Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

READING THE JEWISH WOMAN ON THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies, ‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’, takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of single-author studies and edited collections will be considered. Titles in this series include: Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew Matthew Biberman Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts Edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640–1660 Marcus Nevitt Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England Edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe A Cross-Cultural Approach Julie Campbell

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

MICHELLE EPHRAIM Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA

© Michelle Ephraim 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Michelle Ephraim has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ephraim, Michelle Reading the Jewish woman on the Elizabethan stage. – (Women and gender in the early modern world) 1. English drama - Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600 – History and criticism 2. Jewish women in literature I. Title 822.3’093522 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ephraim, Michelle. Reading the Jewish woman on the Elizabethan stage / Michelle Ephraim. p. cm.— (Women and gender in the early modern world) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5815-3 (alk. paper) 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500–1600—History and criticism. 2. Jewish women in literature. 3. Jews in literature. I. Title. PR658.J4E64 2007 822’.3099287--dc22 2007021342 ISBN: 978-0-7546-5815-3 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Corwall

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on the Text

ix xi

Introduction: Elizabeth and the Jewish Woman on Stage

1

1

The Emerging Female Monarch in The Godly Queene Hester

27

2

Maternal Authority in The Historie of Jacob and Esau

49

3

The Reader as Voyeur: Thomas Garter’s The Virtuous and Godly Susanna and George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe

69

Reading the Sacrificed Daughter in George Buchanan’s Jephthes Sive Votum Tragoedia

89

“I’ll sacrifice her on a pile of wood”: Abigail’s Roles in The Jew of Malta

113

Her “flesh and blood”?: Jessica’s Mother in The Merchant of Venice

133

4

5

6

Epilogue: Jewish Women, Women Writers, and Elizabeth’s Legacy

153

Works Cited Index

159 173

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For Marc and in memory of my father, Frank Ephraim

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Acknowledgements This project began with my doctoral thesis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and with the masterful guidance of many professors, especially Heather Dubrow, Jacques Lezra, and Susanne Wofford. I owe a special debt to Heather for her comments on an early form of this book manuscript, which were instrumental at a crucial stage of revision. Over the years, many of my graduate school colleagues have helped me to turn what were ambitious, if inchoate, ideas into an actual book manuscript. I am grateful to Robert Darcy, Andrea Kaston, Rebecca Lemon, Joan Parks, Rebecca Walsh, Emily Hall, Jim Miller and others for their enthusiasm and enlightening conversations. This book would not have been written without the generosity, humor, and brilliance of my colleagues in the Boston area: William Carroll, Katherine Conway, Marcia Folsom, Judith Haber, F. Elizabeth Hart, Diana Henderson, Coppelia Kahn, Linda McJannet, Kaara Peterson, Virginia Mason Vaughan, and Helen Whall have continually kept me on my toes with difficult questions and insightful criticism. My good friend and colleague Caroline Bicks has been a particular source of inspiration as I have navigated the many twists and turns of this project. Caroline provided the crucial theoretical glue on more than one occasion. Many other colleagues have provided meaningful time and energy including Nona Fienberg, Jonathan Gil Harris, Susannah Heschel, Gail Kern Paster, James Shapiro, and Michael Shapiro. Debora K. Shuger and John L. Thompson helped me to rethink my initial arguments about Jephthah’s daughter, and I know this book is much stronger because of their input. I want to thank the anonymous readers at Ashgate Publishing, whose enthusiasm for the project and suggestions for revision helped me immeasurably. It has been a particular joy to work with Ashgate’s Erika Gaffney, whose expert guidance and professionalism have made writing my first book a rewarding experience. My colleagues at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have offered much support and feedback over the years. Steven Bullock, Jeffrey Forgeng, Roger Gottlieb, Peter Hansen, Lorraine Higgins, H.J. Manzari, and John Sanbonmatsu in particular have listened to my ideas and read my work with great attention to detail. In his capacity as department chair, Patrick Quinn encouraged my research in every sense, from reading preliminary drafts to enabling me to accept fellowships toward the completion of this project. I am grateful to the Yale Beinecke Library for awarding me the Elizabethan Club Fellowship in History and English, with which I was able to use the library’s invaluable resources and devote time to writing. At Yale, Stephen Parks and Una Belau helped me greatly with my research efforts. I also thank the many people at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem who shared their expertise on the Book of Judges as well as John Vincler at The Newberry Library for his assistance with permissions and image reproduction. Editors and readers at The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Studies in English Literature, and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal helped me

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to clarify my initial ideas about Jewish women in Elizabethan drama. I am grateful to these journals for granting me permission to publish revised versions of earlier articles as chapters of this book. In the process of writing this book, I have benefited from the encouragement and sincere interest of many friends and family members. Special thanks go to the Rysman family, Michele Baker, Jim Morgan, Marin Hagen, Eleanne Hattis, Alison Dagnes, Rachel Hamilton, Alanya Harter, and Peter Arcidiacano. My mother and father, Ruth and Frank Ephraim, have shown endless support for my professional endeavors. I owe an enormous debt to my father, who has taught me how to be determined under any circumstances. My three children, as always, brought me daily doses of joy and much needed distractions. Finally, my husband, Marc, provided everything from childcare to late night conversations about Jewish women and Shakespeare. His intelligence and passion for learning continue to motivate and inspire me. Other citation acknowledgements: Ephraim, Michelle, “Jepthah’s Kin: The Sacrificing Father in The Merchant of Venice,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5.2 (2005): 71-93; “Jewish Matriarchs and the Staging of Elizabeth I in The History of Jacob and Esau”, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (2003): 301-21. © William Marsh Rice University. Reprinted with kind permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press; “From Jewish Matriarch to Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I and The Godly Queen Hester,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30 (2001): 605-22.

Notes on the Text With the exceptions of the Latin and Greek texts I cite in translation in Chapter 4, my quotations from primary sources conform to original spellings and syntax; bracketed words and phrases indicate my alterations made for clarity. Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical passages are taken from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile from the 1560 edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969). All references to Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare.

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Introduction

Elizabeth and the Jewish Woman on Stage An English Bible ... This is the Jewell that we still love best, This was our solace when we were distrest, This booke that hath so long conceald it selfe, So long shut up, so long hid; [now] We here unclaspe, for ever it is free ... Who builds on this, dwel’s in a happy state, This is the fountaine cleere imaculate, That happy [issue] that shall us succeed, And in our populous Kingdome this booke read. “Queen Elizabeth I” at her coronation If you know not me, You know no bodie, Part 11

During the penultimate pageant of Elizabeth I’s coronation procession through London on January 14, 1559, a young female civilian-actor wearing a white gown and sash emblazoned with the word Veritas ceremoniously carried a copy of the English Bible to the forefront of the stage.2 The book, visibly labeled Verbum veritatis—the “word of truth”—was to be presented to the attending queen. An eye-witness account provides this lively description of Elizabeth’s enthusiastic response: [W]hen her grace had learned that the bible in Englishe should there be offered, she thanked the citie therefore, promysed the reading therof most diligentlie, and incontinent commaunded, that it shoulde be brought. At the receit whereof, how reverently did she with both her handes take it, kisse it, and lay it upon her brest to the great comfort of the lookers on. God will undoubtedly preserve so worthy a prince, which at hys honor so reverently taketh her beginning.3 1 Thomas Heywood, If you know not me, You know no bodie: Or, The troubles of Queene Elizabeth, Part I (London, 1605), G4. 2 This edition was most likely Miles Coverdale’s 1535 Great Bible, which he translated from German and Latin editions. Coverdale’s was the first complete English translation of the Bible. Coverdale also incorporates William Tyndale’s earlier translation of the first five books of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew (1530). 3 The Quenes Maiesties Passage through the Citie of London to Westminster the Day before her Coronacion (printed January 23, 1559), ed. James M. Osborn, intro. John Neale (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 64. See also pp. 47-9. The conclusion of Heywood’s If you know not me, You know no bodie re-enacts a similar moment and, earlier, includes a dumbshow in which an angel places an English Bible in the sleeping Princess Elizabeth’s hand after saving her from murderous friars (E3V). Teresa Grant argues that the

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Strikingly, the chronicler plays up the pageant’s overlapping images of female body and Verbum veritatis as Elizabeth’s “incontinent [command]” for the gift is fulfilled: after kissing the Bible and “lay[ing] it upon her breast,” Elizabeth, like the personified Veritas, physically appends herself to the true Word of God in scripture.4 The crowd, we are told, responded to this image with “great comfort.” While this may have been a savvy political gesture on Elizabeth’s part, it also shows how her subjects envisioned her rejection of the Catholic Church and her fidelity to the Protestant dictum of sola Scriptura—the Bible alone—as religious authority.5 In this book I am primarily interested in how Elizabeth’s subjects imagined the queen as a body through which to articulate and examine their own relationship with the Hebrew scripture and how the queen’s body, in this context, finds full expression in representations of the Jewish woman on the Elizabethan stage. Throughout her reign, Elizabeth is represented as physically connected to the English Bible, significant for its native tongue and, in its various editions, for incorporating direct translations of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew text rather than from Latin and Greek editions. In 1568, Elizabeth’s likeness appears as the woodcut frontispiece for the first edition of The Holie Bible as if a corporeal point of entry to its contents: in order to access this English translation (and the Hebrew text consulted by its editors), the reader must go through Elizabeth’s body. David S. Katz has shown how for the Protestant reader the Hebrew language offered no less than the promise of God’s original Word, a “unique, divinely infused, supernatural method of communication.”6 As the character of Elizabeth I ascends the throne in Thomas Heywood’s 1605 play If you know not me, You know no bodie: Or, The troubles of Queene Elizabeth she rejoices that this English text and, implicitly, the Hebrew source-text that would become the defining feature of sixteenth-century Protestant translations, is finally liberated from the Latin Vulgate mandated by the Bible serves as a touchstone for Heywood’s distinction between Mary and Elizabeth: “after gaining the throne ... [Mary] persecutes her religious enemies and returns the country to the errors of the Catholic faith; but Elizabeth metes out no punishments—even to those who have done her substantive wrong—and embraces the true Protestant religion in the instrument of the English Bible presented to her by the people of London” (“Drama Queen: Staging Elizabeth in If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody,” in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman [New York: Palgrave, 2003], p. 24). 4 An image evocative of Deuteronomy 6:6 as Moses exhorts the Israelites to honor God’s commandments: “[t]hese wordes which I commande thee this day, shall be in thine heart” as well as Romans 10:8: “The word is nere thee, even in thy mouth, and in thine heart.” 5 As John Neale writes, the pageants “[i]n unmistakable language, verbal, pictorial, and symbolical ... proclaimed the new, revolutionary England which the citizens confidently expected [Elizabeth] to inaugurate” (Osoborn, The Quenes Maiesties Passage, p. 13). Mary Hill Cole similarly calls our attention to how the progresses dramatized “ceremonially rich moments of dialogue” that asserted the queen’s power (The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony [Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2000], p. 1). In Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995) Helen Hackett suggests that the pageant’s emphasis on words—“a sense of verbalisation run wild”—is also a reaction against Mariological iconography (p. 47). 6 Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603-1655 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 88.

Introduction

3

Catholic Church. She will now “unclaspe” this “Jewell” that for her subjects “hath so long conceald it selfe,/So long shut up, so long hid.” Elizabeth’s own “bodie” is paramount here: her mention of “happy issue” suggests both the English progeny that will inherit this Bible and the biblical “issue” that Elizabeth produces through her body as a type of text that promises “cleere” meanings to the reader. Given the new emphasis on the Hebrew language during the sixteenth century, Katz contends, the Jews themselves, while still a cultural and religious scourge in English culture, came to be regarded also as the “guardians of that sacred heritage” with an exclusive connection to the scripture and to God.7 This association of Jew and “sacred heritage” is evident in the 1559 pageant above. Almost as a logical step that follows the overlapping images of female body, Bible, and Truth, queen and Old Testament fuse together during the fifth and final performance of Elizabeth’s coronation in the form of Deborah, the judge and prophetess of the Book of Judges. An actor in the guise of “Debora,” wearing a dress that may have resembled Elizabeth’s own, declared Elizabeth as her rightful heir: just as God sent Deborah to save the Israelites from their Canaanite enemies, she explains, “gods aide” has enabled Elizabeth to deliver her Protestant subjects from Catholic oppression.8 In this theatrical display, Deborah plays a vital role as both political and religious “type,” legitimating Elizabeth’s place within a historical continuum of divinely-appointed rulers and affirming a cohesive relationship between Old and New Testament. The pageant reflects what Roy Strong terms the “iconic” role of the Bible in Elizabethan culture: the Protestants’ intense focus on biblical interpretation and the centrality of the Old Testament—from their perspective, a chronicle of God’s original elect nation and a transmission of his true Word—as writers and exegetes endeavored to define its place in Christian ideology.9 According to Barbara K. Lewalski Protestants considered both Old Testament type and New Testament anti-type as “historically real entities with independent meaning and validity” that, together, “form[ed] patterns of prefiguration, recapitulation, and fulfillment by reason of God’s providential control of history.”10 With its “types” of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, the Old Testament provided what David C. Steinmetz calls the “hermeneutical key” to

7

Ibid., Philo-Semitism, p. 88. As Elizabeth approached the final pageant, a child participant stepped forward to proclaim Deborah as a “worthie president ... [a] worthie woman judge, a woman sent for state” (Osborn, The Quenes Maiesties Passage, p. 54). David M. Bergeron cites a costume list for this pageant as potential evidence that “Debora” wore a reproduction of Elizabeth’s gown (“Elizabeth’s Coronation Entry [1559]: New Manuscript Evidence,” English Literary Renaissance 8 [1978]: 3-8). 9 See Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Elizabeth I (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 39. 10 Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), p. 111. On Elizabethan political typology, see Steven N. Zwicker, “Politics and Panegyric: The Figural Mode from Marvell to Pope,” in Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Earl Miner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 115-46. 8

4

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

the meanings of the Christian Bible.11 The “Judaic” content of the Old Testament was thus also assimilated as “Hebraic” elements essential to Christian ideology.12 For Elizabeth’s audience, the events and people of the Old Testament signified the foundational source-text that offered Christian truths to the faithful reader. In essence, they approached it as the historical and textual origin of the Protestant self. My goal in this book is to examine how on the Elizabethan stage the character of the female Jew offered empowering possibilities for Elizabeth and for her subjects, eager as they were to claim the Old Testament as their own. I argue, however, that dramatists also represent the Jewish woman as a text that cannot be understood or assimilated, despite the ardent efforts of its readers. As a body symbolic of the scripture itself, the Jewish woman plays a key role in conforming, and complicating, Christian modes of scriptural interpretation. On the Elizabethan stage, the Jewish woman is characterized by her bodily obfuscation and ambiguity as well as her penchant for disguise and deception. As we will see, for example, in Rebecca’s ability to shape her progeny in The Historie of Jacob and Esau, Hester (Esther)’s hidden Jewish identity in The Godly Queene Hester, and Abigail’s nun disguise in The Jew of Malta, the Jewish female body confirms and destabilizes the Christian allegories with which the audience was familiar. As the body through which the Protestant audience receives (or is denied) scriptural meaning, Jewish women symbolize interpretive mastery and interpretive occlusion, complicating the hermeneutic expectations of their Christian audience. Understood collectively, these diverse representations call attention to the unstable position of the English reader vis-à-vis the Hebrew scripture and serve as a primary literary expression of an emerging Protestant identity. The final pageant in Elizabeth’s coronation procession is an important starting point for this book because its physical incarnation of Deborah also recreates for the audience’s benefit what Jeffrey S. Shoulson calls the “unassimilable” biblical and post-biblical Jewish body—the Jews’ “lived experience” that troubles the idea of the Old Testament as an essentially Christian text.13 For Christian readers, Paul’s teaching that “the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6) clearly iterated how the Mosaic Law is superseded or fulfilled by Christ’s gospel; accordingly, the external meaning or “letter” of the Jewish scripture is exposed as only a veil that covers its deeper significations. Yet as scholars of rabbinical writings in the early modern period have argued, Protestant readers struggled to reconcile their conception of the Old Testament as incomplete with what they perceived as the Bible’s authentic “Hebrew truth” conferred to the Jews (and accessible only through the Jews’ own language).14 As Shoulson observes, the “Hebraic” and “Judaic” are

11 Quoted in Richard A. Muller, “Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation: A View from the Middle Ages,” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, ed. Muller and John L. Thompson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdsmans, 1996), p. 7. 12 See Jeffrey S. Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 28-9. 13 Shoulson, p. 46. Shoulson emphasizes the Jews’ particular experience of suffering and its relevance to Christian history (pp. 74-80). 14 See Michael A. Signer, “Polemic and Exegesis: The Varieties of Twelfth-Century Hebraism,” in Hebraica Veritas?: Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early

Introduction

5

“[n]either fully rejected nor wholly embraced [but] function dialogically.”15 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, radical Protestant sects earned suspicion and condemnation for their strict adherence to Mosaic law, but Renaissance scholars, writers, and ultimately, I argue, theater-goers and the general reading public, also regarded the Old Testament as an authoritative text—and the biblical Jews as emblematic of a connection to the unmediated word of God.16 The English had a keen interest in the Jew’s historical and linguistic connection to the sacred texts, the “prisca veritas” that, according to Protestants, had been obfuscated by the Catholic Church.17 The theatrical simulation of Jewish “lived experience” figures prominently during Elizabeth’s inauguration as a promise of the true word of God. As Deborah’s rightful descendant, Elizabeth establishes a living, tangible connection between her subjects and the Old Testament; her body becomes the symbolic point of transmission, enacting the public reception of the Bible and its contents. The pageant narrator’s description of the Jews as “gods people,” the original elect nation, celebrates the Protestant acquisition of biblical veritas through the English Bible yet also intimates more complicated cultural ideas about the biblical and post-biblical Jews’ native intimacy with the Old Testament. Such tensions within the Protestants’ desires to adopt and reject the Judaic text are what we see played out in each of the Jewish women who appears on the Elizabethan stage. It is my central contention in Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage that Elizabethan playwrights imagine the Jewish woman as a figure of the scripture itself. I argue throughout this book that Elizabethan playwrights embody Elizabeth in Deborah and other Old Testament women in order to examine what was an encompassing cultural desire to take possession of the scripture; this claim of ideological and, by extension, readerly superiority was writ large in Protestant biblical commentaries that revised or attacked rabbinical and Catholic interpretations—or that simply allegorized the heresies of the Catholic Church.18 Modern Europe, ed. Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 22-3. 15 Milton and the Rabbis, p. 29. 16 See Katz, Sabbath and Sectarianism in Seventeenth-Century England (New York/ Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), pp. 1-88. Katz focuses on disputes about the Sabbath as a touchstone for these tensions: after the Reformation, more non-radicals adopted the Jewish practice of a Saturday Sabbath. As he argues elsewhere, “The validity of the Old Testament commandments for Christians was an issue of critical importance during the Reformation, for upon it hinged the nature of their approach to Scripture, and the authority of biblical law. ... This revitalized branch of scholarly study inevitably led Englishmen to contemporary Jews as the guardians of the Hebraic tradition, although imprisoned in a brand of Mosaic legalism which no Christian could accept in its entirety” (Philo-Semitism, pp. 9-10). See also Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis, especially pp. 27-9. 17 Miner, Afterword, Literary Uses of Typology, p. 389. 18 Strong argues that during Elizabeth’s reign the expertly staged annual Accession Day celebration as well as the Order of the Garter ceremony appropriate historical and biblical narratives used in pageantry during Queen Mary’s reign in order to “sanctify Tudor and above all Elizabeth’s own rule” (The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry, 2nd edn [London: Pimlico, 1999], p. 115). See also Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, pp. 43-4.

6

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

In the theatrical incarnation of the Jewish monarch, matriarch, wife, and virgin on the Elizabethan stage—all adaptations of or allusions to Old Testament women— Elizabeth becomes a body that holds the authority to “unclaspe” the prisca veritas of the Hebrew text, accurately captured in the English translation of the Bible. On stage, these Old Testament women came to life as texts to be read and interpreted; in public and private performances, Jewish women emerge as key symbolic figures whose bodies disclose and deny the Christian truths readers imagined as embedded in the Old Testament. At an historical moment when Protestant Reformers asserted their interpretive mastery over the scripture, Elizabeth inspired an interest in Jewish women that is expressed on the private stage in such plays as George Peele’s biblical history The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe and the anonymous interlude The Godly Queene Hester and, in a subtler form, in productions with which we are more familiar—Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. On the public stage, we see Jewish daughters that are less a direct reference to Elizabeth than a more intricate convergence of the Old Testament narratives and female archetypes with which Elizabeth was associated; in this sense, Marlowe and Shakespeare play out fantasies about textual propriety that strongly mimic the cultural work of contemporary representations of the queen. As we will see, Deborah is only one of the complex set of Jewish women with whom an Elizabethan audience would have been familiar. In The Historie of Jacob and Esau, for example, a play written soon after Elizabeth’s coronation, Deborah appears again as judge and prophetess but also as the nurse Deborah from Genesis, a midwife figure who confirms Jacob as a type of the Protestant elect. In other plays as well, figures such as Esther, Susannah, and Jephthah’s daughter remind us of Elizabeth’s multifaceted persona. In her important study, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare, Lisa Lampert investigates the shared role of Jew and Woman in medieval and early modern exegeses as “sources of origin” central to Christian modes of scriptural interpretation: “One cannot conceive (of) men without women or (of) Christianity without Judaism.” In religious discourse, they are both insiders and “Others,” grouped together in an exegetical tradition that “links the spiritual, masculine, and Christian and defines them in opposition to the carnal, feminine, and Jewish.”19 So for example, although Jessica in The Merchant of Venice appears to be celebrated as a successful Christian convert she is always delimited, Lampert contends, by her hermeneutic connections to the body, the carnal place of origin that signifies also the exterior, inferior sense of the scripture that must be effectively penetrated and discarded by the Christian reader. For a medieval and early modern audience, she

19 Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 2. In this context Lampert identifies the Virgin Mother as a figure of hermeneutical uncertainty: she is “the Jewish Christian, whose body is the site of the Incarnation and, as the critical site of contact between the two faiths, an embodiment of the paradoxes posed by the figures of both woman and Jew” (p. 29).

Introduction

7

argues, Jews and women represent at once bad readers and physical bodies removed from the spiritual meanings of the scripture.20 My approach to the Jewish women in early modern literature differs from Lampert’s in important ways. Elizabethan representations of Jewish women certainly reproduce these binaries and yet, unlike the medieval texts that are Lampert’s focus, also ascribe value to Jewish female characters that complicate long-standing hermeneutic traditions. Although Jews, and perhaps Jewish women in particular, were associated in Christian exegetical tradition with a carnal sense inextricable from the inferior meanings of the scripture, I show how Jewish women during Elizabeth’s reign are also understood as an “embodied” symbol of scriptural veritas, a site of origin connected to the Hebrew language and to the Jews’ exclusive communication with God that both promises an ur-text of Christian selfhood and threatens to be inaccessible to the Christian reader. Elizabethan pageants as well as dramatic performances on the public and private stage theatrically deploy these female characters in order to imaginatively, and visually, play out the disclosure of the true Word of God for the Christian audience, subsequently affirming and interrogating the audience’s desire to grasp the scripture’s true meanings. In this book I establish that the Jewish woman in Elizabethan drama is an overdetermined figure who demonstrates how Protestant religious selfhood was shaped by a crisis about scriptural interpretation. As we will see, the theater (and its meta-theatrical moments of cross-dressing and physical artifice) also becomes a mechanism through which these productions point to the complexity of reading in a “cleere” manner—that is, of accessing God’s Word and discerning the value of the Judaic experience in a Christian context. As figures of conversion, election, and salvation, Jewish women symbolically disclose meanings relevant to the Christian audience; yet, through their bodies—the very site of their exclusive “lived experience”—they also play out cultural fears about the inaccessibility or even the sheer absence of Christian meaning in the sacred text. Elizabeth, as I have already suggested, should be a key figure in our consideration of dramatic representations of Jewish women during the second half of the sixteenth century. Protestant writers figured the female Jew as a source-text of Christian veritas not merely because of their monarch’s gender; these connections between Elizabeth, the Hebrew scripture, and the Jewish woman were shaped by Elizabeth’s unique qualities as a female ruler as well as by existing cultural ideas about Jews. The Jewish woman was, unlike Jewish men, not directly implicated in Christ’s murder (as the poet Aemilia Lanyer famously argues) and, as far as bodily characteristics, did not appear to have an imposing—or permanent—ethnic or racial identity. Unlike her circumcised male counterpart, James Shapiro contends, she lacked the physical sign of the Jewish Covenant that Christian theologians understood metaphorically (if often paradoxically) as a spiritual rending, or circumcision, of the heart.21 Marlowe

20 “[Their] impeded ability to read is tied to the profound embodiment with which Woman and Jew are associated” (p. 43). 21 See Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 117-30. Shapiro contends that Pauline discussions of Jewish circumcision contrast the Jewish ritual

8

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

and Shakespeare too imagine the Jewish daughter as un-inscribed, a Jew-in-name who is primed for effective Christian conversion.22 Shapiro’s ground-breaking study of Jews and English conceptions of nationhood, however, does not take into account how playwrights, for the very reason of the female Jew’s “unmarked” nature, also imagined her mysterious, desirable body symbolically as a site of scriptural promise and deception. It is precisely because of her elusive physical traits that the figure of the Jewish woman signifies an elusive, valuable essence of scripture that her Christian audience may not be able to discern. Both Mary Janell Metzger and Janet Adelman have examined how Jessica’s desire to become Christian in The Merchant of Venice exposes cultural anxieties about the racial Otherness of her familial blood and its implications of an immutable identity impervious to Christian influence.23 Adelman argues that Jessica demonstrates not an affirmation of Christian universalism, but rather English efforts to differentiate with Christian “inward” circumcision but also attribute value to physical circumcision as a means of enforcing sexual chastity. 22 In 1925, J.L. Cardozo dismissed the figure of the female Jew on the English stage as selfish, lovestruck, and “utterly insignificant”: “the only two Jewesses in the whole range of Elizabethan drama, are none of their own showing: before the plays are half over they have both followed their heart’s desire and become Christians, and help in bringing down ill-fate on their Jewish fathers” (The Contemporary Jew in the Elizabethan Drama [Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1925], p. 81). Other older criticism also presumes that the Jewish daughter could turn Christian at will. Frank Montagu Modder offers a more flattering assessment than Cardozo of the Jewish daughter as essentially—perhaps racially—superior to her father: “The tradition once established has persisted in literature from the Elizabethan days down to the time of Scott and beyond, that the Jewess is beautiful, very attractive to Christian men, and possessed of ability and rare intelligence” (The Jew in the Literature of England [New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1934], p. 28). Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s Jewish daughters hail also from a more dubious literary ancestry: she is both a beautiful ingénue, anxiously awaiting her official title as Christian wife, and a threat to the Christian man. The Jewish woman in medieval homilectic exempla, Joan Young Gregg argues, is a conflation of a dual tradition: both Jew and women were represented as “seducers of the soul” (Gregg, Devil, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories [Albany: SUNY Press, 1997], p. 186). In the eighteenth century, the Jewish daughter is imagined in popular ballads as responsible for the recorded 1255 murder of young Hugh of Lincoln, who was, according to Raphael Holinshed, discovered in a well behind a Jew’s house. Versions of the ballad describe the Jewess’ crime as a type of rape: “She’s led him through ae dark/door,/And sae has she thro nine;/She’s laid him on a dressing-table,/And stickit him like a swine” (see George Lyman Kittredge, ed., English and Scottish Popular Ballads [Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1904; rpt, 1932], pp. 368-73). 23 See Metzger, “‘Now by My Hood, a Gentle and No Jew’: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity,” PMLA 113.1 (1998): 52-63 and Adelman, “Her Father’s Blood: Race, Conversion, and Nation in The Merchant of Venice,” Representations 81 (2003): 9. In The Merchant of Venice Lorenzo responds to Lancelot’s taunts about his marriage to Jessica by implying that the non-racial (or perhaps invisible) qualities of her Jewish identity, unlike what he imagines as the visible markers of blackness, will enable him to assimilate her into Christian society without significant trouble: “I shall answer [my marriage] better to the commonwealth than you can the getting up of the Negro’s belly” (3.5.37-9).

Introduction

9

between the land-based religion of Elizabeth’s Protestant England and Shylock’s Jewish, nation-less “sacred nation” that is determined by blood ties.24 Shylock’s declaration of his “sacred nation,” she notes, often articulated through allusions to scripture, raises questions about how England will stake its own distinct claim to sacred nationhood. Adelman focuses on Jessica’s father as a symbol and source of her Jewish blood, but it is also in the play’s intimations of maternal identity— Jessica’s and her mother’s—that we see how the Jewish woman complicates the discourse of Christian selfhood more broadly. As I will argue, the body of the Jewish woman presents not only a racial but a textual problem of assimilation, even as Christian exegetes imagine the literal acquisition of her body as a proprietary move over the scripture. Throughout this book, I investigate the ways in which Elizabeth’s elusive persona reinforces her connection to the Hebrew scripture and to the figure of the Jewish woman in the public imagination. On stage, Elizabeth’s body may have signified the securement of Christian, spiritual meaning in the Old Testament, but Elizabeth’s own volatile physical self-representations suggests how she too was symbolic of interpretive instability. As Christine Coch has argued, Elizabeth’s rhetorical pose as “mother” of her subjects was actually a vehement rejection of actual maternal experience, which she would have perceived as dangerous from both a medical and political perspective.25 Elizabeth’s manipulation of her role as Virgin Queen has, of course, been treated extensively in literary criticism. As John N. King and Helen Hackett have shown, Elizabeth fashioned herself (or was presented by her supporters) as martyr, Jezebel, eligible bride, and spiritual and political leader of her people.26 In the character of the Jewish woman Elizabeth emerges not as a singular persona but as a composite of colliding scriptural and gendered significations—formidable queen, judge, prophetess, domineering mother, shrewish wife, benevolent nurse, and vulnerable daughter—the fictionalized versions of female selfhood by which she became known to her subjects.27 The magnificent Elizabethan Conceit, a Shrove 24 Adelman contends that Shylock, with his assertion that Antonio owes him a pound of flesh, “poses a blood claim not only to nationhood but specifically to ‘sacred’ nationhood, the term Shylock introduces early in the play (1.3.48) in contestation of the Christian understanding of Jewish history” (p. 20); Jessica too poses a racial threat not only as the potential adulterer of Christian blood (and producer, subsequently, of Jewish children) but also as part of a distinct, itinerant nation defined by its immutable kinship bonds. Although Adelman approaches “blood kinship” as an essentially Jewish trait, playwrights’ use of Jewish women as representations of Elizabeth suggest the queen’s own investment in blood ties as evidence of her legitimacy. 25 Coch, “‘Mother of my Contreye’: Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood,” in The Mysteries of Elizabeth I, ed. Kirby Farrell and Kathleen Swaim (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts, 2003), pp. 134-61. 26 King, “Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen,” Renaissance Quarterly 43.1 (1990): 30-74 and Hackett, Virgin Mother. 27 Critics have engaged extensively with the question of how much the queen controlled her public representations. On literary representations of the power struggles between the queen and her court writers and propagandists during her reign, see Susan Frye, The Competition

10

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

Tuesday vellum that can be folded to superimpose the faces of Venus, Dido, Judith, David, and Joshua atop Elizabeth’s own body, portrays the queen as a shifting set of historical, biblical, and classical prototypes. Dated March 8, 1603, the conceit was possibly presented to the ailing queen just two weeks before her death. The piece suggests the compatible images of the queen and the Jewish woman, through whom Christian writers found a place upon which to stage various battles of propriety. Yet the dramatic works I examine in this book also call attention to the slipperiness of their own interpretive machinery: in presenting Elizabeth as a palimpsest on which they could inscribe multiple scriptural personae (who in themselves signified various, and often conflicting interpretations), writers stage the unstable process of reading itself and, subsequently, the “play” that characterizes the English reader’s more uncertain engagement with the scripture. Each of the diverse dramatic representations I discuss deploys the body of the Jewish woman, often conflating it with the body of the elect queen, to expose the fluidity and instability of scriptural interpretation and, inevitably, the gap between reader and veritas. The extent to which dramatists consciously figure Elizabeth in the character of the Jewish woman is sometimes a matter of speculation, of course; my primary intention is not to decode the plays’ hidden biographical meanings but rather to explore what were most definitely dynamic associations between the queen and Old Testament women in the cultural imagination. I approach allusions to Elizabeth in dramatic representations of Old Testament women not primarily as commentaries on the queen herself; instead, I argue that these representations allow Elizabethan playwrights to examine the hermeneutical tensions inherent in the Protestant subject’s relationship to the scripture. Reading Jews Any critical study of Jews and Jewishness in the years between Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and Oliver Cromwell’s readmission of them in 1656 risks making conjectures about a group that was, from a legal standpoint, non-existent.28 Yet as Rachel Trubowitz observes, “[w]hile the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, ‘the Jew’ continued to reside quite openly in England as a familiar scriptural and legendary type or ‘shadow’—a presence, however spectral,

for Representation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993) and Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986). Leah Marcus in Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988) has described how Elizabeth shaped her public image as Virgin Queen in response to her subjects’ desire to see her fulfill other traditional gender roles: her virginity “[allowed] her to preserve her independence while simultaneously tapping into the emotional power behind the images of wife and mother through fictionalized versions of herself” (p. 53). 28 Shapiro persuasively contends that Jews did exist as a small and diffuse population in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “Marrano” or “crypto” Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition.

Introduction

11

that shapes the cultural construction of not only Jewish identity but English national identity as well.”29 Although “real” Jews were exiled for almost 400 years, the dynamic role of European Jews in the lives of Christian scholars during the twelfth century must inform my study of Jewish characters on the early modern stage. Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson’s excellent collection of essays on the significance of rabbinical scholarship to early modern Christian Hebraists elucidates the dialogic relationship between Jewish and Christian theologians: the latter, in quest of the “prisca theologia—an idealized, pristine wisdom often attributed to prehistoric Adam”—solicited help from Jewish scholars in translating Hebraic texts.30 Their ensuing intellectual exchanges and the subsequent growth of Hebrew studies in European universities fostered two types of Hebraic scholars: in his discussion of Reformation interest in a “Hebrew truth,” Michael A. Signer makes a helpful distinction between what he terms the “cultural” Hebraists who were dependent on Jewish interlocutors for their translations and the “lexical” Hebraists, who could independently read biblical texts.31 As Shoulson persuasively shows in his earlier study of Milton, early modern texts demonstrate the dialogic relationship between Judaic sources (that is, Jewish commentaries on the Old Testament such as the Talmud and Midrash) and work written by Christian theologians. The sixteenth century brought an intensified interest in the Hebrew language. Protestant Reformers, Katz explains, imagined Adam and Eve speaking Hebrew in Eden; they believed Hebrew to be a pre-lapsarian form of discourse spoken by God himself.32 Protestant theologians’ perception of the Old Testament as the true Word of God, influenced by the Renaissance humanists’ avid interest in philology, inspired them, as well as the educated elite, to study the Hebrew scripture in its original form.33 Under Elizabeth, English translations of the Bible from the original Hebrew did more than reflect the rejection of Church authorities and the inclusive ideology of the new church: they symbolically marked the emergence of a new Protestant nation. The queen revived her father’s and brother’s decree for an English Bible in every parish church. The Geneva Bible, which surpassed the Great Bible in popularity during Elizabeth’s reign, was printed in a stunning 140 editions between 1560 and 1640 and offered the first comprehensive English translation of the original Hebrew and Aramaic. Another rival version, The Holie Bible—otherwise known as the Bishop’s Bible—of 1568, which boasted a frontispiece image of Elizabeth as both comely virgin and potent ruler (with orb and scepter in hand), also saw 29

Trubowitz, “‘But Blood Whitened’: Nursing Mothers and Others in Early Modern Britain,” in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 88-9. 30 Collectively, the essays challenge the perspective of many historians who have viewed the Renaissance “as an extension and intensification of the hostility they see as characteristic of the later Middle Ages” (Hebraica Veritas?, p. 5). 31 Signer, pp. 22-3. 32 See Philo-Semitism, p. 44. 33 Katz notes the copious Hebrew grammars, Bibles, lexicons and, by the early seventeenth century, the rabbinical commentaries, Midrash, Talmud, and other exegetical texts, available in England (Philo-Semitism, pp. 10-11).

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

12

numerous editions and widespread distribution.34 This translation, intended to be a viable replacement of the Great Bible, which was still the “official” Bible used in English churches, omitted the Geneva’s controversial Calvinistic marginal notes. The Geneva, nonetheless, remained the most authoritative Hebrew translation in England.35 Attempting to cast the Old and New Testaments together as part of the same true Word, Protestant Reformers appropriated the Old Testament as a record of the earliest events of Christendom.36 From their perspective, Jews were intimately connected to the scriptural text; they were the original gatekeepers of the word of God and thus intrinsic to a history that culminated with Christian salvation. Protestants invoked the Hebrew scripture as an ur-text of Christian selfhood and emphasized that God’s original intentions in the sacred scripture were accessible to the faithful Christian through the Holy Spirit’s guidance. In the dedicatory epistle to his commentaries on the Old Testament, Arthur Jackson writes that “[h]istories of former times have been ever acknowledged both most pleasant, and most profitable. ... But above all ... both [acquaint] us with the dispensations of Gods providence towards his Church. ... and

34

The frontispiece is not included in the 1574 and subsequent editions. Only scant English translations of the Old Testament appeared prior to the midfifteenth century. Political responses to the surge of Bible translations during Henry VIII’s reign—and Mary’s—demonstrate what was at stake in such ideological enterprises. The Reformist William Tyndale, the first translator of the Bible to work directly from the Hebrew text, whose English versions of the New and Old Testaments were published respectively in 1525 and 1530, was executed in 1536. Sir Thomas More in A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (London, 1528) vilifies Tyndale and John Wycliffe for corrupting the Bible through translation. Yet More condemns the authors, not the specific aspects of the translations; regarding the text itself, More cites only minor syntactical points and printing discrepancies. Tyndale responded to More in An Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (London, 1531), who in turn continued the debate in The Confutations of Tyndale (London, 1532). Miles Coverdale received approval from Henry VIII for the first complete printed Bible in English in 1535 and played a significant role in subsequent English translations, including the Geneva (1560). As a reaction against the burgeoning Protestant movement, Parliament banned private, unsanctioned use of the Bible in 1543 and Henry VIII subsequently banned the use of Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s translations. Although the English Bible was revived during Edward VI’s reign, his successor, Mary, ordered the execution of a number of people involved with Bible translation. For a survey of English translations of the Bible and their controversies, see Wilbur Owen Sypherd, The Literature of the English Bible (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938); F.F. Bruce, History of the Bible in English (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978); and David Daniell’s excellent The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2003). Daniell’s attention to the Geneva Bible is notable (pp. 275-319). 36 This sense of a historical continuum between the chosen Israelites and the Protestants certainly inspired the House of Lords, in their attempt to encourage Elizabeth to marry, to cite the ten tribes of Israel as an example of succession problems (Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose [Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000], p. 85). 35

Introduction

13

[were] written by the unerring pen of men inspired by the holy Ghost.” 37 Yet just as the Christian Hebraists consistently expressed a desire to sever Jews from the Hebrew language, definitively removing the exclusively “Judaic” sense of Jewish history and practice from the “Hebraic” value of the text to be claimed by the Christian reader, early modern readers constantly struggled with the same. Anxious about the value they did in fact ascribe to the Jews’ connection to the sacred text, Christian exegetes had traditionally declared them to be inadequate readers of their own scripture; in the sixteenth century more than ever, Reformers defined themselves through such claims of interpretive expertise, denouncing by contrast the Jews’ “spiritual impediments.”38 Charges of “Judaizing,” exchanged between Protestants and Catholics during the sixteenth century, did not only connote a Christian suspected of practicing Jewish prayer and ritual but also one who ceded too much authority to Old Testament law or to rabbinical interpretations of the Old Testament. The playwright George Buchanan, whose rendition of Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter I discuss in Chapter 4, was charged as “Judaizer” for what were perceived as his anti-Catholic practices.39 The issue of scriptural interpretation was central as Protestants continued to navigate their almost paradoxical relationship with the Old Testament. Jewish women proved a particularly dynamic topic as exegetes balanced their embrace of the Jewish scripture with their rejection of its Judaic content. Although Martin Luther would condemn the Book of Esther for its portrayal of a Jewish queen who enables her fellow Jews to avenge their Gentile enemies, the Protestant schoolmaster and commentator John Stockwood embraces the German Hebraist Johann Brenz’s more fluid characterization of Esther in A right godly and learned discourse upon the booke of Ester, which Stockwood translated into English in 1584. After first interpreting the Jew-hating character Haman as a Catholic insurgent plotting against the Protestant savior, Queen Esther, Brenz reformulates the narrative as a symbolic rejection of the Jewish people, sharply distinguishing between his Jewish contemporaries and the Jews represented in the scripture: The Jewes, which in our time rejoice of this behalfe, do marvellously please themselves in the reading of this historie. ... But they have not to rejoice at this time of the story of ester. For this story perteyneth unto the people and Church of God. ... And because that [the Jews] hate the true Israelites, which are the Christians, which the same hatred, wherwith Aman in times past hated them, it is plain, that they are the cousins and kinred of Aman the Amalechite, which nation always with extreme hatred thirsted after the utter distruction of the Israelites.40

37 See his dedicatory epistle to Annotations upon the remaining historicall part of the Old Testament. To wit, the books of Joshua, Judges, the two books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, and the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther (Cambridge, 1646). The scripture, he writes, is the Church’s Magna Charta “whereon all our priviledges and all our hopes depend” (“The Preface to the Reader”). 38 Lampert, p. 43. 39 See Katz, Sabbath, pp. 1-20 and Shapiro, pp. 20-26. 40 John Stockwood, Intro. A right godly and learned discourse upon the Booke of Ester (London, 1584), pp. 688-91.

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Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

Brenz’s (and, by extension, Stockwood’s) interpretive dexterity reflects a broad cultural interest in aggressively laying claim to the scripture and establishing the Verbum veritatis as a text for Protestant readers. He scorns the Jews’ faith by characterizing them as incompetent readers: they persistently “do marvellously please themselves in the reading of this historie” despite their inability to understand the narrative as an allegory of Christian salvation. Although he had relied heavily on their translations, Luther regularly undermined the work of Jewish interlocutors: “When the Jews have doubts about a word, they resort to equivocation and multiply meanings and make it more obscure by their glosses.”41 “playnely translated”? With the English translation of the Bible, Protestants also asserted their superior methods for interpreting the scripture and thus their departure from Jewish and Catholic exegetical traditions. Christian scriptural exegesis had a long and complex history, perhaps most profoundly shaped by the medieval “fourfold” approach to scripture’s literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical meanings. Protestant theologians attempted to define their interpretive methods against those of the Catholic Church, emphasizing their “literal” approach to Old Testament people and events as elements of an overarching Christian history. They endeavored to read scripture as an unmediated form of communication between God and the reader, embracing the sacred texts of the Old Testament as the source of an authoritative Word, not as symbolic language to be de-mystified by the local priest.42 Protestant commentators regularly indicted the Catholic church for dispensing self-serving, bogus interpretations of the scripture and attempted to establish, by contrast, how the individual’s certainty of salvation could be confirmed by the conviction of textual certitude.43 A popular Elizabethan homily proclaims, “[l]et us diligently search for the Well of Life in the bookes of the New and Old Testament, and not runne to the stinking puddles of mens traditions (devised by mens imagination) for our justification and salvation.”44 41 Quoted by Stephen G. Burnett, “Reassessing the ‘Basel-Wittenberg Conflict’: Dimensions of the Reformation-Era Discussion of Hebrew Scholarship,” in Hebraica Veritas?, p. 192. 42 See Daniell, p. 128; Karlfried Froehlich, “‘Always to Keep the Literal Sense in Holy Scripture Means to Kill One’s Soul’: The State of Biblical Hermeneutics at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century,” in Miner, Literary Uses of Typology, pp. 20-48; and Muller, pp. 3-22. The “literal” thus had a double sense of both an inferior, grammatical meaning (associated also with the Pauline concept of the “letter that kills”) and the true (Christian) meaning intended by God or the Holy Spirit. 43 See Susan E. Schreiner, “‘The Spiritual Man Judges All Things’: Calvin and the Exegetical Debates about Certainty in the Reformation,” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, pp. 189-215. 44 “A Fruitfull Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture,” in Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches In the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547-1571), a facsimile reproduction of the edition of 1623, ed. Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968), 1: 2.

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This imagined or idealized vision of a community of “correct” readers is an essential part of Protestant exegeses during the sixteenth century. Dedicated to the queen, the Geneva Bible boasted marginal glosses that refuted Catholic readings of the text. The Geneva’s prefatory inscription to the reader explicates the new translation as gratitude for God’s salvation from Catholic rule and asserts the Geneva’s superiority to earlier Catholic editions of the Bible: [N]ow forasmuche as this thing chefely is atteyned by the knollege and practising of the worde of God (which is the light to our paths, the keye of the kingdome of heaven, our comfort in affliction, our shielde and sworde against Satan, the schoole of all wisdome, the glasse wherein we beholde Gods face, the testimonie of his favour, and the only foode and nourishment of our soules) we thought that we colde bestowe our labours & studie in nothing which colde be more acceptable to God and comfortable to his Churche then in the translating of the holy Scriptures into our native tongue: the which thing, albeit that divers heretofore have indevored to atcheive: yet considering the infancie of those tymes and imperfect knollage of the tongues, in respect of this ripe age and cleare light which God hath now reveiled, the translations required greatly to be perused and reformed.

The Geneva’s dedicatory epistle to Elizabeth claims “the holy Scriptures faithfully and playnely translated according to the languages wherein thei were first written by the holy Gost” to be the essential “fundacion and groundworke” of the Protestant state: “For the worde of God is an evident token of Gods love and our assurance of his defence, wheresoever it is obediently receyved.” This skilled translation, they contend, supersedes those attempted by men with “imperfect knollage” of Hebrew and also serves as evidence of divine approbation. The implication here is that the Geneva translators’ mastery of Hebrew enables them to deliver God’s Word “playnely” in its original, intended form and without artifice or embellishment. In a sense, the more Judaic the translation, the more Christian it was perceived. Catholic writers such as Thomas Harding refuted these charges: “Our adversaries perceiving well they have no good grounde to staye upon, would make the world beleve, that for this our glorious church, we had no scriptures. They laye to our charge, that we call the scriptures a colde, uncertaine, unprofitable, domme, killing and dead letter. But this is a slaunder ...” He goes on to assert the superiority of the “well lerned and virtuous” Church authorities to the “unlerned, ungodly, rascall sorte of men,” the general public to whom the Protestant church “prostitute[s the scripture] as bawds do their harlottes.”45 This conceit of the scripture as a potentially dangerous female body was common to both Catholics and Protestants and very relevant, as we will see, to theatrical adaptations of and allusions to Old Testament women. The term “harlot” as a metaphor of the scripture suggests two distinct anxieties about the Christian reader’s relationship with the text: on the one hand, readers without true faith may too easily access its meanings, but on the other, the reader who does sincerely possess such faith could be denied access to the true Word of God because of intervening forces that “corrupt” the body of scripture. Put

45

Harding, A Confutation of a Booke Intitled An Apologie of the Church of England (Antwerp, 1565), GGG4V-HHH.

16

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

another way, the Judaic content of the Old Testament may not serve to illuminate a totalizing Christian narrative. Despite the distinctions that Protestants made between their own methodologies and those of the Catholic Church, their exegetical practices were not so far removed from Catholic approaches to the scripture. Protestants understood themselves essentially as superior readers of biblical texts, but for each Protestant subject, as Thomas H. Luxon observes, interpreting the Old Testament also precipitated a crisis about how to read scripture; indeed, there was no real distinction between the Protestants’ “historical” typology and the practice of allegory that they attributed to the Catholic Church.46 Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson have shown extensively how exegetes such as Luther and Calvin did not reject Catholic allegory but rather incorporated traditional allegorical methods into what Protestants called the “literal” and historical sense of the scripture. In short, Protestant exegetical methodology was diverse and not in opposition to the varied approaches to scriptural interpretation employed by the patristic and medieval theologians.47 Even more, the Protestant exegetes’ efforts to simultaneously confirm the scriptural meanings originally intended by God and to allow for the reader’s autonomous experience with the text proved complex and often contradictory: the dictum of sola Scriptura encouraged anxiety about false interpretations and also necessitated that scriptural truth be definitive and accessible.48 Susan E. Schreiner argues that Luther, Calvin, and other Protestant Reformers believed an individual’s salvation to be confirmed by their apprehension of the Holy Spirit in the scripture, 46 Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago,IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 71. In his important study of Protestant hermeneutics, Luxon notes that Protestant typology was only a semantic evasion of Catholic allegory: “I call it a dodge because it is largely a euphemism for allegory designed to mask Protestantism’s continued commitment to allegorical structures of thought and representations of reality or truth even as it constituted itself under the antiallegorical banner of the one true literal sense of God’s Word” (p. 40). In this sense, Luxon challenges Erich Auerbach’s and Barbara Lewalski’s distinctions between Protestant typology and allegory (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 111). Auerbach contends that in the Old Testament, the figura or “type” is “something real and historical which announces something else real and historical” (“Figura,” trans. Ralph Manheim in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature [1957; rpt, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973], p. 29). On the history of typological practice in patristic, medieval, and early modern exegeses, see Froehlich; Muller; E. Earle Ellis, The Old Testament in Early Christianity (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1991); Joseph A. Galdon, Typology and Seventeenth-Century Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1975); Leonhard Goppelt, TYPOS: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New, trans. Donald H. Madvig (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1982); and Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). 47 On Calvin and Luther, see Muller, pp. 11-12. Muller and Thompson’s collection of essays is devoted to establishing the continuity of patristic and medieval tradition in Protestant exegeses. See especially Thompson, “The Survival of Allegorical Argumentation in Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Old Testament Exegesis,” on the Protestants’ pervasive use of allegory despite their professions to the contrary (pp. 255-71). 48 See Miner, pp. 370-94.

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yet such theologians also expressed wariness of how the reader’s subjective response to the text would always call this interpretive certitude into question: [During the Reformation] [a]ll the warring parties appealed to the guidance of the Spirit in their scriptural interpretation. Claims to an immediate inner experience of the ‘Spirit,’ ‘inner word’ or ‘Wisdom of God’ became common claims for the certainty of authority. ... With everyone appealing to the same text, the sixteenth-century quest for certitude took on the nature of an intense hermeneutical crisis.49

For Luther, Schreiner argues, the promise of a concealed truth also raised the possibility of the scripture’s hidden deceptions—Satan’s cunning attempts to misguide the faithful reader. The Jewish text remained elusive, even for those who had mastered the Hebrew language; English interpretations of the Hebrew Bible did not ensure control over its readers’ comprehension of its meanings. Ian Green observes how the mass publication of the Bible in English during the sixteenth century increasingly heightened the theologians’ concern about the reader’s ability to understand the text without additional guidance: [while] it was generally agreed among Protestants that the complete Bible should be made available to everybody, it was also realized that while some passages were so clear and safe that even the youngest and most innocent reader could be trusted to negotiate them, others were so deep and dangerous that even great intellects could drown in them.50

Once again, the text, like a “harlotte,” might be too accessible or, alternatively, too “deep and dangerous” and thus denying the reader spiritual meaning. During the sixteenth century, the Protestants’ investment in the Hebrew scripture renewed and fuelled long-standing anxieties about the process of ascertaining Christian truths within the Old Testament. From a literary perspective, as Northrop Frye has pointed out, the project of typology exposes its own fragility, undermining the traditional practice of establishing a definitive correspondence between the Old and New Testament.51 The Old Testament narratives provided a focal point where Christian ideology could be shaped and defined, and yet, in their potential to produce multiple, changing significations, also hinted at the instability of scripture—of language— as the one, true locus of Christian authority. Indeed, the Judaic aspects of the Old Testament, in combination with the established history of Catholic exegetical tradition, inevitably raised the question of the text’s ownership: to whom do these narratives belong? In the productions I discuss in this book, it is the Jewish woman-as-scripture who, through her various bodily identities as mother, virgin, and erotic object of desire, symbolically promises and eludes comprehension, barring the reader 49

Schreiner, pp. 197, 199. Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), p. 101. Green notes the large number of Bible study aids published beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. 51 Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 78. 50

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

18

from the desired contents. Drawing upon the inherent theatricality and artifice of stagecraft, Renaissance dramatists emphasize the slippage between text and meaning, generating interpretive “play” that encourages us to read their work as a type of midrash that demonstrates the heteroglossia of language rather than its coherence. Debora Kuller Shuger has called our attention to the influence of the Renaissance Bible on both secular and sacred literary forms during the sixteenth century: early modern texts were “gentile midrashim [in which] the ancient stories served as a primary locus for synthetic, speculative, and symbolic production.”52 The incorporation of rabbinical scholarship in early modern texts, as Shoulson explains in the context of the interpretive modes of Paradise Lost, “allow[s] for a greater play of possibilities, contradictions, and fancies in an effort to provoke its audience to a more active engagement with the text and all its implications.”53 Reading Jewish women Many Elizabethan plays whose titles promise fascinating adaptations of Old Testament narratives such as Hester and Ahasuerus (1594), Abraham and Lot (1593), and Holofernes (1572) do not survive for our perusal.54 There is a great deal of unmined material in extant manuscripts of private and academic performances featuring Jewish women, however, especially as these more obscure plays have yet to be examined together with the Jewish daughters made famous on the popular stage, Abigail and Jessica in The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice. I examine these dramatic representations of the Jewish monarch, mother, wife, and daughter along a continuum as figures connected to Elizabeth in the public imagination and also as scriptural bodies through which the playwright examines the audience’s expectation of Christian meaning. Each of these characters engages in acts of deception that involve bodily concealment and disguise; in their inaccessibility to their audience on stage, they represent anxieties about such disclosures also to the audience in the playhouse itself. Moving from monarch to daughter, I examine increasingly fraught representations of the relationship between the Protestant reader and the Hebrew text. Famously described and self-portrayed as England’s mother and nurse, Elizabeth played the role of daughter ad infinitum as well. John Foxe’s 1563 dedication to Acts and Monuments captures Elizabeth as a virgin martyr whose suffering on behalf of her subjects proves her chaste, devout, and worthy of her divine Father. The infant Elizabeth presented at the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (1613) is 52

Shuger, p. 3. Milton and the Rabbis, p. 11. 54 Dates refer to the first performance on record. See Alfred Harbage, The Annals of English Drama, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 38-9, 64, 72-3. Hester and Ahasuerus (first performed on June 8, 1594 and published in 1599) is registered as a revival performed by either the Admiral’s or Chamberlain’s groups. C.C. Stopes suggests that this play was based on The Godly Queene Hester (William Hunnis and the Revels of the Chapel Royal: A Study of his period and the influences which affected Shakespeare [1910; rpt, Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1963], p. 264). 53

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immediately prophesied to be a “maiden phoenix,” an eternal virgin who resurrects herself, achieving everlasting fame. Elizabeth herself often referenced her role as daughter, eternally suspended between father and God and resisting the mundane itinerary of marriage and childbirth. Shuger has extensively examined Old Testament blood sacrifice, and in particular the sacrifice of the virgin daughter, as a “symbolic form” in Renaissance literature through which writers examined and articulated the contours of the Christian self and its relationship to the ancestral past; in this sense, she argues, the crucifixion is “the point of maximal exemplarity and maximal estrangement.”55 It is my contention that the archetype of the sacrificed daughter in Marlowe and Shakespeare, for a late sixteenth-century audience, would have been imagistically associated with Elizabeth, the perennial daughter, as well as Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11:2940. On the popular stage, the Jewish daughter plays out the allegorical promise of Jephthah and his sacrificed daughter, familiar to every Protestant reader as a narrative of Christian transformation: a symbolic replacement of Jewish ritual murder and the spiritually “blind” Jew with the daughter, the ultimate sacrifice in Christ. Yet this Jewish daughter also signifies a distinct, valuable Judaic essence that does not easily translate into this most fundamental of Christian narratives. As we will see, the Jewish daughter also dismantles this interpretive mode through her associations with bodily disguise, deception, and sexual transgression. Her elusive body also recalls the deceptive and authoritative Jewish mother/matriarch in plays such as Jacob and Esau, The Godly Queene Hester, and The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe. In narratives where a Jewish virgin daughter serves as a key figure in Christian allegory, overdetermined images of a maternal womb, a symbol of both Jewish origin and textual obfuscation, return to suggest the unassimilable nature of the Hebrew text for its Christian reader. At a time when Elizabeth’s detractors contested her legitimacy, the theatrical representation of Deborah in the 1559 coronation pageant offers an image of scriptural assimilation and mastery. The conjoining of Elizabeth and Deborah asserts Elizabeth’s ties to a historical precedent of the Christian elect while also mitigating her extraordinary power as female head of church and state: the audience is reminded twice that it is by “God’s aide” that Deborah had become the most “worthie woman judge.”56 Outfitted with crown and scepter, the civilian performing as “Debora” was flanked by representative “members” of the clergy, nobility, and the commonwealth.57 Elizabeth’s subjects named her a modern-day David, Moses, and Solomon, but comparisons between Elizabeth and Old Testament women, especially Deborah, Esther, Judith, and Rebecca, figured even more prominently during her reign, offering historical and spiritual prototypes for the queen’s divine appointment as well as her martial aggression.58 Each year of Elizabeth’s reign further substantiated 55

Shuger, pp. 9, 53. Shuger’s focus is on Christian Humanists such as George Buchanan. 56 Osborn, The Quenes Maiesties Passage, p. 54. 57 Ibid., pp. 53-5. 58 In a sermon published on occasion of the annual Queen’s Day (Accession Day) event in 1585, Edwin Sandys praises Elizabeth as “our” Deborah, Judith, and Hester (Sermons and

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Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

comparisons with the prophetess’s 40-year rule. During a pageant in Norwich two decades later on August 16, 1578, another Deborah, standing alongside Judith and Esther, declared Elizabeth’s preeminence: “[The Lord] appointed me Debora for the Judge of his elect . ... So, mightie Prince, that puisaunt Lord hath plaste thee here to be, The rule of this triumphant Realme alone belongth to thee.”59 In 1588, the Lord Keeper Sir Thomas Egerton penned the following heading on a manuscript of Elizabeth’s own prayer after the defeat of the Spanish Armada: “A godly prayer and thanksgiving, worthy the Christian Deborah and [the eighth-century adolescent martyr] Theodosia of our days.”60 In these public declarations, intimations of Elizabeth’s legitimacy and the Protestants’ masterful appropriation of the scripture were mutually reinforcing. It is thus appropriate that “Ester Sowernam,” the pseudonymous (and very likely male) author of Ester hath hang’d Haman, refutes Joseph Swetnam’s disparagement of Elizabeth in The arraignment of lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women by questioning his ability to interpret the Hebrew scripture.61 Against his assertion of women’s numerous sexual and social indiscretions, “Sowernam” cites Deborah, Judith, Susannah, as well as “her” namesake, Esther, as paragons of strength and virtue: “With what wisedome did Queene Hester preserve her people, and caused their enemies to be hanged? What a chast mirrour was Susanna, who rather hazarded her life, then offend against God?” Later, the author includes Elizabeth in the tradition of celebrated female martyrs and heroes from the Old Testament. 62 In a prayer during the early years of her reign, Elizabeth herself appeals to God for the strength of

Miscellaneous Pieces by Archbishop Sandys (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press for The Parker Society, 1841; rpt, 1968), pp. 80-81. Richard Vennard’s “A Prayer for the prosperous Successe of hir Majestie’s Forces in Ireland” (London, 1601) cites the bloody victories of Deborah, Esther, and Judith in his prayer for Elizabeth I’s success in Ireland: “Sweet Jesus, God of mercie, Lord of compassion, regard thy servants’ humble petition, thou that didst fight the most bloodie battaile that ever was fought; that sprinkled Golgotha with that sacred precious effusion that flowed from thy bodie; suffer thy servants to pass through that Irish red Sea of sanguin and blodie pretence, and let those rebbels be overwhelmed with the Egiptian Pharo. Circumvent that rebellious Sissira, that thy judgement (like a naile), may pierce into the braine of his malitious practises: that our Soveraigne may sing with Debora after the victorie, having with Hester preserved hir people, and with chast Judith cut off the head of harme pretending Holofernes. And as to thy servant Moyses, under-prop the arme of hir Generall with thine owne powre, the head corner stone of the Temple. Stand still, O sonne of God, and give thy people victory. Let the traiterous vaissaile be confounded, thy servant Elizabeth preserved, and thy selfe above all glorified” (in The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Nichols [1823; rpt, New York: AMS, 1970], 3:541). 59 The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 2:147. 60 Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 424. Egerton’s allusion to Theodosia evokes also the archetype of the Jewish daughter that I discuss in the latter half of this book. Theodosia was remembered for her attempt at protecting a statue of Christ that the iconoclast Emperor Leo III intended to destroy. 61 Ester hath hang’d Haman (London, 1617), p. 33. 62 Ibid., pp. 12, 21.

