In this compelling study of female mourning on the medieval and Renaissance stage, Katharine Goodland examines Renaissance drama's debt to medieval mourning rituals and conceptions of grief, arguing that the figure of the grieving woman embodies the cultural trauma of the English Reformation. Though Anglican nationalism was predicated on severing the medieval past from the present in favor of a more distant classical heritage, the grieving woman exemplifies the Catholic residue still powerful in the sixteenth century. Goodland is thus interested in the ways Renaissance drama encounters and stages a past that is viewed as potentially idolatrous but also crucially foundational. By tracing shifts in mourning rituals—both as cultural practices and dramatic conventions—Goodland traces the shifts in England's constitution of its own national history.

Goodland locates the profound shift in mourning rituals in the eradication of the doctrine of Purgatory during the Henrician reform. Following the model of the Virgin Mary's compassion, medieval Catholic doctrine envisioned tears, prayers, and emotional wailing as powerful demonstrations of a connection between the living and the dead. After the Reformation, Goodland shows, such emotional laments were seen as excessive, effeminate, and sinful, but the Renaissance stage offered a place for emotional laments to be performed, a site of mourning safe from doctrinal disapproval. Goodland maps out the mourning practices of late medieval and Reformation England to emphasize that the performances of lamenting women operate not as mirrors to actual cultural practices but as comments on Reformation England's doctrinal and political conceptualization of death and its putative break from medieval Catholicism.

To make the argument that female lament on the Renaissance stage draws upon medieval constructions of grieving, Goodland divides her book into two sections. The first is a three-chapter examination of late medieval discourses of mourning and their articulation in English religious drama. In part 1, Goodland traces what she calls the “spiritual pedagogy of tears” (32), in which the Virgin Mary's compassionate mourning for her son's suffering celebrated female lament as central to Catholic devotional practice. Chapter 1 examines a series of Lazarus plays to argue that these plays expose the theological conflict between a faith that promises eternal life and funerary rituals that lament the dead. The next two chapters look at, respectively, Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection plays, outlining patterns of heroic female grief and devotion that will be taken up by Reformation dramatists. Goodland is careful to give nuanced readings, thus providing a complex picture of the various forms of female lament on the medieval stage. In doing so, she clearly demonstrates “the structuring contradictions of medieval English discourses of mourning and death” (36).

The second section moves into the Reformation, promising to explain Renaissance tragedy's reconstitution of medieval feminine displays of grief into explorations of masculine doctrinal and political authority. Goodland begins with King John, in which she persuasively argues that Lady Constance inherits the medieval model of Mary's performance of grief. The two most successful chapters of this section—and of the entire book—come at the end, when Goodland thoroughly discusses the interrelationship between grieving practices and revenge as a structuring principle of Renaissance tragedy. Chapter 7, “The Gendered Poetics of Tragedy in Shakespeare's Hamlet,” gives a sensitive reading of the patterns of interruptions and denunciations of female grief in the play, understanding those patterns as registering angst over England's disrupted funeral rituals. In chapter 8, “Inverting the Pietà in Shakespere's King Lear,” Goodland elegiacally writes of Lear's gendered revision of the Virgin Mary's lament, suggesting that the pietà operates as a model for his own grief for Cordelia. These chapters beautifully articulate the focus of her book, which is to understand how William Shakespeare relies on the dramatic conventions of the medieval stage and Catholic grieving practices to comment on the political and cultural upheaval that is both required and produced by Anglican nationalist doctrine.

Given her Shakespearean focus, it is strange that chapter 6, “Monstrous Mourning Women in Kyd, Shakespeare, and Webster,” motions toward other Reformation plays, specifically John Webster's The White Devil and Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Despite such a gesture, this chapter remains an examination of Shakespeare's drama (this time, The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus). Here, Goodland lucidly demonstrates how these two Shakespeare plays dramatize the trauma surrounding the violent iconoclastic destruction of artifacts depicting the pietà and female saints. However, Webster provides merely an introductory exploration of how destabilizing the noise of grief can be, and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy receives no sustained reading whatsoever.

The strength of this book is its dedication to thinking across the medieval–early modern divide that structures English literary studies. Goodland's sustained interest in medieval drama is a welcome addition to current trend in thinking across the divide between pre- and early modern England, and her study provocatively shows Shakespeare's investment in the dramatic conventions of both the medieval stage and medieval funerary rituals. Had the book articulated itself as such—that is, as an exploration of Shakespeare's use of the medieval English past as a staging ground for his investigation of the cultural trauma at the heart of reform movements—the book would have been able to provide more specific and even, perhaps, more courageous readings of Shakespeare's drama. It is nonetheless an informative and stimulating read for medievalists and Shakespeareans alike.