Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama investigates the traces of Catholic belief and imagery, particularly concerning the Virgin Mary, present in the dramatic work of Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries. Taking their cue from recent historians, the authors suggest that the Protestant Reformation in England was a slow and not entirely successful process. Reform doctrine demoted the Virgin Mary from her almost goddesslike status as a mediator with God, but English culture was slow to accept her lesser role. As Arthur Marotti points out in his forward to the collection, the Catholic figuration of Mary satisfied deep-seated psychological and emotional needs, and although reformers sometimes displaced her qualities onto other figures, they were never able to completely usurp her place (xvi). In the plays discussed, the authors uncover both iconoclasm against Marian images and a certain nostalgia for her lost status.

Five of the essays focus on Shakespeare's corpus. Both Helen Ostovich and Katharine Goodland find “Marian moments” in Shakespeare's staging practices. In Richard II, Isabel's appearances within a garden call to mind a number of medieval visual representations of Mary as hortus conclusus, enclosed in a garden. Ostovich suggests that reading Isabel as a Marian figure helps legitimate Richard's status as God's anointed king. In her essay, Goodland shows how in the climactic scene of King Lear, the devastated king's mourning over the dead body of his daughter resonates with the pietà, although Shakespeare inverts male and female roles. She sees the scene as offering “a critique of the emerging post-Reformation construction of mourning and death” (51), in which feminine expressions of grief, like those previously dramatized in medieval passion plays, were deemed “too volatile for public display” (63).

Two essays in the collection focus on Othello. Lisa Hopkins suggests that the play draws on pairs of oppositions—blackness and beauty, virginity and motherhood—that were associated with devotion to black Madonnas (like the Virgin of Loreto) in many parts of the early modern world. Greg Maillet reads Desdemona as a type of the Virgin Mary, whose extraordinary goodness can be read in opposition to Iago's demonic qualities. If Desdemona can be read as an earthly intercessor for Cassio early on in the play, so too might she be a divine one for Othello, who, at the play's end, might yet receive mercy for his sins.

In a final essay on Shakespeare's work, Alison Findlay discovers a “tripartite representation of the Virgin Mary as virgin, mother and intercessor” (37) in the characters Diana, Helen, and the Countess of All's Well That Ends Well. In their collusion to restore Helen to Bertram through a bed trick and seeming virgin birth, the characters show how idealizations of virginity and maternity can provide women with a means of challenging men's authority. A fallen woman at the start of the play, Helen is able to refashion herself into a “redemptive mediatrix” (38), who, with the aid of other women, makes “all well” at the play's end.

Four additional essays explore Marian moments as they occur in the plays of several of Shakespeare's contemporaries: Marston, George Chapman, Thomas Dekker, and Elizabeth Cary. In the first of these, Thomas Rist explores how Marston's The Tragedy of Sophonisba challenges the play's idealization of female virginity (through its title character, referred to as “the Wonder of Women” in the play's main title), suggesting, as many Protestant reformers did, that there's something superstitious about overvaluing virgin constancy. At the same time, Marston reads Sophonisba's (and Carthage’s) hostility to Rome as figuring contemporary division between Protestant England and Catholic Rome. Sophonisba's decision to commit suicide before becoming a Roman slave suggests that her “dislike of Rome is confused and disproportionate” (122).

Alice Dailey's essay uncovers a parody of biblical scenes at Christ's empty tomb in the last two scenes of Chapman's play The Widow's Tears. By turning “the solemnity of Christ's death” into “black comedy,” Chapman's play underscores humanity's profound fallen nature (136) and how the “loss of faith in Mary ultimately leads to a cataclysmic loss of faith in all women” (16).

In her essay on Dekker's The Whore of Babylon, Regina Buccola shows how Dekker's play, which appeared four years after James I took the English throne, “unfixed” his predecessor's identities as virgin and fairy queen from “their Protestant moorings” (141). Inspired by Edmund Spenser's homage to Elizabeth in The Faerie Queen, Dekker attempts to oppose his (Protestant) fairy queen, Titania, to the (Catholic) empress of Babylon, but his efforts are undermined by James's condemnation of veneration for the Virgin and the period's own association of fairies and Catholicism.

In the final essay of the collection, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright considers how Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam encourages identification of its title heroine with the virgin Mary and also Mary Queen of Scots in order to comment on “the threat of Protestant tyranny” in Jacobean England. While some previous critics have suggested that women were more spiritually liberated in the reformed church, Hodgson-Wright finds Herod's execution of Mariam figures the Reformation's “excision” of Marian devotion and also of the limited “spiritual autonomy” granted to women under Catholicism (167).

As a collection, the essays in Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama provide compelling evidence for the persistence of Catholic belief and tradition in post-Reformation England. They also provide us with new ways of understanding female characters in the plays and open up new paths for inquiry into the spiritual practices of actual women in early modern English culture.