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CHAPTER 1

Fractured Discourse: Recusant Women and Forms of Virginity

Nuns and vowed virgins appear with surprising frequency in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, but they are nonetheless outnumbered by their Protestant counterparts—virgins whose narratives are structured around the expectation of marriage. The slow process of sixteenth-century religious reform stimulated a parallel reconfiguration of the imagery and ideology associated with Catholicism, and female chastity has long been the most visible and contested site in this competition for representation.¹ From the virgin warriors, virgin queens, fleeing virgins, and virgin shepherdesses of the Arcadia and The Faerie Queene to the chaste young women on their way to the altar (or, in the case of certain star-crossed lovers, the grave) in early modern drama, a marital telos informs and motivates literary representation. In the decades after the Elizabethan settlement, it became increasingly unusual to find women like Hero of Hero and Leander and Isabella of Measure for Measure, who conceptualize virginity as an earnest religious vow rather than a transitional phase that must culminate in marriage. These nuns—one a votaress of Venus, the other a future Catholic Poor Clare—demonstrate that the devotional markers associated with female virginity could never be completely subsumed under a Protestant ideology that repositioned chastity not within the female community of the convent but within a marital relationship. Yet both are lured away from their religious positions, into negotiations with men who urge them to abandon their vows and participate in a social system in which patriarchal control takes precedence over faith. These virgin characters thus simultaneously profess a devotional practice associated with the convent and occupy a political space reminiscent of the married recusant women who refused to participate in church services and drew increased government scrutiny in late sixteenth-century England.

Hero and Isabella have inspired endless critical consternation, in part because they do not fit neatly into Protestant England, ancient Sestos, or Catholic Vienna. Together with Queen Elizabeth, that most famous of perpetual virgins in sixteenth-century England, they take on a surfeit of meanings associated with female virginity: they are rhetorically powerful, yet their gendered bodies are vulnerable; they are self-possessed, yet the objects of male desire; they are motivated by religious and political convictions, yet restricted by a patriarchal culture. In a period of ongoing religious reform, virginity offered a complex discursive field for authors interested in the conflict between patriarchal ideologies and social practice, and thus pointed not only to convent and queen but also to the recusant women whose outlawed faith enabled active political resistance and underscored the fact that marriage held its own ambiguities in early modern England.² In the last half of the sixteenth century, when English female monasticism had yet to be revived on the continent, recusant women put pressure on the social and ideological reconfigurations that accompanied the English Reformations through their unique position on the margins of Catholic religious hierarchies and English law. Their political significance is amply represented in the historical record—in legislation, court records, letters, and manuscript lives—and this chapter demonstrates how their complicated relationship to the patriarchal state contributed to the multiple and sometimes competing significations that female virginity bears in early modern literature. Just as Elizabeth’s iconography as Virgin Queen was not a simple appropriation of the cult of the Virgin Mary, the vowed virgins of post-Reformation English literature did not offer straightforward representations of female monasticism.³ Instead, authors engaged the political dimensions of female chastity in their representations of vowed virgins, creating characters whose dramatic and poetic disruptions formally expressed the social and political disruptions of a broad range of early modern Catholic Englishwomen.

The virgins and nuns imagined by Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, and William Shakespeare offer a complex map of the relationship between literary form and ideological content in canonical early modern literature. In disparate texts marked by narrative insufficiency or deferral—poems left unfinished or completed by another author; a play that ends with an unanswered question and the promise of further explication—virginity functions as both a social position and a discursive concept under near constant attack.⁴ Queen Elizabeth’s marital politics offer one touchstone for these late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century explorations of virginity, and Spenser’s fragmented representation of the Virgin Queen serves as a foundation for my reading of the formal effects precipitated by conflicting ideologies of chastity and marriage in his contemporaries’ representations of women associated with Catholic devotional practice and religious politics. As Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie have argued, “Elizabeth as the cynosure of the age has created a focus but also a blind spot in the study of the poetics of virginity in the Renaissance.”⁵ Both focus and blind spot are evident in The Faerie Queene, which exposes the ambiguities at the heart of late sixteenth-century celebrations of married chastity even as it resolutely turns away from the representation of vowed female virgins. Instead, the poem explores multiple facets of the queen’s chastity through Spenser’s diffuse representational strategy: Elizabeth is everywhere and nowhere. She is Gloriana, the unreachable virgin queen; Britomart, the desiring virgin knight; and Belphoebe, the quick-tempered virgin huntress—amidst a host of other virgin characters, flattering and not.⁶ At the same time that he creates this fractured mirror of chastity for his queen, Spenser offers the promise of marriage at the end of his epic poem, in a narrative strategy that puts pressure on the marital telos through a constant process of deferral, as both consummation and social recognition are delayed for almost all of the poem’s prospective married couples. Spenser seems almost constitutionally incapable of representing married life in The Faerie Queene, though the marital relationship remains imaginatively significant to his characters. The narrative ruptures that occur when, for example, the Red Cross Knight postpones his marriage to Una or Merlin prophesies but barely describes the future of Britomart and Artegall are, I argue, products of a representational crisis surrounding female virginity in post-Reformation England that extended beyond “the body and the iconography of a queen” to women of diverse religious affiliations and social positions.⁷

The effects of these discourses of late Elizabethan virginity and marriage are evident in Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander and Chapman’s moralizing continuation of it. Beginning in 1598, when Marlowe’s poem was printed with the suggestive “desunt nonnulla” at the end of its final line, readers have felt compelled to supply what they imagined to be lacking in Hero, Venus’s nun. She has been called “equivocal and equivocating”—a suggestive choice of words, considering the Catholic connotations of her devotional status—“both a naive virgin serving the goddess of the household and of love and a prostitute whose chief interests are carnal.”⁸ Marlowe’s Hero is paradoxical and troubling: she is a virgin, yet she is dedicated to the goddess of love; she is a nun, yet she is not bound by rules of enclosure; she is a woman, yet she performs the duties of a priest. George Chapman attempted to transform the inconsistencies of Marlowe’s poem and its heroine into material for allegory, and his remarkable depiction of the goddess Ceremony in competition with Venus for control over the lovers’ relationship explicitly positions Hero outside an appropriate social order. The two parts of Hero and Leander thus make visible the conceptual and social transformations created by the Protestant Reformation, the exile of English nuns, and Elizabeth’s status as the Virgin Queen. When read in its entirety, as Chapman imagined it after Marlowe’s death, the poem underscores the evolving and precarious position of Catholic women in late Elizabethan England and reveals the literary significance of contemporary debates over female recusancy and marital coverture addressed in manuscripts such as John Mush’s “A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow,” a hagiographical account of an executed recusant woman written by her priest.

By 1604, when Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure was first performed, the revival of English female monasticism had begun, and parliamentary efforts to control recusant women remained largely ineffectual. As a result, whether they joined convents on the continent or married in England, Catholic women in the early years of the seventeenth century were able to maintain a certain degree of religious freedom. Shakespeare’s depiction of Isabella as a defiant virgin agitating for governmental change in a play that ends with many marriages but little resolution thus points to a turning point in English conceptions of Catholic femininity, when a burgeoning interest in monasticism on the part of English Catholic women aggravated, rather than alleviated, concerns over female recusancy. Measure for Measure registers Isabella’s significance through chiastic formulations that recall the mirroring and fragmentation of The Faerie Queene but reveal that Queen Elizabeth’s virginity was not alone in exerting a shaping influence on early modern literature. Together, the texts I examine in this chapter demonstrate that in addition to being objects of representation in poems and plays of the post-Reformation period, Catholic women’s social positions, sexual choices, and political efficacy were essential to the formal and narrative structures explored by canonical English authors.

“But Yet the End Is Not”: Virginity and Narrative Teleology

The Faerie Queene encompasses multiple understandings of virginity, including the iconic virginity of England’s queen and the continued imaginative influence of its ruined cloisters, yet Spenser does not allow for the possibility of female virginity as the product of an eternal religious vow. Instead, he positions his female characters as participants in a courtly culture for which marriage is the presumptive endpoint. This expectation is most conspicuous at moments when Spenser alludes to female monasticism only to implicitly reject it. In the House of Holiness, which looks suspiciously like a convent, virgin maidens practice “godly exercise.”⁹ Yet this house, “renowmd throughout the world for sacred lore, / And pure vnspotted life,” is unlike a monastery in one significant respect: its inhabitants are mothers and wives (1.10.3.2–3). Spenser reveals their participation in a Protestant spiritual and social economy through an instructive sleight of hand, as he leads his readers to believe that the two eldest daughters of the house may be nuns. “Most sober, chast, and wise, / Fidelia and Speranza virgins were,” and, as such, they seem to fit into the Catholic imaginary that Spenser has already invoked through their mother Cælia’s “bidding of her bedes” (4.5–6, 3.8).¹⁰ But he immediately reverses course: “Fidelia and Speranza virgins were / Though spousd, yet wanting wedlocks solemnize” (4.6–7). The uncertainty created by this series of reversals—they are virgins, then married, then married but for the ceremony—raises the possibility of female monasticism at the same time that Spenser denies perpetual virginity a place in this most religious household.

