Shakespeare's Widows

S hak espeare’s Widows

Previous Publications The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation. Co-ed. with Laurel Amtower, 2003. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: Critical Essays. Ed. Dorothea Kehler, 1998. Paperback reprint, 2001. Problems in Literary Research: A Guide to Selected Reference Works. 4th rev. enl. ed., 1997. ——— Third rev. ed., 1987. ——— Second rev. ed., 1981. ——— First ed., 1975. In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama. Ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker, 1991.

S hak espeare’s Widows

Dorothea Kehler

SHAKESPEARE’S WIDOWS

Copyright © Dorothea Kehler, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61703-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kehler, Dorothea, 1936Shakespeare’s widows / Dorothea Kehler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-230-61703-2 (alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Widows in literature. I. Title. PR3069.W53K44 2009 822.3'3—dc22 2008050914 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Macmillan Publishing Solutions First edition: August 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Pauly and Evi—with love

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

Precept and Practice

17

2

Exemplary “Seeming Widows”

43

3

Problematic Widowed Mothers

59

4

War Widows

93

5

Working Widows

119

6

Lusty Widows/Remarried Widows

139

7

Opting Out

171

Conclusion

191

Notes

197

Works Cited

217

Index

241

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Ack nowledgments

I wish to thank the following journals and presses for the use of excerpted material from my previously published articles and chapters: “Shakespeare’s Emilias: The Politics of Celibacy,” In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, co-ed. with Susan Baker (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow 1991): 157–78, rpt. with the permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group; “Shakespeare’s Cymbeline,” The Explicator 54.2 (2001): 70–72 and “Shakespeare’s Richard III,” The Explicator 56.3 (1998): 118–21, both articles reprinted with the permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th St., NW, Washington DC 20036-1802, © 2001 and 1998 respectively; “Teaching the Slandered Women of Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale,” Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s “Tempest” and Other Late Romances, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: MLA, © 1992): 80–86 and “Teaching Romeo and Juliet Historically,” Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: MLA, © 2000): 78–84, both essays reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association of America; “The First Quarto of Hamlet: Reforming Widow Gertred,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46.4 (1995): 398–413 © Folger Shakespeare Library, reprinted with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press; “Shakespeare’s Widows of a Certain Age: Celibacy and Economics,” MHRA Works in Progress 1 (2006): 17–30, reprinted with the permission of the Modern Humanities Research Association; “Canard and the Common Lot: Shakespeare’s Margaret of Anjou,” Journal of Drama Studies 1.1 (2007): 4–19, reprinted with the permission of Journal of Drama Studies; and “Cleopatra’s Sati: New Stagings and Old Ideologies,” “Antony and Cleopatra”: Critical Essays, ed. Sara Munson Deats (New York: Routledge 2005): 137–52, reprinted with the permission of Taylor and Francis, permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. I am grateful to the many people who have helped me over the years. In particular, I wish to acknowledge my late friend and distinguished colleague Thomas Moisan, whose wit, erudition, and kindness I continue

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Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts

to miss. I deeply appreciate the insights and generosity of James Schiffer. It has been a privilege to have the assistance of past editors Philip Kolin, Maurice Hunt, and Sara Deats. I am grateful to Brigitte Shull and the staff at Palgrave Macmillan. For their incisive comments, encouragement, and companionship, thanks are due to the members of my writing group—Laura Emery, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Sherry Little, Jeanie Grant Moore, and Jeanette Shumaker—and to my colleagues Clare Colquitt and Deborah Chaffin. Members of the Women’s Group at Clare Hall, Cambridge, especially Marta Cavazza, and auditors at Clare Hall’s Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities colloquia have provided perceptive audiences for portions of this book. (Thank you, Bob Ackerman.) So, too, have faculty and students of the English Literature departments at the Universities of Copenhagen and of Pune, and auditors at meetings of the Shakespeare Society of India, the International Shakespeare Association, and the Shakespeare Association of America. I am indebted to SAA respondents Linda Woodbridge, Alexander Leggatt, and Paul Werstine. San Diego State University funded much of my research and furnished me with always challenging students. Jessica and Edward Kehler offered astute comments on sections of Shakespeare’s Widows. James Edwards, Marc Pastor, and Carol Tohsaku have saved me from innumerable computer disasters. Thank you, all. Unless otherwise indicated, Shakespeare quotations are taken from the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare (1997) with editorial brackets omitted, biblical references from the Geneva Bible (1560), the most popular family Bible during Shakespeare’s career. When using original editions, I have retained old spellings and the exchange of “v” for “u,” and “i” for “j” (but not “long s” for “s”).

4

Introdu ction

A few months before his death at fifty-two, Shakespeare drafted his

last will. To his sixty-year-old wife, Anne Hathaway Shakespeare, he bequeathed his “second-best bed.” Although the family was welloff and his widow would have been comfortably provided for under English law, the connotations of “second-best,” particularly when joined to an object so crucial to nuptial bliss as a bed, have long intrigued posterity. How William felt about Anne we will never know. Nor will we know how he felt about his mother, widowed at sixtyone. What we may discern are Shakespeare’s insights into the psyches of a wide array of women, figured in thirty-one characters young and old, common and noble, recently or long widowed, all of whom have dealt with loss. At one extreme is Measure for Measure’s Mistress Overdone. A brothel keeper, noteworthy for her nine husbands, “Overdone by the last” (2.1.202), she mentions none of her erstwhile spouses. At the other is Cleopatra, mourning the death of Antony before her own suicide: Noblest of men, woo’t die? Hast thou no care of me? Shall I abide In this dull world, which in thy absence is No better than a sty? O, see, my women: The crown o’ th’ earth doth melt. My lord! O, wither’d is the garland of the war, The soldier’s pole is fall’n! Young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon. (Ant. 4.15.59–68)

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S h a k e s p e a r e’s W i d o w s

So great a disparity raises questions. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, how were widows, some 15 percent of English women, expected to behave? (Froide, Never Married 16).1 How did they in fact behave? And how does Shakespeare represent widows? A principal way in which patriarchal cultures constructed the widow was as emotionally needy, an old woman defined by incompleteness and her husband’s absence, possessing little beyond the widow’s mite, and more apt to be grouped with orphans as objects of charity than stereotyped as wealthy or merry.2 Whereas contemporary urban societies stop short of destroying the widow’s sexual appeal, not so some traditional communities. Modern readers are struck by Balzac’s “sombre portraits of crow-like widows” in the Comédie humaine (Holderness 423). Through the 1950s if not later, in southern Italy, especially in the countryside, widows were expected to wear black for the rest of their lives. In Michael Cacoyannis’s film Zorba the Greek, immediately after the death of Madam Hortense, a swarm of black-clad Cretan widows loot her home; a beautiful young widow who dares to love again is murdered. In parts of India, unattractive clothing was prescribed and the widow’s head was shaved (Lopata 24). Today, in many developing countries, widow stereotypes and roles are relics of a transitional phase between traditional social organization (often patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchal) and a society ostensibly dedicated to egalitarianism. To borrow Raymond Williams’s terms, the older stereotypes are residual elements in what is, one hopes, the dominant culture (41). Nevertheless, even in fully industrialized nations, widowhood commonly evokes a dreary image of women already dead in spirit. Not surprisingly, they disappear from our consciousness. Once the funeral and mourning period end, widowhood is merely a statistic, a sociological category without a specific social role or visible identity.3 This amorphousness as well as our distaste for the subject of bereavement—aptly called the West’s “pornography of death” (Gorer 9)—may in part explain why widowhood is not much acknowledged in mainstream discourse.4 In contrast, widows in early modern England, at least according to the literati, did have a prescribed social role, albeit more honored in the breach than the observance. Of the roles available to women—maid, wife, widow (Lucio in Measure for Measure adds “punk” or whore)— only that of widow is grounded exclusively in the past.5 In keeping with an older Catholic and primarily continental tradition, male polemical writers of conduct books and other guidance manuals for married couples, as well as the entertainment-oriented authors of plays and popular ballads, usually cast virtuous widows as models of Christian charity, of devoted motherhood, and—above all—of fidelity to their deceased

Introduction

3

spouses.6 The faithful, celibate widow could donate freely to her church and satisfy her emotional if not physical needs through commitment to her children. The Catholic ideal of celibacy lingered and was not without appeal for Protestants, despite its doctrinal rejection. John Webster, the Anglican author of thirty-two Overburian Characters (1615 printing) describes the attributes of “A Vertuous Widdow”: “Shee gives much to pious uses, without any hope to merit by them: and as one Diamond fashions another; so is shee wrought into workes of Charity, with the dust or ashes of her husband.” Webster assumes that the widow is a mother: “For her Childrens sake she first marries, for she married that she might have children, and for their sakes she marries no more.” She foregoes remarriage because “shee thinkes shee hath traveld all the world in one man; the rest of her time therefore shee directs to heaven” (Paylor 70).7 As for the “lusty widow”—the alternative widow construction popular with playwrights—she was food for satire and censure. While those of Shakespeare’s widows who reject celibacy have generated some interest, mostly negative, by and large Shakespeare critics have marginalized the widow characters, reflecting the situation of real widows throughout history and ignoring a vital element of the canon. Widows or “seeming widows,” comprise a prominent and impressive character group, appearing in over half of Shakespeare’s plays.8 I use the term “seeming widows” to denote wives uncertain of their status or mistakenly believing themselves widowed—Aemilia in Comedy of Errors, Thaisa in Pericles, Imogen in Cymbeline, and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale. From this group and from the larger category of widows, I exclude Henry VIII’s Katherine of Aragon, a Renaissance Anita Hill; historically, Katherine denied that her “marriage” to Henry’s older brother had been consummated, and I believe her.9 That said, if we classify the widows (including “seeming widows”) by genre, the greatest number—ten—appear in the history plays, nine in the tragedies, seven in the romances, and five in the comedies.10 If we classify by life events, sixteen are mothers, ten remarry (or eleven, if we count Cleopatra),11 and twelve die. We may infer a lesson from the fact that over half of the remarried die, none peacefully, and two at the hands of their second husbands—but more of that to come.12 By multiplying the number of widows in individual plays, Shakespeare increases their conspicuousness. Thus, he pairs widows in Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline; he groups them in Richard III, King John, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. In five of the nine plays, widows form a good/evil binarism: in Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is associated with celibate virtue (for her a function of inclination as well as mutilation),13 Tamora with

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S h a k e s p e a r e’s W i d o w s

remarriage—and evil. Similarly, Cymbeline’s Imogen protects herself from men through male disguise, whereas her wicked stepmother is a remarried widow. Less prominent yet still detectable is the binarism in Romeo and Juliet. Despite the unsettling ideological implications of deeming the child-widow’s suicide romantic, Juliet’s Liebestod guarantees celibacy. Whereas the heroine chooses death over life without her husband, the widowed nurse, who counsels bigamy in the face of Romeo’s banishment and Juliet’s sexual deprivation—“and you no use of him” (3.5.225)—is dismissed from Juliet’s heart and the audience’s regard as an “ancient damnation” (3.5.235). In Henry IV, Part Two, the binarism is created as foolish Mistress Quickly, now widowed, looks forward to wedding Falstaff, whereas the admirable Lady Percy’s moving eulogy for Hotspur implies perpetual celibacy. Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV demonstrate that when widows of both higher and lower classes are represented, the aristocracy’s monopoly on steadfastness is a class marker. In King John, Constance, who dies of grief for her son, is opposed to the murderous Elinor (and the adulterous Lady Falconbridge). In Antony and Cleopatra, Octavia is not responsible for the political remarriage engineered by her brother, so she occupies the moral high ground over lusty Cleopatra, widowed at least once. Shakespeare augments the importance of these widow, ex-widow, and briefly widowed characters (Juliet), insofar as more than a few can be considered central to their plays: Queen Margaret in Henry VI, Part Three and Richard III; Tamora in Titus; Constance in King John; Gertrude in Hamlet; the old Countess in All’s Well; Volumnia in Coriolanus; Paulina in The Winter’s Tale; and Juliet and Cleopatra in their plays. No less telling, all of Shakespeare’s widowed characters to some extent act as they do because they are widows—not merely queens, mothers, or bawds. Shakespeare was aware of the widow’s freedom, often in tension with her private terrors, and made those attributes an element of his characters’ distinctive subjectivities. Although he viewed widowhood from a male perspective and wrote roles for an all-male cast, to gloss over a character’s widowhood is to read her incompletely. Consider, for example, Angelica, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Having lost her husband—“ ’A was a merry man” (1.3.40)—and her daughter Susan, contrary to custom she finds protection within the Capulet household and emotional satisfaction caring for Juliet, who takes the place of her infant. Had she not been widowed, like other wet nurses of the time she would have taken Juliet to her own home for three years, then lost contact with the toddler (Paster 199). Except for her widowhood that allowed her to live with the Capulets, she could not have involved herself so completely in Juliet’s life. The representation of Constance,

Introduction

5

Geoffrey Plantagenet’s widow in King John, which reveals Shakespeare’s willingness to tamper with historical fact in the interests of convincing motivation, is another case in point. In the play, after Geoffrey’s death Constance is alone in the world except for her young son, Arthur, claimant to the English throne. Fearing for his safety, she goes mad. Shakespeare suppresses Holinshed’s mention of her two remarriages.14 Obviously, he thought Constance would be more affecting and believable as a widow than a wife. Probably the best known of the widows is Gertrude. Hamlet turns on Shakespeare’s not suppressing her remarriage, for to Hamlet and the Ghost, Gertrude never becomes Claudius’s wife but instead remains a shameful remarried widow. Thus, despite the highlighting of female characters by feminist critics, the need for a study of Shakespeare’s thirty-one widows qua widows remains. This lacuna is all the more striking since every genre includes strong-minded, developed widow characters. While widow status is more important in some plays than in others, the character’s perception of widowhood changes her subjectivity. Whether she conforms to or rebels against her new gender role, her behavior reflects awareness of social protocol for widows and is one of the ways Shakespeare achieves psychological realism. Reading historically and sociologically, Shakespeare’s widows, and more broadly the plays they figure in, describe a strategic negotiation between the opposed poles of an ancient ideology designed to impel women to police themselves into celibacy and a fairly progressive practice. Depictions of the widow characters by England’s greatest cultural authority not only reflect literary expectations for bereaved wives but also interrogate those expectations.15 Shakespeare’s widows are prone to elude ideology by embodying their author’s insights into the economic and gender issues that constitute the infrastructure underlying a patriarchal construction of reality. If my analyses of the widows’ reasons for remaining single or wedding again seem to undervalue the power of love, either for the deceased spouse or for a new mate, I intend no disrespect to Cupid. I mean only to redress the balance between readings that focus on personal emotion and those that focus on social concerns, the latter, like the widows themselves, having suffered from neglect, although demographers assure us that “there were close links between economic circumstances and marriage decisions in the past. Because of the nature of the institution of marriage, the decision to marry was peculiarly susceptible to economic pressures” (Wrigley, Reconstitution 125). While little has been written about Shakespeare’s widows as a category, one finds even less about Shakespeare’s widowers. To better understand the widow, it behooves us to locate her male counterpart in Elizabethan culture and in Shakespeare. The dearth of writing about

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S h a k e s p e a r e’s W i d o w s

widowers is not curious, since “widower” is not a primary source of identification in the plays, nor did it ever figure in early modern society as prominently as the death of a spouse did for women. For Shakespeare’s female characters few attributes are as socially definitive as marital status, but for male characters it is only one among many equally or more imperative situating factors. In Elizabethan and Tudor England, more often than not widowers were listed on government documents as “single men” (Pelling 42). Because the circumstance of being widowed did not become a descriptive category for men, the widower “was not inundated with advice on his conduct, the remembrance of his first wife, or the administration of the estate” (Cavallo and Warner 8). The Shakespearean widower’s role is more likely to be signaled inconspicuously by the absence of an onstage wife. In fact, we cannot always be sure of who actually is a widower, and who is not. Most often the audience sees the character not primarily as a widower but as a ruler, a soldier, a courtier—a noun, not a past participle. When a role in private rather than public life is foregrounded, the widower is drawn above all as a father. Most often, he has only one child, a daughter, or if he has other children, only one is a daughter.16 Thus, Much Ado’s Leonato wishes that both he and his daughter were dead when she is dishonored, and Brabantio’s heart is broken when Desdemona marries Othello. A Shakespearean hallmark is the number of widowers who, rather than remarrying, displace their affections onto their daughters.17 What may look like emotional incest elsewhere in the canon becomes the thing itself in Pericles. On a happier note, Pericles makes real the fantasy of the seemingly dead wife’s restoration to her husband as a reward for his attachment to her memory—an attachment that, we are free to imagine, takes the form of celibacy. In The Comedy of Errors and The Winter’s Tale, deriving from the same source as Pericles, Egeon’s Aemilia is restored to him after thirty-three years, and Hermione returns to a husband who, rather than remarrying, for sixteen years “shuts up himself ” (WT 4.1.19). While in The Tempest Miranda’s father, Prospero, perforce remains celibate on his uninhabited island, for the most part we can only guess at whether or not Shakespeare’s other widowers abstain. Shakespeare may employ the impression of celibacy to make the intense relationship between father and daughter more plausible. Perhaps merely for the sake of dramatic economy, a remarrying widower in Shakespeare is a rare bird, contrary to the demographics of early modern England where “the widower appears to have been not so much submerged as short-lived, or hardly existent at all.” Not only was there minimal legal pressure for men to define themselves as widowers rather than as single men, but throughout England—in

Introduction

7

fact, throughout all of Europe—widowers were likely to soon abandon that category, remarrying more frequently than widows, sooner than widows, and at older ages than widows (Pelling 37, 46). Statistics suggest that men need marriage more than women do; modern European widowers’ disproportionate deaths owing to bereavement are almost three times as high as that of widows (Brockmann and Klein 568). But few widowers remarry in Shakespeare. Of these only Cymbeline, who with breathtaking lack of judgment weds his would-be murderess, is portrayed as a father; more specifically, he is a senex in the vein of Silvia’s father in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Antony marries Octavia only to desert her for Cleopatra (as he deserted his former wife Fulvia). His fatherhood is mentioned only once in Antony and Cleopatra, and nothing is made of it. Richard III, who authored his own widowhood, attempts unsuccessfully to remarry his politically useful niece. All are punished, Cymbeline losing to Rome, Antony to Octavius, and Richard to Richmond, who becomes Henry VII. The desire for exclusive power over the child and the father’s sexual/ aesthetic attraction to a young woman rather than to a woman of his own age are only two explanations for a widower’s shunning remarriage. It may be that Shakespeare was inclined to the Catholic privileging of celibacy, a doctrine that inspired Torquato Tasso to view marriage as a spiritual union continuing after death. Although unwilling to blame those who remarry, in “The Father of the Family” (1580), Tasso instructs widowers as well as widows that “the happiest are still those who have been bound by the marriage knot only once in their lives”; for Tasso, “once the knot that binds a soul to a body is dissolved, that particular soul cannot be joined to any other body . . . and therefore it also seems fitting that the woman or man whose first marriage knot has been dissolved by death should not form a second” (81).18 Whereas most Protestant divines favored remarriage, Shakespeare appears to reserve his approbation for a single standard of eternal fidelity for both sexes. Unlike the theologians, however, Shakespeare observes the heavy toll celibacy may take on emotional relations between widowed parents and their children. In the plays, more often than not, practice subverts precept. Another explanation for the single standard may be fear of an unloving stepparent. The second wife of King Cymbeline plans not only his death but also that of his child by his first marriage; similarly, Claudius, Gertrude’s second husband, tries to kill Hamlet. Do Shakespeare’s widowers seldom remarry for fear of incurring the risk of cuckoldry once again? References to such a risk appear too frequently throughout the canon to discount them as an explanation for the widower’s remaining single. Cuckoldry jokes, plots turning on the

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S h a k e s p e a r e’s W i d o w s

slandered lady, references to physical likeness as proof of paternity, and many variations on Prospero’s jest—“Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter” (1.2.56–57)—all suggest male anxiety about marriage.19 That anxiety, prominent long before the sixteenth century, bred a code of proper behavior for widows—“relicts” of their husbands and therefore (it was hoped) still under the marriage yoke. In England, widowed celibacy was largely associated with Catholicism, remarriage with Protestantism. Yet in spite of the Reformation and the practice of remarriage by even the most “godly” widows, prescriptive writings and literary works continued to honor the celibate. One explanation is economic. In traditional societies vested interests are fairly obvious; both the widow, whose social role obligates her to remain with her husband’s family and to have sexual relations with his brother (leverite marriage), and her opposite, the widow forbidden remarriage and made physically undesirable, surrender their own inclinations for the financial advantage of the husband’s family. Law and custom are designed to secure the widow’s dowry and productivity as mother and/or laborer for the patrilineal unit. In early modern societies, economic interests were rarely as transparent; nevertheless, remarriage could be financially detrimental to the widow’s children—and by extension, to her deceased husband’s family. In time, the Quakers would insist on the widow’s religious duty to make appropriate settlements for the children of her first marriage before embarking on a second voyage (Fraser 87). Patrilineal economic benefit being an important reason for the literati’s privileging of celibate widowhood, Shakespeare’s widow characters invite a materialist reading. In part because the canon valorizes widowed celibacy for both sexes, Shakespeare may seem ambivalent about patriarchal ideology. Seeking a broad, heterogeneous audience, he serves his interest by maintaining the stance of a consummate relativist. As a playwright, his widows, like their real-life counterparts, are embedded within a specific and individual set of political, social, and economic circumstances. To take remarried Queen Gertrude as an example, was she, as she is so often figured, a “lusty widow”? Or was she, rather, the object of a mercenary “widow hunt,” her status as queen conferring validity on Claudius’ new title? Having enjoyed the social status of a queen, did she choose to preempt a successor? Did she fear dwindling means? Was it political power and the security it brings that Gertrude sought between incestuous sheets? In contrast to Shakespeare, patriarchal preceptors, whether in the name of morality or decorum, were prone to ignore the particular circumstances that each widow faced. Rather, they lay down rules and made judgments as if widows were a monolithic abstraction.

Introduction

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Early modern Europe was transitional in its conceptions of the widow’s place. If “marriage constitutes the great image of patriarchal political order” (Rackin, Stages 162), widowhood was an image of potential instability and disorder. Widows were “unheaded women.” The term derives from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians 5.22–23: “Wiues, submit yourselues vnto your housbands, as vnto the Lord. For the housband is wiues head, eué as Christ is the head of the Church. . . .” A widow is called “unheaded” on stage in The Puritan: Or, the Widow of Watling Street (1607), once attributed to Shakespeare. She has almost wed the jailbird, Idle, unmasked in the nick of time by a nobleman, who concludes, “such is the blind besotting in the state of an unheaded woman that’s a widow” (5.4). As the anonymous author of The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights (1632) laments, “But, alas, when she hath lost her husband, her head is cut off, her intellectual part is gone . . .” (232).20 Then, surprisingly, having paid his debt to ideology, he consoles the widow, urging her to rejoice in her autonomy: Why mourne you so, you that be widowes? Consider how long you have beene in subjection under the predominance of parents, of your husbands, now you be free in libertie . . . you may see . . . that maidens and wives vowes made upon their souls to the Lord himselfe of heaven and earth were all disavowable and infringible, by their parents or husbands unless they ratified and allowed them, either express or by silence, at the day when such vowes came first to their notice and knowledge: But the vow of a widow or of a woman divorced, no man had power to disallow of, for her estate was free from controlment. (232)

As he provides legal advice and practical caveats, enabling the independence of his “unheaded” reader, the author encourages her to face the future with a more auspicious than dropping eye. Many of Shakespeare’s widows take up that challenge. Attention to widowhood, with its own political and literary history, uncovers important facets of the plays: the broad, nuanced range of ways in which Shakespeare represents a status that was, in effect, a site of contestation for control. Nominally at stake was the widow’s sexuality, seen as an ever-present threat, particularly to the children of the deceased husband. But since the reward for chastity, although rarely acknowledged, was autonomy, which was all the more substantial when accompanied by economic independence, many a widow may have thought it no great sacrifice to eschew remarriage. We cannot know to what extent remaining single entailed remaining celibate, but—if it is any indication—among Shakespeare’s widows, only two of the thirty-one are portrayed as having

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had affairs: Titus Andronicus’s Tamara and Cleopatra. (King John’s Lady Falconbridge had a liaison with Richard the Lionhearted before she was widowed, and King Lear’s Regan appears to have lacked the opportunity; that the widow Gertrude slept with Claudius at any time prior to their marriage is a questionable inference.) At the mercy of a gender system characterized by male domination and female subordination, most literary widows were dressed in ideological robes, lauded for fidelity if they remained unwed and devout, mocked if they remarried. Ideology concealed an unacknowledged truth. Real-life widows were largely an economic category, their actions more apt to be determined by materialist than theological considerations.21 Why does the Shakespearean widow remarry? Most often because her back is to the wall either politically or economically—and the former entails the latter. That nexus is crucial to reading Shakespeare because all but a handful of his widows are women of rank. The insecurity they face is portrayed as political, but the “middling sort” who made up the bulk of Shakespeare’s audience would have known that the losers of political conflicts were at best slated for financial dependency. Whereas the commoner worried about money, the aristocrat worried about land and status, which equated to money. Mistress Overdone’s shady business could only benefit from the authority of a husband, so she accumulates nine of them; Lady Grey begs Edward IV for her family’s lost estate and gains the king along with the estate. For both widows the economic motive either overrides sexual desire or competes with it for center stage. Admittedly, throughout this book I privilege political/economic motives over sexual desire in my analysis of why Shakespeare’s widows remarry, for the stereotype of the “lusty widow” has overshadowed material reasons. Of course material and amatory causes may coincide. Ambition, too—the queen in Cymbeline plotting to crown her son by her former marriage, Hostess Quickly dreaming of a title—is another face of politics and economics. A significant part of the energy captured in the twenty-one plays I discuss is generated by the clash between a materialist practice reflecting English Protestant values and a conservative Catholic ideology that derides the lusty, remarrying widow and extols the celibate. Whether or not Shakespeare’s audiences avowed the Pauline line, conservative ideology was what they would have been accustomed to hearing. As a popular playwright, Shakespeare was obliged to appeal to the preconceptions of his audiences by grounding his widow characterizations in recognizable types. I use the plural “characterizations” advisedly because widowhood had its phases, depending on the widow’s economic class and age, on whether or not she remarried, on whether she had children and, if she

Introduction

11

did, on the nature of her relationship with them, and so on. Similarly, audiences were anything but monolithic, including men and women of all sorts, among them potential widows, single widows, and remarried widows. This “widow” group would have been quite sizable in a period when women usually married older men and outlived them, the average marriage enduring between sixteen and twenty years (Hufton 223). In The Merry Wives of Windsor when Master Ford, suspicious of the friendship between his wife and Page’s, jibes, “I think if your husbands were dead, you two would marry,” Mistress Page retorts breezily, “Be sure of that—two other husbands” (3.2.14–17). Elizabethan women watching Hamlet may therefore have related ambivalently to an ideology that censured remarriage, experiencing a more complex queen than did men. To the extent that ideology persuades in Shakespeare, it is not necessarily because of the spectator’s predisposition but because the plays, and none more than Hamlet, urge a male point of view: “Frailty, thy name is woman!” (1.2.146). If an alternative, noncolonizing ideology was less accessible than a conservative one, an alternative life experience was ready to hand. To revisit Gertrude, what would female playgoers have made of her? Among their number, were there not some who might have pitied or even disdained Gertrude for her “o’er hasty marriage” (2.2.57) without affirming her construction as lusty and reprehensible? Would not women have intuited that the remarriage of a widow who could afford to stay single might be unwise or impractical, even self-betraying, but an error, not a sin? Would not some women have understood that a dowager queen was apt to be neutralized along with her son, and that for Gertrude a marriage to the new king could protect her and Hamlet from a politically—and therefore economically—precarious future? So, too, in Titus Andronicus, Tamora, queen of the defeated Goths, a prize of war and therefore penurious, expediently marries the victorious Roman emperor. And during the House of York’s ascendancy in Richard III, Lancastrian Anne, utterly vulnerable, yields to Richard of Gloucester, younger brother of the Yorkist king, although Richard has killed her husband and her father-in-law. Women of all social strata could find themselves in need of a protector. Because social historians have shown that English widows who considered themselves comfortably off were far less prone to wed again than the financially anxious, we can understand Shakespeare’s remarrying widow characters more realistically. Nevertheless, an ideology of widowhood predating the Renaissance is not entirely defunct, though a number of recent studies conclude that because modern wives expect more from marriage but lack negotiating power “widowhood might turn out to be a relief more than a

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burden” (Brockmann and Klein 569). The corollary of regarding the widow as a remembrance of things past, a metonym for mortality, is that her shattered marriage is still idealized as a paradise lost. Implied is the sentimentalization of a social institution, which in life as in Shakespeare suits some better than others. Among those early modern women whom it did not suit was Lady Elizabeth Hatton, known for remarking of her deceased husband, “We shall never see his like again—praises be to God” (qtd. in Mendelson and Crawford 175). For anxious men, a widow’s relief upon the death of her husband was disquieting. No less so was her craving for another man. Many Jacobean plays in which the frailty of women is a given are “Widow of Ephesus” variants.22 George Chapman’s Countess Eudora in The Widow’s Tears (1605) calls remarriage adulterous and incestuous, yet is quick to wed again. Mistress Thomasine in Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term (also written in 1605) swoons at her husband’s funeral—out of desire for the lover she immediately marries; she is presented as a typical widow. That some men have feared an irreverent response to their demise is evidenced by the plot motif of the husband who feigns death in order to observe his widow’s reaction. In Middleton’s The Witch (c. 1615–16), a Duke believes that his wife has arranged his death by promising her sexual favors to his murderer. To his credit, upon learning that she has preserved her chastity, he rises from his coffin and magnanimously pardons her! Nathaniel Hawthorne’s eerie tale “Wakefield” and Krzystof Kieslowski’s film thriller Trois Couleurs: Blanc [Three Colors: White] evince the motif ’s continuing interest. In Shakespeare, residual widow stereotypes and male anxiety are most obvious in the tragedies, histories, and those comedies markedly orchestrating a male subject position. Different sources make different demands on the playwright. The surfaces of some plays advance a male perspective more insistently than do others. Witness the final condemnation of Hortensio’s wife, a “wealthy” and “lusty” widow in The Taming of the Shrew (4.2.37, 50), a comedy that interpellates the spectator, inviting agreement with conservative codes and acceptance of only moderately altered pejorative stereotypes. In other plays the widow is scapegoated like Mistress Overdone, Measure for Measure’s brothel keeper—no pardon for her at the end of the play. Or, like King John’s Constance, the widow may see herself as innately a victim and ventriloquize a masculinist ethos: “A widow, husbandless, subject to fears, / A woman, naturally born to fears . . .” (3.1.14–15). If she triumphs within a patriarchal system, it is by subscribing to it, as does the “seeming widow” Abbess Aemilia in The Comedy of Errors. In still other plays, Shakespeare’s widow characterizations are more progressive, modifying

Introduction

13

what was essentially a European Catholic ideology based in part on a Pauline valorization of the soul over the body. Shakespeare creates greater complexity, some qualification of traditional stereotypes, and the overdetermination that expands interpretive possibilities. But however forceful or flexible the plays’ subject positions, my study seeks to lift the ideological veil from the widow constructions, to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between gender issues, politics, and economics, which Shakespeare so artfully complicates. To that end, Chapter 1 serves as a prologue to Shakespeare’s representation of widows, tracing the ideology of widowhood from its classical and Christian antecedents to its Renaissance manifestation. Juxtaposed against ideology is the actual behavior of widows in early modern England—behavior influenced by demographics and law. In the ensuing chapters, I group Shakespeare’s widows into key categories. Chapter 2 considers characters in comedy and romance uncertain or wrongly certain of their status as wives or widows and therefore liminal, betwixt and between. Cymbeline’s Imogen, erroneously (if briefly) believing herself widowed, belongs to this group of “seeming widows.” Although three of the four occupy a liminal status for many years—Abbess Aemilia in The Comedy of Errors for thirty-three, Thaisa in Pericles for fourteen, and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale for sixteen—none remarry. Instead, Aemilia and Thaisa choose piety—Aemilia rising to a position of command in the Christian hierarchy, Thaisa becoming a priestess of Diana, the goddess of chastity. For serving as exempla of fidelity, their long-lost husbands are returned to them. Paulina, a great noblewoman, continues to serve her royal patrons and is compensated with power over the king himself. Imogen’s pledge of fidelity to the memory of her husband is inscribed in the pseudonym she takes, Fidele, and substantiated by her disguise as a boy. The Roman army provides her with the protection Amelia finds in the abbey, Thaisa in the temple, and Paulina in the court. As celibates, all endorse a patriarchal ideology, but the abbess and Paulina are ideologically disruptive by virtue of their empowerment, and Imogen’s moral superiority to her murderous husband, quick to believe slander, problematizes the supposed inferiority of “the weaker vessel.”23 Chapter 3, “Problematic Widowed Mothers,” begins with Cymbeline’s stereotype of the wicked stepmother, here a widowed mother who remarries in order to advance her son. Because Cymbeline pairs the queen, an erstwhile widow, with Imogen, a “seeming widow,” I discuss them together. In contrast to Cymbeline with its evil queen, All’s Well That Ends Well depicts two “Vertuous” widowed mothers, the Countess and the Widow Capilet who, like the wicked queen, behave as the moralists recommend, centering their lives on their children—with notably

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destructive results. Although about half of Shakespeare’s widows are mothers, motherhood is not always conspicuously enacted. Abbess Aemilia, reunited with her sons only at the very end of Errors; Juliet’s Nurse, whose daughter Susan died fourteen years before; and Cleopatra, who apparently forgets that she has children, are among the mothers whose chief interests lie elsewhere. In the “problem play” All’s Well, among the most problematic characters are the mothers. Equally problematic are King John’s Lady Falconbridge, Elinor, and Constance and Coriolanus’s Volumnia, the last three characters based on historical sources. Those sources, however, did not restrict Shakespeare’s representations to “the facts.” The sources themselves were not reliable; the historiographers’ moral didacticism and partisanship were expected and acceptable. In the interests of compelling drama, Shakespeare felt free to change, embroider, or omit all but the most well-known facts. Hence, although King John had to be succeeded by his son Henry, the play forgets that Constance was thrice married. Plutarch represents the mother of Coriolanus as a subdued, ordinary woman, but she is Shakespeare’s fiercest matriarch. The widows in Chapter 3 all exhibit notions of motherhood counter to a patriarchal code that viewed the mother as handmaiden to the child, as modern psychology all too often still does, when it considers the mother at all (Benjamin 23–24). Shakespeare endows these widowed mothers with fully developed, intriguingly warped subjectivities, their independent identities exceeding the impact of their influence on their progeny. In this respect, he proves himself ahead of both Freudian and object relations psychology (Garner 76–80). Chapter 4 discusses war widows, most of whom appear in the history plays. Thanks to the pacific proclivities of Elizabeth and James, during Shakespeare’s lifetime fewer women would have lost their husbands in battle than was the case in most reigns. But in the canon, war widows comprise almost a quarter of the widow category, figuring mainly in the histories as victims of the War of the Roses. Some are mothers: the first tetralogy’s Lady Elizabeth Grey who becomes Queen Elizabeth in Henry VI, Part Three and Richard III; the latter play’s Duchess of York, mother of Richard III; and old Queen Margaret of Anjou, widow of Henry VI. Other war widows are childless: Lady Anne in Richard III and Lady Percy in Henry IV, Part Two. The war widows’ power is insidious. The “wailing women” of Richard III, defying the patriarchal code that enjoins their silence, curse and dishearten Richard despite their own divisiveness. Lady Percy in her grief dominates her cowardly, calculating father-in-law, who is responsible for her widowhood. In the last of his plays, Shakespeare returns to war widows. Their collectivity suggests a prototypical support group, and like their earlier versions

Introduction

15

in the histories, the three suppliant queens of The Two Noble Kinsmen subvert militarism by representing its effects. Unlike Shakespeare’s mostly aristocratic widows, the vast majority of widows in England were self-supporting servants, skilled or semiskilled laborers, entrepreneurs, and homemakers whose economic sufficiency challenged the ideology that subordinated them. Chapter 5 focuses on Shakespeare’s working widows. They represent the demographic realities of the period—in tragedy, Juliet’s Nurse, ensconced within a wealthy family; in the chronicle plays Hostess Quickly, owner of the Boar’s Head Tavern. Widowed in Henry IV, Part Two, Quickly parodies the bourgeoisie in her hope for an upscale second marriage. The dark comedies feature Widow Capilet of All’s Well That Ends Well, an innkeeper whose ancestry is superior to her current status and whose social pretensions are centered on her daughter, and Mistress Overdone of Measure for Measure, whose brothel had prospered better than her nine husbands but who faces ruin by play’s end. Chapter 6, “Lusty Widows/Remarried Widows,” is devoted to characters who, by remarrying or seeking to remarry, exemplify the most popular of early modern widow stereotypes. While all women were supposedly consumed by lust, none were drawn as more prey to passion than widows. Extremist ideologues afforded no more respect to those who remarried than to the promiscuous. Remarriage confirmed not only the widow’s fickleness but also her insatiability. Alert to changing attitudes toward remarriage and sexuality in widows, Shakespeare’s constructions of the lusty widow, while not approving, are more often subversive than recuperative. Of the four characters I discuss, only Hortensio’s bride in The Taming of the Shrew is expressly identified as a “lusty widow” (4.2.50), and she proves to be more outspoken than lickerish. Tamora of Titus Andronicus remarries for the power to avenge her son’s death, her lust having long since found an outlet in her lover rather than in her new husband. Hamlet’s Gertrude, and her counterpart Gertred of the First Quarto, serve as controversial examples of widows whose lust resides not in their lines but in the eyes of the beholders. I argue that Gertrude weds the new king with an alacrity that appalls her son in order to save her position and to protect Hamlet’s life and claim to the throne. As for Regan, in light of her relationship with Goneril and the possibility of a renewed French invasion, King Lear’s widow (who dies unsatisfied), needs a daring man to lead her troops as well as to warm her bed.24 If deceased husbands are “so soon forgot”—a recurrent motif in the construction of lusty widows—it is because few widows can afford to live in the past. In Shakespeare, the present offers them an abundance of theatrically compelling challenges.

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“Opting Out,” Chapter 7, concerns three characters who die for love. The youngest of Shakespeare’s widows, Juliet, and one of the oldest, Richard II’s desolate Duchess of Gloucester who deliberately chooses to pine away, in effect commit a less painful form of sati—suicide on the deceased husband’s pyre once expected of certain upper-caste Indian women. So, too, does Cleopatra, if reluctantly. Widow of her younger Ptolemy brother (and in spirit, perhaps in law, Antony), Cleopatra epitomizes problematic motherhood and the lusty widow topos, the latter with all of its histrionic appeal. Yet despite the gross political distortions of the victor’s accounts available to Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra is haunted by Cleopatra’s strategic, nationalistic motives born of Egypt’s precarious position vis-à-vis Rome. Although suicide as the ultimate gesture challenges Christian doctrine, descriptions of sati that had reached England were quite palatable to Western audiences, spectators being more likely to find such suicides romantic or natural or tragic, but rarely a direct consequence of materialist causes. Shakespeare disrupts ideological notions of sacrificial suicide by revealing the unacceptable alternatives his doomed characters confront. The Conclusion returns to the totality of Shakespeare’s widows, considering them in relation to the residual literary ideology that prevailed and to the actualities of early modern England. Moving the widows to center stage and reading with an awareness of their materialist context exposes the damage conservative ideology with its role restrictions and demeaning stereotypes can inflict. The plays are ambivalent about traditional widow roles and stereotypes, perhaps because Shakespeare was disinclined to rile female playgoers, surely because ideological correctness defeats compelling characterization. I hope that my book will be regarded as a contribution to a stream of progressive criticism and productions that do worthwhile cultural work—helping to assure that the greatest of dramatic poets remains attractive to judicious readers and spectators increasingly put off by what many regard as a patriarchal ethos. Nonetheless, even today Shakespearean drama remains a touchstone of high culture, a vehicle that both interrogates and perpetuates ideology, whether as school texts, stage performances, or films, and is not entirely without influence on the way people feel or think they should feel about loss. All too often readers and spectators report the lines a character speaks as the playwright’s belief, and “Shakespeare says” still has the ring of authority. It matters, therefore, that in the world of Shakespeare’s plays society may not stigmatize the remarrying widow, but it prefers the celibate. Unlike the moralists, however, Shakespeare acknowledges that celibacy does not come cheap. Not all widows find it affordable.

Chapter 1

4

Precept and Practice

The pernicious clichés about widows (but not widowers) found in

polemics, proverbs, household manuals, and plays of the early modern period demonstrate how perplexing widowhood was for patriarchal theory. In The Merchant of Venice, Solanio’s quip about a hypocritical widow who “made her neighbors believe she wept for the death of a third husband” (3.1.9–10) reminds us that widowhood is problematic. First of all, the weaker vessel survives the stronger. Second, she may remarry, thus, some would say, cuckolding her former husband(s), however belatedly (Carlton 125). Third, she may not remarry, thereby revealing that “unheaded” women can get along quite nicely, thank you. Moreover, having been sexually awakened—some believed inflamed— the widow is no less threatening if she remains single, since she can be expected to take multiple lovers. Explicating Plato’s assertion in the “Timaeus” that the womb is a creature ever seeking to bear children and afflicting the entire body if it does not do so, the sixteenth-century misogynist Giovanni Della Casa writes, Do not imagine that Etna burns with more violence than the soul of woman burns with lust. And her husband is so far from being able to stop it by extinguishing it or appeasing such a fire that his labor ends by exciting it further, just as the intensity of the fire is usually increased by the addition of a small quantity of water.

When women are unsatisfied (and when are they not?), Della Casa concludes, “driven by their passion, they lose their minds” (qtd. and trans. by Poisson 398n.12 and 385–86). Statements like Della Casa’s derive from the defamatory Pandora/Eve myths and from readings of the ancients.

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In the context of such writings there evolved an ideology of celibate widowhood. In a world where a low opinion of women was unexceptional, chaste widows provided exempla. Artemisia the Second, wife to her brother Mausolus, was considered a paragon, because according to legend, upon his death in Caria in 353 BCE, she drank some of his ashes daily to assure that they would never be parted. In a number of early civilizations, widows remained the chattel of their deceased husbands; consequently, the bias against remarriage applied only to women (Sogner and Dupâquier 7). In ancient Rome although the remarriage of widows was acceptable, as property rights evolved into morality, univira, a woman who wed one man only, was regarded as the ideal wife (Gardner 50–51 and 54–55). Propertius (c. 50–2 BCE) regrets that Roman widows show no interest in emulating bereaved Indian wives who “burn and offer their breasts to the flame and lay charred faces on their husband’s body.”1 And Ovid, his contemporary, jeers, “Often a husband is sought for at a husband’s funeral; it is becoming to go with disheveled hair, and to mourn without restraint.”2 One of the best-known classical stories is Petronius’s “Widow of Ephesus” from the latter part of the first century CE. A beautiful young widow entombs herself with her husband’s corpse, intending to starve to death. When a soldier guarding the crucified bodies of several thieves hears her moans, he leaves his post to comfort her and soon they become lovers. Meanwhile, the parents of one of the thieves take away their son’s body for burial. Having been derelict in his duty, the soldier faces severe punishment, whereupon to save him the widow gladly offers her husband’s body for crucifixion. Her actions, according to the narrator, betoken the lust and faithlessness of women. Obviously, widows are among the worst offenders. Such prejudices were not confined to Mediterranean peoples. At the turn of the first century (98 CE), Tacitus remarked an antipathy toward remarrying widows among certain Germanic tribes (Macfarlane 232), and the Chinese long considered remarrying widows so disgraceful that many widows chose to prove their fidelity by hanging themselves (Pamela Sharpe 228). In Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale,” while we are invited to scoff at January’s wishes for his young wife, May, an incipient Wife of Bath, his words nevertheless voice a widespread medieval ideal of widowhood: For neither after his deeth nor in his lyf Ne wolde he that she were love ne wyf, But evere lyve as wydwe in clothes blake, Soul as the turtle that lost hath hire make. (CT 164, ll. 2077–80)

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These lines echo Catholic discourse on proper behavior for the devout. Following biblical, apocryphal, and patristic writings, the Church allowed but denigrated remarriage. Looking back to the Old Testament, Leviticus 21:14 associates the widow with the divorced woman, the polluted woman, and the harlot as an inappropriate wife. Judith, a beautiful and devout widow who never remarried, was empowered to slay Holophernes (Jth. 8.4–8 and 16.22). Saint Anne the Prophetess served as a New Testament model widow. Paul honored pious matrons who were “widdowes in dede”; those over sixty who had been married only once were deemed fit to join the congregation (1 Tim. 5.3, 5, 9). Asserting that Jerome had implied a similar binarism when he wrote, “Fly the company of those widdowes, who are widdowes not in will, but of a kind of necessity,” Father Fulvius Androtius, an English Jesuit, describes “the Mantle and the Ring,” a rite honoring the patristic view and celebrated in England from about 660 CE until the establishment of the Anglican church.3 In this rite, widows who had remained celibate for a number of years after the death of their first husbands knelt before the high altar during the Mass. After vowing never to remarry on pain of punishment by the Church, each widow was clothed by the bishop in a consecrated black mantle. On her fourth finger he placed a silver or gold wedding band, and over her head a veil. The bishop then blessed the widow as a sacred person, and Te Deum laudamus was sung before two pious matrons accompanied the widow to her home.4 Her habitlike apparel did not signify the widow’s mourning for the loss of her husband but rather her perpetual mourning for sin—her own and others’. That the celibacy of a widow who had been unhappily married might express preference rather than sorrow presented no problem.5 Inclusivity promoted participation in the rite. Unlike the lusty remarrying widow, her celibate sister was of value to the community and particularly to the Church as a philanthropist and an intercessor. It was therefore in the interests of the Church to discourage remarriage (Goody, Development 64–67). Jane Owen urged wealthy Catholic women “to prevent the flames of purgatory during the time of your widowhoods” by donating large sums of money for charitable purposes. “For if you be not solicitous thereof before your second marriage, when your states are in your own disposal; it is much to be feared that your future husbands will bridle you of all such (though most necessary) charges” (qtd. in Aughterson 280).6 And in The Widdowes Glasse, Father Adrotious recounts that [i]t was an ancient custome in our Iland . . . that in tyme of warre, plagues, famyne, or of any publicke necessity, there were in many Citties

20

S h a k e s p e a r e’s W i d o w s and Townes a certaine number of widdowes ordayned to watch & pray continually, night and day, in the Churches, by their turnes or courses, one or more togeather: because it was held, that their prayers were of more efficacy, and power with Almighty God, to asswage his wrath, then the prayers of other common people, as persons dedicated wholy to his seruice, by the obseruation of Continency, in their Chaste, and Holy widdowhood. (336–37).

The translator’s “Epistle Dedicatory” to The Treasvre of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons reminds readers that “Virginity, and Widdowhood, haue euer been accounted Sisters, and betroathed to the same Eternall Spouse Christ Iesus” [6]. In a diary entry for August 1520, Albrecht Dürer describes a ritual he saw in Antwerp, more general than “the Mantle and the Ring,” but also honoring widows. In this church procession, in which people of every rank, of every guild, and of various religious orders participated, the widows displayed their specific identity by wearing white garments, symbolic of their purity (61). In England, the legal system followed church doctrine by honoring celibate widows and, at one time, by considering remarriage a bigamous union that lost the couple “benefit of clergy” (Macfarlane, 232). How widows were supposed to behave was a popular subject with men eager to instruct women. The most significant moral treatise was penned by Juan Luis Vives, a doctrinal conservative, albeit an enlightened humanist, who encouraged ladies to study languages, classical authors, the Bible, and religious works, yet who saw no contradiction in deeming a woman of the most sophisticated education incompetent. Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII commissioned Vives to write a Christian conduct book for Mary Tudor.7 His 1523 Latin original, De Institutione Foemineae Christianae, became one of the century’s best-known works on the continent and in England.8 Upon arriving in England, Vives took up a teaching position at Oxford. The Spaniard soon gained Catherine’s favor, expounding notions not so much extreme as medieval. The Instruction of a Christen Woman devotes almost half of its instructions to the duty that widows owe their spouses, who are absent corporally but not spiritually. In these pages Vives makes some heterodox claims: that the dead “knowe moche of our actis and fortunes by the shewyng of angels, that go betwene”; that they are merely absent, not “clene deed”; and that therefore the widow should “nat behave her selfe so, that his [her husband’s] soule have cause to be angry with her and take vengeaunce on her ungratiousnes” (167–68).9 This aside, Vives largely delineates orthodox conservative Catholic views.

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To Vives’s dismay, many priests were less conservative. While calling for moderation in mourning since, after all, it is only a matter of time before we are together with our spouses in heaven, Vives reproves those too worldly shepherds, who “drynke to them [young widows] in the funeral feast, and byd them be of good chere, sayeng, they shall nat lacke a newe husbande, and that he is provided of one for her all redy . . .” (165) Indeed, for a widow to be cheerful is cause for suspicion, for “wepynge, and mournyng, solytarines, and fastyng, be the most precious doures and ornamentes of a wydowe” (169). Vives teaches that the more somber the widow’s clothing is the better (168–69), a doctrine that recalls the Indian custom of dressing widows unattractively. Christ loves her who “playethe the wyddowe in dede, that is to saye, the whiche beynge desolate in this lyfe, hath all her hope and trust, and all her joye and delite in Christe” (171). Vives’s predilection for the third person when referring to widows suggests that he is addressing a male readership (Benson 175); the intensity of his exhortations suggests that conservative principles had an uphill job overcoming a contrary practice among women. Nor is it sufficient for the widow to abjure remarriage. Many do so for the wrong reasons: “Also many be glad, that their husbandes be gone, as who were ryd out of yocke and bondage . . .” (163), “[a]s byrdes, whan they be out of their cagis, by and by tourne to their olde conditions . . .” (170). To prevent such backsliding, Vives recommends that the widow live with an old woman who would manage her household. If the widow is elderly, she had best live with an elderly kinsman: “The olde Romayns wolde, that the women shulde ever be under the rule of theyr fathers, and bretherne, and husbandes, and kynsmen” (172). An alternative is for her to live with her mother-in-law so that she will always remember her husband. There are other advantages, too: her chastity will be stricter and she will have less liberty. The widow should be solitary, rarely go out, always be chaperoned, and take the advice of an aged man (172–73). Of course, by counseling widows to shun public venues, including law courts, Vives urges them to sacrifice their financial and legal rights and perhaps the interests of their children, all in the name of chastity (Todd, “Virtuous Widow” 70). In fact, despite the continuing popularity of his treatise, most female civil litigants in Tudor and Stuart England were widows (Stretton 195). Worst of all behaviors is a second marriage, for which there is seldom an excuse. The widow should not seek a father for her children nor, if she is childless, desire children. Approvingly, Vives quotes St. Jerome advising Furia “on the Duty of Remaining a Widow”: “she bryngeth upon her children an enemie, and nat a norisher: nat a father, but a tyranne” (176).

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Besides, “[i]f thou have children alredy, what nedest thou to marye? If thou have none, why dost thou nat feare the barennes, that thou hast proved afore . . .” (177). But the issue of children is a red herring. Vives agrees with Jerome that lust is the real motive of remarrying widows, whatever other reasons they may allege: “confesse thyn owne viciousnes. For none of you [widows] taketh an husbande but to the intent that she wyll lye with hym, nor excepte her lust pricke her” (177).10 Idealizing chastity, Vives reviles remarrying widows as lecherous and counsels perpetual celibacy. Nevertheless, young widows, incorrigibly frivolous, present special problems. In the case of a concupiscent young widow who cannot “suffre,” Vives falls back on Paul’s dictum, “better to marie than bourne” (177). Of course, she should wait a suitable time and then choose a husband “some thyng past mydle age” (178), who can govern her and her household. The ideal husband, apparently, is old enough to be the bride’s father and would elicit the respect due to a father. Comparing the injunctions of Vives with those of Christine de Pisan (1365–1429), we find that they reach the same destination, though by different routes. Christine urges the widow to be frugal and dress soberly for practical reasons: “to conserve what she has.” As for remarriage, Since there is so much hardship for women in the state of widowhood (we say it, and it is true), it could seem to some people that therefore it would be better for them all if they remarried. This assumption could be countered by saying that if in married life everything were all repose and peace, truly it would be sensible for a woman to enter it again, but because one sees quite the contrary, any woman ought to be very wary of remarriage, although for young women it may be a necessity or anyway very convenient. But for those who have already passed their youth and who are well enough off and are not constrained by poverty, it is sheer folly, although some women who wish to remarry say that it is no life for a woman on her own.

Christine explains why they feel that way: “So few widows trust in their own intelligence that they excuse themselves by saying that they would not know how to look after themselves” (159–60). In effect, she holds the men who devalue women responsible for women’s male dependency and lack of self-esteem. If women remarry, Christine intimates, it is not out of lust but rather fear of inadequacy induced by misogynous teachings. It was rare for a Catholic writer to smile upon remarriage—“vidual incontinence.” Erasmus is a most notable exception. Contrasting foolish and wise husbands in “The Funeral” (c. 1526), one of the former, unable to induce his thirty-eight-year-old wife to become a nun, makes a will disinheriting her unless she live as a Beguine (an order following

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a religious discipline though not taking perpetual vows). The exemplary husband instead tells his wife, “As for marrying, use the liberty the Lord has given you,” asking only that, if she remarries, she choose a moral man who, “guided by his own kindness and prompted by your gentleness . . . may love his stepchildren” (Colloquies 111). Few humanists espouse a position as broadminded as that of Erasmus, despite the possibility of the unmarried widow being unprotected financially, subjected to slander, and tempted to immorality. Indeed, his privileging of marriage over celibacy in A ryght frutefull epystle . . . in laude and prayse of Matrymony (1518, trans. c. 1531) was thought heretical by many churchmen, heresy being punishable by death (Erasmus on Women 55–77). Even after the Reformation stripped marriage of its status as a sacrament, many English Protestant writers were loath to abandon earlier attitudes. For example, in the 1560s Thomas Becon, chaplain to Cranmer under Edward VI, based his argument in favor of young widows’ remarriages on sheer misogyny, rather than on spiritual convictions about the superiority of the married state. He held that young widows are so “light, vain, trifling, unhonest, [and] unhousewife-like” that one way or another, they will exercise their lust, so best that they remarry (365). Old widows were more promising. The records of a seventeenth-century Baptist church in Bristol stipulate that widows of sixty years of age or more, who pledge to remain single, could serve as deaconesses. Similar conditions were in force in other separatist churches (Crawford, Women 45). Protestant John Webster writes like a Catholic when he opposes “An ordinarie Widdow” to “A vertuous Widdow.” Shunning remarriage, the “vertuous” lady garners up her heart in her children and her Maker. Her celibacy is a second virginity: “this latter Chastity of Hers, is more grave and reverend, then that ere shee was married; for in it is neither hope, nor longing, nor feare, nor jealousie” (Paylor 70). For some readers, this rather bleak prospect may have commemorated the Virgin Mary and paid tribute to the Virgin Queen. About 1615, Thomas Middleton wrote More Dissemblers Besides Women, in which the Duchess is instructed that “she’s part virgin who but one man knows” (2.1.81). Class-oriented writers believed that high social standing affected the extent of effort and self-restraint required to attain this second virginity, so they gave credit where credit was due. Because soft living—dainty food and freedom from toil— joined with a fragile constitution to weaken a gentlewoman’s resistance to sexual overtures (Kelso 24), her chastity was more admirable than that of a commoner, being more difficult to achieve. To the extent that a woman could exercise authority, the celibate Lady has shown herself worthy.

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While celibacy as an ideal of widowhood probably lingered longest in areas where adherence to the old religion was most pronounced—above all in the north, and also in midcoastal and southern Wales; in the Gloucestershire, Hereford, and Worcester area; and in the far southwest11—conduct books continued to propagate a Catholic privileging of virginity and celibacy nearly a hundred years after England’s turn to Protestantism. In 1631 Richard Brathwait, a landed Anglican Royalist, still echoes Vives on the widow’s role as celibate recluse. His English Gentlewoman, once regarded as “the culmination of the writing upon women” (Powell 162) follows St. Paul in praising the widow “in dede.”12 The etymology of “widow,” explains Brathwait, is “depriued or destitute” (110), a cue to how a widow should feel and behave that intimates his fear of women rejoicing in their liberation from the connubial yoke. Yet, paradoxically, he decries remarriage as less “happy” than widowhood, warning widows to shun suitors, “lest enforced by necessity, or wonne by importunacy, or giuing way to their frailty, they [the widows] make exchange of their happy estate for a continuate scene of misery” (111). He surprises again in his discussion of chastity. So valued is the widow’s fidelity to her dead husband that Brathwait grants it an unexpected priority: “This inestimable inheritance of Chastity is incomparably more to be esteemed, and with greater care preserued by Widowes then Wiues . . .” (111). Brathwait concludes his section on widows by equating any behavior short of the widow’s withdrawal from society with dishonesty, excepting only activities designed to serve her family. While not as effective as the Indian custom of sati, the prospect of withdrawal from society—perpetual solitude—would assure most husbands of their wives’ utmost solicitude for their health and safety. Like Vives, Brathwait teaches that women do not so much require husbands (that is, living husbands) as male guidance, which can be supplied by kin or friends. Thus, once again Brathwait inadvertently puts pressure on the Protestant ideological injunction that women marry. Not only do Catholic Vives and Protestant Brathwait share a similar social engineering agenda, but both of them (and their many congeners) take for granted a financially stable, upper-class readership, in spite of the dearth of wealthy English widows (Sommerville 221). To the moralists the less privileged are invisible. The remarriage of widows for socioeconomic reasons, although prevalent in early modern England, is no extenuating circumstance. These mentors teach that remarriage, with few exceptions, inevitably dishonors all women. Praise of the celibate widow was matched by disparagement of the lusty widow, which persisted on the Protestant English stage, in print, and in popular culture, however unheeded. An Elizabethan adage taught,

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“He that woos a Maid must feign, lie, and flatter; but he that woos a widow must down with his breeches and at her” (Tilley 404, M18). Like his continental counterpart, Giovanni Della Casa, Joseph Swetnam assures his readers in his Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (1615) that widows were desperate for sex and that no new husband could “make her [the remarried widow] forget her former corrupt and disordered behaviour . . .” (59).13 The ballad-maker Martin Parker advises young bachelors to marry lusty, rich (albeit old) widows: All waies take this for a maxime, That old widowes loue young men, Oh then doe not spare for asking, Though she’s old, shele toot agen.

