By Ruben Espinosa
"Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England" bargains a brand new method of comparing the mental 'loss' of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England by way of illustrating how, within the wake of Mary's demotion, re-inscriptions of her roles and meanings merely proliferated, seizing carry of nationwide mind's eye and leading to new configurations of masculinity. the writer surveys the early smooth cultural and literary reaction to Mary's marginalization, and argues that Shakespeare employs either Roman Catholic and post-Reformation perspectives of Marian energy not just to scrutinize cultural perceptions of masculinity, but in addition to supply his viewers new avenues of exploring either spiritual and gendered subjectivity. by way of deploying Mary's symbolic valence to infuse convinced characters, and dramatic occasions with female efficiency, Espinosa analyzes how Shakespeare attracts recognition to the Virgin Mary in its place to an differently unilaterally masculine outlook on salvation and gendered id formation.
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Additional resources for Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England
Example text
How this actually played out in sixteenth-century England is rather difficult to gauge. Peters scrutinizes Willis’ claim on the grounds that the maternal is imagined along the narrow terms of “reproduction and nurture” (233). In this regard, the “cross-gender” possibilities of Willis’ argument are rather ambiguous. On the other hand, Peters argues, “Medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary could interact with gendered understanding, but, as we have seen, it clearly was not gender specific. The apparently hostile male supernatural realm For a detailed discussion of the Society of the Rosary, see Lisa McClain, 90–100.
Introduction 25 We can compare this to the English Jesuit Henry Garnet’s influential tract, The Societie of the Rosary (1596), which encouraged the membership of English Catholics in a society where they could gain indulgences by saying a daily rosary. The Virgin Mary had long been imagined as a compassionate maternal figure pleading on behalf of sinners, but Garnet draws on her specific role as an assertive ally for sinners—he imagines the Virgin Mary’s strength in a more combative light. 31 Garnet fashions the Virgin Mary as a protective warrior, and urges prayer of the rosary as a means of emboldening oneself.
In 1 Henry VI, Shakespeare is not merely reflecting his culture’s anxiety about female strength or religious identity, but instead he is interrogating the very basis for that anxiety. Although the play appeals to Protestant sensitivities, it also potentially provokes “nostalgia or longing for an older manner of worship issuing from a positive identification with saints and saints’ miracles” (Tricomi 7). In other words, the play’s ambivalence about England’s religious and gendered identity (an ambivalence that includes the Virgin Mary herself) appears to be on display.