Instead of lifelong celibacy, The Faerie Queene’s female virgins occupy a transitional space positioned between an understanding of chastity as “abstinence from all sexual intercourse” and “purity from unlawful sexual intercourse.”¹¹ They have entered a Protestant narrative of chastity, in which women no longer have an institutionally supported alternative to marriage—but their marriages remain beyond the poem’s narrative horizon. Spenser embraces a devotional ideal of vowed virginity in only one instance, and then only for men: priests in the temple of Isis “by the vow of their religion / They tied were to stedfast chastity / And continence of life, that all forgon, / They mote the better tend to their deuotion” (5.7.9.6–9).¹² Celibate monasticism is possible for religious men, but, in this mirror of Elizabethan England, it is not an option for women.¹³ In what follows, I will demonstrate how the multiple virginities—and multiple deferred marriages—of The Faerie Queene reveal the fractures in a social system that simultaneously elevated married chastity, celebrated powerful virginity, and denied women a religious vocation.

Spenser suggests that Elizabeth made every facet of female virginity her own, leaving him with no basis for the representation of chaste women who did not fit within England’s post-Reformation religious and political system.¹⁴ By the last decade of her reign, iconography associated with England’s Virgin Queen proliferated in literary and visual representations, and Elizabeth’s youthful intimation that “it might please almighty God to continue me still in this mind to live out of the state of marriage” had resulted in the seeming paradox of a Protestant monarch dedicated to perpetual virginity.¹⁵ Critical scrutiny has focused not simply on the queen’s choice to live and die a virgin but on the similarities between her representation and that of the Virgin Mary, leading many scholars to interrogate discourses of virginity in early modern England as part of an Elizabethan appropriation of Marian iconography and Catholic devotional materials.¹⁶ Recent work has questioned this narrative of substitution and suggested that, rather than replacing the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth “functioned as an icon of Protestant reform and England’s newly imagined identity.”¹⁷ Indeed, like England’s religious settlement, Elizabeth’s virgin status remained under near-constant scrutiny, especially during the first twenty years of her reign.¹⁸ While she imagined a monument raised in commemoration of her rule in 1559—“in the end this shall be for me sufficient: that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin”—it would be many years before this statement could be viewed retrospectively as a kind of prophecy.¹⁹ Elizabeth’s early preference for an unmarried life was a savvy political maneuver, one that enabled her to avoid the inevitable questions of how a queen would negotiate the internal contradictions of a patriarchal system in which the ideology of marriage necessitated female submission. But it was also one of many ways that virginity came to be redefined for English Protestants: even as the queen adopted a rhetoric of perpetual virginity, she positioned herself as an object of courtly desire and remained at least conjecturally open to a future marriage.

Virginity was essential to both courtly and literary figurations of Elizabeth’s power, though the queen maintained the possibility that she might eventually conform to a Protestant ideal of married chastity. Theodora A. Jankowski has argued that “Elizabeth used the cultural ‘fact’ that there was no profession, no place for adult women virgins in the early modern sex/gender system to stress how unlike other women she was, as well as how unlike other rulers.”²⁰ The Virgin Queen’s exceptional status, in other words, depended in part on the religious and cultural shifts that accompanied the Protestant Reformation: if nuns had remained a significant presence in England, Elizabeth’s vow to remain unmarried until “it may please God to incline my heart to another kind of life” would have carried devotional rather than political implications.²¹ Just a few years after Queen Mary had restored Catholicism and attempted to revive English monasticism, Elizabeth’s accession meant both the perpetual exile of England’s remaining nuns and a significant shift in the early modern religious, political, and literary representation of virginity.

In the years following the dissolution of the monasteries, English nuns had largely disappeared. While some former monastics remained in England, their diminished social positions and meager pensions led to lives of poverty outside the cloister walls.²² A number of women traveled to the continent to join religious orders, individually and in groups, but exile in foreign monasteries prevented them from fully participating in sixteenth-century English religious and political life.²³ When Mary took the throne, the renewal of monastic foundations briefly became possible: in 1557, members of Syon Abbey—the only convent to survive the dissolution intact—returned to England after exile on the continent and were “restored” to their “former happy foundation and monastery of Syon.”²⁴ But their restoration was short-lived, and, with Mary’s death, they “were once again cast into the sea of their previous sorrow and tribulation, and expelled from their monastery and from all their first hope and consolation.”²⁵ This second exile coincided, on the one hand, with Elizabeth’s attempt to position herself as a politically self-contained virgin for whom marriage was not essential and, on the other, with a significant reconfiguration of the relative social status of marriage and vowed virginity in humanist thought on both sides of the doctrinal divide.²⁶ Protestant writers were especially eager to valorize female chastity within marital relationships; virginity, in their tracts, became a “transitional phase” to be supplanted in every woman’s life by chaste married sexuality.²⁷ The complexity of religious life in early modern England, however, prevented such cultural constructions from solidifying. Thus, while I find Jankowski’s argument regarding Elizabeth’s self-representation and “the cultural ‘fact’ that there was no profession, no place for adult women virgins” useful as starting point in 1559, when Elizabeth offered herself as a uniquely Protestant and exceptionally powerful virgin at precisely the moment nuns were forced to leave England, this chapter will question both the validity and the relevance of that “cultural ‘fact’” in the later years of Elizabeth’s reign, when literary representations of vowed virginity reflected on the unsettled status of chastity and religion in post-Reformation England.

In the proem to Book 3 of the 1590 Faerie Queene, Spenser suggests that his depiction of chastity is superfluous, since Elizabeth already provides the best example of “that fairest vertue” (3.proem.1.2). “Sith it is shrined in my Soueraines brest, / And form’d so liuely in each perfect part, / That to all Ladies, which haue it profest, / Need but behold the pourtraict of her hart, / If pourtrayd it might be by any liuing art” (1.5–9). Chastity lodges like a relic enshrined in the reliquary of Elizabeth’s breast, in a devotional image that is swiftly overtaken by a series of conditionals and reversals that recall those initiated by Fidelia and Speranza in the House of Holiness. Instead of worshipping Elizabeth’s chastity directly, women should look at the portrait of her heart, if such an artistic reproduction is even possible. Spenser asks whether art is sufficient to represent the virtue most prominently associated with the queen, says no, and then says yes. Sculptors and painters “may not least part expresse” and even poets will not dare to try “for fear through want of words her excellence to marre” (2.1, 9). Yet Spenser’s “lucklesse lot doth me constraine / Hereto perforce,” and he asks Elizabeth’s pardon “sith that choicest wit / Cannot your glorious pourtraict figure plaine / That I in colourd showes may shadow it” (3.4–5, 6–8). Allegory, in the form of “colourd showes,” is an unsatisfying solution to an intractable problem, for here and in the first line of the proem (“It falls me here to write of Chastity”), Spenser implies that he must write of chastity, and that he must do so here, in the final book of his 1590 Faerie Queene.

As the virtue “farre above the rest” (1.2), it makes sense that chastity would serve as a culmination, and yet Book 3 is only a temporary endpoint. Both the title page, which advertises “The Faerie Queene. Disposed into twelve books, Fashioning XII. Morall vertues,” and the letter to Ralegh printed at the end of the poem promise twelve books—twenty-four if the moral virtues are “well accepted” and Spenser frames “the other part of polliticke vertues.”²⁸ Chastity is only a temporary conclusion, for both his poem and his characters. Rather than perpetual, vowed virgins, Spenser depicts women who participate in a culture of courtly love and whose narratives incorporate a future transition from premarital virginity to married chastity. But that transition seldom occurs within the poem: just as readers will never reach the forecasted end of The Faerie Queene, which was left unfinished at Spenser’s death, chastity offers the promise of a conclusion that is never fully realized. This indeterminacy manifests in the history of The Faerie Queene’s print publication: while the 1590 version of Book 3 concludes with the reunion of the chaste Amoret with Scudamour, the 1596 version replaces this gesture toward marital and sexual union with renewed separation and deferral. In 1590, Amoret and Scudamour embrace while Britomart witnesses their love and “to her selfe oft wisht like happiness, / In vaine she wisht, that fate n’ould let her yet possesse” (3.12.46.8–9). Even though Spenser’s knight of chastity has not “yet” found Artegall, her own future husband, the final stanzas of the 1590 Book 3 suggest that marriage is the inevitable conclusion for both Amoret and Britomart. And yet, as Jessica C. Murphy notes, “we have only Merlin’s prophecy to rely on if we are to think that Britomart will marry Artegall.”²⁹ The 1596 Faerie Queene further complicates the possibility of marital resolution and suggests that even if Spenser had reached twelve or twenty-four books, he may have never fully resolved the representational difficulties of late Elizabethan female chastity.³⁰ In 1596, Scudamour leaves the House of Busirane before Britomart and Amoret emerge from it. Instead of an image of heterosexual union, Spenser concludes his revised book on chastity with the delays and digressions that characterize romance: Scudamour must now “wend at will” rather than standing still with Amoret “like two senceles stocks in long embracement” (1596, 3.12.45.9; 1590, 3.12.45.9).³¹

In Book 4, we learn that Spenser’s deferral of Amoret and Scudamour’s union replicates Busirane’s earlier disruption of their wedding:

For that same vile Enchauntour Busyran,

The very selfe same day that she was wedded,

Amidst the bridale feast, whilest euery man

Surcharg’d with wine, were heedlesse and ill hedded,

All bent to mirth before the bride was bedded …

Conueyed quite away to liuing wight vnknowen. (4.1.3.1–9)

Rhyme calls the reader’s attention to the expected progression from marriage vows to consummation and to Amoret’s suspension between the two. She is kidnapped in the liminal space between being “wedded” and “bedded”—still a virgin and not yet a wife. By relating this interrupted marital history after he prolongs Amoret and Scudamour’s separation in the revision of Book 3, Spenser suggests that his own poetic project is not far removed from Busirane’s rape and torture of Amoret.³² The opening of Book 4 thus acknowledges both the violence of poetic representation and its fundamental limits: while he can fragment chastity into different characters, Spenser cannot fully reconcile its complexities and ambiguities.