In another song, he reverses his advice, but is no more complimentary to the widow: A young man that marries a widow for wealth, Does euen much dammage vnto his soules health, For he will be toying and playing by stealth, Shee’s iealous through neuer so iustly he dealth. (229–38, esp. 231 and 237)

It would be comforting to accept the old-fashioned protestation of Chilton Latham Powell, a pioneer scholar of the Elizabethan period, that such writings—the entire misogynous outpouring of the conduct books, the pulpit, and the stage—were merely “a pose,” no more testifying to “the true state of man’s regard for woman” (159) than did idealizing Petrarchan sonnets or courtly Renaissance prose. Linda Woodbridge, a feminist critic studying the querelle des femmes in England, also concludes that most antifeminist tracts were no more than “intellectual calisthenics,” yet she opines that, bolstered by other conservative social forces, the net effect was to discourage women from joining together to improve their legal and economic situation (Women 17, 326–27). What an earlier generation of scholars like Powell had too easily overlooked was that when such sour attitudinizing is virtually institutionalized, the harm that results is quite real. Most Protestant thinkers and polemicists, perhaps suspicious of celibacy as smacking of Catholicism, or perhaps fearing fornication, or desiring male control over the widow’s wealth, knew in principle that they should feel differently about remarriage.14 Many male writers urged remarriage because widows’ independence was disruptive to patriarchal ideology (Hull, Women 19). Men could take their cue from the

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marriage of the founder of the Anglican church to widowed Catherine Parr. Women might recall that Henry’s admirable last wife had been twice widowed before she wed Henry and that she married Thomas Seymour within four months of Henry’s death.15 Yet, even while urging remarriage, many men could not escape its age-old coding as a betrayal of the deceased. Sir Walter Raleigh’s statements on this point exemplify an ineradicable ambivalence within the culture. In 1603, expecting to be executed and realizing how desperately his wife would need protection from his enemies, Raleigh advised Bess, then thirty-eight, to remarry, yet “to witness that thowe didest love me once, take care thowe marry not to please sence but to avoide povertie and so preserve thy child” (my italics; Letters 249n.4 and 247). Later he was to cringe at the prospect of a Raleigh widow’s wedded bliss. As one testator to another, he counseled his son Wat, who was in fact to die a bachelor, “if she [the son’s wife] love again, let her not enjoy her second love in the same bed wherein she loved thee . . .” (Instructions 22). Ambivalence toward widows’ remarriage was most apt to become condemnation when women no longer young thought to love again (Mendelson and Crawford 193).16 Their breach of a generational boundary was offensive to both Catholics and Protestants. Celibacy was the approved behavior for women past the age of childbearing. The purpose of marriage was, above all, procreation. Forestalling fornication and providing mutual comfort were secondary.17 Body-curers supported soul-curers, the former declaring that sexual intercourse between aging spouses was hazardous to their health (Thomas, “Age” 243). Like their counterparts in the real world, Shakespeare’s older widows are a generally chaste lot, all but Mistress Quickly remaining single. (We do not know if Mistress Overdone has thrown in the towel.) In print, celibacy was crucial for elderly widows. Not only was sexuality, the presumptive driving force behind remarriage, considered unseemly in women past middle age, but the appearance of the old was thought to be repulsive, in part because of the Renaissance privileging of youth and beauty. Also distasteful was female longevity, for aristocratic women were beginning to outlive men, a phenomenon particularly evident from 1575 to 1600 (Minois, Old Age (249 and 292–93). A consequence of these aesthetic and demographic factors was that in early modern English literature, a widow of fifty or older with a predilection for the altar was on shaky moral ground, whatever her status. It was not merely colportage—a cultural notion imposed on the folk rather than created by them (Ginzburg xv)—that explains the gulf between the literary prejudice against remarriage and its seemingly uninhibited practice, particularly among widowers.18 Although derogatory

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widow stereotypes may have been divorced from the realities of remarriage, they thrived in the social imaginary. There Shakespeare found the material he was to transmute into his thirty-one widow characters. Ancient biases, elaborated in classical literature and perpetuated through continental Renaissance writings, figured the widow as a subset of the weaker vessel. Those biases reverberated in England, providing literary ideologues with a market to exploit despite Reformation theology and English inheritance laws that militated against traditional widow stereotypes. While women who chose to remarry did so in considerable numbers, the ideal of eternal wifely fidelity, of univira, remained an epitome of virtuous conduct. Perhaps the ideal endured because inherently we shrink from the realization that, even where love seems greatest, the beloved can be replaced. Well before Hamlet learns that his father was murdered, he contemplates self-slaughter over his mother’s perfidious remarriage, for him an attack on individuality itself: Why, she should hang on him As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on, and yet, within a month— Let me not think on’t! Frailty, thy name is woman! (1.2.143–46)

Shakespeare did not cultivate verfremdungseffekt; Hamlet’s despair is not unique. Sexual possessiveness and fear of negation motivated Raleigh when he instructed his wife to reject carnal pleasure with his surrogate and bid his son, young Wat, to deny his “relict,” the Raleigh marriage bed. These motives led some Englishmen to write wills penalizing their wives financially if they remarried,19 while other men, in excellent health, sought to guarantee the mourning that was their due by having their wives’ portraits painted as grief-stricken widows (Levy 147–64). Writers, printers, and booksellers, controlling literary output and distribution, and fearing the faithless woman’s cry, “The King is dead; long live the King!” continued to perpetuate a moral model of widowed celibacy. The catch-22 was that although a widow’s remarriage was denigrated in the “media” of the period, the widow who remained single was often regarded as a madam, prostitute, or witch. (Foyster, “Marrying” 109). Anthony Fletcher concludes, “What seems undeniable is that there was an acutely felt anxiety in Tudor and early Stuart England about how women could best be governed and controlled” (27).20 In the face of such anxiety and the prejudices it bred, real widows made their pragmatic decisions about wedding again or persisting in the single state.

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For purposes of comparison, again a word about widowers: Despite their precise marital status being obscured in public records, widowers were as pragmatic as widows. No matter how great a role sexual urgency played in a widower’s remarriage, other determinants influenced him, too. The widower might seek love, a mother for his children,21 a partner for his business, an heir and a spare. Or as Mr. Pecksniff, the eulogizing widower in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, reminisces a few centuries later, “She was beautiful, Mrs. Todgers. . . . She had a small property” (149). A study of remarriages in England between 1580 and 1649 reveals that 33 percent of widowers remarried within half a year (Wrigley et al., Reconstitution 177 and 171–82). In a companion work to the Instruction of a Christen Woman, The Office and Duetie of an Husband, Vives provides insight into the social construction of the early modern widower’s psyche. Construing women’s frailty as crucial to their subservience, Vives asks, “For yf the woman were robust and strong, both of mind and body, howe could she suffre to be obediente and subject to him y [that] were no stronger then herselfe?” What if she were to reject her role of housekeeper? “Who wold take upon him the office and charges of a house? Or the office of a cooke? Who woulde nourishe and bring up childre˜? What a torment were it for a man to do those thinges? A man wold rather leaue all, and dwel in a desert, then to dwel in such misery and bondage” (sig. E6r–E7vr). It was one thing to disparage remarrying widows, another to blame a widower averse to desert living who took another wife. Many of Shakespeare’s literary contemporaries bowed to the long-lived bias against the remarrying widow that remained a precept if not a practice. They authored the tendentious pamphlet literature, ballads, adages, conduct books, “characters,” and plays that constructed her as a wanton, more simulacrum than human, a symbolic personification looming larger than the woman herself. In contrast, for the most part Shakespeare explores widowhood sympathetically. Very few of his remarrying widows are figured as libidinous—the most common canard of the polemicists. It was, however, incumbent upon him to connect with an audience taught that every widow, depending on her degree of self-restraint, was potentially or actually a Lusty Widow.22 Audience expectations, a personal predilection for celibate widowhood, or the demands of his source stories— any or all of these factors—may account for his habitually assigning misfortune to those who wed again. Of the thirty-one Shakespearean widows and “seeming widows,” the ten who remarry, lusty or not, more often wed calamity than joy. Of those ten—Elizabeth Woodville in Henry VI, Part Three, Anne Neville in Richard III, Tamora

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in Titus Andronicus, Hortensio’s wife in The Taming of the Shrew, Hostess Quickly in Henry V, Gertrude in Hamlet, Mistress Overdone in Measure for Measure, Cleopatra (if she weds) and Octavia in Antony and Cleopatra, and the Queen in Cymbeline—six die. If we include King Lear’s Regan, who attempted to wed a second time, seven out of eleven die. Of the remarried, two fall victim to their new husbands. Richard III instructs Catesby, “Rumor it abroad / That Anne, my wife, is very grievous sick,” and yet again, “give out / That Anne, my queen, is sick and like to die” (R3, 4.2.50–51, 56–57). In the next scene Richard muses complacently, “And Anne my wife hath bid this world good night” (4.3.39). Claudius kills Gertrude inadvertently when she drinks from the poisoned cup intended for Hamlet, but had he been willing to reveal his treachery, he could have struck it out of her hand. For those who survive their remarriages, the future is less than reassuring: Elizabeth Woodville loses her sons and brother to the ambition of her brother-in-law, Richard III; Hortensio’s wife, having publicly discomfited her new husband, has gotten the marriage off to an unpromising start; Mistress Overdone, nine times a bride, remains in prison; and Octavia, deserted by Antony, is an object of pity in Rome. Little wonder that Paulina of The Winter’s Tale remains silent when Camillo is thrust upon her. Since remarrying widows fare ill in every genre acknowledged by Heminges and Condell, genre as the determinant of the widows’ destinies seems less relevant than a residual ideology of revered celibacy. Shakespeare’s lusty widows are punished for violating an ideology at odds with an acceptable Elizabethan social practice, a practice, current research suggests, dictated as much or more by economics than by desire.23 What do we know about widowhood and remarriage in early modern England? Who were the widows and how did they behave in the face of patriarchal injunctions and the constraints of law? An examination of the economic, legal, and social status of widows reveals that the loss of a husband could bring disaster, difficulty, or opportunity, depending on the widow’s financial circumstances. Widowhood was common and anticipated, wives typically being younger than their husbands and more resistant to disease; in the 1603 plague visitation, for every woman who died, so did at least two men.24 Large cites claimed the most lives, with London a contender for England’s least healthful environment. In the capital, death ended half of all marriages within ten years (O’Day 114). So high was the mortality rate that it is almost gratuitous to speculate about Shakespeare’s marriage being less than happy because Anne remained in Stratford. Rather, a protective husband from the countryside might well be loath to move his family to London.

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In England, widows outnumbered widowers by at least two to one, in some communities by as much as nine to one (Houlbrooke, English 209).25 Whereas among the peerage until the mid-1570s it was likely the wife who died first and died fairly young from illness related to childbearing,26 among the poor—and also among townswomen in general—women usually outlived their husbands; in fact, they might spend most of their lives as widows. Paradoxically, only these “unheaded” women had the opportunity—or, for the poor, the economic burden— of heading households. How were widows to live? Most husbands anticipated that their widows would carry on in their stead as “deputy husbands,” residing in the family home (Froide, Never Married 18, 25). If all the children of the “deputy husband” were young, the widow would have to take on her deceased spouse’s labor and obligations along with her own (Abbott 111). Widows with grown children might choose or be forced by poverty to live in their children’s homes. King Lear’s situation reflects the English village custom of elderly parents (possibly widowed) offering their sons or sons-in-law governance of the farm in exchange for room and board as “sojourners.”27 Some children, potential heirs, remained at home to help out, protecting their widowed mothers—and their inheritances. Frequently a widow, son, and daughter-in law would share a house.28 If spectators understood Coriolanus and Virgilia to be living with his mother Volumnia, they would not have found it odd. Widows fortunate enough to have a house might support themselves by taking in paying boarders (McIntosh 61; Froide, Never Married 18). One thinks of Diana’s mother in All’s Well. However, tax records show widows as one of the most penurious categories. While some turned to friends and neighbors for support, others were forced to rely on the parish. A study of Boroughside, a London suburb, suggests that throughout England the authorities often placed poor widows as boarders in private homes or in almshouses—purpose-built shelters, the greater part being single units for separate occupancy that offered considerable privacy.29 Classed among the “deserving poor,” widows were favorite recipients of relief (Henderson and Wall 15–16). Such relief was not entirely altruistic because state relief was tantamount to state control, enforcing a masculinist ideology, moral (read sexual) standards, and the status quo (Pamela Sharpe 228). The majority of widows, however, were self-supporting. Of particular relevance is a study by Judith M. Spicksley, who examined seventeenthcentury wills in Cheshire and Lincolnshire (85–94).30 She found that over half the single-women testators, both widows and those who had never married, either supplemented their incomes or lived exclusively

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on the proceeds from money-lending. Practiced at every economic level, money-lending offered many women financial independence and allowed them a real choice between marriage or remarriage and the single state. Notwithstanding, among the “middling sort” widowhood might entail hardship, for by the 1450s European guilds had begun to restrict the widows’ right to carry on their deceased husbands’ businesses.31 Within some guilds, unless the widow remarried a man who could succeed to the business, she might be forced to sell it, losing her income along with her spouse. Within other guilds, if she remarried she might be barred from practicing her deceased husband’s trade (Froide, Never Married 27). In any case, widows comprised a very small fraction of guild members (Bennett, “Medieval” 160). If she was not among those who were successful in business, she could join the ranks of the hawkers, street vendors of food or drink (Froide, Never Married 26). While death often did the work of divorce in early modern England, bringing emotional release to the loveless, the results could be financially calamitous, especially if there were children (Laurence 64). When their mother’s income was insufficient, even young children might be compelled to labor, like Anne Bucke’s nine- and five-year-olds, who “worke lace” (Wrightson, Necessities 50). Widows might eke out a meager living as spinners or weavers. The unskilled often became servants (O’Day 114), like Angelica, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. The London Consistory (ecclesiastical) Court depositions identify some widows by occupation—for example, Alice Sparrowe, age fifty-six, spins, knits linen and woolen, and keeps sick folk; Agnes Strayte, thirty-two, spins, cards, and knits; Mary Rookes, thirty-six, is a sewster; Margaret Comendale, thirty-nine, washes, sews, and knits; Agnes Widdeson, sixty, washes and spins; and Agnes Waller, sixty, is a midwife.32 Of these, only the midwife would seem to have a reliable and adequate source of income—assuming she was thought to have the right political and religious views and could afford a license. If she were unlucky, she could be taken for a witch, midwives being suspect for their knowledge of abortifacients, which law officers usually construed as poisons (Riddle 133, 137–38). Women in toto, not merely widows, were often part-time laborers, sometimes working several jobs, their occupations overwhelmingly “low-skilled, low-status, [and] low-paid. . . .” (Bennett “Medieval” 158). What provisions did English law make for widows? Amy Louise Erickson points out that “the ways in which property was distributed shaped the structure of society” (4).33 For many years scholars thought that women had lost ground during Elizabeth’s reign, but studies of marital settlements, wills, and other inheritance provisions suggest otherwise.

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Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, widows’ entitlements were entrenched and protected beyond that of any other legal inheritance category (Goody, “Inheritance” 11n.2). Diversity complicates English law, and studies of the disparities and intersections between the various forms of law as they affected women are a fairly recent project. Alongside the common law were equity law, manorial or borough law, and ecclesiastical or civil law. (Statutory law, made by parliament, could modify ecclesiastical law.)34 Some of these bodies of law were more generous to women than were others. Although in a court of common law married women (including remarried widows) had no legal identity and therefore could not defend their rights, they did have legal identity in equity courts such as Chancery and in the ecclesiastical courts. And while an English wife was temporarily “couverte” (covered)—that is, for the duration of the marriage, her husband became her guardian and took control of everything she owned—she never lost her separate identity. Rather, that guardianship ended with her widowhood. Even wives had some relief from coverture; except for London, where civil law held sway, most husbands, wrote Sir Thomas Smith in the 1560s, named their wives as the only or chief executors of their wills, giving them full authority over their children’s lives and inheritances.35 By the seventeenth century, when wills came to be seen as primarily secular personal documents, the wife/executrice was often described as “dear, beloved, most loving” (Houlbrooke, “Death, Church” 32–33). For whatever reasons, in his will Shakespeare did not designate his wife Anne fondly, and he named his daughter Susanna and her husband as his executors. Throughout England, widows were provided for whether or not they had borne children. It was the custom that if the couple had no children, the widow received half the estate (perhaps more) for life, and at the very least her home (if there was one), whether or not she remarried (Sir Thomas Smith 131). “The estate” included any real property her husband held, both land and houses. While this inheritance custom could be circumvented by a prenuptial contract or a will, it became law during the Restoration. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Master Shallow assures Mistress Anne Page that his cousin Slender “will make you a hundred and fifty pounds jointure” (annuity), which amounted to half of Slender’s annual income, Anne having remarked in an aside, “O, what a world of vild ill-favor’d faults / Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!” (3.4.48–49, 32–33). If the couple did have children, the widow was subject to the medieval custom or law of “reasonable parts,” which continued to be followed in London and other major cities especially in the north. This law gave the widow the proceeds of a third, perhaps more, of her husband’s estate for life, gave

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the children a third, and set aside the final third for the husband’s debts, burial expenses, and bequests, both religious and secular (Hanawalt 23–24; Erickson, “Property” 153). In addition, if there had been a legal settlement at marriage, financially fortunate widows would seek to repossess their dowries. The term “dowry” in English civil law denoted a gift from the bride’s family to the husband, also called the bride’s “portion” (whereas “dower” in common law was the property assigned to the widow, usually a third or half of the husband’s estate). In the early seventeenth century, a bride who had brought her husband a six-hundred-pound dowry, which was usually invested in land, could expect to receive about a hundred pounds a year in her widowhood, a generous return of over 16.5 percent (Macfarlane 281). Her return, usually in the form of an annuity, was her jointure, and was in addition to her entitlement by ecclesiastical law of the third (or more) of her husband’s freehold estates as well as property owned in other ways. The provision extended even to widows who were erstwhile adulterous wives separated from their husbands (Macfarlane 282). Had the liason between King John’s Lady Falconbridge and Richard I been detected and publicized, she still could not have been disinherited. While widows might agree or be pressured to take less than their third, they could also be left the entire estate. Although a common principle of inheritance was that the greater a husband’s means, the smaller the fraction of his estate he was apt to leave his wife and daughters (Erickson, Women 19), we should not forget that amor vincit omnia. While misogynists and ideologues urged women’s worthlessness and incompetence, devoted husbands like Thomas Salmon declared that “if he had a thousand pounds more, he would give it all to his wife” (qtd. in Brodsky 147). By and large, the law was sympathetic. In short, bearing in mind that law is a major player in the construction of social reality, widows enjoyed a legal status, if not equal to men’s, still far superior to that of maids and wives. For instance, widows could be testators, leaving property to their daughters as well as to their sons;36 thus, a widowed mother could will property to a widowed daughter or daughter-in-law, as an English Volumnia might to an English Virgilia. Yet despite laws that tried to strike a fair balance between the competing interests of the widow and her children, we have only to imagine what it would be like for the new “deputy husband” of a family barely getting by to have to manage on a third or a half of her prior income. It was incumbent upon brides who had something to lose to have a care for their widowhood. Happy the widow who had exercised her right to draw up a prenuptial contract specifying that upon marriage her property should not pass automatically to her husband. Published legal

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advice was available to wives and widows with financial problems. Best known to us today is The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights (1632), but an important earlier work, Thomas Phayer’s Newe boke of presidents [precedents], was first printed in 1543 and reprinted five times by 1600. It contains a sample Chancery form for protecting the property a widow brought to marriage and even “An Indenture of maryage,” a contract between the bride’s widowed mother and the groom. The indenture granted the remarrying bride sole authority over her own daughter’s marriage with respect to whom she married and the assets she brought to the marriage. William West’s Symbolaeography, a 1594 manual containing sixteen forms, was also designed to protect wives and widows (Erickson, Women 104). “Separate estate” settlements have been found in Chancery as early as 1582, when “Mrs. Kitchin arranged a trust whereby she might dispose of all her jewels and £500 worth of goods by will” (Erikson, Women 106). By so doing, she could secure her property from being seized to pay a husband’s debts and could thus provide for her children. But was knowledge of such contracts, manuals, and settlements widely disseminated? Did people of all social ranks, including those who had even the most modest property to shelter, have access to these “Cliff ’s Notes” on prenuptial arrangements? We have yet to learn how typical was the legally provident wife who, with some luck, upon shedding her coverture as a widow found herself financially independent. We do know that widows were twice as likely as the hitherto nevermarried to shelter their property from their husbands (Foyster, “Experienced” 114–15). Such foresight was not always appreciated. Depicting “An Ordinarie Widdow,” John Webster writes that “a great comming in, is all in all with a Widow: ever provided, that most part of her Plate and Jewels, (before the wedding) lye concealde with her Scrivener” (my emphasis; Paylor 71). In The Merry Wives of Windsor, although Fenton has persuaded Anne Page, not yet seventeen, to elope, thus eluding the prenuptial contract, we can be sure that Master Page will invoke the full force of law to protect Anne’s “[s]even hundred pounds, and possibilities” (1.1.64) from a feckless gentleman “of no having” (3.2.72). “No, he shall not knit a knot in his fortunes with the finger of my substance” (3.2.74–75), says Master Page, in tones that might have been echoed by many an English father. An astute remarrying widow would not need a father to advise her to safeguard her property—and the interests of her children if she had any—from potential economic mishaps. Even so, widows’ “property rights . . . varied in accordance with the provisions of different systems of law, their place of residence, and their access to legal assistance” (Wrightson, Necessities 43–44).

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In the face of both a residual literary ideology that typically censured women who wed more than once and the loss of autonomy that widowhood brought, many bereaved wives nevertheless remarried. Some, like William Lily’s wife who had buried two old husbands, sought love. This latter-day Wife of Bath rejoiced in William, her junior, and her servant. He knew he stood a chance with her, since “she was frequently observed to say she cared not if she married a man that would love her so that he had never a penny. . . .” (qtd. in Brodsky 126). Her historical counterpart, fictionalized by Thomas Delony in his 1626 novel, is the attractive elderly widow who weds her employee, the weaver Jack of Newbery, almost against his will.37 Lonely widows were content to remarry for companionship. Others, as Christine de Pisan had pointed out some two centuries earlier, having been told time and time again that they were the weaker vessel, may have felt inadequate to deal with life. Especially among the aristocratic and moneyed classes, a young widow’s family might see their daughter as a marketable commodity, useful for securing valuable alliances. Or the widow herself, however well dowered, might remarry out of ambition for even greater status or more money; one thinks of the Queen in Cymbeline. But often remarriage was obligatory for financial reasons. Widows may have considered remarriage attractive if they had inherited more debts than assets, or if they had been unable to reclaim a sufficient part of their dowries to live independently. In the lesser ranks of society, a widow left with children might need a husband to support them. Consequently, prior to 1570, remarriage was to some extent encouraged among the less privileged in order to protect children: better that a second husband provide for them than the parish. To remain an entrepreneur, a widow with a business might require a husband, perhaps because of guild restrictions or perhaps because she lacked the physical strength to operate the business on her own and could not afford or trust hired help. In Henry V we discover that the widowed Mistress Quickly has wed Ancient Pistol on the rebound following her inconclusive relationship with Falstaff. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Mistress Ursula was not alone. Disregarding the myriad literary and extra-literary exhortations to shun remarriage, the English found new mates in droves. While demographers studying marriage records for both sexes, state that “it is a fortiori beyond reach to discover what proportion of those who were widowed later remarried” (Wrigley, Reconstitution 171), they nevertheless estimate that about 30 percent of mid-sixteenthcentury English marriages were remarriages. Guardedly, Wrigley and Schofield cite a study that presupposes remarriage by 43 percent of widowers and 25 percent of widows (190 and 360n.9). In late Elizabethan

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London, remarrying widows may have exceeded one in four. They were not slow to remarry if they needed men to carry on the family craft or trade; their median interval of mourning before remarriage was a mere nine months—the same as for widowers (Brodsky 134). In every socioeconomic class, not only did societal attitudes facilitate the remarriages of widowers, but remarrying widowers ideally preferred wives who had never been married. They could expect to have their way since the sex ratio, property laws, and customs favored men (Ségalen, 75–76; Houlbrooke, Death, Religion 233–34). Economic motives were significant to widows who wed: “In so far as remarriage was necessary to enable the bereaved to fulfill familial and occupational functions, it could be looked upon as a social duty” (Houlbrooke, Death, Religion 233). A contemporary writer, deploring the speed with which the bereaved wed again, referred to the deceased spouses as “cope-mates,” thereby unwittingly revealing a main purpose for remarriage (qtd. in Cressy, Birth 395). An interesting exception to the preference of remarrying widowers for the never-wed were the widows of clergymen, who were often “recycled” as the wives of other clergymen. In the ministry, not only would Protestant theology celebrating marriage over celibacy have overridden ideological slurs, but the clerical widows’ prior “on-the-job” training made them particularly desirable as wives. For example, Josias Nicholls (c. 1553–1639/40), a minister of the Church of England inclined to nonconformity, was known to have twice married widows (Collinson, “Nicholls” 40: 783–84),38 and the more orthodox Anglican clergyman Thomas Goffe (1590/91–1629) married his predecessor’s widow (Larkum 22: 636). Nor were devout remarrying widows stigmatized. Anne Locke, among the “godliest” of women, being the friend of John Knox, was thrice married. Daughter of a widower who had himself remarried, Anne first wed Henry Locke, a mercer. Ignoring Locke’s protests, upon Knox’s entreaty she left her husband for two years (1557–59) to live with the Protestant exiles in Geneva, where she translated Calvin’s works. Two years after Locke’s death in 1571, Anne married Edward Dering, a preacher ten years her junior, who died within three years at the age of thirty-six. Anne remarried for the last time in her late forties or early fifties, this time to a draper, three times mayor of Exeter, and remained a woman of the highest repute.39 The literati’s tacit assumption that every widow is the site of a psychomachia, in which fidelity to her deceased husband opposes shameful wantonness, is contested by such marriages as these. Statistically, the widow’s wealth or lack thereof also entered into the question of whether she would find a husband, should she want one. Amy Erickson, however, interrogates a number of (male) historians’

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hackneyed notions—that the “wealthy widow” was typical, that wealth was the source of her allure, that she was eager to remarry, and that all women were eager to wed again, remarrying in much greater numbers than widowers: “Aside from the breathtaking arrogance of both the contemporary and the historical stereotype, it is wholly untenable in the light of demographic and economic facts.” Wealthy widows were least likely to remarry “from medieval England to nineteenth-century Virginia” (Erickson 196). For a woman of property, remarriage could be a desperate gamble. Unless she had legally sequestered some part of her possessions before marriage, all she had became her husband’s to spend or bequeath at will; moreover, “though he bequeath them not, yet are they the husbands executors and not the wifes which brought them to her husband” (Lawes 130). This law helps to explain why over half of the widows of London aldermen—a representative group of well-to-do women—remained single (Brodsky 123) despite the protection offered by prenuptial contracts, despite the received wisdom of the age—“The rich Widow weeps with one eye and casts glances with the other” (Tilley 722a, W340). The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights provides an exemplum of a “faire, young, rich” widow who marries a foolish young man and loses everything, including her new husband when he is killed in a duel. Once again a widow, she is restored to legal personhood (no longer an “infant” under law); now she can sue her husband’s killer for felonious homicide, turn to God, and invest wisely (331).40 Although for many if not most widows, making ends meet might well have been an ordeal, the third who were impoverished (Erickson 196) remained single in increasing numbers and, arguably, often by choice, despite their desire for security. Remarriage was no less risky for poor widows than for wealthy ones, for the suitors of the former were often “[i]mprovident, impoverished, sick, very old, very young, lame or alcoholic men . . . not the source of the security widows sought” (Todd, “Demographic” 426). If suitable mates were not available for most poor widows, other options included almshouses, reduced rent, jobs, and supplementary relief payments, all of which could alleviate hardship and allow a mother to better protect her children’s interests. That needy older widows were unlikely to remarry is attested to by a 1570 finding from Norwich where, among the poor, widows over sixty-one outnumbered widowers of corresponding age by twelve to one, male survivors being far more apt to find new spouses (Houlbrooke, English 213). The celibate poor widow, like her affluent sister, could, however, count on one bonus: for serving her first family, church, and community rather than another husband, she stood to gain social approval even in Protestant England (Todd, “Demographic” 426–27).

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Despite widowhood being considered generally advantageous for bourgeois women in preindustrial Europe (Vann 195), widows most likely to remarry were neither wealthy nor poor but marginally comfortable, involved in crafts or trades facilitated by male assistance (Brodsky 128; Erickson, Women 196–97). The more energetic widows, like their male counterparts, may have chosen to offer moderate affluence in return for a younger spouse, especially one who had not been previously married. But economic motives predominated among widows in business and widowed mothers who lacked the means to live comfortably on their own. Even relatively benign laws could not always keep women from want, sometimes from prostitution or procuring. Perhaps the prototype of Mistress Overdone, the brothel keeper in Measure for Measure, got her start in the hold-door trade as a needy widow. Despite great differences in widows’ status, conservative ideologues, those would-be makers of manners, nonetheless assumed that widows were able to get along financially. Husbands, good Protestants though they were, might seek to shield their wives as future widows from need while discouraging remarriage. After 1570, at first among the well-todo, then by the seventeenth century, among all classes, husbands tended to penalize remarriage by writing the consequent loss of the widow’s inheritance into their wills (O’Day 76).41 They may have wished to keep their property within the family; they may have feared cruel or irresponsible stepfathers and wished to protect their children by leaving them larger bequests; they may have yielded to sexual possessiveness and wished to avoid posthumous cuckolding; they may have assumed that the new husband would provide for his wife; or they may merely have followed a legal fashion. We cannot know their motives; however, by the seventeenth century, remarriage declined even among the middling sort (Boulton, “London” 323–55). English Renaissance drama both reflects and distorts such findings. For example, in the seventeenth century, the older the widows, the wealthier (or the poorer), and the more children they had, the longer they were likely to remain unmarried.42 When widowers did marry widows, they favored those without children.43 Aside from the expense of raising another man’s child, Shakespeare’s more traditionally-minded spectators could look to King Cymbeline’s remarriage to the mother of Cloton, her vicious, foolish son by a previous marriage, for vindication of this preference. In All’s Well That Ends Well, Bertram’s mother, the Countess of Rossillion, has neither remarried nor seems apt to, being old, very wealthy, and a mother. Not her age but her status––riches, rank, and what today we would call social class––guarantees her an enviable position in society (Mendelson and Crawford, 180 and 193). Regardless,

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whereas at least in theory the authority of age was extended to men, who possessed the right to rule by virtue of their wisdom and experience, no such claim was made on behalf of older women (Thomas, “Age” 207). The Widow Capilet, described in the Dramatis Personae as “an old widow of Florence,” is probably ineligible for remarriage because of her age. That she has a daughter also makes marriage less likely. Even though Widow Capilet might enjoy a new husband’s help with her guesthouse, her suitors would be put off by the Widow’s need to dower Diana; as proverbial wisdom has it, “an old child sucks hard!” (Manningham 12). A popular plot motif during the first two decades of the seventeenth century was the “widow hunt,” in which the widow was involved in predatory financial relationships. As in Martin Parker’s ballads, she was either the object of a widow hunt motivated by her wealth or the wealthy (and lusty) hunter of a younger spouse. Among the Jacobean plays in which a widow-hunt figures are Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1605); Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), More Dissemblers Besides Women (1615), The Widow (1616), and Women Beware Women (1621); Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614); and Fletcher’s Wit Without Money (1614).44 Shakespeare most nearly approaches the widow-hunt plot motif in Richard III, when Richard seduces the vulnerable Anne, not for her money but for her prestigious family status. Shakespeare is also wary of the “lusty widow” trope. Among his remarrying widows, only Tamora and Cleopatra—two out of thirty-one—have explicitly sexual lines, prima facie textual evidence of lust. Significantly, both are foreign, reflecting current findings that English widows at whatever socioeconomic level who did not need a husband to conduct a business, provide legal protection, etc., were less likely to remarry. Although wives had considerably more legal and economic power than had been thought before economic historians undertook intensive research into wills, apparently many widows deemed such power insufficient to make remarriage attractive. A wife with an unloving husband and no protective prenuptial contract could find herself at the mercy of the parish. Whether or not a remarrying widow had safeguarded her estate, she was still subject to her new husband, who had the right to punish her disobedience physically. The law of Protestant England continued to agree with Augustine that “the gestures of discipline are gestures of affection.”45 Not surprisingly, many widows found that “Liberty, if accompanied by affluence, could be very sweet” (Fraser 94). If they chose liberty, presumably most chose celibacy as well, since otherwise, in a period lacking efficient contraception, we would expect to find significant statistics on widows’ bastards.46

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Among the remarrying, amid a multiplicity of motives—romantic, sexual, psychological, social, religious, etc.—economic advantage or necessity cannot be discounted. As historians Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford put it, “marriage and remarriage were the usual price which women . . . paid for survival” (183). For the materially fortunate, however, despite having been endlessly admonished that women were incapable of running their own lives, widowhood offered the chance, in the words of The Lawes Resolutions, to “shift it well enough” (6). And just as early modern English plays continued to reflect unpleasant stereotypes, so too conservative ideology from pulpit and pamphlet was apt to celebrate the celibate widow, in effect conferring a status medal; for those who bought into that brand of ideology, widows who rejected remarriage were commendable, whatever their motives. The poor widow who was a bit better off than her fellows and might even have a pound or two to lend out at interest, the widow in trade who could afford to hire (rather than need to marry) a worker for the family business, the gentlewoman who was well provided for—they could choose eternal fidelity to their spouses. Thus celibacy, to the extent that it was consciously elected, was often made possible by material sufficiency, though its economic base was mystified. On consideration, widows were apt to be a nuisance all around. Even the celibate wealthy widow could threaten patriarchalism because money conferred autonomy. One such character is Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, an eminent Lady who for sixteen years had hidden a queen and deceived a king. If unheaded women were comparable to masterless men, Paulina was tantamount to a one-woman army of the masterless. Impoverished widows threatened the system because parishes found them expensive, requiring public support lest they beg or turn to crime. How will Juliet’s Nurse, Angelica, live if the Capulets fire her as they did in Shakespeare’s source story? Remarrying widows with children by a first marriage might neglect those children’s financial interests in favor of the new husband or of children by him. The issue of le deuxième lit (the second bed) was resonant throughout Europe (Goody, “Inheritance 12). Shakespeare glances at the problem in Hamlet, the son of Gertrude’s first husband being passed over for the throne. Behind the theology of marriage as eternal lies a concern with the inheritance of property. If widows were figured as wealthy, they were a present or potential disrupter of a system that, despite fits of liberality, continued to subordinate women legally, socially, and financially. Moreover, the stereotype of the rich widow made it easier for people to overlook the poor or marginally selfsufficient widow who needed an economic partner to survive. If widows were figured as lusty, the fantasied fear of their sexuality could mask a

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very real fear of women as economic competitors, taking scarce employment away from men. In one way or another, wealth and the power it shadowed was inevitably the issue underlying discourses of widowhood in England and its theater. By revising and repressing economic motives, a gendered ideology worked to obscure political shortcomings. Small wonder that among all categories of women Renaissance writers satirized, widows took top honors (Woodbridge, Women 20).

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Chapter 2

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Ex empl ary “Seeming Wid ows”

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ear the beginning and end of his career, Shakespeare created three female characters who do not know whether their husbands are living or dead. Aemilia, the abbess of The Comedy of Errors, a “seeming widow” is miraculously reunited with Egeon in late middle age. Thaisa of Pericles, a paler version of Aemilia, like her Errors’s counterpart also originates in Gower’s retelling of the story of Apollonius of Tyre. And the elderly Paulina of The Winter’s Tale waits sixteen years for confirmation of Antigonus’s death. Unlike the others, Cymbeline’s young princess Imogen knows she is widowed, having mistaken the headless trunk of her would-be rapist for that of her would-be murderous husband. Discovering her error, Imogen is nevertheless quick to rejoice in the restoration of her repentant spouse. While each character is partly a captive of her source story, various pairs possess certain similarities. But all share a common trait: they never consider remarriage. Aemilia does not reveal whether she had believed in Egeon’s survival for over three decades; she speaks only of “so long grief” (5.1.407). In light of Pericles’s setting in ancient times when voyages were long and shipwrecks frequent, Thaisa laments, “My wedded lord, I ne’er shall see again” (3.4.9). Although Antigonus’s death is not confirmed until the last act, Paulina is inclined to think herself widowed much earlier: “I’ll not remember you of my own lord, / Who is lost too” (3.2.230–31). For all that she lacks proof, she restates this belief in act 5, scene 1: “my Antigonus . . . / . . . on my life, / Did perish with the infant” (42–44). For their fidelity, Aemilia, Thaisa, and Imogen are rewarded with their lost spouses, Paulina with the offer of a replacement—which, in a hypothetical act 6, she might be wiser to decline than to accept. The depiction of these characters and the narratives in which they appear implies that the sole cause of

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their fidelity is love, but what enables their fidelity is solvency. None of them experiences the economic or political pressures that could make remarriage attractive or necessary. Taken together, the four “seeming widows” represent an array of status ranks. Had shipwrecked Aemilia, a Syracusan merchant’s wife, lived in Shakespeare’s England, she would have been a commoner. Her ability to buy the children of the poor as slaves for her children implies that Egeon made a comfortable living. Yet familiarity with the hazards of trade would have taught a merchant’s wife the importance of economic security. When quizzing Adriana to find the cause of Antipholus of Ephesus’s apparent madness, Aemilia allocates first place to financial loss: “Hath he not lost much wealth by wrack of sea? / Buried some dear friend?” (5.1.49–50); grief for loss of wealth takes precedence over grief for loss of life (Tempera 154).1 Seeking safety and a means of subsistence, Aemilia has relinquished men and taken God as her second husband, as Vives and Tasso (writing in the tradition of Paul and Jerome) enjoined. The play’s setting, neither English nor post-Reformation, constructs her as a Catholic head of a religious house and a palimpsest tracing her origins to Gower’s Confessio Amantis. In Gower she is Apollonius of Tyre’s pagan wife Lucina, who becomes “Abbesse” of the Temple of Diana in Ephesus; Thais is her daughter (Bullough 1: 50–54). Shakespeare’s Thaisa is closer to Gower than is Aemilia. A king’s daughter and a king’s wife, Thaisa is at the pinnacle of aristocracy. When she puts on a “vestal livery” (3.4.10) and becomes one of Diana’s “maiden priests” (5.1.242), like Aemilia she finds an occupation and a livelihood by unsexing herself. Imogen, also a king’s daughter, is transgendered as Fidele, emblematically bespeaking her undiminished love. Mournfully, she serves the Roman general Lucius as a page. Between the bourgeois and the princesses in rank is another celibate, the aristocrat Paulina, a great Lady of the court. The queen’s friend and companion, she becomes the king’s mentor. Her actions and the deference accorded her intimate her high position and independent wealth. Most notably missing from this spectrum are those of the lowest class, the parents of the Dromios, forced to sell their twin infants into slavery. Their presence would have underscored a plight too bitter for comedy. Since natural and social afflictions take the greatest toll on the poor, in real life poor women would have been most apt to experience the ambiguous marital status of “liminal” widowhood, a status corresponding to what the social anthropologist Victor Turner describes as “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law,

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custom, convention, and ceremonial” (95).2 In Shakespeare, privileged liminal widows stand in for their less fortunate sisters. Two find occupations within the authorized social constraint of an established religion, but Paulina, the king’s tormentor, remains suspect. We see enough of Aemilia and Paulina to speculate that, despite their losses, they live productively while “betwixt and between.” Although remarriage has no appeal for these characters, Elizabethan women in a similar liminal state, who may have been inclined to remarry, could have found that option precluded. In Section 26 of The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights on “Captivitie or long absence of one which is married,” the author explains, It falleth out not seldome, the one of them which are married to be taken captive, or otherwise so detained, that it is uncertaine if he live or no. Therefore because it is in some sort dangerous to expect long the uncertaine returne of an absent yoake-fellow, here the Civil Law did ordaine that after a husband had beene gone five yeares, and nothing knowne whether he lived or no, the wife might marry againe, and so might the husband, that had expected his wife, etc. But the Common Law commandeth simply to forbeare Marriage till the death of him or her that is missing be certainely knowne (66).3

Shakespeare flatters his liminal widows by making their celibacy a matter of choice rather than necessity (indentured servants and apprentices had no choice). Imogen, a “seeming” if not liminal widow, also resolves on lifelong fidelity. For opting to remain celibate, all three women are fashioned as a credit to their husbands and the best of role models. Important as the act-5 reparations are, with their restoration of husbands (or Paulina’s option of a new one), the prior reward of authority and economic self-sufficiency is what enables these models of chastity to undertake successful independent action, partly enforcing, partly subverting, patriarchal values (Kehler, “Emilias” 157–78). Aemilia and Paulina enjoy authority and a measure of independence. They belong to a tradition of self-willed widows who escape condemnation for disobedience because of their worthy actions. A medieval metrical exemplum, “The Widow’s Candle” (c. 1300), tells of a determined widow who was rewarded for her piety in spite of (or because of ?) disobedience to the Virgin Mary herself. This widow had built a chapel to the Virgin, but on the Feast of Candlemas, the priest being away, she could not hear mass. So she said a prayer and fell asleep in front of the altar. There she dreamed of a great religious procession including Christ and the Virgin entering a church. A clerk gave candles to everyone, which they all—except for the widow—returned

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at the offering. When the Virgin’s messenger bid her offer her candle, she replied: Well may the priest sing forth his mass— I will not bring him my candle; But go and say to My Lady, That what God has sent me, that will I hold.

At the Virgin’s behest, the messenger tried to force her to relinquish the candle, but she held on until it broke in half and the widow awakened, part of it still in her hands. And all her life, we are told, she kept that precious relic, which still works miracles.4 The exemplum acknowledges and allows for defiance as a probable attribute of a woman who could do as she chose, being wealthy enough to build a chapel. She is even privileged to participate in a miracle because her rebelliousness is contained. However unseemly her behavior, she acts in accordance with an unshakeable belief in a patriarchal God. Moreover, she defies the Virgin only in her sleep; it is Our Lady, not Our Lord, whom she disobeys; and she does so only in order to keep “what God has sent me.” Shakespeare’s strong-minded exemplary widows are similarly dedicated to virtuous action. Though neither silent nor obedient, they are paragons of chastity. Although Aemilia is a belatedly developed character, her religious position assures her a special kind of power, that of the Magna Mater. Ephesus was the site of a famous temple to Diana, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Although commonly associated with virginity, Diana was also a fertility goddess through her fusion with Cybele of Anatolia—an appropriate association for Aemila, the mother of twins. As Diana/Cybele she became Rome’s Magna Mater; traces of her terrifying power in the ancient world remain in Elizabethan depictions of Hecate, Diana’s incarnation as an aged witch goddess.5 For some Elizabethan spectators, Abbess Aemilia’s importance in bringing about the “miracle” of Comedy of Errors’s resolution may have recalled the legend of the Virgin Mary’s death in Ephesus, sanctifying the city with the supernatural authority of Christianity that informs the abbess. Insofar as Aemilia “combines chastity and fertility in her image of a nun giving birth to sons after thirty-three years of labor” (J. A. Roberts, “The Crone” 132), she seems uncanny. The ideological assumptions that Aemilia resists concern both gender and rank. Despite her sex, she refuses to be helpless. Here she anticipates such spunky young heroines as Rosalind and Viola and older ones like Paulina. Though no aristocrat, she refuses subordination other than within the religious order that honors her as

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abbess. Understanding her culture, she finds empowerment. Moreover, her insistent assertion of female authority, notwithstanding its Christian imprimatur, can be read as a challenge to patriarchy.6 Granted, that challenge is well disguised. Judging from her confrontation with Adriana in act 5, scene 1, Aemilia’s ideological function in Comedy of Errors appears to be teaching the women in the audience, as she teaches her daughter-in-law, to accept their status as possessions without themselves becoming possessive. Prefiguring many of Shakespeare’s male characters who seem fondest of dead women, Egeon describes young Aemilia as a model wife: “With her I liv’d in joy” (1.1.39). He speaks of her “kind embracements” (1.1.43) and praiseworthy fecundity, the sine qua non of the plot. Subtextually, however, she is not without specifically female guilt. Egeon implies that she bears ultimate responsibility for the family’s disaster because of her incessant and irresistible entreaties to return to Syracuse: My wife, not meanly proud of two such boys, Made daily motions for our home return: Unwilling I agreed. Alas! too soon We came aboard.

(1.1.58–61)

Twenty lines earlier Egeon speaks of Aemilia’s pregnancy as “[t]he pleasing punishment that women bear” (1.1.46). As a daughter of Eve, Aemilia suffers Eve’s punishment of painful labor for tempting her sexually vulnerable husband. When Egeon and Aemilia reenact the sin of Adam and Eve, with Egeon bowing to his wife’s pride and uxoriously relinquishing his authority over her, both are punished but Aemilia more so. She loses sons, husband (not only a personal loss but also loss of social certification in a man’s world), and sexual fulfillment. Her situation contrasts sharply with her husband’s, in that Egeon has not chosen a cloistered life. One reason is his responsibility for raising the Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio. An equally important reason, however, is that, in Shakespeare, religious withdrawal is not a male response to catastrophe; men do not require protection. In the secular world, the male privilege of sexual freedom would not have been denied Egeon. True, there is nothing of the erstwhile rake about this most paternal of artificial persons; yet while he is free from socially imposed, gender-based restrictions on his sexual behavior, Aemilia, to gain the protection of the Church, must commit sexual sati. Her thirty-three years of celibacy could be regarded as a patriarchally imposed expiation for sexuality—not so much for fleshly pleasure as for her pleasure in the power of those “kind embracements” for which Egeon unwillingly

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agreed to leave Epidamium. Shakespeare’s change of setting and ages suggests the redemptive power of celibacy in Christian thought. Plautus’s Epidamnum, the locale for the main action, becomes Ephesus with its Marian and Pauline associations; Plautus’s Antipholi are twenty-five, Shakespeare’s thirty-three, Christ’s age at his crucifixion.7 Having first freely relinquished sexual power over men, then having yielded all to “time’s deformed hand” (5.1.299), the Aemilia of act 5 is a figure of considerable importance. Celibacy has enabled her to achieve power within the church. Though in truth no widow, she has been one of St. Paul’s “widdowes in dede” (1 Tim. 5.5), married to only one husband for all of her life, not merely for his, thereby winning the Duke’s praise as “a virtuous and a reverend lady” (5.1.134). Nor does the text insist on an end to Aemilia’s celibacy even after she finds her husband. Aemilia’s concluding speech abounds in Christian references that emphasize her former religious identity rather than a new or resumed secular one. Her allusions to Christ’s age and to “gossips” (godparents at a baptismal feast) and her repeated use of the word “nativity,” which recalls Christ’s birth (5.1.405 and 407), serve to verbally clothe Aemilia in her religious office no less than the vestments she wears on stage. A defrocked Aemilia remains outside the play, difficult to imagine. Even an Aemilia who leaves her office to live with Egeon, ruling her household and extended family as she had the abbey, is more easily envisaged as a celibate—emotionally a wife, sexually a widow.8 Christianity being patriarchal, the role of a Christian religieuse is likely to reinforce institutionalized male dominance. Accordingly, Aemilia takes on the authority of the institution that shelters her and allows her to be assertive without being condemned. She bullies Adriana much as Shrew’s Kate, after winning the wager for Petruchio, bullies Bianca and Hortensio’s wife, those “froward and unable worms!” (Shr. 5.2.169). Ironically, the celibate abbess ignores the reason for Adriana’s jealousy—Antipholus of Ephesus’s likely adultery—and instead blames the victim. Aemilia refuses to release Antipholus of Syracuse; she favors the imperative mode, silencing others rather than practicing silence: “Be quiet, people,” and again, “Be quiet and depart, thou shalt not have him” (5.1.38 and 112). The female patriarch becomes both an aspiring restorer of order and a licensed shrew—empowered because, by entering the abbey, she turns away from sexual sin, ensuring her fidelity to her lost husband as she serves another Father, another Son. Celibate devotion erases Aemilia’s association with the devalued term in the binary oppositions male/female and spiritual/physical. No longer physical (or threateningly female), she is a spirit, serving Spirit. Under Christian auspices, her service paradoxically becomes sway. Earlier Adriana had

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suggested to her sister that “were you wedded, you would bear some sway” (2.1.28). “Widow” Aemilia bears sway in a larger unit than the family—in the abbey and in the community of Ephesus itself. Aemilia’s importance increases as she is moved from the utmost margins of the play, where she was a disembodied, bittersweet remembrance in Egeon’s first-scene framing speeches, to a prominent place in its conclusion. Brought to life much like Hermione of The Winter’s Tale, she is Errors’s abbess ex machina. Aemilia’s functions are narrative and dramatic. By detaining the Syracusan twins in the abbey so that they can be juxtaposed against their siblings more easily, she becomes a major agent of the plot, enabling the recognition. By betraying Adriana to her own reproof (5.1.90), she again takes center stage as a restorer of family order. With the longest speech before the Dromios’s joint epilogue, Aemilia appropriates the Duke’s authority and all but concludes the play. The miracle of “such nativity” (5.1.407) shifts the play’s focus from loss to the miracle of birth and rebirth, making Errors in a sense her story. As Aemilia becomes a major character, her actions and authority interrogate the doctrine Luciana had expounded in act 2, scene 1, asserting women’s lower place in the world order. Even as early as Errors, then, the female enforcer of patriarchy begins to appear as a subtextual—and sexual—subverter. Neither wife nor widow, celibate Aemilia is herself an error, confounding gender roles and locating an inadequacy in the hierarchizing of the social formation, as she bridges and breaches categories, successfully, irreducibly insisting on her exemplary status as faithful wife to her lost mortal husband and to an ever-present immortal husband. The Church that provides for her both requires and enables her celibacy, which might otherwise prove unaffordable in the commercial world of Ephesus, where even the unquestioning, obedient Luciana believes that marriage is based on acquisition: “If you did wed my sister for wealth, / Then for her wealth’s sake use her with more kindness” (3.2.5). Aemilia personates the syncretizing in Western thought of celibacy with spirituality. Subtextually, Aemilia’s story demonstrates that celibacy can be an empowering privilege, if something of a luxury. Royal, young, and pagan, Thaisa can also afford celibacy. Very much her father’s child, she is a game-player, a spirited princess determined to have a voice in the selection of her mate. She feigns reluctance when Simonides commands her to toast Pericles—a command, she admits in an aside, that “could not please me better” (2.3.72). Yet once she loses her husband and child, she reveals an unexpected strain of selfrenunciation that heightens her contrast with the play’s evil or imperfect fathers. These include not only Antiochus and Cleon but Pericles, who

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for fourteen years abandons his daughter, and “good king Simonides” (2.1.43), whose subjects live under his rule like the fish in the sea: “the great ones eat up the little ones” (2.1.28–29). In contrast to her daughter Marina, who must practice virtue in the world at its ugliest, Thaisa, an acknowledged monarch, can choose a rigorous cloistered virtue. Her “corpse” having been cast overboard in a fearful storm, along with precious jewels and a scroll attesting to her rank, the resuscitated royal widow finds a place in the service of Diana. Although Thaisa’s role is small, she, no less than Aemilia, shares the authority of the Magna Mater because of her religious office and because she has borne Marina. That she should serve the goddess of chastity is entirely appropriate, for as daughter and wife of a king, she shares in the role of “the true prince,” traditionally associated with and distinguished by chastity (Flower 37). Moreover, the goddess shows her power through the princess’s uncanny fate. For Simonides, father of Thaisa, knowing of her eagerness to wed Pericles, had lied to her suitors, telling them that “for twelve moons more she’ll wear Diana’s livery; / This by the eye of Cynthia hath she vowed” (2.5.10–11). Although in her aspect as Lucina, Diana protects Thaisa in childbirth, the goddess claims fulfillment of Simonides’s reckless promise fourteen times over. During that time, Thaisa is effectively revirginated. Whereas Aemilia is temporally empowered, Thaisa experiences a spiritual, quasi-mystical empowerment. Through her “sanctity,” she is able to “curb” her sight, “spite of seeing” (5.3.29, 31). Just as these characters occupy a range of status positions, so too they cover a spectrum of age. Imogen appears to be in her late teens or early twenties. By act 5, Thaisa is in her thirties, Aemilia and Paulina in their forties if not older. The names of the latter two hint at an affinity. Paulina, is, of course, the feminine form of Paul. Could Shakespeare have known that Paul was a name “which originated with one of the Aemilian gens” and was “chiefly distinguished among the Aemilii”? (Yonge 165). No Paulina appears in Shakespeare’s source, Greene’s Pandosto; this is Shakespeare’s name for his own addition. Although Shakespeare used Pandosto, he did not use Greene’s character names. Instead, he found the names for most of his characters in Plutarch, who includes an Aemylia and a Paulinus but no Paulina (Pafford xxix and 163). Shakespeare makes another addition to his source in the waiting woman who attends Hermione in prison. In act 2, scene 2, she is called by name conspicuously four times: Emilia. Shakespeare’s choice of the name Emilia may have been triggered not only by Plutarch but by a remembrance of the topoi of uncertain widowhood and the female community of nuns in Errors. In any case, despite her restricted role in Winter’s Tale,

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her name can serve as a nexus of remembrances since within nineteen lines of her entrance, Paulina is in conference with Emilia (2.2.19–64). In Paulina Shakespeare creates an even more articulate successor to the first of his liminal widows. That both wield notable power we must at least partly attribute to their celibacy and age. In Protestant England, where the convent and the abbey were not available, only premenopausal women who denied their bodies or postmenopausal women ceased to be dangerous, the latter unable to foist illegitimate children, the fruit of their adultery, upon their husbands’ families (Crawford, “Attitudes” 65). Aemilia and Paulina are both chaste and, in act 5, depicted as possibly postmenopausal. From her first appearance when the sixteen-year ordeal begins, Paulina is an avatar of courage and fortitude. Whereas the authority of religion protects Aemilia and Thaisa, Paulina is not a réligieuse. Nevertheless, she stands up to the king when he threatens to burn her alive, offering her life in defense of Hermione and Perdita: “I care not: / It is an heretic that makes the fire, / Not she which burns in’t” (2.3.114–16). For sixteen years a danger to tyranny and the most daring of the liminal widows, will she persist as unrecuperated in the face of Leontes’s attempt to silence her with the unlooked-for gift of a new husband? Age only strengthens Paulina’s resolve. In the first half of the play, Paulina is the mother of three daughters, the eldest already eleven. As Queen Hermione’s chief lady-in-waiting, she becomes a “waiting woman” in every sense, waiting on the secluded queen as both await the prophecy’s fulfillment, and waiting in vain for her husband’s return. Appropriately, the character whose celibacy is enforced and who enforces the King’s celibacy is named after Saint Paul, who revered celibacy. Since sixteen years pass between acts 3 and 4, Paulina of the last acts could be middle-aged or older.9 The standing that age and motherhood confers may account for her representation as so outspoken and steadfast a shrew. That Paulina appropriates male prerogatives is particularly disturbing to Leontes because she is a mother and, he believes, “a mankind witch” (2.3.68). Female characters associated with witchcraft in Shakespeare are capable of emasculating a man by making him feel defenseless, once again a boy confronting an omnipotent, vicious mother (Willis 6). The disruption of gender roles through powerful rhetoric and physical courage warrants that Paulina must be a witch—outside the “natural” order. She is a Hecate figure, the triad of Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate representing maiden, nymph, and crone. As if this were not enough— enough to burn her—Paulina is also called a “most intelligencing bawd” (2.3.69), not merely because she could have acted as go-between for Hermione and Polixenes but because women are ineluctably linked to

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sexual sin. The younger are maligned as whores; Imogen is slandered, and even the young Aemilia whom Egeon describes in Errors causes ill fortune as the temptress of her husband. Older outspoken women are figured as procurers. As it becomes more likely to Leontes and his courtiers that Antigonus, commissioned to abandon the king’s infant daughter, will never return from his unholy voyage, Paulina seems to justify Leontes’s canards, based on the early modern association between powerful widows and the dark world.10 But when she brings Hermione’s statue to life, the magic Paulina practices becomes “an art / Lawful as eating” (5.3.110–11). In the rubble of loss that the fear of women creates, Leontes’ and Paulina’s sexuality, if not destroyed, is driven underground. The depth and violence of Leontes’ sexual distress11 call for nothing less than the dismal purgation Paulina mandates. Like Abbess Aemilia, Paulina is a healer, but hers is a sterner nature: therefore betake thee To nothing but despair. A thousand knees, Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting, Upon a barren mountain, and still winter In storm perpetual, could not move the gods To look that way thou wert.

(3.2.209–14)

Kneeling, fasting, cold, unregarded—these are emotive cues to Paulina’s meaning: endless despair implies for Leontes a lifetime of celibate expiation.12 He accepts celibacy—“shuts up himself ” (4.1.19)—despite his courtiers’ concern for an heir because of guilt, which is carefully nurtured by the celibate and aging Paulina. Like Aemilia, Paulina is long unsexed and unhusbanded: I, an old turtle, Will wing me to some wither’d bough, and there My mate (that’s never to be found again) Lament till I am lost.

(5.3.132–35)

By likening herself to the turtle dove who pairs for life, Paulina reveals that, now knowing for certain of Antigonus’s death, like Abbess Aemilia she, too, has elected to join the ranks of the “widdowes in dede.” Why, then, does Leontes marry her off or, rather, attempt to do so? One answer has to do with genre. On stage, the romance’s happy ending could be darkened by the presence of the inconsolable widow. But tragicomedy, a hybrid form, does not insist on the marriage of Paulina and Camillo. How, after all, could a long-celibate and late middle-aged

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Paul-ina dismiss Saint Paul’s disparagement of those who “can not absteine”?13 If the miracle of reunion is sufficient to offset Paulina’s loss, ideological, not generic, reasons determine this final pairing.14 Leontes’ intended miracle—winning absolution by gifting the “old turtle” with a new mate—is dicey. The audience recognizes that Paulina has been empowered by celibacy. As his victim and fellow mourner, Paulina was able to control Leontes, to keep him celibate. How could Leontes dare to take comfort in sex, forever reminded by her solitary presence that he had sent her husband to his death? In effect, he is “married” to Paulina (Neely 209): united in grief, theirs is a relationship more enduring than either character’s first marriage. But whereas the celibate king is represented as isolated from his courtiers, alone except for Paulina, she lives productively in female community with the celibate Hermione and with her own virgin daughters. That is, since Paulina’s daughters are not referred to after act 2, the audience’s sense of them remains unchanged despite the sixteen-year interval. Paulina has her abbey, too. Here, as in so much of Western literature, a patriarchal society accords power to the neutered woman. Even before the play ends, however, Paulina has fulfilled her narrative functions: she has preserved Hermione, in effect engineering her divorce (Alfar 182), and has kept Leontes the “seeming widower,” from remarrying so that reunion with his queen is possible. If Hermione exemplifies the “woman as wonder” (Clubb 65–89)—the Neoplatonic version of Patient Griselda, apt to respond to victimization by feigning death to prove her steadfast love—Paulina, through her constancy and bravery, has proven herself an alternative version of that trope. Courageous in the face of mad tyranny, she remains faithful to Antigonus despite his long absence and her declining hope for his life, faithful to her queen through sixteen years of altruistic service. Now a supernumerary, proven a widow by the shepherd’s testimony, she is a permanent reproach to the king. If Leontes is to find sexual pleasure, Paulina’s reproaches must be silenced through her second marriage. Besides, the economic and political challenge of the unheaded woman (like that of the masterless man) calls patriarchy into question.15 The restoration of male control requires that Paulina take a new mate who nominally will rule her, for Leontes’ sickness and Paulina’s wisdom have reversed the hierarchy of male/female in The Winter’s Tale. Yet rather than endorsing these values, the play resists the resumption of the conventional hierarchy through Paulina’s final silence. The text can be played accordingly. Leontes would pause at line 146, as if waiting for a physical or gestural reply from Paulina and Camillo. Embarrassed that it is not forthcoming, he quickly orders, “Let’s from this place,” only to encounter more cause

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for discomfort as Hermione shrinks from Polixenes: “What? look upon my brother” (5.3.146–47). By act 5, Paulina has been typed as a crone, a threatening “mature woman not characterized primarily as virgin, wife, sex object, or potential mother” (J. A. Roberts, “The Crone” 116). Not only was a crone’s remarriage thought especially unseemly and disturbing, but were Paulina to wed, she would be the sole exception to the Shakespearean rule for remarrying widows: second marriages cannot turn out well. Instead, the least ambiguous component of the play’s questionably happy ending is its mother-daughter reunion and the revelation of the long friendship between women. As we imagine the bond forged between Hermione, Paulina, and Paulina’s three daughters, we see that female community is one of the chief commitments of The Winter’s Tale, integral to Paulina’s heroic plan for concealing Hermione. It answers to Victor Turner’s description of communitas: “a relationship between concrete, historical, idiosyncratic individuals. These individuals are not segmentalized into roles and statuses but confront one another rather in the manner of Martin Buber’s ‘I and Thou’” (131–32). This example of an ultimate prioritizing of gender over class is exemplified by the long-term ties between the queen, the courtier’s erstwhile wife, and Paulina’s daughters. Although Shakespeare often depicts a special bond between two young woman— sisters, “sworn sisters,” or female cousins—Paulina’s larger household is a rare example of female communitas in Shakespeare.16 As in Aemilia’s abbey, so admirable a bond is largely contingent upon political and economic sufficiency. In a discussion of The Comedy of Errors, Anne Barton observes that the last scene anticipates the “marvellous discoveries” of The Winter’s Tale (114). I have further suggested that as a managing pseudo-widow Aemilia looks forward to Paulina, actual widow and manager extraordinaire. They have yet more in common. Both are “widdowes in dede,” whose voluntary renunciation of sex accounts in large measure for their acceptability as female wielders of power. In time, Queen Elizabeth came to share this insight into patriarchy, and in the last decade of her life she may have seemed akin to an aging widow. For women, power is often a reward for the death or seeming death of desire. Luce Irigaray contends that the feminine itself is forbidden: “The feminine has . . . had to be deciphered as forbidden [interdit], in between signs, between the realized meanings, between the lines” (qtd. in Moi 132), for when measured against the male, the female is merely a lack that cannot be represented. Irigaray is germane because her “in between signs,” or “meanings,” or “between the lines” replicates Turner’s concern with

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the state of being “neither here nor there . . . betwixt and between.” Turner and Irigaray, sighting through their respective lenses of anthropology and feminist psychology, appreciate the creative potential of the displaced and the challenges they pose to the culture that seeks to control them. By suppressing their sexuality, celibate women like Aemilia, Thaisa, and Paulina elude the universal culture/nature binarism that inevitably subordinates women through their association with nature. Therein lies subversion. In Cymbeline subversion is tenuous. Shakespeare’s “seeming widow” Imogen may be better placed near the throne than on it. The poet awards her honor but questions her acumen. Written under James in 1609–10, Cymbeline ends with order restored through the discovery of the king’s lost son. Imogen is willingly displaced by her brother, who becomes male heir to the English throne. (James I could not have found this turn of events displeasing.) In lieu of the right of succession, Imogen regains her reputation for chastity, lost through slander. The loyalty she demonstrates to her husband is all the more remarkable in that he had commissioned her murder.17 When she first learns of that commission, she bids Posthumus’s agent Pisanio “witness my obedience,” offering her heart to his sword: “‘tis empty of all things but grief” (3.4.66, 69). Later she adopts Pisanio’s belief that Posthumus was duped; in order to be near him she changes her identity by donning male disguise: “You must forget to be a woman” (3.4.154), says Pisanio, more wisely than he knows; for this, it seems, is the only way to escape misogynous slander. Finally, believing Posthumus dead, Imogen renounces all identity, replying to Lucius’s question, “What art thou?” with “I am nothing . . .” (4.2.367). Like Aemilia and Paulina, the once sprightly princess had disregarded two of the “three especiall vertues, necessary to be incident in every vertuous women . . . Namely obedience . . . and sylence”—but never “chastitie.”18 As both slandered wife and liminal widow, Imogen, possibly a model for Hermione, learns to conform to the sanctioned trope for victimized women—Patient Griselda, who suffers silently and loves long. Griselda’s Neoplatonic alter-ego is Woman as Wonder, apt to respond to victimization by feigning death (in Imogen’s case, inadvertently) to prove her steadfast love: Love is promoted to the rank of grace and providence, and the commonplace of feigned death and burial . . . [becomes] a wonder of steadfastness signifying the right human action that cooperates through love in the stability of the Unmoved Mover, who is the source of love and of the providence that controls the mutability of fortune. (Clubb 73)

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While the ennobling of the victim is preferable to her debasement, the pain of abuse seems all too easily forgotten as misery is transmuted into transcendence: “She’s punish’d for her truth, and undergoes, / More goddess-like than wife-like, such assaults / As would take in some virtue” (3.2.7–9), says Pisanio of Imogen, whose reincarnation as Fidele heightens the tropes she enacts. Since intrinsic to them is the expectation that the offender will be forgiven, they figure a potentially dangerous male fantasy of women’s unconditional love. At play’s end, we are left with a recovering misogynist who lacks a support group and has nothing but the memory of the great harm he did to save him from recidivism. Only the final striking image allows us to accept the romance’s redemptive ending. It is the power of poetry, the desire to believe that a character cannot speak rapturously without meaning it, that awakes our faith (perhaps against our better judgment) in the future happiness of Imogen, a widow no more. As Imogen embraces him, Posthumus cries, “Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die!” (5.5.263–64). The image recalls Genesis, suggesting not Eve as primal sinner and temptress whose actions elicit mistrust of women, but rather Imogen and Posthumus at last married in spirit, becoming a single uncorrupted creation—a tree in Paradise.19 Although Imogen, certain of her widowhood, is spared years of liminality, she is tested no less rigorously than the “seeming widows,” insofar as the husband with whom she keeps faith, her would-be proxy killer, for whom she had incurred her father’s wrath, is not her equal in birth. The device that buys her time to recover from the shock of her husband’s villainous intentions is the assumption of male disguise. Imogen neuters herself when she becomes Fidele; now neither man nor woman, or both, or a code-jumper, she demonstrates the fragility and permeability of gender boundaries that underpin social hierarchy based on sex. As such she presents a challenge to the social order, which is, however, largely nullified by her rank. A princess’s fidelity is predictable. In Shakespeare “blood will tell” is a signifying constant, an implicit trope, evidenced most notably throughout the romances. Moreover, being of royal blood, Imogen has acquired the courtly manners and deportment that Lucius recognizes as befitting a page in his service. Imogen can remain chastely faithful to her husband’s memory because her survival needs are met and because (while within Lucius’ camp) she is politically secure. Like the older celibate liminal widows, Imogen, too, finds fidelity affordable. Sufficiently well provided for and politically secure, Aemilia, Thaisa, Paulina, and Imogen have the means to remain celibate, cherishing their husbands’ memories. The first three, partly by virtue of their

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ambiguous status as neither wives nor widows, gain authority usually denied to women who fit too easily into traditional gender roles. Moreover, Aemilia and Paulina, being older, gain authority because of their ambiguous status as women. Eventually, celibacy and age dissipate the threat of their sexuality. If they are liminal widows, they are also liminal women—no longer valuable reproductive commodities from whom men demand obedience and encourage silence. At most, they offer comfort, not frenzy; such passion as they may inspire, lacking urgency, will not threaten. Their empowering, a political good, is finally a consequence and signifier of decay and loss. But because they are neither useful procreatively nor sexually menacing, for at least one inspiring ahistorical moment, Aemilia displaces a duke and Paulina rules a king.

