dean’s valuable insights on the sacramental body). 134

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1 Sacramental Communities in Pre-Reformation England: The Croxton “Play of the Sacrament” 1. On the problematics of cultural representations of the eucharistic Real Presence in a wider European context, cf. Gallagher and Greenblatt: “The painting of this particular doctrine [i.e. the Real Presence] is in tension with its doctrinal point – that one should learn to look with the eyes of faith past appearances to a reality invisible to the senses – because it is, after all, a painting, an image that appeals to the senses even as it tries to limit the authority of their testimony” (83; emphasis in original); “the Host in Joos van Gent’s panel serves as a representational challenge to representation itself” (95); “The doctrine of the Real Presence might be said to exceed all representational claims – the Host is the body and blood of Christ – while the painting relies on the representational efficacy of the icon” (107; emphasis in original). Gallagher and Greenblatt’s comments on the representational problematics of painting the Real Presence are, by and large, applicable to dramatic stagings of the doctrine; doctrinal dramatics carry the additional burden, however, of distinguishing between dramatic representation and sacramental performance. 2. The Croxton play is by no means the only example of sacramentally didactic drama in late medieval England. In addition to the Corpus Christi cycles, which self-consciously celebrate the eucharist, morality plays such as Wisdom contain, in the words of David Bevington, “pedagogical explanations of the sacraments, original sin, and the like [which] are appropriate for a general public Simultaneously spiritual and secular in focus, Wisdom provided a practical model for the nascent political morality play, demonstrating how the morality could retain its popular and homiletic function while adapting itself to the fascinations of political conflict in the early Tudor regime” (Tudor Drama 34). 3. Cf. Bevington’s claim that Everyman’s sacramental emphasis “reflects a church on the defensive” (Tudor Drama 35). 4. Cf. White for later, sixteenth-century uses of the church as a playing space. 5. Michael Jones suggests that the play was performed by a travelling troupe, and that the establishment of communitas may have been repeated in various centres of population: “The concluding pilgrimage also signals the travelling company to move on, which is to say that the latter emerges as a means of mechanical reproduction: travelling from town to town and, in the terms of Mervyn James, repeating the ceremony of reconstitution and incorporation into the social body” (235). 6. Cf. Turner: “All human societies implicitly or explicitly refer to two contrasting social models. One is of society as a structure of jural, political and economic positions, offices, statuses and roles, in which the individual is only ambiguously grasped behind the social persona. The other is of society as a communitas of concrete, idiosyncratic individuals who, though differing in physical and mental endowment, are nevertheless regarded as equals in terms of shared humanity” (Ritual Process 166).

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7. For Duffy, there is a balance in the eucharist between “individual wholeness [and] rightly ordered human community” (92). But what Duffy sees as a balance could just as easily be read as a tension, an interpretation to which the Croxton play seems to point. 8. Cf. The Ludus Coventriae “Last Supper”: Jesus says to Peter and the apostles, “Werfore, Petyr, and ye every-chon,/Gyf ye love me, fede my schep Gevyth hem my body as I have to yow” (496–500). 9. Trans. in Medieval Drama, ed. Bevington. 10. Cf. Jones: “In the anthropological idiom elaborated by Meryvn James, the Croxton play emerges as a drama which enacts, not only the fragmentation of the body, but also its reconstitution; it comes into focus as a drama of social differentiation, of inclusion and exclusion” (232). 11. The close correlations between eucharistic processions and drama are outlined by the Banns of the Chester Corpus Christi cycle: Also maister Maire of this citie, With all his bretheryn accordingly, A solempne procession ordent hath he To be done to the best Appon the day of Corpus [Ch]r[ist]i: The blessed sacrament caried shalbe, And a play sett forth by the clergye In honor of the fest (“Pre-Reformation Banns”, ll. 157–164). In the manuscript copied at the end of the sixteenth century, this passage, and a similar one immediately following, are marked “erazed in the booke”, probable evidence of sixteenth-century censorship. 12. Cf. Bevington: the play “is designed for performance in various churches” (Tudor Drama 37). Cf. also Gallagher and Greenblatt’s analysis of the complex representational and interpretive issues aroused by the location of eucharistic paintings as panels on an altarpiece: the “full significance must have derived to a very considerable degree from the implications of this placement and from the ritual in which the altarpiece participated the aesthetic and institutional structure would have included the altar itself upon which the sacrifice of the Mass was performed There would have been a complex movement then, at once formal, representational, and institutional, from the painted figure of Christ standing before an altar and holding the wafer between his fingers, to the predella narrative of the bleeding wafer restored to the altar, to the actual altar on which the holy wafers and the other elements and implements of the sacrifice would be placed, and thence to the priest who would stand at Mass and take up a consecrated Host between his fingers, exactly as the painted figure of Christ as priest was shown to be doing” (106). 13. In the York play of John the Baptist, it is Jesus who outlines the soteriological necessity of baptism: “Mankynde may noght un-baptymde go/To endless blys” (90–1).

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14. The “Jews”, of course, are projections of the sacramental community; cf. Gallagher and Greenblatt: “the Jewish unbeliever [in eucharistic miracle stories] has to behave as if he were instead a doubter, determined to test the validity of the doctrine by seeking direct corporeal evidence of its truth or falsehood” (100). Cf. also Jones on the Christian “theatricalization” of “the Jew”: “This scene [that is, the torture of the Host] draws on the respective roles traditionally assigned to Jews and Christians in the drama of the Passion, and in its delineation of the maimed body as the place where the identities of Jew and Christian are mapped, and the roles of torturer and victim apportioned, it could be said to epitomize Christian theatricalization of Jews By this time, it would seem fair to suggest, the conventions of Christian inscription of Jews are firmly established, and their roles as agents in a sacramental and theatrical economy fully codified” (230). But cf. also Jones 248 for a summary of recent scholarship which argues against “the ideologically motivated myth of complete Jewish absence from England” (248). 15. On the iconography of the sacrament of penance, cf. Nichols 41. 16. Cf. Sarah Beckwith: “By the late Middle Ages, the claims of eucharistic piety were being contested by the explicit Lollard polemic, which attacked the relationship of eucharistic and priestly power. For the Lollards the bread and wine in the mass did not actually or wholly become blood and body; rather they were signs for them. At issue was not simply an acute attack on clerical jurisdiction of the sacred, but an altogether different understanding of the nature of sign and symbol which disrupted a sacramental view of the world The eucharist, then, is the focus of competing claims which concern an intense debate about the very nature of sacramentality and social power. To stage a miracle play around the eucharist in the 1460s was to enter the very terms of that debate” (“Ritual, Church and Theatre” 67). 17. Cf. also a poem on the mass preserved in Richard Hill’s commonplace book, which also suggests that the mass benefits community: The priste in the holy canon prayeth also For all that at the messe stondith a-bowte, & for all Cristyn people, that be well moo, That labowr the comen vele in the world a-bowt ([“The Sacrifice of the Mass”] ll. 64–8). 18. If there is, as I suggest here, some overlap between the modes of subject-formation in late medieval and early modern culture, then the common critical urge to read early modernity as the point of emergence of modern subjectivity is called into question. For a recent expression of the view that early modernity represents “a historical vanishing point” for the subject (12), cf. Christopher Pye: “The appearance of the abstractly defined, freely acting human subject is coterminous with the emergence during the early modern era of society understood as an autonomous, impersonal domain, the domain of state and law” (8).

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19. For an interesting example of the way in which these issues reverberate throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, cf. Alan R. Velie’s reading of Shakespeare, which employs the same phrase as Braswell’s reading of medieval literature: “Shakespeare’s tragedies explore the effects of sin on the noblest men of their times. The emphasis in the plays is on the psychology of sin” (36). 20. When compared to perhaps the best-known dramatic re-enactment of the Passion in late medieval culture – the Corpus Christi cycles – one can appreciate the remarkable dramatic economy – and the employment of densely significatory symbolic language – of the Croxton play. 21. On the metadramatic qualities of the text, cf. Jones: “As it is possible to view chronicle accounts of ritual murder and host-desecration as inherently theatrical in purpose and function, the Croxton play, which draws on chronicle accounts of host desecration, is perforce metadramatic: already commenting reflexively on its own operations and its own mediatory status” (225). 22. It is, for example, dramatically more complex than the comparable moment in the Ludus Coventriae Last Supper; there Jesus, blessing a host, also dramatically (but not sacramentally) performs transubstantiation (“Of this that was bred is mad my body”; 380). But the moment of institution in the Last Supper is invoked in a reverential atmosphere, and expounded at length in a speech which resembles a eucharistic sermon; the witty dynamism of Croxton provides a marked contrast. 23. Late medieval audiences were encouraged to make a link between dramatic character and priests in other circumstances. Cf. Expositor’s speech in the Chester De Abrahamo et Melchisedech et Loth: By Abraham understand I may The Father of heaven in good faye, Melchisadech a priest to his paye To minister that sacrament, That Christ ordayned on Sherethursday In bread and wyne to honour him aye – [This signifieth the south to saye] Melchisadechs present (ll.137–144). Cf. also Langforde’s suggestion that the priest, in saying mass, performs the role of Christ: “the prest Immedyaitly. after the Sacryng. spreides and splays hys armys Abroyde. In manner of A crosse. sygnyfying. the presse of the Passyon of Cryst. the whiche owght to be remembryd in the hartes of faithfull Crysten People” (25). Cf. also Gallagher and Greenblatt’s reading of Joos van Gent’s Communion of the Apostles altarpiece (Urbino, c.1460–80): “Assisted by Saint John, who serves as altar boy, Jesus is a priest standing in the crossing of the transept, with the apse behind him, celebrating the Mass” (76).