What does Amoret’s chastity signify, if she is both virgin and wife? The 1596 Faerie Queene leaves this question open, as virgins proliferate and the poem’s few weddings do little to contain chastity’s accretion of meanings. Book 4 features the metaphorical marriage of the Thames and Medway rivers, an extended poetic conceit that does not clarify the poem’s treatment of either chastity or marriage. Rachel E. Hile argues that “Spenser’s choice of a reluctant, proud bride and his focus on the wedding procession to the exclusion of the wedding itself suggest the possibility that he intends the Thames-Medway wedding to represent a concordant union, not an ideal of marriage based on the virtue of friendship.”³³ But this focus on the wedding procession is not unusual for Spenser: the twelve stanzas dedicated to anticipation, preparation, and procession in Epithalamion—compared to the single stanza depicting the ceremony itself—reveal a similar hesitation surrounding the marriage service. Rather than indicating what type of union Spenser hopes to depict, the weddings in The Faerie Queene help reveal the narrative ruptures occasioned by conflicting ideologies of chastity and marriage in late Elizabethan England. While marriage was no longer a sacrament in the English church, chastity within marriage had at least conceptually surpassed the virtues of perpetual virginity. And yet Spenser struggles to represent a smooth transition from unmarried virginity to chaste wedlock. The wedding of Florimell and Marinell in Book 5 is especially notable in this respect, as the narrator acknowledges that he will not represent the wedding itself.

To tell the glorie of the feast that day,

The goodly seruice, the deuicefull sights,

The bridegromes state, the brides most rich aray,

The pride of Ladies, and the worth of knights,

The royall banquets, and the rare delights

Were worke fit for an Herauld, not for me. (5.3.3.1–6)

The bride, groom, guests, food, and, most important, the “goodly seruice” are here dismissed as material for a herald rather than a poet. Spenser suggests that such subjects would be digressive distractions from the true task at hand: the advancement of virtue. “But for so much as to my lot here lights, / That with this present treatise doth agree, / True vertue to aduance, shall here recounted bee” (5.3.3.7–9). Even if “this present treatise” refers specifically to Book 5’s focus on justice, readers may be surprised to learn that when “true vertue” is at stake the poem must turn its attention away from the spousal union.³⁴

Marriage is nearly as impossible to represent as chastity, but for different reasons: rather than accruing meanings throughout the poem, it remains almost exclusively promissory. For many of Spenser’s paired characters—Una and Redcrosse, Amoret and Scudamour, Britomart and Artegall, Arthur and Gloriana—a consummated marital relationship is at the poem’s narrative horizon, always just out of reach and only visible in the prophetic mode. For Britomart, whose first sight of Artegall is of a “manly face” in a magic mirror, marriage is originally a spectral vision with an unknown object (3.2.24.4). The details of their union are communicated only through Merlin’s prophecy, part of Spenser’s chronicle history of Britain. The poem’s characters look forward as the poet looks back, but Britomart’s marriage is nearly invisible in both prospective and retrospective visions. She learns that “the man whom heauens haue ordaynd to bee / The spouse of Britomart, is Arthegall,” but this identification of marital status does not produce a representation of marital practice (3.3.26.1–2). Instead, Merlin’s syntax grows knotty as his narrative approaches Britomart and Artegall’s life together. After explaining that Artegall is in Faeryland but not of it, he reveals that “from thence, him firmely bound with faithfull band, / To this his natiue soyle thou backe shalte bring, / Strongly to aide his countrey, to withstand / The powre of forrein Paynims, which inuade thy land” (3.3.27.6–9). The delay of the “thou” identifying Britomart makes the “faithfull band” that binds Artegall ambiguous: is it a marriage band or is he bound to his native soil?³⁵ Subsequent clauses (“strongly to aide,” “to withstand”) suggest that Britomart brings him home so that he may demonstrate his martial might rather than enjoy their marital union. The next stanza emphasizes military prowess on the part of both Britomart and Artegall: “long time ye both in armes shall beare great sway” (3.3.28.5). They are united on the battlefield, “till thy wombes burden thee from them do call, / And his last fate him from thee take away” (3.3.28.6–7). Pregnancy arises from the battlefield rather than the bedroom in a parallel construction that aligns Artegall’s death with his child’s birth. Spenser thus elides Britomart and Artegall’s marriage in favor of their political and martial alliance, the outcome of which is dynastic rather than domestic.

As Jonathan Goldberg has argued, “there seems never to have been a domestic partnership…. This story seems less to support the seamless relationship between sexuality, marriage, and socio-political efficacy than to continue the problematization of these linkages.”³⁶ Goldberg offers this reading in the interest of demonstrating that “marriage is not the only legitimate form of sexuality in The Faerie Queene, although it is a critical commonplace to say so.”³⁷ I would add that this critical commonplace arises out of the poem’s many representations of female chastity, which consistently point toward a marital future that rarely materializes. Marriage is a representational blank and an empty future in The Faerie Queene: an end that is not, to borrow Merlin’s formulation of the post-Elizabethan future for England. He concludes his chronicle of Britomart and Artegall’s dynastic legacy with Elizabeth, the “royall virgin” whose own uncertain dynastic legacy prompts Merlin’s inconclusive “But yet the end is not” (3.3.49.6, 50.1). This syntactic deviation from Matthew 24:6—“but the end is not yet”—suggests not only that the end has not arrived but also that the end may not exist at all.³⁸ In Matthew 24, Christ foretells the end of the world for his disciples; Merlin’s prophecy integrates this apocalyptic gesture but also suggests the failure of a narrative telos by way of the failure of Elizabeth’s marital telos. The end does not exist, because Elizabeth has not married and produced an heir. This might suggest that “Elizabeth’s choice of lifelong virgin chastity is so far from the virtue of chastity that she has cut off its lineage.”³⁹ But I would instead argue that it points us to the ways that female virgins exert formal pressure on early modern literature, not simply as a result of Elizabeth’s representational dominance and the exile of vowed virgins but also in response to the indeterminacy of post-Reformation chastity. Like the rewritten end of Book 3, the conclusion of Merlin’s prophecy reveals that the ends of chastity are ultimately unknowable: while ideologically it may point toward marriage and children in late Elizabethan England, it can also signal political authority, perpetual religious devotion, or unions that do not conform to a simple patriarchal hierarchy.

“Dim and Darksome Coverture”: Marriage, Recusancy, and Female Autonomy

Spenser’s contemporaries built upon his representation of multiple virginities and marital deferral in order to explore the nonroyal associations of female chastity. The nuns of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature challenge the representational dominance of the Virgin Queen while also calling attention to the political significance of women during a period of ongoing religious reform. By considering the social and legal status of female virgins, authors such as Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare offered veiled interventions into debates over England’s Catholic women, particularly those married recusants whose legal position under coverture enabled them to avoid the full force of statutes requiring attendance at church services. As vowed (or nearly vowed) virgins, Hero and Isabella point toward Catholicism and the cloister while simultaneously participating in debates regarding female autonomy and choice, sexuality and marriage, and the role of the state in matters of conscience. While they are, in many ways, radically different characters in radically different texts, both resist entering a sexual or marital relationship that will necessitate abandoning their devotional practice, and their resistance carries narrative implications. As in The Faerie Queene, these virgins occasion formal disruptions, and Chapman’s desire to provide narrative closure for Hero and Leander helps reveal how these literary effects relate to the political position of recusant women in early modern England. The troubling conclusion of Marlowe’s poem, which offers a sexual culmination so fraught that most editors have altered the order of its lines, makes visible the fractures in a sex/ gender system predicated on female submission. Like modern editors, Chapman attempted to smooth away Marlowe’s rough edges, but in so doing drew attention to the legal and social implications of Hero’s odd and paradoxical position as an unenclosed and sexually active nun.

In the final lines of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, the eponymous lovers engage in an ambiguous seduction: Hero simultaneously resists and encourages Leander’s advances, leading to a sexual encounter that some critics read as mutual while others suggest rape.⁴⁰ A significant editorial emendation in most modern editions—the silent displacement of ten lines (“She trembling … the golden tree”) from 763 to 785—has allowed readers to gloss over some of the more troubling metaphors Marlowe uses to describe the moment or moments when Leander takes Hero’s virginity.⁴¹ It is easy to imagine a joyous consummation as the narrator describes how Leander “like Theban Hercules, / Entred the orchard of Th’esperides. / Whose fruit none rightly can describe, but hee / That puls or shakes it from the golden tree” if these lines signal a final moment of bliss before Hero’s postcoital reverie.⁴² Instead, the 1598 poem positions Leander’s entrance into the metaphorical garden before the narrator’s violent description of “a bird, which in our hands we wring” and then jumps abruptly from the bird that “flutters with her wing” to Hero wishing “this night were never done.”⁴³ This line, like Spenser’s “but yet the end is not,” simultaneously points in two directions that resist narrative closure: Hero may wish that the night could be never-ending—or that it had never happened.

