The domestication of religious objects in The White Devil.(Critical essay)

It seems obvious to state the centrality of the crucifix, the material representation of Christ's sacrifice, to pre-Reformation worship in England. The large wooden crucifixes that stood atop the rood screens in parish churches literally framed the divine service and served as the focus of a universal Christian history, while in the medieval theater smaller crucifixes played a vital role in dramatizations of the entombment and the resurrection, literally standing in for the body of Jesus. (1) These objects were crucially important and implicitly accepted as the visual supports for an invisible faith. Consequently, roods and other crucifixes were among the first targets attacked by the iconoclasts during the early years of the Reformation. The overt physicality of the corpus, the three-dimensional image of Christ hanging on the cross, was equated with the pagan idols described in the Old Testament, and hundreds were publicly defaced or burned to prove that they were merely dead pieces of wood, not sacred embodiments of God's mercy.

The controversial nature of the crucifix might lead us to conclude that all such objects were necessarily absent from the theaters of Shakespeare's London, just as they were absent from churches and cathedrals. But in John Webster's The White Devil (1612), a stage property designed to resemble a crucifix takes on a major role within the dramatic fiction where it functions as the embodiment of family unity. The play thus reinforces a point made elsewhere by historians of the Reformation: namely, that in many cases Catholic objects survived by being translated into new contexts. In this essay, I take up the crucifix as stage property (in fact, as I will explain below, there are two of them in this unusual play) in order to address the public theater's response to the shifting status of these highly charged objects.

Cornelia, the crucifix's owner, is one of the few admirable characters in The White Devil, but she is also the mother of Flamineo, its malcontent antihero, and her crucifix becomes the focus of the tragic family drama he provokes in act V, scene ii. Flamineo has been arguing with his younger brother Marcello and the two have chosen their weapons for an upcoming duel. Instead of staging their fight, however, this scene brings the sword and the crucifix together in an unexpected juxtaposition:

 
  MARCELLO. Was not this crucifix my father's? 
  CORNELIA. Yes. 
  MARCELLO. I have heard you say, giving my brother suck, He took the 
  crucifix between his hands Enter Flamineo, And broke a limb off. 
  CORNELIA. Yes; but 'tis mended. 
  FLAMINEO. I have brought your weapon back. Flamineo runs Marcello 
  through. 
  CORNELIA. Ha, O my horror! 
  MARCELLO. You have brought it home indeed. (2) 

By bringing "home" his brother's weapon, Flamineo has emphasized the connection between the broken crucifix and his broken family. Marcello's death speech, delivered a few lines later, provides an even more explicit link between the desecration of the cross and that of the family unit as he urges his mother to

 
  remember what I told 
  Of breaking off the crucifix:--farewell-- 
  There are some sins which heaven doth duly punish 
  In a whole family. 
  (V.ii. 18-21; I3v) 

The crucifix calls to mind the family tree, which Flamineo has violated by severing one of its branches, and in this scene its theatrical power is associated with its role as a repository of personal memories.