Beyond the Cloister. Jenna Lay

powerful, yet their gendered bodies are vulnerable; they are self-possessed, yet the objects of male desire; they are motivated by religious and political convictions, yet restricted by a patriarchal culture. In a period of ongoing religious reform, virginity offered a complex discursive field for authors interested in the conflict between patriarchal ideologies and social practice, and thus pointed not only to convent and queen but also to the recusant women whose outlawed faith enabled active political resistance and underscored the fact that marriage held its own ambiguities in early modern England.² In the last half of the sixteenth century, when English female monasticism had yet to be revived on the continent, recusant women put pressure on the social and ideological reconfigurations that accompanied the English Reformations through their unique position on the margins of Catholic religious hierarchies and English law. Their political significance is amply represented in the historical record—in legislation, court records, letters, and manuscript lives—and this chapter demonstrates how their complicated relationship to the patriarchal state contributed to the multiple and sometimes competing significations that female virginity bears in early modern literature. Just as Elizabeth’s iconography as Virgin Queen was not a simple appropriation of the cult of the Virgin Mary, the vowed virgins of post-Reformation English literature did not offer straightforward representations of female monasticism.³ Instead, authors engaged the political dimensions of female chastity in their representations of vowed virgins, creating characters whose dramatic and poetic disruptions formally expressed the social and political disruptions of a broad range of early modern Catholic Englishwomen.

      The virgins and nuns imagined by Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, and William Shakespeare offer a complex map of the relationship between literary form and ideological content in canonical early modern literature. In disparate texts marked by narrative insufficiency or deferral—poems left unfinished or completed by another author; a play that ends with an unanswered question and the promise of further explication—virginity functions as both a social position and a discursive concept under near constant attack.⁴ Queen Elizabeth’s marital politics offer one touchstone for these late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century explorations of virginity, and Spenser’s fragmented representation of the Virgin Queen serves as a foundation for my reading of the formal effects precipitated by conflicting ideologies of chastity and marriage in his contemporaries’ representations of women associated with Catholic devotional practice and religious politics. As Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie have argued, “Elizabeth as the cynosure of the age has created a focus but also a blind spot in the study of the poetics of virginity in the Renaissance.”⁵ Both focus and blind spot are evident in The Faerie Queene, which exposes the ambiguities at the heart of late sixteenth-century celebrations of married chastity even as it resolutely turns away from the representation of vowed female virgins. Instead, the poem explores multiple facets of the queen’s chastity through Spenser’s diffuse representational strategy: Elizabeth is everywhere and nowhere. She is Gloriana, the unreachable virgin queen; Britomart, the desiring virgin knight; and Belphoebe, the quick-tempered virgin huntress—amidst a host of other virgin characters, flattering and not.⁶ At the same time that he creates this fractured mirror of chastity for his queen, Spenser offers the promise of marriage at the end of his epic poem, in a narrative strategy that puts pressure on the marital telos through a constant process of deferral, as both consummation and social recognition are delayed for almost all of the poem’s prospective married couples. Spenser seems almost constitutionally incapable of representing married life in The Faerie Queene, though the marital relationship remains imaginatively significant to his characters. The narrative ruptures that occur when, for example, the Red Cross Knight postpones his marriage to Una or Merlin prophesies but barely describes the future of Britomart and Artegall are, I argue, products of a representational crisis surrounding female virginity in post-Reformation England that extended beyond “the body and the iconography of a queen” to women of diverse religious affiliations and social positions.⁷

      The effects of these discourses of late Elizabethan virginity and marriage are evident in Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander and Chapman’s moralizing continuation of it. Beginning in 1598, when Marlowe’s poem was printed with the suggestive “desunt nonnulla” at the end of its final line, readers have felt compelled to supply what they imagined to be lacking in Hero, Venus’s nun. She has been called “equivocal and equivocating”—a suggestive choice of words, considering the Catholic connotations of her devotional status—“both a naive virgin serving the goddess of the household and of love and a prostitute whose chief interests are carnal.”⁸ Marlowe’s Hero is paradoxical and troubling: she is a virgin, yet she is dedicated to the goddess of love; she is a nun, yet she is not bound by rules of enclosure; she is a woman, yet she performs the duties of a priest. George Chapman attempted to transform the inconsistencies of Marlowe’s poem and its heroine into material for allegory, and his remarkable depiction of the goddess Ceremony in competition with Venus for control over the lovers’ relationship explicitly positions Hero outside an appropriate social order. The two parts of Hero and Leander thus make visible the conceptual and social transformations created by the Protestant Reformation, the exile of English nuns, and Elizabeth’s status as the Virgin Queen. When read in its entirety, as Chapman imagined it after Marlowe’s death, the poem underscores the evolving and precarious position of Catholic women in late Elizabethan England and reveals the literary significance of contemporary debates over female recusancy and marital coverture addressed in manuscripts such as John Mush’s “A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow,” a hagiographical account of an executed recusant woman written by her priest.

      By 1604, when Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure was first performed, the revival of English female monasticism had begun, and parliamentary efforts to control recusant women remained largely ineffectual. As a result, whether they joined convents on the continent or married in England, Catholic women in the early years of the seventeenth century were able to maintain a certain degree of religious freedom. Shakespeare’s depiction of Isabella as a defiant virgin agitating for governmental change in a play that ends with many marriages but little resolution thus points to a turning point in English conceptions of Catholic femininity, when a burgeoning interest in monasticism on the part of English Catholic women aggravated, rather than alleviated, concerns over female recusancy. Measure for Measure registers Isabella’s significance through chiastic formulations that recall the mirroring and fragmentation of The Faerie Queene but reveal that Queen Elizabeth’s virginity was not alone in exerting a shaping influence on early modern literature. Together, the texts I examine in this chapter demonstrate that in addition to being objects of representation in poems and plays of the post-Reformation period, Catholic women’s social positions, sexual choices, and political efficacy were essential to the formal and narrative structures explored by canonical English authors.

      “But Yet the End Is Not”: Virginity and Narrative Teleology

      The Faerie Queene encompasses multiple understandings of virginity, including the iconic virginity of England’s queen and the continued imaginative influence of its ruined cloisters, yet Spenser does not allow for the possibility of female virginity as the product of an eternal religious vow. Instead, he positions his female characters as participants in a courtly culture for which marriage is the presumptive endpoint. This expectation is most conspicuous at moments when Spenser alludes to female monasticism only to implicitly reject it. In the House of Holiness, which looks suspiciously like a convent, virgin maidens practice “godly exercise.”⁹ Yet this house, “renowmd throughout the world for sacred lore, / And pure vnspotted life,” is unlike a monastery in one significant respect: its inhabitants are mothers and wives (1.10.3.2–3). Spenser reveals their participation in a Protestant spiritual and social economy through an instructive sleight of hand, as he leads his readers to believe that the two eldest daughters of the house may be nuns. “Most sober, chast, and wise, / Fidelia and Speranza virgins were,” and, as such, they seem to fit into the Catholic imaginary that Spenser has already invoked through their mother Cælia’s “bidding of her bedes” (4.5–6, 3.8).¹⁰ But he immediately reverses course: “Fidelia and Speranza virgins were / Though spousd, yet wanting wedlocks solemnize” (4.6–7). The uncertainty created by this series of reversals—they are virgins,