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Deborah, Judith, and Esther to free “[t]hy people of Israel”—the Protestants that are the New Israelites—from their enemies.63 As I show in the first half of this book, Elizabethan stage drama similarly employs women from the Hebrew scripture in order to legitimate the queen’s own religious authority: by figuring the queen as Deborah, Rebecca, and Esther, writers position Elizabeth within the history of God’s chosen people, confirming her connection to the text that became the Protestant prisca veritas. Yet the stronger these Judaic characters, the more complicated their roles become within a Christian milieu: in Elizabethan drama, these figures do not merely carry out God’s will but become independent agents, often achieving parity with divine authority or, alternatively, accessing “God’s aide” in a manner that eludes comprehension by her Christian audience. I argue in Chapter 1 that the anonymous interlude The Godly Queene Hester perhaps enjoyed only one performance around the time of its publication in 1561, yet it is significant that this play about Esther’s subversion of her husband King Ahasuerus’s decree to kill the kingdom’s Jews was possibly staged for an elite group that may have included the queen herself. Rewarded for her virtue and chastity, the biblical Esther tempers what always, even for her most devout promoters, threatened to be an overwhelming image of Elizabeth’s female authority. The Godly Queene Hester, however, re-envisions Esther as a proactive deliverer of God’s elect and a skilled politician and equivocator. Esther emerges as an advisor and monarch who can speak “playnely” and yet her ability to conceal her Jewish identity and to assimilate as a “fayre,” humble virgin testifies to her ability to deceive sexually, politically, and in the most symbolic sense, textually, as a body to be read. The interlude’s invocation of passages added to the Book of Esther in the Greek Septuagint underscores her dissension from the king and her alliance with the Jewish nationals she seeks to protect. Like contemporary allusions to Elizabeth as the “godly” Queen Esther, the interlude foregrounds the paradox of Esther’s Jewish identity, which at once confirms the queen as a deliverer of God’s Christian elect and emphasizes her exclusive connection to her Jewish nation. Chapter 2 examines Jewish matriarchs in the academic interlude The Historie of Jacob and Esau (1558/9). Most likely written by William Hunnis, imprisoned before Elizabeth’s accession for plotting rebellion against her half-sister Mary, the play centers on Rebecca’s manipulation of her husband and her plot to fulfill God’s prophecy that her younger son would rule over her first born—a story of predestination often employed by writers in their descriptions of Protestant election. Contemporary debates about whether the interlude’s depiction of Rebecca’s supervision of Jacob was intended as a subversive plug for Elizabeth in 1557 testify to the historical drama’s political significance. In Genesis, Jacob’s in utero struggle with Esau and his grasp on the first-born twin’s heel during birth was read typologically as an image of the Protestants’ ascension over the Old order that is both Catholicism and Judaism as well as the appropriation of the Old Testament as Christian text.64 Jacob’s 63

Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 157. This allegorical reading of the brothers as Christian and Jew emerges much earlier than the sixteenth century. One thirteenth-century scholar commenting on working with 64

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Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

fate is disclosed to Rebecca during her pregnancy, yet in Jacob and Esau Rebecca’s maternal authority, aided and abetted by the character of “Deborra” (imagined in the play as judge, nurse and midwife), blurs together with divine prophecy. The play’s excessive images of this authoritative womb that can shape its subjects at will are striking. As figures of Elizabeth, both Rebecca and Deborra act as creators of the Protestant elect, but Rebecca’s womb also signifies a threatening type of maternal authority associated with an elusive place of Judaic origin. Chapter 3 considers the problem of reading Hebrew scripture in two plays that treat this theme metatextually through the figure of the Jewish woman. In both George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (1599) and Thomas Garter’s The Virtuous and Godly Susanna (1578) voyeurism becomes a trope for the Christian reader’s relationship with the Hebrew scripture: King David’s prurient gazing at the bathing Bethsabe, like the Elders’ secret glimpses of Susannah, are depicted as forms of misreading. As they did with segments of the Book of Esther, Protestant editions of the Old Testament beginning with Miles Coverdale’s Great Bible relegated the story of Susannah and the Elders and other so-called Apocryphal texts to an appendix following the Old Testament. In his note published with the 1537 edition, Coverdale describes the narratives as “dark places of scripture” adulterated by the “blind and covetous opinions of men” that in turn “cast a mist afore the eyes of the simple.” The Apocrypha, he claims, is thus full of “many places ... that seem to be repugnant unto the open and manifest truth in the other Books of the Bible.” In Garter’s play, the truth about Susannah is delivered by the prophet Daniel whose public interrogation of the Elders effectively offers a clear interpretation of Susannah’s ostensible sexual transgression. In Peele’s history, King David’s inward illumination, contingent on how he views Bethsabe’s body, is played out through Bethsabe’s dual pregnancies, which confirm both David’s sin and his eventual redemption. Ultimately, the eroticized Bethsabe emerges as a self-conscious spectacle, a spiritually righteous, maternal Elizabeth, espousing moral insights directed at the sinning king. In The Godly Queene Hester, The Historie of Jacob and Esau, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, and The Virtuous and Godly Susanna playwrights directly adapt biblical narratives into theatrical material. Numerous allusions to women from the Hebrew scripture also emerge more obliquely, but no less significantly, on the popular stage. The second half of this book focuses on the Elizabethans’ fascination with Jephthah’s sacrifice of his unnamed daughter in Judges 11:29-40 and the relevance of this archetype to representations of the Jewish daughter on the Elizabethan public stage. In the popular imagination, Jephthah’s daughter functions as the overdetermined linchpin of Christian allegory: in Christian exegesis, she is a virgin martyr and type of Christ who, like Elizabeth, signified a shift from the the Hebrew Bible and the Vulgate deploys the maternal body as an image of reconciliation between the Jewish text and Christian translations: “Therefore, in order to quit this collision and conflict in their mother’s womb, it may be thought not unprofitable to bring the peoples together into the unity of faith under the leadership of Christ, by reconciling such differences, through a knowledge of both tongues and both Scriptures, and to put them side by side, lest, because they differ, they should always fight” (Quoted in Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952], pp. 343-4).

Introduction

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Old order to the New.65 Yet Judges 11:29-40, a particularly complicated narrative about Old Testament sacrifice and also controversial in the context of contemporary debates about transubstantiation and sacramental vows, was a lightening rod for debates about how to read the Hebrew scripture correctly. In the sixteenth century, literary interest shifted from Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, a popular subject in the medieval mystery play cycles, to Jephthah’s more ambiguous, and disconcerting, violence against his daughter. In Chapter 4 I establish that the sacrificed daughter archetype on the popular stage takes inspiration not only from the story of Jephthah and the daughter he must sacrifice as a vow-offering to God, but from a tradition established by both Scottish playwright George Buchanan’s Latin adaptation Jephthes Sive Votum Tragoedia (1554) and John Christopherson’s Greek Jephthah (1544). These mid-sixteenth-century plays, while perhaps shaped by divergent partisan sentiments on Jephthah’s vow and sacrifice, both deploy the virgin daughter as a site of Christological transformation. My focus in this chapter is on Buchanan’s particular version of this daughter, who at once fulfills and confuses her exegetical role as a Christ figure spiritually superior to her father. Both Christopherson and Buchanan draw from Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, but Buchanan in particular conflates the Judges 11 narrative with this classical tragedy of female wiles: Euripides’ version of Helen’s adultery and the subsequent sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia. In his most important revision to Judges 11, Buchanan inserts a mother figure into the father/daughter relationship who embodies threatening images of mature women. This garrulous, aggressive wife and her suggestion of both Helen and the bastard Jephthah’s own emasculating mother complicate the play’s simultaneous allusion to the archetypal tradition of the sacrificial daughter. Jephthes undermines its own Christian allegory by constructing a counter-narrative about female sexual deception in which sacrifice is a response to a father’s anxiety about his maturing daughter. By rendering the virgin daughter imagistically as a sexually promiscuous adult, Buchanan demotes the spiritual sacrifice to an act of sexual possessiveness. Buchanan’s and Christopherson’s plays significantly inform my reading of the trope of murdered and converted Jewish daughters in Marlowe and Shakespeare. I argue that while Marlowe and Shakespeare undoubtedly stage a Christological scheme, their interest in religion, like Buchanan’s, lies not merely in subscribing to Christian allegory but rather in calling its interpretive certitude into question. Like Buchanan, Marlowe and Shakespeare exploit the overdetermined scriptural blueprint of Judges 11:29-40. Chapter 5 examines how Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, in which Barabas refers to Abigail as his “Iphigen” and later threatens to “sacrifice her on a pile of wood,” casts his eventual murder as a “sacrifice” that is a crude retributive strike against her sexual rebellion. Abigail’s devotion to father and, as a Christian convert, to Christ and the Father, in one sense fulfills what might be understood as the culture’s hermeneutic expectations for the Jewish daughter; by representing sacrifice 65 This distinctly allegorical reading of Jephthah’s sacrifice, as Thompson points out, was yet another piece of evidence that Protestant theologians had not significantly departed from the traditional exegetical practices of the Catholic Church (“The Survival of Allegorical Argumentation ...,” pp. 264-6).

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

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as the father’s means of asserting control over the sexual dispensation of his daughter, however, the play caricatures the Jew as well as popular exegetical and liturgical interpretations of the Jewish father and his sacrificed daughter as types of Christ. This parodic version of sacrifice reflects how the play dismantles Christian modes of reading and interpretation in Abigail, a theatrical figure who plays many roles. Early modern gynecological manuals suggest how the so-called virgin was always under suspicion of hiding illicit sexual activity. So, too, the virgin Abigail is associated with various types of concealment. Abigail’s connection to the body/ bawdy also underscores her symbolic role as a type of text to which her Christian suitors want physical access. In the play’s most striking moment, Abigail is figured as the Book of Maccabees, a narrative celebrating Jewish nationalism; in an elliptical conversation between Barabas and Abigail’s suitor, Abigail becomes the object of the Christian’s sexual and textual desire. Abigail’s various roles as devout Jewish daughter, alluring virgin, and converted nun and her association with dark, unknown places suggest her constant modes of deception as she reveals and conceals herself to the Christians. Although Barabas too is unable to claim propriety over the sexual/textual body that is his daughter, he initially imagines her as a virgin body who discloses meaning exclusively to him as well as a maternal figure linked to the Jewish origin of the scripture. These maternal images ultimately return in the play’s depiction of the womb-like cauldron that swallows Barabas—a bogus sacrifice that, while destroying the Jewish father, parodies tidy allegorical readings of the sacrificed Jewish daughter and suggests instead that she is a foreboding container who remains elusive to the Christians of Malta. Critical work on biblical allusion in The Merchant of Venice until the 1980s tends to read as religious exposition itself, such as Roy W. Battenhouse and Austin C. Dobbins’s interpretation of Jessica’s Christian marriage as a symbolic, righteous shift from her father’s crude Hebraic legalism to Portia’s benevolent “quality of [Christian] mercy.”66 In addition to, and perhaps in response to recent work on race and gender in Merchant, a niche of literary criticism has nostalgically returned to this religiosity.67 In Chapter 6 my arguments about Christian hermeneutics and Jewish women in Elizabethan drama challenge traditional typological approaches to Shakespeare’s representations of the Jewish daughter, which have largely assumed her primary function to be as the linchpin of an overarching Christian allegory. Shakespeare was interested in the complexity of Jephthah and his daughter, as we see clearly in his ambivalent allusions to Jephthah’s ostensibly “impious” vow and sacrifice in both Hamlet and 3 Henry VI. There is a long critical tradition of reading Shylock’s attempt 66

“Jessica’s Morals: A Theological View,” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 107-20. John W. Mahon and Ellen Macleod Mahon’s collection, The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2002) is fundamentally devoted to such an approach. Other critics have, in a less polemical fashion, shown us exciting new perspectives on Shakespeare’s interest in religion. Jeffrey Knapp contends that critics have too hastily approached the Shakespearean stage with a “secular bias,” thus neglecting the more complex spiritual purpose of his theatrical productions. Knapp considers the function of the Shakespearean stage as a pulpit from which actors preached doctrines of Christian egalitarianism (Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England [Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002]). 67

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at extracting a pound of the Christian Antonio’s flesh as a shift from Old Testament sacrifice to the ultimate sacrifice in Christ. The Jewish daughter in Shakespeare certainly plays out a rejection of barbaric ritual emblematized by her father, yet contemporary interpretations of Jephthah and his daughter, including multiple explanations for the Epistle to the Hebrews’s praise for Jephthah as a hero of faith, suggest that the father who potentially kills his daughter can also be a sympathetic and even exemplary figure. As we will see, Shakespeare subverts Christian allegory through Shylock’s intimation that the pound of flesh is a fulfillment of a vow he has made to God. By reading him as a type of Jephthah, Shylock’s allusion to Jessica “dead at his feet” after she has eloped with a Christian may be understood as not only vengeful bloodlust but as a fantasy of an obedient daughter who, like Jephthah’s daughter, would faithfully support (and even be a martyr to) her father’s religious practice. My interest is ultimately in how Shakespeare complicates Christian allegory through Jessica’s role as the Jewish daughter who desires to leave her father’s house. At this threshold, a place rich in metaphoric possibilities, Jessica evokes Jephthah’s daughter as well as Jacob and Rachel, other biblical figures with whom she is associated in the play, whose departures from their fathers’ homes were understood as the movement of darkness into light and a rejection of the Old order for the New. The conceit illustrates what Shuger calls “gentile midrashim,” as Jessica’s actions in the play recall variations on this threshold in the Hebrew scripture. What these narratives share, however, are women who implement forms of bodily disguise. Jessica does not fulfill the role of Jephthah’s daughter as she leaves her father’s house, but rather, like Jacob and Rachel, embarks on a journey marked by deceit and concealment. Most significantly, Jessica’s role as a deceptive figure is played out through her connection to her mother, Leah, who in Genesis deceives her husband and, later, with her sister Rachel and their shared husband Jacob, flees from her father’s house. Shylock implicitly laments the difference between his daughter and his late wife, whose devotion is symbolized by the ring that Jessica sells “for a monkey.” This wife, to whom Shakespeare gives the appropriate moniker “Leah,” also, ironically, calls our attention to Jessica’s deceptions to Shylock as well as to the Christians. In Genesis, Leah effectively disguises herself as her sister Rachel, taking her sister’s place on the altar with Jacob and then sexually duping her new husband as they consummate their marriage. Jessica plays an overdetermined allegorical role as she aspires to Christian conversion and remains tethered to the “flesh and blood” of her mother, a relationship that suggests her exclusive ties to Jewish history and the scriptural text that eludes her Christian audience. Ironically, although Jessica rejects her father, his investment in images of maternal agency as the basis for his scriptural authority over the Christians of Venice anticipates Jessica’s particular association with this maternal and Jewish place of origin that symbolizes the scriptural veritas her Christian audience (and suitors) attempt to penetrate. Her own struggle to understand her place of origin, the Judaic womb that is “Leah,” the provenance of her own “flesh and blood,” plays out the audience’s concern with the same. Shaped by Elizabeth, the Jewish woman in English literature continued to expose the vulnerability of her Christian reader during the seventeenth century. My purpose,

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Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

ultimately, is not to recognize all Old Testament archetypes as types of Elizabeth, but rather to read these later allusions as influenced by the tropological history of the Elizabethan stage, on which women from the Hebrew scripture played out the complex relationship between reader and scripture. As an epilogue to my study of dramatic representations of Jewish woman during Elizabeth’s lifetime, I consider Aemilia Lanyer’s poetry collection Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) and Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), which depict Jewish women from the Hebrew scripture and from the first-century Jewish historian Josephus’s History of the Jews respectively. In these texts, we see a remarkable departure from the intimations of scriptural anxiety that characterize plays written by the male authors who are the primary focus of this book. For Lanyer and Cary, the Jewish woman becomes the means through which they may articulate their writerly authority and, most importantly, affirm the religious selfhood of both female writer and reader as superior to that of their male counterparts. Through a dedicatory verse, Lanyer directly connects Elizabeth to the Old Testament women she honors in Salve. Lanyer intimates that her claim to scriptural authority derives from her gender; it is only women’s wombs, she argues, that enable men to come into being. So similarly, she suggests, the womb becomes a symbol of the female and Jewish origin of the Christian self, as Lanyer also claims an intimate relationship with the true meanings of the Old Testament. As a Christian female reader and writer, Lanyer appropriates the Jewish womb as a site of production, asserting her interpretive mastery over the scripture. Her fantasy of sharing her book with the deceased Elizabeth recalls the excitement of Elizabeth’s subjects as she embraced the Bible during her coronation. Although Elizabeth lacked an heir, Lanyer herself in Salve produces a type of “happy issue” through which she proudly asserts the “cleere” meanings of the Hebrew scripture.

Chapter 1

The Emerging Female Monarch in The Godly Queene Hester In a grandiose pageant that took place over the course of two days in August 1392, the citizens of London celebrated King Richard II’s return from a self-imposed exile in York: after failing to extort money from city officials and wealthy merchants, Richard finally annulled the fines he had issued against them.1 Although the pageant stages a public reconciliation with the king, his subjects no doubt continued to suffer the court’s financial demands—including the responsibility of funding the pageant itself. The details of the event as narrated in the most reliable extant account, the Carmelite Friar Richard Maydiston’s Latin verse Concordia: Facta inter Regem Riccardum II et Civitatem Londonie, reveal the performers’ ambivalence towards their monarch. Outside of Westminster, amidst an elaborate pageant tableau constructed to look like a forest, a performer in the guise of an angel presented a tablet to King Richard and Queen Anne engraved with symbolic allusions to the scripture. For the king’s benefit, there was a reference to Christ on the Cross, encouraging the merciful treatment of his subjects; for the queen, a hopeful and praiseworthy comparison to the biblical Queen Esther who successfully challenges her husband’s decree for the mass execution of the kingdom’s Jews: The queen will be able to speak in behalf of her grateful people: What a man does not dare, the woman alone can. As Esther stood fearfully before the judgement seat of Ahasuerus, she made void the proclamations which he himself first ordained. There is no doubt that the Almighty gave you as the companion of this kingdom for this: may you be like Esther for your people.2

1

The king’s financial demands were not without precedent: he had successfully lobbied the merchants for loans in previous months. On this particular occasion, in addition to imposing trade restrictions, he had dismissed the Mayor and sheriffs, and fined a number of civic employees. Glynne Wickham interprets this striking historical moment as evidence of the people’s success in manipulating the king. See Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300 to 1660 (1959; rpt, New York : Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), Vol. 1, pp. 64-71 and Caroline M. Barron, “The Tyranny of Richard II,” in Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41 (1968): 1-18. 2 Translation in Paul Strohm’s chapter on “Queens as Intercessors” in Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), p. 110. Strohm contextualizes the reference to Esther in the 1392 pageant within a broader fourteenth-century tradition of portraying queens as intermediaries between king and subject. Queen Anne’s subjects had understood her as such, he notes, even before 1392: on her wedding day, they presented her with a document calling for her to play the role of a “mediatrix” who

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Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

The moment to which Anne’s subjects refer in the Book of Esther is Esther’s revelation of her Jewish identity to her husband: Esther, by way of her wifely virtue and obedience, disproves the corrupt advisor Haman’s charge of the Jews’ rampant treachery. Richard’s subjects thus offer a provocative contradiction: while they intimate their betrayal of the king, they also claim to be the righteous victims who, under the queen’s leadership, are divinely authorized to overrule their reigning monarch. In Elizabethan civic pageantry, Esther and Judith were popular images of subjects emancipated from monarchical tyranny.3 Glynne Wickham notes that biblical characters in sixteenth-century pageants signified “the conception of Divine Providence taking an active part in the nation’s affairs; ready to look kindly on any new beginning or promise of future good, but equally prompt to intervene directly or indirectly where privilege was abused or responsibility shirked.”4 As we will see, allusions to Esther during Elizabeth’s reign also imagine such a providential intervention in the English monarchy, elevating the Jewish queen from “companion” to an exemplary monarch who delivers her subjects from Catholic oppression. Just as the citizens of London reference Esther to encourage Queen Anne’s intervention should her husband mistreat his subjects, sixteenth-century writers also cite the Jewish wife of King Ahasuerus to promote the influence of two of their female monarchs in court: Catherine of Aragon, possibly the intended subject of the anonymous sixteenth-century interlude The Godly Queene Hester, and Elizabeth, during whose reign Hester made its debut in print and, potentially, on stage. Although this dramatic adaptation of the Book of Esther was likely written between 1525-9, it was first published in 1561, and as such we may examine it in the context of contemporary associations between Esther and Elizabeth. David Bevington, Ruth Blackburn and other critics have argued that The Godly Queene Hester was originally conceived as an allegorical attempt to discourage Henry VIII from divorcing Catherine, idealized in Hester as a spiritual figurehead and agent of political unity under the Catholic Church.5 C.C. Stopes makes the tempting argument will appeal to the king on their behalf with “gracious words and deeds” (p. 105). See also Wickham, pp. 70-71. 3 See Fabrizio Lelli, “Jews, Humanists, and the Reappraisal of Pagan Wisdom Associated with the Ideal of the Dignitas Hominis” in Hebraica Veritas?, pp. 60-65. 4 Wickham contrasts the use of such figures on the medieval stage, where they provided allegorical commentary on individual morality (Vol. 1, p. 78). 5 Each component of the Old Testament narrative can be thus understood as part of this tight allegorical motif: Ahasuerus (Asseurus), Henry VIII, a king feared to turn progressively away from church authority; Haman (Aman), a figure of Cardinal Wolsey, a church figure who compromises the Catholic church for his own political gain; and the Jews, the small monasteries threatened by Henry VIII’s increasing emphasis on civil authority. As “Hester,” Catherine would suggest a Catholic heroine who will preserve the religious infrastructure from civil manipulation. Representative of fellow Catholics instead of a minority religious group, the Jews in Hester’s allegory, figured as monastics, become sympathetic pacifists. In Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968) Bevington makes the point that Aman is “guilty not of disestablishing the Catholic Church but of personal aggrandizement under the guise of administrative

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that Hester was written by William Hunnis, the author of Jacob and Esau—the subject of the following chapter and a play, I argue, fueled by Protestant and proElizabethan polemic—but her theory remains speculative.6 Undoubtedly, the persona of the “godly queene Hester” emerged prominently in literary and political discourse during Elizabeth’s reign. Elizabethan exegetes embraced the theme of legitimate spiritual rebellion within the Book of Esther, and Esther’s salvation of the Jews powerfully evokes Elizabeth’s own protection of her Protestant subjects. Moreover, the motif of a “godly” queen of uncertain parentage would certainly have resonated with Elizabeth, who had been vilified as a bastard by her Catholic opponents. Bevington suggests that the interlude may have originally been intended “to encourage and console [Queen Catherine] with a scriptural vindication of her [Catholic] cause.”7 A similar desire to legitimate Elizabeth through scriptural example very likely inspired the publication of the play in 1561. The possible re-contextualization of the interlude as a performance that honors the Protestant queen as part of a continuum of divinely authorized female rulers can also be considered a proprietary move over the scripture itself, and thus another theatrical moment in which the queen’s body, by way of the Jewish woman’s, enacts the Protestants’ claim to interpretive mastery. As we will see, the aggressive female monarch of The Godly Queene Hester departs significantly from her prototype in the Book of Esther. The scriptural Esther’s role as submissive wife and reluctant savior perhaps served as a powerful blueprint with which to imagine the parameters of Elizabeth’s authority, yet the interlude’s “Hester” affirms instead Elizabeth’s role as a formidable head of church and state whose loyalty to her subjects would take precedence over any union with a foreign husband. By celebrating Hester’s skill at coercion and deceit, however, the interlude reminds its audience of the paradoxical conception of Jews in early modern England as both traitorous and the chosen people of the Old Testament. Hester’s emphasis on the queen’s exclusive bonds with her fellow Jews takes further the issue of Jewish nationalism in the Book of Esther; ultimately, the interlude suggests a type of racial and religious selfhood at odds with the spiritual community of the Protestant church. The concept of Jewish blood kinship may have struck an Elizabethan audience as a housecleaning” (p. 91). Bevington discusses the interlude as a political allegory that is both an expression of papal favor and a warning against civil insurrection. Should he divorce and occasion a break with the Catholic Church, Henry would be in a position of extreme vulnerability (pp. 87-95). Like Bevington’s, most critical treatments of Hester focus on interpreting the play’s political analogies. On dating the play, see W.W. Greg’s introduction, A Newe Enterlude of Godly Queene Hester (from the quarto of 1561) (1904; rpt, Vaduz, 1963); Ruth H. Blackburn, Biblical Drama Under the Tudors (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 70-76; and Lily B. Campbell, Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England. (1959; rpt, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1961), pp. 207-10. 6 C.C. Stopes, in a chapter on Hunnis’s lost plays, suggests that Hunnis, a schoolmaster, wrote the play for the Chapel of the Children Royal (pp. 263-4). Greg, who argues against an Elizabethan date because of the play’s topical allusions, discounts Stopes entirely, and considers John Skelton or the pamphleteer William Roy as potential authors. 7 To Bevington, “the surroundings [of the interlude] seem consciously feminine and cloistered” (p. 94).

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comfortable analogue to Elizabeth’s own blood claims to her frequently contested throne, yet as Janet Adelman argues, the notion of Jewish biblical ancestry and bloodlines was problematic, troubling English conceptions of their land-based “sacred nation” that was free of foreign blood.8 Hester’s effectively concealed Judaic loyalties play out cultural fears about England’s vulnerability to foreign threat: political treachery (a long-standing accusation against the Jews, famously directed at Elizabeth’s doctor, Rodrigo Lopez) as well as blood miscegenation. Hester’s benign appearance as a “fayre” virgin raises the possibility that Jewish blood can covertly permeate other unsuspecting bodies; in a symbolic sense, her ability to share the king’s bed as a disguised Jew intimately imperils the body of the Christian subject.9 My central contention in this chapter, however, is that Esther’s Jewish identity, which she wields as a commanding political weapon, also plays out contemporary concerns about scriptural interpretation. The interlude’s revised portrait of the biblical Esther as a proactive and exemplary monarch foregrounds the implicit tension between the “Hebraic” (the Old Testament scripture that can be appropriated to Christian sensibilities in a general sense) and the “Judaic” (pertaining only to the Jews and their history) in the Book of Esther. My interest in the convergence of Elizabeth and the character Hester in 1561 lies in the interlude’s characterization of Hester as a veracious political advisor and fledgling monarch who garners respect through her “playne” speech: in these roles, I argue, Hester also becomes a figure of the Old Testament scripture that promises and, potentially, denies scriptural veritas to the Christian reader. In Hester, an Elizabethan audience could imagine their queen as righteous monarch as well as a body that can “unclaspe” meaning. In one sense, Hester suggests a deceptive exterior that must be penetrated to discern a hidden Christian truth, but the interlude also inverts this traditional hermeneutic mode. In The Godly Queene Hester, Hester’s hidden Jewishness offers the essence of scriptural clarity and yet ultimately delivers a Judaic and nationalistic meaning that excludes her Christian audience. The biblical Esther In order to give emphasis to Hester’s revisions of the biblical story, I must first consider the Book of Esther and notable Jewish responses to the text, most significantly the ancient Greek translation, known as the LXX or the Septuagint. Richard II’s performers highlight Esther’s bravado, but early rabbinical writings recognize the biblical Esther more as a paragon of female obedience. As Leila Leah Bronner observes, the scripture lauds her “dual role [as] savior of her people and

8

See fn. 24 in the introduction. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s comparison between the scripture’s representation of Esther’s Jewishness and the contemporary rhetoric of disclosure associated with homosexuality in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), pp. 75-82. Like Esther’s Jewishness, Sedgwick argues, homosexuality is represented as a dangerously hidden identity; Esther’s persona as obedient wife, however, supersedes her role as Jewish “Other.” 9

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tiptoeing wife.”10 The Book of Esther begins with the expulsion of the rebellious Queen Vashti by her husband, the Persian King Ahasuerus, after she has refused his orders to appear before the country’s princes who are assembled for a banquet dinner. Following the suggestions of his advisors, the king issues a decree that will banish his wife from the kingdom—a document that also warns women throughout the kingdom of the consequences of disobeying their husbands: For he sent letters into all the provinces of the King, into everie province according to the writing thereof, & to everie people after their language, that everie man shulde beare rule in his owne house, and that he shulde publish it in the language of that same people. (1:21)

Ahasuerus’s severe response to Vashti’s disobedience reveals the king’s anxiety about civic insurrection more broadly; his concerns, easily fomented by his advisors, foreshadow his hasty reaction to Haman’s story of Jewish insubordination. Ironically, Esther is initially welcomed as a preventive strike against such unruly wives. Under the auspices of her cousin Mordecai (who has advised her to hide her Jewish identity) Esther wins Ahasuerus’s hand during a countrywide search for a second wife, a victory cinched by her demure qualities as well as her beauty. Provoked by Mordecai’s refusal to prostrate himself at his feet, Haman fabricates a charge of widespread Jewish treason and easily convinces the gullible Ahasuerus of the need for a defensive strike. Esther does not disclose her Jewish identity until Mordecai informs her of this planned genocide. As we will see, The Godly Queene Hester imagines Esther as the Jews’ protector who proactively comes to their defense; in the scripture, however, it is Mordecai who insures the Jews’ salvation after he convinces Esther to petition the king by appealing to Esther’s fears for her own safety: “Thinke not with thy self that thou shalt escape in the King’s house, more then all the Jewes. For if thou holdest thy peace at this time, comfort and deliverance shal appeare to the Jewes out of another place, but thou and thy fathers house shal perish” (4:13-4). If initially hesitant, Esther ultimately chooses to approach the king without formal invitation despite the potentially fatal consequences of doing so.11 Instead of political savvy, it is Esther’s lack of rebellious qualities—her obedience to both her husband and cousin—that allows her to expose herself as a Jew and advocate for her people: “If it please the King,” she modestly appeals to Ahasuerus, “and if I have founde favour in his sight, and the thing be acceptable before the King, and I please him, let it be written, that the letters of the devise of Haman ... may be called againe. ... For how can I suffer and se the evil, that shal come unto my people? Or how can I suffer and se the destruction of my kinred?” (8:5-6). Esther fades to the background of the story as Mordecai rises to heroic status: Ahasuerus ultimately rewards Mordecai’s discovery of two rebels in the court by appointing him to the highest position in his court.

10 From Eve to Esther: Rabbinic Reconstructions of Biblical Women (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), p. 180. 11 To approach the king unsolicited was, according to the scripture, punishable by death.

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Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

Esther deserves commendation, the Midrashic writers emphasize, for obeying Mordecai’s instructions to live with the king as a hidden Jew and, ultimately, for demonstrating her loyalty to her fellow Jews: “[S]he put a ban of silence on herself like her ancestress Rachel who also put a ban of silence on herself. All the greatest of her descendents forced themselves to be silent.”12 Like Rachel, who allowed her beloved Jacob to unknowingly marry her disguised older sister Leah, Esther does not disclose her identity. Yet the comparison also intimates Leah’s deception of her husband—a ruse in which Rachel presumably participates. Esther’s situation, no doubt, recalls this incident of sexual trickery and mistaken identity: Leah shares a bed with her husband by pretending to be her sister, taking advantage of Jacob’s ignorance of their bodies to successfully consummate the marriage. The analogy between Rachel and Esther also gets at what will be Esther’s more subversive and paradoxical role in Christian exegesis as writers allude to or incorporate rabbinical writings that portray Esther’s “godliness” and transform her into a divinely-appointed monarch, a pious woman whose marriage to a nonJew is justified by Mordecai’s understanding of her role as a savior of the Jewish people. The supplements to the Book of Esther in the Greek Septuagint (composed between the third and second centuries BC), which clearly influenced the writing of The Godly Queene Hester, aggrandize Esther’s unique religious authority as a Jew. Like other early Jewish commentators, the authors of the Greek text were troubled by the omission of God in the Hebrew scripture and actively amended the secular narrative, creating the “godly” Esther in six additional passages that would inspire the author of The Godly Queene Hester as well, who also incorporates spelling variants particular to the Septuagint.13 Commentaries explain that Esther’s actions should be understood as necessary events within a narrative of Jewish salvation rather than as violence of her own initiative.14 Although Rachel does sincerely desire marriage 12 Midrash Rabbah, ed. Rabbi H. Freeman and Maurice Simon. (London: The Soncino Press, 1983), 9:78 13 Elaine Marks, in Marrano as Metaphor: The Jewish Presence in French Writing (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), notes that the Greek text references God 50 times (the word does not appear in the Hebrew text). The relationship between the Greek and Hebrew texts, long disputed by biblical scholars, extends far beyond the scope of this book. Two of the seminal studies on this topic include Charles C. Torrey, “The Older Book of Esther,” Harvard Theological Review 37 (1944): 1-40 and Elias J. Bickerman, “Notes on the Greek Book of Esther,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 20 (1950): 101-33. 14 Rabbinic and Midrashic commentaries express discomfort with her ability to deceive Ahasuerus and, later, her martial bravado: Esther ensures Haman’s death through the King’s decree that the Jews may legally slaughter their enemies but then adds her own command to publicly hang his sons’ dead bodies. Exegetes employed other interpretive strategies as well to dispel the image of an aggressive Esther. The Midrash legitimates Esther’s confrontation of her husband by identifying Ahasuerus as a longtime opponent of the Jews (Midrash Rabbah, 9:18). Thus the initial feast, though made memorable by Vashti’s rebellion, is ironically inspired by what is believed to be the cessation of another source of subversion within the kingdom: according to the Midrashic writers and later medieval scholars such as Abraham Ibn Ezra, the king celebrates what he believes to be the end of a 70-year period of vulnerability to Jewish uprising (The Megillah. The Book of Esther: A New Translation with a Commentary Anthologized from Talmudic, Midrashic, and Rabbinic Sources, 2nd edn, trans. Rabbi Meir

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to Jacob, the allusion is consistent with a larger exegetical emphasis on Esther and Mordecai’s manipulation of Ahasuerus to protect the Jews, to ensure Jewish control over the land, and to reveal Judaism as the religion of the chosen. In this respect, Jewish exegetes prioritize Esther and Mordecai’s relationship over her marital bond. Indeed, the Talmud proposes that Esther is Mordecai’s wife rather than his cousin or niece.15 Undoubtedly, the Book of Esther itself would have been provocative for the Christian reader (as it was for Luther who condemned the Books of Esther and Maccabees for their Jewish nationalism). The notion of Judaism as the true religion of God’s chosen went against sixteenth-century millenarianism, which advocated the mass conversion of the Jews as a prerequisite for the Second Coming and, implicitly, sought to affirm Protestantism itself.16 Instead of the familiar endorsements for universal Christendom that filled sixteenth-century liturgy in England, the Book of Esther raises the possibility of Christians turning into Jews: in response to King Ahasuerus’s compensatory decree that the Jews may take vengeance against their professed enemies, many of his subjects actually convert to Judaism for selfprotection (8:13-7). This brief narrative detail is also a striking inversion of the forced conversion of the Marrano Jews, a number of whom subsequently inhabited England.17 The Christian Esther Early modern Protestant exegetes allegorically figured Esther’s salvation of the Jews and defeat of Haman as the true Church’s deliverance from Catholic oppression. Whereas the Old Testament and its rabbinical commentaries valorize Mordecai as the Jew’s savior, the Geneva Bible’s thematic synopsis that precedes the Book of Esther suggests that Esther is the primary agent of God’s will.18 On the one hand, Zlotowitz [Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1981], p. 41). In this context, the exegetes put forth a psychoanalytic reading of Ahasuerus’s condemnation of Vashti as a projection of his real anxiety about the Jews. Finally, in a more direct attempt to distinguish between Ahasuerus’s assertive wives, the Midrashic writers shift the charge of anti-Semitism to Vashti, whom they accuse of abusing the Israelite women (Megillah, pp. 45-6). On rabbinic responses to Esther and Vashti, see also Bronner, “Esther Revisited: An Aggadic Approach,” in The Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith, and Susanna, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield, England: Academic Press, 1995), pp. 176-97. 15 See The Megillah, p. 82 (and pp. 57-8, 76-7, 80). See also Bronner, “Esther Revisited.” 16 See Shapiro, pp. 133-46. 17 Marks reads the theme of the Marrano in Jean Racine’s dramatic adaptation of Esther in 1689 as well. 18 “Herein is declared the great mercies of God toward his Church: who never faileth them in their greatest dangers, but when all hope of worldly helpe faileth, he ever stirreth up some, by whome he sendeth comfort, and deliverence. Herein also is described the ambition, pride and crueltie of the wicked, when they come to honour, and their sodeyn fall when they are at highest: and how God preserveth, and preferreth them which are zeolous of his glorie, and have a care and love towarde their brethren.” In a sermon translated into English

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Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

Esther, like other Old Testament figures, was appropriated entirely as Christian allegory—in this case, a figure of the true Church. Yet Esther in Christian exegeses always occupies a dual role as this deliverer of the true Church and, uncomfortably, a strident champion of Jewish nationalism. During Elizabeth’s reign, Esther is represented as a model ruler who uses violence honorably—a powerful combination of feminine virtue and martial success against enemies of the Protestant state. Unlike Judith, whose spectacular decapitation of Holofernes made her a popular figure in early English dramatic and poetic adaptations of the Hebrew scripture, Esther condones violence but remains “godly” in her own pacifism.19 The Elizabethan perception of Esther as a spiritual leader derives from the additional biblical passages in the Greek Septuagint, in which Esther secretly honors Jewish dietary laws and prays to God, as she does in this acknowledgement of her trials: “Thou knowest all things, O Lord: thou knowest, that I hate the glorie of the unrighteous, & that I abhorre the bed of the uncircumcised, and of all the heathen” (14:15). Although Elizabethan writers embraced the spiritual Esther of the Septuagint, to do so was also to accept this animosity towards her “uncircumcised” husband and Esther’s ardent Jewish nationalism, a prominent theme in this version of the narrative. Catholic editions of the Old Testament included the additional passages; the Geneva and other Protestant translations, however, adopt the Church Father’s practice of placing them in the Apocrypha and Coverdale’s 1535 relegation of the Apocrypha in 1599, the French preacher Pierre Merlin explains that “[t]his Historie therefore bearing for title the name of Ester, (because Ester was as a principall instrument, which God did use for the deliverance of his Church, when it was like utterly to have bin destroyed in her time, throughout all the provinces of Assuerus) is adorned with this note of divine majestie and undoubted truth, and layde up in writing amongst the holy monuments, for the instruction and consolation of the Church, throughout all ages” (A most plaine and profitable exposition of the book of Ester [London, 1599], B2V). 19 During a 1578 pageant entertainment for the queen in Norwich, “Judith” explains her deeds as those of a humble, powerless woman guided by Divine Providence. She reasons therefore that the indomitable Elizabeth would, with God’s support, greatly surpass her in strength: “God ayded me poore widow ... To enter into Holofernus field,/And with this sword, by his directing hand,/To slay his foe, and quiet so the land./If this his grace were given to me poore wight,/If Widowes hand could vanquish such a Foe:/Then to a Prince of thy surpassing might,/What Tirant lives but thou mayest overthrow?/Persever then his servant as thou art,/ And hold for aye a noble victors part” (The Progresses and Public Processions, Vol. 2, p. 147). Hester’s conclusion in which the king is able to rescind his initial order of genocide, thus obviating the need for Jews to take arms in self-defense, reflects contemporary unease with the Jews’ violence in The Book of Esther, and especially the queen’s own approbation of the massacre. The Geneva’s gloss on the conclusion, for example, insists that the Jews take up arms not out of blood thirst but, in accordance of divine will, to protect the Church. As evidence of their virtue, they do not take their victims’ spoils: “Whereby they declared, that this was Gods just judgement upon enemies of his Church, forasmuch as they soght not their owne gain, but to execute his vengeance.” Esther’s command to display Haman’s murdered sons also follows this higher purpose: “This she requireth not for desire of vengeance, but zeale to se Gods judgement executed against his enemies.” Brenz provides the same justification: Esther’s commands, condoned by God and the king, are “lawfull vengeance” (p. 666).

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to an appendix that followed the Old Testament. Because of the Protestant Reformers’ emphasis on scriptural authority, the dictum of sola Scriptura, it was essential to clearly identify what were to become known as indisputably “sacred” texts. Luther condemned the Book of Esther for its celebration of belligerent Jewish nationalism: “I am so hostile to the book [II Maccabees] and to Esther that I wish they did not exist at all; for they Judaize too much and have much heathen perverseness.”20 To “Judaize,” in this context, was to preach the doctrines of the Jews, to possibly incite Jewish conversion, and, more broadly, to read the scripture erroneously—that is, like a Jew. This charge was exchanged between Catholics and Protestants, especially as the more radical Protestant sects during the Reformation adopted practices taken verbatim from Mosaic law.21 In the Christian imagination, Esther was a problematic character in many respects. Luther’s reaction to Esther also recalls his associative blurring of Jews and women as figures of religious and sexual deception. In Against the Jews and Their Lies (1543), he imagines a type of metatextual threat in which real life imitates the Jewish conversion that transpires within the Book of Esther. Urging his readers to be wary of Jews who have only feigned a Christian conversion, Luther compares the deceptive Jew to a sexually depraved woman: [L]et us suppose that somewhere a pretty girl came along, adorned with a wreath, and observed all manners, the duties, the deportment, and discipline of a chaste virgin, but underneath was a vile, shameful whore, violating the Ten Commandments. What good would her fine obedience in observing outwardly all the duties and customs of a virgin’s station do her? It would help her this much—that one would be seven times more hostile to her than to the impudent, public whore.22

20 See Bernhard W. Anderson, “The Place of the Book of Esther in the Christian Bible,” in Studies in The Book of Esther, ed. Carey A. Moore (New York: KTAV, 1982), p. 131. It is no surprise that Luther grouped The Book of Esther with the story of the Maccabees, who defeated their Greek enemies to establish Jewish independence. 21 See Shapiro, pp. 20-26. 22 This excerpt from Luther’s Against the Jews and Their Lies is quoted in Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), p. 59. While written on the continent, Against the Jews and Their Lies elucidates the slippery rhetorical constructions of religious and national selfhood circulating in sixteenth century England as well. Though Luther tags the precarious implications of conversion onto the Jews, such concerns about spiritual legitimacy were pervasive at an historical moment in which there were many types of converts—Luther himself included. Luther’s image of the Jew who passes himself off as a Christian is meant to provoke a broader association between contemporary religious practice and deception: his “impudent whore” would become familiar to the Elizabethans as the Roman Catholic Church—and its supporters within England’s environs. “An Homilie Against perill of Idolatrie, and Superfluous decking of Churches” warns that men will be seduced by the painted face of the harlot just as they would by the ornate, idolatrous trappings of the corrupted church. In the homily, the harlot is made analogous, as the Jewess is by Luther, to a misreading of the scriptural text: a gilded, bejeweled Bible, evocative of the whore’s made-up face, will undoubtedly encourage the reader to turn away from God (Rickey and Stroup, Certaine Sermons, Vol. 2, pp. 61-76).

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It is worse, he contends, to “observe outwardly” than to be a blatant heretic, an “impudent, public whore.” This “vile whore” who performs the role of “chaste virgin” is metaphoric here, but in Esther, the figure of the deceptive Jew/virgin comes to be literalized. Luther’s fantasy of identifying those who erroneously profess their Christian affiliation simultaneously involves wresting control over both the Jew who “passes” as a Christian and the promiscuous woman who dupes men into believing her a virgin.23 His “warnings” also intimate specific concerns about reading the scripture: like a harlot, the scripture could be too accessible to the public or, alternatively, too obscure and deceptive to comprehend. Most significantly, his description also suggests what I argue is always a concern for the Protestant reader: that the Jew possesses or symbolizes an exclusive connection to the scripture that remains elusive to the Christian reader. His reference to the desecrated commandments suggests popular descriptions of the Jews’ incomprehension of the true meanings of the scripture: he imagines the Jews as disloyal to their own commandments and thus attempts to sever the Jews from what was also perceived as their exclusive covenant bestowed to them by God. The Esther of the Greek text, though fulfilling Mardocheus’s (Mordecai’s) prophetic dream of Jewish liberation, independently acknowledges her own Jewish identity and her faith in God’s deliverance and justice: “From my youth up I have heard in the kinred of my father, that thou, O Lord, [chose] Israel from along all people, and our fathers from their predecessours for a perpetual inheritance, and thou hast performed that which thou didst promise them. Now Lord, we have sinned before thee: therefore hast thou given us into the hands of our enemies” (14:5-6). Her sense of chosenness precedes Mardocheus’s solicitation, and she petitions Ahasuerus without her uncle’s encouragement. In a passage that no doubt ignited Luther’s ire, Ahasuerus’s second decree explicitly names the Jews as divine agents: “[W]e finde that the Jewes (which were accused of this moste wicked man that thei might be destroyed) are no evil doers, but use moste just Lawes. And that they be the [the] children of the moste high and almightie and ever living God, by whome the kingdome hathe bene preserved unto us, and our progenitours in verie good ordre” (16:15-16). Protestant interpretations of the Book of Esther often struggle with the paradox of Esther as both deliverer of the Christian elect and strident Jew. John Stockwood’s 23

Chaucer’s adultery parable, The Merchant’s Tale, which begins with an ironic list of Old Testament wives who offer their husbands “good conseil,” similarly intimates the disguised Jewish woman’s ability to deceive her Gentile husband. The merchant names Rebecca who disguises her son Jacob in order to secure a blessing from her blind husband as well as Judith who was able to provide her people with “wyse conseil” by murdering the enemy Holofernes in his sleep. Esther, he notes, “by good conseil delivered out of wo/The peple of God, and made hym Mardochee/Of Assuere enhaunced for to be.” Later, Chaucer compares May, the “meke” future adulteress, and Esther, who also seemed demure on her wedding day: “Mayus, that sit with so benyngne a chiere,/Hire to biholde it seemed fayerye./Queene Ester looked nevere with swich an ye/On Assuer, so meke a look hath she.” Kevin Harty reads Chaucer’s allusion instead as contrast between the deceptive May and Esther, who was upheld by the Church Fathers and medieval writers as a model of virtue (“The Reputation of Queen Esther in the Middle Ages: The Merchant’s Tale, IV (E) 1742-5” Ball State University Forum 19.3 [1978]: 65-8).

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introduction to Johann Brenz’s A right godly and learned discourse upon the booke of Ester is particularly intriguing for its multiple readings of the Book of Esther. Stockwood offers the familiar political allegory of the “chosen” Esther as a victim of the treacherous Catholic Haman but also interprets Haman as a Jewish infidel. In his dedication to Sir Francis Walsingham, Stockwood notes how the narrative deftly illuminates the Catholics’ “suttle shiftes, & craftie practices” and how the divinely-sent Esther “countenance[s] the godly, against the pestilent policies of all proud and ambitious Amans.” 24 For Walsingham’s benefit, Stockwood glosses Esther as an exemplary advisor who, in her brave confrontation with the king, serves as a reminder that counselors must guide a weak, credulous monarch. He also reads in Esther and her salvation of the Jews a prototype for Elizabeth I and the survival of the Protestant church.25 Like Esther, Elizabeth, whom Stockwood explicitly names “our godly Ester,” assumes the role of spiritual leader, a martyr who, though persecuted by “Haman,” her Catholic half-sister Mary, will emerge to lead her subjects to salvation.26 The Jews, he remarks, like Elizabeth during her imprisonment under Mary’s reign, suffer Haman’s persecution heroically; so too, the Jews’ retaliation against their enemies should provide instruction on how to subdue England’s residual Catholic threat. He reasons that “[p]apistes everywhere, if they can keepe their itching fingers from attempting treasons, are permitted but too much libertie, & such, as in many places tendeth unto the hurt & corrupting of many poore & simple ignorant people.”27 Most significantly, Brenz’s commentary showcases the duality of Esther as both deliverer of the Protestant church and the embodiment of Jewish nationalism that threatened England’s spiritual uniformity. Indeed, Brenz’s interpretation demonstrates the fervor with which exegetes claimed a singular truth of the Old

24

Ibid., p. 484. Stockwood’s interpretation is also striking for how it departs from Brenz’s own reading of female authority. Brenz interprets Esther as essentially passive and self-serving: she seems to rebuff her uncle initially and claims that, despite his persecution of the Jews, the king would spare her own life (p. 629). 26 Stockwood, p. 501. Under James I too, after the failed 1605 Gunpowder Plot, writers contrasted the Book of Esther’s loyal Jews with the country’s “Hamans,” the Catholics guilty of treason (See also fn. 39 below). During James I’s reign writers characterized Ahasuerus as a mirror for magistrates, thus depicting him more sympathetically as a fallible leader. In his Hadassa: or The history of Queene Ester with meditations thereupon, divine and morall (London, 1621), for example, Francis Quarles reads Ahasuerus as receiving deliverance after enduring both a villainous wife and a deceitful advisor. Quarles compares James favorably to Ahasuerus (G3V), but uses this magisterial mirror to warn about the country’s vulnerability to bad advisors and civil war. Early modern commentators often cite Josephus’s influential version of the Book of Esther in which the ambitious Haman plots to kill the king himself. As Louis H. Feldman argues, Josephus hoped to rouse more sympathy for the Jews amongst his Greek audience by portraying Ahasuerus as a victim. See Feldman’s detailed discussion of Josephus’s numerous deviations from his sources in “Hellenizations in Josephus’ Version of Esther,” in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 101 (1970): 143-70. 27 Stockwood, p. 513. 25

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Testament as he attempts to wrest a universal “Hebraic” sense of the scripture from its Judaic source: For this booke was written, neither for Mardocheus [Mordecai], nor for Ester, nor for those Jewes which live at this day, but for the whole Church of God. And it was written not to commend the name of any one particular person, as for example, either Mardocheus or Ester: but to commend the name of our Lord God, to wit, that the church by this history may know, with how great care, power and wisedome God doth defend his people, also with how great severitie and sharpnesse he tumbleth downe the wicked persecutors of his people.

He then turns his attention to Jewish readers, whom he charges have falsely appropriated the narrative for their own belligerent political purposes—namely, plotting ill-will against the Christian monarchs who refuse to support their rejection of the true Church: The Jewes, which in our time rejoyce on this behalfe, do marvellously please themselves in the reading of this historie. And if so be any godly magistrate doo handle them sharply, and drive them out of his borders, they give him the name of Aman, and this only they hope and gape for, that it may be lawfull for them to be revenged of their enemies, that is, of the Christians, among whom they live, like as this history beareth record that the Jewes in Persia tooke vengeance on their enemies.

This desire to murder Christians, he concludes sarcastically, “is the thankfulnesse of the wicked Jewes.” He reassures his reader, however, that the Jews have no right to read themselves in Esther because “they have cast [off] christ, the true seede of Abraham.” The narrative “perteyneth unto the people and Church of God” and thus the Jews may be seen, from the Christian reader’s perspective, as “the cousins and kinred of Aman the Amalechite” who “hate the true Israelites, which are the Christians.”28 Brenz extols the Jews’ loyalty, but then dramatically qualifies this praise as he emphasizes the treachery of Europe’s living Jews. Ultimately, what becomes Stockwood’s own lengthy analogy between Elizabeth’s Protestant subjects and the Jews in the Book of Esther emphasizes this tension and thus reveals not the true meaning of scripture but its endlessly fluid, unstable significations. Elizabeth and The Godly Queene Hester Stockwood’s contemporization of the Book of Esther is germane to the 1561 The Godly Queene Hester. While originally the notion of “the godly Queene Hester” may have conceived Esther as a benevolent Catholic queen threatened by a king who dared to undermine the supremacy of the church, in the 1560’s, Protestant writers associate the Catholic Queens—the late Queen Mary as well as the resident thorn Mary, Queen of Scots—with Haman’s machinations. In 1561, the performed play transforms the Catholic queen (and the mother of the late Queen Mary) into 28

Brenz, pp. 688-91.

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Elizabeth, the true spiritual leader of England, and the Jews into her Protestant subjects. In a 1572 speech urging parliament to support the execution of the Duke of Norfolk, one of Mary’s co-conspirators, the MP Nicholas St. Leger compares the Duke to Haman and Queen Elizabeth to “the godly Queen Hester.”29 Like Stockwood above, St. Leger draws upon the Greek narrative’s suggestion of the queen as a devout victim who protects her righteous subjects from their enemies. Like the Book of Esther, The Godly Queene Hester imagines Esther as a catalyst for peace between the monarch and his subjects. Yet Hester’s author pushes Mordecai to the sidelines, positioning Hester as a skilled advisor to a guileless king and, after her marriage to Asseurus (Ahasuerus), an exemplary monarch herself. Both Hester and other allusions to the Jewish queen during Elizabeth’s reign also invoke the supplementary passages in the Greek text, in which Esther emerges as an audacious religious authority to whom her subjects loyally adhere. Critical to The Godly Queene Hester’s construction of the female Jewish monarch is the complete omission of Vashti. Without this foil, Hester becomes queen not as a panacea for Asseurus’s fear of female disobedience, but as the supplier of a rightful heir to the throne, a suggestion of the childless king’s vulnerability to usurpation. After appointing Aman (Haman) as chancellor, the king announces that “we are comfortles, for lacke of a Queene,/which shoulde be our joye, & chefe solace,/And to say truth, it hath not been oft seene,/But the prince with a [princess] matched hath beene/Leaste defaulte of issue shoulde be, whiche God defende/therfore youre counsells firste had, to marry we do intend” (117-22).30 This explanation for Asseurus’s beauty contest glosses the threatening implications of female disobedience exemplified by Vashti; the “comfortless” kingdom reformulates the specter of the disobedient woman as desire for a nurturing, generative wife. That Hester—like her biblical prototype—never fulfills this role, of course, also suggests more broadly her multiple deviations from the initial ideals imposed upon her. Although she provides no heir, she politically restores the kingdom from its weak, unstable monarch. 31 29

J.E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments: 1559-1581 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958), Vol. 1, pp. 277-8. In 1589, one Puritan minister urges Elizabeth to put an end to “the pestilent practise of Politicke Hamans,” comparing her to Esther soliciting the attention of Ahasuerus: “The golden scepter was not valed to Hester; shee came unsent for: she put her life in peril to bewray the peril of her people. God blessed her boldnesse with a happy successe, she saw the confusion of her enemies, and the deliverance of God’s children” (The asse overladen [London, 1642], B2-B2V). 30 All quotations are from Greg’s edited version of the 1561 quarto. Citations refer to line numbers. 31 In her study of Renaissance domestic art, Cristelle L. Baskins argues that the tradition of representing Esther and the Virgin Mary as type and anti-type calls our attention to the hermeneutical paradoxes of Esther’s sensual Jewish body that is admired in the biblical text: “Esther elicits contradictory readings of the female body; she both secures a typological parallel with the Virgin Mary, and simultaneously threatens typological coherence through a corporeal unruliness or autonomy portrayed as alien female sexuality” (“Typology, Sexuality, and the Renaissance Esther,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993], p. 37). Drawing on the Pauline metaphor of the “barren” Old Testament that is brought to “fruition”

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As we will see, Hester embraces her Jewish identity but, unlike the biblical Esther, does so independently of Mordecai. The play begins, however, by iterating one of the central themes of its source: Esther’s exceptional obedience. Echoing the message of Ahasuerus’s letter to the kingdom after Vashti’s expulsion in the scriptural text, the inscription on Hester’s title page reminds the female reader of the importance of feminine virtues: [Come] nere vertuous matrons and womenkind, Here may ye learne of Hester’s duty, In all [comeliness] of vertue you shal finde How to behave yourselves in humilitie.

