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The Winter's Tale and Henry VIII are built on a paradox--their women protagonists acquire increased moral authority even while they are being demoted and persecuted. The structure of these plays supports this empowering through a series of spectacles of female fictive kinship. While male kinship, especially patrilineage, is central to the construction of Shakespeare's histories and tragedies, female fictive lineage is crucial to the vision of these two plays. Henry VIII and The Winter's Tale visually and verbally construct succession through a series of mutually sympathetic female figures who are not necessarily biologically related: Hermione/Paulina/Perdita; Katherine/Anne/Elizabeth. Shakespeare draws on a range of sources to represent women as inheriting intangible but important strengths from one another. This paper will explore how two of these sources--Marian mythology and the historical events of Henry VIII's relations with his wives and children--function in rich interplay with one another in both pla ys. The plays appeal to the audience's collective memory of both sources. Elements of Mariology critique male-female relations and suggest visionary resolutions which resonate with the medieval past and look forward to an imagined Utopian future. [1]
I argue that these plays mourn the loss of those popular elements of the old religion that imaginatively empowered the powerless, especially women, and that combated the power of the patriarchal family through valorization of fictive kinship and same-sex community. The plays also celebrate these elements of the common culture and reinscribe them into theatrical performances that in many ways replace the cultural power of communal church ritual and practice. I shall first give a brief account of some of these elements in Mariology and the saints' cults and then go on to a reading of patterns of fictive female kinship in the two plays.
The cults of the Virgin and of the female saints have been viewed with ambiguity by many twentieth-century feminists. Marina Warner's view of the Virgin as a patriarchal construct whose inimitability functions to castigate real women has tended to dominate modern feminist discourse on the Virgin. [2] More recently, however, several commentators have argued that this view of the Virgin's cult is too literalist and underestimates the medieval ability to think metaphorically. Although Mary's feat of producing a child while remaining physically a virgin is literally inimitable, it is metaphorically imitable, and Mary was constantly invoked as a model both by women who produced works of art instead of children, as well as by nuns, female saints, and religious laywomen who saw their students, followers, or the world at large as their children. It is in this sense that Mary as model is central to the intellectual and spiritual all-female lineage that Christine de Pizan constructs in her City of Women. [3] This kind of female lineage, transmitting a moral power that contrasts with and is ultimately perceived as greater than the male lineage of economic and political power, was an integral part of the Marian cults that the Protestant reformers vehemently attacked.
The cult of Mary was always grounded in popular devotion, which subscribed to such doctrines as the immaculate conception of the Virgin (that she, like Christ, was conceived without sin, as an idea in the mind of god, before the creation of the world), her Assumption into heaven, her queenship of heaven and her position as co-creatrix and co-redemptrix, centuries before they were declared as dogma by papal decree. [4] Art depicted Mary as a student--learning at the knee of her mother Anne; a teacher--instructing the child Jesus and also instructing numerous male and female scholars; and a scholar--who appears in almost symbiotic relation with the book, who composes the Magnificat, and who presides over scholarly communities on earth and in heaven. This model was given material reality by the many nuns and female saints who refused or left marriage and family for convents, where they had access to education, scholastic debate, same-sex community, female bonding, and different types of power not available to w ives and mothers. [5] What to post-Freudians may appear desexualizing and therefore debilitating might have functioned as an empowering freedom from the burdens and dangers of compulsory heterosexuality in a society where contraception was not available and maternal mortality rates were alarmingly high. [6] Mary can be read as one who opts out of heterosexual structures and acts as a model for others who wish to do so. [7]
Worshiped in her own right (in visual art, often without the baby) as protectress, mediatrix, and Queen of Heaven, Mary could be a model of freedom and autonomy. As a woman who protected victims, she was an attractive reversal of the stereotype of woman as victim. The popularity of her cult was grounded largely in her image as all-compassionate, willing, indeed especially eager, to forgive and protect the worst sinners. As many legends attest, she was perceived as particularly helpful to prostitutes, thieves, erring nuns, and other social outcasts. [8] Crucial to this compassion was her own fully human status--having herself been once suspected by Joseph of sexual transgression, and having suffered poverty and pain, she could sympathize with other suffering sinners. She was the ultimate exemplar of the Judaeo-Christian tradition's privileging of the underdog, expressed in the paradox of the last being first.
