Shakespeare Catholicism Middle Ages

T H E N E W M I D D L E A G E S
ShakespearE,
Catholicism,
and the Middle Ages
MAIMED RIGHTS
Alfred Thomas
The New Middle Ages
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English & Medieval Studies
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Alfred Thomas
Shakespeare,
Catholicism, and
the Middle Ages
Maimed Rights
Alfred Thomas
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA
The New Middle Ages

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Here comes the king,
The queen, the courtiers,—who is this they follow,
And with such maimèd rites?
Hamlet (Act 5, scene 1)
For Jana and Robert Kiely
and
Arthur F. Marotti
Frendes ful fyin
Preface and Acknowledgments
Why another book on Shakespeare? There have been numerous

Shakespeare biographies in the last few years, all exhibiting different
aspects of the Bard’s personality and world view, from Stephen Greenblatt’s
sunny account of a man in love with words (Will in the World) to Richard
Wilson’s secretive, even closeted poet anxious to conceal his connections
to Catholicism (Secret Shakespeare). In a sense, both these biographies
project their authors’ own personalities and concerns in a way that is inevi-
table given the dearth of available facts. What this book tries to do is to
steer clear as much as possible of the “biographical fallacy” by placing
Shakespeare and his work in the religious and political context of his own
time. This, then, is not so much a book about Shakespeare’s life as about
Shakespeare’s England, about its rulers, playwrights, and audiences.
It is also a book about our own world, which—like Shakespeare’s—is
riven by fear, paranoia, and religious violence. William Shakespeare arrived
in London from Stratford-upon-Avon at the end of the 1580s and spent his
formative years writing plays there during the 1590s and early 1600s. These
years were a particularly difficult time for England and its people. During
the last full decade of Queen Elizabeth’s reign famine, poverty, vagrancy,
war with Spain, and religious persecution combined to turn England into a
paranoid, fearful place. The early years of the reign of King James I were
marked by plots and intrigues, culminating in the disastrous Gunpowder
Treason of 1605. When in Hamlet Marcellus refers to Denmark as a prison,
Shakespeare’s audience may have recognized a veiled reference to England
circa 1600, where ports were carefully monitored for the arrival of “sedi-
tious” Jesuits and, even worse, Spanish armadas. Shakespeare’s native
ix
x PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Warwickshire, where he spent his free time from the London theater, was
one of the most religiously conservative parts of England, and the sur-
rounding counties of Worcestershire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire,
and Staffordshire were sprinkled with the manor houses of the Catholic
gentry whose lives were disrupted—and oftentimes ruined—by fines,
imprisonment, and frequent house raids. These raids were conducted by
pursuivants, liveried servants of the Crown, anxious to uncover plots—real
or imagined—fomented by disaffected Catholics, who were egged on by
underground Jesuit priests.
In my earlier book Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War (2014) I drew
parallels between the paranoid atmosphere of Shakespeare’s England and
the Cold War mentality of the mid-to-late twentieth century, and sug-
gested that eastern European appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays were
not simply imagined projections but empathetic understandings of the
playwright’s own plight, as an artist threatened by an increasingly central-
ized state apparatus and a government mistrustful of theaters as sites of
disaffection and sedition. As in Soviet Russia, Shakespeare’s theater
became a veiled forum for perspectives discouraged or prohibited by the
state. Being a writer could be dangerous. Ben Jonson was thrown into
prison for overstepping the mark, and Christopher Marlowe was mur-
dered in suspicious circumstances in a Deptford rooming house in 1593.
In this book I have chosen to look backward to the Middle Ages rather
than forward to the twentieth century, arguing that Shakespeare inhabited
a world not only still largely medieval in religion, culture, and sensibility
but, more importantly, one that was inclined to draw on medieval literary
models in order to seek new ways to articulate political and religious dis-
sent. The Middle Ages have suffered a bad press at least since the
Enlightenment, so my thesis that Shakespeare saw the medieval period as
less authoritarian than his own may come as a surprise to some readers,
used to Shakespeare being presented as an apologist for the Tudor state
and to hearing the word “medieval” used in journalistic and popular dis-
course as a synonym for fanaticism, barbarism, and cruelty (including the
practices of the so-called Islamic State).
My revisionist account argues for a mixture of innovation and tradition,
continuity and change that problematizes Stephen Greenblatt’s binary
account of a benighted, superstitious medieval world transformed by
Renaissance learning and individuality (The Swerve; How the World Became
Modern, 2011). My work is closer to Helen Cooper’s book Shakespeare
and the Medieval World (2010) in that it stresses continuity rather than
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xi
radical change. At the same time, my approach differs from Cooper’s in

focusing on the political rather than simply the cultural implications of
Shakespeare’s debt to the medieval past. In her book Shadowplay: The
Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (2005) Clare
Asquith takes a more partisan approach to the Bard as a secret Catholic,
but her focus is much more on the early modern than the medieval period.
This book tries to address both the medieval and the Catholic dimensions
of Shakespeare’s work and argues that both these dimensions provided the
playwright with a political agenda with which to counteract the oppres-
siveness of his age. When a culture finds itself without a hopeful future—as
England must have seemed to many at home and abroad in the last decade
of Elizabeth I’s reign and the first few years of James I’s, as a place where
religious toleration was rejected, even though it had achieved a measure of
success in France following the Edict of Nantes (1598) and in Habsburg
Central Europe—it tends to turn to its past for inspiration. That is why, in
the early years of Jacobean England, Shakespeare set about writing his
bleakest tragedy, King Lear, carefully located in a remote medieval Britain,
yet—more importantly perhaps—deeply imbued with a thoroughly medi-
eval sense of contemptus mundi—of the corruption of rulers, the penury of
their subjects, and the defiance of their writers.
This book has profited greatly from stimulating discussions with
Michael Bennett, Tom Bestul, Helen Cooper, James A. Knapp, Filip
Krajník, Arthur Marotti, Deirdre McCloskey, Derek Pearsall, Mary Beth
Rose, Elaine Scarry, David Wallace, and many other esteemed colleagues
and friends. The following friends have provided valuable company and
support during the period of writing: Pietro Bortone, Linda Marshall, Eric
Osipow, Jonathan Romney, Beryl Satter, Paul J. Smith, and James
Williams. Adrian Bravo, Mario R. Albizurez, and Marcus Phillips helped
with the preparation of the manuscript, while Tyler Grand Pre was a most
conscientious research assistant. Cheryl Hunston was a wonderful and rig-
orous indexer. Allie Bochicchio and Bonnie Wheeler, editors of the “New
Middle Ages” series at Palgrave, were gracious and helpful supporters of
the project. I would also like to thank the staff at the Special Collections
of the Newberry Library in Chicago for allowing me access to their collec-
tion of early modern printed books. Mai Pham at Bridgeman Art Library
was very helpful and efficient in providing me with the images. All quota-
tions from Shakespeare’s works are from The Riverside Shakespeare.
Contents
1 Introduction: Maimed Rights in Shakespeare’s England 1
2 Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in

Medieval Arthurian Romance and Richard II 29
3 Demonizing the Other: “The Prioress’s Tale,” The Jew of

Malta, and The Merchant of Venice 75
4 Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain

and the Green Knight, and Hamlet 113
5 Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi,

and The Virgin Martyr 149
6 “Remember the Porter”: Memorializing the Medieval

Drama and the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth 191
7 Conclusion: Shakespeare “Our Contemporary” 217
Bibliography 231
Index
243
xiii
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 St Catherine of Alexandria Tortured (1480). By Friedrich

Pacher (ca. 1474–1508) 4
Fig. 1.2 Raphael: The Grand Duke’s Madonna (ca. 1504–1505) 5
Fig. 2.1 Gawain returns to court. Cotton Nero A. x. (ca. 1400). British
Library48
Fig. 2.2 Westminster Portrait of King Richard II (ca. 1395).
Westminster Abbey 55
Fig. 3.1 Fra Angelico: The Torment of Christ (ca. 1440–1443).
San Marco, Florence 101
Fig. 3.2 The Wilton Diptych (ca. 1395). National Gallery, London 111
Fig. 4.1 Gateway of Walsingham Abbey 140
Fig. 4.2 The Wheel of Fortune. From the Troy Book (ca. 1446–1450).
British Library 146
Fig. 5.1 Head of John the Baptist flanked by St Margaret and St
Catherine (Fifteenth century). Exeter 161
Fig. 5.2 View of St Winifred’s Well at Hollywell, Flintshire (1811).
British Library 180
Fig. 5.3 St Dorothea with a basket of flowers (1500). North
Tuddenham Church, Norfolk 186
Fig. 6.1 The Harrowing of Hell. The Holkham Library Picture Book
(ca. 1320). British Library 194
Fig. 6.2 The Last Trump from the Wenhaston Doom (ca. 1500–1520).
Wenhaston, Suffolk 202
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Maimed Rights

in Shakespeare’s England
In the preface to his controversial book The Swerve: How the World Became
Modern (2011), Stephen Greenblatt asserts that the Renaissance marked a
decisive and fundamental break with the medieval past:
Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against

the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, indi-
viduality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body.
The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has
been fiercely contested … the key to the shift lies not only in the intense,
deeply informed revival of interest in the pagan deities and the rich mean-
ings that once attached to them. It lies also in the whole vision of a world in
motion, a world not rendered insignificant but made more beautiful by its
transience, its erotic energy, and its ceaseless challenge.1
In his illuminating study Must We Divide History into Periods? (2015)

Jacques Le Goff argues that there was no simple cut-off point between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and that this claim only arose with the
writings of the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) and the Swiss
historian Jakub Burckhardt (1818–1897) in the nineteenth century, when
we first witness the emergence of history as an academic field of study and
1
Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 2011), 9–10.
© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Thomas, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages,
The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90218-0_1
2 A. THOMAS
the establishment of chairs of history in the European universities.2 Le

Goff makes the convincing case that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
were really part of a cultural continuum and that the real break with the
past only occurred in the eighteenth century. According to Le Goff, the
emergence of Latin as the language of intellectual enquiry, admiration for
classical learning, and the privileging of reason and individuality began not
with the Renaissance but with the Middle Ages. Le Goff also shrewdly
discerns in the writings of Michelet a personal and far from neutral
response to history. Initially praising the medieval period, Michelet only
put forward his belief that the Renaissance marked a new era of luminosity
and rationality with his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1840.
The same idea was taken up and developed by Jakob Burckhardt in his
classic study Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the
Renaissance in Italy, 1860), which claimed that the Renaissance inaugu-
rated a new era of modernity and individuality as opposed to the medieval
period, which had been dominated by “childish” faith and superstition:
In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was

turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half-
awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and
childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad
in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race,
people, party, family or corporation—only through some general category.
In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration
of the state and of all the things of this world became possible. The subjective
side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man
became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.3
As Peter Burke has stated in his introduction to Burckhardt’s classic

work, the claim that medieval men did not feel themselves to be individu-
als “does not square with the existence of twelfth-century autobiographies
such as those by Abelard and Guibert of Nogent” and “to describe
Renaissance Italians as the first modern men encourages us to see them in
our own image and forget the many differences between us and them”
(13–14).
2
Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods?, translated by Malcolm De Bevoise
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
3
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Penguin Classics,
1990), 13–14.
INTRODUCTION: MAIMED RIGHTS IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND 3
Thus the binaries which Greenblatt sets up to sustain his thesis that the
Renaissance marked a fundamental swerve away from the medieval past
(stasis/motion, conformity/individuality, sexual repression/erotic energy)
are themselves historically contingent and far from neutral. In fact, they
rehearse the largely discredited theses of Michelet and Burckhardt. To take
a simple example: Greenblatt bases his opposition between the medieval
period and the Renaissance on a simplistic contrast between Duccio’s
painting of the Maestà in Siena, with its static enthroned Virgin and Child,
and the swirling rhythms of Botticelli’s Renaissance masterpiece in the
Uffizi Gallery in Florence. For Greenblatt, one is marked by serenity and
calm, the other by frenetic motion and energy. But if one takes a cursory
glance at many medieval paintings—for example, the popular motif of the
flagellation of Saint Catherine of Alexandria—one sees all the qualities that
Greenblatt overlooks in the medieval period: movement, erotic energy,
and a total obsession with the body (Fig. 1.1). Conversely, if one looks at
Raphael’s Madonnas, one finds the static calm that Greenblatt identifies
with Duccio’s medieval masterpiece (Fig. 1.2). What we see is not a radical
shift or swerve, but continuity as well as change: Raphael’s Madonnas do
not mark a departure from Duccio’s, but are a refinement of them.
I shall be arguing in this book that the same dialectic of continuity and
change characterizes English writing and culture between 1400 and 1620.
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster may have been steeped in
humanist learning and love of classical antiquity—both Shakespeare and
Marlowe adored the Roman writer Ovid—but this was hardly a new phe-
nomenon. The term “humanism” was first introduced in the later Middle
Ages by the Italian poet Petrarch (1304–1374); and European writers’ love
of Ovid is already manifested in the twelfth-century Arthurian romances of
Chrétien de Troyes, as well as his French verse version of the tale of
Philomena from the Metamorphoses; the Lays of Marie de France; and the
fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. To this extent
Shakespeare and Marlowe were deeply attached to medieval traditions.
Another example of an English Renaissance writer embedded in a
medieval sensibility is Sir Thomas More, author of the humanist classic
Utopia (1516), but also a traditional Catholic who was prepared to die—
and did so—for his religious beliefs and his commitment to a Catholic
world view. What separates More from Shakespeare and Marlowe is not an
epochal gulf between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance but a tempera-
mental distinction that straddles that temporal marker: More was a fervent
believer whereas Shakespeare was a skeptic in the tradition of Montaigne.
4 A. THOMAS
Fig. 1.1 St Catherine of Alexandria Tortured (1480). By Friedrich Pacher (ca.

1474–1508)
But skepticism was not a unique preserve of the Renaissance, as a brief

consideration of Chaucer’s writing shows. Like Shakespeare, Chaucer was
deeply indebted to the classical past and translated Boethius’ Consolation
of Philosophy into English. In this respect Chaucer is closer to Shakespeare
than, say, his contemporary William Langland, author of Piers Plowman,
or the mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, all of whose works
Fig. 1.2 Raphael: The

Grand Duke’s Madonna
(ca. 1504–1505)
were typical of the religious fervor of the age. Conversely, Shakespeare is

closer to Chaucer than he is to, say, the devotional writings of his contem-
porary Robert Southwell.
In this book I argue that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were not
only familiar with the culture of their medieval forefathers (most obviously
the mystery and morality plays that were still being performed in the
English Midlands in the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign) but consciously
revived other non-theatrical forms of medieval culture such as romances
and saints’ lives in order to challenge the new constraints placed on public
dissent by Tudor and Stuart absolutism. What many of these medieval
genres—both dramatic and non-dramatic—have in common is the shared
affirmation of the power of the powerless. For example, in the virgin-
martyr narrative of St Catherine of Alexandria, which forms the basis of
Chap. 5, we find a characteristic confrontation between a pagan despot
and a Christian virgin martyr who resists his tyranny and speaks truth to
power. Catherine’s adversary Emperor Maxentius becomes increasingly
vulnerable to rages of madness as his power over the virgin diminishes.
6 A. THOMAS
Equivalents to this medieval tyrannical figure are Leontes in The Winter’s

Tale and Lear in King Lear, both men vanquished in argument by assert-
ively eloquent women (Paulina and Cordelia). A similar figure of power in
crisis is the ranting Herod the Great from the mystery play. Shakespeare
finds in this one-dimensional character a source not only for a critique of
exaggerated acting (as in Hamlet’s reference to those who “out-Herod
Herod”) but also for tyranny in Macbeth.
Where traditional scholarship assumed that Shakespeare was using the
medieval past (in particular the ruinous Wars of the Roses) as a negative
foil to legitimate the Tudor-Stuart present, I argue—to the contrary—that
Shakespeare valorizes the past in order to critique the Tudor-Stuart pres-
ent. In some ways this was part of a larger groundswell of resistance to the
Protestant hegemony. For Alexandra Walsham, writing about the Counter-
Reformation in Britain and Europe, “repossessing the medieval past was
another arm of Catholicism’s struggle to reclaim its territory, temporal as
well as geographical.”4 This is not to say that Shakespeare was himself a
Catholic, although the possibility cannot be ruled out entirely. Rather, it
is to see him in a more complex and polyvalent light than the traditional
Whiggish picture of the Bard as a true Protestant Englishman or as the
willing enforcer of Elizabethan propaganda, as Garry Wills envisions him.
Where Professor Wills’ Making Make-Believe Real speaks of Shakespearean
drama as “politics as theatre,” my book proceeds in the opposite direction
by treating theater as politics—that is to say—theater not as the collusive
mystification of power but as its demystification and subtle unmasking.5
If there was a significant break between the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, it was occasioned not by cultural trends alone—as Michelet,
Burckhardt, and (latterly) Greenblatt would have it—but by religio-
political developments that necessitated cultural change. For James
Simpson, the Protestant Reformation is the motive force behind the cul-
tural revolution that we habitually identify with sixteenth-century
England.6 Whereas Greenblatt sees the sixteenth century as witnessing a
massive explosion of cultural energy, Simpson sees it as marking a loss or
4
Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape. Religion, Identity and Memory in
Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
210–211.
5
Garry Wills, Making Make-Believe Real: Politics as Theater in Shakespeare’s Time (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
6
See James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English Literary History
Volume 2. 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1.
diminution of political rights brought about the Protestant Reformation

and the concentration of Church and temporal power in the hands of the
sovereign. According to Simpson, texts such as Thomas Hoccleve’s
Regement of Princes, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and the anony-
mous alliterative Richard the Redeless represented a robust tradition of
political criticism that ceased to be possible under the Tudors: “By con-
trast, the fifteenth century provides a series of ‘literary’ works that consis-
tently constrain royal power in a way that would be unpublishable (not
unthinkable) in the reign of Henry VIII” (Simpson, Reform and
Revolution, 191). Furthermore, Simpson detects a narrowing range of
discursive possibilities in the Tudor era: “Although hagiography, elegy and
romance survived the Henrician revolution in some shape or form, more
overtly ‘political’ forms of writing such as Aristotelian politics, Langlandian
ecclesiology and a feminine visionary mode did not” (Simpson, Reform
and Cultural Revolution, 359).
What is striking about Shakespeare and his dramatic contemporaries is
how they exploited the political potential of the surviving modes of hagi-
ography, elegy, romance, and morality plays to fit their own dissenting
needs. Medieval chivalric romances are redeployed in Shakespeare’s
Richard II to provide a negative mirror of royal absolutism under Elizabeth
I (Chap. 2); the elegiac mode informs Shakespeare’s Hamlet with its over-
riding sense of mourning and loss not only for a deceased father but also
for the Catholic rituals to which his Ghost gives voice and which are per-
petuated in Hamlet’s irreconcilable grief (Chap. 4). Medieval virgin-
martyr narratives are powerfully harnessed in King Lear, The Winter’s
Tale, and in The Duchess of Malfi, as we shall see in Chap. 5. The fifteenth-
century political critiques of worldly power and corruption in the medieval
dramas The Harrowing of Hell and Herod the Great are invoked to particu-
larly tragic effect in the figure of Macbeth (Chap. 6).
Criticism of the rich and powerful became more difficult with the rise
of the Tudor state and the centralization of power by Henry VIII, who
subordinated the English Church to his own will. The English Reformation
thus had major implications not only for the religious life of Catholic
England but also for political writing in English. The 1534 statute on
“treason by words” defined treason not simply as a violent act against the
king’s person but as a verbal or discursive assault on the king as a “heretic,
schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper of the crown.” In the words of
Rebecca Lemon, “while earlier treason law condemned violence to the
king’s body, the 1534 statute regulated speaking as a treasonous attack on
8 A. THOMAS
his or her dignity as well.”7 This Tudor legislation differed radically from
the medieval statute of 1352 (issued under Edward III), which defined
treason purely in terms of violence planned and enacted on the king’s
body. Although the statute was rescinded in the reign of Henry’s son
Edward VI, it was reinstated during that of Elizabeth I.
The inevitable consequence of this legislative shift from treason being
defined as a violent act to being more broadly understood in terms of
verbal violence meant that early modern writers were required to be more
careful in articulating criticism of the monarch and royal policies. While
late medieval writers were more or less at liberty to highlight the failures
of monarchy, under the Tudors such critiques became potentially treason-
ous. The effect of this Tudor legislation on literature soon became appar-
ent. As Greg Walker has importantly explored, Sir Thomas Wyatt did not
simply translate Petrarch’s Italian sonnets into elegant English poems but
harnessed the medieval lyric form so as to internalize political themes that
could no longer be expressed in public terms.8
However, the distinction between medieval public/political writing and
Tudor private writing should not be exaggerated. For example, the Tudor
morality play Youth (ca. 1514) is not only typical of medieval allegory in its
treatment of the follies of youth, it is also inherently political in its criticism
of royal power. Henry Algernon Percy, fifth earl of Northumberland, prob-
ably sponsored this interlude to steer his profligate son and heir toward a
more virtuous, moral life. As Ian Lancashire shows, Youth’s depiction of a
spoiled young man may have been intended as an oblique criticism of the
young Henry VIII’s profligacy and neglect of rule in the north of England.9
Far from the direct control of the court, the Percy estates in northern
England would have been a relatively safe place from which to orchestrate
criticism of the young king and his policies. But even then the play had to
be couched in allegorical terms to escape censure.
In the Middle Ages, direct criticism of a specific ruler was dangerous
and could be fatal. On July 18, 1485, the West Country rebel William
Collingbourne posted a bill on the door of St Paul’s Cathedral in London
lampooning the usurped rule of Richard III and his henchmen William
7
Rebecca Lemon, Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2016), 5.
8
See Greg Walker, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician
Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 279–295.
9
See Two Tudor Interludes: Youth and Hick Scorner, edited by Ian Lancashire (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1980), 27–29.
Catesby, Richard Ratcliffe, and Francis Lovel. Collingbourne paid the ulti-
mate price for his seditious doggerel and was hanged, drawn, and quar-
tered as a traitor.10 It is true that Richard III was a tyrant and usurper, but
criticism of non-usurpers like Richard II could also prove hazardous. As
James Simpson points out, the author of Richard the Redeless has to obvi-
ate his aggressive criticism of royal absolutism and the prerogatives of par-
liament by speaking through a personified Reason (Simpson, Reform and
Cultural Revolution, 215). William Langland also needed to exercise
extreme caution if he was to avoid the opprobrium of the Church and the
state, especially at a time of religious dissent (Lollardy) and royal absolut-
ism (Richard II’s final years as king). Following the Peasants’ Revolt of
1381—during which some of the more incendiary language of Piers
Plowman was appropriated by the ringleader John Ball in letters to his fol-
lowers—Langland cut most of his trenchant criticisms of the Church in
what became the final “C” version of his text.11 In this redaction Langland
softened his critical stance toward “Holy Church.”
Conversely, support for a king could also prove dangerous if his rule
suffered drastic reversal or instability. As Ann Astell makes clear, this was
especially true of the turbulent reigns of Richard II, Henry VI, and Edward
IV: “Langland, Gower, Chaucer, the Gawain-poet and (to a lesser extent)
Malory all practiced an allegorical art, partly as a result of their similar
educational backgrounds and also because political pressures encouraged
and indeed necessitated indirection in writing about matters of public
concern.”12 Chaucer was notably absent from London and Westminster
during the turbulent years 1387–1389 that coincided with the Merciless
Parliament’s destruction of Richard II’s affinity, including the writer
Thomas Usk, who was executed on the order of Richard’s opponents, the
Lords Appellant.13 Whether this was political calculation or coincidence is
difficult to prove; but it does seem likely that Chaucer—like Shakespeare
two hundred years later—was able to avoid controversy and political scan-
dal in a way that eluded writers like Usk, Marlowe, and Jonson.
10
David Horspool, Richard III: A Ruler and His Reputation (New York: Bloomsbury
Press, 2015), 226–227.
11
See Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 118.
12
Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1999), 4.
13
See Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Viking,
2014), 172.
10 A. THOMAS
It was within this medieval tradition of veiled dissent, I argue, that

Shakespeare and his contemporaries found the artistic resources to chal-
lenge and even subvert the oppressive orthodoxies of late Elizabethan and
Jacobean England. Although Shakespeare did not have to cope with the
kind of immediate hazards facing Wyatt as a courtier at the court of Henry
VIII, the experiences of his friend Ben Jonson (imprisonment) and his
older contemporary Christopher Marlowe, who was killed in mysterious
circumstances a few days after being summoned to the Privy Council,14
must have made him extremely circumspect in articulating opinions that
diverged from state policy. It is sobering to remember that far more writ-
ers and men of letters were executed under the Tudors than under their
medieval forebears—men of considerable talent like the courtier-poet
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey;15 the great humanist Sir Thomas More; the
Jesuit orator and rhetorician Edmund Campion; and the Jesuit poet
Robert Southwell.
Publishers were also vulnerable to the ire of the Tudors. When in March
1579 John Stubbs dared to publish a polemic against the queen’s prospec-
tive marriage to a French Catholic (the duc d’Alençon), Queen Elizabeth
was outraged and issued a proclamation banning the book. The author of
the book and some of its distributors were sentenced to have their right
hands chopped off with a cleaver. The sentence was carried out publicly on
November 3, 1579, and the event was, in the words of Tudor historian
Christopher Haigh, “a public relations disaster for Elizabeth” since it con-
trasted the patriotism of the offenders with the brutality of a queen deter-
mined to marry a foreigner.16
Needless to say, ordinary people also suffered greatly under Henry VIII
and his Tudor successors. The so-called Pilgrimage of Grace (1536/7)—
in fact an uprising originating in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire orchestrated
by the “commons,” who were angry at religious reforms and the enforced
dissolution of the monasteries, which had been important sources of char-
ity17—resulted in 178 public executions.18 The next religiously inspired
14
See Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1992).
15
See Jessie Childs, Henry VIII’s Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey (London: Vintage Books, 2008).
16
Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (London: Longman, 1998), 80 (second edition).
17
See G.W. Bernard, The Late Medieval Church. Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break
with Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press), 176–177.
18
Susan Loughlin, Insurrection: Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell and the Pilgrimage of Grace
(Stroud: The History Press, 2016), 75.
northern insurrection—the Northern Uprising of 1569—was even more

cruelly crushed with the execution of one in ten of the 6000 rebels
involved.19 In a sermon preached before the royal court, Thomas Drant was
insistent that the rebellion against Queen Elizabeth required drastic and
harsh measures: “Let them in God’s name feel the punishment of a club,
and hatchet, or an halter and in doing so, I dare say God shall be highly
pleased” (Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion, 118). In practical terms, the
mass public hangings of the northern rebels who had risen up against the
queen in 1569–1570 were intended as an act of state terror and deterrence.
But they were also underpinned by a Protestant belief that rebellion against
the monarch was tantamount to an insurrection against God.
These facts still continue to be occluded by the reputation of Elizabeth
I as a tolerant, moderate ruler in contrast to her older sister “Bloody
Mary.” The Catholic Mary Tudor has had a bad press largely because she
was one of history’s losers while “Gloriana” came out on the winning
Protestant side of English history. But it is salutary to recall that after the
collapse of the Wyatt Rebellion against Mary in 1554, far fewer rebels
were executed than during the Northern Uprising against Elizabeth in
1569. Mary ordered the deaths of 100 ringleaders, as tradition dictated,
including Wyatt himself, the duke of Suffolk, his daughter Lady Jane Gray,
and her husband Guildford.20 Elizabeth, by contrast, insisted on executing
ordinary rank-and-file rebels in order to instill terror and deterrence. It is
true, of course, that Mary’s government was responsible for the burning
of 300 Protestants, but Elizabeth’s regime sentenced to death almost 200
Catholic priests by hanging, drawing, and quartering, and many other
priests and laymen and women died in prison.
Elizabeth’s excommunication by the Pope (1570) and the threat of the
Spanish Armada (1588) only made things worse for her Catholic subjects.
By the 1590s, when Shakespeare and Marlowe were active as playwrights,
the political situation in England had become so dire that the historian
John Guy has even referred to it as the “second reign” of Elizabeth, a
period marked by economic failure, poor harvests, increased vagrancy,
corruption, bribery, and religious repression.21 In his biography of these
19
See K.J. Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith, Politics, and Protest in
Elizabethan England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 118–119.
20
John Edwards, Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2011), 177–178.
21
The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, edited by John Guy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–19. A rather more sanguine account of
12 A. THOMAS
“forgotten years” of Elizabeth’s reign, Guy makes it clear that the queen
not only tolerated but actually encouraged the torture of Catholics.22 Her
personal rack-master was the infamous Richard Topcliffe, who was respon-
sible for the capture and repeated torture of Catholic priests, most
famously Robert Southwell. Elizabeth gave instructions that the young
priest-poet was to be cut down from the gallows after one swing so that he
would still be conscious to suffer the full torment of witnessing his own
bowels being burned in front of him. But when Southwell surprised the
crowd by praying for the queen —just as Thomas More had prayed for
Henry VIII at his execution in 1535— the spectators defied the queen’s
orders and insisted that the priest be hanged until he was dead; and the
hangman obliged. As Guy states, “It was a rare moment of human com-
passion in a brutal world of bloodshed and religious violence” (Guy,
Elizabeth: the Forgotten Years, 176). What Guy does not mention is that
Shakespeare—who was Southwell’s distant kinsman and who had likely
read his verse—may be alluding to this kind of compassionate scenario
when he has the servant of the duke of Cornwall refuse to carry out the
order to blind old Gloucester in King Lear. In the cruel world of
Elizabethan religious politics, it was still possible for human decency and
pity to prevail.
Although Shakespeare would not have had access to some of the
Arthurian romances I discuss in Chap. 2, he was probably familiar with Sir
Thomas Malory’s great prose romance Le Morte Darthur (ca. 1469–1470),
which was printed several times in the sixteenth century. He would also
have known medieval romances which survived well into the sixteenth
century in popular, cheap editions.23 As Helen Cooper has pointed out
with respect to King Lear, it seems likely that Shakespeare had read (or
heard) the medieval romance Bevis of Hamtoun as a child, since Edgar’s
lines “Mice and rats and such small deer/have been Tom’s food for seven
long year” (3.4.135–136) closely resemble the description of Bevis’ hard-
ships in prison: “Rattes and myse and such small deere/Was his meate that
London in the Elizabethan period is provided by Steve Rappaport in Worlds within Worlds:
Structures of Life in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
But even Rappaport confirms that the 1590s were a period of political unrest.
22
John Guy, Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years (New York: Viking, 2016), 170–176.
23
See the essays in Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper, edited by Andrew
King and Matthew Woodcock (Cambridge: Boydell, 2016); for the connection between
romance and traditional religion in Shakespeare, see Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Shakespeare,
Catholicism, and Romance (New York: Continuum, 2000).
seven yere.”24 And, of course, Bevis of Hamtoun is mentioned by the Duke

of Norfolk in Shakespeare’s last and coauthored play Henry VIII, suggest-
ing that either Shakespeare or Fletcher or both were familiar with this
medieval romance.25
However, more important than the question of source and influence is
that of analogic modes of thought. What the medieval authors of the
romances and Shakespeare had in common was the urge to deploy secular
narratives about flawed kings and rulers in order to shed light on religious
and political issues that confronted them in both periods. As Barbara
Newman has argued, there was a significant “crossover” between the sacred
and the secular in medieval culture that allowed medieval writers to address
worldly and spiritual questions in the same text.26 Shakespeare’s drama
inherited this tension between the religious and the political spheres.
Professor Newman begins her important study of medieval crossover by
contrasting Shakespeare’s secular comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream
with the medieval world view, in which the sacred is the normative, unmarked
category while the secular is the marked, asymmetrical Other (the reverse of
modernity) (Newman, Medieval Crossover, vii–viii). This distinction may be
true for the difference between the medieval and modern periods, but
Shakespeare and his contemporaries were far more medieval than modern in
this respect. For them—to quote Newman on the medieval period—“the
sacred was the inclusive whole in which the secular had to establish a niche”
(Newman, Medieval Crossover, viii). This is especially true of a play like
Richard II, with its simultaneous critique of political corruption and its
religious emphasis on the need for personal penance and atonement.
The problem arises when the secular power (the early modern state)
begins to impinge on this sacred dominance by dismantling traditional
medieval belief practices such as Purgatory and the Mass. Shakespeare’s
plays do not initiate that secularizing trend—as is often maintained—but
rather respond to it. For example, one way Shakespeare treats the theme
of persecuted Catholics in his own time is by resorting to medieval modes
of allegory. Shylock in The Merchant of Venice can be read as a veiled alle-
gory for the persecuted Elizabethan Catholics just as the Spanish Jews in
the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament have been interpreted
Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Methuen, 2010), 168.
24
Henry VIII, 1.1.38.

25
26
Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).
14 A. THOMAS
as a thinly disguised representation of East Anglian Lollards or English

heretics.27 Shakespeare’s critique of Tudor absolutism (and the late rule of
Elizabeth I) in his play Richard II finds an analogue in the Alliterative
Morte Arthur, with its criticism of pride in the figure of King Arthur,
which probably reflected the disastrous rule of the historical Richard
II. This is not to say that Shakespeare read either of these medieval works
but, rather, that he used the same allegorical mode of thought to link the
past to the present. What the four medieval romances discussed in Chap.
2 have in common is a shared set of assumptions about the proper role of
a limited monarchy and the responsibility of the monarch not to exceed
those limits. As in the medieval romances, Shakespeare’s Richard II wit-
nesses a crucial turn in the affairs of the king when his pride is punished by
Fortune. Frederick Kiefer has shown that early modern writers did not
simply reproduce this classical and medieval motif but used it to articulate
their very real anxieties and concerns about the uncertainty of life in the
age of the Tudors: “Treatment of Fortune in the drama, then, represents
not some literary fossil, but the profound doubts and fears of a culture
whose faith in providential design was at times precarious.”28 Like Fortune,
pride is a theme that straddles the medieval–Renaissance divide and has a
particular significance in an age of political absolutism. I am not arguing
that Shakespeare was anti-monarchist (on the contrary) but that he was
aware of the limits that should be placed on royal absolutism. This tradition
of political critique was inherited by many of Shakespeare’s recusant con-
temporaries, including Catholic priests like Edmund Campion, Robert
Parsons, and his distant kinsman, the priest-poet Robert Southwell.
Important here is the political as well as religious role played by Catholic
resistance in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. Shakespeare
clearly derived some of his ideas about the dangers of Tudor absolutism
from the samizdat works by Catholic priests that were smuggled into
England. The inspiration for Richard II was almost certainly Robert
Parsons’ inflammatory book A Conference about the Next Succession to the
Crown of England, 2000 copies of which were printed in Antwerp in the
summer of 1595 and smuggled into London, where they caused a run on
27
For Jews as Lollards, see Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian
Drama and Devotion in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),
36.
28
Frederick Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (San Marino: The Huntington
Library, 1983), xvii.
the bookshops (Guy, Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years, 248). Parsons argued
that the “Commonwealth” (i.e. Parliament) had the right to choose the
queen’s successor and that bad or incompetent rulers like King John and
Richard II had in the past been deposed. Like Shakespeare, Parsons was
deploying the medieval past in order to instigate a polemic about the
political present, but as an exiled dissident writer he was able to make
explicit connections between the past and the present whereas Shakespeare,
writing in England under an absolutist Tudor monarch, was required to
camouflage his parallels between Richard II and Elizabeth. But
Shakespeare’s audience would definitely have noticed these parallels. Both
monarchs relied on “new men” who were not of noble birth and who
alienated the gentry and the aristocracy through their policies. Like
Richard, Elizabeth relied on an inner circle of advisers: most notably, Lord
Burghley, Sir Francis Walsingham, and, until his death in 1588, her favor-
ite, the earl of Leicester.
Catholicism, then, was not only a religious belief but also a political
discourse in Elizabethan England. The survival of Catholicism as a belief
system long after its official prohibition meant that recusant resistance to
the Tudor state was political as well as religious. As Helen Cooper has
stated, “Catholicism did not, as we too often need reminding, disappear in
the 1530s: it was alive and vibrant in the late 1550s as well, and was thor-
oughly familiar to the older generation of Elizabethans. Not only texts,
but habits of thought, speech, and belief, kept their hold widely over the
populace, far beyond the many active recusant households.”29 Whether or
not Shakespeare was himself the product of a recusant family, his “thought,
speech, and belief ” would have been shaped in part by the inherited cul-
ture of a thousand years of Catholicism. As Cooper has pointed out, mem-
ory was a central feature of early modern writings by Shakespeare and
Marlowe: “Consciousness, however, works with memory far more than
prediction. The Elizabethans knew what was there in their world and what
had been there before, not what was going to happen next, and their own
memories were supplemented by what their parents had told them”
(Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 7–8). And as Michael
O’Connell has importantly stated, the fact that Shakespeare assumes his
29
Helen Cooper, “Introduction” to Medieval Shakespeare. Pasts and Presents, edited by
Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 1–16 at 9. Bourgeois Richmond speaks of “habit of mind” in Shakespeare, Catholicism,
and Romance, 45.
16 A. THOMAS
audience’s familiarity with references to the mystery plays suggests that “a

cultural memory of this theatre still existed, the kind of understanding
that comes of a certain cultural osmosis.”30
Cultural memory also entails political memory, including the memory
of constitutional and legal rights that had been effectively abrogated by
the Tudor state. The function of memory is especially important in peri-
ods of political repression and religious persecution like Elizabethan and
Jacobean England. Among recusants in Elizabethan and Jacobean England
writing becomes an extension of memory and a substitute for proscribed
religious practices and rituals. As Gerard Kilroy has stated, the deep con-
nection between memory and recusant writing meant that writing was
both political and dangerous in Elizabethan and Jacobean England:
Never have books or writing or letters been as dangerous as they were

between 1581 (the date of Campion’s mission to England) and 1606 (the
aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot): proclamation after proclamation for-
bade seditious writings; books were seized in midnight raids and men were
questioned for copying poems … Writing went underground, between the
lines, into the paper and into the code; far from suppressing language, the
state’s actions seemed merely to put value on writing.”31
Even though Catholic priests were banned from England, their polem-
ics continued to circulate among the faithful. It seems likely that
Shakespeare was familiar with some of the recusant samizdat pamphlets
which took Elizabeth I to task for her persecution of Catholics. These
works were as much concerned with the excesses of executive power as
they were with religious persecution; in fact they rightly saw that one was
contingent on the other.
The medieval texts discussed in this book will range from Arthurian
romances to saints’ lives, as well as mystery and morality plays. My empha-
sis will be less on the specifics of theatrical continuity and change—a
scholarly service fulfilled by Lawrence Clopper and more recent schol-
ars32—than on the shared political underpinnings of medieval and early
30
Michael O’Connell, “Blood Begetting Blood: Shakespeare and the Mysteries,” in
Medieval Shakespeare, 177–189 at 179.
31
Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005), 1.
32
Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval
and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). More recently, see
Kurt A. Schreyer, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the Medieval
Stage (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2014).
modern culture. Here I show some affinity with Peter Lake’s study of the
history plays, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, not because
Professor Lake is concerned with medieval literary antecedents but because
he sees plays like King John and Richard II as taking the kind of risks dem-
onstrated by more overtly dissenting treatises published abroad by Catholic
exiles.33 By reading plays like The Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice,
Richard II, Hamlet, King Lear, and the Duchess of Malfi alongside late
medieval works of varying genres, such as the heroic epic Beowulf, the
Arthurian romances Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Alliterative
Morte Arthur and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur as well as the
late medieval virgin-martyr narratives of Saints Catherine of Alexandria
and Margaret of Antioch, this book hopes to show how early modern
English playwrights did not turn their back on the medieval past but con-
sciously embraced and appropriated its strategies of dissent as a means to
confront the political and religious challenges of the present.
Although a considerable amount of scholarship exists concerning
“Medieval Shakespeare,” this approach tends to stress the cultural conti-
nuities rather than the dialectic of religious change and continuity in
Shakespeare’s England. For Helen Cooper, “the world in which
Shakespeare lived was a medieval one” (Cooper, Shakespeare and the
Medieval World, 1). Whereas Greenblatt insists on a total rupture with the
medieval past, Cooper sees an equally organic continuity with it. What
both narratives overlook is the role of religious politics in creating cultural
continuity and change. Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have
experienced the transformation from Catholicism to Protestantism as both
a religious and cultural phenomenon. Even if Shakespeare was not Catholic
(and the jury is still out on the question),34 he could not ignore the
immense impact of English Catholicism with its cult of saints, its rituals,
and its visual legacy in the form of church art and architecture. He would
almost certainly have had personal exposure to the Coventry mystery
plays, which did not cease to be performed until 1579 (Cooper, Shakespeare
and the Medieval World, 60).
33
See Peter Lake: How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the
History Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 66.
34
See Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden
Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).
18 A. THOMAS
According to David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare’s plays are deeply