But Hester serves as instructive paradigm in more ways than this as she takes on the position originally assumed by Mardocheus (Mordecai), whose role the interlude significantly reduces. The play’s omission of both Mordecai’s appeal to Esther and his disclosure of the murder plot against the king result in a character whom Ruth Blackburn declares “pathetic.”32 In the interlude’s version of The Book of Esther, Hester freely commands her husband without inviting comparisons to his first wife and assumes Mordecai’s role of heroic protector of both the Jews and the court. Hester undermines Mardocheus’s authority even as he issues commands at Esther. Before she presents herself for the king’s consideration, Mardocheus reminds Hester of her conjugal responsibilities: [If] the kinge chose you to his queene It is of hys goodnes, bountie, and grace And for none youre merites, the truthe to bee seene Therefore to hym repaye muste you needes obedience Trew love, and kyndnes, above personnes all, Not forged nor fayned, but with affection cordiall. (171-6)

In the Old Testament narrative, Mordecai concerns himself with Esther’s responsibilities to her fellow Jews, not to the Persian king; here, Mardocheus prioritizes Hester’s duties as an obedient and sincere wife who is a vehicle of the king’s own salvation. Mardocheus’s words also hint at assimilation: to show the king unfeigned “kyndnes” implies also an effort to become as his kin, relinquishing any signs of cultural or religious difference. Hester, as we will see, only feigns “kyndnes” in this sense, and through the deployment of her secret Jewish identity underscores her independence from the king. Her deception as a hidden Jew ironically becomes a means through which she can reveal herself as the source of political and spiritual guidance. in the New, she argues that Esther’s sexually active yet childless body also complicates her typological relationship with Mary, the mother of Christ. On representations of Esther as a type of the Church and the Virgin Mary in Christian exegesis, see also Harty. 32 Blackburn, p. 71. Blackburn’s contrast between the “heroic” and “vengeful” Old Testament Esther and the interlude’s “gentle” and “pious” heroine, however, neglects what I have shown here to be the more authoritative aspects of the latter character (p. 72).

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Hester “playne” and “fayre” Hester emerges simultaneously as a master of deception and an exemplar of domestic and political honesty. She discloses advice and wisdom to guide the kingdom, her essential attribute being her ability to speak clearly and truthfully. Whereas her foil Aman manipulates language, Hester will be associated with “playne” speech and lucid meaning. In the prologue’s dramatic foreshadowing of the king’s appointment of Aman, Asseurus’s advisors conclude that only “justice personall” (77), the monarch’s direct involvement with his people and his court, will ensure the country’s protection from fraud and treason. Without his proactive surveillance “some tyme suche coloured sentence/Under cloke of Justice ye maye be sure/Craftely shall procede from them that have the cure/which in processe, may brynge to downfall,/ The kynge, hys realme & hys subjectes all” (59-63). In the moment before he appoints Aman, Asseurus agrees that he must assume personal responsibility if a member of the court “[s]hal happen to square from trueth and justice,/Albeit his faire wordes and good semblaunt” (95-6). He understands that “[t]he prince must nedes be circumspect and wise,/That no great ambicion nor covetise/Through great welth and riches inordinat/Doe erect his corage” (97-100). It is not long, however, before he is deceived by Aman’s “cloke of Justice”: Aman claims that he has been maligned with “fained [detractions] ... [b]oth payntyd and printyd” (596, 598). Moved by Aman’s own feigned “faire wordes and good semblaunt,” Asseurus disregards his advisors’ warning not to judge by hearsay alone; he attributes the people’s ostensible harassment to envy and promptly assigns Aman a promotion. As the allegorical character Pride testifies, it is Aman who represents a “double world” (346): “Outwardly kinde, in his heart a [fiend],/A knave in two partes./Outward honestie, inward infidelitie” (348-50).33 Aman’s fabrication of the commoners’ audacity foreshadows his later warning of the Jews’ treason against the king. Once again, he describes their seditious language in his own “paynted” style, telling Asseurus that the Jews are “dispersed over all youre province,/with in them selfe dwellyng, desevered from our nation,/By theyr new lawes they think to convince,/And eke draw unto theyr conversation,/And unto theyr ceremonyes and faction/Of our people as many as may be,/Intendyng to sub dew all gentilite” (730-36). The Jews not only sever themselves from the monarch and his country but threaten to lure the Gentiles into their Hebrew “conversation”—or, perhaps, “conversion.” Both terms suggest the seductive effect of the Jews’ religious practice and their persuasive use of language. Tapping skillfully into the king’s anxieties, which undoubtedly would have evoked the converso Jews for the 1561 audience and perhaps the danger of both ostensible Christian converts and unconverted Jews more broadly, Aman argues that the Jews seek to convert Christians and ultimately

33

Hester incorporates the Morality figures of Pride, Ambition, and Adulation, characters who discuss Aman’s usurpation of their attributes. Greg notes Hester’s unorthodox use of Morality elements: the three personifications do not embody these qualities but rather elucidate Aman’s character. Bernard Spivack observes that the figures serve as a homilectic chorus (Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958], p. 259).

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“subdew” the king—an implication of violent rebellion as well as a more subtle, insidious religious indoctrination.34 As we will see, Aman’s plot sets up the interlude’s representation of the Jews as true subjects, as led by the exemplary Hester: Aman wears a deceitful “cloake” while Esther’s deception ultimately confirms her political and religious authenticity. Aman’s fabrications nonetheless betray a more legitimate concern about the Jews whose obscure religious practices reify their loyalty to their religion and to one another. Hester plays on the significations of the hidden Jew: for an Elizabethan audience, Hester, with her concealed interior faith is the very embodiment of both religious counterfeit and spiritual authenticity. She wins the beauty contest because she is misleadingly “fayre” (194, 215-16), lacking any outward signs of her Semitic identity, but ultimately it is as a Jew that she stakes a claim to both moral and religious purity. Mardocheus promotes his young charge as “[a] pearle undefiled and of conscience cleare/Sober, [serious], gentill, meke and demure” (256-58) yet she proves as adept as Aman in manipulating her self-representation. Mardocheus’s characterization of the ideal queen as “neither forged nor fayned” describes not only the ideal wife, but the play’s definition of a “godly” monarch: the qualities of virtue and diligence prescribed by the advisors in the prologue are demonstrated by Hester in her multiple roles as loyal wife, advisor, and queen. It is Hester who will explain to her husband how he has been duped by Aman’s fraud. The successful monarch, the character of Hester suggests, employs artful performance when necessary; she dissembles in order to become queen, but such strategies are to be understood as political acumen guided by a divine power. The paradox of Hester is that she delivers veracity through obfuscating means— in the guise of a racially “fayre” and submissive virgin bride. Her introduction to the king, more than a show of her winning “humilitie” as the interlude’s epigraph declares, becomes a platform for her self-assertive rhetoric; her candor helps her to prevail in Asseurus’s competition. The Book of Esther states merely that Esther dutifully follows Mordecai’s command not to disclose her family history; in The Godly Queene Hester, she effectively equivocates: “Moste noble Prince as for my linage,/Nor yet my countrey, sertis I can not saye/My parentes dicessed in myne non age,/So that I never harde yet unto thys daye/what coste or countrey, what lande or laye,/I was bred in, broughte forth or borne” (237-42). She denies knowledge of her “lande” or “laye”—her country, race, and religion of origin, yet fashions herself as a woman fit to represent his subjects. In response to his question, “[H]ave you ought reade or seene/Of vertues that be best, and fittest for a queene?” (267-8), Hester gives a speech in which she both acknowledges that “[n]o quene there is, but by marriage of a prince” (273) and declares her readiness to take command if her husband should be called away to war:35

34 In response, Asseurus, like his biblical prototype, disavows his own responsibility for the planned genocide by expressing shock at the news of Aman’s intentions (while also acknowledging that he had initially believed Aman’s charges of the Jews’ disloyalty). 35 The allusion was perhaps inspired by Henry’s departure to France in 1513 (Bevington, Tudor Drama, p. 90).

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Then the Quenes wysdome, sadly muste deale, By her greate vertue, to rewle the common weale. Wherfore as many vertues be there muste, Even in the Quene as in the prynce, For feare lest in warre, sume treason unjust, The realme shoulde subdewe, and falsely convince. The Quene muste saveguarde all the [whole] province, And so as muche goodnes aye muste be seene, As in the kynge, to be in the Quene, And how many vertues longe to a kynge, Lyke unto youre grace, I cannot make recknynge. (285-95)

Hester’s obsequious comment that “no quene there is, but by marriage of a prince” would have surely elicited a laugh from an audience in 1561, but Hester’s humility, even in a pre-Elizabethan context, is still subversive. Though deferring to the king in theory, Hester actually asserts her unique qualifications as a female leader: she is a ruler of “wysdome” and “greate vertue” who, in the event of treason, can effectively protect her subjects. Hester’s speech foreshadows the moment when she must intercede in her husband’s governance—a necessity, not because of the king’s absence but rather his bad judgement in implementing Aman’s scheme. Like Elizabeth, Hester cunningly deploys her body as an effective political tool and humbly ascribes her fortitude to her masculine attributes—her kingly virtue. Her assertion that “[a]s in the kynge, to be in the Quene” anticipates Elizabeth’s claim to “the body of a weak and feeble woman” but “the heart and stomach of a King” while rousing her troops at Tilbury against the approaching Spanish Armada in 1588. Hester as a figure of both Queen Anne in the pageant of 1392 and Queen Catherine in the 1520’s is a model of a wife who will reluctantly take over for her husband as a preventive measure to protect the kingdom from the authority of deceitful advisors—a situation aptly expressed by Hester as she imagines her political authority: “Then the Quenes wysdome, sadly muste deale,/By her greate vertue, to rewle the common weale.” Yet as a figure of Elizabeth, Hester suggests a more proactive figure who embraces her authority and furthers the political legitimacy of the Protestant cause. Given that Hester will prevent the kingdom from being “defaulte of issue,” the figure of Asseurus may have suggested, in these early moments of Elizabeth’s reign, a future husband for the queen. In 1561, The Godly Queene Hester constructs the female monarch as both an obedient woman (appealing to the men inevitably threatened by her power) as well as a woman who does not let a foreign husband prevent her from protecting her people, a concern with which Elizabeth’s subjects would have been well familiar.36 In her initial speech to Asseurus, Hester also takes the opportunity to advocate for the rights of the “commons,” following Mardocheus’s advice but hardly in a “meke” manner. Hester’s message centers on the welfare of her subjects; presciently echoing the councilors’ advice in the interlude’s prologue, she declares “I wyl be 36

See also Susan Doran’s thoughtful discussion of Queen Elizabeth and the marriage controversies marking her reign in Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996).

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playne, for veritie hath no pere” (304) and proceeds to argue that the king’s neglect of his disenfranchised subjects threatens to foment unrest and precipitate invasion by foreign enemies: [W]here [God’s] servyce and hospitalitie Doeth decaye, and almes to the poor [fall], There maye be wealth in places two or three But I assure you the most part in generall, Neither have meate nor money, nor strength substancial Fytte to doe you service ... (311-16)

By neglecting the poor and thus discouraging them from defending the kingdom, Asseurus leaves the country vulnerable to both internal and external assault. To temper her criticism, Hester reminds the king that her disclosure of the “playne” truth “hath no pere”: her rejection of “fayned and fraud” behavior, she suggests, establishes her as loyal wife and subject as well as invaluable advisor who speaks her “trew heart and mynde” (325). Hester’s language recalls the Geneva editors’ proud description of their new English translation: Hester too offers “veritie” that may be “playnely translated.” Hester’s assertion of loyalty and goodwill for the monarchy suggests also a promise of intimacy with the scripture. Her candor here establishes Asseurus’s trust in the truth she will later “dysclose” (867) regarding Aman’s fraudulent claims against the Jews. The king initially applauds her aspiration to adeptly “rewle the common weale” and imagines a dynamic collaboration: “Then I doute not, but the wysdome of us two/Knytte both to gether in [perfect charity]/All thynges in thys realme shall cumpas so,/By truth and Justice, law and equitye,/That we shall quenche all vice and deformitie” (296-300). Hester promptly requests the specific reforms above, but the king defers the issue: “Of these matters another tyme moore at large,/We shall speake, and of dyvers other [more]” (327-8). Asseurus’s response, in which he calls upon his servants to adorn Hester and her ladies-in-waiting in “riche apparel of golde and pall” (332) confirms his affection for material excess, his disregard for the poor, and his indifference to his wife’s prudent advice. It is Hester, not the king, who internalizes and advocates a “justice personall.” Hester, like Vashti, challenges the monarch, yet her assertion of power fortifies rather than undercuts Asseurus’s own jurisdiction; her “rebellion” in fact reveals itself to be the cure to the larger problems brewing against the king throughout the country. Her speech proves prescient as, later, the allegorical character Ambition, one of the three Morality figures who personify Aman’s duplicity, confirms the threat to national security caused by Aman’s abuse of the poor (469-78). Hester’s speech above on the rights of the king’s subjects anticipates both her defense of the Jews and her ability to quell the king’s fears of rebellion. Most strikingly, the interlude attributes Hester’s “veritie” in political and personal matters to her Jewish identity. Rather than appealing first to Asseurus to repeal his command for mass murder, she tells Mardocheus and his cohorts, she will solicit God’s help:

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Mardocheus wyth youre cumpanye, we have harde youre lamentation, To our grefe and displeasure verely, yet we truste by meke supplication, Fyrste unto god by humble oration And than to the king by desyre cordyall A meane to fynde, for to saveguarde ye all Call in the chapell to the intent they maye Syng some holy [hymn] to spede us this day After this prayer and our former abstynens To the goode Lorde I call for cumforte To inspyre the prynce, & his mynd incence That I may optayne now at my resorte To redeme the Jewes, all the hole sorte Eke to dysclose the [false fraud]. (853-67)

Like Esther in the Septuagint, Hester will prioritize her relationship with God over that of the king. Hester’s emphasis on the Jews’ “meke supplication” and “humble oration” recall Aman’s very different “elegant oration” which ensnared Assuerus. With God’s blessing and the prayers of her fellow Jews, Hester may now take action to proactively “dysclose” herself and Aman to her husband. The climactic moment of Hester’s revelation demonstrates her “veritie” as well as her cunning. When Hester does confront Asseurus, she skillfully associates her Jewish identity with religious and political virtue: This I do aske with true harte unfayned And wyth charitie, of all vertues best, That throw all your [realme] both east and west As manye as bee of the Jewyshe nation, Your grace wil them pardon at my supplication Assurynge you I am of that nacion, Borne and eke brede in Jerusalem, yet I and all they by one [condemnation], To deathe are determined throughe all this realme. (910-18)

When first introduced to the king, Hester claimed not to know her place of origin; now, she reveals that she was “[b]orne and eke brede in Jerusalem.” Assuerus claims—lamely and ironically—that Aman had convinced him of the Jews’ lack of “hospitalitie” for the poor and their penchant for hording wealth. In her retort, Hester strategically explicates the scriptural patriarchs as exemplary benefactors— the spiritual progenitors of and original sourcetext for their Christian descendants: “Is not of Abraham the hospytallyte,/In scripture noted and of noble fame,/But one honoringe when he received three,/The trenite fygured in the same,/Both Isaake and Jacob had a lyke name,/Of whom the twelve tribes descended be,/which ever dyd maintaine hospitallyte” (957-63). Hester also recalls her earlier description of the king’s lack of “hospitalitie”; her invocation of the same term here suggests that the Jews have generously “hosted” Christian meaning in the scripture and are thus vital to the commonwealth. Hester contextualizes Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—frequently allegorized as the Holy Trinity—within a larger Christological scheme, but she also

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emphasizes their spiritual authority as Jews, as confirmed by God through Moses: “The Jewes be the people of god elected/And weare his badge of cyrcumsicion/The dayly prayer of that [holy] secte/As the psalmes of David by gostly inspiracion/Eke holy ceremonies of gods provision/To god is [available], that nothing greater,/And al the whole realme for [this] fares y better” (1096-1102). Hester’s assertion that the Jews “weare [God’s] badge of cyrcumsicion” also, by contrast, calls attention to her own bodily deceptions: it is precisely because of her lack of external markers of Jewishness that she has succeeded in subverting male, hegemonic power. Ultimately, The Godly Queene Hester magnifies the biblical narrative’s nationalistic overtones and the implication of the Jews’ exclusive covenant with God that disturbed Luther and others. The interlude curiously adds to Asseurus’s reconciliation with the Jews in the original scripture his proclamation declaring them free to practice their religion (1138-1153). Moreover, Mardocheus gains promotion not for discovering the king’s potential assailants as he does in the Book of Esther but, as Hester explains, because he comes from the stock of Benjamin (1072). The King declares Aman an outsider—a Macedonian “not of our nacion” (1127) who, ironically, by way of his intended mass execution would have “[o]ur gentelnes so in fecteth for certayne” (1129). The king’s projection of racial anxiety about the Jews onto Aman recalls Brenz’s defensive allegorical relegation of the Jews to treacherous Hamans lying in wait for their Christian enemies. But whether the king refers here to Hester’s “gentle” Jewish nation or the Gentile country led by her husband is unclear; the ambiguity, however, raises the possibility of the Jews as a nation independent of and superior to Asseurus.37 The duality of meanings attached to the Jews in Christian interpretations of the narrative suggests the difficult of reading outside of the story’s strong message about Jewish nationhood. Esther’s religious faith in the additional passages of the Greek Septuagint is integral to her role in The Godly Queene Hester as a model of spiritual fidelity and authority. The figure of this “godly” Hester held wide appeal for Elizabeth’s subjects, even after her death. In his 1646 petition against the Catholic Church addressed to the House of Commons, Queen Esthers resolves: or, A princely pattern of heaven-born resolution, for all the lovers of God and their country, Richard Heyricke, warden of Christ’s College in Manchester, evokes Elizabeth as champion of the Protestant cause in his description of the pious Esther. Lauding the Jewish queen as “a virtuous woman more than manfully wrestling with publike danger and destruction,” Heyricke recalls the character Hester’s (and Elizabeth’s) self-described ability to transcend the limitations of her gender. Most significantly, he applauds Esther’s religious belief as that which differentiates her from Vashti and ensures the nation’s health: “Religion is the very Nerves and sinews of the Common-wealth, the very heart and prime fountain of life and livelihood, the Crown, the glory of a Nation, the beauty, the strength, the perfection, the Spirit, the soul of a Kingdome.” Compared to those who fail to defend their faith, Heyricke argues, “Esther is of a more divine temper, she stands up for the defence of her Religion; In her Religion, she saw the glory of God 37

Bevington argues differently that the interlude shifts the Old Testament Esther’s loyalty from the Jewish people to the king and his subjects. Asseurus also names Hester “our wife” at the end of the above scene, signifying her marriage to both country and king (p. 89).

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had founded it, and it could not be ruin’d without a manifest hurt to the glory of that God which was dearer to her then her own life.”38 To an Elizabethan reader, the trope of Esther’s disguise signified both treachery and the spiritual authority of their queen, a Christian truth cloaked in Jewish nationalism rather than in the “elegant orations” of the Catholic Church. Yet Esther also suggests an interior, hidden Jewishness and a veritas of “playne” language that can be elusive and unassimilable. Hester employs a discourse of disclosure that would become familiar in other contemporary allusions to Elizabeth. In the Norwich pageant of 1578, the figure of “Hester” assures the observing Elizabeth of her own ability to detect false subjects and advisors.39 The auspicious precedent set by Esther in thwarting Haman becomes a vote of confidence for Elizabeth’s new reign: Haman exercised “fraude as force” but, the actor portraying Hester assures, “[neither] force nor fraude, nor Tyrant strong can trap,/Those whiche the Lorde in his defence doth wrap.”40 Elizabeth, figured as Esther, also becomes a body through which to claim propriety over the text and its hidden meanings. Elizabeth, Esther, and the Hebrew scripture come together here, representing a spiritual, interior truth that, under God’s auspices, will guide the nation. For Elizabeth’s subjects, Esther’s hidden Jewishness signifies their claim to that “which the Lorde in his defence doth wrap”: the “playne” truth of the scripture that affirms their spiritual and political rebellion. The image of the righteous “wrap,” Esther’s divinely-sanctioned disguise, however, does not resolve the contradictions of her religious “nacion” that is both essentially Jewish and fluid enough to be co-opted as Protestant. The Godly Queene Hester and other Elizabethan allusions to Esther insist on her Jewish identity and her particular connection to the Hebrew scripture, and yet this suggestion of deceit and exclusion was the reason that Protestant translators relegated the Book of Esther, or at least its Greek additions, to the Apocrypha, a word that appropriately derives from the Greek “apo” (away) and “kriptein” (to hide).

38

Heyricke, (London, 1646), B2, B4v, C. In two prayers during the early years of her reign, Elizabeth names this problem explicitly: “Grant me faithful councillors, who by Thy counsel will advise me about my kingdom” and “Give us ... prudent, wise, and virtuous councillors, driving far from us all ambitious, malignant, wily, and hypocritical ones” (Elizabeth I: Collected Works, pp. 138, 147). 40 The Progresses and Public Processions, Vol. 2, pp. 147-8. 39

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Chapter 2

Maternal Authority in The Historie of Jacob and Esau As Susan Doran notes, Deborah of the Book of Judges, “a providential ruler and the rescuer of the Israelite chosen people from Canaanite idolatry, could readily be identified with Elizabeth in her attempts to uproot popery and build up the Protestant Church in England.”1 Deborah, a prophetess and the wife of Lapidoth, judges the people of Israel to be redeemed after a 20-year period of enslavement. With this vision, Deborah calls upon Barak to lead the Israelites to war and predicts Israel’s defeat of the Canaanites at the hands of a woman (in 5:24-7, Yael, who would drive a spike into Sisera’s head). Indeed, John Aylmer, the future bishop of London under Elizabeth, cites Deborah specifically in his rebuttal to John Knox’s vitriolic diatribe against women rulers, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), as one “not so heinous, and intollerable, or in any wyse evel” but a leader who “delyvered [the Israelites] out of thraldome, and set them at libertie.”2 The ancient rabbis believed her arrogant for claiming that Israel could not be revived “until I Deborah came up, which rose up a mother in Israel” (Judges 5:7), yet Elizabethan public pageants until the late 1570s affirmed Deborah’s bold declaration.3 As I have shown, during Elizabeth’s coronation processional through 1 See Doran, p. 11. On the use of Deborah as a figure for Elizabeth, see also Wickham, Vol. 1, p. 78; Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 69; Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, p. 53; and Alexandra Walsham, “‘A Very Deborah?’ The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch,” in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (New York: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 143-68. 2 John Aylmer (An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects agaynst the Late blowne Blaste, concerninge the government of Wemen [London, 1559], D2v). Aylmer concludes with a reminder of the importance of obedience and a warning against rebellion. Knox’s piece was originally directed to the two Catholic monarchs, Mary Tudor and the Scottish Queen Regent, Marie of Lorraine; in his subsequent letters to Queen Elizabeth he vehemently reiterates his central argument about a woman’s lack of mental and physical fitness to govern. See “Knox to Queen Elizabeth,” in The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1846), Vol. 6, p. 49. Jacqueline Vanhoutte contends that Aylmer’s interpretation of Elizabeth as a mother to her subjects depicts her as entirely dependent on her child, England’s, love and thus undermines her authority as the country’s ruler (“Queen and Country?: Female Monarchs and Feminized Nations in Elizabethan Political Pamphlets,” in Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman, ed. Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004], pp. 7-19). 3 According to the ancient rabbinical commentaries, Deborah temporarily loses her divine sight because of this claim. On rabbinic views of Deborah, see Bronner, From

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London in 1559, an actor in the guise of “Debora,” reciting detailed accounts of her role in the Israelite’s victory, bestowed encouragement and advice on the new queen. Deborah, who articulates national liberation as a coming into being of maternal identity, becomes a key figure in the anonymous The Historie of Jacob and Esau, an academic interlude written for young schoolboys that is a hybrid of Roman comedy and morality play. 4 Written on the cusp of Elizabeth’s accession, the play in its celebration of Jacob’s usurpation of his elder brother Esau’s blessing in Genesis has been widely recognized as an allegory of Protestant election. As David Bevington remarks, the interlude “transforms Jacob’s dubious behavior into unassailable Protestant virtue.”5 Naomi E. Pasachoff has already considered Jacob’s mother Rebecca as an allusion to Elizabeth Tudor, yet her reading does not take into account what I believe to be the play’s more compelling allegorical reference Eve to Esther, pp. 170-74 and “Valorized or Vilified?: The Women of Judges in Midrashic Sources,” in A Feminist Companion to Judges, ed. Althalya Brenner (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), pp. 72-95. Jewish exegetes have historically understood “like a mother” to describe both Deborah’s sympathy and her position of authority. See Rabbi A.J. Rosenberg, ed., The Book of Judges: A New English Translation, trans. Rabbi Avrohom Fishilis and Rabbi Shmuel Fishilis (New York: The Judaica Press, 1983), p. 37. 4 The full title of the original frontispiece reads, “A newe and merry and whittie Comedie or Enterlude, newely imprinted, treating upon the History of Jacob and Esau.” Jacob and Esau was printed for the first time between 1557-8, when it is entered into the Stationers’ Register, and again in 1568. Paul Whitfield White proposes that the interlude was first performed in the early 1550s and revived during Elizabeth’s reign. See Whitfield White’s survey of Jacob and Esau’s publication history in his introduction to Reformation Biblical Drama in England: An Old Spelling Edition (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. xxxiv-xxxix. 5 Bevington, p. 110. Although Bevington’s reading is widely accepted, it is contingent to some extent both on the date of authorship assigned to the play (especially if we are to accept its date of authorship as during Mary’s reign) and on the play’s author. Critical debate has focused on two potential authors: either the pro-Catholic Nicholas Udall, a schoolteacher involved in the staging of a number of Marion masques, or William Hunnis, imprisoned during 1557-8 for allegedly plotting to take Mary off the throne and later hired by Elizabeth to lead the Royal Choir. While the majority of scholars believe Hunnis to be the author, there is considerable disagreement about the play’s date of authorship, its views on predestination, and, subsequently, the degree of its political subversiveness. Whitfield White challenges Helen Thomas’s argument that the play reflects a pro-Catholic, Erasmian stance on free will as opposed to a strictly Calvinist stance on predestination (see Thomas’s Pro-Udall reading, “Jacob and Esau—‘rigidly Calvinistic?,’” SEL 9.2 [1969]: 199-213). He reads the “Poet” figure in the play’s epilogue as expressing the opinions of moderate Protestants in the period who “staunchly defended divine determinism against human free-will without going so far as to acknowledge that reprobation as well as election is directly willed by God” (“Predestinarian Theology in the Mid-Tudor Play Jacob and Esau,” Ren&R 12.4 [1988]: 300). On this issue, see also Bevington, pp. 109-113 and Whitfield White’s introduction in Reformation Biblical Drama. Whitfield White is more persuaded that the play is Edwardian, while Pasachoff assigns to it a Marion date, subsequently reading the Protestant interlude as a dangerous political gesture, an active affront to Mary that is most definitely authored by Hunnis (Playwrights, Preachers, and Politicians: A Study of Four Tudor Old Testament Dramas [Salzburg, Austria: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1975], pp. 16-19).

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to Elizabeth: the character of “Deborra” that is both the militaristic prophetess of Judges 4-5 and Rebecca’s nurse of the same name who is mentioned only briefly (and on occasion of her death) at Genesis 35:8.6 A significant embellishment of the biblical Rebecca, Jacob and Esau’s Rebecca, in collusion with Deborra, orchestrates an elaborate manipulation of husband and sons. Like Hester, Rebecca and Deborra serve symbolic roles as divulgers of truth; as such, mother and nurse/midwife in Jacob and Esau allow the audience to imagine Elizabeth as part of the scriptural text, figuring her body as an active agent in the generation of “issue”—both progeny and the word of God that spiritually validates her Protestant subjects. Read as a narrative of election, the interlude upholds the Reformists’ view of the Hebrew scripture as a site of veritas—an entryway into the Bible’s essential Christian meanings. Yet Jacob and Esau also turns popular contemporary readings of the Hebrew scripture into an opportunity for interpretive “play.” In Jacob and Esau the body of the Jewish woman becomes a site where the playwright interrogates the Christian audience’s hermeneutic expectations of the Hebrew scripture. My argument, guided by the narrative’s rabbinical and Christian contexts, is that Jacob and Esau’s legitimation of female authority—Rebecca’s and, ultimately, Elizabeth’s—hinges, ironically, on the play’s capacity to destabilize its own epistemological truths. In Christian exegesis, the Jewish mother is an overdetermined figure, signifying the transference of Old to New but also a complex place of origin that is both the carnal body tropologically associated with the Jews and the spiritual birthplace of the Protestant self. She is not the Virgin Mary whose actual body is also connected to the Incarnation, the Word made Flesh; rather, hers is a fleshly body that always troubles this hermeneutical expectation.7 Jacob and Esau complicates the Christian meaning exegetes attached to the figure of Jacob by making this supercession contingent on Rebecca’s body. As we will see, this maternal body is particularly difficult to read: her womb, a dark place of unknown secrets as well as the site of divine prophecy, discloses the elect Jacob, but her deployment of bodily disguise and manipulation, her covert schemes and deceptions of husband and son (often in collusion with Deborra), suggest a maternal agency that is threateningly independent of male authority. Rebecca insures the production of Jacob, but also produces his twin, Esau, the reprobate figured allegorically as the Old order of the Jews. In his preface to an ostensible account of a converted Jew, Thomas Calvert’s metaphoric use of the maternal body to depict the “divers of the worst sort of damnable Heresies, and sundry sects” that are Judaism’s blasphemous legacy also suggests the real body of the Jewish woman who gives birth indiscriminately to both Jacob and such a “damned” progeny as Esau: “Judaisme hath been the fruitfull Mother and Nurse, to give both Wombe and Pap to many monstrous Children.”8 In Jacob and Esau the aggressive physical presence of the Jewish mother reminds us of her capacity for generating such “monstrous children” as well as her exclusive ability to be the 6 All quotations will be taken from the 1568 edition of The Historie of Jacob and Esau, The Tudor Facsimile Texts, ed. John S. Farmer (1908; rpt, New York: AMS Press, 1970). 7 See Lampert’s discussion of the “Jewish Christian” Virgin Mary, passim. 8 Calvert, The Blessed Jew of Marocco: or, A Blackmoor made White, the ostensible testimony of “Rabbi Samuel, a Jew turned Christian” (York, 1648), pp. 2, 3.

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“fruitfull Mother and Nurse” who produces legitimate, elect progeny. In the play’s climactic standoff between Esau and Deborra, Esau projects anxiety about Rebecca’s ability to control his destiny onto the midwife/nurse figure whom the play authorizes as judge and witness of his birth. The drama that unfolds in Jacob and Esau centers on Deborra and Rebecca’s ability to construct and disclose prophetic interpretations of Jacob and Esau. As we have seen, Hester’s hidden Jewishness in The Godly Queene Hester stands for sexual and religious deception as well as her spiritual legitimacy as a member of the Jewish elect nation. In Jacob and Esau’s excessive images of the maternal body, Rebecca offers a similarly conflicted image of the relationship between Christian audience and Hebrew scripture: she offers an authentic body that also threatens to conceal and obfuscate these anticipated truths. Rebecca’s labor and prophecy in Genesis At Genesis 25:23, Rebecca’s labor pains are revealed to prophesize Jacob’s rule: “And the Lord said to her, two nations are in thy wombe, and two maner of people shalbe divided out of thy bowels, and the one people shalbe mightier then the other, and the elder shal serve [the] yonger.” Paul explicitly cites the twins in Romans 9:12 as evidence of the “younger” Christianity’s rightful succession over the “elder” Judaism. In 1605, the Protestant exegete Andrew Willet writes that “[s]piritually these two people doe signifie the carnall Jewes, subdued unto the Christians, beeing yet themselves the elder people.”9 Since the writings of the early Church fathers, the ensuing events of Genesis 25 and 27—the prophecy and Jacob’s subsequent usurpation of his older brother’s blessing—represented the triumph of Christian over Jew, the New order over the Old.10 In Protestant commentaries and liturgy, the narrative was also a particularly salient illustration of the doctrine of election. Jewish commentators understood the crude elder son Esau as Christian, but an Elizabethan audience would have been familiar with popular allegorical glosses of Esau and his blind father as signifiers of both Judaism and Catholicism.11 The Geneva Bible glosses Esau’s choice to trade 9

Willet, Hexapla in Genesin: that is, a sixfold commentarie upon Genesis (London, 1605), p. 276. 10 For a thoughtful discussion of the figure of Esau in Judeo-Christian commentaries, see Gerson D. Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 19-48. Cohen argues that in making Jacob a figure for the triumph of Christianity, “Christian typology [by the tenth century] had appropriated the very symbols that provided the substance of Jewish eschatological theory and had turned them against the Jews” (p. 30). A pervasive allegorical pattern within Christian exegesis, the Old/New binary construed from the story of Esau and Jacob is allegorized through other Old Testament pairs as well: Cain/ Abel, Leah/Rachel, Hagar/Sarah, Ishmael/Isaac, Manasseh/Ephraim, Eli/Samuel, and Saul/ David (p. 34). 11 On Esau as Christian, see Signer, p. 26 and Deutch, “Polemical Ethnographies: Descriptions of Yom Kippur in the Writings of Christian Hebraists and Jewish Converts to Christianity in Early Modern Europe,” in Hebraica Veritas?, p. 220.

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his birthright for Jacob’s stew (25:29-34) as evidence that his destiny is secured even before Rebecca later conspires with Jacob at 27:8-13: “[the] wicked preferred their worldelie comodities to Gods spiritual graces: but [the] children of God do the contrary.” Under his mother’s auspices, Jacob, disguised as Esau with lambskin “hair” and a dish of venison, hastens divine prophecy by deceiving his blind father into blessing him as the firstborn (27:18-29). This symbol of “chosenness” as the child Jacob triumphant in a familial struggle emerges consistently in late sixteenthcentury culture. Jacob’s dream of a ladder ascending from earth towards heaven appears in the Geneva Bible’s dedicatory epistle to Elizabeth (iii-iiiv); she herself alludes to the battling twins in her distraught letter to the ex-Protestant Henry of Navarre (Henry IV), who had converted to Catholicism upon his succession to French throne: Ah, it is dangerous to do ill that good may come of it. Yet I hope that sounder inspiration shall come to you. In the meantime I shall not cease to set you in the foremost rank of my devotions that the hands of Esau undo not the blessing of Jacob.12

Elizabeth imagines a vengeful Esau, a figure of Catholic brutality, who threatens to “undo” Jacob’s blessing. The comparison suggests how the narrative of Jacob and Esau at this particular historical moment was illustrative of election as well as the vulnerability of the elect, the possibility for nation and individual to become “undone.” Elizabeth also attributes a type of maternal agency to the king in her hope that he will come to “sounder inspiration” that affects the forces battling within him. Maternal authority in Jacob and Esau Jacqueline Vanhoutte notes that an anonymous 1555 pamphlet entitled “Certayne Questions Demaunded and Asked by the Noble Realme of Englande, of her true and naturall chyldren and Subjectes of the Same” favorably compares Elizabeth to the former Queen Mary as a more benevolent mother to her subjects.13 Indeed, in a 1563 speech dismissing public demands for her marriage, Elizabeth suggests her role in shaping the healthy English subject, strategically tapping into what Rachel Trubowitz has shown to be the culture’s fixation with the figure of the “natural mother” as “a source of authentic Englishness.” While Trubowitz notes that early modern texts pathologize the male Jew as an “unnatural” maternal body complete with lactating breasts and menstrual cycles, I argue that in Jacob and Esau’s Rebecca, as well as other figures on the Elizabethan stage, writers imagined the Jewish mother quite differently as part of the most “natural” and pure origin of the English self.14 12 Dated July 1593 in The Letters of Queen Elizabeth, ed. G.B. Harrison (London: Cassell, 1935), p. 225. 13 “Queen and Country?,” p. 10. 14 “Natural” English identity was thus shaped rhetorically through the vilification of male Jews and others labeled as social dissidents such as the transvestite and wet nurse. See Trubowitz, “Cross-Dressed Women and Natural Mothers: ‘Boundary Panic’ in Hic Mulier,” in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700, ed. Christina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 187, 199 and “‘But Blood Whitened.’”

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Claiming her singular devotion to her subjects, Elizabeth issues an implicit warning about severing the exclusive bond between them: “I assure you all that though after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have any a more mother than I mean to be unto you all.”15 Elizabeth’s own descriptions of herself as a type of mother to her subjects drew on idealized images of mothers in the culture, yet were not necessarily a sincere sentiment about physical motherhood. Christine Coch makes a clear distinction between Elizabeth’s use of maternal images as masterful rhetorical strategy and her rejection of biological motherhood. A pregnancy for Elizabeth, Coch contends, would signify a loss of physical control and threaten what was understood metaphorically in early modern political theory as the divine, transcendent of her two monarchical bodies.16 Mary Beth Rose argues that Elizabeth, who stopped referring to herself as a mother after 1563, would have been conscious of tempering her public persona as a virgin mother to her Protestant subjects who certainly would have valued marriage over celibacy.17 In the late 1550s, however, when Elizabeth represented a fresh promise of progeny and the newly acquired “issue” of the English Bible, mother figures are indeed the subject of Jacob and Esau, which elides maternal and belligerent sensibilities in Rebecca. Although the play’s bawdy maternal allusions may be understood as the externalities of the scriptural text and Jacob’s body as that which lies hidden in the former—the scriptural truth gleaned by the Christian reader—it is as a physical agent of reproduction that Rebecca exercises her authority and spiritual legitimacy in the play. The biblical Jacob signifies Elizabeth and her subjects as the “elect” nation, yet it is Rebecca who exists at the center of Jacob and Esau and whose authority is ultimately reified by the character of “Deborra,” who suggests both nurse and the judge/self-described mother who “arises” to wrest her people from servitude. Given Elizabeth’s own rhetoric, what is striking in Jacob and Esau is that Elizabeth, figured in Rebecca and Deborra, wields power not by way of her rejection of physical motherhood, but through a full identification with the excessively physical and, at times, grotesque, maternal body. Jacob and Esau continues a tradition of examining Rebecca’s intervention in divine prophecy. Rabbinical commentators largely justify Rebecca’s plan to disguise Jacob as Esau and their subsequent coercion of the first-born’s blessing from Isaac as an extension of divine prophecy. Though Rebecca comes from a family of deceivers, the Midrash comments, she herself is “as a lily among thorns.”18 But Rebecca’s decision to become a more proactive agent in facilitating Jacob’s election generated more debate in Christian commentaries. The Geneva Bible’s gloss, for example, points to Rebecca’s haste: “This subtiltie is blameworthie because she shulde have taried til God had performed his promes” (27:9). Rebecca is thus culpable for Jacob’s lies as well: “Although Jaakob was assured of this blessing by faith: yet he did evil 15

Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 72. Coch, pp. 140-41. 17 Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 26-54. 18 Such as her brother Laban, who cheats Jacob out of his earnings (Genesis 29-30). See Midrash Rabbah: Genesis 2:558, Leviticus 4:292, and Song of Songs 9:94-5. 16

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to seke it by lies and the more because he abuseth Gods Name therunto” (27:19). Yet for Calvin, for whom the narrative became the consummate dramatization of Christian doctrine, the machinations provide the means to a necessary end: Rebecca errs, he acknowledges, but her actions are inspired from a pure faith in God and a true love for her son.19 Andrew Willet, similarly, contends that Rebecca should not be scorned at all as she is focused solely on “the trueth of Gods promise.”20 While many early modern biblical commentators respond equivocally to Rebecca’s intervention, Jacob and Esau not only approves the means of Jacob’s usurpation, but lauds Rebecca as the author and agent of this plot.21 As I expand on the implications of Pasachoff’s important observation that the “Quene” evoked at the end of the play is a figure of Elizabeth, I hope to show that the play celebrates Rebecca’s self-righteousness in the face of both secular and divine male authority.22 Election, ultimately, is realized through the physical place of the mother, the bawdy, vulgar world with which Rebecca is associated. Rebecca’s position in Jacob and Esau is established initially during her confrontation with Jacob in 1.3 when she informs Jacob of the prophecy and persuades him to procure Esau’s blessing even before he trades his stew for his elder brother’s birthright. In this elaboration of what is in Genesis only a brief consultation between mother and son, Jacob concedes after some resistance to trust his mother’s judgment: Jacob: Mother Rebecca, if withouten fraude I might, I would your advise put in use wyth all my hart, But I may not attempt any such guilefull part: To buie my brothers eldership and hys birthright, I feare woulde be a great offence in Gods sight. Which thyng if I wist, to redeeme I ne wolde, Though I might get therby ten millions of golde. Rebecca: God, who by his worde and almightifull decree, Hath appoynted thee Esau his lorde to bee, Hath appointed some way to have it brought about. And that is thys way, my sprite doth not doute. Jacob: Upon your worde mother, I will assay ere long, Yet it grudgeth my heart to doe my brother wrong. Rebecca: Thou shalt do no wrong sonne Jacob, on my perill. Jacob: Then by Gods leave once assay I wil. (B1V) 19 Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses called Genesis, trans. John King. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1948), Vol. 2, p. 101. Calvin lauds Rebecca’s sense of Jacob’s higher purpose: instead of being possessive over Jacob, he contends, Rebecca lets him leave home after he has received his blessing from Isaac. Calvin uses the Genesis narrative as a model of the doctrine of election in “Thirteene sermons … entreating of the free election of God in Jacob, and of reprobation in Esau” (London, 1579). 20 Willet, p. 289. 21 On this point, I am indebted to Pasachoff’s provocative study of Jacob and Esau, specifically her arguments concerning both the interlude’s unorthodox rendering of the Old Testament story and its emphasis on Rebecca. 22 For an opposing view, see Blackburn’s reading of Rebecca’s unsympathetic “superficial piety” (p. 152).

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Jacob protests against his “guilefull part” in his mother’s scheme; ultimately, he is swayed by Rebecca’s testimony of her faith, but perhaps without full conviction that this plot is “withouten fraude.” It is a moment that foreshadows Isaac’s acceptance of Jacob and thus a larger theme of female leadership and male blindness—spiritual and literal—within the play as a whole. In Genesis, Rebecca’s deception of Isaac in Genesis 27 is precipitated by Esau’s own decision—his expedient trade of his birthright for Jacob’s bowl of food—and Rebecca accordingly tells Jacob of the prophecy only after the trade has taken place. The reordering of events in Jacob and Esau positions Rebecca at the forefront of all subsequent action between the two brothers; later, Jacob will name Rebecca as instigator for this premeditated coup as he explains that it was by her “enticement” that he bought the birthright (Dii). Assuring Jacob that her “[spirit] doth not doute” what he fears to be fraud, Rebecca, as in the Hebrew scripture, accepts culpability for the proposed plot. And with this success at convincing the reluctant Jacob, who capitulates “[u]pon [his mother’s] worde,” Rebecca establishes herself as a master of discourse—a successor of Noah’s wife in the mystery cycles—not only to Jacob but also to her audience. Left alone on the stage at the end of 1.3, Rebecca becomes a benevolent Vice as she appeals directly to her audience: Ah my sweete sonne Jacob, good fortune God thee sende. The most gentle yong man alive, as God me mende. And the moste naturall to father and mother: O that such a meke spirite were in thy brother, Or thy syre loved thee as thou hast merited, And then should Esau soone be disinherited. (B1V)

Rebecca constantly reminds us of her authority, which the play defines in physical terms. As the origin and maker in charge of Jacob and Esau’s care (and, potentially, neglect), she embodies a type of maternal influence that Naomi J. Miller has observed in early modern women’s advice books. Their female authors, she argues, imagine mothers as a locus of physical and spiritual authority whose labor (in the household and in childbirth) also translates into “the rearing of souls.”23 Miller’s suggestion that these texts also represent the mother’s care as “verbal and spiritual nourishment” that encourages her children’s affection for the scripture (another “mother tongue”) has particular relevance to Jacob and Esau’s Rebecca.24 Like the Jewish queen in The Godly Queene Hester, Rebecca possesses a body figured as a site of authority and truth: her natural body suggests a connection to the “playne” language of the scripture through which the Protestant reader would perceive the Christian meaning of Jacob’s acquisition of his brother’s blessing. In the dramatic monologue above, Rebecca unhesitatingly declares Jacob’s “naturall” entitlement; and what is natural in Jacob, his innate chosenness, his relationship with God, is shaped also by his mother’s valuation of him. Rebecca hints at the paradox of her situation: because Jacob will not obtain that which he “hast merited” by natural 23

Miller, “‘Hens should be served first’: Prioritizing Maternal Production in the Early Modern Pamphlet Debate,” in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, p. 163. 24 See Miller’s discussion of author Elizabeth Grymeston, p. 171.

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means, she will intervene to secure what is “most naturall.” Here and elsewhere Rebecca also suggests that the “most naturall” is a maternal bond literalized in the physical connection to her lactating breasts and womb. The interlude adds a number of characters to the events of Genesis 2533 who call attention to Rebecca’s ability to manipulate her sons: Isaac’s neighbors Hanan and Zethar; Ragau, Esau’s abused servant; Abra, Rebecca’s serving girl; and the irreverent boy Mido, guide to the blind Isaac and the play’s comedic scourge of dominant women. In Jacob and Esau the disruption of the patriarchal order becomes slapstick as Mido’s snipes undercut Rebecca’s skillful manipulation of husband and twin sons. Dramatizing the effects of Rebecca’s respective relationships with her sons, Jacob and Esau foregrounds Jacob’s righteousness and embellishes his elder brother’s impiety. Esau is not merely the hirsute hunter of the Genesis narrative but an inhumane machiavel who cruelly beats his servant, Ragau. Indeed, the opening scene of Jacob and Esau begins with Ragau’s testimony of Esau’s selfish gluttony, a lengthy monologue that reiterates a single sentiment: [N]o delite [Esau] hath, no appetite nor minde But to the wilde Forrest, to hunt the Harte or Hinde, The Roebucke, the wilde bore, the fallow Deere, or Hare: But howe poore Ragau shall dine, he hath no care, Poore I, must eate Acornes or Bearies from the Tree. (AiiV)

The reprobate Esau, a crude satire of the Roman Catholic doctrine of free will, also characterizes the unenlightened English Catholic in the symbolic economy of the play.25 Isaac’s neighbor, Hanan, espouses Esau’s predisposition to sin: Esau evermore from his yong childehoode Hath ben lyke to prove yll, and never to be good. Yong it pricketh (folkes do say) that wyll be a thorne, Esau hath ben nought ever since he was borne. And wherof commeth this, of Education? Nay it is of his owne yll inclination. They were brought up bothe under one tuition, But they be not bothe of one disposition. (Aiiii)

Hanan’s explanation of Esau’s “owne yll inclination” both serves the author’s allegorical purpose and exonerates Rebecca, not only from conspiring with Jacob, but from the charge that her “tuition” has fostered Esau’s “disposition.” Yet Jacob and Esau also repeatedly articulates the doctrine of election as a relationship between filial obedience and spiritual merit. Esau is an abusive future patriarch who neglects his social inferiors, but Jacob is a docile “mother’s boy,” and this distinction between the two sons becomes the most predominant feature of their characterizations within the play. Jacob and Esau portrays Esau’s want of election as inextricable with his disrespect for his mother. As he remarks to Ragau during the play’s first scene, “I passe not whether she doe me prayse or blame” (Aiii). Unlike 25

See Whitfield White, Reformation Biblical Drama, p. xliii.

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Esau whose only dalliances with the domestic involve his delivery of food to Isaac, Jacob stays close to his mother’s side, a trait that for his brother becomes initially a point of mockery. From Esau’s perspective, Jacob is coddled and emasculated in Rebecca’s domicile. When Ragau suggests that Jacob be invited to hunt with them, Esau’s scorn reveals his antipathy towards both his brother and their mother: Nay, he must tarrie and sucke mothers dugge at home: Jacob must keepe home I trow, under mother’s wing, To be from the Tentes he loveth not of all thing. Jacob loveth no huntyng in the wylde forest: And would feare if he shoulde there see any wylde beast. Yea to see the game runne, Jacob would be in feare. (Aiii-AiiiV)

Esau’s antagonism is directed towards the female body that he imagines sequestered and hidden in a womb-like tent—a dark, enclosed, gendered space that, as we will see, comes to be associated with all Jewish women represented and alluded to on the Elizabethan stage. He attributes to this maternal and Jewish womb an emasculating effect realized in his younger brother but also suggests that his “mothers dugge” has secured Jacob’s fate and nurtured him as a legitimate English subject. Esau’s reaction expresses also the broader cultural anxieties embodied in the Jewish maternal body as a symbol of the scripture: she is an authority figure who is difficult to access and comprehend. After Rebecca inquires as to why Jacob neglects to give Esau “wyse counsaile,” Jacob responds by describing Esau’s irreverence towards her; it is because Jacob is “under mother’s wing” that he earns his brother’s disrespect: [W]hen I doe him any thing of his fault tell, He calleth me foolishe proude boy with him to mell. He will somtime demaunde by what authoritee, I presume to teache them which mine elders bee? He will somtime aske if I learne of my mother, To take on me teaching of mine elder brother? Sometime when I tell hym of his leude behavour, He will lende me a mocke or twaine for my labour: And somtime for anger he will out with his purse And call me as please hym, and sweare he will doe wurse. (Bi)

Esau’s condescension, though directed at his brother, lays bare his antipathy towards Rebecca and his disdain for the “authoritee” she assumes with regards to her sons; Esau fears, it seems, what Jacob “learn[s] of [his] mother,” whom he figures as both bogus authority and a source of knowledge. Esau’s chiding that Jacob “must tarrie and sucke mothers dugge” reveals a bitter loathing of the female body that has confirmed his fate; Esau’s particular affront to the “dugge” also affirms its life-sustaining function, here clearly associated with male disempowerment.26 His

26

My reading of Esau is very much shaped by Janet Adelman’s seminal analyses of mother/son relationships in Shakespearean drama in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of

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rejection of the domestic here, as we will see, anticipates how the play further associates Esau’s domestic and spiritual exile. Rebecca’s “clene vessell” While not the author of Jacob’s prophecy, Rebecca is represented as its earthly manifestation. The play locates tropologically Jacob’s election in a domestic setting, a space where Rebecca’s authority takes center stage. What deserves attention in the interlude is not only its potentially “explosive” political sentiment about predestination, as Paul Whitfield White claims, but the way in which its imaginative re-readings of the Hebrew scripture and its matriarchs temper and moderate the discourse of political rebellion. Ultimately in Jacob and Esau the subversion of gender hierarchies becomes a means through which political hierarchies may be justifiably overturned.27 The play in some sense naturalizes the usurpation of men by women through the blocking character of Mido, who openly mocks Rebecca as she tries to convince Isaac that Jacob is worthy of the first-born’s blessing. This slapstick episode is a shaping moment of ideological resistance within the play, as Rebecca’s incipient plot to deceive her husband is mitigated through Mido’s comic relief. Throughout the play, his mockery of female garrulousness and disobedience—an echo of early modern descriptions of female unruliness—strategically voices potential anxiety on the part of the audience as Rebecca skillfully dupes Isaac. In 1.4, Rebecca contends that Isaac should facilitate God’s prophecy for Jacob instead of favoring the first-born Esau. Trying in vain to convince her husband to give favor to his younger son, the irrepressible Rebecca will not let Isaac have the last word (Biii-BivV). While their banter is humorous, it is also thick with Rebecca’s cynical defiance of her husband’s will: Rebecca: Nowe woulde God, I coulde persuade my lorde Isaac, Jacob to preferre, and Esau to put backe. Isaac: I may not do it wife, I pray you be content. The title of birthright that commeth by descent, Or the place of eldershyp comming by due course I may not chaunge nor shift, for better nor for wourse. Natures lawe it is, the eldest sonne to knowlage, And in no wise to barre hym of his heritage. And ye shall of Esau one day have comforte. (Biiii)

In her actions throughout the play, Rebecca challenges, and in some sense appropriates, “[n]atures lawe,” asserting instead her own definition of “nature” that is dictated by her maternal authority. Mido, having observed Rebecca’s witty retorts, remarks to Isaac: Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992). 27 Bevington argues that the interlude sanctions a rebellious seizure of power, but ultimately conveys that such acts are always taken reluctantly (p. 112).

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I have stoode here all thys while, listning howe you And my Dame Rebecca have bene laying the lawe, But she hath as quicke answeres as ever I sawe. Ye coulde not speake any thing unto hir so thicke, But she had hir answere as ready and as quicke. (BiiiiV)

Mido’s observations of the domestic quarrel broaden, unequivocally, as charges of female disobedience and treason, foreshadowing the fate of Isaac who will soon be indefensible against his wife’s “quicke answeres”: Isaac: Well, come on, let us goe. Mido: And who shall leade you? I? Rebecca: No, it is my office as long as I am by. And I woulde all wives, as the worlde this day is, Woulde unto their husbandes likewise do their office. Mido: Why dame Rebecca, then al wedded men shold be blind. Rebecca: What thou foolish ladde, no such thing was in my minde. (BiiiiV)

Isaac’s blindness is ultimately echoed tropologically in both Jacob and Esau; at the play’s conclusion, both sons make peace only after they each acknowledge Rebecca’s authority. Unlike the blind Isaac, they see her with spiritual clarity. Before this revelation, however, the narrative indulges Mido’s theme: as Rebecca instructs her servants to conceal her plot to disguise Jacob, Mido taunts “if any tell, Abra here, will be pratling./For they say, women will ever be clattering” (Diii)—a comment intended certainly for the benefit of the young serving girl but also, evoking his earlier statements about Rebecca’s garrulousness, implicating his female superior as well. Yet Mido shifts in the play from misogynist to ally as the main action transfers to Rebecca’s kitchen and to the tent of women where Esau will have his confrontation with Rebecca and Deborra in the play’s final scenes. Here, too, female authority, emerging first as the target of Mido’s jibes, reveals itself to be the ideological underpinnings of Jacob and Esau. Rebecca’s kitchen actualizes what Wendy Wall describes as the threatening domestic space imagined by Renaissance writers: the private domain was presumed to nurture the English subject as a good citizen but also represented a “bizarre and disquieting” place where women could distribute and deny sustenance. Wall concludes that “[t]he domesticated subject was not simply passively molded within a fixed hierarchy, but submitted as well to uncomfortable modes of disciplining that set up multiple and discrete lines of dependency.”28 She contends that the mother’s authority in the kitchen, which was acted out in the mutilation of animals for food preparation, involved relationships with servants that displaced the bond between husband and wife. We see this in Jacob and Esau as the tent, Rebecca’s body, and the kitchen each conceal and disclose Jacob in this drama of disguise and deceit. The maternal body, as a literal and symbolic place of trickery and spiritual authenticity, here takes on a type of agency that both mimics and displaces divine authority.

28

Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 2, 3.