Most important for my purposes, the medieval devotees of Mary did not worship her in isolation but in the context of a female lineage. The matrilineal holy kinship of Jesus consisted of his mother, grandmother Anne (whose cult was extremely popular in England), and great grandmother Emerentia, with the three often being depicted as a female trinity. [9] Since Jesus' only human parent was a woman, his lineage was necessarily matrilineal. [10] Mary's cousin Elizabeth and Mary's sisters and their children were also important figures in this lineage, which was frequently depicted as a garden of women and their children, with fathers either absent or present as shadowy background figures. Mary, her mother Anne who was barren before her miraculous conception of the Virgin, and Elizabeth, the Virgin's cousin who was an old woman when she conceived John the Baptist, were referred to as the three miraculous mothers. In some depictions of heaven, female saints from different historical periods, including several queen s, were assimilated to this all-female community, so that the Virgin and her kin sat in an eternally timeless space with saints from various times and places." [11] The women were often shown reading, writing, and playing different musical instruments, even while surrounded by their children--thus, scholarship and the arts were represented as compatible with mothering.
In Shakespeare's early plays, women are disempowered by the absence of their natal kin or by the collaboration of their fathers with their accusing husbands. The often-noted absence of mothers in most of Shakespeare's plays may, as C. L. Barber has suggested, relate to the violent removal of Mary and the female saints from public life in early modern England, although not from collective memory and imagination. Barber argues that the removal of the benign mother left behind the threatening, witchlike mother. He is interested in a psychoanalytic reading of the male child's relation to father and mother in such a changing historical context: "the search for equivalents of the Holy Family of Christianity in the human family." [12] He does not, however, note that during this period, the patriarchal nuclear holy family progressively replaced the matrilineal holy kinship, and St.Joseph replaced Anne, while the consequences for women of the powerful mother's disappearance may have been even more difficult than for men. I am interested in those matrilineal, even Sapphic, elements of female bonding that were suggested in the cults of Mary and the female saints, and that are foregrounded in The Winter's Tale and Henry VIII.
Same-sex celibate community was often attacked by Protestant reformers for its supposedly unnatural character, flouting the normative heterosexual relationship ordered by God in the creation of Adam and Eve. Monks and nuns were frequently accused of homosexual as well as of heterosexual fornication. [13] This kind of critique and suspicion of celibacy emerged from humanist valorization of companionate marriage that subordinated women within the family. Although Thomas More advocated women's education, he also enforced near-universal marriage for women in his Utopia. In Erasmus's dialogue "The Virgin Averse to Matrimony," a male suitor, dissuading a virgin from joining a convent, accuses nuns of "doing more than becomes maids to do" since "there are more among 'em that imitate Sappho in Manners, than are like her in Wit." [14]
In this context, the remarkable plot of The Winter's Tale, which ensures that Hermione and leontes spend the best part of their adult lives in celibacy, Hermione living in a women's community, posits a startling alternative to marriage. Unlike Thaisa in Pericles or Emilia in The Comedy of Errors, Hermione lives away from her husband by choice, not by force of circumstance. Several critics have expressed acute discomfort at the "unreal" or implausible nature of this choice, but for a woman to opt out of a marriage that has humiliated her is not necessarily implausible, and many medieval as well as Renaissance women made such choices. [15]
In her defense speech during her trial, which is also in a sense her opting-out speech, Hermione's most powerful argument is premised on a rhetorical "If," which, for her, represents not a hypothesis but a certainty. She knows it is futile to plead with Leontes--figuratively, she, like Isabella in Measure for Measure, Hero in Much Ado, Desdemona in Othello, or Cordelia in King Lear, is prejudged by the same male double standards which find her wanting. She appeals from these male standards to divine standards, and she is absolutely sure that divine powers are on the side of wronged women:
But thus, if pow'rs divine
Behold our human actions (as they do),
I doubt not then but innocence shall make
False accusation blush, and tyranny
Tremble at patience.
(III.ii.28-32) [16]
Although Hermione appeals to a male god (Apollo) and Shakespeare's audience too believed in a male God, both classical and Christian sacred traditions incorporated female presence, which the dramatist could draw on, to empower the maker of such a claim. The defense speech quoted above is addressed as much to spectators offstage as on-stage and assumes their assent to both premises--that divine powers exist and that they are opposed to all tyranny, including the tyranny of men over women.
As a queen, Hermione appears to be the most powerful woman in her society. But this power is extremely tenuous, as it depends on the whims of her husband. She bemoans the fact that although she is the daughter of a king, the wife of a king, and the mother of a prince, she can be so easily unqueened, thrown into prison, defamed, and threatened with death. That her unqueening and trial resonates with that of Henry VIII's wives has often been noticed. But another even more dramatic unqueening had occurred in England during that same time....
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