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24. Bevington sees this congruence between ritual and drama as an indication that the Croxton play is an “act of worship”, an orthodox and coherent theological statement: The trompe d’oeil theatrics used to “prove” the real presence may strike a modern reader as naïve and apt perhaps to induce disbelief of what is after all only stage illusion These stage methods are nevertheless thoroughly traditional in liturgical drama and are related to the nature of the mass itself The acceptance of dramatic miracle in the Sacrament play is therefore synonymous with the acceptance of the doctrine of transubstantiation, not abstractly but vividly and immediately. It is in this largest sense that the Play of the Sacrament is conceived as a liturgical experience, a timeless act of worship restated in the later fifteenth century to meet the exigencies of a contemporary “wanhope” (Tudor Drama 39). Although right to point out that the existence and techniques of the play suggest that it is a reaction to anti-sacramental discourse, this reading too readily accepts the reclamation of heterodoxy proclaimed by the text. It is worth recalling that the late medieval mass was often performed in strikingly theatrical ways. Cf. Duffy’s account of the care taken by late medieval communities to emphasise the dramatic qualities of the mass: In churches with elaborately carved or coloured altar-pieces the custom emerged of drawing a plain dark curtain across the reredos at the sacring, to throw the Host into starker prominence. In some places this provision was improved: at St. Peter Cheap in London the cloth displayed at the elevation had a crucifixion scene on it. In 1502 a Hull alderman left money for the construction of a mechanical device above the high altar which caused images of angels to descend on the altar at the sacring, and ascend again at the conclusion of the Paternoster (96). Such ecclesiastical stage-managers demonstrate a keen awareness of the theatricality of the specific moment in the ceremony when the sacramental action occurs. The simple theatrical effect of the dark cloth, emphasising the appearance of Christ as the Host; the image of the crucifixion, locating the sacrifice of the eucharist in the context of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary; and the “mechanical device” of the ascending and descending angels, figuring the conjunction of human and divine effected by the sacrament: all of these examples suggest the role of theatre as an adjunct to sacramental performance. Yet one should be aware that, for believers, the mass is never simply theatre as representation; cf. Gallagher and Greenblatt: “the Roman Catholic

140 Notes

Mass [in late medieval and early modern Europe] is not an institutional interpretation or ritualized recollection of the Last Supper; it is the Last Supper, constantly renewed through the Christlike offices of the priesthood” (78; emphasis in original).

2

John Bale and the Politicisation of Sacramentality

1. These are not the only critics to make such claims. Mattsson, for example, claims that King Johan “is a morality play where the political question is more important than the religious” (6). 2. The five extant dramas are all that survive from Bale’s corpus of 24 vernacular plays; cf. Mattsson 5 and Happé, John Bale 5–6. 3. In addition to developments in ceremonial practice, the decade also witnessed a growing separation between the English church and the Roman. Cf. Happé, John Bale: “In 1532 Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury, and in 1533 the Act in Restraint of Appeals limited the right of the Church to appeal to Rome in defiance of royal authority. Cromwell became the King’s Secretary in 1534, the year that saw the Act of Supremacy establish royal authority over the Church of England” (6). 4. Bale was in fact imprisoned after complaints were made regarding his preaching on the Ten Articles; cf. Happé, John Bale 8. The dating of Bale’s drama is quite complicated; Happé, in the most recent book-length study of Bale, suggests the following as probable dates. Three Laws: first written in the early 1530s, revised after 1540. King Johan: A text composed in 1538– 1539, B text, after 1558; but “although there is evidence of additions and changes of emphasis, the outline of the play may not have changed much, and there is a high probability that many of the attitudes embodied in the A text inform the later version” (104). Therefore “most of the play might reflect Bale’s state of mind around the second half of 1538, just about the time when there is evidence for two Cromwell-backed performances” (104). The biblical plays were printed in 1547/8, with a title page claim that they were “compiled” in 1538; Happé suggests that they are later than Three Laws and King Johan (108). 5. See, for example, Bale, Three Laws, 1129–30, 1226. 6. Cf. Miller: “The parody in no wise distorts, in so far as it represents, the points and the curse itself – use of cross, book, bell, and candle; totality of imprecation; delivery to the devil; and separation from the benefits of the church It could pass for authentic save for its verse and incongruous context” (818). For a similar viewpoint, see White: “the incongruous context of the ritual holds it up for ridicule and shows it for what Bale thought it was: good theatre” (37). 7. Cf. Blatt: “When Deus Pater hands [Law of Christ] a heart, this is only the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual working” (69). This description, in its deliberate borrowing from the language of theological definitions of sacraments, suggests the sacramental aspects of Bale’s significatory practices.

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8. Cf. Blatt: “[t]he tone of the dialogue between John and the representatives of the two ‘sects’ shows clearly that [Bale] has in mind the spiritual heirs of the Pharisees and Sadducees in the 16th century” (97), and Harris: “the dispute of Pharisee and Sadducee with John the Baptist is an argument between Catholic and Protestant” (82). 9. The anti-Catholic verse tract The Resurrection of the Masse (Strasbourg, 1554) has been attributed to Bale and may give a non-dramatic indication of Bale’s later eucharistic concerns. 10. The reference to “purgatory and holy bred” (1162) has been interpreted by Blatt as referring to “purgatory and transubstantiation” (113), but this reference – possibly to pre-consecrated bread – does not seem to support such an interpretation. Cf. Happé, Complete Plays (123). 11. Bale did compose a play on the Last Supper which no longer survives (Happé Bale 5); such a play would be almost certain to touch on at least the institution of the eucharist. 12. Miller gives a good indication of the strength of this ideology: “When John, just absolved, directs England to hang treason, Private Wealth threatens cursing again He threatens authentically, for a layman was subject to cursing for not regarding tonsure and ordination” (820). 13. Happé’s interpretation is perhaps hyperbolic, but gives some suggestion of the importance of the resistance to Bale’s ideology: “[Bale’s] persistent indignation about the dangers of enforced celibacy seems indicative of long lasting anxiety, or even neurosis” (“Introduction” 3). 14. Cf. Miller, for example: “His polemically dramatizing the Roman rite [of confession] marks him among reformers and contemporary dramatists” (522). 15. The historian Lucy Wooding has recently argued that the Ten Articles is by no means a Protestant document: “There was more consistency between the Ten and Six Articles, the Bishops’ and King’s Books, than we are used to acknowledging In the Ten Articles of 1536, still sometimes given the label ‘Protestant,’ a progressive and reforming intention could thus be combined with unequivocally Catholic doctrine” (63). 16. These anecdotes are recounted chiefly by Hypocrisy. See the tales of absolution “behynde the hygh aulter” (1459–60), of the hollow pillar of Lyons (1461–4), and of the “holye popysh patryarke” who “broached” 200 nuns (1469–72). 17. The tripartite division of the sacrament was also frequently attacked by Protestants; cf. Luther: “They have divided penance into three parts – contrition, confession, and satisfaction, but in such a way that they have removed whatever was good in each of them, and have established in each of them their caprice and tyranny” (83–4; emphasis in original). 18. Cf. Luther: “There is no doubt that confession of sins is necessary and commanded of God” (85–6). 19. I am reliant here on the translation of Peter Happé, in his edition of the plays.

142 Notes

20. Happé goes on to argue that “[i]n these episodes [i.e. the ridicule of confession] Bale gives evidence of his dramatic skill, for they show inventiveness in the individual scene, and a wider relevance to the structure of the play as a whole” (“Introduction” 21). Miller, in a noteworthy article, claims that Bale’s use of Catholic ritual “articulate[s] structure” in the play (802), and is used to further important plot developments: “[t]he treason of John’s subjects one after another, the capitulation of John, and the disclosure of the scheme to poison him are all embodied in parodies of confession and absolution” (804). 21. Cf. Bryant: “[Bale] associates the practice [of confession] with the pope’s master design to continue his subjugation of English citizens” (52); and Miller, who outlines Bale’s view of the confessional as an “instrument towards dominion” (808). Miller further claims: “[t]he whip, which is the fear of hell, and the unguent, which is the hope of heaven, govern the subjects of the state more than the state itself can, and make them pliant to the will of the Church, even when it means treason to the state and murder of the king” (821). Cf. Mattsson: “the Church encourages treason by means of confession, the priests and the monks are subversive elements within the state” (63). 22. On the possible influence of Luther on Bale, Happé claims that “[i]t is somewhat difficult to ascertain whether [Bale] used Luther’s work directly the quality of his German remains unclear even though he lived in German-speaking communities from time to time” (John Bale 28). 23. Also significant here is the claim of Catholic characters in the play to absolve a poena (from penalty) and a culpa (from guilt). In Catholic theology, only the former absolution can be obtained from a priest; the latter must come from God. Cf. Miller 807. 24. It is presumably no accident that “sinful speech” is most obvious in the sacrament of penance, the ritual which demands verbal enunciation of sin. Cf. Julia Kristeva: “the practice of confession, upon the whole, does nothing else but weigh down discourse with sin” (130). 25. Cf. Mattsson: “all themes and characters are black or white” (167). Blatt claims that in King Johan, Vices are identified with ritual, whereas virtuous characters “work mainly through godly words and a simple symbolism based on the Bible” (133). Harris states the case simply: “now the virtues are Protestants; the vices are Catholics” (66). 26. Cf. Cavanagh: “The significance of such instability for King Johan is increased when we remember the play’s protracted composition during a period that threatened as much as it enabled its author’s aspirations” (183); “King Johan’s polemical assurance is offset by Bale’s insistent recognition of the power of Catholicism” (185). 27. Cf. Cavanagh, who sees Bale as willing to accept this problem: “what is striking is Bale’s acknowledgement that the political qualities of Sedition are also potential facets of his own doctrinal stance” (188). 28. Cf. Happé: “his Protestant work not only reacts against traditional Catholic material but also makes use of it where Bale is impressed by it” (John Bale 122).