invested in the religious questions of his time: “Written and performed in
a culture in which religion was indeed inescapable, the plays have usually
been seen either as evidence of Shakespeare’s own disinterested secularism
or, more recently, as coded signposts to his own sectarian commitments.”35
Kastan concludes that the plays are “not keys to Shakespeare’s own faith
but … remarkably sensitive registers of the various ways in which religion
charged the world in which he lived.” But Shakespeare did not have to be
sectarian in his faith to be registering his own religious beliefs. Neither did
he need to be a secularist to express a disinterested response to religion. If
Shakespeare was a moderate Catholic, we can see his plays as expressing
sympathy for persecuted Catholics while also exploring the general reli-
giously charged atmosphere of the time. Regardless of his denominational
affiliation—whether Catholic, Anglican, or even Calvinist—36 I argue that
Shakespeare was an irenicist who believed that religious tolerance was not
only desirable but necessary if England—and Europe—were to avoid even
greater strife and bloodshed in the future.37
Irenicism was an early modern precursor of ecumenicism. It derives
from the Greek word for “peace” (irene), which was the ultimate aim of
the movement. Irenicism cut across confessional lines and enjoyed
support among prominent Catholic and Protestant thinkers in England
and Europe. As Howard Louthan has shown, there was an important
group of irenicist thinkers at the court of the Habsburg Emperor
Maximilian II in Vienna.38 Maximilian was himself a Catholic, but unlike
his zealous Spanish cousin Philip II, he preferred to pursue a policy of
détente with his Protestant subjects in the Empire.39 This live-and-let-live
policy was continued by his son and heir, Rudolf II, whose court at Prague
became a magnet for the leading thinkers and artists of the time, men like
35
David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
36
For the argument that Shakespeare’s plays reveal a Calvinist world-view, see Graham
Holderness, The Faith of William Shakespeare (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2016).
37
For the cogent argument that Shakespeare was an advocate of irenicism, see Arthur
F. Marotti, “Shakespeare and Catholicism” in Theater and Religion Theatre and Religion:
Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 218–241.
38
See Howard Louthan, The Quest for Compromise: Peace-Makers in Counter-Reformation
Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24–26.
39
See Paula Sutter Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2001).
Tycho Brahe, the famous Danish astronomer, and Dr John Dee, Queen
Elizabeth’s personal astrologer.40 Rudolfine Prague also witnessed a
golden age of Jewish culture, as reflected in the important synagogues
that date from that period. As we shall see in Chap. 3, the tolerant atmo-
sphere of Rudolfine Bohemia is reflected in the setting of Bohemia as a
refuge from tyranny in The Winter’s Tale.
But England also had its irenicist adherents. The foremost of these was
the itinerant and well-connected Henry Constable (1562–1613), the
favorite of three monarchs, James VI of Scotland, Elizabeth I of England,
and Henri IV of France.41 Constable was the author of the influential
anonymous tract Examen pacifique des Huguenots (1589), in which he
urged his countrymen to support the recently crowned French King Henri
IV. Henri had converted to Catholicism in order to be eligible for the
French throne. Constable followed Henri’s lead by converting to
Catholicism in 1591. He left England during the last full decade of
Elizabeth’s rule, which, as we have seen, marked a particularly oppressive
time for England and its writers. Constable lived in exile on the Continent
for some years. Henri signed the Edict of Nantes in April 1598, which
granted substantial rights to the Huguenots (French Calvinists). This act
of toleration meant that by the end of the sixteenth century, France, for so
long crippled by religious conflict, had joined the Austrian Habsburgs
who had granted a measure of toleration to Protestants in Germany and
Bohemia. Probably hoping for a similar outcome in England following the
accession of James I as King of England in 1603, Constable returned to
England. But he was sorely disappointed and was soon committed to the
Tower and the Fleet Prison. He died as an exile in Liège in 1613.
It is not certain whether Shakespeare knew Constable’s treatise on
irenicism, but it is not unlikely. He may have been exposed to it through
the Huguenot Mountjoy family, with whom he lodged from 1598 to
1604 on Silver Street.42 Elaine Scarry has argued that Shakespeare not
only knew Constable’s poetry but that the latter is the mysterious “Fair
Youth” addressed in the Sonnets. More importantly for our purposes,
40
See R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973).
41
For Constable as a “moderate Catholic,” see Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and
the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 122–126.
42
For this theory see Elaine Scarry, Naming Thy Name: Crosstalk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 210. For Shakespeare’s time on Silver Street,
see Charles Nicholl, The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (London: Penguin
Books, 2008).
20 A. THOMAS
there is evidence that Shakespeare shared Constable’s hope for a measure

of religious toleration in Stuart England. Sonnet 107 has long been seen
as an allusion to the death of Elizabeth I and the inauguration of a new
time of peace and concord under James I:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos’d as forfeit to a confin’d doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assurd,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I’ll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.
(The Riverside Shakespeare, 1768)
Writing many years later about the death of Elizabeth I and the acces-
sion of King James VI of Scotland as James I of England, the Jesuit priest
Oswald Tesimond speaks in similar language of the euphoric mood of
Catholics who hoped for some religious toleration from the new monarch:
“They (Catholics) hoped that after the long and damaging flood of unre-
lenting persecution, some bird of good omen would bring them the olive
branch of peace, with word of land where they could set their feet and
enjoy for the future that peace so long desired.”43 None of this proves that
Shakespeare was Catholic but it does suggest that—at the very least—he
shared the Catholics’ hope that a new era of religious peace and harmony
would be ushered in by the Stuart dynasty.
Shakespeare benefited from the new king’s patronage when he became
part of the acting troupe known as the King’s Men. In effect he was now
a court playwright. But this is not the same thing as saying that he always
maintained his faith in the monarchical system; and my thesis will be that
the plays written during the later years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the first
decade of the Jacobean era articulate not only doubts and misgivings
about the absolutist direction in which the English Crown was heading
43
The Gunpowder Plot: The Narrative of Oswald Tesimond Alias Greenway, translated by
Francis Edwards (The Folio Society, London: 1973), 21.
but express veiled criticism of these dangerous trends. Such suggestions

were not made with the intention of undermining the authority of the mon-
archy as an institution, but to highlight its moral and political deficiencies.
King Lear is not an anti-monarchical play but one that holds up monarchy
to the most rigorous moral scrutiny. It is not existentialist in the modern
sense but infused with a moral vision that I characterize as “medieval.”
That Shakespeare was conscious of the differences as well as the conti-
nuities between the medieval past and his own world is beyond doubt. As
Eamon Duffy has shown in his discussion of the memory traces of Catholic
culture in Shakespeare’s England, the past was not simply eclipsed by the
present but coexisted—if residually—alongside it, often in a jarring, pain-
ful way. The image “bare ruin’d choirs” invoked in Shakespeare’s famous
Sonnet 73 shows Shakespeare ruminating on the scarred landscape of
Reformation England, with its poignant ruins of abbeys and monasteries
dissolved during the Henrician reforms44:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In these lines the physical landscape of post-Reformation England

reflects an inner psychic landscape (“thou mayst in me behold”): the trans-
formative effects of religious politics have become profoundly subjective
and personal, creating an internalized landscape of the soul that is as
scarred and confused as the physical landscape.45 This internalized land-
scape, I shall argue, was central to Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s imagina-
tive world and was populated by split, divided heroes like Doctor Faustus,
Hamlet, and Macbeth and marked by confusion and friction between con-
flicting claims to metaphysical truth.
44
Eamon Duffy, “Bare Ruined Choirs: Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare’s
England” in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard Dutton,
Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 40–57.
45
For a subtle study of the effects of the Protestant Reformation on the British landscape
itself, see Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and
Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
22 A. THOMAS
King Lear—perhaps Shakespeare’s most medieval play—provides an

exemplary case of this interpenetration of continuity and change. King Lear
can be read as a warning to the new King James I (James VI of Scotland) to
avoid the pitfalls of flattery. To have critiqued the divine right of kings
directly would have been impossible under the absolutist Stuart monarchy
and the official censorship (the Master of the Revels) inherited from the
Tudors.46 But Shakespeare camouflaged his implied parallels between James
and Lear—neglect of the affairs of state, love of hunting, and insistence on
his God-like authority and so on—by contrasting the two rulers: James had
two sons to succeed him whereas Lear has three daughters; Lear is old
whereas James was only 36 years of age when he came to the English throne;
Lear was king of a pagan Britain whereas James was a Calvinist ruler of
Scotland and England, though not of a unified kingdom. By underscoring
the differences between James and Lear, Shakespeare was able—paradoxi-
cally—to highlight the similarities between them with relative impunity.
Chapter 2 traces the trajectory from pride to penitence in Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthur, and Sir Thomas
Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and sees it as providing a blueprint for
Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595). Whereas the medieval romance uses the
story of King Arthur’s rise and fall to draw parallels between the mythic
king of Britain and the doomed historical Richard II and Henry VI,
Shakespeare uses the failings of Richard II to comment obliquely on the
discontents of another childless monarch with no obvious successor—
Queen Elizabeth I. In all these texts the parallels between historically dis-
tant and present rulers are deliberately camouflaged. The author of the
Alliterative Morte Arthur has Richard II in mind when he portrays the fall
of King Arthur in the Wheel-of-Fortune scene, but he makes sure that he
does not identify the king in a direct or obvious manner. Regardless of
which side he was on—Richard’s, Bolingbroke’s, or neither—the author
was probably anxious to avoid the pitfalls of direct criticism in the after-
math of Richard’s deposition and death in 1400. More importantly per-
haps, he was concerned to draw universal moral conclusions from his
political allegory, namely, that all rulers, however heroic (and exemplified
by the Nine Worthies catalogued in Arthur’s second dream), invariably
succumb to the vicissitudes of fate. In Richard II Shakespeare deploys the
same technique of veiled criticism in order to draw parallels between the
autocratic Richard and the Elizabeth of the 1590s.
46
See Janet Clare, “Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean
Dramatic Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).
Chapter 3 seeks to locate the origins of the Marlovian and Shakespearean

demonized “Other” in the figure of the treacherous and murderous Jew
in Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales. Whereas
Renaissance scholars like James Shapiro have been at pains to emphasize
the very different circumstances that distinguish the late medieval depic-
tion of Jews based on doctrinal and religious alterity (Jews as the murder-
ers of Christ) from the early modern focus on them as economic and
ethnic aliens,47 I argue that there is in fact far greater similarity between
Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Jew than has sometimes been acknowledged.
The bifurcation into medieval and early modern treatment of Jews over-
looks the unresolved critical debate concerning Chaucer’s attitude to Jews
as evinced in “The Prioress’s Tale.” While some scholars assume that the
medieval poet simply reproduced the anti-Jewish prejudices of his own
time, others have argued that the tale is profoundly incoherent in that it
destabilizes the Jewish–Christian binary in the text.48 As recent scholarship
has highlighted, Chaucer’s retelling of the ancient blood-libel accusation
is inseparable from late medieval anxieties about Christian involvement in
a money economy and the financial connections that existed between
medieval Christians and Jews.49 Chaucer’s tale foregrounds at the very
outset the dangers posed to Christian salvation by Jewish usury (“usure”)
and excessive profits (“lucre”), thus linking economic and metaphysical
anxieties in a way that anticipates Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s
Shylock:
There was in Asye, in a greet citee,

Amonges Cristene folk a Jewerye,
Sustened by a lord of that contree
For foule usure and lucre of vileyne
Hateful to Crist and to his compaignye.50
47
James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
48
See Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350 to 1500
(Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2006).
49
See Kathy Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016). Chapter 3 was initially published as “The Minster
and the Privy” in PMLA vol. 126, no. 2 (March 2011), 363–382.
50
The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987),
209 (third edition).
24 A. THOMAS
In the second half of Chap. 3 I suggest that the treatment of Jews in

Marlowe and Shakespeare only serves to highlight the double standard of
Christians, in particular the manner in which the Governor of Malta justi-
fies his annexation of Barabas’ fortune through the flimsy pretext of inher-
ited Jewish sin (the blood-libel legend). Shakespeare similarly links
economic and religious exploitation in The Merchant of Venice in a way
that would have resonated with the persecution of the Catholic gentry in
Elizabethan England. But discrimination worked both ways. In the eyes of
many fervent Catholics, Protestants were regarded as “more grievous ene-
mies of Christ and much more to be hated than Jews or Turks.”51
Chapter 4 concerns the connection between memory and revenge in
the medieval epic Beowulf, the chronicle History of the Danes (Gesta
Danorum) by Saxo Grammaticus, and in Hamlet. When Hamlet’s father
returns from the dead to urge his son to avenge his murder by his own
brother, the scene reprises the moment in Beowulf when Grendel emerges
from the darkness of the Danish landscape to take revenge on Hrothgar
and his mead-hall. In both cases their origins and identity are obscure.
Who or what is Grendel? Is he human or monster? And what exactly,
Hamlet constantly asks himself, is the nature of the apparition that visits
him? This uncertainty is precisely what drives—or rather fails to drive—his
revenge. Hamlet is torn between the need to mourn his father and the
urge to avenge him; and this confusion arises from the Ghost’s own mixed
messages. At first he enjoins Hamlet to wreak revenge for his murder, but
his valedictory words to his son are “Remember me!”
Shakespeare’s Hamlet was based on an older lost play—the so-called
Ur-Hamlet probably written by the contemporary playwright Thomas
Kyd—whose source was the tale of the medieval Danish prince Amleth
from the twelfth-century Gesta Danorum of the Danish chronicler Saxo
Grammaticus. Shakespeare probably did not use Saxo as his direct source,
but it does seems likely that he was familiar with Francois de Belleforest’s
French version of the story in his Histoires tragiques (1570).52 It is here
that the supernatural intervention of the ghost of Hamlet’s father is intro-
duced in order to shed light on a secret murder that is freely acknowl-
edged in Saxo’s chronicle, although—like Shakespeare’s Hamlet—Amleth
51
See Jessie Childs, God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England (London: The
Bodley Head, 2014), 182.
52
See David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages (Oxford: Oxford
feigns madness in order to conceal his eventual plan to kill the usurper.
This straightforward story of murder and revenge is interpolated into
Saxo’s chronicle history but its origins are clearly folkloric, just as the Old
English epic Beowulf mingles historical characters like Hrothgar with
mythic archetypes like Beowulf.53 Both narratives are located in a distant
pagan medieval Scandinavia and both involve an act of primordial fratri-
cide that has its roots in much older myth: Amleth’s father is murdered by
his brother while Grendel is descended from Cain, the archetypical
brother-murderer. In both cases the story is intended to set right this pri-
mordial act of fratricide: Amleth must revenge his father’s murder while
Beowulf must slay the monster Grendel. Both Amleth’s father and Grendel
can be understood as manifestations of the Oedipal repressed, murdered
fathers haunting their murderous sons. But they can also be seen in reli-
gious terms as older faiths that have come back to haunt the new Christian
religion, repressed or abolished pagan gods that continue to haunt the
memory of the new dispensation. Grendel is angry when he attacks the
mead-hall for the first time, his desire for revenge aroused by the Christian
song of Creation that emanates from the brightly lit hall.
Needless to say, Shakespeare did not know the Beowulf story, which had
not been rediscovered in the Renaissance; nor did he need to in order to
grasp the Oedipal implications of the Scandinavian myths he was drawing
upon. In Shakespeare’s updated version of Hamlet the medieval double
theme of revenge and remembrance is not abandoned but given a new and
topical twist: Hamlet’s father returns from what Stephen Greenblatt has
identified as the Catholic domain of Purgatory, a medieval doctrine, abol-
ished by the Elizabethan state, which continues to haunt the memory of
the new Protestant dispensation, personified by the Wittenberg-educated
Lutheran Hamlet.54 Unable to take actual revenge on the Protestant pow-
ers that be, English Catholics—like Hamlet—are forced to substitute the
rites of memory for the rights of revenge just as Hamlet’s father enjoins his
son to remembrance as well as revenge, which become conjoined themes
in the play, not mutually alternative propositions. To this extent Hamlet is
not a radical Renaissance departure from a crude medieval tale but a subtle
revision of the same basic narrative tension between the rites of religious
memory and the rights of political revenge.
53
See Saxo Grammaticus and the Life of Hamlet, translated with a commentary by William
F. Hansen (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 1 ff.
54
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001).
26 A. THOMAS
Chapter 5 explores the dramatic “afterlives” of medieval saints in

Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
(performed 1614), and The Virgin-Martyr, coauthored by Philip
Massinger and Thomas Dekker (1622). A possible source for Cordelia’s
spirited resistance to her father’s demand for absolute love may be the
precedent provided by the extraordinary popularity in late medieval
England of the cult of early Roman virgin martyrs. The powerful accounts
of dissenting women who speak truth to power in the name of their
Christian faith, represented by the apocryphal lives of Margaret of Antioch,
Catherine of Alexandria, and Dorothea of Caesaria, continued to haunt
the imagination of early modern playwrights. There seems to be some
evidence that this popularity lasted well into the seventeenth century. The
martyrdom of St Dorothea was the subject of The Virgin Martyr (Cooper,
Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 61). The play was clearly popular and
was revived during the Restoration in 1661 and 1668. This legend would
have been familiar to early modern playwrights through printed versions
of the vastly popular compendium of saints known as The Golden Legend,
and the defaced and scarred wall paintings and statues of these saints in
churches. Margaret and Catherine are among the most frequently depicted
on church walls and in statuary. In her story Margaret of Antioch defies
her pagan father by accepting Christianity and is tormented by the pagan
prefect of Antioch, Olybrius. The miraculous culmination of the story is
Margaret’s triumphant emergence from the stomach of a dragon (the
symbol of the devil) that had devoured her. This scene became one of the
most popular devotional images of the later Middle Ages and can still be
seen today on the defaced walls and stained-glass windows of English
churches. Given the central role played by the dragon in Margaret’s hagi-
ography, it is interesting to note that Lear refers to his “dragon’s wrath”
(1.1.123) when speaking to Kent, implying a parallel between himself
and Margaret’s pagan father and Cordelia and the defiant Margaret.
During the Reformation, English Catholics identified with the mem-
bers of the early Church and saw their own persecution by the Protestant
state reflected in the persecution of the early Christian martyrs. As we shall
see, many Catholic women during Shakespeare’s time specifically identi-
fied with these virgin martyrs in their resistance to the Protestant authori-
ties; women like Anne Vaux, who laughed in the face of her interrogators
when they insinuated that she had had sexual relations with her confessor
Father Henry Garnet, head of the Jesuit province in England, whom Vaux
bravely sheltered from arrest for twenty years (Childs, God’s Traitors, 2).
Another recusant woman who not only identified with the virgin martyrs
of the medieval past but whose violent fate emulated theirs was Margaret
Clitherow—the “Pearl of York”—whose refusal to plead in the case against
her led to her barbarous execution by peine dure et forte, itself a medieval
penalty reserved for those who refused to acknowledge the legality of the
authorities.55 In defying the authorities in this fashion, Clitherow was also
emulating the radical dissent of the virgin martyrs in refusing to accept the
legal authority of their pagan overlords. Several of Shakespeare’s hero-
ines—such as Cordelia in King Lear and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale—
adopt similarly defiant positions in the face of the state’s insistence on
absolute conformity to its dictates. The defiance of Cordelia and Paulina
may therefore not only reflect the legacy of medieval virgin martyrs but
also point polemically to the experience of female recusants in Shakespeare’
own time.
Although the eponymous heroine of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
seems at first appearance to be very different from the medieval virgin
martyrs, especially given her determination to marry her steward Antonio
in the face of her brothers’ opposition rather than desiring to remain a
chaste bride of Christ—what remains the same is the heroine’s right to
choose her own fate in the face of patriarchal power. Although the Duchess
of Malfi’s murder is not overtly presented as an act of martyrdom, we can
detect traces of medieval hagiographic tradition both in the way she dies
and in the ghostly echoes of her voice overheard by her husband Antonio
when he visits her grave. The murder of the duchess recalls the medieval
martyrdom of Ludmila (b. 860), a Bohemian princess who was strangled
on the orders of her jealous daughter-in-law Drahomira in 921, while the
“echoes from the grave” scene recalls the medieval motif of posthumous
saints’ miracles such as the sweet fragrance that emanated from their
tombs (indicating the incorruptibility of the body) as well as cures and
other wonders performed in the vicinity of those tombs.56
Chapter 6 argues that the late medieval drama such as the Harrowing of
Hell pageant provides a template for a political reading of Macbeth. Whereas
traditional readings of the tragedy present it as a pro-Jacobean play intent
on flattering the king and condemning the Jesuits as equivocators, I follow
55
See Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution,
Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London: Continuum, 2011).
56
See Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981).
28 A. THOMAS
more recent interpretations in proposing that Macbeth is deliberately

ambiguous both in its treatment of Jesuitical equivocation and in its treat-
ment of King James himself. In conclusion I argue that regardless of their
religious beliefs—Webster was apparently an anti-Catholic Protestant in a
way that distinguishes him from the atheistic Marlowe and the irenic
Shakespeare—all the playwrights studied in this book shared a common
desire to deploy medieval motifs and themes in order to critique the
oppressively hegemonic order of Protestant England.
CHAPTER 2
Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral

Allegory in Medieval Arthurian Romance
and Richard II
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the audience is privy to a play within a play when

the Prince orchestrates a staged political allegory in front of the usurper and
regicide King Claudius and his wife Gertrude. Intended to “catch the con-
science of the King,” The Murder of Gonzago (also known as The Mouse-
Trap) is conceived as an exposé of political corruption and intrigue. The play
within a play provides a paradigm of Shakespeare’s technique of using the past
to shed light on the present. Typically, the allegory deployed in The Mouse-
Trap is both oblique and pointed: it is not the king’s brother who commits
the murder, but his nephew (Lucius). Thus the play serves as a scenario of
future revenge as well as a depiction of crimes already committed. This change
of detail (substituting the nephew for the uncle as the regicide) is typical of
Shakespeare’s use of political allegory in his plays as a whole. Instead of map-
ping historical or fictional prototypes directly onto real-life rulers, the play-
wright deftly camouflages them through displacement and reversal.
Shakespeare’s earlier play Richard II (1595) uses a similar mode of
political allegory to explore the last troubled decade of the reign of
Elizabeth I and to critique the failings of Tudor absolutism. Shakespeare
draws upon a long medieval tradition of using art to critique life, and “his-
torical” kings like King Arthur to illuminate the failings of real rulers like
Richard II and Henry VI. In his various medieval permutations, from
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s foundational text Historia regum Britanniae
(History of the Kings of Britain, ca. 1136) to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le

30 A. THOMAS
Morte Darthur (ca. 1469–1470)—written during the dynastic faction

fights known as the Wars of the Roses—King Arthur emerges at a particu-
larly acute moment of feudal crisis, at once a reflection of that crisis and a
wish-fulfillment transcendence of it. In Geoffrey’s work, the heroic war-
rior King Arthur, who conquers Britain and then Rome, may have served
as a role model for the expansionist and ambitious Norman kings, but he
also fills a dynastic vacuum, a much-needed figure of myth who restores to
the inchoate flow of history its fraudulent sense of direction and purpose.
Geoffrey was writing his great pseudo-history during the first half of
the 1130s, in the final years of the reign of Henry I, the youngest son of
William the Conqueror who had famously subordinated England to his
will with the Norman invasion of 1066. Henry had lost his only son and
heir, William, a decade earlier in the disastrous sinking of the White Ship
in the English Channel in 1120; and the rest of the king’s reign was taken
up trying to find a solution to the succession crisis that would ultimately
plunge England into civil war after Henry’s death in 1135. Although
Geoffrey could not have known that England would be divided between
the forces of Henry’s daughter and designated heir, Matilda, wife of
Geoffrey of Anjou, and the king’s nephew Stephen, he would have been
conscious as he wrote of the atmosphere of insecurity that gripped the
realm without a male heir to the throne.1 The powerful and unifying
Arthur is the imaginary response to this sense of impending crisis, the
messianic figure born of the illicit union of Uther Pendragon and Igerna,
who will restore unity and strength to a fractured and divided kingdom.
A similar picture of crisis emerges in the late medieval representations
of King Arthur. Although the figures of Arthur in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthur (AMA), and Sir Thomas
Malory’s Le Morte Darthur are very different in many ways—the first
young and boisterous, the second vengeful and ruthless, the third weak
and passive—they can be seen to reflect the unstable reigns of two deposed
kings—Richard II (1366–1399) and Henry VI (1421–1471). The only
son of Edward the Black Prince, Richard of Bordeaux came to the throne
at the tender age of ten and inherited a feudal crisis that rapidly spiraled
into the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.2 Although the young Richard handled
the situation well and helped to pacify the rebels, it seems to have left him
See Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), 50.
1
See Juliet Barker, 1381: The Year of the Peasants’ Revolt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
2
University Press, 2014).

PRIDE AND PENITENCE: POLITICAL AND MORAL ALLEGORY IN MEDIEVAL… 31
feeling insecure for the rest of his reign, even after he attained his majority.
The political dominance of his father’s brothers—John of Gaunt principal
among them—also led him to compensate by asserting his royal preroga-
tive. Unable to control his unruly subjects, Richard was almost deposed by
the Merciless Parliament of 1388 and temporarily lost his power base to
the so-called Lords Appellant, a group of mighty magnates related to the
king who presided over his humiliation and the execution or banishment
of his favorites, and who ruled for several years in his stead.
Henry VI came to the throne at the age of nine months following the
premature death of his father Henry V in 1422. Henry inherited the
French as well as the English throne, but his inability to live up to the
strong rule of his warrior father meant that the French territories gained
by Henry V were lost and England itself succumbed to a disastrous civil
war known as the Wars of the Roses. These unstable reigns form the his-
torical backdrop to the fictional world depicted in the three Arthurian
romances to be discussed in this chapter. These texts can also be seen,
loosely speaking, as examples of the popular genre of the speculum prin-
cipis (mirror for princes) in which a mirror is held up to a prince, at once
an idealized reflection of what he should be and a critical reflection of what
he might become. Such mirrors were ambiguous in so far as they high-
lighted both the virtues and vices of princes. In the High Middle Ages
such examples of the genre as John of Salisbury’s Policratus (1159) and
Gerald of Wales’s Liber de principis instructione (ca. 1193) exemplified the
concern of the clerical estate to provide rulers with a moral blueprint of
the ideal Christian prince. The most famous example of the genre is Giles
of Rome’s De Regimine principum (1277–1279), written for King Philip
the Fair of France. In the Renaissance these advice manuals continued to
be composed for rulers, among them Erasmus’ Institutio principis
Christiani (1516), intended for King Charles of Spain, later Holy Roman
Emperor Charles V. In England the tradition was exemplified by John
Skelton’s Speculum principis, a lost work intended for Henry Prince of
Wales (later Henry VIII).
But manuals of clerical advice for rulers ceased to be written after Henry
VIII made himself Head of the Church of England; and by the mid-Tudor
era such works would have been regarded with suspicion and as potentially
seditious. However, this tradition of clerical advice and admonition sur-
vived in the form of tracts by religious dissidents addressed to rulers like
Elizabeth I. Several of these were written by Catholics warning Elizabeth
of the pernicious influence of Protestant advisers such as her favorite the
32 A. THOMAS
earl of Leicester. In what became known as Leicester’s Commonwealth,

Thomas Morgan compared Elizabeth to Richard II and Leicester to
Richard’s favorite Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford.3 As we shall see, medi-
eval writers drew similar comparisons between King Arthur and Richard
II, and between Arthur’s nephew Gawain and Robert de Vere.
These writers also needed to proceed with caution, especially during the
politically volatile reigns of Richard II and Henry VI, when power quickly
switched from the king to his opponents and back again. The reign of
Richard II typified the difficulty of clerical writers faced with a king who
possessed a high sense of his own regality and was inclined to take extreme
pride in his ancestry, looks, and appearance. Richard’s narcissism was
encouraged by flattering courtiers like Richard Maidstone who wrote that
the king was “as handsome as Paris” and “as gracious as Absalon,” and
Thomas Usk who noted in the king’s obituary that he was “as beautiful as
Absalon.” 4 If, as has been supposed, the Gawain-poet was part of the
Ricardian affinity and a clerical member of the Cheshire affinity that sur-
rounded the king, he faced the challenge of reconciling his status as a
courtly writer of romance with his clerical role as a chastiser of courtly pride.
Pride was not only the first and most serious of the seven deadly sins; it
was often the sin most closely identified with knights, whose wealth and
power made them peculiarly susceptible to arrogance. A good example of
pride and penitence is Hartmann von Aue’s German tale Der arme Heinrich
(Poor Lord Henry, ca. 1190s) about a knight named Henry (Heinrich)
whom God punishes for his pride (hôchmuot) and ingratitude by making
him a leper. In the early section of the story Lord Henry is compared to
Absalon (l. 85) who was also punished for his pride. As Lord Henry explains
to his tenant farmer, this was the consequence of his foolish arrogance:
dô des übermuotes
den hôhen portaenare verdrôz,
die saelden porte er mir beslôz.
dâ kume ich leider niemer in:
daz verworhte mir mîn tumber sin.
got hat durch rache an mich geleit
ein sus gewante siecheit,
die nieman mac erloesen.” (404–412)5
3
See King Richard II, edited by Charles R. Forker (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 6–7.
4
Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 452.
5
Hartman von Ouwe, Der arme Heinrich, edited by J. Knight Bostock (Oxford: Blackwell,
1965), 23.
[When, then, the Heavenly Gatekeeper had enough of my arrogance, he

closed the gates of happiness to me. Now I’ll never enter there! My foolish
attitude spoiled that for me. As punishment God imposed an infirmity upon
me of such a nature that no one can free me of it.6]
In the end Henry is forgiven by God when he refuses the human sacri-
fice of a young virgin whose blood is the only means to effect a cure. Thus,
through penitence, Henry comes to humility and overcomes his pride. He
then takes the girl as his bride. It has been suggested that Hartmann von
Aue derived his story of a knight who marries the young daughter of his
tenant farmer from a real-life case of a lord who also married a commoner
and suffered from some kind of severe disease (Der arme Heinrich, xxx).
If this is the case, the tale is clearly an attempt to please his courtly audi-
ence while making a moral point about the danger of pride. This was, as
we shall see, also the challenge facing the Gawain-poet.
A popular English romance possibly known to Shakespeare in some
shape or form is Sir Isumbras, about a knight whose pride in his wealth
leads to his punishment:
Into his herte a pryde was browghte

That of God yafe he ryghte nowghte,
His mercy ones to nevenne;
So longe he regned in that pryde
That Jesu wolde no lengur abyde:
To hym he sente a stevenne. (37–42)7
[Into his heart pride was brought
So that he paid no heed to God at all,
Or praised his mercy even once.
So long he reigned in that pride
That Jesus could no longer endure it,
And sent him a warning voice.] (author’s translation)
Through the voice of a bird perched in a tree, Christ gives the proud
knight a stark choice: suffer poverty in youth or in old age. Sir Isumbras
6
Hartmann von Aue, “The Unfortunate Lord Henry,” translated by Frank Tobin in
Medieval German Tales, edited by Francis Gentry, The German Library, volume 4
(Continuum: New York, 1983), 1–21.
7
Six Middle English Romances, edited by Maldwyn Mills (London: J. M. Dent and Sons,
1973), 126. Modern translation is my own.
34 A. THOMAS
elects to be poor in youth and then endures separation from his wife and
children. After defeating the Saracen king in battle his wounds are healed
by nuns in a convent. Then he becomes a poor pilgrim for seven years
(“And sevenn yer he was palmere thare,/With scrippe and pyke in sorowe
and care,” 508–509). Only after many years of deprivation and hardship is
Isumbras finally restored to his fortune and reunited with his wife and
children. Extant in the same manuscript as Sir Isumbras, the AMA reveals
a similar movement from pride to penitence (Lincoln Cathedral Library,
MS. A.5.2). At the same time Arthur becomes a reflection of a flawed,
doomed protagonist and his volatile knights reminiscent of Richard II and
his protegés.8
That Shakespeare had Queen Elizabeth’s pride in mind when he wrote
Richard II seems plausible enough, but perhaps the more important point
is that the precedent provided by medieval political allegory was the ability
of the playwright not only to make a series of veiled political points but his
ability to do so without drawing undue critical attention to himself. Like
the authors of medieval Arthurian romance, Shakespeare was carefully cri-
tiquing the present political system through the allegorical lens of the past.
Medieval romance thus provided Shakespeare with a precedent for bring-
ing politics onto the stage. Whether Shakespeare himself had actually read
the first two medieval Arthurian romances discussed in this chapter is less
important than the fact that penitential romances like Sir Isumbras contin-
ued to be read well into the sixteenth century. In fact, medieval penitential
romances enjoyed something of a vogue in the second half of the sixteenth
century, and provided raw material for playwrights of the Elizabethan the-
ater and for poets like Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590/1596).
William Copland printed Guy of Warwick in 1553 and 1565; Sir Isumbras
survives in eight manuscripts from ca. 1350 to ca. 1565, and Robert the
Devil (Sir Gowther in Middle English) was printed as prose and metrical
versions in the early sixteenth century. These editions and the surviving
manuscripts of the recusant Edward Banyster suggest that penitential
romances were particularly popular among Catholic readers, although
they were by no means limited to a recusant audience.9
8
See Christine Chism, “Friendly Fire: The Disastrous Politics of Friendship in the
Alliterative Morte Arthure”, Arthuriana, vol. 20, no. 2 (summer 2010), 66–88. Also
Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
9
For the popularity of penitential romance in Shakespeare’s England, see James Wade,
“Penitential Romance after the Reformation” in Medieval into Renaissance, 91–106 (95).
For medieval penitential romances, see Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights: A Study of
Middle English Penitential Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Shakespeare’s motivation for writing Richard II may also have been

fueled by his reading of political pamphlets by Catholic critics of the
Crown like Morgan, Rowlands, and Parsons. What the penitential
romances and these Catholic broadsides had in common was a moral need
to address the sin of princely pride, the former directly, the latter by more
veiled means. It is not surprising that Shakespeare, who was also writing
during a period of political upheaval following the execution of the Queen
of Scots and the failed Spanish invasion of England, should feel the need
to tread warily when chronicling the rule of a childless monarch. That he
decided to do so regardless of the consequences is perhaps an indication
of the extent to which he was willing to take calculated risks in the inter-
ests of his dramatic art. Like Henry Bolingbroke confronted with the
corpse of his victim Richard II—and even more appositely, Elizabeth faced
with the news of Mary’s execution—Shakespeare was able to equivocate
around the figure of Richard II by making him the focus of his Elizabethan
polemic, while appearing to be invested in the distant history of England.
Shakespeare’s Richard II also raises questions about the role of monar-
chy in an age of political absolutism and the divine right of kings. Richard’s
famous lines “not all the water in the rough, rude sea/can wash the balm
off from an anointed king” (3.2.54–55) would have been understood by
Shakespeare’s audience not just as the assertion of a medieval king but of
a Tudor monarch like Elizabeth I. Medieval legal theorists like Henry de
Bracton and John Fortescue had argued for the limited role of monarchy,
the former in his De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and
Customs of England) and the latter in his De Laudibus Legum Angliae (In
Praise of the Laws of England), written for Henry VI’s son and heir,
Edward of Lancaster, between 1463 and 1471. But this model of limited
monarchy had been challenged by Henry VIII and his absolutist succes-
sors (Forker, King Richard II, 19). In the second half of the chapter we
shall see how Shakespeare breathes new life into these political questions
in order to explore—albeit in an oblique and veiled form—the discontents
of the later years of Elizabeth I’s reign (1558–1603).
Like Richard II and King Arthur, Elizabeth was a childless monarch,
and by the 1590s was increasingly out of touch with her subjects. Also like
Richard, Elizabeth became increasingly paranoid about threats to her sov-
ereignty. Initially disinclined to inquire into the windows of her subjects’
souls, the queen responded to the polarization of the political situation
created by the introduction of the Protestant prayer book in 1569, the
Northern Uprising of the same year, and the papal excommunication of
36 A. THOMAS
1570 by adopting a more punitive policy toward her recusant subjects.

The exile of Catholic dissidents became the order of the day, reflected, as
we shall see, in Richard II’s draconian banishment of Henry Bolingbroke
and Thomas Mowbray in act 1 of Shakespeare’s play. In the 1590s Ireland
became a threat to Protestant England as it remained Catholic and a haven
for Spanish infiltration. It is significant, therefore, that so much is made of
Richard II’s ill-fated departure for Ireland following Bolingbroke’s ban-
ishment. So sensitive was the parallel between the two childless monarchs
that the deposition scene was actually cut from the play and never per-
formed during Elizabeth’s lifetime; it was restored only during the reign
of her successor, James I, in 1608.
I argue that this kind of political allegory focused on past rulers was the
best option available to Shakespeare in the final full decade of the reign of
Elizabeth I, when criticism of state policy could have serious consequences
for the writer. Only by turning to motifs and themes deployed by medieval
writers could Shakespeare safely navigate the troubled waters of late Tudor
absolutism. The motif of the mirror is an obvious example of Shakespeare’s
appropriation of medieval motifs. The final act of Richard II famously
includes a scene in which the deposed king looks at himself in a mirror,
only to shatter it to pieces in an acknowledgement of his failure as a king
and as a human being. The mirror was a favorite motif to denote vanitas
and pride, as in the fifteenth-century Flemish book of hours in the Morgan
Library in which Pride is depicted as a handsome youth admiring himself
in a mirror. In stressing Richard’s pride and vanity, Shakespeare was fol-
lowing a medieval tradition which emphasized the seven deadly sins, in
contrast to Protestantism, which gave greater weight to the observance of
the Ten Commandments.
Needless to say, the critique of Elizabethan absolutism does not mean
that Shakespeare was opposed to the Tudor monarchy, any more than
the medieval author of the AMA disliked Richard II or Sir Thomas
Malory was antagonistic to Henry VI. The main purpose of using his-
torical or biblical prototypes like King Arthur as ciphers for specific rul-
ers was to illuminate the moral failings of medieval rulership in general.
As C. S. Lewis importantly states: “It is a mischievous error to suppose
that in an allegory the author is ‘really’ talking about the thing symbol-
ized, and not at all the thing that symbolizes; and the very essence of art
is to talk about both.”10 Romances about “historical” figures such as
10
C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
Alexander the Great and King Arthur were intended both to reference
specific medieval rulers and to highlight the universal moral and politi-
cal dangers posed by ambition and pride.
Medieval authors of Arthurian romance explore the tension or dialectic
between chivalric idealism and political reality. In the case of AMA the
anonymous author goes even further by highlighting King Arthur’s fail-
ings in order to demonstrate a universal truth about the futility of worldly
power and ambition. His intention is not to write a roman-à-clef in the
modern sense but to demonstrate a larger moral insight—that pride and
vainglory invariably result in catastrophe for all concerned. Richard II’s
ambitions, as we shall see, were not limited to his desire to subjugate his
recalcitrant subjects, but also reflected his desire to become Holy Roman
Emperor, an ambition that he pursued actively in the 1390s. Although
Richard was not a martial ruler, like his grandfather and father, he was as
politically ambitious as they were—perhaps even more so—in seeking the
imperial crown. It is this overweening pride and ambition that the author
of the AMA condemns at the end of his work.
Such a moralizing perspective was part of the stock-in-trade of medieval
writing. Clerical writers were particularly anxious about the deleterious
effects of pride, even—perhaps especially—on successful medieval rulers.
Following Henry V’s glorious victory at Agincourt against the French in
1415, the author of a letter to the king (perhaps Henry, Bishop of
Winchester and Chancellor of England) urges Henry not to fall into the
sin of pride for such a great victory but to thank God for it.11 The manu-
script of AMA dates from around 1440, several years after Henry’s early
death at the age of thirty-six and during the minority of his infant son
Henry VI. Though the poem itself probably dates from the end of Richard
II’s reign (or perhaps the beginning of Henry IV’s), the later audience of
the romance may have seen it as reflecting the career of Henry V, whose
ambition ultimately led to his own early death and the ultimate loss of the
military gains in France. It is significant that Shakespeare’s Henry V ends
on an ambiguous note in which the hero’s victories are followed by the
disastrous reign of his son: “Henry the Sixt, in infant bands crown’d
King,/Of France and England, did this king succeed;/Whose state so
many had the managing/That they lost France, and made his England
bleed” (Epilogue, 9–12).
11
Anne Curry, Agincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 48.
38 A. THOMAS
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

In the last thirty years the critical understanding of the Middle English
alliterative courtly romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) has
undergone a remarkable transformation, from the work of a provincial
author writing in the obscurity of the north-west midlands of England to
the sophisticated creation of a courtier-poet composing his masterpiece for
a London-based audience of Cheshire retainers attached to the glamorous
court of Richard II. In a groundbreaking—if still controversial study
(1983)—the historian Michael J. Bennett argues that the localized milieu
of the poet’s native region could not have provided him with a suitable
audience for his sophisticated and cosmopolitan texts such as SGGK and
Pearl (probably written by the same author), which survive in the same
small and undistinguished manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A. x.12
Following Gervase Mathew’s claim in his book, The Court of Richard II
(1968), 13 Bennett proposes that this modest codex (which includes crudely
drawn illustrations), was probably a copy of a deluxe manuscript that origi-
nated at the royal court.
The opening lines of SGGK celebrate the heroic Trojan origins of
Britain along Galfridian lines, only to turn into a sophisticated Arthurian
romance along the French lines established by Chrétien de Troyes. This
syncretic blend of the British and French Arthurian traditions lends weight
to the thesis that the romance was written for the Ricardian court or, at
the very least, a combination of cosmopolitan merchants and knights
based in London.14 Richard was known for his interest in English history
(including his Anglo-Saxon royal ancestors such as Edward the Confessor)
while his court was Francophile and international in complexion. Richard
appears to have commissioned Corpus Christi, Cambridge, MS. 251, a
history of the kings of England from Brutus to Richard II.15
In a persuasive article entitled “Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics
in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (2009),16 Jill Mann has joined the
growing ranks of scholars inclined to see the poem as the product of a
12
Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, Cheshire and Lancashire Society in
the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983).
13
Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 117.
14
See Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), 191–192.
15
Michael Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), 42.
16
Jill Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 31 (2009), 231–265.
refined and courtly elite rather than of a provincial baronial household.