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Chapter 3

4

Problematic Widowed M others

Throughout the canon we find examples of a character type only occa-

sionally represented during Elizabeth’s lifetime but one that anticipates a Jacobean and Stuart stage vogue: the widowed mother. Both selfsacrificing and child-sacrificing widowed mothers became well-known stereotypes. In Shakespeare the binarism is most often deconstructed and melded into characterizations “of a mingled yarn,” insofar as fully seventeen of his thirty-one widows and “seeming widows” are mothers. The ideology of widowhood instructs them to devote themselves to their children as fervently as they cherish the memories of their deceased husbands. Shakespeare’s “seeming widows” are paragons of fidelity, but Aemilia and Thaisa lack the opportunity to raise their children. Paulina must direct her best energies to keeping Leontes’ guilt alive lest he remarry. Though her maternal affections are not in doubt, The Winter’s Tale is silent about her three daughters over the course of the sixteen years intervening between acts 3 and 4. Tamora and Cleopatra, mothers both, are in a class by themselves. Tamora’s construction is inconsistent. In act 1 of Titus Andronicus, Tamora is all mother, eloquently attempting to save the life of her eldest son, Alarbus. But when her infant son by Aaron the Moor is born black, she orders Aaron to murder him. The alternative, she believes, is exposure as an adulteress and her likely execution along with Aaron, her adolescent sons, and the baby as well. Even so, her decision is unnerving. As for Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen finds her children simply irrelevant; warned by Octavius that if she kills herself he will destroy her children (5.2.128–33), she promptly chooses suicide. We have heard of these children before. Octavius bitterly justifies impending conflict because of Antony and Cleopatra’s bounty to “Caesarion, whom they call my

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father’s [Julius Caesar’s] son, / And all the unlawful issue that their lust [Antony and Cleopatra’s] / Since then hath made between them” (3.6.6–8). When Antony is enraged by the warm reception Cleopatra offers Octavius’s smug messenger, she proves her love by offering to curse herself, Egypt, and all “the memory of my womb” (3.13.163). They are merely the ante she puts up to save herself from Antony’s wrath. We hear of the children for the last time from Dolabella (5.2.200–03); he brings her word of Caesar’s planned triumph and triggers her suicide. Shakespeare risks audience antipathy toward Cleopatra, whose dying metaphorical allusion to nursing could remind spectators of how readily she surrenders her children’s lives: “Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep?” (5.2.309–10). Because we never see these children, like Falstaff’s peppered ragamuffins, they may not strike playgoers as real. Falstaff leads his pitiful draftees to death but remains a great comic creation. Similarly, Cleopatra’s infinite variety fascinates, but motherhood is not part of the package.1 Germane to this chapter, however, are not widows careless of their children but all-too-caring widowed mothers. That interaction with their children is integral to the representation of more than half the widowed mothers does not necessarily give them high marks. Ideology overlooks a major pitfall of living for one’s children. Inevitably, some widows, albeit would-be altruists, live through their children, further complicating Shakespearean characterizations of sacrificing mothers unable to control who, ultimately, is sacrificed. To begin with Cymbeline’s pairing of Imogen with a remarried widow, the king’s second wife and the mother of Cloten by her first marriage: Shakespeare’s sole representation of a wicked stepmother,2 the queen attempts to poison her stepdaughter in her efforts to advance Cloten. Such groupings of widows are not rare in Shakespeare. All’s Well That Ends Well’s Countess Rossillion and Widow Capilet constitute another widow pair, differentiated primarily by class. The coupling of these two plays is not haphazard. Cymbeline has more in common with All’s Well than with Shakespeare’s other romances, for they feature heroines who go in search of their undeserving, estranged husbands and include physically or emotionally ill kings who are eventually cured (Nevo 92). No fewer than three widowed mothers appear in King John, and another, Volumnia, dominates the life of her son Coriolanus. What happens to these mothers and children when widows and former widows attempt to live for their children in the context of the societal demands made upon mothers, that is, when ideology meets the plays’ “real” worlds? Although Cymbeline’s queen defies the injunction against remarriage, she does so in order to install her ill-fated son in the

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succession as the king’s heir; when he goes missing she goes mad. To see their children married well, the mothers in All’s Well damage them perhaps irreparably. Among King John’s trio of widowed mothers, Lady Faulconbridge’s adultery and lifelong duplicity is far more benign than the child-focused behavior of the other widows; Elinor abets the murder of her grandson to aid her son John, and Constance dooms young Arthur. Although Volumnia devotes herself to raising Rome’s best servant, he turns traitor and dies by the hand of an enemy he had called a friend. Shakespeare suggests a good deal about the inner lives of the Countess of Rossillion and Volumnia, less about Constance, and little about Widow Capilet, Lady Faulconbridge, and Queen Elinor, yet clearly all meant to advance their children’s interests (and some, their own interests as well). All were fulfilling the moralists’ injunctions to dedicate themselves to their children; but in Shakespeare, mothers contend with social, economic, and political issues preceptors had ignored. Whereas the degree of ensuing disaster varies with the genre the widows inhabit, the destinies of their children expose the problems generated when the ideology of widowhood meets Shakespearean society. In Cymbeline, the queen epitomizes the age-old figure of the wicked stepmother, but her behavior is rooted in the ideology of widowhood. Her devotion to the foolish, depraved child of her deceased husband leads her to seek a crown for him that costs them their lives. The play’s key binarism, good versus evil widows, derives largely from romance and folktale gender-biased plot motifs: the wager on a chaste wife’s virtue and the machinations of a wicked stepmother.3 These motifs, melded with early modern social expectations for “widdowes in dede,” serve as the raw material from which Shakespeare constructs Imogen and Cymbeline’s queen. Even though slippage from the binarism creates characters that somewhat undermine the easy opposition, a net effect is to perpetuate age-old sexist canards and diminish the heroine’s stature.4 Whereas the “seeming widow” Imogen’s pseudonym Fidele implies an implicit promise to remain unwed, the remarried queen belongs to the third of Shakespeare’s widows who wed again, almost all of whom come to grief. Motivated by a passion to protect and advance her son, the queen invites comparison with three other widows who marry royalty. Lady Grey of Henry VI, Part Three marries Edward IV to protect and promote her family, only to lose her sons and brother. Tamora Queen of Goths weds the emperor to protect her surviving sons but lives to ingest them. The second marriage of Hamlet’s Gertrude shields Hamlet for a time but eventually claims both their lives. Shakespeare’s plays honor the period’s literary ideology of widowhood: to remain faithful to the memory of a husband was for early modern Europeans, particularly Catholics, an admirable decision. As for the

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importance of the widow’s looking after the interests of her children by her deceased spouse, to that not only the literati, but Catholics, Protestants, and the state said amen. In Shakespeare, widows who remarry to shield or elevate their children are mistaken—but so are widows who remain single for their children’s sake. The good/evil opposition in Cymbeline is not solely based on abiding monogamy or its violation. Cymbeline is strikingly similar to the Snow White fairy tale, elements of which appear in various Elizabethan ballads and romances (Geoffrey Bullough 8: 24). Like Snow White, Imogen is endangered by her wicked stepmother, a would-be poisoner. Snow White is abandoned in the forest by the queen’s hunter who, according to Bruno Bettelheim, is “an unconscious representation of the father” (204); that is, the huntsman spares her life but does not protect her. Bettelheim explains “what the oedipal and adolescent girl wishes to believe about her father: that even though he does as the mother bids him, he would side with his daughter if he were free to, tricking the mother as he did so” (205). Cymbeline, however, shows a marked preference for Imogen as the boy Fidele over Imogen as a young woman (Adelman 203). Emotionally abandoned by her subjugated father, alone in the wilds of Wales, Imogen finds male protectors in her long-lost brothers, whom she serves as “cave-keeper” (4.2.298), just as Snow White keeps house for the seven dwarves who take her in. And just as the stepmother’s apple seems to kill Snow White, so the sleeping potion the queen mistakes for poison creates Imogen’s supposed death. As Snow White is resuscitated and marries a prince, so Imogen revives as Fidele, finds her mate, and redeems her lost reputation. In about a fifth of Snow White versions, the heroine, like Imogen, is persecuted after her marriage, sometimes through calumny.5 The “generic persecution pattern of Threat, Hostility, and Escape” in Snow White and other fairy tales about women (Steven Jones 176) provides the skeletal structure of Cymbeline. The similarities between the fairy tale and the play would seem to reinforce the disparity between Imogen and the queen, most often staged as contrasting archetypes.6 But beyond the virtue of the one and the vice of the other, diversity asserts itself. Although the queen has been faulted as a cardboard character, Roger Warren observes her many faces—“fairy tale witch, wicked stepmother, patriotic defier of the Romans, queen mother . . .” (9). Not only does the queen present the most fragmented of archetypes, but the requisite resemblances between the opposed women characters (since the two must be sufficiently alike to allow for comparison), are numerous enough to undermine the good/evil binarism and create a discouraging subtext about “[t]he woman’s part” (2.5.20).

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Bettelheim claims that fairy tales feature dichotomies because “polarization dominates the child’s mind” (9). Writing for adults, Shakespeare creates an illusion of realism sufficient to invite the emotional involvement of an audience less given than children to dichotomizing; Cymbeline’s characters both fulfill and disappoint the expectations of spectators familiar with the folk types. In following a variety of sources, Shakespeare constructs a heroine less fault-free than Snow White, who shares some attributes with the queen. Concomitantly, the complex female dyad becomes more ambiguous. What is unambiguous is that ultimately both women are politically displaced: Imogen is no longer heir apparent and the queen is dead. Their displacement has been explicated allegorically and historiographically. The queen, who derives from Boadecea, voices a patriotism that stands in for the “originary female savagery” of ancient Briton (Mikalachki, “Romance” 119). Imogen (her name a variant of “Innogen”) was wife to Brute, ancestor of the British islanders. The thrust of the play, albeit questionably executed, is to effect a merger of England, too long female-dominated, with the masculine virtus of Roman civilization. Giving ourselves over uncritically to Cymbeline’s surface, the resolution feels satisfactory because we have introjected a tradition that views women skeptically. For both Imogen and her stepmother, public obligations give way to personal desires. Imogen’s love for Posthumus and the queen’s love for her son make both women politically disruptive. As long as Imogen is England’s heir, she is not free to carve for herself. Coppélia Kahn describes her chastity as “a national treasure.” Eventually, like Lucrece’s, it belongs to her husband, but initially, like Lavinia’s in Titus Andronicus, it belongs to her father (Roman 160–61). Resisting a marriage to Cloten is one thing, marrying Posthumus, another. Lineally unsuitable as a future king, he confirms her political fault by his readiness to abandon his wife, to provide her slanderer and would-be seducer with means and opportunity, and to arrange her murder— the last to satisfy his honor at the risk of a war over the succession. While Imogen’s faulty choice pales beside the queen’s intended regicide to assure “the placing of the British crown” (3.5.65) on the head of her son, Imogen, too, forgets Britain. Again like the queen, Imogen deceives, first by concealing her marriage and later by concealing her identity. Such behavior, acceptable within romance, is troublesome in a “historical” frame. The heir apparent is complicit in putting her life at risk. Through concealment and disguise, she fulfills the letter if not the spirit of Posthumus’s charge: that “the woman’s part” includes “lying” and “deceiving” (2.5.22–23).7 The wicked queen, a mistress of deception, rarely speaks truth on stage.

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Dying, she regrets her lack of success as poisoner and politician. She was successful, however, at feigning sexual pleasure—for Cymbeline perhaps the cruelest sham of all: Cor. First, she confess’d she never lov’d you; only Affected greatness got by you, not you; Married your royalty, was wife to your place, Abhorr’d your person. (5.5.37–40)

Constructing the ambitious queen who prefers power to sex, Shakespeare disables the stereotype of “the lusty widow,” lust being posited by moralists as the true reason for widows’ remarriages. The princess, too, is immune to lust. “Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d, / And pray’d me oft forbearance” (2.5.9–10), rants her husband, outraged by her sexual reserve. For Posthumus, such is the transformative power of calumny directed at women that Imogen’s reserve paradoxically becomes proof of her promiscuity. For Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Imogen’s reticence, which would otherwise have been construed as exemplary,8 could be clouded by association with the queen’s coldness and mendacity. Imogen and the queen also share a lack of discernment. Although he cannot seduce her, Iachimo dupes Imogen, who misjudges him and Pisanio. The queen also misjudges, thinking she has deluded Cornelius into supplying her with poison. Shakespeare portrays both women as ineffectual. For all her moral strength, Imogen is politically weak, as defenseless as Snow White. The play opens with the “exiled lover” plot-motif from Greek romance; the stolen marriage discovered and Posthumus banished. Soon Iachimo blemishes Imogen’s reputation, and Posthumus endangers her life. That Imogen escapes the death her husband had commanded and the rape Cloten had intended is the result of luck, materialized thanks to Shakespeare’s manipulation of character (Pisanio’s) and circumstance (the appearance of a long-lost brother spoiling for a fight). Her survival is not the result of empowerment. Rather, Cymbeline encourages audiences to feel how much better for England that it has been spared rule by a very vulnerable, albeit lovely, girl. If Imogen is as powerless as Snow White, the queen is even weaker than Snow White’s stepmother. The latter is responsible for Snow White’s abandonment in the forest, whereas in the play Iachimo’s lies cause Imogen to leave the court for Milford. And whereas Snow White’s stepmother, disguised as an old woman, gives her the poisoned fruit that causes her (temporary) death, the queen fails as a poisoner. All her plots

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come to naught. Shakespeare would have the audience understand her patriotic defiance of Rome as a bad thing, “radical nationalism” of the sort practiced by Boadicea and other strong women in ancient Britain, when female gender was no bar to leadership (Mikalachki 121). A formidable enemy, Snow White’s stepmother is cruelly destroyed, “forced to put on ‘red-hot shoes, and dance until she dropped dead’” (Bettelheim 115). But for Imogen’s stepmother external punishment is superfluous. Bereft of the son who may be her true love-object or her channel for achieving autonomy—“the penis of that phallic woman”9—or both, she goes mad from “an excess of savage emotion” (Mikalachki 139n.15), her death a possible suicide. Cymbeline intimates that the heavens have punished her for persuading him to fight Rome rather than to pay Rome (5.5.459–65), but the audience is free to read her degrading self-revelations and death as befitting her presumptuous ambitions for Cloten. Her passing partakes as much of wish-fulfillment fantasy as the enforced dance, in that enemies who self-destruct rid us of themselves while sparing us responsibility for their deaths. In the end, the female villain’s power has proven to be as slight as her intended female victim’s. Even the widows’ characterizations are threatened with disintegration. Just as Imogen loses her sense of selfhood when she believes Posthumus dead—“I am nothing” (4.2.367)— so too, when she is restored to happiness, another woman, the murderous queen, replaces her as a cipher: “O, she was naught” (5.5.271), says Cymbeline of his second wife. An examination of differing attitudes toward the wicked stepmother proves instructive. For Bettelheim, a Freudian, she embodies mother when she withholds what the child wants; more specifically, she is the narrative projection of a girl’s Oedipal hostility toward her mother (67, 112–14). The wicked stepmother serves a supposedly therapeutic function as one whom, unlike the real mother, it is acceptable to hate. Lutz Röhrich, rethinking the sociopolitical dimension of the stepmother, finds “astonishing relics and role constraints in connection with gender from the patriarchal realm.” For Röhrich, “[n]egative female stereotypes reveal themselves particularly in the female antagonist roles of wicked stepmother or witch” because “[f]airy tales always reflect the society in which they are told” (5).10 So, of course, do plays. Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences expected derogatory portrayals of stepmothers. A sixteenth-century proverb cautions, “Take heed of a stepmother, the very name of her suffices” (Tilley 305, M374). Through the 1850s in England, “the very name of stepmother” also meant mother-in-law. The ambiguity points up the status of the former, who became a mother to her new husband’s children in law but not necessarily at heart (Warner 219). Any woman who stood in for a mother could arouse resentment

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in those under her authority. In fairy tales such women were often older and vicious, given to destroying love affairs (Warner 231–33). Most reprehensible was the stepmother who was also a remarrying widow. Slippage aside, the binarism underlying female characterization in Cymbeline endorses that bias despite the prevalence of remarriage in England. Shakespeare’s widows are frequently paired as faithful/ unfaithful. That Imogen is only a “seeming widow” is to be expected. Given the dictates of the genre, the female protagonist who is married must stay married, even if it entails reinforcing her surface construction as a Griselda figure, the pattern of the all-forgiving battered wife. Recall that when Posthumus, repentant for commanding Imogen’s death, strikes his page Fidele, she (masochistically?) urges him to “throw me again” (5.5.263). Moreover, a patriarchal nation ruled for forty-five years by a woman, a nation where male succession had only recently been reestablished, may take comfort in a princess who wishes herself a “neatherd’s daughter” wed to “[o]ur neighbor shepherd’s son” (1.1.149–50), a princess more than willing to step aside in favor of her newly arrived brothers.11 So, too, the audience can rejoice that Cymbeline’s ambitious queen, “a woman that / Bears all down with her brain” (2.1.53–54) should die in despair. Insofar as the binarism deconstructs and Imogen resembles her stepmother, the category of woman itself is interrogated and found wanting. Insofar as Imogen is contrasted with her stepmother, the latter’s characterization is an abuse of enchantment, an abuse of our powers of imagination and delight in fantasy. It is the outgrowth of an unhappy social negotiation that smears women both as stepmothers and as remarrying widows. We do not know in what circumstances the widowed queen lived when she chose to marry the king. She may have been wealthy and politically secure—or not. We do know that she was left alone with her child (she is attended by no counterparts of Richard III ’s Rivers, Grey, and Dorset) and that in Shakespeare’s England, young widows with only one child constituted a population cohort of the relatively apt to remarry. As queen of Britain she could only better her circumstances and her son’s. The queen found a perfect stepfather in King Cymbeline, who is blind to Cloten’s blatant character faults and all too eager to advance him. That the queen’s ambitions and happiness are concentrated on Cloten is clear. After all, she does not need him to gain power, for she believes that Imogen has been poisoned and that the king has no male heirs. So the queen is apt to remain queen, even if she outlives the king. Her madness and death being brought on by the “strange absence” (5.5.57) of her son signals that all her conniving and all her love was for him. Yet, by seeking to safeguard and promote his interests,

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she is complicit in his death. This Machiavel is no lusty widow but rather a vicious wife and doting, misguided mother. Her story teaches that garnering up one’s heart in one’s children can have inadvertent, catastrophic consequences. Even as the stepmother topoi is a blatantly patriarchal construction, so, too, if somewhat more subtly, is motherhood. In All’s Well That Ends Well Shakespeare presents two versions of the “good” widowed mother. Both are elderly and celibate as ideology dictates. One is rich, the other poor, but their lives are linked, for the Countess of Rossillion is the mother of Bertram, the Widow Capilet of Diana, the girl Bertram attempts to seduce—despite her unpromising name. These widows, like their counterparts in the nonfictive world, are marginalized, but they repay attention with a lesson in the interface between societal constraints and private lives. By doing their duty as loving mothers, subject to their circumstances and to the injunctions and customs surrounding widowhood, inadvertently they do their children far more harm than good. The Countess, Shakespeare’s addition to his source, has long been praised for her graciousness and gravity, for epitomizing the “great lady,” an aristocratic, patriarchal ideal realized by Judi Dench in Gregory Doran’s 2003–04 RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) production, lauded by critics and public alike. Indeed, perhaps the best-known comment on the Countess is Bernard Shaw’s: hers is “the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written” (1: 30). However, when characterological descriptions bowed to psychoanalytic readings, the Countess’s emotional involvement with her son was viewed as minatory. Bertram flees from “the dark house and the detested wife” (2.3.292) in order to escape his mother in Helena. One may therefore read the Countess as unwittingly responsible for precipitating the political and economic problem of disrupted dynastic inheritance. Although academic critics have paid little attention to Widow Capilet, reviewers record that over the years, she has gained in stature. In a 1959 British Tyrone Guthrie production, Alan Brien describes Angela Baddeley’s Widow as “an old bag of tricks from a Giles cartoon swathed in a purple knitted dress, strangled in Woolworth beads, and choking over her nightcap of gin.” Henry Fenwick appraises the 1981 BBC director Elijah Moshinsky’s more complex characterization: “Rosemary Leach’s Widow . . . is a rather gossipy, perhaps slightly flighty woman, frightened by the precariousness of her position, but fundamentally honest, tough and no one’s fool. The character has become a very strong presence.”12 In this century, playing opposite Judi Dench for the RSC, Jane Maud’s Widow Capilet was even stronger, “a less cynical version of Mother Courage . . . ” (Jackson, “2003–2004” 194). Yet her presence in her daughter’s life is

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one of the “problems” of this problem play. The Widow’s program for preserving Diana’s virginity while finding her a substantial dowry transforms an ingenuous girl into a woman leery of relationships with men. Arguably, both widows create problems as they attempt to cope not only with the difficulties of raising children in a society distorted by inequalities in gender privileges, rank, and wealth, but with the responsibility of matchmaking that frequently devolved on married mothers, and virtually always did upon widowed mothers (Ezell 18–35). Central to the play is an exchange of gender roles. Helena reincarnates her father as “Doctor She!” (2.1.79), adopting the prerogatives of agency incumbent upon male identity. At her behest Bertram is “given” in marriage, and thereafter tries unsuccessfully to regain his masculinity through warfare and uncommitted sex. Seeking the glamorous identity of the aristocratic young man, which he envisages as freedom to the point of license, he attempts to seduce Diana—a Renaissance version of the medieval droit de signeur. But the young soldier loses his war against women. Instead of his exploiting Diana, he is “raped” by Helena and rendered powerless by a hierarchical social system that reifies him as the King’s gift, effectively designing him as female or subordinate. This reversal of the patriarchal economy creates a “biter bit” plot intrigue with Bertram as dupe. Other role exchanges, both explicit and implicit, initiate the exchange of gender roles between Bertram and Helena. LaFew comforts the Countess and Bertram by observing, “You shall find of the King a husband, madam; you, sir, a father” (1.1.6–7), a line that suggests “the creation of a symbolic family parented by the king and the countess . . . ” (Wheeler 315). Among the legal and economic implications of this new family is the status of the Countess: although a widow, a “headless” woman, she is directly subject to the King’s authority as she was to her husband’s. Moreover, by providing Helena with a dowry, the King plays the role of father toward her as he does toward Bertram, thus underscoring Helena’s role of incestuous sister/ wife.13 And whether or not Bertram wants another father, as heir to a great estate he is the King’s ward and must report to Paris; titles and property are too important to be left in the hands of women and boys. Either because he could not or would not, the old Count did not name his widow as Bertram’s guardian. Because of Rossillion’s wealth, the Countess loses not only a husband but a son. Role exchange inheres in the play’s very first line, which reveals the peculiar nature of the Countess’s fidelity to her dead husband: “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband” (1.1.1–2). Blurring the separate identities of husband and son, the Countess implies through her obvious reluctance to let Bertram go that she is losing a husband surrogate.

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At the same time, knowing herself old and wishing herself young—“To be young again, if we could . . .” (2.2.38)—she blurs her identity with Helena’s. The Countess sees herself in the receptive child of her own sex, having raised Helena and formed her character far more successfully than Bertram’s. With Helena’s father dead, the Countess’s attachment grows more intense; she steps into the role of Helena’s mother as if retreating into a Lacanian imaginary that erases distinctions between mother and child. Taking Helena’s part against Bertram, she becomes Helena;14 in this sense, she herself can wed Bertram. Her acceptance, then, of a “poor physician’s daughter” (2.3.115) as her daughter-in-law need not indicate that the Countess is essentially a democrat—a perception that fumigates an authoritarian exclusionary class system not acclaimed for welcoming impoverished commoners. Rather, the Countess acts upon a serendipitous exchange, seeing Helena as an aristocrat at heart and a younger version of herself, a “gentlewoman” (1.1.17).15 If the King is the primary matchmaker, the Countess wholeheartedly seconds him. Similarly, LaFew champions Helena not only out of gratitude for his friend’s cure but also out of nostalgia for his own lost youth: “I’d give bay Curtal and his furniture, / My mouth no more were broken than these boys’, / And writ as little beard” (2.3.59–61). He suffers from a metaphorical fistula, as it were—“for doing I am past” (2.3.233)—and would relish Helena’s ministrations. Moreover, it might be that Shakespeare’s King (unlike Boccaccio’s) is willing to allow the marriage of Helena and Bertram for his own advantage. Responding to political conditions in early modern Europe, the King takes this opportunity to bring a recalcitrant member of the nobility to heel, asserting the primacy of the sovereign. After the marriage, Helena’s financial dealings index European social mobility. Helena, whose needs mesh with the Florentines’, negotiates the great economic distance between the Countess and the Widow Capilet—the distance between the landed aristocracy and the urban petty bourgeoisie, albeit once merchant patricians. Although by birth Helena cannot lay claim to social status as high as that of Diana’s mother, as the new Countess, empowered by access to the wealth of Rossillion, Helena exchanges dependence for the role of entrepreneur or merchant, buying Diana’s services in order to give permanence to her marriage and her title.16 The permanence of Helena’s good fortune is a function of the longevity of the Rossillion dynasty. More important to the state than the emotional needs of two females or an adolescent male is the begetting of legitimate issue to govern and to serve as the repository for a vast accumulation of private wealth in which the King himself has an interest. By endangering his lineage, Bertram attacks his own social identity as a

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link in the great chain of dynastic heirs. He must learn to accept the ideological code of values that his mother, an unquestioning subject, lives by, a code that equates loyalty to family line and crown with personal satisfaction. That is why once the old Countess believes Helena dead she must immediately find another means of accomplishing her paramount charge: overseeing the continuance of her line. Out of necessity the Countess is prepared to forgive the son whose name she professed to have washed out of her blood and to accept his immediate remarriage to Lafew’s daughter. If the Countess cannot see herself in fair Maudlin, it is of no matter compared to the great issue of dynasty. That issue is resolved through the bedtrick, which Helena arranges with the play’s other elderly mother, the Widow Capilet, who like most early modern widows has remained single and self-supporting, providing for her family as best she can. The Widow Capilet’s literary origins shed light on her unintentionally destructive behavior toward Diana. Among the tales in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566, 1575) is a generally close translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1370), containing the story of Giletta di Nerbona that served as Shakespeare’s most likely source. In Painter the “poore” widow at whose house Giletta stays refers the young Countess to her impoverished neighbor, “a wise and honest ladye,” and the mother of “a gentlewoman, verye poore and of small substance” who “by reason of her poverty was yet unmaried . . . ” (1: 175). That is to say, Painter’s “poore” widow, who takes in lodgers, is not gentle; his gentlewomen, although poorer than she, eschew business.17 Shakespeare conflates the duo of widows (innkeeper and gentlewoman) in both Boccaccio and Painter, though not to achieve dramatic economy, for he introduces yet more roles—a new speaking character, Mariana, as well as the silent Violenta “with other Citizens” (3.5.s.d.). Shakespeare ambiguates class behaviors. His “old Widow of Florence” (3.5.s.d.), who claims that though her “estate be fall’n” she was “well born” (3.7.4), “[d]erived from the ancient Capilet” (5.3.159),18 is the mother of Diana as well as the self-employed, sole proprietor of the St. Francis, an inn much frequented by pilgrims. Unable to lead the leisurely life of the gentry (Laslett 33–34),19 she clings precariously, despite her prestigious lineage, to what at a later period we might call the lower-middle class. Although Widow Capilet is sympathetic to Helena, her foremost motive is financial. For Diana to enjoy the Capilet’s lost status, she needs a sizable dowry. The bedtrick is morally ambiguous, in part because behind the bed is a cash register. Through a scheme as commercial as it is mendacious, Helena forces Bertram to consummate their marriage: she buys the Widow’s consent to an encounter in which Diana is to buy Bertram’s ring by falsely promising to sleep with him; or conversely,

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Diana must promise to sell herself to Bertram. Actually, the Widow Capilet, suspecting that Helena is no ordinary pilgrim but Bertram’s wife, initiates the “sale” of Diana: “This young maid might do her / A shrewd turn, if she pleas’d” (3.5.67–68). Helena understands, and offers generous and ongoing compensation when they meet in private: Take this purse of gold, And let me buy your friendly help thus far, Which I will over-pay and pay again. . . . (3.7.14–16)20

For the Widow, the need to make ends meet and to help Diana achieve financial security precludes too curious consideration. Though she would prefer not to put her “reputation now / In any staining act” (3.7.6–7), she hazards both her own reputation and her daughter’s; hard times create gamblers. In effect, she sells Diana’s good name, which will inevitably be open to question. Diana plays far too public and salacious a role for a moral young woman. Even the King is not certain that she is chaste, a “fresh uncropped flower” (5.3.327), determining that if indeed she is, she will nevertheless need to pay a princely sum for a husband. However, the Capilets cannot afford to reject Helena’s scheme: “To be the child of a widow in straitened circumstances could be disastrous for a daughter unless, as in Rome, there were charitable dowry funds to help her” (Hufton 253). In Shakespeare, as in Boccaccio, the bedtrick remains problematic, for unconditional integrity—onestà, a word Boccaccio’s widow is inordinately fond of—is a luxury beyond Widow Capilet’s means. When, in addition to the gold she has already given, Helena offers a dowry for Diana of three thousand crowns, the Widow’s response is comically succinct: “I have yielded” (3.7.36). In the Widow’s mouth, the word “business” acquires a modern meaning. Despite her initial protest that she is “[n]othing acquainted with these businesses” (3.7.5), the bedtrick accomplished, she assures Helena, “You never had a servant to whose trust / Your business was more welcome” (4.4.15–16).21 Having lived through the 1590s, Shakespeare’s audience knows that the elderly innkeeper will not find a good match for her daughter and restore the estate-fallen Capilets to their rightful social standing merely by following a strict moral code. Since the business of marriage in which the Widow is now engaged promises to achieve her goals, it takes precedence over onestà and over the St. Francis. Leaving the weary pilgrims to indeterminate accommodations, the Capilets accompany Helena to France. The play’s various journeys may reflect increased European migrations at the turn of the century in pursuit of a sustainable life.

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The Widow’s new endeavor is not without terrors. In All’s Well family values are contested by a macho code dictating that “[a] young man married is a man that’s marr’d” (2.3.298).22 Since the establishment realizes that assuaging desire through wartime liaisons with foreign women endangers noble lineage, the Widow Capilet is vicariously scapegoated through her daughter as she hears the King threaten Diana with prison and death. Like Isabella and Mariana of Measure for Measure’s act 5, as Diana implores the King for justice, she is instated as “woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look” (Mulvey 368). Pronounced “some common customer” (5.3.286), one of “[t]hose girls of Italy” (2.1.19) about whom the King had warned his young lords, she (and empathetically her mother) are spared, thanks to Helena’s folktale intervention. What the audience sees before the climax is the discrediting—the “stain[ing]” to use the Widow’s word—of untitled women by aristocratic men. Bertram’s words may have reminded the audience of a well-known social fact—“that the poverty of the widowed mother living with her daughter could turn the daughter into a whore and the mother into a procuress” (Hufton 254). Even as the play appears to render social divisions less distinct through Helena’s acceptance by the King and Countess, those divisions are recuperated through Diana’s initial humiliation. What is particularly unfortunate about Widow Capilet’s attempts to contract a successful marriage for her daughter within a social system in which beauty increases the vulnerability of the poor is that to protect Diana from seduction she must contribute to her psychological scarring: “My mother told me just how he would woo, / As if she sate in’s heart. She says all men / Have the like oaths” (4.2.69–71). The cautions of an elderly single parent, burdened by economic responsibilities and a menacing double standard of morality, have led Diana to universalize Bertram and to mistrust half the human race—“Marry that will, I live and die a maid” (4.2.74)—a decision that Elizabeth reached from another direction. Nothing in the text suggests that Diana will marry, though ultimately she can buy a very expensive husband. The cost of Helena’s fruitfulness may well be Diana’s children. The conclusion of All’s Well leaves a sour aftertaste; it falls short of a happy ending, not least because of Diana’s shaming and her final silence when the King guardedly offers her a dowry.23 In act 5 the widows appear on stage together, loving mothers who are nevertheless blind to their children’s feelings and blind to the extent to which their own behavior is predetermined by their socioeconomic roles. Both have achieved what they feel is best for their children. The Countess has a daughter-in-law whose pregnancy assures her that Rossillion’s great estates will not pass out of the family’s control. Bertram has done

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his duty. As a husband and father, given time, he will prove worthy of the “honor ’longing to our house, / Bequeathed down from many ancestors . . .” (4.2.42–43). The Countess has suffered, but her son will reap the rewards. Widow Capilet has yet to hear her daughter’s vow. Trekking across Europe was hard for the old woman, but the sacrifice was worthwhile. She has gambled and won, having procured Diana a sizeable dowry and brought her before a king about to present her with the husband of her choice. The Widow Capilet is more than ready to retire. In keeping with Diana’s new social status, she can sell the St. Francis and finally enjoy the economic privileges of the wellborn.24 If Diana chooses wisely, they need never see a lodger again. If. . . . What of the widows’ children? Bertram is trapped by the fulfillment of the impossible conditions he set for Helena, trapped in his mother’s dream. Publicly disgraced by his own lies, Bertram ends his short-lived stint as widower and returns to his earlier status: here stands Bertram, the married man. How he feels about that status is suggested by his response to Helena’s question: “Will you be mine now you are doubly won?” He replies not to Helena but to the King, and he uses the conditional: “If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, / I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly” (5.3.314–16, my emphasis). His squirming suggests that, in spite the evidence of the rings and her belly, he still hopes that she will not be able to prove her assertions. Helena has been instrumental in compelling his marriage to her, has deceived him, and has arranged for his disgrace. Is she likely to seem loveable to a very young man whose psychological tensions over his mother/wife/sister have not yet been resolved and whose affections appear shallow? Only those spectators most single-mindedly committed to happy endings could wax optimistic over this literally “iffy” marriage, and even they, reflecting beyond the purlieus of the theater, may have second thoughts. In contrast to Bertram, Diana is an appealing character, the innocent agent in a plot that—if we pay her the compliment of believing her—has left her fearful of men and marriage.25 Her encounter with her would-be seducer in France shows her an even darker vision of the prerogatives of male desire and disregard than she had seen in Italy. The plot turns on her victimization by her mother’s fears for her, by Helena’s desire for Bertram, and by Bertram’s lust. But more fundamentally, she is victimized by the customs and institutions of her society: the dowry, without which she is valueless merchandise, and the double standard of sexual morality, which allows men to lay siege to the very chastity they deem indispensable in women. Allied to and exacerbating the double standard is the prerogative of aristocratic birth. As Parolles, who seeks to pass for a gentleman, puts it, Bertram “did love her, sir, as a gentleman

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loves a woman” (5.3.245–46)—a “woman” being quite another thing from a “lady.” Would things have gone better for Bertram and Diana had the childfocused widows remarried?—a question not to be asked. Yet All’s Well does allow spectators to reflect on whether celibacy and self-sacrificing motherhood are necessarily the ultimate good that ideologues and their literary advocates would have had widows believe. We may also observe that the Countess, like Paulina, reflects how financial sufficiency enabled celibacy among wealthy English women. Old Widow Capilet also remains celibate, but financial exigencies drive her to put her desirable daughter’s reputation for celibacy at risk, a symbolic displacement. Both widows are situated within a socioeconomic system that warps their children, whether over- or underprivileged. Although unmindful of their children’s feelings and of the problems they themselves create as dutiful amateurs in marriage matters, the widows are not insensible to all of their society’s flaws. They might not consciously desire a different order, but each in some way challenges the code. The old Countess may wish only for a daughter-in-law she can identify with, while assuring that Bertram fulfills his principal obligation, to perpetuate his dynasty; she nevertheless subverts the hegemonic code when she sanctions a Cinderella marriage. And while the Widow Capilet aspires to a wealthy match for Diana, she denounces the double standard aggravated by elitism as she cries “Marry, hang you!” (3.5.91) to Parolles, Bertram’s pander and himself a would-be lover of Diana. Lending her words substance, the elderly widow travels as far as France not only for reward but to assure that Bertram keeps his vows. Women are not isolated in All’s Well. In the 2003–04 RSC production, Russell Jackson noted their affectionate social network at Widow Capilet’s guesthouse in Florence (194). Similarly, a bond comes to exist between the Capilets and Helena, which in turn parallels the female bond between Helena and the old Countess. Like The Winter’s Tale, All’s Well intimates a community of women, its widowed mothers no mere stereotypes but psychologically realistic representations, responding as best they can to the constraints of sexual, social, and economic stratification. Compared to the widows of All’s Well who get what they want or think they do, the widows of King John are a less happy lot. Shakespeare followed his Richard III with King John, once again depicting a trio of widowed mothers at various stages of life, all of whom challenge social boundaries. Perhaps influenced by the anonymous Troublesome Reign of King John, Shakespeare depicts Constance as a widow, although he was aware that she had remarried twice after Geoffrey’s death. Holinshed mentions that fact in the same paragraph in which the Bastard’s killing of

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Limoges appears, an incident Shakespeare used (2: 278). Despite the wide recognition of aristocratic marriages as politically based, a thrice-married widow could not have evoked as much audience sympathy as a widow who had remained single. But John’s three widowed mothers have all left the stage by the end of the third act, and the deaths of Elinor and Constance are announced in the fourth.26 Dead, they cannot draw attention from the main male characters. Of the women, only Blanch, a chaste and obedient maid, approaches conformity with patriarchal precepts, and even she breaks her silence when agonizing over whom to call master. Perhaps that is why after act 3, scene 1, we hear her no more. In contrast to the widows, Blanch is the perfect pawn, possessing neither agency nor power. To the extent that John relies on her, Elinor has both, whereas Constance is a free agent but lacks power, able to rule only through her son Arthur.27 Insofar as she has the youngest and therefore most easily controlled son, she is dangerous. Frustrated in her hopes, she becomes a wailing woman, lamenting the loss of Arthur, never her husband Geoffrey. Elinor and Constance are ambitious actors in international politics to the detriment of their sons. Lady Faulconbridge, no kingmaker, was instead “made” by a king. But at the end of act one, she walks away not a jot the worse for her long-concealed adultery, leaving the rest of the play to her illegitimate child by Cordelion. If the Bastard is represented as England’s salvation, are royal liasons acceptable in the ethical jungle of King John? Whether Lady Faulconbridge has been a doting mother, has harbored ambitions for her sons, has sacrificed for them, remains unknown. Her role is barely more than a walk-on, fourteen lines. But because we see her only vis-à-vis her child and because her past behavior has been highly questionable, she earns a place among the problematic widowed mothers. A precursor of Restoration comedy, Lady Faulconbridge is virtue incarnate, the soul of outraged maternal authority, until she learns that her elder son has renounced his Faulconbridge legacy. Then she confesses.28 From her perspective, she has incurred little blame. That she slipped was not because she made a conscious choice but because she had no choice.29 Cordelion Richard prevailed with her through a suit so “long and vehement,” “so strongly urg’d” (1.1.254, 258), that she could not possibly resist. The Bastard jocularly seconds her explanation: Needs must you lay your heart at his dispose, Subjected tribute to commanding love, Against whose fury and unmatched force The aweless lion could not wage the fight, Nor keep his princely heart from Richard’s hand. (1.1.263–67)

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As for the cover-up, she may believe that she had no alternative. What recourse would her cuckolded husband have had against the King? Could she offer Sir Robert a life of frustration and shame? He seems to have reached the same conclusion, for until he was at the point of death he accepted Philip as his son and heir. Nor could Lady Faulconbridge consider emulating Lucrece, it being incumbent upon her, nay—a sacred trust—to raise the King’s child. Tenderly she speaks of “my dear offense” (1.1.257), that is, not only an offense for which she may pay dearly, but an offense that is dear to her.30 It is doubtful that she deceived her husband; he knew, her son Robert knew, and her son Philip suspected as much.31 His pun on “horn” indicates that the Bastard has questioned his Faulconbridge paternity: “What woman-post is this? Hath she no husband / That will take pains to blow a horn before her?” (1.1.218–19). Physical resemblances served as the paternity tests of an earlier age. Until John supports the Bastard’s claim, subverting her husband’s testamentary rights, Lady Faulconbridge has had to live a lie, while surrounded by those who know her for a liar. Yet by concealment, Lady Faulconbridge served the social order. At least she is not guilty of baldly exposing patrilinearity as a house built on sand. That is the work of the younger Sir Robert, who brings his claim to open court and of the Bastard, whose quips demolish the house: But for the certain knowledge of that truth [his paternity] I put you o’er to heaven and to my mother. Of that I doubt, as all men’s children may. (1.1.61–63)

Phyllis Rackin, in a landmark commentary (albeit recently qualified), observes that “Lady Faulconbridge’s infidelity has created the nightmare situation that haunts the patriarchal imagination, a son not of her husband’s getting destined to inherit her husband’s lands and title” (Stages 188).32 What John’s interpretation of the brothers’ claims amounts to is “admitting that the relationship between father and son is finally no more than a legal fiction . . .” (Rackin, Stages 189). The play elaborates on the old proverb “Ask the mother if the child be like his father” (Tilley 477, M1193), recalling Shakespeare’s doubtless successful (since repeated) earlier cuckoldry jokes in The Taming of the Shrew and Love’s Labor’s Lost, jokes which reappear in Henry IV, Part One, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest.33 Lady Faulconbridge can expect disdain from the relentlessly respectable, but thanks to Philip’s royal connection, she gains prestige among the worldly. The Bastard, unique among Shakespeare’s sons in

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so playfully accepting his mother’s sexuality, promises her protection: “I will show thee to my kin . . .” (1.1.273). Only the relationship between Lady Faulconbridge and her son by Sir Robert remains at risk. It may or may not be healed by his ultimate acquisition of five hundred pounds a year. Knowing that his mother chose to preserve her “honor” by defrauding him, he has some cause for disaffection despite being made whole.34 Lady Faulconbridge’s adultery highlights Dr. Johnson’s dictum on the importance of chastity: “Upon that all the property in the world depends” (qtd. in Thomas, “Double Standard” 209). Why then is the lady let off so lightly? Were Shakespeare’s audiences to believe that a mere woman could not refuse the royal mandate? Were they to assume her subsequent fidelity to her husband and a celibate widowhood, viewing those possibilities as mitigating circumstances? Or does Lady Faulconbridge, concerned only to maintain a difficult status quo, escape censure because she has had no ambitions for her sons and has not intentionally meddled in their emotional lives? Like Lady Faulconbridge, in spite of her past transgressive sexuality, Elinor is not portrayed as a “lusty widow”; rather, both were lusty wives. Some Elizabethan spectators would have been familiar with young Elinor’s reputation for wantonness. When Constance replies to Elinor, who has just called Arthur a bastard—“My bed was ever to thy son as true / As thine was to thy husband” (2.1.124–25)—Shakespeare reminds the more knowing members of his audience of that reputation. “Given the many rumors current in sixteenth-century history and literature about Elinor’s infidelities,” writes Carole Levin, “for Constance’s bed to be as true as Elinor’s was to assume it to be hardly true at all” (224). The checkered past that both Elinor and Lady Faulconbridge share introduces King John’s all-important issues of legitimacy and inheritance, soon to be complicated by the pragmatics of power, the Queen and Duchess being players in the great game. Shakespeare presents these contenders in dramatic vignettes, the first of which introduces the Queen, who had been married to Henry II.35 Despite the frequent critical assertion and theatrical representation of women’s power in King John as “illusory” (Cousin 113), Elinor’s control over John appears near complete, looking forward to the relationship between Volumnia and Coriolanus. One reads of early modern widows who, in accordance with law, lost authority, possessions, and status when their eldest son came of age (Fletcher 403–04). Elinor appears to have lost little if any authority.36 John’s public and private responses to his mother’s death tell all: “What? Mother dead? / How wildly then walks my estate in France!” (4.2.127–28). Left alone, the first words John speaks are “[m]y mother dead!” (4.2.181). Within a

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patriarchal society, that a grown man, a king, should be so dependent on his mother and so much less competent than she is a damaging admission. At the Swan, in Gregory Doran’s 2001 production for the RSC, as John (Guy Henry) spoke, he “collapsed in anguish” (Jackson, “2001–2002” 548). Elinor’s importance to John and to the play inheres in the conjunction of history’s dictates and Shakespeare’s awareness of the theatrical power dramatic economy regarding parental roles could generate. Henry II being dead, Shakespeare introduces a parent/child relationship involving a widowed mother and her son, then draws a double parallel to that relationship. Thus, John appears to be a widower, his son appearing in the play but not his wife. (Historically, Eleanor of Angoulême had left him during one of his French campaigns.) In lieu of a wife, he has his mother. Shakespeare’s method in constructing Elinor is to assign her an attribute instated early and reinstated shortly thereafter. For example, Eleanor demonstrates her importance from the first scene, strategically intervening in the French ambassador’s address: Chat. Thus, after greeting, speaks the King of France In my behavior to the majesty, The borrowed majesty, of England here. El. A strange beginning: “borrowed majesty”! K. John. Silence, good mother, hear the embassy. (1.1.2–6)

Elinor refuses to let the insult go unchallenged; rather than let Chatillion deliver his message uninterrupted, she breaches protocol in a move to disconcert him. By heightening John’s position as secure and defiant, she relays to John her sense of an appropriate reply. Simultaneously, she diminishes Chatillion’s—and France’s—hope of an easy compromise, and makes it clear that she is no mere adjunct. Compared to John, who observes decorum to no advantage, and Constance, a loose cannon, Elinor keeps her own counsel, cautions John shrewdly, and from the onset appears the more experienced and successful politician. She demonstrates a propensity for sardonic interruption, a characteristic she shares with the Bastard, and he with the mystery-play Vice (Braunmuller 125n.97–98), as she braves not only the king’s ambassador but the king himself: “Who is it thou dost call usurper, France?” (2.1.120). Having no husband to subordinate or silence her, the widowed queen can speak freely—and artfully. Nor does she spare her advice. John made his first error before the play opens. Elinor reminds her son that because he disregarded her counsel to negotiate, he must

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now risk all on the fortunes of war. When, in act 2, scene 1, she advises him to avert war by supporting the marriage of Blanche to Louis, John is quick to listen. Although Chatillon describes Elinor as “the motherqueen, / An Ate, stirring him to blood and strife” (2.1.62–63), like Elizabeth, Elinor prefers politics to battle. Most interesting is Elinor’s freedom from the moral constraints of religion. When John defends himself against her recriminations, claiming “[o]ur strong possession and our right for us” (1.1.39), Elinor whispers, Your strong possession much more than your right, Or else it must go wrong with you and me; So much my conscience whispers in your ear, Which none but heaven, and you, and I, shall hear. (1.1.40–43)

She is the first though not the last character to “jest with heaven” (3.1.242).37 Alison Fiske, Doran’s Elinor at Stratford, was “a gravelvoiced warrior queen in black with a permanent grin of cynical skepticism” (Jackson, “2001–2002” 546). Having taken Arthur aside while John shares his vicious purpose with Hubert, she is—ahistorically—an implied accessory to the intended blinding or murder of the boy she addresses as “little kinsman” (3.3.18). Such willingness to cheerfully condone her grandson’s unhappy fate, the price of her power and John’s, reinforces her earlier jest, strongly implying that she has discarded religion for realpolitik. Since her characterization does not lead us to imagine a repentant Elinor receiving timely absolution, she is either a skeptic, or, like Macbeth, willing to jump the life to come. As the Bastard assures his mother, “Some sins do bear their privilege on earth . . .” (1.1.261). The aged widow can have no doubts about the imminence of her own death, having lost four sons and two husbands. Yet she refuses to capitulate to an almost universally accepted faith, and however heinous her actions, her resolution never falters. Although Elinor is a law unto herself, her good is England’s. John is the better of two evils. So the queen goes to war. In keeping with her strong personality and her compelling voice is a martial freshness sooner expected in John than in his aged mother. “I am a soldier, and now bound to France” (1.1.150), says the vigorous widow, despite her preference for outwitting over warring. Shakespeare also gives her a gift for banter— Bast. Madam, I’ll follow you unto the death. El. Nay, I would have you go before me thither (1.1.154–55)—

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—and for telling invective: “Out, insolent! thy bastard shall be king / That thou mayst be a queen and check the world!” (2.1.122–23). The insult is rhetorically resonant, for to deny Arthur’s legitimacy is to deny his claim; to depict “that ambitious Constance” (1.1.32) as the wouldbe ruler of England is to remind supporters and enemies alike that whereas England has an adult male ruler in John, Arthur is a foreign child. Moreover, under Arthur, England’s de facto monarch would be the French king to whom Constance is beholden, a point clarified later with regard to the match between Lewis and Blanch. However, when Elinor employs telling invective to attack Constance as an ambitious mother eager to rule through her son, she reveals her own purposes as well (Calderwood 87). Although Shakespeare gives Arthur a better claim than Holinshed does,38 the play follows Holinshed in its representation of Elinor’s motive: Surelie quéene Elianor the kings mother was sore against hir nephue Arthur, rather mooued thereto by enuie conceived against his mother, than vpon any iust occasion giuen in the behalfe of the child, for that she saw if he were king, how his mother Constance would looke to beare most rule within the realme of England, till hir sonne should come to lawfull age, to gouerne of himselfe. . . . (2: 274).

Elinor’s verbal duel with Constance is a female version of the AngloSaxon “flyting” before battle. It masks a Shakespearean signifying constant, that of rival brothers, with Elinor standing in for John and Constance for the deceased Geoffrey, whose child John supplants. As single women, widowed queens can exercise power on behalf of their sons and win male loyalty. Elinor demonstrates laudable acumen through her dealings with the Bastard. She is the first to recognize him as a Plantagenet and to recruit him for John. It is the Bastard’s loyalty that saves the throne for Henry III. Despite the energy and distinctiveness of her voice, Elinor is old with few lines, Constance young and endowed with a virtuoso role. While rhetorically a match for Elinor, Constance is out of control and politically out of her depth, as we see in her dealings with Austria and England. In a heavy-handed move, she publicly promises Austria an eventual return on his investment in Arthur: O, take his mother’s thanks, a widow’s thanks, Till your strong hand shall help to give him strength To make a more requital to your love! (2.1.32–34)

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Knowing full well that Austria’s involvement is not altruistic, she nevertheless expects him to fight on principle: “Thou cold-blooded slave, / Hast thou not spoke like thunder on my side?” (3.1.123–24). She is similarly unrealistic in her hope for John’s eleventh-hour capitulation (2.1.46–47) and in her belief that the English would be sympathetic to the rule of a “boy” and his regent mother. (Significantly, not she but France speaks for Arthur to the men of Angiers.) At her most recklessly malicious, she undermines Arthur’s claim by answering Elinor’s charge of adultery in kind: My boy a bastard? By my soul I think His father [Geoffrey] never was so true begot [as Arthur]— It cannot be, and if thou wert his mother. (2.1.129–31)

To infer Geoffrey’s bastardy is to vitiate Arthur’s claim.39 Her reason clouded by emotion, Constance cannot thrive among Machiavels. Although Constance lives for Arthur, she knowingly sacrifices his happiness to win him a crown. In an interesting parallel, in act 2 he attempts to silence Constance as John had silenced Elinor when she interrupted Chatillion’s message (1.1.5–6). But whereas Elinor desisted, Constance speaks twenty-five more lines before Angiers’s trumpet ends the women’s confrontation. “Good my mother, peace,” Arthur weeps, “I am not worth this coil that’s made for me” (2.1.163, 165). He is too young to understand that the ultimate beneficiary of “this coil” will be France, that Constance is the pawn of France as Arthur is hers. Elinor uses Arthur’s misery to continue her attack on Constance: “His mother shames him so, poor boy, he weeps” (2.1.166). Constance replies with a metaphor suggesting divine simony to advantage Arthur: his tears will bribe heaven (2.1.168–72). Does she see them as a useful commodity? Ignoring Arthur’s discomfort, she continues to rant, expounding Exodus 20.5 as proof of Elinor’s adultery when conceiving John and even Geoffrey. Elinor’s sin is visited on Arthur, “Being but the second generation / Removed from thy sin-conceiving womb” (2.1.181–82). Her tirades earn her insults: “Bedlam” (2.1.183) and “unadvised scold” (2.1.191)—time (dis)honored insults for women who, if they cannot be silenced can at least be unheeded.40 So disruptive and unpredictable is Constance that Philip and John offer to “create young Arthur Duke of Britain / Earl of Richmond, and [to give him] this rich fair town [Angiers],” hoping to “satisfy her so / That we shall stop her exclamation” (2.1.551–52, 557–58). Had she agreed, Arthur would likely have lived.

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Constance might have survived as well. When she attempts to goad the kings to renewed enmity, she forgets her initial desire for peace: “we shall repent each drop of blood” (2.1.48). Tamsin Grieg, director Josie Rourke’s 2006 RSC’s Constance, exploited the theatrical moment of act 3, scene 1, by deliberately misunderstanding Austria’s “Lady Constance, peace!” (3.1.112): “Grieg’s volume control goes all the way up to eleven, and the effect is electrifying when she screams for “War, war, no peace!” (Christopher Hart). Constance’s desperate need to rely on uncertain allies and her fear for Arthur’s life turn her into the Bedlam and scold she has been called. (For the Elizabethans, insanity had audience appeal.) We are told that Constance dies “in a frenzy” (4.2.122) like Cymbeline’s queen—if not a gendered end, one that seemed particularly suitable for difficult women. Is she aware of her role in Arthur’s death? Does she acknowledge her own ambition? Her willed blindness to the self-seeking motives of her allies? Does she escape guilt through madness? Constance never admits complicity, recalling Shakespeare’s earlier creation, the first tetralogy’s Margaret, who represses the role she played in the death of her son Edward. Perhaps Constance defies judgment, her interests being inseparable from Arthur’s: “Lewis marry Blanch? O boy, then where art thou? / France friend with England, what becomes of me?” (3.1.34–35). Constance has been compared to the Mater Dolorosa of the medieval Corpus Christi plays (Goodland 121), but textually she remains an ambiguous character. In her last scene she anticipates emotionally evocative lines from two of the great tragedies, King Lear and Macbeth.41 Her concluding expression of grief for Arthur is profoundly disturbing, in part because of her psychic fusion with her son, a fusion revealing another face of their indivisible political interests:42 Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then, have I reason to be fond of grief ? ... O Lord, my boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! My widow-comfort, and my sorrows’ cure! (3.4.93–98, 103–05)

These are her last words in the play. She has devoured her food.