The confusion that results from these abrupt reversals is, in large part, a product of the confusion that Hero herself inspires: does she desire Leander? Does she wish to have sex with him? To marry him? How does she interpret her vow to Venus? What would constitute a breaking of that vow? Leander’s desire and intent are largely static: from the moment he is “enamourèd,” he pleads with Hero to renounce her virginity, exchanging it for marriage and “the sweet society of men.”⁴⁴ Hero, on the contrary, is nearly impossible to pin down. This is literally the case in the final seduction: “His hands he cast upon her like a snare; / She, overcome with shame and sallow fear, / Like chaste Diana when Actaeon spied her, / Being suddenly betrayed, dived down to hide her” (2.259–62). Instead of completing the trajectory of the Diana and Actaeon myth by turning against Leander, Hero hides under the covers. “With both her hands she made the bed a tent, / And in her own mind thought herself secure, / O’ercast with dim and darksome coverture” (2.264–66). This is one of many times that the expectations created by the poem are not fulfilled, but in this particular instance Marlowe’s word choice and imagery also provide a key for understanding the frustration that Hero inspires in critics and readers.

Hero’s protective covering is both material and mental: she hides under bedclothes and “in her own mind thought herself secure.” Marlowe thus alerts his readers to the possibility that “coverture” may hold a variety of meanings for Hero. It is not simply that which literally covers (a quilt, clothing, a veil) but also that which figuratively protects or deceives (concealment, dissimulation).⁴⁵ Yet the covering seems to deceive Hero rather than any external observer: she only thinks herself secure under “dim and darksome coverture,” perhaps because the term used to describe her refuge paradoxically conjures the social status that she wishes to avoid. Coverture, in its broadest legal definition, “is when a man & a woman ar maried together.”⁴⁶ In religious discourse, Protestant writers and theologians went further in identifying how marriage could cover an individual’s sins. John Harmar’s translation of the Sermons of M. John Calvine, upon the X Commandementes of the Lawe, describes how “the coverture of marriage sanctifieth that which is polluted and unhallowed, it serveth to purge and make cleane that which in it selfe is filthie and uncleane.”⁴⁷ Marriage, in other words, provides a means by which men and women can practice chastity even though humans are by nature corrupt and lustful: “albeit men bee incontinent: yet are they not accused before God, nor brought before his throne of judgement, if so bee they keepe them selves within the boundes of marriage.”⁴⁸ The goddess Ceremony makes a similar argument regarding marriage and sexuality when she appears to Leander in Chapman’s poem, and Marlowe’s use of “coverture” suggests that the Protestant marriage system, which dominates Chapman’s postcoital depiction of the lovers, also serves as an essential background for their initial encounters in Marlowe’s poem.

But Hero’s covering is individual, and it is meant to protect her from Leander rather than with him. While marriage as coverture provided spiritual protection for both partners, it also carried a more specific legal implication for women: in early modern legal discourse, a woman under coverture was subject to her husband’s authority—but she was also able, in certain instances, to evade the authority of the state under the cover of her marriage. Coverture in this final, unsettling scene of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander thus raises questions that extend beyond the bedclothes that Hero pulls over her head or the consummation that she seeks to avoid. When she attempts to hide herself, Marlowe evokes the very legal and social system that Leander has urged her to enter—a system that held within itself the elements of its own subversion. The troubling ending of Marlowe’s poem, which both Chapman and later editors have felt the need to complete or correct, is largely a product of the ambivalent sexuality of his lovers, who seem not to know what they want or how to achieve that unknown desire. But it is also a product of the religious and political climate of late sixteenth-century England, where a woman who vowed virginity and invoked coverture as a protective shield would have called to mind the Catholic women whose marriages created a space for devotional practices that were the province of nuns before the Reformation.

As penalties for male recusancy increased over the course of Elizabeth’s reign, women became ever more important to the survival of English Catholicism. Married women in particular were able to avoid the full force of the statutes because of their status under coverture. Legally, these women could not control their own property and were subject to their husbands.⁴⁹ Practically, this meant that it was almost impossible for the state to punish them: monetary fines would necessarily be imposed on their husbands, in effect punishing men for their wives’ crimes. Parliament was reluctant to take this course, or to imprison married female recusants—thereby separating them from their families—for long periods. Some families were willing to exploit the legal situation: husbands attended English services, giving rise to the term “church papist,” while wives maintained the Catholic faith at home.⁵⁰ In the wake of the Gunpowder Plot, “An Act for the better discovering and repressing of Popish Recusants” acknowledged that Catholics might feign conformity to the English church: “divers persons Popishly affected, doe neverthelesse, the better to cover and hide their false hearts, & with the more safety to attend the opportunitie to execute their mischievous desseignes, repaire sometimes to Church to escape the penaltie of the Lawes in that behalfe provided” (emphasis added).⁵¹ But even this act of 1606, which instituted the Oath of Allegiance and attempted to control church papistry, avoided punishing married women or their husbands for actions associated with the wife’s recusancy. It provided that “no person shall be charged or chargeable with any penalty or forfeiture by force of this Act, which shall happen for his wives offence, in not receiving the said Sacrament, during her marriage, nor that any woman shall be charged or chargeable with any penaltie or forfeiture by force of this Act, for any such offence of not receiving, which shall happen during her marriage.”⁵² Marital coverture denied women autonomy within the patriarchal household, but it could also serve as a protective shield from the power of the state for those women who made the politically subversive choice to be Catholic in England after the Reformation.

By the late sixteenth century, women had become visible and vocal members of the recusant community.⁵³ In a letter of 1576, Henry Hastings, the earl of Huntingdon and lord president of the Council of the North, simultaneously acknowledged the persistence of female Catholicism while dismissing its importance: “for those that are in thease matters most peavyse, so farr as I yet see, are in thys towne wemen, and in the cuntrye verrye meane men of Callynge.”⁵⁴ As Huntingdon saw it, the threat of political rebellion was contained by the gender and class of those who were most “peevish” in their adherence to Catholicism. But as little as ten years later, Catholic women had become a force in local religious politics. In 1586, Margaret Clitherow, a York butcher’s wife, was accused of sheltering priests and put to death when she refused to go to trial.⁵⁵ John Mush, Clitherow’s priest, wrote a manuscript description of her life and death and, within a year, accounts of her martyrdom began to appear in continental books detailing the persecution of English Catholics.⁵⁶ Mush’s “A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs. Margaret Clitherow” was not simply a hagiography; it was also, as Anne Dillon points out in her definitive study of martyrdom after the Reformation, a “conduct book for recusants” since “recusancy was … perceived as itself an act of martyrdom.”⁵⁷ The narrative of Clitherow’s recusancy demonstrates one of the ways that sixteenth-century Catholic Englishwomen were represented: as individuals willing to take advantage of coverture and reconfigure its effective meanings and ideological associations. In what follows, I will demonstrate how Mush’s representation of Clitherow can illuminate the sociopolitical issues that precipitate the startling shift in tone between Marlowe’s ambiguous ending of Hero and Leander, written before his death in 1593, and Chapman’s subsequent affirmation of state-sanctioned matrimony, printed with one of the two 1598 editions of Marlowe’s poem.

Mush’s Clitherow calls into question one of the ideological underpinnings of Protestant England: she refuses to acknowledge the patriarchal power of the state and yet professes her loyalty to her husband, John Clitherow, whose symbolic position as “her head” she affirms before her death.⁵⁸ Margaret Clitherow was a product of post-Reformation English Catholicism: she converted only after her marriage and, despite her change of faith, proclaimed herself “a true and a chaste wife to my husband, both in thought and deed” (407). In many respects, the Clitherows’ marriage conforms to a companionate model of married chastity and thus fits comfortably into the ideological landscape of Elizabethan England. But this marriage creates the possibility of political subversion rather than serving as an ideal microcosm of the state. Clitherow’s faith and her willingness to hide elements of her religious practice from her husband form the basis for her remarkable choice to disavow the government’s ability to put her to trial. Mush establishes the foundation for her resistance early in his text, when Clitherow queries her priest regarding the limits of temporal authority. “‘May I not,’ said she, ‘receive priests and serve God as I have done, notwithstanding these new laws, without my husband’s consent?’” (381). Clitherow blurs the boundary between the power of government (“these new laws”) and the power of the domestic patriarch (her “husband’s consent”) and thus reveals how the relationship between Catholic wife and Protestant husband could be read as a metaphor for every recusant’s relationship to England. While she accepts her husband’s authority in worldly matters, taking care “in selling and buying her wares … to have the worth of them, as both her neighbours uttered the like, as also to satisfy her duty to her husband, which committed all to her trust and discretion,” her interpretation of spiritual affairs encompasses far more than the Elizabethan government would allow, including the Catholic education of her children (399).⁵⁹ The individual circumstances of Clitherow’s marriage demonstrate how ideological and legal frameworks meant to restrict women to the household and to certain prescribed roles could have very different practical results.

Margaret Clitherow’s husband shields her from the full force of the laws against recusancy, and she correctly fears that his absence from their home will lead to her arrest. When he appears before the Council to explain their son’s trip to the continent, which Margaret arranged “without the knowledge of her husband,” “they deceitfully practised indeed, and sent forthwith the sheriffs of York, with divers other heretics, to search her house” (409, 410).⁶⁰ Both Clitherows are arrested when Catholic devotional materials and evidence of a priest are discovered in the search, but John is released when Margaret explains that she “‘could never yet get my husband in that good case that he were worthy to know or come in place where they were to serve God’”; he was not, in other words, “privy to her doings in keeping priests” (414). At the same time that Clitherow publicly reveals that she has kept her husband in the dark regarding her religious activities, she also “‘refuse[s] to be tried by the country,’” thus simultaneously diminishing her husband’s authority in spiritual matters and dismissing the state’s authority altogether (414).⁶¹ Mush describes a series of encounters between Clitherow and government representatives, and, in every case, she openly questions the applicability of English law. When asked “‘Will you put yourself to the country, yea or no?’” she explains that she sees “‘no cause why I should do so in this matter: I refer my cause only to God and your own consciences. Do what you think good’” (416). According to Mush, her defiance prompts even a “Puritan preacher” to argue against “‘the Queen’s law’” in favor of “‘God’s law’” (416). As Christine Peters has argued of this moment, “concerns about the temporal authority trampling upon religious conscience were not limited to Catholics. The underlying arguments, because they concerned the higher obedience owed to God, were also shared by spokesmen for godly Protestants.”⁶² Clitherow undermines the ideological substructure of early modern England, which treated the monarch as a representative of God’s divine authority, but in so doing she reveals the many fissures occasioned by the intersections of religion and politics, even as she positions herself outside the conceptual boundaries of English society—much as Hero will in Chapman’s continuation of Marlowe’s poem.