Mann perceives in the poem a perfect congruence between its aesthetic
focus on the luxurious lifestyle of the court—including armor, clothing,
jewels, and fabrics—and its ethical preoccupation with knightly virtue
and chastity, exemplified by the eponymous Gawain. Whereas many of
his contemporaries, most notably William Langland, regarded the luxu-
rious world of the court as incompatible with the apostolic espousal of
poverty—the Gawain-poet seeks to reconcile courtly with spiritual val-
ues. As Nicholas Watson has pointed out with reference to the Pearl-
poet, the writer’s relationship with the audience is both deferential and
authoritative, suggesting that he was both a courtier and a cleric, eager
to please and flatter his courtly audience while highlighting its moral
deficiencies.17
Certainly the poem’s syncretism of courtliness and piety is consistent
with the complexion of a royal court presided over by a royal couple—
Richard II and his wife Anne of Bohemia—who appear to have espoused
the fashionable trend of a chaste union (Bennett, Richard II, 71). But
Richard’s companionate marriage to Anne raised the vexed issue of the
king’s sexuality: was he chaste out of religious zeal or because he was sexu-
ally attracted to men? The startling intervention of the mysterious Green
Knight during the Christmas celebrations at Camelot and his subsequent
upbraiding of Arthur’s court as effete and cowardly highlights the gulf
between what the Ricardian court purported to be and how it was per-
ceived by many of its detractors and critics: “What, is this Arthures house,”
quoth the hathel thenne,/That al the rous rennes of thurgh ryalmes so
mony?” (“What is this Arthur’s house,” said the horseman then, “Whose
fame is so fair in realms far and wide?”) (309–310).18 The Green Knight
also dismisses the young knights of the Arthurian court as “berdles
chylder” (“beardless children”, 280), a reference perhaps to the youthful
court of Richard II in the mid-1380s. Mann argues that the author seeks
to close the gap between the unflattering perception of the Ricardian
court as effeminate and his own desire to present it as healthily hetero-
sexual. Referring to the curious emphasis on the pleasures of heterosexual
17
Nicholas Watson, “The Gawain-Poet as a Vernacular Theologian” in A Companion to
the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
1997), 293–313 at 299.
18
The Works of the Gawain Poet, edited by Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London, Penguin
Classics, 2014), 278.
40 A. THOMAS
intercourse in Cleanness, which most scholars attribute to the same author

as SGGK, Mann opines: “The message that Cleanness speaks on behalf of
these elegant courtiers is: ‘We are feminized but not effeminate’” (Mann,
“Courtly Aesthetics,” 239). The desire to make the same distinction may
be said to undergird SGGK: the kisses exchanged between Sir Gawain and
Lord Bertilak are as far removed from the specter of homosexuality as a
physical relationship between Gawain and Bertilak’s wife. According to
Mann, the romance draws a line under these homosexual prohibitions in
its attempt to reconcile a courtly vision of the world with a more conserva-
tive clerical perspective. But as Carolyn Dinshaw suggests in an important
essay on the poem entitled “A Kiss is Just a Kiss,” the writer deflects the
audience’s attention away from the kisses between two men only to raise
the specter of same-sex intimacy.19 If Gawain had succumbed to the blan-
dishments of Bertilak’s wife, he would logically have been required to have
sex with Sir Bertilak in conformity with their prior agreement that they
share their winnings at the end of each of three days. The comedic subtext
of illicit heterosexual relations is thus never far from the deeper anxiety of
illicit homosexual acts.
As Mann and Dinshaw both point out, what the Gawain-poet may be
reacting to here—somewhat defensively for sure—is Richard II’s reputa-
tion in some critical quarters not only as an effeminate king but also as a
possibly homosexual one. Unlike his father Edward the Black Prince and
his grandfather Edward III, Richard was uninterested in pursuing military
glory in France and actively sought peace in the face of opposition from
the Lords Appellant. Moreover, his intimate friendship with his favorite
courtier Robert de Vere, ninth earl of Oxford (1363–1393), appears to
have aroused scandal even during the king’s lifetime, although some of the
gossip may have been a posthumous blackening of his reputation after his
usurpation by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. The chronicler
Thomas Walsingham clearly implies that Richard enjoyed sexual relations
with de Vere: “The king was very devoted to him, and greatly respected
and loved him, but not without the ignominy of an unpure relationship”
(“[rex] tantum afficiebatur eidem, tantum coluit et amauit eundem, non
sine nota, prout fertur, familiaritatis obscene”) (quoted by Mann, “Courtly
Aesthetics,” 240, footnote 29).
19
Carolyn Dinshaw, “A Kiss is just as Kiss: Heterosexuality and its Consolations in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight,” Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.
Notwithstanding these slurs on his sexuality, de Vere had the reputation

of a womanizer (Saul, Richard II, 121). A case in point is his infamous
abduction of (and later marriage to) Queen Anne’s Bohemian lady-in-
waiting Agnes Lancecrona. The affair was especially scandalous since de
Vere had until recently been married to a granddaughter of Edward III,
King Richard’s first cousin, Philippa de Coucy. The Westminster chroni-
cler provides the background of the scandal:
This Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, had married the daughter of

Enguerrand, sire de Coucy, by the lady Isabel daughter of King Edward III;
but he grew to detest her, and sent the clerk John Ripon to the Roman
curia to secure a divorce terminating the marriage—a task at which he
worked to such effect that through perjured witnesses, hired for the pur-
pose, he came away with the pronouncement of a sentence of divorce.
These proceedings greatly displeased the lady’s uncles, the dukes of
Lancaster, York, and Gloucester. When she had eventually been thus repu-
diated, this Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, to his everlasting disgrace and
reproach, committed the iniquity of taking to wife a Bohemian chamber-
woman of the queen’s, named Lancecron, and this in the face of the queen’s
unremitting protest.20
Following Ann Astell, Mann points out that Gawain’s pentangle

resembles de Vere’s heraldic arms of a five-pointed star (a “mullet”).21
Astell has proposed that SGGK contains several encoded references to de
Vere and Agnes Lancecrona, including punning on their names (Astell,
Political Allegory, 126, 129). Another interesting allusion to de Vere is
the author’s unusual use of the word “duke” in the comment that it
would have been better to make Gawain a duke rather than waste his life
in war: “Warloker to have wroght had more wyt bene/and have dight
yonder a duk to have worthed” (674–675). In December 1385 Richard
II created de Vere marquess of Dublin and, in October of the following
year, duke of Ireland, with the lordship of Ireland attached to him for life
(Saul, Richard II, 182).
20
The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, edited and translated by L. C. Hector and Barbara
F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 189–191.
21
Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics,” 240–241; Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval
England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 125.
42 A. THOMAS
De Vere’s lieutenant in Ireland was Sir John Stanley.22 De Vere had for
some time been recruiting Cheshire men into the king’s service and had
forged links with local soldiers such as Sir John.23 A further historical detail
that supports the possibility that the audience of SGGK may have detected
a parallel between Sir Gawain and de Vere is the fact that Agnes Lancecrona
was—on de Vere’s orders—abducted from Berkhamstead by William
Stanley of Wirral and delivered to Chester Castle, where the earl had set
up his household in 1387. William Stanley was Sir John’s younger brother
and therefore probably known to the author of SGGK, who, according to
some scholars, may have been attached to the Stanley household as a clerk
or confessor (Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 234).
The fact that it was William Stanley who delivered Agnes to Chester
Castle provides a suggestive real-life subtext to SGGK. William’s home,
the Wirral, looms large in the poem as the setting for Gawain’s winter
wanderings before he comes upon Bertilak’s fairy-tale castle of Hautdesert.
John Bowers has proposed that Chester Castle may have served as the
model for the luxurious Hautdesert since de Vere filled his citadel with
“furniture, tapestries, and other finery” (Bowers, An Introduction to the
Gawain Poet, 4). According to Gervase Mathew, de Vere also owned a
splendid bed with blue hangings, embroidered in gold fleur-de-lys and
with owls, that was valued at ₤68 (Mathew, The Court of Richard II, 19).
No doubt, it was this very bed in which de Vere welcomed Agnes upon her
arrival in Chester. And perhaps it also served as the model for the luxurious
bed in which Sir Gawain is awakened by the lovely wife of Lord Bertilak.
But if these elements were intended as a flattering allusion to de Vere’s
elevation to the duchy of Ireland, they also strike an ambiguously chastis-
ing note since, as Ad Putter points out, the passage references an antiwar
passage in The Destruction of Troy where Achilles condemns the war as a
waste of life in a foolish cause.24 The dovetailing of an antiwar sentiment
and a courtly compliment is entirely characteristic of a poet eager to steer
between courtly praise and clerical admonition. Richard’s profligate use of
the ducal title for his favorites may also smack of pride since it implicitly
elevated his own position as an imperial figure. As we shall see in the next
section, this concern with Richard’s imperial ambitions looms large in the
figure of King Arthur in the AMA.
22
After de Vere’s fall, Stanley returned to England in 1388 but the Appellants reappointed
him the king’s lieutenant Ireland for three years in 1389. See Saul, Richard II, 275.
23
John M. Bowers, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (Gainesville: University of Florida
Press, 2012), 4.
24
See footnote in Putter and Stokes, The Works of the Gawain Poet, 655–656.
Mann goes on to qualify her finding by stating: “I am not proposing

that SGGK should be read as a roman à clef, with Gawain himself as a
covert stand-in for de Vere, but simply that assigning him the pentangle as
his heraldic blazon might have been a graceful way of associating Richard’s
beloved friend (or perhaps his memory) with the romance’s virtues”
(Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics,” 241). But there may be more to Mann’s
insight than a passing heraldic allusion. If the audience of SGGK saw in Sir
Gawain a cipher for de Vere, this would have been intended primarily as a
compliment since Gawain had a reputation for bravery and was Arthur’s
premier knight just as de Vere was Richard II’s favorite courtier. However,
Gawain’s susceptibility to worldly pleasures and the blandishments of
Bertilak’s wife underline the sin of pride of which de Vere was guilty when
it came to his extramarital affair with Agnes Lancecrona. The poem may
well have been written as a backward glance at de Vere’s glamorous, but
short-lived ascendancy at the court of Richard II, and might therefore have
been intended to compliment the king and his favorite by equating them
with the heroes of the Round Table while also serving as a morality tale on
the dangers inherent in chivalric-courtly pride.
According to Walsingham, Richard approved the illicit match between
de Vere and Agnes because a friar in the former’s household cast a malefi-
cium (spell) on the king (Astell, Political Allegory, 191, footnote 86). If
Bertilak’s mysterious wife was indeed intended as an allusion to Agnes
Lancecrona, this would be consistent with Walsingham’s hostile assump-
tion that Agnes used magic to ensnare de Vere (and Richard) into marry-
ing her (Astell, Political Allegory, 129). This association of Agnes with
witchcraft would also help to explain the role of the sorceress Morgan le
Fay—the aged companion of Bertilak’s wife—in SGGK. At the end of the
poem, the reader is informed that Arthur’s half-sister (and thus Gawain’s
own aunt) was the instigator of the entire plot and that she used magical
arts to transform Bertilak into the Green Knight: “Thurgh myght of
Morgue la Faye that in my house lenges/And quoyntyse of clergye, by
craftes wel lerned,/The maystres of Merlin, mony has taken” (“Through
the might of Morgan le Fay, that lodges at my house,/By subtleties of sci-
ence and sorcerers’ arts,/the mistress of Merlin, she has caught many a
man”) (2446–2448). Sir Bertilak then goes on to explain that Morgan’s
motivation was to punish the pride and arrogance (“sorquydrye”, 2457)
of the Arthurian court. We shall return to this enigmatic ending later.
The real-life love affair between de Vere and Agnes seems to have been
instigated by de Vere rather than by Agnes, or was at least consensual. But
in the poem the woman becomes the seductress in the guise of Bertilak’s
44 A. THOMAS
wife, the personification of luxuria. It is this anti-feminist assumption that

all women are devious and promiscuous that animates Gawain’s bitter
outburst against women at the end of the poem:
Bot hit is no ferly thigh a fol madde,

And thurgh wyles of wymmen be wonnen to sorwe.
For so was Adam in erde with one bigyled,
And Salomon with fele sere; and Samson eftsones—
Dalyda dalt him his wyrde—and David thereafter
Was blended with Barsabe, that much bale tholed. (2414–2419)
[And if a dullard should dote, deem it no wonder,
And through the wiles of a woman be wooed into sorrow,
For so was Adam by one, when the world began,
And Solomon by many more, and Samson the mighty—
Delilah was his doom, and David thereafter
Was beguiled by Bathsheba, and bore much distress.]25
In the Hebrew Bible (2 Samuel 11), David espies Bathsheba bathing

and orders her to be brought to him for his sexual gratification. He then
arranges for her husband, Uriah the Hittite, to be sent into the thick of
battle and killed. Gawain’s rant is typical of medieval misogyny in invert-
ing the story to make Bathsheba the guilty party and King David her
victim.26 The biblical story forms a curious parallel to de Vere’s order to
have Agnes brought to him at Chester Castle. In both cases the Gawain-
poet inverts the true circumstances to make the woman the seductress and
the man the victim rather than the instigator of an adulterous affair. This
inversion gets Gawain/de Vere off the hook, yet leaves open the criticism
that the male protagonist made a profound error of judgement based on
the sin of pride. This explanation would be characteristic of the poet’s
intention to compliment Richard’s favorite while providing a subtle cri-
tique of his moral shortcomings. Given the royal couple’s alleged commit-
ment to chaste marriage, the passionate nature of the Lancecrona affair
would have raised major moral scruples about de Vere’s behavior in real
life and Gawain’s flawed conduct in SGGK.
25
The Gawain Poet: Complete Works, translated by Marie Borroff (New York: W.W. Norton,
2011), 257.
26
Writing in 1371–1372, Geoffrey de la Tour Landry similarly portrays Bathsheba as a
seductress and implies that she staged the encounter with David. See Deirdre Jackson,
Medieval Woman (London: British Library, 2015), 22.
If SGGK was indeed written for Richard’s court, the flattering parallel
between the king’s favorite and Gawain of Arthurian legend would have
been perfectly appropriate. However, this was all the more reason to high-
light the moral dangers inherent in the Lancecrona affair. This might
explain the fact that the real-life scenario of de Vere abducting Agnes to his
castle at Chester is subtly inverted in SGGK when Bertilak’s wife makes
Gawain a prisoner in her castle, threatening to tie him to his bed so that he
cannot escape (1208–1211). In spite of his lack of guilt, by the end of the
poem, Sir Gawain must still pay the price for succumbing to the lady’s
blandishments and accepting her green girdle. His humiliation in the final
scene, when the entire plot is exposed by Sir Bertilak/the Green Knight—
signals the moral dangers of the female body and extramarital sex, a warn-
ing that the original members of the poem’s audience—especially if they
were looking back at the doomed career of Robert de Vere after his exile—
could not have totally ignored.
In the poem women are tarred with the anti-feminist brush that they
are always inclined to lead men astray. In fit 3, it is made clear that Bertilak’s
wife is not only a seductress, but a rather dangerous one.27 The anxiety
about women’s power over men is reinforced by the metaphors that per-
vade each encounter between Sir Gawain and his hostess: in the first
encounter, she deploys the courtly love language of the lady-as-jailer to
assert her power over her interlocutor; in the second encounter, the meta-
phor shifts to the even more transgressive image of woman-as-teacher:
“Yet I kende yow of kyssyng” (“I taught you how to kiss”) (1489). In 1
Corinthians 11 St Paul explicitly states that women should not be allowed
to preach, and the medieval Church took the prohibition very seriously.
But at the time that SGGK was being written the controversial question of
women’s right to preach had flared up in connection with Lollard follow-
ers of Wyclif. Some of Richard’s chamber knights were tainted with the
suspicion of pro-Lollard sympathies; and this suspicion may have extended
to Queen Anne and her Bohemian entourage, since the queen was reputed
by Wyclif himself to have possessed copies of the Gospels in three lan-
guages (Czech, German, and Latin). Wyclif used the queen’s multilingual
literacy to defend the translation of the Gospels into English by suggesting
27
It is of interest that the spelling of Bertilak’s name, albeit presumably of French origin,
recalls the Czech names of some of Queen Anne’s Bohemian household, such as Nicholas
Horník, her confessor.
46 A. THOMAS
that to call her a heretic for possessing a vernacular Bible would be indeed
“diabolical pride” (luciferina superbia).28 The implication here is that
Wyclif himself had been accused of the sin of pride.
After the beheading scene Lord Bertilak grants Sir Gawain absolution
for his sins:
“Thou art confessed so clene, beknowen of thy mysses,

And has the penaunce apert of point of myn egge,
I holde thee polysed of that plight and pured as clene
As thou hades never forfeted, syn thou was borne.” (2391–2394)
[“You are so fully confessed, your failings made known,
And bear the plain penance of the point of my blade,
I hold you polished as a pearl, as pure and as bright
As you had lived free of fault since first you were born.”]
According to Richard Rex, Wyclif believed that “even when it is use-

ful, confession can be made just as well to a lay person or to God.”29
Wyclif maintained that there was no need to confess to a priest, since
“priests nor anyone else can tell who is predestined, and thus who is
truly contrite” (Rex, The Lollards, 47). In the eyes of the Church the
denial of the priest’s authority was nothing less than diabolical pride. In
granting absolution to Sir Gawain, Lord Bertilak is not only usurping
the power and authority of the priest to hear confession and grant abso-
lution; as a layman he seems to be mimicking Lollard belief that the
laity was equally as qualified as the priest to hear confession and grant
absolution. Further, it is worth noting the demonic connotations of the
Green Chapel. When Sir Gawain first sees it, he imagines the Devil say-
ing matins at midnight (2186–2188); he then goes on to state that it is
the Devil (“the Fend”) that has lured him to the site (2193–2194). The
Chapel’s connotations of evil and witchcraft recall the demonization of
the Lollard heresy by the Catholic Church. At the Council of Constance,
in 1415, Wyclif was condemned as a heresiarch, the founder of a new
and dangerous heresy. The alleged real-life setting for the Green
Chapel, a rock crevice known locally in Staffordshire as “Lud’s Church,”
28
John Wyclif’s Polemical Works in Latin, edited by R. Buddensieg, 2 vols (London, 1883),
vol. 1, 168. See also Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 30.
29
Richard Rex, The Lollards (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 47.
was an illicit meeting place for Lollards in the fifteenth century.30 If this
association of the site with Wycliffite heresy was already known to the
Gawain-poet in the late fourteenth century, it reinforces the theory that
the Green Chapel had sinister connotations for the original audience.
As a chaste knight devoted to Mary, Gawain betrays his own principles
by trusting more in the talisman of the green girdle than his own shield,
emblazoned with the image of the Blessed Virgin. His punishment is to
undergo an ordeal which exposes his all-too-human frailty. On one level,
the poet seems to suggest that Gawain’s crime is not as serious as it
seems, and Sir Bertilak bears out that impression by laughing off the
whole incident and inviting Gawain back to Hautdesert. But Sir Bertilak
is not the poet. On the contrary, he seems to be the agent of pride quite
as much as its chastiser. Gawain’s humiliation cannot be assuaged by Sir
Bertilak’s avuncular dismissal. On the contrary, his levity only seems to
make things worse; and Gawain returns to Camelot a chastened peniten-
tial knight (Fig. 2.1).
If the author of SGGK treats the conjoined themes of pride and peni-
tence obliquely, it is in the knowledge that he must exercise caution in
critiquing the values of the Ricardian court. If the flawed Sir Gawain is a
cipher for Robert de Vere, it follows that King Arthur is a cipher for the
young Richard II. While both characters are presented in a largely posi-
tive light, they nevertheless fall short of the moral ideals exemplified by
the Round Table. To this extent the court of Richard II is presented in a
somewhat ambiguous light, reckless and brave, but also lacking in wis-
dom and maturity. If there is a moral to the romance, it is that pride is
always subtly present in the affairs of men, especially of princes. In laying
the chastisement of the Arthurian court at the door of Morgan le Fay,
the poet seems to be presenting us with a red herring, since the ending
comes across as a rather unconvincing resolution to the story. One way
to explain this implausible denouement is to see Morgan as the cipher
for the poet himself just as Arthur is the cipher for Richard and Gawain
for de Vere. But—perhaps on an unconscious level at least—there is also
a suggestive link between the seductress Lady Bertilak and Richard, since
both seem to have been sexually attracted, respectively, to Gawain and
de Vere. In using Morgan as the instrument of the Arthurian court’s
30
The original name was probably “Lollards’ Church.” See Ralph Elliott, “Landscape and
Geography” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan
Gibson (D. S. Brewer: Cambridge, 1997), 105–117 (116–117).
48 A. THOMAS
Fig. 2.1 Gawain returns to court. Cotton Nero A. x. (ca. 1400). British Library
chastisement, the poet is able to draw attention to the sin of pride (and
the concomitant sin of homosexuality) without causing offence and
harm to himself. After all, it is not Morgan le Fay who concocted the
story, it is the Gawain-poet himself.
The Alliterative Morte Arthur

In 1395 Richard II’s favorite Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, who had
died as a result of a hunting accident near Louvain two years earlier, was
brought back to England for a formal burial at Earl’s Colne (the mauso-
leum of the de Vere family) sometime in November. The distraught
Richard ordered the coffin to be opened so that he could gaze one more
time on his beloved friend and place precious gold rings on his fingers
(Bennett, Richard II, 71). There is a possible allusion to this macabre
scene in the culminating episode in the AMA, when King Arthur similarly
reacts with uncontrolled grief to the death of his nephew Sir Gawain.
I suggest that the author evokes Richard’s feelings on that occasion in the
powerful episode of Arthur opening the dead Gawain’s helmet and kissing
him just as Richard ordered de Vere’s coffin to be unsealed:
Then gliftis the gud king and glopyns in herte,

Gronys full grisely with gretande teris,
Knelis down to the cors and kaught it in armes,
Kastys upe his umbrere and kysses hym sone;
Lokes on his eye-liddis that lowkkid were faire,
His lippis like to the lede and his lire falowede. (3949–3954)31
[The Sovereign stared, stricken with horror,
He groaned with grief and wept great tears.
Then he knelt to the corpse and clasped his comrade,
Cast up his visor and quickly kissed him,
Looked at his eyelids which were locked shut
And at his lead-like lips and lifeless white face.]32
As far as I am aware no one has as yet proposed that King Arthur’s

distress at witnessing the sight of his dead nephew Gawain may have
reminded the contemporary audience of the AMA of the grief displayed
by Richard at de Vere’s funeral at Earl’s Colne. The author of AMA makes
it clear that Arthur is so distraught that he kisses Gawain’s face
repeatedly:
31
Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, edited by Mary Hamel (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1984).
32
The Death of Arthur: A New Verse Translation by Simon Armitage (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2012), 269–271. Subsequent modern citations of AMA refer to this translation.
50 A. THOMAS
Then swetes the swete kynge and in swoun fallis,

Swafres up swiftly, and swetly hym kysses
Till his burliche berde was blowdy berown,
Alls he had bestes birtenede and broghte owt of life. (3969–3972)
[Then the sweet King swayed and fell in a swoon,
Then staggered and stood and stooped to kiss him,
Till his noble beard was bright with blood,
As if he had bent to butcher a beast.]
So intense and unrestrained is Arthur’s grief at witnessing the dead

Gawain that he earns a reprimand from his knights for wringing his hands
and weeping like a woman (3978). This kind of passionate and feminized
behavior was what observers like the chronicler Thomas Walsingham
found so troubling about Richard’s relationship with de Vere. Arthur sim-
ilarly treats Sir Gawain as a martyr, scooping up his blood with his own
hands and pouring it in his helmet as if it were a sacred relic (3993–3996).
Then he orders that the body be embalmed and buried with Masses and
lights (4006–4010), recalling the similar reverence shown by Richard to
de Vere’s embalmed corpse at his burial.
Before Mary Hamel published her definitive edition of the AMA, most
scholars of the poem assumed that Arthur’s invasion of Europe looked
back to the distant days of Edward III’s conquests in France.33 There is no
doubt that Arthur and Edward both repudiate a foreign ruler’s demand
for tribute. But it has to be remembered that Edward III was victorious in
France and retained his English throne, whereas Arthur loses his. In an
important article on the dating of the poem, Larry Benson has argued that
the AMA can be understood as a meditation on the fall of Richard II in
1399 and therefore should be dated no earlier than 1400.34 More recently,
scholars, such as Christine Chrism, have agreed with this later dating and
see the tragic figure of Arthur and his Round Table as a reflection of
Richard II’s disastrous rule and ruinous friendships.
As was also true of Richard, one of Arthur’s failings is his readiness to
accept at face value the flattery of his close advisers. After he awakens from
33
See, for example, J. L. N. O’Loughlin, “English Alliterative Romances.” In Arthurian
Literature in the Middle Ages, edited by Roger Sherman Loomis (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1959), 520–527 (523).
34
Larry D. Benson, “The Date of the Alliterative Morte Arthure,” in Medieval Studies in
Honor of Lillian Herlands Hornstein, edited by Jess B. Bessinger Jr. and Robert R. Raymo
(New York: New York University Press, 1976), 19–40.
his first dream (the fight between the Dragon and the Bear), the King’s
wise men are eager to assure him that he represents the victorious Dragon,
an interpretation the troubled King accepts, although the dream is ambig-
uous and can be seen to foreshadow Arthur’s ultimate tragic showdown
with the traitor Mordred. Though the wise men identify Arthur with the
Dragon (presumably on the grounds that the dragon is the traditional
emblem of Wales), it could also be argued that the Bear signifies Arthur
since “bear” in Old Welsh is arto, the folkloric etymology of Arthur being
a combination of two Welsh words arto (bear) and wiros (man).35
More importantly, it is clear that the wise men are flattering Arthur. In
accepting their interpretation, the king already reveals the sin of pride
(superbia) that will doom him in the end. Richard II’s close advisers and
confessors, including the Dominican friars Alexander Bache and Thomas
Rushook, were frequently criticized for their excessive influence on the
king’s policies (Saul, Richard II, 320–321). Interestingly, Arthur’s advis-
ers are described as “the cunningest of clergy under Christ knowen”
(AMA, 809) (my emphasis).
Although I concur with Benson’s later dating of the poem, I disagree
with his claim that Richard should be equated with the traitor Mordred. I
am inclined to agree with Hamel that Richard is reminiscent of the tragic
figure of Arthur (Hamel, Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, 58). Benson
also dwells in great detail on Arthur’s European conquest, but it is possi-
ble to read the conquest of Rome as a veiled reference to Richard’s ill-
advised second expedition to Ireland, undertaken in 1399 soon after his
seizure of Bolingbroke’s Lancastrian inheritance. The confiscation of the
Lancastrian estates and his rapid departure for Ireland left Richard and his
kingdom vulnerable to Bolingbroke’s subsequent invasion. Like Arthur
in the AMA, Richard drew up his will, at Westminster on April 16, 1399,
before departing for his campaign. The king bequeathed to his faithful
followers large amounts of money: to the duke of Surrey 10,000 marks,
the duke of Exeter 3000 marks, and the duke of Albemarle and the earl of
Wiltshire 2000 marks each (Bennett, Richard II, 147). Interestingly, the
AMA makes a great deal of the fortunes amassed by Arthur as mentioned
in his will: “Take here my testament of tresoure full huge; As I trayste
appon thee, betraye thowe me neuer” (668–669).
35
See the essay on King Arthur in The Anglo-Saxon World, edited by Nicholas J. Higham
and Martin J. Ryan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 64.
52 A. THOMAS
As Bennett has shown, Richard’s state of mind on making his will was

marked by anxiety and apprehension. Like Richard before he set off for
Ireland in 1399, Arthur is full of foreboding even before he hears news of
Mordred’s treachery. Typical of medieval narratives, this sense of dread
assumes the form of a predictive dream36:
Thane this comlyche kinge, as cronicles tellys,

Bownnys brathely to bede with a blythe herte;
Of he slynges with sleghte and slakes his gyrdill,
And fore slewthe of slomowre on a slepe fallis.
Bot by ane aftyre mydnyghte all his mode changede;
He mett in the morne-while full meruaylous dremes. (3218–3223)
[Then the courteous king, as the chronicles record,
Went at once to his bed with a happy heart,
And did not dally in undressing and undoing his girdle,
And for lack of sleep slipped swiftly into slumber.
But in the hour after midnight his mood altered,
For as morning drew near he met with a nightmare.]
Like Arthur when informed of Mordred’s usurpation, Richard was

forced to abandon his campaign overseas and rushed back to England to
defend his kingdom. Explaining Richard’s fascination with Ireland, Nigel
Saul points out, “it is possible that Richard saw his dominions much as the
Angevins had seen theirs, as a loose ‘empire’ of principalities, duchies and
lordships” (Saul, Richard II, 292). When Philippe de Mézières addressed
Richard in his Epistre of 1395 as “King of Great Britain,” he was acknowl-
edging Richard’s vision of himself as ruler of all the British Isles (Saul,
Richard II, 2912).
These imperial ambitions were not confined to Richard’s rule of the
British Isles but extended to Continental Europe as well. Both Arthur in
the AMA and Richard are similar in entertaining unrealistic imperial fanta-
sies of European domination, Arthur in dreaming of taking Lucius’ Roman
crown and Richard in aspiring to become Holy Roman Emperor by right
of his wife Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles IV and half-sister of the king of the Romans Wenceslas IV. From
the very beginning of the AMA the hostility between Lucius and Arthur is
framed as a rivalry for power, reflecting the real-life rivalry between Richard
II and his brother-in-law Wenceslas. Arthur tells Sir Cador that it is not he,
36
It is of interest that dreams of foreboding are also found in Shakespeare’s plays, such as
Richard III, where the tyrannical King has nightmares before the Battle of Bosworth.
Arthur, who owes tribute to the Emperor Lucius but the other way round,
citing the fact that his own ancestors were emperors (Hamel, Morte
Arthure: A Critical Edition, 275–285).
Emperor-elect Wenceslas was unpopular and was deposed as king of the
Romans in 1400. He was also tainted with accusations of heresy on account
of his support for the Hussites, the Bohemian followers of John Wyclif. In
what is probably an allusion to Wenceslas’ association with the Hussite
heresy the AMA refers to Lucius as “the false heretik that Emperour him
calles/That occupies in errour the Empire of Rome” (“And the empty
heretic who calls himself Emperor,/who rules without right the Empire of
Rome”; 1307–1308). At some point in his reign, perhaps earlier than we
think, Richard decided that he wanted to replace his brother-in-law
Wenceslas as Emperor-elect. An important part of the rivalry between
Richard and Wenceslas was their shared identification with Troy, which
was frequently a site of ideological appropriation by medieval rulers. The
myth of Britain’s foundation by the Trojan refugee Brutus, a descendant
of Aeneas, is recalled in the opening lines of SGGK. In order to justify his
conquest of Scotland Edward I had appealed in a letter to the Pope to his
superior right as the descendant of Locrine, the eldest son of Brutus of
Troy.37 According to the diplomat and chronicler Edmund de Dyntner (ca.
1375–1449), Wenceslas showed him the murals depicting the Luxembourg
family genealogy at Karlstein Castle and boasted that he was descended
from the Trojans and Charlemagne through his great-grandfather’s mar-
riage to the daughter of John of Brabant.38 This ambitious family tree,
which illustrates the Luxembourgs’ arriviste ambitions quite as much as
their illustrious pedigree, once adorned the walls of Karlstein Castle, but is
now lost and survives only in the form of later sixteenth-century drawings
contained in the Codex Heidelbergensis (now in the National Gallery,
Prague). The original cycle depicted more than sixty of the Emperor’s
alleged ancestors, beginning with Noah and culminating—through a pan-
oply of biblical, classical, Merovingian, and Carolingian rulers—with
Charles himself (Thomas, A Blessed Shore, 74). For both Wenceslas as
Emperor-elect and Richard as would-be Emperor, their descent from Troy
was a crucial component of their imperial ambitions.
37
See Sylvia Federico, New Troy. Fantasies of Empire in the Later Middle Ages, Medieval
Cultures at Minnesota, 36 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 68.
38
See Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 75.
54 A. THOMAS
We can see further evidence of Richard’s political designs in a painting of

imperial eagles on the wooden roof of the Great Hospital in Norwich, vis-
ited by Richard and Anne in 1383. The king’s imperial ambitions were given
additional artistic expression in the carved head of an emperor, wearing a
triple crown, still visible in the south-east pier of York Minster and probably
dating from the 1390s.39 Richard’s extensive refurbishment of Westminster
Hall was clearly modeled on Charles IV’s ambitious building projects at
Karlstein Castle and in Prague itself.40 The statues of thirteen English
kings in Westminster Hall, extending from Edward the Confessor to Richard
himself, date from 1385. Here too is evidence of Luxembourg imperial
influence: just as Richard traced his sacral kingship back to his saintly ances-
tor Edward the Confessor, so Charles IV had emphasized his descent from
the Bohemian proto-martyr Ludmila and her grandson, duke Wenceslas.
Charles IV was an astute propagandist as well as a generous patron of
the arts: for him art and ideology went hand in hand.41 An important
component of his imperial ideology was his identification with Christ. The
analogy between divine majesty and imperial majesty originated in the
early Christian Church following Constantine’s conversion to Christianity
in ad 313 and was endorsed by early Christian apologists like Eusebius.
Richard II appears to have cultivated the image of alter Christus in his
pursuit of the imperial throne. The famous Westminster Abbey full-length
portrait of the king depicts him as a Christ-like figure with long hair,
crowned and enthroned as he faces the viewer in a dramatic and powerful
assertion of his spiritual and temporal authority (Fig. 2.2). The original
gold frame of the portrait, which still survives, displays the imperial eagle
above the arms of England on both sides of the panel along with the initial
“R” and a sunburst along the top and bottom.
The Bohemian-imperial influence on English court art is well attested
in such surviving artifacts as the richly illuminated Liber Regalis, the coro-
nation book commissioned by Richard II around 1382 (shortly after his
marriage to Anne) or possibly as late as the mid-1390s when Richard
began an aggressive campaign to be elected Holy Roman Emperor. Paul
39
John H. Harvey, “Richard II and York” in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of
May McKisack, edited by F. R. H. du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (London, 1971),
202–217 (214).
40
Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of
Power 1200–1440 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995), 51.
41
See Iva Rosario, Art and Propaganda. Charles IV of Bohemia, 1346–1378 (Woodbridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2000).
Fig. 2.2 Westminster

Portrait of King Richard
II (ca. 1395).
Westminster Abbey
Binski has proposed that the book may have been intended to circulate
among the Electors on the Continent in order to enhance Richard’s claim
to the imperial crown in the late 1390s.42 In particular, the mannerist style
of the elongated figures and their curious claw-like hands in the Liber
Regalis recall contemporary Bohemian manuscript illumination and wall
painting such as the magnificent German Bible of Wenceslas IV, the
Golden Bull of 1400, and the mulier amicta sole motif from the Apocalypse
42
Paul Binski, “The Liber Regalis: Its Date and European Context” in The Regal Image of
Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, edited by Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnis, and Caroline
Elam (London, 1997), 233–246 at 246.
56 A. THOMAS
cycle at Karlstein Castle. If Richard intended the book to circulate on the

Continent, as Binksi hypothesizes, it would have made sense to have it
illustrated by Bohemian, rather than English, artists.
In the last years of his reign this ambition seems to have gone to
Richard’s head as he sought to replace his discredited brother-in-law
Wenceslas, who was deposed by the Electors in 1400. In 1397 there was a
flurry of diplomatic activity between England and the Holy Roman Empire,
as Richard made concrete moves to replace his discredited brother-in-law.
On May 30, the king received a report concerning the ceremony at which
Rupert of Bavaria, Count Palatine of the Rhine, had become his vassal at
Oppenheim. In late June of the same year Hugh Hervorst, Archdeacon of
Cologne, arrived in England; and on July 7, in complementary ceremonies
at Westminster and Godesburg, Frederick, Archbishop of Cologne, per-
formed homage to Richard in return for an annual pension of £1000 (see
Bennett, Richard II, 90).
Following these diplomatic successes, Richard moved against the Lords
Appellant by inviting Gloucester, Warwick, and Arundel to a feast on July
10. Here he intended to arrest all three men on charges of treason, but the
ruse failed since only one of the men (Gloucester) showed up. Richard was
outwardly cordial to the guest but by the end of the dinner his mood had
changed, rather as Fortune’s mood shifted from positive to hostile in
Arthur’s second dream in the AMA. Gloucester was arrested and sent to
the Tower of London, while measures were taken to secure Arundel and
Warwick. In moving so ruthlessly against his former opponents, Richard
was not only taking delayed revenge against the men who had humiliated
him at the Merciless Parliament in 1388; he was also reacting to foreign
criticism that he was not the master of his own house and therefore
unqualified to become Holy Roman Emperor. The coup against the lead-
ing Appellants was intended to demonstrate to the imperial Electors that
Richard was not only in control of his own kingdom but equally capable of
proving a strong and decisive Emperor in contrast to the inept and indeci-
sive Wenceslas. In a sense, therefore, Richard’s imperial fantasies led him to
pursue domestic policies that merely confirmed his reputation for tyranny
in the eyes of many of his subjects. The AMA emphasizes the tragic end of
the reign in the guise of the collapse of King Arthur’s Round Table and the
king’s betrayal by Mordred. Arthur here serves as a typical example of a
king who overreaches himself and falls prey to the vicissitudes of Fortune’s
Wheel. But he also falls victim to his own pride and arrogance (surquidrie),
as the sage makes clear in his interpretation of Arthur’s second dream:
“Freke,” says the philosopher, “thy fortune is passed.

For thou shall find her thy fo; fraist when thee likes!
Thou art the highest, I hete thee forsooth;
Challenge now when thou will, thou cheves no more!
Thou has shed much blood and shalkes destroyed,
Sakeles, in surquidrie, in sere kings lands;
Shrive thee of thy shame and shape for thine end.[”] (3394–3400)
[“Sir,” said the sage, “your good fortune has ceased,
You shall find her your foe, no matter how you fight.
You sway at the summit, I swear it is so,
So challenge as you may, you will never achieve more.
You have shed much blood, butchered many beings,
Killed civilians out of vanity through vast kingdoms.
Now shuck off your shame and shape yourself for death.”]
Although the AMA assumes the form of a traditional meditation on

the fall of kings and the power of Fortune’s Wheel, it also resonates with
the fate of Richard II. To quote Mary Hamel’s remarks on the AMA:
“No other work of the first decade of the fifteenth century seems to rever-
berate quite so much with the shock of Richard II’s fall and Henry IV’s
usurpation; no other work comments so subtly on human pride and self-
destructiveness without taking sides or making political statements”
(Hamel, Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, x).
Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur

Sir Thomas Malory’s great prose compendium of Arthurian romance was
completed around 1469–1470 and was first published by William Caxton
in 1485. Although Shakespeare would not have been familiar with the
AMA (since it survives only in a unique manuscript which was not edited
until the nineteenth century), he probably knew Malory’s compendious
work, since three editions were published before the English Civil War:
William Copland’s (1557), Thomas Earl’s (1585), and William Stansby’s
(1634). In addition to using Holinshed’s chronicles as the main source for
Richard II, Shakespeare may have used Malory’s work as a cipher to shed
critical light on Elizabeth’s government. King Lear also contains several
references to Le Morte Darthur; hence it is likely that it may also have
influenced Richard II, in particular the abdication scene.43
43
See Cherrell Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play with Play: Medieval Imagery and Scenic Form
in Hamlet, Othello and King Lear (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990),
100–101.
58 A. THOMAS
Unlike SGGK and Malory’s French sources, with their inner conflict
within an individual knight between his ideals and his all-too-flawed
humanity, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur chronicles the collective breakdown
of harmony among Arthur’s knights. In Helen Cooper’s succinct formula-
tion, “his version is not a clash between earthly and divine rivalries focused
on the sin of sexual sinfulness, but a study of the personal rivalries that
underlie political disintegration.”44 The infighting between Arthur’s
knights clearly reflects the Wars of the Roses and the ineffectual reign of
Henry VI. Malory was knighted by Henry VI but changed sides during
the wars and ended up supporting the victorious young Edward IV, who
assumed the throne in 1461. His work mirrors the weak monarchy of
Henry VI and presents King Arthur as ineffectual and indecisive, especially
when faced with the internecine conflicts between his knights as a conse-
quence of the love affair between his wife Guinevere and his favorite
knight Sir Lancelot. When Arthur is informed of Lancelot’s successful
attempt to rescue Guinevere from the stake and the deaths of Sir Gaheris
and Sir Gareth, he swoons and, when he awakens, laments his own misfor-
tune: “Alas, that ever I bore crown upon my head, for now I have lost the
fairest fellowship of noble knights that ever Christian king held together”
(Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 481).
Several details in the last book of Le Morte Darthur point to specific
events of the Wars of the Roses; for example, Arthur’s attempt to patch up
an agreement between Lancelot and his opponents recalls the “Loveday”
ceremony on March 25, 1458, at St Paul’s Cathedral when the warring
factions of the houses of York and Lancaster proceeded hand in hand in a
public display of harmony that fooled no one but its well-intentioned
organizer, Henry VI.45 Lancelot’s emergence as a strong and valiant coun-
terpart to Arthur suggests parallels with the young Edward of York, who
became King of England in 1461 at the age of seventeen. The scene of
plunder following the battle between Mordred and Arthur evokes the
ruthless reality of the Wars of the Roses and the breakdown of moral as
well as political order that ensued from the weak reign of Henry VI:
So Sir Lucan departed, for he was grievously wounded in many places. And
as he yode, he saw and hearkened by the moonlight how that pillagers and
robbers were come into the field to pillage and to rob many a full noble
44
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur. The Winchester Manuscript, edited and abridged
by Helen Cooper (Oxford: Oxford World Classics), xii.
45
David Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 52.
knight of brooches and bees, and of many a good ring and many a rich
jewel. And who that were no dead all out, there they slew them for their
harness and their riches. (Le Morte Darthur, 513)
King Arthur’s inability to control his warring knights and his futile
attempts to reconcile them certainly recall King Henry’s disastrous rule.
The agreement that Arthur’s rebellious nephew Sir Mordred would inherit
the throne after the former’s death clearly recalls the compromise made in
October 1460 that the throne should pass to Edward IV’s father Richard,
duke of York, after the king’s death even though Henry by this time had a
son and heir46: “And at the last, Sir Mordred was agree to have Cornwall
and Kent by King Arthur’s days, and after that all England, after the days
of King Arthur” (Le Morte Darthur, 511). Confirming the political topi-
cality of these references, Malory addresses the fickle nature of the English
knights who constantly changed sides during the Wars of the Roses:
Lo, ye all Englishmen, see ye not what a mischief was here? For he that was
the most king and noblest knight of the world, and most loved the fellow-
ship of noble knights, and by him that all were upheld, and yet might not
these Englishmen hold them content with him. Lo, thus was the old custom
and usages of this land; and men say that we of this land have not lost this
custom. Alas, this is a great default of us Englishmen, for there may nothing
please us no term. (Le Morte Darthur, 507)
Not surprisingly, the wheel of Fortune motif is central to the descrip-

tion of Arthur’s fall. Derived from the second dream in the AMA, Arthur
dreams that he is plunged from a turning wheel into a “hideous deep black
water” and snatched at by “serpents and worms and wild beasts.” These
beasts represent the warring knights of Arthur’s court as well as the mem-
bers of the warring houses of Lancaster and York in the reign of Henry VI:
So upon Trinity Sunday at night, King Arthur dreamed a wonderful dream;

and in dream him seemed that he sat upon a chafflet in a chair, and the chair
was fast to a wheel, and thereupon sat King Arthur in the richest cloth of
gold that might be made. And the King thought that there was under him,
far from him, a hideous deep black water, and therein was all manner of
serpents and worms and wild beasts, foul and horrible. And suddenly the
King thought that the wheel turned upside down, and he fell among the
serpents, and every beast took him by a limb. And then the King cried as he
lay in his bed, “Help, help!”. (Malory, Le Morte Darthur, 510)
46
See A. J. Pollard, The Wars of the Roses (London: Palgrave, 2001), 65.
60 A. THOMAS
The fate of Arthur remains a mystery. Malory reproduces the standard

account that the wounded king was taken to Avalon on a barge by three
queens, but also provides an alternative explanation that he is buried in a
grave next to the chapel encountered by the grieving Sir Bedivere (516).
This ambiguous ending perhaps reflects the mysterious fate of Henry VI,
who disappeared from sight after Edward IV regained the throne in 1471
and was murdered in the Tower of London soon after. Following the
king’s death, several of Arthur’s knights leave England for the Holy Land
in order to do penance for their past sins and to become holy men: “For
the French book maketh mention, and is authorized, that Sir Bors, Sir
Ector, Sir Blamor, and Sir Bleoberis went into the Holy Land there as Jesu
Christ was quick and dead, and anon as they had established their lands”
(Le Morte Darthur, 526). Similarly, Queen Guinevere enters a nunnery
while Lancelot “endured in great penance for six years” and then “took
the habit of priesthood” (522).
Shakespeare’s Richard II
In February 1601, Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex and Queen
Elizabeth’s disgraced favorite, led his followers into London in an unsuc-
cessful attempt to seize the throne or at the very least to remove from
office his hated rivals and her principal councilors, Robert Cecil and Walter
Ralegh. A few days earlier some of Essex’s followers had offered
Shakespeare’s company (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) 40 shillings to
perform a version of the play Richard II—by this time an old piece—on
Saturday afternoon, the day before the attempted uprising.47 The rebel-
lion failed, and Essex lost his head. The actor and shareholder Augustine
Phillips was summoned before the Privy Council to answer questions
about the performance, but no punitive action was taken against the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men.
As Frances E. Dolan points out, “evidence suggests that the story of an
anointed king’s downfall and a usurper’s triumph had become associated
with Elizabeth and Essex.”48 The crown had already made an effort to
suppress a printed version of Richard II’s story, John Hayward’s Life of
47
E. M. Albright, “Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy.” Publications of the
Modern Languages Association (1927) 42: 686–720.
48
See the introduction to William Shakespeare Richard II, edited by Frances E. Dolan
(London: The Pelican Shakespeare, 2000), xxxv.
Henry IV, first printed in 1599 with a preface addressed to the earl of
Essex.49 All the printed versions of Richard II published in Elizabeth’s
lifetime appear to have been similarly subject to government censorship.
In these printed versions lines 154–317 are cut from the highly sensitive
and subversive deposition scene (act 4, scene 1).50 The full version of the
scene was only printed in the fourth Quarto in 1608, five years after
Elizabeth’s death, and there is no way of knowing whether the complete
version of the scene was ever performed during the queen’s lifetime.51
Queen Elizabeth seems to have recognized the parallel between herself
and Richard highlighted by the ad hoc staging of the play in February 1601,
since later in the same year, she remarked to William Lambarde, the Keeper
of the Records at the Tower of London: “I am Richard II, know ye not
that?”52 Doubts have been cast on the authenticity of these famous words
but, as Peter Lake points out, even if Elizabeth did not make these comments,
they are the kind of thing she might have said.53 More importantly for us, did
Shakespeare intend this parallel between Richard and Elizabeth and, if so, did
his audience recognize this parallel? Did the play already enjoy a risqué repu-
tation among London theatergoers before the occasional performance; and if
so, did this reputation linger on in the memories of those of Essex’s followers
who wished to see it reenacted six years after its first performance?
As already mentioned, some Catholic writers deliberately drew unflat-
tering parallels between Richard II and Elizabeth. Perhaps the most influ-
ential of these was an inflammatory book titled A Conference about the
Next Succession to the Crown of England, attributed to one R. Doleman
but actually written by the Jesuit Robert Parsons, an archenemy of Queen
Elizabeth. Two thousand copies of the book were printed in Antwerp and
smuggled into England, where there was an immediate run on copies. The
author mischievously used the strategies of his enemies to destabilize the
assumption of a Protestant succession by appealing to the rights of
Parliament to decide the matter. In the words of John Guy:
49
J. Leeds Barroll, “A New History for Shakespeare and His Time,” Shakespeare Quarterly
vol. 9, no. 4 (1988), 441–464.
50
Janet Clare, “Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority”: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic
Censorship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 47–51.
51
Robyn Bolam, “Richard II: Shakespeare and the Language of the Stage” in The
Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, edited by Michael Hattaway
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141–157 (143).
52
John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (London,
1823), III, 552.
53
Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Politics in the History
Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, 267).
62 A. THOMAS
With the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots dead and her son, James VI, a
Protestant, the Jesuit Parsons stole the Calvinists’ clothes and argued—not
unlike the young Burghley, when he had tried for so many years to exclude
Mary—that it was written within the power of the “Commonwealth” (by
which Parsons meant Parliament) to determine the succession on its own.
Bad or incompetent rulers like King John or Richard II had in the past been
called to account or deposed, and Parliament might, for good reasons,
choose to debar an otherwise lawful successor. (Guy, Elizabeth: The Forgotten
Years, 248)
Inspired by Parsons’ book, Shakespeare may well have decided to write