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Compared to Arthur, wholly at the mercy of adults, and John, who cannot function without his mother, Coriolanus is a heroic military leader, though strangled in civilian life by Volumnia’s strong leading strings. Having raised her country’s preeminent soldier, contemptuous of danger and eager for her approval, Volumnia has validated herself and gained importance beyond that of other patrician women. It is her misfortune and his that she could not have been a warrior in her own right. Instead, she was destined to breed, for which some two and a half millenniums later she still was honored: “[F]rom mothers like Volumnia came the men who conquered the known world and have left their mark for ever on the nations of Europe. . . .” (Furnivall qtd. in Brockbank 26n.1). Volumnia compensates for having produced only one son by the quality of his service. Her superior status within her privileged class is partially due to her age and widowhood; her authority affects the public as well as the private sphere because she conforms to ancient Roman notions of male old age (Taunton 38). But her status is largely a function of her son’s valor. Coriolanus is her service to Rome, her sacrifice for Rome. Volumnia is a product of the militaristic Spartan-Roman code. Attention to that code is crucial to any psychoanalytic approach, otherwise apt to be politically conservative, insofar as it accepts the social formation as neutral. Shakespeare deliberately departs from his classical source in which the widowed mother does ill by lavishing affection on her child, a fault according to early modern writers as well. Volumnia does not spoil her son with tenderness. At no little cost, he fulfills her notion of the patriarchal fantasy of manhood, and the glory he wins devolves on her (Harding 252–53). Volumnia knows that the best fighter is a hungry fighter. A political focus insists that the individual psyche can never be isolated from ideological forces: what one social formation labels psychic deformity—for example, Volumnia’s pleasure in her son’s fierceness, even in his wounds—may be another’s great desideratum.43 Approvingly, Cominius describes Coriolanus in battle: “His sword, death’s stamp, / Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot / He was a thing of blood . . . ” (2.2.107–09). In Rome such action is eloquence, conferring honor not only on the son but on his mother. Unless these social facts temper readings of Volumnia, she will seem an aberration, a grotesque, rather than a classic depiction of the true believer. As Marx realized, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (21). Viewing Coriolanus politically evokes similar ideological practices of twentiethcentury fascism that illuminate Volumnia’s characterization.44

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In 1922 the king gave the government of Italy to Mussolini. Within a decade no article of ideology took precedence over the celebration of war. Italian women, denied the franchise until the end of World War II, were fired from professional and teaching jobs in order to discourage their independence and encourage procreation. Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti connubi endorsed these goals. For the sake of family values, women should stay at home and work at being wives and mothers. Mussolini wanted each woman to give the state twelve children so that Italy would be on a par with the near 300,000,000 Germans and Slavs. He called increasing the birthrate the test of his regime. The fascist ideology of gender was encapsulated in the slogan “War is to man what motherhood is to woman” (Birnbaum 34).45 The Nazis also sought to increase their population, notably diminished by loss of territory and by deaths in World War I. Because of war casualties, German women outumbered men by almost three million. Nazi propagandists found support in Teutonic myths “where man was the warrior and woman the homemaker” for their claim that “man was essentially productive, and woman fundamentally reproductive” (Stephenson 8). Since the sexes were “gleichwertig aber nicht gleichartig (equivalent but not the same),”46 women required only limited education; they were not to work outside the home—though in practice, women replaced conscripted men—and equal rights were irrelevant. Women were exhorted and induced to procreate and were rewarded when they did. Abortion was prohibited, though Jews were exempted (Stephenson 8). The 1933 Marriage Loan Program (with significant repayment cancellation for each birth) was succeeded in 1935 by programs providing immediate cash payments to large families. Some localities offered additional incentives for childbearing. In Darmstadt large families were given rent rebates; in Camburg near Halle the water rates of large families were halved, and mothers with three or more children could receive free theater tickets—though not for all evenings! Throughout Germany, storekeepers and office workers were enjoined to give preferential treatment to parents of large families and to mothers of small children, the latter being holders of “Honour cards” bearing the legend “The most beautiful name the world over is Mother” (Stephenson 48). Mother’s Day became a major holiday. In 1939 on Mother’s Day, the Honor Cross of the German Mother was presented to three million Aryan mothers (the requisite number of children was a minimum of four). Members of the Hitler Youth were ordered to salute wearers of the Cross. Among the honorees were unwed mothers. Because of the preponderance of women in Germany, the Nazis sought to eliminate the stigma

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of unwed motherhood. Heinrich Himmler’s Lebensborn Association (Fount of Life) sponsored homes for expectant and nursing mothers, about half of them unmarried; there were claims that Himmler encouraged illegitimate pregnancies. In fact, Himmler told his masseur that he had let it be known privately “that women anxious to have children could have ‘racially pure’ men provided as ‘conception assistants.’” (Stephenson 69). “To’t luxury pellmell, for I lack soldiers” (Lr. 4.6.117), raves the maddened King Lear, anticipating Himmler, who looked forward to a compulsory program of such assistance as well as to the fostering of bigamy once the war was won, thus both increasing and improving the master race. Publicly, Himmler was not much less reticent. In 1939 Das Schwarze Korps, the SS weekly, reported his belief that in wartime no soldier could go to the front, possibly to die, in peace of mind if he had not left heirs behind him. Therefore the names “wartime father” and “wartime mother” would signify that in time of national emergency there were those who served their country not only in the field or in the factory, but by their contribution to the future of the nation by begetting and bearing children. Thus, girls who refused to serve their country in this way, even if unmarried, could be compared with army deserters, while those who had illegitimate children could be confident that the State would welcome and support them. (Stephenson 67)

Stalin, too, embarked on a program to raise the birth rate. Like his counterparts on the right, he tempered authoritarian control over women’s bodies with progressive social measures, on the one hand, outlawing abortion and the distribution of contraceptive information while, on the other, offering welfare aid and respect to mothers, wed and unwed (Stephenson 5–6). Despite the material incentives offered by these dictators, despite the barrage of propaganda they authorized, the birthrate did not rise significantly; in fact, it fell in Italy . There is also the example of Romania. At the conclusion of The Handmaid’s Tale, the Keynote Speaker suggests the historical analog for Margaret Atwood’s misogynist dystopia: “Rumania, for instance, had anticipated Gilead in the eighties by banning all forms of birth control, imposing compulsory pregnancy tests on the female population, and linking promotion and wage increases to fertility” (317). Women’s fertility has always been at a premium, especially with regard to the bearing of sons. Yet faithfulness to one’s deceased husband overrides the widow’s fertility. One of thirteen widowed mothers of sons in Shakespeare, Volumnia has remained single; she is a “Vertuous,” not an “Ordinary Widdow.” Perhaps her celibacy as well as her identification

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with Rome earns her the right to survive.47 Despite her abiding fidelity, however, like most of Shakespeare’s widows she never mentions her deceased husband. Instead, she imagines Coriolanus, who clearly outclasses him, as his successor: “If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honor than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love” (1.3.2–5). Historically and in Livy, a probable source for Shakespeare, Coriolanus’s wife was Volumnia, his mother Veturia. These blurrings in part account for the psychoanalytic interest Volumnia has attracted. Shakespeare adds an incestuous substratum to his sources, the psychic struggles between mother and son and between mother and daughter-in-law, the frictions arising from need and resentment, and the hostility engendered by pride joined to powerlessness. While these elaborations invite attention to individual subjectivity, at the heart of Coriolanus and the representation of Volumnia is an ideology not much changed between the classical and modern periods. Its sources complexly layered, Coriolanus draws on a number of militaristic regimes resembling Rome’s twentieth-century fascistic analogs. Volumnia can be understood as the ideological effect of a patriarchal society—early Republican Rome—bent on aggrandizement through legendary victories like Caius Martius’s over the Volscians at Corioli in 493 BCE. The annals of that period are reinscribed in Plutarch’s Lives, the play’s primary source. Plutarch (46–120 CE), a Greek writing almost five hundred years after Coriolanus’s lifetime,48 supplies access to the ideology of the empire. Shakespeare, an upwardly mobile Englishman whose country (though not yet a military superpower) nursed imperial aspirations, reinscribes the story, offering his contemporaries a pertinent theatrical experience that explores the limits of aristocratic power, the class conflicts of his period, and the gendered ideology of patriotic duty: service to the state. The provenance of Shakespeare’s son-breeding, son-sacrificing matron is Sparta (Brockbank 33). In his Moralia Plutarch describes how a Spartan mother of four put down an Ionian lady who prided herself on having woven a beautiful tapestry: “Such as these [children] (quoth she) ought be to the works of a ladie of honour, and herein should a noble woman in deed, make her boast and vaunt herselfe” (qtd. in Brockbank, 49n.1).49 In his “Life of Agesilaus,” Plutarch describes the reactions of mothers of sons who fought a losing battle against the Thebans at Leuctres: “For the mothers of them that kept their sonnes which came from the battell, were sad and sorowfull, and spake not a word. Contrarily, the mothers of them that were slaine, went frendly to visite one an other, to rejoyce together” (4: 192–93).

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The appeal of such a code for Romans is understandable in light of Rome’s history of continuous warfare: “When Octavian closed the gates of the temple of Janus in 29 BC, an act that signified that Rome was completely at peace, only two precedents could be found, the most recent in 241 BC!” (John Evans 2). Under such conditions, materna auctoritas was virtually the only form of power available to women. Plautus (250–184 BCE) tells parents they are “the builders of their children” and should “stop at nothing to make them useful and upright, both as men and citizens . . .” (qtd. in Evans 193; my italics). Citing Livy’s account of Veturia and Coriolanus as an example of proper patrician behavior in the late Republic, Evans states, “The most celebrated widows in Roman history were not those who indulged their sons, but rather those who continued to subject them to the disciplina ac severitas that we customarily associate with the patria potestas” (192). By teaching Spartan-Roman matrons to behave like men (to restrain affect, for example, with their children or when mourning the dead), the patriarchy paradoxically enforced male authority and kept women disciplined and obedient. While male authority over sexual behavior remained unchanged between the lifetimes of Lycurgus and Plutarch, notions regarding the proper disposition of women as sexual property changed radically. Plutarch’s “Life of Lycurgus” expands on the willingness of Spartan men to share their wives in order to avoid jealousy and increase the population (1: 139–40), thus looking forward to Himmler’s plan to provide greater access to women through bigamy. Later Plutarch reverts to the more possessive values of his own time, emphasizing Volumnia’s status as univira. In fact, Plutarch’s Volumnia appears to be a paragon, unless we “read in” her responsibility for Coriolanus’s exclusive interest in war, and hence his “lacke of education,” the source of his incivility (2: 144).50 In Plutarch, the widowed mother raised him, and he valued honor for the joy it brought her: “[A]t her desire [he] tooke a wife also, by whom he had two children, and yet never left his mother’s house therefore” (1: 153). This Volumnia is neither proud nor spiteful, nor is she involved with Coriolanus’ counselship or his banishment troubles. Coriolanus is her child, but she knows a Roman woman’s place. When he threatens Rome in order to reestablish patrician rule, she promises to kill herself so as not to see him captured or to know him as Rome’s attacker; kneeling before him, she defends her country by asking, only then, for his duty and reverence as her child. The behavior of Plutarch’s matriarch enacts the sentiment Plutarch ascribes to Spartan males in his “Life of Lycurgus”: “[T]hey were all of this minde, that they were not borne to serve them selves, but to serve their countrie” (2: 147, 1: 153).

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One last point: Plutarch’s Volumnia shares Lycurgus’s concept of freedom as well as service. [I]n governing of the nobility, [Lycurgus is known for] casting all craftes and base occupations upon bondemen and straungers, and putting into the handes of his cittizens the shield and launce, suffering them to exercise no other arte or science, but the arte and discipline of warres, as the true ministers of Mars: which all their life time never knewe other science, but only learned to obey their captaines, and to commaund their enemies. For to have any occupation, to buye and sell, or to trafficke, free men were expressely forbidden: bicause they should wholy and absolutely be free. (1: 201)

For Spartan “free men,” read Roman patricians, both groups being “free” to die for the state. On the one hand, this ideology is in Volumnia’s own interest since she is a member of the landowning class. On the other, as a woman Volumnia can never earn the ultimate honor awarded only for valor in battle. In the “Life of Coriolanus,” Plutarch writes, “Now in those dayes, valliantnes was honoured in Rome above all other vertues: which they called Virtus, by the name of vertue selfe, as including in that generall name, all other speciall vertues besides” (2: 144). Unable to achieve virtus other than vicariously, Shakespeare’s Volumnia accedes to the ideology of patriarchal militarism. Her sexuality is warped; denied physical satisfaction she takes sadistic pleasure in hearing or speaking of violence as she drives her son toward glory and destruction. Shakespeare’s early modern England, an emergent capitalistic nation, was neither a latter-day Sparta nor an early republican Rome. Yet it was a male-dominated society, engaging in military adventures to secure political and commercial power. A large standing army being too expensive to maintain, a few permanent units almost invariably led by noblemen served as the nucleus for a force expanded by mercenaries. An amalgamation of commercial vessels and warships and of English sailors doubling as soldiers became the nucleus of the Royal Navy. In the 1500s England fought Scotland, France, and Spain, contending for power at home, on the continent, and in the new world (Dupuy and Dupuy 506). Thus, despite the frugality that led Elizabeth to shun major conflicts, despite James’s pacific bent, Shakespeare would not have found the patriarchal, militaristic ideology in Plutarch unduly strange. Volumnia, although a far more highly developed and complex personality than the character Shakespeare’s known or possible sources offered him, is nevertheless made out of ideology. That is perhaps most strongly demonstrated in act 1, scene 3, as she relates to Virgilia her joy in having

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borne a son (rather than a daughter); her eagerness to send him, even as a boy, to war; and her willingness to accept his death in war: Vol. When yet he was but tender-bodied and the only son of my womb . . . I, considering how honor would become such a person, that it was no better than picture-like to hang by th’ wall, if renown made it not stir, was pleas’d to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him, from whence he return’d, his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing he had prov’d himself a man. Vir. But had he died in the business, madam, how then? Vol. Then his good report should have been my son . . . (1.3.5–21)

The passage recalls the words of the English warrior Siward in Macbeth who, on hearing of his son’s death, asks, “Had he his hurts before?” then offers the briskest of eulogies (5.9.12–16). Siward, an old West Pointer fighting a tyrant in his nephew’s right, is another such ideological effect. Talbot of Henry VI, Part One, is more recognizably human when he urges his son to flee and live to fight the French another day (4.6.30–42). Volumnia, in contrast, emphasizes “honor,” “renown,” “fame,” “good report.” She raises no question of defending Rome, of “just” wars against a tyrannical enemy, or even of particular enemies. Rather, enemies must be found or created so that war can be waged and honor conferred.51 In place of a protective parent, the ideology of Rome—patriarchal, classconscious, militaristic, expansionist—fashions a mother in the tradition of Volumnia’s joyous Spartan predecessors whose sons died at Leuctres.52 In Volumnia’s world only a male relative can bestow the highest honors on a woman, so bearing daughters is not much better than barrenness; anything short of producing a male child is a sign of failure. Playing on the desire for recognition, for “centering,” the state turns a woman against children of her own sex, while impelling her to encourage the men she loves—brother, sweetheart, husband, son—to set their lives at risk.53 Lackluster soldiering brings her no reward; but whether her man lives or dies, if he fights heroically she gains glory. If he lives, however, he may gain political power, thus further aggrandizing himself and his family. Volumnia rejoices in the latest of her son’s twenty-seven wounds. They will buy Coriolanus a consulship and gain him yet more honor: “There will be large cicatrices to show the people, when he shall stand for his place” (2.1.147–49). The play’s gender oppositions deconstruct ironically as Coriolanus, fearing the hold Volumnia has over him, turns away from her with a doggerel aphorism: “Not of a woman’s tenderness to be, / Requires nor child nor woman’s face to see” (5.3.129–30).

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In the text Volumnia greets her victory over Coriolanus, a personal triumph as well as a victory for Rome, with silence. He says his life is now endangered, but of course it always was. In militaristic societies for sons to outlive their mothers is not unusual. Unless Volumnia is perceived as herself a victim, her needs produced and frustrated by the state for its own purposes, she will remain a site of misogynous readings that even feminist critics are more likely to affirm than dispel. Among the best feminist psychoanalytic readings of Coriolanus are those of Janet Adelman and Madelon Sprengnether. Sprengnether is interested in the “fantasy that underlies the other tragedies though less clearly articulated in them—a fantasy of maternal omnipotence in which a mother seeks the death of her son.” She elaborates: “Volumnia, who maintains . . . the paradoxical equation of wounds with masculinity, seems to thrust her son towards death” (98).54 No wonder that Volumnia is a character critics love to hate (Sprengnether 109n.13). Surely Volumnia’s lack of parental protectiveness in favor of “manufactured feelings”55 demonstrates the introjection and triumph of a political ideology. Alison Fiske offered a more interesting, sympathetic characterization as a “passionate” Volumnia in David Farr’s 2002 RSC production at the Swan. When Coriolanus (Greg Hicks) was exiled, she uttered a “howl of anguish” and, at the end, as confetti fell on the parade she was leading, she howled again (Jackson, “2002–2003” 184). This interpretation is not endorsed by the text, but neither is it barred in favor of a monolithic Volumnia who has swallowed ideology whole. Not surprisingly, a standard psychoanalytic move is to fuse Volumnia with the state itself (Adelman 328n.65). The patrician Menenius identifies the plebeians bent on killing Coriolanus with Rome, and with Volumnia—devourers all: Now the good gods forbid That our renowned Rome, whose gratitude Towards her deserved children is enroll’d In Jove’s own book, like an unnatural dam Should now eat up her own! (3.1.288–92)

Adelman remarks on this passage, “The cannibalistic mother who denies food and yet feeds on the victories of her sweet son stands at the darkest center of the play, where Coriolanus’s oral vulnerability is fully defined” (158). The limitation of such a commentary, however psychologically acute, is that it figures the individual as autonomous, as if a woman were author of herself, and social existence were not a determinant of

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consciousness. At the conclusion of Coriolanus, the patriarchal, militaristic code still prevails. The patricians are vindicated. Volumnia will soon lose her only son in Corioles, and Virgilia will join the ranks of widowed mothers. Roman matrons anticipate such sacrifices. Young Marcius will tear Rome’s enemies to pieces as he had his “mammock’d” butterfly (1.3.60–65), especially if his grandmother has a hand in raising him. Virgilia will learn to accept the brevity of her son’s life so that he can serve the state. Volumnia, her country’s savior and incarnation, has learned that already. Cymbeline’s queen, the Countess and Widow Capilet, Lady Faulconbridge, Elinor, Constance, and Volumnia—all want to be good mothers. Ideology having taught them celibacy, only one weds again: Cymbeline’s queen. Although she found the king repulsive, she remarried for her son’s sake. Except perhaps for Lady Faulconbridge and Elinor, celibacy intensifies the mothers’ concern for their children. (Shakespeare appears to reward Lady Faulconbridge and Elinor for their emotional absence, Lady Faulconbridge with royal connections and Elinor with a quiet death at a great age.) Ideology takes a toll on the children. Cloten, a vicious pampered fool, is killed. Bertram tries to lead his own life but succeeds only in tarnishing his name; the nasty male ingénue in a dark comedy, his life is spared so that he can spend it with a woman he has devoted himself to eluding. Diana mistrusts all men. Soon after his mother’s death, John, never compelled to grow up, loses his kingdom, his treasure, his mind, and his life. Arthur is miserable as the center of contention but remains a pawn because of his youth. Twice Coriolanus attempts to stand up to Volumnia, and twice he fails. Her ambition transmogrifies Rome’s greatest warrior into a dead traitor. It may be impossible to be a good mother. Even the mother’s affective distance is no guarantee of salubrious results, for “both in its profusions and in its inadequacies, maternity takes up too much of the child’s subjective space” (Schwarz 227). The mother’s feverish search for emotional fulfillment through the child can only make things worse. The incipient madness of Constance, not merely reported like that of Cymbeline’s queen but staged in act 3, could be construed as a punishment visited on mothers whose tunnel vision is so complete that the only lives they perceive as real are their own and those of the children they manipulate and unwittingly destroy. Other lives are destroyed, too. As Constance screams for war, we may remember the victims of the dynastic conflicts she initiates to make her doomed child a king: “Many a widow’s husband grovelling lies, / Coldly embracing the discolored earth . . .” ( Jn. 2.1.305–06). How many die at the hands of Volumnia’s son for the glory of Rome? How many “wives left poor behind them . . . how many “children rawly left”? (H5 4.1.139–41). But that is another chapter.

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Chapter 4

4

War Widows

D

uring Shakespeare’s lifetime, England was generally peaceful, yet memories of the War of the Roses and its prologue in the rebellions against Henry IV remained alive, fanned by Tudor apologists eager to justify absolutist monarchy. Following Holinshed and Hall, two of the most unreliable but accessible sources,1 Shakespeare’s chronicle plays rehearse fifteenth-century history with its motif of war as widowmaker. During the War of the Roses, aristocratic women were likely to be widowed a decade sooner than in peacetime and left with children correspondingly younger. Widowed mothers lived in fear for youngsters at risk because of their dynastic value. When husbands were on the losing side, the widows’ estates might be forfeit, leaving the survivors impoverished (Rosenthal 146, 139–40). In the plays as in reality, ambition often annihilated family loyalty. Joel Rosenthal sums up significant events in the life of Cecilly Neville, the Duchess of York, as Shakespeare depicts her in Richard III: “[O]ne or perhaps two of Cecilly’s sons had killed a third . . . the youngest labeled his oldest brother a bastard and his mother a whore, and then caused two of his nephews to disappear (if not worse) . . . ” (143). Whatever power widows like Cecilly may have possessed as adjuncts to their husbands was lost; they were on their own. The challenge they faced was not without theatrical appeal, as Shakespeare realized when he launched his career by writing the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. In Henry IV, Part Two, his cameo war widow, Kate Percy, has only one speech in the play, but it renders her unforgettable. At the end of his career, writing in collaboration with John Fletcher under a pacifist king, Shakespeare limns his last war widows, the Theban queens of The Two Noble Kinsmen, retelling a tragic moment in the

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history of a revered classical civilization. As in the chronicle plays, we hear nothing of military glory, but much of brutality, wasted potential, and betrayal. Shakespeare depicts the grim realities of war, as they touched the lives of not only men but women as well. For the latter, obedience to strictures on widows’ proper behavior offers no temporal reward. Shakespeare’s celibate and child-centered widows suffer no less than those who ignore male precepts.2 Those who remarry for protection find none. All bets are off. It might seem to follow, then, that a concomitant effect of Shakespeare’s writing history as tragedy is to vitiate female agency (Rackin, “Engendering” 51). Margaret Ranald quotes the Maryland state motto, “Fatti maschii, parole femine, deeds are for men, words for women,” to describe “the world of Shakespeare’s English history plays which denies power to women, however hard they may try to exercise it” (Social 173). Ranald’s claim may be a better description of the fifteenth-century real world than the play world. In Shakespeare, lacking men to speak for them, the widows are of necessity articulate. Their rhetorical strategies, wit, invective, curses, and misleading speech succeed because plays are fabricated out of words, and fictive dramatic entities are theatrically empowered by eloquence. In the play world, words count. Lacking the ability to command or exert authority, the war widows fight calamity with words. Shakespeare allots these characters, whose only action is eloquence, a space from which to defend and attack. Unable to escape suffering, to turn back the clock and restore their husbands and children, the widows can nevertheless persuade. Although empowered only rhetorically, they serve as agents of the plays’ underlying pacific design. Most of the war widows are suppliants. Among them is Lady Grey of Henry VI, Part Three, who, upon her remarriage to Edward IV, becomes Queen Elizabeth and, upon the death of her second husband, becomes dowager queen. Ideologues would have subsumed Lady Grey under the rubric of remarrying and therefore lusty widows. Notwithstanding, she has no lines suggesting carnality. Lust is entirely the king’s, but whatever her motives, for moralists remarriage suffices to confirm the belief in female inconstancy. She proves that women are “changeable” by changing from one husband to another. Elizabeth Grey, née Woodville, is the widow of Sir Richard Grey, who died fighting at the battle of St. Albans.3 A mother upon whom the support of a warwracked family has devolved, she begs Edward IV for the return of the Grey lands. His attempt to seduce her founders, first on her reluctance to recognize his licentious purpose, then on her adamant rejection of

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concubinage, despite her need of a protector. She is partial to the stichomythic squelch: K. Edw. To tell thee plain, I aim to lie with thee. L. Grey. To tell you plain, I had rather lie in prison. (3H6 3.2.69–70)

She follows this overt display of wit with a more subtle demonstration. When Edward denies her the family estate, she answers, “Why then mine honesty shall be my dower . . .” (3.2.72), “dower” suggesting marriage, if only subliminally. In her next retort, she calls his proposition a “merry inclination” (3.2.76), merely a jest, thus enabling him to save face. At bay she becomes more earnest yet retains verbal mastery as evidenced first by her stichomythic use of anaphora, “repetition of the same word at the beginning of successive clauses or verses,” then by her melding of antithesis with homoioteleuton, “like ending”:4 K. Edw. Say that King Edward take thee for his queen? L. Grey. ’Tis better said than done, my gracious lord. ... K. Edw. I speak no more than what my soul intends . . . And that is to enjoy thee for my love. L. Grey. And that is more than I will yield unto. I know I am too mean to be your queen, And yet too good to be your concubine. (3H6 89–90, 94–98)

Her ploy is successful. Manipulated by her rhetoric, Edward offers her the throne. If we can trust anecdotal evidence, this scene valorizing the chastity of Elizabeth does justice to accounts of her historical prototype, the great-grandmother of the Virgin Queen: “Almost two decades later a foreign visitor was told that when Edward put a dagger to her throat, she still would not yield her virtue!” (Kendall 495n.13). Perseverance and wit win Elizabeth a husband by whom she is silenced: “Answer no more, for thou shalt be my wife” (3.2.106). As a widowed mother whose lost lands are in the king’s gift, Elizabeth is more apt to wed for security than passion. When Buckingham narrates his version of this first encounter between Edward and Elizabeth to the Londoners, he describes her as the seducer, but one whose motive was pecuniary, she being “a poor petitioner, / A carecraz’d mother to a many sons . . .” (R3 3.7.183–84). Vulnerable

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because of the remarriage that her enemies choose to regard as only partial, she remains for them Lady Grey. Clarence does not protest when Richard says, ’Tis not the King that sends you to the Tower; My Lady Grey his wife, Clarence, ’tis she That tempers him to this extremity. (R3 l.1.63–65)

When Elizabeth the chaste widow is transformed into a chaste wife, she loses all trace of “her wit incomparable” (3H6 3.2.85) that had so impressed Edward. Having again become a breeder, she fears to feel, let alone speak, “Lest with my sighs or tears I blast or drown / King Edward’s fruit, true heir to th’ English crown” (3H6 4.4.23–24). Reinscribed as a silent, obedient wife, she plays a role that by the final scene is reduced to one empty line: “Thanks noble Clarence, worthy brother, thanks” (3H6 5.7.30). Not until Edward’s death, when she once again becomes a single woman, does Elizabeth regain the verbal facility she had possessed as Grey’s widow. Politically Elizabeth is the wrong match for Edward, bringing neither a great dowry nor an important alliance, creating enmity with France over the match Edward breaks off with the king’s sister, and antagonizing the English nobility because of the wealth and power accorded the Woodvilles. But Elizabeth’s fate collocated with the murdered Anne’s suggests that remarriages are likely to be the wrong match whatever the political situation. Not only the Woodvilles’ social climbing but Elizabeth’s remarriage leads to the queen’s second widowhood and the loss of her young sons and brother. If “posthumous cuckoldry” (Carlton 125) is inherent in remarriage, in Richard III the deceased Sir Richard Grey’s horns are avenged. According to Gloucester, who jests about the king’s mistress, Jane Shore, Elizabeth is “[w]ell strook in years” (R3 1.1.92).5 Married to a sometime husband about to die of “surfeit” (1.3.196), Elizabeth, her brother, and the children of both her marriages are imperiled by her royal position. Her lost identity as rhetorician returns when, possessed by language in a frenzy of mourning for Edward, she announces his death with wild puns: Duch. What means this scene of rude impatience? Q. Eliz. To make an act of tragic violence. (R3 2.2.38–39)

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Grieving for her sons, Job-like she interrogates God: Wilt thou, O God, fly from such gentle lambs, And throw them in the entrails of the wolf? When didst thou sleep when such a deed was done? (4.4.22–24)

We do not hear so powerful a query again until Macduff loses his family: “Did heaven look on, / And would not take their part?” (Mac. 4.3.223–24). That, unlike Macduff, she finds no easy answer bespeaks the intellectual depth Shakespeare grants her. By the end of Richard III, heavy with loss, her daughter’s only defender, Elizabeth regains the protective verbal facility she once possessed as Grey’s widow. Shakespeare even re-endows her with her talent for stichomythia. With words as her only weapon, she learns to play the fox. The prince who hopes to survive, wrote Machiavelli, “must be a fox in order to recognize traps,” a “deceiver” to defeat men of bad faith (99, 100). Some half century after Machiavelli, Thomas Wilson called rhetoric indispensable to those who “either shall beare rule ouer manye, or muste haue to do wyth matters of a Realme” (Wilson 6). It is in character for Elizabeth to defeat Richard through rhetorical superiority. When the Duchess asks, “Why should calamity be full of words?” Elizabeth, huddling conceit upon conceit, describes words as [w]indy attorneys to their client’s woes, Aery succeeders of intestate joys, Poor breathing orators of miseries . . . (4.4.126–28)

For her, however, words in the face of calamity are more than mere “orators of misery”; they are weapons that lead Richard to fatally drop his guard. In act 4, scene 4, the second courtship scene, Richard asks Elizabeth for her daughter’s hand. Shakespeare creates dramatic irony as Elizabeth deceives Richard but not alert auditors. Whereas Richard holds his own against Anne and eventually gains rhetorical mastery over her, in this second debate he is confounded, his misogynous view of women leading him to underestimate his opponent, although in their final interview Elizabeth’s rhetorical virtuosity includes some of her favorite figures—stichomythia, antithesis, and homoioteleuton: K. Rich. Her life [the princess’s] is safest only in her birth. Q. Eliz. And only in that safety died her brothers. K. Rich. Lo at their birth good stars were opposite.

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S h a k e s p e a r e’s W i d o w s Q. Eliz. No, to their lives ill friends were contrary. K. Rich. All unavoided is the doom of destiny. Q. Eliz. True——when avoided grace makes destiny. . . . (4.4.214–19)

The preponderance of stichomythic responses are Elizabeth’s, hers the sarcasm and greater dramatic force.6 When Richard tries the ploy on Elizabeth that had succeeded against Anne when he wooed her, he fails: K. Rich. Say that I did all this [murdered her family] for love of her. Q. Eliz. Nay then indeed she cannot choose but hate thee, Having bought love with such a bloody spoil. (4.4.288–90)

Even Richard’s most nightmarish rhetorical foray leaves Elizabeth unshaken: Q. Eliz. Yet thou didst kill my children. K. Rich. But in your daughter’s womb I bury them; Where in that nest of spicery they will breed Selves of themselves, to your recomforture. (4.4.422–25)7

Despite his pleasure in perversity, for the greater part of this interview Richard seems tongue-tied, slow, and pedestrian compared to Elizabeth. At one point, baffled by her amphibology (she plays on from as apart from rather than with), he admits his obfuscation: K. Rich. Then know that from my soul I love thy daughter. Q. Eliz. My daughter’s mother thinks it with her soul. K. Rich. What do you think? Q. Eliz. That thou dost love my daughter from thy soul; So from thy soul’s love didst thou love her brothers, And from my heart’s love I do thank thee for it. (4.4.256–61)

Elizabeth’s wordplay gains importance at the end of the debate, invalidating her promise to report on her daughter’s attitude. After asking herself three questions, none of which she answers (“Shall I be tempted . . . ?” “Shall I forget myself . . . ?” “Shall I go win my daughter to thy will?” [4.4.418, 420, 426]), she replies to Richard, this time employing a figure called adianoeta, literally, “unintelligible” because

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the words conceal a hidden meaning. The signifier slides under the signified due to the same ambiguous from used earlier in the sense of disavowal: “I go. Write to me very shortly, / And you shall understand [apart] from me her mind” (4.4.429). That is, what you understand will be your own imagining. Ironically, Richard himself had used the word in this sense of apart or removed from to malign Elizabeth’s kin, who “[d]eserve not worse than wretched Clarence did, / And yet go current from suspicion!” (2.1.94–95).8 If the director and actress favor an astute Elizabeth, spectators will understand that meaning is emptied out of her promise to report on her daughter’s attitude (Susan Brown 112–13). In any case, Lord Stanley soon assures them that she has not given way: “Withal say that the Queen hath heartily consented / He [Richmond] should espouse Elizabeth her daughter” (4.5.7–8). The verbal facility that Shakespeare grants Elizabeth had first preserved her chastity against Edward’s assault. As Edward’s wife she demonstrates a keen awareness of likely duplicity. In Henry VI, Part Three, fearing Warwick she flees to sanctuary “to prevent the tyrant’s violence / (For trust not him that hath once broken faith) . . .” (4.4.29–30). Her keen survival instincts protect her daughter from a perverse, exploitative marriage to Richard, whose hallmark is broken faith. Deluded by Elizabeth, Richard’s complacency about wedding the princess translates into insufficient mistrust of Stanley, Richmond’s stepfather, who vindicates the wisdom of Elizabeth’s political move: the promised alliance with Richmond. Stanley has even greater reason to betray Richard, knowing marriage to the princess will strengthen Richmond’s claim. For all that, the power of a voice is an imperfect shield. Whether construed as a clever trickster or as an easily persuaded, inconstant woman, Elizabeth may lose ethical stature. Just as the historical Elizabeth was sent away from court when Henry VII asserted himself,9 so she disappears from the play before the final act and, for some spectators, with a sullied reputation. Nonetheless, if action is eloquence, in drama eloquence is action. While appeasing those playgoers who, like Richard, insist on thinking ill of the remarried Widow Grey and would confine her within a belittling stereotype and the circumscribed role of victim, Shakespeare nevertheless endows Elizabeth with sufficient wit and verbal facility to assure others of her foxy triumph. Not merely her chastity but a rhetorical and political victory over Richard is appropriate for the woman whose namesake and descendant was Shakespeare’s queen. Aware that having his play tapped for court performance would be both profitable and prestigious, aware that Roger Ascham’s protégé, a rhetorician and fox par excellence, might well become his most illustrious spectator, why would Shakespeare think to represent Elizabeth

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as a “[r]elenting fool, and shallow, changing woman”? (R3 4.4.431). Rather, in Richard III, a key factor validating “the innate credibility of a woman as ruler” is Elizabeth Woodville’s shrewd deployment of her rhetorical skills (Grubb 171). In the first Henriad, Anne’s situation when faced with Richard’s proposal parallels Elizabeth’s as Lady Grey. Although we do not know if Anne’s marriage to Edward was consummated,10 Shakespeare presents Anne, like Elizabeth, as a war widow in need of a male protector. But whereas in Henry VI, Part Three, Shakespeare makes a Yorkist of historically Lancastrian Elizabeth Woodville Grey, Anne, the widow of Edward Prince of Wales, son of Henry VI and Margaret, remains on the Lancastrian losing side. Fighting for his right to inherit the crown, her husband is killed at Tewkesbury by Edward IV, Clarence, and their brother Richard of Gloucester, the last soon to become Anne’s second husband and England’s king. As a war widow, Anne’s position is even more difficult than Elizabeth’s. Anne has no claim on the Yorkist government. Her father, Warwick the Kingmaker, killed fighting Edward IV, betrayed York by trading Anne to Lancaster in his pique over Edward’s marriage (3H6 3.3.242–43). Elizabethans would understand that Anne is impoverished and imperiled. Fatherless under a hostile monarchy, she has no one to champion her cause, to help her reclaim her dowry or receive her widow’s jointure. Further, whereas Lady Grey is politically unimportant, Anne, as Warwick’s heir and Prince Edward’s widow, is too central to the dynastic struggle to hope for a quiet life. Like Elizabeth she possesses rhetorical gifts, but Shakespeare depicts her situation as so desperate and her character as so uncertain that only after her death do words avail her. Anne is a foil against whom Richard can display his virtuosity. Critics have discounted her predicament as a remnant of the enemy in the Yorkist court, since the play seems to discount it as well. Most frequently, she is played as an avatar of female frailty, a traitor to her husband when she accepts Richard’s ring. However, Lady Anne’s public mourning for her late father-in-law and husband, Prince Edward, denotes resolution. As best she can, she conforms to proper decorum for a widowed princess. Christine de Pisan enjoins, “As long as she lives she will greatly cherish the parents of her husband. She will bear great honour to them, and for doing this, she will be greatly praised and esteemed” (82). Anne behaves loyally and generously, though no one praises her for it.11 That only she dares mourn Henry and Edward underlines her courage and her dangerous isolation as a Lancastrian. The plight Anne finds herself in at least partly explains her surrender to Richard. Ian McKellen, who played Richard, reads her motive as

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exclusively financial, likening her remarriage to Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding Aristotle Onassis (Rothwell 221). Notwithstanding, Anne’s surrender turns her story into a Widow of Ephesus variant. In the unhistorical wooing scene, a coup de théâtre, Richard uses Anne’s attractiveness against her. Shakespeare characterizes her as extraordinarily susceptible to a calculated fusion of Petrarchan compliment and incitement to guilt over her fatal beauty. Believing him may allow her to feel consequential. Yet throughout the nineteenth century and later she has been read as inconstant, feckless, foolish, the Cressida of the chronicle plays. Marguerite Waller observes that Richard need only respond to the double nature of her bereavement—her loss of her male points of reference and her role as a subjectivity that thinks of itself as authoritative. He can make her “amends” as he puts it at the end of scene 1, by repeatedly inviting her to see herself reflected in him, as immensely powerful. (172)12

Actually, Shakespeare draws Anne as the least powerful of all the history plays’ war widows. What store of strength remains to her is exhausted in invective during her first encounter with Richard; she hates but not well, in time electing her own feminine nature as target for reproof: “Within so small a time, my woman’s heart / Grew grossly captive to his honey words . . .” (4.2.78–79). These sentiments jolt us out of a psychological reading of Anne, since they do not belong to a woman but rather to the early modern discourse of misogyny. Anne is troped as the weaker vessel. The sadistic manipulation of a beautiful young widow is not without erotic overtones.13 Her misogynistic ventriloquism works structurally, too: just as her curse on Richard’s future wife produces irony through fulfillment, so her self-recrimination functions as an anagnorisis. As Margaret’s erstwhile daughter-in-law, Anne represents a younger generation of victimized women. Her rhetorical facility, the biting stichomythia of act 1, scene 2, cannot safeguard her. Once remarried, she pays with her life for betraying her “other angel husband” (4.1.68). Only when she invades Richard’s dream, speaking as the ghost of the wife Richard murdered, are her words effectual: “Despair and die!” (5.3.163). One ghost among many, Anne participates in the supernatural tactic that unsettles and disheartens Richard before his last battle. But neither this effort nor self-recrimination enables her to transcend the derogatory topoi out of which she is constructed, a characterization that offers only the barest nod to the political vulnerability constraining her to remarry.

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For artificiality of construction even Anne cannot compete with Margaret of Anjou, Shakespeare’s earliest extended and compelling female role. Prior to her unhistorical return in Richard III as a bitter widowed seer, she appears in the three parts of Henry VI as a pastiche of misogynous commonplaces and canards laced with xenophobia and English jingoism.14 Some of these elements are present in Joan of Arc, Margaret’s spiritual predecessor in Henry VI, Part One; some in Titus Andronicus’s Tamora; and some bolster the trope of the wicked stepmother in Cymbeline’s queen. Lady Macbeth is a daughter of Margaret; so is Cleopatra, who both lives up to and transcends simulacra initially exploited in the early history plays. Because Shakespeare appropriates so great a host of literary canards for his portrayal of Margaret—foreigner, white devil, shrew, virago, vengeful fury—the sheer quantity awakens skepticism and deprives them of force. For Penny Downie, who played her throughout Adrian Noble’s 1988–89 RSC tetralogy The Plantagenets, Margaret is a “woman who tells us so much about things universal through her particular journey. Surely, it is one of the greatest parts ever written” (114, 139). As Henry VI, Part Three, draws to a close, Margaret, maddened with grief and rage over Prince Edward’s murder, commences the prophetic cursing that will structure Richard III. Although the real Margaret died in her early fifties, Shakespeare’s queen, joyless but for her prescient knowledge of her enemies’ grim fates, is depicted in Richard III as a crone: a “[f]oul wrinkled witch” (1.3.163) and “hateful with’red hag” (1.3.214). Crones are frequently demonized “as witches and harbingers of death, nearly always repulsive and threatening” (Roberts, “The Crone” 116). The description fits this last incarnation of Margaret to a tee. Still at war with York and still vigorous, Margaret is last troped as an Até whose every curse is fulfilled. As in the Henry VI plays, in Richard III she remains an assemblage of formulaic slurs but these are more limited, advancing age having taken her husband, her status, her beauty, and her Lancastrian army. By Richard III, states actress Fiona Bell, she has become “an outcast, hated, feared, and pitied by the new generation at court” (172). With an armory only of words, Margaret nevertheless competes successfully against Richard for audience interest. A formidable foe, she commands an ease of aggressive speech that distinguishes her from her fellow victims. Margaret speaks like the queen regnant that Henry and Shakespeare allow her be.15 Her first entrance is an iconic positioning: “Enter old Queen Margaret [behind]” (R3 1.3.109 s.d.), her last speech a cruel gloating: “These English woes shall make me smile in France” (4.4.115). In lieu of soliloquies, Shakespeare grants Margaret a single

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address to the audience, but it opens with the play’s arguably most striking image: “So now prosperity begins to mellow / And drop into the rotten mouth of death” (R3 4.4.1–2). Otherwise, the closest Margaret comes to interior speech is through the words of the other widows, who construct her subjectivity by voicing communal emotions, and through her own corrosive asides: Q. Eliz. Small joy have I in being England’s queen. Q. Mar. [Aside.] And less’ned be that small, God I beseech him. (1.3.109–10)

Yet limited as are her modes of displaying interiority, Margaret never lacks a distinctive voice. Margaret revels in deploying an uncanny feature of her voice, the gift of prophecy. Foretelling the ills that are her heart’s desire, she becomes a likely candidate for the perilous designation of witch.16 Whereas Anne unwittingly curses herself, Margaret deliberately curses the entire family of Edward IV, both by blood and marriage; for good measure she curses Hastings and Buckingham, too. Her curses are specific and predictive, and most are fulfilled: the Prince of Wales “[d]ie[s] in his youth by . . . untimely violence!” (1.3.200); Richard is tormented by “the worm of conscience” (1.3.221), bereft of sleep, suspecting friends like Hastings and Buckingham, trusting traitors like Stanley, and afflicted in dreams by his victims; by the fourth act Elizabeth does indeed wish for Margaret to help her curse Richard (1.3.244–45), and Buckingham has good reason to “say poor Margaret was a prophetess!” (1.3.300). Like Elizabeth, Margaret validates the power of words. Although she knows that ambitious nobles have produced the grief she relishes, those subject to her curses do not. Moreover, many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries would likely have acknowledged her power: [A]lthough post-Reformation Protestants usually denied both the propriety and efficacy of ritual cursing, they frequently believed that, if the injury which provoked the curse were heinous enough, the Almighty would lend it his endorsement. . . . it was a moral necessity that the poor and the injured should be believed to have this power of retaliation when all else had failed. (Thomas, Religion 605)

The peculiar notion that one strengthened the weak by injuring them must have had little restraining force in real life. In the history plays, however, male responsibility for the Wars of the Roses is concealed under a cloud of female magic (Williamson 42, 56).17 The only magic

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Shakespeare allows the “wailing women” is the power of rhetoric. While it cannot avert their victimization, it can avenge them. At some point, each of the wailing women including Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York, wishes for Richard’s death. Portrayed ambiguously, the Duchess is a wise interrogator of war, if not a good-enough mother. An elderly celibate living in remembrance of her husband and through her sons—“I have bewept a worthy husband’s death / And liv’d with looking on his images” (2.2.49–50)—she enters the play torn between maternal duty to Richard and moral judgment. Mourning the death of her son Clarence, she is aware of Richard’s complicity: “from my dugs he drew not this deceit” (2.2.30). Initially, she grants Richard her blessing (at Edward’s death, he becomes her sole surviving son). But after her grandsons are killed at their uncle’s command, the Duchess, refusing to be silenced by trumpets and drums, curses Richard. Her startling regret that she had not strangled him in her womb has been interpreted as an allusion to abortion, a representation of men’s fear of maternal power: Duch. And in the breath of bitter words let’s smother My damned son that thy two sweet sons smother’d. ... K. Rich. Who intercepts me in my expedition? Duch. O, she that might have intercepted thee, By strangling thee in her accursed womb, From all the slaughters, wretch, that thou hast done! (4.4.133–34, 136–39)18

Analyzing her speech that recapitulates Richard’s growing up—“Thou cam’st on earth to make the earth my hell” (4.4.167ff.)—C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler uncover “the mother’s active hatred and rejection of such a child under the surface of her efforts to cope with him” (105), an interpretation the text does not privilege but that is too rich to exclude. On such a view, Richard might have psychological as well as political reasons when in act 3 he maligns his mother (3.5.86–92). The Duchess’s implied witchlike power to kill (a metaphor for the mother’s power to injure her child through emotional withdrawal?) is reinforced by the “most grievous” curse she calls down upon Richard, “Which in the day of battle tire thee more / Than all the complete armor that thou wear’st!” (4.4.188–90). Although Richard, intent on securing Elizabeth’s intercession with the niece he plans to wed, seemingly makes light of the power of a mother’s curse, it works to defeat him, especially if we understand the curse as emboldening

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Elizabeth to match wits against Richard and withhold her daughter. We can also infer the power of the curse from Richard’s admission on the eve of Bosworth: “I shall despair; there is no creature loves me” (5.3.200)—not even my mother. Whereas psychoanalytic criticism may credit the Duchess with “help[ing] turn a physical monster into a moral one” (Kahn, Estate 64), a Renaissance spectator, following the Neoplatonist notion that a deformed exterior betrays a deformed soul, would likely have thought the Duchess responded involuntarily to the sociopath she sensed him to be. In any case, Shakespeare casts her as a fearsome crone. Since crones like Margaret and the Duchess supposedly presaged death, by calling Margaret a witch Richard transfers his feelings about his mother on to her. Not surprisingly, mourning scenes, both solitary and shared, are prominent in Richard III. The formal, incantatory verse of Anne’s mourning in act 1, scene 1, and of the Duchess’s and Elizabeth’s antiphonal mourning in act 2, scene 2, which stands in for memorial services, attempts to redeem the slaughtered from oblivion and lend dignity to their deaths. As the widows (and Clarence’s children) contend over who has suffered more, they simultaneously create important human rites. Film productions of Richard III are apt to cut the wailing women (Olivier) or at least Margaret (Loncrain/McKellen),19 but even a critic who turns a tin ear to “these caterwaulings” grants the importance of the lamentation scenes: “They provide a formal setting for Richard’s crimes and epitomize the Elizabethan reading of history” (Reese 209). The mixed feelings with which Englishmen regarded mourning widows may have its source in “the expressive potential of a woman’s passion” (Goodland 125). Public mourning is a potent weapon. The culminating mourning scene, act 4, scene 4, involves the three surviving widows: three mothers and a grandmother who have lost sons and grandsons. The “wailing women” scene fulfills Bedford’s prophesy of England’s decay: “And none but women left to wail the dead” (1H6 1.1.51). In lamentation at its most ritualistic, Yorkists Elizabeth and her mother-in-law, the Duchess, support each other (Richard has already done away with Anne, their sympathizer), while Margaret remains “other”; bonding can surmount factional but not national lines. Despite the Duchess’s plea—“O Harry’s wife, triumph not in my woes! / God witness with me, I have wept for thine” (4.4.59–60)—Margaret exults, retelling the names of her dead enemies like an unholy liturgy, a grotesque cathartic rite through which she grieves her own losses.20 Significantly, this rhetorical scene with its final tallying of the dead marks the beginning of Richard’s peripety.

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Shakespeare reserves to the oldest widow, the mother who wishes her last surviving son dead, the bitterest condemnation of power-hunger. Having known “[e]ighty odd years of sorrow . . . / And each hour’s joy wrack’d with a week of teen” (4.1.95–96), she questions war itself. The other widows accept conflict as inevitable. Their protestations are local; not a war-prone honor-culture or war itself but rather those who fought against their husbands and children earn their anger. In contrast, the old Duchess of York gains authority by transcending partisanship; she speaks for all as she seeks words to depict the madness of a lifetime of war. Her indictment of internecine war provides the tetralogy with a moral center: Accursed and unquiet wrangling days, How many of you have mine eyes beheld! My husband lost his life to get the crown, And often up and down my sons were toss’d For me to joy and weep their gain and loss; And being seated, and domestic broils Clean overblown, themselves, the conquerors, Make war upon themselves, brother to brother, Blood to blood, self against self. O, preposterous And frantic outrage, end thy damned spleen, Or let me die, to look on death no more! (R3 2.4.55–65)

As the Duchess laments York’s power lust and the “[a]ccursed and unquiet wrangling days” her husband and her sons have occasioned, she unmasks ambition for hegemony as pernicious and insists upon the war widows’ darkest knowledge: a surfeit of horror destroys the will to live. It is appropriate that a widow, alluded to but unrepresented, plays a determining role in Richard’s downfall: Edmund Tudor’s widow, Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the future Henry VII of England. Henry’s twice-widowed mother, Lancastrian Countess Richmond, had wed Lord Stanley, perhaps the most successful remarriage in the Shakespeare canon. She never appears on stage, although Elizabeth speaks of the Countess’s “proud arrogance” (R3 1.3.24), glossed by Blakemore Evans as “ambition for her son” (757n.24). Countess Richmond influences Stanley to turn his coat at the Battle of Bosworth Field, risking the life of his (but not her) son George, Richard’s hostage. Stanley’s action at his wife’s behest assures Richard’s loss to Richmond and the triumphal Lancastrian ending of the first tetralogy, thus proving that, artfully used, women’s words can

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sometimes move armies and bring down a dynasty. Is the Countess missing from Richard III because she subverts widow ideology? Not a celibate widow, she is multiply remarried, the child she has devoted herself to becomes a successful regicide, and she lives long in great honor. The war widows of Richard III are impressive mourners, but they meet their match in Lady Percy of Henry IV, Part Two, who appears in only one scene and is almost entirely a Shakespearean invention.21 Her quiet intensity of grief is the equal of Constance’s lyric lament for Arthur (Jn. 3.4.93–98), affirming Shakespeare’s developing mastery of psychological, poetic, and dramatic representation. Kate’s tender remembrances of Hotspur recall the skepticism with which she had greeted his eagerness for battle, reflecting her “distinctly anti-heroic views of war” (Rosenthal 147). Christine de Pisan, who wrote her Treasure of the City of Ladies two years after Hotspur’s death at Shrewsbury, advises women of rank and wealth to take upon themselves the blessed role of peacemaker. One section of The Treasure is titled “How the good and wise princess will make every effort to restore peace between the prince and the barons if there is any discord.” Whether her husband is the aggressor or defender, “[t]he good lady will consider this thing carefully, bearing in mind the great evils and infinite cruelties, destruction, massacres and detriment to the country that result from war,” and labor to prevent it. Whereas men are “hot-headed” and vengeful, women, being “timid” (here a virtue!) and “of a sweeter disposition” than men, are best suited to pacifying antagonists (50, 51). Hotspur’s high-handedness and secrecy deprive Kate of an opportunity to avert the rebellion; she has no voice in determining her fate but can only take her place among the wives who became war widows, wives “called upon—like it or not—to bear the consequences of their men’s foolishness” (Rosenthal 147). In David Giles’s 1979 BBC Henry IV, “the surprising violence” of Michelle Dotrice’s refusal when Hotspur asks her to sing conveys “all the pent-up force of her anxiety at his departure” (Wharton 71). Brief as her role in Part Two is, in performance it resists marginalization: The most memorable scene in either part of the play in this [Giles’s] production was Lady Percy’s lament for the death of her husband [2.3.9–45]. . . . She [Dotrice] walked a little aside from her parents-in-law for the speech, and the camera tightened in to close-up on her. It held that shot throughout the whole of her lament, except for one brief reaction-shot of a horror-struck Northumberland. She was barely able to begin speaking, managing to do so only by talking with deliberate slowness, one phrase at a time, pulling down her head, fighting off the tears. As the speech proceeded, her agonised face and voice went to the very edge of control. (Wharton 71)

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The young widow’s envisioning how, but for Northumberland’s betrayal, she might have been “hanging on Hotspur’s neck” (2H4 2.3.44) brings to mind the playful Kate of Part One, threatening to break her Harry’s little finger. In Part Two, bereft of “him, O wondrous him! / O miracle of men” (2.3.32–33), she defies the rules of deference. She confronts the patriarch with the full implications of his having instigated war and then abandoned the son who fought it for him, forcing Northumberland to face his complicity in Hotspur’s death: The time was, father, that you broke your word When you were more endear’d to it than now, When your own Percy, when my heart’s dear Harry, Threw many a northward look to see his father Bring up his powers; but he did long in vain. (2.3.10–14)

Exposing Northumberland’s ethical posture as no less “worm-eaten” than his hold (Ind. 35), Kate contrasts with Morton, the retainer who brings news of the rebels’ defeat and Hotspur’s death. Morton’s survival hinges on Northumberland’s military commitment. So although Morton beholds his lord shedding his mountebank’s crutch and nightcap, hears him launch into unconvincing magniloquent nihilistic imperatives (1.1.153–54), Morton nevertheless accords the Earl honor: “Sweet Earl, divorce not wisdom from your honor” (1.1.162). Rather than echoing Lady Northumberland, who has obediently resigned herself to the patriarchal will, Kate impugns her father-in-law’s wisdom and his honor. Shakespeare summons up the earlier scene by juxtaposing the words “wisdom” and “honor” in Lady Northumberland’s acquiescence and her husband’s reply: Lady N. Do what you will, your wisdom be your guide. North. Alas, sweet wife, my honor is at pawn, And but my going, nothing can redeem it. (2.3.6–8)

Kate offers to dissuade him by insisting that his honor is lost irredeemably: There were two honors lost, yours and your son’s: For yours, the God of heaven brighten it! For his, it stuck upon him as the sun In the grey vault of heaven. . . . (2.3.16–19)

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Kate places blame, aware that Northumberland was not “grievous sick” (1H4 4.1.16) but “crafty sick” (2H4 Ind. 37). Why does he license her accusations? Is it because she as good as promises to epitomize Webster’s “Vertuous Widdow,” who “thinkes she hath traveld all the world in one man” (Paylor 70), and is married to perpetual bereavement? Does the power of the celibate ideal cast in eloquent language induce Northumberland to accept her recriminations and do her bidding, persuade him to believe that his troops will not be missed? However sympathetic a character Kate is, representing her as a moral voice is awkward. Although her grief and his wrongdoing entitle her to upbraid Northumberland, she invokes the betrayed son in order to exhort the father to continued deceit: Never, O never, do his ghost the wrong To hold your honor more precise and nice With others than with him! (2.3.39–41)

Why urge another betrayal? The real-life Lady Percy would know that if Northumberland dies in a losing battle against the king, his widow’s chances of keeping the family estates would be in even greater jeopardy than they already are. Had the real Northumberland lived and kept out of trouble, he could have retained some part of his possessions. Historically, Parliament pardoned him after Shrewsbury, for he had not taken part in the battle. Though the greater part of his estate was forfeited, he was allowed to keep two of his holdings. Shakespeare has the widowed daughter-in-law and soon-to-be-widowed wife of Northumberland urge him to flee “for all our loves” (2.3.55). Wisely seeking the preservation of the Percys, Kate pleads with Northumberland to desert his fellow rebels. In the topsy-turvy moral world of Henry IV, betrayal is the only constant. Even duplicity’s victims counsel deception. Kate’s power is as ambiguous as her counsel. She succeeds because, for all her acerbity, she begs Northumberland to act in accordance with his nature. She says what he wants to hear, for he believes that the odds are still against the rebels: “Never so few, and never yet more need” (1.1.215). For 1590s theater buffs who knew Northumberland as a byword for betrayal (having gone back on his word to Richard and Henry IV as well as to his brother Worcester, son Hotspur, allies Glendower, Mortimer, and others), the play is a cautionary tale. The outcome of Kate’s plea could not have been in doubt. Euphemistically renaming his desertions “ancient oversights” (2.3.47), Northumberland finds that for all his will to fight, “many thousand reasons” (2.3.66) hold

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him back, and he deserts to Scotland. His track record suggests that he would have found his way north without Kate’s entreaties. The flight to Scotland was not Northumberland’s last betrayal. Historically, he once more promised loyalty to Henry IV, in return for which the king returned his lands and remitted his fine. Breaking that promise, too, Northumberland secured 2,600 French troops to fight on the rebels’ behalf, led his bedraggled, inexperienced tenants into combat, and was soon defeated (Alexander Rose 360–65). In Henry IV, Part Two, Shakespeare mentions his death in battle (4.4.97–99). Northumberland’s overthrow paradoxically occasions a kind of victory over Henry IV, for the news brings the king to his deathbed. But despite a history of familial ruptures, Bolingbroke leaves an heir. Shakespeare points a moral in his retelling of the Percys’ dynastic story. He deprives Northumberland of the grandson whose loyal military service to Henry IV was to regain much of the Percys’ land, though not their power. Instead, Shakespeare’s Northumberland, having destroyed his heir, leaves only the widows, and their story ends with his.22 Kate has her way, but she and Lady Northumberland disappear from the Henriad with the fall of their house. Like so many real-life counterparts, the Percy war widows become forgotten casualties. Their celibacy is ultimately irrelevant. Yet the eloquence of Shakespeare’s Kate is effectual beyond the unmasking of her father-in-law. By urging his continuing betrayal of his allies, she unmasks herself as morally damaged by the insurrection, damage that testifies to the insidious corrupting influence of war. For the audience, hers is the power of example. The Two Noble Kinsmen’s trio of suppliant widows also gets its way before fading into obscurity. Kinsmen overtly interrogates masculinist assumptions about love and war, the dual subject reified in Venus and Mars, who control the resolution. The play, aptly termed a “postromance” (Frey, “O Sacred” 307), opens with the queens’ visitation. Their errand embodies a central paradox of the dual subject: out of love for their slain husbands who fought against Creon and by his edict lie unburied, the queens have come to Athens to demand that Theseus war against Thebes. In the Shakespeare-Fletcher collaboration, as in Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale,” the queens forward the action by prompting the conveyance of Creon’s nephews Palomon and Arcite to Athens, where they fall in love with Emily, the young sister of Theseus’s bride Hippolyta. Theseus accedes to the widows’ pleas, fights Creon, and captures the hitherto devoted cousins. Eventually, Palomon and Arcite fight for Emily, in Kinsman an unreconstructed Amazon, who believes “[t]hat the true love ‘tween maid and maid may be / More than in sex

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dividual” (1.3.81–82). Only in scenes generally attributed to Fletcher does Emily show any desire for her male suitors.23 The widows bury their husbands and exit just as the love-rivalry main plot is about to get under way. Yet, brief as their roles are, the widows exceed their plot function. They establish the persistent ambiance of malaise by their iteration, both vocally and visually, of a major motif: love’s inseparability from contestation.24 The widows index one of Kinsmen’s chief subjects—the indissolubility of love and war. By persuading Theseus to make war on Thebes, they demonstrate their grief. Although Venus and Mars are antithetical, the human characters lump rather than split; nothing is more customary than to fight and die for love. As Romeo intuited, describing the private war in Verona: “Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love” (Rom. 1.1.175). From beginning to end, Kinsmen stages a man’s world in love and war. The Prologue asserts the commodification of women, comparing new plays to healthy virgins, both costly and sought after (1–3). Within the first hundred lines of act 1, Theseus is commended for overcoming and subordinating the Amazon queen, whom he “shrunk” (1.1.84) in order “to uphold [patriarchal] creation in that honor / First nature styl’d it in” (1.1.83). In acts 1 and 3 various suppliants explicitly associate love with war, the widowed queens initiating Kinsmen’s numerous kneeling tableaux.25 Significantly, women kneel to Theseus, but men (with the exception of Pirithous, Theseus’s friend, possibly his lover), kneel only to the gods. The plethora of kneeling women recalls Isabella and Mariana kneeling before the Duke in the last scene of Measure for Measure, women as object of the gaze, subservient before a male authority figure. In the first tableau, the queens remind Hippolyta of Theseus’s victory over her: “subduing / Thy force and thy affection” (1.1.84–85). Later Pirithous pleads for the lives of Palomon and Arcite, reminding Theseus of “all you love most—wars, and this sweet lady” (3.6.203). The juxtaposition of Theseus’s predilections is particularly disturbing, since the probable consequences of war for ladies are vividly emblematized in the distress of the royal widows. Heartache is not surprising in a society in which, by ducal fiat, men win wives through mortal combat, and women become wives, whatever their inclinations. The play’s surface endorses military values. When Palomon begs that he be allowed to fight Arcite before wooing his own death, Pirithous exclaims, “O heaven, / What more than man is this!” (3.6.156–57); and when both Palomon and Arcite reject life in exile because of their overwhelming need to destroy each other, Pirithous is again awed: “These are men!” (3.6.265). “Appropriately,” notes Donald K. Hedrick, “the Epilogue to the whole play is addressed only to the ‘gentlemen’” (62).