Many of the responses to Clitherow’s refusal to go to trial reflect on her choice to stand apart from the legal system of early modern England, including those of her fellow Catholics. In conflating religious dissent with domestic upheaval and sexual deviance, these responses reveal the imaginative relationship between political resistance and social or cultural norms. Members of Clitherow’s community repeatedly urged her to change her mind by invoking her duty to her family: “others also came to her at divers times, and said she died desperately, and had no care on her husband and children, but would spoil them, and make all people to exclaim against her” (426). The urgency of these interventions reveal the divisions among York’s Catholics, who were by no means a unified or homogeneous group. As Peter Lake and Michael Questier have demonstrated, these divisions were part of a complex “struggle between different local claimants to or versions of what English Catholicism should be like—a struggle conducted in terms of a range of different responses to, on the one hand, the regime’s demands for conformity and, on the other, to the no less totalizing claims of certain priests and lay people for a completely separatist recusancy.”⁶³ Clitherow’s response—that she loved her husband and had done her duty in raising her children to fear God—did little to convince her interlocutors that she was the “true and … chaste wife” she claimed to be (407).⁶⁴ According to their logic, if she did not accept the patriarchal authority of the state, attend church services, or acknowledge her domestic responsibilities, she must also disregard the sexual mores of English society: “when they saw that they could not persuade her, nor make her yield in anything, they brought ridiculous slanders against her, and told her how the boy had confessed that she had sinned with priests” (427).⁶⁵ Clitherow’s reputation for chastity depends upon her conformity with the religiopolitical order that she rejects, and her narrative demonstrates how the political resistance of recusant Catholic women was frequently read as evidence for sexual promiscuity, even by fellow Catholics.⁶⁶ Because they embraced separatism over church attendance and conformity with the state, recusant women were imagined to be outside the ideological space occupied by the chaste and obedient wife. Thus literary representations of women situated at the margins of society—whether through devotional vows that suggested Catholic monasticism, sexual choices that undermined marital chastity, or, in Hero’s case, both—can offer indirect reflections on female recusancy.

Recusant women posed a conceptual difficulty, not just for poets and playwrights of the late sixteenth century but even for their own biographers. Mush, as we have seen, was at pains to depict Clitherow’s adherence to domestic hierarchies, despite the fact that she frequently took part in religious activities without her husband’s knowledge or consent. As a result, Mush’s Life does more than “reveal to us the sort of traumatic and tension-filled gender and family politics in and through which religious change was often effected during this period”;⁶⁷ it also reveals that Clitherow and her fellow recusants did not fit easily into the cultural constructions of either post-Reformation England or post-Tridentine Catholicism: they were neither the contemplative nuns of Catholic ideology, enclosed within the ecclesiastical hierarchy and subject to new restrictions imposed by the Council of Trent, nor the obedient and conformist wives of Protestant marriage manuals.⁶⁸ Mush’s representation of female recusancy illuminates the limitations of even his own hagiographical understanding of Clitherow’s martyrdom, as his narrative resists its narrator’s attempt to control interpretation, raising questions for the reader about Clitherow’s actions and intentions (how did she send her son to the continent without her husband’s knowledge? why does she refuse to go to trial? does she deliberately create the circumstances of her own death?).⁶⁹ Historians have studied the religious and political effects of women such as Clitherow, but the cultural implications of their paradoxical status in Protestant England have not yet drawn the attention of critics focused on canonical English literature, perhaps because married recusant women’s unsettling disruptions of social categories seem to have forestalled contemporary literary representations of them. But while Margaret Clitherow’s life and martyrdom were not performed on the London stage or printed in elegiac verse, plays and poems of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries do register both the indeterminacy and the impact of recusant women.

While textual representations of women such as Margaret Clitherow were largely confined to martyrologies, these narratives—shaped not only by religious and political considerations but also by literary concerns—can facilitate new readings of perplexing female characters whose ethics and actions seem at odds even with the poems and plays in which they feature. Hero, for example, is not simply a divisive figure for literary critics; she is also divided and divisive within Hero and Leander, and her position leads Chapman to create a remarkably conservative ending to Marlowe’s potentially subversive poem. Hero never quite fits into her society; she stands apart, and Marlowe makes her separation visible through a vow of virginity that signifies her religious devotion and individual autonomy. Though the personal and political dimensions of religious choice figure prominently in Hero and Leander, these issues have frequently been overshadowed by the erotic force of Marlowe’s verse in the first sestiads and by the abrupt shift in the sexual and lyric sensibility of Chapman’s continuation.⁷⁰ But Hero’s initial desire to be a virgin and her ultimate (and ambiguous) renunciation of that vow are not simply aspects of her sexuality; these choices position her as a religious authority and an autonomous woman who lives in Sestos but does not seem entirely of Sestos.

In social terms, virginity marks Hero much as Catholicism marked recusant women: she is at once incorporated into the practice of daily life in her community and yet she remains imaginatively distinct from the world that surrounds her. This division between Hero and her society intensifies throughout the course of the poem: Marlowe imagines a Hero who lives apart but conforms to social expectations while Chapman allegorizes her silent postcoital rejection of the social order. At the same time, Chapman implicates Hero more completely in the ceremonial forms and institutional structures that the lovers have avoided, turning Marlowe’s vacillating and sexually conflicted heroine into a figure of religious hypocrisy and deceit. The two halves of the poem enact the paradoxical status of recusant women in English society, as Marlowe’s rumination on female exceptionalism and the pressure to conform to a patriarchal sexual order turns sinister under Chapman’s pen, which depicts Hero’s religious devotion as a misguided subversion of the state-supported ideology of marriage. Hero and Leander is thus a poetic instantiation of the implicit conflict between Mush and Huntingdon regarding the interpretation and importance of recusant women.

When Marlowe introduces Hero, he establishes the magnetic force of her presence in Sestos while at the same time demonstrating that her importance is almost wholly dependent upon her position as an independent and potentially disruptive woman—a position that nonconformist Catholic Englishwomen occupied in the wake of Clitherow’s execution, as Parliament became increasingly concerned with the question of how to legislate against married recusant women. The enigmatic and untouchable Hero is an object of desire for the gods (Apollo courts her and Cupid rests in her bosom in the early lines of the poem), and her presence in mortal company highlights her singularity. The artificial flowers adorning her veil cause those around her to “praise the sweet smell as she passed, / When ’twas the odour which her breath forth cast” (1.21–2). Hero’s countrymen do not know how to interpret her clothing or her physical presence, and she remains separate from them even in the midst of communal celebrations. At the feast of Adonis, Hero ranks “far above” her peers in beauty, and all eyes are upon her (1.103). Yet even those who “near her stood” do so only to observe: “so ran the people forth to gaze upon her, / And all that viewed her were enamoured on her” (1.112, 117–18). Hero travels “thorough Sestos, from her tower / To Venus’ temple” and never fully integrates into the community she passes in transit, perhaps because the very attributes which draw men’s eyes to Hero—her physical appearance and her clothing—also point to her position as a devotee of the goddess of love.

In these early descriptions, Marlowe establishes how Hero’s devotional stance shapes her personal and public relationships: despite the fact that she is well respected and admired, she is very much alone until Leander sees her performing a sacrifice in the temple. While watching this devout act, Leander is “enamourèd”; like the people of Sestos, he falls in love with Hero when her status as a nun is clear (1.162). But Leander does more than gaze: “he touched her hand,” and this physical interaction inspires him “to display / Love’s holy fire, with words, with sighs and tears” (1.183, 192–93). Hero’s virginity, as one element of her devotional affect, is part of what inspires Leander’s desire, and yet he immediately asks her to reject the very things that attracted him to her. “This sacrifice,” he argues, “Doth testify that you exceed her far, / To whom you offer, and whose nun you are. / Why should you worship her?” (1.209–13). According to Leander, Hero’s religious practice elevates her above the goddess she worships, but it also makes her a bad votaress: “thou in vowing chastity hast sworn / To rob her name and honour, and thereby / Commit’st a sin far worse than perjury” (1.304–6). By this contradictory logic, Hero must relinquish a significant aspect of her religious identity in order to properly express her faith.