Richard II and King John at this juncture in order to explore the similarities
between these incompetent medieval kings and Elizabeth I.54 Peter Lake
claims that both plays can be read as responses to Parsons’ treatise: though
Shakespeare is not endorsing Parsons’ position (that the monarchy is in
effect elective rather than hereditary), he is showing how tyranny inevitably
leads to rebellion and usurpation. Lake goes on to posit that “rather than
some epitome of a lost medieval golden age of monarchical legitimacy,
Richard is a recognizably Tudor figure, using an emergent tradition of royal
absolutism to legitimize novel claims and exactions” (Lake, How Shakespeare
Put Politics on the Stage, 266). This is true, but he is also a flawed medieval
ruler in the tradition established by the romances we have discussed.
The 1590s was a decade marked by bad harvests, a poor economy,
expensive wars fought on several foreign fronts, corruption, bribe-taking,
and mounting religious persecution.55 Furthermore, the year these two
plays were probably written—1595—saw not only the publication of
Parsons’ book but also the outbreak of major riots against Elizabeth’s rule
and widespread discontent with her government (Guy, Elizabeth: The
Forgotten Years, 20–22). The unstable reign of Richard II would thus have
resonated with Shakespeare’s London audience in a very immediate way
and would have raised questions about the fate of the aging Queen
Elizabeth. The deposition scene would have been deemed highly sugges-
tive, which is presumably why it was cut until long after Elizabeth’s death.
54
See R. Lane, “‘The Sequence of Posterity’: Shakespeare’s King John and the Succession
Controversy,” Studies in Philology vol. 92 (1995), 460–481; Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two
Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977), 107–111; Richard Dutton,
“Shakespeare and Lancaster,” Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 49 (1998): 1–21.
55
See the introduction to The Court of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade,
edited by John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–19.
It is significant that Shakespeare cut all the virulently anti-Catholic sen-

timents from his probable source for King John—a two-part play called
The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn, King of England first published in
1599—reinforcing the likelihood that he was at least sympathetic to the
Catholic cause in Elizabethan England.56 Shakespeare seems to have been
familiar with Catholic polemics at the time he was planning Richard II
and King John. The use of the words “benevolences” and “new exac-
tions” in Richard II (2.1.249–250) echoes the formulations of the
Catholic propagandist Richard Rowlands (also known as Richard
Verstegan) in his A Declaration of the True Causes of the Great Troubles,
Presupposed to be Intended Against the Realm of England (1592) (Forker,
Richard II, 6–7). This suggests that, in addition to his acknowledged
sources for Richard II, Shakespeare was reading Catholic polemics against
Elizabeth and her government.
Both Richard and Elizabeth were conscious of the highly theatrical
dimension to kingship, and in Richard II Shakespeare constantly high-
lights the double role of Richard as king and player.57 By the end of the
play Richard turns his theatrical power against Bolingbroke’s newfound
political power. As Forker states, “Bolingbroke may hold the reins of sov-
ereignty, but Richard is the master of self-dramatization with its attendant
arts—command of rhetoric and metaphor, the power to embarrass ene-
mies, ironic wit and quicksilver fancy, the capacity to evoke both pity and
irritation, the posture of associating his own suffering with the Passion of
Jesus …” (Forker, Richard II, 34).
But Richard’s illusionistic skills are also evident at the beginning of the
play when he conceals his secret murder of his uncle Gloucester by setting
Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, and Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk,
against each other, thus providing an opening spectacle that distracts the
audience from his own involvement in the murder. As Robyn Bolam points
out, Richard’s implication in the murder of Gloucester may have suggested
a disturbing parallel with Elizabeth’s involvement in the execution of
her cousin Mary Queen of Scots in 1587 (Bolam, “Richard II,” 145).
However, highlighting the similarities between the two rulers did not nec-
essarily entail mapping the character of Richard onto Elizabeth in a strictly
56
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, edited by Geoffrey Bullough, vol. 4
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 1–151.
57
See Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (New York: Barnes and Noble,
1962), 122–137.
64 A. THOMAS
one-on-one manner. Rather, we might speak of a certain fluidity whereby

different characters point to the queen’s actions. At the end of the play it is
the usurper Henry Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV, who employs the
same ruthless tactics as Richard at the beginning of the play. Just as Richard
used the murder of Gloucester to divide and rule his overmighty subjects,
so Henry IV, when faced with Richard’s corpse, feigns indignation at the
overthrown King’s murder and blames the murderer. Both Richard’s and
Henry’s Machiavellian tactics may have reminded members of Shakespeare’s
audience of Elizabeth’s dubious claim that she was innocent of ordering
the execution of Mary Queen of Scots:
KING HENRY
Exton, I thank thee not; for thou has wrought
A deed of slander with thy fatal hand,
Upon my head and all this famous land.
EXTON
From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed.
KING HENRY
They love not poison that do poison need.
Nor do I thee. Though I did wish him dead,
I hate the murtherer, love him murthered. (5.6.34–40)
Showing a similar attitude to that of the usurper Bolingbroke towards

his rival, Elizabeth clearly feared the threat posed by the Catholic Queen
of Scots, yet was loath to order her execution as an anointed queen. And
like Bolingbroke faced with Richard’s threat, Elizabeth wanted Mary dead
but did not wish to be the immediate cause of her death. Following the
exposure of the Babington Plot in 1587, which aimed to depose Elizabeth
and place her cousin Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, Elizabeth
desired Mary’s death but wished her to be smothered by a private citizen
rather than formally tried and executed (Guy, Elizabeth: The Forgotten
Years, 84). Like Bolingbroke, faced with the corpse of a man whose death
he had ordered, Elizabeth distanced herself from the news of Mary’s exe-
cution when she was informed of it and blamed those of her advisers,
among them Lord Burghley, who had pushed for it. We see similar topical
resonances in King John. Arthur Marotti has pointed out that the history
play “dangerously suggests a parallel not only between John’s concern
about the threat posed by a rival claimant to the throne, Arthur, and
Elizabeth’s former worries about her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, but
also between John’s blaming of Hubert for the death of Arthur and
Elizabeth’s scapegoating of her Secretary of State, William Davison, for

the execution of Mary”.58
The Bishop of Carlisle’s warning that killing Richard would have dire and
violent consequences for England resonates not only with the War of the
Roses in the fifteenth century but also with confessional and sectarian vio-
lence of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. Anthony Davis and
Paul Yachnin see this powerful speech as possibly reminding English theater-
goers of their English past: “Did they perhaps feel the blood of their ances-
tors and their ancestors’ rulers under their feet in the very soil of the yard of
the Theatre?”59 But Carlisle’s words may equally allude to the religious crisis
that was dividing English society in 1595, the year that saw the bloody exe-
cution of Shakespeare’s distant kinsman, the poet-priest Robert Southwell:
The blood of English shall manure the ground,

And future ages groan for this foul act.
Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,
And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars
Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound.
Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny
Shall here inhabit and this land be call’d
The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls (4.1.137–144)
At the beginning of the play, Richard mediates in a dispute between

two magnates—Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray—by banish-
ing both to the Continent, the former for six years and the latter to per-
manent exile. Mowbray’s drastic fate may well have evoked for many
spectators the real fate of hundreds of English Catholics who had refused
to accept the Royal Supremacy and rejected the Elizabethan church settle-
ment. As Richard Simpson has pointed out, after Elizabeth’s accession in
1558, more than a hundred Oxford scholars left England in order to enter
the Catholic priesthood and undertake the work of the Catholic mission
in Douay and elsewhere.60 Mowbray’s valedictory speech would thus have
resonated with those Elizabethans who had been forced to repudiate their
native English tongue as they assumed a life of exile in Catholic Europe:
58
Arthur Marotti, “Shakespeare and Catholicism.” In Theater and Religion, 218–241 at 223).
59
William Shakespeare, Richard II, edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 36 (introduction).
60
Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion: A Definitive Biography (TAN Books: Charlotte,
North Carolina, 2013), 7.
66 A. THOMAS
MOWBRAY
A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege,
And all unlook’d for from your Highness’ mouth.
A dearer merit, not so deep a maim
As to be cast forth in the common air,
Have I deserved at your Highness’ hands.
The language I have learnt these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo,
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up
Or, being open, put into his hands,
That knows no touch to tune the harmony. (1.3.154–165)
Similarly, in act 1, scene 1 of King Lear, banished Kent articulates the

pain of exile while expressing defiance in the face of royal tyranny: “Fare
thee well, king. Sith thus thou wilt appear,/Freedom lives hence, and ban-
ishment is here” (1.1. 185–186). Like many Elizabethan recusants, Kent
does not actually go abroad, but becomes an internal exile by assuming a
disguise.
Like Richard II, Elizabeth I was deeply narcissistic, but, unlike Richard,
highly pragmatic. The flipside of her narcissism was profound insecurity
concerning her ability to keep the throne, and her alleged self-comparison
with Richard II would support the claim that Elizabeth had no illusions
about how even an anointed monarch could be deposed. In the words of
the Queen’s recent biographer, “it was a suspicion that brought home to
her that monarchy, even if divine, was also transient and mortal” (Guy,
Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years, 346). After Bolingbroke’s banishment,
Richard is still haunted by the former’s popularity among the common
people; and his paranoid speech about his popular cousin echoes Elizabeth’s
deep-seated fears about the esteem in which her cousin, Mary Queen of
Scots, was held among the influential Catholic nobility and gentry of
England.
Bolingbroke’s popularity with the common people might also have
made the Elizabethan audience think of the dashing, young Robert
Devereux, earl of Essex. As Lake states, “by the mid-1590s Essex was both
acknowledged and feared, noted and excoriated, as the past master of this
particular mode of self-presentation and pitch-making” (Lake, How
Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, 285–286):
KING RICHARD
He is our cousin’s cousin; but ’tis doubt,
When time shall call him home from banishment,
Whether our kinsman come to see his friends.
Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here, and Green
Observ’d his courtship to the common people;
How he did seem to dive into their hearts
With humble and familiar courtesy,
What reverence he did throw away on slaves,
Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles
And patient underbearing of his fortune,
As ’twere to banish their affects with him.
Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench,
A brace of draymen bid God speed him well
And had the tribute of his supple knee,
With “Thanks, my countrymen, my loving friends,”’
As were our England in reversion his,
And he our subjects’ next degree in hope. (1.4.20–36)
At all events, the quoted passage signals Elizabeth’s suspicion of all

political rivals. As long as the Protestant Elizabeth remained childless and
the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots alive, England would remain in “rever-
sion” Mary’s. Her eventual, if reluctant decision to have Mary executed
on charges of plotting against the Queen may be said to parallel Richard’s
Machiavellian murder of his uncle Gloucester before the play begins and
his seizure of Bolingbroke’s inheritance following the death of John of
Gaunt. Lake sees the latter action as the crucial moment of transition from
Richard’s covert to overt tyranny, the overweening deed that dooms
Richard morally as well as politically since it precipitates—and justifies—
Bolingbroke’s premature return from his Continental exile (Lake, How
Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, 244).
Moreover, Richard’s dependence on a narrow council of advisers—
upstarts like Bushy, Bagot, and Green—would have reminded some
members of the audience of Elizabeth’s reliance on an inner sanctum of
non-aristocratic councilors such as Lord Burghley (Bushy) and Sir Francis
Walsingham, the Queen’s spymaster, who like Richard’s henchmen vis-à-
vis Bolingbroke, never ceased to point out to Elizabeth the dangerous
popularity of the Queen of Scots (“Ourself and Bushy, Bagot here, and
Green/Observ’d his courtship to the common people”) (1.4.24). In
order to force Elizabeth into signing Mary’s death warrant, Burghley
68 A. THOMAS
spread a false rumor that Spanish troops had landed in Wales (Guy,
Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years, 84). In the later years of her reign the
Queen’s inner circle of privy councilors was also prone to bribery and cor-
ruption, and veniality permeated the regime. Lord Burghley’s income as
Master of the Wards during the last two and a half years of his life shows
that he accepted ₤3301 from suitors as “arranged fees” for eleven grants
of wardship at a time when his official salary as Master was ₤133. This
amount tripled the figure of the Crown’s receipts, which amounted to a
mere ₤906 from these transactions. Where crown receipts were entered in
the official records, Burghley’s profits were listed in a paper marked “This
is to be burned” (Guy, The Reign of Elizabeth I, 8–9). Corruption and
cover-up were the order of the day.
Flattery was also a major preoccupation of Catholic critics of Elizabeth’s
government. The anonymous Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of the
Arts of Cambridge (1584) warns the Queen against the influence of
“wicked persons,” citing the precedent of Richard II (Forker, King
Richard II, 266, note). The danger of flattery is also emphasized by
Northumberland in Shakespeare’s play:
Now, afore God, ’tis shame such wrongs are borne

In him, a royal prince, and many moe
Of noble blood in this declining land.
The King is not himself, but basely led
By flatterers, and what they will inform
Merely in hate ’gainst any of us all,
That will the King severely prosecute
’Gainst us, our lives, our children and our heirs (2.1.238–245)
The last line in particular would have appealed to members of the

Catholic gentry, whose descendants were constantly threatened with the
confiscation of their property for espousing the recusant cause. As we have
seen, the evils of flattery are also laid at the door of King Arthur’s advisers
in the AMA, reflecting the corrupt government of King Richard II.
Upon his return to England from his ill-advised campaign in Ireland—
where he finds himself deserted on all sides and Bolingbroke’s fortunes on
the rise—Richard begins to realize that his waning fortunes are the direct
consequence of his pride: “All souls that will be safe, fly from my side,/For
time hath set a blot upon my pride” (3.2.80–81). Richard now undergoes
the spiritual rebirth rendered possible by self-knowledge. The monologue
in which Richard relinquishes the attributes of his worldly power—jewels,

palace, rich apparel—for the humble attributes of a pilgrim (“palmer”) is
entirely consistent with medieval and early modern penitential romances
such as Sir Isumbras:
KING
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,
My figur’d goblets for a dish of wood,
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking-staff,
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little grave, an obscure grave—[.] (3.3.147–154)
Richard’s penitential speech shares with the medieval romances the

familiar narrative arc from pride to penitence. Following his second
dream in the AMA, Arthur is walking along the road toward Rome,
ruminating on its meaning, when he encounters a pilgrim, who turns out
to be none other than one of his own knights, Sir Craddock, bearing the
dire news of Mordred’s rebellion. The penitential Sir Craddock becomes
the mirror image of the troubled King himself, the obverse of a mighty
monarch at the zenith of his powers (1468–1486), but now on the brink
of self-destruction.
The antithesis between Richard’s royal regalia and the attributes of his
aspirant role as a pilgrim (“palmer”) also recalls Southwell’s poem “new
prince, new pompe” in which Christ’s humble earthly origins are con-
trasted with his princely status as the King of Heaven:
This stable is a Princes Courte

The Cribb his chaire of state
The beastes are parcel of his pompe
The wooden dishe his plate
The persons in that poore attire
His royall livories weare. (17–22)61
61
St Robert Southwell, Collected Poems, edited by Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney
(Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), 15. The poem is printed from the “Waldegrave” Manuscript
(Stonyhurst MS A.v.27). The poem appears after “the burning babe” which Shakespeare
cites in Macbeth (see Chap. 5). Thus it is likely that Shakespeare was familiar with both of
Southwell’s poems.
70 A. THOMAS
Just as Richard aspires to be a pilgrim (“palmer”), so the princely Christ

is described as “this little Pilgrime.” Intriguingly, Richard’s “figured gob-
lets for a dish of wood” also recalls the wording of Christ’s “wooden
dishe” in Southwell’s poem, suggesting that Shakespeare may have actu-
ally read “new prince, new pompe”.
The penitential spirit of the rest of the play comes in the wake of
Richard’s increased understanding that his pride has led to his political
downfall. The sign of this self-knowledge is the imagery of weeping and
tears, which begins with his return to England and continues intermit-
tently for the duration of the play: “Now must I like it well; I weep for
joy/To stand upon my kingdom once again” (3.2.4–5); “Let’s talk of
graves, of worms and epitaphs/Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes/
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth” (3.2.145–147); “We’ll make
foul weather with despised tears” (3.3. 161). Richard’s tears are the token
of his conversion from pride to penitence, damnation to salvation.62 The
image of weeping culminates in the motif of the “Fortune’s buckets”
speech in which Richard resigns the crown to Bolingbroke63:
KING
Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown.
Here, cousin,
On this side my hand, and on that side thine.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water:
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high. (4.1.182–189)
In relinquishing his crown and scepter to Bolingbroke, Richard also

repudiates his pride, making his resignation not simply a political act but
also a religious conversion:
62
John Gerard recounts the story of a schismatic tutor named Thomas Smith whose con-
fession he received amidst a torrent of penitential tears. Smith later became a priest at St
Omers. See John Gerard S.J., The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, translated by Philip
Caraman, S.J. (San Francisco: Saint Ignatius Press, 1988), 219–221.
63
“Fortune’s buckets” may be proverbial but it is also literary and is attested in Guillaume
de Machaut’s Remède de Fortune (ca. 1342) as well as Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale.” See
Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy, 263 (footnote 10).
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;

With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With my own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths. (4.1.206–210)
Perhaps the most “medieval” of all Richard’s words is the famous “hol-
low crown” speech:
For within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humor’d thus,
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king! (3.2.160–170)
As was stated earlier, it is important not to map the character of

Richard onto Elizabeth in a strictly one-on-one manner. This is espe-
cially true of the deposed and disinherited Richard; for as with King
Lear, the monarch’s disinheritance can be understood in the positive
terms of his spiritual redemption. Peter Milward has compared Richard’s
meeting with his sorrowing queen on the way to the Tower with Christ’s
grieving mother (mater dolorosa) on the way to Calvary. Father Milward
also suggests a parallel between Richard leaving Westminster Hall and
Sir Thomas More’s encounter with his daughter Margaret Roper as he
walked from Westminster Hall to his imprisonment in the Tower.64
During the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I it became a commonplace
for wives of condemned Catholics to wait for their husbands to pass by
on the way to Tyburn and other places of execution. Antonia Fraser has
cited examples of how the wives of the Gunpowder plotters mingled in
the crowds of onlookers for an opportunity to bid farewell to their
doomed husbands. Thomas Bates’ wife Martha even managed to throw
64
Peter Milward, SJ, “The Catholic King Lear” in The Catholic Shakespeare? Portsmouth
Review (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2013), 59–65 (60).
72 A. THOMAS
herself on her husband as he was dragged past her on a wattle hurdle.65

No doubt these scenarios were themselves modeled on Christ’s path to
Calvary; but the larger point is that Shakespeare uses the device not
only to highlight Richard’s religious role as alter Christus but also his
political role as a victim of state tyranny, a stand-in for all those Catholic
priests like Southwell executed under Elizabeth.
Words of encouragement were often exchanged between the con-
demned and their wives. Similarly, Richard stops and advises his queen to
leave England: “Hie thee to France,/And cloister thee in some religious
house./Our holy lives must win a new world’s crown” (5.1.22–14).
Father Milward focuses on the religious significance of the words “new
world’s crown” but does not comment on the king’s injunction to his
wife to leave England and enter a cloister in France. Shakespeare’s origi-
nal audience might have understood this reference in political as well as
religious terms, since at the time the play was written many recusant
wives and sisters had left England to enter nunneries in France. For
example, Elizabeth Vaux, daughter of the prominent recusant nobleman
William Lord Vaux, was smuggled across the Channel and entered the
closed community of the Poor Clares in Rouen in March 1582 (Childs,
God’s Traitors, 91). Her brother George married Eliza Roper, daughter
of Sir John Roper of Lynsted, Kent. Eliza’s great uncle had married Sir
Thomas More’s favorite daughter Margaret in 1521 (Childs, God’s
Traitors, 224). Although she never became a nun, Eliza Vaux née Roper
was one of the most defiant and brave Catholic women of her time. In
King Lear France also plays a political role as the place of exile of the
disinherited Cordelia. The King of France welcomes her as his bride in
the biblical language of St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians as if she were
a sponsa Christi. In being forced to leave for France Cordelia’s fate also
recalls the fate of recusant women like Elizabeth Vaux, who became a
bride of Christ in Rouen.
The culminating moment of the abdication scene is the motif of the
mirror (glass), which the king asks to be brought to him in act 4, scene 1.
Richard compares his conscience not only with a mirror but also with a
book, recalling the morality play Everyman:
See Antonia Fraser, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (New York:
65
Anchor Books, 1996), 230.

They shall be satisfied. I’ll read enough

When I do see the book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that’s my self.
Enter one with a glass.
Give me that glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck
Upon this face of mine.
And made no deeper wounds? O flatt’ring glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me. (4.1.273–281)
The mirror that Richard holds up to his face becomes not only a reflec-
tion of his own pride but also of those who followed him in good fortune
and who have now abandoned him in adversity. Herein lies the most tren-
chant political insight of the play—the realization not only that Richard’s
power depended on the flattery of others but that his successor’s power is
established on the same shaky foundation of human treachery:
Was this face the face

That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink?
Is this the face that fac’d so many follies
That was at last outfac’d by Bullingbrook?
A brittle glory shineth in this face,
As brittle as the glory is the face.
[Dashes the glass to the ground.]
For there it is, crack’d in an hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport—
How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face. (4.1.281–291)
Just as Richard holds up the mirror not just to himself but also to
Bolingbroke—making the latter the object of the moral as well as the king
himself—so too, we might say, does Shakespeare hold up Richard as a
negative mirror to Elizabeth. The line beginning “Is this the face …?”
echoes Marlowe’s famous paean to Helen of Troy in Doctor Faustus (“Is
this the face that launched a thousand ships?”). It is reasonable to assume
that Shakespeare’s audience would also have recognized in the line the
allusion to a powerful woman. Elizabeth too, the playwright implies, relies
74 A. THOMAS
on flattery to sustain and perpetuate her power. If Richard exploits his

deposition scene to maximum theatrical effect, it is in the knowledge that
this is the last occasion he will be able to exercise his political power before
he vanishes into oblivion. By the same token, Shakespeare is fully con-
scious that this scene is perhaps the moment in the play where he can hold
up a mirror to the reigning monarch without incriminating himself in the
process. Ironically, the scene proved so potent that it was, as we have seen,
cut from all performances during Elizabeth’s lifetime. But Shakespeare
had the last word. Unlike many of his fawning fellow-writers, the play-
wright did not write a single word in praise of Elizabeth after her death.66
66
Richard Wilson, Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2015), Chap. 3. It is true that in the final scene of Henry VIII,
Cranmer predicts the future greatness of the newborn Elizabeth; but given the double
authorship of the play, it is unclear whether this praise is attributable to Shakespeare or to his
collaborator John Fletcher. I would suspect the latter.
CHAPTER 3
Demonizing the Other: “The Prioress’s

Tale,” The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant
of Venice
It was in medieval England that the so-called blood-libel accusation—the

Christian belief that Jews constantly and obsessively reenacted the Passion
of Christ by means of the ritual torture and murder of innocent Christian
children—originated. The mysterious murder of a tanner’s apprentice in
the East Anglian city of Norwich in 1144 became the catalyst for one of
the most notorious accusations in Christian history, casting a shadow over
Christian–Jewish relations for centuries to follow. This obscure event rap-
idly took on momentum thanks to the polemical efforts of a local monk,
Thomas of Monmouth, whose vivid account of young William’s abduc-
tion, torture, and murder by local Jews has to be placed in the larger con-
text of the crisis in medieval Christian society. As E. M. Rose shows, the
destabilizing effects of the civil wars fought between King Stephen and the
Empress Matilda, the international fallout from the disastrous failure of
the Second Crusade, and the considerable debts incurred by Christian
knights who had participated in the failed expedition all combined to cre-
ate an atmosphere of fear, paranoia, and distrust that inevitably found an
outlet in the persecution of English Jewry.1
By attributing the murder of the boy William to the local Jews, Thomas
was in effect projecting the crisis of medieval Christian society onto its
1
E. M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval
Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

76 A. THOMAS
denigrated doctrinal “Other.” The murder of one of these Jews by the

knight Sir Simon de Norris in 1149 in order to cancel out his debts—just
five years after the discovery of William’s corpse in a forest—exemplifies the
way projective inversion habitually works: an atrocity committed by a bank-
rupt Christian knight against an innocent Jewish moneylender—on the pre-
text of avenging the murder of “Saint William”—is reversed and becomes
the ritual slaying of a Christian innocent by a malevolent Jew. Thomas refers
to the case of Sir Simon and his trial for murder, demonstrating both the
projective and retroactive nature of the blood-libel accusation. Thomas’
account rapidly attracted international attention, while the murder commit-
ted by Sir Simon slipped into oblivion. William’s putative murder by Jews
soon gave rise to copycat cases in Gloucester, Blois, Paris, and Bury St
Edmunds and was adapted to different regional circumstances over time.
But the core narrative invented by the monk Thomas persisted into recent
times as exemplified by the blood-libel accusations that occurred in Bohemia
and Poland well into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In the introduction to her translation of Thomas of Monmouth’s nar-
rative, Miri Rubin places the story of William of Norwich in a literary as
well as a historical context by demonstrating how it spawned a whole series
of blood-libel narratives. One of the most famous—not to say, infamous—
variations on this theme is “The Prioress’s Tale” from Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales.2 Chaucer’s clever syncretism of two popular medieval
narratives—child murder by Jews and miracles of the Virgin Mary—was
written around 1390 but it looks back to the distant past by invoking the
story of “young Hugh of Lincoln,” who in 1255—100 years after William
of Norwich’s murder—also went missing. In this case Henry III’s stew-
ard, John of Lexington, accused the Jew Copin of Lincoln of the murder.
Copin was forced to confess, tried, and dragged through Lincoln by horse
to a place where he was hanged (Rubin [ed.], Thomas of Monmouth, The
Life and Passion of William of Norwich, viii). Like William of Norwich,
young Hugh of Lincoln (whose body was eventually found down a well)
soon became the object of a religious cult; and his name and reputation
survived long enough to inspire Chaucer’s tale of a little boy who is mur-
dered by an angry Jew for singing a hymn of praise to the Virgin Mary.
As Sara Lipton has demonstrated, the mid-thirteenth century (when the
alleged martyrdom of Hugh of Lincoln took place) marked a significant
shift in Christian perceptions of visual representations of Jews in Christian
2
Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, translated and edited
by Miri Rubin (London: Penguin Classics, 2014), vii.
DEMONIZING THE OTHER: “THE PRIORESS’S TALE,” THE JEW… 77
art: “Toward the middle of the thirteenth century, a distinct shift occurred.
In a growing number of artworks, the range of features assigned to iniqui-
tous Jews was condensed into one fairly narrowly construed and easily rec-
ognizable Gothic ‘Jewish’ face, characterized by a bony hooked nose and a
pointed beard.”3 The emergence of this Gothic “Jewish” face in the mid-
thirteenth century coincided with the standardization of the blood-libel
legend as illustrated by the “martyrdom” of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255. By
the time Chaucer wrote “The Prioress’s Tale” in the late fourteenth cen-
tury the accusation had become formulaic and the visual representation
of Jewish features had become fixed as a caricature. Lipton points to the
example of an illustrated prayer book made in 1340 for Bonne of
Luxembourg, daughter-in-law of the king of France and daughter of King
John of Bohemia. In the image accompanying the first verse of Psalm 52
(“the fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God’”), the fool (insapiens) looks
to the left and is depicted with caricatured Jewish features: a long bony
nose and long beard (Lipton, Dark Mirror, 171–172).
As Lipton points out, however, there is an intriguing ambiguity in the
visual representation of the image, which consists of two figures, one beat-
ing the other with a bundle of twigs while his “victim” drinks from a large
chalice, presumably a sign of drunkenness. The assailant on the right has
“normal” Christian features, while the drunkard looks like the caricature of
a Jew. The question arises: who is the fool and who is the victim of the fool?
Are both fools? And if the Jewish figure is presented as the victim of vio-
lence, how do we explain his Jewish features, since Jews were invariably
identified as perpetrators of violence in the blood-libel legend? More prob-
lematic still, why is the “Jew” drinking from a large cup that resembles the
chalice containing the wine in the sacrament of Holy Communion? The
distinctive Jewish face crops up again in the same manuscript on the mon-
strous body of a grotesque. Like the Jewish fool, he looks to the left, tradi-
tionally associated with evil. Significantly, the grotesque is wearing a bishop’s
miter, thus conflating the negative image of the Jew with a sinful cleric. In
the words of Lipton, such images echo “contemporary anxiety about
Christian as well as Jewish moral identity” (Lipton, Dark Mirror, 182).
The ambiguous imagery in Bonne’s prayer book correlates with the
ambiguity of the wording of the Latin psalm it illustrates: “Non est Deus”
means both “there is no God” and “he is not God.” In the second meaning,
3
Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2014), 173.
78 A. THOMAS
“he” would refer to Christ, which would help to explain why the fool is
depicted as a Jew since the Jews denied Christ’s divinity. But given the fact
that the fool on the right is not a Jew but a Christian, the implication is that
Christians could also deny Christ’s divinity. As we shall see, such ambiguities
are characteristic not only of the image of the Jew as demonized “Other” in
late medieval and early modern Christian culture but also of Christians
themselves.
In this chapter I would like to trace the development of this ambiguous
“Other” in English writing from Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” to
Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
Shakespeare scholars such as James Shapiro and David Scott Kastan have
alerted us to the need to recognize the shift from medieval anti-Judaism
(based on the theological perception of Jews as the murderers of Christ) to
the early modern European paradigm of Jews as merchants and usurers.
For Kastan, Shakespeare “succeeds in giving both Shylock and Othello a
complex psychology that makes each more than a stereotype” and “dif-
ferentiates Shylock from the Jew of medieval blood libels and from
Marlowe’s Barabas” (Kastan, A Will to Believe, 110). The former statement
may be true—Shylock is certainly more complex than his murderous medi-
eval predecessors and Marlowe’s two-dimensional villain—but the differ-
ence between medieval and early modern Christian perceptions of Jews has
also been exaggerated. In recent years medievalists have begun to discern
in “The Prioress’s Tale” a marked preoccupation with Jews not only as the
“murderers” of Christ but as usurers and moneylenders at a time when
Christians themselves were becoming increasingly involved and implicated
in a cash economy. In the words of Kathy Lavezzo, “Chaucer’s Prioress’s
Tale, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta
feature Jews whose danger is as economic as it is religious.”4 The anxiety
that underpins these texts lies in the proximity of Jewish to Christian
involvement in commerce, and the opprobrium attached to Jewish “lucre”
(profit) is reflected in the scatological motif of the Jewish privy where the
murdered boy’s body is dumped in Chaucer’s tale. Similarly, E. R. Rose has
made it clear that the murder of William of Norwich was blamed on the
Jews to cover up for a Christian knight’s murder of a Jewish moneylender.
The link between money and murder is thus central to these blood-libel
accusations. Far from fading away, the blood-libel accusation was still alive
4
See Kathy Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 24–25.
and well in early modern England as reflected in a 1578 sermon by John

Knox, who refers to the Jews as “cursed,” “partakers of the same crime” as
their ancestors who “spilt [the] guiltless blood of Christ.”5
This chapter will explore the continuity in Christian attitudes to Jews in
English writing between 1400 and 1600. All the texts we shall be analyz-
ing arose at a time of crisis for the Christian Church and society that neces-
sitated the construction of a demonic “Other” to serve as a scapegoat for
the problems faced by Christians. “The Prioress’s Tale” and the fifteenth-
century Croxton Play of the Sacrament were written during a period of
schism within the Catholic Church, as the teachings of John Wyclif gained
dangerous traction in the form of Lollardy and spread to Bohemia where
they helped to form the influential Hussite movement. It is hardly coinci-
dental that these divisions within Christianity itself coincided with the
emergence of texts that emphasized Jews as threats to the Christian faith.
Thus these late medieval texts can be understood as a reaction to—and
reflection of—the crisis within the Church in the late fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries. Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s plays were written during
an even greater crisis of identity in the sixteenth century created by the
Protestant Reformation. I shall argue that the demonizing of the Jewish
“Other” in these plays reflects a new sixteenth-century crisis within the
Christian self. The Jew in both plays comes to assume a larger symbolic
significance as a threat to that Christian identity. I shall also be arguing
that the demonization of Jews in the later period can be read as an oblique
reflection of the persecution of other scapegoated minorities in Protestant
England such as Catholics and Huguenot immigrants.
“The Prioress’s Tale” in Its Late Medieval

European Context
In this section I shall use “The Prioress’s Tale” as a case study of Christian
attitudes to Jews in the later Middle Ages by placing it in a larger medieval
European context and by reading it alongside lesser known materials writ-
ten in Czech and Latin, as well as texts more familiar to Anglophone
scholars such as Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Passion of William of
Norwich and the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament. What
such a comparative and synchronic approach yields is the insight that
5
Quoted in Tom Rutter, The Cambridge Introduction to Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 2012), 70.
80 A. THOMAS
Chaucer’s tale is not only highly conventional in its stereotyping of Jews,

but also that its genesis can be explained as a repressed reaction to a crisis
in medieval Christian society. It matters far less whether these views origi-
nated within Chaucer’s own mind or in the fictional imagination of his
Prioress than the fact that Chaucer chose to articulate them in the first
place. If, as some scholars have argued, Chaucer deliberately parodies such
anti-Judaic opinions by attributing them to his Prioress, this still does not
explain why Chaucer wrote the story, merely that he disguised his own
involvement in writing it.6 Important both for an adequate understanding
of medieval Christian attitudes to Jews and Chaucer’s particular treatment
of the Prioress is the projective nature of such beliefs: just as medieval
Christians projected their own doubts about the Christian faith onto the
Jews, so Chaucer projected onto the Prioress his own need to relate a
blood-libel narrative about murderous Jews. In both cases—the Jews and
the Prioress—become the fictional expression of a hatred that arises dur-
ing a period of Christian crisis. The result, as Anthony Bale has argued, is
a narrative that is profoundly incoherent and unstable.7
By placing Chaucer’s story within a broader European framework, it is
possible to demonstrate that projective inversion is not unique to Chaucer’s
tale but is a structuring feature of all anti-Jewish narratives. A theoretical
text that succinctly presents the Freudian theory of projection and applies
it to antisemitic discourse is Alan Dundes’ essay “The Ritual Murder or
Blood Libel: A Study of Anti-Semitic Victimization through Projective
Inversion.”8 The virtue of this synchronic approach is that it shows how
Chaucer’s tale does not transcend the bigotries of its age, but exemplifies
them. What Chaucer’s tale shared both with its English antecedents such
as Thomas of Monmouth’s Life and Passion of William of Norwich and
with its European counterparts such as The Passion of the Jews of Prague
was the basic assumption that Jews were the perpetrators rather than the
victims of religiously inspired atrocities even when—especially when—
these atrocities took the form of Christian aggression against Jews.
6
See, for example, Richard Rex, sees “The Prioress’s Tale” as an example of pastiche in
“The Sins of Madame Eglentyne” and Other Essays on Chaucer (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1995), chapter 3.
7
Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 81–88.
8
The essay is included in: The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore,
edited by Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 366–376.
The Passion of the Jews of Prague

Dating from about the same time as “The Prioress’s Tale” was a polemical
work written in Latin known as Passio Judeorum Pragensium (The Passion
of the Jews of Prague) and attributed to a fictional narrator named John the
Stocky, just as Chaucer’s tale is attributed to the fictional Prioress.9 The
author of the Latin text was probably a cleric critical of the royal policy of
protecting the Jews, and anxious to blame them for the crisis within the
Bohemian church in a time of schism. The Passio is based on a notorious
pogrom against the Jews of Prague that broke out during Holy Week
1389 (April 11–17) and which resulted in the deaths of countless Jewish
victims, the burning of their corpses, and the partial destruction of the
Jewish quarter. Some of the Jews committed suicide, choosing the
“Kiddush ha shem,” the sacrificial martyrdom glorified at Massada and
reenacted at the Clifford Tower during the 1190 pogrom at York. As
many as 3000 Jews out of a total population may have perished, but this
number is probably exaggerated. Barbara Newman has proposed that the
number was more likely 400–500, which would have meant that the
Jewish community of Prague was literally decimated (Newman, Medieval
Crossover, 183).
As Sarah Stanbury has pointed out, the atrocity was so serious that
news of it might easily have spread to England through the lines of com-
munication established by Richard II’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in
January 1382.10 The atrocity took place while Anne’s half-brother King
Wenceslas IV was away from the city, which meant that the Jews were
especially vulnerable since they were officially under royal protection. The
instigation for the attack was the spurious claim that a Jewish child had
thrown a stone at a monstrance housing the sacrament being carried
through the ghetto. This is such a commonplace of anti-Jewish discourse
that the allegation was most likely invented in order to vilify the Jews while
they were at their most vulnerable. But the allegation, which was later
incorporated into the Passio, is also strikingly similar to the core narrative of
“The Prioress’s Tale.” In both cases a little boy serves as the instigation for
9
For an English translation of the Passio, see Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover:
Reading the Secular against the Sacred (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2013), 264–271 (Appendix 1).
10
Sarah Stanbury, “Host Desecration, Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale, and Prague 1389” in
Mindful Spirits in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk, edited by
Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 211–224.
82 A. THOMAS
a violent atrocity: in Chaucer’s tale the Christian boy who walks through
the ghetto singing a hymn of praise to the Virgin Mary is murdered by an
angry Jew, while in the Passio based on the 1389 pogrom a Jewish boy
throws a stone at the sacrament. In a sense, both narratives are merely an
inverted reflection of each other, suggesting that the events in Prague had
their origin in the psychic phenomenon of projective inversion whereby
Christians’ doubts about their own faith are inverted and projected onto
the Jews.
Significantly, this atrocity took place during a crisis within the Bohemian
church and a deep conflict between the king and the Archbishop of
Prague, that itself derived from the Great (or Papal) Schism; the latter had
lasted from 1378 to 1417, when Pope Martin V was appointed by the
Council of Constance to reunite the Church after thirty years of a divided
papacy with one claimant based in Avignon, the other in Rome. As Miri
Rubin has pointed out, John of Jenštejn, Archbishop of Prague (ca.
1348–1400), delivered a Christmas sermon in the 1380s arguing that
royal favor toward the Jews and the wealth accumulated by them as a
result rendered them more powerful than magnates and churchmen.11
The accusation that Christian princes were “thieves’ accomplices” in facili-
tating and profiting from Jewish moneylenders was a frequent complaint
of medieval moralists such as Jacques de Vitry (1160/70–1240) and Peter
the Chanter (d. 1197) (Lipton, Dark Mirror, 181 and 337, footnote 46).
Intensifying the Papal Schism was the crisis in Church teaching and
practice, which came under assault from John Wyclif in England and Jan
Hus in Bohemia. Wyclif’s denial of transubstantiation in his De eucharistia
(1379–1380) was, in the words of one historian, a “stab in the heart of
late-medieval Catholicism.”12 The festering doubts about the core beliefs
of Christianity (Christ’s divinity and resurrection) were repressed and pro-
jected onto the “unbelieving” Jews, which in turn necessitated their pun-
ishment. In short, the 1389 pogrom against the Jews—and the texts that
it instigated such as The Passion of the Jews of Prague and “The Prioress’s
Tale”—has to be seen within the context of a crisis in late medieval
Christianity just as the earlier Life and Passion of William of Norwich can
be understood in the context of the crisis of twelfth-century English
society.
11
Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale
12
Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 42.
Barbara Newman has recently argued that the parodic account of the
1389 Prague pogrom may have come to Bohemia from England via the
contacts opened up by the royal marriage (Newman, Crossover, 184).
But it is really beside the point where these narratives of murderous,
unbelieving Jews originated, since such tropes of inversion were com-
mon to all Christian nations and were in circulation throughout Western
Christendom. As Sara Lipton acutely points out, “Bonne of Luxembourg’s
Paris was likewise empty of Jews, the community having been definitively
expelled in 1327, barely a decade before the painting of her prayer book”
(Lipton, Dark Mirror, 196–197). To this extent it did not matter
whether the Jews were absent (as in late medieval London or Paris) or
present (as in Prague) since in these narratives the Jews are not real but
phantasmatic projections of Christian doubts and fears about the funda-
mental tenets of Christian belief.
It is hardly surprising that some of the most virulently anti-Jewish nar-
ratives to have survived from the late fourteenth century originate in
Bohemia and England, precisely those countries where orthodox beliefs
were under assault from Wycliffite and Hussite heresies. What character-
izes these texts is the confusion of perspective. Newman has pointed out
that in The Passion of the Jews of Prague the Jews are paradoxically identi-
fied with Christ and with his persecutors (Newman, Crossover, 192). For
example, the Christian mob’s revenge on the Jews for defiling the Host is
described in the parodic terms of the Crucifixion, at which the Jews (by
the later Middle Ages) were said to have thrown lots for Christ’s garments.
The Czech author maliciously states that the mob went one better than
the Jews in seizing their clothes and goods:
And at once they cruelly laid hands on the perfidious Jews, not sparing
their goods or their bodies. They divided their garments among them,
each one taking as much as he could snatch. Nor did they cast lots for
them, but seized them whole and in great heaps, and not only the gar-
ments, but all their treasure and furniture with them. (Quoted from
Newman, Crossover, 267)
Another example of this inverted parallelism is the Christian mob’s

mutilation of the Jews’ bodies, which the author compares with St Peter’s
striking off the ear of the high priest’s servant in John 18: 10: ‘All who
were present stretched forth their hands, striking them without mercy
84 A. THOMAS
and cutting off not only their ears, but their heads, hands and feet”
(Newman, Crossover, 267). The burning of the murdered Jews’ bodies is
also compared with the Jews’ mocking of Christ wearing the Crown of
Thorns: “They fashioned crowns of burning wood and set them on the
heads and bodies of the Jews, and mocking them set them on fire”
(Newman, Crossover, 268). Even the burial of the Jews’ corpses resonates
with the scriptural account of the opening of Christ’s tomb with the dif-
ference that the Jews did not rise from the dead (Newman, Crossover,
268). The unintended effect of this inverted parallel technique is to desta-
bilize the distinction between Jew and Christian, perpetrator and victim.
A similar instability of perspective characterizes “The Prioress’s Tale.”
Twice in the tale Chaucer inserts the parenthetical phrase “quod she” (she
said) as if attempting to distinguish his own point of view from his narra-
tor’s. As Anthony Bale has shown, the word “purge” has a contradictory
resonance of defilement and purification: “purge” implies evacuating
one’s bowels (“purgen hir entraille”) but also “cleansing oneself of a bad
conscience or sinful traits.” The Virgin Mary’s miraculous insertion of the
seed (“greyn”) into the boy’s mouth (thus enabling him to carry on sing-
ing after death) finds an inverted and denigrated bodily counterpoint in
the Jew throwing the boy’s corpse into the latrine. Purification and defile-
ment thus become opposite sides of the same coin, blurring the distinction
between Christian sanctification and Jewish denigration of the corpus
christianum. Moreover, as Steven Kruger has pointed out, in the tale
Christian and Jewish communities each act as persecutor and persecuted;
for example, when the Abbot falls down and lies “as he had ben ybounde”
(676), the wording mirrors the punishment of the Jews (“And after that
the Jewes leet he bynde,” 620).13 The murdered clergeon’s mother is
described as “a newe Rachel,” thus identifying her with a heroine of the
Old Testament.14
13
Steven Kruger, “The Bodies of Jews in the Late Middle Ages” in The Idea of Medieval
literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard,
edited by James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
1992), 301–323 (307).
14
On the subject of the “newe Rachel”, see Mariamne Ara Krummel, Crafting Jewishness
in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015), 96–99.
The Sacred Drama of Late Medieval Europe

