Isabella is pulled away from the female community of nuns—and from her own strongly voiced religious system—first by Angelo’s attempted seduction and then by the Duke’s marriage plot. At the play’s end, the audience is left with the image of a Duke disguised as a friar proposing to a silenced woman who wishes to be a nun.103 These Catholic figures of chastity are transformed into secular, marriageable characters, closely resembling the situation in England at the Reformation, when some former nuns and priests did choose to marry. James Ellison has argued that this “final tableau” is “unmistakable in its Protestant message.”104 But this marital solution is just as incomplete as those of The Faerie Queene and Hero and Leander: Isabella never responds to the Duke’s proposal, which he defers to a “fitter time” (5.1.493).105 Natasha Korda shows that “the textual fissure produced by this silence has been filled by a cacophony of critical voices,” and suggests that there is in fact “ample evidence within both the text and its cultural contexts … to support both Isabella’s acceptance of the Duke’s offer of marriage and her return to the nunnery.”106 While the fissure that Korda describes is interpretive rather than textual—Isabella’s silence leaves the Duke’s proposal hanging as an open question to be answered by audience and readers—I would argue that there is a textual fissure in the play’s final moments, as well. In the Duke’s final chiastic proposal and his inconclusive concluding couplet, Shakespeare formally registers Isabella’s silence as an embodiment of Francisca’s earlier chiastic formulation of the convent’s rules.107
For the Duke, chiasmus does not fragment into multiplying mirror images or offer a recursive process of interpretation. Instead, it is a closed circuit that suggests marriage as perfect equivalence: “her worth worth yours,” as he says to Angelo (5.1.495). In the final lines of the play, he poses a similar chiasmus as a marriage proposal: “Dear Isabel, / I have a motion much imports your good, / Whereto if you’ll a willing ear incline, / What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine” (5.1.534–37). The Duke thus attempts to close a circuit that Isabella keeps open by maintaining a protective silence. She refuses to be enclosed within his possessive pronoun, and instead protects her own self possession by refusing to speak, as Francisca suggested early in the play: “if you speak, you must not show your face, / Or if you show your face, you must not speak” (1.4.12–13). Isabella’s chastity is held within her silence, and the Duke registers her lack of response by concluding the play not on the rhyme of “incline” and “mine” but with a second concluding couplet: “So bring us to our palace, where we’ll show / What’s yet behind, that[’s] meet you all should know” (5.1.538–39). When Isabella does not verbally accede to his attempt to impose a marital telos grounded in masculine possession, the Duke slips from an enclosed chiastic formulation to a communal proposal that suggests moving forward in order to recover and remember what has passed. The final two couplets of the play thus refuse narrative closure and instead signal the necessity of recursive reading.
While the Protestant Reformation shifted the religious and political landscape of sixteenth-century England, the literature of the post-Reformation period reveals the fissures within that transformation. Measure for Measure illuminates one such fissure in its representation of Isabella, who embodies multiple aspects of Catholic femininity: her choice of chastity provides her with a tool of political power, a language for resistance, and a religious justification for her final choice of silence. Perhaps, at the end of the play, Isabella will flee to her monastery, as some Catholic women fled proposed marriages in England to enter convents on the continent. Jane Martin, a lay sister in the English convent at Cambrai, for example, might have married “a gentleman of a good estate in England, but shee rather chose to lead an humble life in Religion, than to appeare great in the world, therefore refused the offer made her & prevailed with the gentleman who would have married her, to bestow his wealth upon a Seminary of English in Flanders, which he did at his death oblidging the sayd seminary to provide for her & settle her as she should desire.”108 Shakespeare does not allow his audience or his readers to settle on a single interpretation of this character because, at his historical moment, it was impossible to settle on a single interpretation of the Catholic woman. Measure for Measure takes a complicated view of female Catholicism, one that is informed by multiple and competing discourses, including not only anti-Catholic propaganda and the Catholic martyr tradition exemplified in Margaret Clitherow but also the writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishwomen who desired lives in the convent that remained connected to a world outside their enclosure. As I have argued, authors such as Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare engaged the political dimensions of female chastity in their representations of vowed virgins, thereby creating characters whose dramatic and poetic disruptions mirrored the social and political disruptions of early modern Catholic Englishwomen. Hero and Leander and Measure for Measure reveal that the conceptual reconfigurations associated with religious reform remained dynamic and competitive even after decades of Protestantism: the Elizabethan ideological system that found its fullest literary expression in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was dominant but never unquestioned, whether in the Catholic poetics of Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune, which depicts a “Virgin in bright majestie” who explicitly does not bear “Elizas name,” or in the doctrinally ambiguous and now canonical literature of Marlowe and Shakespeare.109 In the chapters that follow, I will trace the literary effects of Catholic women and their self representations through the first half of the seventeenth century, as books and monasteries gradually displaced courtrooms and prison cells as the primary locations for female religious and political dissent.
CHAPTER 2
To the Nunnery: Enclosure and Polemic in the English Convents in Exile
The female virgins of late Elizabethan literature, whether votaresses of Venus or novices of the Poor Clares, were products of a culture in transition. At the same time that Elizabeth fashioned her virginity into a sign of royal power, Catholic women exposed the fissures in a religious settlement that did not allow for monastic vocations. Some traveled to the continent to join foreign and newly established English cloisters, while others practiced their faith with relative impunity due to the conflicting legal positions of female coverture and married recusancy. These women, who put pressure on ideals of married chastity, influenced both the narrative and form of poems and plays that explored their political and social significance. The presumptive marriages of The Faerie Queene, Hero and Leander, and Measure for Measure recede before us, as each text suggests a telos thwarted by the demands of character, of book history, and of death—or fulfilled only in protest. Yet even as discourses associated with Catholic femininity helped shape the formal properties of canonical English literature at the turn of the seventeenth century, Catholic women themselves were seldom acknowledged as authors or participants in literary creation.
In the decades that followed, as the establishment of new English convents on the continent gained momentum, plays such as John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and pamphlets like Thomas Robinson’s The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon depicted women as victims of a religious culture that depended on the control of female bodies