When Leander attempts to convince Hero to abandon her vows, he posits an alternative no more in line with Venus’s sexuality than Hero’s virginity. Instead of suggesting the promiscuity of the gods, Leander offers marriage: “virginity, albeit some highly prize it, / Compared with marriage, had you tried them both, / Differs as much as wine and water doth” (1.262–64). Of course, Leander is willing to say almost anything to forward his seduction, but he remains consistent in opposing “fruitless cold virginity” and “single life” with ceremonialized heterosexual partnership (1.317, 321): he calls upon “never-singling Hymen,” praises celebratory “banquets,” and finally asks Hero to perform “Venus’ sweet rites” without clarifying what he imagines those rites to include (1.258, 301, 320). Leander’s ideal of sexuality, which associates the loss of virginity with social rituals, could easily fit within a Protestant ideal of married chastity.⁷¹ Even his confusion over whether “some amorous rites or other were neglected” during the lovers’ first sexual encounter can be read within an ideological framework that privileges marriage, though it also alludes to the fact that Hero is eager to protect the last remaining signs associated with her virginity (2.64). Yet she is no longer chaste. In her rosestrewn room, Hero “seeming lavish, saved her maidenhead,” but her renewed vows of “spotless chastity” were earlier offered “all in vain” (2.76, 1.368).

From her first interaction with Leander, Hero’s virginity has seemed both already lost and not yet relinquished. The ambiguity that dominates the poem’s conclusion can thus be traced to the mind and body of Venus’s nun: while critics have been eager to pinpoint when, exactly, the lovers fully consummate their relationship, the precise moment at which Hero offers or loses her bodily virginity remains mysterious. Her internal renunciation of chastity, on the contrary, leads to immediate linguistic, physical, and emotional signs. Marlowe identifies her as “Chaste Hero” just as she silently acknowledges Leander’s appeal: “‘Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him,’ / And as she spake those words, came somewhat near him” (1.179). Hero quite literally makes the first move, and Leander responds by touching her hand. “These lovers parlèd by the touch of hands; / True love is mute, and oft amazèd stands. / Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled, / The air with sparks of living fire was spangled” (1.185–88). This emotional entanglement has more immediate and tangible effects than the lovers’ explicitly sexual interactions: before the encounter, Hero is chaste; after, she has “yielded” and vainly attempts to recover her formerly “spotless chastity” (1.330, 1.368). In early modern discourse, as we have seen, virginity and chastity—two terms that Marlowe uses almost interchangeably—had meanings that transcended marital status and the physical condition of the hymen. This is certainly true for Hero, and Marlowe queries the meanings of virginity in both individual and social contexts through his portrayal of her nearly instantaneous loss of conceptual chastity and her far more gradual physical transformation.

The social construction of Hero’s virginity as a religious choice that simultaneously creates and justifies her singular autonomy survives even after she has entertained Leander’s overtures. For the reader, if not the people of Sestos, chastity and virginity thus seem largely meaningless by the end of Marlowe’s poem. Chastity is only identifiable from within—Hero knows when she is no longer chaste and futilely renews her vows to Venus in hopes of regaining her chastity—and yet is defined and interpreted by a community of observers. To be considered chaste, then, Hero may privately break her vow of perpetual virginity, but she must, as Susan Frye has written of Elizabeth, remain publicly “remote, self-sufficient, and desirable.”⁷² Within ancient Sestos, where she performs her devotional identity, Hero’s chastity is a sign of her social positioning rather than her bodily purity. She is, in this sense, somewhat like Elizabeth, and Patrick Cheney has argued that, through Hero, Marlowe assails “the sanctity of the Queen’s palisade of chastity” in his critique of “Spenser’s Elizabethan cult.”⁷³ Cheney reads Marlowe reading Spenser, and, as a result, he offers a nearly allegorical interpretation of the first sestiads of Hero and Leander that does not account for the fact that the meanings of virginity and chastity remain contested through the end of Marlowe’s poem.⁷⁴ While Cheney recognizes the cultural power of chastity in the late sixteenth century, his focus on “the merits of Spenser and his writing of England, especially with respect to England’s queen and her erotic cult of chastity” obscures other political contexts in which the ideological conflicts associated with chastity were relevant.⁷⁵ Hero, like the many virgins of The Faerie Queene, reveals that chastity could be a flexible tool for literary representation—one that might glance at Elizabeth’s conceptual dominance while also invoking the social and religious positioning of women other than the Virgin Queen. Chapman’s poem goes further, not by restoring “a Spenserian vision of love and marriage within the epic context of English nationhood”—for, as we have seen, this vision was always deferred in The Faerie Queene itself—but by critiquing Hero’s religious position and explicitly positioning the lovers outside a Protestant ideological framework.⁷⁶

Chapman allegorizes doctrinal conflict in his continuation of Hero and Leander, thereby making the subtext of Marlowe’s poem explicit: while Marlowe encoded various interpretations of chastity in Leander’s clumsy seduction rhetoric, Chapman ventriloquizes a Protestant position through the goddess Ceremony, who advocates state-sanctioned matrimony. Ceremony interrupts Leander’s postcoital reverie when she arrives in his chamber leading Religion, with “Devotion, Order, State, and Reverence” as her shadows (3.120). She “sharply did reprove / Leanders bluntness in his violent love; / Told him how poor was substance without rites” (3.145–47). The “amorous rites” Leander worried over in Hero’s bedroom were in fact neglected, and Ceremony envisions a society overrun with “rank corn” and “meats unseasoned” should such “civil forms” be abandoned (3.149–51). Chapman’s poem celebrates marriage as a communal activity rather than a private handfast ceremony and positions individual relationships within a network of mutual responsibility.⁷⁷ Leander easily decides to marry after his visit from Ceremony, but Hero remains torn between her religious duties and her love for Leander. She decides that she “was singular too much before: / But she would please the world with fair pretext” and “still proceed in works divine” while continuing a sexual relationship with Leander (4.193–94, 204). Hero, in other words, chooses hypocrisy and dissembling: she hides her broken vow from the people of Sestos and continues to perform the religious duties associated with her position as Venus’s nun. But her devotion is no longer primarily directed toward Venus; instead, “her religion should be policy, / To follow love with zeal her piety; / Her chamber her cathedral church should be, / And her Leander her chief deity” (4.178–81). Love makes Hero into the idolatrous nun that Leander accused her of being in Marlowe’s poem, but he has taken the place of virginity as her “idol,” and religion has become her coverture (1.269).⁷⁸ Protestants argued that the pretext of religious devotion served a similar function for recusant women such as Clitherow, who faced the accusation that “it is not for religion that thou harbourest priests, but for harlotry” (Mush 414). Under the cover of religion, Hero hides a relationship that threatens the ideological system that Ceremony urges Leander to uphold. Chapman’s allegory thus literalizes the religious and political issues to which Marlowe alluded in his more flexible and ambiguous depiction of Hero.

Chapman’s Hero is more fully incorporated into her society, and her priest-like office provides her with the authority to openly defy Venus and undermine the religious and social system of which she is a part. She officiates at a marriage ceremony for “her consort vowed / In her maid’s state”—Hero’s fellow votaress, Mya—that elides distinctions between vowed virginity and married sexuality (5.35). The wedding of Alcmane and Mya allows Hero to “covertly … celebrate / With secret joy her own estate” (5.9–10). She continues to perform the role of Venus’s nun but uses that position to support an understanding of virginity that positions it along a continuum that eventually results in marriage, just as Spenser did in The Faerie Queene. Here, too, the transition from virgin to wife prompts formal disruptions: in the inconclusive ending of Marlowe’s poem, in the editorial desire to provide clarity to the sexual encounter, and in Chapman’s continuation of a poem that was arguably “designed to be a fragment.”⁷⁹ And Hero resists a marital telos: she hides her relationship, dooming herself in either a Protestant or a Catholic formulation of marriage, chastity, and sexuality. Despite the fact that Hero’s religious devotion seems to have been misdirected—Chapman imagines a Venus who intends to prove that one of her servants can be chaste, regardless of her own sexuality—her virgin vows are still broken without a marriage vow to replace them. Hero, the nun who can travel freely between her tower and the town, becomes a dangerous figure of sexual freedom. She cloaks herself in “religious weeds” and hopes that “when her fault should chance t’abide the light” the people of Sestos will “cover or extenuate it” (4.13, 5.50–51). These transgressions against religion and the state are only superficially solved through the lovers’ tragic fate, which Chapman treats as the inevitable coda to their disruption of the social order.

A comparison of the two different versions of Hero and Leander printed in 1598 reveals the very ideological tensions that Chapman attempted to resolve. Just as Chapman’s Ceremony hopes to impose form and order on Hero and Leander’s relationship, so too does the edition that includes Chapman’s continuation impose form and order on Marlowe’s fragment. Instead of a continuous narrative poem, as it is in Edward Blount’s edition, the Hero and Leander “begun by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman” appears in sestiads headed by brief arguments.⁸⁰ This formal change mimics the cantos of The Faerie Queene, and suggests that Chapman would like to see narrative closure not only for Marlowe’s no-longer-virgin nun but also for the many characters in Spenser’s poem whose marriages are promised but never completed. Both Marlowe and Chapman built upon the conflicted representation of chastity and marriage in The Faerie Queene, but Chapman worked to contain the troubling implications of Marlowe’s incomplete narrative, in which sexuality does not foreclose female autonomy. Instead of pointing toward the virginity of queen or convent, Marlowe’s Hero suggests a devotional practice and social position akin to the recusant women who troubled Protestant notions of chaste married femininity in Elizabethan England. The representational multiplicity of her vow of virginity results in a fragmentary poem that resists both the marital and tragic closure that Chapman’s continuation demands.