The Passion of the Jews of Prague provides a helpful transition to a signifi-
cant corpus of late medieval anti-Judaic texts: the sacred drama of medi-
eval Europe. This was a popular art form in which Christian core beliefs
were dramatized and reinforced in the minds of their audiences. Central to
this reinforcement of orthodox beliefs and miracles (such as the
Resurrection and transubstantiation) was the need to mock Jews as “unbe-
lievers.” In this section I shall address two of these plays—the Czech-Latin
sacred farce Unguentarius (The Ointment Seller, ca. 1340s) and the
English Croxton Play of the Sacrament. It has been customary in Czech
literary criticism (especially during the Communist period) to interpret
the transition from sacred drama to sacred farce as a gradual process in
which not only does the vernacular begin to prevail over Latin, but also
secular elements over religious themes. In fact, the internal textual evi-
dence afforded by medieval Czech drama points toward a very different
conclusion in which we find an ideological consistency and uniformity in
the religious treatment of the material. The anonymous authors of the
religious drama were intent on instructing their audiences in the mysteries
of the Gospels and the eternal truths of the Christian faith. As we shall see,
part of this ideological agenda was to underscore the difference between
believers and unbelievers, holy women and prostitutes, Christians and
Jews. In fact, what the plays reveal is their consistency—rather than differ-
ence—in how they go about making these distinctions. For example, the
references to the Jews as the betrayers and murderers of Christ are present
in all these texts, the only difference being that the sacred drama, which
was performed in the convent by the nuns themselves, utilized the pathos
of Christ’s death to demonize the Jews while the sacred farces, presumably
performed beyond the precincts of the church and cloister, exploited
humor and obscenity to make the same point. But the ideological point
remained the same whether it involved the figure of Mary speaking of her
crucified son being betrayed by the Jews as in the Lament of the Virgin
Mary or the Merchant’s wife referring to the Three Maries as “harlots” in
The Ointment Seller. Linking both tragic and comic modes of representa-
tion is the distinction between clean and defiled categories of humanity.
If the plays are not completely successful in keeping these categories
apart, such a slippage is the effect created by contradictions in medieval
attitudes to women and Jews rather than the conscious intention of their
creators. There was far more fluidity between medieval Christian and
86 A. THOMAS
Jewish cultures than has sometimes been acknowledged. According to

Kathy Lavezzo, the lines of contact included Jewish funding being pro-
vided to build and furnish medieval churches and cathedrals. As we shall
see, these points of contact were especially true of medieval Prague, where
Jews and Christians lived in close proximity and collaborated in all kinds
of ways. Unlike Chaucer’s London, which had been stripped of its Jews
since the expulsion of 1290, medieval Prague boasted a thriving Jewish
community; and contacts between Jews and Christians, albeit sometimes
fraught, could also be harmonious and mutually beneficial. The famous
Old-New Synagogue in Prague (1270) illustrates this cultural and artistic
cooperation in ways that can still be seen in its interior. Cistercian monks
collaborated with Jewish stonemasons in erecting this famous Gothic
structure, the oldest surviving synagogue in Europe. If these cultures were
more interactive than is often acknowledged, the very confluence between
them may help to explain the anxieties underlying the sacred texts—and
their need to underscore the differences rather than the affinities between
Christians and Jews.
The central question for critics of medieval sacred drama—how the farci-
cal and bawdy elements of such popular plays could be reconciled with the
gravitas of the Gospel narrative—is especially relevant to The Ointment
Seller.15 How did the medieval Church conceive and control these popular
vernacular plays that appear—at least to modern eyes—to deviate from the
sacred spirit of the Easter liturgical drama and even make fun or parody the
sacred dramatis personae and the sacred narrative of the death and resurrec-
tion of Christ? What was the medieval audience’s response to the Merchant’s
assistant Rubin’s mockery of the Three Maries as prostitutes when they
come to buy the ointments to anoint Christ’s body, or their description as
“harlots” by the Merchant’s irate wife? Would the audience have laughed at
the Maries or at Rubin and the Merchant’s Wife who insult them?
Rather than seeing the parodic elements in The Ointment Seller as blas-
phemous, we might understand them more accurately as reinforcing
Christian orthodoxy by attempting to draw a clear-cut line between the
denigrated characters who do the mocking and the sacred figures who are
mocked by them.16 In the play the Three Maries come to buy ointment in
order to anoint the body of the dead Christ. In the course of the farce, the
15
See Jarmila Veltrusky, A Sacred Farce from Medieval Bohemia: Mastičkář (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1985), 326–330.
16
For a close reading of the play see, Alfred Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature
and Society 1310–1420 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), chapter 4.
Ointment Seller’s assistant Rubin makes fun of the women, implying that
they are hanging their heads “like hinds” not because they are in mourn-
ing for their dead Lord but because they are exhausted after a late night of
whoring. He offers to demonstrate the miraculous properties of his oint-
ment by making someone rise from the dead. With the collaboration of
the Jew Abraham and his son Isaac, Rubin smears excrement on the boy’s
backside and makes him come back to life. The Merchant, his shrewish
wife and his anarchic Jewish assistant Rubin were clearly intended as low-
life characters whose ignorance of the mysteries of the Christian faith
makes them blind to the sacred status of the Three Maries. Their mis-
recognition of these holy women as prostitutes is not necessarily meant to
make fun of the Maries themselves (who speak mainly in Latin and thus
insulate themselves from the sordid setting in which they find themselves)
but rather of the lowlife characters who surround them. But there is also
an element of ambiguity in the play that directs the humor away from the
lowlife characters to the sacred figures of the Three Maries. On the one
hand, the mock-resurrection of the Jewish boy Isaac can be understood in
terms of a parody or inversion of the Resurrection of Christ, so that instead
of anointing Christ’s head and arms with precious oils, Rubin smears shit
on the boy’s backside. On the other hand, the scene can be read as a
mockery of Christian practice and belief, with the Three Maries presented
as the gullible victims of a cheap con trick (this would imply that Isaac just
pretends to be dead).
This kind of ambiguity implies a degree of unconscious collusion
between the audience and these lowlife characters, the effect of a split in
the Christian belief system itself. The same psychomachia is true of the
Christian attitude to the Jews. Laughing at the Jews was in part a repressed
impulse to laugh with them, that is to say, to see the sacred Christian nar-
rative from a skeptical or unbelieving perspective. Seen in this light, the
Jewish protagonist Rubin becomes a safety valve through which the
Christian audience can release its doubts about the truth of Christ’s divin-
ity and the Resurrection. Central to Rubin’s incongruous role as a pro-
fane character in a sacred drama is his outsider status. In medieval society
Jews in particular were regarded as blind to the logic of Christian belief.
In his Tractatus adversus Judeaos Peter the Venerable placed Jews in the
category of beasts since they lacked the human reason necessary to be
persuaded by the logical arguments for the Incarnation of Christ. Similarly,
in his Sermon 60 on the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153)
affirms that the Jews are the murderers of Christ and calls them “bovine”
88 A. THOMAS
in their inability to recognize the divinity of Christ.17 In this sense the

humor generated by the plays serves to reinforce the doctrinal message
and underscore the difference between insiders and outsiders, those
believers who are saved and those unbelievers who are damned.
This fraught distinction between insiders and outsiders—the latter cat-
egory consisting of Jews, prostitutes, heretics, and lepers—became part of
what R. I. Moore has termed “the formation of a persecuting society”
between 950 and 1250.18 If the regulation and categorization of these
deviant groups began in the high Middle Ages, they were fully consoli-
dated by the fourteenth century. Fear of pollution and contamination
from lepers, Jews, and prostitutes underscored the need to distinguish
more forcefully between doctrinal insiders and outsiders. Public latrines
were associated in the medieval mind with prostitution and Judaism. For
example, in Troyes, the Saint-Abraham Hospital, founded for reformed
prostitutes, was charged with the responsibility of clearing dung from the
market place, the Place du Marché-aux-Blés (Bayless, Sin and Filth in
Medieval Culture, 35).
The connection between Jews and feces also occurs in “The Prioress’s
Tale,” when the Jew who murders the little Christian boy dumps his body
in their latrine:
I seye that in a wardrobe they him threwe,

Whereas these Jewes purgen hir entraille.
O cursed folk of Herodes al newe,
What may youre yvel entente yow availle? (138–141)
The Christian boy in Chaucer’s tale has his throat slit by a Jewish assas-
sin because he has dared to sing a song of praise to the Virgin Mary (Alma
mater redemptoris) while walking through their quarter. The miracle of
the Christian story related to the pilgrims by the Prioress is that the boy
continues to do so even after his body has been left in the latrine, where it
is discovered and translated to a martyr’s resting place while the Jews
found guilty of the crime are convicted and hanged. Here the Jew, defiled
through metonymic identification with his own latrine, functions as the
inverted counterpart of the boy whose virginity is accentuated to identify
him with the spotless Virgin Mary:
17
Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 76–77.
18
R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western
Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 94–99.
O martir souded to virginitee,

Now maystou singen, folwinge evere in oon
The Whyte Lamb celestial—quod she—
Of which the grete evangelist Seint John
In Pathmos wroot, which seith that they that goon
Biforn this Lamb and singe a song al newe,
That nevere, fleshly, women they ne knowe. (145–151)
Jews were habitually regarded as a source of pollution, and contact

between them and Christians such as trading in the marketplace was sub-
ject to strict regulations. This anxiety about contamination was perhaps
especially acute in Bohemia, with its large population of Jews and the close
proximity between Jews and Christians. A twelfth-century bishop of
Prague lamented on his deathbed that he had been too intimate with Jews,
polluting himself through physical contact: “Woe unto me that I have
been silent, that I have not restrained the apostate race, nor have I bran-
dished the sword with anathemas for Christ; but I allowed myself and the
Christian people to be defiled by touching hands with the unholy race”
(quoted from Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 88). Given the Jews’ need to
practice moneylending for lack of any other permitted professions, it is
likely that the bishop in question borrowed money from the Jews of
Prague; and it is this guilty secret that the cleric may be referring to in his
deathbed confession.
On a fundamental level, the plots of “The Prioress’s Tale” and The
Ointment Seller are both concerned with financial transactions, and the
imagery of filth and excrement in the play is related to the money that
changes hands between the merchant/prostitute and their customers. The
opening stanza of “The Prioress’s Tale” foregrounds this anxiety about
Jewish money and usury at the very outset of the story:
There was in Asie, in a greet cite,

Amonge Cristen folk, a Jewerye,
Sustened by a lord of that contree
For foule usure and lucre of vileynye,
Hateful to Christ and to his compaignye;
And thurgh the street men mighte ryde or wende,
For it was free, and open at either ende. (54–60)
The Jewish ghetto is visualized as a body “open at either end” with the
emphasis on the bodily orifices of mouth and anus where food is respec-
tively ingested and flushed out as waste. By contrast the Christian body,
90 A. THOMAS
symbolized by the little boy’s virginal innocence, is sealed and hermetic.

The equation of the Jewish quarter with the lower parts of the body in
Chaucer’s tale can be adduced as further evidence of projective inversion
whereby Christian guilt about money, sex, and dirt is displaced onto the
Jewish Other. The connection between money and denigrated body parts
is also central to The Ointment Seller, for example, when the Merchant
demands from the Jew Abraham the payment of gold and his daughter
Meča in return for the “resurrection” of his son Isaac:
Abraham, I want to tell you this,

That I will heal your son,
If you give me three talents of gold
And also your daughter Meča.19 (67–70)
This anxiety about uncleanness and pollution explains the imagery of

excrement and feces both in Chaucer’s tale and The Ointment Seller. The
apparently extraneous and farcical episode of the excrement that is smeared
onto Isaac’s backside in The Ointment Seller is in fact central to the fear of
contamination and disease associated with the lower parts of the body, the
genitalia, and backside. Following his parodic “resurrection” Isaac makes
explicit this distinction between the upper parts of the body (head, shoul-
ders), which are traditionally anointed with oil in ceremonies such as coro-
nations and consecrations, and the denigrated lower parts of the body:
Other masters, according to what I’ve read,

Use their ointments to anoint the head;
But you, master, have been more kind
By pouring oil on my behind. (87–90)
The fact that the merchant bought the ointment used to pour on Isaac’s
backside in a brothel reinforces the comic connection between prostitu-
tion, Judaism, and money. All these categories are linked by their met-
onymic association with dirt and as such stand in defiled contrast to the
spotless Virgin Mary. It is hardly coincidental that the great exponent of
the cult of the Virgin Mary, Bernard of Clairvaux, should also have given
his voice to the vilification of the Jews as “bovine” and ignorant. The ideo-
logical polarization of the twelfth century that helped to create the distinc-
tion between Christian insiders and outsiders (Jews, lepers, prostitutes)
19
My translation of the Czech text edited by Veltrusky (see footnote 15).
was coterminous with the splitting of the female imago into the Blessed
Virgin Mary and the temptress Eve. Both images were merely opposite
sides of the same coin, which, far from liberating women, confined them
within a restrictive evil/pure binary. In 1330 a scribe from Barcelona com-
plained that a sewer from the Jewish quarter of town passed through a
Christian neighborhood and that the smell offended the Virgin of the
Pine, the patron of the local parish church. This detail is not coincidental:
as the spotless exemplar of sanctity, the Virgin Mary afforded an obvious
contrast with the unbelieving Jews whose lack of faith equated them with
evil and filth (Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture, 21).
Another example of inverted parallelism between the defiled Jew and
the spotless Virgin Mary occurs in Abraham’s monologue in The Ointment
Seller where he appeals to the Merchant to make his son rise from the
dead. Abraham’s speech is a parody of the Marian planctus in which the
Virgin grieves for her crucified son, Jesus Christ. Even the wording of the
monologue, such as the rhyme nebožátko/dětá ̌ tko (poor child/little child)
(lines 285–286), mimics the Virgin’s traditional lament. Analogously,
Isaac’s resurrection from the dead is intended as a parody of Christ’s resur-
rection, the excrement smeared on his buttocks an obscene inversion of
the anointing of Christ’s head with oil. Such tropes of inversion were not
intended to parody official Church beliefs and doctrines, but, on the con-
trary, to reinforce them by projecting Christian doubts and anxieties onto
a despised group of outsiders.
The Croxton Play of the Sacrament

A further example of the late medieval sacred drama where the distinction
between Christian self and Jewish Other becomes destabilized is the
fifteenth-century English Croxton Play of the Sacrament. In the play a rich
Jewish merchant named Jonathas purchases a host wafer (the Body of
Christ in Catholic theology) from a Christian merchant and, with the help
of four Jewish accomplices, desecrates it by stabbing it, plunging it into a
vat of boiling oil, and then locking it in an oven that explodes. But, mirac-
ulously, Jesus appears bleeding from his five wounds and upbraids the
terrified Jews, who see the error of their ways and convert to Christianity.
As in The Ointment Seller and “The Prioress’s Tale,” Christians’ doubts
about their own belief system (in this case the doctrine of transubstantia-
tion) are repressed and projected onto the Jewish characters, who are
eager—even desperate—to demonstrate the fraudulent nature of the
92 A. THOMAS
miraculous transformation of the wafer into the literal body of Christ.

When stabbing the wafer, Jonathas significantly parodies the Latin liturgy
of the Mass when the priest elevates the Host:
On thes wordys ther growndyd hath He,

That he sayd on Shere Thursday at Hys sopere:
He brake the brede and sayd, “Accipite,”
And gave Hys dyscyplys them for to chere.
And more he sayd to them there,
Whyle they were all togethere and sum,
“Comedite corpus meum.” (397–404)20
Conversely, it is the Christian merchant who steals the host from the
church and sells it to Jonathas for a bribe, so that the former becomes the
Christian mirror image of Judas, and the Jews to whom he delivered the
Savior. Aristorius’ desecration of the Host also makes him resemble a
Lollard heretic. Significantly, he states that he fears that he will be
denounced by a priest and accused of heresy for stealing the host from the
church: “And preste or clerke might me aspye,/To the bysshope thei
wolde go tell that dede/And speke me of eresye” (300–302).
With its anxieties about the fundamental efficacy of the Host and the
blurred relation of Christian to Jewish identity, the Croxton Play of the
Sacrament can be seen tacitly to reinforce Lollard attacks on the doctrine
of transubstantiation in fifteenth-century England.21 Cecilia Cutts has
characterized the Croxton Play as an “anti-Lollard piece” but, perhaps
more significantly, the play’s instability reveals anxieties about the possible
legitimacy of Lollard beliefs. The same instability characterizes Bohemian
orthodox attempts to represent the supporters of Wyclif as “Other.” As
Martha Bayless has shown, the Bohemian anti-Hussite parodic Mass
known as Tristiabitur iustus (“the just man shall be saddened”) “suffers
particularly from a confusion about its point of view, at times purporting
to represent the Wycliffites, at times framing their words as if addressing
an orthodox audience, and at times addressing the Wycliffites directly.”22
20
Croxton Play of the Sacrament, edited by John T. Sebastian (Kalamazoo: Western
Michigan University, 2012), 46.
21
See Cecilia Cutts, “The Croxton Play: An Anti-Lollard Piece.” Modern Language
Quarterly 5/1 (1944), 45–60.
22
Martha Bayless, Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1996), 123–124.
This confused perspective comes to a head in the offertory of the parodic

Mass, when the authorial voice oscillates not only between Wycliffite and
anti-Wycliffite perspectives but also between feminist and misogynistic
personifications of the Christian faith:
Offertorium: Amen, amen, dico vobis. Maledictus a Deo, qui exasperate

matrem suam; heresis, qua diabolo regenerati estis, mater vestra est.
Exterminate mulierem extreneam, que Christianorum fides dicitur, tamquam
adulteram a cubilibus vestris, dicit Wykleph deus vester.23
[Offertory: Amen, amen, I say unto you. Cursed unto God is he who pro-
vokes his mother; heresy is your mother, by which you are reborn through
the Devil. Do away with that foreign woman who is called the faith of
Christians, as though you were banishing an adulterous woman from your
beds, says Wyclif, your God.]
The Jew of Malta

Act 1, scene 1 of The Jew of Malta opens with a long soliloquy by Barabas,
the villainous protagonist of Marlowe’s play, in which he boasts of his
immense wealth. The references to far-flung trading places—Persia, Spain,
Greece, Egypt—point to the sixteenth-century explosion of international
commerce and the colonial roles of European powers such as Spain,
Portugal, and England in the creation of this wealth. Its vertiginous evo-
cation of the fabulous wealth to be gained from trade and colonial expan-
sion, however, reprises a very medieval fascination with precious gems and
jewels and in particular their association with the exotic Orient:
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,

Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld seen costly stones of so great price,
As one of them indifferently rated,
And of a caract of this quantity,
May serve in peril of calamity
To ransom great kings from captivity[.] (I.25–33)24
Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie des Mittelalters (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1963), 222.
23
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, edited by James R. Siemon (London:
24
Bloomsbury, 2009), 12 (third edition).

94 A. THOMAS
Although Barabas values these precious stones as indicators of wealth

and security, he is also bedazzled by their appearance in a way that evokes
the medieval Christian fascination with precious stones as metaphysical
signifiers. In the anonymous medieval English poem Pearl, for example,
the description of the Heavenly Jerusalem is heavily reliant on the account
in the Apocalypse, where St John evokes the city as a crystalline edifice
studded with precious gems:
As John the apostel hit saw with sight,

I saw that city of gret renoun:
Jerusalem so new and ryally dight,
As hit was lyght fro the heven adoun.
The burgh was all of brende gold bright,
As glemande glasse burnist broun,
With gentyl gemmes anunde pyght:
With bantels twelve on basying boun,
The fundementes twelve of rich tenoun;
Uch tablement was a serlepes stone,
As derely devises this ilk toun
In Apokalypce the apostel John. (XVII, 985–996)25
[As John the apostle saw it of old
I saw the city beyond the stream,
Jerusalem the new and fair to behold,
Sent down from heaven by power supreme.
The streets were paved with precious gold,
As flawless pure as glass agleam,
Based on bright gems of worth untold,
Foundation stones twelvefold in team;
And set in series without a seam,
Each level was a single stone,
As he beheld it in sacred dream,
In Apocalypse, the apostle John.]26
Barabas’ monologue also recalls the boast of Jonathas, the Jewish mer-
chant in the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament. Here too the
Jewish trader identifies not only with the wealth accrued from international
commerce but lists the precious stones in a way that resembles the Pearl-
poet’s fascination with the transcendental appearance of the Holy City:
25
The Works of the Gawain Poet, edited by Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London: Penguin,
2014), 70–71.
26
Marie Borroff, The Gawain Poet: Complete Works, (New York: W.W. Norton and cCom-
pany, 2011), 153–154).
For I thanke thee hayly, that hast me sent

Gold, sylver, and presyous stonys,
And abundance of spycys thou hast me lent,
As I shall reherse before yow onys:
I have amatystys ryche for the nonys,
And baryllys that be bryght of ble,
And saphyre seemly I may show you attonys,
And crystalys clere for to se. (157–164; The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, 40)
Barabas’ paean to precious stones sets the stage for Marlowe’s subtle
deconstruction of the Christian–Jewish binary in the play. This effect of
destabilization becomes rapidly apparent when it emerges in scene 2 that
the Christian governors of Malta deprive Barabas and the other Jews of
their wealth in order to pay off the “ten-year tribute” to the Turks menac-
ing the island. The blood-libel accusation becomes a flimsy pretext to jus-
tify their real motives of greed:
FERNEZE
For through our sufferance of your hateful lives,
Who stand accursed in the sight of heaven,
These taxes and afflictions are befallen,
And therefore thus we are determined;
Read there the articles of our decrees. (1, 2, 64–67)
When the first knight repeats the Governor’s calumny and insists on the
Jews’ “inherent sin” as the justification for their loss of wealth, Barabas
lashes out at Christian hypocrisy:
BARABAS
What? Bring you scripture to confirm your wrongs?
Preach me not out of my possessions.
Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are:
but say the tribe that I descended of
Were all in general cast away for sin,
Shall I by tried by their transgression?
The man that dealeth righteously shall live:
And which of you can chare me otherwise? (1, 2, 111–118)
In refusing to convert to Christianity Barabas forfeits all his wealth. His

tragic fate up to this point replays the medieval blood-libel legend and the
murder and passion of William of Norwich with which this chapter began:
96 A. THOMAS
just as the murder of the boy William was blamed on the Jews of Norwich
to cover up the Christian need for money (that is, cancel out the debts
owed to Jews), so too Barabas’ fortune is confiscated in order to pay the
Maltese tribute to the Turks. In both cases, the blood-libel accusation
serves as a crude pretext for Christian greed: theological justification and
financial expediency thus become part and parcel of each other.
Scholars have provided a socio-economic context for the negative depic-
tion of Jews in Renaissance English drama by pointing to the immigrant
crisis in Elizabethan London. Although few Jews were living in early mod-
ern England (until they started to trickle back under the Commonwealth),
there were many European migrant workers. These immigrants were
immensely unpopular in Elizabethan London, not only because of their
economic prosperity but also because they were deemed to receive unfair
favors from the government. Second-generation Huguenot immigrants in
London were seen to pose a threat to the commercial interests of English
merchants. Whereas their parents, fleeing France after the St Bartholomew
Day’s Massacre in 1572, had been happy to integrate fully into London
society, these younger Huguenots were rediscovering their national iden-
tity as Frenchmen and discriminating against true-born Englishmen (Guy,
Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years, 193). An anti-immigrant riot broke out on
a sultry evening in early June 1592 when a group of apprentices, war vet-
erans, and vagrants armed with cudgels and daggers swarmed out of
Bermondsey High Street in Southwark looking for foreign victims (Guy,
Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years, 192). In many ways these accusations of
favorable treatment recall the resentment felt toward Flemish artisans in
Chaucer’s London as well as the accusations by Bohemian clerics that King
Wenceslas IV was protecting the Jews of Prague and helping them to
become wealthy. As we have seen, the instigation for the Jewish pogrom of
Prague in 1389 was undoubtedly the belief that the Bohemian Jews were
receiving favors from the king in return for loans.
As in the medieval texts we have examined, in The Jew of Malta it is not
clear who is the perpetrator and who is the victim of the revenge plot
instigated by the confiscation of Barabas’ wealth. Is Barabas the victim
because he has been unfairly stripped of his wealth or are the Christians
the victims of Barabas’ ruthless revenge? Barabas’ desire for revenge in the
early scenes of the play recalls the London apprentices’ desire to take
revenge on the Huguenot immigrants around the time the play was being
performed. On the other hand, the same audience would consciously
have identified these unscrupulous foreigners with the threat posed by the
Jewish “Other.” In particular the Huguenots’ preference for employing

their own countrymen rather than hiring native-born Englishmen would
have resonated with the nefarious commercial practices traditionally attrib-
uted to Jews. It is unclear whether Marlowe’s play instigates the attacks on
the Huguenots or the other way round—that the attacks encouraged the
playwright to represent them in a disguised form on the London stage.
The more important point is that the difference between Jew and Christian
breaks down since the audience of The Jew of Malta may have (uncon-
sciously at least) identified with Barabas in his vengeful desire for justice
rather than the unscrupulous governors of Malta, who in their eyes might
have more closely resembled the oppressive and hypocritical English gov-
ernment. We witnessed the same unconscious tendency to identify with the
Jews in the medieval Bohemian play The Ointment Seller and in The Passion
of the Jews of Prague, texts that radically reflected the unstable context of
conflicts within late medieval Church and society.
The blurring between self and other in The Jew of Malta raises the fraught
question of Marlowe’s own complicity in the xenophobic violence his play
presumably encouraged. The Jew of Malta was very popular with London
audiences; and there can be little doubt that it fed resentment against foreign
immigrants. Philip Henslowe’s theatrical records show that the Admiral’s
Men performed The Jew of Malta thirty-six times between February 26, 1592
(the first recorded performance) and June 21, 1596 (Rutter, Christopher
Marlowe, 75). But whether the play was intended to fuel xenophobic senti-
ment is another question, and it can be argued that the play reflects rather
than instigates the politics of racial and ethnic hatred. In some ways the play
holds up Christians to mockery quite as much as Jews. David Katz makes the
important point that the play is in fact a black comedy which pokes fun at
popular Christian stereotypes of the Jews. For example, when a friar hears
that Barabas has done something terrible, his first response is, “What has he
crucified a child?”27 And Katz also observes that Barabas’ last words are in fact
an inversion of the litany of the Book of Common Prayer: “Damn Christian
dogges and Infidels” (Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 81). This
subversive Jewish appropriation of the Christian liturgy recalls Jonathas’
mimicry of the Mass in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament discussed earlier.
As with “The Prioress’s Tale,” the hatred explored in The Jew of Malta reflects
just as negatively on Christians as it does on the alleged Jewish villains.
27
David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), 81.
98 A. THOMAS
Henslowe’s decision to restage the play may also have been intended to
capitalize on the scandal of the execution in 1594 of the queen’s private
physician, Dr Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who had fled the
Inquisition in his native land and found refuge in Elizabethan England.
Ironically, Lopez became the focus of an investigation into a plot to poison
the queen. Whether Lopez was actually guilty of the crime is uncertain, but it
seems unlikely, and the queen herself did not believe it. The accusation of
Jews poisoning wells was an old medieval canard dating back to the time of
the Black Death, and it seems probable that Lopez was simply the victim
of the earl of Essex’s desire to prove himself indispensable to the queen by
exposing treachery in her inner circle. At his trial, Lopez was described by
the queen’s new Attorney General Sir Edward Coke as a “miscreant, per-
jured, murdering traitor and Jewish doctor” who “hath been proved a
dearer traitor than Judas himself … .” (Guy, Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years,
233). Not only does this description reactivate the medieval blood-libel
accusation (Jews as descendants of the treacherous Judas); it also recalls the
accusation leveled by the governor of Malta against Barabas to justify the
confiscation of his wealth. Rather than attaching blame to Marlowe—or
for that matter to Chaucer for writing an anti-Jewish tale—it may make
more sense to see Marlowe’s play and Chaucer’s story as exploring rather
than exploiting the ethnic and religious hatred they describe.
It could also be argued that the persecution of Barabas and the hypo-
critical confiscation of his fortune on fraudulent religious grounds reflects
the fate of Catholic members of the English gentry whose wealth was
seized and given to Protestant loyalists by the Elizabethan government.
We shall focus more on this question in the next section. Here it suffices
to point out that many recusants left England for the Continent, or were
imprisoned for protecting missionary priests or for their failure to pay
increasingly heavy fines levied against them for refusing to attend official
Church of England services. Elizabethan policy against Catholics is
reflected in the allusions to the confiscation of Catholic wealth and prop-
erty in Jonson’s play Sejanus: His Fall (1603), which looks back on
Elizabeth’s reign and compares it with the tyranny of the Emperor
Tiberius. Barabas’ reaction to his persecution—the desire to take revenge
against the rulers of Malta—is psychologically justified; and it is interest-
ing that the Catholic resentment toward Elizabeth and her government
was reflected in several plots to assassinate her (most notably the Ridolfi
plot of 1571 and the Babington Plot of 1586). These assassination
attempts—along with the infamous if unsuccessful Gunpowder Plot of
1605—were motivated by revenge against a Protestant regime that had

systematically—and tragically—persecuted a religious minority for almost
fifty years.
The Merchant of Venice

Written between 1596 and 1598, The Merchant of Venice is one of
Shakespeare’s most troubling plays. Its treatment of the Jewish character
Shylock sits uncomfortably with modern audiences and modern critics
alike. For Derek Cohen, it is a “crudely anti-Semitic play” which “associ-
ates negative racial characteristics with the term Jewish and with Jewish
characters generally.”28 The word “Jew” and its variants are used seventy-
four times, and Shylock the villain is repeatedly referred to as “The Jew.”
Paradoxically, Shakespeare’s psychological and realistic representation of
Shylock (compared with the more caricaturish depiction of Barabas in
Marlowe’s play) has the effect of lending greater force to the anti-Jewish
coloration.
The aim of this discussion is neither to exonerate nor to blame
Shakespeare but to show how the unstable Jewish–Christian binary that
we have glimpsed in all the texts discussed so far is especially true of The
Merchant of Venice. Whatever Shakespeare’s own position, his play exposes
how antisemitic tropes ultimately undermine themselves by collapsing the
distinction between self and Other. This is particularly true of the central
character Shylock, a deliberately ruthless and unsympathetic figure whose
suffering at the hands of the Christian majority renders problematic his
straightforward status as the “villain of the piece.”
When we are introduced to him in act 1, scene 3, Shylock’s hatred of
Christians is so intense that he refuses to accept Bassanio’s invitation to
dinner: “I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, and so following;
but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (1.3.
35–38). As we have seen, it was medieval Christians who shunned Jews—
or were encouraged to do so—by not touching their wares or trading with
them in the marketplace. Moreover, Shylock’s hatred of Antonio, the
eponymous merchant of Venice, is not rooted in religious scruples but in
the personal experience of persecution; that is to say, it is personally and
psychologically motivated:
28
Derek Cohen, “Shylock and the Idea of the Jew” in Shakespearean Motives (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1988), 104–118.
100 A. THOMAS
SHYLOCK
Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances.
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug
(For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe).
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own. (1.3.106–113)
Far from being spontaneous manifestations of hatred, the behavior

attributed to Antonio in this speech—spitting on Shylock’s beard, calling
him a cutthroat dog and so on—is part of the stock-in-trade of medieval
anti-Jewish discourse. However, in the medieval period, the act of spitting
on others was not attributed to Jew-haters like Antonio but to the Jews
themselves. In a characteristic case of projective inversion Christians attri-
bute to Jews their own hateful practices. In late medieval scenes of the
Calvary, dogs often become the companions of Christ’s tormentors; Pilate
is replaced by the Jewish high priest or the Sanhedrin as the main players
in the Crucifixion, and enemies shown spitting at Christ in Arma Christi
images are explicitly identified as Jews (Lipton, Dark Mirror, 244–245).
These Jews are increasingly rendered as alien and are dressed in eastern
robes and turbans. In a late fifteenth-century stained glass at Malvern
Priory, we see a typical representation of a Jew wearing a turban and spit-
ting at Christ.
By Shakespeare’s day this vilification of Jews had become commonplace
but, as we have seen, it has its origins in late medieval imaginings of absent
Jews. Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” is set in a distant Asian city and is
populated by hateful Jews. But in The Merchant of Venice the hatred cuts
both ways, as Shylock’s speech makes clear. Here he is implicitly cast in the
role of Christ rather than as a tormentor of Christ, his beard smeared with
Antonio’s “rheum” (1.3.117), making him the victim of religious bigotry
rather than its embodiment as in the medieval Arma Christi, which
includes the spitting Jew among Christ’s torment. This ambiguous blur-
ring of Christian/Jewish roles as persecutor/persecuted is even more
apparent in Fra Angelico’s famous mural of the buffeting (torment) of
Christ, where we see a young man raising his cap and spitting at Christ in
a mock salutation to the King of the Jews (Fig. 3.1).
Fig. 3.1 Fra Angelico: The Torment of Christ (ca. 1440–1443). San Marco,
Florence
Significantly, the youth is not represented with Jewish features, sug-

gesting that Christians are also capable of denying the Savior’s divinity.
This blurring of roles is especially apparent in the scene where Shylock
appears in court to take his pound of flesh (act 4, scene 1). What begins
as Antonio’s “trial” soon turns the other way round as Shylock’s
expected vindication in extracting the pound of flesh becomes the
source of his punishment. The culmination of the scene is a grotesque
reenactment of Christ’s Passion, with Antonio cast in the role of Christ
102 A. THOMAS
and Shylock as Christ’s tormentor. However, what makes the scene to

all intents and purposes Shylock’s trial is the fact that the law is clearly
not impartial. The presiding Duke refers to him from the outset as “the
Jew” and the iteration of the word becomes a refrain throughout the
scene in the speeches of Bassanio, Antonio, and especially in the words
of Portia, fraudulently disguised as a doctor of law.
Significantly, Portia’s opening words make it clear that the distinction
between Jew and Christian, persecutor and persecuted, is not obvious or
immediately apparent: “I am informed thoroughly of the cause./ Which is
the merchant here? And which is the Jew?” (4.1.175–176). As David Scott
Kastan points out, Portia’s question undermines the distinction between
Christian self and Jewish Other throughout the play: “As much as charac-
ters assert the radical difference between the merchant and the Jew, the
play itself is far less confident that it can be maintained” (Kastan, A Will to
Believe, 95). Both Antonio and Shylock are traders, so that Portia’s ques-
tion presupposes a false distinction or binary that the scene—and the
play—ultimately renders problematic. Both are present in their capacity as
merchants since the dispute is a monetary one, but Portia’s loaded ques-
tion tilts the law squarely in favor of Antonio and against the “Jew” even
before the deliberations have begun. Portia insists that Shylock exercise
mercy (“Then must the Jew be merciful,” 187) where later none is
extended to him, suggesting not only anti-Jewish prejudice in the pro-
ceedings but a degree of Christian hypocrisy:
PORTIA
Tarry a little, there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.
The words expressly are “a pound of flesh.”
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh,
But in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are by the laws of Venice confiscate
Unto the state of Venice. (4.1. 305–312)
The hypocrisy is not only rooted in the double standard (Christian

blood must not be shed) but in the fact that Portia renders a literal reading
of the law that was traditionally attributed to Jews. According to Christians,
the literal law of the Old Testament has been superseded by the spiritual
letter of the New Testament; and yet here we have Portia applying her own
literal interpretation of the law to undermine Shylock’s claim. Shylock’s
own fundamentalist interpretation of the law (the assumption that he can

literally have his pound of flesh) is thus paradoxically replicated in Portia’s
own fundamentalist reading of it. Portia’s strategy might have been under-
stood by Shakespeare’s audience as a Christian quid pro quo. Or more
likely it was intended to prove the superiority of the Christian spirit over
the Jewish letter of the law. After all that is what appears to be the point of
the subplot of the three caskets, in which Christian humility and spirituality
triumph over pagan hubris and materiality. However it was intended, the
effect of the main plot is to blur the distinction between the Jewish and
Christian practices and beliefs. What appears to triumph in the subplot of
the three caskets is far from the case in the main plot. And the obvious fact
remains that Portia is not a doctor of the law, but masquerades as one,
rendering her legal determinations both bogus and fraudulent. When, fol-
lowing her meretricious judgment, Gratiano applauds Portia as “A second
Daniel, a Daniel, Jew!” (4.1.333), the comparison is ironic in so far as a
Jewish hero of the Hebrew Bible is here being claimed for the Christian
cause, thus further destabilizing the distinction between Christian and Jew.
The implication, then, is that the scene of the pound of flesh is not so
much a trial as a show trial in which rhetorical effects of truth prevail over
truth itself. This irony would not have been lost on Shakespeare’s Catholic
contemporaries, for whom treason trials were little more than show trials.
The infamous trial of Edmund Campion and his Jesuit associates on
November 20, 1581 was a case in point: as was standard practice, the
accused were unable to have defense lawyers and were not allowed to call
witnesses or collect evidence on their own behalf. (Similarly Shylock has
no legal representation but himself, whereas Antonio is represented by
Portia posing as a lawyer.) We see further evidence of the homology
between Jews and Catholics in the “Addled Parliament” of 1614, when it
was proposed that all recusants should be forced to wear yellow caps and
slippers to distinguish them from the king’s obedient Protestant subjects.
As Alexandra Walsham points out, this proposal provides a chilling precur-
sor of Nazi legislation against the Jews in 1930s Germany.29 The proposal,
which was not implemented, had its origins in the Lateran Council of
1215, which stipulated that offenders should be forced to wear a distinc-
tive badge of shame. Underpinning both the medieval and early modern
constructions of the Jewish “Other” was a deep anxiety about Christian
29
Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England,
1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 70.
104 A. THOMAS
identity itself. This anxiety was especially pronounced in late Elizabethan

and early Jacobean England, when, as Alexandra Walsham has shown,
there was no simple distinction between obdurate recusants and church-
going Anglicans; in between these groups was an indeterminate and
blurred category of church papists, that is to say, Catholics who outwardly
conformed by attending services of the Church of England but who
secretly believed in the papal supremacy.30
So far we have traced a continuum of ambiguity across several key
examples of English anti-Judaic writing, from Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale”
to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. We have not attempted to answer
the futile question “Were Chaucer and Shakespeare anti-Semites?” but
rather to demonstrate through close readings of their work how the dis-
tinction between Christian and Jew is rendered not only unstable but even
subject to reversal. As we have seen, this reversal is often signaled by the
application of comparisons between Christian characters and Jewish heroes
from the Hebrew Bible: Chaucer refers to the mother of the murdered
little clergeon in “The Prioress’s Tale” as a “newe Rachel,” while
Bassanio describes Portia in The Merchant of Venice as a “second Daniel.”
Whatever Chaucer or Shakespeare may or may not have personally believed
about Jews, their texts expose the unstable fault lines between Christian
self and Jewish Other in a society that was at pains—even desperate—to
construct its own stable identity through an arbitrarily conceived “Other.”
The representation of Jews as the doctrinal “Other” in the later Middle
Ages (Jews as the murderers of Christ) was not replaced in Shakespeare’s
England by a purely economic and ethnic model of Jewish alterity but
continued to intersect with these constructions to make religion and com-
merce, faith and finance, inseparable concomitants of each other. As Leslie
Fiedler points out, the Venetians’ stigmatization of Shylock is “a stratagem
for projecting what they must needs recognize as evil in themselves onto
an alien Other.”31 As we have seen, the same trope of projective inversion
characterizes the medieval treatment of Jews in Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s
Tale” and other related medieval texts.
Whatever Shakespeare may have thought about Jews, his play under-
mines the neat binary of self and Other that the Venetians construct in
their desire to stigmatize Shylock as evil. The fact that this stigmatized
30
Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic
in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999).
31
Leslie Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (Boston: David
R. Godine, 1991), 28.
construction of the Other bears certain resemblances to the treatment of

Catholics in Elizabethan England has often been overlooked. Important
here is the metaphorical function of Jewishness in the play. As David Scott
Kastan has pointed out, in so far as there were no Jews—or precious few—
in Shakespeare’s London, we can see the theme of Jewishness in the play
as a metaphor:
In the absence of a visible Jewish population, we can tell ourselves that what-
ever Shakespeare was doing in the play it could not have been intended as an
expression of a social prejudice, imagined as any kind of hate-speech directed
against a particular group of people, nor could it have provoked others,
intentionally or otherwise, to violence against them. There were no real
Jews, or at least very few real Jews, and that small number was practicing in
secret. Jewishness, therefore, can be no more than a metaphor in the play.
(Kastan, A Will to Believe, 89)
Building on Kastan’s insight, I would argue that Jewishness in the play

functions as a metaphor for other kinds of religious persecution, including
the systematic stigmatization of Catholics in Elizabethan England. A simi-
lar use of Jews as metaphors for aberrant Christians has been claimed for
the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, in which Spanish Jews are “thinly veiled
Lollards, Christian heretics who queried such aspects of Christianity as the
priesthood, pilgrimage, the sacraments, and especially the communion
ritual and its attending doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the host.”32
But whereas the Croxton Play of the Sacrament presents the Jews/Lollards
in a negative light, Shakespeare give us a more ambiguous treatment of
Shylock which suggests some sympathy for the plight of English Catholics.
Here too Shakespeare was working within a medieval tradition of using
Jews to talk about more localized English identities. When Shylock refers
to “suff’rance as the badge of all our tribe” the word “sufferance” (for-
bearing, suffering) would have carried special connotations for many
Catholic members of the play’s audience, since they were routinely fined
and had their property confiscated (like Shylock) for failing to attend offi-
cial Church of England services. The words “unnatural subjects” were
used to describe Catholics, placing them in the same category of the deni-
grated “Other” as Jews. Robert Southwell’s A Humble Supplication to her
Majesty (1591) pointedly asks the queen whether Catholics deserved to be
Lavezzo, The Accommodated Jew, 141–142.