Notes

3

143

Mid-Tudor Drama and Sacramental Reform

1. Cf. James C. Bryant: “Mary’s First Proclamation About Religion (1553) called attention to the common use of drama for propaganda and ordered such practices to cease. Sedition and false rumours circulating in publications and stage plays were prohibited, as were printing and all stage interludes, without special permission from the queen” (31). 2. See Thomas Fuller’s support for John Foxe’s utilisation of a similar literary technique: “I am not ignorant that of late great disgrace hath been thrown on that author [Foxe], and his worthy work, chiefly because sometimes he makes Popish Doctors, well known to be rich in learning, to reason very poorly, and the best Fencers of their Schools worsted and put out of their play by some countrey poore Protestants. But let the cavillers hereat know, that it is a great matter to have the oddes of the weapon, Gods word on their side; not to say anything of supernaturall assistance given them” (Qtd. Oliver 4) 3. In a volume published at Ingolstadt in 1577, Christophorus Raspergerus claimed to have identified 200 interpretations of the words “hoc est corpus meum”. 4. The original Latin reads: “Principio docet sancta synodus et aperte ac simpliciter profitetur in almo sanctae eucharistiae sacramento post panis et vini consecrationem dominum nostrum Iesum Christum, verum Deum atque hominem, vere, realiter ac substantialiter sub specie illarum rerum sensibilium contineri” (Tanner 693). 5. The original Latin reads: “Quoniam autem Christus redemptor noster corpus suum id, quod sub specie panis offerebat, vere esse dixit, ideo persuasum semper in ecclesia Dei fuit, idque nunc denuo sancta haec synodus declarat, per consecrationem panis et vini conversionem fieri totius substantiae panis in substantiam corporis Christi domini nostri et totius substantiae vini in substantiam sanguinis eius. Quae conversio convenienter et proprie a sancta catholica ecclesia transsubtantiatio est appelata” (Tanner 695). 6. John N. King: “For the only time in English theater history, clergymen were the driving force behind the drama. The following clerics wrote plays: Bale, Becon, Foxe, Baldwin, Udall, and Grimald” (275). King omits Watson, possibly because Watson’s Catholicism doesn’t fit with King’s study of Protestant literature. 7. A more useful approach, theologically speaking, is to deny the validity of the Aristotelian substance-accident formula on which the intellectual content of the doctrine depends. 8. On the sacramentality of the mystery cycles, see Cox, 19–38; Lepow, passim. 9. Cf. Bevington: “The morality play, inasmuch as it was the dominant mode of popular dramatic expression for about a century, inevitably developed various forms to suit its perpetually changing environment” (From Mankind to Marlowe 4); others have, of course, argued for a “continuity” of the

144 Notes

morality genre. Cf. Hardin Craig: “it is not difficult to show a continuity in Tudor drama from the full-scope morality with clearly religious purposes to later great secular representations of the issues of typical human life” (65). 10. There may also be a pun here on the linguistic similarity of “monster” and “monstrance” (i.e. a receptacle for carrying and displaying the consecrated host). Etymologically, both derive from the Latin m¯onstr¯are (to show); cf. Burnett, Constructing “Monsters” 2. 11. For more on Spiera, see Wine 663–5; for the circulation of narratives and plays based on Spiera’s life, see Wine 667–9. 12. Oliver 2–3; Wine 661; Jackson 592. 13. Compare the equivalent lines rom the first issue: But SPERAES name for causes iust, our Author doth omit, And at this tyme imagine him PHILOLOGVS to be, First, for because a Comedy will hardly him permit, The vices of one priuate man, to touch particularly, Againe, nowe shall it styrre him more, who shall it heare or see, For if that SPERA had ben one, we would straight deeme in mynde, That all by SPERA spoken were, our selues we would not finde (36–42). 14. Wine claims that “[t]he author’s statement in the Prologue that comedy must not touch particularly the vices of one private man is an indication of classical precedent” (676), which she sees as opposed to the morality structure. Yet the sense of Philologus as a representative of humanity is derived from medieval drama just as much as, if not more than, classical influence. 15. For Oliver, the play’s “closest literary counterpart is the dramatic work of Bale” (2). 16. For examples of economic sacramentalities, cf. Chapters 1 and 2. See also James Shapiro on the “economics of conversion” from Judaism to Christianity (146–51). 17. See Jones 238–49. 18. See Bale, Select Works. L.M. Oliver claims that the trial in The Conflict of Conscience “is, in all probability, a composite of many such trials, or ‘examinations’, as they had been reported by Foxe in the Acts and Monuments” (3). 19. Although Oliver claims that “the arguments advanced on these subjects [i.e. papal supremacy and the real presence] are about the simplest and most obvious to be found in Foxe” (4). 20. Cf. John Frith: “For in that it is made one bread of many corns, it is called our body, which, being divers and many members, are associated and gathered together into one fellowship or body. Likewise of the wine, which is gathered of many clusters of grapes, and is made into one liquor” (Qtd. in Oliver 8).

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21. Cf. Spivack passim. 22. Bevington locates the problem of the two endings within a context of generic uncertainty: “it is the struggle between the impulse toward biography and the impulse toward generic representation that produces the two endings The author’s final decision in favor of a happy ending stems from the central conflict in transitional drama between secular fact and religious ideal” (From “Mankind” to Marlowe 251). 23. “Si quis dixerit, baptismum liberum esse, hoc est non necessarium ad salutem: a.s.” (“If anyone says that baptism is optional, namely that it is not necessary for salvation: let him be anathema”) (685/685*); “Si quis dixerit, peccata omnia, quae post baptismum fiunt, sola recordatione et fide suscepti baptismi vel dimitti vel venialia fieri: a.s” (“If anyone says that, solely by the remembrance of receiving baptism and of its faith, all sins committed after baptism are forgiven or become venial: let him be anathema”) (686/686*). 24. “Vox sum in remotis montium clamans ingis:/“Viam parate, facite rectas semitas/veniente domino. cuius adventu cavae/in plana valles explicabunt se, solo/saxosa montes culmina qequabunt.” ego/in nomen eius abluo populos aquis,/cui detratendis servus etiam socculis/indignus essem, nemo quem agnoscit, licet/versetur inter vos et usque obambulet.” (ll. 783–91). Other plays of the period on John the Baptist include Bale’s Johan Baptystes Preachynge; James Wedderburn’s The Beheading of John the Baptist (1539–40; lost); Nicholas Grimald’s Archipropheta (1546–7). 25. “quam caede puras nos manus est aequius/servare, puris e parentibus satos,/et pura caste sacra iussos numini/offerre!” (892–5); “remedium id arbitror tutissimum,/intaminata conscientia frui” (568–9). 26. Famously, for example, in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale: “For whil that Adam fasted, as I rede,/He was in Paradis; and whan that he/Eet of the fruit deffended on the tree,/Anon was he out cast to wo and peyne./O glotonye, on thee wel oghte us pleyne!” (222–6). 27. Cf. Albert R. Cirillo on Milton’s version of Eden: “Luxuria, one of the principal vices associated with the noon-day devil, was an excessive appetite particularly, though not exclusively, in matters of sex” (383); “What superficially appears to be an appeal to the physical appetite of hunger, is here clearly predicated on the sensuous qualities of the fruit which awaken that desire” (385). 28. “Also, forasmuch as variance and contention is a thing that much displeases God, and is most contrary to the blessed communion of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ, curates shall in no wise admit to the receiving thereof any of their cure and flock, which be openly known/to live in sin notorious without repentance, or who hath maliciously and openly contended with his neighbour, unless the same do first charitably and openly reconcile himself again, remitting all rancour and malice, whatsoever controversy hath been between them” (“Injunctions”, 427–8). 29. Cf. Katherine Eisaman Maus: “The point of such distinctions is normally to privilege whatever is classified as interior. For Hamlet, the internal