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The widows owe their roles—their place in a militaristic society congenial to “gentlemen”—to the war that created their widowhood and to the new war for which they provide justification. Shakespeare departs from Chaucer by giving the queens considerably more prominence. In the “Knight’s Tale,” Theseus marries Hippolyta abroad; the newly made widows interrupt a homecoming. In Shakespeare, death accosts Theseus on his wedding day, a far more dramatic alignment, both as contrast and as harbinger of the inevitable end of all unions. In Chaucer only the oldest queen speaks—a succinct forty lines—whereas Shakespeare spins out the queens’ request into some two hundred (Smith 1690) and differentiates the queens in accordance with whom each supplicates. The third queen, who addresses Emily, foreshadows the girl’s confusion and desperation when forced to choose a mate.26 Chaucer’s paired, undifferentiated queens, kneeling each behind the other, become Shakespeare’s royal trinity, an allegorical signifier of the cost of war. The widows’ entrance in act 1 prepares for the cheerless wedding awaiting Palomon and Emily in an offstage act 6. These faithful remembrancers make disconcerting wedding guests. They recall the surviving widows of Richard III, dressed “in black, with veils stain’d ” (1.1.25 s.d.). Genuflecting before the strong man of the classical world, they pictorialize losing in a play in which autonomy, friendship, sanity, and life are lost: “for our crowned heads we have no roof, / Save this which is the lion’s, and the bear’s, / And vault to every thing!” (1.1.51–54). These erstwhile queens are, ironically, the poorest of Shakespeare’s war widows, being homeless. Shakespeare anticipates them in Henry V when, on the eve of Agincourt, Michael Williams, an English soldier, questioning the justice of his king’s cause, imagines how “all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’—some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them . . .” (4.1.135–40).27 Because Shakespeare depicts no working-class war widows, were it not for the Theban queens, we might understand those “wives left poor behind them” merely as rhetorical citations—a phrase within a phrase, a thought in the mind of Williams’ fantasized fighting man whose widow counts even less than he in the power struggles between nations.28 Kinsman’s homeless queens kneeling in the public thoroughfare make casualty substantial. Contradicting their subservient, static pose of entreaty, the genuflecting widows speak as Furies. Their stark and violent images capture the nightmare visions of the battlefield. The First Queen describes their husbands’ corpses that “endured / The beaks of ravens, talents of the kites, / And pecks of crows in the foul fields of Thebes” because of

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Creon’s decree that “infects the winds / With stench of our slain lords” (1.1.40–42, 46–47). The Second Queen bids Hippolyta kneel to Theseus “no longer time / Than a dove’s motion when the head’s pluck’d off.” She should put herself in their place: “Tell him, if he i’ th’ blood-siz’d field lay swoll’n, / Showing the sun his teeth, grinning at the moon, / What you would do” (1.1.96–101). The Third Queen, whose claim to distraction aggravates her unsettling quality, and who foreshadows the Jailer’s love-maddened daughter, urges Theseus to fall on Creon’s soldiers while they are “full / Of bread and sloth” (1.1.158–59)—a Hamletian figure (Ham. 3.3.80) that here might describe the aftermath of a wedding feast. Theseus defers his marriage to honor the entreaties of loving women whom war has made voracious for the slaughter of their enemies. The wheel comes full circle as the widows of Shakespeare’s last play echo Queen Margaret’s vengefulness in the first Henriad, while anticipating Kinsmen’s own cousins bent on destroying each other for love. The queens also anticipate key rhetorical figures of the love triangle: paradox and irony. An ominous paradox inheres in the widows’ insistence that the cure for war’s devastation is further devastation: “Bid him [Theseus] that we, whom flaming war doth scorch, / Under the shadow of his sword may cool us” (1.1.91–92). The juxtaposition of love and war that they initiate produces related paradoxes. These turn on perversion of sympathy: Theseus’s “lamenting” for the dead kings “wakes [his] vengeance and revenge for ’em” (1.1.57–58); and the First Queen hopes that “[s]ome god hath put his mercy in your [Theseus’s] manhood” (1.1.72), on the assumption that a merciful Theseus will forego loving for killing. The play builds on such paradoxes and related ironies. Pitying the widows Theseus goes to war; pitying the wounded cousins, Theseus restores them to health, only to have his erstwhile enemies become each other’s enemies. Arcite’s death, so desired by Palomon, leaves him bereft. Palomon’s final speech is charged with multiple meanings: “That we should things desire which do cost us / The loss of our desire! that nought could buy / Dear love but loss of dear love!” (5.4.110–12). The actor playing Palomon may suggest the regretful substitution of one love for another, or the disillusioned loss of both, or an effort to convince himself of the wisdom of his worldwithout-end bargain. Any of these interpretations reinforces the mood of melancholic emptiness, the placated widows’ legacy to Kinsmen. The adulation the widows offer Theseus as their wedding gift further contributes to the play’s disquieting tone. They kneel before him when they beg him to champion their cause and again prostrate themselves as they gratefully prepare to conduct the fallen kings’

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funerals. Countering the remembrance of Hippolyta’s (Elizabeth I’s?) rule, ideologically problematic by virtue of gender, is the sanctioned epideictic mode: your fame Knolls in the ear o’ th’ world; what you do quickly Is not done rashly; your first thought is more Than others’ labored meditance; your premeditating More than their actions. (1.1.133–37)

Since so fine a mind merits extraordinary pleasures, this widow images the ecstasy of making love to Hippolyta as an experience the gods would envy. The arms of Theseus’s bride are “[a]ble to lock Jove from a synod” (1.1.176); Theseus’s imminent bliss would “make Mars spurn his drum” (1.1.182). Suitably, the Second Queen promises Theseus “a deity / Equal with Mars” (1.1.227–28). The Third Queen commends Theseus for his temporary abstinence—an exercise in asceticism that proves his superiority to the gods: “Thou being but mortal makest affections bend / To godlike honors; they themselves, some say, / Groan under such a mast’ry” (1.1.228–31). The queens’ fulsome flattery is particularly incongruous in that as widows their very presence proclaims mortality and the vanity of worldly glory. Striking as the queens’ rhetoric is, with its brilliant imagery of death and sonorous praise, it is not the sole cause of the war between Athens and Thebes. Theseus grants the widows’ petition because they ask him to do something he is used to and excels at—fighting, not marrying.29 The audience expects Theseus to fight and defeat Creon because the widows’ request is politically correct: dishonoring dead warrior kings is an insult to patriarchy. Yet, as it turns out, Theseus’s further intentions are ultimately thwarted, his power over the lives of the young Theban princes illusory. The “heavenly charmers” (5.3.131) play their own game, and the baffled ruler encounters the limits of human authority: The gods my justice Take from my hand, and they themselves become The executioners. ... O you heavenly charmers, What things you make of us! (5.4.120–22, 131–32).

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Playgoers familiar with the legend of Theseus will remember how briefly his marriage lasts and, as if to chasten the aging warrior, how cruel a fate the heavenly charmers have prepared for him and his only son, Hippolytus. Even after the queens’ husbands are buried, war is never far from the surface of Kinsman. Rather than undoing the effects of war by defeating Creon, Theseus seems bent on replicating them in peacetime. He refuses his kneeling petitioners who wish to save both Palomon and Arcite, preferring to orchestrate a private quarrel into a miniwar, enlarging a one-on-one gladiatorial combat by ordering that each principal furnish himself with a retinue of four knights and by imposing a death penalty on the entire losing side. Chaucer’s Theseus tries to prevent deaths in the tournament for Emily’s hand by severely limiting the use of lethal weapons. Moreover, neither Palomon nor Arcite need die, so long as one is defeated: The voys of peple touchede the hevene, So loude cride they with murie stevene [merry voices], “God save swich a lord, that is so good He wilneth no destruccion of blood! (59, ll. 2561–64)

No such cheer greets Shakespeare’s Theseus. In Kinsmen not only does war certify the value of a love object—unburied royal husbands, a “dreaded Amazonian” (1.1.78)—but the death of the rival assures exclusive ownership. Yet when Arcite, favored by Mars, wins a pointless victory (he is thrown by his horse and dies), he undermines those premises and demonstrates the foolishness of entrusting one’s happiness to the god of war. The war widows know better. For them life is drained of hope. Elegiacally, Theseus remembers the beauty of King Capaneus’s bride—“You were that time fair” (1.1.62). Now, as a homeless widow, her beauty obliterated by misery, she is no more than the occasion of a melancholy lesson. “O grief and time, / Fearful consumers, you will all devour!” (1.1.69–70), says Theseus, contemplating the only queen to be designated by a name—that of her infamous husband, not her own.30 The widowed survivors in Kinsmen, permanently marked by loss, have won their husbands’ bones and the promise of a solitary, celibate future. The code that informs their world is not hospitable to widow remarriage. Lest the audience construe the benison of the Third Queen as implying hope that the “blubber’d queens” (1.1.180) will love once more—“Joy seize on you again! Peace sleep with him!” (1.5.12)—her next speech

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is a memento mori: “This world’s a city full of straying streets, / And death’s the market-place, where each one meets” (1.5.15–16). Dismally, the widows, an icon of war, exit to the dubious comfort of their own “one sure end” (1.5.14). The audience of “gentlemen” to whose taste the playwrights cater is left to assume that the queens live and die, like the nobly sired modest bride of the prologue, “constant to eternity” (14). Though their enemy Creon is defeated, their mood, so influential to the mood of the play, resonates in Emily’s final despairing question: “Is this winning?” (5.3.138). In the unpleasant world of The Two Noble Kinsmen, where love is forced and war revered, losing is losing, but winning is losing, too. How can a war widow make her presence felt? Playing by the rules, the literary strictures for widows, is of no avail. Celibate widows suffer as much as those who remarry, and, in fact, the war widows have very little choice as to celibacy or remarriage. The realities of history and the widow’s age assert themselves. Political and economic circumstances thrust remarriage on those young enough to be sought after, those who cannot afford to remain single. Elizabeth and Anne remarry; historically, so did Hotspur’s Kate. Margaret, whom Shakespeare portrays as a crone, and the Duchess of York, an octogenarian, are unlikely candidates for the altar. As for the three queens, their function in Kinsmen as well as in legend overrides remarriage. Another precept for widows, singleminded devotion to children, only makes the children’s loss harder to bear. Moreover, Shakespeare erases the children of the real Queen Anne and Kate (Elizabeth Percy) as not germane to the action. Piety, much recommended to widows by moralists, disappears; such piety as there is manifests itself chiefly in the widows’ rancorous curses. “O God! Which this blood mad’st, revenge his [Henry VI’s] death!” (R3 1.2.62), says Anne. None of the war widows is less bitter. Does the role of Shakespearean war widow allow for resistance to the topos of helplessness? On what can Shakespeare’s war widows rely? High rank, a mother’s status, a strong will may not empower. Anne, widow of the Lancastrian heir presumptive, cannot stop Richard from contravening her order for Henry VI’s funeral procession to continue, she cannot resist Richard’s advances, and she cannot save her own life. Neither Queen Elizabeth, King Edward’s widow and mother of his sons, nor the widowed Duchess of York, mother of Richard III and grandmother of the young princes, can save the Woodvilles or Edward’s sons. Elizabeth’s linguistic cleverness shields her daughter from Richard, but the male line is decimated. Margaret’s experience teaches that in the histories loss of a husband, even within a loveless marriage, is his widow’s loss; without Henry, Margaret’s power dissolves. Despite his

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weakness, he is her imprimatur. She led his army and negotiated with France as his wife. Hotspur’s widow Kate can only plead with her fatherin-law Northumberland as the Theban queens can only plead with Theseus. Such success as the widows of Henry IV, Part Two, and Kinsmen meet with owes as much to Northumberland’s and Theseus’s desires as to the widows’ eloquence. Rhetoric has its limits. Ultimately, however, the war widows might do worse than to place their faith in words. In Henry VI, Part Three, the widowed Lady Grey wittily defends herself against Edward’s importunities and becomes a queen; in Richard III as Edward’s widow she defeats widower Richard, who would have wed her daughter. After Anne dies, her words destroy Richard’s sleep and confidence. The Duchess of York unleashes a fearsome, disheartening mother’s curse on Richard. Margaret rails and laments, but, most terrifying, curses prophetically and successfully against her enemies. In Henry IV, Part Two, Lady Percy’s words lead her father-in-law to expose his hypocrisy and weaken his faction. In Kinsmen, it is a given that the queens will win burial for their husbands. Nevertheless, their remarkably graphic language is the immediate reason for Theseus’s postponing his wedding in order to wage war. Elizabeth, Kate, and the Theban queens are heeded because their words appealed to their auditors’ covert desires; notwithstanding, their words turn the trick. In the theater, eloquence has its rewards. Although the war widows’ restricted protest is no more than an allowed and contained subversion, it is haunting. Richard III ’s wailing women, mourning both individually and collectively (if not in solidarity), are a striking chorus. The Duchess of York damns war and the hierarchal ambitions upon which it feeds. In Henry IV, Part Two, devastated Kate Percy defies the authority of the pater familias, scorching her father-in-law with contempt for his cowardice and craftiness. In Kinsmen, widows figure an effective same-sex community. Male control per se is undermined by war, for conformity to male-authorized notions of proper female behavior does not avert disaster. In the wake of loss, the war widows deploy rhetoric, officially off-limits to women, exposing war’s malign consequences, no small part being the widows’ own coarsened sensibilities. Richard III ’s wailing women use words not just as a medium for defense or mourning but for venting unbearable anger. Transformed by victimization, the widows become savagely vengeful. Not only does gentle Anne cry for vengeance, but so, too, does Elizabeth, regretting that her nails are not “anchor’d in [Richard’s] eyes” (4.4.232). So, too, does Margaret. An innocent in Henry VI, Part One, before being sold into marriage, she ends her life wishing harm to all (1.3), so “hungry for revenge” (4.4.61) that even her enemies’

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misery cannot satisfy her. So, too, does Richard’s mother, who “in the breath of bitter words” wishes to “smother / [her] damned son” (4.4.133–34). The integrity of Lady Percy in Henry IV is clouded as she encourages Northumberland to further disloyalty. Kinsmen’s queens urge their husbands’ burial no matter how many men must die to achieve their purpose. So chilling is the amorality and violence of these desires, so appalling the victims’ metamorphosis, that among the strongest instances for rejecting conflict are these fiercest of warmongers: Shakespeare’s war widows.

Chapter 5

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Work ing Widows

W

ith the exception of Cymbeline’s Fidele, Imogen’s pseudonym as “cave-keeper” (4.2.298) in Wales, Shakespeare’s royal and gentle widows are spared manual labor. The labor of others provides such comforts as they enjoy, thus distinguishing their social status (Laslett 33–34).1 Only four Shakespearean characters are clearly identified as working widows: Juliet’s Nurse, Mistress Quickly of Henry IV, Part Two, Diana Capilet’s mother in All’s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure’s Mistress Overdone—a servant, tavern keeper, innkeeper, and madam. The Nurse is employed within a great household; the others are selfemployed in small businesses of varying degrees of legality, entailing the manual as well as managerial labor of the entrepreneur.2 Widow Capilet and, despite their shady business ventures, perhaps Quickly and Overdone exemplify the modern petty bourgeoisie. Categorizing them under an Elizabethan rubric uncovers contradictions between the ideologies of class and gender, for, were these characters English, bourgeois or not, as women they would still be politically powerless. As a servant, even were she male, the Nurse would belong to William Harrison’s “fourth and last sort of people . . . [who] have neither voice nor authority in the commonwealth, but are to be ruled and not to rule other” (118),3 servants being “profitable to none” (119). The greater part of her wages is likely her room and board. She defines the level to which the other widows could easily sink. If the friar implicates her in Juliet’s stolen marriage, like the other Shakespearean working widows, she will be tainted with criminality. Had the entrepreneurial widows been Englishmen, Sir Thomas Smith might have placed them among the “marchantes or retailers which have no free lande” to provide them with a significant annual income. Like

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Harrison, Smith calls these “the fourth sort of men which doe not rule” (76–77). As part of “the swarming world of petty tradesmen” (Wrightson, “Estates” 22), all answer to the description of “the middling sort,” if we include the service and flesh trades.4 Their businesses generate little if any upward mobility. Like many sixteenth-century alehouses, Quickly’s tavern is under surveillance; Widow Capilet ostensibly plays madam to her daughter, whom only a plot twist saves from prison; and Mistress Overdone is jailed, her brothel-turned-bathhouse closed down. That the Widow Capilet gains a significant sum of money is due not to her competence or the strict legality of her business but rather to her good fortune in meeting Helena. The widows need luck, since, among Shakespeare’s female characters, intelligence is often the preserve of “the better sort” (Wrightson, “Estates” 21), and even Widow Capilet, who is “well born” (3.7.4) but down on her luck, cannot completely escape foolishness. The Nurse and Quickly are stereotypes—garrulous, simple women. The former marvels over the friar’s admonitions: “O, what learning is!” (3.3.160); the latter’s multiple malapropisms mark her as ignorant. Mistress Overdone is drawn so slightly that she remains a more open character, but her record number of husbands (or Significant Others passing for husbands) turns her into a joke. The effect of the widows’ foolishness is containment, Renaissance ideology having little tolerance for successful “unheaded” women whose very existence was subversive, since in law “[a]ll of them [women] are understood either married or to bee married . . .” (Lawes 6). If women can succeed on their own, a major justification for patriarchalism is disabled. But if despite their owners’ foolishness, tavern and brothel endure (Overdone has been in business for eleven years), patriarchal ideology can ascribe such success to sheer happenstance and a strong market. If we accept Weber’s view—that class has to do with ownership and the kind of work one does, status with socially valued appearances (Neale 70–71)—then the challenge the widows pose to hegemonic assumptions about class is contained by their belief that they possess a higher status than in fact they do. This misapprehension induces them to accept the social order as essentially unalterable. Although the Nurse derives from the commedia dell’arte ruffiana and bawd (and ultimately from the Nurse of Roman comedy),5 she knows what belongs to a lady; upon meeting Mercutio and Benvolio, she orders imperiously, “My fan, Peter” (2.4.106). Mistress Quickly parodies the hopes of the middling sort, thinking she can trade a steady supply of food, drink, and money for Falstaff’s love and title: “And didst thou not, when she [the butcher’s wife] was gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity

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with such poor people, saying that ere long they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings?” (2H4 2.1.98–102).6 Her marriage to the improvident Pistol suggests that for a working widow with a business, to find a husband was one thing, to find a husband above her station, another. Widow Capilet, who derives her sense of status from her family origins, seems unaware that proprietorship of the Saint Francis is even more damning than being a poor physician, and that despite a considerable dowry, Diana is bound to be as much a social leper among the fastidious as Helena is. Even Mistress Overdone believes that her income ensures her certain entitlements: that the law will not close her down, or that she can continue in business as the proprietor of a “hot-house” (2.1.66), or that—like Pompey expecting Lucio to bail him—through her connections she can at least avoid imprisonment. Both remarrying widows are mistaken. Mistress Quickly, soon to be a bride again, and Mistress Overdone, who makes a habit of being one, meet the unhappy fate that widows who remarry can expect in Shakespeare. Even before tying the knot, Nell finds herself in trouble with the law. Blame for urban iniquity is largely displaced onto the prostitute Doll, but Nell is censured, too: “‘Neighbor Quickly,’ says he [Master Tisick the deputy], ‘you are in an ill name’” (2H4 2.4.84–90). Master Tisick draws no connection between disorderly taverns and the wellsupported inference that for most of the sixteenth- and seventeenthcenturies tax collectors spared a third of adult males in England due to their poverty (Slack 103). It is easier to blame Nell for disorder. Upon adding the insult of remarriage to the injury of female entrepreneurship, her days are numbered. Mistress Overdone, whose remarriages are legion, stands in for all of Vienna’s offenders. Perhaps her chief offense is her unwitting indictment of Duke Vincentio. She laments the decline of her trade, due not only to a scarcity of whores—“she hath eaten up all her beef” (3.2.56)—but to a scarcity of men: “Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk” (1.2.82–84).7 Under the Duke’s rule, Vienna has known neither peace nor prosperity. For so ill-managed a state, someone must pay. At the end of Measure, Angelo, Claudio, Lucio, even the murderer Barnadine are pardoned,8 but Mistress Overdone remains in prison. Prostitution may not be contained, but an unruly widow is. Nevertheless, ideologically nonexistent single businesswomen did exist, including the entrepreneurs of illegal businesses, sometimes allowed to function, sometimes not. The entrepreneurs’ representation in Shakespeare indexes the discontinuities and instabilities of the social code, for although gender and rank assign them to subordination, the

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widows undermine ideology. They may simply ignore the touchstones of the virtuous widow—celibacy, kinder, und kirche; they may participate in, even preside over, communities that interrogate hegemony by offering a more egalitarian alternative; or, individually, they may behave in ways that collapse distinctions between the higher and lower orders. In so doing, the widows reveal the fissures in a society based on a hierarchy of class, social status, and gender. The stage gives lip service and primacy to celibacy. Shakespearean drama compensates even the most disruptive widows who reject remarriage. Juliet’s nurse, Angelica, may not fare well in the future, but she survives a tragedy that takes six lives. In some ways, she is typical of the poor, who were expected to perform work from their earliest years and were often sent into service as young as ten. A century later, John Locke was to recommend that poor children start work at age three (Laslett 15, 3). Angelica’s low birth dictates her role as a dependent worker. Like the Clown for whom Romeo reads Capulet’s guest list, Angelica is probably unskilled and illiterate. Although most English servants were underpaid, Lord Capulet is a generous master, for the Nurse appears to be well remunerated. To act with the hauteur of a lady, as she does when she brings Juliet’s message to Romeo, she likely has at least one suitable outfit. The world of the Nurse’s English counterparts was rarely larger than the house, the church, and the market. Under the Statute of Artificers (1563), single females between fourteen and forty could be compelled to work as servants, their wages set by government authorities, their only alternative imprisonment (Ann Rosalind Jones 22). Through enforced servitude, the statute attempted to control the sexuality of masterless fecund women (Mendelson 3–5). In “A Modest meane for Maids,” Isabella Whitney advises two of her sisters, both London servants, “All wanton toys, good sisters, now exile out of your mind” (qtd. in Jones 25). Angelica took no heed of such moralizing. At twelve she was sexually initiated; eventually, she finds parturition enabling. Because few woman of high social status like Lady Capulet would suckle their own infants (Mendelson and Crawford 155), Angelica has the opportunity to serve the Capulets as Juliet’s wet nurse.9 Her live-in situation is unusual (Paster 199), signaling that she lost her husband and baby about the time that Juliet was born. Later, the Nurse becomes Juliet’s nanny, supervised by Lady Capulet, privileged mothers being responsible for keeping an eye on their children’s caretakers (Mendelson and Crawford 157). Subsumed under Lord Capulet in accordance with God’s will (Laslett 20–21), she remains with the family because her employment is a sinecure, all the more so after her husband’s death. By then, her

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chances of finding another mate are worse than those of a younger woman or of one better-off (Brodsky 122–24). So she lives vicariously through her young charge. Conniving in Juliet’s marriage to Romeo and later advising a bigamous marriage, the Nurse defies the ideology of social hierarchy and religion: “Seruants, be obedient vnto them that are your masters . . . as vnto Christ . . .” (Eph. 6.5). Pauline injunctions notwithstanding, the Nurse betrays no sign of conflict, no awareness of obligation, no sense of a divided duty. She is immune to the ideology of service. Angelica serves the plot primarily as a clandestine go-between. Shakespeare may have likened her project to an illicit version of a peasant custom that someone of her class might find familiar. Marriage required negotiation to the mutual advantage of all parties. Striking the bargain was often the province of a “mean” person who, on behalf of the suitor, would propose the match to the father of his intended betrothed (Goody, “Inheritance” 16). Although Juliet has made her own match and the Nurse negotiates with Romeo rather than with his father, she is greatly concerned with the propriety of the arrangement, intent on seeing that Juliet is not led into “a fool’s paradise” (2.4.165–66). No abstract system of sexual morality prevails with her, only loyalty based on affection for a surrogate child. In Arthur Brooke’s poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), the Nurse refers to Juliet as “my childe” (Geoffrey Bullough 1:346, l.2433). In Shakespeare, too, if we acknowledge mothering as a conscious choice, the Nurse earns the right to think of herself as Juliet’s real mother, affection and concern overriding pedigree and lineage. Caregiving leads her to subscribe to an alternate community, consisting of herself, the friar, Romeo, and Juliet. A servant, a friar, and two upper-class adolescents unite to defeat the will of their superiors in class or age. Although disaster ensues, the alternate community wins a Pyrrhic victory: Juliet and Paris do not wed. Insofar as the thwarted marriage would have raised Capulet’s social status no less than Juliet’s, the Nurse is instrumental in defeating not only parental (more specifically, patriarchal) authority but also the practice of using children to advance a family’s position. Her behavior as go-between suggests an explication for the obscure phrase “Shake, quoth the dove-house” (1.3.33). Angelica recalls Juliet’s weaning “since the earthquake now aleven years” (1.3.23). She was “sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall” (1.3.27), suckling Juliet: When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool, To see it teachy and fall out wi’ th’dug!

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If we read the phrase as yet another instance of the play’s omnipresent foreshadowing, the dove-house could also be seen as the Nurse defying the Capulets, as she had defied baby Juliet, though loath to lose her sinecure, should they “bid . . . [her] trudge” (1.3.33–34).10 Knowing that marriage is about seeking happy nights to happy days, Angelica hopes to ensure Juliet’s happiness. Significantly, she is the only one of the working widows who speaks of her dead husband, “a merry man” (1.3.40), still relishing his off-color joke. In fact, she is the only Shakespearean widow whose “unscene” husband, to borrow Marjorie Garber’s pun, lives in our memories through his wife’s fond recollections. If Romeo is Juliet’s “merry man,” then patriarchs, masters, the authority of wealth, the church, are irrelevant to their union. Nevertheless, because the Nurse believes that what is important is the “use” (3.5.225) a woman has of a man, and that one young man is much like another, when Romeo is banished Angelica speaks on behalf of the Count: Beshrow my very heart, I think you are happy in this second match, For it excels your first; or if it did not, Your first is dead, or ’twere as good he were As living here and you no use of him. (3.5.221–25)

In Protestant England, as in Catholic Italy, divorce was not an option. Inevitably, for people like Angelica, too insignificant to be known outside their immediate locality, informal separations and desertions often ended dismal unions. Bigamous marriages were one corollary of these escapes. Geographic distance—even of slight extent by modern standards—lent anonymity, making bigamous marriages difficult to detect. Some culprits, of course, were apprehended. Bridewell Hospital—actually employed as a house of correction—counted bigamists among such sexual offenders as prostitutes and their clients, bawds and pimps, adulterers, rapists, and child molesters (Archer 239). Social history offers enlightening stories about bigamy from the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. A country rector, asked if a parishioner (one Henry Farthing) about to wed already had a wife, replied that it was impossible to tell, Farthing having come from a town all of sixteen miles

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away. Women abandoned their spouses less often than did men, but wives deserted too. When Richard Rockley’s wife left him, he remarried, claiming that she had been hung. His neighbors doubted his assumption and thought the new marriage bigamous. John Lebie bigamously married Margaret Peach, then left her, whereupon Margaret, too, attempted to make a bigamous marriage. Another Margaret, Margaret Least, maintained that her first husband, who had abandoned her, was dead, but he disconcertingly reappeared six years after her remarriage (Amussen, Ordered Society 124–26). When the Nurse urges Juliet to accept Paris because her first husband “is dead, or ’twere as good he were,” Renaissance playgoers might have recalled the claims of spousal death, frequently but sometimes dubiously made to justify remarriage. In a society where public records were few, communication limited, and distance momentous, bigamy was an option, albeit a radical one. Rather, bigamy was an option for the less fortunate: “This was no way out, however, for those whose property and obligations kept them tied to a particular locality. If their marriages were unsuccessful, then they had to be endured” (Wrightson, English 100). Identifiable members of prominent families could not walk away and remarry. That Juliet finds the Nurse’s counsel—congruent with the behavior of ordinary folk— outrageous and vicious serves as a status marker. Shakespeare sharpens the characterization of the Nurse through her flexible conscience regarding matters domestic and sexual. Because class and status codes divide Juliet from her nurse, Juliet comes to see her as an “[a]ncient damnation” (3.5.235). Insofar as a second marriage would obscure the Nurse’s complicity in Juliet’s first stolen marriage, both Capulet and the Nurse can be seen as anticipating advantage from Juliet’s wedding Paris—as “using” Juliet. Self-interest collapses class binarisms; like master, like servant. Yet, even if the Nurse is being self-protective, hoping for a second marriage to erase incriminating evidence, she may also think to spare Juliet a barren marriage that puts an end to Capulet’s line. She has earlier reminded Juliet that “women grow by men” (1.3.95), and “use” connotes offspring as well as pleasure. If Angelica sometimes thinks of herself, she also thinks “all for the best” (3.1.104). What awaits the Nurse should the master discharge the servant? Though in Shakespeare her future remains uncertain, in Arthur Brooke’s poem, she “is banisht in her age” (qtd. in Geoffrey Bullough 1:362, l.2987). If conditions in Verona were anything like those in England, and if Angelica is punished as a disorderly servant—a standard category drawing a routine sentence—she would be imprisoned, forced to perform hard labor, and whipped regularly (Archer 218). For the widow of a man with insufficient means (insufficient, else why would

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she have become a wet nurse?), kept on as a servant and nanny, then discharged for breach of trust, the chances of remarriage or reemployment were slim. She would have to support herself. Servants in England of the 1590s, especially those lacking skills and references, had a hard time. Positions were scarce and in high demand; many workers were forced to travel in search of them: [S]ervants turned out of service . . . would mingle on the road with migrant workers, harvest workers, and youngsters in search of service or apprenticeships. To such people, begging, stealing or working might well have been equally attractive methods of getting by, each of them to be employed when appropriate. (J. A. Sharpe 100–01)

Many job-seekers who would have been law-abiding given a choice found that they had no choice. And even vagrancy—read homelessness, a plight that afflicted servants more than it did any other occupational group and that exceeded the rate of population growth between the early 1570s and the 1630s—was a punishable offense (Beier, “Social” 204, 212; and Mikalachki, “Women’s Networks” 52–59). Childless, the Nurse might languish like some English widows who lived and died in impoverished solitude. Lacking the protection of the church that the friar enjoys, having lost both her charge and probably her good name with Juliet’s death, the Nurse seems destined to be among “some punished” (5.3.308). Within the boundaries of the play, however, Shakespeare spares Angelica so grim a fate, for she is a character audiences delight in. From a Bakhtinian perspective, “[i]n the Nurse’s speech and laughter life-affirming joyousness subsumes the metaphysics of religion and death, banishes fear, and celebrates the regenerative cycle of organic being—the essence of carnival” (Knowles 73). At the end of act 5, she is still alive and still employed. Perhaps that is a reward for devotion to Susan’s surrogate, her child Juliet; or for such piety as her falling in with the friar’s plans attests to; or for celibacy, surely a challenge for a woman so preoccupied with sex. But Shakespeare leaves it to us to determine whether her continuing fidelity to Susan’s father is dictated by personal choice, financial reasons, or aging, indicated by a drastic shortage of teeth—“I have but four” (1.3.13). Like her three working-widow counterparts, audiences would have considered the Nurse old. Most Elizabethan widows, of course, were older women, as are only about a third of Shakespeare’s. (Even though played by boys, younger women, presumably, would have had more audience appeal.) Elderly widows who remarried were a favorite target

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of ideological preceptors, since the purpose of marriage was, above all, procreation. Writers generally depicted the older remarrying widow as lust-driven and therefore comical, pitiable, or immoral, and the aging bride’s neighbors might have agreed.11 Whom one labels as no longer young is a subjective determination. Generally, Renaissance women between the ages of fifty and sixty were thought old, perhaps earlier if widowed (Botelho, “Old Age” 43; Froide “Old Maids” 91). Social historians distinguish between chronological, functional (decrepitude), and cultural old age, the last primarily dependent on appearance (Schen 14–15), for, like Nestor, an older woman can be “most reverend for [her] stretch’d-out life” (Tr. 1.3.61), yet healthy and energetic. Maimonides asks, “Who is an old woman?” and replies, “One who is called old and does not protest” (qtd. in Botelho, “Old Age” 43). Being unable to chat with Shakespeare’s widows, I fall back on the adjective “old” prefaced to the widow’s name as a useful indication of age. Widow Capilet appears in the dramatis personae as “An old Widow of Florence.” The descriptor “old” may be part of the dialogue as when the page in Henry IV, Part Two, refers to “old Mistress Quickly” (2.2.152). Mercutio mocks Juliet’s nurse as “an old hare hoar” (Rom. 2.4.134) and “ancient lady” (2.4.143), and Juliet fidgets when the Nurse is late: “But old folks—many feign as they were dead” (2.5.16). Mercutio’s and Juliet’s notion of agedness is questionable (Angelica had suckled Juliet only fourteen years before, and besides to the young most adults are old), but by early modern demographic standards the nearly toothless Nurse may indeed be elderly or appear so—“culturally old.” I include Mistress Overdone in the category of elderly widows although the text tells us nothing explicit about her age. However, it must have taken some years for her to acquire and shed nine husbands, and Renaissance dramatists frequently used the profession of bawd or madam to sexualize a crone.12 The author of the Character of “A Maquerela, in Plain English, a Bawd,” writes, “Her yeeres are sixty & odde. . . .”13 For widows of low estate and limited means, advanced years could be a stigma. Although no bawd like Overdone, Mistress Quickly is tarred with the lecher’s brush. Should she be regarded as a “lusty widow,” a stereotype so ancient as to disable a myth of origin? Does any man know where to have her? If Quickly is lusty, never came lust in such mundane attire. Her sexual malapropisms testify not to lechery but to her naivety in language as in life. Her bawdry is inadvertent. Like Elizabeth Grey of Henry VI, Part Three, and Anne of Richard III, she neither speaks nor acts in a consciously lewd manner. In Henry IV, Part One, “an honest man’s wife” (3.3.119), she becomes “a poor widow of Eastcheap” in Part Two (2.1.70), betrothed, or so she thinks, to Falstaff, who falsely engages

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her affections. Elizabethan audiences would have known that the remarriage of this fictional creation mirrored reality and was dictated by the needs of her business as much if not more than by personal motives. Left with a tavern of dubious repute, it behooves Mistress Quickly to remarry whoever will have her—and the Boar’s Head. On the one hand, as a tavern keeper who would have inherited her husband’s privileges from the Vintners’ Company, she is something of a financial prize. On the other, she is precariously situated as the owner of a marginally legal business. Granted, taverns had a better reputation than generally suspect alehouses, and Nell Quickly, by virtue of serving sherry, is a tavern keeper and (because she rents out rooms), perhaps an innkeeper (McIntosh 168–70, 202–09). However, her disreputable tavern “has all the earmarks of an alehouse” (Widmayer 198n.37). To remain in business, she needs a protector, and who could serve her needs better than Sir John Falstaff, a knight in the bosom of the prince apparent, a knight who dares to defy the Lord Chief Justice? What she feels for a man in whom desire had outlived performance is not apt to be lust. While she takes pleasure in the prestige his rank would confer upon her, she seems genuinely to enjoy Sir John, despite his caddish behavior. She laughs over his histrionics until tears come: “O Jesu, this is excellent sport, i’ faith!” (1H4 2.4.390–91). Among the breach of contract depositions of the Bishop of London’s Consistory Court is an analog to her unhappy situation, that of a rejected widow who sought legal redress. On April 20, 1610, “at the widowe Perries howse the sayd Richard Warren sate downe at the tables ende and tooke the sayd widowe Margaret Perrie als More uppon his knee . . . and . . . sayd here Pegge once againe here is my hand my faith and my troathe thow art my wife and none but thow” (Giese, Consistory xxiv, 238). So, too, at the Globe, Londoners might hear Mistress Quickly’s futile accusations: Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the Prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? (2 H4 2.1.86–93)

Though Falstaff ’s commitment phobia proves invincible, a propertied widow like Quickly, her age notwithstanding, did not have to look long for a strapping fellow to tote those “parcel-gilt goblets” and tend her “sea-coal fire.” She soon has her choice of two ne’er-do-well untitled

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suitors, taciturn Nym and swaggering Pistol. Her choice of Pistol again demonstrates her weakness for Falstaffian grandiloquence and again disappoints whatever expectations she may have for a genuine helpmate. To the horror of moralists and the amusement of cynics, widows like Quickly were often quick to marry men eager to take over a business or simply to enjoy its profits. Both husband and wife felt they were serving their economic interests and each was getting a bargain. Although Peter Laslett describes the owner of a commercial undertaking as head of an extended family (2), normally ensuring a regressive social stability, such is not the case when a woman replaces the patriarch and the undertaking is both criminal and democratic. Quickly presides over the unruly society of a tavern where princes mingle with paupers, Lenten fasts are broken, and prostitutes are lodged. In establishments such as hers, robberies were planned, and their perpetrators concealed: witness Falstaff after the Gadshill robbery in Henry IV, Part One, “asleep behind the arras, and snorting like a horse” (2.4.528–29). Similarly, the Hertford County records for 1626 describe one woman innkeeper, “who received stolen goods at the sign of the ‘Leabord’s Head’ in Ware, [and who] had there a ‘priviye place’ for hiding stolen goods and suspicious persons[;] ‘at the press for soldiers she hid five men from the constables, and can convey any man from chamber to chamber into the backside’” (Alice Clark 233). More heinous, if the beadle is to be believed, Boar’s Head habitués Doll and Pistol beat a man to death. Although most taverns were decent, law-abiding establishments (Widmayer 186), Quickly’s, more alehouse than tavern, belongs among the “obvious centres of disorder, where stolen goods could be disposed of, whores picked up, money wasted and youth corrupted” (Slack 103). Running such an enterprise would pose a challenge. Even though a minority of women licensed to keep drinking establishments were older widows (McIntosh 159–60),14 presumably of stronger moral character than young women, any woman was likely to have difficulty keeping order among her workers and customers: “[I]f trouble broke out, a man’s physical and social authority might be needed” (McIntosh 180). Hired help was an additional expense, whereas an improvident husband’s labor was free and his self-interest might promise an incentive to hard work. So, overcoming her fear of swaggerers, Mistress Quickly remarries, perhaps to console herself for a lost mate—or the lost title she had dreamed of—perhaps for companionship, even desire, but surely for a helpmate to keep her demanding business solvent. As Moll Cutpurse in Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl remarks, “[d]istressed needlewomen and trade-fallne wiues” are targets for vicious rakes (qtd. in McNeill 13–14). If Nell’s trade falls off, she could find herself no more

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secure or respectable than her lodgers. So Nell weds again, and while the tavern owner never becomes a lady, Ancient Pistol improves his economic standing, although he perceives a decline in prestige: Base tike, call’st thou me host? Now by Gadslugs I swear I scorn the term; Nor shall my Nell keep lodgers. (H5 2.1.28–30)

Once he is legal owner of the Boar’s Head,15 Pistol immediately abandons the tavern to his wife’s care. Eager for martial male camaraderie, he follows the wars. Why then did Pistol marry Nell? One could read his rivalry with Nym for Nell Quickly’s hand and holdings as an aspect of a widow hunt, a parody of an inherently parodic courtship, mercenary at bottom. That Quickly is misguided in her choice of spouse is regrettable, but as her audience would have known, many a widow caricatured as lusty remarried above all for security.16 Although Nell calls on Officers Fang and Snare to protect her interests when Falstaff will neither repay the hundred marks he owes her nor marry her, in both parts of Henry IV, Quickly subverts law by hosting an alternate community that, in its promise of plenitude and release, retains its power to divert an audience into applauding the carnivalesque. Oblivious of the promise of her friend’s surname, Tearsheet, she sends Doll to console Falstaff (2H4 2.4.387–91), and on Doll’s behalf Nell abandons all respect for the forces of law and order, wishing the beadle hanged (2H4 5.4.1–2), hurling scornful epithets at him: “starv’d bloodhound” (5.4.27), “Thou atomy, thou!” (5.4.29). She is appalled “that right should thus overcome might!” (5.4.24–25). Whether or not Doll merits this spirited defense, Quickly offers it in the name of friendship. Enlarging the Boar’s Head community of unruly women are the offstage lodgers: “[W]e cannot lodge and board a dozen or fourteen gentlewomen that live honestly by the prick of their needles but it will be thought we keep a bawdy-house straight” (H5 2.1.32–35). “Prick” being the operative word, these women’s incomes, and hence their rent, must be as precarious as their health, but Mistress Quickly is pleased to be their respectful landlady, even if imposed upon by those she trusts. But fidelity to such friends cannot cancel out infidelity to a deceased spouse. In Shakespeare the consequences of remarriage are not auspicious. According to Pistol, Nell (or the prostitute Doll) may have died “i’ th’ spittle / Of a malady of France,” for he continues, “And there my rendezvous is quite cut off” (H5 5.1.81–82). The textual confusion over whether it was Nell or Doll who contracted syphillis17 continues a

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blurring that amounts to an attack on entrepreneurial women excluded from many of the more respectable trades (Howard and Rackin 176–85, esp. 180). For some Elizabethan playgoers, dying of a venereal disease would have signaled promiscuity. Others may have understood that Nell contracted the malady from her first husband. If it was Nell who died, aside from her two husbands, were there unsanctioned others who could have infected her? We have heard Falstaff swear cryptically, “A pox of this gout! or a gout of this pox!” (2H4 1.2.243–44). The nature of her business, her lodgers, and her friendship with Doll all serve to sexualize her. The law does not appreciate a troublemaking crone, so she, like Doll, is manhandled by the officers—“Thou hast drawn my shoulder out of joint”—and promised “whipping cheer” (5.4.2–3, 5). That should remind this out-of-control, unheaded woman of who writes the rules in a man’s world. Widow Capilet is not at odds with social strictures regarding hierarchy. Descended from a great Italian family and distressed by her current social and economic position, she is eager to return to her rightful (because original) station. Her characterization is illuminated by the life of a real Florentine, Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (1408–1471). Although Alessandra was far better off than Widow Capilet, and differently situated, there are enough similarities to invite comparison. Alessandra’s life was sandwiched between those of Boccaccio and Shakespeare, the one providing the other with the primary source for All’s Well That Ends Well.18 We know her from her letters that date from 1447, her middle age. When Alexandra wed, both the Strozzi and the Macinghi were distinguished families of considerable means. Like most Florentine testators, Alessandra’s husband specified his widow as guardian of their children and their financial assets—unless she remarried.19 This stipulation was customary in Florence, where, husbands being their wives’ elders by some dozen years, every fourth women was a widow, of these every third a head of household.20 The most desirable widows, those most apt to remarry, were under twenty, but thrice blessed were they that master so their blood as to remain single. Such a one was Alessandra, who remained celibate after her husband died while she was still in her twenties. She raised her five children (including two daughters needing dowries) and engaged in business, at which eventually she was quite successful, despite periods of serious financial difficulty. So money and profit figure as importantly in her letters as honor and religion, even though toward the end of her life she joined a lay order, anticipating the religious associations surrounding old Widow Capilet, who keeps the St. Francis on a pilgrims’ route. The two mothers are similar in presenting their business dealings as undertaken for their children’s good.

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Like Widow Capilet, whose assistance is quickly won by cash in hand and the promise of an even larger dowry settlement, for Alessandra “good” meant lucrative. If we hypothesize the occurrence of a historical shift from the total rejection of business by the wellborn in Shakespeare’s ultimate source, The Decameron, to engagement in white-collar business by the “merchant patriciate,” that is, Alessandra (Gregory 1), to open participation in “trade,” as in All’s Well, we may explain Shakespeare’s representation of Widow Capilet. Let us assume that she has fallen upon hard times due to increased economic pressure, the “crisis of the 1590s,” a pan-European phenomenon that extended considerably before and after that decade. Certainly, if we envisage the setting of All’s Well as English, Widow Capilet’s actions on behalf of Diana can be more readily understood, as can a wellborn woman keeping an inn.21 The turn of the century in England saw a continuation of crisis conditions: “plague, repeated harvest failure, massive price inflation, heavy taxation, depression . . . large-scale unemployment, and escalating crime and vagrancy” (Archer 9). London’s economy and populace were so afflicted by plague that it was easier to elude death than penury (Archer 9–11, 13; F. P. Wilson). Crime and vagrancy followed in the wake of unemployment and inflation. When goods are too costly, homelessness becomes commonplace and crime a means of survival for the impoverished. In a period of great economic stress, how easy for Widow Capilet to lose all, slipping into the lower strata of itinerant workers, poor farmers, craftspeople, and servants, and from thence to pauperization.22 “The poor widow,” writes Olwen Hufton, “perforce trod a dangerous line between minimum sufficiency and destitution” (254). Periods of economic hardship in early modern Europe necessitated a blurring of class behaviors. Shakespeare represents this situation through his “well born” innkeeper, all of whose thoughts are bent on finding a large dowry for her daughter. Whereas the Countess, whose husband has died quite recently, eulogizes him, the Widow Capilet, loquacious as she is, never mentions her deceased husband. The text does not indicate whether she cared for him or when she became déclassé; we know only that present circumstances compel her to take in boarders. She has no time for the dead. She is fortunate that when fathers died, daughters usually remained at home with their mothers (Mendelson and Crawford 180). For the time being, better that Widow Capilet swallow her pride, keep the Saint Francis, and make the best of things. In England an inn like the Widow’s was apt to be a small one. Because drink was sold, fights might break out, so the authorities were loath to license “the weaker vessel” unless the establishment was small. In 1564,

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only one of thirty-eight Norwich innkeepers was a widow (McIntosh 206), and she may have been licensed to keep her off the relief roles. We can imagine the widowed innkeeper growing shrewd and tough as she makes instant judgments about the credit and characters of her wouldbe guests. Will they pay? Will they start a brawl? Will they try to rob her? Granted, romance does come to Shakespeare’s old working widows like Mistresses Quickly and Overdone. Both have functioning businesses and no heirs with whom suitors must share the widow’s purse or affections. Diana’s mother, however, wisely prefers to transfer the benefit of her assets to her daughter, a more suitable agent for effecting the family’s return to gentility than she herself. So Widow Capilet, a shrewd businesswoman, sets about increasing her assets in order to enhance Diana’s dowry. In Tyrone Guthrie’s 1959 Stratford production, Widow Capilet (Angela Baddeley) first strengthens her bargaining position by repeatedly refusing Helena. Finally, when she senses her moment, she reveals that she is “not averse to a little bribery. She says slyly, ‘Y’are great in fortune,’ whereupon Helena responds with “Take this purse of gold, / And let me buy your friendly help thus far’” (Styan 5, 87). If widowed, Diana will not have to content herself with a small inn, her mother having sold Diana’s services for a dowry of three thousand crowns. While the privileges of aristocracy remain intact, consciousness of money and the language of business penetrate all orders, not merely the petty bourgeois. Helena is no less shrewd than the Widow. The three thousand crowns, presumably the dowry that the king gave the poor physician’s daughter and that she offers the Widow, is not Helena’s but Bertram’s. Helena’s dowry was an exchange between men—the King and Bertram. At a stroke, Helena has reversed the helpless financial position of the wife by summarily appropriating that dowry. Her aptitude for trade is evoked by the metaphor of debt she uses in the letter purportedly from Diana: “[H]is [Bertram’s] vows are forfeited to me, and my honor’s paid to him” (5.3.142–43). The Countess describes Helena in legal language that is also commercial: “Her father bequeath’d her to me, and she herself, without other advantage, may lawfully make title to as much love as she finds. There is more owing her than is paid, and more shall be paid her than she’ll demand” (1.3.101–05). Lafew bluntly concludes: “I will buy me a son-in-law in a fair, and toll for this” (5.3.148–49). The characters’ use of a common language of gain undermines notions of inherent class difference, but gender divisions are not undermined. Throughout, women take each other’s part, with Widow Capilet accepting the role of chaperone and protector of Diana and Helena, aiding them as earlier the Countess had Helena. The courage Widow Capilet shows in agreeing to appear before a king to play a

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role in a morality drama that has no guarantee of success owes much to anger at Diana’s would-be seducer. Bertram is defeated by an alliance of women that cuts across class lines just as commercialism does. In contrast, alliances in Measure for Measure that are grounded in the brothel (operators and patrons) cut across both class and gender lines. Within her brothel/alehouse/hothouse, Mistress Overdone presides over a community of whores, young men-about-town, and rogues, many of whom Pompey, the tapster and pimp turned executioner’s assistant, recognizes when he meets them again in prison. In Vienna/London the official closing of the Southwark brothels in 1546 resulted in their conversion first to bathhouses and later, during Elizabeth’s reign, to notorious alehouses (Widmayer 186; Burford, Private 11). John Taylor, the Water Poet, marked the occasion: The Stewes in England bore a beastly sway til the eighth Henry banished them away: and since these Common whores were quite put downe a damn’d crewe of privat whores are growne. (Qtd. in Burford, Private 11)

Bad as a tavern might be (and Quickly’s was), a taphouse, more frequently called an alehouse, was worse. More than a third of the complaints listed in Norfolk petitions to justices of the peace between 1600 and 1669 have to do with alehouse offences (Amussen, “Gender” 210). Mistress Overdone’s alehouse is typical, either directly or indirectly being associated with “venereal disease, theft, poverty, prodigality, illicit sex, private spousals, and bastardy” (Widmayer 191). Alehouses, hothouses, bathhouses, and stewes provided similar pleasures. So wrote Ben Jonson in “Epigram ‘on the New Hot-Houses’”: Where lately harbour’d many a famous Whore a purging bill, now fix’d vpon the dore, Tells you it is a hot-house: So it ma’ And still be a whore-house. Th’ are Synonyma. (Qtd. in Burford, Bawds 146)

Yet Measure does not support labeling Mistress Overdone a lusty widow. Despite her employment as prostitute and madam, and a line of deceased husbands (if they truly were husbands) stretching out to the crack of doom,23 her speeches are circumspect and devoid of desire: she pities Claudio, worries about her business, and begs Escalus for clemency, claiming at least one good deed. She has reared Kate Keepdown’s

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baby by Lucio. Compared to the salacious Bawd in Pericles, Mistress Overdone seems far less vicious, merely a concerned entrepreneur anxious to weather hard times. An attack on prostitution is inevitably an attack on the poor, since the alternatives to prostitution for poor girls and women were punitive. If the brothels are pulled down, Mistress Overdone will be homeless (McNeill 108). Typically, moralists suppressed the fact that prostitution fulfills (albeit temporarily) poor women’s economic needs rather than their sexual desires, whether the women are at heart wayward or virtuous. Robert Greene’s 1592 “A Disputation between a HeCony-Catcher and a She-Cony-Catcher” (or “A Disputation Between Laurence, a Foist, and Fair Nan, a Traffic, Whether a Whore or a Thief is Most Prejudicial”) reveals that Nan’s real profession is that of cozener. Although the “wiles to compass crowns” that she uses are sexual, she has no desire for the “amorous fools” she entices (209). Were the wayward Nan able to get as much money with a deck of cards or a pair of dice, she would abandon prostitution. Nan may not have fancied respectability, but many real prostitutes did. Vern Bullough writes, When the brothels at Strassburg were closed [at Luther’s behest] the women drew up a petition stating that they had pursued their profession not from liking it but only to earn bread; they asked for honest work if they were to quit their present occupation. Serious attempts were made by the reformers to give them work, or as an even better solution, to get them husbands. (131)

Had Mistress Overdone been a Londoner, rather than being offered honest work for fair wages, she would have been treated as prostitutes were at Bridewell, notorious “as a house of pain” (Carroll 116). Whereas, by the turn of the century, vagrants unfortunate enough to be sent to Bridewell were whipped and freed for lack of space, sexual offenders were kept for half a year or longer, set to forced labor and whipped twice weekly unless they paid a fee, presumably earned through their handicrafts (Archer 240–41, Carroll 117–18). Early modern society having minimal provisions for an aging demimondaine, after serving her sentence Mistress Overdone would be free to starve or to break the law again by reestablishing her brothel. The latter course seems more probable. The authorities closed the London stews over fifty years before Shakespeare wrote Measure, yet various comments, notably Robert Burton’s and Thomas Heywood’s, suggest no decrease in prostitution. The 1540s crackdown was followed by

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another “reformation of manners” in the 1570s.24 That Angelo has let the brothels in Vienna “stand for seed” (1.2.99) indicates an eventual return to business as usual. Were prostitution legal, the brothel (following Laslett’s model) might serve as a family or household for otherwise destitute women with Mistress Overdone as female patriarch—except for its challenge to class distinction. Not only does it threaten the health and wealth of heirs like Master Froth, more highly valued than the poor, but like the Boar’s Head, the brothel undermines hierarchy. Mistress Overdone’s house is a meeting ground for such “gentles” as Lucio and Froth and the commoners who staff it; and since the prostitutes are for sale to all who can afford them, the clientele, like the suspect playhouse audience, may comprise men of different “sorts.” Governments regard the control of an egalitarian sexual practice as their prerogative; the brothel defies control. Even so, Jonathan Dollimore points out how demonized sexuality props up the state: “Like many apparent threats to authority this one in fact legitimates it: control of the threat becomes the rationale of authoritarian reaction in a time of apparent crisis” (73). Officialdom from William the Conqueror to Henry II’s Bishop of Winchester to Elizabeth’s cousin Lord Hunsdon had no qualms about making money from prostitution (Burford, Private 9–11, 17). Did they realize that the sexual license with which Shakespeare’s working widows are associated helps to maintain such governmental power as passed for good order in society? Laslett believes that the Elizabethan version of good order must have appeared permanent. He differentiates our own time from the past on the grounds that then “[t]here was no expectation of reform. How could there be when economic organization was domestic organization, and relationships were rigidly regulated by the social system, by the content of Christianity itself?” (Laslett 4). Although neither hoping for nor fostering reform, Shakespeare’s working widows nevertheless chip away at the system, rejecting or destabilizing their socially imposed roles as widows, intent on whatever they may need or choose to do. The Nurse, poorest and most subordinated of the group, is constructed as most free of ideological control. She makes a hash of conduct-book strictures for older widows. Reluctantly chaste, she focuses her energies on Juliet as Widow Capilet does on Diana. In their less than perfect worlds, Juliet dies and Diana renounces marriage. As for Mistresses Quickly and Overdone, directives against remarriage have not fazed them. Being childless, they are more marriageable. However, Overdone is raising Kate Keepdown’s baby, perhaps out of kindness or perhaps because the prostitute pays her

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for childcare. Another explanation for Overdone’s nursing is hinted at in Pericles: Bawd. . . . as I think, I have brought up some eleven [poor bastards]— Boult. Ay, to eleven, and brought them down again. (4.2.14–16)

That is, at eleven the children are put to work as whores, an apprenticeship of sorts. Whatever her motives, Overdone has been identified as possibly “the play’s most historical voice” when, by speaking up for Kate Keepdown and all the Elizabethan unwed mothers forced into prostitution, she “complicate[s] our attitude towards the sexual misogyny on which the play is predicated” (Salkeld 35). Nonetheless, Mistress Overdone, interminably married and outside the law, remains in Vienna’s version of Bridewell. Among the working widows, only the “well born” Widow Capilet meets with a degree of success, having acted on behalf of Countess Helena, who in turn has the approval of the old Countess, Lord LaFew, and the King. Yet, even as a well-compensated tool of the aristocracy, she is disruptive. Working-class and entrepreneurial unheaded women were troublesome both in theory and in practice. Untidy extrusions of the social formation, barely encoded, these characters contravene an ideology that privileges them—along with orphans—primarily as objects of charity. Lacking class-consciousness and power, they are not political rebels or reformers. Rather, they trespass to ease the friction between themselves and the social order. But unthinking as the widows may be, Shakespeare represents them more fully as agents of change than of stasis. In Marx’s words, “They know not what they do, but they do it” (qtd. in Lukács 81n.13).

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Chapter 6

4

Lu sty Wi dows/R emarr ied Widows

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omen’s lust is “insatiable; put it out, it bursts into flame; give it plenty, it is again in need. . . .” So wrote St. Jerome (“Jovinianus,” Bk. I, 367). This ancient myth of women’s sexual ravenousness was not displaced until the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when females were reconstructed as sexless.1 Conservative ideologues and world-without-end saws insisted that passion is at its most violent in widows. For women with pretensions to respectability, lust waits upon marriage—hence Chaucer’s contribution to the tradition. His Wife of Bath having been married five times and hoping for six is outhusbanded by Shakespeare’s nine-times married Mistress Overdone, “Overdone by the last” (Meas. 2.1.222).2 Following Freud, Charles Carlton suggests that the lusty widow became a figure of fun because men used humor as a way of dealing with realizations that frightened and angered them (124). Nevertheless, “so soon forgot” remained a characteristic theme in many plays featuring remarried widows,3 and, even for those who observed the mourning custom of “the widow’s year” designed to assure paternity, any time was liable to be “so soon.” If the remarrying widow was a mother, she was apt to be figured not only as sexually driven and unfaithful to her dead husband but also as disloyal to her children. They might be ill-treated by a stepfather or displaced emotionally and financially by his children from a former marriage or from the present one. Struggling to keep legal title to her land, widowed Anne Fitton Newdigate (sister of Queen Elizabeth’s ladyin-waiting), while still in her early forties promised her influential patron that she would not be “so accursed a woman as to marry agayne.” For that would be tantamount to “a private purpose of my own commoditie to defraud my children” (qtd. in Larminie 102). Anne’s celibacy met

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with approval; upon her death, she left her children an enlarged estate and valuable aristocratic connections (Larminie 106). Aside from saddling her children with an unkind stepfather, another pitfall awaited the remarrying widow. Folk wisdom taught men to suspect her of duping her new husband. A proverb of the period warns, “He that marries a Widow and three children marries four thieves” (Tilley 722, W335). That is how the Yorkists saw Elizabeth Woodville Grey, whose petition for economic security netted her a king; Elizabeth’s promotion enriched her two Woodville sons and her brother. Cymbeline’s queen overturns standard expectations, for rather than slighting her child by her former marriage, she sought a crown for him, although that entailed the murder of her new husband and stepdaughter. On the basis of anecdotal evidence and questionable theology, extremists could construe remarriage as criminal. In all three texts of Hamlet’s “Mousetrap,” the future remarrying widow sees herself as murderess: “A second time I kill my husband dead, / When second husband kisses me in bed.”4 Reading the first line literally, all widows are to blame for their husbands’ deaths, whether they remarry or not. The line “None wed the second, but who kill’d the first,”5 reiterates the sense of guilt as actual, not merely metaphoric. Had Claudius not cut short the performance of “The Mousetrap,” would we have learned of the player king’s son avenging himself on his mother? In Jonathan Miller’s BBC production of King Lear, Regan (Diana Rigg) assures her widowhood by ignoring her critically wounded husband’s plea, “Give me your arm” (3.7.98).6 Early in his career, Shakespeare used traditional misogynous tropes to construct two remarrying widow roles not dictated by historical sources: the widow whom Hortensio weds in The Taming of the Shrew and Tamora, a fully developed caricature in Titus Andronicus. The part played by Hortensio’s Widow, as she is known and with whom I begin, is barely larger than a walk-on, a dozen lines enabling her to operate as a plot device, a foil against which Kate achieves the status of comic heroine. Hortensio’s Widow personifies the popular notion that because widows are incorrigibly willful, marrying one is imprudent. Audience identification with Hortensio’s spirited bride is forestalled by her portrayal; this nameless character lacks the roundedness (or its illusion) that we associate with Shakespearean characters even in farce. In Shrew’s dramatis personae, the designation of Hortensio’s bride is Widow, and as Widow she is the thing itself. Even after her remarriage, Lucentio speaks to Hortensio about “thy loving widow” (5.2.7). Petruchio refers to her twice as widow (5.2.16, 25), only once as wife (5.2.101). For Hortensio, her new husband, she is “widow” as often as she is “wife.”7 This mode of address recalls the

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schema of maid-wife-widow, an ontology whose problematic nature the remarrying widow reveals by her simultaneous participation in two categories. Were Shrew’s attempt to classify her less confused, she would still test the boundaries of those categories. Also confusing is why she has “long lov’d” Hortensio (4.2.38), a hapless soul who anticipates Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Received wisdom would infer that she believed him tractable and that, beset by the insatiable passion common to widows, she cannot be choosy. Hortensio, whose wooing schemes serve only to win his first choice of mate for Lucentio, fatuously rejects Bianca, who has in fact rejected him. With an alliterative sneer, Hortensio vows to think of her “[a]s one unworthy all the former favors / That I have fondly flatter’d her withal” (4.2.30–31). Instead, he resolves to seek “[k]indness in women, not their beauteous looks” (41). We may take this to mean that the Widow is older than Bianca and perhaps no better-looking—or worse-looking—than Hortensio himself. Forgetting or unaware that widows, especially rich ones, were notorious for their independent spirit, Hortensio tells Tranio that within three days he will wed “a wealthy widow,” who “hath as long lov’d me / As I have lov’d this proud disdainful haggard” (4.2.37–39). Whether the Widow’s love for Hortensio will endure longer than his for Bianca is moot. Also in question is whether the Widow is as wealthy as Hortensio believes. The saying “Widows are always rich,” with its variant “Wooers and widows are never poor” (Tilley, 722, W342), intimates that financial puffery to attract a spouse was common. If Hortensio’s bride is indeed wealthy, she seems to be precisely the sort of widow likely to have safeguarded her assets before remarrying (Erickson, Women 104–07). If childless as well as wealthy, “uniquely independent” (Houlbrooke, English 209), she is a prize on the marriage market, and Hortensio’s chances of ruling her are slim. However, to Lucentio’s saucy servant Tranio, who does not know Hortensio’s Widow, her salient trait is not wealth but lust; she is a “lusty widow” that “shall be woo’d and wedded in a day” (4.2.50–51). In the entire canon, only she is explicitly called “a lusty widow.” What Tranio knows about remarrying widows can be found in Elizabethan aphorisms. One of many similar proverbs advises, “He that woos a Maid must come seldom in her sight but he that woos a widow must woo her day and night,” (Tilley 404, M17). Hortensio’s wife, however, validates widow stereotypes when in act 5, scene 2, she appears onstage in time to play her part in the bet over the three wives’ obedience that corresponds to the Induction’s contention over which of the Lord’s three dogs is best (Kehler, “Echoes” 31–42). Her defect is not lustful words or actions but rather assertiveness.