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The material of the domestic, represented by Esau’s greed for Jacob’s stew in the play’s initial exchange, becomes the absurdly extended subject matter of Jacob and Esau’s kitchen scenes. Mido first mimics Esau’s gluttony to Ragau, and with great performativity, tells the starved Ragau that Esau has licked the pot clean (Ciiiv). Later, Mido impersonates Esau again to the pleased Rebecca, who reads in Esau’s eagerness to swap his birthright a sanction of her own “stew trick,” another exchange in which the overdetermined bowl, as a type of womb, facilitates Jacob’s promotion: When he had supte up all, I sawe him licke the potte. Thus he licked, and thus he licked, and this way. I thought to have lickt the potte my selfe once to day. But Esau beguilde me, I shrewe him for that, And left not so muche as a licke for pusse our catte. (DiiV)

These excessive images of Esau’s consumption underscore through sexual humor the embeddedness of the female body in Jacob and Esau, a body that is imagined at once erotic, chaste, and maternal: life-giving and fate-sealing. As the drama of Esau’s fall unfolds, all the action congregates in Rebecca’s kitchen, where she has assembled a cast of characters to help her cook a version of the victuals the hunter Esau provides daily for his father. As Rebecca prepares the lamb, the previously recalcitrant Mido is enlisted to help perfect every detail of her plot (EiV). In Rebecca’s tent, too, the image of Esau’s coveted pot of food re-emerges: instead of Esau licking it clean, however, Abra obsesses about cleaning the pot herself. In a provocative exchange between Rebecca and Abra, both frantic in their preparations, the cleanliness of the pot is suggestive of both a clean cooking utensil and a viable womb: Rebecca: Must I call so oft? why come ye not by and by? Abra: I was washing my vessell forsooth maistresse I. Rebecca: And in very deede, looke that all your vessell be clene. Abra: There is not one foule peece in all our tent I wene. Rebecca: Then make a great fyre, and make redy your pot And see there be plenty of water colde and hotte. And see the spitte be scoured as cleane as any pearle. (Eii)

The womb transforms symbolically here from a physical entity to spiritually pure “vessell.” In the kitchen, “[t]here is not one foule peece,” a phrase crudely evocative of Rebecca’s womb (then bloodied with Jacob and Esau’s struggle). Now, however, in the double entendres of this symbolic prop, the female “vessell” is pristine. The cleanliness of the domestic space becomes a testimony of order and accord; just as the place of the womb was the site of election, the device of the bowl now enables Rebecca to facilitate this divine prophecy. Esau disparages Jacob’s reverence for his mother, yet the bowl that is the object of Esau’s desire and the means through which he affirms his favor with Isaac recalls this feminized place of birth. In the kitchen, the pot is purified, purged of its associations with Esau as both firstborn and the bearer of Isaac’s food; the pot is “cleane as any pearle,” now ready for Jacob’s use. In Jacob and Esau,

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as we will see, the mother and the nurse (like the midwife)—who helps the mother and necessarily gets her hands dirty in the fleshy stuff of life (the birthroom, the kitchen)—constitute a physical world ruled by women. Deborra: nurse, midwife, and judge The text of Jacob and Esau is striking in that it foregrounds Rebecca’s role in Jacob’s election, ultimately blurring together maternal agency and divine prophecy. Her preeminence as the central protagonist is not realized—and in some sense not justified—until the final scenes of the play; in Act 4 the playwright evokes as Rebecca’s co-conspirator in securing Jacob’s election the character of “Deborra the nurse.” Both nurse and mother converge in Rebecca and in the unnamed “Queen” at the end of the play. Although Elizabeth’s self-image as “mother” suggests a “natural” nurture that was contrasted against the wet-nurse’s form of care in popular discourse, Elizabeth is celebrated as both mother and nurse. Indeed, the image of queen as nurse to her people appears in Isaiah 49:23: “And Kings shalbe nourcing fathers, and Quenes shalbe thy nources.” Like Rebecca and Deborra in Jacob and Esau, Elizabeth often appeared allegorically as mother and a benevolent “nurse,” who would protect her subjects from their Catholic enemies. In his poetic opus, “Elizabeth Triumphans” (1588), James Aske reflects on the Queen’s suppression of Catholic affront during her reign, and eulogizes her position as England’s savior. In the “Triumphans,” Aske allegorizes Mary, Queen of Scots and her co-conspirators as children who have rejected their loyal nurse, Elizabeth, and thus abandoned their mother England: Lament with me for England’s haples lucke: Her haples lucke through these unnaturall sonnes, Who seeke to ruine her their mother deare, And lay in wait to slay their carefull Nurse Elizabeth, their Queene and Royall Nurse, Whose milke her lawes (her sacred life-full lawes) Was for them food, if that they would have suckt: Whose sacred lawes a cradle (none so sure) Was for their ease, would they have lien therein. And last, whose lawes did carefully them warne Least they should fall, by payne which longed thereto. But these fond youths (as wayward Children) did Despise the counsell of their carefull Nurse, And for the same they seeke her death (alas!) With the confusion of their Mother deare.29

Allegorized as the “unnaturall sonnes,” the Catholic “wayward children” evoke also the recalcitrant Esau, Jacob’s adversary and antagonist to Rebecca. And the language 29

“Elizabeth Triumphans” in The Progresses and Public Processions, Vol. 2, p. 559. The Mayor of Norwich at the 1578 pageant addresses the queen as “Nurse of religion, Mother of the Commonwealth, Beautie of Princes, Solace of thy Subjectes” (Vol. 2, p. 168).

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of the “Triumphans” recalls Rebecca’s own description of her “natural” younger son; as in Jacob and Esau the unnatural is that which rejects the maternal, here signified by both mother and nurse. With vivid images of a lactating body, Aske promotes Elizabeth as the exemplary provider of nourishment for England; Elizabeth herself draws on the same images in this prayer composed in her late 40s: “[M]y God and Father, I render Thee everlasting thanks that Thou hast given me the honor of being mother and nurse of Thy dear children.”30 In Jacob and Esau, Rebecca insures Jacob’s election and also has strong affiliation with characters who threaten to “undo” or undermine this spiritual guidance: the play’s audience would have been most aware of Deborra’s symbolic role as both this spiritual guide and as a subversive authority figure who works independently of divine prophecy. Appearing in Rebecca’s kitchen, the somber nurse acts as a mature overseer for the hectic (and bawdy) discourse that transpires. In the most literal sense, Deborra clearly corresponds to the character whose only mention in the actual Genesis narrative is the announcement of her death at 35:8 on the occasion of Jacob’s journey to Bethel. The medieval philosopher Nachmanides understands the nurse Deborah as a surrogate maternal figure who gets sent along in lieu of Rebecca to accompany Jacob as he leaves home. Jacob’s weeping on the occasion of her death, he reasons, should be taken as his mourning of Rebecca, whose death ceremony, for reasons of Jacob’s departure, Esau’s fury, and Isaac’s blindness, could not be properly performed: “[F]or the weeping and anguish could not have been such for the passing of the old nurse that the place would have been named on account of it. Instead, Jacob wept and mourned for his righteous mother who had loved him and sent him to Paddan-Aram and who was not privileged to see him when he returned.”31 The Midrash explains Jacob’s weeping, similarly, as grief for both Deborah and Rebecca.32 Calvin understands Deborah as “a holy matron ... whom the family of Jacob venerated as a mother” whose ceremonial burial is evidence of her status. Willet explains that Deborah most likely played the role of Rebecca’s “bringer up and instructor.”33 “Deborra,” revisioned as a central figure in the events of Genesis 25 and 27, simultaneously recalls the more famous Deborah celebrated by Elizabethan pageant actors. The conflation of Deborah and Rebecca, nurse and mother, in medieval and early modern exegesis suggests the similitude the playwright creates between Deborah of the Book of Judges and Rebecca: like Deborah, she is a self-appointed “mother” who has risen to intervene as prophetess and judge. This dual allusion, I argue, reveals too an intentional ambiguity on the part of the playwright: the minor nurse perhaps becomes a symbolic bridge used to invoke the ideological power of the revered Deborah in the Book of Judges, the woman who led her country out of its enslavement. The 1568 text does identify Deborra as Isaac’s nurse in its players’ 30

Elizabeth I: The Collected Works, p. 314. Nachmanides, Commentary on the Torah: Genesis, trans. Rabbi Charles B. Chavel (New York: Shilo, 1971), pp. 422-3. 32 Midrash Rabbah: Ecclesiastes, 8:175-6. 33 Calvin, Commentaries, Vol. 2, pp. 239-40. Calvin believes that Deborah follows Jacob because of her “regard for religion” (p. 240). Willet, p. 350. 31

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list, yet she also evokes this warring prophetess who in the 1578 Norwich pageant “appears” to remind her primary spectator, Elizabeth I, that God “[a]ppointed [her] Debora for the Judge of his elect.”34 Whitfield White, in his annotations to the most recent modern edition of the play, explicates “Deborra” in the dramatis personae as the prophetess of the Book of Judges, with no mention of the nurse whose life and death are recorded in a single line in Genesis. In Jacob and Esau the divinely appointed female judge, protecting her country from illegitimate rule, suggests also the author’s strategy for legitimating Rebecca to his audience. Deborra reinforces Rebecca’s position within the play as judge of sorts, enabling her as such to emerge triumphant during the last two acts of Jacob and Esau which realize—and celebrate—together both Rebecca’s authority and Jacob’s election. In Jacob and Esau, Deborah becomes a multifaceted character, playing the roles of judge and nurse—and well as midwife. The Protestant writer John Prime, in a sermon celebrating the suppression of Catholic threat from Spain, invokes Jacob and Esau to warn his audience of resurgent danger: “Well, for this time hether to (God bee thanked) Jacobs hand hath beene stronge enough to hold Esau by the heel, and if some Midwives helpe out blooddy Esaus forces once againe, God that hath preserved us so long, will not, we hope, forsake us now.”35 In his strikingly graphic metaphor, Prime likens the shedding of Rebecca’s maternal blood to the carnage of civil war. Like many of his contemporaries, he understands the midwife as potentially dangerous to mother and child, and also as a general threat to English society. He describes the attending midwife as an aid to the illegitimate son, and thus an active danger to God’s elect. As many critics have established, the midwife, having special access to the womb, occupied a position of power in the birthing chamber.36 With her exclusive access to a woman’s secret disclosures of sexual infidelities (and thus the potential “bastard” status of her child), the early modern midwife emerges in contemporary literature as a possible threat to male authority—private and public. The midwife’s proximity to the laboring mother, as Caroline Bicks has shown, had familial and political implications: her collusion with the birth mother regarding issues of legitimacy (and, perhaps, birth order) could threaten the authority of the state. Prime’s allusion thus emphasizes the woman’s part in determining the newborn’s status in the world. Juxtaposing this midwife’s invasive hand against the mother whose womb is the initial place of prophecy, he naturalizes the younger son while depicting Esau as the innate enemy of his maternal origin. Like the midwife, the wet-nurse became a scapegoat for general anxieties about how mothers, both real and figurative, wield control over their male children: as Deborah Willis has shown, early modern writings pathologize the nurse’s lower-class body as a corrupting, and

34

This edition lists Deborra as “the nurse of Isaacs Tente.” John Prime, The consolations of David breefly applied to Queene Elizabeth (Oxford, 1588), C1. 36 See, for example, Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 185-90 and Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 35

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even demonic influence on the infant.37 Bicks and other critics have also identified the midwife’s role as a maid’s “hymen-tester” as a source of anxiety for both men and woman: their concern that the midwife might puncture the hymen during the examination was indistinguishable from their paranoia about what the midwife would profess to have discovered.38 In her reading of the midwife’s hymeneal examination of the Virgin Mary in the fifteenth-century “Nativity” play of the N-town cycle, Lisa Lampert argues provocatively that the midwife was perceived as a type of Jew who also represented a symbolic physical threat to the spiritual sense of the scripture: “Like the doubt of the Jew, the midwife’s doubt is special and particular, a challenge to the truth of one of the foundational moments in the history of Christianity and a particularly carnal, feminized challenge to its universal message.”39 In Jacob and Esau the midwife does not work against the mother (who, in Prime’s allusion, is figured as the passive vehicle for state-approved ideology); rather, in the figure of the nurse Deborra, she serves the domineering Rebecca in a distinctly carnal—and spiritual—maternal domain. She appears as both nurse and midwife, aid and abettor to Rebecca’s plots: at the end of the play, confronted by Esau who has just realized his mother’s plot to usurp his blessing for Jacob, it is Deborra who confirms that she witnessed Jacob holding him by the heel at their birth. Her reply to his anxious request—“It is true, I was there, and saw it very wele” (GiV)—emphasizes her role, and not God’s, in determining his birthright. Esau’s question indicates too his awareness that maternal authority has sealed his fate. Deborra makes clear her approval of Jacob’s disguise, but her most important function is as an antagonist to Esau, who, having learned of Jacob’s deception and the subsequent loss of his father’s blessing, rages outside of Rebecca’s tent: “Come out whores & theves, come out, come out I say” (FiiiiV). As in Genesis, Esau’s fury is a response to Jacob’s thievery, yet in Jacob and Esau his rants, filled with images of dark spaces and witch figures, convey a distinct loathing of the feminine. He maligns Deborra: “come out thou mother Mab, out olde rotten witche,/As white as midnightes arsehole, or virgin pitche” (Gi).40 This feminized dark space conveys the complex attributes of Rebecca as mother of the elect, ruler of the bawdy kitchen, and domineering wife. Willis’s argument that “[early modern] witchcraft beliefs encode fantasies of maternal persecution” illuminates the significance of Esau’s indictment of Deborra as an “olde rotten witch”. Charges of witchcraft leveled at older, marginalized women, Willis concludes, were a projection of pervasive anxieties about the “natural” mother and her control over male children.41 Esau’s “mother Mab,” the fairy’s midwife cited by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, also calls attention to Deborra’s role in dictating the status of male selfhood. Esau yells 37 Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995). Hostility towards mothers, she contends, is often displaced onto older women such as the wet-nurse (pp. 18, 36-7). 38 Bicks, pp. 60-93. 39 Lampert, p. 129. 40 Whitfield White understands Esau to mean that she is literally a witch. The Oxford English Dictionary, citing Jacob and Esau’s use of “Queen Mab” defines the term as a “woman of loose character.” 41 Willis argues that “witches were women ... because women are mothers” (p. 6).

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into the dark tent his plea for Deborra to disclose what she witnessed at his birth: “Is it true that when I and my brother were first borne,/And I by Gods ordinaunce came forth him beforne,/Jacob came forthwith, holding me fast by the hele?” (GiV). Although Esau confronts the various occupants of the tent, he directs his blame specifically at Deborra; it is she who confirms to the elder son his fate in the womb and, subsequently, explains her role as not a conjurer of evil plots, but as a woman carrying out God’s will (Gi-GiV). Deborra, a Jewish woman like Hester who plays a privileged part in revealing and concealing meaning at her own discretion, succeeds at blocking Esau’s efforts to enter the tent, a moment of inquiry in which he desperately attempts to glean the truths withheld by the maternal body. Esau, like the Jew who cannot access the spiritual meanings of the scripture or, alternately, as I argue throughout this book, like the Christian reader who attempts to penetrate this veritas, engages in a symbolic attempt to comprehend the womb that brought him into being. Esau swears vengeance on Jacob and also on Deborra, should she betray his plot to kill Jacob: “[I]f ever I heare that thou speake worde of this,/I shall cut out thy tongue, I will not mysse” (GiV)—a threat that also suggests vengeance against the other prattling woman, his mother, who has insured this plot. Ignoring Esau’s warning, Deborra immediately tells Rebecca of Esau’s intentions. As Esau transfers to Deborra his animosity towards Rebecca, Deborra becomes the conduit and the message-bearer who mitigates Rebecca’s position as a key player in the fulfillment of Jacob’s prophecy. In the Hebrew scripture, Esau’s hatred of Jacob is not diffused until the two brothers meet in Genesis 33 when Esau, seeing Jacob’s wives and children in tow, rescinds his plan to harm his brother and pledges instead his eternal loyalty. Esau similarly comes to this understanding of God’s will and Jacob’s supremacy in Jacob and Esau. Yet this peace is reached through a discussion with Rebecca, who promptly scolds and diminishes the will of her “yll” inclined son and urges him not to harm Jacob. Esau makes an improbable change of heart and responds to her immediately: “For your sake with Jacob I will be at accorde” (GiiiV). It is striking at this moment that Esau, who states explicitly that it is on his mother’s behalf that he refuses to do violence unto his younger brother, focuses not only on God’s preference, but on his mother’s as well (Giii). No longer condescending about his brother’s attachment to Rebecca, Esau in the final scenes of the play accepts both God’s will and his mother’s authority. Now openly coveted by Esau, Rebecca’s maternal soothing—and verbal cunning—finally calms Esau into forgiveness, as Rebecca herself boasts to Isaac, “He hath at my worde remitted all his quarele” (GiiiV). The emergence of Deborra, who helps Rebecca successfully disguise Jacob as Esau, brings resolution to Esau’s rage as a somber paean to both Jacob’s election and to Rebecca. In the epilogue, a figure of the “Poet” emerges and joins the rest of the actors in praising their provocatively unnamed Queen, a eulogy led by Rebecca that is echoed by her two sons (GiiiiV). Together, they pray for her health and for God’s protection against her enemies; Rebecca ultimately appears as protector of Elizabeth’s progeny and as a figure of Elizabeth, who also famously perpetuated the mystery of her (potentially) maternal body. Both Rebecca and the Queen addressed in the epilogue are the interlude’s revered subjects; to a large extent, their roles blur

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together in the play’s final moments. “Deborra” imbues the matriarchal figure of Rebecca with political authority and sets up, in effect, the play’s final celebration of a Protestant, female monarch. With its unconditional celebration of Jacob and Rebecca’s overthrow of Esau, Jacob and Esau may have agitated the political and religious status quo under the Catholic Queen Mary’s rule, a time when her fear of Protestant rebellion led to the suppression of a number of plays in the period.42 Indeed, Pasachoff goes as far as to suggest that Hunnis wrote the play as part of his plan to overthrow Mary.43 Yet the play is most significant for its strategic employment of biblical narrative: the author invites his audience to imagine Elizabeth through these Jewish matriarchs, and more, through the process of re-reading and revising palimpsestically their scriptural significations. The maternal body, a physical site associated with Jewish historical and scriptural authority, exists at the center of the play’s reverence for the Hebrew scripture. Calling attention to its use of typology, Jacob and Esau both upholds the authoritative coherence of the Hebrew text and suggests the instability of its meanings. As we will see, the Jewish mother in George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, like Rebecca, makes clear that the Jewish maternal body can fulfill and deny the Christian audience’s hermeneutic desires.

42 43

Whitfield White, Reformation Biblical Drama, pp. xxxv-vi. Pasachoff, p. 47.

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Chapter 3

The Reader as Voyeur: Thomas Garter’s The Virtuous and Godly Susanna and George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe In his 1599 biblical history The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (with the Tragedie of Absolon), the playwright George Peele adapts 2 Samuel 11-19 and 1 Kings 1-2 as Renaissance tragedy, faithfully recounting King David’s lustful glimpse of the bathing Bathsheba and the devastating consequences of this voyeuristic moment.1 In the scripture, David incurs God’s wrath for his adultery and subsequent conspiracy against Bathsheba’s husband, the loyal soldier Uriah. Just as the prophet Nathan forewarns, God ensures that “the sworde shall never depart from [David’s] house” (2 Samuel 12:10): after the death of his infant son and, for his older children, a tragic sequence of incestuous rape and fratricide, David’s beloved son Absalom raises a rebel army against his father.2 The figure of David—poet-King and sinner—emerged 1 The 1599 title page states that the play has been performed on stage “divers times,” but there is no extant record of its performance. On the eccentric genre of David and Bethsabe, see Inga-Stina Ewbank’s survey of the play’s generic components: the play has been described as a biblical history, a revenge tragedy, a tragicomedy, and as a medieval drama (“The House of David in Renaissance Drama: A Comparative Study,” Renaissance Drama 8 [1965]: 3-40). Whether Peele’s patchwork structure is an intentional device, a consequence of ill planning, or simply evidence that the play is unfinished, remains a topic of debate. On Peele’s literary form, see Ewbank, p. 20, Blackburn, pp. 171-82; and Frederick S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (1914; rpt, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), pp. 363-5. Carolyn Blair repudiates claims of the play’s disjointed structure in “On the Question of Unity in Peele’s David and Bethsabe,” in Studies in Honor of John C. Hodges and Alwin Thaler, Tennessee Studies in Literature, ed. Richard Beale Davis and John Leon Livesay (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1961): pp. 35-41. 2 The Talmudic writers explain that “whosoever states that David sinned is but in error”: regarding Uriah, David errs not in adultery, but in his hasty marriage to Bathsheba—a disregard of halachic practice for mourning the dead. Yet David initiated a relationship with Bathsheba, contends the Talmud, because he knew already that she would give birth to his heir; he is surprised, in fact, to learn that she is already married. On Midrashic and Talmudic interpretations of David, see The Book of Samuel: A New English Translation, ed. Rabbi R.J. Rosenberg (New York: The Judaica Press, 1981), pp. 317-18.

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in different forms throughout the early modern period. Most prominently, his story epitomized the elect Christian’s journey from sin to redemption.3 In David and Bethsabe, Peele turns biblical history into a Senecan-type tragedy, condensing David’s reign into a rapid sequence of events set in motion by his injudicious lust. But it is Peele’s depiction of “Bethsabe” that is so notable: barely present in the biblical narrative, she emerges in David and Bethsabe as a commanding presence whose erotic and, later, maternal body frames the trajectory of David’s redemption. It has been critical tendency to understand Peele’s audience as voyeurs complicit with David as he looks upon Bethsabe, but Peele also directs his audience away from this perspective.4 The text mitigates David’s sins through Bethsabe who fears—correctly—that her body will obscure David’s spiritual vision. In David and Bethsabe, Bethsabe demonstrates an acute awareness of the relationship between voyeur and object of desire: she understands her body as the cause of David’s voyeuristic lust, the producer of his sin (their child who dies at birth), and, ultimately, in her second pregnancy, the marker of his salvation. Bethsabe guides him to read her body correctly and to reject his voyeuristic ways: she directs him away from his rebellious son Absolon (Absolom) and towards their second child, Solomon, a symbol of David’s inward illumination. My interest is not in reading Bethsabe as a figure of the Virgin Mary, mother to Solomon/Christ, as she is often read in Christian exegeses, but rather to focus on how the play foregrounds the theme of biblical interpretation and deploys Bethsabe’s body as a symbolic touchstone of the Christian reader’s engagement with the Hebrew scripture. The hermeneutics of voyeurism position Bethsabe, like the scripture, as a body to be read: as such, she threatens to generate bogus meanings, thus leading David astray, or to remain inaccessible. David and Bethsabe, while incorporating Christian allegory, also calls attention to this theme, enacting the Christian reader’s ability to penetrate the Old Testament and to subsequently access the true Word of God in scripture. Early modern analogies between Elizabeth and other biblical figures from 2 Samuel, especially David himself, are already established in critical treatments of Peele’s play, but the relevance of his allusion to Elizabeth in Bethsabe in the context of contemporary interest in the Hebrew scripture has not been fully explored.5 Our 3

Jan Wojcik notes that while Elizabethan writers treat David as a sacred figure, he often emerges as the subject of burlesque in the seventeenth century. See “Discriminations against David’s Tragedy in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature,” in The David Myth in Western Literature, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 12-35, for an excellent discussion of the figure of David in the JudeoChristian secular and religious writings from the medieval period to the present. On David in sixteenth-century religious writing, see Ewbank, “The House of David,” and Pasachoff. 4 See, for example, A.R. Braunmiller, George Peele: Criticism and Interpretation (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1983), p. 109. 5 Michele Osherow examines these invocations of David during Elizabeth’s reign in “‘A poore shepherde and his sling’: A Biblical Model for a Renaissance Queen,” in Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman, pp. 119-130. The preacher John Prime likens the Queen to Solomon, “a daughter of David” who is living evidence that David, despite his sins, would be redeemed: “the deliverances of David,” Prime assures, “were but a taste of those which we feede on” (B2v, C1).

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comprehension of Bethsabe may also be illuminated by Peele himself, a striver on the periphery of court circles and a renowned flatterer who notoriously curried Elizabeth’s favor.6 Carolyn Whitney Brown has argued that David and Bethsabe condenses popular images of Elizabeth, both real and imagined: Peele represents the unmarried queen as King David and, in Bethsabe, indulges a fantasy that the queen’s reproductive body may rescue the faltering kingdom—a sheer impossibility for the 60-year-old Elizabeth in 1594, when the play is entered into the Stationers’ Register.7 In order to elucidate literary representations of male voyeurs as readers of Elizabeth’s body and the scripture, I begin this chapter not with David and Bethsabe but with Thomas Garter’s 1578 comedy, The Commody of the moste vertuous and godlye Susanna, another play that examines the relationship between Christian reader and the Old Testament through the hermeneutics of male voyeurism.8 Modern critics have read Garter’s Susannah as an allusion to Elizabeth, and at the conclusion of Susanna, Garter makes an explicit parallel between the “virtuous and godly” Susannah and his queen. In the apocryphal story of Susannah, two Elders sexually proposition the wife of Joachim and threaten her with slander: if she does not comply with their wishes, they will claim to have witnessed her adulterous tryst with a young man (later, they do indeed attest to having “[seen] them as they were together”). As in 2 Samuel, the spectacle of a beautiful woman incites sexual desire in a male voyeur. Both Peele and Garter depict biblical women as bodies to be perceived by their audience; like the Elders, David sins by (mis)reading the object of his desire as an erotic body. In Susanna it is the prophet Daniel, sent by God to prevent false judgment, who guides the spectators to a clear view of Susannah’s truth—that is, he teaches them how to read her correctly. Peele depicts Bethsabe herself as an agent of redemption who fulfills the Christian audience’s expectation of mastery and propriety over the Old Testament. Peele’s version of biblical history focuses on the theatrics of viewing the female body; by figuring Elizabeth in Bethsabe, he does not reject the body but transforms physical spectacle into the inward illumination of faith. As in Jacob and Esau, Bethsabe’s womb represents the essential physical and Judaic umbilical link that is the narrative thread between Jewish history and Christian salvation.

6 Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris directly solicits the queen’s attentions. On the play’s use of dramatic convention, see R. Headlam Wells, “Elizabethan Epideictic Drama: Praise and Blame in the Plays of Peele and Lyly,” Cahiers Elisabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1983): 15-33. 7 See Brown, “‘A Farre More Worthy Wombe’: Reproductive Anxiety in Peele’s David and Bethsabe,” in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1991), pp. 192-7. 8 John Mayer comments that both Bathsheba and Susannah are “unclean” as they are apprehended in their respective gardens, washing themselves because of menstruation (Many Commentaries in One [London, 1647], p. 403). The virtuous innocence of Susanna was a popular Renaissance trope, emerging as the subject of not only Garter’s popular play, but numerous lyrics throughout the sixteenth century.

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The Virtuous and Godly Susanna In the biblical story of Susannah, we are told that her husband Joachim chose “a verie faire woman, and one that feared God” with a lineage of the same: “Her father and her mother also were godlie people, & taught their daughter according to the Law of Moses.” But Susannah’s outward appearance proves anathema to this Law as her beauty leads men away from the sacred commandments. After they glimpse Joachim’s comely wife, the Elders “turned away their [minde], & caste downe their eyes, [that] they shulde not see heaven, nor remember juste judgements”: instead of looking to God, they become voyeurs, filled with lust at the sight of Susannah walking through her garden. Their collusion begins when they discover one another back at Susannah’s garden, both hoping for another glimpse. From the reader’s perspective, the narrative has an uncomfortably erotic construction; during the protracted description of how Susannah came to be alone in her garden, including the anticipation of a soap and oil cleansing ritual, we occupy the Elders’ subject position, becoming complicit as they stalk the unwitting Susannah. When given the choice of yielding to their desire or being slandered with the false charge that she has sequestered herself for a sexual encounter with a young man, Susannah chooses the latter, refusing to commit the sin of adultery. Even during her trial, the Elders indulge in their lustful viewing of Susannah: they insist that she removes her face covering so that “thei might so be satisfied with her beautie.” They are also “satisfied” that the mere fact of Susannah’s attractive visage will confirm her guilt. It was not only Susannah’s exemplary piety but the extent of her suffering that struck a chord for Elizabeth and her Protestant subjects.9 During the early years of her reign, Elizabeth compares herself to Susannah, another victim of false testimony as she offers thanks to God for delivering her from Catholic persecution.10 For Elizabeth and Garter, Susannah offered an image of improbable, miraculous salvation relevant to contemporary events. Garter’s prologue explains the value of Susannah’s story for a Christian audience. The play “[d]oth but declare a matter olde, as it were done anew./And sheweth forth how prone God is, to helpe such as are just,/And in that God before all men, doe put assured trust” (7-9).11 He justifies the narrative as an indisputable example that God will provide salvation for the faithful; at the same time, Garter raises the possibility of experiencing the theatrical representation of Susannah in a more prurient manner. He acknowledges that the audience, like the Elders, will enjoy Susannah as voyeurs absorbing a titillating scene: “The strong assaultes of wicked men, that lecherous lustes had led/To ravish 9

M. Lindsay Kaplan argues that “the exemplary virtuousness of Susanna, her special relationship to God and the attacks on her reputation by veiled representatives of Catholicism [the Elders]” point to Elizabeth (“Sexual Slander and the Politics of the Erotic in Garter’s Susanna,” in The Judgment of Susanna: Authority and Witness, ed. Ellen Spolsky [Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996], p. 79). 10 “Thou hast made me one of the number of those whom Thou freest from great afflictions” (Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 155). 11 All quotations are taken from the 1578 facsimile, The Commody of the most vertuous and Godlye Susanna (1578). The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936/7). Citations are to line number.

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her, and to pollute, her chaste and wyfely view,/This is the somme of all that shall be shewed unto you” (13-15). Susannah’s body will “shew” us truth as well as an erotic spectacle. Garter also anticipates our moralistic reaction to this bodily “show” which incited the Elders’ “lecherous lustes”: “And though perchaunce some wanton worde, doe pass which may not seeme/Or gestures light not meete for this, your wisedomes may it deeme,/Accoumpt that nought delightes the hart of men on earth,/So much as matters grave and sad, if they be mixt with myrth” (16-19). He assures that these “wanton wordes” are comedic and serve to temper the gravity of Susannah’s situation. Through such devices, the audience will withstand Susannah’s suffering and be reassured by her “good example” of God’s protection. We quickly see how Garter’s Susannah is acutely vulnerable to her male viewers. Because of her piety, the Devil targets her as the ultimate prize: “She serveth God and on him sets,/her study and her care” (80-81). Later, the Devil’s son “Ill Report,” the personification of the Elders’ slander, echoes this point: “There is in all this Babilon, but one that he doth spye,/That feareth God, and eke my Dad in all his workes defye” (151-2). At the mercy of Ill Report, Susannah appears particularly helpless; true to the biblical account, her salvation will only come when God sends Daniel, who exposes the people’s ignorance and the Elders’ lies. Susannah, like Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, is redeemed only through a male benefactor’s defense. It is only by Daniel’s intervention that Susannah’s life and reputation are saved and the Elders (whom Garter dubs Voluptas and Sensualitas) duly punished with a sentence of execution. As M. Lindsay Kaplan has argued, in Susannah, Garter also examines Elizabeth’s vulnerability to her subjects’ false testimony against her.12 Where the Devil failed to seduce Susannah into sin, Ill Report boasts, slander will succeed: “[T]hough the Devill himselfe, could not tempt Susans grace/The wit of Mayster Ill Report hath her and it defaste,/Oh goodly wit, oh noble brayne, whence commeth this devyce” (183-5). When the Elders are rebuffed by Susannah in her garden, their slander is indeed of the most vicious kind: Voluptas: Come away, come away, in fayth Madame, you are a secrete whore Full long have I mistrusted it, though I tooke you not before. Sensualitas: A whore, yea vyle and fylthye whore, fye on it filthy acte, I thinke a thousand of her toyes, the vyldest whore doth lack. (793-6)

The moment is a jarring reminder of how verbal acts can shape the public construction of selfhood—sexual chastity and legitimacy of birth—at any time and without warning. As we will see at the end of the play, Daniel’s protective, patriarchal arm will extend explicitly to the queen. Susanna concludes with an appeal to God for Elizabeth’s protection, voiced most energetically by Susannah’s husband Joachim: “[G]ood Lorde amongst thy giftes, which every day are seene,/We have to prayse thy mighty grace, for our most noble Queene./Defende her Lorde in all affayres, give passage to thy word./And cut them short that will her wo, graunt this O living Lord” (1433-6).

12

“Sexual Slander,” pp. 73-84.

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In The Virtuous and Godly Susanna, Garter expands on this conceit of the virtuous woman’s plight but also complicates Susannah as a victim of defamation who, to some extent, deserves this public scrutiny. Garter suggests that Susannah, acutely aware of her vulnerability to public slander, is not only a “virtuous and godly” victim of defamation but an oppressive noble maintaining her own censorious regime. Susannah demonstrates that she is savvy to the perils of her privileged life, including the loose talk of her servants. One of her maids attests: “[At home] had I for to run abroade my free and youthly will,/here may we not once peepe for feare, our mouthes are shut up still” (714-15). Susannah’s other maid remarks that, despite her hopes, she may not attain “hye degree” (627) by any amount of virtue: “For we but wayters are on them, that leade these happy days,/We trudge and travayle and take payne, they do possesse the prayse” (634-5). The scene of Susannah’s entrance into the garden that immediately follows seems to confirm these claims: first, she declares her own exemplary virtue with great braggadocio—“If any woman in this world, my God may justly prayse./It is I good Lorde above the rest, that liveth in these days” (674-5)—and then she scolds the two maids for forgetting her soap and oil: “Me thinkes the wether very warme, the season very hote,/And yet there is a thing or two, that both you have forgot” (693-4). The reprimand recalls Susannah’s earlier exchange with Joachim in which she appears more carping wife than silenced victim. After she criticizes him for arriving late to dinner, Joachim chides Susannah in return: “I will tell thee my mynde,/That women there be none at all, but shrewes they are by kynde” (355-6). Susannah’s trial In his introduction to the Great Bible, the first full translation of the Old and New Testaments that began a Protestant tradition of placing the story of Susanna in the Apocrypha rather than at the end of the Book of Daniel, Miles Coverdale shares his concern that readers will lose their way in these “dark places of scripture” inspired by the “blind and covetous opinions of men.” Garter expands on the effects of these “dark” aspects of the narrative and the subsequent dangers of reading the scripture as he portrays the public’s misperceptions of Susannah during her trial. Garter complicates the image of a virtuous, suffering Elizabeth in Susannah, juggling the dual implications of watching Susannah as both erotic voyeurism and as a pedagogical example of how God rewards the faithful. During her trial, Susannah’s body is held up for view as a text open for interpretation. The “Bayliff” announces that it is time for the public to pass judgment on Susannah: All manner creatures, That have humayne features, And dwell within this Lande, Come in and disclose, What you heare and suppose, By this woman Susan, And what you can tell, Shall now be heard well,

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As reason it is, Your worke shall be good, In saving her blood, If she did not amis, But if she be guilty, Then is it necessitie, That she die for her sinne, Then what you can say, Let us know straight way, For the Court doth begin. (959-76)

He makes clear that Susannah’s fate lies in the people’s ability to “disclose” her clearly, and yet they are unable to do so. The Elders request the removal of her veil ostensibly to verify her identity, but they confide to one another their real motive: “for though we could not touch/Yet pleasing our eyes with this her sight shall serve our lust as much” (992-3). Viewing Susannah, the play suggests, is tantamount to physical indiscretion. Earlier in the play, the Elders describe their viewing of Susannah as a satisfactory substitution for sexual consummation: “[In the orchard] were we sure at the least, our eyes to fyll and please” (660). As we see during the trial scene, disclosing the truth of Susannah’s body suggests also a textual truth—a way of correctly reading the Christian essence of God’s Word in the Hebrew scripture. After exposing the Elders’ fraud, Daniel warns his audience to see the men as an example: [Y]ou that wicked are in deede, have you none other trust, God will confound your actes and deedes, [and] turne your selves to dust And then for your just deserte, he will place you to dwell, In Plutoes Pit a fyery Lake, the deepest dyke in hell. And therefore I advertise you, doe learne your selves to know, And reade Gods bokes where you shall fynde, I nought but truth doe showe. And let these wicked Elders two, be sample to you all, View well their lofty state of late, and now doe marke their fall. (1126-33)

The people, he argues, do not know “ill from good” (1063). Although the Judge insists that all witnesses swear on the Bible (1007), they incorrectly read Susannah and, as Daniel accuses them, “have not knowen the truth” of “this Israelite” (1072, 1070). Daniel argues that the purpose of reading “Gods bokes” is to find the “truth” that “showe[s]” there—a clear explication of the consequences of evil deeds. After Daniel proves Voluptas and Sensualitas guilty, the Judge, echoing Daniel’s initial claim that he will show the truth “playnly said” (1067), announces to his audience that they will now “see playne” (1207) Susannah’s innocence. Susannah herself expounds on the purpose of her story after Daniel’s victory at court: “See here good people, unto you all I speake,/How God doth helpe the innocent, and eake their sorrowes breake,/Let myne example comfort you, in all kinde of distresse,/That if you suffer for his sake, he will your cares release” (1105-8). Although Garter reassures us of God’s proactive response to the Elders’ indiscretions, we are constantly reminded of the precarious nature of judgment and condemnation. Susannah’s father, Helchia, scolds his wife when she fears that

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Susannah will be wrongly charged: “Doest thou not know our Lorde and God is able to make right,/The weakest parte of simple men, agaynst all Tyrantes spight[?]” (8889). But he also easily entertains the possibility of Susannah’s sin. The play concludes with a flurry of praise for the queen, with each character claiming the highest level of devotion: Joachim appeals to God for the queen’s protection, and Susannah’s mother adds her wish that the queen’s subjects heed her rule. The straightforward praise also directs our attention away from the story itself, insisting on a neatly packaged correlation between Elizabeth and the “virtuous and godly” Susannah. For careful readers of the play, however, Susannah remains a blurry vision; like a trick picture, she changes in form depending on our angle and inclination. David and Bathsheba in England Both the Elders and David attempt to manipulate the public interpretation of a woman’s body. In 2 Samuel, David covertly observes the bathing Bathsheba and, later, discreetly summons her to his bed. His attempts to disguise Bathsheba’s subsequent pregnancy as the result of a reunion with Uriah, her solider-husband, fail, and David finally resolves the matter by sending Uriah to the frontlines, where his death is all but assured. As we have seen in Elizabethan drama, the pregnant Jewish woman is an overdetermined site of concealment and disclosure, mystery and illumination. In Jacob and Esau Rebecca threatened to produce elect and monstrous offspring, always evading the grasp of the men who attempt to control her; by contrast, Bethsabe’s pregnancies in Peele’s version of 2 Samuel play out David’s mastery of scriptural veritas that is his access to the true word of God and, subsequently, his path to salvation. In David and Bethsabe David’s ruse with Bethsabe’s first pregnancy is an attempt to manipulate how she is being read; ultimately, it is Bethsabe who, with Solomon’s birth, enables David to see her body clearly as evidence of his inward illumination and God’s grace. In 2 Samuel, David’s attempt to control the public reception of Bathsheba’s (illegitimate) pregnancy immediately leads to devastating consequences. The prophet Nathan confronts David after Uriah’s death to forewarn him of God’s vengeance: Thus saith the Lorde, Beholde, I wil raise up evil against thee out of thine owne house, and wil take thy wives before thine eyes, & give them unto thy neighbour, and he shal lye with thy wives in the sight of this sunne. For thou didst it secretly: but I wil do this thing before all Israel, and before the sunne. (12:11-12)

This retributive “evil” transforms David from voyeur to pitiable spectacle: like the Elders, the sinning David becomes the subject of the public’s consumption. After David neglects to punish his son Ammon for the rape of his half-sister, Tamar, Absolom avenges the incest by murdering Ammon himself. David’s forgiveness only furthers Absolom’s subversion of his authority. With David’s traitorous advisor Achitophel in tow, Absolom launches a full-fledged assault on his father’s crown. Absolom’s affront, like Ammon’s rape and the death of the son borne out of David’s adultery, is undeniable proof that God has “raise[d] up evil” in the House of David.

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In David’s fall into sin and subsequent forgiveness by God, Protestant readers saw a compelling narration of felix culpa. A textual note in the Geneva Bible cites David as proof that the “moste perfect [may] fall headlong into vice & abomination” (11:15) and emphasizes his immediate contrition: God “wolde touche Davids conscience” with Uriah’s “fidelitie & [religion]” (11:11). David’s seeming manipulation of Uriah, the editors suggest, may have been motivated by concern for Bathsheba: David encourages Uriah to bed Bathsheba not only to conceal his own actions but to prevent her from being stoned for adultery (11:5). More than these generous interpretations of David’s actions, however, Elizabethans redeemed David by reading the biblical text as a narrative about Catholic treachery. Like Peele, commentators neatly displace their moral censure from father to son: as with Haman’s threat to the virtuous Esther, Absolom’s rebellion offered opportunity to identify Catholic archetypes in the biblical text. Urging Elizabeth during the parliamentary debates of 1572 to execute Mary Queen of Scots, a bishop participating in a joint committee of MPs and the House of Commons uses the figure of Absolom, to whom he ascribes the amalgamation of sins transpiring in the house of David, to paint the specter of Mary: “The late Scottish Queen hath heaped up together all the sins of the licentious sons of David: adultery, murder, conspiracy, treasons, and blasphemies against God also.”13 No doubt with a similar political allegory in mind, the Geneva editors immediately identify Absolom’s wickedness, even as he avenges his brother’s rape of Tamar (13:28): when David learns of Absolom’s rebellion, he understands that “Satan had so possessed” Absolom’s heart (15:14).14 Like the bishop, Peele draws from an Elizabethan tradition of figuring David’s battle with his recalcitrant son as the queen’s struggle with her Catholic halfsister. This allegory was so pervasive within the culture that a critique of the Israelite king, Pasachoff contends, would have been taken as a direct affront to Elizabeth.15 At the helm of a kingdom besieged with accusations of sexual iniquity, David also appeared to some Protestant writers as a biblical counterpart of Henry VIII, a king, in A.R. Braunmuller’s words, whose “private immorality taints the nation and threatens its future, especially through endangering the royal succession.”16 The allegorical conflation of Henry VIII and Elizabeth in David did not have contradictory significations, however: the tumultuous events of 2 Samuel played out the passing of the crown from Henry’s troubled reign to the promise of Tudor renewal in Elizabeth. As a political allegory, the David and Bathsheba story provided a particular logic to Elizabeth’s reign as the redemptive trajectory of the House of David. As I will show, Peele’s main purpose is to create such a narrative, and he envisions Bethsabe herself as amending the initial moment of voyeuristic prurience.

13

Neale, Vol. 1, p. 270. See also comments on 14:30 and 14:32. The Geneva characterizes Absolom as a machiavel who curries the favor of David’s subjects: “Thus by slander, flatterie, and faire promises the wicked seke preferrement” (15:4). 15 Pasachoff, pp. 107-8, passim. 16 Braunmuller, pp. 107-25. 14

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Voyeurism in David and Bethsabe Modern criticism has made much of Peele’s vision of moral redemption in The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, and his particular emphasis on David’s sins.17 Peele’s moralizing history, as both Pasachoff and Bevington have noted, is less sympathetic to David than most contemporary interpretations of the narrative; David and Bethsabe depicts Absalon’s rebellion with ambivalence rather than with overt condemnation.18 In David and Bethsabe, Peele faithfully depicts Absolon’s expulsion from Jerusalem and subsequent retaliation, yet his indictment of David is more intense than it is in contemporary biblical commentaries and political allusions. The Chorus laments David’s deception of Uriah: “If holy David so shoke hands with sinne,/What shall our baser spirits glorie in[?]/This kingly giving lust her raigne,/Pursues the sequell with a greater ill” (DV).19 David’s actions precipitate familial sin that branches from father to son: Absolon describes Amnon’s rape of Tamar as “sprung from [the] root of heinous lust” (CiiV) and Absolon’s own symbolic fate is to be executed while trapped by his hair (by the roots) in the limb of a (familial) tree. The bishop’s heavy-handed analogy between David and Elizabeth, Absolom and Mary above becomes a more expansive web of political allegories in Peele’s adaptation of the biblical story. His representations of David and Absolom are not intended, as they are in the parliamentary incident of 1572, to be a warning to Elizabeth, who had already shown herself in the years after the Armada to be successful in suppressing England’s Catholic enemies. Rather, David and Bethsabe plays with the slippery allegorical possibilities of the David narratives, figuring Elizabeth not only in David, whom he represents as an emotional and vulnerable king, but in Bethsabe who supplants Absolon as his father’s object of desire and who plays a proactive role in sustaining David’s kingdom. Bolstering her flailing husband, Bethsabe signifies a moral order and an authentic marital bond: the romanticized title of Peele’s play, For the Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (with the Tragedie of Absolon), sustains a fantasy not only about a pregnant queen but also a companionate-type marriage between the queen and her former aggressor. In its protracted staging of Bethsabe’s bathing scene, David and Bethsabe suggests how the moral regeneration of the House of David—the lessons learned by David within the play and the message about monarchical duties imparted to David 17 Bruce Thomas Boehrer argues that Peele’s play dramatizes the pervasive consequences of David’s sin and then enacts a fantasy of political and social recuperation: “David and Bethsabe’s lack of plot continuity and focus, its contradictions of language and character portrayal, and its emphasis upon sexual pollution all unite to serve a single purpose: to rescue the monarch and his dynasty from the consequences of his own criminal behavior” (Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992], p. 62). Ewbank concludes that David and Bethsabe’s only goal is “the working out of moral and civil disorder within the House of David” (“The House of David,” p. 36). 18 Bevington, pp. 219-20 and Pasachoff, pp. 122-3. Bevington argues that Peele’s play wavers on the subject of rebellion against the monarch: “Absolom’s rebellion cannot succeed, yet David is unfit to govern” (p. 220). Solomon is the monarchy’s only viable option. 19 All citations refer to the 1599 text.

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and Bethsabe’s audience—will come through the theatrical experience: the vision of Bethsabe as both lurid spectacle and nurturing mother and wife. Like Garter, Peele positions the Jewish woman as the means through which to enact a type of relationship with the Old Testament itself. As it embellishes the scriptural account of David’s voyeurism, the play conveys a self-consciousness about how the reader, like the voyeur, reacts to the spectacle of the erotic female body. In 2 Samuel, Bathsheba is a silent, passive object of desire: “David arose out of his bed, and walked up on the roofe of the Kings palace; and from the roofe, he sawe a woman washing her selfe: and the woman was very beautiful to loke upon. And David sent and inquired what woman it was” (2 Samuel 11:2-3). In David and Bethsabe, Peele initially invites his audience to participate in David’s experience with a detailed account of Bethsabe in her bath. The speaker of the prologue dramatically reveals the spectacle of the naked Bethsabe: “He drawes a curtaine, and discovers Bethsabe with her maid bathing over a spring, she sings, and David sits above vewing her” (BV). The play’s opening stage directions create a tension between David’s (and our own) voyeurism and Peele’s expressed hope that “[divine] Adonay” will, “[u]pon the wings of [his] well tempered verse,” redirect the audience’s gaze “above the towers of Heaven”(B). David’s initial observation of Bethsabe, however, conveys less an adaptation of the Old Testament narrative than an Ovidian seduction—a scenario in which David appears as an aggressive, mythic creature.20 It is Bethsabe, however, who speaks the play’s most seductive (and Petrarchan) rhetoric: Hot sunne, coole fire, tempered with sweet aire, Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white haire Shine sun, burne fire, breathe aire, and ease mee, Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me Shadow (my sweet nurse) keep me from burning Make not my glad cause, cause of mourning. Let not my beauties fire, Enflame unstaied desire, Nor pierce any bright eye, That wandreth lightly. (BV)

She repeatedly appeals to shade as her “fair nurse,” a protective, maternal figure who will prevent her body from being misperceived as a lustful invitation. But she 20

See Bevington, Tudor Drama, pp. 219-20; Campbell, pp. 252-60; Raymond-Jean Frontain, “The Curious Frame of Chapman’s Ovids Banquet of Sence: 2 Samuel 11,” Cahiers Elisabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies 31 (1987): 37-43; and I.S. Ekeblad, “The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe: A Note on George Peele’s Biblical Drama,” English Studies: A Journal of English Letters and Philology 39.2 (1958): 57-62 on the play’s incorporation of the Ovidian tradition. Campbell argues that the play, while evoking George Chapman’s Ovid’s Banquet of Sense in David’s initial seduction of Bethsabe, is very much in the tradition of divine poetry, anticipating Miltonic invocations in the opening and concluding scenes. See also Murray Roston’s discussion of Garter’s moralization of Ovid in Biblical Drama in England From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), pp. 87-92.

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acknowledges immediately that the “shroud” of shade cannot shield her from the sensual winds that “sweetened Adam’s love,” suggesting that she is, like Eve, the instigator of their transgressions.21 Bethsabe’s ironically cautionary song establishes her acute self-consciousness of the male gaze and also anticipates her role as a touchstone for both spiritual blindness and, alternately, perspicuity. David’s own interpretation of Bethsabe as a type of Eve confirms that Bethsabe does indeed need a protective “nurse”: What tree, what shade, what spring, what paradise Enjoyes the beautie of so faire a dame? Faire Eva, plac’d in perfect happinesse, Lending her praise-notes to the liberall heavens, Strooke with the accents of Arch-angels tunes, Wrought not more pleasure to her husbands thoughts, Then this fair womans words and notes to mine. (BV-Bii).

David’s ironic compliment of her as a sight that provides the ultimate “pleasure to her husband’s thoughts” construes her act of bathing as a type of infidelity to Urias (Uriah). David is enticed by Bethsabe’s body and also by her seductive “words and notes.” He views her and “reads” her simultaneously. Peele quickly calls attention to David’s transgressions with the entrance of his servant, Cusay, who delivers David’s summons: Bethsabe: Ah what is Bethsabe to please the King, Or what is David, that he should desire For fickle beuties sake his servants wife? Cusay: David (thou knowest faire dame) is wise and just, Elected to the heart of Israels God, Then doe not thou expostulate with him For any action that contents his soule. Bethsabe: My lord the King, elect to Gods owne heart, Should not his gracious jealousie incense, Whose thoughts are chaste, I hate incontinence. (BiiV)

The intrusion gives occasion for Bethsabe to chastise David for his infidelity to his subjects and to God. She acquiesces as “the Kings poore handmaid” (BiiV) who must obey his commands, a moniker that anticipates her later description of herself as God’s handmaid who guides her husband back to a righteous kingship (Dii). As Brown contends, Peele’s Bethsabe “is more than a sight or site of David’s transgression, more than the silent object of desire. She is fully a speaking subject, exposing and criticizing the contradiction between David’s lecherous behavior and the ideology of the godly king.”22

21 See Susan T. Viguers, “Art and Reality in George Peele’s The Araygnment of Paris and David and Bethsabe,” College Language Association Journal 30.4 (1987): 481-500. David’s sin, she argues, is initially depicted through artistic constructs, such as the revealed spectacle of the bathing Bethsabe-as-Eve. 22 Brown, pp. 185-6.

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When the reluctant Bethsabe is first brought to him, David welcomes his “darling,” attesting that his “eyes with all [her] beuties pierst,/As heavens bright eye burnes most when most he climes/The crooked Zodiake with his fierie sphere,/And shineth furthest from this earthly globe” (Biii). He misconstrues his lustful gaze as heavenly, tantamount to the sun’s “view” of the stars. Although she employs traditional Petrarchan conceit to describe David’s desire—his vulnerable, “unarmed heart [was] ... by her haplesse beautie pierc’d” (Biii)—Bethsabe also understands him as perverse: Too neere my lord was your unarmed heart, When furthest off my haplesse beautie pierc’d, And would this drerie day had turned to night, Or that some pitchie cloud had clok’d the Sun, Before their lights had caus’d my lord to see His name disparag’d, and my chastitie. (Biii)

Bethsabe warns against the dangers of female allure, her “haplesse” beauty over which she has no control. In Bethsabe’s description, David’s vision of her is enabled by the sun, but also mimics the sun, piercing through the shade that shrouds her. We are meant to contrast David’s audacity, his distraction from God, with the omniscient divinity to which Peele later alludes: David’s voyeuristic encounter is the opposite of God’s “sacred eyesight” that watches over David’s army as they successfully subdue Absolon. Peele continually emphasizes how David misapprehends Bethsabe as an erotic object; his transgressive perception of her allows his audience to shift from complicit sinner to moral judge, fully sympathetic with Bethsabe’s disgust. David’s fixation on the aesthetic experience of viewing Bethsabe (and, later, Absolon) is in stark contrast with Bethsabe’s piety, her inward vision of God. It is clear, moreover, that she has not simply forgotten her husband; she later mourns his death not only once, but again with the death of her first born son with David. Bethsabe acknowledges her culpability while still juxtaposing her godliness against David’s sin: Urias, woe is me to thinke hereon, For who is it among the sonnes of men, That sayth not to my soule, the King hath [sinned] David hath done amisse, and Bethsabe Laid snares of death unto Urias life. My sweet Urias, [fallen] into the pit Art thou, and gone even to the gates of hell For Bethsabe, that wouldst not shrowd her shame. O what is it to serve the lust of Kings, How Lyonlike they rage when we resist, But Bethsabe in humblenesse attend, The grace that God will to his handmaid send. (DV-Dii)

Bethsabe laments her role in her husband’s death, but pledges her faith in God at this moment of spiritual crisis. We comprehend retroactively that she has always

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understood herself as not the King’s handmaid (as she is forced to claim earlier) but a servant to God. Peele’s portrayal of Bethsabe is a departure from standard representations of Bathsheba as a flat character who personifies David’s sin. Thomas Wyatt’s “A Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms,” his translation of Pietro Aretino’s 1594 poetic adaptation of the biblical psalms attributed to David, characterizes Bathsheba as the catalyst of David’s disloyalty to his subjects and to God. Wyatt describes the spectacle of Bathsheba as a scene of original sin, in which David is “converted” from devout King to fallen spirit: Love, to give law unto his subject hearts, Stood in the eyes of Barsabe the bright, And in a look anon himself converts Cruelly pleasant before King David sight; First dazed his eyes, and further forth he starts With venomed breath, as softly as he might Touched his senses, and overruns his bones With creeping fire sparpled for the nonce.23

The love that he gives to his subjects, with the vision of Bathsheba, transforms into “cruelly pleasant” lust. Bathsheba precipitates David’s metamorphosis into a fallen man envenomed and “dazed” with the “creeping fire” of his desire. Arthur Jackson endorses a similar view of Bathsheba in his 1646 commentary as a woman who “kindled lustfull thoughts and desires in Davids heart”: though more passive object than aggressor, it is Bathsheba who in these literary representations inspires what Jackson describes as the “poysoned arrow” that penetrates David’s body.24 Peele’s biblical history departs from a strong literary tradition in Reformist literature that equates Bathsheba with both eroticism and violence: in the only miracle play incorporating David, it is Bathsheba and not David who plots Uriah’s murder.25 Similarly, the parodic allusions to David and Bathsheba that predominated in the later seventeenth century portray her as a lustful and willing participant, most notably Samuel Cobb’s mock-heroic poem “Bersaba: or, the love of David,” in which Bathsheba is a woman who “thinks it brave t’enjoy an am’rous King.”26

23

Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R.A. Rebholz (London: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 195. Rebholz glosses “sparpled for the nonce” as “scattered [for the purpose]” (456n). 24 Jackson, p. 375. 25 As Elmer Blistein puts it, she is more “sinning than sinned against” in this medieval drama (Blistein, ed. David and Bethsabe in The Dramatic Works of George Peele [New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1970], Vol. 3, p. 169). For a discussion of the Cornish play, Ordinale de Origine Mundi, see pp. 168-70. 26 Samuel Cobb, “Bersaba: or, the love of David” (London, 1695), p. 5. Wojcik notes a Midrashic interpretation laying blame on Bathsheba for taking off her dress (p. 27).

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Absolon’s rebellion David, after being told of his daughter Tamar’s rape by her half-brother, personifies Sin as a voyeur, hungrily viewing his objects of desire with many eyes: “Sin with his sevenfold crowne and purple robe,/Begins his triumphs in my guiltie throne,/ There sits he watching with his hundred eyes,/Our idle minutes, and our wanton thoughts,/And with his baits made of our fraile desires,/Gives us the hooke that hales our soules to hell” (CiiV).27 Bethsabe’s sexual allure is not forgotten in David and Bethsabe but repressed and reconfigured as Peele distinguishes Bethsabe from Absolon, to whom David also plays the role of voyeur.28 The play’s characterization of Bethsabe turns on this fundamental parallel and, ultimately, contrast with Absolon, whose beauty also debilitates David. Absolon’s physical allure is established in the biblical account: “Now in all Israel there was none to be so muche praised for beautie as Absolon: from the sole of his foote even to the top of his head there was no blemish in him” (14:25). Peele’s descriptions of Absolon take further this conceit, and are resonant with David’s earlier rapture for Bethsabe: David’s “longings [are] tangled in [Bethsabe’s] haire” (BiiV) just as the traitorous Absolon’s flowing hair, his “golden hue,” fills David with wonder and reverence.29 Absolon’s hair becomes the central image in David’s plea that Joab spare his son’s life: “[T]ouch no haire of him,/Not that fair haire with which the wanton winds/Delight to play, and loves to make in curle. ... O spoile not Joab, Joves faire ornaments,/Which he hath sent to solace Davids soule” (Gii). Absalon’s femininity and erotic appeal become contiguous with political threat: the erotic, feminized spectacle of Absolon continually “strikes” David, pulling him away from his political responsibilities and from God. When David readmits Absolon into the city, he refuses to let Absolon see his face. His intention might be to conceal his own emotions from his son, but the gesture also suggests how David does not trust himself to see clearly; consequently, he must protect himself from the sight of Absolon. On the cusp of war with his father, Absolon describes his physical beauty as evidence of God’s grace: [God’s] thunder is intangled in my haire, And with my beautie is his lightning quencht, I am the man he made to glorie in,

27

David also personifies Lust as “[p]iercing with venome of thy poysoned eies,/The strength and marrow of [his] tainted bones” as he laments Absolon’s treachery (EiiiV). 28 Peele contrasts Bethsabe and Tamar as well. Roger Stilling, in Love and Death in Renaissance Tragedy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1976), notes the contrast between Tamar and Amnon’s destructive sexual relationship and David and Bethsabe’s redemptive love. 29 Brown argues that “Absalon’s political rebellion is similar to David’s adulterous rebellion: both are based in an ethic of beauty, specifically of beautiful hair that embodies desire—David’s adulterous desire fixating upon Bethsabe’s hair, and Absalon’s political desire solipsistically focusing upon his own beauty radiating from his hair as an aesthetic legitimation of his claim to the throne” (p. 183).

