Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama

Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the period and the theater that it spawned. Contributors analyze the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization. Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation of the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the 'Old Faith'? How do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm and / or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the audience? Contents: Preface; Foreword; Introduction; 'Here in this garden': the iconography of the Virgin Queen in Shakespeare's Richard II', Helen Ostovich; 'One that's dead is quick': Virgin re-birth in All's Well That Ends Well, Alison Findlay; 'Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say': performing grief in Shakespeare's King Lear, Katharine Goodland; 'Black but beautiful': Othello and the cult of the Black Madonna, Lisa Hopkins; Desdemona and the Mariological theology of the will in Othello, Greg Maillet; The wonder of women: virginity, sexuality and religio-politics in Marston's The Tragedy of Sophonisba, Thomas Rist; Easter scenes from an unholy tomb: Christian parody in The Widow's Tears, Alice Dailey; Virgin fairies and imperial whores: the unstable ground of religious iconography in Thomas Dekker's The Whore of Babylon, Regina Buccola; Not kissing the (He)rod: The Tragedy of Mariam and the English Reformation, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright; Index. About the Author: Regina Buccola is Assiociate Professor of Literature and Language at Roosevelt University, USA. Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.