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What the play’s surface positions us to accept and what the subtext intimates are at odds. At the beginning of the banquet scene, Hortensio hints that he has not found the “kindness in women” he expected: Pet. Padua affords nothing but what is kind. Hor. For both our sakes, I would that word were true. (5.2.14–15)

When Petruchio teases Hortensio, saying he “fears his widow,” she mistakenly understands “Hortensio frightens his widow.” To this she avows, “Then never trust me if I be afeard [of Hortensio or of any man]” (5.2.16–17). While it is possible, (though far-fetched) to construe her response as a deliberate double entendre, in which she teases about never being afraid of sex, such a reading has eluded the most assiduous specialists in Shakespearean bawdry.8 The ensuing dialogue puts her at a further disadvantage: Wid. He that is giddy thinks the world turns round. .......................................... Kath. Mistress, how mean you that? Wid. Thus I conceive by him [that’s what I understand from his remark]. (5.2.20–22)

This last line allows for Petruchio’s risqué retort but is itself without bawdy intent. The locker-room humor is confined to Petruchio, Hortensio, Vincentio, and briefly Bianca. Of no avail is the Widow’s attempt to defend herself against the charge of shrewishness. Hortensio’s summons, following hard upon Lucentio’s to Bianca, arouses the Widow’s suspicion that the husbands are in some way toying with their wives, so she refuses to come at Hortensio’s call: “She says you [Hortensio] have some goodly jest in hand. / She will not come; she bids you come to her” (5.2.91–92). Her response is interpreted as frowardness. In fact, the bet on the wives is Petruchio’s goodly jest. So, too, is his command that Kate tread on her cap, at which order the Widow exclaims, “Lord, let me never have a cause to sigh, / Till I be brought to such a silly pass!” (5.2.123–24). Just as the “froward” (5.2.119) Widow objects to tests of obedience, so she resists having Kate lecture her on obedience: Pet. Katherine, I charge thee tell these headstrong women What duty they do owe their lords and husbands. Wid. Come, come, you’re mocking; we will have no telling.

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Pet. Come on, I say, and first begin with her. Wid. She shall not. Pet. I say she shall, and first begin with her. (5.2.130–35)

Of what is the Widow guilty? Wanting to be treated with respect by her husband’s friend? Not wanting to be made the subject of a wager (did Hortensio wager her dowry)? Not wanting dinner to end in her forcible enlistment as the object of a diatribe and subject of a doctrine? Her show of independence not only puts her in the wrong but validates conventional warnings against marrying widows, their willfulness being assured: “[F]or commonly widdowes are so froward, so waspish, and so stubborne, that thou canst not wrest them from their willes, and if thou thinke to make her good by stripes, thou must beate her to death” (Swetnam 59).9 Traditional misogynists held that widows expressed willfulness not only in their insubordination but in their appetites, “will” in the sexual sense. If textually outspoken, then they were surely lickerish. Any show of self-assertion gives away the widow’s hidden lust. If A, then B. To the misogynistic theorist such a conflation was eminently logical. A troubling aspect of Shrew’s conclusion is the opposition between the right-minded, obedient Kate and the wrongheaded, disobedient Bianca and Widow, the latter two having formed a coalition whose protest is “brief, peevish, inchoate” (Pamela Allen Brown 3: 302). The playgoers are asked to condemn the coalition, although Bianca’s willfulness resides primarily in making her own choice of husband and the Widow’s in resisting mockery. That the “two sets of husbands and wives—Hortensio and his widow, Lucentio and Bianca—settle comfortably in the same-sex alliances that are the traditional repositories of survival techniques in the conjugal struggle” (Hutson 222) is deemed deplorable compared to the ideal relationship Petruchio and Kate achieve, based on proper female subordination. Lest domestic inequality blind us to issues of social class, we need only contrast the Induction’s Hostess with Barthol’mew, the pageboy about to play the role of Lady to Sly as “Lord.” The innkeeper, whose business requires that she deal with deadbeat drunks like Christopher Sly, cannot afford to be obedient. The pageboy “Lady,” who is instructed in maintaining a demeanor of meek subservience, can. Obedience, then, functions as a class marker (Briggs 157). The major characters in Shrew are well-to-do bourgeois, perhaps members of a commercial patriciate like the Strozzis and Macighis. Bianca and the Widow stand in for the bourgeoisie; their rejection of the patriarchal class marker happily anticipates

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the day, some four centuries hence, when brides would promise to cherish rather than obey their husbands. But in the world of the 1590s, whatever her motive, the Widow might already regret her remarriage. Such hope as she may cling to lies in the example of Mistress Littlegood of the polemicist John Taylor’s last Juniper Lecture. Although Taylor intended the characterization satirically, he wrote more truly than he knew. Having survived four husbands during her reproductive years, Mistress Littlegood takes a vow of celibacy. In her seventies, she claims proudly, “I have not been troubled these thirty-two years with so grievous a burden as a Husband” (qtd. in Henderson and McManus 76). Titus Andronicus’s Tamora conforms to the lusty widow stereotype far more closely than does Hortensio’s merely wilful Widow. The trope is fundamental to Titus’s misogynist discourse, drawing upon and syncretically evoking an array of jaundiced views of women. In the play’s probable chapbook source,10 Tamora’s counterpart owes her widowhood to Titus, who killed her husband (Geoffrey Bullough 6: 380). Although Shakespeare’s Tamora is never referred to as a widow, an Elizabethan audience seeing a queen with three sons and no husband would surely have conjectured her widowhood. In act 2, scene 3, when she woos Aaron, playgoers would know her for a lusty widow. Female gender being a locus of Otherness, woman, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it, “appears essentially to the male as a sexual being” (xvi); widowed, she remains a sexual being, but an unrestrained one. For spectators who had introjected the European male as their norm, and who expected the “symbolic casting out” (Fiedler 16) of unruly women no less than of blacks or Jews, inevitably Tamora would appear alien, a “most insatiate and luxurious woman” (5.1.88), suitably matched with her black lover.11 Whereas hell’s alleged mutiny in Gertrude’s matronly bones raises such questions as how lusty is lusty, by whose standards, and how do we measure the desire of fictive entities from a world long past, Tamora is a less ambiguous construction, sexually foreshadowing Cleopatra. Demonized as alien and unruly, Tamara nonetheless disrupts the stereotype of the lusty widow even as she realizes it, remarrying out of necessity rather than choice, using her new husband to gain safety and vengeance rather than sexual pleasure, while remaining as faithful as a married woman can be—to her lover. In terms of naturalistic psychology, an alien such as Tamora, engendered out of misogynistic stereotypes, is not convincing. Her initial motives and characterization, however, are moving and persuasive. Her desire for vengeance against the Andronici replicates their talionic belief: the slain cannot rest until their enemies are dead. For Tamora, Rome was always a wilderness of tigers. Her bloodthirstiness is produced by

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the “excessive savagery” of her son’s murder, instigated by Lucius. Alarbus is “hacked and dismembered alive and then cremated on a pyre” (Schwyzer 126–27). Tamora’s vengeful practice is produced by Rome but also intensifies Roman violence in a gruesome dialectic. Titus’s decision to kill Alarbus also kills whatever was decent in Tamora. Rome teaches Tamora to unlearn mercy, and Shakespeare reconstitutes her as a dehumanized Other even as she embraces the code of her conquerors: “Titus, I am incorporate in Rome, / A Roman now adopted happily . . . (1.1.462–63).12 Tamora’s initial speech is divorced from her further development: Stay, Roman brethren! Gracious conqueror, Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed, A mother’s tears in passion for her son; .............................. Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? Draw near them then in being merciful: Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge. Thrice noble Titus, spare my first-born son! (1.1.104–20)

The addition of the character and sacrifice of Alarbus to the probable chapbook source created the opportunity for a strong scene in which the captive mother pleads for her son. Tamora’s eloquence looks forward to Portia’s mercy speech in The Merchant of Venice and like hers goes unheeded. However, as maternal suppliant Tamora is a powerless character, less interesting than a femme fatale and less malleable in relation to Shakespeare’s sources. Perhaps that is why the morning after Alarbus’s hewing—and her own wedding—Tamora is discovered speaking sylvan seduction poetry to Aaron. No longer a naturalistic character, she is strategically reduced and refashioned in accordance with a historical trajectory of misogyny, one of whose topoi is the lusty widow. A site for colonization, she is freighted with such taboo attributes as perversity, hypocrisy, cunning, violence, vengefulness, cruelty, and wilfulness. These traits, or most of them, distinguish Tamora from the later stereotype of the lusty widow in city comedy. Shakespeare’s about-face in characterizing Tamora may have owed something to her name. The chapbook Attava (Bullough 6: 38) is reborn as Tamora, possibly an allusion to the biblical Tamar in Genesis 38.6.30, a widow who, disguised as a prostitute, had incestuous relations with her father-in-law, Judah, and bore twin sons.13 Or Shakespeare might have been thinking of 2 Samuel 13.1–39, which narrates the incestuous rape of Tamar by her brother Amnon, avenged by her

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brother Absalom.14 Whether or not Tamora’s biblical associations are coincidental, among the many psychosocial dimensions of Titus, critics have noted incest. Tamora’s encouraging rape “expresses her enjoyment of her sons’ potency, which veers toward and approaches a sublimated incest” (Stimpson 60). She is the menacing, bewitching mother: “Being eaten by the mother symbolizes incestuous intercourse (entry into the mother’s body) as well as death by dismemberment and dissolution” (Willbern 179). Most pertinent for an exploration of Tamora as alien is C. L. Barber’s observation that Titus deals with the incest taboo by “enact[ing] a fantasy that separates overt sexuality, linked with violence, from the family and extreme family loyalty” (Barber 191). Thus, despite the actual violent actions of the Andronici, mythically violence is linked to outlawed sexuality and projected onto the lusty widow, fittingly constructed as alien. An incestuously inclined, mythologized widow with whom Tamara is associated is the ninth-century BCE alluring Assyrian queen, Semiramis.15 Admiringly, Aaron calls Tamora [t]his goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph, This siren that will charm Rome’s Saturnine, And see his shipwrack and his commonweal’s. (2.1.22–24).

Semiramis, though married, was coveted by King Ninus. When her husband refused to relinquish her, Ninus threatened to blind him. He responded by killing himself, leaving his widow ripe for remarriage to Ninus. The king’s obsession with Semiramis may be a prototype for Saturninus’s instant infatuation with Tamara, since the name Ninus suggests Saturninus, a name not found in the chapbook. Semiramis ruled for almost half a century upon Ninus’s death, which, according to one account, took place at her command. Known for founding Babylon and distinguishing herself as a military leader and builder—accomplishments patriarchal theorists would not have relished—she was also known for promiscuity and cruelty. Semiramis supposedly took lovers from her army, killing them to make way for their replacements. She was killed by her son for whom she was said to have lusted. However, she was also said to have lusted for a horse! (Nashe 3: 112). When at Tamara’s behest Chiron and Demetrius stab Bassianus, Lavinia likens Tamora to Semiramis (2.3.118). A last association between the two queens is created as Lucius orders that Tamora’s corpse be left unburied—“let birds on her take pity” (5.3.200)—recalling how, having been exposed as an infant, Semiramis was cared for by birds.

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It is this sexually forward Tamora, Tamora as Semiramis, rather than Tamora the injured mother, who is cultivated after the first act. Her “codding spirit” (5.1.99) is emphasized by Shakespeare’s denying sexuality to all but Tamora and her satellites: her new husband, her old lover, and her sons. Titus’s contemporary success must have been due in part to its conjunction of revenge-tragedy villains who embodied English prejudices: the lusty widow and the cruel Moor. Despite the Elizabethan correlation of blacks with gross lasciviousness, Aaron’s sexuality is psychoanalytically “‘phallic’ but not ‘genital,’” based on his “standing up” to Tamora’s seductiveness (Willbern 167). With Titus, Tamora is the sexual aggressor, the penetrator who can “fill his aged ears / With golden promises . . .” (4.4.96–97). As for the other characters, Lucius, though a father, is unmarried; Marcus, an adjunct character, lacks a personal life; and Bassianus takes pride in Lavinia’s early waking after her wedding night (2.2.16), a tribute to her invincible chastity. A testament to Tamora’s beauty and code-transgressing power is her control over her young husband. Typically, when the lusty widow of the Tudor-Stuart stage is older than her new suitor, she has exerted financial rather than sexual charms. But Tamora wins Saturninus while she is his prisoner, and since he seems not much older than her sons—she promises to be “a loving nurse, a mother to his youth” (1.1.332)—the difference in their years both hints at incest and poses a threat to male dominance, which the husband’s greater age normally helps to hold in place. That the Roman emperor depends entirely on Tamora’s advice makes him appear feckless, infantile, and uxorious. This last is a fault for which Robert Burton, writing in 1621, cites primarily Roman examples: Caelius Rhodiginus . . . makes mention of a fellow out of Seneca, that was so besotted on his wife, he could not endure a moment out of her company. . . . and many noble Senators and souldiers (as Pliny notes) have lost their honour, in being uxorii, so sottishly overruled by their wives, and therefore Cato in Plutarch made a bitter jest on his fellow Cittizens the Romanes, “wee governe all the world abroad, and our wives at home rule us.” (3: 284–85)

It is just such a condition, that of the governed governor, which Milton sees in Charles I and attacks in Eikonoklastes (1649): Examples are not farr to seek, how great mischeif and dishonour hath befall’n to Nations under the Goverment of effeminate and Uxorious

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Magistrates. Who being themselves govern’d and overswaid at home under a Feminine usurpation, cannot but be farr short of spirit and autority without dores, to govern a whole Nation. (3: 421)

Elizabethans would have recognized uxoriousness in Henry VI’s doting on Margaret and Macbeth’s submission to Lady Macbeth. Ben Jonson’s Epicene, Or The Silent Woman (1609) caricatures the uxorious husband in the person of Captain Tom Otter. In private, the captain may rebel, but in public “[h]e is his wife’s subject; he calls her princess, and at such times as these follows her up and down the house like a page, with his hat off, partly for heat, partly for reverence” (2.6.53–56). Saturninus is in a worse case, for while he is his own man in public, in private he follows his wife’s lead. Certainly, an emperor who invites petticoat government by an enemy queen invites disaster. Tudor ideology can tolerate Lucius’s leading the Goths into Rome, even though the act looks like a foreign takeover, because a Rome ruled by Saturninus is a Rome ruled by a “child” who is ruled by his “mother.” Lucius is returning Rome to strong male rule, breached when the young emperor proved too susceptible to mature female beauty. Whatever appeal her age may have for Saturninus, Tamora is portrayed as seductively attractive. By cuckolding him, she validates the popular belief that most women are deceitful, quick to take advantage of men’s sexual vulnerability. As a beautiful exotic, not her bid for hypostatization as Revenge but her very flesh, her physical being, is a convincing disguise. Significantly, it is Saturninus, rather than Aaron, who fetishizes the whiteness of that flesh, comparing her to “the stately Phoebe” (1.1.316)16 and finding her “goodly” for her “hue” (1.1.261).17 Whereas Othello’s attraction to “that whiter skin of hers [Desdemona’s] than snow” (5.2.4) makes a point about racial difference, Saturninus’s attraction to Tamora plays to the Elizabethan concern with the discrepancy between appearance and reality; Tamora, the lusty widow, like Henry VI’s Queen Margaret, becomes all the more alien when she is revealed as partaking of another Elizabethan convention, disturbing enough to be rarely if ever depicted as comic: the white devil. In a sermon one T. Adams preached in London in 1613, The white divell, or the Hypocrite uncased, the white devil is exemplified by Judas (Lucas 1:193). The comparison indicates the vileness of the hypocrite more clearly than does John Webster’s heroic Vittoria Corombona. Contained within this malevolent formulation, Tamora forfeits the playgoers’ respect and sympathy for her mercy speech, since it was well known that “[t]he Devil can transform himself into an angel of light”

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(Tilley 151, D231). That Tamora looks and speaks like an angel of light makes her especially dangerous; for some, she is the play’s archvillain. As another adage teaches, “The white Devil is worse than the black” (Tilley 155, D310). Eventually, the baby Tamora bears by Aaron unmasks her to the Goths as no true white woman but a white devil. Demonized by lust as much as by hypocrisy, Tamora can be read as a sexualized version of the Countess of Auvergne in Henry VI, Part One. Although vicious rather than foolish, Tamora is another foreign wouldbe deceiver intent on destroying a heroic soldier-father. As a remarried widow and mother, she is also a sexualized forerunner of Cymbeline’s queen, who planned to kill the king in order to advance her son. All three characters use not only their beauty but their verbal “art” (4.4.109) to beguile. The revelation of Tamora’s cruelty and adultery following her noble speech on behalf of Alarbus may have appeared less discrepant to Shakespeare’s audience than to us, for chaste women were enjoined to silence, especially in public, the talker’s “open mouth [being] the signifier for invited entrance elsewhere” (Boose 196). Tamora, of course, must speak if she is to accomplish her revenge; Lavinia’s inability to speak emphasizes through contrast the importance of control over language. As an alien empress dependent upon Saturninus, Tamora is forced “to gloze [dissimulate] with all” (4.4.35). Her successful strategy is a function of her wit, to which Marcus and Aaron attest.18 Tamora’s twin descriptions of the forest vale (2.3.10–29 and 91–108), the one inviting love, the other death, mark her as an expert in the rhetoric of duplicity, a Duessa figure: I will enchant the old Andronicus With words more sweet, and yet more dangerous, Than baits to fish, or honey-stalks to sheep, ... For I can smooth and fill his aged ears With golden promises, that, were his heart Almost impregnable, his old years deaf, Yet should both ear and heart obey my tongue. (4.4.89–91, 96–99)

The act 5 reversal in which Tamora misjudges Titus’s gullibility and leaves her sons in Titus’s power does not convincingly prove “the subtile Queen” a fool.19 Rather, it is out of character, designed to alleviate the discomfort occasioned in the audience by a beautiful but wicked woman’s cunning and persuasiveness, attributes that suggest another stereotype the English chose to regard as alien, this one normally a male preserve: the Machiavel.

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Although Tamora fails to deceive Titus when she is disguised as Revenge, her attempt is unsettling nonetheless, since a mother seeking to avenge her son is to some extent an allowed role, motherhood being a destined livery and revenge a wild kind of justice. Demetrius’s evocation of Hecuba, avenger of her son Polydorus (1.1.136–38), would have heightened sympathy for her analogue Tamora among playgoers conditioned to respond automatically to the Troy trope. To counter such sympathy, Tamora is immediately recast as “a witch-mother from across the Alps” (Fiedler 181), much like Queen Margaret, another mother in Shakespeare seeking to avenge a murdered son though less successfully. Why should avenging mothers be represented as villainous? In a harsh world of war and violent politics, where sons are killed with regularity, a spate of avenging mothers would threaten the status quo. Tamora’s short-lived triumph over her enemies is dangerously subversive insofar as she wields the power of an injured mother. Although war redefines the Gothic queen as a victim and possession of the emperor, revenge heightens her importance. As a Senecan “angry woman,” or femina furens (Stapleton 41), Tamora can assert her subjectivity. Hence, patriarchy has no more use for her as Até than for the lusty widow or the white devil. To counter the pathos of her unheeded plea for her oldest son’s life, Tamora is shown mothering her brutish surviving sons, encouraging them to rape, mutilate, and murder. Since their father is a textual aporia (a gesture toward the dangers of the unheaded woman), Tamora bears sole responsibility, by blood and tutelage, for their viciousness. The old Duchess of York in Richard III, cursed with a homicidal son, wishes she had strangled him in her womb (4.4.137–39). Not so Tamora, who is supportive of her boys and they of her. But whether the mother of monsters accepts or rejects her issue, the effect is chilling; Tamora does both. Manipulated by the plot, the fond mother of Chiron, Demetrius, and the hewed Alarbus demands an act akin to hewing when she orders Aaron to “christen it [their newborn infant] with thy dagger’s point” (4.2.70). Elizabethans may have considered the baby—black, illegitimate, the token of an adulterous union, his life jeopardizing his parents and brother—as much a monster as his kin. At the same time, with regard to the infant as well as to the sons she consumes in act 5, Tamora literally plays out the male fantasy of the “suffocating mother.” Constructing Tamora as eager for her baby’s death maps obvious misogynist meanings onto the play’s surface, but subtextually Titus intimates that, in a world given over to war, where “civilized” victors practice human sacrifice, a woman might well fear to invest in maternity as a vital source of happiness.

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Tamora has reason to elevate sex over motherhood. Underlying these issues concerning maternity is the reminder that for most of the play she is a mother-to-be and probably was one when she married Saturninus. Offstage, for much of Titus, she yields place to Aaron, but by delivering his child, she provides the occasion of his desperate venture: to place a Moorish child in the imperial nursery and in line for the empery. Even though Aaron’s capture suppresses Saturninus’s false fatherhood, the troubling issue of women’s ineradicable role in inheritance is raised. That role is both personal and, for the elite, public. What could be more troubling than for such power to reside in a woman coded as “unruly,” a malignant alien? Tamora’s rejection of a bond with women is another alien behavior. Notwithstanding that Elizabethan men were wary of friendships between females (who knew what domestic insurrections women planned among their gossips?), Tamora’s autonomy is yet more threatening. Denying mercy to Lavinia, constructed as her opposite in the binarism of virgin widow/widowed whore, Tamora unhesitatingly rejects a repressive gender role that enjoins women to be “chaste, silent, obedient” (Hull, Chaste 142), accordingly inhibiting sexuality, assertiveness, and power. Because any widow stood in peril of being styled lusty unless she was a widowed virgin (or had long been a celibate married to the memory of her husband), Shakespeare ambiguates Lavinia’s status. Tamora’s line “And let my spleenful sons this trull deflow’r” (2.3.191) confers a virginal ambiance upon Lavinia befitting a chaste wife. Tamora’s vengeance is to turn Lavinia into a grotesque epitome of the paragon. For who is more chaste than a violated woman, haunted by remembrance of having been, as Jane Marcus aptly puts it, “gang-raped”? (80). Who more silent than a woman without a tongue? Who more obedient than a woman compelled to rely on men for her every need? By abetting Lavinia’s vicious refashioning, Tamora mocks the complacent, self-serving expectations of her male masters; here, she seems to say, is your ideal of womanhood in full flower. Even more ironic is the death meted out to Lavinia for enabling Titus’s vengeance by revealing her assailants’ names. In so doing, she has published her family’s dishonor and must die (Aebischer 56–57). Similarly, Tamora repudiates the patriarchal taxonomy of identity that categorizes and controls women by making their primary attribute their relationship to men. A remarried lusty widow, Tamora subverts the subordination inherent in the categories of maid, widow, or wife by nonconformity. In act 1, scene 1, she is unconstrained by any marital status label. Immediately after her marriage to Saturninus, Aaron blazons himself as her past and future lover. As adulterer, she is wife and

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no wife. Nor is she more inclined to subordinate herself to her lover than to her husbands, dead or alive. While Aaron claims that he holds Tamora “fett’red in amorous chains” (2.1.15), her insistence that he kill his son by her suggests that the chains are weaker than he had realized. Her willingness to defy the code of chastity, even if defiance entails infanticide, is tied to her status as Gothic queen and Roman empress. Her actions are communicated as a dangerous privilege of rank, the destabilizing prerogative of a maker of manners, embedding in Titus a tacit interrogation of female authority. According to the code that Tamora defies, a remarried widow is suspect, a sexually active widow who has not remarried is reprehensible, but totally beyond the pale is the widow whose lust knows no color bar. Her transgression far exceeds that of Saturninus, even though his affinities are with the besotted Henry VI and lecherous Edward IV, insofar as these three rulers disregard their countries’ political interests. But, whereas Saturninus is an irresponsible ruler, Tamora is far worse. Her choice of Aaron as her lover recklessly attacks a binarism based on color, religion, and birthplace (black/Moslem/African versus white/ Christian/European), a binarism designed to validate “our” entitlement to what is “theirs,” no matter how similar “they” may be to “us.”20 Modern racism was still “in progress” in Shakespeare’s day, but Aaron the Moor was designed, in part because of his color, to terrify. To the Romans, Tamora is alien because she is a Goth, but to most white spectators, past and present, Tamora is alien because of her conventionflaunting racial predilections. Emergent racism provides the answer to the initially puzzling question of why the Goths want to “be adveng’d on cursed Tamora” (5.1.16), since one might suppose that they would regard their queen’s cuckolding the Roman emperor as highly entertaining. Why should they be offended? As Lucius produces first Aaron and then Aaron’s infant, he refers to them as if he had already informed the Goths of Tamora’s affair: “This is the pearl that pleas’d your empress’ eye, / And here’s the base fruit of her burning lust” (5.1.42–43). Bonding Lucius to the Goths are shared biases against Moors and women: not only will women deceive you, but they will deceive you with those marked out as Other. Tamora forfeits her racial privilege when Aaron is revealed as her lover. Distinction between the two is lost when, in the last scene of the play, they are twinned as fierce subhumans, each a “ravenous tiger,” Aaron at 5.3.5 Tamora at 5.3.195. Most abhorrent, to attain her revenge, Tamora has empowered a black to commit crimes against whites. For this, Goths and Romans alike seek and obtain vengeance. The new world order with which the play concludes is entirely white and male, for the nurse,

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Lavinia, and Tamora are all dead and Aaron is soon to die. Emperor Lucius has a child but—another suggestive aporia—no wife. He cannot be cuckolded. Like all aliens, Tamora is necessarily, if paradoxically, constructed out of familiar materials—lusty widow, white devil, Semiramis, Machiavel, Até. Her difference is a marker of social disapproval and socially determined inferiority. By branding her as alien, such heinous deeds as incitement to rape, mutilation, and murder are blurred with female beauty, intelligence, and sensuality—qualities that often serve as a means of resistance to male hegemony. What allows Tamora to partially elude or contest the stereotypes that generate her are incipient alternative narrations or subtexts created by the interchangeability of Goths and Romans, insofar as both subscribe to a code of racism, sexism, and violence. Racial slurs dissolve polarities, for example, for Demetrius the Goth, Aaron is the “hellish dog,” the “foul . . . fiend” (4.2.77, 79) who compromised Tamora; for Lucius the Roman, he’s “the incarnate devil” with a “fiend-like face” (5.1.40, 45). Sexist as well as racist, both Goths and Romans exhibit the “murderous hostility toward women which informs the play” (Willbern 175). Just as Chiron and Demetrius are quick to redefine their love for Lavinia as appetite for “some certain snatch or so” (2.1.95), so Lucius’s determination to kill Lavinia rather than infringe on Bassianus’s right to her (1.1.296–98) betrays the same “murderous hostility,” issuing from a code that makes chattel of women. Lavinia’s rape only continues her use as a site of contention over male property rights, and her death is predictable once the vengeance her presence evokes is achieved, suicide validating her virtue and her family’s honor (Baines 158). It follows that Titus should kill both Tamora, the remarried widow, and his widowed daughter, Lavinia, who has been raped by Tamora’s sons—thus obliterating her shame and his sorrow.21 The murders smudge the distinction between a widow being known illicitly through rape, the other legally through remarriage, perhaps for some playgoers provoking questions about the construction of social reality. Moreover, that Goths and Romans are equally predisposed to violence is apparent from the equipoise between the atrocities Tamora perpetrates or applauds and the slaughter of her three legitimate sons. This disintegration of difference, obscuring moral poles, destabilizes Tamora’s characterization and creates a space for unauthorized responses. Some modern spectators, gifted with a measure of ideological immunity, may therefore perceive Tamora as cruelly twisted by the killing of Alarbus and refuse to judge her; they may respect her feistiness and her absence of color prejudice. Such responses, however, are insufficient to permit the wholesale recuperation of Tamora; a vehicle for

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odious stereotypes, trapped in the defamatory plot of Titus, she remains a villain—though a villain in a tragedy whose overt racism, misogyny, and sadism demands its reclassification as a “problem play.” Still, her very overdetermination allows us to understand her as a simulacrum modeled out of a patriarchal society’s fears and to note the fissures in her construction. Particularly revealing is the aside in which she expresses the hunger for security that, no less than vengefulness, drives her to plot the death of Titus: “Thy life-blood out . . . / Then is all safe, the anchor in the port” (4.4.37–38). For a moment, the mask of the satanic alien drops, and we catch a last glimpse of a wretched, frightened woman, a prize of war, fighting back. Notably, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, the two most popular Shakespearean tragedies in Elizabethan London, feature remarrying widows. But, whereas Tamora vigorously exploits such agency as is incumbent upon her status as empress, Queen Gertrude is still largely figured as a notorious embodiment of weakness: “Frailty, thy name is woman!” (Ham. 1.2.146). Though the ancient myth of widows as sexually ravenous had survived in early modern England, optimists hoped that with age widows would outgrow lust. Apparently, Gertrude did not. Steven Mullaney explains Hamlet’s misogyny as grounded in obsessive disgust with “Gertrude’s aging sexuality, conceived at times as a contradiction in terms, at times as a violation of her own body akin in its unnaturalness to a rebellion in the body politic: hers is a passion . . . at once unimaginable and yet impossible not to imagine and visualize in graphic detail” (151).22 Hamlet’s image of Gertrude supplants the persona that the lines she speaks would otherwise evoke: “Less powerful as an independent character than as the site for fantasies larger than she is, she is preeminently mother as other, the intimate unknown figure around whom these fantasies swirl” (Adelman 30, 34; Traub 48). For Hamlet and Hamlet’s more judgmental critics, only by excising her sexuality can she be redeemed. Consequently, a stage or screen Gertrude whose dress and behavior correspond to her speeches is rare. In all three texts of Hamlet, the queen has no provocative lines, although when Shakespeare wants to depict a libidinous woman, he does not hesitate to let her verse reflect her character; thus, Tamora woos Aaron: And after conflict such as was suppos’d The wand’ring prince and Dido once enjoyed, ... We may, each wreathed in the other’s arms (Our pastimes done), possess a golden slumber. . . . (Tit. 2.3.21–22, 25–26)

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In fact, by heeding Ben Jonson’s dictum, “Speak, that I may see thee,” one discovers that except for Tamora and Cleopatra, the remarrying widows say nothing intentionally salacious that could serve as prima facie textual evidence of lustful desire. Further, unlike Tamora and Cleopatra (or Belleforest’s Gertrude-character), it is far from certain that Shakespeare’s Gertrude has had a lover—other than the suspicions of Hamlet, who could not have observed his mother’s actions from Wittenberg, and the word of the Ghost. That word is “adulterate.” As early as 1938, John W. Draper pointed out that in Shakespeare’s day, “adulterate” encompassed multiple meanings stemming from its etymology, among them “unchaste,” and “lewd,” and was used accordingly in the New Testament and Canon Law (112–14).23 Thus, in Richard III, Margaret speaks of “[t]h’ adulterate Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey” (4.4.69), and in Sonnet 121, the speaker asks, “For why should others’ false adulterate eyes / Give salutation to my sportive blood?” (Kehler, “Recollections” 7–9). Bradley to the contrary, Draper insists that “adulterate,” even in the sense of adultery, may refer not to what Gertrude did but to what Claudius wanted to do. Moreover, when Hamlet tells Horatio that the king had “whor’d” Gertrude (5.2.64), “whor’d” could denote what Hamlet (but not the court) construes as an incestuous marriage (112–13). Or it may simply express his own outraged, turbulent feelings for his mother. Similarly, aside from testimony regarding the method of his murder, the Ghost, that thinly disguised, self-proclaimed “radiant angel” (1.5.55), is an obviously biased witness. But despite the Ghost’s bias and his widow’s textual decorum, theatrical representations of Gertrude suggest their opposite. That Gertrude, like Claudius, drinks too much has become a stage-business cliché. Imogen Stubbs, a “Yummy Mummy” in Trevor Nunn’s 2004 Old Vic production, took to the bottle after the closet scene (32). Michael Billington lumps Gertrude (Diane Fletcher) with Claudius as “sensual topers” in the Catalan director Calixto Bieito’s 2003 Edinburgh Hamlet. A shameless Gertrude, chastened only by the closet scene, has long dominated the stage. In Adrian Noble’s 1993 RSC Stratford production with Kenneth Branagh, an Edwardian Gertrude, Jane Lapotaire, wore bridal white but sported a too-revealing décolletage. Watching “The Mousetrap,” Gertrude and the Player Queen established their similarity as mirror-image sensualists: both wore red gowns. Significantly, the Player Queen sat with her legs apart. In the closet scene, Gertrude’s scarlet gown matched her scarlet bed. But after being upbraided by Hamlet, she virtually hobbled offstage, a broken woman. When she reappeared, she had renounced makeup and looked primly severe. At Claudius’s command, “O, come away!” (4.1.44), Gertrude set off

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in a different direction. Despite her paucity of speeches, Gertrude’s entrances and exits demonstrate a clear pattern; she is associated with Claudius far less after the closet scene. Instead, she is linked to Hamlet, either directly or through his friend Horatio (O’Brien, “Revision” 28–30). Yet, the image of Gertrude as lascivious persists. In the critical tradition of A. C. Bradley, John Dover Wilson, Harold Jenkins, and Philip Edwards, Michael Boyd’s 2004 RSC Hamlet presented Gertrude (Sian Thomas) as an adulteress (Taylor). While even the most successful stage performances of Hamlet reach a limited audience, Branagh’s and Zeffirelli’s films can be counted upon to inculcate their director’s interpretations in the minds of anyone who likes “highbrow” movies. Sir Lawrence Olivier’s 1948 Ernest Jones–inspired Hamlet was pivotal for film; Eileen Herlie, who played Gertrude, was considerably younger than Olivier as Hamlet. Critics observed that the bed onto which Hamlet flung Gertrude was noteworthy for its sexually suggestive, labial shape. Herlie seemed to embody Freud’s notion of a female binarism that juxtaposed gentle affection against “a sensuality that is ruthlessly demanding—consuming men as if they were alien beings” (11: 108). Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 Gertrude, Glenn Close, was so girlishly flirtatious that she provoked desire even in her son; she seemed to have consciously fostered their Oedipal relationship. In Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film of Hamlet, Julie Christie played Gertrude as a party girl, for all that she ultimately rejects Claudius. Perhaps even more far-reaching than films are student cram books like Cliffs Notes, Monarch Notes, and SparkNotes (Kehler “Outline” 53–62), now in free online versions under various titles: Studyworld Studynotes, PinkMonkey, Barrons Booknotes, Jiffy Notes, etc. As a rule, these supply students with decades-old criticism, reprinted ad infinitum. The favored interpretation of Gertrude is still that of A. C. Bradley, the great character critic of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Bradley teaches that “the moral shock of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother’s true nature” causes Hamlet’s suicidal thoughts in act 1. He adds that Gertrude married Claudius “not for any reason of state, nor even out of old family affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an eruption of coarse sensuality . . . speeding post-haste to its horrible delight” (85–86). The phrase “horrible delight” tells us more about Bradley and the Victorian age in which his character was formed than it does about Gertrude. Bradley reveals his own Ruskin-like disgust at female desire in his comment on Ophelia: “There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother . . . that what had seemed simple

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and affectionate love might really have been something very different” (114n.19). Of all Bradley’s judgments on Gertrude, the most quoted is his comparison of her to “a sheep in the sun”: The Queen was not a bad-hearted woman, not at all the woman to think little of murder. But she had a soft animal nature, and was very dull and very shallow. She loved to be happy, like a sheep in the sun; and, to do her justice, it pleased her to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun. She never saw that drunkenness is disgusting till Hamlet told her so; and, though she knew that he considered her marriage ‘o’erhasty’, she was untroubled by any shame at the feelings which led to it. (123)

Bradley therefore rejoices in the queen’s ultimate misery because it is redemptive: “When affliction comes to her, the good in her nature struggles to the surface through the heavy mass of sloth” (123). In his wake, PinkMonkey describes Gertrude as “the foolish, weak-willed Queen of Denmark,” and SparkNotes teaches that “Gertrude loves Hamlet deeply, but she is a shallow weak woman who seeks affection and status more urgently than moral rectitude or truth.” Aside from the cram-book writers, most of whom are moonlighting high-school teachers, character critics of the Bradleyan stamp are largely extinct. But since the cram-book writers are apt to be the only critics most students read, their influence is disproportionate. What produces the need to condemn Gertrude? She has been held responsible not only for events that presumably transpired before the play and for her actions during the play, but also, according to T. S. Eliot, for the failure of the play itself.24 Perhaps it is easier for spectators to understand a character if they assist the playwright by imaginatively painting her in bolder strokes than he did. Thus, conjectured adultery becomes a certainty; for a few, Gertrude’s conjectured complicity in the murder becomes a certainty as well. Perhaps because Hamlet excludes a female perspective, because it virtually compels its audience to accept the subject position of the Ghost and his son, we overlook inconsistencies in their construction.25 If the Ghost knows that murder is “most foul,” as even “in the best it is” (1.5.27),26 why does he demand that his son commit the same “most foul” crime? And if, even before speaking to the Ghost, Hamlet has been plunged into suicidal despair by Gertrude’s remarriage, should we accept him as a reliable interpreter of his mother’s guilt? But we do accept the Ghost and Hamlet as reliable interpreters because in orchestrating audience response, Shakespeare had traditional

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ideology on his side. In John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614), Ferdinand says pointedly to his sister, “You are a widow: / You know already what man is” (1.1.293–94). Her appetites having been aroused, she is now a lusty widow. Sexuality, even male sexuality, has never been well received in the Western world: “The beds i’ th’ East are soft . . . ” murmurs Marc Antony, as he decides to leave his Roman wife for the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra (Ant. 2.6.50). So disruptive to good order was the construct of worldly, nymphomaniacal, and independent widows, that nothing was put past them. They might be murderous as well. How could a sexually insatiable wife get rid of a tiresome old husband when she wanted an exciting new one? Divorce was almost impossible. A familiar proverb reminded the Elizabethan bachelor, “It is dangerous [m]arrying a widow because she has cast her rider” (Tilley 446, M700). In The White Devil (1612), John Webster’s historical heroine, Vittoria Corombona, instigates the murder of her husband so that she can wed her lover. In Cymbeline, the queen, a widow who remarried England’s king, plans to poison him and his daughter. Had she poisoned her first husband as well? By extension, then, could not Gertrude have had a hand in attaining her short-lived widowhood and sudden remarriage? The mythology of widowhood did not allow for any factor but lust in determining a widow’s choice of celibacy or remarriage. Yet political and economic necessity and ambition provide sufficient incentive for the remarriages of Lady Grey, Lady Anne, Hostess Quickly, Mistress Overdone, Octavia, and Cymbeline’s queen. The last makes an art of faking, not feeling, desire, a far cry from the uncontrollable passion attributed to remarrying widows. Shakespeare’s widows who remarry may or may not love their new spouses, but with the possible exception of Hortensio’s bride, they, like so many Tudor-Stuart widows, always have a practical reason for wedding again. In this context, then, I question the much maligned “o’erhasty marriage” of widow Gertrude (2.2.57) as motivated by coarse sensuality that leads her “to prey on garbage” (1.5.57), wedding her brother-in-law within a month (or is it two? or three?) of her husband’s death.27 Could Gertrude have had some other motive? The behavior of her First Quarto counterpart, Gertred, provides a clue. To briefly recapitulate the history of the three different extant versions of Hamlet: What we now call the Second Quarto text of Hamlet, Q2, appeared during Shakespeare’s lifetime in 1604/05. The Second Quarto has long been accepted as deriving most directly from Shakespeare’s lost manuscript; the best text of the play, its queen is Gertrard. The First Folio version, F1, was published by Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, in 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death. Being more remote from his

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pen, perhaps a performance version, it is thought less authoritative; however, it contains some passages lacking in Q2, so most editors conflate Q2 with F1—in which the queen is Gertrude. Last is the First Quarto, Q1, which, although dated 1603, was not discovered until the 1820s. Q1, according to its title page “hath beene diuerse times acted by his Highnesse seruants in the Cittie of London: as also in the two Vniuersities of Cambridge and Oxford, and else-where” (Kliman and Bertram, xxvii).28 This most puzzling version of Hamlet may be a poor memorial reconstruction or a shortened acting version, for even today it is a playable text (Kehler, “First” 17–18). It is also the best known of the “bad” quartos, a term some textual scholars challenge.29 Among its chief differences from Q2 and F1 are its brevity, being about half their length; its omission of Laertes’ rebellion against Claudius; and its protagonist being younger by ten years. Most important for my purposes, when Gertred is forced to choose between Claudius and Hamlet, she leaves no doubt as to where her loyalty lies. On its surface, Q1 holds the queen to an even stricter standard of chastity, as advocated in “The Mousetrap,” than the two other versions in which to remarry is to kill one’s husband a second time. Q1 is unique in that it adds an explicit, hyperbolic death wish: “When death takes you, let life from me depart” (CLN1321). Subject to so demanding a code (in effect, demanding some form of sati), Gertred is guiltier than her counterparts, not because of when she remarried or whom she remarried. That she remarried at all, that she survives, condemns her. Yet Gertred’s few speeches are characterized not by lust or “will” but almost exclusively by meekness. For the most part, she is silent and neutralized politically. Corambis (Q1’s Polonius character) slights her and Claudius typically overlooks her. In Q1’s prayer scene, Claudius does not speak of murdering for “My Crowne, mine owne Ambition, and my Queene” (F1TLN 2331). Neither is Q1’s Gertred “so coniunctiue [Q2 “concliue”] to my [Claudius’s] life and soule; / That as the Starre moues not but in his Sphere, / I could not but by her” (F1TLN 3022–24). Q1’s audience would not likely conclude that longing for Gertred led Claudius to kill his brother. Silence seems natural to Gertred, not merely imposed by others. The little she says only echoes the lines of other characters, expresses agreement, or gives thanks to God. No small part of why she impresses us as “a relatively passive mirror of events, a surface without independent motives for action” (Urkowitz 300) is her possessing in quantity the silence that patriarchal writers thought so proper for women. In 1613, Barnabe Rich wrote that foremost among “The infallible markes of a vertuous woman . . . [are] “bashfullnes [and] silence. . . . She must not bee a vaine talker” (qtd. in Hull, Chaste 196).

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Gertred is also preeminent for the virtues of obedience and piety. Unless the actor chooses to play an unscripted “subversive resistance to her apparent treatment as a virtual prop,” she defers to the wishes of her husband (Shand, “Gertred” 39). This queen does not disobey him when she drinks from the poisoned cup. Gertred drinks before Claudius orders her not to: Queene. Here Hamlet, thy mother drinkes to thee. Shee drinkes. King. Do not drinke Gertred: O t’is the poysned cup! (Q1CLN 2160–62)

As for piety, “[a]lthough her role is just over half the size of the Q2/F Gertrude, she has three times the number of references to God, heaven, her soul, and prayer . . .” (Shand, “Gertred” 42). These religious references sanitize Gertred and make it difficult for an audience to believe that she would have committed adultery. They underscore her innocence—except for her misguided remarriage. Silence, obedience, piety—such qualities become all Elizabethan women. Join to these qualities motherly concern and celibacy (a strong possibility for Gertred after the closet scene when Hamlet rebukes her), and Gertred becomes a near approximation of the “Vertuous Widdow.” Gertred’s bland words and actions are always decorous and genteel, her behavior always maternal. Claudius entreats Hamlet to remain in Denmark because he is “the Ioy and halfe heart of your mother” (Q1CLN 176); the phrase underlines Gertred’s domestic role. Gertred agrees to see “The Mousetrap,” for “it ioyes me at the soule / He [Hamlet] is inclin’d to any kinde of mirth” (Q1CLN 1186–87). She stakes her only claim to importance on her position as Hamlet’s mother. In her closet, Gertred shows the first signs of self-regard when, in reply to Hamlet’s accusation, “Mother, you haue my father much offended,” she demands, “How now boy?” (Q1CLN 1498–99). That is, the sole time that she insists on respect is as a mother. Again, while Gertred’s account of the murder of Polonius is similar to Q2’s and F1’s, Q1 has the unique lines “But then he throwes and tosses me about, / As one forgetting that I was his mother . . .” (Q1CLN 1607–08). She appears astonished that Hamlet could so disregard her parental status. Since Q1’s Hamlet is still in his teens,30 Gertred’s attitude toward a son new to adulthood is all the more understandable. When Claudius hopes “to heare good newes” from England” (Q1CLN 1678), Gertred devoutly observes, “God grant it may, heau’ns keep my Hamlet safe . . .” (Q1CLN 1681). Her last gesture of concern is when she offers Hamlet

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her napkin to wipe his sweaty face. Gertred toasts her son, saying, “Here Hamlet, thy mother drinkes to thee” (Q1CLN 2160)—“thy mother” rather than “[t]he Queene” (Q2/F1TLN 3758). Gertred’s maternal commitment is tested and starkly demonstrated at the end of the closet scene. When Hamlet confronts her explicitly with the truth about Claudius, she swears her innocence, “But as I haue a soule, I sweare by heauen, / I neuer knew of this most horride murder . . .” (Q1CLN 1582–83), then calls on God to witness her loyalty to her son:31 Hamlet, I vow by that maiesty, That knowes our thoughts, and lookes into our hearts, I will conceale, consent, and doe my best, What stratagem soe’re thou shalt deuise. (Q1CLN 1594–97)

Later, in a scene absent from the two other texts, Horatio tells Gertred that Hamlet has returned to Denmark. In order to forward Hamlet’s revenge, she promises Horatio that she will keep Claudius in the dark; she will “soothe and please him [Claudius] for a time . . . ” (Q1CLN 1820), although she now knows him for the murderer of her first husband and the would-be murderer of her beloved son. That she is able to “soothe and please him” suggests rigid self-control rather than lust. Maternally she asks Horatio to commend me A mothers care to him, bid him a while Be wary of his presence, lest that he Faile in that he goes about. (Q1CLN 1826–29)

When Gertred learns of the fate of Gilderstone and Rossencraft, she thanks heaven for preserving Hamlet, sending him “thowsand mothers blessings” (Q1CLN 1843). Her loyalties are not divided between Claudius and Hamlet. Her feelings are in no way ambiguous; her identity is grounded in motherhood. Overall, Q1 presents her as a cohesive but neutral character. It downplays unflattering conjectures about the queen. Gertred is neither temptress nor villain. With the single exception of her remarriage, she does and says what is expected of her and little more. Focusing on that exception, one may extrapolate from Gertred to her sister Gertrude, “a haiku of a woman.”32 She, too, is a queen newly

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widowed, her son abroad, and her brother-in-law “[p]opp’d in between th’ election and my [Hamlet’s] hopes” (5.2.65). To this point in her life, her reputation has been unstained; presumably, she is not eager to disappoint social expectations. When considering Claudius’s proposal, the Gertrude Shakespeare constructs must know that by remarrying she invites the world to see her as a lusty widow, perhaps as an adulterer. She must know that to marry her brother-in-law could be construed as incestuous and that if she marries him within a few months of the dead king’s passing, she magnifies the effect of an act that some will call vulgar, others sinful. Yet she does marry—arguably for the sake of her son.33 The play allows us to understand Gertrude as a mother willing to destroy her honor, to drink from a chalice poisoned with slander, because it is the only way to protect herself and her son and to safeguard his future claim to the throne.34 Such a reading does not entail rejecting the dominant subject position of the Ghost and Hamlet, for Getrude cannot share her strategy with her deceased husband and wisely chooses not to share it with Hamlet; his prolonged, ill-advised absence from Denmark while Claudius and Polonius were electioneering cost him the crown. Were she to refuse Claudius, she would lose her title and her freedom; more terrifying, Hamlet might lose his life. If she waits “the widow’s year,” Claudius could find a younger wife capable of childbearing. If Claudius had a son of his own, Hamlet’s claim would be drastically weakened. However, Gertrude’s role allows us to understand her not only as a selfsacrificing mother but also as a woman determined to remain queen. As an extraneous ex-queen, she would be sent away for safekeeping, probably to a convent or remote castle in what would amount to house arrest. Historically, that was the fate of Henry V’s widowed queen, Katherine of Valois, and Edward IV’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville. Royal widows were regarded as loose canon, their actions unpredictable, and therefore best kept under close surveillance. Gertrude could not shield Hamlet if Claudius decided to imprison or end the life of the nephew who might dispute his title. On the other hand, if the queen makes this “o’er hasty marriage,” she remains sole queen, and Hamlet remains the undisputed Prince of Denmark. She bars Claudius from fathering legitimate sons by any other woman. If she is not too old to bear children, at least any son of her second marriage will be Hamlet’s baby brother—and (oh dear) cousin! But more likely, she is too old or otherwise incapable of bearing a child; she has not given birth for some two or three decades (two in the First Quarto, three in the Second Quarto and First Folio). If she has no second son, she resolves the issue of le deuxième lit, or “the second bed.” Thus her marriage to Claudius precludes him from fathering legitimate

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sons, while protecting Hamlet’s claim to the throne and conceivably protecting his life. That it is rather nice to be a queen, that the “satyr” is a younger brother not known to require afternoon naps, that his “reechy kisses” may move her, that she may be learning to love him—these are bonuses she well deserves. The response Gertrude makes to what she sees as an attempted coup reveals her fear of losing all. To the messenger’s report—“They cry, ‘Choose we, Laertes shall be king!’”—she scornfully exclaims, “How cheerfully on the false trail they cry! / O, this is counter, you false Danish dogs!” (4.5.107, 110–11). That the rabble should choose the king, that they should choose outside the royal family, that they should support Laertes against Hamlet—all this is a false trail, counter to her own interests. Seizing Laertes (4.5.123, 127), she protects herself as queen in Claudius’s right as much as she protects Claudius. To be locked away as a superfluous dependent dowager upon Laertes’ accession would no more suit Gertrude than to have been put aside when her first husband died. Her effort to protect Claudius is no proof of hyperactive sexuality.35 Is such a queen open to the charge of being too cunning by half? Such criticism loses its force when collocated with how much Gertrude has at stake. Moreover, queens are of necessity political animals. Insofar as foresight in a man is too often read as unattractive calculation in a woman, best to dispense with routine judgmental views of the queen. If instead we align her with the practices of historical early modern English widows and of Shakespearean widows, her second marriage is not unusual. Those who were most vulnerable economically or politically were most likely to remarry. A pragmatic, historically situated reading, however, is not necessarily theatrical. Playing Gertrude as lusty is more dramatic than playing her as maternal; as frailty personified she becomes the vehicle of male fears that husbands are expendable. Women also identify with the Ghost and Hamlet, even to their disadvantage, because they share the very human fear of being too easily replaced. Juan Luis Vives understands: “For our frendes lyve with us, though they be absente from us or deade, if the lyvely image of them be imprinted in our hartes, with often thynkyng upon them, and dayly renewed, and theyr lyfe ever waxe fresshe in our myndes. And if we forgette them, than they dye towarde us” (Instruction 167). Although her hand was forced, Gertrude has remarried. She does not see the Ghost. The “black and grained spots” (3.4.90) in her soul that she does see may be no more than guilt over having “so soone forgot.” Like Gertrude, Regan acts out of multiple motives. Seeking remarriage, she answers to the lusty widow stereotype, though lust never

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displaces the political motives on which her survival is based. By complicating without mitigating Regan’s behavior, Shakespeare transcends caricature. Regan being a king’s daughter, Jacobean playgoers would have inferred that her marriage to Cornwall was arranged for England’s benefit. At his death, she seizes the opportunity to command her own destiny. The text suggests that Regan and Edmund are considerably younger than Cornwall, just as Gertrude and Claudius are younger than Hamlet Sr. The trace of paternalism that colors “[m]y Regan counsels well” (2.4.309) is reiterated in Cornwall’s grotesque promise to stand in lieu of a father to Edmund: “I will lay trust upon thee; and thou shalt find a dearer father in my love” (3.5.24–25). The text implies that Regan has been emotionally, if not literally, bastardized by her father’s favoring Cordelia. “I lov’d her most” (1.1.123), Lear announces before the entire court. Perhaps Regan senses her psychic counterpart in Edmund, who shares her sense of gnawing deprivation. Perhaps she senses his cunning and ambition. Fearing Goneril as a romantic and political rival makes Regan all the more impatient to assert her claim to Edmund. Shakespeare delineates the distinctive identities of King Lear’s ruthless sisters as early as the first scene: Reg. We shall further think of it. Gon. We must do something, and i’ th’ heat. (1.1.307–08, my italics).36

Goneril, the doer, is first to realize that Lear’s hundred knights could form the nucleus of a force that would allow the king to “resume the shape” he had surrendered (1.4.309). She acts upon her insight by first rejecting her father’s terms and then rejecting her father himself. She commissions the murder of her “[m]ilk-liver’d” husband (4.2.50), whom she thinks too weak an instrument to partner her. To secure Edmund, she poisons her sister and, when her schemes are discovered, stabs herself. Distinguishing Goneril as “proactive” is an understatement. Although Regan claims to be “made of that self metal as my sister” (1.1.69), she is a follower. Regan seconds Goneril in making the fulsome love speech Lear demands and seconds her again in denying shelter to her father’s retinue of knights. She is belated in arranging an alliance with Edmund. At the beginning of act 3, scene 7, Regan stays behind to torture Gloucester, giving Goneril and Edmund the opportunity to reach an offstage understanding. The pleasure Regan takes in tormenting Kent and Gloucester reveals her most distinctive quality: sadism. When Cornwall decrees that Kent, disguised as Caius, sit in the stocks until noon, Regan doubles his already crippling sentence: “Till

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noon? Till night, my lord, and all night too” (2.2.135). When Cornwall commands the servants to bind Gloucester, Regan cries, “Hard, hard” (3.7.32), and pulls the hair from his beard. Feverishly excited by the torture, she goads her husband to complete the blinding: “One side will mock another; th’ other too” (3.7.71). After killing Cornwall’s servant who challenges ducal authority by daring to intervene, she engages in emotional torture, jeering at Gloucester for his credulous confidence in Edmund: “Thou call’st on him that hates thee” (3.7.88). Although earlier Regan had urged hanging Gloucester, she lets the wretched man live. Having pleasured herself by shattering his spirit, she exults in his continued misery, commanding her servants to “[g]o thrust him out at gates, and let him smell / His way to Dover” (3.7.93–94). Yet, not long after, she realizes that Gloucester moves the populace to pity for himself and hostility toward her and that not to have killed him was “great ignorance” (4.5.9), a dangerously flawed strategy. Why then does Goneril regard Regan, a comparative lightweight, as a serious competitor for Edmund? What is it that transforms Regan into a “mighty opposite”? To explain Regan’s behavior, critics have long offered readings drawing on various social sciences: thus, the furious cruelty Regan shows toward Kent and Gloucester is grounded in displaced rage toward Lear for rejecting her; her rivalry with Goneril for Edmund is a displaced form of the sisters’ youthful rivalry for the king’s affection (Reid 240, 243–44). Playing Regan for the RSC in 1976, Judi Dench stuttered, but only when speaking to Lear, an impairment he found irritating. The audience was meant to perceive Lear’s part in creating Regan’s cruelty (Kelly, “See” 140–41). Many critics have come to favor sociological readings that engage issues of gender and material circumstance. Regan (and both of her sisters) model a unisex literary type, the virago, based on a reversal of social norms. Viragos come in both good and evil versions (Cordelia leading an army is a good virago). But because viragos contravene gender expectations—being outspoken, fearless, and selfpossessed—at their best they are troublemakers, at their worst vicious (Cox 143–57, esp. 146). One psychosocial approach to the play interprets its villains as “more subject to calculation of personal advantage than sentiment in regard to the person . . .” (Margolies 16). Expressed financially, such calculation becomes “mercantile competitiveness” or antagonistic individualism, defiant of traditional social and economic behaviors (Kelly, “King” 15, 5). In Yvonne Brewster’s London Talawa production, Regan (Cathy Tyson) played Regan as ever more grasping, licking her lips to signify that she was propelled by “irresistible appetite, rather than innate evil . . .” (Kelly, “See” 141). Taking these ideas a step further, Christina León Alfar asserts that “a desire for political survival

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drives, at least partially, their [Goneril and Regan’s] involvement with Edmund” (98). In the political conflict between the sisters, Regan has an edge—the widowed status that leaves her eligible for remarriage, a status Goneril does her best to emulate. Forgetting for a moment that Regan is “a royal,” a childless, relatively young aristocratic widow would have been a catch in Stuart England. Yet, with the possible exception of Hortensio’s Widow, like all the other Shakespearean widows, and many real-life widows who remarry or wish to remarry, Regan acts on a desire for selfpreservation. For commoners like Hostess Quickly and Mistress Overdone, self-preservation entails economic security. For aristocrats like Lady Grey, Lady Anne, and Regan, left in untenable political positions, self-preservation is contingent on political security, which translates into wealth and power. Although nominally Regan fights against the French, the conflict we see her emotionally engaged in—so much so that her prosecution of a defensive war seems almost cursory—is against Goneril, her competitor for Edmund. At some point between Cornwall’s death and act 4, scene 5, when Regan tells Oswald, “My lord is dead; Edmund and I have talk’d, / And more convenient is he for my hand / Than for your lady’s” (30–32), Regan has arranged her marriage to Edmund. She attempts to formalize that marriage on the battlefield: “Witness the world, that I create thee here / My lord and master” (5.3.77–78); not for her is “the widow’s year.” She does not bother to feign mourning because no one’s opinion matters to her. But why has she chosen Edmund? For modern viewers, the play’s focus on sexual rivalry may obscure the sisters’ intense political rivalry. Jacobean spectators, however, having been taught relentlessly that only a strong monarchy can protect the nation against civil war, must have shuddered when Lear divides England between Goneril and Regan. Because Jacobeans need not have read Gorbuduc to readily envisage a conflict for total power between the sisters, Shakespeare could forego emphasis on a virtual certainty; for an author bent on audience appeal, sex trumps politics. But whatever the ratio of sex to politics, at the heart of Regan’s attraction to Edmund, the imperative of remarriage, and remarriage to the right husband, is foremost. Virago or not, Regan needs a man to protect her duchy against the inevitable incursions of her proactive sister, inclined to act “i’ th’ heat.” Doubtless, ambition as well as fear motivates Regan. With the whole of England as a prize, the right husband could enable her to go on the attack. Regan may desire Edmund sexually, but the text also encourages a political reading in which the appeal of this “proper” young man (1.1.18) must stem in good measure from the merciless efficiency

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that wins him his brother’s inheritance and defeats the French army. The competition for Edmund echoes the sisters’ earlier competition for the best share of the kingdom—a rivalry for land and authority. Regan resembles the remarrying widows insofar as she is under political/economic pressure that can be relieved through remarriage. Just as the derogatory stereotype of the lusty widow suppressed the material motives of real-life widows in early modern England, so it suppresses the dramatic imitation of those motives on the Renaissance stage. Goneril and Regan, having gained power without security, fight Lear, Gloucester, France, Albany, and each other against a threatened loss of power. Their circumstances and behavior resemble those of Shakespearean male kin, their rivalry ending in death, a fitting reward for their brutality. Yet, in the play’s last scene, before Lear dies, Shakespeare’s text directs that all of Lear’s daughters, not just Cordelia, are on stage. The bodies of Goneril and Regan are produced at Albany’s command (while Edmund’s body, not insignificantly, is removed: no distraction is going to disturb the stage picture of family reunion). The audience looks at a stage crowded with female—only female—death and remembers the opening scene, only now all the “sometime daughters” are estranged by death. . . . (Rutter 17)

The male survivors are now all single men, in no danger of being cuckolded, posthumously or otherwise. Although King Lear represents neither sex as predominant to the other in kindness or cruelty, one of Cornwall’s servants, nominally condemning Regan for Gloucester’s blinding, voices a distressing view of all women: If she live long, And in the end meet the old course of death, Women will all turn monsters. (3.7.100–102)

That is, all women are potentially as cruel and murderous as Regan; only apprehension of divine judgment holds them in check. One could argue that Cordelia proves him wrong. Or perhaps more aptly, if Regan and Goneril are his case in point, it is because they are acting more like Shakespearean brothers than sisters. Conflict between sisters, cousins, or “sworn sisters” is rare in Shakespeare; the rivalries between Kate and Bianca and between Goneril and Regan are notable exceptions. In contrast, conflicts between male kinsmen are frequent. If we look to

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the comedies and romances, in Much Ado About Nothing, Don John opposes Don Pedro; in As You Like It, Oliver opposes Orlando and Duke Frederick, Duke Senior; in The Tempest, Antonio opposes Prospero and Sebastian, Alonso; and in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Palamon opposes Arcite. Except for Henry VIII, all the history plays dramatize internecine conflict among various male Plantagenet claimants to the throne. The tragedies, too, boast fraternal competition. In Titus Andronicus, Saturninus challenges Bassianus; in Hamlet, Claudius has killed his brother and seeks the death of his nephew, who finally kills him. In King Lear, Gloucester puts a price on his son’s head and Edgar kills Edmund. Yet territorialism between male kin evokes nothing like the censure generated by the lusty widow stereotype. The ideal of the faithful widow has an analogue in the ideal of female chastity. Although between 1581 and 1620 some 22 percent of English brides went to the altar pregnant (Adair 197)—and of course there are less conspicuous forms of pollution that must have boasted many celebrants—women’s sexual purity remained an elemental moral principle, the sine qua non of female honor and obverse of lusty widowhood. Ideals and reality are distinct offices, and are of opposed natures. As for the longevity of the lusty widow trope, while male projection plays a role in its popularity (I’m not lecherous; you are), more specific to the era was the resurgence of patriarchalism that encouraged male performance anxiety. Maintaining dominance can be burdensome. Anxiety was fostered by medical treatises such as Levinius Lemnius’s The Secret Miracles of Nature (1658), which grounded ancient misogyny in early modern science, asserting women’s need for frequent sex lest they sicken mentally and physically (Fletcher 51). The more caring the husband, the more responsible—and eventually inadequate—he was bound to feel for keeping his wife in good health in the face of her voracious, unappeasable sexual appetites. Among the Essays of Michel de Montaigne is “Upon Some Verses of Virgil” (1603), which disseminated a more realistic understanding of women to readers outside the medical community; as a corollary of women’s biology, Montaigne questioned both the double standard and the wisdom of a code designed to constrain women. Paradoxically, men wanted them to be “sound, healthy, strong, in good liking, wel-fed and chaste together, that is to say, both hotte and colde.” He concludes, I say, that both male and female, are cast in one same moulde; instruction and custome excepted, there is no great difference betweene them. . . . the Philospher Antisthenes took away al distinction betweene their virtue

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and ours [men’s]. It is much more easie to accuse the one sexe, then to excuse the other. (Third Booke, 513, 537)

But despite the Essays’s popularity, the denigration of women persisted and prospered. Any canard aimed at women in general applied doubly to widows: sexually awakened, knowledgeable, and self-willed. Alarming as the fiction of the nyphomanical wife is, it protected against the equally if not more terrifying prospect of a wife in the mold of Cymbeline’s queen—a woman who, for her own purposes, in the most intimate moments, night after night, year after year, pretended desire and acted pleasure. What could Cymbeline have found more chilling than the report of her dying confession—that she “was wife to your place, / Abhorr’d your person” (5.5.39–40)? One can easily imagine Shakespeare’s male spectators nodding gravely as the amazed king, anticipating Freud, asks, “Who is’t can read a woman?” (5.5.48). Not surprisingly, Cymbeline’s queen is a remarried widow, for widows “know already what man is.” If the widow is (unnaturally) cold, she can nevertheless manipulate, deceive, and abuse her doting spouse. Even if the widow’s lust is in the eye of the beholder rather than in the woman herself, there is reason to fear her. Perhaps what detractors find most worrisome is the widow’s independence. The literary lusty widows treated most sympathetically, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, are nevertheless ambiguous figures, both of whom have the decency to die before their time. At the lower levels of TudorStuart society, most real unheaded women were obligatory players in the economy, necessary to its functioning but perforce competitors with men, who like as not had their own weaker vessels to provide for. However irrelevant the lusty widow trope might be to the marketplace, disparagement has always been a useful weapon. We are fortunate that Shakespeare uses the ancient trope sparingly, for in a larger sense, what it entails, to quote Jeremy Tambling, is the “danger of submitting to a male version of history” (76).37

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Chapter 7

4

Opting Ou t

Death, I say . . . hath called the husband hence, left the house full of mourning, and specially the wife cannot chuse but sorrow and lament . . . [being] nothing desirous of life, having lost a moytie of her selfe. . . . (Lawes 231–32)

T

he widow’s ultimate proof of fidelity to her husband is to follow him in death—as soon as possible. Of the thirty-one widows and “seeming widows” in Shakespeare’s plays, two, Juliet and Cleopatra, are actors in a Liebestod, Richard Wagner’s term for the fanatically impassioned double-death in which each lover dies for the other. Other well-known literary exemplars include Pyramus and Thisbe, Hero and Leander, Tristan and Isolde, Eloise and Abelard, and Paolo and Francesca (Bijvoet [Williamson] 2–8). That of all these pairs fewer than half are married (to each other) could reflect an enduring belief that marriage, like Congreve’s Lady Wishfort, is an antidote to desire. Juliet has barely been a wife, let alone a widow. Shakespeare’s fatal-marriage tragedy is of accelerated duration, so she is widowed for what seems no more than a few minutes; dead by her own hand within fourteen lines of learning that Romeo has killed himself, she elicits pity and admiration from the audience and the play’s surviving characters. As for Cleopatra, her marital status in Shakespeare and in history is ambiguous, yet whether wife or lover, she does not survive Antony long. For both characters, “self-shattering,” to use Cynthia Marshall’s term, promises a perfected, supreme merger through the loss of individuality. The mutuality of the Liebestod can defeat “love-devouring death” (2.6.7).