146 Notes

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

experience of his own grief ‘passes show’ in two senses. It is beyond scrutiny, concealed where other people cannot perceive it. And it surpasses the visible – its validity is unimpeachable. The exterior, by contrast, is partial, misleading, falsifiable, unsubstantial” (4). Cf. also Julia Kristeva’s assertion of how Christianity’s sense of the interior differs from biblical Judaism: “Before any relation to an other is set up, and as if underlying it, it is the building of that archaic space, the topological demarcation of the preconditions of a subjectivity, qua difference between a subject and an ab-ject in the be-spoken being itself, that takes over from earlier Levitical prohibitions” (117). On bodiliness and the subject, see Sawday passim and Schoenfeldt passim. The first issue, interestingly, conceives of sin as lack of grace; the inability to repent and the suggested preferability of non-existence sit comfortably with the first issue’s emphasis on despair and abjection (see below): “A cruell Conflict certainly, where Conscience takes the foyls,/And is constrained by the flesh, to yeld to deadly sinne,/Wherby the grace and loue of God, from him sinne reaues and spoyls,/Farre happier, if that vnborne and lyfelesse he had bene” (57–61). “Manere autem in baptizatia concupiscentiam vel fomitem, haec sancta synodus fatetur et sentit Hanc concupiscentiam, quam aliquando Apostolus peccatum appeallat, sancta synodus declarat, ecclesiam catholicam nunquam intellexisse, peccatum appellari, quod vere et proprie in renatis peccatum sit, sed quia ex peccato est ed ad peccatum inclinat” (667). Cf. Jaroslav Pelikan: “As part of their attack on ‘neo-Pelagianism’ the Reformers made a point of calling the concupiscence that remained after baptism ‘sin’, in contrast to the scholastic terminology, according to which it was a ‘spark [fomes]’. Such terminology was inadequate because the justified believer was not only righteous but a sinner at the same time. Yet in the light of the Catholic doctrine of baptismal grace this ‘remaining spark cannot be sin’, and the teaching of the Reformers had been condemned repeatedly, above all by the papal bull against Luther” (278). Cf. Kristeva: “various descriptions of sin converge on the flesh or rather on what might be called, by anticipation, an overwhelming release of drives, unrestrained by the symbolic” (124). Cf. Kristeva: “Sin remains the only token of difference from the sublimity of Christ Sin, even if its remission is always promised, remains the rock where one endures the human condition as separate: body and spirit, body jettisoned from the spirit; as a condition that is impossible, irreconcilable, and, by that very token, real” (120). The attempted rebellion against God – challenging the creative prerogative of the divine – also marks Juventus as a type of Satan; one should then compare Juventus’s abjection with the expulsion of Satan from heaven. Although see Susan Snyder on despair and Protestant subjectivity: “Protestantism was, in a sense, born of Christian despair – the dissatisfaction

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with works and rites which can never be perfect, the tormented conscience, the desire for spiritual rebirth in total dependence on God. The whole Protestant emphasis on man’s complete unworthiness and helplessness tended to reinforce the paradox of despair, to make it at once more necessary and more terrible. Luther in particular placed despair of self at the very core of Christian experience” (23). 38. “peccatum, quod mors est animae” (666).

4 Interrogating Sacramentality: The Drama of Christopher Marlowe 1. See Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe, 245–62; Thomas and Tydeman 242–5. 2. Cf. Marotti (Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism) for an interesting collection of essays on representations of Catholicism in early modern England. 3. See Bryant 40–3. 4. For a dramatic representation of this division, albeit transported to France, see Marlowe’s fragmentary The Massacre at Paris: here we find a visual portrayal of the religious divide – “The rest that will not go [to mass] may stay [on stage]” (i.23). This sacramental worship associated with Catholics is mirrored by a prayer-based religion ascribed to the Protestant characters: “Come, my lords, let’s go to the church, and pray/That God may still defend the right of France” (i.54–5). 5. In The Massacre at Paris, the Duke of Guise is constructed as a representative of the hypocrisy and political aims of international Catholicism: For this, have I a largess from the Pope, A pension and a dispensation too; And by that privilege to work upon, My policy hath framed religion (ii.59–62).

6.

7. 8.

9.

See also Condé’s claim that “what [Guise] doth the Pope will ratify,/In murder, mischief, or in tyranny” (i.39–40). The surviving text of The Massacre at Paris, which may owe its existence to a form of memorial reconstruction, gives a remarkably similar speech to King Henry: “I’ll fire his crazèd buildings, and enforce/The papal towers to kiss the lowly earth” (xxiv.62–3) (On memorial reconstruction in The Massacre, see Burnett, “Introduction”, xxv). The Massacre at Paris contains an enthusiastically staged murder of a Catholic cardinal (Scene Twenty-Two). See, for example, Bryant: “Of all the University Wits, Christopher Marlowe is the most consistently vehement in his dramatic derogation of Roman Catholics” (121). Throughout this chapter I refer to the “A”-text (i.e. the text published in 1604) of Doctor Faustus; this should not be taken as implying any claims about the relative value or significance of the “A” (1604) text as

148 Notes

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

opposed to the “B” (1616) text. Rather, I am following the editorial work of Bevington and Rasmussen, who argue that “the A-text more nearly represents the play that Marlowe wrote in about 1588” (xvi). Since the composition of this text accords with the time frame with which this chapter is concerned, it is the more appropriate text for analysis. Cf. John D. Cox: “Marlowe [in Doctor Faustus] recreates a simulacrum of familiar oppositional thinking in order to deconstruct it” (113). Barber sees this mixture of the supernatural and the prosaic as one of the key features of Doctor Faustus: “the magical dominion and pleasures of Dr. Faustus ambiguously mingle the divine and the human, giving to the temporal world a wonder and excitement which is appropriated, daringly and precariously, from the supernatural” (“Form” 101). One may also compare the non-sacramental means of disposing of the bodies of Sigismond (“We will both watch and ward shall keep his trunk/Amidst these plains for fowls to prey upon”; 2 Tamburlaine II.iii.38–9) and Barabas (“For the Jew’s body, throw that o’er the walls/To be a prey for vultures and wild beasts”; Jew V.i.56–7). Duffy sees, for example, a conflict between the traditionalism of some parishioners and the reformist zeal of some of their clergy: “Insistence on the due performance of [the last rites] and the other rites of passage became a frequent bone of contention between traditionally minded parishioners and Protestant clergy” (590). A rather lengthy passage from Duffy may clarify this distinction: Such practices survived in some regions longer than others. Bishops and archdeacons in the archdiocese of York and the dioceses of Chester and Hereford in the 1580s were still enquiring after the users of beads and primers, and the survival of altars, images, and the medieval or Marian vestments or books. In London, Exeter, and Norwich, by contrast, the ritual offences being enquired after were more likely to be the abandonment of the fonts by ministers who would not baptize in popish pig-troughs or who would not wear the surplice (579; my emphasis).

Duffy captures well the variety of ritual controversies which could accumulate around one sacrament. His use of the rhetoric of survival and abandonment, though, does not suggest the cultural fluidity unleashed when traditional rituals of subject-forming and subject-saving become open to reinterpretation. Marlovian drama, on the other hand, unmistakably reflects this volatility. 15. Barber does, however, draw attention to the way in which Marlovian drama appropriates some of the functions of ritual. This is in part a result of language – “[t]he high poetry, the bombast, of Marlowe and kindred Elizabethans is incantation, a wilful, self-made sort of liturgy” (“Form” 117) – but also relates to the way in which drama functions as a conduit for social forces: “[t]he analogy between tragedy and a scapegoat ritual is very clear Faustus the hero has carried off into death the evil of the motive he embodied, freeing from its sin, for the moment, the

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author–executioner and the participating audience” (118). Cf. also Eric C. Brown’s claim that “the Marlovian ritual represents a mythic act of violence that aims at containing and controlling time” (19). 16. Contemporary writers often identified baptism as a sign of belonging to the Christian community; see, for example, Christopher Barker’s reference to baptism as “the outward signe and badge of christianitie” (Image 6). 17. For Protestants, it was imperative that the “word” of Christ be emphasised over the Latin words of the Roman ceremony: cf. Thomas Bilson, The true difference betweene Christian subiection and unchristian rebellion (1585): “our beliefe is, that his mightie word, not your vnpausing speech or intentiue lookes performeth the Sacrament. And therfore your blowing Christs words vpon the bread is rather a magicall incantation, than any effectual application of them to the elements; and if you hold that his word is too weake to endue the visible signe with inuisible grace, except it be backed by your blowing and crossing, we say you be proud disciples, no right appliers of his heauenly word and power” (1). 18. Elsewhere, Faustus’s “sacrifices” are accordingly diabolic rather than eucharistic: he has “prayed and sacrificed” to devils (I.iii.7), and vows to build “an altar and a church” to Beelzebub, “[a]nd offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes” (II.i.13–14). If sacrifices are diabolic in Doctor Faustus, they are erotic in Dido, Queen of Carthage; see Dido’s claim that “I’ll make His lips an altar, where I’ll offer up/As many kisses as the sea hath sands” (III.i.84–7). This example suggests a lack of solemnity towards the idea of religious ritual on the part of the dramatist, which receives expression more fully in Faustus. See also Bajazeth’s equation of Christianity with idolatry: Now will the Christian miscreants be glad, Ringing with joy their superstitious bells And making bonfires for my overthrow. But ere I die, those foul idolaters Shall make me bonfires with their filthy bones (1 Tamburlaine III.iii.736–40). 19. T. McAlindon, for whom Faustus’s rituals project a “topsy-turvy worldview” (52), draws attention also to the fact that “Mephastophilis [sic] demands that the signing of the pact be enacted as a grave religious ritual this covenantal surrender of [Faustus’s] soul to hell is an inversion of Christ’s covenantal surrender of himself on the cross” (51). The sacramental (or otherwise) status of marriage is a considerable concern in The Massacre at Paris: initially, marriage is seen as a means of reconciling the gap between Protestant and Catholic: “this union and religious league thus joined in nuptial rites” (i.4–5), but it soon becomes clear that the Catholic King Charles sees marriage and the eucharist as intertwined forms of worship: “And now, my lords, the marriage-