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When by the errors of my fathers sinne He lost the path that led into the land Wherewith our chosen ancestors were blest. (FiiV)

Absalon believes that his visage “[c]arries the finall purpose of ... God” (FiiV). His vanity blurs aesthetic, erotic spectacle with spiritual illumination, setting up by contrast Bethsabe’s ability to help David make a clear distinction between the two. As in the biblical narrative, Absolon, while riding his mule, is “taken up between the heaven and the earthe” (18:9), as his hair becomes entangled in a tree.30 Indeed, even on the cusp of death, Absolon in David and Bethsabe insists on the divinity of his physicality: “O let my beautie fill these sencelesse plants,/With sence and power to lose me from this plague,/And worke some wonder to prevent his death,/Whose life thou madst a speciall miracle” (Giii). And, a moment later, as Joab delivers him a fatal strike, he imagines his father as the voyeur moved by the vision of his rebel son: “O my deere father, that thy melting eyes/Might pierce this thicket to behold thy sonne,/Thy deerest sonne gor’de with a mortall dart” (Giiii). Joab initially reminds David of Absolon’s beauty in order to encourage David’s forgiveness of his son: “A beautifull and fair young man is he,/In all his bodie is no blemish seene,/His haire is like the wyer of Davids Harpe,/That twines about his bright and [ivory] necke” (Eiii). But Joab’s admiration also foreshadows Absolon’s lethal vanity, and Joab’s soldier’s own vilification of the entrapped Absolon: See where the rebell in his glorie hangs, Where is the vertue of thy beautie Absalon, Will any of us here now feare thy lookes? Or be in love with that thy golden haire, Wherein was wrapt rebellion gainst thy sire, And cords prepar’d to stop thy fathers breath? (Giiii)

Absolon’s fate is a fitting end: his most glorious attribute, his hair, literally ensnares him. Just prior to Absolon’s death, his advisor, Achitophel, struck with remorse at his own disloyalty to David, imagines that he is outcasted as Eve’s progeny: in contrast to David and Bethsabe’s second son, Solomon, as we will see, Achitophel signifies the traitorous body that poisons the state. Like Absolon’s, Achitophel’s transgression is rendered in these feminized terms: Ope earth, and take thy miserable sonne Into the bowels of thy cursed wombe, Once in a [surfeit] thou diddest spue him forth, Now for fell hunger sucke him in againe, And be his bodie poyson to thy vaines. And now thou hellish instrument of heaven, Once execute the arrest of Jove’s just doome, And stop his breast that curseth Israel. (GiiV)

30

Absolon’s death, like Achitophel’s, is glossed by the Geneva editors as proof of divine justice: “This is a terrible example of Gods vengeance against them that are rebels or disobedient to their parents” (18:9).

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It is this “cursed wombe” that has occasioned the tragic bind within which he finds himself entrapped as a member of the rebel army; Achitophel ends his life determined to poison that which has already tainted him.31 Achitophel’s lament as he falls into “the bowels of [earth’s] cursed womb” also draws attention to Bethsabe, whose womb, though once cursed, will produce the son that replaces Absalon as the future King. Peele elaborates on this womb imagery also in his version of Absolon’s death. As Absalon hangs precariously from a tree by his own hair, vulnerable to slaughter at the hands of the King’s army, he manages one last speech. His final words, partially comprised of a corrupt textual fragment often omitted from modern editions of the play, convey an abstract sense of despair: “What boots it Absalon, unhappie Absalon,/Sighing I say what boots it Absalon,/To have disclos’d a farre more worthy wombe” (GiiiiV).32 In Absolon’s declaration that emerges, improbably, ten lines after he has ostensibly been executed by the King’s army, Absalon juxtaposes his own body, capable of ensuring the future line of Kings, against Bethsabe’s; perhaps he also imagines himself in competition with Bethsabe to produce an heir. In this feminized self-image, he imagines his curative—if thwarted—“wombe” as that which will allow the corrupt kingdom to be reborn. This imagery also underscores, by damning contrast, Bethsabe’s powerful fecundity in giving birth to the future King Solomon. Like Hester and Rebecca who deploy the female body as a secret place of concealment and disclosure, Bethsabe too can physically “disclose” truth: in the play, she has exclusive possession of this “worthy” womb. Whereas the barren Tamar’s story ends with her expulsion, Bethsabe’s, centered on her ability to reproduce, becomes one of cosmic regeneration. Bethsabe’s “worthie wombe” In the concluding scenes of David and Bethsabe, Peele elevates Bethsabe’s role to spiritual guide and sympathetic wife who is loyal to her husband even as he wavers between Absolon and Solomon. Peele plays up the contrast between the vulnerable, emotional king and Bethsabe, who attempts to direct David’s attentions to his new heir. Peele represents David’s grief for his rebel son not as an expression of paternal loss but as an imprudent outpouring of desire that takes the reader back to David’s initial captivation with Bethsabe. As we have seen, David indulges first as a voyeuristic figure of Sin who chooses to read Bethsabe incorrectly and, thus, with tragic consequences. But the play self-consciously positions Bethsabe as an erotic body that is also a figure of the scripture; David’s desire to penetrate her sexually suggests other forms of access and modes of interpretation as well. Absolon emblematizes the realm of the erotic, the world of pure desire, ambition, and vanity that David must give up; his death affirms that the female body has metamorphosed from spectacle to 31 The Geneva explicates Achitophel’s suicide as political allegory: “God’s juste vengeance even in this life is [poured] on them, which are enemies, traitours, or persecuters of his Church” (17:23). 32 See Brown on the fragment and Elizabethan concerns about the queen’s possession of the “worthy womb” that would produce a legitimate successor.

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spiritual guide who affirms David’s salvation. Bethsabe’s discouragement of David’s voyeurism, his way of seeing the world, suggests also instruction in the way of reading scripture that is the larger project of Peele’s biblical adaptation. Bethsabe greets David just before receiving news of Absolon’s death: What meanes my lord, the lampe of Israel, From whose bright eyes all eyes receive their light, To dim the glory of his sweet aspects, And paint his countenance with his hearts distresse? Why should his thoughts retaine a sad conceit, When every pleasure kneeles before his throne, And sues for sweet acceptance with his grace, Take but your Lute, and make the mountaines dance, Retrieve the sunnes sphere, and restraine the clouds, Give eares to trees, make savage Lyons tame, Impose still silence to the loudest winds, And fill the fairest day with foulest stormes, Then why shoulde passions of much meaner power, Beare head against the heart of Israel. (HV-Hii)

In David and Bethsabe’s final scenes, Bethsabe reminds David of his role as “the lampe of Israel” (HV) and a spiritual leader of his people. Bethsabe describes David’s eyes as full of light, suggesting how he must forsake voyeurism for a transcendent vision of God. Bethsabe herself has served as model for this inward illumination; Peele’s representation of her maternal body affirms her efforts to steer David toward piety. Bethsabe directs David’s gaze to spiritual things: she reconstructs David through metaphor, attributing to him the “bright eyes” that no longer signify his lustful gaze but rather are the expression of his inward faith. Bethsabe will look upon David with her “sweet sight,” a “balm” for his troubles, reminding him of the son who will become the future Israelite king: Then is the pleasure of my soveraignes heart, So wrapt within the bosome of that sonne, That Salomon, whom Israels God affects, And gave the name unto him for his love, Should be no salve to comfort Davids soule? (Hii)

Yet David refuses to renounce his rebel son despite the political ramifications of this alliance: “Salomon, my love, is Davids lord. ... But Absolon the beautie of my bones,/Faire Absolon the counterfeit of love,/Sweet Absolon, the image of content/ Must claime a portion in his fathers care,/And be in life and death King Davids sonne” (Hii-HiiV). Peele’s purpose here is both to underscore David’s impious vision of Absolon—an iconic “image” and a “counterfeit” feigning loyalty to the state— and to set up Bethsabe as a loyal wife to David. Nathan chastises David for revering Absolon who “incenst with gracelesse pride,/ Usurpes and staines the kingdome with his sinne” (HiiV), but Bethsabe attaches herself to David, sharing his grief as news of Absolon’s death reaches the court: “Die

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Bethsabe to see thy David mourne,/To heare his tunes of anguish and of hell,/O helpe my David, help thy Bethsabe” (HiiiiV).33 Bethsabe’s martyristic rhetoric on occasion of David’s grief—“Now sits thy sorrowes sucking of my bloud,/O that it might be poison to their powers,/And that their lips might draw my bosome drie,/So Davids love might ease him, though she die” (HiiiiV)—suggests Christian sacrifice and the transcendence of the body but also underscores her physical role and “worthie womb” as nursing mother.34 Joab assumes an authoritative role in the aftermath of Absalon’s death, scolding David and Bethsabe: “Why is this companie so Tragicke hew’d?” (HiiiiV). In the biblical narrative, Joab urges David’s followers not to abandon their king at this moment, yet Peele assigns this important role to Bethsabe. Still blinded by his emotional attachment to Absalon, David almost succeeds in turning his frustrated court away until Bethsabe urges them to stay, convincing them that the king is finally ready to renounce his private grief for public duty: “O stay my lords, stay, David mournes no more,/But riseth to give honour to your acts” (IV). Peele’s revisions are especially significant as he relates the final events of 2 Samuel and 1 Kings. Bethsabe’s directives depart from the scripture, in which it is Nathan who commandeers David’s choice of successor. Also, in 2 Samuel, David’s ambitious son Adonijah aggressively appoints himself heir to the throne, and David would have gladly acquiesced were it not for Nathan’s intervention: he dictates to Bathsheba exactly what she must convey to David to protect Solomon and herself from Adonijah’s persecution (1 Kings 1:11-15).35 Although Bathsheba’s participation in the scheme is important, it is Nathan who ensures David’s consent. Whereas the Bathsheba of 1 Kings disappears after soliciting David to approve a wife for Adonijah, Peele establishes Bethsabe’s fundamental role in David’s redemption. He presents Solomon as the only righteous heir and does not mention another competitor for the throne; his omission of Adonijah enables the play to represent an indubitable succession that unquestionably establishes Bethsabe’s symbolic role as a physical body that enables David’s access to (Christian) meaning. In Bethsabe, Peele plays out a fantasy that the Hebrew scripture may be accessed and readily understood as a Christian text. Once the object of sexual desire, Bethsabe’s ultimate status is as a political figure who marks a new era for David’s court. In David’s final monologue, after being reminded by both Bethsabe and Joab to focus on the auspicious future signified by Solomon’s birth, David imagines Absalon’s eyes as “now no more eyes but shining stars” (IV), no longer the instrument of voyeuristic perpetration but a signifier of 33

See Joab 19:5: “Thou hast shamed this day the faces of all thy servants, which this day have saved thy life, and the lives of thy sonnes and of thy daughters, and the lives of thy wives, and the lives of thy concubines.” 34 The Geneva gloss to 22:5 explains David as a figure of Christ, and the Geneva’s introductory argument to 1 Kings iterates the importance of David’s bloodline in this context. In the Geneva, David’s recognition of Solomon-as-Christ confirms that he is “moved by the spirit of God [to name Solomon as King] because he forsawe that Salomon shulde be [the] figure of Christ” (1:30). On images of nursing in Christian exegeses as the passing of Jewish substance to a superior being, see Lampert, pp. 24-5. 35 One possibility is that the elderly king lacks the mental faculties to fully comprehend the state of affairs.

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divine illumination. While Absalon may view God face to face in his death, there is a “curtaine drawne” (IV) that prevents David from idealizing his deceased son and from embracing the world of pure desire that he symbolizes. No longer a spectacle himself, Absolon watches his reformed father. This curtain also refers back to the play’s opening tableau, but no longer with its voyeuristic implications; with the curtain “drawn,” David and Peele’s audience are barred from the spectacle of Bethsabe. The curtain’s disclosures and concealments suggest too that which Bethsabe has revealed through her “worthie womb”: a type of truth to which David has needed access. David ultimately shifts from sinner to effective public symbol who is humble in his awareness of God’s grace. David learns by watching Bethsabe—first as erotic spectacle and then finally as queen, in possession of a restorative womb and, subsequently, mother of the future heir.36 The conceit of the curtain simulates and confirms the audience’s ability to “unveil” meaning in the Hebrew scripture, to get access to the truth that is first obfuscated and then ultimately figured through Bethsabe’s body. This second invocation of a “curtain” thus instructs us in the ways of seeing on two levels: as the monarch learns how to see himself in relation to God, the audience learns how to view the monarch—a resolution underscored by Joab’s own expression of relief at the king’s transformation which constitutes the closing lines of the play: “Bravely resolvd and spoken like a King,/Now may old Israel, and his daughters sing” (IV). As we saw in Jacob and Esau, scriptural images of childbirth are metaphorically suggestive of the “birth” of the New order from the Old as well as the obfuscation of this hermeneutical expectation by way of the maternal body. Although Bethsabe’s womb represents political and ideological transformation, the maternal figures in the plays I have examined also disrupt Christian typology. Jacob and Esau and David and Bethsabe remind us that this mother is not only a conduit of Christian salvation but a body always at the threshold of meaning that can disrupt and amend. She promises coherence and illumination, but also frustrates this desire on the part of the men who wish to sexually and textually penetrate this body. The mother figure returns in the chapters that follow, troubling the overdetermined biblical archetype of Jewish father and daughter, a key narrative in early modern exegetical expressions of Christian selfhood.

36

Ewbank notes this continuum between David’s view of Bethsabe and God in “‘What words, what looks, what wonders’: Language and Spectacle in the Theatre of George Peele,” The Elizabethan Theatre V, ed. George Richard Hibbard (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), p. 151.

Chapter 4

Reading the Sacrificed Daughter in George Buchanan’s Jephthes Sive Votum Tragoedia And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the Lord, and said, If thou shalt deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, [then] that thing that commeth out of the dores of mine house to mete me, when I come home in peace from the children of Ammon, shal be the Lords, and I wil offer it for a burnt offring. Judges 11:30-31

I have diminished my own revenue that I might add to your security, and been content to be a taper of true virgin wax, to waste myself and spend my life that I might give light and comfort to those that live under me. Elizabeth I, 16011

In this chapter and in the two that follow, I turn to the figure of the sacrificed Jewish daughter who quickly emerges as popular subject matter in sixteenth-century literature. In doing so, I shift toward more subtle intimations of Elizabeth: dramatic representations of the Jewish daughter perform complex cultural work, generating layers of contemporary significations within their typological contexts. Elizabethan writers were fascinated with the Israelite Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11:29-40— an innocent who is the victim of her father’s outrageous vow to kill “that thing that commeth out of the dores of mine house to mete me” should he defeat the Ammonite enemy. In early modern drama, Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter eclipses the medieval focus on Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22, which had appeared in all four of the York, Towneley, Chester and Coventry medieval mystery play cycles.2 In Genesis 22, God rescinds his initial command for Abraham 1

Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 347. Thompson notes that “[t]he sixteenth century ... boasts of over two dozen literary treatments (including several ballads) of Jephthah’s daughter” (Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation [Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 2001], p. 165). See Thompson’s excellent analysis of the exegetical history of Judges 11:29-40 prior to and during the Renaissance (pp. 100-178). For a consideration of the literary history of the Judges narrative see Wilbur Owen Sypherd, 2

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to sacrifice Isaac; in Jephthah’s case, there is no such divine intercession. Not surprisingly, Jewish and Christian theologians have always struggled to understand Jephthah’s actions: at no point does the scripture indicate whether God sanctions his hasty vow or his decision to kill his daughter, his only child, who had the misfortune of running out of the house to greet him. It is my contention that Judges 11 played a particularly important role in the latter half of the sixteenth century as playwrights explored the implications of exegetical debates about this controversial narrative. Christian readers since the first century generated numerous (and often conflicting) explanations for Jephthah’s human sacrifice; they emphasized Jephthah’s exemplary devotion to God but also cited his misguided vow and sacrifice as evidence of the Jew’s inferior perception of divinity.3 From a Christian perspective, the Jews’ physical form of worship—carnal sacrifice—also signified their inability to read correctly: they comprehended the exterior sense of the scripture and not its true spiritual meaning. For the Christian reader, Jephthah and his daughter served as what Shuger terms a potent “symbolic form” that epitomized sacrifice’s paradox in early modern culture as both the “barbaric ritual” of the Jewish ancestral past as well as a “loving self-oblation,” the ultimate demonstration of piety that is Christ’s own sacrifice.4 As we will see, sixteenth-century drama reflects the tropological centrality of Judges 11:29-40 in Christian exegesis as a powerful allegory of Christ’s sacrifice, a shift from Old to New order, and a transformation of carnal to spiritual sense that is played out through the sacrificed daughter. I make an ambitious claim in this chapter: Jephthah and his daughter illuminate the metaphoric promise of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s Abigail and Jessica, the Jewish daughters who leave their father’s house on the Elizabethan popular stage. In these plays, the point of entry (and exit) becomes an overdetermined threshold: by departing, the daughter moves from darkness into light, a rich Christological metaphor. Yet she also retains ties to her father’s house and, in the case of both Abigail and Jessica, can enter and exit at will. Just as the daughter stands at the Jephthah and His Daughter (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1948). Although versions of the narrative flourished during and after the Reformation, literary references to Jephthah were scarce before 1500. Sypherd provides a full account of the Judges narrative in drama, poetry, prose, and musical compositions from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. On the popularity of the narrative see also Shuger, pp. 128-66. 3 The Church Fathers frequently cited evidence of the Jew’s spiritual blindness in the practice of sacrifice: stubbornly attached to the literal letter of the law, they argued, the Jews remained ignorant of meanings revealed to the Christian reader. By reading Jewish sacrifice in symbolic terms, as figurae, Stephen D. Benin argues, Old Testament sacrifice could give shape to a broader, all-encompassing picture of Christian salvation: “[Augustine and Chrysostom justified] the sacrifices of old both as divine pedagogy and as divine kindness; they interpreted sacrifice as but one rung on the ladder of human development which lead to the coming of Christ” (“Sacrifice as Education in Augustine and Chrysostom,” Church History 52 [1983]: 19). See also Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 48-52, passim. 4 Shuger, p. 9.

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entrance of Jephthah’s house, she potentially blocks the Christian reader’s access to the text. Through their allegorical roles, both daughters play out symbolically a promise of scriptural veritas. As we will see, the Jewish daughter offers the fulfillment of hermeneutic expectations and, like Rebecca and Deborra in Jacob and Esau, is simultaneously linked to womb-like, dark, obscure places (caverns, caskets, houses, and other enclosures) that symbolize a place of Jewish origin desired and feared by her Christian audience. If the matriarchal and monarchical figures I discuss in the first half of this book play out the writers’ respective attempts to articulate the relationship between Protestant reader and scripture, the sacrificed daughter embodies—quite literally—the crisis of interpretation that is the undercurrent of all of these texts. The controversial Judges story lends itself to the playwrights’ self-conscious examination about how the construction of the Protestant self was contingent on a reader’s ability to glean definitive, Christian meaning from the Hebrew scripture. The Judges story is a salient example of how scriptural interpretation became a battle of propriety during the Reformation; the character of the Jewish daughter was the medium through which the playwright could “perform” the Christian audience’s tenuous grasp of the Hebrew scripture. As such, I argue, the texts’ suggestions of Elizabeth as a sacrificed daughter position her as a means through which to appropriate Old Testament sacrifice as Christian truth. The subject of this chapter, the Scottish playwright George Buchanan’s Latinate Jephthes Sive Votum Tragoedia (published in 1554), a classical tragedy that is a hybrid of Judges 11:29-40 and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, although written in France and years before Elizabeth’s accession, anticipates how the figure of the sacrificed daughter captures the public perception of the righteous martyr Elizabeth as a figure of textual propriety. In the final section of this chapter I establish a connection between Elizabeth’s own persona as virgin daughter and the Jewish daughter on the public stage. I do not intend my inquiries to result in a tidy conclusion; rather, I hope to establish the embeddedness of this literary figure. The provocative interplay of Jewish daughter, queen, and scripture in stage performances invites such a broad critical approach. As we have seen, Elizabeth’s subjects imagined her as part of Old Testament history as a way to authenticate their own connection to the scripture. Buchanan’s tragedy is striking for its emphasis on women and the relationship between sacrificed daughter and the mother he constructs for her. In Buchanan, as well as in Marlowe and Shakespeare, the popular allegorical reading of the virgin daughter’s body as a “conversion” of Old Testament darkness into Christian salvation is compromised by images of the maternal womb, an image of obfuscation and Judaic origin, and the actual presence of maternal characters who complicate the allegories with which the Protestant audience would have been familiar. Jephthes subverts the allegorical implications of Jephthah’s relationship with his daughter by introducing the character of Jephthah’s wife, Storge, who recalls Euripides’ Clytemnestra as well as the brief mention of Jephthah’s own harlot mother in Judges who determines his status as a bastard exiled by his legitimate brothers. As we will see, Storge interprets Jephthah’s sacrifice as an attempt to prevent his daughter from growing up, not as an expression of faith, simultaneously emasculating Jephthah and subverting also the Christological promise of his sacrifice for the Christian reader. This potent mother,

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who in Storge’s case troubles readings of her virgin daughter’s body, also takes us back to the problem of scriptural interpretation in plays I have already examined. As we have seen in the case of Rebecca and Bethsabe, the Jewish mother on the early modern stage wields potent symbolic power: in possession of a womb tropologically linked to a place of Jewish origin, the obfuscating and revealing sourcetext of the Christian self, she calls attention to the audience’s desire to get at meaning in the Hebrew scripture. As I have argued, Christian readers were ambivalent about what this place of origin signified: in symbolic terms, it was the Jews’ inferior method of reading scripture as well as their exclusive connection to the text. In narratives about Jewish fathers and daughters on the sixteenth-century stage, mother figures intervene; the theme of textual uncertainty is figured through their stories of sexual transgression and deception. The Jewish mother’s ability to reveal and conceal through her physical body also raises questions about her progeny, the daughter who appears as a pure virgin—“cleere” and easy to read. In symbolic terms, this narrative intrusion complicates the way we read the Jewish daughter as a figure of the New dispensation that supersedes the Old. The virgin daughter who is also a Jew, as Luther’s cautionary metaphor of the hidden Jew as harlot would suggest, can dupe her observers with a convincing outward show. In Jephthes and on the popular stage, her relationship with her father demonstrates the fluid forms she takes as a willing Christian martyr/convert as well as a figure of deceit whose sexual indiscretions carry larger implications about the reader’s interpretive mastery over her. The Jewish virgin, like the maternal figures we have seen, plays out the reader’s concerns about staking a claim to this female body as veritas. Jephthah’s sacrifice in Judges 11:29-40 At Judges 11:30, Jephthah, on the cusp of battle, makes a vow to God: should he defeat the Ammonite enemy, he will sacrifice the first “thing” he sees emerge from his house as a burnt offering.5 Upon his victorious return, Jephthah is greeted by his unnamed daughter who, after hearing her fate, acquiesces, and asks only to lament her virginity “upon the mountains” for two months with her fellow maidens. The episode concludes enigmatically: [Jephthah] did with her according to his vow which he had vowed, and she had knowen no man, and it was a custome in Israel. The daughters of Israel went yere by yere to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite, foure dayes in a yere. (11:39-40)

5

Most pre-critical exegetes presume Jephthah to have made a mistake, but St. Augustine, working from the Vulgate’s translation of Judges 11, makes the provocative argument that Jephthah most definitely had a human sacrifice in mind when making the vow: the text clearly reads quicumque (whoever) rather than quodcumque (whatever) leaves the house (see Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, pp. 125-30). See also David Marcus, Jephthah and his Vow (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1986), pp. 175-85.

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In a disturbing realization of that which is circumvented in Genesis 22, Jephthah actually kills his only child as an expression of divine obeisance. Jewish and Christian biblical commentaries since the Talmudic period have struggled with this obscure conclusion; the narrative, offering no guidance on how to evaluate Jephthah’s decision to sacrifice his daughter, has always provoked impassioned debates about the compatibility of child murder and divine obedience. In Numbers 30:3 and Deuteronomy 23:21-3, where Moses relates God’s command that all divine vows should be fulfilled, the scripture explicitly calls for unconditional adherence to all vows uttered to God, yet this law also makes the proclamation of Leviticus 18:21 with regards to Judges 11 a perplexing contradiction: “Thou shalt not give thy children to offer them unto Molech, neither shalt thou defile the Name of thy God.”6 Early rabbinical scholars grappled with the question of whether human sacrifice could be condoned in Jephthah’s case. According to Midrashic commentaries on Leviticus 27:2, idolatry, sexual indiscretions, violence, and slander come upon the person who neglects to uphold a divine vow; Jephthah’s vow, however, despite the scripture’s ample discussion of the necessity of honoring vows, is one of the few that should not have been carried out.7 Even more than their rabbinical predecessors, Christian readers since the Church Fathers were particularly challenged by the scripture’s ambiguous rendering of Jephthah who, though condemned by the Midrash and Talmud for committing filicide, is honored in the Epistle to the Hebrews along with Gideon, Barac, Samson, David and Samuel as one of the Old Testament heroes of faith (11:32). Still, exegetes denounced Jephthah for his haste and blasphemy: the Geneva Bible’s marginal note states that Jephthah “by his rashe vowe & wicked performance of the same his victorie was defaced.”8 The Geneva’s gloss on the Epistle also explains that Jephthah, along with his Hebraic counterparts, “had no suche cleare light of Christ as we: for thei loked for that we have: therefore it were shame for us, if at least we have not as great constancie as thei” (11:39). Jephthah’s sacrifice thus confirms both his religious constancy and, as in the patristic adversos Judaeos tradition, his limited comprehension of divinity that is reflected in his inability to read the scripture with 6 See also Leviticus 20:2-5, Deuteronomy 12:31, 18:10 and Micah 6:7. On the Israelites and child sacrifice see 2 Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 32:35. 7 See Levenson, pp. 14-17. Rabbinic commentaries generally condemned Jephthah for both his rash vow and decision to honor this promise. According to the Talmud and Midrash, Jephthah is one of a small group in the scripture who makes inappropriate vows (See Midrash Rabbah: Leviticus, 4: 465-71 and Joshua and Judges: Hebrew Text and English Translation, ed. Andrew Cohen [New York: The Soncino Press, 1950], pp. 256-8). 8 Jephthah’s case is cited in the Elizabethan homily “Against Swearing” as the quintessential example of an unlawful vow that should not be honored. In fulfilling it, he commits a “double offence” (Rickey and Stroup, Certaine Sermons, Vol. 1, p. 49). Anthony Munday, in his poem “Of Jephthah’s Rashness” draws upon the biblical narrative as a “tragic” prototype. His poem, one of a series modeled on The Mirrour for Magistrates, ends with Jephthah’s warning to the reader: “You yunger yeeres therfore be warnd by me,/Unto your vowes alwayes have good regard:/Respect in time the daunger for to flee,/Least unto you doo happen like reward./Stil vow no more then well perfourme you may:/And so be sure you cannot goe astray” (The Mirrour of Mutabilitie [London, 1579], Fi).

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“cleare light.” The minister Edward Elton likens Jewish blood sacrifice to “the first elements of the instruction of children to the letters, the A.B.C. or Primar, wherein little children are first instructed, and thence led forward to the exercise and studie of more excellent learning.”9 In her own divine meditation, Elizabeth intimates the obsolescence of physical sacrifice in Christian worship: “Thou preferrest the virtues of the lips to the flesh and blood of cattle, so in proclaiming Thy praises and performing Thy commandments may I complete the remaining course of life.”10 Animal sacrifices were one thing, as was the devout Abraham’s scare in Genesis, which for Christian exegetes proved a successful test of his obedience. Despite their certainty of God’s preference for “the virtues of the lips to the flesh and blood of cattle,” Elizabethan readers also struggled to secure the meaning of Jephthah’s sacrifice in a Christological context: on the one hand, the bloody act distinguished Jew from Christian, but on the other, sacrifice expressed the ultimate form of suffering and devotion intrinsic to Christian selfhood. The sacrificed daughter becomes a key figure as exegetes engaged with this paradox. Jephthah’s unnamed daughter Jephthah’s exile by his brothers and subsequent sufferings provoked patristic and medieval exegetes to read him typologically. Yet it is Jephthah’s daughter who emerges as an overdetermined type in early modern exegeses on Judges 11:29-40— including Buchanan’s tragedy. She plays a crucial role as a touchstone of Christian selfhood and an expression of interpretive mastery over the Old Testament. In his excellent survey of Christian commentaries on Judges 11:29-40 from the first century through the Reformation, Thompson traces the interpretive shift from Jephthah to his daughter: read initially as the flesh of Christ or the Church, Jephthah’s daughter emerges during the sixteenth century as the narrative’s central martyr.11 She herself

9

Edward Elton, “An Exposition of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Colossians,” 2nd edn (London, 1620), Aa3. Stockwood contends similarly that animal sacrifices in the Old Testament should be understood not only as barbaric acts but also as the Jews’ earnest (if deeply flawed) expression of devotion. 10 Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 159. Theodore Beza’s phenomenally popular tragedy Abraham Sacrifant (1550) celebrates the triumph of inward conviction over the outward show of sacrifice, also signifying the Catholic Mass. As Beza explains to his reader in the prologue, Abraham, following God’s initial instructions to lead his son to the sacrificial altar, is rewarded for his faith by Isaac’s life. Faith, then, becomes the antithesis of the literal sacrifice: “You shall see him justified/By faith, for killing (in a certeine wise)/Isaac his dearest sonne in sacrifice” (trans. Arthur Golding, A Tragedie of Abraham’s Sacrifice [1577], ed. Malcolm W. Wallace [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1906], p. 16). By the end of the century, 10 editions of Sacrifant had been produced, followed by 13 more in the seventeenth. 11 Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, pp. 100-178. Renaissance discussions of Jephthah’s daughter regularly deploy these allegories. John Mayer explains that “the sacrificing of [Jephthah’s] daughter, a Virgin, was Christs sacrificing of his humane nature, pure and spotlesse as a pure Virgin: the Virgins from yeare to yeare lamenting this, are Christians keeping the remembrance of Christs passion yearely with griefe and sorrow” (p. 151).

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becomes emblematic of what Christian exegetes read as a “certaine shadow” and a “holy preparation” for the true sacrifice in Christ’s death.12 These pervasive allegorical readings did not eradicate readers’ ethical and theological concerns about Judges 11, however, and expositions on the narrative were still fraught with conflicts about how to read Jephthah’s daughter. Was she actually murdered, or, as many sixteenth-century Christian Hebraists claimed, following David Kimhi’s arguments in the thirteenth century, “sacrificed” in a more figural sense as an eternal virgin?13 “Survivalists” cited Jephthah’s daughter’s request to bewail her virginity and the text’s pronouncement that she will have “known no man” as evidence that no fatal “sacrifice” actually took place.14 In dramatic form, the indeterminate physical state of Jephthah’s daughter symbolically captured the Protestant reader’s concerns about scriptural interpretation. Although the allegorical reading of Jephthah’s daughter as a figure of Christian sacrifice and martyrdom was pervasive, the elusive narrative brought up issues of textual propriety during the Reformation. Her body offered multiple readings that were also potentially complicated by Christian interpretations of the narrative’s religious symbolism. Although the “sacrificialist” and “survivalist” positions were not split on partisan lines, Protestant exegetes were perhaps sensitive to how a literal sacrifice might be suggestive of transubstantiation.15 As Peter Sharratt observes of Buchanan’s 12

Brenz, p. 622. Modern scholars continue this debate. See Tony W. Cartledge’s response to David Marcus’s non-sacrificialist analysis of the narrative in Jephthah and his Vow (Cartledge, Vows in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East [Sheffield: Sheffield Academy Press], 1992). 14 See Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, pp. 150-51. 15 Protestant theologians debated the subject of the Eucharist, often equating the doctrine of transubstantiation with Old Testament idolatry. In 1585, during a sermon celebrating the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s accession, the Archbishop Edwin Sandys repudiated the “sacrifice” of the Catholic Mass: “St. Paul teacheth, that Christ was offered up once to take away all sin, and by that one oblation, because it was perfect, obtained the full delivery and redemption of his church” (p. 67). Elton sums up another popular argument against transubstantiation: “the popish sacrifice of the masse (which the papists hold to be a propitiatory sacrifice for the quicke and dead) is a most abominable idoll: they please themselves in the shadow when they may have the true substance” (Gg3). In medieval and early modern texts, associations of the Jew and Old Testament sacrifice transform into accusations of ritual murder, child sacrifice, and Host desecration. Miri Rubin notes the association of the Eucharist and child sacrifice in medieval exempla, and their depiction of Jews as the perpetrators of both child abuse and host desecration (“The Eucharist and the Construction of Medieval Identities,” in Culture and History 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identity and Writing, ed. David Aers [Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1992], pp. 43-63). As Leah Marcus argues, in medieval literature and liturgy, Jews could be witnesses to or participants in the desecration of the child/Host, the motif or spectacle of which was intended to affirm the Real Presence of Christ. Representations of Old Testament sacrifice, such as Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, played out this intimate relationship between the infant Christ and the sacrifice of the Mass (“The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum 48 [1973]: 491-509). See also Gregg, pp. 191-4; Francis Clark, Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 412-14; Rosemary Radford Ruether, “The Adversus Judaeos Tradition in the Church Fathers: The Exegesis of 13

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Jephthes, “Jephtha’s sacrifice of his daughter can be seen as a parallel of God’s sacrifice of his Son and can therefore be indirectly linked with the sacrifice of the mass. ... There can be no doubt that Buchanan’s contemporaries would associate the discussion of sacrifice in the Jephthes with the theological debate.”16 Yet Protestants who argued for a “survivalist” reading were also wary of endorsing monastic vows of celibacy—another Catholic sacrament that was the subject of heated debates during the sixteenth century. The Protestant preacher William Perkins faults those who might read in the narrative a literal execution of Jephthah’s daughter but makes clear that the narrative does not support monastic vows: Jephthah’s loss of offspring, he concludes, was a great tragedy.17 The energy with which exegetes staked their claim to the “right” interpretation of the episode was more than just the zeal of partisan debate: Judges 11 was the Old Testament narrative that raised the most difficult questions about the veritas of the Hebrew scripture more broadly and, consequently, the reader’s interpretive certitude regarding the Old Testament’s disclosure of the ultimate sacrifice in Christ. Getting access to the veritas meant taking a clear position on the questions of Jephthah’s daughter’s body. Sir Thomas Browne suggests that a “sacrificialist” reading of the episode would be tantamount to profaning the scripture itself: There being therefore two wayes to dispose of her, either to separate her unto the Lord, or offer her as a sacrifice, it is of no necessitie the latter should bee necessary; and surely lesse derogatorie unto the sacred text, and history of the people of God, must bee the former.18

Browne imagines that the reader too may “dispose” of Jephthah’s daughter in either way, suggesting that interpretive accuracy enacts a type of mastery over her body. Yet his insistence on the reader’s ability to choose this “less derogatorie” option in the “sacred text” also makes clear the arbitrary and unstable nature of this interpretation: if readers can “dispose” of her either way, is it possible to know for sure the singular meaning of the scripture? Browne also implies an ambivalence about the “history of the people of God”— the Jews who demonstrated what Lisa Lampert terms “spiritual impediments” and who, in a contradictory sense, the Protestants understood as intimately connected Christian Anti-Judaism,” in Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages, Paul E. Szarmach, ed. (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1979), p. 32 and also Ruether’s overview of the Church Fathers’ charges against the Jews in Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974), pp. 117-82. On visual representations of the Jew as crucifier of Christian children, see Ruth Samson Luborsky, “The Pictorial Image of the Jew in Elizabethan Secular Books,” SQ 46.4 (1995): 449-53. 16 Sharratt, George Buchanan: Tragedies, ed. and trans. Peter Sharratt and P.G. Walsh. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983, p. 18. Sharratt maintains that this issue of the Mass ceremony—not vows—is paramount in the play. 17 William Perkins, A Cloud of faithfull witnessess, leading to the heavenly Canaan: or a commentarie upon the 11. Chapter to the Hebrewes (London, 1608), p. 501. On Protestant reactions to Catholic readings of the narrative, see William Dodwell, Jephthah’s Vow Perform’d (London, 1745), pp. 113-14. 18 Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London, 1646), p. 256.

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to the biblical text—its history as well as its meanings. Long after the Elizabethans staked their claim to the scriptural veritas, Christian exegetes would continue to intimate the Jews’ experiential and linguistic authority with regard to the Word of God in scripture. Writing in 1745, William Dodwell defends his “sacrificialist” position on Jephthah’s sacrifice by citing the Church Fathers’ knowledge of the Jews themselves and their proximity, therefore, to the original sacred meanings captured in the Hebrew scripture: [The Church Fathers] had very sufficient Means of knowing the Sense of the whole Jewish nation in this Particular. Some of them were themselves converted Jews, and others had great Opportunities of consulting those who were unconverted on the Subject. It was easy to know what Notion they had of a History, which was daily read amongst them. As soon as different Constructions of an ancient History are once advanced, Men, we find, are always divided in their Determinations. But the Fathers were unanimous in their Judgment, from whence we may safely conclude, that the Jews amongst whom they so much conversed, were so likewise, and that they had never thought of more than one Meaning in this plain Relation. ... Their holy Books were daily read, repeated, and explained to them, and there was scarce a single Instance in their History more memorable than this we are treating of. Must it not then be of great Consequence to know what the Jews themselves thought of the Meaning of this Passage; and if they had but one Opinion in the Case, must it not be of great Weight in Confirmation of that?19

This authoritative Jewish opinion is, as we know, a working contradiction for Protestant readers, who struggled to simultaneously rely on and reject rabbinical interpretations of the Hebrew text as well as the association of the Jews themselves with the Hebrew language. Although Dodwell errs in declaring the Jews and the Church Fathers unanimous in their explanations of Jephthah’s sacrifice, his emphasis on the Church Fathers’ embrace of the Jewish texts, their intimacy with “[t]heir holy Books” that were “daily read, repeated, and explained,” accurately reflects the Christian reader’s long-standing fascination with Jephthah’s sacrifice, the most “memorable” moment in Jewish history for its shock value, its allegorical potential as a narrative of Christian sacrifice, and its ambiguity. St. Augustine explicates the reader’s difficulty in apprehending the religious and moral veritas of Jephthah’s actions as part of God’s plan to call attention to Christ’s suffering and divinity. The reader’s contemplation of the “hero” Jephthah’s illicit human sacrifice, he believes, “would encourage the zeal of pious minds to examine the great mystery, so that he who piously examines the profundity of the prophecy might lift the Lord Christ from the depth of the scriptures, just as a fish on a hook.”20 Yet Augustine’s own convoluted meditations on the narrative ironically move Shuger to observe that “[t]he ethical opacity of [Judges 11:29-40] opens a space for interpretive maneuvering—for using narrative to discern meaning rather than merely enforce it.”21 This “interpretive maneuvering,” however, did not guarantee the ends Augustine imagines. Rather than ensuring that the reader grasp meaning “as

19 20 21

Dodwell, pp. 31, 32. Cited in Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, p. 128. Shuger, p. 137.

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a fish on a hook,” sixteenth-century dramatic representations of Judges 11 explore the open-ended heteroglossia of Judges 11 through the figure of the daughter who facilitates and, ultimately, obfuscates the meaning of Old Testament sacrifice for the Christian reader. George Buchanan and Iphigenia Before gaining recognition as one of Europe’s most famous innovators of French humanist tragedy—and later, for his anti-monarchical writings—Buchanan wrote Jephthes for his students at the College de Guyenne in Bordeaux where he served as Latin instructor between 1539 to 1542.22 Michel Montaigne, a student at the College during Buchanan’s tenure, would claim later that it was he who clinched the title role in the school’s production of the play.23 Immediately popular across the continent after its publication in Paris in 1554, Jephthes draws from a number of classical texts, but the blueprint for Buchanan’s tragedy is Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, the story of Agamemnon’s concession to sacrifice his daughter after the soothsayer Calchas prophesies that this will enable the Greek army to reach Troy—and the purloined Helen.24 In one sense, Jephthes transforms the unnamed, nearly silent daughter of the Hebrew scripture into a fully-formed subject that is the tragedy’s overriding emblem of salvation.25 Jephthes gives particular Christological gloss to Jephthah’s daughter—whom he names “Iphis”—by conflating her with the martyristic Iphigenia

22 In Scotland, Buchanan also served as tutor to the future James I. On Jephthes’ publication history, see Sypherd’s thorough survey of its European editions and translations, Jephthah and His Daughter, pp. 18-20 and I.D. McFarlane, Buchanan (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1981), pp. 201-5. 23 Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. and trans. M.A. Screech (London: Allen Lane, 1991), 1:26, 198. See J.R.C. Martyn, “Montaigne and George Buchanan,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 26 (1977): 132-42. 24 Desperate to revive his ship, flagging from lack of wind en route to war against the Trojans, Agamemnon, goaded by his brother (and Helen’s husband) Menelaus, lures Iphigenia to Aulis with the ruse of a marriage ceremony for her and Achilles. Browne notes the popular view of the Judges narrative as the inspiration for the story of Iphigenia (p. 255). 25 Shuger argues that Buchanan’s Jephthah signifies secular fatherhood that is replaced by the divine Father to whom his daughter is ultimately bound. On Iphis as Christ figure, see also James H. McGregor, “The Sense of Tragedy in George Buchanan’s Jephthes.” Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies 31 (1982): 120-40. On Jephthes as a redemptive Christian tragedy, see John Wall, “The Dramaturgy of Buchanan’s Tragedies,” in Actus Conventus Neo-Latini Guelpherbytani, ed. Stella P. Revard, Fidel Radle, and Mario A. DiCesare (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1988), pp. 163-9. A devotee of Erasmian humanism, Buchanan would have been familiar with Erasmus’ Latin translations of Iphigenia and Hecuba, which were published together in 1506. On Buchanan’s Christianization of Greek tragedy see McGregor and Martin Mueller, Children of Oedipus and Other Essays on the Imitation of Greek Tragedy, 1500-1800 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980), pp. 153-71. Buchanan, Mueller argues, chooses to dramatize Judges 11 because it speaks to the paradox of felix culpa (pp. 153-71).

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from Euripidean tragedy who is miraculously replaced by a hind on the altar and ultimately “resurrected” in Iphigenia in Tauris. Yet the Euripidean narrative also allows Buchanan to play on the fluid connotations of the virgin body as both pristine and sexually elusive. In Euripides, “sacrifice” always evokes male reaction to dominating or sexually threatening women. Buchanan imagines the sacrificing father as a man painstakingly vulnerable to the sexual aspects of his virgin daughter. The specter of the emasculating woman emerges prominently in Buchanan’s Jephthes, signified by Storge, Iphis’s Clytemnestra-like mother who recalls Jephthah’s own problematic maternal relationship. This mother figure also threatens to obfuscate the true meaning of the scripture for the Christian reader: rather than the linchpin of a straightforward allegory, the body of the Jewish virgin carries multiple connotations of Christian martyrdom as well as sexual impurity. Buchanan’s representation of Jephthah and his daughter affirms Christian readings of the narrative as an allegory of Christ’s sacrifice, and thus the supersession of Old by New, but also disassembles this typological blueprint signified by Jewish father and daughter; by way of her mother, he demotes the theological significance of Jephthah’s sacrifice to a pathetic attempt at controlling the sexual dispensation of his daughter. Before focusing on Buchanan’s version of the sacrificed daughter, I turn briefly to a similar adaptation written at approximately the same time by the Catholic playwright and polemicist John Christopherson.26 Both Buchanan and Christopherson position Jephthah allegorically as part of a symbolic shift from Old to New, from ritual sacrifice to crucifixion. Like Buchanan’s play, Christopherson’s Jephthah, the only extant English biblical drama composed in Greek, also adds the character of Jephthah’s wife. Although Christopherson represents Jephthah as a devoted brother and son who obeys religious authority, his unnamed wife still undercuts him by vociferously dissenting from his view of sacrifice as an expression of faith. Jephthah violently dismisses his wife in one scene, however, and we don’t hear from her again. Christopherson’s play begins with Jephthah’s prologue: he gives thanks to God for his piety, which allows him to rise above the lowly status of his birth (1-8). The Chorus lauds him as exemplary and “godlike” (199).27 The play begins with an optimistic view of Jephthah’s illegitimacy: his brother’s maltreatment only clarifies Jephthah’s own piety and diplomacy by contrast. To his elder brother’s charge that he is a “bastard vile” (50), the son of a “strange and unclean woman” (51), Jephthah responds “Thou speakest truth; I must be calm and suffer,/For I am guiltless. Thine the breath of wrath” (52-3). Christopherson revises the actual Judges 11 account of the Ammonite war as God’s punishment for the Israelites’ idol worship (of which Jephthah too presumably is guilty); instead, he embellishes the biblical Jephthah as

26

Christopherson dedicates his 1547 Latin translation to Henry VIII. All quotations will be taken from Francis Howard Fobes’s English translation of Christopherson’s Jephthah, intro. Wilbur Owen Sypherd (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1928). All references are to line numbers. Sypherd speculates that a production entitled Jephthes performed at Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1566-67 may have been either Buchanan’s or Christopherson’s version. 27

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an exemplary pacifist—a Christ figure who, after failing to appease the Ammonites, mercifully delivers salvation to those who have sinned against him. Infamous for his vicious anti-Protestantism during the 1550’s, Christopherson in his capacity as Dean of Norwich (1554) and Bishop of Chichester (1557) denounced any criticism of the Catholic monarchy.28 His Jephthah has been widely understood as an homage to the Catholic Church.29 Christopherson rose to great prominence during Mary’s reign but his career would end almost immediately after Elizabeth’s accession. Arrested for a polemical sermon at St Paul’s Cross in 1558, Christopherson died in prison shortly thereafter. Christopherson takes a traditionally Catholic stance on divine vows, and Jephthah’s Chorus concludes that “[v]ows unto God must e’er be wisely made/And paid in full; this is the righteous act” (1163-4). This sentiment is reified through the play’s confident typology. The play offers a clear allegory as Jephthah’s Old Testament legalism gives way to the ultimate sacrifice in his offspring, the daughter who on the altar becomes this beatific martyr. According to an eyewitness, she offers much consolation to her father: “A glorious lot is mine, to leave the light/For all of Israel, and willingly/ I give myself to death for those who live./It was for this that thou didst give me life” (1123-6). Jephthah’s daughter fulfills the spiritual implications of his sacrifice, illuminating ritual murder as her Christian martyrdom. As Christopherson himself explains in a dedicatory letter to his Latin translation, and at the conclusion of the play itself, this daughter exemplifies loyalty to both fathers: Jephthah and God.30 One of Christopherson’s most interesting embellishments of the biblical narrative is Jephthah’s description of his daughter as a perfect homemaker who keeps the servants in line and is devoted to “nursing him/In his old age” (822-3)—a Cordelia to his Lear. Jephthah laments that she will no longer serve as “the staff of age [who] didst guide/[his] steps ... a clear light to the blind” (828-9). The characterization also helps us to understand the typological context of the Jewish daughter on the public stage (who in one sense fails to lead her father, dramatized as a “blind” Old Testament figure), an issue to which I will return in my discussion of Marlowe and Shakespeare in the final chapters of this book. There are suggestions in Christopherson, however, of what we see played out more extensively in George Buchanan’s Jephthes. Pressed by his daughter to explain the reason for his distress, Jephthah first comments elliptically before telling her of his vow: “Women would ever learn their own mischance” (778). The moment suggests that her death, rather than a fulfillment of Christian sacrifice, is just another consequence of a woman’s error in judgment (reminiscent of his mother’s?). Indeed, 28 See Christopher Upton’s introduction to the Latin translation of Iephte, in Renaissance Latin Drama in England, Vol. 7, ed. Marvin Spevack, J.W. Binns, and HansJürgen Weckermann (Georg Olms Verlag: Hildesheim, 1988). On the play’s publication and composition, see Sypherd’s introduction above. Although Jephthah’s date of composition is conventionally noted as 1544, little is known of the play’s performance history. On Christopherson’s adaptation, see Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter, pp. 20-22; Campbell, pp. 183-5; Blackburn, pp. 102-6; Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), pp. 43-62; and Roston, pp. 78-86. 29 In Boas’s opinion, the play ends on a “tritely didactic note” (p. 60). 30 See Sypherd’s introduction in the Fobes edition, pp. 11-12.

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Jephthah’s outrage at his wife for condemning the sacrifice as heretical suggests a misogynistic theme: he angrily dismisses her as a prating fool (1012) and commands her back into the house (1020). The Jewish daughter provides a “light” signifying a type of textual illumination: she illuminates that which Jephthah, the Old Testament Jew, cannot see and promises (or, alternatively, denies) such a “clear light” for the Christian reader who understands her as a figure of Christ. Yet her typological role is also compromised, as it will be more extensively in Buchanan’s version of Jephthah and his daughter, by the suggestion of a connection between her sacrifice and Jephthah’s experience with dominating women—his harlot mother as well as his dominating wife. Jephthah’s brothers do not appear in Buchanan’s Jephthes, which stays faithful to the biblical account of the Ammonite war as God’s punishment for the Israelites’ paganism. In Buchanan’s prologue, an Angel figure explains also that God has mercifully orchestrated Jephthah’s vow and sacrifice as a preemptive strike against both further transgressions by the Israelites and Jephthah’s own pride at his newfound status as war hero: [S]o that Jephtha too may not assess himself by the outcome of this battle, and grow proud and arrogant with success, he will at once be overwhelmed with domestic loss, and his arrogant airs will be shattered and retreat. (65)31

Buchanan emphasizes the predestined nature of the vow and sacrifice by having Jephthah utter the vow after he has defeated the Ammonites—a maddeningly obsolete gesture of gratitude. Jephthah’s destiny seems especially cruel and inappropriate, especially since he does not actually display any “proud and arrogant” inclinations. As Shuger has noted, he expresses only love for his daughter and loyalty to God.32 In this sense, it is difficult to accept the Angel’s “explanation” for the vow and sacrifice, but I believe that Buchanan does not really intend for us to do so. Although we know that the vow and sacrifice are predestined as a warning to the Israelites, Jephthah himself stubbornly insists that the fulfilled vow will be an appropriate demonstration of his faith. The characters’ condemnation of Jephthah underscores his error in judgment. His daughter, Iphis, while still ignorant of her fate, lectures her father on the importance of following through with all vows, yet unwittingly condemns him for seeking rewards through a rash promise. Jephthah’s friend Symmachus believes Jephthah emotionally unstable to be considering honoring such a vow (79). The Chorus mourns the tragedy as humankind’s fate. Storge, desperate to prevent the sacrifice, rages that “[v]ows that are wicked are not welcome to God” (88). Storge’s response, although evoking contemporary debates on the strictures of divine vows, fully shifts the tragedy away from theological debate to the domestic problem of Iphis’s sexual maturation. Buchanan’s Jephthah fumbles his way through the play, attempting to justify his decision to sacrifice his daughter. For the Priest, the sacrifice is morally reprehensible and a consequence of Jephthah’s gross misunderstanding of the scripture. Jephthah 31

All textual references are to page number in Jephthes in George Buchanan: Tragedies. 32 Shuger, p. 138.

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cites Abraham and Isaac as evidence that God intends the fulfillment of all vows; by contrast, the Priest believes God’s intercession in that case to be a clear statement against human sacrifice. He suggests to Jephthah that the Old Testament, as pedagogical example, teaches a departure from the practices of the past, and thus Jephthah should understand his own predicament (that is also the text of Judges 11 itself) as a warning against rash vows, not as justification for murder (81-6). In one sense, Jephthah plays the role of the “blind” Jew and the Old Law that must be penetrated by the Christian reader. Yet the central—and metatextual—point that Buchanan conveys in their debate and, ultimately, in Iphis, is the opaque nature of the Hebrew scripture and thus its Christological meanings. Buchanan draws on religious controversies familiar to his audience to make scriptural uncertainty the central theme of Jephthes. Critics have read the play’s exchange between Jephthah and the Priest allegorically in the context of debates between the Reformer Martin Bucer and the Catholic theologian Barthelemy Latomus during the 1540s regarding the sacramental nature of vows.33 While on trial in Lisbon, Buchanan alludes to the debate between Jephthah and the Priest as evidence for his Catholic stance on the matter: On vows I revealed my opinion by a passage in my tragedy on the vow of Jephthah. The sum of the discussion was as follows: vows which were lawfully made should always be kept, and moreover many know that at Coimbra it was my custom gladly to read and always to commend the speech of Barthelemy Latomus on this subject against Bucer.34

Although Buchanan would deny any anti-Catholic sentiment in Jephthes, it remains unclear whether he is devoted to the Protestant cause at the time of the play’s 33

Although Latomus argues that divine vows should be honored, he acknowledges that Jephthah’s would have been displeasing to God. As McGregor notes, Protestants, most following Calvin on this issue, would have understood such vows to be motivated by superstition rather than by faith (p. 135). On Buchanan’s tragedy and the Latomus-Bucer pamphlet debates see Sharratt’s introduction to George Buchanan: Tragedies, pp. 14-17 and McFarlane, Buchanan, pp. 196-8. Both Sharratt and McFarlane, however, are skeptical about the extent to which Buchanan’s play can be viewed as partisan in light of the vow controversy. Although Buchanan’s contemporaries would have recognized the Catholic stance as one that generally upheld the holiness of vows, the orthodox exegetes, as McFarlane reminds us, expressed a range of opinions on the matter. While the Geneva Bible condemns both the vow and Jephthah’s adherence to it, the Catholic Douai Bible (1609), citing Augustine and other early commentators, suggests that Jephthah had a commitment to follow through with his vow once it was made; his misstep lies in the vow’s hasty conception, for which he is duly punished by his daughter’s emergence from his house and her subsequent death. The commentary takes issue with the Reformers’ gloss: “[despite the opinions of the ancient fathers] a new glosser of the English Bible without scruple sayeth, that by his rash vow, and wicked performance his victorie was defaced” (p. 543). See the annotations to Judges 11:2940, The Holie Bible Faithfully Translated into English (1609), English Recusant Literature, ed. D.M. Rogers (London: Scolar Press, 1975), Vol. 1, pp. 542-3. 34 James M. Aitken, trans. The Trial of George Buchanan Before the Lisbon Inquisition (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939), p. 13. For a transcript of the charges against Buchanan and Buchanan’s defense, see pp. xlviii-xlix, li.

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composition in the early 1540s (his conversion is indisputable by the 1560s). In the years after Lisbon, Buchanan would become an outspoken enemy of the Scottish state; in 1582, he promoted regicide in his History of Scotland, which attempted to legitimate the Protestant coup that had replaced Mary with her son James VI.35 Despite authoring a number of well-received and technically innovative tragedies (Sir Philip Sidney hails Buchanan in The Defense of Poetry: “the tragedies of Buchanan do justly bring forth a divine admiration”), the radical republican Buchanan gained infamy for antagonizing the monarchy with which he was once socially and professionally intimate.36 It may be going too far to read this anti-authoritarianism in Jephthes, but the play’s distinction from Christopherson’s more conservative stance on divine and political authority also invites us to do so. As David Norbrook proposes, “At the basis of Buchanan’s thought is a critical rationalism that is hostile to all forms of unreasoning submission to traditional institutions and hierarchies.” 37 The ambiguity of Buchanan’s opinion on Jephthah’s vow and sacrifice, especially in the context of Buchanan’s personal life, have inspired modern critics to focus on decoding the play as political allegory. Raymond Lebègue, who names Jephthes explicitly as a crypto-Protestant drama reads the Priest as a mouthpiece for Buchanan’s convictions and thus as evidence of the play’s Protestant leanings.38 Fokke Akkerman and Donald Stone take this position as well.39 Buchanan’s foremost modern biographer, while noting the play’s later popularity in Protestant countries, insists vehemently on the playwright’s conservative loyalties: [Jephthes’s] popularity is due to its literary merits and not to any Calvinist overtones such as undoubtedly contributed to its later progress. We have seen good reasons for accepting that Buchanan was back in the Catholic fold at the time he published his Jephthes; nor 35

Buchanan’s influential History, advocating the right of the Scottish people to depose their monarch, made Elizabethan authorities so uneasy for its support of rebellion that the text was banned temporarily in England. Buchanan’s rallying call for monarchical usurpation, David Norbrook contends, greatly influenced Shakespeare’s conceptualization of Macbeth (Norbrook, “Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography,” in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987], pp. 78-116). 36 Sidney, The Defence of Poesy. In Sir Philip Sidney: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 2nd edn (Madison: The Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 152. 37 Norbrook, p. 91. 38 See Lebègue’s discussion of the dialogue as an allegory of the Latomus–Bucer debates in La Tragédie Religieuse en France: Les Débuts (1514-1573), Bibliotheque Litteraire de la Renaissance (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honore Champion, 1929), pp. 230-39. 39 Akkerman, “A Spinozistic Perspective on the Jephthah Tragedies by George Buchanan and Joost van den Vondel,” in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontnensis, ed. Alexander Dalzell, Charles Fantazzi, and Richard J. Schoeck (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1991), pp. 165-76. Donald Stone makes the claim that “Buchanan, if not an avowed Protestant at the time he wrote his plays, was nonetheless highly critical of the Church and more than once engaged in serious religious polemics in his writings. The full title of Buchanan’s play is Jephthes Sive Votum ... and the question of the vow, like Abraham’s sacrifice, had deep religious connotations” (Stone, ed. and intro. Four Renaissance Tragedies [Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966], p. xi).