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From the unglamorous perspective of Shakespeare’s Pyramus and Thisbe farce (MND 5.1.127–347), social forces mystified by the Liebestod’s ultraromanticism are more visible; Juliet and Cleopatra are driven to suicide not solely by love but by love joined to political powerlessness. They experience powerlessness in diverse ways, for Juliet, whose impulsive death most nearly approximates a Liebestod, is an adolescent at the mercy of her parents, whereas Cleopatra is a defeated queen in an intensely political play about Roman Empire building and Egypt’s role as a client state. Because generations of critics have dictated that she earns moral and tragic stature only through self-destruction, her death, redemptive and virtually obligatory, might sooner be likened to a painless version of sati than to a Liebestod. Dreariest and most typical of real-life suicidal widows is the Duchess of Gloucester in Richard II. Elderly and isolated, she suffers from what Emile Durkheim called “domestic anomy”—loss of familial integration and a social role (258–59), a condition common to women dependent upon their husbands for their occupation, status, and purpose in life. As a victim of domestic anomy, the Duchess predicts and wills her death by desolation. Unlike Juliet and Cleopatra, who love and die erotically and theatrically, the Duchess makes an end so passive and undramatic that Shakespeare does not stage it. Dramatizing tales of turbulent desire made good theatrical sense in light of the increasing acceptance of mutuality in love, oddly synchronous with the extension of patriarchal control: [T]he ideal of romantic love was deeply rooted in popular culture in the first half of our period. We read of men and women of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who fell ill and almost died of love or even threatened suicide. People were often described as saying that there was only one person they could possibly marry as long as their lives lasted. (Houlbrooke, English 78)

Whereas in the First Quarto of Hamlet the “Mousetrap’s” Player Duchesse supplies a grim model of romantic devotion—“When death take you, let life from me depart” (Kliman and Bertram CLN1321)—she is only a Player, acting a role in a play-within-a-play, doubly removed from reality, and her resolution turns out to be short lived. In contrast, Juliet, Cleopatra, and the Duchess of Gloucester, also players, though at a closer remove, make no promises but have no real options. The first two are generically condemned to die. By feigning death (Juliet to save her marriage, Cleopatra to save herself ), they have inadvertently caused their husbands’ deaths.1 Tragedy therefore demands that these widows

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die too (Rozett 152). Dramatic form aside, like Shakespeare’s fifty other suicidal characters, including the innocent duchess, they are “playthings of circumstance, urged on to death by merciless external mechanisms” (Minois, Suicide 107–08). Suicide offered Shakespeare many possibilities for orchestrating audience response. Suicides of pagans, increasingly familiar due to the resurgence of interest in classical writers, were deemed heroic. These inflected the suicides of Christians, which, while officially adjudged sinful, were inducing more elastic responses, at least from the educated. Early in the sixteenth century, Castiglione approved women’s suicides for noble motives, as did Thomas Elyot in his Defense of Good Women (Minois, Suicide 64). Later, albeit less influentially, Sidney’s Arcadia, Montaigne’s essay “A Custom of the Ile of Cea,” Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and Donne’s Biathanatos esteem suicide in a noble cause.2 In Biathanatos, Donne tries to negotiate a space for praiseworthy suicide; witness the subtitle: A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis, That Selfehomicide is not so Naturally Sinne, that it may never be otherwise (Wymer 8). Donne was not alone among writers or characters. Cleopatra thinks along the same lines: “Then is it sin,” she asks, “To rush into the secret house of death / Ere death doth come to us?” (Ant. 4.15.80–82). Even so, during the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, harsh treatment of suicides prevailed, owing to the conjunction of two institutions intent upon enlarging their power: Tudor administrations and Protestant reformers (MacDonald and Murphy 5). Coroner’s juries were instructed to regard suicide by a sane person as a diabolically inspired crime, to be punished not only by the denial of Christian burial but also by confiscation of property. Accordingly, English suicide rates are often skewed and unreliable, it being in the financial interest of the coroners and the crown to declare that the suicide was of sound mind (Minois, Suicide 62). The corpse of the suicide was strung up and left hanging, or, in order to cleanse the community of spiritual pollution and prevent its vampirelike ghost from doing harm, a stake was driven through the corpse, which was buried by night in a highway. Alternatively, the corpse was buried at a crossroads with a stone on its face (Glanville Williams 259). Such revulsion did not prevail in the theater, where to die for love of one’s deceased spouse evoked sympathy and applause. Suicide was an especially popular subject for drama at the turn of the century. A historian of suicide writes, “Late-sixteenth-century audiences just lapped up voluntary death” (Minois, Suicide 88). Because attitudes toward theatrical representations of suicide were varied and far less doctrinaire than those of state and church, “a stage suicide could evoke whatever response a dramatist wished” (Wymer 8).

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Romeo and Juliet evokes deep sympathy. If we understand it as Kiernan Ryan urges, rejecting approaches that would naturalize a fusion of love with a death wish, or blame the protagonists for youthful rashness, or turn them into mere fools of fortune or victims of a shamelessly conservative ideology of romantic love—approaches that “screen off . . . precisely the qualities which account for Romeo and Juliet’s profound hold on the hearts of generations of spectators and readers down through the centuries” (118)3—then, by her suicide, Juliet proves not only the strength of her devotion to Romeo but the strength of her disillusion with Verona. Though not yet fourteen, though the dagger is a harder death than poison, though she is offered the protection of the convent, Juliet keeps her promise: “If all else fail, myself have power to die” (3.5. 242). Prior to the Reformation, life “[a]mong a sisterhood of holy nuns” (5.3.157) served, on occasion, as a Catholic solution to the problem of economically or politically troublesome ruling-class females, often widows. However, for Shakespeare’s largely Protestant audience, convent life is no more a tenable alternative for Juliet than it is for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Hermia, who flees rather than “endure the livery of a nun” (1.1.70). As for those who are immured—Comedy of Errors’s Abbess Aemilia, Pericles’s Thaisa, and Measure for Measure’s Isabella—by the end of act 5, all are out and about. In Romeo and Juliet, social concerns again trump theology; the operative principle is not the Everlasting’s “canon ’gainst self-slaughter” (Ham. 1.2.132) but the Anglican rejection of cloistered living. In Masuccio of Salerno’s Il Novellino (1476), containing an early version of the story, Giannozza retreats to a convent to die of grief, but Shakespeare predictably follows the suicide tradition of succeeding versions that he found in Arthur Brooke, the Puritan poet. Genre is also an issue. Joining the sisterhood may have been a viable choice in comedy’s Ephesus, but not in tragedy’s Verona. In keeping with the play’s liberal innovation—its insistence that Romeo and Juliet are victims “of their parents’ rage, / Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove . . .” (Prologue 10–11)—the lovers’ suicides are glamorized as inevitable, predestined, and contingent, the stipulated sacrifice to resolve a social conflict. Thus, Mercutio alerts the audience to Romeo’s characterization as a Petrarchan lover: “Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flow’d in” (2.4.38–39). The Liebestod having grown out of a Petrarchan (and pre-Petrarchan) literary tradition that smiled upon suicide for love, the protagonists, though “desperate,” do not despair of God’s forgiveness and grace; instead, by uniting in death, they sidestep the sin of despair.4 In the literary if not the real world of Elizabethan Christians, fulfilling an ineluctable fate absolves Romeo and Juliet of the sin attaching to those whose despair has

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doctrinal resonances. The sin that impels Juliet to kill herself is patriarchal obduracy. Shakespeare anticipated the egalitarian position of Commonwealth “Digger” Gerrard Winstanley: “Every man and woman shall have the free liberty to marry whom they love” (qtd. in Cedric Watts 96). What kind of life is more abhorrent to a girl than stabbing herself to death? Still dependent upon her father despite her sudden widowhood, Juliet faces the strongest pressure to take her own life. No less guilty of deception and a transgressive union than Brooke’s wayward Juliet, she faces the humiliation of disclosure, likely chastisement, and possible repudiation by parents construing her as a wanton schemer responsible for the deaths of three young men. (To blame the younger generation exonerates the elder.) If not disowned, Juliet could be forced into an intolerable remarriage, assuming a match turned up for such damaged goods—or for her dowry. If unmarketable, she would grow old in the Capulet household, a continuing embarrassment to her family—another shameful alternative. Friar Lawrence’s proposal of life in a convent would not appeal to Juliet any more than it would to her audience. The Church offers only a death-in-life entombment, echoing her drugged sleep. Rejecting a continued subjugation in which ecclesiastical rule replaces parental authority, she tells the friar, “I will not away” (5.3.160). For students of young adulthood, Juliet’s “choice” is predictable, her death the outcome of a critical but not abnormal moment in the passage from childhood to adolescence. In this view, the love story signifies the necessity for adolescents to distance themselves from their families (their childhoods) and to join with another (Dalsimer 8–9, 77ff.; Faber 169–81). Such separation carries a high emotional cost.5 Although Juliet represses both her anger at her father and her culpability for Tybalt’s death, envisaging herself in the charnel house (4.1.81–85) is a veiled chastisement (Farrell 140). Her soliloquy attests to her fear of death and longing for life, but after her false funeral, the subject-self she has become cannot accept her parents’ rule. Death is a continuation of the movement away from her family and toward Romeo. Because he is her surrogate family—“‘Romeo is banished’: to speak that word, / Is father, mother, Tybalt, Romeo, Juliet, / All slain, all dead” (3.2.122–24)—his death sentences her to emotional destitution. Her isolation is accentuated by the defection of all those upon whom she had relied. Threatened with disinheritance by her father (if she disowns him by refusing the husband of his choice), abandoned by her mother, ill-advised by the Nurse, deserted by the friar, Juliet is utterly alone (Dalsimer 108). Moreover, within the space of five acts, while barely more than a child, she has traversed the totality of female life-roles—maid, wife, widow.

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Only death offers an escape from an entrenched establishment, all the more overbearing as it loses control—over marriages, over the feud—an establishment like her father, an old lion dying.6 A sensitive actress portraying Juliet may decide that, upon learning of Romeo’s death, the heroine is not only grief-stricken and abandoned but fed up. In this tragedy of good intentions—for who did not think “all for the best”? (3.1.104)—Juliet has been the victim of men’s codes and men’s blunders: a mindlessly perpetuated feud that dictates her “only love sprung from . . . [her] only hate!” (1.5.138), Tybalt’s reckless determination to prove himself in a society that valorizes the use of deadly skill as manly (Kahn, “Verona” 173–74), senex Capulet’s tyrannical rage at being thwarted by a “young baggage!” (3.5.160), and the friar’s naive optimism and lack of contingent planning. By the last scene, she has had enough. Juliet’s choice of suicide is as much societally as privately determined. Rather than trust her life to a community in which she has no voice, she wastes neither time nor words considering the friar’s impromptu notion, but at once finds a means of death and, like Cleopatra, takes “her own way” (Ant. 5.2.337); Mark Antony might have envied her workmanlike competence. Yet Juliet’s role in the Liebestod exemplifies the “fatalistic suicide” Durkheim defines as that “of slaves” and other victims of “excessive physical or moral despotism,” of “a rule against which there is no appeal” (276n.25). By resisting the patriarchal perquisite of arranging her marriage to man or God, the thirteen-year-old widowed heiress challenges her society’s allocation of agency. Having rejected her father’s authority, having revealed herself as an assertive, sexual “unruly woman” (Sasha Roberts 53, 48–52), she is driven to accept her literary role as doomed Petrarchan love-object dying for love.7 Appropriately, she ends her life with the sudden passion of a sexual giving. Discovering Romeo’s body, she refuses to leave the tomb; finding the poisoned cup drained, she precipitately stabs herself with Romeo’s dagger—“This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die” (5.2.170)—her death appropriately suggesting a sexual climax and fulfillment. For her suicide, both a societal and literary exigent, she wins praise from her father-in-law: That whiles Verona by that name is known, There shall no figure at such rate be set As that of true and faithful Juliet. (5.3.300–02)

Her Liebestod and Romeo’s solve the problems their marriage would have created had they survived. It is simpler for their fathers to erect

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statues. But the play allows us to speculate that, in a better world, although Juliet might have entertained suicidal imaginings,8 the solace of autonomy could have saved her life. Autonomy could have saved countless victims of sati—a practice Durkheim characterizes as “obligatory altruistic suicide,” the result of society’s devaluation of women (219–21). Unlike the Liebestod, sati was grounded neither in romantic love nor in the widow’s volition. Whereas Brahmin tradition imposed upon widows of higher castes shaved heads, white clothing, an absence of adornments, and other behavioral conventions designed to render them unappealing and unmarriageable, widows belonging to warrior and certain other higher castes in North India were expected to commit sati (Gujral 51).9 However, because of the “sanskritization” movement, promising greater wealth and status to groups that adopted the practice, sati was more widespread (Weinberger-Thomas, 135; Gujral, 52–53). On September 22, 1987, eighteen-year-old Roop Kanwar was set alight on the funeral pyre of her husband in Deorala, Rajasthan. Roop was a modern young woman, and Deorala, on the outskirts of Jaipur, was no backwater (Sen 1–4). Her death, which initiated an Indian national debate on sati, unearthed the information that there have been at least thirty-eight widow immolations in Rajasthan since independence [in 1947], and dragged out of the closet vociferous supporters of the practice. In this recent case the government of India vacillated in taking action against family members found to have coerced Roop. State officials were present along with an estimated 300,000 others at an event “honouring” the episode thirteen days after the burning, and when the state finally banned glorification of sati, the response was too little, too late. (Mani, “Mediations” 315)

The following September, a crowd of some 8,000 gathered to honor Roop Kanwar’s sati.10 A public ritual some thought scripturally sanctioned, sati was outlawed by the British in 1829, but in India and among a number of Hindu sects in other countries, suicide came to be seen as “the duty of a virtuous wife” (Mani, “Contentious ” 1). One rationale is that the sins of the wife in a former incarnation have caused her husband’s death. Through her death she atones for his, and she can tend him in the afterlife, where both will be granted “heavenly pleasures” and may elude continuing rebirth and death.11 Patriarchal theorists held out yet another spiritual inducement: as widows are incapable of leading a chaste life for the right reasons (chastity for the wrong reasons doesn’t count), through

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immolation, explained Kashinath Tarkavagish in 1819, a woman could “get rid of her feminine sex” (qtd. in Mani, Contentious 55). Economics and territorialism underpin theological motives. Although sati was not specific to the upper castes, in practice only they could easily afford the loss of a female worker. Because sati was sometimes limited to women who were still reproductive, it allowed wealthy families to escape the possibility of the widow’s bearing children who were not members of the deceased husband’s family. Often, relatives were loath to support the widow or to deal with her legal rights to an estate from which they and the local authorities could profit. Pundits were paid for officiating, and the crowd so enjoyed the show that spectators could be counted on to drag the widow to the pyre and keep her there, should she prove unwilling (Mani, Contentious 26). Lata Mani contends that most widows who elected sati did so for socioeconomic reasons, that their relatives and the authorities profited from their burning, and that “there is insurmountable evidence that women were coerced, drugged, and tied to the pyre” (Contentious 162). Some widows, drugged or brainwashed, came to their senses after the burning had begun and were able to leap off the pyre. Others, dissuaded from immolating themselves, confessed to fear of privation and ostracism, not so much for themselves as for their children. Mani quotes an 1828 Indian newspaper account of a woman whose life was saved when she could not endure the burning, although she had agreed to sati lest she disgrace her son. She now feared that “her want of firmness would prejudice the boy’s interests and success in life . . .” (Contentious 163). Theological rhetoric of wifely duty and casuistry sanctioning suicide as “the suicide that is not suicide” (Spivak, Critique 293) cannot stifle the voice of a woman compelled to “choose” an agonizing death for reasons wholly extraneous to the rationale for sati. Granted the misrepresentations and often impure motives of colonialist discourse that made capital of sati, the rancor elicited in some quarters by Western feminist interventions, and the remarkable courage of widows who freely agreed to immolate themselves; nevertheless, the severe pressure of cultural expectations and sometimes brute force erode the voluntarism of this indefensible practice.12 The mother who believes she must choose between her life and her son’s material success does not have much of a choice. For all its cultural particularity, the custom of sati in a sense formalizes and radicalizes teachings and attitudes not unfamiliar in the West. The ideal of the devastated widow whose fidelity is realized through suicide is a cross-cultural phenomenon. The wife who joined her husband in death was eulogized in English literature as a secular saint. Dorigen in Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale” honors the suicides, not only of wives and

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widows who had been violated or were threatened with violation, but of widows who refused to survive their husbands: Pardee, of Laodomya is writen thus, That whan at Troie was slayn Protheselaus, Ne lenger wolde she lyve after his day. The same of noble Porcia telle I may; Withoute Brutus koude she nat lyve, To whom she hadde al hool hir herte yive. (CT 187, 1445–50)13

Dorigen’s exemplars were not barred from suicide by their faith. The self-slaughter of a wife from classical history or legend was fertile ground for medieval and early modern English writers, since the suicides of pagans were generally considered heroic. An excruciating death by fire was not unusual. In The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, Marlowe depicts the death of Dido on the pyre of Aeneas’s relics. She becomes “widow Dido” for Shakespeare in The Tempest (2.1.79 passim). Olympia, another Marlovian widow whom Shakespeare likely knew of, although thwarted in her first attempt at suicide when her husband is killed, still longs to “cast her body in the burning flame / That feeds upon her son’s and husband’s flesh” (Tamburlaine, Part Two, 3.4.71–72). Later, she successfully tricks her captor-suitor into stabbing her to death. In Mary Sidney’s 1590s translation of Robert Garnier’s “The Tragedie of Antonie” (1578), with which Shakespeare was also probably familiar, Cleopatra eludes death by snakebite but not by metaphoric flames. She offers Antony her “boiling teares” until her eyes are soon “consumed by the coales / Which from my brest, as from a furnace rise (Geoffrey Bullough 5: 230–31, 406, ll. 1980, 1985–86). Likening the suicide of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to sati is not entirely ahistorical. Nor are the cultural disparities between Shakespeare’s notion of Egypt and seventeenth-century India unbridgeable. Ironically, European conduct books, sermons, marriage manuals, and such achieved their apotheosis in the Hindu widow. By the sixteenth century, European travel writings about India almost always contained references to sati; although judged barbarous, the practice was greatly admired as heroic proof of wifely virtue (Banerjee 8); even Montaigne, generally sympathetic to women, lauded Indian wives and others who chose to die rather than to survive their husbands.14 How great, after all, was the psychological distance between witch-burning Europe and widow-burning India? As Pompa Banerjee astutely observes, traffic between Europe and the East was not all one way (333–34).

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East and West meet in Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. She begins the play as “Egypt’s widow” (Ant. 2.1.37). Historically, she was a divorcée before she was a widow. At eighteen she became the lover of Julius Caesar, who for reasons of state insisted on a fashionably incestuous marriage between her and her eleven-year-old brother. After their divorce, Caesar had her wed her twelve-year-old younger brother, whom she outlived (Grant 68–74, 78, 97). Because of the boys’ ages, it is doubtful that these unions were consummated (Hughes-Hallett 22). From the bills Julius Caesar composed for the senate, we learn that had he lived and had the senate consented, he would have married Cleopatra bigamously; made Alexandria a second capital of the empire; and acknowledged Caesarion, his son by the queen (Goudchaux 135). Instead, Antony was (perhaps) Cleopatra’s third husband. While still married to Octavia, he may have wed Cleopatra in an Egyptian rite that Rome, in the person of Octavius—“the queen’s implacable enemy” (Goudchaux 128)15—did not recognize; had Rome acknowledged the three children of Antony and Cleopatra as legitimate, they would have been dynastically competitive with Octavius. Literary evidence for or against Cleopatra’s legal marriage to Antony is inconclusive. A letter from Antony to Octavius that appears in Chapter 69 of Suetonius’s Life of the Deified Augustus contains an ambiguous phrase, uxor mea est, which could signify either “is she my wife?” or “she is my wife”: What has changed your mind: that I am screwing the queen? Is she my wife? Have I just begun, or have I been doing it nine years already? And do you only screw Drusilla? You’re doing well if, by the time you read this letter, you have not screwed Tertulla or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia Titisenia or all the rest. Does it really matter where and in whom you get it up? (Qtd. in Meadows 29)16

Virgil notes a marriage in the description of Aeneas’s shield; although Antony conquers the East, “there follows him (O shame!) his Egyptian wife” (“sequiturque [nefas] Aegptia coniunx”).17 Almost as an addendum to “The Comparison of Demetrius with Antonius,” Plutarch grudgingly acknowledges a marriage: “Antonius on thother side [unlike bachelor Demetrius] was blamed for marying of Cleopatra, a Queene that for power and nobilitie of blood, excelled all other kings in her time, but Arsaces.” Perhaps fearing repercussions in Augustan Rome, Plutarch then discounts the marriage as bigamous: “But Antonius first of all maried two wives together, the which never Romane durst doe

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before, but him selfe. Secondly, he put away his first Romane wife, which he had lawfully maried: for the love of a straunge woman, he fondly fell in fancy withall, and contrarie to the lawes and ordinaunces of Rome” (Geoffrey Bullough 5: 318, 320). In response to Cleopatra’s classical provenance, contradictory traditions evolved. Pious medieval writers treated Cleopatra as a type of lust leading to despair (Wymer 127). Chaucer, however, following the contrary tradition, codes her as Antony’s proper wife who, in The Legend of Good Women, plunges naked into a snake pit—“And she hir deeth receveth with good chere, / For love of Antony that was hir so dere” (ll. 700–01). In the Renaissance, Cleopatra’s representation as Antony’s wife was perpetuated in such “fatal marriage” plays as the GarnierSidney “Antonie.” From this fumigated domestic perspective, her suicide was not merely the Liebestod of a mistress but the admirable and appropriate obligation of a loving widow. Harley Granville-Barker notes that in Shakespeare’s play, when Dolabella calls Cleopatra “Most noble Empress” [5.2.71], he acknowledges her, not Octavia, as Antony’s widow (34). In her triumphant pun, “Husband, I come!” (5.2.287), Cleopatra both resurrects Antony and insists on their marriage. When he says “I will be / A bridegroom in my death” (4.14.99–100), Antony, too, intimates a wedding, if a belated one (Wymer 129–30). While Shakespeare does not foreclose a reading of Cleopatra’s suicide as the means by which the queen earns only poetic widowhood, he nevertheless gestures toward a more tangible claim. More elusive than Virgil’s, Plutarch’s, Chaucer’s, or Garnier’s Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s “most triumphant lady” (2.2.184) transcends the hostile, conservative reading that constructs her as the epitome of her gender: “A Very Very Woman.” The second Character in the 1614 printing of Sir Thomas Overbury’s Characters, “A Very Very Woman” is a vain, witty, and sensual seductress, who makes a point of marrying advantageously. She is not to be trusted: “[i]f she love, she loves not the man but the beast of him,” and “[h]ir chiefe commendation is, she brings a man to repentance” (Paylor 5).18 Admittedly, the sexuality of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra undermines her historical role as queen regnant, a stance Shakespeare may have believed would be politically pleasing to James. Shakespeare depicts her as a sovereign queen (Rome being portrayed as a threat instead of an overlord), whose rule is disastrous. Rather than concern for her country, she shows bad judgment: fighting at sea with an unready fleet, retreating out of fear, possibly dealing with the enemy. She appears as indifferent to the good of Egypt—“melt Egypt into Nile!” (2.5.78)—as to the lives of her children, whom Octavius threatens with death should she take her own life. Did Shakespeare feel

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that a maternal figure is disqualified as a sexual icon unless the object of her solicitude is not her children but her lover?19 But for all this, it is a critical commonplace that Shakespeare’s “enemy of gravitas” (Geoffrey Bullough 5: 218) of the first four acts makes amends in act 5. From the end of the eighteenth century to our own time, the view persists that, despite her histrionic “celerity in dying” (1.2.144) which so impresses Enobarbus, she wins absolution by dying for love.20 European Romantics conflated Liebestod with sati, converting the widow into a lover, often a prostitute, who by dying repentant became admirable, “an Indian Mary Magdalene” (Figueira 59). Shakespeare’s taste, however, ran to an unrepentant Cleopatra. Turning to the Stoic tradition that figured suicide as noble and to the courtly love tradition of suicide as romantic, he capitalized on the latter topos which, never averse to such adulterous longings as Antony’s, sometimes achieved a seemingly providential pairing, one of its manifestations being the lovers’ eternal fidelity. This tradition can also be noxious in its effects; glamorizing victimization, such fidelity is more likely to be actualized in the real world by the widow’s sati than by the mutual Liebestod. Both forms of suicide are apt to evoke the masculinist left-handed compliment, “She’s good, being gone . . .” (Ant. 1.2.126). “She had great and unpardonable faults,” writes Hazlitt of Cleopatra, “but the beauty of her death almost redeems them. She learns from the depths of despair the strength of her affections” (81). Well over a century later, she is commended in language eerily evoking sati, “the glory” of her suicide being identified with “the triumph of spirit over flesh and the sublimation of selfishness in the act of self-immolation” (Geoffrey Bullough 5: 252). Cleopatra continued to win praise from (male) critics for finally “accept[ing] a love which is all giving and self-sacrifice” (Irving Ribner qtd. in Spevack 689). Is that a good thing? Lorraine Helms considers “Shakespearean ways of killing a woman” and concludes that, like women’s deaths in Greek drama, “they also emerge from the protocols of a patriarchal society and testify to the resilience of an ancient discourse of gender and violence” (555). Fortunately for feminists, Shakespeare complicates an essentialist understanding of Cleopatra by inviting us to question whether Cleopatra kills herself because she cannot live without Antony or because Octavius is immune to her fascination. Or does she die for the honor of Egypt? For her own personal honor? For immortality? To spite Octavius? For a combination of some or all of these factors? Or does she have yet other motives? “The play posits two version of love: love as poetic construct or usable material for fiction, and love as realpolitik; love that is ‘to die for,’ and love that is to die for if nothing else can be worked out” (Charnes 144). Notwithstanding his pro-Roman sources, Shakespeare understood

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that a queen with no talent for rule could scarcely have kept her throne for twenty-one years, avoided annexation, and gained huge territories for Egypt. Syria, Cyprus, Lydia, Media, Parthia, Armenia, Cilicia, and Phoenicia (3.6.1–16) comprise Antony’s Donations of Alexandria— donations to Cleopatra and her children—that enrage Octavius. Aside from these, Egypt was already the beneficiary of lands restored to Cleopatra by Julius Caesar, who, like those other men of power, Pompey and Antony, was surely a strategically chosen lover (Woodbridge, “He Beats Thee” 207). So Shakespeare depicts Cleopatra as a queen driven to suicide by her political decline no less than by blighted love. Assigning her transcendent “[i]mmortal longings” (5.2.281) that establish her as a goddess/monarch in the heroic tradition, Shakespeare has her refuse to die terminally, as it were. A master-mistress of public relations, historically Cleopatra chose a means of death—snakebite—long associated with divinity, making a triumphant end as the goddess Isis, whose ceremonial worship assured rebirth. Because Christian injunctions against suicide are irrelevant to pagan Cleopatra, she glories in a death that is her own creation, an expression of a high-spirited, self-possessed subject rare among both sexes in Shakespeare’s tragedies. Her dying is likened to a life-giving activity, her remarkable vitality encoded as sexuality (Farrell 42–47). As she suckles the asp whose bite “is as a lover’s pinch, / Which hurts, and is desir’d” (5.2.295–96), she blurs the boundaries of life and death in a poetically irresistible sexual haze. Regally, she rejects for herself and her children life lived on their captor’s humiliating terms as his “scutcheons and . . . signs of conquest” (5.2.135), smelling the breath of “[m]echanic slaves / With greasy aprons, rules, and hammers” (5.2.209–210), handled by Octavius’s officers, caricatured in ballads and plays for the plebes. Plato would have approved her decision, for although he refuses honorable burial to suicides, he exempts those who choose death over unbearable humiliation (Wymer 11). Dying like a queen is about class consciousness as well as gender. Cleopatra’s suicide affirms her majesty: “It is well done, and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings” (5.2.326–27). Long having known that events may call upon a queen to make a sudden forced exit, Cleopatra is prepared. She manages her death and her women’s with no less competence than does Juliet. Octavius would minimize or negate the queen’s heroism, insisting that “[s]he hath pursu’d conclusions infinite / Of easy ways to die” (5.2.355–56).21 But the audience has seen that, taken unaware, she snatches a dagger. “Quick, quick, good hands” (5.2.39), she cries before being disarmed. The chiasmus of the title characters and their methods of death in Shakespeare’s two love tragedies demonstrate that poison is not gendered female: Romeo-poison

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and Juliet-blade/Antony-blade and Cleopatra-poison. Octavius’s speech is always calculated; Cleopatra has tricked him, gotten the better of him. To redeem himself, he must belittle her death, attacking a method that, compared to Antony’s, is swifter, more elegant, and more sure. Her suicide has been called “the most self-consciously performed, the most elaborately gestural dying in all Shakespearian tragedy” (Neill, Introduction 78). Disarmed by Proculeius, denied the dignitas secured through metal, she employs a surer means, though generally less admired. Yet Anton J. L. van Hooff, citing Horatius’ Carmina, insists, “By her planned death she showed herself even steelier than before (deliberata morte ferocior)” (77–78). Although the play eroticizes her last moments and denies her pro patria lines, her apostrophe to the asp, only six lines before she dies, delineates a political motive and diminishes Rome’s victory: O, couldst thou speak, That I might hear thee call great Caesar ass Unpolicied! (5.2.306–08)

Historically, Caesar acquired an immensely wealthy nation, the breadbasket of Rome. Cleopatra, Queen of Kings, was the last of the Egyptian pharaohs. Egypt exchanged generations of tolerable Macedonian Greek rule for Roman annexation and impoverishment. But in the play, “her suicide clouds her political defeat with mystic glamour and a show of autonomy” (Loomba, “Traveling” 290). Cleopatra recalls Richard III ’s Queen Elizabeth, who tricks Richard into believing she will match him with her daughter,22 when, in the tragedy’s final scene with Seleucus, Cleopatra leads Octavius to believe she will not kill herself; a prisoner intent on hiding her personal treasure must be providing materially for the future. Shakespeare foreshadows her ruse when Antony tells Enobarbus, “She is cunning past man’s thought” (1.2.145). Such deceptions also recall the canny political maneuvering of Shakespeare’s Tudor queen.23 Cleopatra is more perceptive than Octavius—“He words me, girls, he words me . . .” (5.2.190)—and reluctantly but regally pays the full price for her rank in a patriarchal, hierarchical society. Her death is no more a Liebestod than Antony’s. She “chooses” it because she has no other choice. Although she escapes the torment of sati, “Egypt’s widow,” like myriad Hindu women, is dead before her time. The pain of being burned to death is worlds apart from succumbing within minutes to an asp’s bite, yet Roop Kanwar and Cleopatra share a commonality: duress.

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For European widows, forbidden suicide by Christianity, the next best course was isolation. “Do nat complayne, that thou arte alone, for chastite requireth solytariness; and a chast woman desyreth secretnes,” urges Catholic mentor Lodovicus Vives in his much reprinted Instruction of a Christian Woman, attributing his behests to the widow’s own desires (174). Even after the Reformation, this remained the dominant literary ideal despite the ample gap between exhortation and practice. Many conduct books and pamphlets continued to advocate that widows live as celibates, withdrawing from the secular world while devoting their fortunes to the community and their lives to their children and God. For those who accepted such teachings, the widow who would escape stigma must be dead to the world. Some half a millennium after Vives, Denis de Rougemont was to observe that “self-imposed chastity is a symbolical suicide” (45). While many widows, particularly older women, may have regarded chastity as not unacceptable, “solytariness” and “secretnes” were something else. Widows like the Duchess of Gloucester, who as wives had enjoyed social prominence and a degree of importance, only to be precipitately dispatched to a life of isolation, might be tempted to transform symbolic suicide into the real thing. Although not expressly a suicide, the Duchess’s death follows closely upon her husband’s. Unlike adolescent Juliet and middle-aged Cleopatra, whose identities are not fashioned by widowhood and who project a vibrant ambiance of romance and sensuality, the Duchess of Gloucester appears to be past sex and past joy. First overwrought, then dispirited, she exemplifies the gnawing pain of bereavement that kills through attrition. Hopeless, she languishes, lacking a husband and a purpose— revenge. For her, Richard’s death comes too late (Molly Smith 266–68). Society, in the person of her brother-in-law and nominal protector John of Gaunt, will not heed her. A counterpart to Mowbray and Carlisle, she is effectively banished to silence. She appears in only one scene, her death reported as an afterthought, a measure of her insignificance. In one of the play’s many ironies, the Duchess foreshadows Richard’s flirtation with death. Whereas Richard promises that at Flint Castle he will “pine away” (3.2.209), he cannot bring himself to do so. Instead, he clings desperately to life, long after the Duchess is gone, her will to live having wasted away. By commissioning the murder of his uncle, Richard sentences his aunt to death. The event becomes its own master, initiating an outcome beyond his control—her passive suicide. Having lost “Thomas, my dear lord, my life, my Gloucester” (1.2.16), the Duchess laments that she, Gaunt’s “sometimes brother’s wife / With her companion, grief, must end her life” (1.2.54–55). Her choice is not about whether to end it but when and how.

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Shakespeare’s Duchess seems much older than the Duchess of his likely source, the anonymous First Part of the Reign of King Richard the Second or Thomas of Woodstock (1591–94?). Woodstock’s Duchess has been called a “stage-widow clamouring for vengeance,” who duly receives it.24 In the first act, however, she is portrayed as middle-aged rather than elderly, happily married to a playful, affectionate husband.25 In the last, she joins her brothers-in-law on the battlefield, where she invokes God, in an attempt to enflame them with her fury: May all the powers of heaven assist your hands, And may their sins sit heavy on their souls That they in death, this day, may perish all That traitorously conspired good Woodstock’s fall. (5.3.15–18)

Shakespeare’s Duchess of Gloucester produces an entirely different effect, that of a psyche disintegrating. Intervening in her past textual life, Shakespeare sets her speech not on a battlefield but within Gaunt’s palace, where she is an unsuccessful petitioner. No Valkyrie, she loses her train of thought as she paints a joyless picture of the home to which she returns. Mary Morris, who plays the Duchess in the BBC production, is far older than Eleanor would have been in 1397; she seems to owe her casting not to historicity but to the mournful tone of the Duchess’ final valediction: Yet one word more! Grief boundeth where it falls, Not with the empty hollowness, but weight. I take my leave before I have begun, For sorrow ends not when it seemeth done. Commend me to thy brother, Edmund York. Lo this is all—nay, yet depart not so; Though this be all, do not so quickly go; I shall remember more. Bid him—ah, what?— With all good speed at Plashy visit me. Alack, and what shall good old York there see But empty lodgings and unfurnish’d walls, Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones? And what hear there for welcome but my groans? Therefore commend me; let him not come there To seek out sorrow that dwells every where. Desolate, desolate, will I hence and die: The last leave of thee takes my weeping eye. (1.2.58–74)26

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By the next act, York’s servingman reports her death—a death that she has willed. Recent psychological findings reveal that elderly widows, particularly in the early stages of bereavement, typically feel a disturbing loss of status (Matthews 34), a loss that may be quite real. In their “world of hierarchy, inherited status, and deference,” the widows of peers suffered from “social demotion” (Rosenthal 139). With the loss of her husband, Shakespeare’s Duchess loses authority. Grief and the recognition of her diminished importance fuel her thwarted anger at Richard and Mowbray. She intends them when lamenting how her husband was “hack’d down . . . [b]y envy’s hand and murder’s bloody axe” (1.2.20–21), how he was “slaught’red” (1.2.30). But she is also infuriated with her brother-in-law Gaunt, who denies her justice: “Finds brotherhood in thee no sharper spur? / Hath love in thy old blood no living fire?” (1.2.9–10). Her anger not only provides a dramatic contrast to the submissive ressentiment of her final speech but clarifies her psychological state. At the beginning of act 1, scene 3, it appears that were Gaunt to commit to her cause, the Duchess would have reason to live.27 His refusal transforms him into the target of her wrath, responsible for her misery and imminent death (Berger, Jr. 58–60). Karl Menninger claims that most suicide victims have three wishes: to kill, to be killed, and to die (23). And Jean Baechler explains that certain suicides mingle grief for the deceased with frustrated aggression transferred from its object to the subject (29). By the end of the scene, the woman who had just demonstrated a memory sufficient to give Gaunt (and Shakespeare’s less knowledgeable playgoers) a lucid lesson in genealogy loses her train of thought in mid-sentence. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud describes the grief of loss by death: “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity. . . .” For the survivor, “the world has become poor and empty . . .” (14: 244). The willed death of the Duchess bespeaks the social distance she has traveled. The intense integration into the highest levels of aristocracy she would have experienced during the lifetime of her husband, the king’s brother, has been exchanged for powerlessness and the widow’s prescribed isolation. Describing Plashy, the Duchess metonymically describes her life as a widow—empty, unfurnished, unpeopled, untrodden—a life of groans, sorrow, and desolation. Woodstock’s Duchess has the satisfaction of vengeance and survives. Without the hope of justice as her raison d’etre, Shakespeare’s Duchess is a supernumerary, her life barren and frustrating. She has lost not only her husband but her faith in her family, her king, and perhaps in a just deity. Her identity shaken as she introjects her

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diminished status, she voices none of the customary, socially authorized female aspirations. She seeks no paradisal reunion with Woodstock. She does not look forward to serving him in an afterlife, and she expresses no interest in serving God or her neighbors in this one. When Gaunt fails her, the Duchess’s mourning slips into depression. Turning her anger against herself, she chooses grief as her companion and death over an intolerable life. Her choice is a passive protest against Richard and Gaunt, against the political/material circumstances that blight her old age. The thousands who celebrated the virtuous and loving sati of widowed teenager Roop Kanwar, who spent only twenty days with her depressed husband during the course of an eight-month loveless arranged marriage, chose to be blind to material factors. They did not want to know that she was murdered for gain.28 But Shakespeare’s plays derive their vitality as much from the material context that shapes his characters as from the language in which they express themselves. Although positioned within the genre of love-tragedy, Juliet and Cleopatra live in a material world where the political and economic are inseparable from the personal. In Verona, even sheltered young Romeo knows that justice is not blind and that poverty corrupts: “The world is not thy friend, nor the world’s law,” he tells the apothecary. “The world affords no law to make thee rich; / Then be not poor, but break it, and take this” (5.2.72–74). Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have been aware of the coup Lord Capulet scored in marrying his daughter to a count. They would have known that so ambitious an undertaking has a price tag, that the dowry had been negotiated, the contracts signed, money had changed hands. When Capulet rages, “I’ll not be forsworn” (3.5.195), parents with social aspirations for their children would have understood. What could be more appropriate than ending the play with a bidding war over the golden memorial statues? Verona had tolerated the feud because the Capulets and Montagues were wealthy, powerful families, Romeo’s death sentence was commuted to banishment because he was the Montague heir, and the date of Juliet’s wedding was advanced rather than postponed upon Tybalt’s death in order to lock in the illustrious Count as a Capulet spousal connection. When Capulet threatens to disown Juliet—“Nor what is mine shall never do thee good,” he outlines the options she will have once on her own: “hang, beg, starve, die in the streets” (3.5.194, 192). What he does not mention is prostitution, but since fourteen-year-old girls were highly prized by brothel keepers, worldly playgoers would have surmised what fate awaited Juliet. Juliet’s Liebestod bespeaks both her grief over Romeo’s death and her protest against the world of wealth and status that has no honorable place for her.

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Material issues are also imbricated in Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Liebestod’s cousins, sati and suicidal domestic anomy. After Antony’s death, Cleopatra’s luck runs out and with it her control of Egyptian revenue. For Octavius, the queen is merely an exotic animal that must be well-tended prior to exhibition; indifferent to her charms, he orders her to “[f]eed, and sleep” (5.2.187). No amount of “lady trifles” can buy her exemption from a starring role in the triumph of the “Sole sir o’ th’ world” (5.2. 165, 120), who now owns everything. Cleopatra dies because she cannot afford to live. Her death is “easy” because she can afford to pay the rustic clown to bring her asps. The Duchess of Gloucester, too, is not only disempowered but also endangered by her husband’s murder. If not her life, her property is at risk. She beseeches Gaunt, “[t]o safeguard thine own life / The best way is to venge my Gloucester’s death” (1.2.35–36), a plea that masks fear for herself as well as for her brother-in-law. Without a husband or male defender, she is vulnerable, for her estate is a financial prize that Richard could confiscate. Through a willed death, the Duchess escapes her lessened status and fear of a worse one. Although in some ideological circles the Duchess of Gloucester would be considered the avatar of fidelity, preferring death to life without her lord, for those of a more political bent, the childless, elderly dowager who dies of cankered frustration flirted with treason when she demanded vengeance on her king. Ironically, by dying she becomes instrumental in Richard’s defeat, for York’s messenger returns empty-handed from his errand: to request a thousand pounds from the Duchess, money needed to hold England for the king (2.2.90–97). Juliet, Cleopatra, the Duchess—all enact what for them is a concrete, rational solution to problems as much social as emotional.29 Suicide maps the scope of the coercive pressures—to a great extent economic—brought to bear upon them. Love is only part of the story. Postscript: Whereas Juliet is wholly fictive, Cleopatra and the Duchess are haunted by their historical prototypes. Octavius might have deliberately encouraged Cleopatra’s suicide or had her assassinated.30 We know with certainty that Shakespeare fictionalizes the motives behind the death of the Duchess. Aged by Shakespeare’s pen (historically, like Woodstock’s Duchess, she was considerably younger), she is felled by the death of a surrogate relative. At thirty-nine, she died of a broken heart, though not for her husband. Richard II ’s seemingly realistic portrait of the aged, childless widow is Shakespeare’s invention, a deliberate departure from Holinshed. The real duchess, Eleanor de Bohun, who had been married to Thomas for twenty years, died three years after his murder. Under his account of the year 1399, Holinshed records her death:

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[H]e [Bolingbroke] sent foorthwith for his sonne & heire, & likewise for the duke of Glocesters sonne & heire, that were as yet remaining in Ireland, commanding them with all spéed to returne home into England. But the duke of Glocesters sonne, through mischance perished, as he was on the seas to come ouer, for whose losse his mother tooke such greefe, that shortlie after through immoderate sorow she likewise passed out of this transitorie life. (2: 856)

The historical Duchess of Gloucester dying of sorrow for the loss of young Humfrie recalls the nineteenth-century Indian woman who attempted sati for her son’s sake, fearing lest the boy’s career be blighted. These realities, as well as Shakespeare’s ambivalent presentations, allow us to demystify the official ideology of widow suicide as a conclusive testament to marital devotion

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o playwright intent on capturing a large and diverse audience can ignore social expectations. Stereotypes are tempting because characters must be recognizable, their actions comprehensible. But stereotypes are procrustean beds, squeezing the humanity out of characterizations. The idealized “Vertuous Widdow” and her caricature antithesis, the “Ordinary Widdow,” are predictably absent from Shakespeare’s greatest comedies and tragedies. (The lugubrious queens of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Hortensio’s Widow in Shrew, and Cymbeline’s queen are perhaps the closest approximation to widow stereotypes in Shakespeare.) Would chaste, silent, and obedient characters hold the stage? Typically, virtuous widow characters have their faults, for example, Abbess Aemilia is bossy, the Countess of Rossillion meddles. By the same token, if only for a moment, the nastiest widows are apt to invite forbearance as they aspire to security, hoping, like Tamora, that “all is safe, the anchor in the port” (Tit. 4.4.38). A common denominator is insecurity; Mistress Overdone echoes King John’s Constance and Richard III ’s Queen Elizabeth when she asks the poignant question: “What shall become of me?” (1.2.105).1 Perhaps Shakespeare tempered idealizations lest playgoers who knew their own actions fell short would feel shamed by the disparity. Perhaps he reined in derogatory stereotypes, fearing lest touchy playgoers see themselves in ignoble characters. So, more often than not, a mélange of credible motivations grounded in financial and political need, often one and the same, humanized stereotypes and tempered a Catholic ideology that persisted in print and onstage long after the Reformation, calling upon widows to remain celibate and give their lives over to God and their children. These interfacing behaviors remained attractive to many

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churchmen and family members, for the pious, celibate widow could be generous in her gifts to the Church, though not at the expense of her children, who would receive larger legacies than if their mother remarried and her inheritance and dowry passed to another husband. The playwright’s challenge was to create widow characters testifying to the validity of contradictory beliefs, characters in whom both progressive and conservative spectators of various stripes could take comfort. The most prevalent and long-lived satirical stereotype was that of the lusty (remarrying) widow.2 Considering the frequency of remarriage in early modern England, one wonders why a discourse that seems so at odds with social practice persisted. I use seems advisedly because if demographers are correct in their tentative claim that 25 percent of widows remarried, what shall we make of the imposing 75 percent who did not? Thirty-six-year-old Katherine Austen, a London widow, chose not to remarry, fearing “the sacrifice of her reputation” (O’Day 76). How many other widows shunned remarriage on principle? Among the more speculative reasons for celibate widowhood, perhaps the most convincing is that, inevitably, some remarriages had bad outcomes. One victim of abuse was Anne Phillips Witter, who had been married to Shakespeare’s fellow actor Augustine Phillips. A year or slightly more after his death, she married a wastrel, John Witter, who deserted and left her penniless. When she died in 1618, Witter went to law, arguing for his right to Phillips’s share in the Globe, descended through Anne to him. Deposing against him, John Heminges, copublisher of the First Folio, claimed that “divers yeeres before the said Anne dyed [Witter] did suffer her to make shift for herself to live” and that it was he, Heminges, who out of charity had paid for her burial (Ingram 157). Did diatribes and satire against lusty widows endure, especially against those past childbearing, because the remarrying were in the minority? For Shakespeare’s widow characters who remarry—roughly a third—if passion is primary, it shares the stage with such unromantic motives as vengeance (Tamora), sovereignty (Cleopatra), and military superiority (Regan, a bride manqué). Shakespeare’s widows are too credible to wed again solely for love—an anachronistic expectation and perhaps an unrealistic one even today in the West. Equally unrealistic is the assumption that the Shakespearean widow’s remarriage indicates she had not loved her deceased husband. Nothing in the text dissuades playgoers from imagining that Lady Elizabeth Grey cared deeply for her slain lord, but that as a young mother whose property was confiscated, she found remarriage a necessary expedient. Similarly, that some widows speak of their deceased husbands and others do not imparts little or nothing about the strength of their past love or present desires.

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Love being slippery, remembrance of love may fade, particularly in the face of material need. Shakespeare’s widows who wed again usually do so because of their troubles, however mistaken marriage is as a response. Anxious widows are placeholders for vital social issues that lend weight and scope to the plays: the cost of war; of class, status, and gender hierarchy; and of such stability as patriarchalism achieves. The traditional ideology of widowhood erases political and material needs, replacing them with the widows’ reprehensible sexuality. The “lusty widow,” once a household phrase, illustrates how language can alter and warp reality. The widow’s normal sexual desires are reinscribed as the sin of lust; her desire for companionship, for the male protection she had been taught to value, for the “head” she had been told she lacks, become further evidence of lechery. Ideology had little use for the mingled yarn, but gross simplification threatens writers who are close observers of society. Unlike Middleton or his fellows who wrote city comedy, Shakespeare seldom depicted widows as a target of satire. Only Juliet’s nurse and Hostess Quickly are crafted as comic figures. By largely resisting stereotypes, Shakespeare sidesteps the risk of alienating spectators who refused or could not afford to buy into the ideology of ennobling celibate widowhood. How could it be otherwise when so many female playgoers had either outlived their husbands or were likely to, and might well wed again if financial need, family circumstances, or desire so dictated, and if Barkis was willin’? Rather than flatly endorsing a masculinist ideology, Shakespeare allows the conservative spectator to assume that the playwright is on his side, the forward-looking spectator to consider the material causes of remarriage. Among demographers and social historians, materialism carries the day. They conclude that poor older widows lacked financial appeal as wives and were themselves wary of penurious old men, whereas wealthy older widows, supposedly the lusty objects of financially motivated widow hunts, were least likely to wed again, many seeing no reason to surrender their independence. Shakespeare capitalized on his awareness that celibacy was a deeply personal matter and that sexual “virtue” might have little or no relevance to a widow’s life choices. “All stories comprise within themselves the ghosts of the alternative stories they are trying to repress,” writes Alan Sinfield (Faultlines 21). Among the ghosts haunting Shakespeare’s plays are the material circumstances that drive the widow characters. Because their needs are not always textually overt, modern audiences may overlook issues that would have been clear to Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Just as the largely middling-sort audience would not have balked at an almost three-to-one ratio of aristocratic to commoner widow characters

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(aristocrats dominated the canon as whole), so too spectators would have known that widows of their own status like Mistresses Quickly and Overdone frequently required husbands to succeed in business. Streetwise Londoners knew that security might be no easier for an aristocrat to come by than for a commoner. They would have heard of marriages between wealthy bourgeois and financially strapped gentry or aristocrats; they would have seen how unstable times played havoc with once impregnable ruling-class families. Less-privileged widows were not the only ones who yearned for safe havens. Noblewomen, including queens, were vulnerable politically and financially. Remarriage may have presented itself as the inevitable solution to the problems historical and Shakespearean widows faced, the latter unaware of the gloomy fate conservative ideology held in store for them, whatever their age. Stereotypes simplify a complex world, sparing us the effort of understanding or empathizing, and circumscribed roles hold the woman and the system in place. But mechanistic schema cannot mirror reality. In her confessional poem “From a Survivor,” Adrienne Rich luminously describes widowhood as transfiguration, “a succession of brief, amazing movements / Each one making possible the next” (50). This modern writer / feminist / lesbian / activist / wife / widow had medieval and early modern predecessors—among the best-known, Christine de Pisan, Emilia Lanier, Katherine Parr, and Aphra Behn—but early modern prescriptive literature lacked the vocabulary with which to describe the spiritual and physical journeys of these women or their myriad more humble sisters. If “character is a strategy” (Sinfield, Faultlines 78), widow stereotypes deny individuality and dimensionality, albeit widowhood is merely one part of the life cycle and often a late one. Widows were once maids, were once wives, and were subject to a host of formative influences. Titus Andronicus’s raped and mutilated widow, Lavinia, having lost any significant control over her life, practices the forced virtue ideologues wished widows to introject. In much of the Renaissance literary world, “widow” came to connote a handful of restrictive roles: the wealthy widow or the poor one, the lusty widow, or the “widdowe . . . in dede” (1 Tim. 5.3). In contrast, Shakespeare explodes the bounds of these rubrics. His widows are psychologically realistic representations, responding in diverse, nuanced, and subversive ways to love and bereavement, to sexual, social, and economic stratification and exigencies. Shakespeare’s compromise with the ideology of widowhood informing the canon leans toward conventional widow tropes. Widows distinguished by piety, maternal care, and fidelity to their deceased husbands are compensated, unless genre dictates otherwise; they may even have their husbands restored to them.

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Nevertheless, richness of characterization complicates conventional attitudes. Philosophically and politically, whether Shakespeare favored endorsement or disruption of the older tradition—or neither—he knew too much about theatrical characterization to deny his unheaded women the breath of life. As a tribute to their vitality, it behooves us to move the widows from the margins to the center of critical inquiries, that we may not only decode a category forming a significant aspect of the canon but better understand an ideological heritage still with us in much of the modern world.

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Notes Introduction 1. Rosemary O’Day, who covers a more inclusive period and area, finds 20 percent of households headed by widows (94). 2. Throughout I follow Judith Bennett’s still useful clarification of the term patriarchy as a multivalent phenomenon, which has taken many forms and therefore has many historical versions, some more overt and conscious than others (“Feminism” 261). 3. I use the term “role” to denote “a set of patterned, interdependent relations between a social person and a social circle encompassing rights and privileges, duties, and obligations on all sides” (Lopata 3). The widow’s required remarriage to a close relative (agnate or levir) of the deceased husband would be such an obligation. 4. The number of widows at the end of the twentieth century, however, was proportionately less than in Shakespeare’s day. In the United Kingdom (1997), 13.3 percent of women were widows, about average for the EU nations, in the United States (1998), 10.2 percent (Economic Commission 99, Table 2.A10). 5. Although this classification scheme is best known from Measure for Measure (1604), it appears both earlier in George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1595) and later in William Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust (1633); see Tilley 404, M26. 6. The argument linking widowed celibacy to the acquisition of Church property in late Roman and early medieval times applies as well to the Reformation: “widows made an important contribution to the Church, which was more likely to benefit if they remained chaste and unmarried” (Goody, Development 64). 7. W. J. Paylor explains that Sir Thomas Overbury, who wrote the first three characters (and probably the next seven as well), died under mysterious circumstances shortly before the first 1614 printing titled “A Wife Now The Widdow of Sir Tho: Overbvrye. Being a Most Exquisite and singular Poem of the choise of a Wife. Wherevnto Are Added many witty characters, and conceited Newes, written by himselfe and other learned Gentlemen his friends.” Of the eighty-three characters, the thirty-two attributed to Webster were added with a new title page in the sixth impression of 1615. For Paylor’s introduction, see v–xxxiv, for Webster’s additions, 47–95. Also see Lucas 4: 10–14 and 38–39.