150 Notes

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

rites performed,/We think it good to go and consummate/The rest with hearing of a holy mass” (i.18–20). Again the fragmentary text of The Massacre suggests a further interest in the sacraments: Guise’s act of swearing by the sacrament (xxi.52) serves as a marker of his Catholic identity, while he also, in death, proclaims the continuation of the Catholic eucharist: “Vive la messe!” (xxi.90). Graham Hammill has recently claimed that Barber makes “a mistake when he argues that the emphasis on eating and consumption in Faustus rehearses a theology of communion” (329); this book, however, argues that there is a clear eucharistic interest in the play, which even extends beyond the metaphors of consumption analysed by Barber. For a late sixteenth-century example of the significance of the eucharistic act of consumption, see Christopher Barker’s emphasis on the “spirituall nourishment of meate and drinke” available through the eucharist: “the flesh & blood of Iesus Christ was broken & shedde for vs vpon the crosse, that it might be spirituall foode” (Image 12). Cf. Huston Diehl’s interpretation: “Faustus calls attention to the Emperor’s mis-judgement, a kind of mis-seeing. He identifies as erroneous the assumption that a visible sign is identical to the substantial thing itself, which is the fundamental error that the Protestants ascribe to the Roman church” (Staging Reform 78). The Emperor’s eucharistic uncertainty, moreover, echoes a piece of stage business in Act Three, Scene Two: the silver goblet which Robin and Rafe toss around in that scene may suggest a eucharistic chalice, in which case the transformation of Robin and Rafe into a dog and ape may be a mocking reference to transubstantiation – this would tie the concerns of this scene to the anxieties of substance voiced by Faustus. There are other ways, too, in which eucharistic anxieties are expressed in the play. The fragmentation of Faustus’s body in the Horse-Courser incident (IV.i.100ff.) recalls the fractio panis in the mass, while the Duchess of Vanholt’s desire for grapes may suggest a de-sacramentalized version of the Christian desire for the eucharistic Christ (IV.ii.). Diehl reads these scenes as undertaking a demystification of the eucharist: “[t]he eucharistic matter is tested and examined, its mystery exhausted as it passes from pope to magician to clown. Displayed in the secular space of the common stage, the sacred eucharistic symbol, the very sight of which many lay Catholics believed to be salvific, is trivialized and domesticated” (80). John Bakeless claims that Marlowe had a “general reputation for unorthodox views, about the time of his death” (124). See the Geneva Bible: “Take eate: this is my body” (Matthew 26.26); “Take, eate, this is my body” (Mark 14.22); “Take, eate: this is my bodie” (1Corinthians 11.24). Cf. Cornelius 159; Battenhouse, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine 155. But see also Shapiro’s refusal to allow a straightforward interpretation of this moment: “While there is no reason to doubt [Abigail’s] sincerity at

Notes

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

151

this moment, her very need to insist that she is no apostate draws attention to the popular belief that, with death imminent, Jewish converts repudiated the Christianity they had once willingly embraced” (158). McAdam calls attention to Barabas’s resistance to symbolic water in the play: “Water is in fact the element he struggles against Water, symbolic of purification and baptism, becomes a nightmare image since it functions only as a destroyer; in Marlowe’s vision baptism can take place only in a symbolic hell, and even then it is not true baptism since it involves not conversion but annhilation” (160). There is in the play, of course, a more specific form of anti-semitism, related to the so-called blood curse, which views Judaism as a sin: “If your first curse fall heavy on thy head/And make thee poor and scorned of all the world,/‘Tis not our fault, but thy inherent sin”, exclaims one of the minor characters (I.ii.108–10). Cf. Shapiro 157–65 on Abigail’s conversion(s). See, for example, David Bevington’s claim that Faustus is the “crowning achievement of Psychomachia drama” (Mankind 245). Although Bevington is among the most influential exponents of the Faustus-as-psychomachia book (“in its pattern of linear episodes and sequence of homiletic characters, Faustus is squarely in the tradition of the dramatic Psychomachia” (Mankind 258)), he nevertheless perceives something of the structure of the play according to life cycle rituals: “[t]he overall plan of the play is nothing less than the spiritual biography of its protagonist from birth until death and from innocence to damnation” (Mankind 258). Although it is not entirely clear what the ideological significance of Wittenberg may have been at this point in the sixteenth century, Huston Diehl has recently suggested that the significance may have been, in part, sacramental: “in addition to its associations with Luther, Wittenberg was in the 1580s ‘a hot-bed of heterodoxy’ and the center of a controversial late-Reformation movement of ‘crypto-Calvinists’ whose beliefs, particularly about the nature of the sacrament of communion, were vehemently opposed and suppressed by orthodox Lutherans” (Staging Reform 75). “it is better to marrie then toe burne” (Geneva, 1Corinthians 7.9). It may be possible to view Faustus’s inability to marry as a sign of spiritual immaturity. R.L. DeMolen argues that “For Catholics and Protestants alike [in the sixteenth century], marriage was the principal rite of adulthood. It acknowledged the adolescent’s spiritual and physical maturity and testified to his readiness for added responsibility” (67). Cf. Cox’s analysis of the competing communities in Faustus: “Stage devils were originally conceived oppositionally as threats to community, whether it was the sacramental social body in traditional religion or the body of the suffering martyrs that Protestants regarded as the true church. But Marlowe’s devils seemingly oppose only another version of the libido dominandi that they represent themselves, except that their opposite

152 Notes

seems to be more successful than they are and therefore, presumably, more powerful” (118). 35. This forms a contrast with, for example, Jonathan Dollimore’s claim that “Faustus is constituted by the very limiting structure which he transgresses and his transgression is both despite and because of that fact” (Radical Tragedy 110). 36. This is similar but not, I think, identical to Dollimore’s reading: “The protestant God demanded of each subject that s/he submit personally and without mediation. The modes of power formerly incorporated in mediating institutions and practices now devolve on Him and, to some extent and unintentionally, on His subject: abject before God, the subject takes on a new importance in virtue of just this direct relation” (114). 37. See Zenocrate’s (non-Christian) separation of body and soul: Ah, life and soul still hover in his breast And leave my body senseless as the earth, Or else unite you to his life and soul, That I may live and die with Tamburlaine! (1 Tamburlaine III.ii.21–4). 38. Cf. Barber: “The hero asks to be swallowed and disgorged, anticipating the fact his sin expects and attempting to elude damnation by separating body and soul” (112). For Barber, however, Faustus resolutely fails to achieve the necessary separation of body and soul, and so is damned: “Despite the fact that his attitude towards his motive has changed from exaltation to horror, he is still dominated by the same motive – body and soul are one” (113). Bevington traces what he calls a “bifurcation of Faustus’ own personality”, not into body and soul, but into a similar binary of “base physical desires and Promethean aspiration” (Mankind 255); while acknowledging a critical reluctance to give support to the ideologically charged notion of the separation of the subject into body and soul, I nevertheless retain the terms as a useful way of analysing how early modern culture imagines the subject to be constructed through the rituals of sacramentality. 39. Faustus at this point is quite similar to Donne’s “Man of Sin”, who “come[s] to sin wisely and learnedly, to sin logically, by a Quia, and an Ergo, that, because God does thus, we may do as we do, we shall come to sin through all the Arts, and all our knowledge” (Qtd. Cole 75). For more on the relation between Faustus and this passage in Donne’s sermons, see Cole 75. 40. In a recent psychoanalytic reading, Ian McAdam has argued that “Faustus wants to be spared from having to surrender to Christ, since that would mean a loss of self, of his own identity [the] potential merger with God is regarded with terror rather than joy The desire for spiritual self-surrender in Faustus, because accompanied by narcissistic terror (specifically a terror of dismemberment and engulfment), constitutes a potentially regressive merger” (116).

