Dramatic nostalgia and spectacular conversion in Dekker and Massinger's: the virgin Martyr.(Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger)(Critical essay)

Holly Crawford Pickett. Dramatic Nostalgia and Spectacular Conversion in Dekker and Massinger's The Virgin Martyr

Critical debates about Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger's The Virgin Martyr (1620) often center on the play's Protestant or Catholic sympathies, but the play's treatment of religious conversion complicates that debate. The play portrays serial or vacillating converts who not only defy easy doctrinal categorization, but also raise questions about the nature and verifiability of conversion. Namely, the play critiques early modern conversion culture by warning about the abuses of pseudoreasonable religious rhetoric and, finally, by embracing a nostalgically visionary paradigm of religious change.

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The Virgin Martyr (1620) is a play with too many conversions. (1) Six of its characters convert a total of sixteen times. In fact, four characters account for fourteen of those transformations. By increasing the number of individual conversions found in the play's source materials, Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger create a troubling conversion-to-character ratio. (2) To the best of my knowledge, the play represents more individual conversions and more serial converts than any other early modern English drama. The play's serial conversion quotient defies the singular ideal of Christian conversion epitomized by Paul's transformation on the road to Damascus. (3) That Pauline paradigm generates the assumption that a Christian should convert once and for all; it offers the promise that transformation will be instantaneous and permanent. But by the end of The Virgin Martyr, the abundance as well as the diversity of characters' transformations questions not only the culture surrounding religious conversion in the English Renaissance, but also the nature of conversion itself. In a play with so many recantations, can any profession of belief be trusted? Does a history of repeated apostasy affect one's access to salvation? What, finally, distinguishes a good from a bad conversion?

While The Virgin Martyr's place in early modern martyrdom debates has garnered some critical attention, its relevance to concurrent conversion debates remains largely overlooked. (4) By destabilizing contemporary concepts of conversion and apostasy, the playwrights stage their culture's struggle with its own doubts about the sincerity and verifiability of conversion in the religiously divided climate of the day. The Virgin Martyr addresses these questions, I will argue, by engaging three main problems attendant upon religious conversion in early modern England. First, the play tests the debates surrounding the sincerity and salvation of the growing number of serial converts in early modern England by contrasting two pairs of such converts. Although the Christian martyrdom of the first pair indicates that serial converts can ultimately attain salvation, the self-interestedness and depravity of the second pair imply that the culture's deep suspicions about the motives of serial converts are frequently well-justified. Second. The Virgin Martyr offers a caveat concerning the rhetoric of reason popular in religious conversion pamphlets of the day. The play separates the mere rhetoric of reasonable conversion from the concept of true or right reason by revealing rhetoric's frequent use as a mask for violence. Finally, by addressing these religious concerns in a self-consciously theatrical style, the play comments on a third problem often encountered by England's repeated converts: the criticism that their conversions are feigned or forged. By dramatizing debates usually waged in theological and polemical pamphlets, Dekker and Massinger connect conversion and theater both in form and in content. In doing so, they reclaim theatricality as a religiously viable category.

In the wake of their contemporary critique, Dekker and Massinger recommend an older, more miraculous and self-consciously theatrical religious vision through the deliberate dramatic anachronism of the play's conclusion. In the last two acts, the play increasingly begins to resemble a medieval saint's play. (5) The vision-laden conversions of the play's last two acts ultimately recommend a nostalgic and metatheatrical visual rhetoric over the corruptible vocabulary of reason. The play's spectacle-centered solution to the problem of performing religious conversion--dependent as it is upon a defamiliarizing, archaic theatricality--raises its own set of interpretive questions: What is the relationship between theater and conversion? Can theatrical spectacle be religiously efficacious? Like many converts, the playwrights are forced to grapple with the idea that conversion can seldom be disentangled from its representation. By staging a problem that is already performative in nature, then, the playwrights ultimately embrace the theatricality of religious conversion, leaving the question of its efficacy (and religious affiliations) intertwined with that of their own creative medium.

The Virgin Martyr tells the story of the ancient Christian martyr Dorothea and her persecution by a zealous official named Theophilus during the reign of Diocletian. Her body miraculously withstands many tortures and repels an attempted rape before her final onstage beheading. In the time leading up to her execution, she converts the persecutor's daughters and the romantic lead Antoninus. In the aftermath of Dorothea's death, moreover, the persecutor himself is converted to Christianity. The play adapts these and other classic motifs of a saint's life from various Protestant and Catholic sources, ranging from the brief mention of Dorothea in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments to a long account in the Catholic recusant devotional manual Flos Sanctorum. (6)