32
106 A. THOMAS
branded in this way: “We desire to have it decided by your Maiesties owne
Arbitrament, whether we have justly deserved to earne so base a Livery?”33
The anger in these words echoes Shylock’s righteous indignation in The
Merchant of Venice:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d
and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us
do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison, us do we
not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his
humility? Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be
by Christian example? Why revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will exe-
cute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (3.1.58–73)
The Merchant of Venice thus raises important questions about religious

toleration as well as religious hatred, since the play demonstrates that reli-
gious bigotry is not only irrational, it also undermines its own unique
claims to truth. The more Christians try to differentiate themselves from
Jews or Protestants from Catholics by relegating the latter groups to the
category of a despised “Other,” the more the distinctions seem to blur.
The Winter’s Tale

So was Shakespeare advocating religious toleration in the play? It has
sometimes been assumed that there was no model of religious toleration
available in late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England and that
therefore it is anachronistic to speak of religious toleration at all. But this
is not the case. As early as 1563 a Catholic sympathizer named Robert
Atkinson made a speech in parliament calling for a measure of religious
toleration that invoked the positive and workable example of Habsburg
Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. And in the same year the Emperor
Charles V wrote to Elizabeth I requesting her to grant Catholics one
church of worship in each English city, a moderate concession to religious
diversity that was refused.34
33
Robert Southwell, An Humble Supplication to Her Maiestie, edited by R. C. Bald
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 3.
34
Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of Elizabethan Catholics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 61.
It is sometimes assumed that Catholic Europe was equally as—if not

more—intolerant of religious differences than Elizabethan England. Here
we need to distinguish carefully between the Spanish Habsburgs—namely
Charles V’s son Philip II of Spain, who was an ardent supporter of the
Inquisition—and the more ecumenical-minded Austrian Habsburgs,
Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II. Faced with a patchwork of diverse
Catholic and Lutheran denominations within his dominions, Maximilian
found it expedient to offer some degree of toleration to his Protestant
subjects within the Empire. Significantly, Maximilian’s court in Vienna
was noted for its irenicist sympathies. One of the key irenicists at the
Habsburg court was the architect Jacopo de Strada, a former pupil of the
Italian painter Giulio Romano (1499–1546) (Louthan, The Quest for
Compromise, 24–26). It is intriguing that Romano is identified as the cre-
ator of the “statue” of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale:
3. GENTLEMAN
The Princess hearing of her mother’s statue, which is in the keeping of
Paulina—a piece many years in doing and now newly perform’d by that rare
Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put
breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is
her ape. (5.2.94–100)
It seems likely that Shakespeare derived his knowledge of Romano from

Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, where he would have found the following Latin
epitaph: “Jupiter saw sculptured and painted statues breathe and earthly
buildings made equal to those in heaven by the skill of Giulio Romano.”35
These lines may have determined Shakespeare’s choice of Romano as the
sculptor who so perfectly simulates nature. It may be no more than coinci-
dental that Romano was linked to Maximilian’s court through his pupil
Jacopo. But it seems possible—even likely—that Shakespeare was more in
tune with artistic (and religious) trends in central Europe than we think. By
the reign of Rudolf II, Prague had become the center of Mannerist art.
Emperor Rudolf was himself a great art collector. This awareness of Prague
as the heart of Europe’s avant-garde may have inspired Shakespeare to think
of Bohemia as more than a state of mind and as an actual place where artistic
trends and religious toleration went hand in hand.
35
Quoted from William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, edited by Ernest Schanzer
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 230.
108 A. THOMAS
By the reign of Maximilian II, east-central Europe was certainly well

known for its religious toleration in Shakespeare’s England, and the play-
wright might easily have heard about it from English players returning
from destinations like Danzig, Königsberg, and Prague.36 In his famous
“Letter to the Council” (popularly known as “Campion’s Brag”), Edmund
Campion pointedly begins his letter to the Queen’s Privy Council by con-
trasting the tolerant countries he has left behind with the repressive and
paranoid kingdom of England he has now entered:
Whereas I have come out of Germanie and Boëmeland, being sent by my

Superiours, and adventured myself into this noble Realm, my deare
Countrie, for the glorie of God and benefit of souls, I thought it like enough
that, in this busie watchful and suspicious worlde, I should either sooner or
later be intercepted and stopped in my course.37
And he goes on to address the queen directly with a plea for religious
toleration:
And because it hath pleased God to enrich the Queen my Sovereigne Ladye
with notable gifts of nature, learning and princely education, I do verily trust
that—if her Highness would vouchsafe her royal person and good attention
to such a conference as, in the ii part of my fifth article I have motioned, or
to a few sermons, which in her or your hearing I am to utter,—such manifest
and fair light by good method and plain dealing may be cast upon these
controversies, that possibly her zeal of truth and love of her people shall
incline her noble Grace to disfavor some proceedings hurtful to the Realm,
and procure towards us oppressed more equitie. (My emphasis; 154–155)
Campion had spent seven years prior to this English mission teaching
rhetoric at the Clementinum, the Jesuit college in Prague, a city famed for
its religious tolerance not only toward Protestants of various persuasions
but also toward Jews, who enjoyed a golden age during the reign of
Emperor Rudolf II. We see this prosperity reflected in ambitious building
projects from the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
such as the Maisel Synagogue, named for Mordecai Maisel, an influential
Jewish member of Rudolf’s court.
36
See Jerzy Limon, Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern
Europe, 1590–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
37
Quoted from A. C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose 1559–1582 (London:
Norwood Editions, 1977), 153.
Prague’s importance as a major center of Jewish religion and culture is

confirmed by the English traveler Fynes Moryson in his Itinerary (1617).
Moryson attests to the religious pluralism he witnessed in Bohemia and
Prague: “Generally in all the kingdoms there was great confusion of
Religions, so as in the same Citty some were Calvinists, some Lutherans,
some Hussites, some Anabaptists, some Picards, some Papists, not only in
the Cheefe Citty Prage, and in other Cittyes of Bohemia … . And as the
Jewes have a peculiar Citty at Prage, so they had freedome throughout the
kingdome.”38 The same impression of religious diversity is grudgingly
confirmed by John Taylor, the so-called “Water Poet” (1580–1653), who
arrived in Prague on Thursday, September 7, 1620, just a month before
the disastrous Battle of the White Mountain: “There is said to bee in it of
Churches and Chappells, 150. For there are great numbers of Catholiques
who have many Chappells dedicated to sundry Saints, and I was there at
foure severall sorts of divine services, at a Lutherans preaching and the
Iewes Synagogue, three of which I saw and heard for curiosity, and the
other for edification.”39
On August 6, 1577, Campion sent a letter from Prague to a fellow
Jesuit in Warwickshire named Robert Arden (a distant relative of
Shakespeare’s mother Mary Arden) in which he refers to his home in exile,
Bohemia, as a place of happy refuge: “For this at least we are indebted to
those whose heresy and persecution we have been driven forth and cast
gently on a pleasant and blessed shore.”40 Bohemia was a landlocked
country in the heart of Europe, but like Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale,
Campion endows it with an imagined seashore. Furthermore, Shakespeare
inverts the settings of his source text (Robert Greene’s Pandosto) to make
Bohemia the refuge of Perdita, rather than her place of origin.
Is it possible that Shakespeare knew of Campion’s letter?41 It is not
impossible, since Campion, who had been in touch with Mary Arden’s
relative, the Jesuit priest Robert Arden, while in Prague back in 1577,
stayed three years later with the Catholic Sir Robert Catesby some twelve
miles from Stratford while Shakespeare was still living there with his
38
Quoted from Shakespeare’s Europe: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the End of the
Sixteenth Century, edited by Charles Hughes, second edition (New York, 1967), 273.
39
Taylor his Travels: From the City of London in England to the City of Prague in Bohemia
(1621). Houghton Library, Harvard University.
40
Simpson, Edmund Campion, 121.
41
See Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 175–176.
110 A. THOMAS
Catholic parents.42 In the medieval and early modern period letters were

more public than they are now, frequently circulating among families and
friends of the correspondent. It is perfectly feasible, therefore, that
Campion’s letter to Arden was read aloud to the latter’s Catholic friends
and family members. Even if Shakespeare never met Campion during the
latter’s mission to England, he may have heard about Bohemia’s reputa-
tion as a place of religious toleration and decided to allude to it by i nverting
the settings of The Winter’s Tale. It may be more than coincidental that the
play was written in 1609, the same year in which Rudolf II issued his
“Letter of Majesty” which granted religious toleration to his Protestant
subjects in the Empire. If Shakespeare was aware of what was happening
in central Europe—and there is no real reason to doubt that he did—he
would have seen an enormous contrast between the religious diversity and
cultural dynamism of Rudolfine Bohemia and a paranoid, repressive
England still traumatized by the shock of the failed Gunpowder Plot.
There is a discernible shift from vindictive revenge in The Merchant of
Venice (1597) to forgiveness and reconciliation in The Winter’s Tale
(1609), the former reflecting the violent divisiveness of late Elizabethan
England, the latter the yearning for religious tolerance following the
Gunpowder Plot of 1605. We see this desire for reconciliation enacted in
the final scene of the play, in which Leontes is reunited with his wife
Hermione after sixteen years of separation and estrangement. This scene
can be read as more than a familial reconciliation and also as an allegory of
a hoped-for religious rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants
symbolized by the “statue” of Hermione which her daughter venerates in
a manner reminiscent of the cult of the Virgin Mary:
PERDITA
And give me leave,
And do not say ’tis superstition, that
I kneel, and then implore her blessing. Lady,
Dear queen, that ended when I but began,
Give me that hand of yours to kiss. (5.3.43–46)
The line “that ended when I but began” refers to the fact that Perdita
was a mere baby when she was separated from her mother and exiled to
42
See Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995), 33.
Bohemia. But for many in Shakespeare’s audience, the line might have
also have served as a poignant reminder of how they themselves had been
sundered from Catholic England’s ancient attachment to Mary by the
Protestant Reformation. Medieval England had been known as “Mary’s
dowry” and the veneration of the Virgin represented a powerful cultus
both for medieval English Catholics and early modern recusants. The
Wilton Diptych, commissioned for Richard II in 1395, shows Richard
kneeling before the Virgin and Child (probably based on a Bohemian
statue owned by his deceased wife Anne of Bohemia). An attendant angel
holds a staff of St George surmounted by an orb illustrating a map of
England (Fig. 3.2). A later copy of a lost altarpiece in Rome shows Richard
handing the orb to Mary with the inscription Dos tua Virgo pia haec est
(“This is thy dowry, o holy Virgin”).43 As Alison Shell has pointed out, the
Fig. 3.2 The Wilton Diptych (ca. 1395). National Gallery, London
43
The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, edited by Gordon Dillian, Lisa
Monnis, and Caroline Elam (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), 24.
112 A. THOMAS
conception of England as Mary’s dowry had a special resonance at

Valladolid in Spain, where the English College displayed a picture of Mary
spreading out her mantle with her hands over kneeling Jesuits who present
her with a scroll, upon which is written Sub umbra alarum tuarum
manebimus, donec transeat iniquitas (“We will remain under the shade for
your wings until the wickedness passes”). The superscription reads: Anglia
dos Mariae (“England, Mary’s dowry”).44
Both The Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale involve the destruc-
tive effects of paranoia and mistrust symbolized by the Protestant
Reformation. Leontes’ jealousy and paranoia drive the tragic plot of The
Winter’s Tale, while in The Merchant of Venice mutual mistrust is what
links Shylock and his Venetian adversaries. Shylock’s hard-heartedness was
perhaps even intended to reflect the Calvinist leadership of England in the
1590s. We should also bear in mind that the play was written only two
years after the execution of Shakespeare’s kinsman Robert Southwell in
1595; and we have already seen how Shylock’s famous monologue on the
shared humanity of Jews and Christians to some extent echoes Southwell’s
Supplication to Elizabeth I for religious toleration. The inability to distin-
guish clearly between Christian self and Jewish Other was not only rooted
in earlier medieval anti-Judaic texts; it is also present in The Merchant of
Venice and ultimately finds resolution in a late play like The Winter’s Tale,
where sectarian hatred and division is healed in Perdita’s return from
Bohemia, her reconciliation with her father, and her reunification with her
long-lost mother Hermione. Of course, in the case of Campion’s return
from Bohemia to England in 1580, it was not peace and harmony that
prevailed but increased bloodshed and religious division. But that is pre-
cisely the point: the harmonious ending of The Winter’s Tale reflects not
just the generic rules of Greek romance but also the religious tragedy of
Elizabethan England and the ardent desire to seek a resolution to that
tragedy in the reconciliation of a fractured family (England) destroyed by
a violently jealous and vindictive husband and father (Henry VIII).
44
Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 206.
CHAPTER 4
Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf,

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
and Hamlet
In act 1, scene 5 of Hamlet, the ghost of the Prince’s father enjoins his son
to revenge even before disclosing the details of his murder: “So art thou
to revenge when thou shalt hear” (1.5. 7).1 He then repeats his command
several lines later: “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.25).
But by the end of the scene, the emphasis has shifted from revenge to
remembrance as the Ghost bids farewell to his son: “Adieu, adieu, Hamlet.
Remember me” (1.5. 91). This oscillation between revenge and memory
in the Ghost’s speech—as well as Hamlet’s anguished and confused reac-
tion to it—provides the key to Shakespeare’s complex—and at times para-
doxical—transformation of the original play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet).
The Ur-Hamlet is now lost; but it is fair to assume that it emphasized
the theme of revenge in a manner reminiscent of its principal source, the
tale of Amleth from the Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus, a twelfth-
century Danish monk who interpolated the folk tale into his chronicle
history. Scholars assume that Shakespeare overhauled this rather crude
revenge melodrama in order to create a more complex and subtle set of
motivations for Hamlet. Instead of being driven by a single-minded urge
to avenge his dead father by killing his uncle, Shakespeare’s Hamlet seems
to doubt the nature of the Ghost even before he hears him speak:
1
Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London:
The Arden Shakespeare, 2006).

114 A. THOMAS
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

Be thou a spirit of hell or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy events wicked or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. (1.4.40–44)
In these lines Hamlet betrays the theological assumptions of his

Lutheran training at Wittenberg (Luther’s old university) since for
Protestants the dead went either straight to hell or to heaven. Hamlet thus
assumes that his father has come back from one or the other of these
places. But it soon becomes apparent that Old Hamlet has returned nei-
ther from hell nor heaven but from purgatory, the place assigned in
Catholic tradition to those who have died suddenly or violently and who
are therefore in need of intercessory prayers for their salvation:
I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away! (1.5.9–13)
The play thus sets up two rival accounts of the afterlife: Hamlet’s
Lutheran-Protestant perspective versus his father’s Catholic purgatorial
origins. Presumably this was Shakespeare’s intention when he adapted the
original Ur-Hamlet. If Shakespeare introduced the theme of purgatory—
as seems likely—he was deliberately raising the vexed question of religious
politics in late Elizabethan England. Although the Protestant state had
officially abolished purgatory as non-scriptural and a superstitious relic of
medieval Catholicism, the country was far from unanimous in accepting
this legislative fiat; and many Catholics still believed in purgatory. Of
course, this does not mean that Shakespeare was taking sides in a confes-
sionally divided world, but rather describing the complexities of the reli-
gious landscape in Elizabethan England. As David Scott Kastan points
out: “The play neither confirms Luther’s teachings nor the Ghost’s
account—although it does not explicitly deny either—and neither
Hamlet’s temperament nor the Ghost’s nature can be adequately deter-
mined or described confessionally as Greenblatt’s elegant formulation
would have it” (Kastan, A Will to Believe, 135). For Kastan, the “problem
WRITING, MEMORY, AND REVENGE IN BEOWULF, SIR GAWAIN… 115
is not that religion demands belief; the problem is that Hamlet desires
certainty—and the credal problem gives way to an epistemological crisis at
the heart of the play and arguably in Protestantism itself.”
I will argue—with Kastan—that Hamlet is very much about the episte-
mological crisis of Protestantism, that is to say, a split in which Protestantism
has not entirely usurped Catholicism but continues to vie with it in the
hearts and minds of English men and women. Memories of the medieval
past and Catholic tradition continued to haunt the physical and psychic
landscape of the nation. Whereas Stephen Greenblatt and Gerard Kilroy
emphasize the Catholic “rites of memory” in the play, Kastan insists on
the dynamic of forgetting since Hamlet ends up by forgetting his original
vow to avenge his father’s death as he descends into the murky world of
his own epistemological doubts.2 I will argue that the play cannot be
reduced to a simple binary distinction between memory and forgetting. As
we shall see, both Greenblatt’s and Kastan’s insights are correct in impor-
tantly interrelated ways: Greenblatt’s preoccupation with the Catholic
need to remember the dead (and by implication the traditional Catholic
rites of the pre-Reformation past) correlates with Kastan’s important
insight that the play is largely about Hamlet’s forgetting of his father as the
play unfolds. But forgetting is also Claudius’ agenda, since he would sim-
ply like Hamlet’s father to be consigned to oblivion in the same way that
the Elizabethan church settlement wanted the Catholic past to vanish. In
fact the Protestant Church went out of its way to make that happen. The
Elizabethan church policy may have been based on “moderation”—a
mediation between religious extremes—but such moderation assumed a
violent form, as Ethan Shagan has importantly pointed out.3 This violence
included the despoliation of Catholic shrines and pilgrimage sites as rem-
nants of Catholic idolatry (Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape,
27). The desire to take revenge on these idols in the landscape was insepa-
rable from the urge to obliterate all memory of them.
As Hamlet famously dichotomizes the problem of political resistance in
Denmark, Elizabethan Catholics could either “take arms against a sea of
troubles” (that is take revenge through violence against the state) or sim-
ply acquiesce in persecution (“to die, to sleep”). But the play itself offers a
2
See Gerard Kilroy, “Requiem for a Prince: Rites of Memory in Hamlet” in Theatre and
Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, 243–260.
3
See Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint
in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
116 A. THOMAS
third option: to take revenge on the Protestant state by remembering the

pre-Reformation past in an active, defiant way. In the end Hamlet does
not kill Claudius for the murder of his father but for the unwitting murder
of his mother. This might be construed as an act of revenge, but it is sig-
nificant that Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio do not speak of revenge but
the exhortation to remember. I will argue that memory in Hamlet does
not negate revenge but becomes another way of expressing it.
I shall be focusing on the play’s relationship between revenge and
remembrance not in terms of a binary opposition but as interrelated cat-
egories. Put another way, Shakespeare’s Hamlet does not simply overhaul
the Ur-Hamlet and its medieval antecedent’s emphasis on revenge as the
driving motor of the plot by replacing it with an internalized drama of
memory and forgetting. Rather, in assuming an internalized form of reli-
gious resistance to the amnesia of the Protestant state, memory becomes
revenge by other means. If, as Kastan observes, revenge is a form of mem-
ory, it is equally true that memory is a form of revenge. Seen in this light,
the Ghost’s final line “Remember me!” does not simply refer to the fate of
Hamlet’s father but to the contested status of purgatory—and hence of
Catholicism as a valid belief system. As Kastan points out, Hamlet’s failure
to avenge his father’s murder is directly connected to his profound doubts
about the afterlife, as his “to be or not to be” soliloquy bears out. And
Hamlet’s failure to murder his uncle Claudius while the latter is at prayer
makes these doubts all the more apparent. The plot of Hamlet is both an
external drama of revenge and an internal drama of memory and forget-
ting. It is from this dialectic of memory and forgetting of the religious rites
of the past that Hamlet’s metaphysical uncertainty is born.
I will also suggest that the dialectic of memory and revenge coexisted in
the medieval sources upon which the play was based as well as important
medieval analogues such as the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight and the Old English epic Beowulf. It may seem strange
to compare works of literature as far apart in time and sensibility as Beowulf
and Hamlet. For Michael Swanton, Beowulf’s “tragedy has far greater
consequences than the merely personal tragedy we associate with the clas-
sical or Shakespearian tragic hero. Hamlet, for example, moves in a neu-
rotic world of inner conflict and self-doubt; between his values and those
of society at large there exists a wide gulf. Beowulf, on the other hand, does
not feel Hamlet’s constant need to question his motives; he and his people
share a community of interests.”4 Beowulf may be a product of a communal
4
Beowulf, edited by Michael Swanton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997),
second edition, 39.
feudal society, but does this make Hamlet the product of modern indi-
vidualism? Hamlet’s Weltschmerz proceeds less from doubts of his own
making than from the epistemological conflicts and controversies that
were generated within his (and also Shakespeare’s) religiously divided soci-
ety, that is to say, within the Elizabethan Protestant state. Hamlet’s doubts
expressed in the words addressed to his father “What should we do?” are
not unique to him but are the shared epistemological crisis of early mod-
ern Europe torn apart by religious strife. Claudio gives voice to these
doubts in the prison scene in Measure for Measure:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clot; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible. (3.1.117–127)
Saxo Grammaticus and Beowulf

In Hamlet, the Ghost’s return from the dead to urge his son to avenge his
murder by his own brother curiously recalls the moment in Beowulf when
Grendel emerges from the darkness of the Danish landscape to take revenge
on Hrothgar and his mead-hall. In both cases their origins and identity are
obscure. Who or what is Grendel? Is he human or monster? And what
exactly—Hamlet constantly asks himself—is the nature of the apparition
that visits him? This uncertainty is precisely what drives—or rather fails to
drive—his revenge. Hamlet is torn between the need to mourn his father
and the urge to avenge him; and this confusion arises from the Ghost’s
own mixed messages. At first he enjoins Hamlet to wreak revenge for his
murder, while his valedictory words to his son are “Remember me!”
Shakespeare probably did not use Saxo Grammaticus as his direct source,
but it seems that he was familiar with Francois de Belleforest’s French
version of the story in his Histoires tragiques (1570).5 It is here that the
5
See David Bevington, Murder Most Foul: Hamlet through the Ages (Oxford: Oxford
118 A. THOMAS
supernatural intervention of the ghost of Hamlet’s father is introduced, in

order to shed light on a secret murder that is freely acknowledged in Saxo’s
chronicle. This tale of murder and revenge is interpolated into Saxo’s his-
tory but its origins are clearly folkloric, just as Beowulf mingles historical
characters like Hrothgar with mythic archetypes like Beowulf.6 In fact, the
ending of the Amleth story, in which the nephew takes revenge on his
uncle by burning his thanes alive in his hall, recalls the fate of the King of
Gautland, in the Icelandic Saga of the Volsungs (ca. 1200):
Amleth saw that they were in a fit state for his trap and judged that the time
to carry out his plan had come. In a fold of his clothing he put the sticks he
had once fashioned and then went back into the room in which the nobles
lay strewn all over the floor, sleeping and vomiting in their drunkenness. He
cut away the supports of the hangings his mother had made, which covered
the inside wall of the hall, so that they fell to the ground. He placed them
upon the sleeping men, and with his crooks he bound them together so
skillfully and tightly that none of the men who lay beneath was able to rise,
however powerfully he tried. After this he set fire to the building. The flames
grew until they covered the entire hall, consuming it and burning to death
all the men inside, whether they were deep in sleep or trying in vain to get
up. (Saxo Grammaticus, 106–107)
They (Sigmund and Sinfjotli) were now both loose together in the cairn and
they sawed through both rock and iron, thus coming out of the mound.
They went back to the hall. All the men were asleep. They carried wood to
the hall and set the wood afire. Those inside woke up because of the smoke
and the hall blazing around them. “Here I am with Sinfjotli, my sister’s
son,” said Sigmund, “and we now want for you to know that not all the
Volsungs are dead.” (The Saga of the Volsungs)7
What Sigmund does not know at this point, and is only informed of
later when his sister Signy emerges from the flames, is that Sinfjotli is not
his nephew but his own son through incestuous sex with Signy, who
assumed the shape of a sorceress in the forest. This was all part of Signy’s
plan to wreak vengeance on her husband King Siggeird for slaying her
father and the Volsungs. What Saxo’s tale of Amleth and The Saga of the
Volsungs have in common is a revenge narrative which involves an uncle
6
See Saxo Grammaticus and the Life of Hamlet, translated with a commentary by William
F. Hansen (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 1 ff.
7
The Saga of the Volsungs, translated by Jessy L. Byock (London: Penguin Classics, 1990),
46–47.
and a nephew. In the former, they are presented as adversaries, in the latter
as allies. But in The Saga of the Volsungs the real relationship between uncle
and nephew is actually that between a father and a son. It is interesting
that this relationship is neither Oedipal nor incestuous in Saxo’s narrative.
The obvious explanation is that as a Christian writer Saxo is at pains to
repress any pre-Christian elements in which the taboo of incest is involved.
The same is true of Beowulf. The story of Sigmund’s vengeance pro-
vides an intriguing intertext in Beowulf when a singer in the mead-hall
celebrates Beowulf’s victory over Grendel by comparing him favorably
with Sigmund/Sigemund:
He spoke of all he heard tell about Sigemund, about courageous deeds—

many strange things—of the struggle of the son of Waels (King Volsungr),
about which the children of men knew little except for Fitela (Sinfjotli), to
whom he would speak of such matters, as uncle to nephew, since they were
always friends in need of every conflict; they had laid low with their swords
very many of the races of ogres. (874–884; Swanton, 77)
Like Saxo in the tale of Amleth, the Beowulf-poet represses the

incestuous-Oedipal relationship between Waels/Sigu and Fitela/Sonfjotli
by presenting it as an uncle–nephew relationship just as—as we shall see—
he represses the father–son relationship between Grendel and the Danes.8
This repressed relationship comes back to haunt the narrative in the guise
of the monstrous Grendel, who, as we shall see, embodies both the Oedipal
father of the folkloric archetype and the pagan pre-Christian past. Like the
tale of Amleth vis-à-vis The Saga of the Volsungs, Beowulf is related to an
older pre-Christian folk tale. According to Michael Swanton, the plot of
Beowulf can be linked to the indigenous European folk tale known as “The
Bear’s Son Tale” (Swanton, 9): “In the Bear’s Son folktale, this young
hero sets out on a series of adventures accompanied by several compan-
ions. He successfully combats a supernatural creature haunting a house,
whom several others have failed to withstand, usually because they had
fallen asleep. In the course of the struggle he commonly wrenches a limb
off the monster. Later he is guided by blood-stained tracks to its lair,
underground and sometimes under water also” (Swanton, 10). Certain
features of this folktale are found in recorded form from the fourteenth
8
For the repressed subtext of incest in Beowulf, see James W. Earl, “The Forbidden
Beowulf: Haunted by Incest.” PMLA vol. 125, no. 2 (March 2010): 289–305.
120 A. THOMAS
century, such as the Grettis Saga, written several centuries later than
Beowulf; but these later texts share with the Anglo-Saxon poem several
similar narrative motifs, including an intrepid hero and a series of troll-like
adversaries that haunt a house. Presumably these motifs were present also
in the tale upon which the Beowulf-poet based his written version. In gen-
eral, these later analogues are much looser in construction and more casual
in mood than the anguished tautness of Beowulf. The difference, I shall
now suggest, lies in the latter’s status as a Christian writer and the text’s
liminal status between memory and forgetting, heroic epic, and Christian
allegory in which Beowulf mediates ambiguously between a Scandinavian
berserker of myth and a Christ-like savior of fallen humanity.
As we have seen, both Saxo’s story of Amleth and the Anglo-Saxon
poem Beowulf are located in a distant pagan medieval Scandinavia, and
both involve an act of primordial fratricide that has its roots in ancient
myths: Amleth’s father (named Orvendil in Saxo’s account) is murdered
by his brother Fengi, who then takes his wife (Geruth) in marriage, while
Grendel, we are informed, is descended from the biblical figure of Cain,
the murderer of his brother Abel:
1
Adam knew his wife Eve intimately, and she conceived and bore Cain. She
said, “I have had a male child with the Lord’s help.”
2
Then she also gave birth to his brother Abel. Now Abel became a shep-
herd of a flock, but Cain cultivated the land. 3In the course of time Cain pre-
sented some of the land’s produce as an offering to the Lord. 4And Abel also
presented [an offering]—some of the firstborn of his flock and their fat por-
tions. The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, 5but He did not have
regard for Cain and his offering. Cain was furious, and he was downcast.
6
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you furious? And why are you
downcast? 7If you do right, won’t you be accepted? But if you do not do right,
sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it.”
8
Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.”
And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and
killed him.
(Genesis 4:1–8)
Both Cain and Fengi are motivated by envy of their brothers, Abel and
Orvendil. Cain resents his brother’s favor in the eyes of God, while Fengi
is envious of his brother’s triumph over the Norwegian enemy King Koller
and the favor he finds in the eyes of Rorik, King of Denmark:
Fengi burned with envy at his brother’s great success, and decided to do
away with him. A good and honorable man dare not feel safe even among
his own kinsmen. When an opportunity came to murder him, with bloody
hands he sated the lust to kill that was in his heart. (Saxo Grammaticus, 97).
In both narratives the heroes (Beowulf, Amleth) avenge this act of frat-
ricide: Amleth must revenge his father’s murder, while Beowulf must slay
the monster Grendel. This myth of a primordial murder is also present in
the Saga of the Volsungs: Sigi, son of the Norse god Odin, goes out hunting
in the snow with Bredi, the thrall of Skadi. But when they compare kills in
the evening, Bredi’s prey is bigger and better: “Bredi’s was larger and bet-
ter than Sigi’s, which greatly displeased Sigi. He said he wondered that a
thrall should outdo him in hunting. For this reason he attacked and killed
Bredi and then disposed of the corpse by burying it in a snowdrift” (Byock,
The Saga of the Volsungs, 35). Sigi claims that Bredi has simply disappeared,
but Skadi does not believe him and organizes a search party to look for the
missing thrall. When his body is found, Sigi is declared an outcast—a “wolf
in hallowed places.” In Icelandic law documents the word vargr (wolf,
monster) is used to describe outlaws (Byock, 112, footnote 5). Yet, unlike
the biblical Cain, Sigi is not doomed to a life of shame and exclusion, but
is led out of the land by Odin and becomes the founder of a line of heroes
exemplified by the hero of the saga, Sigurd the Dragon Slayer.
In the Norse tradition the primordial murderer is not demonized but
retains his heroic status as the ancestor of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer,
whereas in Beowulf Grendel is demonized as the descendant of Cain.
Cain’s murder of Abel is more heinous because he kills his own brother. In
the pre-Christian version of the story, there is no indication that the troll
who haunts the house is related to Cain or that he is evil: this is probably
the invention of the Christian poet of Beowulf. His demonization as
Grendel in Beowulf can be explained in terms of the Christianization of the
Anglo-Saxon epic. As J. R. R. Tolkien argued in his seminal essay “Beowulf:
The Monsters, and the Critics” (1936) the poem is the work of a Christian
writer and the monsters are central to his Augustinian vision of a fallen
world.9 In the folk tale upon which Beowulf was based, the trolls who are
encountered and defeated by the hero were probably not so much evil as
supernatural. To this extent they were not moral opposites of the hero but
9
J. R. R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Proceedings of the British
Academy 22 (1936): 245–295.
122 A. THOMAS
related in their superhuman nature. Inheriting this pagan material, the

Christian poet not only turns Beowulf into a prototype of Christ, who
enters the world of fallen humanity (Hrothgar’s Denmark) and redeems it,
but also makes the monsters the incarnation of that fallen, sinful world.
Swanton comments that it is strange that Beowulf’s comitatus falls
asleep before Grendel arrives at Heorot, but this detail is already present
in the folk tale he cites as the likely source for the poem. Rather than omit-
ting this detail the poet appropriates it for his Christian purpose, since the
scene of the slumbering thanes in the mead-hall provides a convenient
echo of Christ’s sleeping apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew
26:36–46; Luke 22:39–46; Mark 14:32–42): “Then he returned to his
disciples and found them sleeping. ‘Simon,’ he said to Peter, ‘are you
asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that
you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is
weak’” (Mark 14:37–38). Just as Christ faces a lonely vigil, so does
Beowulf remain alert for the arrival of the evil monster Grendel, the
descendant of Cain: “The creature that prowls in shadows came stalking
through the black night. The marksmen who had to guard that gabled
building were asleep—all but one” (Swanton, 67).
If Beowulf’s heroism becomes an allegory for Christ’s redemptive
incarnation, Grendel (and Amleth’s father) can be seen in the theological
terms of older, displaced pagan deities that have come back to haunt and
take revenge on Christianity. This Oedipal father–son conflict is present in
the shared narrative archetype glimpsed in The Saga of the Volsungs, but is
repressed in Saxo’s tale of Amleth and Beowulf. Although in both
Christianized narratives the heroes are ostensibly presented as pagan, both
Anglo-Saxon and Danish monk-writers are in effect addressing a Christian
audience with a view to instilling theological as well as heroic values.
Saxo’s Gesta Danorum dates from about 1200, only a few decades after
the Christianization of Denmark in the eleventh century. Grendel and his
mother are more threatening than the trolls that haunt the narratives of
the Scandinavian sagas precisely because they represent the older pagan
belief system that Christianity usurped: defeated and outcast they may be,
but as the story makes clear they have the inconvenient habit of coming
back to wreak havoc on the harmonious world of the mead-hall. Grendel
takes revenge for God’s banishment of his ancestor Cain from the world
of men by attacking the inhabitants of the mead-hall. Grendel’s envy is
also aroused by the monotheistic Christian Song of Creation that ema-
nates from the brightly lit hall whence he has been excluded:
Then the powerful demon, he who abode in darkness, found it hard to endure
this time of torment, when every day he heard loud rejoicing in the hall. There
was the sound of the harp, the clear song of the minstrel. He who could
recount the creation of men in far off times, spoke; he told how the Almighty
made the earth, a bright-faced plain which the waters encircle, set up in tri-
umph the radiance of the sun and moon as light for those dwelling on land,
and adorned the corners of the earth with branches and leaves, how also he
created life for every kind of thing that moves about alive. Thus these noble
men lived blissfully in joy, until a certain fiend from hell began to wreak evil.
(Swanton, Beowulf, 39)
This is essentially a biblical and monotheistic paraphrase of the Creation,

which is odd given the fact that the Danes are supposed to be polytheistic
pagans. Why should the Anglo-Saxon poet paint this confusing picture?
The obvious answer is that a degree of ambivalence still existed within
Anglo-Saxon society. If we date the composition of the poem to the eighth
century, the Anglo-Saxon world in which the anonymous poet emerged
had been Christianized for barely 200 years.
Writing in the sixth century, the cleric Gildas provides a glimpse of
the complex compound of Roman Christianity and Celtic paganism in the
British landscape during this murky period: “I shall not enumerate
the devilish monstrosities of my land, numerous almost as those that
plagued Egypt, some of which we can still see today, stark as ever, inside
or outside of deserted city walls: outline still ugly, faces still grim.”10 The
equivalent of these ugly grim faces in Beowulf are the hideous, diabolical
monsters Grendel and Grendel’s Mother: they are the incarnations of
the “devilish monstrosities” that Gildas is so reluctant to enumerate.
The archeological equivalent to the ambivalent coexistence of pagan
and Christian elements in Beowulf can be glimpsed in the layered nature
of the Anglo-Saxon landscape itself. Pagan sites were not completely
destroyed but made way for Christian churches, as Alexandra Walsham
explains:
The attitude of the early Christian evangelists to the indigenous religion and
magic of the landscape is best described as ambivalent. The lives of the saints
attest to a concerted strategy of iconoclastic destruction, but they simulta-
neously supply evidence of a programme of “rescue” and substitution which
10
Gildas, The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, edited and translated by Michael
Winterbottom (London, 1978), 17.
124 A. THOMAS
Valerie Flint and other historians have argued was being pursued across early
medieval Europe as a whole. The smashing and dismantling of idolatrous
shrines was accompanied by the deliberate resanctification of the same sites.
Thus St Martin of Tours is said to have erected a church monastery on the
spot where he demolished an ancient temple and cut down a sacred pine.
(Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 27)
A good example of this uneasy coexistence of pagan and Christian reli-

gious rites is the famous Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo in East
Anglia. The excavation of one of two burial sites near Woodbridge in 1939
revealed the outline of a decayed timber ship, which housed the body of a
prince and his worldly goods (sword, shield, helmet, lyre, and bracelets) in
a manner that recalled the earlier pagan practice of burying princes at sea,
like the fate of the Danish war leader Scyld Scefing from the prologue of
Beowulf:
There at the landing-place stood the curved prow, ice-covered ready to put
out, a prince’s vessel. Then they laid down the beloved ruler, the distributor
of rings, in the bosom of the ship, the famous man by the mast. Many trea-
sures, jewels from distant lands, were brought there. I have not heard of a
craft more splendidly furnished with weapons of war and battle garments,
with swords and coats of mail. On his breast lay many treasures which were
to go with him far out into the power of the flood. (Swanton, 37)
By the sixth or seventh century when this burial took place, the Anglo-
Saxons had ceased to bury their princely dead at sea and—consistent with
Judeo-Christian religious practice—interred them instead in the ground.
But the incorporation of a ship in the earth bears witness to the vestigial
rites of pre-Christian Scandinavia, the ancestral home of the Anglo-Saxons.
The famous burial site at Sutton Hoo is a fascinating topographical exam-
ple of how traditional pagan practices continued to haunt the Anglo-Saxon
Christian landscape.
Just as the pagan origins of many Christian churches haunt the land-
scape of Anglo-Saxon England, so pre-Christian elements in Beowulf
haunt the poem itself. Anxieties about the residual influence of old pagan
beliefs linger within the poet’s Christian unconscious as well as in the
physical landscape of Britain. The fact that paganism is not rejected out-
right but assimilated to the Christian belief system raises anxious questions
about the incestuous nature of that relationship. Although the poet seeks
to draw a clear divide between pagan and Christian by demonizing Grendel
and Christianizing Beowulf, his syncretic approach goes in the opposite

direction by highlighting the proximity of pagan to Christian beliefs.
Beowulf is both a Germanic hero and a Christ-like savior, who comes to
Heorot to deliver the Danes from the evil of the monsters. Beowulf’s
descent into the lair of Grendel’s Mother probably derives from a pre-
Christian folkloric source. But it also dovetails with the Christian-
apocryphal episode of the Harrowing of Hell when, following his
crucifixion, Christ descends into hell and delivers Adam and Eve and the
patriarchs from the snares of the Devil. In medieval depictions of this
apocryphal scene hell was often visualized as a hell-mouth.
We see further evidence of the ambiguous coexistence of pagan and
Christian belief systems in the description of the mead-hall in Beowulf.
One of the problems in discussing the description of the mead-hall is the
notorious obscurity of the following lines:
Heorot eardode,
Sincfage sel sweartum nihtum.
No he ϸone gifstol gretan moste,
maϸdum for Metode, ne his mynne wise. (166–169)
On dark nights he (Grendel) dwelt in the treasure-decked hall, Heorot.