“As Easy Broke as They Make Forms”: Mirrors of Virginity

Measure for Measure is not a narrative poem, nor is it unfinished, and yet the formal effects of female virginity—its disruptions and fragmentations, visible in language and narrative—mark this 1604 play as a culmination of the late Elizabethan religious and political discourses I have been tracing in this chapter. Unlike Marlowe and Chapman, Shakespeare explicitly designated his would-be nun a Catholic and associated her with an order that would have been familiar to contemporary audiences.⁸¹ This theatrical representation of potential female monasticism had its analogue in the movement of Catholic women from England to the continent—a migration that increased in the early decades of the seventeenth century, after the first post-Reformation English convent was founded in Brussels in 1598.⁸² Thus, though it was staged only six years after the print publication of Hero and Leander, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure depicts an even more fraught religious and political landscape than that of ancient Sestos: sexuality is corrupted by the bawds and openly condemned by the Viennese state in the person of Angelo, while marital relations lead to personal disappointment, civic unrest, and the threat of death. Religion provides temporary relief for women such as Isabella and Mariana, who attempt to choose lives of quiet devotion away from city life, but their faith is overshadowed by the machinations of the Duke disguised as a friar, whose robes and ultimate unveiling implicate religious life in the problems of the state. Shakespeare expands upon the devotional and social questions that Marlowe posed in Hero and Leander and Chapman attempted to resolve in his continuation of the poem, first by transporting Isabella into an explicitly political realm and then by testing the limits of her faith in response to governmental pressure rather than reciprocal sexual attraction.⁸³ Isabella’s speeches—and her famous final silence—invoke contemporary choices made by women joining female communities on the continent, but rather than offering a direct representation of these new English nuns, Shakespeare creates a character who provokes chiastic forms and linguistic paradoxes that register the indeterminate signification of female virginity. Isabella thus allows Shakespeare to consider the issues associated with Catholic women and their devotional practices more broadly: as the problem at the center of Measure for Measure, she provides a theatrical means of confronting the increasingly complicated position of recusant women in relationship to both the English state and the Catholic religious hierarchy.

Measure for Measure, a play known for its political and theological stakes, was first performed less than two years after James took the throne, and Debora Shuger has called it “a sustained meditation on its own political moment—the political moment of James’s accession, but also, and more significantly, of the Reformation’s aftermath.”⁸⁴ In tracing the effects of the Reformation, scholars such as Julia Reinhard Lupton and Sarah Beckwith have offered compelling readings of the play’s engagement with Catholicism, and others such as Alison Findlay, Natasha Korda, and Jessica Slights and Michael Morgan Holmes have focused on Isabella’s association with the convent in general and the order of St. Clare in particular.⁸⁵ I build on these readings of Measure for Measure’s post-Reformation context and its exploration of female monasticism in order to show how Shakespeare’s representation of vowed virginity in crisis offers a distinctively literary response to the religious and political resistance of Catholic Englishwomen. Since Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure at the height of parliamentary debates concerning female Catholicism and in the wake of the first English monastic foundations on the continent, it is hardly surprising that his Catholic heroine seems torn between the life of a nun and the death of a martyr.⁸⁶ Isabella is a novice who hopes to enter a convent of Poor Clares, a religious order known for its asceticism. In pamphlet literature on monasticism, Protestant writers referred derisively to “the poore bare-footed Clares” and claimed that Jesuits would have nothing to do with these nuns because “they are not rich, and therefore not a fit bit for their palate.”⁸⁷ But such austerity is not enough for Isabella: she claims that she desires “a more strict restraint / Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare.”⁸⁸ Her response to Angelo’s demand that she relinquish her virginity in exchange for her brother’s life emphasizes her willingness to suffer and die rather than forsake her moral and spiritual system: “th’ impression of keen whips I’ld wear as rubies,” she says, “And strip myself to death, as to a bed / That longing have been sick for, ere I’ld yield / My body up to shame” (2.4.101–4). She thus resembles both the women of the English recusant community like Margaret Clitherow, who “never feared nor once shrunk at any worldly affliction or pain sustained for the Catholic faith and her conscience,” and their daughters, who left England in order to fully practice their faith in continental cloisters (Mush 397).⁸⁹

Isabella’s wish for “a more strict restraint” produces linguistic effects that reverberate throughout the play; when she expresses desire—for restraint, withdrawal, virginity, martyrdom—her interlocutors frequently turn to chiastic formulations. Immediately after Isabella questions the convent’s rule, for example, Francisca responds to Lucio’s arrival by articulating the order’s restrictions: “When you have vow’d, you must not speak with men / But in the presence of the prioress: / Then if you speak, you must not show your face, / Or if you show your face, you must not speak” (1.4.10–13). These final two lines incite a recursive movement on the part of the reader, a doubling back that contains Isabella’s physical body within her choice to speak or be silent. In traversing not speaking/speaking/not speaking, they also point further back, to Claudio’s description of his sister’s facility “with reason and discourse” and especially her “prone and speechless dialect” (1.2.184, 182). The paradox of Claudio’s description—for how can dialect be speechless?—suggests that Isabella, like Elizabeth before her, creates representational difficulties for those who would portray her. Shakespeare draws attention to this parallel not only in naming his nun Isabella (a variant of Elizabeth), but in his structural echoes of the moment when Spenser suggests that Elizabeth’s chastity may reveal the inadequacy of art: “If pourtrayd it might be by any liuing art. / But liuing art may not least part expresse” (The Faerie Queene 3.proem.1.9–2.1). Here, the chiastic turn crosses stanzas, heightening the reader’s experience of an enforced return and reevaluation of Elizabeth’s chastity and its availability for representation. Isabella poses a similar problem for characters in Measure for Measure and for readers of the play, and provokes responses that take the shape of chiasmus or antimetabole, forms in which a second phrase or clause is the mirror or near mirror image of the first.⁹⁰ Recent work on chiasmus in early modern poetry reveals its relationship to religious change,⁹¹ and I argue that Shakespeare’s use of chiastic structures contributes to this broader discourse while clarifying the implications of the narrative ruptures provoked by the female virgins of The Faerie Queene and Hero and Leander.

The interplay of Isabella’s bodily integrity, verbal facility, and social circulation creates an interpretive crux for other characters in the play.⁹² Since virginity cannot be “with character too gross” writ on her body, as Juliet’s pregnancy is on hers, it at once holds no meaning and too many meanings (1.2.154). When Lucio greets her at the convent door, he names her as a virgin before adding a conditional: “Hail, virgin, if you be” (1.4.16). Though he withdraws his “if”—explaining that “those cheek-roses / Proclaim you are no less”—the physical sign of Isabella’s body is nonetheless not a reliable marker of either her sexual status or her religious position (1.4.16–17). Instead, Isabella depends upon speech and, as many critics have noted, prompts a series of misunderstandings when she refuses to acknowledge that her words may have multiple meanings. She suggests that she will bribe Angelo (with “true prayers”) (2.2.151), agrees to sin with Angelo (by begging Claudio’s life), and tells Claudio that he may live (condemning him to die when he accepts the conditions under which he could be saved). Throughout the play, then, Isabella’s language, like her body, prompts a recursive interpretive process: in order to understand what she means, we must continually reevaluate what she has said in light of what she is saying.⁹³ At its most condensed, this appears as a fractured chiasmus: “There is a vice that most I do abhor, / And most desire should meet the blow of justice; / For which I would not plead, but that I must, / For which I must not plead, but that I am / At war ’twixt will and will not” (2.2.29–33). This is not a perfect example, because Isabella is not a perfect rhetorician. The slightly askew formal patterns of her language suggest reason under duress. Here, she creates a parallelism that flirts with chiasmus and anaphora: the repetition of “for which I” at the beginning of two lines and two seemingly parallel clauses (“would not plead”; “must not plead”) creates the impression of order, but the chiastic move of ending one line with “I must” only to have it reappear as “I must not” in the first clause of the next line suggests a rupture in parallel logic. The enjambment at the end of this second “for which I” line further disrupts the parallelism: by ending the line but not the sentence on “I am,” Shakespeare creates the momentary impression that Isabella herself is the vice for which she would not and must not plead. But the final line reveals that Isabella describes not her ontology but rather her current mental state, “at war ’twixt will and will not,” which points us back to what she “abhors” (will not) and “desires” (will) in the first two lines.⁹⁴ It is no surprise that Angelo’s response is a curt “well, the matter?” given that Isabella circles around the substance of her petition in a rhetorical maneuver that we might, with Claudio, identify as a kind of “speechless dialect.”

This is not to suggest that Isabella is unskilled. Rather, her flexible use of rhetorical forms demonstrates the insufficiency of language to represent the conflicts and compromises of her position.⁹⁵ When she turns her attention to her interlocutor, her strategy shifts, and chiasmus enables a swift dismantling of Angelo’s theory of a justice system based on the equivalence of crime (act) and punishment (law). “If he had been as you, and you as he,” Isabella argues, “You would have slipped like him, but he, like you, / Would not have been so stern” (2.2.64–66). The conditional Isabella proposes, in which Claudio (he) is Angelo (you) and Angelo (you) is Claudio (he), forces Angelo to consider another form of equivalence. By asking him to imagine himself as Claudio, Isabella unsettles Angelo’s precise sense not only of self but of justice. The second chiastic formulation in these lines—you would slip if you were like him, but if he were like you he would not be stern—suggests that equivalence is not a simple one-to-one relationship; instead, it requires evaluation and modification. Isabella’s language reveals an adaptable sense of self and world produced in part by her desire for a strict restraint; while what she means (in speaking and in signifying) is not always clear to her interlocutors, her rhetorical patterns establish structures of containment that she would translate from the walls of the cloister to the government of Vienna.