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5 Sinful Subjects: Shakespearean Sacramentality 1. John D. Cox has emphasised the critical fallacy of using Greenblatt’s reading of Lear as a template for Shakespeare’s other plays: “the play’s effect depends on its constructing a dependable symbol system in the first place – that is, a system so close to believed symbol that its inability to cope with what happens in the play produces the kind of anxiety that is the tragic effect of King Lear. In short, the emptying out of religious symbol would seem to be strategic for King Lear; similarly constructed symbolic worlds work very differently in Macbeth and the romances (154). 2. An alterative, though less common, critical viewpoint stresses the spiritual and sacramental qualities of Shakespearean drama; cf. Knapp: “For Shakespeare, in fact, the carnal spectacles of the theatre are better than demystifying: they are sacramental. In other words, Shakespeare believes that his audience can draw spiritual strength from their carnal experience of the theatre, and Henry V shows that this belief has strong affinities with mainstream English Protestant conceptions of the eucharist Following those Protestants who treated the petty materiality of the wafer as proof that the eucharist represented Christ, Henry V suggests that the carnal spectacles of the theatre sacramentally highlight, rather than obscure, the operations of the spirit Framing his histories as far less homiletic than sacramental experiences, Shakespeare suggests to his audience that the process of spiritual edification must necessarily be communal by locating the real sacramental action of the theatre less on the stage than in the mind, he also encourages his auditors to take responsibility for their own spiritual welfare” (33–4). 3. On the ritual form of the Catholic sacrament of penance, cf. Tentler, Sin and Confession 82–95. 4. Debora Kuller Shuger, however, offers a contrasting argument: “Given the Duke’s profound religious aura, along with the fact that nothing in his words or behaviour seems at all relevant to what are usually considered the political foci of the early Jacobean era it is not clear that the Duke should be read politically To see the Duke, and the play, as having political import, one needs to rethink, in some fairly fundamental ways, the nature of early modern politics, above all, what religion has to do with it” (Political Theologies 36). 5. Cf. Adelman on the absence and presence of Juliet: “the body so prominent in the beginning is curiously effaced by the action of the play, as the relationship between Juliet and Claudio is effaced, and this effacement seems to me a sign of the play’s uneasy relation to sexuality and to the pregnant female body as the site of origin Originating cause of the play’s dilemma’s, [Juliet] is largely forgotten as the Duke increasingly commands central stage; her pregnant body – the visible sign of maternal origin and of female generative power – is replaced by his invisible and bodiless control. But at the end Juliet returns, silently entering with Claudio; and her return qualifies the Duke’s control” (89).

154 Notes

6. Old Hamlet, of course, is denied his final confession, dying “disappointed.” Cf. the introduction to this book for more on Hamlet’s sacramentality. Velie suggests an inversion of the deathbed confessional in the case of Cymbeline’s Queen, suggesting that “[b]efore she dies she gives what might be termed a ‘black confession’, repenting that she had not been able to do more evil when she was alive” (76). 7. There are a series of other moments in the play which seem to imply an interest in eucharistic discourse: Cassio’s tirade against wine in II.iii., for example, hints at an engagement with the doctrine of transubstantiation: “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!” (II.iii.277–9). The “invisible spirit” of consecrated wine is, from a Catholic point of view, the presence of Christ; from a radical Protestant perception, however, the doctrine could certainly have been construed as a trick of the devil. Cassio’s next remark may then refer to the plight of Catholics who have been duped into believing the doctrine: “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths, to steal away their brains!” (II.ii.286–7); he continues, “Every inordinate cup is unblest, and the ingredience is a devil” (II.iii.302–3). 8. The force of grace in the Catholic conception of the sacrament was certainly keenly felt in the period; Michael C. Questier has recently argued that “Catholic assertions about the power of sacramental confession were thought to have a persuasive influence on people to join the Roman communion in order to avail themselves of this channel of grace” (175). The infusion of grace and the regeneration of the subject, we can surmise, represented a substantial part of the appeal of the Catholic understanding of the sacrament. 9. Cf. Dollimore: “What Foucault has said of sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems appropriate also to sexuality as a sub-category of sin in earlier periods: it appears to be that which power is afraid of but in actuality is that which power works through. Sin, especially when internalised as guilt, has produced the subjects of authority as surely as any ideology” (“Transgression and Surveillance” 85). Shuger’s reading of the play initially seems to support this (“sexuality leads to the formation of exclusive bonds, and hence to withdrawal from communal fellowship and the demands of the common good into erotic privacy” (25)), but goes on to suggest that the play sees sexuality as individually disruptive rather than productive: “sixteenth-century English texts pay attention to the process by which illicit sex leads to catastroph[ic?] personal disintegration The belief that illicit sex erodes the moral foundations of personality has an obvious bearing on Measure for Measure” (Political Theologies 37–8). 10. Alan R. Velie has analysed Angelo’s confession in terms of its relation to penitential theology. He claims, “Angelo’s repentance is not a full one. The Homily describes four steps to repentance: contrition, confession, faith, and amendment of life. Angelo undergoes the first two. He is contrite – ‘earnestly sorry for his sins’, as the Homily puts it. And he

Notes

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

155

confesses to the Duke, God’s representative on earth, that he has sinned. But the shock of being discovered has thrown Angelo into a state of despair. He lacks the faith that God, or the Duke, will deem him worthy of forgiveness” (52). Lucas Erne (“Shakespeare’s ‘Ever-Fixed Mark’ ”) has suggested that the doctrine of indelible characters informs some of the wordplay of the Sonnets; yet he prefers the term “mark” to the more theologically precise “character”. Maus’s sense that “the word ‘character’ refers to a publicly legible inscription” is therefore too narrow (168). Cf. Paul Dean’s analysis of the ways in which materialist criticism is unable to interpret the sacramental body: “Materialist criticism, with its tendency to read all human relationships in terms of power, the circulation of social forces and so on, can make little sense of a worldview in which the possession of a body was also the stewardship of a soul, in which membership of a social body entailed membership of the church as the body of Christ, in which union with another person in marriage was a symbol of the union of Christ with his bride the church, and in which the high point of affirmation of incorporation into the social and ecclesiastical body was sealed by partaking the body and blood of Christ in the consecrated host. Such was the philosophy of the body on the eve of the Reformation” (“Twelfth Night and Transubstantiation” 291). Cf. Knapp for an argument that Shakespeare’s drama promotes a fusion of body and soul through a sacramental rhetoric: “the fellowship between flesh and spirit that Shakespeare aims to encourage though the experience of Henry V depends on more than a matching fellowship between stage and audience: it depends as well on a fellowship encouraged within the audience [Shakespeare] appears to imagine his auditors playing the communicants to the eucharist of his historical drama. That is, he seems to think that, as a stage for immaterial violence Henry V provides the audience as ‘unbloody’ a sacrifice as the eucharist was thought to supply in recalling Christ’s death” (48). Huston Diehl senses in Measure for Measure “a profound sense of the gap between the fallen world and the celestial one it can only shadow” (“Infinite Space” 398). Cf. Hankins (170) on Shakespearean original sin. Alan Sinfield has written of the tension between divine omnipotence and the problem of “evil” in early modern culture and has outlined Macbeth as one of the texts which demonstrate the problem most clearly: “Macbeth, in the manner of Absolutist ideology and Reformation Christianity, strongly polarises ‘good’ and ‘evil’, but, at the same time, also like the prevailing doctrine, it insists on complete divine control of all human events. This twin determination produces a deity that sponsors the ‘evil’ it condemns and punishes” (69). Sinfield’s concern is not to establish that this is a self-conscious process in the play; rather, he is interested in the way in which official ideology results in “unresolvable anxiet[ies]” (69).

156 Notes

18. James Schiavoni has suggested a similar reading for a similar moment in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and should be mentioned here: “sacraments may illuminate the relationship between Book One and Book Two. Both the Well of Life in Book One and the washing of Ruddymayne’s hands in Book Two are reminiscent of baptism, but in the first case the sacrament works and in the second case it does not. The water revives St. George for his fight against the dragon, but it does not clear the infant’s hands of the inherited stain Augustine’s distinction between the guilt of original sin and the inherited concupiscence could be relevant. Baptism can wash away the guilt, but concupiscence remains in the Christian, and must be resisted concupiscence is like an ineradicable stain imprinted on a child by the folly of his parents” (116–17). 19. After his accession to the throne, James was presented with the Millenary Petition, so called because it had apparently been signed by a thousand ministers, all eager for further reformation of the Church of England (Lockyer 102). In sacramental terms, the petitionaries specifically campaigned for an end to the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, and of the ring in the marriage ceremony. At the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, the godly also objected to the practices of general absolution and of the confirmation of children (Lockyer 105). Huston Diehl has complained of the critical tendency to ignore the Hampton Court Conference in discussions of Measure: the conference “goes unmentioned in virtually all treatments of Measure for Measure as a play written for or about James even though Shakespeare’s 1604 comedy, in staging a conflict between a rigid reformer and a woman intent on entering a strict Roman Catholic religious order, rehearses the extremist views – radical puritan and Catholic – that James sought to suppress at the Hampton Court conference” (“Infinite Space” 395). Cf. also Shuger’s contention that “the play is a sustained meditation on its own political moment – the political moment of James’s accession, but also, and more significantly, of the Reformation’s aftermath” (1). 20. Earlier critical readings saw the multiplicity of religious attitudes in Shakespearean drama as evidence of Shakespeare’s lack of partisanship, thereby contributing to the myth of a universal Shakespeare. David Bevington’s (1968) claim that Shakespeare is “an unusually brave, sensitive, and humane defender of a middle position rapidly losing credence in the extremist temper of Elizabeth’s lasy years” (Tudor Drama 5), presents, I think, a rather “safer” Shakespeare than my emphasis on religious tension throughout the century. Bevington’s Shakespeare performs resolution rather than revealing tension: “Anticlericalism is staple in Shakespeare’s plays In its historical context, however, Shakespeare’s anticlericalism is notably mild Shakespeare’s anticlericalism in no way contradicts his generous attitude towards the old religion Yet Shakespeare may be equally absolved of campaigning for a return to the medieval church” (201–2). A more recent argument which repeats the general tone of Bevington, although with some significant nuances, is

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that of Knapp: “Shakespeare regards his exposure of puritan and papist carnality as serving a religious purpose, in promoting a less repressive and thus more durable spirituality” (33); “what gives the appearance of an aestheticizing skepticism in his plays is Shakespeare’s increasing conviction that, for religion’s sake, doctrinal controversies must be muted” (49; emphasis in original). 21. On such re-inscription, cf. Knapp: “The prologues to Henry V suggests that Shakespeare wants to help redeem the spirituality not only of the sacraments but of stage-plays too. When the Chorus advises the spectators he exhorts them to invest what seem like empty signs with something more substantial – to treat open haunts, material communions, the flesh, in other words, as vehicles for an immaterial force” (45–6).

