Joining the current scholarly conversation about the influence of residual Catholicism in early modern England, and particularly the discussion of Shakespeare's dramatic exploitation of elements of what was called “the old religion,” Ruben Espinosa concentrates on the ways Shakespeare, in nine of his plays, responded to the post-Reformation religious demotion of the Virgin Mary, Henry VIII's and Elizabeth I's suppression of Marian devotion and shrines, and Protestant criticisms of traditional Catholic attitudes toward the Virgin and her influence. Espinosa's particular interest is in the ways female characters with Marian associations challenge patriarchal power and redefine male protagonists’ masculine identities: he argues that “Shakespeare draws on Marian influence (from both Catholic and Protestant perspectives) as a means of exploring perceptions of masculinity—both in individual and cultural terms—and masculine identity formation to offer his audience new avenues of exploring both religious and gendered subjectivity” (31).
After an Introduction setting the more general cultural context of traditional Marian beliefs and practices in relation to the Protestant marginalization of Mary and suppression of the Marian cult, Espinosa's first chapter discusses “Shakespeare's deployment of Marian strength in I Henry VI” in the figure of Joan La Pucelle “as a means of scrutinizing England's post-Reformation anxieties about its religious and gendered identity” (37–38). The post-Reformation fear of the Virgin Mary's feminine authority, highlighted in such works as William Crashaw's The Jesuit's Gospel (1610) is evoked by Joan and her actions. Though the final status of the miraculous is ambiguous in the drama, Espinosa argues that the play “opens the door for Shakespeare's audience to re-imagine the old world of Marian miracles as one—like Shakespeare's theater—full of wonder and vigor” (38), a formulation suspiciously close to views of Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, who perceive a transfer of “charisma” from religion to the stage.
In a second chapter on The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, Espinosa emphasizes Portia's and Isabella's appropriation of the Marian role of intercessor, which is seen as threatening to masculine culture. Portia, thus, has the “power to destabilize the system of masculine dominance through her intercessory influence” (66) and Isabella, who is given some clear Marian associations, “threatens patriarchal omniscience” (84). In a third chapter on Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, Espinosa argues, “Shakespeare gestures at the influential nature of virgins, mothers, and the Virgin Mother as a means of interrogating otherwise phallocentric views of masculine identity” (93). After discussing cultural attitudes toward Mary's perpetual virginity (which Protestants continued to uphold), he relates the ambiguity of Ophelia's virginity to “the general male anxiety about female sexuality, their own desire, and their perception of feminine virtue” (103) and he characterizes Hamlet's final passive acceptance of Providential agency as a Marian trait best exemplified in the Annunciation, a behavior conflicting with traditional masculine norms. In Othello, the tragic protagonist's final perception of Desdemona's “Marian-like purity” is connected to “both masculine and post-Reformation religious anxiety surrounding the fractured identity of the Virgin Mary in Shakespeare's England” (112). In King Lear, “Lear's paradoxical desire for both Cordelia's maternal empathy and Marian purity disrupts his ultimate reaffirmation of masculinity” and “the Virgin Mary's absence in post-Reformation English culture is vividly underscored” (121), but, in the final, inverted-Pietà, the king himself “surrender[s] masculine control to grieve the loss of that feminine strength” (125). In the background to this scene is the traditional, but lost, figure of the Mater Dolorosa, whose maternal compassion the dramatist and his audience nostalgically desired.
The final chapter of this study deals with Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale in terms of the relationship of Marian miracles to theatrical wonder. Espinosa makes a counter-intuitive argument that Cleopatra is a figure who embodies the Marian challenge to patriarchalism (especially in the Protestant mind) and he characterizes her final suicide scene as one that reproduces the iconography of the Madonna and Christ child—perhaps the most problematic moment in this study. The discussion of the dynamics of incest and family relations in Pericles in terms of the ambiguities of gender relations between Mary and the persons of the Trinity seems somewhat forced, but the relation of Marina to the traditional figure of the Mater Dolorosa makes sense as do the Marian associations of her mother, Thaisa. Finally, building on some recent studies of the Catholic elements in The Winter's Tale, a play that exhibits some classic male bad behavior, Espinosa emphasizes the statue scene as “reminiscent of Mariolatry” (170), but sees Shakespeare avoiding Protestant demystification of the miraculous.
Not surprisingly, in a book as thematically driven as this one, the author sometimes pushes things too far and tends to see Marian elements everywhere. Not every empathetic female character, for example, has obvious Marian associations. But the general argument of the study has real force, complementing some recent scholarship on the afterlife of Marian material in Protestant English culture and the creative manipulation of residual Catholic material by the greatest dramatist of the age.