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would he have dared, had he so wished, to bring out a text then that smacked in any way of heresy.40

My purpose here is not to establish whether Buchanan was committed to the Protestant cause at the time of the play’s composition in the early 1540’s, but rather to make the point that these debates have also obfuscated how Buchanan defers a clear stance on such political and theological issues, reminding the reader instead of the problems of scriptural interpretation in general. The questions so passionately debated by Jephthah and the Priest become obsolete as Buchanan shifts the terms of the play to Jephthah’s attempt to circumvent the sexual maturation of his daughter. Critics have, in pursuing questions of religious allegory, glossed over the gender issues of the play and the impact of Euripides on Buchanan’s treatment of Jephthah’s decision to sacrifice his daughter. As I hope to show, Buchanan muddles an allegorical reading of Jewish father and daughter by interjecting sexual themes into this relationship. Jephthes’s mother and daughter While praising the biblical Jephthah for his obedience, William Perkins also singles him out from the other Old Testament patriarchs honored in the Epistle to the Hebrews because he is born out of wedlock. “For this sinne of fornication,” he explains, “doth not onely hurt the persons committing it, but even staines the children base borne to the tenth generation.” Jephthah’s extraordinary faith and subsequent acquisition of God’s favor, he argues, is an inspirational story for other “base born” men.41 Although early commentators do not attribute Jephthah’s sacrifice in Judges to this generational “stain,” modern feminist critics have taken compelling, if highly ambitious, interpretive leaps in claiming that Jephthah projects anxiety about his mother’s sexuality onto his daughter: the vow and sacrifice in this sense serve not as an expression of divine obeisance but rather a lashing out against the daughter who may mature into another emasculating mother. Mieke Bal argues that the terms of the vow are set up to punish the daughter who, in precipitously leaving her father’s house, symbolically enacts a repetition of Jephthah’s mother’s sexual freedom. The departure mimics the sexual autonomy that will come with her impending adulthood and marriage.42 Lillian R. Klein makes an explicit link between Jephthah’s harlot 40

McFarlane, Buchanan, p. 191. Perkins, A Cloud of faithfull witnessess, pp. 499-500. 42 See Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in The Book of Judges (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 61-2, 169-83; J. Cheryl Exum, Tragedy and Biblical Narrative: Arrows of the Almighty (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 68; and Lynda E. Boose, “The Father’s House and the Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture’s Daughter-Father Relationship,” in Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989): “for the father, the daughter’s adolescence signifies a contradictory mélange of threats: loss, desire, and betrayal” (p. 35). See also Nona Fienberg, “Jephthah’s Daughter: The Parts Ophelia Plays,” in Old Testament Women in Western Literature, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (Conway: Univ. of Central Arkansas, 1991), pp. 128-43. 41

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mother and the fate of Jephthah’s daughter: “Jephthah is the single male between two generations, two women—his mother and his daughter. The line of Jephthah ends, and in disgrace.”43 Thompson has shown how Christian and Jewish responses to the narrative from the first century through the Renaissance, including Buchanan’s, have not silenced Jephthah’s daughter as feminist criticism often suggests but have instead grappled with the ethical problems of the narrative. Jephthah’s daughter’s story, he concludes, lends itself to “imaginative reconstructions”—the necessary filling in of gaps that illuminate the selfhood of the female subject. The feminist readings I cite above produce interpretations too far beyond the actual parameters of the sparse biblical narrative itself, yet as Thompson suggests, these analyses are certainly germane to early commentaries as well as Buchanan’s particular “imaginative reconstruction” of Jephthah’s relationships with women.44 Buchanan’s classical source, Iphigenia in Aulis, repeatedly identifies Helen’s sexual allure as what precipitates an ongoing cycle of devastation; ultimately it is Iphigenia who will suffer because of Helen’s adultery. Paris’ lust for Helen, his abduction of her, and her husband Menelaus’ determination to win her back lead to Agamemnon’s promise to sacrifice his daughter. Euripides’ Chorus explicitly names Helen as the cause of Iphigenia’s death and Agamemnon’s fall: “O wicked Helen, through you, and through your/Marriage, this terrible ordeal has come/To the sons of Atreus and to the child” (1251-3).45 Lamenting his role as abettor and accomplice to his brother, Agamemnon rages at Menelaus: “[Y]ou’ve thrown to the winds all reason/And honor, and lust only to hold a lovely woman/In your arms. Oh, the pleasures of the base/Are always vile” (386-9). In Euripides, as Helene P. Foley and others have argued, the sentencing of Iphigenia is intended to repair the damage that Helen has caused to the male psyche—her husband’s and Agamemnon’s.46

43 Klein, The Triumph of Irony in the Book of Judges (Sheffield, Eng.: The Almond Press, 1988), p. 99. 44 Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, p. 101. 45 All subsequent line references are from Iphigenia in Aulis, trans. Charles R. Walker, Euripides: The Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. 4, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958). 46 Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 78. Foley gives an insightful Girardian reading of the substitution of Iphigenia for Helen. For another consideration of how Girardian sociology speaks to feminist concerns, see also William Beers’s psychoanalytic study of sacrifice as an expression of male anxiety in Women and Sacrifice: Male Narcissism and the Psychology of Religion (Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1992).Victoria Wohl explains the relationship between the two women in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon also as a precautionary one: “It is as if Helen is an Iphigenia gone bad or, more to the point, as if Iphigenia must be killed in order to prevent her from becoming another Helen” (Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1998], p. 76). Charles Segal similarly understands Helen’s adultery to be replayed symbolically in Iphigenia’s story. Orestes’ rescue of Iphigenia in Iphigenia in Tauris, he argues, mimics Paris’ abduction of Helen (Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba [Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993], p. 10).

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At the beginning of Jephthes, Jephthah’s wife spells out a clear allegorical reading of Jephthah as a carnal Jew, a Christ-killing traitor, who lacks ability to comprehend the true meanings of the scripture. Storge is tormented by terrible nightmares in which a sheepdog chases off wolves only to kill the “shrinking lamb” in her arms himself with his “merciless teeth” (66). Jephthah is this Jewish wolf threatening the Lamb of God: he signifies the Old order to be replaced by his daughter as a figure of Christ. Buchanan’s play constantly examines the substitutional function of sacrifice within the community, both supporting and undercutting the allegorical replacement of Old with New, vengeance with mercy, and Jewish ritual sacrifice with the crucifixion. Yet Buchanan’s addition of Storge to the events detailed in Judges 11:29-40 also displaces this father/daughter allegory as she foregrounds the play’s motifs of female aggression and sexual autonomy. The image of the garrulous wife’s open, wailing mouth, which begins and ends the action of the play, is another dark, threatening, and sexualized female space that links Jephthah’s mother, wife, and daughter. Jephthah’s mother, only a brief mention in Judges 11, returns as Jephthah imagines his fate as a dark, hellish cavern that is both the literal site and ultimate metaphor of his tragic life: O sun, creator of the light of day, O ancestors, O all you men who have no part in sin, turn your faces far from this accursed sacrifice. Or do you, earth which is to drink in the innocent blood of the maiden, suck me into your open caverns and devour me in your boundless womb. As long as I can die in innocence, bury me anywhere. I do not refuse to enter hell itself, so long as I do not dwell in hell as slayer of my kin. (81) 47

The translator of this English edition, P.G. Walsh, interprets aut tu, cruorem virginalem innoxium potura tellus, hisce patulos in specus sinuque vasto me vora as a specific image of a “boundless womb.” The connection makes sense in Jephthes: as Buchanan emphasizes, it is indeed because of a harlot mother that Jephthah is exiled, and then consequently selected as the “low born” victim who must suffer for the community’s sins. His suffering, as the Angel initially explains, is inevitable; as in Euripides, female sexuality implicates innocent virgins as well. Storge’s condemnation of the sacrifice suggests the specter of the aggressive woman more broadly in the narrative—the dark, dangerous open spaces of Jephthah’s mother, as well as his daughter’s own assertive behavior in emerging from the house to greet him. Iphis’s place on the threshold of the house, in leaving herself vulnerable to slander and misinterpretation as a virgin body in the world, suggests also how she may prevent a type of “entry” into the narrative for the Christian reader. In Jephthes, words are dangerous because hasty vows can result in murder. But the power of words, specifically gossip, is also connected to female indiscretion. Evoking an archetype of female vulnerability that we see in the case of Susannah in Chapter 3, Buchanan’s Chorus comments on the maiden’s fate:

47

In her Lacanian reading of Judges 11, Bal compares Jephthah’s daughter as the first thing that he sees to a maternal figure—the primary object viewed by a child that determines the construction of his identity (pp. 61-2).

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What a harsh fate the breed of women experiences when brought forth into the world! Though free of blame, they are bitten by the envious tooth of malevolent gossip. The fictions invented by the anger of the talkative servant, the lies uttered by the suspicious husband himself, or by malicious neighbours, are regarded as fact. (75)

Iphis herself also displays an acute self-awareness of public concern with her virginity. Confused at her father’s lack of warm reception after she has run out to meet him, Iphis first suspects gossip. Her father, she worries, might be threatened by that which may also anger a “suspicious husband.” The Chorus immediately echoes this conceit: As for you, most wicked malice, so bold at devising deceits, and condemning dear friends on feigned charges, and with malevolent gossip proceeding headlong to loose the compact of the sacred marriage-torch, you rejoice to arm loving fathers with the blinding poison of the tongue against their dear children; so may that witness and just judge of our hidden lives enclose and secrete you in the caverns of murky hell, so that wandering gossip may never come back to this abode. (76)

It is not only bodies, but words that complicate reading the truth of the scripture. The feminized image of “the caverns of murky hell” returns here, as the proper habitat for “wicked malice” that spreads “malevolent gossip.” Buchanan’s sexualized description of Iphis on the altar is the realization of the suggestive comments above: Iphis is ostensibly innocent of these charges, and yet the “gossip” implicates her just the same. The erotic discourse that characterizes Iphis’s sacrifice calls our attention to the problem of the Jewish female body: its promise of spiritual supersession in Christian allegory and the more prurient interpretive possibilities with which this body is associated that symbolically obfuscate this typlogical mode. The sacrificial ritual, rather than only a prefigurement or realization of the ultimate sacrifice in Christ, becomes also a preventive strike against Iphis. As in Iphigenia in Aulis, “sacrifice” replaces “marriage” as a means of controlling the daughter on the verge of sexual maturation. Vilifying her husband to the daughter she had hoped to marry off, Storge rages: I was preparing a wedding-celebration for you, my daughter. I longed to behold the day when I might see you adorned by a happy fortune, blessed by children and a glorious husband. I held out the promise that you would be the stay and solace of my old age. In vain did I nurture deceiving dreams in your regard. ... [I]n our case fortune mingles countless crimes in a single crime—a father as executioner of his children, a criminal sacrifice conducted with barbaric ritual, altars bloodstained with sacrilegious victims. (87-8)48 48 This conceit is taken directly from Aulis. The notion of virgin sacrifice as a means to arrest adolescent sexuality derives also from Ovid’s tale of Iphis and Ianthes in the Metamorphosis IX (666-797): Iphis, saved from her fate as virgin sacrifice by her mother who disguises her as a boy, falls in love with Ianthes, also a woman. Ovid’s homoeroticallycharged resolution defies male authority in a double sense, as Iphis both successfully “leaves her house” and assumes a male role herself. In John Lyly’s comedy Gallathea, there are sly suggestions of incestuous desire in the father who prevents his daughter from becoming the annual virgin sacrifice to Neptune.

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Jephthah rejects Storge’s plea to die with her daughter, prompting Storge’s bitterly sarcastic praise: “What virtuousness, what sense of right, what innocence! The ritual slayer of his daughter is afraid to sin!” (90). In one sense, Iphis’s fate plays out a typological shift from her father’s carnal brutality to her own martyristic forgiveness. A model of filial obedience, mundane and spiritual, she renounces her physical life to her parents: “[W]hatever the fate which necessity impels, I readily consent to suffer, and I gladly offer my life which I owe to my father and my land” (90). She concludes by urging her mother not to carry a grudge (an eye-wink from Buchanan given Clytemnestra’s plot to murder her husband). At the scene of the sacrifice, her bold speech stuns the crowd into silence: “I wish that I could shed this blood more often, and if the salvation of my parents and fellow-citizens lies in me, I wish that I could turn the force of your fury and anger repeatedly on myself with a thousand deaths” (93-4). As she approaches the altar, Jephthah rescinds his earlier fervor and declares in the presence of the inconsolable Priest that the vow was undertaken in error: “now at last to my grief I realise how foul, savage, and grim was the purpose I contrived in rashly orphaning myself of such an offspring” (91). Iphis ultimately rejects her father’s pleas to stand in place of her; though spared the murderous crowd faced by her classical counterpart, she does not take the opportunity of freedom, but rather glorifies herself—and her crucified body—as a spectacle of martyrdom. The crowd, a messenger relates to Storge, stood “astonished at the marvel” (93) of her daughter. In Buchanan, Iphis is not a liberator (28), the term with which Buchanan characterizes her father but, more specifically, as Iphis conceives of herself at the moment of her sacrifice, a piaculum or an agent of expiation (63, 93).49 As Iphis assumes the role of her people’s savior, she herself is characterized by masculine attributes: she is, Shuger notes, “the first female [type of Christ] ... in Christian literature,” replacing earthly father for a spiritual one.50 When the Messenger gives an account of Iphis’s death to Storge in the tragedy’s final scene, he emphasizes her “manly spirit,” a description echoed by the Chorus (93).51 Yet at the conclusion of Jephthes, what emerges is not only the Christ-like Iphis, but an emasculating daughter who undercuts the allegorical weight of the narrative. Although Iphis’s sacrifice and resurrection as a deer at the conclusion of Aulis richly suggests a Christological scheme, her fate in Euripides’ sequel undercuts this image 49

It is Jephthah’s lowly status, Buchanan’s prologue explains, that makes him the ideal “liberator,” a sign of God’s mercy on the idolatrous Israelites and an assurance that they will, through Jephthah’s own scandal, learn obedience and humility themselves: “sed modum statuens suae irae liberatorem dedit” (28). William Tyndale first translates the Hebrew “azazel” to “scapegoat” in his vernacular Bible (1530). In the Vulgate, the goat is the “caper emissarius.” See Tyndale, Five Books of Moses Called the Pentateuch, intro. F.F. Bruce (Carbondale: Illinois Univ. Press, 1967), p. 345. As Thomas Hobbes contends in his allusion to the passage in Leviathan xli, both goats can be conflated typologically as a figure of Christ. 50 Shuger, p. 148. 51 The Chorus first describes her in this way (92). Walsh notes Buchanan’s adoption of Erasmus’ emphasis on Iphigenia’s “manly spirit” in “Buchanan and Classical Drama,” in Actus Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandraeni, ed. I.D. McFarlane (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986), p. 109.

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of spiritual ascension. Borrowing from Seneca’s Troades, Buchanan describes the multiple reactions of the crowd, who have different interpretations of her suffering: they are in awe of her as the savior who has liberated them from slavery; they also lament the loss of her youth and waste of her beauty (93).52 The conclusion of Jephthes necessarily recalls Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, which begins with Iphigenia’s explanation of the sacrifice as a sham: when the knife fell, she did not ascend to spiritual martyrdom but was snatched by Artemis who, fooling the onlookers with a bleeding deer, has enslaved her. In an ironic, bitter twist, Iphigenia in Tauris portrays the post-sacrificial Iphigenia as a practitioner of sacrifice herself: Artemis enlists her as a “High Priestess,” responsible for preparing visitors to the island for ritual slaughter. The Iphigenia of Tauris represents the bloody, vindictive world of her past: If but some heaven-sent wind, forcing a ship Between the Clashing Rocks, might bring me Helen, The Helen whom I hate, and Menelaus, That I might make of them the sacrifice, Let a new Aulis expiate the old, And vent my vengeance! It was Helen’s fault And his, that Greek hands lifted me at Aulis And led me like a beast where, at the altar, My father held the sacrificial knife. I live it all again. (354-61)53

Unlike the ending of Aulis, which has Iphis crying out that her blood will purge the country’s sins: “I will come/And bring Greece/Her salvation/And a crown of victory!,” “sacrifice” in Jephthes does not only lend itself to Christian allegory but to a cycle of revenge that mimics the “eye for an eye” ethos associated with Judaic practice in the Old Testament. Jephthah’s daughter’s fate, in Buchanan’s conflation of biblical and classical narratives, resists allegorical meaning and takes the Christian viewer back to the discomfiting carnal practices of the Jews. In Jephthes, the narrative of Judges 11:29-40 becomes a type of lens, a cultural prism through which the fate of the virgin daughter opens up for scrutiny the ways that the Protestant reader understood the Hebrew scripture. As I have argued too, the matter of the sacrifice raises the question of how to distinguish the present from the past—the one true faith from a lapsed “old” order of Catholics and Jews. The sacrificed daughter Elizabeth The connection of Elizabeth and “holy virginity” was also, of course, a problematic one for its Catholic connotations and for its reminder that England lacked an obvious, legitimate successor to the throne. Perhaps with Jephthah’s daughter in mind, who 52

See George Buchanan: Tragedies, 266n. Iphigenia in Tauris, trans. Witter Bynner, Euripides: The Complete Greek Tragedies, Vol. 2, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969). 53

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has the misfortune to die without offspring, Parliament cites the time of Judges as notable for its lack of heirs.54 Nonetheless, the image of Elizabeth as a sacrificed daughter throughout her reign also suggests a claim to scriptural propriety: her body becomes the means through which Old Testament sacrifice yields spiritual truths to her subjects. As a type of sacrificed daughter, as she was frequently represented, Elizabeth also promised a connection to what Dodwell terms the most “memorable” moment in Jewish history: the symbolic appropriation of the Old order, which is both Catholicism and Judaism, into Protestant ideology. In the preface to her translation of Queen Catherine’s Prayers for Meditation dated December 30, 1545, the young Elizabeth addresses her father: “I am bound unto you as lord by the law of royal authority, as lord and father by the law of nature, and as greatest lord and matchless and most benevolent father by the divine law.”55 Two decades later, John Foxe turns Elizabeth’s public image as loyal daughter to father and God into ambitious allegory. In his 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments, he depicts Elizabeth as a type of Iphigenia, a Protestant martyr and providential survivor of Catholic persecution.56 His allusion to Agamemnon in his impassioned account of Elizabeth’s imprisonment explicitly refers to Mary, but is conceivably also a provocative commentary on Elizabeth’s actual father, Henry VIII. Though not an actual martyr, Foxe explains, Elizabeth should be acknowledged for the extent to which she suffered at the hands of Mary and her supporters: [A]s we have hitherto discoursed the afflictions and persecutions of the other poor members of Christ comprehended in this history before, so likewise I see no cause why the communion of her grace’s afflictions also ... ought to be suppressed in silence. ... For there was [nothing lacking] to make a very Iphigenia of her but her offering up upon the altar of the scaffold.57

More than a “king’s daughter,” he writes, Elizabeth, for her bravery in the face of Catholic “afflictions and persecutions” is lauded as almost a female divinity. Foxe’s account of Elizabeth’s imprisonment in the tower mimics Iphigenia’s acquiescence in front of the agitated crowd at Aulis and Christ’s forbearance at the scene of his crucifixion. Ultimately a paradigm of brave steadfastness, Elizabeth consoles her horrified supporters: A large number of the wardens and servants of the Tower were arranged in order, between whom the princess had to pass. Upon inquiring the use of this parade, she was informed it was customary to do so. ‘If,’ said she, ‘it is on account of me, I beseech you that they may be dismissed.’ On this the poor men knelt down, and prayed that God would preserve her grace, for which they were the next day turned out of their employments. The tragic scene must have been deeply interesting to see an amiable and irreproachable princess 54

Elizabeth I: Collected Works, p. 85. Ibid., p. 9. 56 Thomas S. Freeman examines how Foxe departs from such unequivocal praise of Elizabeth in later editions (“Providence and Prescription: The Account of Elizabeth in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in The Myth of Elizabeth,” pp. 27-47). 57 Quoted in William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, The Bedford Historical Series (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963), p. 127. 55

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sent like a lamb to languish in expectation of cruelty and death; against whom there was no other charge than her superiority in Christian virtues and acquired endowments. Her attendants openly wept as she proceeded with a dignified step to the frowning battlements of her destination. ‘Alas!’ said Elizabeth, ‘what do you mean? I took you to comfort, not to dismay me; for my truth is such, that no one shall have cause to weep for me.’58

Foxe’s Elizabeth, a paragon of “Christian virtues and acquired endowments,” stoically awaits her fate. His depiction of the future queen juxtaposes Elizabeth’s self-effacement against Catholic wrath; rather than issuing a call to arms to her supporters, she urges them to find solace in her suffering. Upon Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Lady Diana Primrose composed A Chaine of Pearle; or, a Memorial of the Peerles Graces and heroick virtues of Queene Elizabeth of glorious memory: Some time in prison this sweet Saint was pent, Then hastily away Shee thence was sent To places more remote; and all her friends Debar’d accesse, and none but suche attends As ready were with poison or with knife, To sacrifice the sacred Princesse life, At bloudy Bonner’s becke, or Gardner’s nod; Had they not been prevented by that God, Who did Susannah from the Elders free, And at the last gave her liberty.59

She praises Elizabeth as a type of Susannah, righteous as others are “ready ... with poison or with knife,/To sacrifice the sacred Princesse life” and ultimately saved, like Isaac, by divine intervention. Like Susannah, Elizabeth appears as a bodily spectacle to be publicly read and interpreted. Elizabeth’s persona as a virgin daughter evolved throughout her reign. From Foxe’s perspective, she is a perennial daughter and celebrated martyr for the Protestant cause. In her mature years, she was heralded as a woman closer to God than to a husband; later, Elizabeth would become a phoenix who could resurrect herself in to an eternal afterlife of fame and glory.60 In 1575, she is famously captured in “The Phoenix Portrait,” the conceit that emerges at the end of Henry VIII as well as in Anne Bradstreet’s poem, “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory” (1650). In her final speech to Parliament on December 19, 1601, Elizabeth explains her financial contributions on behalf of the country’s defense, depicting the subsequent loss of her own income as a type of martyrdom:

58

John Foxe, Book of Martyrs, ed. John Malham (Philadelphia, 1813; rev. 1830), p. 404. See also Berry on Foxe’s allusion and Iphigenia in Aulis in Of Chastity and Power, pp. 70-72. 59 A Chaine of Pearle... (London, 1603), p. 649. Printed in The Progresses and Public Processions, Vol. 3, pp. 640-50. 60 See Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, pp. 80-81.

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Images of sacrifice and resurrection—Elizabeth as this “taper of true virgin wax”— pervade Elizabethan iconography. Elizabeth describes herself as a source of “light and comfort”: she shows mercy and also illuminates in a more symbolic sense, as her subjects deployed her as a type of scriptural text. The image of Elizabeth as a near-sacrificed daughter is also relevant to my examination of the archetype of the sacrificed daughter on the popular stage and her allegorical significance in Christian exegeses. The virgin daughter in adaptations and allusions to Judges 11:29-40 in late sixteenth-century drama engages with readerly expectations of the scripture that validate the supersession of Old by New and, more specifically, the meaning of Old Testament sacrifice to the Protestant reader. In the Old Testament, the virgin body offers a touchstone around which readers could understand Christian sacrifice as a fundamental element of the sacred scripture. In dramatic versions of the sacrificed daughter on the sixteenth-century stage, the conceit signifies the ultimate form of knowledge and also, like the maternal body with its disclosing and concealing womb, symbolizes the obfuscation of these overdetermined meanings. I am not going so far as to argue that Marlowe and Shakespeare had Elizabeth specifically in mind when composing their Jewish daughters. Rather, I argue, these daughters are illuminated by Elizabeth’s fluid identity as virgin daughter and her public image as a type of scriptural text who, through her connection to the body of the Jewish woman, signified her Protestant subjects’ own intimacy with the scripture. As I have argued too, Elizabeth’s own manipulation of public conceptions of her virginity mirrors the obscuring qualities of the Jewish women we see on the public stage. Shakespeare certainly has a broad interest in fathers who threaten to kill their daughters, but Jephthah and his daughter have a particular significance in this dramatic context. The elusive nature of the Jewish virgin daughter has implications for the reading of scripture, and both Marlowe and Shakespeare engage with her overdetermined role in Christian hermeneutics. My discussions of The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice in the chapters that follow focus on how the body of the Jewish daughter symbolically offers and disrupts Christian interpretations of the Old Testament; the playwrights’ inclusion of deceitful mothers and emphasis on theatrical illusion contribute to the image of the virgin daughter as both promising— and complicating—what appears initially to be a tidy blueprint of Christian typology. These plays stage ruptures between text and reader and, subsequently, the reader and the priscas veritas. In the sixteenth century, the sacrificed daughter motif betrays a deep anxiety about the interpretation of texts that amplifies the concerns suggested in the narratives I discuss in the first three chapters of this book. As we will see, Jewish women in popular drama reveal and conceal themselves, always threatening to bar access to a type of true meaning.

Chapter 5

“I’ll sacrifice her on a pile of wood”: Abigail’s Roles in The Jew of Malta I have no charge, nor many children, But one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear As Agamemnon did his Iphigen; And all I have is hers. (2.1.134-7)1 During the first scene of The Jew of Malta, Barabas invokes Agamemnon’s love for Iphigenia to describe his own devotion to Abigail, his adolescent daughter. The allusion foreshadows Barabas’s actual murder of his only child at the end of Act 3—a delivery of poisoned porridge prompted by her conversion to Christianity. The comparison between the two daughters is ironic in other ways: we remember Agamemnon for his hasty concession to offer his daughter as a blood sacrifice, not for his paternal devotion. Critics have looked to medieval depictions of Jewish violence against Christian children as a context for Marlowe’s meaning here. Dena Goldberg notes that Marlowe’s parallel between Iphigenia and Abigail deflates typological images of Jewish ritual murder/sacrifice as a prefiguration of Christian suffering and the expiation of communal sin.2 Shapiro reads Marlowe’s invocation of Agamemnon’s loss of his daughter, and Barabas’s subsequent murder of Abigail, as a retribution fantasy against the Jewish slayer of medieval myth who preyed on Christian children.3 Marlowe clearly draws from such prevalent stereotypes of the bloodthirsty Jew, but his audience may have also understood Barabas’s allusion to Iphigenia above—as well as his implicit threat to “sacrifice [Abigail] on a pile of wood” (2.3.52) should she marry a Christian—as a winking allusion to Judges 11:29-40.4 1 All subsequent quotations will be from Christopher Marlow’s The Jew of Malta: Text and Major Criticism, ed. and intro. Irving Ribner (Indianapolis, IN: The Odyssey Press, 1970). 2 Goldberg, “Sacrifice in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” SEL 32.2 (1992): 233-45. 3 See Shapiro, pp. 108-9. 4 Both Maurice Charney (“Jessica’s Turquoise Ring and Abigail’s Poisoned Porridge: Shakespeare and Marlowe and Rivals and Imitators,” Renaissance Drama 10 [1979]: 38) and Ruth Hanusa (“Killing the Daughter: Judges’ Jephthah and The Jew of Malta’s Barabas,” Notes and Queries 46 [1999]: 199-200) make a brief connection between the Judges 11 narrative and Barabas’s threat to sacrifice Abigail. Although critics have noted the difficulty of locating potential source material for The Jew of Malta, I have found no mention of either Buchanan’s tragedy or other contemporary dramatic versions of the biblical father-virgin daughter motif.

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I am interested in the roles that Abigail plays as Barabas’s sacrificed daughter. In one sense, she is a convert and, like Jephthah’s daughter in Christian commentaries, an innocent victim who signifies the replacement of Old by New. She is also a parody of this allegorical tradition. Barabas’s sacrifice reads as neither a pious gesture nor as an affirmation of his daughter’s Christian martyrdom but, as Agamemnon’s sacrifice has been understood by many critics, as a crude attempt to control the sexual dispensation of his daughter; as the constant object of the Friars’ lust, Abigail’s conversion, too, confirms how she is perceived as more body/bawdy than spiritual neophyte. As such, the conceit of sacrifice in The Jew of Malta reflects how the play more pervasively stages a destabilization of Christian modes of scriptural interpretation. In the sacrificed Abigail, Marlowe also subverts an interpretive method that figures the Jewish body as the crude exterior that contains a deeper, spiritual Christian truth. As a so-called convert who contrives identities that promise and obscure her suitors’ ability to gain access to her, Abigail denies what I have argued is the audience’s hermeneutic investment in the Jewish daughter’s rejection of her father as a narrative of Christian supersession. Most significantly, in the symbolic terms of the play, the Maltese Christians seek a Jewish body that promises both a physical experience as well as an essential truth from which they are barred entry. Abigail, figured through tropes of enclosure and disclosure, offers, and then defers, sexual fulfillment to the Christians of Malta. As we will see, their attempts to gain possession of her are also portrayed metaphorically as acquisitive moves toward the scriptural text; Barabas too participates in a discourse that equates the Jewish daughter with the elusive scripture, a thing of value to be protected. His claim is that he alone may read Abigail’s body correctly as she, in the guise of a chaste novitiate and, alternately, a lustful maiden, dupes her suitors and the Christians of Malta. Abigail deploys her virginity to great theatrical effect. She makes a dramatic transformation from Jewish ingénue to zealous nun, yet her ostensible trajectory toward conversion, a blur of dramatic displays and religious histrionics, only serves to heighten her mystery and agitate her suitors’ sexual desire. As we know from contemporary gynecological manuals that detail hymeneal examinations and other methods for determining virginity, the virgin, while representing spiritual purity and, as Peter Stallybrass has argued, the safe enclosure of the political state, also generates anxieties about what this body may conceal.5 Luther’s warning of the false convert Jew who behaves as a “fake” virgin—a body seemingly pure and Christian on the outside (like Abigail’s nun disguise) but deceptive within—illuminates the possibility of the virgin Jewish daughter as a figure of sexual and religious deception. Yet The Jew of Malta collapses this internal/external binary as well, representing the Christian nuns as sexually illicit and Abigail as a figure symbolic of truth, a Judaic essence desired by Christian and Jew. It is specifically in her capacity as a Jewish virgin that Abigail plays out Protestant concerns about the disclosure of scriptural veritas. Both the virginal and maternal body reveal and obscure: as we have seen, 5 Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 123-42.

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early modern drama also represents the Jewish maternal body ambivalently as an overdetermined site of truth and deception. The Jewish mother is an important figure of disclosure—Bethsabe’s promise of a rightful heir that signifies David’s redemption, Rebecca’s deliverance of the true elect in Jacob—as well as a body that stands in the way of the Christian reader’s apprehension of what they believed to be the scripture’s true meanings. At key moments in The Jew of Malta this mother returns, figured metaphorically in Abigail’s maturing body and in the image of the womb that is the lethal container at the play’s conclusion. It is not insignificant that the play’s stage run was concurrent with another Jewish body on display for a general audience. Marlowe’s tragedy enjoyed over 36 performances between 1592-96, the years surrounding the 1594 trial and execution of Elizabeth’s doctor, Rodrigo Lopez, who was charged with attempting to poison her. For the audiences that flocked to the theater, The Jew of Malta played out in high theatrics, like Lopez’s body drawn and quartered in a London courtyard, a retributive strike against the Jewish body, a symbol of treachery and blood miscegenation. I want to also consider Abigail’s body as a spectacle to be scrutinized by Christian readers. In early modern discourse, as I have shown, the body of the Jewish woman is also given value as a coherent site of meaning that must be pursued and penetrated. The physical presence of the Jewish woman manipulates the sensibilities of her Christian viewers (on stage and in the paying audience); as it did during Elizabeth’s pageants, playing the Jewish woman on stage suggests the authenticity of the Jewish historical past as well as the inherent limitations of such representations as theatrical show. Abigail’s body is the play’s focal point as it comments on and parodies modes of reading and interpretation. Her theatrics threaten to undercut Christian claims to “playne” meaning by their suggestion of the Jew’s exclusive possession of such a scriptural truth. Ultimately, both Abigail and Barabas exit the play as physical spectacles that evoke and subvert exegetical readings of the Jewish father and his sacrificed daughter as types of Christ: the simulacrum of sacrifice promises a totalizing moment, the delivery of meaning, but their respective deaths, like Barabas’s allusion to Agamemnon, mock this Christological archetype. Abigail’s father and Father The play begins with a sudden assault on Barabas. To procure the tribute they owe to the Turkish Caliphate, the Christian governor Ferneze imposes fines on the “infidel” Jews (1.2.62), whom he describes as cursed and thus deserving of such financial suffering. While a type of Vice-figure, machiavel, and devil preying on Jew, Turk, and Christian alike, Barabas is also the particular victim of these circumstances: after Barabas refuses to concede any of his wealth, Ferneze declares that he will take all of his money (as opposed to the half which he extracts from the other Jews): “We take particularly thine/To save the ruin of a multitude,/And better one want for a common good/Than many perish for a private man” (1.2.97-100). Marlowe alludes to the actual historical circumstances of sixteenth-century Malta in which Jews were often victimized by the colonizing Knights of Malta, but even more subversively, turns

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Barabas into a Christ-like sacrifice for the community.6 Andrew Hiscock argues that Marlowe “interrogates Early Modern religious prejudices” in part by making “the Jewish villain ... a parody of Christ in his persecution.”7 As we have seen, the Jewish father, as a type of Jephthah, is singled out to suffer but ultimately surpassed by his daughter as the (Christian) spirit that supersedes (Jewish) blood sacrifice. This allegory certainly underlies the drama that unfolds between Barabas and Abigail. Our first view of Abigail is of a daughter devastated by the Christians’ abuse of her father: Not for my self, but aged Barabas, Father, for thee lamenteth Abigail. But I will learn to leave these fruitless tears, And, urged thereto with my afflictions, With fierce exclaims run to the senate-house, And in the senate reprehend them all, And rent their hearts with tearing of my hair, Till they reduce the wrongs done to my father. (1.2.229-36)

Abigail initially pledges vengeance against the Christians who have seized Barabas’s house and fortune to pay back the tribute owed to the Turks: “Father, whate’er it be, to injure them/That have so manifestly wronged us,/What will not Abigail attempt?” (1.2.274-6). She despairs at the Christians’ demand for her father’s fortune (with a penalty of Christian conversion should he resist) and is prepared to “rent [the government’s] hearts with the tearing of [her] hair/Till they reduce the wrongs done to [Barabas]” (1.2.235-6). Abigail’s intense fidelity to Barabas also, ironically, anticipates her Christian conversion. Abigail, like Jephthah’s daughter in Christian exegetical tradition, demonstrates a fervent loyalty to her father that ultimately takes a distinctly Christological shape. She agrees to go undercover as a nun, joining the nunnery (their former house) so that she may access the money Barabas has stashed under the floorboards. The ruse plays out in rehearsal her sincere conversion later on, precipitated by her discovery of Barabas’s successful plot to kill her Christian suitors, including her fiancé, Mathias. Abigail’s story inspires dramatic language in early criticism of The Jew of Malta, which presumes the play a Christian allegory. Douglas Cole argues in 1962 that Barabas represents infidelity, “the inverse of the key Protestant virtue of Faith”; his daughter, however, is the moral and spiritual departure from and supersession of this “monster and metaphor.”8 Don Beecher 6

See Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 82-108. While the Knights of Malta, a group of young and largely aristocratic Catholic missionaries who took command over Rhodes in 1530, defeated the Turks in Malta during the critical siege of 1565, Marlowe imagines his Christian Knights as this defeated army, a subjugated yet corrupt group who, in turn, extort payments from the Jews. 7 “Enclosing ‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room’: The Question of Cultural Marginality in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 35 (1999): 12. 8 Cole, Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 136, 144.

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concludes similarly that “[o]nly Abigail represents some vestige of the world where men believe in and guide their activities by transcendental values, and thus no person is less suited to survive in the world of this play than she.”9 Abigail in the nunnery After their house is seized and turned into a nunnery by the Christian governor, Barabas insists that Abigail disguise herself as a nun to gain entry, as “religion/ Hides many mischiefs from suspicion” (1.2.282-3). Barabas here does not so much refer to the nuns themselves, but to his daughter. Indeed, Barabas presumes the Christians’ sins to be visible; he attributes to Abigail, however, a particular skill at concealment that is thick with religious, sexual, and, ultimately, textual meaning. The nuns may claim to be sexually chaste, he later sneers, but “‘[t]is likely they in time may reap some fruit” (2.3.83); his comment that “they do a while increase and multiply” (2.3.88) suggests that they may grow in number and also that they are growing large with pregnancy. Barabas’s explanation to Abigail that she must travel as a hidden Jew is echoed immediately in the Abbess’s description of herself and her fellow nuns as women who “love not to be seen” (1.2.306); although they are both concealed, Barabas makes a sharp distinction between his “counterfeit profession” (1.2.292), ingenuity taken in self-defense, and the Christians’ “unseen hypocrisy” (1.2.293), their sanctimonious self-delusion. He also understands himself as the exclusive reader of Abigail’s body: she will perform her role “unseen,” a figure of bodily obfuscation. As we will see, the Jewish father’s insistence on his propriety over his daughter blurs together with his claim to a superior interpretive knowledge of the Hebrew scripture. Barabas’s desire to disguise Abigail and his later fantasy of her locked away in his house (like Shylock’s own) suggests how he protects Abigail sexually and, as a symbol of the Hebrew scripture, textually, from Christian infiltration. The theatrical scheme hatched by father and daughter enables Abigail to fulfill her potential as a figure of multiple concealments. In order to access the money he has stashed under a floorboard, Barabas explains, she is to “[e]ntreat the abbess to be entertained” (1.2.280). Abigail has only a brief hesitation about her ability to do this: Abigail: Ay, but father, they will suspect me there. Barabas: Let ’em suspect, but be thou so precise As they may think it done of holiness. Entreat ’em fair, and give them friendly speech, And seem to them as if thy sins were great, Till thou hast gotten to be entertained. Abigail: Thus, father, shall I much dissemble. (1.2.283-9)

9 Beecher, “The Jew of Malta and The Ritual of the Inverted Moral Order,” Cahiers Elisabethains 12 (1977): 48. Sara M. Deats illuminates Marlowe’s many biblical allusions as “ironic strategy” rather than clear allegory (“Biblical Parody in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: A Re-Examination.” Christianity and Literature 37 [1988]: 43).

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Abigail inquires what she should do after she is “entertained,” meaning both that she will be accepted as a novitiate and, perhaps, that she will provide or experience a type of theatrical pleasure. “Entertained” appears three times in this exchange, and again as the Friar Barnardine confirms that Abigail has indeed been “entertained” (1.2.328), not only admitted to the nunnery but, given what is quickly revealed to be his lascivious inclination, targeted as a means of satisfying his lust. The Friars’ approving reaction—they are convinced of her “moving spirit” (1.1.327)—reads as a tongue in cheek reference to how they’ve been titillated at the prospect of taking pleasure in her body. Indeed, the Friars’ response to the body they imagine under Abigail’s nun disguise anticipates her actual romance with Mathias. Abigail immediately plays her part well. An amorous adolescent in the guise of a chaste virgin who renounces her body, she solicits the attention of her small audience at the nunnery—the Abbess, two Friars, and a nun: “Grave abbess, and you, happy virgin’s guide,/Pity the state of a distressed maid” (1.2.313-14) and proceeds to explain her predicament: “Fearing the afflictions which my father feels/Proceed from sin or want of faith in us,/I’d pass away my life in penitence/And be a novice in your nunnery/To make atonement for my laboring soul” (1.2.321-5). She promises to a be “a novice [who will] learn to frame/[her] solitary life” (1.2.330-31) to the Church’s laws: “I do not doubt, by your divine precepts/And mine own industry, but to profit much” (1.2.333-4). Her talk of hard work comments more on the theatrical moment, however: she brings diligence to her performance as a nun rather than to the principles of this vocation. Abigail’s theatrics also position her metatheatrically as she becomes the subject of her baffled suitor’s gaze. Passing by her on the street, Mathias too joins her Christian audience, but is unconvinced by what he sees playing out before him: Who’s this? Fair Abigail, the rich Jew’s daughter, Become a nun? Her father’s sudden fall Has humbled her and brought her down to this. Tut, she were fitter for a tale of love Than to be tired out with orisons, And better would she far become a bed, Embraced in a friendly lover’s arms, Than rise at midnight to a solemn mass. (1.2.364-71)

Nonetheless, Mathias informs his rival Lodowick that Abigail has “strangely metamorphosed” (2.1.379). Abigail’s transformation is sudden and, as such, calls our attention to its arbitrariness. Mathias’s credulity, despite his healthy skepticism of the situation, reflects what Darryll Grantley terms “scripted Christian theatre” in The Jew of Malta: excessive religious displays in which the ostensible spiritual experience, the embrace of Christian ideology, reads instead as self-conscious artifice or “camp.”10 10 See Grantley, “‘What meanes this shew?: Theatricalism, Camp and Subversion in Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta,” in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts, (1996; rpt, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 231.

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Reading Abigail as scripture Playing on familiar descriptions of the Jews’ betrayal of Christ, Barabas describes his innate deceptiveness as ideal for the part of actor: I am not of the tribe of Levi, I, That can so soon forget an injury. We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please; And when we grin, we bite; yet are our looks As innocent and harmless as a lamb’s. (2.3.18-22)

As Jonathan Gil Harris argues, “Barabas characterizes his skill in role-playing as his racial birthright.”11 This “racial birthright” is also tied to the biblical Jews of the scripture. As I will show, Barabas affirms his identity in large part through his relationship with scripture, his own access to true meanings that are, by contrast, obfuscated for the Christian reader. Like the Christians whose “profession” he maligns at the beginning of the play, he too manipulates language and self-representation, but prides himself through his legitimate ability to do so. As Barabas plots to retrieve the jewels he has stashed in his former house, his instructions to Abigail are acting lessons, and a suggestion that the Jewish virgin, with her ability to disguise her body, may both adeptly “mean truth” to the Christians who attempt to comprehend her and “dissemble” such meaning. More than her father, Abigail proves the ultimate model of “unseen” Jew because her virginity gives her a distinct proclivity toward fraudulent self-presentation. To reassure her suitor Lodowick, to whom Barabas has promised Abigail, that his daughter’s tears are not a sign of disinterest, Barabas explains that it is “the Hebrews’ guise/That maidens new-betrothed should weep a while” (2.3.322-3). Although she expresses sincere revulsion for Lodowick, her role as virgin does allow her to surpass her father in dramatic range. Barabas gives her initial coaching on how she may seduce her two Christian suitors: Entertain Lodowick, the governor’s son, With all the courtesy you can afford, Provided that you keep your maidenhead. Use him as if he were a—Philistine. Dissemble, swear, protest, vow to love him; He is not of the seed of Abraham ............ Kiss him, speak him fair, And like a cunning Jew so cast about That ye be both made sure ere you come out. (2.3.222-7, 231-3)

Barabas intimates rhetorically the similitude between the bogus outward show of the lustful nuns and Abigail’s own skill at deception, yet he prides himself in the difference between the nuns’ promiscuity and Abigail’s chastity. Inverting Luther’s 11

Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 95.

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metaphor of the “unseen” Jew as the slattern who can disguise herself as a virgin, Marlowe depicts Abigail’s secret Jewish virgin body as a site of spiritual value connected to the biblical patriarchs. By adeptly donning the guise of a willing lover, she will protect her virginity just as she shields her Jewishness under a Christian cloak. Deception here, like Hester’s in The Godly Queene Hester, suggests the Jews’ sexual and political treachery as well as the protection of a sacred identity—Abigail is a “cunning Jew” and the “seed of Abraham.” Her “cunning” succeeds because of her suitors’ ardent desire to possess her; in the parodic logic of the play, Abigail offers an essential place of origin, an entryway to Christian truth that is always “dissembled” as theatrical illusion and thus denied to her audience. Abigail manipulates public perceptions of her body and turns the nunnery into her theater. As she informs Barabas of their eviction, her initial description of the nunnery as a protected cloister suggests her unique role as a versatile performer who may enter and exit at will: “I left the governor placing nuns,/Displacing me ... of thy house they mean/To make a nunnery, where none but their own sect/Must enter in, men generally barred” (1.2.254-7). Abigail continually “displaces” herself, taking on multiple roles that suit the desires of her particular audience; as she discloses and hides herself throughout the play, first duping the inhabitants of the nunnery and then her Christian suitors shortly thereafter, she stirs up not a trace of suspicion. The tropes of enclosure and disclosure with which Abigail is associated figure prominently as father and daughter stage Abigail’s seduction of Mathias and Lodowick. Abigail claims that “men [are] generally barred” from the nunnery, but she is able to travel back and forth to participate in her father’s schemes, and to tantalize her Christian, male audience with fantasies of penetrating her religious disguise. Barabas paints for Mathias a picture of Abigail locked in his house, peering out a keyhole at his rival Lodowick: “[W]hen he comes, she locks herself up fast;/Yet through the keyhole will he talk to her,/While she runs to the window, looking out/When you should come and hale him from the door” (2.3.259-62). For Barabas, the Jewish father’s house signifies the ultimate form of physical and ideological possession: after acquiring a new house, he boasts that the Christians— “the [u]nchosen nation, never circumcised” (2.3.8)—“hoped my daughter would ha’ been a nun,/But she’s at home, and I have bought a house/As great and fair as is the governor’s” (2.3.12-14). Although Jessica always eludes Shylock’s grasp, she and Abigail both represent the Jewish father’s fantasy of concealment and the Christian suitor’s wish for penetration. Barabas constructs an enticing image of his daughter’s sequestered body for the benefit of her Christian lover, and his suggestion that only Mathias may have access to her body, which he keeps under lock and key from her other suitors, drives Mathias to murderous distraction. By the end of Act 3, Mathias and Lodowick have swiftly executed one another in a duel orchestrated by Barabas. Abigail’s complex role in the play’s intimations of scriptural hermeneutics occurs most strikingly in a scene in which she does not actually appear. During a secret conference between Barabas and Mathias, the rivals actually transform Abigail into a scriptural text, the Book of the Maccabees. During this fascinating exchange, Barabas confers with the love-struck Mathias while Mathias’s mother anxiously interjects her concern about his interest in the Jewish merchant:

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Katherine: Tell me, Mathias, is not that the Jew? Barabas: As for the comment on the Maccabees, I have it, sir, and ’tis at your command. Mathias: Yes, madam, and my talk with him was About the borrowing of a book or two. Katherine: Converse not with him; he is cast off from heaven. Thou hast thy crowns, fellow. Come, let’s away. Mathias: Sirrah, Jew, remember the book. Barabas: Marry, will I, sir. (2.3.151-9)

The ruse, a scholarly exchange about commentaries on Maccabees, depicts the competition between Jewish father and Christian suitor for Abigail as also a textual matter. Barabas feigns interest in sharing his possession with Mathias “at [his] command,” when in fact he takes desperate measures to keep his property— Abigail—concealed. As in Barabas’s description of Abigail locked in a room awaiting the exclusive entry of Mathias, this exchange tantalizes the Christian audience with full access to the Jewish woman—a body that signifies a carnal experience as well as the disclosed truth of the scripture. Here, Barabas plays the role of Jewish scholar illuminating for the eager Christian reader rabbinical commentaries on the Jews’ improbable martial victory, a narrative that Luther famously condemned, as he did the Book of Esther, for its celebration of Jewish nationalism. The fictitious commentaries to which Barabas and Mathias allude would have praised the Jews’ righteous defense of their nation against its enemies—a meaning that might, as Luther feared, encourage Christians to “Judaize”: to turn Jewish and, even more, to blur the distinct parameters of Christian identity by embracing too strictly the Judaic meaning of the Hebrew scripture. Luther’s metaphor of the Jew as a sexually deceptive woman disguised as a virgin is realized in The Godly Queene Hester’s heroine; so, too, in The Jew of Malta the virgin becomes literalized as Abigail who remains sexually and textually elusive to her Christian audience. Mathias wants to penetrate her, but of course he will never be able to do so. The return of the mother Barabas’s initial boast of his fortunes as an accumulation of “infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37), as many critics have noted, revises the popular liturgical conceit of Christ (the “pearl beyond price”) in the Virgin Mary’s womb, transforming the spiritual meaning into material wealth.12 As Lampert argues in her reading of Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, the converted Jewish daughter, who collapses the traditional divide between “internal” and “external” sensibilities as they are figured in Christian hermeneutics, “most embodies the threat of indeterminate [Christian]

12 David Riggs points out that Marlowe’s characters subvert Christian typology through their literal interpretations of spiritual language (The World of Christopher Marlowe [New York: Henry Holt, 2004], pp. 265-6). On “infinite riches” in the room/womb, see G.K. Hunter, “The Theology of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 222-5.

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identity.”13 Abigail, a Jew and Christian martyr who takes residence in a nunnery often characterized as a brothel, reflects these troubled distinctions between whore and virgin, letter and spirit, Old and New. As Barabas suggests, hidden under the habit of the “real” nuns is not a chaste but an erotic body: it is a Christian exterior that potentially cloaks illicit, sexual truths. The play, as I have suggested, effectively inverts traditional exegetical distinctions between the exterior and interior sense of the scripture—that is, the Jewish text that must be infiltrated in order to access the spiritual truth that lies within. Abigail suggests how cultural perceptions of Jewish historical and textual authenticity do not discard the physical sense, but are rendered symbolically through the body of the Jewish woman. Abigail gleefully stands guard over what she describes as the “happy place” (2.1.32) of “the infinite riches” stashed in the dark hiding place in the nunnery: the dark spaces with which Marlowe associates the pseudo-nun Abigail suggest that the Jewish woman’s womb is a carnal, material place and, in the play’s association of Jewish woman and scripture, a potential site of God’s Word that is also (like the Apocrypha) dangerously obscured for the reader or potentially bogus. In early modern drama, Jewish mothers and daughters are continuously associated with dark spaces—the tent where Deborra and Rebecca hide with Jacob, the inside of a locked room guarded by a Christian-hating father in The Jew of Malta and, in Merchant, the dark interior of gold caskets. On the popular stage, it is Christian men who attempt to penetrate this space that is the Jewish virgin body. Marlowe’s insertion of the mother into the allegorically-weighted narrative of a Jewish daughter’s rejection or transcendence of her father recalls, of course, Buchanan’s own invocation of mothers in his version of Judges 11:29-40. The maternal image of the womb and its connotations of a cloistered, sacred vessel that troubles Christian supersession returns in The Jew of Malta. Our first vision of Abigail after she joins the nunnery is of a maternal adolescent whose full breasts signify her nurturing of Barabas.14 Barabas views Abigail as she looks down at him from the nunnery’s balcony poised to throw down his stash of jewels—a scenario that, in its depiction of Barabas’s greedy ecstasy, mimics a wooing scene: Oh my girl, My gold, my fortune, my felicity, Strength to my soul, death to mine enemy, Welcome, the first beginner of my bliss. O Abigail, Abigail, that I had thee here too, Then my desires were fully satisfied. But I will practice thy enlargement thence. O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss! [He] hugs his bags. (2.1.47-54)

13

Lampert, p. 143. Tambling argues that Abigail symbolizes Barabas’s pre-Oedipal desire for the maternal, parodied also in the cauldron/womb at the play’s conclusion (“Abigail’s Party: ‘The Difference of Things’ in The Jew of Malta,” in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker [Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1991], p. 103). 14

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As Maurice Charney and Jeremy Tambling have noted, what follows is a scene that anticipates Shylock’s famous cry: “My ducats and my daughter!/A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats ... jewels, two stones, two rich and precious stones” (2.8.17-18, 20), a bawdy reference to his own testes.15 Barabas’s vision of his daughter emphasizes her physical maturity into womanhood (she is on the cusp of this transformation): he will “practice [her] enlargement” as the bags simulate her developed breasts. The maternal Abigail promises various types of procreation to her father. The literal place of the Jewish womb as well as the symbolic spaces with which it is associated conceal things of both material and spiritual value; like the treasure hidden under the floorboards of the nunnery, this place of origin discloses and produces exclusively for the Jews. Under the balcony, Barabas fantasizes simultaneously about his restored finances and his daughter’s maturation, equating the Jewish (and nursing?) mother with the production of more money and more Jews. He praises the “sole daughter” whom he “holds as dear as Agamemnon did his Iphigen” by emphasizing that “all [he has] is hers”—meaning the fortune he will bequeath or, more provocatively, that his existence is contingent on Abigail’s own ability to reproduce in the future. Although he and Abigail will ultimately exploit the Christians’ perception that God punishes Jews for their lack of faith, Barabas initially disputes the Christian Governor’s claim that his financial extortion of the Jews is proper recompense for those “[w]ho stand accursed in the sight of heaven” (1.2.64); as Barabas states explicitly at the beginning of the play, he understands his financial and physical reproduction as insured through the Jews’ exclusive claim to biblical history. Barabas cites his successful mercantile ventures as evidence of “the blessings promised to the Jews” (1.1.103) a legacy that ensured “old Abram’s happiness” (104). Abigail’s ability to reproduce answers Barabas’s frantic question to the Christians after they initially threaten him with financial destitution—or forced conversion: “Christians, what or how can I multiply?/Of nought is nothing made” (1.2.104-5). Abigail serves as a place of Jewish origin, a source which fulfills God’s command to Noah to “be fruitful and multiple.” Barabas initially glorifies her as the “first beginner of [his] bliss”—a body with a viable womb and milk-filled breasts. Later, he “[grieves] because she lived so long,/An Hebrew born [who] would become a Christian” (4.1.17-18), emphasizing the moment of her birth and her connection with the (Jewish mother’s) womb that was supposed to ensure her identity as part of his “sacred nation.” In Abigail, Barabas imagines a maternal agency that he may harness; this maternal body, in its ability to make something from nothing reifies the Jews’ connection to the scripture that is the origin of the Christian self. The Jewish woman’s body produces what the character of Elizabeth I in Thomas Heywood’s If you know not me, You know no bodie describes as “happy issue”: a place of origin tropologically encoded as maternal. Marlowe suggests that Barabas’s desire to control and interpret this body is also an act of scriptural possession: she is to be read 15

Charney reads Abigail’s role as most definitely sexually charged: “Jessica has symbolically emasculated her old father, while Abigail has filled Barabas full of lusty, incestuous vitality” (p. 36).

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exclusively by him. Barabas’s attempts to dictate how Abigail’s admirers will “read” her resonate in his broader concern with interpretation, language and meaning. Like the other Jewish women I have discussed, Abigail plays a symbolic role as a type of scriptural text: through her virgin body (whose obfuscating qualities are exaggerated in the guise of a nun), she “multiplies” not only by promising more Jews through childbirth but by generating multiple narratives through which to entangle her father’s enemies. Abigail literally unearths Barabas’s treasure, giving him access to the container of “infinite riches.” Barabas imagines Abigail as this illuminating presence early in the play as he invokes the Jewish past, his biblical ancestry, to describe Abigail’s responsibilities as “Abraham’s offspring”: O Thou that with a fiery pillar led’st The sons of Israel through the dismal shades, Light Abraham’s offspring, and direct the hand Of Abigail this night, or let the day Turn to eternal darkness after this. No sleep can fasten on my watchful eyes, Nor quiet enter my distempered thoughts, Till I have answer of my Abigail. (2.1.12-19)

Abigail illuminates past and present, leading Barabas to emancipation. The conceit appropriates images associated with Christian supersession; in Merchant, Jessica’s Christian husband describes her similarly as she leaves Shylock’s house as his “torchbearer.” Barabas’s description of Abigail’s illumination also suggests his own ability to access God’s Word in an exclusively Judaic context. Barabas regularly mentions Old Testament figures with a vehement possessiveness: he cites the scripture as evidence that the Jews are God’s chosen people and historically locates his Christian enemies in the scripture’s “unchosen”—the “offspring of Cain, this Jebusite/That never tasted of the Passover,/Nor e’er shall see the land of Canaan,/Nor our Messias that is yet to come” (2.3.298-301). He resists the notion of Christ’s Second Coming, subsequently rejecting millenarian desires for the mass conversion of the Jews on which, an increasing number of English believed, the return of Christ was contingent. Barabas iterates instead the Jews’ understanding of a Messiah that “is yet to come,” implicitly denying the Christians their appropriation of Jews and Jewish scripture as Christian ideology.16 Barabas, like his successor on the Shakespearean stage, accuses the Christians of being inadequate readers of scripture. Reminding Barabas of the Jews’ part in the crucifixion (and suggesting, of course, the role of his biblical namesake), a Maltese Knight explains why he receives no mercy: “If your first curse fall heavy on thy head/And make thee poor and scorned of all the world,/’Tis not our fault, but thy inherent sin” (1.2.108-10). Barabas, distancing himself from his Jewish ancestors, accuses him of “[bringing] Scripture to confirm [his] wrongs” (111) and thus, perhaps 16

See Shapiro, pp. 131-65. Barabas makes an interesting suggestion here too of the Jewish Passover and the original “sacrifice” of the paschal lamb—which Christian exegetes figured as a type of crucifixion—as exclusive to the Jews.