Because of Providence he could not approach the precious throne, the
source of gifts; nor did he feel his love. (Swanton, 43)
Important here is the emphasis placed on the sacred status of the “pre-
cious throne” (gifstol). As Tolkien opines in his commentary on these
lines, the language here is theological so that gifstol is best rendered
“God’s throne,” being an example of “the frequent use of heroic language
with theological import.”11 In support of this claim Tolkien cites the
example of the same word with a theological meaning in Cynewulf’s poem
Crist. Gifstol is not merely a throne but “God’s throne,” which would
explain why Grendel cannot approach it, in spite of his temporary victory
over the Danes and his occupation of the mead-hall. Of course, this is all
wishful thinking on the part of the Christian poet: however victorious the
aggressor, the mead-hall must remain under the Lord’s providential con-
trol. Yet elsewhere he concedes that wyrd (fate) is in control of the world.
Especially toward the end of the poem, as the aged Beowulf confronts his
11
See J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, edited by Christopher
Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 182–186 (184).
126 A. THOMAS
mortality before his battle with the dragon, the hero himself invokes the
omnipotence of fate and its precedence over Christian providence: “You
are the last of our race, the Waegmundings; fate has swept away all my
kinsmen, courageous warriors, as destiny decreed; I must follow them”
(Swanton, 165). This is very much at variance with the notion that God’s
providence prevents Grendel from approaching the gifstol. Pagan and
Christian visions of the world are not harmonized completely but exist in
a state of uneasy tension with each other.
It has been argued that Heorot is based on Lejre, the capital of an Iron
Age kingdom, known in Old Norse as Hleidra, and located on the island
of Zealand in eastern Denmark.12 But the poet tacitly portrays it as a
Christian or at least a monotheistic shrine since it is where the Song of
Creation is sung and where “God’s throne” (gifstol) is located. As Swanton
suggests, the author may have been aware of the pagan origins of Heorot,
since Grendel’s successful incursions have the result of making its inhabit-
ants revert to their pagan practices, as the most explicitly Christian passage
in the poem (or a possible later interpolation) makes clear. If so, Christianity
is presented as the originary faith from which paganism derives, rather
than the other way round. In other words, the poet reverses the historical
sequence whereby paganism yielded to Christianity and pagan shrines
gave way to Christian churches:
At times they took vows of idol worship at heathen shrines, prayed aloud
that the slayer of souls would render aid against the nation’s calamities. Such
was their custom, the hope of heathens; they turned their minds towards
hell; they were ignorant of Providence, the Judge of deeds, they knew not
the Lord God, nor indeed did they know how to worship the Protector of
Heaven, the Ruler of Glory. (Swanton, 43)
What is intriguing about this passage is its slippage between an evil

pagan past and an implicitly Christian present, even though, as the author
points out, the Danes were not yet Christianized. When Gildas refers to
mountains, hill, and rivers “upon which, in those days, a blind people
heaped divine honours” he could be speaking of the Danes described in
Beowulf. If the passage is indeed a later addition, the interpolator is clearly
attempting to paper over the ideological cracks that complicate his desire
12
John D. Niles, “Beowulf and Lejre” in Beowulf and Lejre, edited by John. D. Niles
(Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007), 169–234.
for a completely Christianized landscape. For pagan Denmark we might

read Anglo-Saxon England in the early centuries of Christianity. Given the
Viking assaults on England in the 800s—beginning with the devastating
attack on the famous monastery at Lindisfarne on the north-east coast in
ad 793—the anxiety for clerical writers about England reverting to pagan-
ism must have seemed very real; and it is possible that the passage describ-
ing Grendel’s conquest of the mead-hall and its inhabitants’ reversion to
pagan worship is a later interpolation by a redactor living through the
horrors of these Viking attacks.
Collective memory of the attack on Lindisfarne is one explanation why
Grendel looms so large in the poem as a source of evil and destruction: he
represents not just the return of the repressed memory of paganism but
the murderous Viking raiders themselves. Like the Vikings, Grendel
attacks unexpectedly, swiftly, and with ruthless force, butchering all those
he encounters. A good example of their terrifying speed is the Viking
attack on Nantes on St John’s Day, June 24, 843, when the Northmen
sailed in their long boats down the Loire River and overwhelmed the
unsuspecting citizens of the town celebrating the saint’s feast day.13
Sometimes, like Grendel’s Mother who abducts Hrothgar’s favorite court-
ier Aeschere, only to behead him later—the Vikings took captives for ran-
som. The doubts felt by the Danes at the ruination of their mead-hall—and
their religious backsliding into worshipping at pagan shrines—may reflect
the Christian interpolator’s fear that the Anglo-Saxons may repudiate the
Christian God for the old pagan gods of the victorious Vikings. It is worth
recalling in this context that the Roman anxiety that abandoning the old
pagan deities for Christianity caused the destruction of Rome by the
Visigoths in 411 prompted St Augustine to refute that belief in his great
apologia for Christianity—De Civitate Dei (The City of God). The inter-
polated passage in Beowulf might be read as a similar defensive assertion of
Christian beliefs in the face of doubts by the Anglo-Saxons concerning the
efficacy of Christianity in the face of Viking power.
The attack carried out by Grendel on the inhabitants of the mead-hall
can thus be understood in terms of the revenge of the pagan gods against
the blissful inhabitants of that hall, who have abandoned the faith of their
ancestors. This is in itself a replaying of the Exodus account of the back-
sliding by the people of Israel, who, in their despair, temporarily abandon
13
See Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2014), 15–19.
128 A. THOMAS
the true monotheistic God and begin to worship the Golden Calf. Just
as the Israelites abandon monotheism for polytheism, so the inhabitants of
the mead-hall have abandoned the God “Almighty” (Aelmihtiga) for
“idol worship.” In perhaps the most pointedly Christian passage in the
poem, the author (or possibly a later interpolator) is compelled to admit
that Grendel’s reign of terror reactivates the memory of the old gods dis-
credited by Christianity.
The hymn of Creation sung in the hall is essentially a paraphrase of the
Genesis account of Creation made accessible and meaningful to the
Anglo-Saxon warrior audience of the poem. The poet attempts to harmo-
nize pagan and Christian elements, just as the Christian evangelists of early
medieval Europe did not simply obliterate the pagan sites and shrines of
the past but appropriated them to their own ideological ends. As a descen-
dant of Cain, Grendel is excluded from the blissful, prelapsarian world of
the mead-hall depicted by the poet: “Unhappy creature, he lived for a
time in the home of the monster race after God had condemned them as
kin of Cain. The Eternal Lord avenged the murder whereby he killed
Abel; he got no joy from that feud, but Providence drove him far away
from mankind for that crime.” Grendel responds to his exclusion by tak-
ing violent revenge on the hall’s inhabitants. Having suffered God’s ven-
geance for the murder of Abel, Cain’s descendant now wishes to take his
own revenge against those who have been redeemed. This implicitly
equates the inhabitants of the mead-hall with the Christian audience of
the poem, making Hrothgar’s thanes a stand-in for the Christianized
Anglo-Saxon audience of the poem, a deliberate strategy that allows the
poet to make his audience identify both with the Danes as their heroic
ancestors and as fellow Christians.
By contrast, Grendel is equated with the pagan gods of these ancestors,
anxious to take revenge not only for being excluded from the mead-hall
but more significantly for being relegated to the status of the monstrous
offspring of “ogres and elves and goblins.” We are also told that Grendel
is descended from the giants who “for a long time strove against God.”
The biblical Song of Creation arouses the ire of Grendel because he is the
descendant not only of the banished Cain but also of the pagan gods of
the North that have been displaced by Christianity. He is the incarnation
of the pagan unconscious that Christianity has repressed. Grendel takes
revenge on Hrothgar and the inhabitants of the mead-hall for celebrating
a monotheistic Christian Song of Creation.
According to Richard Fletcher, the feud that exists between Grendel

and Hrothgar reflects the social values of the Anglo-Saxons, for whom
blood feuds were part of everyday life: “The point here is that Grendel’s
refusal to negotiate put him, morally and socially speaking, beyond the
pale. He did not play by the rules. The poet’s audience did not need to be
told this. They lived in a feuding culture; they were familiar with the
conventions.”14 This is an important point, but perhaps the more impor-
tant point is the fact the blood-feud model is applied not only to the
dynastic politics in the poem (including the so-called backstories of inter-
necine conflict between members of the same family) but to its religious
politics as well: the Anglo-Saxon way of exacting revenge across genera-
tions is applied to the metaphysical struggle between Christianity and
paganism, in which the latter, having been displaced by the former and
repressed by Christian writers, comes back to seek vengeance on Hrothgar
and his subjects. Just as familial memories of past atrocities haunt and ani-
mate the collective urge to avenge those atrocities, so does the memory of
repressed pagan religious practices come back to haunt the political uncon-
scious of the Christian Anglo-Saxons.
The correlation between revenge and memory become even more
apparent in the next episode when Grendel’s Mother arrives at the mead-
hall to take revenge on Hrothgar and his subjects for the murder of her
son. Her revenge is simultaneously an act of violence and a ritual of
mourning and memory:
Grendel’s mother, a woman, she-monster, brooded on her misery, she who

had to dwell in dreadful waters, cold currents, after Cain killed his only
brother, his father’s son, by the sword; stained he then went out, marked by
murder, to flee the joys of mankind, and occupied the wilderness. Thence
sprang many a fated demon; one of these was Grendel, the hateful savage
outcast who at Heorot had found one man watchful, awaiting the conflict.
There the monster came to grips with him, and counted on the Almighty for
help, comfort and support; by that he overcame the fiend, laid low the hell-
ish demon. Then humiliated he went off, the foe of mankind, bereft of joy,
to seek out the mansion of death. And his mother, still ravenous and gloomy
at heart, purposed to go on a sorry journey to avenge the death of her son.
(Swanton, 95)
14
Richard Fletcher, Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 11.
130 A. THOMAS
What is interesting about this passage is the pronominal confusion it

suggests between Grendel and Beowulf: it is not always clear who is who.
This is itself significant on an unconscious level at least, since the protago-
nist and antagonist are not so much opposites as extensions of each other.
Both are products of a pagan world of heroism and folklore. Beowulf may
be cast in the role of a salvific Christ-figure by the Christian poet, but his
literary ancestry is far from Christian. The battle between Grendel and
Beowulf is a reenactment of a much older agonistic conflict that we see
between heroic opponents in ancient epic—between Gilgamesh and
Enkidu, for example. But also between father and son in the Oedipal
myth. If Grendel is the descendant of the pagan gods of old, this makes
him closer to Beowulf than the poet is comfortable in admitting.
The eerie, unnatural landscape that surrounds the mere where Grendel’s
Mother lurks correlates with the evil personified by the monsters them-
selves. This dark, sinister landscape is deliberately contrasted with the
light-filled mead-hall that the poet tacitly associates with Christianity. Yet
the contrast between the infernal landscape ruled by the monsters and the
blessed mead-hall becomes destabilized in spite of the poet’s best inten-
tion to present them as binary opposites. Following Grendel’s conquest of
the hall, the light is extinguished and it is plunged into darkness. And the
underwater lair of Grendel’s Mother is illuminated by firelight, making it
the diabolical mirror image of the brightly lit mead-hall. The more the
poet enforces a distinction between Christian and pagan, human and
monstrous, the more these motifs merge into each other. By the same
token, the distinction between revenge and memory is far from water-
tight. Grendel and Grendel’s Mother enact revenge on the inhabitants of
the mead-hall because—unlike those monotheistic inhabitants—they
refuse or are unable to forget their pedigree as descendants of a lost pagan
world. They are driven to take revenge on Hrothgar and his thanes pre-
cisely because the latter have implicitly repudiated their polytheistic past in
favor of a monotheistic present.
As James W. Earl succinctly observes, “Beowulf is haunted by uncon-
scious meanings that the text represses, meanings that the conscious text
cannot completely control” (Earl, “The Forbidden Beowulf,” 303). Earl
applies this Freudian insight to the repressed motif of incest in the poem,
but the same is true of the pagan religion which comes back to haunt the
poem’s “textual unconscious.” Earl concludes: “If Freud is right, and I
think he is, most of the demons we wrestle with in the night are also the
return of the repressed.” In so far as they are incarnations of the repressed
world of pre-Christian paganism that has returned—like the marauding

Vikings in their longships—to take revenge on the Anglo-Saxons for aban-
doning the faith of their forefathers, this is also true of the monsters in the
poem with whom Beowulf wrestles in the mead-hall. If the relationship
between the pagan “father” and the Christian “son” is Oedipal—each
bent on the destruction of the other—it is equally incestuous, since in the
poem the pagan past and the Christian present are not alien to each
other—as the poet would like us to believe—but intimately related.
Beowulf and Grendel are not opposites but similar, descendants of a pagan
world in which incest and Oedipal desire are not repressed but flourish. As
we shall now see as we turn to SGGK and Hamlet, the same dynamic
between a repressed and a repressing religion correlates with the Oedipal-
incestuous themes that inform both the late medieval romance and the
early modern play.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

In the fourth and final fit of SGGK the eponymous hero Sir Gawain reluc-
tantly rides out from the comfort of Hautdesert, where he has for three
days received the hospitality of Sir Bertilak—and the sexual attentions of
the latter’s wife—to confront his nemesis, the Green Knight, at the desig-
nated rendezvous of the Green Chapel. It is here that Sir Gawain must
receive the return blow for that which he inflicted on the Green Knight at
King Arthur’s Court one year earlier. Albeit couched in the generic terms
of an Arthurian romance, the plot in many ways recalls the revenge drama
of older epic. We might even say that the subtext of the romance is
folkloric, since the beheading game itself derives from the older Irish nar-
rative known as Bricriu’s Feast and finds an analogue in the thirteenth-
century French romance Caradoc, in which the equivalent of the Green
Knight turns out to be none other than the young hero’s father, making
the entire beheading game a test performed by a father on his son and thus
a boy’s initiation ritual into manhood. Although these pagan elements are
not overtly present in SGGK, the specter of the Oedipal father haunts the
confrontation of the eponymous Green Knight and Arthur’s court at the
beginning of the poem and the confrontation of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight at the end.
These elements are of course obscured in SGGK by the poem’s complex
ethical concerns with chivalric honor and “troth,” as we might expect from
a late medieval chivalric romance, in which the moral reputation of a knight
132 A. THOMAS
is at stake. Scholarly approaches to the poem have tended to mediate

between readings of the romance as either folkloric/pagan or Christian/
ethical. Helen Cooper traces a development in scholarly reception of the
poem from the somewhat old-fashioned investment in the poem’s pagan
antecedents and sources to the more recent interest in its Christian homi-
letic features.15 However, this pagan-versus-Christian-binary approach to
the poem threatens to undermine its layered complexity. Pagan and
Christian elements are both present and exist in a dialectical state of ten-
sion with each other. The folkloric father–son relationship and its Oedipal
tensions are never far from the surface and erupt at key moments in the
narrative, notably the “beheading scene” at the beginning of the poem and
the mock-beheading scene at the end, precisely those moments where the
poem’s ethical concerns are foregrounded.
The key to this ambiguous tension is the Green Knight himself. On the
one hand, he gives voice to the Christian clerical concern with superbia
when he questions the pride and courage of the effete and pleasure-loving
Arthurian court in the language of the ubi sunt topos: “Where are now
your sourquydrye and your conquests,/Your gryndellayk and your greme
and your grete words?” (310–311). On the other, the Green Knight also
embodies the revenge principle that is such an important feature of heroic
epics like Beowulf. But revenge for what? In the denouement of the
romance the Green Knight explains to Sir Gawain that the old lady com-
panion of his wife was none other than the sorceress Morgan Le Fay, King
Arthur’s half-sister and therefore Gawain’s own aunt. He claims—some-
what improbably perhaps—that it was Morgan—not the Green Knight
himself—who forged the plan to put the Arthurian Round Table to the
moral test and to scare Guinevere to death. While the desire to test the
prowess of Sir Gawain as the surrogate of the Round Table—and punish
him for his pride—makes perfect sense, Morgan’s intention to scare
Guinevere to death with the sight of the decapitated Green Knight is less
plausible. In fact, we never even see the reaction of the Queen herself to
this grisly sight, only the generalized disquiet of the assembled court. One
plausible explanation for this seeming red herring is that Morgan’s plan to
kill Guinevere is intended as an act of revenge for an offence that is never
revealed or explained. In some versions of the Arthurian legend Morgan
Le Fay is not only Arthur’s half-sister but also the mother of his child
15
For this discussion, see Helen Cooper, “The Supernatural” in A Companion to the
Gawain-Poet, 277–291 (286).
Mordred (in other versions he is Arthur’s nephew). As in Beowulf, the

specter of incest is elided in Sir Gawain since it is not made clear why
Morgan is so intent on getting back at Guinevere. But we can surmise that
the desire for revenge is because Guinevere has usurped Morgan in
Arthur’s bed.
Sir Bertilak’s intervention in fit I can be understood as the representa-
tive of an older belief system returning to haunt the Christian dispensation
that has usurped it. The attributes of the Green Knight—the holly branch
and the axe he holds in each hand—have often been interpreted as con-
trasting and paradoxical emblems of peace and war respectively. But holly
is also traditionally associated with Celtic religious rites and ceremonies,
including the ancient Druids who inhabited the British Isles before the
arrival of the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons. And the knight’s trademark
green color has been associated with the pagan motif of the Green Man
that can still be seen in the carved bosses of medieval churches.16 In this
sense the Green Knight can be understood as the incarnation of a pagan
world that has come to take revenge on the Christian court of Camelot for
usurping its rights and privileges. His taunts and mockery of the chivalric
values of this court is merely a more restrained, discursive version of
Grendel’s violent attack on Hrothgar’s thanes in the mead-hall. Whereas
Grendel literally rips apart his victims’ bodies, the Green Knight tears apart
the reputation of the Arthurian chivalric ethos with his withering words.
When Sir Gawain eventually takes up this challenge, his fate is to receive a
return blow at the Green Chapel one year hence. But part of this challenge
is also to undertake a forbidding journey through the winter landscape,
one that crosses symbolically from the familiar courtly and comforting
realm of Logres to the uncanny world of pre-Christian religious beliefs,
from the romance world of Chrétien de Troyes to the epic world of Beowulf.
Sir Gawain heads north from the safe and civilized confines of Camelot to
the wild region of the Wirral, passing by as he does so, the Isle of Anglesey
and the ancient site of Holy Well.17 It was on the Isle of Anglesey that the
pagan Druids fought their rearguard action against the Roman incursions
of Suetonius Paulinus in ad 60 and suffered a massive defeat, leading to the
16
For the complexity and ambiguity of the color green in the poem, see Derek Brewer,
“The Colour Green” in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and
Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 181–190.
17
For the importance of topographical references to the local landscape familiar to the
Gawain-poet, see Ralph Elliott, “Landscape and Geography” in A Companion to the
Gawain-Poet, 105–117.
134 A. THOMAS
destruction of their sacred shrines and groves by the Roman legionaries

(Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 22). It was also at Holywell
that, according to legend, the decapitated head of the pious Welsh virgin
Winifred had come to rest and where a holy well had sprung up to mark
the site (Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 40). In places like
this pre-Christian pagan memories had been only semi-effaced by newer
Christian cults and practices. Paradoxically, such Christian appropriations
of the pagan world entailed memory as well as forgetting, since these sites
were not obliterated so much as transformed or renewed to accommodate
Christianity’s veneration of its early martyrs.
When Sir Gawain rides out to seek the Green Chapel, it is precisely such
a pre-Christian world that he encounters, since the Green Chapel turns
out to be nothing more than a mound or grassy knoll open at either end.
This strange terrain is redolent of the abject landscape described in
Beowulf. The description of the boiling stream running by the knoll
(2174) recalls the burning water where the lair of Grendel’s Mother is
located. This dismal landscape experienced by Sir Gawain correlates with
the disturbingly unexpected aspect of the “chapel” itself, for its contours
resemble an ancient burial mound or barrow. The only way Gawain can
explain this uncanny experience is in terms of the Devil—just as the
Beowulf -poet identifies the monsters of his poem with the diabolical
descendants of Cain or Hamlet initially identifies his father’s Ghost with a
spirit from hell:
Hit had a hole on the ende and on ayther side,

And overgrowen with gresse in glodes anywhere,
And all was holwe inwith—nobot an olde cave,
Or a crevisse of an olde cragge, he couthe hit not deme
With spelle.
“We! Lord,” quoth the gentyl knight,
“Whether this be the Grene Chapelle?
Here might about midnight
The Dele his matynes telle.” (2180–2188)
It had a hole at one end, and on either side,

And was covered with coarse grass in clumps all without,
And hollow all within, like some old cave,
Or a crevice or an old crag—he could not discern
Aright.
“Can this be the Green Chapel?
Alack!” said the man. “Here might

The devil himself be seen
Saying matins at black midnight!” (Borroff, 252).
This landscape is uncanny precisely because it is as familiar as it is

strange, evoking memories of a pre-Christian pagan world glimpsed in
Beowulf. Nor is this only a memory trace of a literary landscape; the late
medieval landscape of Britain and Europe would have been littered with
such tumuli, evoking feelings of both familiarity and strangeness in medi-
eval people. One such example is the Neolithic passage grave near Gammel
Lejre in eastern Denmark, a location discussed earlier. The description of
the Green Chapel, and the illustration that accompanies it in the manu-
script, bears an intriguing resemblance to this tumulus with its hole in the
middle.
As Walsham states, “Bronze age barrows and tumuli also had an after-
life: the fading memory of their first creators provided the stimulus for
forging fresh traditions about their past history and for the reappropria-
tion of these burial mounds to serve different ideological and practical
objectives” (Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 21). Gawain’s
own perception of the mound is intriguing in using Christian ecclesiastical
vocabulary to describe the uncanny formation—“oratory” (“oritore”);
“chapel of doom” (“chapel of meschaunce”); “most unhallowed church”
(“corsedest kirk”)—as if he is on some level acknowledging the sacred
origins of the site. Gawain goes on to describe the mound as “evil-looking”
(“vgly”) precisely because it activates uncanny memories to which he has
never been exposed within the safe walls of Camelot. Suddenly the com-
forting, domesticated world of late medieval Christianity, emblematized
by the image of the Virgin Mary on the inside of his shield, has been
replaced—usurped we might say—by a threateningly pagan domain ruled
by a vengeful male god. The embodiment of this pagan deity (who only
later is identified as the Green Knight) “emerged from a fissure, came
hurtling out of a cleft with a terrible weapon” (2221–2222) as if from the
underworld itself.
It is precisely such places that Alexandra Walsham has described as the
site of intersection between the human and supernatural realms: “Caves,
volcanic chasms, and rocky fissures were similarly regarded as entrances
and gateways to an unseen spiritual realm hidden beneath the surface of
the earth. Forests, words, and groves functioned as arenas in which com-
munication with numinous forces was believed to be possible and indi-
vidual trees of impressive stature frequently became the focus of cultic
136 A. THOMAS
behavior” (Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 20). It is at such

a liminal site that the Green Knight has determined that the return blow
will be delivered, thus completing a plan of revenge concocted, he tells us,
by Gawain’s own aunt Morgan Le Fay. Gawain is not only confronting his
personal nemesis—the Green Knight. In a larger sense, the Christian poem
is confronting the return of the pre-Christian repressed in the guise of an
avenging pagan deity, a male equivalent to the female deity Morgan.
It is the inaptly named Green Chapel—which turns out to be more like
an ancient burial mound or pagan shrine than a Christian place of wor-
ship—that this antagonism between paganism and Christianity is played
out, where the embodiment of paganism (the Green Knight) in effect
takes revenge on the epitome of late medieval Catholic Christianity (Sir
Gawain). The Green Knight’s humiliation of his younger combatant can
thus be read as a form of vengeance enacted by the pagan past. But, unlike
in Beowulf, the retribution does not have lethal consequences but is played
out as a series of verbal taunts. Murderous revenge along the lines of
heroic northern epic has yielded to the ludic verbalism of courtly romance.
As we shall now see with Hamlet, this retreat from physical and murderous
revenge is completed in a very different kind of drama—one in which the
rites of vengeance have been displaced by the rights of memory.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1623)

If Beowulf and SGGK can be understood respectively as an epic and a chi-
valric romance in which elements of revenge and remembrance are inter-
twined—and in which revenge is enacted in the name of memory—Hamlet
is a play in which memory is enacted in the name of revenge. It is possible
to make sense of the Ghost’s appearance as a similar act of revenge as
remembrance not just for the murder of Old Hamlet but also for the sup-
pression of the Catholic faith by the new Protestant regime. When the
Ghost returns from the dead, it is made clear that he has come from the
Catholic domain of purgatory:
Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand

Of life, of crown, and queen at once dispatched,
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhous’ld, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reck’ning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O horrible, O horrible, O horrible! (1. 5.74–80)
Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out the technical and sacramental signifi-
cance of the words “unhouseled” (denied Holy Communion), “disap-
pointed” (unconfessed), and “unaneled” (denied extreme unction), three
crucial Catholic sacraments disabled by the sudden murder of the victim,
who was not given time to make his “reckoning,” and “account.” Thus when
the Ghost enjoins his son to remember him, this can be understood in the
contested terms of the religious politics of Shakespeare’s England. The Ghost
is not only urging Hamlet to avenge his death; he is exhorting Shakespeare’s
audience to remember the sacraments of the old religion abolished by the
Elizabethan state. Shakespeare may have come across these terms in Malory’s
Le Morte Darthur where the dying Sir Lancelot is “houselled and eneled, and
had all that a Christuan man ought to have” (Cooper, 524).
For English Catholics memory of the medieval past and its religious
practices was crucial to their political defiance of state-sanctioned
Protestantism. These included medieval pilgrimage sites and shrines like
the Well of St Winifred in Flintshire, which was visited by the Gunpowder
plotters and their families in 1605. Writing about the early modern British
Isles, Alexandra Walsham speaks of “the deep attachment that the Catholics
of Britain and Ireland maintained towards spaces and sites that had been
venerated by their medieval predecessors, even when these had been vio-
lently defaced in the course of the Long Reformation” (Walsham, The
Reformation of the Landscape, 155). And she continues that “clergy and
laity collaborated in a spirited revitalization of the sacred landscape that is
now widely recognized was a keynote of the process of Catholic renewal
across Europe as a whole” (156).
If the Ghost personifies the abolished Catholic faith, his murderer
Claudius personifies the Calvinist establishment in the last full decade of
Elizabeth I’s reign. For Claudius, Hamlet’s excessive mourning for his
father smacks of “unmanly” affect, associated by ardent Protestants with
Catholic rites of mourning. His admonition to Hamlet to cease mourning
betrays not just a regicide anxious to consign the memory of his victim to
oblivion but also a Protestant regime keen to bury the Catholic-medieval
past—including its rites and monuments—once and for all:
But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness, ’tis unmanly grief,
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, or mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool’d. (1.2.92–97)
138 A. THOMAS
Claudius’ rebuke can be read in terms of the Protestant state’s desire to

eradicate the memory of Catholic beliefs just as the early medieval cleric
Gildas, quoted earlier, is anxious to condemn the vestigial practices of
pagan rituals and traditions. Calvinist preachers like the firebrand John
Knox often invoked the Bible to inspire iconoclasts to destroy the Catholic
idols in the landscape. After one sermon delivered in St Andrews on Jesus
purging the temple in Jerusalem, the zealous congregation could hardly
wait until it was finished to begin their work of destruction (Walsham, The
Reformation of the Landscape, 100). The Old Testament was also deployed
to set the forces of iconoclasm in action, much as the author of Beowulf
invoked the story of Cain and Abel to demonize the pagan gods of the
North. Congregations would have detected in these destructive actions “a
deliberate echo of Old Testament crusades against the groves of Baal and
a desire to follow in the footsteps of Gideon” (Walsham, The Reformation
of the Landscape, 101).
This desire to cleanse the nation of vain idols correlates with the
Protestant desire to induce officially sanctioned forgetting of the medieval
past. In Eamon Duffy’s memorable phrase, the stripping of the altars and
the despoliation of Catholic monuments by the Protestant Reformation
was “a necessary rite of exorcism.”18 The spectral metaphor used by Duffy
is particularly apt if we read the Ghost in Hamlet as an allegory for English
Catholicism that must—in the minds of Calvinists like Claudius—be exor-
cised from the memory of the people. Hamlet’s desperate struggle to
remember his father in the face of Claudius’ pressure on him to forget—
pressure that partly succeeds, as Kastan points out—exemplifies the grad-
ual erosion of the English people’s memory of Catholicism after decades
of Elizabethan Protestantism. Crucial here was the link established
between the physical and the psychic landscape of the nation. As Alexandra
Walsham points out, “only by smashing the physical objects and structures
that sustained them could the written and unwritten traditions linked with
wells, trees, caves, and stones be consigned to oblivion” (Walsham, The
Reformation of the Landscape, 125).
In defiance of such iconoclastic amnesia, recusant writings—and the
Ghost’s speech can also be understood in this way—work the other way
round in reinscribing memories of the medieval past in the minds of their
readers. In late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, where the
18
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–1580
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 495.
despoliation and destruction of medieval shrines and pilgrimage sites was

so effective and thorough, writing about those shrines became a crucial
way to preserve their memory. According to Walsham, “while the recus-
ant nobility and gentry had the opportunity and means to participate in
this resurgent and confessionally self-conscious culture of religious tour-
ism, Catholics of lower rank could only do so indirectly through the
medium of books and devotional objects linked with these sites which
filtered into Britain and Ireland illicitly” (Walsham, The Reformation of
the Landscape, 165). Most of these pilgrimage sites were little better than
ruins by Shakespeare’s time, and the Protestant iconoclasts had been
largely effective in destroying or removing objects of Catholic veneration
such as crosses and statues of saints and the Virgin Mary. In the 1530s,
during the Henrician Reformation, the shrine of St Thomas Becket at
Canterbury was targeted by Cromwell’s iconoclasts, as were the shrines of
St Anne at Buxton and of the Virgin Mary at Walsingham in Norfolk
(Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 96) (Fig. 4.1).19
Since the despoliation of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, recus-
ants were increasingly required to substitute visits to the physical sites with
elegies and poems memorializing them. For example the recusant noble-
man Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, who died of dysentery after ten years
of imprisonment in the Tower of London, penned a powerful lament on
the destruction of the shrine known as “In the Wracks of Walsingham”:
In the Wracks of Walsingham

Whom should I choose,
But the Queen of Walsingham
To be guide to my muse? 20
Such writings were not merely devotional but also highly political in
their attempt to resist the state’s desire to eradicate all written and unwrit-
ten memories of the Catholic past. These writings represented Protestant
iconoclasm as pagan, just as Protestant writings characterized Catholic
monuments and shrines as idolatrous. For Howard, the despoiled shrine
at Walsingham becomes a symbol of the hell created by the Reformation,
one that correlates with the evil pagan landscape of Beowulf and Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight:
See Gary Waller, Walsingham and the English Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011).
19
Quoted from Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 377.

20
140 A. THOMAS
Fig. 4.1 Gateway of

Walsingham Abbey
Owls do shriek where the sweetest hymns

Lately were sung;
Toads and serpents hold their dens
Where the palmers did throng.
(Quoted from Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 378)
This haunted landscape resembles the description of the well house of

St Frideswide at Binsey, which bore a picture of the Virgin on the front
and which by the later seventeenth century, “was overgrown with nettles
and other weeds, and harboring frogs, snails and vermin” (quoted in
Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 123).
This kind of elegiac writing about haunted landscapes served as a criti-

cal tool in promoting Catholic defiance of state-induced amnesia about
the medieval past. In the very act of describing Walsingham’s desolation as
a great medieval shrine, Howard paradoxically reinscribes its former holi-
ness in his readers’ memory:
Weep, weep, O Walsingham, Whose days are nights,

Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to despites.
Sin is where Our Lady sat,
Heaven turned is to hell.
Satan sits where Our Lord did sway;
Walsingham, O farewell.
(Quoted from Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 378)
In the same way, the Ghost’s speech, with its own allusions to purga-
tory as well as its naming of the abolished sacraments of medieval
Catholicism, can be understood in terms of defiant Catholic writing or as
a kind of recusant samizdat encoded within Shakespeare’s play. Most likely
the words “unhouseled,” “disappointed,” and “unaneled” uttered by
Hamlet’s Ghost would only have been recognized and understood by
Catholic members of the audience, who would have remembered them
from Queen Mary’s reign (1553–1558):
But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood … (1. 3.13–16)
It is at the end of this speech that the Ghost reiterates his desire for
revenge:
GHOST
If thou didst ever thy dear father love—
HAMLET
O heaven!
GHOST
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder! (1.5.23–25)
142 A. THOMAS
Ever since Plato there had existed a connection between writing and
memory; hence the function of memory in early modern England was
envisaged as a form of writing (Hamlet in Purgatory, 214–215). When
Hamlet assures his deceased father that he will never forget him, he uses
the image of the brain or mind as a book:
HAMLET
Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matters! (1.5.97–104)
When Hamlet swears to secrecy the witnesses to his father’s return from
the dead, he does so by invoking St Patrick (1.5.135). Swearing by this
saint is hardly coincidental. Not only was Patrick associated with the doc-
trinal domain of purgatory, he also gave his name to a famous medieval
pilgrimage site in Ireland, which the Protestants tried to destroy in spite
of—indeed because of—its popularity with people near and far. According
to Walsham, “St Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland, a complex of caves on a
barren island in the middle of Lough Derg in Donegal, in northwestern
Ireland, enjoyed a unique degree of international prestige” (Walsham, The
Reformation of the Landscape, 53–54). Just as Howard’s elegy on the
shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham paradoxically perpetuates its memory,
so Hamlet may be said to inscribe the memory of an officially abolished
Catholic pilgrimage site in which writing becomes a substitute for the
physical site itself.
Madness and Memory
In Saxo’s version of the story, Amleth feigns madness in order to deflect
Fengi’s suspicions that Amleth might be preparing to take his revenge and
murder his uncle: “Amleth saw this and feared that he might make his
uncle suspicious if he behaved intelligently. So he feigned madness and
pretended that his mind had been damaged. With this cunning he not
only concealed his cleverness but also guarded his life” (Saxo Grammaticus
and the Life of Hamlet, 98). By feigning madness Amleth pretends that he
has forgotten about his father’s death; that is to say, that he no longer
remembers the murderous events of the past. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet
feigns madness not to cover his own plan of revenge but to discover
whether Claudius really committed the murder; that is to say, for Hamlet,
madness becomes a way to achieve knowledge—and thus—attain power.
In the play known as The Murder of Gonzago the murderer is not the uncle
of the king (aka the duke of Vienna) but his nephew (Lucius), thus turn-
ing the relationship of Hamlet/nephew to Claudius/uncle from that of
victim to perpetrator. In this way the play becomes the means not only to
“catch the conscience of the king” but to undermine his power just as the
play itself becomes the means to subvert the hegemony of the Protestant
regime. In a sense this shift from madness as a cover for murder to mad-
ness as a pretext for assuming power reprises the Oedipal subtext of the
archetypal story upon which Saxo’s tale of Amleth is based. Underlying
the uncle–nephew antagonism of the Hamlet plot is a deeper father–son
Oedipal conflict. In terms of the religious conflicts played out in
Elizabethan England, the father (Catholicism) comes back to haunt and
take revenge on the son (Protestantism). Significantly, both Hamlet and
Claudius are Protestants. When the Ghost enjoins his son to avenge and
remember, he is in a sense addressing both his son and his brother, since
both Hamlet and Claudius are ultimately responsible for having sup-
pressed the Catholic religion.
Heroes as fools or tricksters were a frequent feature of medieval narra-
tives and are common to Celtic as well as Germanic tradition. Perhaps the
most famous Celtic example is the legend of the trickster Tristan, who
assumes the guise of a fool in order to gain access to Iseult at King Mark’s
court. The episode of Tristan’s feigned madness is recorded in a twelfth-
century Old French poem of 998 lines that recounts how Tristan, banished
from King Arthur’s court, disguises himself as a fool in order to see his lover
Queen Iseult. At court, he amuses Mark with his wit and makes allusions to
his past with Iseut. After Mark leaves to go hunting, Iseut remains skeptical
until Tristan is recognized by the dog Husdent. The work survives in a
single manuscript in the Bodleian Library (Douce d 6) immediately follow-
ing a truncated text of Thomas’s Tristan, to which it is closely related.21
The story dates from about the same period as the story of Amleth, but
its folkloric origins would appear to be much older. A cruder ancestor is
probably Grendel, whose madness is literal rather than feigned and whose
Les deux poèmes de la Folie Tristan, edited by Joseph Bédier (Paris: Didot, 1907).
21
144 A. THOMAS
desire for revenge is therefore more directly violent. Madness as subver-

sion has a similar function in Shakespeare’s drama, as the example of Lear’s
Fool demonstrates. It also has political implications in a society where tell-
ing the truth could be dangerous, which is why Lear tolerates the Fool’s
criticisms but no one else’s. Kent is banished for criticizing the king’s
abdication whereas the equally critical Fool remains in his entourage even
after the king has left his daughters’ residences. Edgar too assumes the role
of a madman (Poor Tom) in order to escape detection and capture.
Crucial to Hamlet’s feigned madness are the Catholic connotations of
madness in Shakespeare’s England. As Gerard Kilroy has pointed out,
Hamlet encodes hidden references to the fate of persecuted Catholics in
Elizabethan England. The theme of madness, in particular, corresponds to
the official perception of recusants as madmen (“fools”) who had to be
locked away as dangerous threats to society: “Catholics were not only
treated as fools and madmen, but seem to have accepted the self-mocking
‘epithet’ of fools with a fiercely proud humility” (Kilroy, “Requiem for a
Prince”). As evidence for this claim, Kilroy cities the example of Robert
Southwell’s description of Catholics as “God Almighties fools” (Kilroy,
“Requiem for a Prince,” 146). In Sonnet 124 Shakespeare’s phrase “the
fools of Time” has also been seen as an allusion to the Jesuit martyrs like
Southwell who insisted on dying for their faith.22 Where modern readers
are inclined to give the word “fool” here a negative gloss, for Shakespeare’s
readers the phrase “fools of Time” could be construed as positive, for mad-
men remember what society has chosen—or has been forced—to forget.
Like that of Lear’s Fool, Hamlet’s feigned madness allows him to critique
the power of Claudius with relative impunity. When Claudius interrogates
Hamlet as to the whereabouts of the murdered Polonius’ corpse, Hamlet
replies in a cryptically punning manner reminiscent of Lear’s Fool that a
“certain convocation of politic worms are e’en now at him./Your worm is
your only emperor for diet” (3.3. 20–21). Stephen Greenblatt sees these
lines as a playful allusion to the Diet of Worms (1521), where Martin Luther’s
doctrines were condemned by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
(Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 241). But this allusion may be a camou-
flage for a more damning—and decidedly medieval—condemnation of the
powerful who, according to medieval writers, are brought by death to the
22
John Klause, “Politics, Heresy and Martyrdom in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 124 and Titus
Andronicus” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, edited by James Schiffer (New York:
Garland, 2000), 219–240.
same level as ordinary men. In the morality play Everyman, for example,
Death assures Everyman that “I set not by gold, silver nor riches,/ Nor by
pope, emperor, king, duke, ne princes” (125–126).23
The medieval theme of vanitas is most powerfully manifested in the
gravedigger’s scene in act 5, scene 1, where Hamlet comes upon the skull
of his old court jester and childhood companion Yorick. In his famous
“Alas, poor Yorick!” speech, Hamlet’s words echo the ubi sunt motif
which was such a commonplace of medieval clerical writing: “Where be
your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that
were wont to set the table on a roar?” (5.1.189–190). As we saw earlier in
SGGK, the Green Knight uses this motif to mock the pride and arrogance
of Arthur’s court. Here Hamlet uses it to more general effect to highlight
the futility of all worldly ambition and aspiration. This commonplace leads
to the equally medieval theme of Alexander the Great, who, as we saw in
Chap. 2, was the exemplar of chivalric heroism and the futility of worldly
ambition. Alexander’s pride was often associated with the Wheel of
Fortune motif in medieval art and literature (Fig. 4.2). Hamlet’s disquisi-
tion on Alexander again reactivates the medieval sense of the transience of
worldly power and ambition: “Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth to dust, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam
whereto he was converted might they not stop a barrel?” (5.1.208–212).
Through this medieval discourse of “madness” Hamlet thus is able to
speak truth to power.
Unlike Hamlet’s feigned madness, Ophelia’s lurch into insanity is
decidedly authentic, motivated by her father’s murder, her brother’s
absence in France, and Hamlet’s rejection of her love. But even though
Shakespeare gives us a perfectly plausible case study of mental breakdown
based on a number of traumatic factors, it could be argued that Ophelia’s
ravings allow the playwright to raise sensitive political and religious issues
otherwise impossible or just too dangerous in late Elizabethan England.
Some of Ophelia’s demented utterances give voice to repressed Catholic
practices such as pilgrimages and prayers for the dead. Her song “How
should I your true love know/from one another? /By his cockle hat and
staff/And his sandal shoon” (4.5.23–26) distinguishes between faithless
love and the “true” love of a Catholic pilgrim wearing a cockle shell in his
hat as he makes his way to the famous shrine of St James at Compostela in
23
Everyman and Mankind, edited by Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen (London:
Arden Shakespeare, 2009), 114.
146 A. THOMAS
Fig. 4.2 The Wheel of Fortune. From the Troy Book (ca. 1446–1450). British
Library
Galicia, northwestern Spain.24 Compostela was one of the most famous

pilgrimage sites in the medieval period and was visited by the English mys-
tic Margery Kempe as well as Chaucer’s fictional Wife of Bath: “At Rome
she hadde been, and at Boloigne,/In Galice at Seint-Jame, and at
Coloigne” (I, 465–466).25 But by Shakespeare’s time such pilgrimages to
European Catholic shrines were out of the question, becoming powerful
Alfred Thomas, Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War (London: Palgrave, 2014), 71.
24
Riverside Chaucer, 31.

25
memory traces embedded in old folk songs. Like Hamlet, Ophelia is

unable to take revenge for the murder of her father. Rather, memory
becomes revenge by other means. The “maimèd rites” of Ophelia’s burial
are usually understood as reactions to her suicide. But the circumstances
of her death are deliberately left murky, as is the true nature of her faith.
Certainly, her demented songs point to an adherent of Catholicism rather
than Protestantism; such a conclusion would further explain the “maimed
rites” of her funeral, since recusants could not be buried according to the
rites of the Church of England and had frequently to be buried secretly
and under cover of darkness.
The crucial importance of memory-as-revenge is reintroduced at the
end of Hamlet when the fatally wounded Prince, having finally avenged
his father by slaying Claudius, exhorts Horatio to remember him just as
the Ghost enjoined Hamlet to remember him: “But let it be. Horatio, I
am dead./Thou liv’st: report me and my causes right/to the unsatisfied”
(5.2.292–293). Anxious that his “causes” should not be forgotten, the
dying Hamlet repeats the same desperate appeal a few lines later: “If thou
ever didst hold me in thy heart/Absent thee from felicity awhile/and in
this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/to tell my story” (5.2.300–303).
In a sense, this was also the message of doomed missionary priests like
Henry Garnet as they stood on the scaffold and addressed the public for
the last time. They too were anxious that their “causes”—the rights of
Catholics to adhere to their own faith without hindrance and oppres-
sion—should be reported. Like Hamlet, they knew they were dead men.
And in their capacity as priests catering to the Catholic faithful, they were
also—like Hamlet’s ghostly father—enjoining them to “Remember me!”
CHAPTER 5
Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The

Duchess of Malfi, and The Virgin Martyr
In the Christmas holidays of 1609 an unlicensed play was staged at

Gowlthwaite Hall, the home of Sir John Yorke in the north Yorkshire vil-
lage of Nidderdale. The players were named the Simpson Brothers and
they were Catholics. The play included an interlude in which the devil
carries off a Church of England minister to hell. The episode caused some-
thing of an uproar among the recusant members of the audience. In spite
of the careful monitoring of those allowed in, a local Protestant preacher
managed to enter and denounced the performance to the authorities as
“seditious.” The case was brought before the Star Chamber, and two years
later Sir John and his wife were fined more than £4000 for allowing the
performance to take place. Unable to pay the staggering sum, the couple
were imprisoned in the Fleet Prison in London and released only in 1617.1
The Star Chamber proceedings against Sir John revealed that the
Simpson Brothers’ repertoire included two of Shakespeare’s plays—
Pericles and King Lear. There is no record that the plays were actually
performed in Yorkshire; but if they were, this would constitute the oldest
political appropriation of Shakespeare ever: the playwright was still alive at
1
Phebe Jensen, “Recusancy, Festivity and Community: The Simpsons at Gowlthwaite
Hall” in Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare, edited by Richard
Dutton, Alison Findley, and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2003), 101–120.