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8. Even in the wake of feminist criticism, attitudes have changed little since Roger Alfred MacDonald wrote, “[T]he widow, in any event, is not a significant factor in comedy written before 1603 (nor, incidentally, is she a significant factor in tragedy, either before or after 1603). The great Elizabethan comedies are of course Shakespeare’s, yet only in The Taming of the Shrew do we have a widow—and her role is minor” (7n.6). 9. In her own eyes and in those of her well-wishers (among whom Shakespeare makes one), Katherine was not a widow, an unconsummated marriage being no marriage. In Henry VIII, likely a collaborative work by Shakespeare and Fletcher, Katherine defends herself with great dignity in a courtroom scene attributed to Shakespeare (2.4), insisting on the legality of her marrying Henry, the union having been sanctioned by both their royal fathers and by an international council (2.4.45–53). For her marriage to Henry to be valid, the Pope needed only to grant a dispensation dissolving the prior ratified marriage contract; however, at the request of England and Spain, eager to doubly protect the legality of the second contract, he also granted a dispensation of affinity. Katherine’s integrity is underscored by the remarks of disinterested courtiers, amused by the king’s expedient for ridding himself of an aging wife so that he can wed a young one (2.2.16–18, 4.1.43–47). As Henry’s innocent victim, Katherine elicits overwhelming audience sympathy. On the division of authorship, see Baker 1023–24. 10. Although Mistress Quickly is widowed in Henry IV, Part Two, her marital status is not indicated in Merry Wives. 11. After her divorce from the elder of her brothers, she married the younger, who drowned. She may have married Antony in an Egyptian rite. 12. In this scheme M = mother, R = remarries, and D = dies. Aemilia M (Err.); Lady Grey/Queen Elizabeth MR (3H6, R3); Queen Margaret M, Duchess of York M, Lady Anne RD (R3); Tamora MRD, Lavinia D (Tit.); Hortensio’s wife R (Shr.); Duchess of Gloucester D (R2); Juliet D, Nurse M (Rom.); Lady Faulconbridge M, Constance MD, Elinor MD ( Jn.); Lady Percy (2H4 ); Hostess Quickly RD (2H4, H5); Gertrude MRD (Ham.); Countess of Rousillion M, Widow Capilet M (AWW ); Mistress Overdone R (MM ); Regan D (Lr.); Cleopatra MRD, Octavia R (Ant.); Volumnia M (Cor.); Thaisa M (Per.); Cymbeline’s Queen MRD, Imogen (Cym.); Paulina M (WT ); Three Queens (TNK ). 13. See Tit. 2.2.14–17 and 2.3.191. 14. Shakespeare may not have known that Constance also had a daughter by Geoffrey and children by her third husband, Guy de Thouars, who outlived her (Everard [xv], 158, 172, 175). 15. Nevertheless, no books have been written about the Shakespearean widow. Jennifer Panek reviews the handful of studies of early modern widow characters (203n.8). 16. Of the forty widowers and “seeming widowers,” all are fathers but for Brutus (JC ), Othello and Iago (Oth.), Albany (Lr.), Macbeth, and

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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Belarius (Cym.), the last being one of Shakespeare’s most paternal characters despite his vengeful kidnapping of Cymbeline’s young sons; in the last scene of All’s Well, the “seeming widower” Bertram is about to become a father. The widowed fathers of sons are less likely to act destructively toward their children than are the fathers of daughters, although exceptions can be found: Proteus’s “peremptory” father Antonio in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry IV in Henry IV, Parts One and Two, the deluded Gloucester in King Lear, and Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale. Significantly, Polixenes seeks to control Florizel’s sexual desire, just as Shakespearean fathers seek to control their daughters’ sexuality. Shakespeare depicts six widowed fathers of children of both sexes and three fathers who mistakenly believe themselves widowed: Winter’s Tale’s Leontes, Errors’s Egeon, and Pericles, the latter two counterparts based on Gower’s Apollonius of Tyre. If we include Antony, who not only is a widower when he meets Octavia, but who believes himself widowed once again when Mardian delivers a false report of Cleopatra’s suicide (Ant. 4.14.27–28), there are four “seeming widowers.” If there are children but no spouse appears or is mentioned, I assume a death. Shakespeare creates seventeen widowers or ex-widowers who have only fathered daughters, and eleven widowers (or presumably widowed men) who have only fathered sons. Fathers of daughters: Baptista (Shr); Duke of Milan (TGV ); Egeus (MND); Shylock (MV); Leonato (Ado); Duke Senior and Duke Frederick (AYL); Lafew (AWW ); Calchas (Tro.); Owen Glendower (1H4 ); Brabantio (Oth.); Lear (Lr.); Antiochus, Simonides, and Pericles (Per.); Prospero (Tmp.); The jailer (TNK ). Fathers of sons: Antonio (TGV); Antonio (Ado); John of Gaunt (1H4 ), Bolingbroke (1H4, 2H4 ); Lucius and Marcus Andronicus, (Tit.); Banquo and Duncan (Mac.); Polixenes and the Old Shepherd (WT ); Alonso (Tmp.). Fathers of sons and daughters: Titus Andronicus; Polonius (Ham.); Probably MacDuff (Mac.); Antony (Ant.); Cymbeline; Leontes (WT ). Also see Mikesell 265–79, esp. 266–67. See, for example, Shr. 5.1.32–34, LLL 2.1.201–02, Ado 1.1.104–05, and 1H4 2.4.402–03. The Lawes Resolutions was apparently written at the turn of the century, although it was printed some three decades later (Klein 27). See, for example, Brodsky 128; Erickson, Women 202–03; Houlbrooke, English 212; Weisner 75; and Greaves 195–97. See Chapter 1. “Likewise ye housbands, dwel with thé [your wives] as men of knowledge, giuing honour vnto the womã, as vnto the weaker vessel, euen as they which are heires together of the grace of life.” (1 Pet. 3.7). Other widows remarry but present no textual evidence of lust: Elizabeth Grey and Anne of the first tetralogy; the working widows Quickly and Overdone; Antony and Cleopatra’s Octavia, and the queen in Cymbeline.

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Chapter 1 1. “Ardent victrices et flammae pectora praebent, / imponuntque suis ora perusta viris,” Book III, Elegy XIII, 222–23, ll. 21–22. 2. “Funere saepe viri vir quaeritur; ire solutis / Crinibus et fletus non tenuisse decet” (“The Art of Love,” III, 148–49, ll. 431–32.) 3. Widdowes Glasse (trans. 1621), esp. 290 and 341–48. 4. Walter Smith, a member of Sir Thomas More’s household, alludes to the ceremony in the fourth of his XII mery jests of the Wyddow Edyth (2nd ed., 1573). Father Androtius finds parallel practices honoring chaste widows in pagan Rome: [O]n the wedding day, there were no women suffered to come neere, much lesse to touch the Bride, but only such as had beene the wiues of one husband, to wit, such as had beene but once marryed; cõmanding all that had beene twice marryed (yea though they were Widdowes) to keep aloofe of, as prophane, impure, and fortelling of an euill fortune to the happynes of marriage. (Widdowes Glasse 322–23). 5. In The Treasvre of Vowed Chastity in Secular Persons, Father Lessius, expounding Paul’s dictum that to marry is to have “trouble in the flesh” (1 Cor 7.28), depicts marriage as an inevitable disaster for both sexes (94–130). 6. Olwen Hufton documents the efforts of the church, particularly the Jesuits, to court wealthy widows as benefactors; she focuses on the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but widows were enjoined to charity much earlier (388–89). 7. Janis Butler Holm notes that, at over three hundred pages, the Instruction was “the most ambitious treatment of female training to be published in the sixteenth century” (266). By 1600, writes Valerie Wayne, The Instruction had seen thirty-six English and continental editions—or more (15). 8. The English translator Richard Hyrde, being of a more progressive temper than Vives, attempted within the limits of translation to soften the text (Benson 179–81). 9. All parenthetical citations from The Instruction in my text are from the edition by Beauchamp, Hageman, and Mikesell. 10. For the text of “To Furia on the Duty of Remaining a Widow,” see 228–65, esp. 257. What Jerome thinks of marriage can be inferred from his invocation of 2 Pet. 2.22 to describe remarriage: “The dog is turned to his own vomit again and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (233). 11. See Roland G. Usher’s map (1: 135). John Bossy has questioned but not revised Usher’s estimates (96n.36). 12. Also see Todd’s discussion of “The Widdowe Indeed” (c. 1620), a Protestant treatise that its author William Page intended for his mother and never published (“Virtuous Widow” 66–83).

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13. Swetnam devotes five pages to widows, they being without exception “the summe of the seaven deadly sinnes, the Fiends of Sathan, & the gates of Hell” (63–64). 14. For a review of Catholic and Protestant theologians on the issue of vidual continence, see Geller 291–97. 15. Catherine Parr was following in the footsteps of Henry’s paternal grandmother Margaret Beaufort, who remarried twice upon the death of Edmund Tudor. 16. Citing a 1633 treatise by R. Capel, Sarah Mendelson and Patricia Crawford write, “Sexuality in old widows (and in old men) was termed ‘lust’ and thought disgusting” (68). But see Giese, Courtships 59–61. 17. Kathleen M. Davies cites Henry Smith, A Preparative to Marriage (1591) and Heinrich Bullinger The Golden Book of Christian Matrimony (1543) to this effect (62). 18. Throughout Europe, widowers remarried more frequently, sooner, and in greater numbers than widows (Ségalen 68 and 76). 19. Eric Josef Carlson mentions a widow who would have lost her farm had she remarried (112), such clauses being “a regular provision of wills” (232n.59). Also see Fraser 97–98. 20. To account for men’s anxiety, Anthony Fletcher observes, “literary evidence … suggests that its roots lay in turbulence about male sexuality, which was in practice more problematic than men let it appear” (28). 21. However, E. A. Wrigley finds that “[t]he number of children that a widower had when losing his wife made very little difference to the speed with which he remarried; nor did his age affect matters” (Reconstitution 177). 22. Linda Woodbridge observes a lessening of offensive female stereotypes between 1610 and 1620 as armed women made their presence felt in the theatres (Women 250–61, esp. 255–61). 23. Wrigley, Reconstitution 125; Houlbrooke, English Family 212. 24. F. P. Wilson states that six to ten men died for each woman (3–4), but Hollingsworth and Hollingsworth dispute these figures (135–36). 25. In 1997 there were over four times as many widows as widowers in the United Kingdom, despite British women living an average of only fiveand-a-half years longer than men (Economic Commission 99, Table 2. A.10 and 203, Table 7A.1). 26. Houlbrooke, English Family 209; Minois, Old Age 292–93. 27. Jack Goody calls this a “pre-mortem transfer” resulting in a “stemhousehold,” as opposed to a nuclear household (Introduction 6). 28. See O’Day 173; Houlbrooke, Death, Religion 139. 29. Boulton, Neighbourhood 129; Todd, “Demographic” 427. 30. Between 1560 and 1660, interest up to 10 percent was considered reasonable (Holderness 442). Also see Davis 219–36. 31. Weisner 7; Crawford and Gowing 77–80. On widows’ relation to the guilds throughout much of Europe, see Hufton 243–49. 32. Giese, Consistory 11, 35, 77, 89.

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33. Jack Goody balances the equation, observing that inheritance practices, whether dictated by law or left up to the individual, are an important way “in which interpersonal relationships are structured”; certainly, what the wife expects to gain or lose upon her husband’s death colors the tone of the relationship. Goody continues, “The manner of splitting property is a manner of splitting people; it creates (or in some cases reflects) a particular constellation of ties and cleavages between husband and wife, parents and children, sibling and sibling, as well as between wider kin” (Introduction 1 and 3). 34. Erickson, Women and Property, 5, 24; O’Day, 107. I am grateful to both historians for many of the references in this chapter. 35. Smith’s treatise was written between 1562 and 1565 and published posthumously (1, 8, 133); also see Wrightson, English Society 102. 36. Widows’ wills were notable for favoring female beneficiaries and the poor (Erickson, Women 19). 37. The Pleasant Historie of John Winchcomb, in his yonguer yeares called Jack of Newbery, 1626. 38. I am grateful to Polly Ha for this reference. 39. Patrick Collinson, biographer of Anne Locke, recommends Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1875 essay, “John Knox and His Relations to Women” (Godly People 279). 40. For three cases in point, see Gowing, Domestic 214–15 and 223–25. 41. The custom of providing for one’s widow “dum sola et casta vixerit” [as long as she shall live alone and chaste] persisted into the nineteenth century, witness a reference in John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (740–41). 42. Mendelson and Crawford 183; Wrigley, Reconstitution 182. 43. O’Day 115; Wrigley, Reconstitution 177–78. 44. Clark 399–416; also see Panek. 45. Reading De Civitate Dei, Marilynn Desmond concludes that “with the emergence of Christian marriage, erotic violence has become domesticated” (30–31). 46. See Gowing, Bodies 77–78, 116, 139–40, 147, and 197.

Chapter 2 1. On the play’s economic matrix, see Christensen 19 and 21. 2. But also see Bynum 105–25. 3. The best policy for a woman of means determined to remarry would be to bring her case in the appropriate court. Some women with little money and less concern for law resorted to bigamy. 4. The British Library owns a rendering from the late-thirteenth century, and a brief version is included in The Golden Legend. I am indebted to Anne Booth Thompson for these references and for her translation. 5. Jeanne Addison Roberts, “The Crone” 117; F. Elizabeth Hart 347–74.

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6. She offers “hints of the contradictions surrounding maternity in early modern England” (Douglas Green 24). For Lorna Hutson, maternity in act 5 of Errors becomes a vehicle for patriarchal reductivism: “masculine cultural production. reinvents procreative sex as ‘female sexuality’—the truth about women, the ‘folded meaning’ that gives them dramatic interiority, and a significant dramatic voice” (208). 7. For the age of the Antipholi, see 1.1.125, 132, and 5.1.321–22. 8. So much is made of Egeon’s years (1.1.96; 5.1.318, 339, 342) that an audience is virtually directed to regard him as past conjugal relations. Like Hermione’s wrinkles, his age connotes the loss of sexuality in a spouse to be cherished but not desired. Also see Luxon 63. 9. Although in England (and therefore Shakespeare’s Sicily), early marriage was more closely associated with the ruling class than with commoners, “between 1600 and 1659 only twelve percent of peers and their heirs married by the time they were seventeen.” (Houlbrooke, The English Family 66). I assume that Shakespeare intended a Paulina married in her twenties, now more wrinkled than Hermione. 10. Any powerful woman was likely to be thought a widow, writes Annette Kreis-Schink (112), quoting John Manningham’s 1602 notes on Twelfth Night in which Manningham mistakes Countess Olivia: “A good practice in it to make the steward beleeue his Lady widdowe was in Loue wth [sic] him.” 11. That he threatens to give Hermione, Perdita, and Paulina to the fire (2.3.7–8, 95–96, 114) indicates his crazed response to all women: he is burning up. Greene’s Leontes-figure commits suicide because of his twisted sexuality. 12. Carol Thomas Neely speaks of Leontes’ sixteen-year “winter of abstinence and penance. in effect, a bleaker form of the eternal summer of youth which he with Polixenes had longed for, equally changeless, sexless, endless” (“Women”190). 13. “Therefore I say vnto the vnmaried, and vnto widowes, it is good for them if they abide euen as I do. But if they cannot absteine [“contain” in the King James version], let thé marie: for it is better to marie thé to burne (1 Cor. 7.8–9). 14. For an opposed opinion, see Neely, Broken Nuptials 208–09. 15. See Hawkes 6; and Beier, Masterless. 16. Observing Paulina’s loyalty to women over men and her invocation of Nature as a “goddess,” A. E. B. Coldiron questions a remarriage as “misaligned with her character as presented in the rest of the play” (67n.53). 17. Although Posthumus is guilty of mistrust and cruelty rather than recklessness or lust, Cymbeline is allied to such prodigal-husband plays as All’s Well That Ends Well, Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (1604), and George Wilkins’s The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607).

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18. Penelope’s Web, qtd. in Hull, Chaste 81. 19. Posthumus’s exclamation is the poetic culmination of an imagery strand figuring trees and fruit that vindicates Imogen and establishes her as the source of her husband’s honor (Kehler, “Cymbeline” 70–72). Be that as it may, for Susanne Collier, Imogen “forgives and accepts her repentant husband so gratefully that even comic credulity is stretched” (42).

Chapter 3 1. Cleopatra had four children: Caesarion by Julius Caesar; and Cleopatra Selene, Alexander Helios, and Ptolemaeus by Antony. Her suicide seems to authorize their slaughter by Octavius. In Plutarch, realizing the dynastic threat Caesarion posed to Octavius, Cleopatra dispatched her son to safety in India. However, his tutor Rhodon persuaded him to return to Egypt. Rightly believing that Cleopatra was trying to starve herself to death, Octavius “therefore did put her in feare, and threatned her to put her children to shameful death” (qtd. in Geoffrey Bullough 5: 313). She allowed her health to be restored but took her life upon learning she would be exhibited in Caesar’s triumph. After her death, Caesar killed Caesarion. Plutarch suggests that Octavius spared her children by Antony (Geoffrey Bullough 5: 312). 2. Pericles’s wicked Dionyza, who orders Marina’s death, behaves like a stepmother surrogate. 3. For sources, see Gesner 90–115 and Geoffrey Bullough 8: [3]–111. 4. Alison Thorne observes that since the publication of Lenz, Greene, and Neely’s The Woman’s Part in 1980, feminist critics have demonstrated misogynistic elements in the construction of the romances’ heroines (19–20). 5. Steven Swann Jones charts three basic versions of the Snow White story and relates them to van Gennep’s pattern of rituals delineating the maturation of a young woman who moves from her parents’ house to a liminal abode and then to her home as wife (171–81). 6. See Jackson, “2003–2004” 189; Warren 82, 9. 7. See Mikalachki 133–34. 8. Gesner suggests a legal reason for Imogen’s reticence. The queen calls Posthumus’s servant Pisanio “the remembrancer of her to hold/The hand-fast to her lord” (1.6.77–78). Gesner concludes that Imogen and Posthumus are bound by a handfasting, “an old form of irregular or probationary marriage contracted by the parties’ joining hands and agreeing to live as man and wife” (102). Since Cloten still hopes to marry Imogen, the handfasting may have been neither binding nor consummated. 9. Adelman (352n.44) quotes Murray Schwartz. 10. See Shuli Barzilai’s feminist critique of the Snow White story (253–72). 11. See Ann Thompson’s insightful essay, esp. 80–81; and Collier 39–58, esp. 49.

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12. Brien and Fenwick qtd. in Styan 28–29. 13. Moshinsky’s BBC Helena appears to seduce the king, further complicating how she is perceived. 14. This transference has been performed on stage (Styan 48). 15. The Countess also refers to Helena as a gentlewoman at 1.3.2, 1.3.68, and 4.5.9. 16. An unconsummated marriage invites annulment, and Bertram’s absence and “defective consent” increase the likelihood of legal dissolution (Ranald, “Marriage” 80). 17. In the ninth tale of the third day of the Decameron (1348–53), Boccaccio’s Giletta stays at “uno alberghetto” [a little inn] kept by “una buona donna vedova” [a good widowed lady], who commends Helena to Diana and her mother. Boccaccio’s innkeeper is neither poor nor gentle, whereas Diana is both (8: 261). 18. Bertram’s companions, the two French lords, refer to Diana as “a young gentlewoman” (4.3.14–15), and therefore think her seduction all the more heinous. 19. In practice, distinction between classes based on their work being manual or managerial is obscured, for people’s work is often both. Although service engrossed a quarter to a third of the population of England (Laslett 16), innkeepers like Hostess Quickly and Widow Capilet would have performed some physical work. 20. Quoting this passage David Scott Kastan states that everything in All’s Well has its price, including Helena’s medical services (585). 21. For the first use of “business” meaning trade, commercial transactions, or engagements, the OED gives 1727. 22. Don Armado voices the same sentiment: “it is base for a soldier to love.” (LLL 1.2.58). 23. This offer to Diana, like the earlier gift of wealth and a title that made Helena Bertram’s equal, shows the King subordinating the nobility to himself. He demonstrates that he can make (and unmake) them. Like any movement between orders, Helena’s rise weakens the polarity between gentles and commons. For problems with the play’s ending, see Sullivan (68). 24. Among the poor, “if the daughter married, she was likely to end up sheltering her mother” (Hufton 254). 25. In an incisive Lacanian reading, Susan Snyder doubts whether Diana will marry (29). 26. Shakespeare eliminates Constance and Elinor “with an abruptness that borders on the ludicrous (4.2.120–23)—in order to recuperate masculinity at the end of the play” (Adelman 10). However, “the play goes to pieces once the women leave the stage.” (Dusinberre 51). Also see Levin 220, 231. 27. Historically, not Constance but Blanch was to rule through her son. 28. In David Giles’s BBC production Lady Falconbridge (Emma Thompson’s mother, Phyllida Law) is fortyish and attractive. At “I have it on my

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30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

N ot e s shoulder” (1.1.245), she laughs and hugs her son, while admitting her guilt with a show of piety. The Countess of Salisbury nevertheless manages to resist her royal suitor in Edward III, some part of which is ascribed to Shakespeare. Is it relevant that she is a countess rather than merely a knight’s wife? Shakespeare anticipates the pregnant Juliet’s polysemic reply to Friar Lodovick: “I do repent me as it is an evil, / And take the shame with joy” (Meas. 2.3.35–36). In Titus Andronicus Chiron and Demetrius accept their mother’s lover Aaron because they must. But see Rackin, “Misogyny” 52. See Introduction, n.19. Robert Faulconbridge is less forgiving than his brother. Of Cordelion’s affair with their mother, he says, “how he did prevail I shame to speak” (1.1.104). He has no word of farewell for the Bastard, his speeches being limited to his plaintiff’s suit. No mention is made of Elinor’s childless first marriage to her third cousin once removed, the French King Louis VII. That consanguinious union ended in an annulment, tantamount to a divorce, because of Elinor’s adultery with Henry II, the eighteen-year-old English ruler, twelve (or fourteen) years her junior, who became her second husband (Brooke 20). For Elinor’s birth year, see Lewis 161. Perhaps her imminent death is foreshadowed, when Elinor requires the Bastard’s rescue and John has her withdraw from the battle (3.3.1–2). Kehler, “So jest with Heaven,” analyzes the relation between religious rhetoric and faith (or its lack). On the validity of both John’s and Arthur’s claims, see Goodland 126, and Saccio 190–91. In a murkier passage Constance asserts that John, another product of Elinor’s adultery, “her sin,” is also illegitimate (2.1.182–90). The BBC’s Constance (Claire Bloom) behaves hysterically, for example, spitting at Elinor. Constance’s unbound hair signifies madness, as does her wild delivery of the Nature and Fortune speech (3.1.43–64), when she learns of the projected marriage. Anthony Fletcher cites research linking the behavior of scolds to madness (273–74), and Elizabeth Foyster, quoting from the ballad “A Caution for Scolds,” discusses medical treatment for presumably mad scolds (“Laughing” 5–21). See Lr. 4.6.65–66 vis-à-vis Jn. 3.4.59–60; and Mac. (4.3.216) vis-à-vis Jn. (3.4.91). Lines 104–05 look forward to widower Leonato’s confession of possessive love for Hero (Ado 4.1.136–39). Lisa Lowe points out that many critics scapegoat Volumnia for the failings of her society and that Roman values are responsible for Coriolanus’s insecurities about his masculinity (86–95). But Adelman responds that the play itself scapegoats Volumnia (323n.44).

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44. In an insightful study, Page duBois notes parallel attitudes towards mothers in ancient Rome and fascist Italy (202). 45. For research on fascist Italy, I am indebted to Lucia Chaivola Birnbaum, for research on Nazi Germany to Jill Stephenson. 46. Stephenson 9. Catharine A. MacKinnon, a leading legal theorist of crimes against women, defines the hierarchical nature of difference as “the velvet glove on the iron fist of domination” (8). 47. She is the only major female character who survives in Shakespeare’s tragedies (Sprengnether 105). 48. Other sources are Livy (59 BCE–17 CE) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (66 BCE–c. 10 CE), the latter of particular importance to Plutarch and hence to Shakespeare (Geoffrey Bullough 5: 460–73). 49. Hitler invokes the same ideology in a 1937 Nuremberg speech: If to-day a female lawyer achieves great things and nearby there lives a mother with five, six, seven children, all of them healthy and well brought up, then I would say: from the point of view of the eternal benefit to our people the woman who has borne and brought up children and who has therefore given our nation life in the future, has achieved more and done more! (qtd. in Stephenson 49) 50. However, Tacitus lauds parents who urge their children to follow a primary interest exclusively, “to focus on this alone, and drain it to the full” (Evans 192). 51. Such motiveless warfare contrasts markedly with Shakespeare’s history plays (Poole 10). 52. If for some the characterization of Virgilia subverts celebration of the Spartan-Roman matron, for others it may endorse the equally noxious role of woman as “gracious silence” (2.1.175). 53. In Elizabethan England the mother’s influence did not necessarily end when her son attained manhood. Controversy attended questions of familial power. For example, who held power after the father’s death, the eldest son or the mother? If the mother, for how long did that power last? (Sommerville 67). 54. But if Coriolanus is the unhappy product of his mother’s raising, why is his little son so like him? (Cefalu 71–72). 55. This perceptive phrase, akin to Ginzburg’s colportage (xv), is John Okada’s (212). In his novel No-No Boy, Okada depicts the scarifying effects of the ideology of Japanese imperialism on the children of Japanese-American immigrants still loyal to Japan.

Chapter 4 1. See Geoffrey Bullough’s survey of sources (3: 221–28). 2. War widows Tamora and Cleopatra, discussed in chapters 6 and 7 respectively, resist male control.

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3. In Henry VI, Part Three 3.2.1–7, Edward IV mistakenly describes him as a Yorkist whose lands were posthumously confiscated. In Richard III 1.3.126–29, Gloucester claims without contradiction that Grey fought for Lancaster. Perhaps Homer nods. If not, are we to understand that for Shakespeare York and Lancaster are interchangeable, their war an unjustifiable power-grab? 4. See Lanham’s alphabetical glossary for definitions of rhetorical terms. 5. Although historically only forty-six (five years older than Edward), Shakespeare’s Elizabeth was apt to be collectivized with the Duchess and Margaret as elderly and unsexed, one of “a bizarre trio [of] aged crones,” (Pitt 157). 6. See Tanner’s careful analysis of this scene (470–72). 7. The images of the uncle’s penetration of his niece’s womb and of her brothers’ presence there evoke an incestuous surreal gang-rape, for the princes are figured as undead and prematurely potent, animated by the “spices” Richard fantasizes. Buried in that womb/tomb, they breed, eerily cloning themselves as the issue of their now amorous, admitted murderer, their uncle. 8. Similarly, after executing Hastings, Richard speaks of his friend’s hypocrisy: “He liv’d [apart or removed] from all attainder of suspects” (3.5.32). Later, Richard regrets that Bosworth field is moist: “I would these dewy tears were from the ground” (5.3.284), that is, “apart from” rather than “came from.” 9. “[A] poor old woman, unloved, untrusted, impoverished,” Elizabeth languished “under virtual house arrest within Bermondsey Abbey” (Rosenthal 141). 10. Like Richard’s, Anne’s character is stylized and distorted. The real Anne Neville was Richard’s childhood friend, only fourteen when her father contracted her to Edward. Tudor historian Richard Grafton states that Anne and Margaret’s son never wed (Bullough, 3: 225), but Michael Hicks provides a marriage date of 13 December 1470, nearly five months before Edward’s death (180). Ill-disposed to the marriage, Margaret “left herself as free as possible to disavow or annul it later. In all probability Anne never shared a marriage bed with the Prince” (Kendall 108, 106). 11. See Goodland on courtly funeral etiquette (143–44). 12. Also see Neill, “Halle” 99–129, esp.110–12; and Charnes 38–51. 13. Charles R. Forker describes Anne as a “victim entranced by her predator. beauty sexually mesmerized by deformity” (119). Also pertinent is the timing of her remarriage: “[T]he abruptness and inappropriateness with which widows are shown accepting (or propositioning) a potential lover … [suggest] a sexual appetite that even great grief cannot diminish” (Arden 316). 14. Her depiction as female villain is almost wholly ahistorical. For modern accounts of Margaret, see Lee 183–207; John Watts; Ralph Griffiths; and Philippe Erlanger. For comparisons between modern historical

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17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

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accounts of the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV and Shakespeare’s sources for those plays, including Margaret’s representation, see Geoffrey Bullough’s Introductions to the Henriad plays (3: 23–41, 89–100, 157–171, and 221–248); Norwich 221–318; and Saccio 91–169. Also see Kehler, “Canard.” See Howard and Rackin’s fine historically based study of the first tetralogy and Lee 211 on the development of Margaret’s representation from the chronicle writers through Shakespeare. Anne, herself bewitched by Richard, escapes the charge of witchcraft, as does Richard’s mother; however, Elizabeth and Mistress Shore are maligned as witches (3.4.70–72), in what may be displaced fury and fear of his mother. (Willis 169). The “recurrent association of Margaret with savage beasts in York’s tirade” (3H6 1.4.111–66) is a strategy designed to scapegoat her for the civil war (Rossini 65). In her discussion of the historical conditions and beliefs that contextualize Richard’s fearful imaginings, Adelman quotes a popular sixteenthcentury midwifery manual, The birth of mankinde, that “attributes spontaneous abortion to the mother’s ‘excesse feeding and surfetting, by the which the byrth is suffocate and strangled in the belly’ ” (6–7). Although she is absent from the Loncrain/McKellen film, some of her defamatory bestial metaphors are visually literalized (Hatchuel 28). In Jane Howell’s BBC production, as early as act 1, Margaret (Julia Foster) walks a thin line between sanity and madness. Ultimately, she succumbs to lunacy. Seated atop a pyramid of maimed English corpses, she cradles Richard’s lifeless body in her arms, laughing uncontrollably. The chronicles provide virtually no information about her (Norwich 144). Historically, Northumberland was a widower well before Shrewsbury. Hotspur and Elizabeth Mortimer (Shakespeare’s Kate) had three children, one apparently dying young. Hotspur’s son Henry eventually succeeded to the earldom of Northumberland, and his daughter married into the Clifford family. Separated from the persuasions of the female domestic sphere, by 1408 Northumberland had contrived to leave his family “penniless, landless, and titleless” (Alexander Rose 366). Kate made the best of things by remarrying, this time a widower—Baron Thomas Camoys. She died in 1417 in her forty-seventh year, fourteen years after the Battle of Shrewsbury (Saccio 55–56; Alexander Rose 361–71; and Leland 9: 677–78). I refer almost entirely to scenes traditionally attributed to Shakespeare: act 1, scene 1, through act 2, scene 1, are Shakespeare’s, but act l, scenes 4 and 5, are doubtful. Act 3, scene l and act 5, scenes l (lines 34–173), 3, and 4 are Shakespeare’s, the rest, except for act 4, scene 2, which is doubtful, is Fletcher’s (Hallett Smith 1690). Also see Werstine “Compositors” 6–30; and Hedrick 45–77. On the play’s sexual implications, see Sinfield, Shakespeare, Authority 68–85; Shannon 112–22; Mallette 29–52; Kehler, “Emilias” 166–69; and Abrams 69–76.

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24. See Hedrick on “the play’s pervasive representation of the male world of contests” (52). 25. See Shannon (110). Although Emily and her lovers (with their retinues) prostrate themselves at the altars of the gods, Theseus is accorded more deference than any god. 26. Neither act 4, scene 2, nor act 5, scene 3, 41–77 depicts Emily convincingly, especially when set against her anguish over Palamon’s and Arcite’s unlooked-for suits and her remembrance of Flavina. 27. In Pericles, when Marina upbraids Boult for serving a pander, he indicts the government, no king being present to sidestep the accusation: “What would you have me do? Go to the wars, would you? Where a man may serve seven years for the loss of a leg, and have not money enough in the end to buy him a wooden one?” (4.6.170–73). 28. Phyllis Rackin notes that the name “Williams” is a variant of “William”—as in “William Shakespeare” (Stages 243–44). 29. On the legendary Theseus’s ill usage of women, see Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild (167–68). 30. Capaneus, one of Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, occupies the seventh circle of Dante’s hell. Evadne achieved legendary fame by immolating herself upon Capaneus’s funeral pyre. To his credit, Shakespeare suppresses rather than celebrates this Greek prototype of sati.

Chapter 5 1. Abbess Aemilia (Err.), a merchant’s wife, is an administrator, a whitecollar occupation. 2. See chapter 3n.19. 3. Harrison upgrades the status of citizens and burgesses from their level in Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum, Harrison’s parents being citizens (Cressy, “Describing” 30), but the entrepreneurial widows would not have similarly qualified by reason of their sex and lack of wealth. 4. Alice Clark groups vintners (both producers and sellers of wine in taverns) under the heading “Provisions Trades” (209). 5. See Dickey 76; and Sasha Roberts 75. Roberts notes that Angelica is given to Bakhtinian language. 6. Laslett discusses continual recruitment into the ruling class in order to keep a title extant and its holders solvent (200–03). 7. J. W. Lever identifies contemporary London issues targeted in Mistress Overdone’s complaint about hard times (Dollimore 76). 8. See Greenblatt, Negotiations, on “salutary anxiety” (129–42). 9. In early modern England, many wives of small farmers and skilled workers regarded nursing as a source of additional income with the advantage of delaying conception (Newall 133). 10. For Barbara Everett, the earthquake is the enraged Juliet, “the unfluttered dovecote” the Nurse, who cannot be shaken (upset) by the angry baby (Romeo 118).

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11. Most social historians hold that vestiges of the condemnatory Catholic position lingered on; see, for example, Todd, “Virtuous” 70–75, and Foyster, “Marrying” 109–12. 12. Jeanne Addison Roberts, “Types” 74; Paylor 42. 13. Authorship of this Character has not been definitively attributed. 14. But see Archer on possible problems with the guilds, should the widow remarry (55). 15. Even if Nell had taken legal advice and kept the tavern in her own name, Pistol would inherit. His last line in Henry V, “To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal” (5.1.87), therefore makes no sense, whether Nell or Doll is dead. 16. Historians agree on the role material circumstances played in remarriage. See, for example, O’Day 114; Mendelson and Crawford 182–83; and Pelling 46–47. 17. Bevington and G. B. Evans have Ancient Pistol lamenting the death of Doll. Evans explains this “curious reference” by suggesting the likelihood “that much of Pistol’s ‘business’ once belonged to Falstaff,” Shakespeare having later excluded Falstaff from Henry’s invasionary force without thoroughly checking the revision (Evans, Riverside, “Note on the Text” 1016). But Stephen Greenblatt, following the Oxford edition, changes “Doll” to “Nell” (Norton 1512). 18. Shakespeare drew on the ninth tale of the Decameron, the story of Giletta of Narbonne, as it appeared in William Painter’s translation, The Palace of Pleasure. 19. For the life of Alessandra Strozzi, I am indebted to Ann Morton Crabb (47–68) and Heather Gregory (1–25). 20. What of the other two-thirds? Barbara B. Diefendorf notes that fifteenthcentury Florentine widows were expected to accept a “dependent and reclusive role”; because the widow’s children belonged to her deceased husband’s family, she lost them if she were to remarry or return to her parents’ home. Only if she remained with her agnatic kin could she keep them. Especially if she was young, the choice may not have been hers to make (677–78). But see Coolidge 388. 21. G. B. Evans glosses the Saint Francis, a guesthouse for pilgrims, as an inn (3.5.36n.). 22. During the 1590s, the least privileged suffered most. Florentine workers lost half the buying power of their wages between the 1520s and the 1590s (Peter Clark 12). 23. Widmayer understands Mistress Overdone as “having nine husbands, [but] widowed apparently only by the last.” (186). 24. See Vern Bullough 142, Widmayer 182, and Archer 211.

Chapter 6 1. On women’s lust, see Rogers 20, 38–39, 64, and 124–25; on changes in the imaging of women’s sexuality, see Laqueur 149–50 and 188–89.

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2. An exception to the prevailing literary prejudice against remarrying widows is Antony and Cleopatra’s Octavia, “of a holy, cold, and still conversation” (2.6.122–23). Although she wed Antony only at her brother’s behest, she does not escape the usual unhappy consequences of remarriage, in her case, abandonment. 3. “Hast thou so soon forgot Andrugio?” asks Andrugio’s ghost of his widow, John Marston’s Gertrude-like character, “Are our lovebands so quickly canceled? / Where lives thy plighted faith unto this breast? / O weak Maria!” (Antonio’s Revenge, 3.2.65–68); also see James 47. 4. The First Quarto text reads, “A second time I kill my Lord that’s dead.” (Kliman and Bertram CLN1327–28; TLN2052–53). I have conflated Q2 and F except for spelling and punctuation. Adelman deals with the psychoanalytic implications of this passage (25). 5. Kliman and Bertram F1 TLN2048; 3.2.180; Q1 is stronger: “None weds the second, but she kils the first.” (Q1CLN1326). 6. The ensuing stage direction, “Exit [led by Regan]” is found only in Q1–2, not in F1, Evans’s primary text for The Riverside Shakespeare. 7. See 5.2.23 and 34 versus 5.2.86 and 90. 8. See the various glossaries of bawdry by Partridge, Rubinstein, and Gordon Williams. 9. Swetnam’s work appeared in at least ten editions (Hull, Chaste 119–20). 10. Geoffrey Bullough assumes that an early version of the eighteenthcentury chapbook The History of Titus Andronicus, The Renowned Roman General. Newly Translated from the Italian Copy Printed at Rome was an important source for Shakespeare (6: 7, 34). The chapbook’s Goths are “a barbarous Northern People” (6: 35). In “Sources. Again,” G. K. Hunter argues against the chapbook as a source (114–16); also see Hunter’s “Sources and Meanings” (171–88). 11. For representations of Africans, see Eldred Jones’s seminal study and more recent works by Mangum, Little, Habib, Hall, Alexander and Wells, and Joyce Green MacDonald. 12. See Kehler, “Limbo” 125–31. 13. Also see Habib 112 on “-mora” in Tamora, associating her with Moorishness. 14. For further discussion of the legendary Tamora, see Herodotus, Waith, and Lamb 64, 195. 15. Sara Hanna discusses the Semiramis legends available to Shakespeare (13–15). 16. Q1, Q3, and F1 give “Thebe,” which makes no sense. 17. Marion Wynne-Davies (134) reads Tamora as “a distantly refracted image of Elizabeth.” The classic argument is Frances A. Yates’s association of Elizabeth with Astraea (74–76). 18. See 1.1.392, 2.1.10, 2.1.120, and 4.2.29.

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19. See Cynthia Marshall on Tamora’s “unusual articulateness” (207). 20. Korhonen 94–112; Neill, “Othello” 37–52, esp. 49–50; Loomba, “Shakespeare” 34–58; and Bartels 433–54, esp. 433–35. 21. Both murders reassert patriarchal power: the former over a mother, the latter over a daughter whose violation challenged the property rights Titus held in her (Kahn, Roman 70–71). 22. In the First Quarto, Hamlet expresses horror that “lust shall dwell within a matrons breast” (Q1CLN 1547). 23. Also see Rebecca Smith 209–10n.11. 24. For a critique of Eliot’s reading of Gertrude as an inadequate “objective correlative,” see Jacqueline Rose 95–103 and 114–18. 25. See Jeremy Tambling’s insightful discussion (73–78). 26. All but through-line references are to Evans’s Riverside Shakespeare. 27. See 1.2.138, 1.2.145, and 3.2.128. According to Uéno, “The objective reality of time is eroded by his [Hamlet’s] expanded subjectivity and no longer remains a solid fact” (161). 28. I have argued elsewhere that Q1’s presenters may have tailored their version of Hamlet for areas of England still devoted to Catholicism, where old ideas about the sacred nature of celibacy and the faithful widow lingered longest (Kehler, “Quarto” 398–413). 29. Edwards describes Q1 as a “bad” quarto: “a corrupt, unauthorised version,” here an abridged “acting-text of Hamlet, based on the playhouse transcription of Shakespeare’s foul-papers” (9, 23). Paul Werstine argues against such textual constructivism: mistaking dubious hypotheses for historical fact (“Narratives” 65–86). 30. In Q1, Yorick’s skull “hath bin here this dozen [not twenty-three] yeare, / … euer since our last king Hamlet / Slew Fortenbrasse in combat.” (Q1CLN 1987–89), and the gravedigger says nothing about his length of service as sexton or about the day of Hamlet’s birth. 31. As Thomas Kyd’s Bel-imperia in The Spanish Tragedy, from whom the lines are lifted, does not. 32. Henderson credits Blair Brown, Campbell Scott’s Gertrude, for the phrase (83). 33. Uéno cites Claudius’s statement “The Queen his mother/Lives almost by his looks” (4.7.11–12), as evidence that Gertrude “is a mother before anything else …” (157). 34. G. B. Shand discusses the possibility of a guilt-ridden Gertrude, who knew the drink was poisoned (“Realising” 95–118). 35. O’Brien suggests that Gertrude’s attack on the “rabble,” who wish to crown Laertes is anomalous, an instance of ideology taking precedence over subjectivity, although it could also fit the characterization of a Gertrude, “whose very identity is bound up with being Queen” (“Mapping” 24–28, esp. 27). 36. Regan’s lines are the same in both substantive texts of King Lear. Halio’s contributors track differences between the texts (21–71).

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37. Although Tambling is commenting specifically on Gertrude’s assumed adultery, the implications of his discussion are broader.

Chapter 7 1. Kirby Farrell claims that Cleopatra’s feigning death “expresses her ambivalence toward her lover” (17). 2. See Michael MacDonald’s finding list of secondary works on changing attitudes towards suicide (“Maimèd” 315n.17). 3. Ryan’s thoughtful essay details how the lovers are “trapped in their fatal impasse by the injustice of ‘the world’s law …’ ” (126). 4. The Friar cries out, “Hold thy desperate hand!” (3.3.108), when Romeo attempts to stab himself after killing Tybalt; Friar Lawrence clarifies the sense in which he uses the adjective when he continues, “[T]hy wild acts denote / The unreasonable fury of a beast” (3.3.110–11). As Shakespeare uses “desperate” at 5.1.36, 5.3.59, 5.3.117, 4.3.54, and 5.3.263, it denotes “reckless,” “hopeless,” or “reckless because hopeless”; a religious context is optional. The OED also defines “desperate” as “extremely dangerous,” “violent,” and “infuriated,” all of which are germane to Romeo and Juliet. 5. Drawing on a 1997 national survey of American high-school students, Jessica Portner finds that one in thirteen attempts suicide (4). 6. George V. Zito, essaying a Durkheimian categorization of Shakespeare’s suicides, ascribes the suicides in Romeo and Juliet to the lovers’ experience of disarticulation as social regulation collapses in Verona (299). 7. Ann Pasternak Slater analyzes Shakespeare’s literalization of the play’s Petrarchan metaphors and conventions (129–50). 8. Petrarchanism served as a suicide model for Elizabethans, just as Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther modeled suicide for the Romantics. Modern psychologists speak of “the Werther effect”: imitative suicides following a wave of publicity (Jobes and Cimbolic 103–12). 9. Not only was remarriage prohibited, but even a widow’s presence at a wedding (or any other celebration) brought bad luck. Many widows (including those who are children) are still banished by their husband’s families to Brindavan, a templed Indian city in the Mathura District of Uttar Pradesh, notorious as a sink of poverty and exploitation. The percentage of women who have cast off the restrictions imposed upon widows is small and limited to educated, progressive women (Kumar 127; Weinberger-Thomas 148–49). 10. Mani, “Mediations” 317; Oldenburg 101–30. 11. Weinberger-Thomas, 45, 13; Mani, Contentious 1. 12. Gayatri Spivak is concerned with the erasure of Indian women’s subjectivity, caught between two patriarchal discourses, the nativist and the imperialist. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, she extends the argument of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” viewing the British abolition of sati

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13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

215

after long collusion with its proponents as a colonialist but “admirable” move: “The ethical aporia is not negotiable” (“Subaltern” 299; Sarkar 205–24). Shakespeare’s Portia kills herself before Brutus is defeated, being “[i]mpatient of [his] absence” (4.3.152). “Of Vertue,” The Second Booke, The nine and twentieth Chapter (406–07) is specifically on sati; and “Of Three Good Women,” The Second Booke, the five and thirtieth Chapter (427–30). Octavius made war against Cleopatra, the imperialistic foreigner, rather than against Antony, foreign quarrels being more palatable to the public than civil war. The extent and tenor of the propaganda Octavius employed reveals that Rome was divided and his base shaky (J. H. C. Williams 193). Meadows treats the relationship between Antony and Cleopatra as merely a liaison. Virgil, Aeneid, vol. 2, Book VIII, l. (688). The first three Characters have been definitively attributed to Overbury. For a credible view of how Shakespeare deals with Cleopatra’s maternity, see Sutherland and Watts (1–6). For ancient and modern historical accounts, see Chapter 3n.1 above. The late-eighteenth-century writer Thomas Davies originated this view (Deats 18). The line recalls Enobarbus’s tribute to her “infinite variety” (2.2.235). See Chapter 4, 97–99. Elizabeth A. Brown explains Elizabeth’s survival versus Cleopatra’s defeat (144). Rossiter (40). Woodstock citations are taken from his edition. Although Scroope refers to Richard’s uncles as “[o]ld doting graybeards!” (2.2.170), and Woodstock calls himself “a poor old man” (5.1.122), his sexual banter with his wife (1.3. 59–67) and their kissing (4.2.48) suggest otherwise. See Harry Berger, Jr., for a skeptical view of this speech (254–57). Vengeance, a wild kind of justice, has its lifesaving aspects. A concentration camp survivor writes that only the hope of vengeance kept him from suicide: “I must live, for those I loved, live to avenge myself and tell the world that Treblinka meant death. Live, escape, proclaim, avenge”; qtd. in Baechler (27). Suspicious circumstances abound. The in-laws of Roop Kanwar did not inform her parents of the couple’s deaths until after her immolation. The husband was diagnosed as suffering from “androgynous depression” after he first failed a medical school admission exam; after their marriage he failed for the second time, dying two weeks later of uncertain causes. He may have taken poison. Not only was Roop’s dowry unusually large and, if she committed sati, nonrefundable, but the in-laws

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gained perhaps as much as $160,000 in religious donations from the ritual. Roop was known to have attempted to hide in a barn when she first heard of her planned burning, and police suspected that she was drugged by a doctor (who soon fled) so that she would not resist the pyre. Even so, witnesses testified to her futile efforts to escape from the flames (Oldenburg 113–17; Hawley, Introduction 8 and 24n.8). 29. See Baechler’s discussion of the relationship between social context and the etiology of suicide (275–76). 30. Goudchaux (140), Grant (225), Meadows (30), and Chauveau (74).

Conclusion 1. Meas. 1.2.105, Jn. 3.1.35, R3 1.3.6. 2. “Patronizing us is like making love to a good-looking young widow. You just can’t overdo it,” claims a postcard from Oasis Rooms Bordello in Wallace, Idaho, in business until 1988 and now a museum. My thanks to Walter Hesford for the card.

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Index

Abbess Aemilia, see Shakespeare, plays: Comedy of Errors Alchemist, The, see Jonson Androtius, Father Fulvius, S. J., 19–20 Anne [Neville], widow of Edward of Lancaster, wife to Richard III, see Shakespeare, plays: Richard III Anne, Saint (the Prophetess), 19 Antonio’s Revenge, see Marston Antony, see Shakespeare, plays: Antony and Cleopatra Apollonius of Tyre (Confessio Amantis), see Gower Artemisia the Second, 18 Até, 102, 153 Augustine, Saint, 39 Austen, Katherine, 192 Baechler, Jean, 187 Balzac, Honoré de, Comédie humaine, 2 Bartholomew Fair, see Jonson Beaufort, Margaret, 106–07 Becon, Thomas, 23 Behn, Aphra, 194 Belleforest, François de, 155 bigamy, 124–25 Boccaccio, Decameron, 69–70, 132 Brabantio, see Shakespeare, plays: Othello Bradley, A. C., 155–57 Brathwait, Richard, The English Gentlewoman, 24 breach of contract, 128

Brooke, Arthur, 123, 125, 174 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, 147, 173 Cacoyannis, Michael, 2 Canterbury Tales, see Chaucer Castiglione, Baldassare, The Courtier, 173 Catholic traditions 2, 7–8, 10, 13, 19, 24, 191 celibacy, see Catholic traditions, Protestant attitudes, remarriage, widows: ancient and medieval ideology Chapman, George, 12, 39 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 18, 112, 139, 178–79, 181 class distinctions, 4, 10, 23–24, 37–38, 44, 56, 63, 72–74, 88, 120–22, 125, 136, 143, 166 Cleopatra (character), see Shakespeare, plays: Antony and Cleopatra Cleopatra (historical), 180–81, 183–84, 215n.15 Constance, see Shakespeare, plays: King John Corombona, Vittoria, see Webster Countess of Auvergne, see Shakespeare, plays: Henry VI, Part One Countess of Rossillion, see Shakespeare, plays: All’s Well That Ends Well crones, 51, 54, 102, 131

242

Index

cuckoldry, 7–8, 17, 75–77, 96 Cymbeline (King), see Shakespeare, plays: Cymbeline Cymbeline’s queen, see Shakespeare, plays: Cymbeline Della Casa, Giovanni, 17 Delony, Thomas, 35, 202n.37 de Pisan, Christine, 22, 35, 100, 107, 194 Desdemona, see Shakespeare, plays: Othello deuxième lit, le, 8, 40, 61–62, 139, 162 Diana (character) see Shakespeare, plays: All’s Well That Ends Well Diana (goddess), 46 “Disputation Between a He … and a She-Cony-Catcher,” see Greene Donne, John, Biathanatos, 173 Duchess of Gloucester (character), see Shakespeare, plays: Richard II Duchess of Gloucester (historical), 189–90 Duchess of Malfi, see Webster Duchess of York (Cecilly Neville), see Shakespeare, plays: Richard III Dürer, Albrecht, 19 Durkheim, Emile, 172, 177 Elinor (Queen), see Shakespeare, plays: King John Eliot, T. S., 157 Elizabeth, Lady Hatton, 12 Elizabeth Tudor (Elizabeth I, Queen of England), 14, 54, 88, 184 Elizabeth Woodville (Lady Grey, later queen to Edward IV), see Shakespeare, plays: Henry VI, Part III, and Richard III Elyot, Thomas, Defense of Good Women, 173 Epicene, Or The Silent Woman, see Jonson Erasmus, 22–23

Falstaff, see Shakespeare, plays: Henry IV, Part One and Henry IV, Part Two fascism in Europe, 84–85 Fletcher, John, see Shakespeare, plays: Henry VIII, also see The Two Noble Kinsmen Freud, Sigmund, 14, 139, 187 Garnier, Robert, 179, 181 Gertred (Queen, Hamlet, Q1), see Shakespeare, plays: Hamlet, Q1 Gertrude, see Shakespeare, plays: Hamlet Gorbuduc, 166 Gower, John, 43 Greene, Robert, 50, 135 Hall, Edward (Hall’s Chronicle), 93 Harrison, William (Description of England), 119 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 12 Hazlitt, William, 182 Heminges, John, 192 Hill, Anita, 3 Holinshed, Raphael (Holinshed’s Chronicles), 5, 80, 93, 189–90 Hortensio’s Widow, see Shakespeare, plays: The Taming of the Shrew Imogen (Fidele), see Shakespeare, plays: Cymbeline incest, 6, 8, 12, 68, 86, 145–47, 155, 162, 180 inheritance dowry, 8, 33, 35, 68, 70–73, 96, 100, 120, 131–33, 143, 175, 188, 192 jointure, 32–33, 100 prenuptial agreements, 32–34 Instruction of a Christen Women, see Vives Irigaray, Luce, 54–55

Index Jack of Newbery, see Delony James Stuart (James I, King of England), 14, 55, 88 Jerome, Saint, 19, 21–22, 44, 139 Jonson, Ben, 39, 148, 155 Judith, slayer of Holophernes, 19 Juliet, see Shakespeare, plays: Romeo and Juliet Kanwar, Roop, 177, 184 Katherine of Aragon, see Shakespeare, plays: Henry VIII Katherine of Valois, 162 Kieslowski, Krzystof, 12 Lady Falconbridge, see Shakespeare, plays: King John Lady Percy, (Kate), see Shakespeare, plays: Henry IV, Part One and Henry IV, Part Two Lanier, Emilia, 194 Lavinia, see Shakespeare, plays: Titus Andronicus law and widowhood, 21, 31–32 Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights, The, 9, 37, 45, 120 Legend of Good Women, The, see Chaucer Lemnius, Levinius, Secret Miracles of Nature, 168 Leonato, see Shakespeare, plays: Much Ado About Nothing Liebestod, 4, 171–72, 181–82, 184, 188–89 Livy, 86–87 Locke, Anne, 36 Locke, John, 122 “Lusty widow” stereotype, 3, 8, 10, 15, 24–25, 39, 40, 64, 130, 134, 139, 143, 147, 153–54, 168–69, 192–94 Machiavel, 149, 153 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 97 “Mantle and the Ring,” 19

243

Margaret of Anjou (Queen of Henry VI), see Shakespeare, plays: Henry VI, Parts One, Two, Three, and Richard III Marlowe, Christopher, 179 Marston, John, 212n.3 Marx, Karl, 83, 137 Masuccio of Salerno, Il Novellino, 174 Menninger, Karl, 187 Michaelmas Term, see Middleton Middleton, Thomas, 12, 23, 39, 193 Milton, John, “Eikonoklastes,” 147–48 Miranda, see Shakespeare, plays: The Tempest Mistress Overdone, see Shakespeare, plays: Measure for Measure Mistress Quickly, see Shakespeare, plays: Henry IV, Part One, Henry IV, Part Two, and Henry V Montaigne, Michel de, Essays, 168–69, 173, 179 Moralia, see Plutarch More Dissemblers Besides Women, see Middleton Newdigate, Anne Fitton, 139–40 Nurse (Angelica), see Shakespeare, plays: Romeo and Juliet Octavia, see Shakespeare, plays: Antony and Cleopatra Office and Duetie of an Husband, The, see Vives Overburian Characters, 3, 22, 85, 109, 127, 160, 181, 191 Ovid, 18 Owen, Jane, 19 Painter, William, Palace of Pleasure, 70 Pandosto, see Greene Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans, see Plutarch

244

Index

Parker, Martin, 25 Parr, Catherine, 26, 194 Paul, Saint, 9–10, 13, 19, 22, 44, 123 Paulina, see Shakespeare, plays: The Winter’s Tale Petrarchanism, 174, 176 Petronius, “The Widow of Ephesus,” 12, 18, 101 Plato, 17, 183 Plautus, 87 Plutarch, 14, 86–88, 180–81 Powell, Chilton Latham, 25 Propertius, 18 Prospero, see Shakespeare, plays: The Tempest prostitution, 27, 72, 121, 124, 127, 129–30, 134–36, 146, 182, 188 Protestantism, 51, 103, 124 provision and drink trades alehouses, 120, 128–29, 134 inns, 15, 70–71, 119, 128–29, 132–33, 143 taverns, 15, 119, 121, 128–30, 134 Puritan: Or, the Widow of Watling Street, 9 Pyramus and Thisbe, see Shakespeare: plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream racism, 147, 150–53 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 26 Reformation, see Protestantism, also see remarriage: Protestant attitudes toward Regan, see Shakespeare, plays: King Lear remarriage economic determinants of, 5, 8, 10, 14, 29, 35–36, 94, 100–01, 128–29, 132, 144, 158, 163–64, 167, 193–94 literary prejudices against, 17, 45, 61, 66, 96, 140, 142–43 by older widows, 26, 54, 126–27

Protestant attitudes toward, 3, 7–8, 10, 24–26, 36, 191–92 by Shakespeare’s widows, 10–11, 28–29, 139–69, 192–93 by Tudor royalty, 26 by widowers 6–7, 35 by widows 5, 8, 35–39, 140, 192 rhetoric, 51, 80, 94–101, 104–05, 112–14, 117, 149, 178 Rich, Adrienne, “From a Survivor,” 194 Richmond, Earl of (Henry Tudor), see Shakespeare, plays: Richard III Rougemont, Denis, de, Love in the Western World, 185 “sanskritization,” 177 sati, 16, 159, 172, 177–79, 182, 184, 188–90 Semiramis, 146–47, 153 Shakespeare, William audiences, 10–11, 173, 191 family, 1, 29, 32 films, 105, 156, 212 plays All’s Well That Ends Well, 3–4, 13–15, 30, 38–39, 60–61, 67–74, 91, 119–22, 131–34, 136–37, 191 Antony and Cleopatra, 1, 3–4, 7, 14, 16, 39, 59–60, 102, 158, 169, 171–73, 177–84, 188–90 Comedy of Errors, 3, 6, 12, 13, 43–49, 54–57, 174, 191 Coriolanus, 4, 14, 30, 83–91 Cymbeline, 3–4, 7, 10, 13, 38, 55–57, 59–67, 102, 119, 140, 158, 191 Hamlet, 4–5, 7–8, 10–11, 15, 27, 29, 40, 139–40, 154–63, 168–69 Hamlet, Q1 (First Quarto), 158–61, 172

Index Henry IV, Part One, 127 Henry IV, Part Two, 4, 10, 14–15, 107–110, 116–22, 127–31, 136–37, 193 Henry V, 35 Henry VI, Part One, 89, 102, 148 Henry VI, Part Three, 4, 10, 14, 94–95, 140 Henry VIII, 3 King John, 3–5, 10, 12, 14, 33, 61, 74–82, 91, 191 King Lear, 10, 15, 30, 85, 139–40, 163–69 Macbeth, 89, 97, 102, 148 Measure for Measure, 1–2, 10, 12, 15, 38, 119–22, 134–37, 174, 191 Merchant of Venice, 17 Merry Wives of Windsor, 11, 32, 34 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 172, 174 Much Ado About Nothing, 6 Othello, 6 Pericles, 3, 6, 13, 43–45, 49–50, 54–57, 135, 137, 174 Richard II, 16, 171–73, 185–90 Richard III, 3–4, 7, 11, 14, 29, 39, 94–107, 112, 116–18, 184, 191 Romeo and Juliet, 3–4, 14–16, 40, 111, 119–27, 136–37, 171–77, 188–89, 193 Taming of the Shrew, The, 12, 15, 48, 139–44, 168–69, 191 Tempest, The, 6, 8, 179 Titus Andronicus, 3–4, 10–11, 15, 39, 59, 102, 139–40, 144–55, 168–69, 194 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 7 Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 3, 15, 110–18, 191 Winter’s Tale, 3–4, 6, 13, 29, 40, 43–46, 50–57

245

sonnets, 155 stage productions, 67, 74, 77, 90, 133, 155–56, 165 television productions, 67, 107, 140, 186 Sidney, Sir Philip, Arcadia, 173 Smith, Sir Thomas, De Republica Anglorum, 32, 119–20 “Snow White” compared with Cymbeline, 62, 64 Spartan-Roman code, 83, 87–89 Statute of Artificers (1563), 122 stepmothers, see Shakespeare, plays: Cymbeline Stoic tradition, 182 Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi, 131–32 student outline guides (cram books), 156–57 Suetonius, Life of the Diefied Augustus, 180 suicide in early modern England, 173 Swetnam, Joseph, 25, 143, 201n.13 Tacitus, 18 Tamburlaine, Part II, see Marlowe Tamora, see Shakespeare, plays: Titus Andronicus Tasso, Torquato, “The Father of the Family,” 7, 44 Taylor, John, Juniper Lecture, 144 Thaisa, see Shakespeare, plays: Pericles Three Theban widowed queens, see Shakespeare, plays: The Two Noble Kinsmen Timaeus, see Plato Tragedie of Antonie, trans. Mary Sidney, see Garnier Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, see Marlowe Treasure of the City of Ladies, see de Pisan Treasvre of Vowed Chastity, see Androtius

246

Index

Trick to Catch the Old One, A, see Middleton Trois Couleurs: Blanc, see Kieslowski Turner, Victor, 44–45, 54 “unheaded women,” 9, 17, 30, 40, 53, 120, 131, 138, 150, 169, 195 univira, 18, 27, 87 uxorious husbands, 147–48 viragos, 102, 165–66 Virgil, Aeneid, 180 Vives, Juan Luis, 20–22, 28, 44, 163, 185 Volumnia, see Shakespeare, plays: Coriolanus “Wakefield,” see Hawthorne War of the Roses, 14, 93, 100 “wealthy widow” stereotype, 36–37, 40, 141, 194 Weber, Max, 120 Webster, John, 148, 158, 169, also see Overburian Characters wet-nursing, 4, 122 White Devil, see Webster “white devil” stereotype, 102, 148–49, 153 Whitney, Isabella, 122 Widdowes Glasse, see Androtius Widow, The, see Middleton Widow Capilet, see Shakespeare, plays: All’s Well That Ends Well widow hunt, 8, 39, 130 widowers, 5–7, 16, 28, 47 widows ancient and medieval ideology concerning, 13, 17–19, 27, 139–40

demographics in early modern England, 2, 29–31, 35–36, 38, 192 and guilds, 31, 211n.14 modern widows in England and elsewhere, 2, 8, 177 as moneylenders in early modern England, 30–31 Shakespeare’s lusty widows, see remarriage: by Shakespeare’s widows Shakespeare’s “seeming widows,” 3, 13, 43–57 Shakespeare’s suicidal widows, 171–90 Shakespeare’s war widows, 14–15, 93–118 Shakespeare’s widowed mothers, 13–14, 59–91, 95–99, 146, 150, 182 Shakespeare’s working widows, 15, 70–74, 119–211 “Widow’s Candle,” 45–46 Widow’s Tears, see George Chapman Williams, Raymond, 2 Wilson, Thomas, 97 Winstanley, Gerrard, 174 Wit Without Money, see John Fletcher Witch, The, see Middleton Witter, Anne Phillips (wife of Augustine Phillips), 192 “woman as wonder,” 53, 55–56 Women Beware Women, see Middleton Woodstock, Thomas of, 186–87 Zorba the Greek, see Cacoyannis