Marian Moments in Early Modern British Drama (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama)

✍ Scribed by Buccola

• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 198
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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 modern 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 cryto-Catholic or recusant members of the audience?

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 6
Contributors......Page 8
Preface......Page 10
Foreword......Page 14
Introduction......Page 22
1 ‘Here in this garden’: The Iconography of the Virgin Queen in Shakespeare’s Richard II......Page 42
2 ‘One that’s dead is quick’: Virgin re-birth in All’s Well That Ends Well......Page 56
3 Inverting the Pietà in Shakespeare’s King Lear......Page 68
4 ‘Black but Beautiful’: Othello and the Cult of the Black Madonna......Page 96
5 Desdemona and the Mariological Theology of the Will in Othello......Page 108
6 The Wonder of Women: Virginity, Sexuality and Religio-Politics in Marston’s The Tragedy of Sophonisba......Page 132
7 Easter Scenes from an Unholy Tomb: Christian Parody in The Widow’s Tears......Page 148
8 Virgin Fairies and Imperial Whores: The Unstable Ground of Religious Iconography in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon......Page 162
9 Not kissing the (He)rod: Marian Moments in The Tragedy of Mariam......Page 182
H......Page 196
S......Page 197
Z......Page 198