Beyond the Cloister. Jenna Lay

own uncertain dynastic legacy prompts Merlin’s inconclusive “But yet the end is not” (3.3.49.6, 50.1). This syntactic deviation from Matthew 24:6—“but the end is not yet”—suggests not only that the end has not arrived but also that the end may not exist at all.³⁸ In Matthew 24, Christ foretells the end of the world for his disciples; Merlin’s prophecy integrates this apocalyptic gesture but also suggests the failure of a narrative telos by way of the failure of Elizabeth’s marital telos. The end does not exist, because Elizabeth has not married and produced an heir. This might suggest that “Elizabeth’s choice of lifelong virgin chastity is so far from the virtue of chastity that she has cut off its lineage.”³⁹ But I would instead argue that it points us to the ways that female virgins exert formal pressure on early modern literature, not simply as a result of Elizabeth’s representational dominance and the exile of vowed virgins but also in response to the indeterminacy of post-Reformation chastity. Like the rewritten end of Book 3, the conclusion of Merlin’s prophecy reveals that the ends of chastity are ultimately unknowable: while ideologically it may point toward marriage and children in late Elizabethan England, it can also signal political authority, perpetual religious devotion, or unions that do not conform to a simple patriarchal hierarchy.

      “Dim and Darksome Coverture”: Marriage, Recusancy, and Female Autonomy

      Spenser’s contemporaries built upon his representation of multiple virginities and marital deferral in order to explore the nonroyal associations of female chastity. The nuns of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature challenge the representational dominance of the Virgin Queen while also calling attention to the political significance of women during a period of ongoing religious reform. By considering the social and legal status of female virgins, authors such as Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare offered veiled interventions into debates over England’s Catholic women, particularly those married recusants whose legal position under coverture enabled them to avoid the full force of statutes requiring attendance at church services. As vowed (or nearly vowed) virgins, Hero and Isabella point toward Catholicism and the cloister while simultaneously participating in debates regarding female autonomy and choice, sexuality and marriage, and the role of the state in matters of conscience. While they are, in many ways, radically different characters in radically different texts, both resist entering a sexual or marital relationship that will necessitate abandoning their devotional practice, and their resistance carries narrative implications. As in The Faerie Queene, these virgins occasion formal disruptions, and Chapman’s desire to provide narrative closure for Hero and Leander helps reveal how these literary effects relate to the political position of recusant women in early modern England. The troubling conclusion of Marlowe’s poem, which offers a sexual culmination so fraught that most editors have altered the order of its lines, makes visible the fractures in a sex/ gender system predicated on female submission. Like modern editors, Chapman attempted to smooth away Marlowe’s rough edges, but in so doing drew attention to the legal and social implications of Hero’s odd and paradoxical position as an unenclosed and sexually active nun.

      In the final lines of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, the eponymous lovers engage in an ambiguous seduction: Hero simultaneously resists and encourages Leander’s advances, leading to a sexual encounter that some critics read as mutual while others suggest rape.⁴⁰ A significant editorial emendation in most modern editions—the silent displacement of ten lines (“She trembling … the golden tree”) from 763 to 785—has allowed readers to gloss over some of the more troubling metaphors Marlowe uses to describe the moment or moments when Leander takes Hero’s virginity.⁴¹ It is easy to imagine a joyous consummation as the narrator describes how Leander “like Theban Hercules, / Entred the orchard of Th’esperides. / Whose fruit none rightly can describe, but hee / That puls or shakes it from the golden tree” if these lines signal a final moment of bliss before Hero’s postcoital reverie.⁴² Instead, the 1598 poem positions Leander’s entrance into the metaphorical garden before the narrator’s violent description of “a bird, which in our hands we wring” and then jumps abruptly from the bird that “flutters with her wing” to Hero wishing “this night were never done.”⁴³ This line, like Spenser’s “but yet the end is not,” simultaneously points in two directions that resist narrative closure: Hero may wish that the night could be never-ending—or that it had never happened.

      The confusion that results from these abrupt reversals is, in large part, a product of the confusion that Hero herself inspires: does she desire Leander? Does she wish to have sex with him? To marry him? How does she interpret her vow to Venus? What would constitute a breaking of that vow? Leander’s desire and intent are largely static: from the moment he is “enamourèd,” he pleads with Hero to renounce her virginity, exchanging it for marriage and “the sweet society of men.”⁴⁴ Hero, on the contrary, is nearly impossible to pin down. This is literally the case in the final seduction: “His hands he cast upon her like a snare; / She, overcome with shame and sallow fear, / Like chaste Diana when Actaeon spied her, / Being suddenly betrayed, dived down to hide her” (2.259–62). Instead of completing the trajectory of the Diana and Actaeon myth by turning against Leander, Hero hides under the covers. “With both her hands she made the bed a tent, / And in her own mind thought herself secure, / O’ercast with dim and darksome coverture” (2.264–66). This is one of many times that the expectations created by the poem are not fulfilled, but in this particular instance Marlowe’s word choice and imagery also provide a key for understanding the frustration that Hero inspires in critics and readers.

      Hero’s protective covering is both material and mental: she hides under bedclothes and “in her own mind thought herself secure.” Marlowe thus alerts his readers to the possibility that “coverture” may hold a variety of meanings for Hero. It is not simply that which literally covers (a quilt, clothing, a veil) but also that which figuratively protects or deceives (concealment, dissimulation).⁴⁵ Yet the covering seems to deceive Hero rather than any external observer: she only thinks herself secure under “dim and darksome coverture,” perhaps because the term used to describe her refuge paradoxically conjures the social status that she wishes to avoid. Coverture, in its broadest legal definition, “is when a man & a woman ar maried together.”⁴⁶ In religious discourse, Protestant writers and theologians went further in identifying how marriage could cover an individual’s sins. John Harmar’s translation of the Sermons of M. John Calvine, upon the X Commandementes of the Lawe, describes how “the coverture of marriage sanctifieth that which is polluted and unhallowed, it serveth to purge and make cleane that which in it selfe is filthie and uncleane.”⁴⁷ Marriage, in other words, provides a means by which men and women can practice chastity even though humans are by nature corrupt and lustful: “albeit men bee incontinent: yet are they not accused before God, nor brought before his throne of judgement, if so bee they keepe them selves within the boundes of marriage.”⁴⁸ The goddess Ceremony makes a similar argument regarding marriage and sexuality when she appears to Leander in Chapman’s poem, and Marlowe’s use of “coverture” suggests that the Protestant marriage system, which dominates Chapman’s postcoital depiction of the lovers, also serves as an essential background for their initial encounters in Marlowe’s poem.

      But Hero’s covering is individual, and it is meant to protect her from Leander rather than with him. While marriage as coverture provided spiritual protection for both partners, it also carried a more specific legal implication for women: in early modern legal discourse, a woman under coverture was subject to her husband’s authority—but she was also able, in certain instances, to evade the authority of the state under the cover of her marriage. Coverture in this final, unsettling scene of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander thus raises questions that extend beyond the bedclothes that Hero pulls over her head or the consummation that she seeks to avoid. When she attempts to hide herself, Marlowe evokes the very legal and social system that Leander has urged her to enter—a system that held within itself the elements of its own subversion. The troubling ending of Marlowe’s poem, which both Chapman and later editors have felt the need to complete or correct, is largely a product of the ambivalent sexuality of his lovers, who seem not to know what they want or how to achieve that unknown desire. But it is also a product of the religious and political climate of late sixteenth-century England, where a woman who vowed virginity and invoked