And Isabella’s arguments do effect change in Angelo, though not the change she desires. After encountering her, he finds himself trapped in chiastic formulations but unable to grapple with his fractured sense of self. “When I would pray and think,” he complains, “I think and pray / To several subjects” (2.4.1–2). Again, enjambment points us to a self divided: like Isabella, whose “I am” is torn between will and will not, what at first appears to be Angelo’s balanced ability to “pray and think” / “think and pray” is in fact torn between “several subjects.” Isabella negotiates her chiastic divide as a balancing act: she contains and represents multitudes. On the contrary, Angelo claims that his chiastic balance is fragmented into multiple subjects outside of himself—but in identifying heaven and Isabella, he reveals that in truth he is divided by “the strong and swelling evil / Of my conception” (2.4.6–7).⁹⁶ Isabella prompts Angelo’s internal fragmentation and, in response, he attempts to pin her down to a single understanding of what it means to be a woman: “Be that you are, / That is a woman; if you be more, you’re none” (2.4.134–35).⁹⁷ The obvious pun of none/nun suggests that to be a perpetual virgin is actually to be many things at once—and nothing at all. As more than a woman—akin, perhaps, to the Virgin Queen—Isabella simultaneously has no value in a system of social circulation predicated on marriage and sexuality and has a very clearly defined religious and social position. We might thus identify a chiasmus hidden within Angelo’s formulation, since to “be that you are” is, for Isabella, to be a nun. Angelo positions “a woman” as both more and less consequential than a vowed virgin: more in the sequential logic, wherein to be chaste and self-sufficient (more than a woman) is actually to be “none”—not a woman or anything at all; less in the chiastic logic, wherein a virgin is more than a sexed body and identifies as a nun. In responding to a woman who means more than he would like, then, Angelo’s language exceeds his control, demonstrating in miniature how early modern literature registers the meaningfulness of Catholic women.

Angelo’s inability to hold his words to a single meaning of womanhood follows directly from a conversation about female frailty on the one hand and creativity on the other. When Angelo suggests that “we are all frail” and that “women are frail too,” Isabella offers a simile that crystallizes the formal effects of Catholic women that I have been tracing in this chapter (2.4.121, 124). They are as frail, she claims, “as the glasses where they view themselves, / Which are as easy broke as they make forms” (2.4.125–26). Women may be easily broken, but they make forms just as easily, in a startling modification of the Aristotelian gendering of form (masculine) and matter (feminine).⁹⁸ Isabella’s mirrors, like Spenser’s mirrors for Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene, are multiple and multiplying, but instead of proliferating virgins, Isabella describes both fragment and increase: the analogous relationship of breaking and making creates an image of a shattered mirror, endlessly producing and reflecting forms. As Slights and Holmes argue, in “yok[ing] women with mirrors through their shared ability to create forms,” Isabella simultaneously points to women’s frailty, sexual fecundity, and “their ability to fashion themselves.”⁹⁹ I would further point out that the play, especially in Angelo’s response, reveals that the forms women make are not only their own or their children’s. The capaciousness of Isabella’s image leads to the chiastic fragmentation of Angelo’s language into the multiple meanings that I analyzed above—it leads to formal effects, in other words, that themselves suggest a broken mirror.

Measure for Measure ends in a flurry of chiasmus, from Isabella’s condemnation of Angelo¹⁰⁰ to the Duke’s coupling of Mariana and Angelo: “her worth worth yours” (5.1.497). The final scene is particularly revealing of the “chiastic exchange in embodied experience” that James Knapp has identified in Measure for Measure, as individuals mirror one another only to demonstrate the necessity of recursive evaluations of the self and others.¹⁰¹ Mariana, who took Isabella’s place in Angelo’s bed and is now “neither maid, widow, nor wife,” looks suspiciously like a nun when she claims Angelo as her husband (5.1.180).¹⁰² The Duke, upon Mariana’s entrance, asks that she “show [her] face, and after speak” but Mariana refuses to reveal herself until Angelo bids her (5.1.168). She thus abides, in part, by the chiastic rules of Isabella’s convent, where “if you speak, you must not show your face, / Or if you show your face, you must not speak” (1.4.12–13). Isabella’s willingness to sacrifice another’s virginity results in two interchangeable and ultimately inscrutable women: at the end of the play, it is not clear whether either of them will be settled as maid, widow, or wife. The question of what Isabella means thus remains open. From Lucio’s “Hail, virgin, if you be” to Angelo’s demand that she “be that you are / That is a woman; if you be more, you’re none,” Isabella’s religious choice leads to questions about her sexual and social position that manifest in formal mirroring and the play’s inconclusive final scene.

Isabella is pulled away from the female community of nuns—and from her own strongly voiced religious system—first by Angelo’s attempted seduction and then by the Duke’s marriage plot. At the play’s end, the audience is left with the image of a Duke disguised as a friar proposing to a silenced woman who wishes to be a nun.¹⁰³ These Catholic figures of chastity are transformed into secular, marriageable characters, closely resembling the situation in England at the Reformation, when some former nuns and priests did choose to marry. James Ellison has argued that this “final tableau” is “unmistakable in its Protestant message.”¹⁰⁴ But this marital solution is just as incomplete as those of The Faerie Queene and Hero and Leander: Isabella never responds to the Duke’s proposal, which he defers to a “fitter time” (5.1.493).¹⁰⁵ Natasha Korda shows that “the textual fissure produced by this silence has been filled by a cacophony of critical voices,” and suggests that there is in fact “ample evidence within both the text and its cultural contexts … to support both Isabella’s acceptance of the Duke’s offer of marriage and her return to the nunnery.”¹⁰⁶ While the fissure that Korda describes is interpretive rather than textual—Isabella’s silence leaves the Duke’s proposal hanging as an open question to be answered by audience and readers—I would argue that there is a textual fissure in the play’s final moments, as well. In the Duke’s final chiastic proposal and his inconclusive concluding couplet, Shakespeare formally registers Isabella’s silence as an embodiment of Francisca’s earlier chiastic formulation of the convent’s rules.¹⁰⁷

For the Duke, chiasmus does not fragment into multiplying mirror images or offer a recursive process of interpretation. Instead, it is a closed circuit that suggests marriage as perfect equivalence: “her worth worth yours,” as he says to Angelo (5.1.495). In the final lines of the play, he poses a similar chiasmus as a marriage proposal: “Dear Isabel, / I have a motion much imports your good, / Whereto if you’ll a willing ear incline, / What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine” (5.1.534–37). The Duke thus attempts to close a circuit that Isabella keeps open by maintaining a protective silence. She refuses to be enclosed within his possessive pronoun, and instead protects her own self possession by refusing to speak, as Francisca suggested early in the play: “if you speak, you must not show your face, / Or if you show your face, you must not speak” (1.4.12–13). Isabella’s chastity is held within her silence, and the Duke registers her lack of response by concluding the play not on the rhyme of “incline” and “mine” but with a second concluding couplet: “So bring us to our palace, where we’ll show / What’s yet behind, that[’s] meet you all should know” (5.1.538–39). When Isabella does not verbally accede to his attempt to impose a marital telos grounded in masculine possession, the Duke slips from an enclosed chiastic formulation to a communal proposal that suggests moving forward in order to recover and remember what has passed. The final two couplets of the play thus refuse narrative closure and instead signal the necessity of recursive reading.

While the Protestant Reformation shifted the religious and political landscape of sixteenth-century England, the literature of the post-Reformation period reveals the fissures within that transformation. Measure for Measure illuminates one such fissure in its representation of Isabella, who embodies multiple aspects of Catholic femininity: her choice of chastity provides her with a tool of political power, a language for resistance, and a religious justification for her final choice of silence. Perhaps, at the end of the play, Isabella will flee to her monastery, as some Catholic women fled proposed marriages in England to enter convents on the continent. Jane Martin, a lay sister in the English convent at Cambrai, for example, might have married “a gentleman of a good estate in England, but shee rather chose to lead an humble life in Religion, than to appeare great in the world, therefore refused the offer made her & prevailed with the gentleman who would have married her, to bestow his wealth upon a Seminary of English in Flanders, which he did at his death oblidging the sayd seminary to provide for her & settle her as she should desire.”¹⁰⁸ Shakespeare does not allow his audience or his readers to settle on a single interpretation of this character because, at his historical moment, it was impossible to settle on a single interpretation of the Catholic woman. Measure for Measure takes a complicated view of female Catholicism, one that is informed by multiple and competing discourses, including not only anti-Catholic propaganda and the Catholic martyr tradition exemplified in Margaret Clitherow but also the writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishwomen who desired lives in the convent that remained connected to a world outside their enclosure. As I have argued, authors such as Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare engaged the political dimensions of female chastity in their representations of vowed virgins, thereby creating characters whose dramatic and poetic disruptions mirrored the social and political disruptions of early modern Catholic Englishwomen. Hero and Leander and Measure for Measure reveal that the conceptual reconfigurations associated with religious reform remained dynamic and competitive even after decades of Protestantism: the Elizabethan ideological system that found its fullest literary expression in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was dominant but never unquestioned, whether in the Catholic poetics of Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune, which depicts a “Virgin in bright majestie” who explicitly does not bear “Elizas name,” or in the doctrinally ambiguous and now canonical literature of Marlowe and Shakespeare.¹⁰⁹ In the chapters that follow, I will trace the literary effects of Catholic women and their self representations through the first half of the seventeenth century, as books and monasteries gradually displaced courtrooms and prison cells as the primary locations for female religious and political dissent.