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unwittingly, suggests that the Knight’s allusion to Matthew 32 is either bogus (as Christian scripture) or irrelevant.17 Unlike Shylock, who must suffer accusations of being a “Devil who can cite scripture for his purposes,” here Barabas levels this charge against the Christians. He rails against the Christians’ religious hypocrisy: “I can see no fruits in all their faith,/But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride,/Which methinks fits not their profession” (1.1.114-16). “Profession” here suggests how their beliefs are constructed tenuously through discourse and expressed ultimately in inferior modes of reading and interpretation. Yet Marlowe associates both Christians and Jews with the obfuscation of the scripture.18 Despite his claims, Barabas also proves himself a laughably trite and inaccurate reader. After relinquishing his fortune to the Christians, Barabas refuses his friends’ attempts at consolation by way of comparison to the long-suffering Job, who sustained his faith despite his immense personal and financial losses. Job, Barabas counters, did not possess nearly as much as he, and therefore cannot be an adequate analogy.19 Later, after discovering Abigail’s renunciation of her Jewish faith, Barabas groups her with such “Cains,” deploying yet another misinformed interpretive claim: False, credulous, inconstant Abigail! ........... Ne’er shall she grieve me more with her disgrace; Ne’er shall she live to inherit aught of mine, Be blessed of me, nor come within my gates, But perish underneath my bitter curse, Like Cain by Adam, for his brother’s death. (3.4.24, 26-30)

Barabas’s citation of the scripture is erroneous: Adam does not bestow any curse on Cain, despite Cain’s murder of his younger brother. Barabas’s lack of facility with the scripture also anticipates symbolically how he too will not be able to claim possession over Abigail. At first, the physical presence of the Jewish woman manipulates the sensibilities of her Christian viewers: moving from nun to seductress of both Mathias and Lodowick, Abigail quickly changes roles at her father’s prompting. Although her performance intimates the Jew’s claim to textual propriety, her elusiveness to Barabas ultimately suggests that no such mastery exists for Jew or Christian.

17

James R. Siemon reads the allusion in his introduction to the New Mermaid edition of The Jew of Malta, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1994), p. xxxii. 18 In Christian commentaries, the Jews’ choice of Barabbas over Christ also emblematized their rejection of the spiritual life. Riggs concludes that Marlowe juxtaposes the play’s numerous scriptural allusions with the characters’ inability to comprehend the Bible’s religious meanings. 19 Martin D. Yaffe reads Barabas as a “crude parody” of Job: “[w]hereas Job takes morality with the utmost seriousness, Barabas and the others, following the manifesto of Marlowe’s Machevill [in the prologue], grow increasingly morally obtuse” (Shakespeare and the Jewish Question [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997], p. 27).

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I have argued that Abigail is the play’s primary performer, and yet it is Barabas who has received most credit for these theatrical displays. Sara Munson Deats and Lisa S. Starks label Barabas the first “surrogate playwright and villain” in Renaissance drama: he is “an obsessive dramaturge, scripting scenarios and manipulating his cast of victims for his own pleasure and profit.”20 Yet Barabas’s own feigned conversion ultimately parrots Abigail’s ostensibly sincere defection from Judaism. From her father, Abigail learns how to master language that throws the Christians into confusion; she also provides the prototype for Barabas’s own course of action in the play. To avoid murder charges, Barabas, mimicking Abigail, plays the part of willing convert as he appeals to the Friars: “O holy friars, the burden of my sins/Lie heavy on my soul./Then, pray you, tell me,/Is’t not too late now to turn Christian?” (4.1.5052). In a dramatic display, he offers to “whip himself to death” (61) as penance for his sins. Religious conversion, he makes clear, is merely a guise for mercenary exchanges of resources. Barabas hints at his true meaning of “conversion” as he boasts of his assets and offers them as a bribe for his freedom: “All this I’ll give to some religious house,/So I may be baptized and live therein. ... I know that I have highly sinned./You shall convert me. You shall have all my wealth” (4.1.77-8, 82-3). We may be tempted to take Abigail’s pledges herself to the nunnery in the aftermath of her father’s murder plots as sincere, but Barabas’s disingenuous “confession” of his suffering suggests also how she is always implicated in Barabas’s theatrical deceptions.21 Although Barabas is profoundly affected by his daughter’s defection to the Christian faith, his sardonic comment on Abigail’s conversion, “What, Abigail become a nun again?” (3.4.1), wonderfully captures her dubious metamorphoses at the end of the play. His “again” reminds us of the rhetorical similarities between one iteration of Christian faith and another—his own bogus confessions, Abigail’s initial ruse, and her later invocations of the same. He is a raging lunatic, but also entirely correct, when he deems her “false, credulous, [and] inconstant.” The performance of sacrifice Abigail’s performance culminates with her death—a public display of self-abnegation and confession. Abigail’s loyal qualities may strongly suggest her sincere embrace of Christian faith, but Marlowe’s double allusion to Agamemnon’s sacrifice also emblematizes the play’s subversion of Christian supersession. Barabas’s “sacrifice” of Abigail is not his daughter’s spiritual union with another, superior Father. In Barabas’s tetchy comment about Lodowick: “[E]re he shall have [Abigail],/I’ll sacrifice her on a pile of wood” (2.3.51-2), Marlowe portrays sacrifice not as 20

Deats and Starks, “‘so neatly plotted, and so well perform’d’: Villain as Playwright in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Theatre Journal 44.3 (1992): 378, 379. 21 Coburn Freer maintains that all characters, with the exception of the Turks, lie, but he only attributes some culpability to the “innocent Abigail” as an unwilling participant (“Lies and Lying in The Jew of Malta,” in A Poet and a filthy Playmaker: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama [New York: AMS, 1988], p. 156).

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Christian martyrdom but as a father’s response to his daughter’s sexual maturity, a rash act of possessiveness that symbolically strips her actions of Christological meaning. The virgin body carries the promise of transcending the physical body through a “sacrifice” that is either martyrdom or a symbolic marriage to God, but ultimately this richly interpretive moment plays out as a parody of Christian exegesis. Just as Marlowe calls our attention to the volatility—and fallibility—of historical interpretation in his own version of sixteenth-century Malta, he reads against one strong exegetical tradition of the sacrificed Jewish daughter. When Barabas poisons the nunnery, it is a “conversion” that exposes the socalled virgins as adulterated bodies. Barabas instructs his servant to deliver the poison to the “dark entry” of the nunnery—a place ostensibly for alms-giving that is in fact resonant with the play’s earlier descriptions of discreet sexual activity: “There’s a dark entry where they take [the alms] in,/Where they must neither see the messenger,/Nor make inquiry who hath sent it to them” (3.4.75-7). Barabas’s version of “sacrifice”—poison—allows him to infiltrate his daughter’s body through her blood almost in the manner of a sexual penetration. The poison, administered by the Jewish father, takes the place of the Christian man who would also enter Abigail’s body: it will “envenom her/That like a fiend hath left her father thus” (3.4.100-101). He no longer imagines his daughter’s body as uniquely “unseen” in the nunnery but still envisions his exclusive ability to lay claim to her. Evoking his earlier jibes about the nuns’ sexual indiscretions, Barabas, describing the “swelling” effects of the poison on the nuns’ bodies, compares the poisoned and pregnant body: “I was afraid the poison had not wrought,/Or though it wrought, it would have done no good,/For every year they swell and yet they live” (4.1.4-6). Whereas Buchanan associates sacrifice with Jephthah’s sexual possessiveness in order to defer the theological issue of his vow and sacrifice, Marlowe has a more aggressive purpose here as he suggests that Barabas’s desire for Abigail completely discredits his audience’s typological expectations of the Jewish father and daughter. Abigail does in fact leave her father for his rival; pursued by one Christian suitor and eagerly consenting to another, she actualizes what we have already seen to be the provocative feminist readings of Judges 11 and Iphigenia in Aulis. The performance of sacrifice, the actual moment of Abigail’s death, generates erotic meaning alongside—or underneath—Abigail’s religious script. We learn from Friar Jacomo that Abigail has been loathe to take her actual vows during her stay at the nunnery; this significant piece of background information furthers even more the hollow tenor of Abigail’s confession. Already feeling the effects of the poison, Abigail vilifies her father to the Friar Jacomo as a way of explanation for her newfound commitment to the church: Then were my thoughts so frail and unconfirmed, And I was chained to follies of the world, But now experience, purchased with grief, Has made me see the difference of things. My sinful soul, alas, hath paced too long The fatal labyrinth of misbelief, Far from the Son that gives eternal life. (3.3.59-65)

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Shapiro observes that Abigail’s confession here is “too good,” thus prompting the Friar Jacomo to comment in response, “Who taught thee this?”22 The leering Friar first observes her surprising change of heart (“thou didst not like the holy life” [3.3.57]) and acknowledges her death primarily as a personal sexual loss. Despite the fact that Friar Barnardine deflates the moment of Abigail’s final confessions by lamenting his missed sexual opportunity with her (raising questions too about his expectations for her “vows” and Abigail’s subsequent reluctance)—“Ay, and a virgin too—that grieves me most” (3.6.40)—many critics tirelessly point to Abigail’s death scene as evidence of her spiritual or moral elevation. In fact, Marlowe highlights the contradictions of Abigail’s conversion: he depicts her displays of religious devotion while refusing to recognize her as a figure of Christian conversion. She is most explicitly a bodily object of desire at the moment when she appears to yearn most ardently for spiritual transcendence. Marlowe deflates her spiritual ambition by conjoining it with her admirers’ physical lust—a clever manipulation of Christian exegetical topoi that in turn issues a searing social commentary on the public construction of religious selfhood. Just as we’ve seen in Barabas’s renunciation of his Jewish sins earlier, “conversion” to the Friars Jacomo and Barnardine suggests not spiritual enlightenment but rather financial and sexual gain: as he anticipates Barabas’s visit, for example, Friar Jacomo rejoices that he “shall convert/An infidel and bring his gold into [the] treasury” (4.3.2-3). Abigail’s death is not a spiritually climactic one; the sexual subtext of her death underscores the unassimilated nature of Abigail’s body throughout the play; as both an object of desire and a signifier of scriptural truths inaccessible to her Christian audience, she continually obfuscates Christian meaning. Abigail declares that the “difference of things,” the superiority of Christian faith to Judaism, has been revealed to her, but Marlowe bestows no such spiritual significance to Christianity. The nunnery appears to be a brothel, and the Friars and Ferneze regular practitioners of bribery, threat, and prurience. The Jew of Malta’s satiric nod to Christian interpretations of Jewish sacrifice in the Old Testament is most pronounced as Abigail, cognizant of the fatal effects of the porridge, confesses that she unwittingly furthered her father’s plot to murder her Christian suitors: “I did offend high heaven so grievously/As I am almost desperate for my sins,/And one offense torments me more than all. ... Ah, gentle friar,/Convert my father that he may be saved,/And witness that I die a Christian” (3.6.16-18, 37-9). As Abigail renounces her Jewish “sins” she also complicates her initial suggestion that her conversion is inspired by “the Son that gives eternal life”—the illumination that will ostensibly supplant her father’s expectation that she will, in the tradition of his biblical ancestors, “light the way” for him. She intimates that her break with Barabas comes also from the death of her love interest; she does not renounce physical love but in some sense feels remorse for not showing her affection more strongly to Mathias: “My father did contract me to [both Lodowick and Mathias]:/First to Don Lodowick; him I never loved./Mathias was the man that I held dear,/And for his sake did I become a nun” (3.6. 21-4). Her meaning remains unclear. Did she commit herself to marriage with God because of lost sexual 22

Shapiro, p. 158.

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opportunity? Or, quite differently, does she refer back to her initial decision to go to the nunnery: was it “for his sake” that she hid herself in order to create opportunity for secret encounters out from under her father’s watchful eye? She emphasizes that both Mathias and Lodowick were sent into a frenzy of jealousy and murderous rage because of her “father’s practice” (3.6.27). Although she did participate willingly in the plan to foment this sexual competition, she attributes full responsibility to Barabas here, using the language of self-sacrifice to disavow her own agency in the double murder. We are no doubt sympathetic to Abigail’s eventual rejection of Barabas; at the same time, Abigail brims over with an encompassing, volatile religiosity that is expressed in the motif of the sacrificing daughter that begins and ends the play. Moving along with the play’s frenetic pace, she becomes a more extreme version of the sacrificed daughter with whom we have become allegorically familiar, rejecting her affiliation with the Old order in Barabas for a melodramatic pledge to the New. She adopts both Jewish and Christian suffering, first practicing Jewish mourning ritual and then, after Mathias’s death, renouncing Judaism’s sins. Her initial claim to the Abbess that she desires to “to pass away [her] life in penitence” (1.2.323) for having lived so long as a Jew, a lie told in order to gain access to the nunnery where Barabas has hidden his money, mirrors exactly her later claim of the same. We are supposed to understand only the first of her two renunciations disingenuously, although they are rhetorically identical. Ultimately, Abigail delivers what might be understood as a legitimate confession, but Marlowe also parodies her language of self-discovery; throughout the play, her disguised body represents the illusion of such inward illumination for the Christian subject. The performative nature of Abigail’s plea for Christian “atonement” (1.2.325) to the Abbess initially anticipates also the play’s depiction of Christian martyrdom as theatrical show, and the virgin daughter’s central role in this performance. Even though Abigail technically betrays Barabas, she is more significantly portrayed as a deceiver to the Christians—someone whose body is always obfuscating the truths she promises. Through Abigail, Marlowe invites his audience not to observe a Christian conversion but rather to participate in what Thomas Cartelli has described as “fantasies opposed to the orthodoxies of a moral order to which most members of the audience would at least be expected to subscribe.” He attributes the value of the play’s excessive final spectacle of Barabas entrapped in the cauldron of boiling water to the theatrical pleasure it elicits from the audience; The Jew of Malta’s climactic conclusion is one of “theatrical transcendence” that is a natural denouement to the performance techniques that Marlowe has utilized throughout the play.23 I understand the nature of this pleasure, in its original context in the 1590s, to be a response also to Marlowe’s provocative staging of biblical hermeneutics. Marlowe examines sacrifice as a false touchstone of Christian meaning, first through Barabas’s role as “sufferer” for this people and, ultimately, in his sacrificing 23 Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 27, 180. Cartelli notes that Marlowe’s outrageous conclusion to The Jew of Malta has often been discredited as “artistic failure or textual corruption of the original play” (p. 162).

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of Abigail that is realized by a bowl of poisoned porridge. At the end of the play, both Jewish father and daughter suggest an absurd act of sacrifice that circumvents the religious teleology of this bloody act in Christian exegeses. Barabas first stages his own resurrection with the help of a magic potion that causes his prison guards to take him for dead (5.1.78-80), a strange image of the sacrificed Jew that, as Hiscock notes, provocatively collapses distinctions between Barabas and Christ. Finally, dropped into the cauldron of boiling water he intends for the Christians, Barabas becomes a type of burnt sacrifice, mutilated in recompense for his sins. Like the biblical Jephthah, Barabas suffers on behalf of his community in being designated the sole provider for the insolvent Maltese government; his death, moreover, causes the witnessing Christian and Turk to reconcile, at least momentarily. Barabas, as Jonathan Gil Harris argues, signifies the culture’s fecal waste (a popular trope in contemporary anti-Judaic tracts) but also, in enematic form, enacts a “curative purge”.24 This social purification remains illusory, however: The Jew of Malta ends not with a vision of Christian harmony (or even a contrived one, as we witness in The Merchant of Venice), but with Ferneze’s house arrest of Calymath—a reminder that Jewish sacrifice has not brought about even the semblance of a corruption-free Malta. The boiling “hell-mouth,” to use G.K. Hunter’s famous term, is an opportunity to see Barabas get what he deserves; the scene is also another intrusion of maternal imagery.25 Ultimately, the Jewish father suppresses his daughter’s sexuality only to be swallowed whole by the womb-like cauldron.26 Rather than experiencing spiritual transcendence, Abigail is suggested posthumously in this consuming vessel—a “dark entry” that turns dangerous and elusive for the Jews and Christians who obsessively attempt to monitor, claim, and control her virgin body. English dramatists call upon Jewish daughters, as they do Jewish matriarchs on the private and academic stage, to play out fantasies of conversion regarding the text of the scripture. Christian typology positions the Jewish female body as a site of transformation, yet The Jew of Malta represents Abigail as a bogus Christian sacrifice. Sharon Achinstein’s comparison between Christian depictions of Jews as excremental “material remainders”—literalists who refused to spiritually evolve in Christ—and the Protestant rejection of the Eucharistic “body” as spirit, suggests how we might further understand Abigail as this corrupt body.27 As an aspiring nun, Abigail’s Jewish body doubles also as a figure of the “material” Catholic Eucharist. Yet Abigail’s womb is also a physical remainder of veritas, the origin that is simulated by the Jewish woman in Elizabethan drama. Like the mother who discloses truth, the source hidden in the dark tent to which Esau violently desires entry in Jacob and Esau, the virgin daughter is a body on the threshold of the scriptural text: the entryway and obfuscation for those who wish to access her. In the cauldron/womb, Marlowe emphasizes the symbolic implications of Abigail’s enduring physicality and the play’s general obsession with the virgin body that promises and prevents 24 25 26 27

Harris, p. 89. Hunter, pp. 234-5. See Tambling, pp. 104-5. “John Foxe and the Jews,” RQ 54.1 (2001): 94.

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what Marlowe slyly imagines as his audience’s most ardent hermeneutic expectation. Despite her potential for spiritual transformation, the Jewish daughter is ultimately impervious to Christian meaning. This cauldron is the perfect ending to The Jew of Malta. Abigail’s sexuality is a threat to Barabas, but her physical body also serves as a powerful blocking device for Christian fulfillment in a sexual and textual sense. Marlowe imaginatively suggests what Abigail might have become should her death not have prevented it: a Christian wife who effectively destroys her father. Although Abigail insures the Jewish father’s fate by way of her confession, the image of her womb, the container of truth and meaning, a body that continually discloses and deceives, poses a more potent threat to her Christian reader.

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Chapter 6

Her “flesh and blood”?: Jessica’s Mother in The Merchant of Venice I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hears’d at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin! (3.1.87-90)

Although she may have left her father’s house against his wishes eventually, Abigail in The Jew of Malta is first reluctant to take leave of Barabas. Her literary successor, Jessica, departs more aggressively from her father’s house, stealing his jewels to the delight of her assembled Christian “audience”: her suitor Lorenzo and his inebriated cohorts. This dramatic departure, which sets in motion Shylock’s murderous vengeance on the Christians, positions Jessica as the linchpin of what has been widely understood as the play’s Christian allegories—readings that are further supported by the sixteenth-century exegetical context of Jephthah’s daughter’s departure from her father’s house in Judges 11:29-40. Although Shakespeare does not explicitly refer to Judges 11 in Merchant, his allusions to Jephthah’s vow and sacrifice in 3 Henry VI and Hamlet make clear his interest in this provocative story.1 As we have seen, Christian readers were fascinated by the typological promise of Jephthah’s daughter’s final departure from her father’s house and her acquiescence to her father’s violent command. Jessica, whose escape from what she calls the “hell” (2.3.2) of her father’s house and desperate desire to “turn Christian” via marriage to Lorenzo similarly maps out Merchant’s rejection of letter of the Law for Christian spirit. It is my contention in this chapter, however, that in Jessica Shakespeare provocatively dismantles the archetypal “sacrificed daughter” in Christian typology. As we will see, the subversion of this primary conceit leads to more interpretive “play” with other 1

On Jephthah in Hamlet and 3 Henry VI see James G. McManaway, “Ophelia and Jephtha’s Daughter,” SQ 21.2 (1970): 198-200; Mark Taylor, Shakespeare’s Darker Purpose: A Question of Incest (New York: AMS Press, 1982), pp. 115-19; Faye L. Kelly, “Oaths in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 24.4 (1973): 357-71; and Fienberg, “Jephthah’s Daughter: The Parts Ophelia Plays.” On Shakespeare’s familiarity with exegetical discussions of Judges 11:29-40 see Richmond Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge (Folcroft, PA: The Folcroft Press, 1935), pp. 93-4. Kelly argues that in 3 Henry VI Clarence’s response to Warwick that keeping his oath to King Henry would be “more impiety” that Jephthah’s fulfillment of his vow ironically calls our attention to Clarence’s own perjury. Shakespeare, I think, also alludes here to exegetical debates on the merit of Jephthah’s sacrifice.

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biblical narratives featuring Jewish women whose bodily deceptions symbolically deny or manipulate their Christian reader’s hermeneutic expectations. Ultimately, the Jewish daughter’s departure from her father’s house becomes a type of deception to both father and to the Christian audience who expects to receive her at the other end. The archetypal model of Jephthah and his daughter helps us to understand the thematic centrality of the Protestant reader’s relationship with the Hebrew scripture in Merchant. On the threshold of her father’s house, Jessica occupies a powerful symbolic position as she embarks from darkness into light and from Old Testament sacrifice toward Christian mercy. Like Jephthah’s unnamed daughter, Jessica devastates her father by leaving the family home; this narrative echo, however, also sharply distinguishes Jessica, who does not go out to greet her father, but deliberately escapes his grasp. The difference between Jessica’s and Abigail’s relationships with their respective fathers is significant in this context: Jessica does not ever appear to replace father with Father but rather exercises a continuous mode of deception that is played out through bodily disguise. Shakespeare depicts her as a figure of illumination to the Christians but also as an obfuscating body tied to her father and mother’s “flesh and blood”—a Judaic body associated with a historical, experiential, and textual origin to which the Christians desire entry. Jessica’s Christian peers repulse her Jewish identity; at the same time, the play suggests that she physically represents, as Deborah did in Elizabeth’s 1559 pageant, a body of veritas. Jessica brings us an intensified version of the Jewish daughter that we have seen played out in different forms in the Jephthes plays and in The Jew of Malta. Marlowe parodies this faithful Jewish daughter as a body not on the verge of spiritual ascension, but a bawdy, sexualized object of desire who effectively impedes her Christian suitors’ efforts to possess her. Shakespeare too interprets the Jewish daughter as a versatile performer who troubles sexual and textual desire: Jessica’s arsenal of theatrical and metatheatrical disguises (as cross-dressed girl/boy/Jew) “dissemble” familiar interpretive modes and instead depict allegory as a crisis of interpretation, a fissure between Christian reader and Hebrew text. Shakespeare’s exploration of the heteroglossia of Judges 11 shapes Jessica, whose escape from her father, like Abigail’s, plays out symbolically the play’s allegorical blueprint—the audience’s hermeneutic expectation of the Jewish daughter’s replacement of father with Father. The play’s palimpsest of Old Testament narratives, however, also calls attention to the constructed nature of such biblical interpretations and to their theatrical aspects: on stage, the narratives generate imaginative, interpretive “play” that also suggests the cultural work of Christian biblical commentaries themselves. Shakespeare draws on rich allusions to Old Testament narratives to emphasize Jessica’s ambiguous relationship with the Christians of Venice and Belmont. Like Buchanan and Marlowe, Shakespeare brings in the Jewish mother to complicate how to read the daughter who is positioned as the key player in an overarching Christian allegory, calling attention to her potential for disclosure and occlusion of interpretive clarity. Shakespeare bestows the significant name “Leah” to Jessica’s mother, Jacob’s first wife and a figure of sexual deception. In Genesis 29, Jacob is duped into marrying Leah instead of her younger sister, his beloved Rachel. More improbably, Leah also successfully conceals herself as the marriage is consummated.

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Midrashic writers describe Rachel’s own participation in this ruse, imagining her under the marriage bed to contribute a familiar voice during the sexual act. As we will see, Shakespeare creates a strong association between Jessica and these two sisters in Genesis. Jessica, like Jephthah’s daughter, exists on the threshold of meaning as she leaves her father’s house. In Merchant, images of the Old Testament Leah, Rachel and Jacob, who also leave their fathers’ houses, take further this conceit, transforming the departure into an occasion for interpretive heteroglossia. All of these figures are associated with bodily deception and represent, I argue, the woman’s part in acts of disclosure and concealment. Jessica’s connection to her mother in Shakespeare’s biblical allusions and in the Christians’ anxiety about the essential Jewishness of her Jewish blood suggest that the Jewish daughter’s body, like the womb we have seen in plays explicitly about Jewish mothers, is essentially elusive. I believe that the Christians disparage Jessica’s Judaic origin precisely because of an underlying anxiety about its value: the alleged goal is for her to share their rejection of Judaism, and yet the play suggests too that Jessica stands for that which they cannot definitively ascertain and possess. As a signifier of the womb that is Judaic and the origin of the Christian self, the Jewish mother underscores the Jewish daughter’s symbolic role in revealing the Christian essence of God’s Word to her audience as well as her ability to deceive with her body, and thus, to also expose this interpretive mastery as merely theatrical illusion.2 Merchant and allegorical criticism After Jessica steals his jewels and elopes with her Christian paramour, Shylock famously wishes her death: “I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hears’d at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!” (3.1.87-90). Presumably, Shylock does not intend to kill Jessica himself; her departure, however, transforms his “ancient grudge” against the Venetian Christians into active bloodlust. Buoyed by news of Antonio’s doomed argosies, Shylock declares that he will “plague” (3.1.116) and “torture” (3.1.117) the Christian merchant by demanding their agreed-upon penalty—“an equal pound/Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken/In what part of your body pleaseth me” (1.3.149-51)—should Antonio forfeit the loan he solicited on Bassanio’s behalf. Poised to take a pound of Antonio’s “fair flesh” in Act 4, Shylock’s crude form of “justice” seems to confirm popular medieval conceptions of the Jew as a Christ-killing ritual murderer. 3 These cultural associations 2 In a different sense, Lampert also identifies Jessica as a figure who troubles the strict binaries in Christian hermeneutics between the outward Jewish letter of the Law (figured in the Jews’ carnal nature) and the internal Christian spirit (pp. 138-67). 3 On depictions of Jewish murder, child sacrifice, and the Mass, see fn. 15 in Chapter 4 above. Medieval homiletic literature depicts the sacrificer-Jew—a killer of Christ, host desecrator, and murderer of young children—to fabricate and sensationalize “Jewish crimes” and, in some, fantasize about Jewish conversion: the Jew who, after witnessing a bloody child transform into the infant Christ, abandons his faith to embrace Christianity. On the association of Jewish ritual murder and profanantion of the Host, see also Sarah Beckwith, “Ritual, Church

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have inspired typological approaches to Shylock’s carnal desires, such as Barbara K. Lewalski’s influential interpretation of Antonio as a Christ figure whose self-oblation ultimately transcends Shylock’s unyielding attachment to Old Testament legalism.4 Joan Ozark Holmer reads the Christians’ annulment of Shylock’s flesh-bond further as an embrace of Christian universalism, an inclusive ideology that supersedes the Jewish “chosenness” of the Old Testament: “The old emphasis on salvation through flesh-and-blood descent within the favoured nation of Israel becomes now the new emphasis on rebirth in the spirit that enables all people, regardless of race or rank, to be part of God’s kingdom.”5 Despite Jessica’s harsh treatment of her father, typological criticism has long understood Jessica’s conversion to reify the triumph of Christian mercy.6 René E. Fortin argues that Shylock’s servant Launcelot’s reconciliation with his blind father also symbolically reconstitutes Jessica’s similar rift with her father within the play’s Christological theme: the encounter between father and son, a parodic allusion to Jacob’s theft of Esau’s blessing from their blind father Isaac in Genesis 27, recasts Jacob’s transgression—and Jessica’s—as filial piety.7 As Leslie Fiedler has famously argued, Jessica, with her marriage to Lorenzo, possesses a privileged connection to the scriptural text and yet promises a departure from its Old Testament significations, representing the comprehensive and authoritative position and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body,” in Culture and History 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers. (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992), pp. 65-89. Beckwith argues that theatricality necessarily exposes the problems of the Eucharist: “[T]heatricality can seem dangerous because it threatens to foreground the gestures of representation over the thing itself” (p. 77). On the figure of the Jew as ritual murderer in Merchant, see Shapiro, pp. 89-111, passim. 4 Lewalski “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” SQ 13.3 (1962): 327-43. See also John Scott Colley, “Launcelot, Jacob, and Esau: Old and New Law in The Merchant of Venice,” Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 181-9; Douglas Anderson, “The Old Testament Presence in The Merchant of Venice,” ELH 52.1 (1985): 119-32; Lars Engle, “’Thrift is Blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice,” SQ 37.1 (1986): 20-37; and Judith Rosenheim, “Allegorical Commentary in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Studies 24 (1996): 156-210. 5 Joan Ozark Holmer, The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard, and Consequence, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 81. 6 Jessica has been consistently read as the linchpin of Merchant’s typological structure. Lewalski, for example, contends that Jessica “[a]s Shylock’s daughter and as a voluntary convert to Christianity ... may figure forth the filial relationships of the New Dispensation to the Old” (p. 42). Dobbins and Battenhouse argue that Jessica is a moral character despite her theft: her removal of her father’s goods, different from Shylock’s usurious thievery, becomes the symbolic means through which she replaces her obedience to Shylock with the higher “parent” of the Lord (p. 113). John S. Coolidge argues that “Shylock’s relinquishing the keys to his house may well call to mind the Jews’ rejection of the spiritual interpretation of their book,” whereupon Jessica becomes the agent of conversion who prefigures Portia’s “affirmation of Christian hope” (“Law and Love in The Merchant of Venice,” SQ 27.3 [1976]: 249). 7 Fortin, “Launcelot and the Uses of Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” SEL 14.2 (1974): 259-70. Holmer reads Launcelot’s encounter with his father similarly as “another episode in the play that points to its subtext of the divine comedy of salvation” (p. 81).

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of the Christian reader. Shakespeare’s narrative disposes of the Christ-killing Jew while appropriating the notion of the “chosen” people of the scripture.8 The Merchant of Venice certainly sets the stage for such a Christian allegory, but the matter of the play is not this apotheosis of interpretive certainty but rather the unresolved struggle for scriptural mastery and possession. The exegetical positioning exercised by Protestants and Catholics during the Reformation is played out directly against the Jew in Merchant. As John S. Coolidge observed 30 years ago, “[t]he play is in fact a kind of hermeneutic drama, reflecting the contest between Christian and Jew for the possession of the Hebrew scripture.”9 Shylock: would-be murderer or hero of faith? In order to better contextualize Jessica’s role as a type of scriptural text that both obscures and illuminates meaning to her Christian audience, I want to first examine how the Judges 11 narrative provides a touchstone for Shylock’s own subversion of Christian allegory. There are important differences between Jephthah and Shylock, of course. Jephthah does not intend to kill his daughter and ultimately claims to do so in order to demonstrate his piety; Shylock’s bitter vision of Jessica above and his subsequent claim to “the heart of [Antonio]” (3.1.127) appear to be driven by vengeance and pride—his refusal to be made “a soft and dull-ey’d fool” (3.3.14) who passively accepts the Christians’ affronts. Though Shakespeare gives us clear evidence of Shylock’s mercenary desires and cruelty in his pledge to take a pound of flesh and to see Jessica dead at his feet, in Shylock’s responses to his friend Tubal, who reports on Jessica’s sale of Shylock’s deceased wife’s turquoise ring “for a monkey” (3.1.119) and provides consolatory news of Antonio’s own economic misfortune, he also constructs a Jewish father more grief-crazed than pointedly homicidal. Indeed, Shylock’s heartfelt lament for Leah— “I had it of Leah when I was a/bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (121-3)—reveals a history of familial loss that perhaps provides explanation for Shylock’s brief reference to his synagogue at the end of the scene, an intimation of prayer and mourning ritual that flickers incongruously alongside his retributive declarations. Shylock’s quick allusion, I believe, foreshadows his audacious justification of Antonio’s murder during the trial scene as the fulfillment of a private vow he has made to God. As I have argued elsewhere, the play suggests in Shylock a self-fashioned “hero of faith” who is not superseded by his converted daughter but rather legitimated by

8 In The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), Fiedler reads Jessica as a type of “Ogre’s daughter” who, in her escape from her father, signifies a “blessed apostasy”: the play’s invocation of this myth serves to reconcile the dual notion of “the Jews simultaneously as the ultimate enemy, the killers of Christ, and the chosen people, with whom God made the covenant, the bond under which all who believe in Jesus as the Christ are saved” (pp. 117-18). 9 Coolidge, p. 243. See also Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 120-24.

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way of her negative example as a potential vow-breaker to father and husband.10 The Christians’ rhetoric, especially Portia’s when she celebrates the triumph of Christian mercy over Shylock’s letter of the law, certainly invokes an allegorical shift from the Old order to Christian mercy and salvation throughout the play, but Shakespeare also characterizes Shylock as a Jewish father for whom murder serves as a legitimate expression of spiritual fervor. The Christians vilify Shylock for his ostensible inferiorities—his usury, his possessiveness over his daughter, his archaic forms of justice—and render him definitively as a barbarian in need of reform. Yet Merchant also legitimates Shylock’s authority as a member of a “sacred nation” (1.3.48) in possession of an elusive connection to God. Prior to the trial, Shylock first recasts his bond as a type of oath: “I’ll have my bond, speak not against my bond,/I have sworn an oath that I will have my bond” (3.3.4-5). He attributes a pointed spiritual significance to his claim to “a weight of carrion flesh” (4.1.41), explaining that “by our holy Sabaoth” he has “sworn” the bond (4.1.36).11 With a striking rhetorical invocation of “vows” and “oaths,” Shylock articulates his proposed murder of Antonio as an act of divine obeisance rather than one solely of vengeance. We do not witness Shylock making any such vow to God, but here he understands his murder of Antonio within such a religious context. Indeed, he argues that to violate his oath would be to “lay perjury upon [his] soul” (4.1.229)—a type of spiritual transgression. Shylock’s fervent proclamations that he has sworn “[a]n oath, an oath ... an oath in heaven!” (4.1.228) which recall Jephthah’s own unwavering determination to follow through with his vow, illuminate the play’s unreconciled aspects of Shylock as both man of faith and crude vestige of Mosaic legalism who “stand[s] ... for law” (4.1.142) and “crave[s] the law” (4.1.206). Shakespeare depicts the knife-wielding Shylock as emotionally and ethically opaque, a Jephthah who understands oaths—however extreme—as spiritually binding. The trial scene in this sense also provides important nuance to Shakespeare’s description of Shylock’s wish for Jessica “dead at [his] feet.” The cry legitimates Jessica’s complaints about her father’s hellish house, but also suggests Shylock’s fantasy of filial loyalty—one that is artfully performed (if not sincerely felt) by Portia who awaits the suitor who will choose the correct casket with her picture inside, her own father’s posthumous attempt to control her marriage. Shylock’s vision of Jessica “dead at [his] foot, and the jewels in her ear,” which recalls his insistence that Jessica protect his house’s windows, emblematized as his “ears” (2.5.34), as well as her own, from Christian infiltration, conveys not only a death-wish for Jessica but a vision of paternal repossession in which the Jewish daughter remains obedient and devout. His image of an earring-adorned Jessica at his feet conveys his fear that the Christians have similarly punctured his daughter; in a different sense, with this physically marked Jessica, he imagines her unassimilable Jewish body. Shapiro observes that if her pierced ears are understood as a feminized version of

10 See my article, “Jephthah’s Kin: The Sacrificing Father in The Merchant of Venice,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5.2 (2005): 71-93 11 The Riverside notes that “Sabaoth” refers to “Sabbath” but is often confused with the Hebrew term meaning “armies” or “hosts.”

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circumcision, the symbol of God’s covenant with the Jews, Shylock’s wish is one of familial and religious loyalty.12 Portia’s and Jessica’s success in breaking away from their overbearing fathers upholds conventional wisdom that marriage bonds should be privileged over a daughter’s responsibilities to her parents. At stake in Shylock’s understanding of his bonds with his wife and daughter, however, are a wider set of interpretive possibilities about Jessica, including her connection to the Jewish mother that lurks under the play’s surface. His crude desire for Antonio’s “flesh and blood” does not only suggest the supersession of Old Testament blood sacrifice by Christian martyrdom, the ultimate sacrifice in Christ, but the “flesh and blood” that Shylock associates with his daughter, a distinctly Jewish place of origin that troubles such supersessionist readings of the Old Testament. Leah and Jessica: possessing the Jewish body Shylock’s invocation of his deceased wife Leah initially constructs an unflattering picture of Jessica. His recollection of Leah’s fidelity anticipates by contrast the various charges of broken “vows of faith” between the Christian lovers and between Jessica and Lorenzo at the end of the play. Critics have widely compared Jessica’s betrayal of her father with the breaking of a marital bond, an analogy that informs our reading of Lorenzo’s later indictments of Jessica for her familial deceptions that are figured also as a legacy of broken sexual vows—a charge reinvoked by Nerissa and Portia shortly thereafter as they reprimand their husbands for breaking their “vehement oaths” (5.1.155).13 Lorenzo reminds Jessica that she “[d]id ... steal from the wealthy Jew,/And with an unthrift love did run from Venice” (5.1.15-16), and though she did “like a little [shrew],/Slander her love” (21), he forgives her. Lorenzo’s precise meaning remains unclear: he suggests that Jessica has “slandered” him, but also Shylock, and thus potentially indicts her for an unwise rebellion that will not serve her well. Jessica’s initial retort to Lorenzo’s slights that he did steal “her soul with many vows of faith,/And ne’er a true one” (18) suggests a contrast 12

Shapiro, p. 120. See for example, Marilyn L. Williamson, “The Ring Episode in The Merchant of Venice,” South Atlantic Quarterly 71.4 (1972): 587-94; Coppelia Kahn, “The Cuckoo’s Note: Male Friendship and Cuckoldry in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C.L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn (Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 104-112; Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Counterfeit Order of The Merchant of Venice,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), p. 58. For arguments on how the play privileges Jessica’s marital bond over her ties to Shylock, see Camille Slights, “In Defense of Jessica: The Runaway Daughter in The Merchant of Venice,” SQ 31.3 (1980): 357-68 and John A. Hart, “Father-Daughter as Device in Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies,” in In Honor of Austin Wright (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 51-61. See also M.C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951): “The pledge and bond of matrimony—which is both a sacrament and a legal contract—is set against the bond of the Jew and Antonio’s pledge of his flesh” (p. 177). 13

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between Lorenzo’s bogus vows and Shylock’s tenacious claim to his bond. And in contrast to Shylock who has kept Leah’s ring with great care, Bassanio and Gratiano relinquish the rings that Portia and Nerissa have given them. In Shylock’s memory, Leah remains a paragon of faith and devotion, but Shakespeare also inserts the Jewish mother into the play as a figure of bodily deception. Although she deceives her father, Jessica is associated with the maternal body that Shylock embraces as a figure elusive to the Christians. The brief mention of “Leah” conveys what Shoulson has termed the “lived experience” of the biblical Jews. Leah also, I argue, affirms the Jewish mother’s symbolic place of historical and textual origin: she produces Jews and, from a Christian perspective, generates what would become their Judeo-Christian lineage—a literal, bodily link between Old and New. As I will show, too, the specter of the Jewish mother Leah emerges prominently in the Christians’ anxious discussions of Jessica’s origins. Mothers do complicate the allegorical logic of Jessica’s departure from her father’s house, reminding her and the Christians not only of her unassimilable national and religious difference but also of her symbolic inscrutability as the body they must penetrate in order to gain possession of the scriptural text. Like the author of Jacob and Esau, Shakespeare incorporates images of maternal agency to dramatize the Protestant reader’s struggle to claim propriety over the scripture. To defend his usury, Shylock cites Jacob’s skillful acquisition of his uncle Laban’s sheep in Genesis 30 as evidence that he too, as another descendant of his “holy Abram” (1.3.72) has divine sanction to pursue his “well-won thrift” (1.3.50) on the Rialto: When Laban and his company were compremis’d That all the eanlings which were streak’d and pied Should fall as Jacob’s hire, the ewes being rank In end of autumn turned to the rams, And when the work of generation was Between these woolly breeders in the act, The skillful shepherd pill’d me certain wands, And in the doing of the deed of kind, He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes, Who then conceiving did in eaning time Fall parti-color’d lambs, and those were Jacob’s. This was a way to thrive, and he was blest; And thrift is blessing if men steal it not. (1.3.78-90)

Shylock concludes that Jacob’s scheme— displaying a multi-colored rod that causes the pregnant sheep to produce variegated offspring (his property, according to the agreement with Laban)—“was a way to thrive, and [Jacob] was blest;/And thrift is blessing if men steal it not.” Shylock explains that “[t]his Jacob from our holy Abram was/(As his wise mother wrought in his behalf)/The third possessor” (1.3.724). His boast includes mention of Jacob’s “wise mother” Rebecca, who insures her son’s trickery of his blind father Isaac and subsequent acquisition of the blessing intended for the first-born Esau.

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Shylock’s emphasis on his privileged relationship with the Hebrew scripture hinges on provocative images of female reproduction that set up a tension between the notion of God’s will carried out through the maternal body and the agency of the maternal mind over the body.14 Shylock’s implicit claim is that he wields control over both. As we have seen, Jacob and Esau praises Rebecca as a type of Elizabeth, a symbolic mother who insures the Protestant election of her English progeny. In Shylock’s own interpretation of Genesis 30, this mother authorizes him over his Christian rivals: his point is to emphasize the lineage that links him to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (the “third possessor” of God’s blessings). Later, Shylock underscores his legitimacy as an historical and spiritual descendant of Jacob by denouncing his servant Launcelot as “that fool of Hagar’s offspring” (2.5.43), Ishmael, the child of Abraham and his Egyptian bondwoman eventually exiled by Abraham’s wife (and Jacob’s grandmother), Sarah.15 In his description of maternal imagination and, as we will see, his attempts to lock up Jessica, Shylock expresses his claim to scriptural authority and his access to the scriptural veritas, its true meanings, as an exclusive right of entry to the Jewish female body. Antonio’s incensed reaction to Shylock’s digressions is prompted by Shylock’s assertion that he is a skilled reader of the scripture, an aggressive contradiction of long-standing characterizations of the Jews’ interpretive handicaps in matters of the sacred text. Rejecting Shylock’s comparison between himself and Jacob, Antonio condemns Shylock for justifying his entrepreneurial ventures as divinely ordained: Jacob’s success, he counters, was very differently “[a] thing not in his power to bring to pass,/But sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven” (1.3.912). He accuses Shylock of corrupting the scripture’s account of Jacob’s success: “Was this [interpretation] inserted to make interest good?” (1.3.94). Antonio simply takes Shylock’s reading of the scripture as evidence of his spiritual corruption: “[t]he devil can cite Scripture for his purpose./An evil soul producing holy witness/ Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,/A goodly apple rotten at the heart./O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” (1.3.98-102). The exchange sets up an implicit contrast between maternal authority and that which is “sway’d and fashion’d by the hand of heaven.” Contemporary gynecological writings make clear a pervasive cultural belief that the maternal imagination could shape offspring (intentionally or involuntarily), yet Antonio denies the mother’s agency that is a signifier of Shylock’s interpretive mastery. But Shylock identifies strongly with this kind of reproductive power, pointing out that he, too, can “make [money] breed as fast” (1.3.96) as the maternal sheep. 14

On the Genesis narrative and the maternal imagination in early modern medical writings, see Elizabeth A. Spiller, “From Imagination to Miscegenation: Race and Romance in The Merchant of Venice,” Renaissance Drama 29 (1998): 137-64. 15 Adelman argues that the peripatetic Jew could lay claim to the sacred text of the Old Testament and to membership in a tribe that transcended national boundaries. Thus at the play’s conclusion, Shylock’s knife with which he threatens to cut Antonio plays out the typological transmission of Old order to New—in which Antonio becomes a Christ figure superseding the barbaric sacrifice of the Jew—but also suggests how the boundaries of English selfhood are dissolved by Jewish blood, specifically by Jessica who is poised to marry Lorenzo (“Her Father’s Blood,” p. 23).

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Shylock’s desire to keep his daughter locked away, like Barabas’s efforts to block access to Abigail’s body, blurs together sexual and textual possession. Shylock expresses his desire to prevent his daughter’s intermarriage with language resonant of his initial claim to the scripture above: reluctantly leaving his house to dine with Antonio and Bassanio, he warns Jessica to protect herself and his fortune from the Christians: “Fast bind, fast find—/A proverb never stale in thrifty mind” (2.5.54-5). Like Jacob, Shylock maintains his possessions—his daughter and his money—by a divinely-ordained “thrift” that is his “blessing” as a Jew. As we see in the only scene that includes both Shylock and Jessica, the familial implication of “flesh bond” resonates in Merchant’s depiction of the Jewish house—a dreary “hell” for Jessica that is characterized as merely “sober” (2.5.36) for Shylock: tedious perhaps, but devout and protected from Christian influence. Shylock warns Jessica that to “thrust [her] head into the public street” (2.5.32) in view of the Christian revelers would invite the subsequent penetration of “the vile squealing of the wryneck’d fife” (2.5.30)—a type of phallic transgression that foreshadows, of course, Lorenzo’s imminent trespass of both Shylock’s residential domain and the body of his daughter. Shylock’s acute (and justified) fear of Christian penetration suggests Jessica’s overdetermined role as a gendered site of Jewish origin, a body and text desired by the Christians. The possession of Jessica’s body is the subject of much speculation in the play, and the Christians flaunt confidence in their ability to take her so easily from Shylock’s tight grip. Salario’s taunts to Shylock that he should have known that Jessica was “flidge” or fledged (3.1.29) and therefore ready to “leave the dam” (3.1.30) give the house a womb-like association: Shylock pronounces her “damn’d” too then (3.1.31), but with Launcelot’s later remark that Jessica is “damn’d” (3.5.15) either because of her father or mother, as I discuss below, we may see the house as a signifier of the maternal space, a place that suggests Jessica’s birth, which is ironically reenacted as she leaves to join with her Christian lover. Elizabeth A. Spiller interprets the three caskets that Portia’s suitors must choose between as reproductive symbols: the correct container selected by Bassanio, which contains Portia’s portrait, mimics the reproductive ability of her father.16 The caskets appear also as wombs that suggest Leah’s connection to Jessica, and the former’s legacy of deception. Like Freud’s symbolic caskets, Shylock’s house brings life and death— Shylock’s devastating loss and, potentially, deadly consequences for Antonio. The Christians yearn to get at Jessica, and mock Shylock for the same. Solanio responds to Shylock’s exclamation—“My own flesh and blood to rebel!” (3.1.34)—with a phallic double entendre, “Out upon it, old carrion, rebels it at these years?” (35-6). Solanio’s accusations of Shylock’s perversions—that his desire for Jessica conveys an unnatural longing for the body of his daughter—is resonant with Antonio’s claim that Shylock meddles with the scriptural text: just as he has “inserted” his meaning into the narrative of Jacob’s maternal sheep, he shows great audacity in asserting ownership over the womb with which Jessica is also associated.

16

Spiller, p. 148.

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Jessica’s “flesh and blood” Lampert aptly observes that Jessica’s own insecurities about her residual Jewishness betray a greater anxiety in the play about the coherence of Christian identity. Jessica’s association with the maternal origin of the Christian self that both promises and obscures meanings to the men who attempt to penetrate her body has consequences for both Jewish father and Christian husband. Shakespeare figures Jessica’s opacity in the flesh-bond motif, which he invites us to read as if through a Midrashic lens that generates multiple interpretations: Jessica is at the center of the play’s battle for interpretive mastery that is played out also as a struggle to understand the relationship of the Christian self to the scriptural past. Jessica acknowledges the blood she shares with her father—“Alack, what heinous sin is it in me/To be ashamed to be my father’s child!/But though I am a daughter to his blood,/I am not to his manners” (2.3.16-19)—and struggles to understand her own relationship to both Jew and Christian. She attempts a dramatic introduction of herself upon entering Belmont, disclosing to the Christians that Shylock’s “envious plea” for Antonio’s life was premeditated rather than provoked by her departure, which the play has otherwise suggested: When I was with him I have heard him swear To Tubal and to Chus, his countrymen, That he would rather have Antonio’s flesh Than twenty times the value of the sum That he did owe him; and I know, my lord, If law, authority, and power deny not, It will go hard with poor Antonio. (3.2.284-90)

Despite Jessica’s lurid suggestions of a Jewish plot to punish Antonio, her account lacks credibility as it is very likely inspired by a desire to be accepted by the Christians who have as yet only acknowledged her as Lorenzo’s “infidel” (3.2.218). Jessica tries to dissociate herself with Shylock, despite their shared “flesh and blood,” but this issue becomes a sticking point for her Christian cohorts. As Metzger and Adelman have shown, her blood is certainly a racial issue pertaining to English conceptions of bloodlines and national identity, but this emphasis on the Jewish female body, as Lampert contends, is also tied to questions about reading and interpretation. The lesser Christians of the play pathologize Shylock’s desire for “flesh and blood” as evidence of his sexual perversity. In Salario’s version of Shylock’s reaction to Jessica’s elopement and thievery, Jessica’s departure has effectively emasculated her father: he describes Shylock’s grief as testicular castration: a lament for the loss of his “double ducats” (2.8.19) and his “two stones, two rich and precious stones” (2.8.20). But Salario’s desire is less to call Shylock a pervert than to remake Jessica and to wrest her away from her familial connections: Shylock: I say, my daughter is my flesh and my blood. Salario: There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory, more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish. (3.1.39-42)

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In practice, however, both the Christians and Jessica herself struggle in their attempts to definitively articulate Jessica’s origin, alternately refuting and intimating Jessica’s innate Jewish identity. Lorenzo weighs in ambivalently on the meaning of her connection to her father: “If e’er the Jew her father come to heaven,/It will be for his gentle daughter’s sake,/And never dare misfortune cross her foot,/Unless she do it under this excuse,/That she is issue to a faithless Jew” (2.4.33-7). This elliptical statement about Jessica’s identity suggests the ineradicable nature of her tainted birth; at “issue,” however, is not so much her father, but the mother who would define her true origin. Such comments by the Christians on Jewish “issue” bypass entirely the Jewish mother whom Shylock introduces so passionately at the beginning of the play. In a scene often omitted from modern productions, perhaps because of its complications to Jessica’s character, the repression of the mother takes place again as Lancelot teases Jessica about the circumstances of her conception:17 Launcelot: Yes, truly, for look you, the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children; therefore, I promise you, I fear you. I was always plain with you, and so now I speak my agitation of the matter; therefore be a’ good cheer, for truly I think you are damn’d. There is but one hope in it that can do you any good, and that is but a kind of bastard hope neither. Jessica: And what hope is that, I pray thee? Launcelot: Marry, you may partly hope that your father got you not, that you are not the Jew’s daughter. Jessica: That were a kind of bastard hope indeed; so the sins of my mother should be visited upon me. Launcelot: Truly then I fear you are damn’d both by father and mother; thus when I shun Scylla, your father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother. Well, you are gone both ways. (3.5.1-18)

“Despite her conversion and marriage to a Christian,” Lampert observes, “Launcelot continues to focus on Jessica’s birth, implying that, whatever her intentions, there is something essentially Jewish about her.”18 Launcelot, who earlier boasts that he is “an honest woman’s son” (2.2.16) (even though his father was adulterous), creates the fanciful scenario in which Jessica must understand her point of origin as either the sinning Jew or a whorish mother—the latter no better than the former. His pronouncement undercuts entirely Jessica’s anticipation of her conversion: “O Lorenzo,/If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife,/Become a Christian and thy loving wife” (2.3.19-21). Jessica defensively reiterates this sentiment here in response: “I shall be sav’d by my husband, he hath/made me a Christian” (3.5.19-20). The most striking aspect of Lorenzo’s quip above—that she is both “gentle” (or Gentile) but potentially cursed for being “issue to a faithless Jew”—as well as this exchange between Jessica and Launcelot is the absent presence of the Jewish mother. Curiously, Launcelot never states the obvious: that Shylock 17

Arthur John Harris and Frankie Rubenstein note this frequent omission in “Jessica’s Bawdy ‘Interlude’ in The Merchant of Venice,” ELN 42.2 (2004): 11-28. 18 Lampert, p. 161.

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was married to Leah, another Jew, who produced a Jewish daughter. Moreover, even if Jessica’s mother, Leah, was unfaithful to Shylock, the fact of this Jewish place of origin is unaffected by circumstances of paternity. In the symbolic economy of the play laid down by Shylock in his claim to scripture as a type of maternal body and place of origin, to be “damn’d” in Merchant suggests at once to be doomed to hell and connected to the “dam” that is the mother. The Christians’ anxiety is not only about miscegenation, an important point made already by a number of critics; Jessica, a new wife, suggests her own mother, a woman tropologically evocative of the physical and textual origins of the Christian self, the Jews’ “lived experience” that is recorded in the sacred text and the Jews’ particular connection to the Word of God. Jessica declares that she will be saved by her husband who “hath made [her] a Christian” but the play undermines Lorenzo’s ability to truly remake Jessica; in challenging her point of origin, Lorenzo also effectively raises questions about his own departure from that which this mother signifies. The recollection of Leah here troubles the allegorical suggestions of Jessica’s defection to Christian Belmont and her marriage to Lorenzo. Her body figures prominently as an obfuscating element in this exchange, defined in the play by her connection to the maternal womb, a place of Jewish origin that can both disclose and conceal meanings to the Christian reader. Like her mother’s namesake, Jessica is a shape-shifter whose disguises and deceptions complicate the tropological markers of Christian hermeneutics in the play. Conversion is not an event with stable meaning in The Merchant of Venice but rather a highly theatrical iteration of the relationship between Old and New—and as unstable as a boy playing a girl-Jew in disguise as a boy. In more than one sense, as Jessica suggests as she nervously climbs out of her father’s window, Lorenzo cannot see her clearly: I am glad ‘tis night, you do not look on me, For I am much asham’d of my exchange. But love is blind, and lovers cannot see The pretty follies that themselves commit, For if they could, Cupid himself would blush To see me thus transformed to a boy. (2.6.34-9)

To “leave the father’s house,” as we have seen in sixteenth-century drama, is to become a symbolic entryway—and barrier—to what Christian readers anticipated as the essential meanings of the Old Testament. Shakespeare emphasizes the theatrics of Jessica’s departure from the “damn’d” and “dam” that is her house, her mother, and the hell of being the daughter of a Jew. With her golden exterior and an (ostensibly) spiritually Christian interior, Jessica is a version of religious metamorphosis, yet her gaudy cross-dressed disguise not only reiterates her association with Bassanio’s “outward show” and its signification of the Jews’ “spiritual impediments,” but undermines the Christians’ ability to access the things of value that Jessica herself embodies. To his friends earlier, Lorenzo refers to Jessica as his “torch-bearer” (2.4.39); his expectation is that she will light a path in the dark. The description metaphorically

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suggests that her body is a source of light, a means of reading clearly. He repeats this designation as he calls up to her at her father’s window. But Jessica defers this role, embarrassed as she is of her disguise: to his direct suggestion that she serve as “torch-bearer” (2.6.40) she defers: “What, must I hold a candle to my shames?/ They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light./Why, ‘tis an office of discovery, love,/And I should be obscur’d” (2.6.41-4). Jessica plays on his implication that she will illuminate his path—as “torch-bearer” she anticipates also Portia’s allusion to the heavenly light that is Christian mercy at the end of the play. Ironically, Jessica imbues the term “light” with carnal meaning: Jessica distorts his sentiment, claiming that she is “too too light” or wanton in her boldness. A woman should be coy when solicited; the wooing should be “an office of discovery,” and as such she prefers to be “obscur’d.” Shakespeare allows Portia to play this role with relative ease: she abides her loathsome suitors as they try their chances at the caskets, and hopes for the right person to get at her body, signified by the portrait of her inside the winning lead casket. This penetration of the casket that is also the female body enacts a fantasy of reading clearly and correctly and also receiving ample rewards for doing so: as Nerissa claims with regards to her lady’s suitors, “who chooses [your father’s] meaning, chooses you” (1.2.30-31). Yet the internal meaning that must be accessed through correct interpretation is an endlessly deferred endeavor in Merchant: the picture of Portia inside, as Bassanio comments, is just a “shadow” of the real thing. If Jessica does signify a veritas desired by her Christian suitor, she remains out of reach and, indeed, “obscur’d.” The scene of Jessica’s elopement is immediately followed by Portia’s Moroccan suitor’s choice of the golden casket—an unknown space, enticingly gilded but containing a death’s head inside. The misread casket, like the other enclosed, dark spaces in Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s depictions of Jewish women, suggests the womb that is never directly acknowledged by the Christians, but that is revealed through metaphor and allusion as the source of much hermeneutic anxiety. When Bassanio finally arrives to select the lead casket that contains Portia’s image, his analogies between the gold casket he rejects in his bid for Portia, the corrupt Law, and bogus religious practice recalls Antonio’s earlier connection between the Jew’s villainy and the practice of interpretation; most significantly, Bassanio suggests a disparity between Jessica’s outward and inward nature: So may the outward shows be least themselves— The world is still deceiv’d with ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt But, being season’d with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error but some sober brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? (3.2.73-80)

The “fair ornament” recalls Jessica’s elopement, for which she literally adorns herself with gilded ornaments: Shylock’s jewels and ducats. Lorenzo affirms that Jessica has proven herself “fair” and “true” (2.6.54, 55), but her ducat-covered exterior as she emerges from her father’s house anticipates Bassanio’s warning about such

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disguises in the scene that follows. Suggestively figured in Bassanio’s condemnation of the golden casket—“ornament is but the guiled shore/To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf/Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,/The seeming truth which cunning times put on/To entrap the wisest” (3.2.97-101)—is the exotic Jessica who is as one covered in “ornament,” duplicitous through her religious identity. Like Abigail, who brilliantly fulfills her father’s instruction to “seem” like a remorseful Jew, Jessica offers a “seeming truth.” In her provocative reading of the scene, Lampert understands Jessica to obfuscate the Christian supersession she otherwise promises by signifying both the carnal, Jewish veil as well as the revealed contents of this disguise—a meaning that should be Christian, but that here is described as the racial and religious Other: “In Jessica, Shakespeare portrays the greatest threat to the important ability to discern relationships between outer appearances and inner worth, one of the defining techniques of Christian hermeneutics.”19 Lampert’s reading, however, affixes Jessica’s body within a tradition of exegetical discourse that metaphorically juxtaposed Jews, women, and the letter of the Law against the spiritual truth of the text. The “seeming truth” also suggests the desired contents of Jessica as a figure of the scripture: she promises clear meaning, the essential truths to be discerned by the faithful Christian reader, but also the elusive, and perhaps exclusive, nature of the Hebrew scripture. Leaving the father’s house redux It may seem like a grand leap to move from Judges 11:29-40 to various strands of Jacob’s marital woes in Genesis, but the conceit of sacrifice serves as a dynamic starting point for exploring how other biblical allusions in Merchant deploy the Jewish woman as a figure of bodily disguise on the threshold of her father’s house; most significantly, as I have argued, the connections between Jessica and these women suggest how she continually disrupts Christian modes of interpretation. The allusions to Leah, Rachel, and Jacob’s mother Rebecca in the play, as they pertain to Jessica, illustrate what I have shown throughout this book to be the complex use of the Jewish woman as a means to play out the relationship between scriptural veritas and the Christian reader. Merchant suggests a parallel between Jessica and Jacob, who, with his mother’s help, deceives his blind father into giving him the blessing reserved for the first-born son, Esau. Thomas H. Luxon notes how early Christian writers depict the Jew as “Christianity’s old man, bound by blindness to a ‘carnal’ existence which he does not realize is no more than an allegorical drama of true spiritual being.”20 Both Launcelot and Jessica attempt to escape this Judaic father in Merchant.21 Shakespeare makes a 19

Lampert, p. 145. Luxon, p. 25. 21 Mihoko Suzuki’s examination of seventeenth-century women and working-class men as marginalized political subjects suggests also the similarity between the servant Launcelot and Jessica: both, of course, attempt to liberate themselves from the Jew (Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588-1688 [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003]). 20

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clear connection between Launcelot and Jacob as the former reunites with his own blind father, Old Gobbo. In its allusions to Jacob and Esau, the play suggests the role of the Jewish mother in authorizing the transmission of Old to New in Lancelot’s reunion with Gobbo, who believes his son dead. Launcelot appeals to him as he prepares to reveal himself: “give me your blessing;/truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long;/a man’s son may, but in the end truth will out” (2.2.78-80). The “blessing” here is tantamount to the truth of his son, a parody of Jacob’s own truth as God’s elect. Old Gobbo exclaims with delight, “I’ll be sworn,/if thou be Launcelot, thou art mine own flesh and/blood. Lord worshipp’d might he be, what a beard/hast thou got! Thou hast got more hair on thy chin/than Dobbin my fill-horse has on his tail” (2.2.91-5). The key to Old Gobbo’s acknowledgement of his son, appropriately, is Launcelot’s identification of his mother, and it is she, Rebecca, like Jessica and the other Jewish women I have discussed, who potentially ensures that the “truth will come to light.” Launcelot’s correct identification of her name confirms that Launcelot is his legitimate “flesh and blood” (2.2.92-3). His mention of Launcelot’s mother recalls, of course, Jessica’s Leah. The allusion to Rebecca, the masterful authority who orchestrates Jacob’s accession, affirms the authoritative maternal Jewish body, a figure that symbolically conceals and, in this case, discloses truth. This maternal figure recalls the very place of origin that Launcelot found so unmentionable in his earlier exchange with Jessica. Launcelot attempts to repress this mother, but she returns here, ironically affirming his own paternal bond, and, in the metaphoric terms of the scene, his election and successful departure from Shylock and his alliance with Antonio, with whom he finds new employment. In one sense, the biblical allusion to Jacob and Esau above validates Jessica’s Christian conversion and a supersessionist reading of her departure from Shylock’s house. Shylock, like Old Gobbo, is blind, unenlightened to either his daughter’s inevitable maturity or to the moral superiority of her Christian friends. But where Launcelot finds himself blessed with freedom, a defection to the Christians played out in a parodic allusion to Jacob’s acquisition of his first-born brother’s blessing, Jessica is a Jacob who promises Protestant election and, in the tradition of Jacob’s mother and her own, also remains closely linked to deceptive female authority. In Genesis, Leah and Rachel are sisters, but both blur together through their connection to Jacob, as Leah and Jessica do in Merchant. As many critics have noted, Jessica and Lorenzo’s flight evokes Jacob’s escape with both wives from their father Laban’s thralldom in Genesis 31; Rachel’s theft of Laban’s household idols that she takes unbeknownst to Jacob recalls Jessica’s looting of her own father’s gold and her mother’s ring.22 In the Jewish scripture, Jacob labors for seven years in Laban’s fields for Rachel’s hand in marriage. At the end of his servitude, however, he is unknowingly given Leah, Rachel’s elder sister; following Laban’s instructions, Leah presents herself at the altar as her younger sister and deceives Jacob during both the wedding ceremony and the consummation of their marriage. After serving seven more years for Rachel’s hand, Jacob, married to both sisters and the father of 22

E.E. Stoll first makes the comparison between Rachel and Jessica (Shakespeare Studies: Historical and Comparative in Method. 2nd edn [New York: Frederick Ungar, 1942], p. 299).