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Index

Abbot, George (1562–1633), 96 abjection, 87–9 and Christianity, 87 and desire, 119–20 and the eucharist, 89 and interiority, 87–8 and sin, 119 and subjectivity, 88, 119 absolution, 53, 101, 114, 115 and Shakespeare, 130 Adelman, Janet, 125 afterlife, and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 115 Anabaptists, 41 anti-Catholicism, see Catholicism, opposition to anxiety and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 109 and interiority, 83–4 and Protestantism, 83 sacramental, 130 and sin, 119 and subjectivity, 27, 83–4, 109 Ars Moriendi, 94–5 Askewe, Anne (1521–46), 77 Baines note, 98 Bale, John (1495–1563), 9, 35–6, 77, 92, 93 on confirmation, 46, 48 on the eucharist, 45–6, 48 on extreme unction, 40, 48 God’s Promises, 39–40, 42, 45, 49 on holy orders, 46–8, 49 Johan Baptystes Preachynge, 38–9, 42–3, 50–1, 56 King Johan, 35–6, 42, 45–6, 47–8, 49, 51–4, 55, 56–7, 58–9 on marriage, 46–8 on penance, 48–54

The Temptation of Our Lord, 42 Three Laws, 39, 42, 45–6, 47–8, 49 view of baptism, 41–5, 48 baptism, 20, 38–9, 54, 72 and anxiety, 45 of Christ, 43 and circumcision, 96 and community, 44 competing versions of, 126 and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 104 and drama, 80 and grace, 127 and Henry V (Shakespeare), 126 and The Jew of Malta (Marlowe), 101 John Bale on, 41–5, 48 Luther on, 127 and Macbeth (Shakespeare), 124, 127 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 122, 125 parody of, 104, 122, 127 and the Play of the Sacrament, 43 as rite-of-passage, 54 and Shakespeare, 130 and sin, 79–81, 84, 127 and soul, 120, 126 see also godparents Barber, C. L., 96, 97, 107 Beauregard, David N., 112 Bevington, David, 33 bishop, role in church hierarchy of, 17–18 Bishop’s Book, 37 blood of Christ, 14, 93–4, 124, 128 and Macbeth (Shakespeare), 124 and sin, 124, 128 173

174 Index

body and anxiety, 114 and concupiscence, 85 fragmentation of, 108 and original sin, 125 and penance, 112–13 and the sacraments, 107 and sin, 82–3, 122, 123 Borris, Kenneth, 106, 107 Brand, Clinton Allen, 103 Braswell, Mary Flowers, 29 Bryant, James, 37 Buchanan, George (c.1506–1582) Baptistes, 80 Jephtha, 80 cannibalism, 99 Catholicism and costume, 47–8 dramatic representations of, 35 and interiority, 57 material emphasis of, 38, 47, 56 opposition to, 37, 51, 57, 66, 75–7, 92, 93, 110 pre-reformation, 11 textual representations of, 92 and theatricality, 47–8, 49, 64–5 as threat, 92 Cavanagh, Dermot, 36, 53–4, 56, 58 celibacy, clerical, 47–8 chantries, 62 church, as building, 15–16 circumcision, 96 community, 15–16, 23–4 and baptism, 44 and eucharist, 26–7, 105–6 and penance, 50 concupiscence, 84–7, 125–6 and the body, 85 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 126, 129 and scriptural authority, 87 and sexuality, 85–6 and sin, 126 and subjectivity, 85 confession, see penance

confirmation Bale’s views on, 46, 48 and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 104 as rite-of-passage, 54 and Shakespeare, 130 and soul, 120 contrition, 21–2, 49, 101 conversion, 72–3, 78, 101–2 Cooper, Thomas (c.1517–1594), 105, 106, 107 Corpus Christi, feast of, 63 Coursen, Herbert R., 123 Cox, John D., 110 cultural materialism, 111, 131 cycle drama, 2–3, 44, 63, 70–1 dance of death, 95 death, and sacraments, 105 deathbed, 94–5 and Hamlet (Shakespeare), 129 and Henry V (Shakespeare), 114–15 and Judaism, 102 and Othello (Shakespeare), 114–15, 129 and penance, 94, 114–15 and Protestant culture, 114 and sacraments, 94 demonic possession, 124 desire and abjection, 119–20 and interiority, 120 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 119–20 and subjectivity, 119–20 dialogue, 63–70 Diehl, Huston, 2 DiPasquale, Theresa, 3 Dollimore, Jonathan, 91, 120–1, 131 Donne, John (1572–1631), 3–4 “Divine Meditations”, 128 dualism, 123 Duffy, Eamon, 11, 57, 94, 95 East Anglia, 13–14 Edward VI, King of England (1537–53), 7

Index

Elsky, Martin, 3 Empson, William, 109 ethnicity, 133 eucharist, 26–7, 32, 40, 54, 62, 63–4, 77 and abjection, 89 Bale’s views on, 45–6, 48 and community, 26–7, 105–6 and crucifixion, 32 and the dead, 46 and deathbed, 94 and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 93–4, 97–9, 108 and drama, 32, 64–6 and Edwardian dialogues, 63–70 and heterodoxy, 98 and idolatry, 46 institution of, 99 and Latin, 46 and Macbeth (Shakespeare), 124 and Othello (Shakespeare), 115 as sacrifice, 99 scriptural foundation of, 67–8, 71 and sin, 80–1, 124 and subjectivity, 27, 107, 170 and Tamburlaine (Marlowe), 99 see also fractio panis; real presence; transubstantiation Everyman, 13, 71, 72, 78–9 excommunication, ritual of, 38 and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 105 exile, and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 106 extreme unction Bale’s views on, 46, 48 and deathbed, 94 as rite-of-passage, 54 Fall, the, 124 Florence, Council of, 94 fonts, seven-sacrament, 13–14, 55 Foucault, Michel, 27–8, 52, 118–19 Foxe, John (1517–1587), 84–5 fractio panis, 32, 99

175

godparents, 104 grace, 94, 99, 104, 132 and alternative sacraments, 96 and baptism, 127 and Holy Spirit, 124 and interiority, 118–19 lack of, 123, 124–5 and Macbeth (Shakespeare), 127 and marriage, 111 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 126 and penance, 97, 116, 118 and repentance, 128 sacraments as sign of, 97 and subjectivity, 118–19 Greenblatt, Stephen, 4–5, 38, 51, 131 Hampton Court conference, 7–8, 129 Hanson, Elizabeth, 112–13, 122 Happé, Peter, 44, 46, 51 Hell and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 106 and Othello (Shakespeare), 115 and subjectivity, 106 Henry VIII, King of England (1491–1547), 6–7 Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, 6, 36, 41 views on transubstantiation, 46 Herbert, George (1593–1633), 3 hierarchy, social, 16 historical materialism, 131, 133 Holleran, James, 2 holy orders Bale’s views on, 46–8, 49 and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 104, 105 as rite-of-passage, 54 and soul, 120 Holy Spirit, 41, 124 holy water, 96, 104 Hooker, Richard (1554–1600), 120 Houlbrooke, Ralph, 94

176 Index

identity interrogation of, 92 and penance, 101 and ritual form, 96 sectarian, 131, 132 incitement to discourse, 113 indelible characters, 97, 104, 105, 120–3 and Macbeth (Shakespeare), 127, 129 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 121–3 and pregnancy, 122 and sin, 127 and subjectivity, 122, 129 interiority, 27, 78–9 and abjection, 87–8 and anxiety, 83–4 and baptism, 45 bodily, 114 and Catholicism, 57 and desire, 120 and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 107 and grace, 118–19 material, 114 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 113, 119 mental, 114 and Othello (Shakespeare), 113–15, 119 and penance, 27–9, 52, 57, 83, 101, 113, 118–19 and Protestantism, 82, 83 sanctity of, 113 and sin, 86 and soul, 81–9, 123 and subjectivity, 122 and submission, 120 and women, 113 intolerance, religious, 131 James, Mervyn, 2–3 John Bon and Mast Parson, 64–70 Judaism, 24–5, 32, 76 and deathbed, 102 and sin, 102

