A comparison of the two different versions of Hero and Leander printed in 1598 reveals the very ideological tensions that Chapman attempted to resolve. Just as Chapman’s Ceremony hopes to impose form and order on Hero and Leander’s relationship, so too does the edition that includes Chapman’s continuation impose form and order on Marlowe’s fragment. Instead of a continuous narrative poem, as it is in Edward Blount’s edition, the Hero and Leander “begun by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman” appears in sestiads headed by brief arguments.80 This formal change mimics the cantos of The Faerie Queene, and suggests that Chapman would like to see narrative closure not only for Marlowe’s no-longer-virgin nun but also for the many characters in Spenser’s poem whose marriages are promised but never completed. Both Marlowe and Chapman built upon the conflicted representation of chastity and marriage in The Faerie Queene, but Chapman worked to contain the troubling implications of Marlowe’s incomplete narrative, in which sexuality does not foreclose female autonomy. Instead of pointing toward the virginity of queen or convent, Marlowe’s Hero suggests a devotional practice and social position akin to the recusant women who troubled Protestant notions of chaste married femininity in Elizabethan England. The representational multiplicity of her vow of virginity results in a fragmentary poem that resists both the marital and tragic closure that Chapman’s continuation demands.
“As Easy Broke as They Make Forms”: Mirrors of Virginity
Measure for Measure is not a narrative poem, nor is it unfinished, and yet the formal effects of female virginity—its disruptions and fragmentations, visible in language and narrative—mark this 1604 play as a culmination of the late Elizabethan religious and political discourses I have been tracing in this chapter. Unlike Marlowe and Chapman, Shakespeare explicitly designated his would-be nun a Catholic and associated her with an order that would have been familiar to contemporary audiences.81 This theatrical representation of potential female monasticism had its analogue in the movement of Catholic women from England to the continent—a migration that increased in the early decades of the seventeenth century, after the first post-Reformation English convent was founded in Brussels in 1598.82 Thus, though it was staged only six years after the print publication of Hero and Leander, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure depicts an even more fraught religious and political landscape than that of ancient Sestos: sexuality is corrupted by the bawds and openly condemned by the Viennese state in the person of Angelo, while marital relations lead to personal disappointment, civic unrest, and the threat of death. Religion provides temporary relief for women such as Isabella and Mariana, who attempt to choose lives of quiet devotion away from city life, but their faith is overshadowed by the machinations of the Duke disguised as a friar, whose robes and ultimate unveiling implicate religious life in the problems of the state. Shakespeare expands upon the devotional and social questions that Marlowe posed in Hero and Leander and Chapman attempted to resolve in his continuation of the poem, first by transporting Isabella into an explicitly political realm and then by testing the limits of her faith in response to governmental pressure rather than reciprocal sexual attraction.83 Isabella’s speeches—and her famous final silence—invoke contemporary choices made by women joining female communities on the continent, but rather than offering a direct representation of these new English nuns, Shakespeare creates a character who provokes chiastic forms and linguistic paradoxes that register the indeterminate signification of female virginity. Isabella thus allows Shakespeare to consider the issues associated with Catholic women and their devotional practices more broadly: as the problem at the center of Measure for Measure, she provides a theatrical means of confronting the increasingly complicated position of recusant women in relationship to both the English state and the Catholic religious hierarchy.
Measure for Measure, a play known for its political and theological stakes, was first performed less than two years after James took the throne, and Debora Shuger has called it “a sustained meditation on its own political moment—the political moment of James’s accession, but also, and more significantly, of the Reformation’s aftermath.”84 In tracing the effects of the Reformation, scholars such as Julia Reinhard Lupton and Sarah Beckwith have offered compelling readings of the play’s engagement with Catholicism, and others such as Alison Findlay, Natasha Korda, and Jessica Slights and Michael Morgan Holmes have focused on Isabella’s association with the convent in general and the order of St. Clare in particular.85 I build on these readings of Measure for Measure’s post-Reformation context and its exploration of female monasticism in order to show how Shakespeare’s representation of vowed virginity in crisis offers a distinctively literary response to the religious and political resistance of Catholic Englishwomen. Since Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure at the height of parliamentary debates concerning female Catholicism and in the wake of the first English monastic foundations on the continent, it is hardly surprising that his Catholic heroine seems torn between the life of a nun and the death of a martyr.86 Isabella is a novice who hopes to enter a convent of Poor Clares, a religious order known for its asceticism. In pamphlet literature on monasticism, Protestant writers referred derisively to “the poore bare-footed Clares” and claimed that Jesuits would have nothing to do with these nuns because “they are not rich, and therefore not a fit bit for their palate.”87 But such austerity is not enough for Isabella: she claims that she desires “a more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare.”88 Her response to Angelo’s demand that she relinquish her virginity in exchange for her brother’s life emphasizes her willingness to suffer and die rather than forsake her moral and spiritual system: “th’ impression of keen whips I’ld wear as rubies,” she says, “And strip myself to death, as to a bed / That longing have been sick for, ere I’ld yield / My body up to shame” (2.4.101–4). She thus resembles both the women of the English recusant community like Margaret Clitherow, who “never feared nor once shrunk at any worldly affliction or pain sustained for the Catholic faith and her conscience,” and their daughters, who left England in order to fully practice their faith in continental cloisters (Mush 397).89
Isabella’s wish for “a more strict restraint” produces linguistic effects that reverberate throughout the play; when she expresses desire—for restraint, withdrawal, virginity, martyrdom—her interlocutors frequently turn to chiastic formulations. Immediately after Isabella questions the convent’s rule, for example, Francisca responds to Lucio’s arrival by articulating the order’s restrictions: “When you have vow’d, you must not speak with men / But in the presence of the prioress: / Then if you speak, you must not show your face, / Or if you show your face, you must not speak” (1.4.10–13). These final two lines incite a recursive movement on the part of the reader, a doubling back that contains Isabella’s physical body within her choice to speak or be silent. In traversing not speaking/speaking/not speaking, they also point further back, to Claudio’s description of his sister’s facility “with reason and discourse” and especially her “prone and speechless dialect” (1.2.184, 182). The paradox of Claudio’s description—for how can dialect be speechless?—suggests that Isabella, like Elizabeth before her, creates representational difficulties for those who would portray her. Shakespeare draws attention to this parallel not only in naming his nun Isabella (a variant of Elizabeth), but in his structural echoes of the moment when Spenser suggests that Elizabeth’s chastity may reveal the inadequacy of art: “If pourtrayd it might be by any liuing art. / But liuing art