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their children, persuades them to flee from Laban’s house with him. Unbeknownst to Jacob, Rachel takes Laban’s household gods with her as they take refuge in Gilead; when Laban comes in search of them, Rachel hides them under her skirt, claiming that she cannot get up because she is menstruating. Here, the site of religious deception is the female body that literally obfuscates Rachel’s religious affiliations. After Laban and Jacob make peace, the gods are not mentioned again until Jacob rids his house of such figures in Genesis 35:2—and even then it is unclear whether these are the same ones that Rachel took from her father’s house. In George Granville’s The Jew of Venice (1701), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s original play, the parallel between Rachel and Jessica is made explicitly in Lorenzo’s comments to Jessica during her escape: “So whilst old Laban snor’d in Bed,/Jacob with sprightly Rachel fled.”23 Although early modern exegetes allegorically gloss Rachel’s elopement as a rejection of the oppressive Old law, they also interpret Jacob’s second wife as an idolatrous girl unwilling to leave behind her father’s idols—a sure sign that she is still tethered to him. Calvin, in his Commentaries on The First Book of Moses called Genesis finds Rachel’s religious loyalty to Jacob extremely questionable: [Rachel] had often heard her husband speaking of the true and genuine worship of God: yet she is so addicted to the corruptions which she had imbibed from her childhood, that she is ready to infect the land chosen by God with them. She imagines that, with her husband, she is following God as her leader, and at the same time takes with her the idols by which she would subvert his worship.24

The Protestant exegete Andrew Willet, similarly, notes that Rachel “was addicted to those images, seeing she sought excuses to keepe them still. ... Rachel was not free from all touch of superstition: both because shee had beene a longe time trained up under a superstitious father, and could not so easily forget her manner of education, though much qualified with Jacobs instruction.”25 Bogus sacrifice in Merchant Images of deceptive Jewish mothers and daughters consistently trouble the conceit of Jessica as a Christian “torch-bearer.” Just as Jessica deceives Shylock whose wish to see her “dead at [his] feet” is one of familial loyalty, she fails to embody Christian sacrifice—that is, the transformation of Old Testament Law to Christian mercy. Jessica, as the ultimate (if ineffective) figure of Christian conversion, represents the culmination of false “sacrifices” throughout the play. As I have argued, Shylock’s religious rhetoric during the trial ultimately sets up a contrast between Jessica’s broken vows of faith and his own perception of familial and religious constancy. After he overhears Bassanio and Gratiano declare that they would “sacrifice” (4.1.286) their wives to save Antonio, Shylock immediately derides their loose marital attachments, 23 24 25

The Jew of Venice (London, 1701), p. 11. Calvin, Vol. 2, p. 170. See also Vol. 2, p. 175. Willet, pp. 325-6.

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intimating his fears for Jessica: “These be the Christian husbands./ I have a daughter—/Would any of the stock of Barabbas/Had been her husband rather than a Christian!” (4.1.294-7). The Christian men do prove themselves quick to make such claims, and Portia too employs sacrifice as a bogus concept of self-abnegation. Harry Berger, Jr. has observed that Portia’s description of her acquiescence to her father’s casket test—“I stand for sacrifice”—suggests her own self-oblation as well as the severe demands that she places on both Bassanio and Shylock, both of whom must be prepared to “hazard all [they] hath,” the “winning” stipulation for her suitors as inscribed on the bronze casket.26 Yet Portia also sustains a fantasy of heroic suffering and helplessness.27 Portia’s description of herself as the intended virgin sacrifice Hesione undermines Bassanio’s true devotion to her: Hercules rescues Hesione not for love but, like the acquisitive Bassanio, for the reward of a pack of horses. That Jessica escapes “sacrificial” death at her father’s feet and succeeds in her elopement also proves problematic to her role as the (Christian) daughter defecting from her (Jewish) father’s house: rather than a true signifier of the Christian spirit, Jessica remains an awkward physical presence on stage that cannot be smoothed into allegory. To Lorenzo’s invitation on the grounds of Portia’s estate to “[l]ook how the floor of heaven/Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold” (5.1.58-9), a brief oration on how even the “smallest orb” (60) participates in the universal harmony of “immortal souls” (63), Jessica responds only that she is “never merry” when she hears “sweet music” (69), recalling her father’s earlier associations between the Christian’s music, the jewels in her ears, and his own devastation. Lorenzo insists that even the “unhandled colt” with “savage eyes” is moved by the “sweet power of music.” Those who are not so moved are “fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils” (72, 78, 85). Still, Jessica remains silent as Portia continues Lorenzo’s intimations of Christological exaltation. In response to Nerissa’s description of a candle obscured by moonlight, Portia extols the role of each small illumination—a “good deed in a naughty world” (91)—as components of a divine hierarchy: “So doth the greater glory dim the less:/A substitute shines brightly as a king/Until a king be by, and then his state/Empties itself, as doth an inland brook/Into the main of waters” (5.1.93-7). An image of truth revealed to the persistent Christian reader, this light thrives despite the external forces that may block its illumination.28 Portia’s clear allusion to the Old order that “[e]mpties itself” into a superior Christian “main” explicitly summons Jessica, who ostensibly joins them here in the spirit of assimilation, yet does not (or can not) participate in the language of salvation. Jessica appears as Lorenzo’s “torch-bearer,” the guide who will lead him to what Portia describes as a type of spiritual illumination, but she is also, as we

26 Harry Berger Jr., “Marriage and Mercifixion in The Merchant of Venice: The Casket Scene Revisited,” SQ 32 (1981): 155-62. 27 Many critics contend that she guides Bassanio toward the correct casket. 28 Portia understands herself as a reader who has bested the Jew at his own game. In the play’s climactic confrontation, Portia attempts to establish Christian authority through a type of interpretive perspicuity. Her outwitting of Shylock on the basis of a more nuanced reading of the terms of the bond, in a broader sense, confirms Antonio’s earlier characterization of him as a devil who erroneously “cite[s] Scripture for his purpose.”

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have seen, a body that obfuscates such truths. Through her silent presence during the remainder of the scene, Shakespeare creates a final image of disconnection between the Christian reader and the Hebrew scripture. At the play’s conclusion, Jessica is far removed from the Christians’ rhetoric of spiritual devotion and praise: she does not speak during the last nearly 250 lines, but there is no indication that she has left the stage. Although we don’t know how Merchant was originally staged, modern playwrights in their theatrical and film adaptations often choose to highlight Jessica’s physical and emotional isolation at the play’s conclusion.29 Modern directors have used Jessica to soften the play’s anti-Semitic resonance; literary criticism has drawn on Jessica for this purpose as well, interpreting Jessica’s awkward interaction with her husband and the others as a sign that she remains an outsider, enlightened with sudden remorse about her father. But Jessica also plays a dynamic role in the context of sixteenth-century concerns about the Hebrew scripture. Her desire for conversion represents the tensions experienced by the Christian reader who relied on both the Jews’ historical authenticity—the “lived experience” that was also tied to textual authority. Michael Radford’s 2005 film adaptation ends with Jessica forlorn and alone, contemplating her turquoise ring: in a surprise twist, we discover that she did not actually sell it, as Shylock (and his audience) have assumed. The image raises some fascinating possibilities. Did Tubal intentionally try to turn father against daughter? Or was Jessica just a victim of slander in the underworld of Venice? The implication of Jessica’s sentiment for Leah, though entirely Radford’s flight of fancy, also taps into the anxieties lurking under Lorenzo and Launcelot’s joking about Jessica’s parents. Perhaps Jessica is more connected to her mother than we thought? Radford’s adaptation raises questions about the symbolic uncertainty surrounding the fate of Leah’s ring in the text itself. His vision of Jessica’s silent attachment to her mother perhaps confirms her deceptions; this relationship also suggests how the Jewish mother is an object of desire more generally to Jew and Christian. Shakespeare’s depiction of the tensions surrounding Jessica’s allegorical function in the play underscore the interpretive uncertainty underpinning the Protestant’s possession of the Hebrew scripture. As I have argued in my reading of the implications of the biblical narratives through which Jessica is characterized, Merchant allows the audience to understand the Jewish daughter in the context of the problems of reading and interpretation: at a historical moment when the Hebrew scripture provided for the English reader a crucial—if porous—touchstone of selfidentification, the Judges 11 narrative made clear that the scripture functioned as a contested space that resisted fixed meanings.

29

See John Picker, “Shylock and the Struggle for Closure.” Judaism 43.2 (1994): 184-6.

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Epilogue

Jewish Women, Women Writers, and Elizabeth’s Legacy Throughout this book, I have focused on male writers and, to some extent, assumed a male audience who seeks to sexually and textually penetrate the Jewish daughter on stage. But female writers are as invested in these acts of infiltration and mastery. In the years immediately following Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Elizabeth Cary and Aemilia Lanyer were both readers and authors of Jewish women. Cary’s closet drama The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) and Lanyer’s collection of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), which begins with a praising acknowledgement of Elizabeth, demonstrate what I have argued is a distinctly Elizabethan interest in Jewish women from the Hebrew scripture. Cary and Lanyer, I argue, take further the authoritative stance assumed by the male writers and exegetes who have been the focal point of this book: they use scriptural and literary archetypes of Jewish women to express their own agency as interpreters of the scripture, challenging male interpretations of these figures and, ultimately, forging an exclusive bond between female writer, subject, and reader.1 The first published English play to be authored by a woman The Tragedy of Mariam draws primarily from the Jewish historian Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews as well as from the three separate accounts of Herod in the scripture. Cary’s adaptation reflects her reputed familiarity with rabbinic and Christian biblical scholarship and, potentially, her knowledge of Hebrew.2 Like his predecessor in Josephus, Cary’s version of the oppressive, jealous ruler Herod the Great gives “strict and private commandment” that, in the event of his own death, his wife Mariam too should be killed.3 Upon discovering that his counselor Sohemus has disclosed this decree to Mariam, Herod believes his sister’s allegation of Mariam and Sohemus’s affair. Like early modern exegetes writing on Jephthah’s daughter, Cary turns Herod’s order for 1 See Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, pp. 111-31. Suzuki suggests that Elizabeth’s legacy can be seen in early modern English women writers’ use of biblical commentary as a means of subverting patriarchal authority: “Elizabeth’s reign became a watershed not only for aristocratic women such as Cavendish, but also for the middle-class Lanyer and petitioning women of the lower classes during the English Revolution ... because it marks a moment when a woman was acknowledged as a legitimate agent in public and political history” (pp. 15-16). 2 See Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson’s introduction on Cary’s marriage, education and her biblical and medieval sources for Herod and Mariam (The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Weller and Ferguson [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994]). 3 Cary, “The Argument,” p. 67.

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Mariam’s execution into a totalizing moment of Christian allegory—a reading that crystallizes her own ability to discern Mariam’s significance for a Christian reader. Although I have yet to find an analysis comparing Mariam and the sixteenth-century Jephthes plays, critics have recognized the influence of the Catholic writer Jane Lumley’s popular translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis on Cary’s depiction of Herod’s hasty judgment and subsequent remorse for her death. As Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson note, “Lumley’s play ultimately rationalizes, or at least distracts our attention from, the father’s terrible judgment by imbuing the daughter’s embrace of her fate with Christian significance. ... Like Cary’s Mariam, Lumley’s Iphigeneia partly succeeds in rhetorically transforming herself from a political victim to a Christlike martyr.”4 Feminist critics have rightly cautioned about reading Cary—and Lanyer—from only a biographical perspective, but Cary’s own religious drama in her marriage does illuminate her investment in reading, and constructing herself through, literary representations of Jewish women.5 A Catholic convert whose contentious relationship with her Protestant husband was well-known, Cary connects herself to the Jewish/Christian martyr whose piety supersedes that of her spouse. Cary asserts a striking literary and religious authority through her particular interpretation of a martyristic Mariam, declaring her own piety through this representation of female sacrifice. In Mariam, the Jewish woman, with her ties to the Hebrew scripture and to the history of God’s original elect, holds a type of sacred authority. By many accounts, Herod married a Jewish woman of high rank to gain power over his Jewish population: in the play, Mariam and her mother, Alexandra, denigrate the non-Jewish Herod as an illegitimate ruler unfit to carry out Jacob, David, and Abraham’s legacy; Alexandra, especially, denigrates her son-in-law as “damnèd Esau’s heir” (1.2.84). Mariam embodies the noble ancestry of her Hebrew predecessors who, in Cary’s retelling, possess the blood that will become Christ’s own: Herod, grief-stricken at his hasty judgment and execution of his wife, honors her scriptural lineage: “[w]ithin her purer veins the blood did run,/That from her grandam Sara she deriv’d,/Whose beldame age the love of kings hath won” (5.1.179-81). Mariam echoes this allusion as she awaits execution, consoling herself with an image of maternal nurture and ancestral legitimacy: “In Heav’n shall Mariam sit in Sara’s lap” (4.8.574). At this moment, Cary and her female subject claim possession over the Hebrew scripture as a narrative of Christian selfhood. Elizabeth always had a ardent admirer in Lanyer, a descendant of an ItalianJewish family of court musicians who in her adulthood, after her father’s death and 4

Weller and Ferguson, p. 27. For another perspective on Lumley’s influence, see Diane Purkiss’s reading of sacrifice in Mariam and Jane Lumley’s translation of Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis as a reflection of the (patriarchal) humanistic tradition these women studied rather than an expression of their authorial autonomy (“Blood, Sacrifice, Marriage: Why Iphigeneia and Mariam Have to Die,” Women’s Writing 6.1 [1999]: 27-45). 5 Dympna Callaghan, in “Re-Reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry” (Women,“Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker [London: Routledge, 1994], pp. 163-77), argues that biographical approaches have thus ignored Cary’s awareness of and participation in the culture’s interest in Jews and Hebraism.

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insolvency, famously aspired to regain access to the elite court circles that had been part of her youth. Lanyer’s great desire to issue public praise for her female patrons and for Elizabeth inspired her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, an imaginative account of Christ’s Passion interspersed with digressions on her patrons and the Old Testament women whom she upholds as paragons of female virtue. One of Salve’s dedicatory verses is an homage to the deceased queen: “[t]he Phoenix of her age, whose worth did bind/All worthy minds so long as they have breath,/In linkes of Admiration, love and zeale,/To that deare Mother of our Common-weale.”6 In her remarks to her readers that preface Salve, Lanyer weaves together queens and patrons with Old Testament women, the powerful “wise and virtuous women” such as Deborah, Judith, Jael, and Susanna whom God empowered to “bring downe [the] pride and arrogancie” of male rulers.7 She charges that men who blame women for original sin “doe like Vipers deface the wombes wherein they were bred”: unlike Christ, who had great respect for women and acknowledged his maternal origins, these men forget their debt to women as their creators.8 The image of the womb is important to Lanyer as one that simultaneously validates female authority over men and, more specifically, her own position as an interpreter of biblical women. Like Elizabeth in the epigraph with which I begin this book, Lanyer suggests that the “issue” of progeny is akin to the production of an authoritative translation of the Bible. She appeals to the spirit of Elizabeth to accept the “first fruits of a womans wit”—her own “issue” that is Salve.9 In her own writing, she engages in a type of authoritative production that she believes to justify her condemnation of a male tradition of scriptural interpretation. Unlike the male authors who have been my focal point, Lanyer claims without reservation to acquire scriptural veritas through her interpretations of Jewish women; her ability to get access to this body, symbolically the ur-text and the ur-womb of the Christian self, is affirmed as a gendered commonality—a shared womb that is a marker of authority over men. It is with Lanyer’s own act of interpretive authority in one segment, “Eve’s Apologie,” that I conclude this book. As Susanne Woods observes, “[Lanyer’s] religious poem claims biblical and historical authority and grants the viewpoint of women as much or greater authenticity as that of men.”10 Achsah Guibbory, who believes Lanyer to take on a “quasi-priestly” role in Salve Deus, even raises the possibility that Lanyer’s publication of Salve in 1611, the same year as the King James Bible, “constitut[es] an oppositional alternative to the

6

“To the Lady Elizabeths Grace” in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), p. 11. 7 From Lanyer’s preface to Salve, “To the Vertuous Reader,” p. 49. 8 Ibid., p. 48. 9 “To the Lady Elizabeths Grace,” p. 11. 10 Woods, xxxii. Suzuki elaborates on this point: “[s]ince the authority of biblical interpretation—heretofore exclusively a male preserve—has been used to legitimate the demonization of and antagonism against women as well as gender inequity, Lanyer proposes to correct the misprision by ‘reading against the grain’ and offering an oppositional interpretation” (p. 120).

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monumental biblical project of James.”11 At once deferential and antagonistic to her male contemporaries, Lanyer vindicates the “misunderstood” women of the Old Testament and in doing so cleverly affirms her female reader’s ability to understand the true meaning of the scripture. Lanyer’s emphasis on the woman’s part also becomes a way to distinguish between the Hebrew and the Jew, terms that I have shown to be weighted with implications about religious and scriptural authority. Lanyer explains Eve’s actions as motivated “for knowledge sake” (797); her only fault in sharing the apple was “too much love” (801).12 Eve’s naïveté, she concludes, makes her innocent of the intellectually superior Adam’s knowing crimes against God: unlike Eve who is “simply good” (765), he does not sin because a “subtill Serpants falsehood did betray him” (799), but because of his own ambition. Even more, and this is Lanyer’s main point, Eve’s transgression pales against the ultimate sin committed by men against Christ. As support for this claim, Salve juxtaposes these virtuous biblical women with “those fooles, that thought themselves so wise,/The Jewish wolves, that did our Saviour bite;/For now they use all meanes they can devise,/To beate downe truth, and goe against all right:/Yea now they take Gods holy name in vaine,/To know the truth, which truth they doe prophane” (683-88). Lanyer, who declares her own scriptural authority through the Jewish women of the Old Testament, implicitly contrasts herself with the Jews themselves whom she characterizes as falsifiers of Christian truth. We’ve seen this contrived distinction between the “Hebraic” elect of the Old Testament, as signified in Salve by the Old Testament heroines, and the Jews themselves who are associated with the very antithesis of scriptural veritas in the writings of the period. These dynamic contradictions embodied by the Jewish woman in English literature, as I have argued, inspire efforts to wrestle with the scripture’s meanings, and Lanyer is no exception here. Lanyer’s own claim to the “truth” that eludes the Jews has much to do with the female readers she imagines as her audience. From the beginning of Salve, Lanyer expresses her concern with this reader’s valuation of her Christian midrash. In her dedicatory verse to Queen Anne of Denmark she writes:

11

Guibbory, “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1998), pp. 192, 193. Michael Schoenfeldt also characterizes Lanyer as a priest who “serv[es] the Word-made-text [the Eucharist] to her readers” (“The Gender of Religious Devotion: Amelia Lanyer and John Donne,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Debora Shuger and Claire McEachern [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997], p. 212). See Marie H. Loughlin (“’Fast ti’d unto them in a golden Chaine’: Typology, Apocalypse, and Woman’s Genealogy in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, RQ 53.1 [2000]: 133-79) on Lanyer’s interest in affirming her female contemporaries through typological device. Kari Boyd McGrath and John C. Uhlrich (“Answerable Styles: Biblical Poetics and Biblical Politics in the Poetry of Lanyer and Milton, The Journal of English and German Philology, 100.3 [2001]: 333-54) point to Lanyer’s Eucharistic imagery as evidence of Salve Deus’s communal spirit and read her radical interpretations of the bible as expressions of divine inspiration. 12 All references to this edition are to line number.

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Behold, great Queene, faire Eves Apologie, Which I have writ in honour of your sexe, And doe referre unto your Majestie, To judge if it agree not with the Text: And if it doe, why are poore Women blam’d, Or by more faultie Men so much defam’d?13

Lanyer urges her reader to “judge” her elucidation of Eve’s innocence. Lanyer’s solicitation is not deferential; rather, she courts her audience with this implicit commendation of their own comprehension of the text’s true meanings. Lanyer forges her own brand of typology as she positions Jewish women as an historical and distinctly inchoate version of Christian, female, religious selfhood.14 At the end of the poem, she praises her primary patron, the Lady Margaret, the Countess Dowager of Cumberland, by claiming her superiority to the Old Testament women whose “glorious actions” (1466) have successfully quelled their male enemies. With this move, Lanyer negotiates the relationship between Old and New, carefully constructing her reader’s authority through her own deployment of the Jewish woman. Lanyer’s epideictic language allows her to connect her female reader to God’s Jewish elect, while still claiming evidence of her reader’s superior faith. She praises her patron as a reader and as a body that can be read with complete clarity: Lanyer assures the Lady Cumberland that she would never have incited male lust like Susannah because her “chaste breast, guarded with strength of mind,/Hates the imbracements of unchaste desires” (1545-6). Mariam and Eve remind us of the daughters, matriarchs, and mothers who have been the focus of this book: interpretively fluid and ripe subjects for the writer’s daring imagination. Cary and Lanyer take on a distinctly Elizabethan anxiety about scriptural authority expressed, in different forms, through these literary representations of Jewish women. Yet these women writers cannot help but to affix these characters into their own master typologies, lifting the Jewish woman off the stage, out of the text, and into their own real living English history.

13

p. 6. Loughlin observes that “[f]rom Old Testament women, to her contemporary dedicatees, Lanyer imagines a typological genealogy of women, one which finally will find its fulfillment in that place outside the time and history of which this genealogy is an intimate part—the apocalypse” (p. 138). 14

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_____.Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. Torrey, Charles C. “The Older Book of Esther.” Harvard Theological Review 37 (1944): 1-40. Trubowitz, Rachel. “‘But Blood Whitened’: Nursing Mothers and Others in Early Modern Britain.” In Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, 82-101. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000. _____.“Cross-Dressed Women and Natural Mothers: ‘Boundary Panic’ in Hic Mulier.” In Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500-1700, ed. Christina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki, 185-206. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Tyndale, William. Five Books of Moses Called the Pentateuch (1530). Intro. F.F. Bruce. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1967. _____. An Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue. London, 1531. Upton, Christopher. Introduction to the Latin translation of Iephte. In Renaissance Latin Drama in England, Vol. 7, ed. Marvin Spevack, J.W. Binns, and HansJürgen Weckermann (Georg Olms Verlag: Hildesheim, 1988 Vanhoutte, Jacqueline. “Queen and Country?: Female Monarchs and Feminized Nations in Elizabethan Political Pamphlets.” In Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman, ed. Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves, 7-19. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Viguers, Susan T. “Art and Reality in George Peele’s The Araygnment of Paris and David and Bethsabe.” College Language Association Journal 30.4 (1987): 481500. Wall, John. “The Dramaturgy of Buchanan’s Tragedies.” In Actus Conventus NeoLatini Guelpherbytani, ed. Stella P. Revard, Fidel Radle, and Mario A. DiCesare, 163-9. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1988. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Walsh, P.G. “Buchanan and Classical Drama.” In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Sanctandraeni, ed. I.D. McFarlane. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1986. Weller, Barry and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds. The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Walsham, Alexandra. “‘A Very Deborah?’ The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch.” In The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 143-68. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Wells, R. Headlam. “Elizabethan Epideictic Drama: Praise and Blame in the Plays of Peele and Lyly.” Cahiers Elisabethians: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1983): 15-33. Whitfield White, Paul. “Predestinarian Theology in the Mid-Tudor Play Jacob and Esau.” Renaissance and Reformation 12.4 (1988): 291-302. _____, ed. Jacob and Esau: An Old Spelling Edition. In Reformation Biblical Drama in England. New York: Garland, 1992.

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Wickham, Glynne. Early English Stages: 1300 to 1660. 3 vols. 1959. Reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Willet, Andrew. Hexapla in Genesin: that is, a sixfold commentarie upon Genesis. London, 1605. Williamson, Marilyn L. “The Ring Episode in The Merchant of Venice.” South Atlantic Quarterly 71 (1972): 487-94. Willis, Deborah. Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Wohl, Victoria. Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Wojcik, Jan. “Discriminations against David’s Tragedy in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature.” In The David Myth in Western Literature, ed. RaymondJean Frontain and Wojcik, 12-35. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1980. Woods, Susanne, ed. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wyatt, Sir Thomas. Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R.A. Rebholtz. London: Penguin, 1978. Yaffe, Martin D. Shylock and the Jewish Question. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Zwicker, Steven N. “Politics and Panegyric: The Figural Mode from Marvell to Pope.” In Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Earl Miner, 115-46. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Index

Abigail 4, 18, 23–4, 90, 113–31, 133, 134, 142, 147; see also conversion of Jewish daughters Abraham; see also Isaac; sacrifice in Genesis 23, 38, 89–90, 94, 103 n.39 in medieval and Renaissance drama 18, 23, 45, 89, 94 n.10, 95 n.15, 101–2, 119–20, 124, 141, 154 Abraham and Lot 18 Abraham Sacrifant 18, 94 n.10 Absolom in 2 Samuel 76–7, 78 as Absolon in For the Love of David and Bethsabe 69–70, 78, 81–8 Achinstein, Sharon 130 Achitophel 76, 84–5 Adelman, Janet 8–9, 30, 58–9 n.26, 141 n.15, 143 advice books 56 Agamemnon 23, 98, 105, 110, 113–15, 123, 126 Ahasuerus in The Book of Esther 21, 28, 31–3, 37 n.26, 40 in The Merchant’s Tale 36 n.23 as Asseurus in The Godly Queene Hester 21, 38–47 in the Greek Septuagint 34–6 in lost biblical plays 18 in a pageant for Richard II 27–8 Aitken, James M. 102 n.34 Akkerman, Fokke 103 Anderson, Bernhard W. 35 n.20 Anderson, Douglas 136 n.4 Anne of Bohemia, Queen of England 27–8, 43 Apocrypha, the books of the 22, 34–5, 47, 71, 74, 122; see also Esther; Susannah Aretino, Pierre 82 Aske, James 62 The asse overladen 39 n.29

Auerbach, Erich 16 n.46 Augustine, St. 90 n.3, 92 n.5, 97–8, 102 n.33 Aylmer, John 49 Bal, Mieke 104, 106 n.47, ballads representations of Jews in 8 n.22, 89 n.2; see also Hugh of Lincoln Barabas 23–4, 113–31, 133, 142 Barron, Caroline M. 27 n.1 Bartels, Emily C. 116 n.6 Baskins, Cristelle L. 39 n.31 Bathsheba in the Bible 69–71, 76–7, 79, 82, 87 as Bethsabe in For the Love of David and Bethsabe 6, 19, 22, 67, 69–71, 76–88, 92, 115 popular perceptions of 82 Battenhouse, Roy W. 24, 136 n.6, Beckwith, Sarah 135–6 n.3 Beecher, Don 116–17 Beers, William 105 n.46 Berger, Harry, Jr. 150 Bergeron, David M. 3 n.8 Berry, Philippa 49 n.1, 111 n.58 Bersaba: or, the love of David 82 Bevington, David 28, 29, 42 n.35, 46 n.38, 50, 59 n.27, 78, 79 n.20 Beza, Theodore 18, 94 n.10 Bible translation in England 1–7, 10–8, 26 biblical plays, lost 18 Bickerman, Elias J. 32 n.13 Bicks, Caroline 64–5 Blackburn, Ruth H. 28–9, 40, 55 n.22, 69 n.1, 100 n.28 Blair, Carolyn 69 n.1 The Blessed Jew of Marocco; Or, a Blackmoor made White 51; see also Thomas Calvert Blistein, Elmer 82 n.25 blood

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and Jewish identity 8–9, 25, 29–30, 42, 46, 115, 127, 133–51, 154 Boas, Frederick S. 69 n.1, 100 n.28, Boehrer, Bruce Thomas 78 n.17 The Book of Martyrs 111; see also John Foxe; Thomas S. Freeman; William Haller Boose, Lynda E. 104 n.42 Bradbrook, M.C. 139 n.13, Bradstreet, Anne 111 Braunmuller, A.R. 71 n.4, 77 breast-feeding 53, 57, 87, 100, 122, 123 Brenz, Johann 13–14, 34 n.19, 36–8, 46, 94–5; see also John Stockwood Bronner, Leila Leah 30–31, 33 n.14, 33 n.15, 49–50 n.3 Brown, Carolyn Whitney 71, 80, 83 n.29, 85 n.32 Browne, Sir Thomas 96, 98 n.24 Bruce, F.F. 12 n.35, 108 n.49 Buchanan, George 19 n.55 Euripides’ influence on 23, 91, 98–9, 104–9 History of Scotland 103 Jephthes Sive Votum Tragoedia 23, 89–109, 113 n.4, 122, 127; see also sacrifice “Judaizing” charges against 13, 102–3 Bucer, Martin 102–3 Burnett, Stephen G. 14 n.41 Cain/Abel 52 n.10, 124–5 Callaghan, Dympna 154 n.5 Calvert, Thomas 51 Calvin, John 12, 16, 50, 55, 63, 102 n.33, 103–4, 149; see also Susan E. Schreiner Campbell, Lily B. 29 n.5, 79 n.20, 100 n.28 Cardozo, Jacob Lopes 8 n.22 Cartelli, Thomas 129 Cartledge, Tony W. 95 n.13 Cary, Elizabeth 26, 153–4, 157 Catherine of Aragon 28, 29, 43, 110 Catholicism; see also mass ceremony allegorical representations of 21, 23, 28–9, 33, 37–8, 46–7, 52–3, 57, 62–4, 67, 72, 77, 78, 94, 102–3, 109, 109–11, 130, 137, 154 and authorship of The Historie of Jacob and Esau 50, 67

and the Protestant Bible 2–3, 5, 13–17, 34–5, 52–3 and vows 96, 99–100, 102–3 Charney, Maurice 113 n.4, 123 Chaucer, Geoffrey 36 n.23 Christian Hebraists 4, 11, 13, 95 Christopherson, John 23, 99–100, 103; see also George Buchanan; Jephthah circumcision 7–8, 138–9 Clark, Francis 95 n.15 Clytemnestra 91, 99, 108 Cobb, Samuel 82 Coch, Catherine 9, 54 Cohen, Andrew 93 n.7 Cohen, Gershon D. 54 n.10 Cole, Douglas 116 Cole, Mary Hill 2 n.5 Colley, John Scott 136 n.4 The consolations of David breefly applied to Queene Elizabeth 64 A Confutation of the Booke Intitled An Apologie of the Church of England 45 conversion of Jewish daughters and Christian anxiety about the Bible 9, 25, 33–6, 41–2, 91; see also Abigail; Jessica Coolidge, John S. 136 n.6, 137 Corinthians 4; see also St. Paul Coudert, Allison P. 4–5 n.14, 11 Coverdale, Miles 1 n.2, 12 n.35, 22, 34–5, 74; see also The Great Bible Cromwell, Oliver 10 Daniel in The Virtuous and Godly Susanna 22, 71–5 Daniell, David 12 n.35, 14 n.42 King David 6, 9–10, 19, 22, 45–6, 52 n.10, 64, 67, 69–71, 76–88, 93, 115, 154 Deats, Sarah M. 117 n.9, 126 Deborah; see also Elizabeth in the Bible 3, 6, 49, 63, 64, 62–7 in Elizabethan pageantry 3, 4–5, 6, 19–21, 64, 134 as judge/prophetess 3, 6, 19–20, 21–2, 62–7 in The Historie of Jacob and Esau 6, 21–2, 49–67 in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 155 as midwife 6, 51–2, 62–7

Index as nurse 6, 63, 62–7 Deutch, Yaakov 52 n.11 Deuteronomy 2 n.4, 93 Dobbins, Austin C. 24, 136 n.6 Dodwell, William 96 n.17, 97, 110 Doran, Susan 1–2 n.3, 43 n.36, 49 The Douai Bible 102 n.33 Edward I, King of England 10 Edward VI, King of England 12 n.35 Egerton, Sir Thomas 20 Ekeblad, I.S. 79 n.20 Elizabeth I, Queen of England as Bathsheba 6, 19, 22, 67, 70–71, 77 and Catholicism 2–5, 13, 28, 29, 37–9, 52–3, 46–7, 62, 64, 67, 72, 77, 110–11 connection between the English Bible and body of 1–10, 26, 29–30, 47, 50–51, 66–7, 71, 91, 109–12 coronation procession and pageantry of 1–6, 7, 19–22, 26, 28, 34 n.19, 47, 49, 62–4, 115, 134; see also The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth as Deborah 3–6, 19–22, 49–51, 54, 62–4, 66–7, 134, 155 as Esther 6, 19, 20–21, 28–9, 30, 33–4, 37, 38–9, 42–3, 46–7, 77, 151–2 as Jewish daughter 6, 18, 22, 91, 109–12 and The Geneva Bible 11, 15, 33–4, 53 and The Holie (Bishop’s) Bible 2, 11–12 as Iphigenia 110–11 and Aemilia Lanyer 154–6 letters of 53 as mother and nurse 6, 9–10, 18–19, 22, 26, 49–67, 70–71, 78, 123–4 and marriage 19, 29, 39, 43, 53–4, 78 prayers, composed by 20–21, 47 n.40, 63 as Rebecca 6, 19, 20–22, 49–67, 141 speeches, made by 43, 53, 111–12 as Susannah 6, 20–21, 22, 71–4, 111 Elizabeth Triumphans 62 The Elizabethan Conceit 9–10 Ellis, E. Earle 16 n.46 Elton, Edward 94, 95 n.15 Engle, Lars 136 n.4 English Bible 1–7, 10–18, 26, 54; see also Bible translation in England; The

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Geneva Bible; The Great Bible; Hebrew language; The Holie Bible Ephraim, Michelle 138 n.10 Epistle to the Hebrews 25, 93, 104 Erasmus 12 n.35, 98 n.25, 108 n.51 Esau in The Historie of Jacob and Esau 21, 49–67, 71, 76, 88, 91, 130, 140 in The Merchant of Venice 136, 141, 147–8 in The Tragedy of Mariam 154 Ester hath hang’d Haman 20 Ester Sowernam 20 Esther The Book of Esther 6, 13–14, 19–21, 22, 27–8, 29, 30–42, 45–7, 77, 121 additional passages 34–5 in the Greek Septuagint 21, 30, 32–36, 45 as Hester in The Godly Queene Hester 4, 28–47 in a pageant for Richard II 27–8 Euripides 23, 91, 98, 99, 104, 105, 106, 108–9,154; see also Agamemnon; Clytemnestra; Iphigenia Iphigenia in Aulis 23, 91, 98, 105, 107–9, 110, 127, 154 Iphigenia in Tauris 98–9, 105 n.46, 109–10 Exum, J. Cheryl 104 n.42 Feldman, Louis H. 37 n.26 Ferguson, Margaret W. 114 n.5, 153 n.2, 154 Fiedler, Leslie A. 136–7 Fienberg, Nona 104 n.42, 133 n.1 Foley, Helene P. 105 Fortin, René E. 136 Foxe, John 18, 110–11, 130 n.27; see also The Book of Martyrs Freeman, Thomas S. 1–2 n.3, 49 n.1, 110 n.56 Freer, Coburn 126 n.21 Froehlich, Karlfried 14 n.42, 16 n.46 Frontain, Raymond-Jean 70 n.3, 79 n.20, 104 n.42 Frye, Northrup 17 Frye, Susan 9–10 n.27 Galdon, Joseph A. 16 n.46 Gallathea 107 n.48; see also Iphigenia; sacrifice

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Garter, Thomas; see The Virtuous and Godly Susanna The Geneva Bible 11–12, 15, 33–4, 52–3, 54, 77, 84 n.30, 85 n.31, 87 n.34, 93, 101 n.33; see also Bible translation in England; Elizabeth I; the English Bible Gilman, Sander L. 35 n.22 The Godly Queene Hester; see Esther Goldberg, Dena 113 Goppelt, Leonhard 16 n.46 Grant, Teresa 1–2 n.3 Grantley, Darryll 118 Granville, George 149 The Great Bible 1, 11–12, 22, 74 Green, Ian 17 Gregg, Joan Young 8 n.22, 95 n.15 Guibbory, Achsah 155–6 Hackett, Helen 2 n.5, 5 n.18, 9, 111 n.60 Hadassa: or, The history of Queene Ester 37 n.26 Haller, William 110 n.57 Haman 13, 20, 28, 31, 32 n.14, 33–4, 37–9, 41–2, 43–7, 77 Hanusa, Ruth 113 n.4 Harbage, Alfred A. 18 n.54 Harding, Thomas 15 Harris, Arthur John 144 n.17, Harris, Jonathan Gil 119, 130 Harrison, G.B. 53 n.12 Hart, John A. 139 n.13 Harty, Kevin 36 n.23, 39–40 n.41 Hebrew language 2–5, 7, 10–18; see also Bible translation in England; English Bible Helen of Troy 105, 109 Henry VIII, King of England 12 n.35, 28, 77, 99 n.26, 110 Henry of Navarre 53 Herod 153–4 Hester and Ahasuerus 18 Heyricke, Richard 46–7 Heywood, Thomas 1–2, 1 n.3, 123, Hiscock, Andrew 116, 130 The Historie of Jacob and Esau 4, 6, 19, 21–2, 29, 49–67, 71, 76, 88, 91, 130, 140, 141 Hobbes, Thomas 108 n.49

The Holie Bible (Bishop’s Bible) 2, 11–12 Holinshed, Raphael 8 n.22 Holmer, Joan Ozark 136, 136 n.7 Holofernes; see Judith Holofernes 18 homilies and sermons, Elizabethan 14, 35n.22, 19–20 n.58, 33–4 n.18, 64, 95 n.15, 100 “On Swearing” 93; see also Jephthah; vows Hugh of Lincoln 8 n.22 Hunnis, William 18n.54, 21, 28–9, 50 n.5, 67 Hunter, G.K. 121 n.12, 130 If you know not me, You know nobodie: Or, The troubles of Queene Elizabeth 1, 1 n.3, 2, 123 Iphigenia 23, 91, 98, 105, 107, 109, 110, 113,123, 127, 154; see also Clytemnestra; Euripides; Jephthah’s daughter Iphis 98–9, 101, 102, 106–9; see also George Buchanan Isaac; see also Abraham; sacrifice in Genesis 52 n.10, 56, 89–90, 95 n.15, 111 in medieval and Renaissance drama 23, 45–6, 89, 93 n.10, 101–2, 136, 140, 141 in The Historie of Jacob and Esau 54–61, 63, 64 n.34, 65–6 Isaiah 62 Jackson, Andrew 12–13, 82 Jacob in Genesis 32–3, 45, 63, 115, 122, 140, 142–9, 154 in The Historie of Jacob and Esau 4, 6, 19, 21, 22, 50–67, 71, 76, 88, 91, 130, 140, 141 in The Merchant of Venice 25, 134–6, 140, 141, 142, 147–9 Jael 155 James I, King of England 37 n.26, 98 n.22, 103,155–6 Jephthah; see Jephthah’s daughter Jephthah’s daughter 6, 13, 19, 22–5, 89–112, 113, 114, 116, 127, 130, 133–5, 137–8, 153; see also George

Index Buchanan; John Christopherson; sacrifice; vows Jephthah’s Vow Perform’d Jephthes Sive Votum Tragoedia 13, 23, 89–112; see also George Buchanan; Jephthah’s daughter Jessica 6, 8, 9, 18, 24–5, 90, 114, 120–21, 124, 133–51; see also conversion of Jewish daughters; sacrifice Jesus Christ 3–4, 7, 19, 20 n.60, 19–20 n.58, 22–5, 27, 38, 39–40 n.31, 70, 87 n.34, 90, 93–5, 96, 97, 98 n.25, 99–100, 101, 106, 107–8, 110, 115–16, 119, 121, 124, 125 n.18, 130, 135, 136–7, 137 n.8, 139, 141 n.15, 154–5, 156 The Jew of Malta 4, 6, 8, 18–19, 23–4, 90–91, 100, 112, 113–31, 133, 134, 146 The Jew of Venice 149 Jews; see also Jewish women and allegations of crime, ritual murder 7–8, 19, 22, 24–5, 29–30, 35, 38, 100, 106, 113, 135–6, 156; see also Hugh of Lincoln as inferior readers of the Bible 4–7, 13–18, 35–6, 38, 90, 93–4, 96–7, 102, 124, 141, 146 Jewish women; see also womb imagery as biblical priscas veritas 2–7, 10–19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 44, 45–7, 51–67, 70, 76, 85, 91–2, 96–7, 112, 114–15, 117, 121–4, 125, 130–31, 134, 135, 137–42, 145–7, 151, 154, 155–7 as daughters; see Abigail; conversion of Jewish daughters; Jephthah’s daughter; Jessica and disguise or deception 4, 6–7, 15, 18–19, 21–2, 23–5, 30, 32, 35–6, 40–43, 45–7, 51–67, 76, 92, 120, 129, 114–21, 129, 133–51, 145–7 and Elizabeth I; see Elizabeth I as mothers; see Bathsheba; Rebecca and performance 23–4, 113–31 and pregnancy 4, 9, 19, 21–2, 25, 54, 70–71, 76, 78, 85, 88, 90, 117, 123, 127, 140–41; see also breast-feeding Job 125 Josephus 26, 37 n.26, 153; see also Louis H. Feldman

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Judith 10, 19–21, 28, 33 n.14, 34, 36 n.23, 155 Kahn, Coppelia 139 n.13 Kaplan, M. Lindsay 72 n.9, 73 Katz, David S. 2, 3, 5 n.16, 11, 13 n.39 Kelly, Faye L. 133 n.1 Kimhi, David 95 King James Bible 155–6 King, John N.9 Kittredge, George Lyman 8 n.22 Klein, Lillian R. 104–5 Knapp, Jeffrey 24 n.67 Knights of Malta 115–16 Knox, John 49 Laban 54, 140, 148–9; see also Jacob; Leah; Rachel Lampert, Lisa 6–7, 13, 51 n.7, 65, 87 n.34, 96–7, 121–2, 135 n.2, 143, 144, 147 Lanyer, Aemilia 7, 26, 153–7 “Eve’s Apologie” 155–7 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 26, 153–7 Latomus, Barthelemy 102, 103 n.38 Leah; see also Rachel in Genesis 25, 32, 52 n.10, 148 in The Merchant of Venice 25, 134–5, 137, 139–45, 147–8, 151 Lebègue, Raymond 103–4 Lelli, Fabrizio 28 n.3 Levenson, John D. 90 n.3, 93 n.7 Leviathan 108 n.49 Leviticus 54 n.18, 93 Lewalski, Barbara K. 3, 16 n.46, 135–6 Lopez, Rodrigo 30, 115 Loughlin, Marie H. 156 n.11, 157 n.14 The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe 6, 19, 22, 67, 69–71, 76–88, 92, 115; see also George Peele Luborsky, Ruth Samson 96 n.15 Lumly, Jane translation of Iphigenia in Aulis by 154 as influence on Elizabeth Cary 154 Luther, Martin 13–14, 16–17, 33, 35–6, 46, 92, 114, 119–21 Luxon, Thomas H. 16, 147 Lyly, John 71 n.6, 107 n.48 Maccabees, the Book of 24, 33, 35, 120–21 in The Jew of Malta 24, 120–21

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Martin Luther’s condemnation of 33, 35, 121 McFarlane, I.D. 98 n.22, 102 n.33, 104 n.40, 108n.51 McGrath, Kari Boyd 156 n.11 McGregor, James H. 98 n.25, 102 n.33, McManaway, James G. 133 n.1 Mahon, John W. and Ellen Macleod 24 n.67 Marcus, David 92 n.5, 95 n.13, Marcus, Leah 10 n.27, 12 n.36, 49 n.1, 95 n.15 Marks, Elaine 32 n.13, 33 n.17 Marlowe, Christopher; see The Jew of Malta Marrano Jews 10 n.28, 33; see also Elaine Marks Martyn, J.R.C. 98 n.23 Mary, Queen of England 1–2 n.3, 5 n.18, 12 n.35, 21, 37, 38–9, 49 n.2, 50 n.5, 53, 67, 100, 110 Mary, Queen of Scots 38–9, 62–3, 77, 78, 103 Marx, Steven 137 n.9 Mass ceremony 94–6, 130, 135–6 n.4, 156 n.11; see also Catholicism; vows Maydiston, Richard 27 Mayer, John 71 n.8, 94 n.11 The Merchant’s Tale 36 n.23 Merlin, Pierre 133–4 n.18 Metzger, Mary Janell 8, 143 Midrash 11–12, 18, 32–3, 50, 54, 63, 69 n.2, 82 n. 26, 93, 134–5, 143, 156 midwives and midwifery 6, 21–2, 51–2, 61–2, 64–5; see also Deborah millenarianism 33, 124 Miller, Naomi J. 11 n.29, 56 The Mirrour of Mutabilitie 93 n.8 Modder, Montagu Frank 8 n.22 Montaigne, Michel 98 Morality plays 41 n.33, 44, 50 Mordecai in the Bible 31–3, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42 in The Godly Queene Hester 40–47 More, Sir Thomas 12 n.35 Mosaic Law 4–5, 35, 138 A most plaine and profitable exposition of the book of Ester 33–4 n.18 Mueller, Janel 12 n.36 Mueller, Martin 98 n.25 Muller, Richard A. 4 n.11, 14 n.42, 16, 16 n.47 Munday, Anthony 93 n.8

Mystery plays 23, 56, 89 Nachmanides 63 Neale, J.E. 39 n.29, 77 n.13 Nichols, John 20 n.58; see also The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth Noble, Richmond 133 n.1 Norbrook, David 103, 103 n.37 Norfolk, Duke of 39 Numbers 93 nuns Abigail’s involvement with 4, 24, 114, 116–30 Osborn, James M. 1 n.3 Osherow, Michele 70 n.5 Ovid 79, 107 n.48 Paradise Lost 11, 18 Pasachoff, Naomi E. 50–51, 55, 67, 70 n.3, 77, 78 Paster, Gail Kern 64 n.36 Paul, St. 4, 7–8 n.21, 14 n.42, 39–40 n.31, 52, 95 n.15; see also Corinthians; Edward Elton; Lisa Lampert Peele, George; see The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe Perkins, William 96, 104 Picker, John 151 n.29 Prime, John 64, 65, 70 n.5 Primrose, Lady Diana 111 prisca veritas 3–7, 11–14, 19, 21, 24–5, 112; see also Bible translation in England; Hebrew language; Jewish women The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth 19–20, 34 n.19, 47, 62, 111 Purkiss, Diane 154 n.4 Quarles, Francis 37 n.26, Queen Esthers resolves: or, A prince pattern of heaven-born resolution, for all the lovers of God and their country 46–7 Queen Mab 65 rabbinical commentaries; see Midrash; Talmud

Index Rachel 25, 32, 52 n.10, 134–5, 147, 148–9; see also Jessica; Leah Racine, Jean 33 n.17 Radford, Michael 151 Rebecca 4, 19, 21–2, 36 n.23, 49–67, 76, 85, 91, 92, 115, 122, 140, 141, 147–8; see also Elizabeth; Deborah; The Historie of Jacob and Esau; pregnancy Richard II, King of England 27–8, 30 Rickey, Mary Ellen 14 n.44 Riggs, David 121 n.12, 125 n.18 Rogers, D.M. 102 n.33 Rose, Mary Beth 12 n.36, 54 Rosenberg, Rabbi A.J. 50 n.3, 69 n.2 Rosenheim, Judith 136 n.4 Roston, Murray 79 n.20, 100 n.28 Rubenstein, Frankie 144 n.17 Rubin, Miri 95 n.15 Ruether, Rosemary Radford 95–6 n.15 sacrifice 13, 19, 22–5, 87, 89–112, 113–16, 124 n.16, 126–7, 128, 129–30, 133–6, 139, 141, 147, 149–50, 154; see also Jephthah’s daughter St. Leger, Nicholas 39 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 26, 153–7 Sandys, Edwin 19–20 n.58, 95 n.15 Sarah 52 n.10, 141, 154, Schoenfeldt, Michael 156 n.11 Schreiner, Susan E. 14 n.43, 16–17 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 30 n.9 Segal, Charles 105 n.46 Septuagint (Greek) 21, 30, 34, 45; see also Esther Shakespeare, William Hamlet 24, 133, 3 Henry VI 24, 133 Henry VIII 18–19, 111 Macbeth 103 n.35 The Merchant of Venice 6, 8–9, 18, 24, 112, 121, 122, 124, 130, 133–51 Much Ado about Nothing 73 Romeo and Juliet 65 Shapiro, James 7–8, 10 n.28, 13 n.39, 33 n.16, 35 n.21, 113, 124 n.16, 128, 136 n.3, 138–9 Shoulson, Jeffrey S. 4–5, 11, 18, 140 Shuger, Debora Kuller 16 n.46, 18, 19, 25, 90, 97, 98 n.25, 101, 108, 156 n.11

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Shylock 8–9, 24–5, 117, 120, 123, 125, 133–51; see also Jephthah’s daugter; Jessica Sidney, Sir Philip 103 Siemon, James R. 125 n.17 Signer, Michael A. 4–5 n.14, 11, 52 n.11 Slights, Camille 139 n.13 Smalley, Beryl 21–2 n.64 sola Scriptura 2, 16, 34–5; see also Bible translation in England; English Bible; Hebrew language Spiller, Elizabeth A. 141 n.14, 142 Spivack, Bernard 41 n.33 Stallybrass, Peter 114 Stilling, Roger 83 n.28 Stockwood, John 13–14, 36–9, 94 n.9; see also Johann Brenz Stoll, E.E. 148 n.22 Stone, Donald 103 Stopes, C.C. 18 n.54, 28–9 Strong, Roy 3, 5 n.18 Stroup, Thomas B. 14 n.44 Susannah 6, 20, 22, 71–6, 107, 111, 157 Suzuki, Mihoko 53 n.14, 147 n.21, 153 n.1, 155 n.10 Swetnam, Joseph 20 Sypherd, Wilbur Owen 12 n.35, 89–90 n.2, 98 n.22, 99 n.27, 100 n.28, 100 n.30 Talmud 11, 32 n.14, 33, 69 n.2, 93 Tambling, Jeremy 122 n.14, 123, 130 n.26 Taylor, Mark 133 n.1 Tennenhouse, Leonard 9–10 n.27, 139 n.13 Theodosia 20 Thomas, Helen 50 n.5 Thompson, John L. 4 n.11, 16, 23 n.65, 89 n.2, 92 n.5, 94–5, 97, 105 Torrey, Charles C. 32 n.13 The Tragedy of Mariam 26, 153–4, 157 The Trial of George Buchanan Before the Lisbon Inquisition 102 Trubowitz, Rachel 10–11, 53 Tyndale, William 1 n.2, 12 n.35, 108 n.49 typology 3–7, 14–18, 21, 23–5, 39–40 n.31, 52 n.10, 67, 88, 89, 94, 99, 100, 101, 108, 108 n.49, 112, 113, 121 n.12, 127, 130, 133, 135–6, 141 n.15, 157 Udall, Nicholas 50 n.5 Uhlrich, John C. 156 n.11

180

Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage

Vanhoutte, Jacqueline 49 n.2, 53 Vashti 31, 32–3 n.14, 39–40, 44, 46 Vennard, Richard 20 n.58 Viguers, Susan T. 80 n.21 Virgin Mary 6, 39–40 n.31, 51, 65, 70, 121; see also Helen Hackett The Virtuous and Godly Susanna; see Susannah vows in the Bucer/Latomus debates 102–3 and theological debates about Jephthah 23, 89–109 in The Jew of Malta 127–8 in The Merchant of Venice 24–5, 133–4, 137–40, 149 Wall, John 98 n.25 Wall, Wendy 60 Walsh, P.G. 98 n.16, 106, 108 n.51 Walsham, Alexandra 49 n.1 Walsingham, Sir Francis 37 Weller, Barry 152 n.2, 154 Wells, R. Headlam 71 n.6

White, Paul Whitfield 50 n.4, 50 n.5, 57 n.25, 59, 64, 65 n.40, 67 n.42 Wickham, Glynne 27–8 n.1, 28, 28 n.4, 49 n.1 Willet, Andrew 52, 55, 63, 149 Williamson, Marilyn L. 139 n.13 Willis, Deborah 64–5 witches and witchcraft 65 Wohl, Victoria 105 n.46 Wojcik, Jan 70 n.3, 82 n.26, 104 n.42 womb imagery as place of Jewish origin 6, 9, 19, 21–2, 24–6, 51–2, 57–8, 61, 64, 66, 71, 84–5, 87–8, 91–2, 106, 112, 115, 121–2, 123, 130, 131, 135, 142, 145, 146, 155 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 82 Wycliffe, John 12 n.35 Yaffe, Martin D. 125 n.19 Zwicker, Steven N.3 n.10, 103 n.35,