Kamps, Ivo, 35 Kastan, David Scott, 35 King, John N., 4, 65–6, 80 Kirschbaum, Leo, 93 Kristeva, Julia, 87–90, 119 last sacraments, 94, 95 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 115 Latin, 17, 53, 96 and the eucharist, 46 Lepow, Lauren, 3 Levin, Harry, 96 Low, Anthony, 106 lust, 86 Lusty Juventus, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86–8 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), 6, 49 The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 6, 36, 52, 53 on baptism, 127 Lydgate, John (c.1370–1449) “Procession of Corpus Christi”, 40 magic, 96 Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93), 10, 91–110 Doctor Faustus, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97–9, 103–6, 128 Edward II, 92, 100 The Jew of Malta, 91, 92, 93, 96, 99, 100–2, 103, 106, 109 on sacraments, 93–4 Tamburlaine, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 109 marriage Bale’s views on, 46–8 ceremonial status of, 97, 105 and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 97, 105 and grace, 111 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 111 as rite-of-passage, 54 Mary, Queen of England (1516–1558), 7 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 111

Index

Mayer, Thomas F., 56 McLaughlin, Elizabeth, 3 McNees, Eleanor, 3 mercantilism, 30–1 Miller, E. S., 51, 53 monstrance, 66 morality play, 71, 77–9, 90, 93, 108 mystagogy, 103, 104, 108–9 Neill, Michael, 95 New Custom, 71–3, 75, 78 new historicism, 111, 131 Nice Wanton, 83 original sin, 41, 80–1, 84–5, 120 and the body, 125 and gender, 125 and Macbeth (Shakespeare), 127, 129 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 125 and pregnancy, 125 Paisley, Ian, 133 panopticon, 51–2 passion of Christ, 31–2 penance, 21–4, 27–30, 42, 73, 116–20 Bale’s views on, 48–54 and the body, 112–13 Catholic conception of, 116 and class, 112 and community, 50 and deathbed, 94, 114–15 and Edward II (Marlowe), 100 and gender, 112–13, 117–18 and grace, 97, 116, 118 and identity, 101 and interiority, 27–9, 52, 57, 83, 101, 113, 118–19 interrogation of, 112 and Jew of Malta (Marlowe), 100–2 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 112–13, 114, 115, 117–18

177

and Othello (Shakespeare), 113–15, 118 parody of, 115 and political domination, 48–54, 55, 57 and power, 116, 118 Protestant rejection of, 79–80, 84 and reconciliation, 116 ridicule of, 51 and ritual, 112 sacramental status of, 36, 49 and sexuality, 129 and Shakespeare, 130 and sin, 79–80, 83, 84, 87, 101, 117, 129 and social control, 116 and soul, 116 and subjectivity, 27–9, 52, 57, 83, 112–13, 118–19, 129 and surveillance, 100 and tragedy, 114 and truth, 119 see also absolution; contrition Play of the Sacrament, the, 11–34, 41, 42, 46, 58, 72, 76, 101, 130 and baptism, 43 poetry, 3–4 pope as antichrist, 133 authority of, 37, 52 demonisation of, 92 power, 116 pregnancy and indelible characters, 122 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 112–13, 118, 122, 125 and original sin, 125 and sin, 113, 118 priesthood and Christ, 32–3 elevated social status of, 16–19, 46 sacramental powers of, 16–17, 46–7 procession, eucharistic, 19–20

178 Index

Protestantism and anxiety, 83 and interiority, 82, 83 and sin, 84–5 as state religion, 91 and subjectivity, 60 psychomachia, 77–9, 88–9, 103 Punt, William (fl. 1548–1563) A New Dialoge called the Endightment agaynste Mother Messe, 64–70 purgatory, 64 and Hamlet (Shakespeare), 115 Questier, Michael, 92, 95 real presence, 45, 68–70 Ribner, Irving, 93 rites of passage, 54, 96 ritual, 23–4 Catholic approach to, 97 demystification of, 130 and drama, 31, 99 experimental approach to, 97 and identity, 96 and Marlowe, Christopher, 96 and penance, 112 political imperative of, 111 and society, 97 and tragedy, 97, 123 sacramental psychology, 120 sacramental sociology, 8, 33, 41, 54–5, 59, 89, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108–9, 114, 120 sacramental subjectivity, 33–4, 89, 118–19, 120, 123 sacraments alternative versions of, 67, 96, 115 and the body, 107 and community, 104, 105–6, 121, 129 and death, 105, see also deathbed; last sacraments definitions of, 6 deprivation of, 38

in Edwardian England, 7, 60–3 efficacy of, 124, 125 in Elizabethan England, 7 in Henrician England, 6–7, 36–7, 58 heterodox versions of, 97 interrogation of, 91 in Jacobean England, 7–8 in Marian England, 7 Marlowe’s views on, 93–4 number of, 37, 45–6, 62, 72 promotion of, 12–13 Satanic, 97 as signs, 6, 39–40, 45, 61, 62, 69–70, 77 and soul, 120–1 and subjectivity, 129 as system, 5–6, 11, 41, 44, 54–5, 83, 84, 93, 100, 102, 103–6 sacrifice, 26, 99 science, 95 scripture and concupiscence, 87 and eucharist, 67–8, 71 sexuality and concupiscence, 85–6 and penance, 129 and sin, 117, 118, 119, 125, 129 and subjectivity, 119, 129 and truth, 119 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), 10, 111–30, 131–2 and absolution, 130 and baptism, 130 and confirmation, 130 Hamlet, 1–2, 129 Henry V, 114–15, 125–6 King Lear, 51 Macbeth, 111, 112, 123–4, 129 Measure for Measure, 111, 112–13, 117–18, 119–20, 120–3, 124, 125, 126, 128–9 The Merchant of Venice, 101 Othello, 111, 112, 113, 118, 119, 124, 129 and penance, 130 and subjectivity, 119, 129

Index

sign of the cross, 97, 104 sin, 28–9, 78, 79–8 and abjection, 119 and anxiety, 119 and baptism, 79–81, 84, 127 and blood, 124, 128 and the body, 82–3, 122, 123 and concupiscence, 126 and eucharist, 80–1, 124 and gender, 117 and indelible characters, 127 and interiority, 86 and Judaism, 102 and Macbeth (Shakespeare), 123–4, 127, 129 original,see original sin and Othello (Shakespeare), 115 and penance, 79–80, 83, 84, 87, 101, 117, 129 and pregnancy, 113, 118 and Protestantism, 84–5 and sexuality, 117, 118, 119, 125, 129 and soul, 128 and subjectivity, 81, 85, 86, 88, 119, 129 Sinfield, Alan, 131 Six Articles, 37 sixteenth century, critical interpretations of, 4 sodomy, 48, 49, 56 soul and baptism, 120, 126 and confirmation, 120 and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 105, 107–9 and Henry V (Shakespeare), 115 and holy orders, 120 and interiority, 81–9, 123 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 123 and Othello (Shakespeare), 114 and penance, 116 and sacraments, 120–1 and sin, 128 see also sacramental psychology

179

Spenser, Edmund (c.1552–1599) The Faerie Queene, 103 Spiera, Francesco (1502–48), 73–4 Strode, George, 95 subjectivity and abjection, 88, 119 anxieties of, 27, 83–4, 109 and concupiscence, 85 and desire, 120 and Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 106–9 and eucharist, 27, 70, 107 and gender, 122 and grace, 118–19 and hell, 106 and indelible characters, 122, 129 and interiority, 122 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 119 and Othello (Shakespeare), 113–15, 119 and penance, 27–9, 52, 57, 83, 112–13, 118–19, 129 Protestant, 60 and sacraments, 129 and sexuality, 119, 129 and Shakespeare, 119, 129 and sin, 81, 85, 86, 88, 119, 129 and truth, 119, 122 substance, 99 surveillance, 121 and Jew of Malta (Marlowe), 100–1 and penance, 100 temporality, 132–3 Ten Articles, 37, 41, 48, 49, 57 Tentler, Thomas, 116, 117 Thomas, Gail, 3 tradition, 38 tragedy and penance, 114 and ritual, 97, 123 transubstantiation, 45, 66, 68–70, 71, 72, 98 Henry VIII on, 46 Trent, Council of, 7, 61, 68, 79, 120, 126

180 Index

Trial of Treasure, The, 81, 83, 86 truth, 132 and penance, 119 and sexuality, 119 and subjectivity, 119, 122 Tyndale, William (c.1494–1536), 52 Ulster, 133 violence, religious, 131, 133 virginity, 101 and Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 126

Wager, Lewis (d.1562) The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene, 80, 81, 83, 85–6 Walker, Greg, 4 Watson, Thomas (1513–1584), 68 Whalen, Robert, 3 windows, seven-sacrament, 14–15, 128 Woodes, Nathaniel The Conflict of Conscience, 73–9, 81–2, 82–3, 85, 88–9, 91, 109 Wooding, Lucy, 58

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