150 A. THOMAS
the time and in the process of writing perhaps his most Catholic play—The
Winter’s Tale—to which we shall return.
Shakespeare’s play was based upon an older play, King Leir, as well as
the brief account of Lear’s reign in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia
regum Britanniae (ca. 1136). In Geoffrey’s version, Leir—disowned by
Regan and Goneril—crosses the sea, where he is reconciled with his
youngest daughter Cordel (Cordelia), wife of Aganippus King of Gaul.
Accompanied by Cordelia, Leir returns to Britain and defeats his son-in-
law, thereby bringing the land under his dominion once again. Old Leir
dies three years later and Cordelia inherits the government before being
overthrown five years later by her nephews. She then commits suicide.2
The ending of Shakespeare’s play is much bleaker than either Geoffrey’s
account or the older lost play, since both Lear and Cordelia are not victori-
ous but die in the most tragic circumstances. The question I pose in this
chapter is not why Shakespeare changed the ending in such a drastic fash-
ion, but how would the Catholics of Nidderdale have responded to it?
And how would they have related to a daughter who refuses to sanction
her father’s folly and instead speaks truth to power? It is likely that the
bleak ending would have shocked everyone who saw it, regardless of
whether they were in London or in the North. But they may have drawn
very different conclusions from it.
For one thing, the cruelty exhibited in the play—and especially
Cordelia’s death by hanging—may have been less shocking to Sir John
and his coreligionists than their counterparts in London. The 1569
northern uprising, when 600 Catholic rebels were hanged throughout
the region, must still have haunted local memories. The sheer arbitrari-
ness of Cordelia’s death—the fact that she is hanged rather than her
father—recalls what K. J. Kesselring has termed “the appearance of a
lottery” in the selection of those who were hanged (The Northern
Rebellion of 1569, 124). To the Catholics of Yorkshire the violence and
disorder of Lear’s kingdom would have felt familiar rather than strange,
not a warning of what might happen in the future but—in a sense—was
a description of what had already transpired—a world turned upside
down in which the adherents of the true faith were punished and those
of the false faith were triumphant. There was no happy ending to the
northern uprising, just as there is no happy ending in King Lear. But if
2
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, translated by Lewis Thorpe
(London: the Folio Society, 1969), 67.
AFTERLIVES OF THE MARTYRS: KING LEAR, THE DUCHESS… 151
the tragic circumstances of Shakespeare’s play were all too familiar to the
people of Nidderdale, perhaps they also instilled a spirit of defiance. By
focusing on the medieval motifs in the play we might be able to recon-
struct how a Catholic audience—disaffected and distant from London—
may have responded to it. The second half of the chapter will explore the
persistence of the virgin-martyr theme in two Jacobean plays, written by
John Webster, and Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger.
Cordelia and the Virgin Martyrs

In deciding to set King Lear in pagan pre-Christian Britain Shakespeare
may have wished to camouflage his desire to comment on the religious
politics of early Jacobean England. We know that the original play-script
was censored, presumably because certain elements offended the govern-
ment, or at least were seen to do so. In particular, Lear’s obsession with
hunting reflects negatively on King James’s laissez-faire attitude to gov-
ernment.3 In setting the play in the distant past and making his protago-
nist old rather than young (James I was thirty-six when he ascended the
English throne), Shakespeare was able to disguise his criticism of royal
monopolies, favoritism, and neglect of government. No doubt, these res-
ervations would have been shared by James’ Catholic subjects. But most
egregious of all in the eyes of the Nidderdale audience would have been
James’ broken promises of religious toleration. After the death of Elizabeth
I and the end of the Tudor dynasty in 1603, the succession of the new
Stuart King James VI of Scotland as James I of England revived hopes
among the beleaguered Catholic minority that a new era of tolerance and
equity would finally be ushered in. Unfortunately, this did not happen.
The new king reneged on the verbal promises of tolerance he made to his
Catholic subjects when he first arrived in England in 1603; and it soon
became apparent that James had no intention of repealing the oppressive
anti-Catholic laws that had marked and marred the reign of his predeces-
sor. James’ broken promises must have been a bitter blow to his Catholic
subjects. Having hoped for the same kind of toleration shown to the
French Huguenots by the Edict of Nantes (1598), many English Catholics
succumbed to despair. The inevitable consequence was the outbreak of
3
See Gary Taylor, “Monopolies, Show Trials, Disaster, and Invasion: King Lear and
Censorship” in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, edited
by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 75–119.
152 A. THOMAS
plots against the new king, signaled by the Bye Plot of 1603. The plotters
claimed that they turned on James because he reneged on his pre-
succession promises of toleration. Following the collapse of the plot,
James began to reinstate the anti-Catholic penal laws introduced by his
predecessor Elizabeth.
But worse was yet to come. In November 1605 a group of desperate
Catholic gentlemen attempted to assassinate the king, his family, and the
country’s political elite by blowing up the parliament house during the
opening of the new session. If the plot had not been discovered in the
eleventh hour, it would have succeeded in destroying the parliament house
and damaging all the buildings within 500 yards’ radius of it—including
Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey. Hundreds of people would
have perished in the blast.4 Following the failure of the Gunpowder Plot
and the execution of the plotters, the English parliament enacted a law on
June 25, 1606, known as the Oath of Allegiance, which required the
king’s Catholic subjects to acknowledge him not only as their lawful sov-
ereign but also as their spiritual lord.5 James was essentially asserting his
belief in the divine right of kings to counter papal power with the assertion
of monarchical religious power. This implied the right of the state not only
to control the subject’s bodies but also their consciences.6 This unprece-
dented legislation created a profound conflict of loyalty for English
Catholics between their temporal allegiance to the king as the head of
state and their spiritual allegiance to the Pope in Rome.
Shakespeare must have been aware of the conflict of loyalty faced by
Catholics, since his own daughter Susanna was among twenty-one parish-
ioners (at least a third of whom were convinced Catholics) cited on April
6, 1606 for refusing to appear at Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church for man-
datory Communion in the Church of England.7 Cordelia’s refusal to com-
ply with her father’s demand for absolute love exemplifies the predicament
of Catholics torn between their temporal obedience to the king and their
spiritual allegiance to the Pope:
4
See James Sharpe, Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
5
Alan Haynes, The Gunpowder Plot (Stroud: The History Press, 2010), 132.
6
Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 129.
7
See James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2015), 221–222.
CORDELIA
Good my Lord,
You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honor you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Happily, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty. (1.1.95–102)
Stephen Jaeger has argued that Cordelia’s refusal to swear absolute love
to her father violates a centuries-long medieval tradition of publicly
expressed devotion to a monarch that he describes as “ennobling love.”8
Jaeger sees Shakespeare’s play—and this scene in particular—as exemplify-
ing a major shift of sensibility from a time-honored discourse of amatory
devotion to a more private and interiorized notion of love. According to
Jaeger, in refusing to swear absolute love to her father, Cordelia breaks
with a powerful tradition that renders her the instigator rather than the
victim of the ensuing crisis in the play. But Jaeger’s argument is compli-
cated by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s original twelfth-century version of the
Lear story. Here it is made clear that Cordel (Cordelia) sees through her
older sisters’ blandishments and desires to test her father (temptare cupiens
patrem) by giving him a different answer—one that affirms that Lear
deserves the love that is due to him as a father, no more or less:
Est uspiam, pater mi, filia quae patrem suum plus quam patrem praesumat
diligere? Non credo eitiam ullam esse quae hoc fateri audeat, nisi iocosis
verbis veritatem celare nitatur. Nempe ego semper te dilexi ut patrem et
adhuc a proposito non desisto. Et si a me amplius extorquere vis, ausi amoris
certitudinem quem tecum habeo et interrogationibus tuis finem impone.
Etentim quantum habes, tantum vales, tantumque te diligo.9
[“My father,” she said, “Can there really exist a daughter who maintains that
the love she bears her own father is more than what is due to him as a father?
I cannot believe that there can be a daughter who would dare to confess to
8
C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 1–4.
9
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae: A Variant Version Edited from
Manuscripts, edited by Jacob Hammer (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America,
1951), 47.
154 A. THOMAS
such a thing, unless, indeed, she were trying to conceal the truth by joking
about it. Assuredly, for my part, I have always loved you as my father, and at
this moment I feel no lessening of my affection for you. If you are deter-
mined to wring more than this out of me, then I will tell you how much I
love you and so put an end to your enquiry. You are worth just as much as
you possess, and that is the measure of my love for you.”] (Thorpe, History
of the Kings of Britain, 62–63)
What is striking about Cordelia’s speech in Geoffrey’s version is its

uncompromising directness; indeed, in some ways its defiant tone recalls
the virgin-martyr narratives of the medieval period. Foremost among
these lives is that of St Catherine of Alexandria, who defies the Emperor
Maxentius’ demand that she relinquish her Christian faith. Geoffrey was
writing just a few decades before one of the earliest vernacular versions of
The Life of St Catherine of Alexandria was written, by Clemence of
Barking. Geoffrey’s account of Cordelia’s strong will is consonant with
the pronounced empowerment and agency of Christian women speaking
truth to pagan power in twelfth- and thirteenth-century vernacular virgin-
martyr narratives. It is worth recalling that Henry I’s only legitimate heir
by the mid-1130s was his daughter Matilda; and it is tempting to read
Geoffrey’s positive portrayal of Cordelia as a gesture of support for the
king’s plan to make Matilda his successor as queen regnant.
Jaeger also overlooks the religious and political circumstances under
which Shakespeare wrote his version of King Lear: the conflict of loyalty
for Catholics between their temporal loyalty to their monarch and their
spiritual allegiance to the Pope made this break inevitable. Cordelia’s
objection to her father’s demand for absolute love—and the concomitant
claim that her future husband will claim half her love—may have been
regarded as callously abstract and disloyal to her medieval predecessors,
unified by a Catholic Church; but for a recusant member of the original
audience, Cordelia’s response may have exemplified their own impossible
situation in trying to reconcile loyalty to the Crown with their spiritual
allegiance to the Pope in Rome.
Cordelia’s refusal to comply with her father’s absolute demands
reflects the defiance of many recusant women during the reigns of
Queen Elizabeth and King James. Interestingly, husbands usually
complied while their wives often refused, probably because wives were
less likely to be prosecuted than their husbands. Under English
Common Law a married woman was a feme covert, not a person with a
legal existence, which meant that only her husband could be fined. As
James Sharpe has pointed out, “gentry women remained a mainstay of
English Catholicism, while their central role in bringing up children

helped ensure that the faith would be passed on to the next genera-
tion” (Sharpe, Remember, Remember, 25). Many of these women
showed great courage and devotion, women like Anne, wife of Thomas
Percy, seventh earl of Northumberland who led the northern uprising
of 1569. Percy’s vacillating support for the rebellion was bolstered by
his strong-willed wife, who rode with the rebels despite her pregnancy
(Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569, 78).
Perhaps the most famous female recusant of Elizabethan England was
Margaret Clitherow [or Clitheroe] of York (Sharpe, Remember, Remember,
25). Known to posterity as the “Pearl of York,” Margaret was sentenced to
be crushed to death in 1586 for refusing to plead against a felony of having
harbored a string of missionary priests in her house. According to Peter
Lake and Michael Questier, Margaret might have been acquitted if she had
made a plea, but she deliberately refused to do so. In their careful analysis of
the trial documents, Lake and Questier point out that Margaret was to
some extent primed for martyrdom by her spiritual adviser John Mush, who
subsequently wrote a testament of his friend’s martyrdom called a “True
Report” in which he told Margaret to prepare her “neck for the rope.”10
Margaret’s cheerful sangfroid during her journeys back and forth
between her house and the court house and her eventual execution suggest
that she consciously modeled herself on the virgin martyrs of the early
Church. The most famous account of the lives of the virgin martyrs was The
Golden Legend (1287), a miscellany of saints’ lives by the Italian Dominican
Jacobus de Voragine. This became one of the most popular books of the
Middle Ages. The most celebrated of the virgin martyrs were Margaret of
Antioch, Catherine of Alexandria, Barbara, Dorothea of Caesaria, and
Agnes of Rome. Their lives were disseminated in textual and visual form
throughout the Middle Ages and survive today in English church wall
paintings such as the spectacular mid-fifteenth-century scenes from the life
and passion of St Catherine in Pickering Church in North Yorkshire. These
are the kind of images of traditional religion that would have been familiar
to the older recusants of Nidderdale. On the left side of the wall paintings
in Pickering Church, Catherine is seen preaching to and converting the
pagan scholars; in the middle we see Catherine locked up in a cell for refus-
ing to give up her Christian faith, and on the right we see her stripped and
beaten for her faith. Although many of these wall paintings were effaced or
10
Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom
and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London: Continuum, 2011), 90.
156 A. THOMAS
whitewashed during the Edwardine and Elizabethan periods, memory of

them would have lingered on in the minds of local people. It is also impor-
tant to point out that the long arm of Protestant iconoclasm did not always
extend as far as Yorkshire and Lancashire, where strong attachment to the
old religion survived the Henrician revolution.
In each of the virgin-martyr legends the core narrative is basically the
same: a young pagan woman converts to Christianity, rejects her family,
and pledges herself to Christ. In some cases—as in the lives of Margaret,
Dorothea, and Barbara—the saint’s father threatens his daughter with
pain and violence if she adheres to her beliefs, but her faith prevails. In the
legend of St Barbara, for example, her father orders a tower to be built to
keep his daughter safe from suitors; and when he hears that Barbara has
converted to Christianity, he orders that she be beheaded. As in King
Lear, it is the fathers of the defiant daughters Margaret and Barbara who
order their punishment. But the daughters are rewarded for their suffering
by becoming brides of Christ in heaven.
These virgin martyrs invariably appear indifferent to the threats of tor-
ture and transcend pain through the love of their celestial spouse Christ.
Margaret Clitherow’s refusal to acknowledge the authority of the court—
and hence her decision not to plea—may have been modeled on virgin-
martyr narratives in which the accused saint flatly refuses to accept pagan
authority. By the same token, Cordelia’s defiance of her father’s demands
may also reflect the virgin-martyr tradition, since the fathers of virgin mar-
tyrs frequently punished their daughters for converting to Christianity.
Lear, we should recall, is a pagan king, and although there is no explicit
suggestion that Cordelia is a Christian, the words of the King of France
(“Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor/Most choice, forsaken;
and most loved despised”) (1.1.250–251) echo the words of St Paul in 2
Corinthians: 8: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that
though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor.” Like the virgin
martyrs, Cordelia is rewarded for her integrity by being accepted by the
King of France, whose citation of St Paul’s words aligns him with the
celestial bridegroom Christ.
Shakespeare would have been familiar with the lives of the virgin mar-
tyrs since they enjoyed an afterlife in the early seventeenth century.11
Alexandra Walsham has pointed to a manuscript collection of women’s
lives compiled ca. 1610—1615, which included accounts of the lives of
11
See Eamon Duffy, “Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: The Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth-
and Sixteenth-Century England.” Studies in Church History vol. 23 (1990), 175–196.
British virgin martyrs such as St Maxentia, who carried her own head after
it was cut off by a lustful pagan prince (Walsham, The Reformation of the
Landscape, 194). Vernacular lives of the virgin martyrs date back to the
twelfth century. These chaste brides of Christ were not simply passive suf-
ferers of torture and death; they were above all personifications of reli-
gious and political defiance. A good example of how virgin martyrs inspired
political as well as religious dissent is Joan of Arc, who led the French
resistance to the English conquest of France during the Hundred Years
War. At her examination in 1431, Joan revealed that she had been guided
by “voices” from her teenage years. After several days of cross-examination
Joan identified these voices as those of St Catherine and St Margaret. On
a later occasion Joan stated that she had often placed garlands of flowers
on images of Catherine and Margaret in church, a gesture that typifies the
devotion to these saints among ordinary people who saw their lives and
passions depicted on church walls and in stained glass.12 Another late
medieval woman who was devoted to Catherine and Margaret was the
fifteenth-century English mystic Margery Kempe (born 1373). Like Joan
of Arc, Margery’s self-image as a pious woman actively engaged in the
world and often resisting male clerical authority was in many ways shaped
by these powerful female role models. 13
Catherine and Margaret also enjoyed immense prestige among medi-
eval royalty. King Richard III of England included St Catherine and St
Barbara among six saints to whom he was particularly devoted when he
established a collegiate church at Middleham in Yorkshire (Bartlett, How
Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 236). The Holy Roman Emperor
Charles IV (r. 1346–1378) showed special devotion to St Catherine after
he won a battle at San Felice in Italy on her feast day on November 25,
1332. Following the example of the University of Paris, he made her the
patron saint of the university he founded in Prague in 1347, the oldest
university in Europe north of the Alps. He also dedicated his private cha-
pel in Karlstein Castle to her memory. The Chapel of the Holy Cross in
the castle includes a portrait of Catherine among the blessed in heaven.
According to the legend Catherine is the only daughter and heir of Costus,
King of Cyprus. She receives a spectacular education and, after her father’s
death, converts to Christianity. She refuses the hand of the pagan emperor and
12
Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from
the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 235.
13
See The Book of Margery Kempe, translated and edited by Anthony Bale (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), xxi.
158 A. THOMAS
is later married to Christ in a mystical ceremony. In the fourteenth-century

Czech legend of her life, this ceremony is described in terms of a royal mar-
riage and takes place in a gorgeous jeweled hall:
At that moment Mary the protectress summoned Catherine with a gesture

of the hand; she approached, shy and humble, bowed and knelt before
them. Seeing this, Mary said: “My beloved son, welcome your bride! For
you know that she has carried out all that you command her.” Christ said:
“I have already decided that I want to take the radiant, lovely Catherine as
my bride. She will live and reign with me in my kingdom forever.” Kneeling
devoutly, Catherine said: “My dearest king, today I pledge my purity to your
mercy, and as best I am able, with a faithful, ardent heart shall serve you
until my death.” At that moment, Christ made himself so beautiful to
behold by so many pleasing features that His radiant splendor filled her
heart in her body with wondrous melodies.14
In retaliation for her refusal to marry the emperor’s son and give up her
Christian faith, Catherine is tormented and ultimately martyred. The
Czech life of Catherine provides a particularly vivid and grisly account of
her flagellation:
When all that was completed, Emperor Maxentius roared with rage and,
looking at the maiden, became angry at witnessing the strength of
Catherine’s faith and was unable to prevail against her. He ordered his ser-
vants to seize and torture her without mercy. Without hesitation, the ser-
vants tied up the desirable girl, immediately stripped her of her garments,
and began to beat her with whips. These whips had been made exactly as the
emperor had ordered for that maiden’s punishment, for he wished her to
believe in their pagan gods. Each whip had three tails threaded from coarse
horsehair; to the end of each tail was fastened a little knot, half of which was
cunningly coated with lead in which had been inserted strong hooks. When
the servants obediently struck the body with the whips, even if the tail
spared the skin, the knots pierced the precious, innocent skin. The hooks
got lodged in the wounds and tore the flesh from the body, painfully ripping
it into shreds. (Thomas, Reading Women, 108)
14
Quoted from Alfred Thomas, Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia
and Chaucer’s Female Audience (Palgrave, 2015), 106–107.
In medieval England Catherine was seen as a holy intercessor for girls

who wished to find a husband, and the folk tradition of invoking her name
continued well into the late nineteenth century.15 Catherine’s status as a
marriage broker is first mentioned by the Elizabethan antiquarian William
Camden in his Britannia published in 1586: “Girls keep a fast every
Wednesday and Saturday throughout the yeare, and some of them also on
St Catherine’s day; nor will they omit it … The reason given by some for
this is, that the girls may get husbands.”16 In spite of the imposition of
Protestantism as the official faith of the land, English girls seem to have
preserved a long-standing medieval tradition of calling upon Catherine to
provide them with a husband.
The popularity of the Golden Legend went hand in hand with the recus-
ants’ devotion to images and statues of saints. This devotion encouraged
the more extremist wing of Protestantism to be unceasing in their determi-
nation to destroy the text’s physical influence. As Alexandra Walsham states:
The determination of a small extreme minority to erase all remaining traces

of the text of the Golden Legend inscribed upon its surface must not be
underestimated. To these zealots, too many mnemonics to the hagiographi-
cal tales with Protestant polemicists from Bale and Foxe onwards scathingly
dismissed as ridiculous fables and damnable lies remained. Only by smashing
the physical objects and structures that sustained them could the written and
unwritten traditions linked with wells, trees, caves, and stones be consigned
to permanent oblivion. (Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 125)
During the Reformation English Catholics increasingly identified with the

martyrs of the early Church and saw their own persecution by the Protestant
state reflected in the suffering of these early Christians. One of the reasons
why recusants identified so closely with St Catherine of Alexandria is that she
uses her rhetorical skills to undermine the arguments of the pagan wise men
assigned by the emperor to defeat her arguments. Edmund Campion simi-
larly debated with his Protestant adversaries before his execution in December
1581; and like Catherine faced with the pagan scholars, he was heavily out-
numbered in a debate that was clearly intended to disadvantage the defen-
dant. Catherine make this point explicitly in Clemence of Barking’s Life:
15
See Katherine J. Lewis, “Pilgrimage and the Cult of St Katherine in Late Medieval
England.” In St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Western Medieval Europe,
edited by Jacqueline Jenkins and Katherine J. Lewis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 37–52 (49).
16
Quoted by John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 1
(New York: AMS Press, 1970), 410.
160 A. THOMAS
This is not an even contest, when you have set against me alone fifty clerks
who are experienced debaters, without peers on earth. Besides that, you
promise them honour if they are strong enough to vanquish me, but you
have promised nothing to me, whom you have pitted against me all alone.17
Robert Southwell composed a Latin poem to St Catherine (“Ad sanc-

tam Catherinam”) in which he closely identifies with the saint who is per-
secuted for her faith: “Tu Catherina mei solatrix unica luctus/O soror et
Christi sponsa decora veni” (“You, Catherine, sole comforter of my grief,
o sister and seemly bride of Christ, come”). Southwell goes on to compare
“our suffering” with Catherine’s and suggests that the medicine applied
by Christ to her wounds should equally be able to help cure the Catholic
faithful:
Quoque tuum pepulit Christus medicamine morbum

Hoc nostro luctum pectore pelle precor.
Cumque dolor similis, quae te medicina iuvaret
Cur potius nostris esset inepta malis?18
[And, with the same remedy whereby Christ dispelled your sickness, dispel
this grief from our heart, and since our suffering is similar, why should the
medicine which would help you be less suitable for our ills?]
Another favorite virgin martyr was St Margaret of Antioch. According

to her legend, Margaret defies her pagan father by accepting Christianity
and is tormented by the pagan prefect of Antioch Olybrius. The miraculous
culmination of the story is Margaret’s triumphant emergence from the
stomach of a dragon (the symbol of the devil) that had devoured her. This
scene became one of the most popular devotional images of the later
Middle Ages, illustrated in church wall paintings, statues, and stained
glass. As Eamon Duffy points out, “the privileged place of Katherine and
Margaret in late medieval piety is attested by the fact that their statues
stood on either side of the shrine image of Our Lady at Walsingham.”19
17
Virgin Lives and Holy Deaths: Two Exemplary Biographies for Anglo-Norman Women,
translated and edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Glyn S. Burgess (Everyman: London,
1996), 12–13.
18
From the Autograph Manuscript (Stonyhurst MA Av.4). St Robert Southwell: Collected
Poems, 105.
19
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 171. For an illustration in Duffy’s book see plate 67.
We can see an example of this frequent coupling of the saints on a stone

panel from fifteenth-century Exeter where Catherine and Margaret stand
on either side of John the Baptist (Fig. 5.1).
Although the shrine at Walsingham was abolished and images of the
saints were proscribed during the Protestant Reformation, the memory of
the Virgin and the saints lingered on among the Catholic faithful, includ-
ing members of Shakespeare’s own family and his neighbors in Catholic-
dominated Warwickshire. Ruth Vanita has detected the outlawed medieval
cult of the Virgin Mary in the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, in which
Fig. 5.1 Head of John the Baptist flanked by St Margaret and St Catherine
(Fifteenth century). Exeter
162 A. THOMAS
Hermione’s statue is hidden in Paulina’s private chapel just as statues of

saints, rosaries, and other objects of devotion were concealed from the
prying eyes of the Protestant state.20
Cordelia’s and Paulina’s resistance also recalls the defiance of recusant
women in Shakespeare’s England, many of whom like Anne Vaux and
Eleanor Brooksby, daughters of William, third baron Vaux of Harrowden,
maintained their own private chapels and concealed illicit priests. According
to the Jesuit priest Oswald Tesimond, Eleanor may have sheltered as many
as twenty or thirty priests at Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire, a manor
house she rented not many miles north of Shakespeare’s birthplace
Stratford-upon-Avon (Childs, God’s Traitors, 167). A well-known case
was the recusant Frances Burroughs, who refused to disclose the where-
abouts of priests in her house. The irate pursuivant held “his naked dagger
at her breast” and threatened to kill her unless she revealed where they
were hidden. “If you do,” she cried, “it shall be the hottest blood that
thou ever sheddest in thy life” (Childs, God’s Traitors, 183). In The
Winter’s Tale the indomitable Paulina typifies these bold women. Her
defiant words to Leontes’ threats resonate with the defiance of the “chaste
ladies” Anne Vaux and the widow Eleanor Brooksby as well as the virgin
martyrs of the early Church whom they consciously emulated:
PAULINA
What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? Racks? fires? What flaying? boiling
In leads or oils? What old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst? (3.2.175–179)
The “wheel” referenced in Paulina’s speech alludes to the grisly fate of

St Catherine who, according to her legend, was strapped to a wheel
equipped with sharp revolving blades to slice up her body. In her Anglo-
Norman Life of St Catherine, Clemence of Barking provides a detailed
cameo of this killing machine:
I shall tell you as much as I know about the construction of the wheels.
There were four of them, large and broad, designed in such a way that they
were covered with sharp nails all over the front and rear spokes. When two
20
Ruth Vanita, “Mariological Memory in The Winter’s Tale and Henry VIII,” Studies in
English Literature 40 (2000), 311–337.
of the wheels rose up, the others moved down, and they met each other with
such a velocity that nothing between them could survive. For the nails col-
lided with the blades so that the blades sharpened the nails, with the result
that there was nothing on earth so hard that it would not be completely cut
to pieces and chopped into little morsels, if it were there for a single moment.
The tyrant was delighted with this and he ordered her (Catherine) to
brought forward and placed among the wheels, if she did not immediately
sacrifice to the gods. (Virgin Lives, 34)
Miraculously, an angel descends and smashes the wheels to pieces:
When the lady had finished speaking, an angel came down from heaven. He
began to whirl the wheels round so that not a spoke remained intact. He
swung them with such violence that not a single joint could hold. He sent
them flying among the assembled ranks, killing four thousand of those that
were there to mock God’s might. (Virgin Lives, 34)
Being boiled alive in oil recalls the apocryphal martyrdom of Christ’s

favorite disciple, St John the Evangelist, one of the most popular male
virgin martyrs of the late Middle Ages. Images of his martyrdom can be
found in sixteenth-century printed primers and may have been familiar to
Shakespeare in this form. According to Eamon Duffy, such primers were
often printed in France and were exported in large numbers to England
even after the Reformation.21
Paulina’s contemptuous riposte to Leontes echoes the defiant words
spoken by virgin martyrs to their tormentors in many medieval narratives
of their lives and passions. In The Golden Legend Margaret defies Olybrius,
the prefect of Antioch who wishes to marry her, in no uncertain terms:
“Shameless dog! Ravenous lion! You have power over the flesh, but Christ
keeps the soul to himself!”22 In Clemence of Barking’s version of the life
of Catherine of Alexandria, the saint responds in equally contemptuous
terms to the emperor when he orders her to be scourged and thrown into
a stinking dungeon: “You cowardly dog,’” said the maiden, “do whatever
your heart predisposes you to do. You will never be able to do me so much
harm that it will ever change my mind” (Virgin Lives, 25).
21
Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers (New Haven: Yale
22
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, translated by William
Granger Ryan (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, 369.
164 A. THOMAS
As we have seen, these virgin martyrs often served as role models for
real women in Shakespeare’s England. Tutored by their spiritual advisers
to emulate the virgin martyrs whose lives they had read or heard, several
recusant women reproduced the discourse of the virgin martyrs when con-
fronted by their Protestant interrogators. Anne Vaux had harbored and
sheltered Father Henry Garnet, the head of the English Jesuits, for almost
twenty years before her arrest. In a letter to the General of the Jesuits in
Rome, Claudio Aquaviva, in October 1591, Garnet praises Mistress Vaux
for her courage in the face of the pursuivants searching for priests in her
house, in language that recalls the virgin-martyr narratives:
The virgin always conducts these arguments with such skills and discretion
that she certainly counteracts their persistence and their interminable chat-
ter. For though she has all a maiden’s modesty and even shyness, yet in
God’s cause and in the protection of His servants, virgo becomes virago.
(Childs, God’s Traitors, 195).
Garnet’s account of Mistress Vaux’s skill in disputation resembles St

Catherine’s rhetorical expertise in disputing with (and converting) the
pagan scholars assigned by the Emperor Maxentius with the task of bring-
ing Catherine back to her original faith. In fact, it is likely that the medi-
eval virgin-martyr narrative provided the blueprint for Garnet’s description.
Like Catherine, Mistress Vaux is endowed with the “masculine” virtues of
reason while her accusers are compared with garrulous women (“intermi-
nable chatter”). Four months after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot,
Mistress Vaux was placed in solitary confinement and interrogated in the
Tower of London. Anne answered the questions of her interrogators “sen-
sibly” and even admitted that her suspicions of the plot had been raised
while she was on pilgrimage with some of the plotters at the shrine of the
Welsh virgin-martyr Winifred. But when she was accused of impropriety
with her priest, Vaux “laughed loudly two or three times” and rounded on
her accusers: “You come to me with this child’s play and impertinence, a
sign that you have nothing of importance with which to charge me” (God’s
Traitors, 1–2). Mistress Vaux’s words recall not only the time-honored
words of defiance uttered by virgin martyrs to their male oppressors and
tormentors in medieval narratives but also the contemptuous words
uttered by Paulina to Leontes:
PAULINA
Thy tyranny,
Together working with thy jealousies
(Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine). O, think what they have done,
And then run mad indeed, stark mad! for all
Thy by-gone fooleries were but spices of it. (3.2.179–184)
According to Alexandra Walsham, “Catholics were not simply passive

witnesses to the bouts of Protestant iconoclasm that periodically affected
them.” She cites the reaction of the Catholic laity attending Mass in a
Franciscan house in Dublin in 1630 that did not simply stand back but
fought back. Instrumental was one Widow Nugent “who raised the cry to
other ‘viragos’ in the congregation, who scratched and thumped the sol-
diers so hard, that they, together with the mayor and bishop, ‘were glad to
hasten out of doors.’”23
King Lear and the Catholic Martyrs

If King Lear was ever performed by the Simpson Brothers, the Gloucester
subplot of Edgar’s betrayal by his illegitimate brother Edmund might also
have resonated with the Nidderdale spectators. Edmund’s betrayal is based
on a forged letter purportedly written by Edgar and displaying his eager-
ness to usurp his father’s lands and title. The false denunciation of friends
and family members became common practice during the Henrician
Reformation. These betrayals inevitably drove a wedge between the king’s
“loyal” subjects (those who conformed) and those who resisted the
changes. As early as the 1530s, numerous letters were sent to Thomas
Cromwell, the king’s minister responsible for introducing and pushing
through religious reforms against the wishes of most parishioners.24
Sometimes denunciations involved members of the same family. In
Elizabeth’s reign, a Protestant father in London denounced his son as a
recusant, and the latter was flogged and seared through the ear in a public
punishment (Walsham, Charitable Hatred, 110).
Quotation from BL Harley MS 3888, fos. 109 v to 110r.

23
G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas
24
Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 1–45.

166 A. THOMAS
Frequently, as in the case of Edmund, denunciation was motivated by

the desire to inherit land or acquire a neighbor’s property. This was a par-
ticular problem for Catholics, many of whom were members of the landed
gentry and therefore vulnerable to the greed of their neighbors. Following
the arrest of the Jesuit Edmund Campion and two other priests in 1581,
the Privy Council instructed Francis Hastings, brother of the earl of
Huntingdon and a fervent Protestant, to search the house of his kins-
woman, the Catholic landowner Elizabeth Beaumont. Campion had been
betrayed by a former Catholic, George Eliot, and the denunciation led to
the priest’s capture at Lyford Grange on July 17, 1581, when Campion,
along with two other priests, was found concealed in a priest’s hole.25 The
search of Elizabeth Beaumont’s house yielded no incriminating items, but
this did not deter Hastings, who recommended searching other houses in
the same county (Leicestershire), including Newark Grange, the home of
Eleanor Brooksby, daughter of Lord Vaux. In his letter to the Privy
Council, Hastings professed his great love for his country and “to Her
Majesty” but, as Jessie Childs acidly points out, “his love for Newark
Grange, the reversion for which he petitioned in a postscript to his letter,
may also have encouraged him in his civic duty” (God’s Traitors, 73).
Frank Brownlow also invokes the real-life case of Thomas Fitzherbert,
who turned government informer on his recusant family so that he could
gain their estates. Fitzherbert became one of the henchmen of Sir Richard
Topcliffe, the queen’s personal rack-master who had come to prominence
in the crushing of the northern uprising of 1569. For Brownlow, the
activities of Topcliffe and the government he served are accurately

reflected in the portrayal of illegitimate power in King Lear, a play whose
cruelty is “remarkably true to the conditions of life for Elizabeth’s
Catholic subjects.”26
Ben Jonson’s Roman play Sejanus His Fall—first performed in 1603
several months after the accession of James I—also addresses the denun-
ciation of Catholics and the illegal sequestration of their goods and prop-
erty by greedy Protestant neighbors. Several speeches in the play give
topical voice to the corruption and veniality of the late Elizabethan court.27
25
Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion. A Definitive Biography (Charlotte: TAN Books,
2013), 397.
26
See Frank Brownlow, “Richard Topcliffe: Elizabeth’s Enforcer and the Representation of
Power in King Lear.” In Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, 161–178 (at 171).
27
See John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the
English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 101–114.
In his speech shortly before committing suicide Silius, who has served the
Roman state in Gaul, defiantly replies to the trumped-up charges against
him by Tiberius’s minions:
What are my crimes? Proclaim them.

Am I too rich? Too honest for the times?
Have I or treasure, jewels, land, or houses
That some informer gapes for? (III.168–171)28
As Peter Lake has argued in an illuminating article on the subtexts of

Sejanus, “the emphasis on informers preying on the wealthy, and on
entrapment and conviction through words rather than deeds, all strike a
chord when viewed from an Elizabethan Catholic perspective.”29
A major inspiration for Sejanus was the writings of the Roman historian
Tacitus “with their searching analyses of corruption and double-dealing at
the imperial court.”30 As Jonson’s biographer Ian Donaldson, states: “The
principal fear about Tacitean historiography lay in its capacity to compare
past and present times, and to reflect adversely, through the subtle use of
historical parallelism, on current political rulers, policies and systems of gov-
ernment” (Donaldson, Ben Jonson, 187). The playwright’s adversary Henry
Howard, earl of Northampton, accused Jonson of treason and popery, and
he was summoned before the Privy Council to answer charges of sedition.
This was not the first time that an English writer had got into trouble for
making historical parallels with the present: as we saw in Chap. 2, John
Hayward’s The First Part of the Life and Reign of Henry IV (published in
February 1599) was examined on grounds of suspected sedition on the
orders of Elizabeth I, who was highly sensitive to perceived parallels between
herself and the deposed Richard II. The case prompted the Elizabethan
authorities to prohibit the writing of history altogether in June 1599.
In setting King Lear in pagan Britain, Shakespeare adroitly avoided the
kind of religious controversies which had mired the work of Hayward and
Jonson. By placing the events of the play in the pre-Christian British
past—rather than in the more recent reigns of Richard II or Henry IV—
28
Ben Jonson,Sejanus: His Fall, edited by Jonas A. Barish (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1965).
29
Peter Lake, “From Leicester his Commonwealth to Sejanus: His Fall: Ben Jonson and the
Politics of Roman Catholic Virtue.” In Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious
Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, edited by Ethan Shagan (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005), 128–161 (134).
30
Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 186–187.
168 A. THOMAS
Shakespeare had learned a valuable lesson about the dangers inherent in

using history to illuminate and critique the present. It is possible that it was
Shakespeare’s play Richard II that caused the head of the Lord
Chamberlain’s men to be summoned for questioning after the ad hoc per-
formance of the play and the failed rebellion of the earl of Essex the follow-
ing day. With King Lear, a play that appeared to flatter King James by
invoking a unified Britain and the follies of political disunity, Shakespeare
was able to offer a sly critique of the oppression of Catholics without incur-
ring the kind of penalty suffered by Jonson with the writing of Sejanus.
For Catholics, Edmund’s false denunciation of his brother may have
evoked Protestant attempts to discredit and betray their recusant neigh-
bors and family members while Edgar’s character suggested comparisons
with those (like the Vaux family) unjustly accused and punished for
crimes—above all high treason—that they had not committed. Shakespeare
may have heard of the tribulations of the Vaux family through a book
known as A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures published in 1603
by William Harsnett, chaplain to the bishop of London, Richard Bancroft.
The bishop of London had presided over an official enquiry into the
strange events of 1585, when several Catholic priests claimed to have exor-
cised the devil from Nicholas Harwood and Sara Williams, a maid to Lady
Vaux, in the Vaux family’s London home of Hackney. The purpose of
Harsnett’s book was to discredit the power of “popish priests” and to show
that the exorcism had been a Catholic “imposture.” Shakespeare alludes to
the incident through the speeches of exiled Edgar, by now known as “Poor
Tom”: “This is the foul [fiend] Flibbertigibbet; he begins at curfew and
walks [till the] first cock.” (3.4.115–116). Shakespeare did not make up
this diabolical name but seems to have lifted it from the account of the
exorcism in the Vaux household, where Father Francis Weston exorcised
the victims with the aid of several relics, including the body parts of mar-
tyred Catholic priests like Edmund Campion (God’s Traitors, 112–124).
It is characteristic of Shakespeare to encode controversial features such as
the claims of Catholic exorcism in the mouth of a madmen, drunkards, or
lowlife characters: some of the most subversive comments in his play are to be
found in the “mad” speeches of Lear’s Fool, Edgar as “Poor Tom,” and Kent
disguised as a peasant. Edgar’s transformation into Poor Tom—naked, humil-
iated, and wounded—inevitably recalls the late medieval icon of the Man of
Sorrows, one of the most popular and widespread images of Christ, in which
he is crowned with thorns and lacerated by wounds. Like many recusants
reduced to penury and vagabondage by fines and imprisonment, Edgar’s exile
and humiliation would have emphasized in many people’s minds the suffering
of the Man of Sorrows who bears the marks of nails and whips on his body:
EDGAR
The country gives me proof and president
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb’d and mortified arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,
Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity. (2.3.13–20)
Late Elizabethan England was notorious for its vagrancy problem, and
the homeless were not infrequently the target of the authorities. In his
account of landing secretly in England and trying to reach London with-
out detection, the missionary priest John Gerard mentions the risk of
being arrested as a vagrant as he made his way through the English coun-
tryside (Gerard, Autobiography, 15). Edgar’s disguise as Poor Tom recalls
the fate of missionary priests like Gerard and his companion Oldcorne,
who were required to move incognito in order to avoid capture by vigilant
pursuivants. As Stephen Greenblatt pointed out, the phrase “no port is
free” in Edgar’s monologue alludes to the closed ports of England during
the later years of Elizabeth’s reign when the Protestant regime feared a
Spanish invasion from the Continent or Ireland31:
EDGAR
I heard myself proclaim’d,
And by the happy hollow of a tree
Escap’d the hunt. No port is free, no place
That guard and most unusual vigilance
Does not attend my taking. (2.3.1–5)
Edgar’s disguise as a beggar also recalls the fate of the Catholic noble-
man Anthony Babington, who hid in a barn and disguised himself as a
farmworker by griming his face and cropping his hair after the collapse of
the disastrous plot to deliver Mary Queen of Scots from Tutbury Castle in
Staffordshire and assassinate Queen Elizabeth (Guy, Elizabeth: The
Forgotten Years, 82). Banished Kent is another character who is forced to
assume a disguise in order to avoid detection. Many Catholic priests went
underground in a similar manner. The back-and-forth when Lear meets
31
See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in
Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 121–122.
170 A. THOMAS
Kent in disguise shiftily points to the religious anxieties of the time and the
need to equivocate around one’s true identity:
LEAR
What dost thou profess? What wouldst thou with us?
KENT
I do profess to be no less than I seem, to serve him truly that will put me in
trust, to love him that is honest, to converse with him that is wise and says
little, to fear judgment, to fight when I cannot choose, and to eat no fish.
(1.4. 11–14)
The unjust treatment of Kent when he is placed in the stocks for defend-
ing his master Lear recalls the real-life fate of Thomas Pounde (1539–1614),
a Jesuit lay-brother and friend of Edmund Campion. Pounde was placed
in the stocks and his ears nailed to a board, a fate far worse than Kent’s:
“Fetch forth the stocks! As I have life and honor,/there shall he sit till
noon” (2.2.133–134). Pounde was periodically imprisoned for recusancy,
the longest period being in Wisbech Castle, a detention center for those
religious dissidents whom the state was unable or unwilling to prosecute.
The theme of a just man unjustly punished also recalls the Tudor morality
play Youth, which went into five printed editions down to 1562. As we
have seen, this play seems to have been written for a northern audience,
perhaps for the Percy household in the early years of the reign of Henry
VIII. Thus it would have resonated with the people of Nidderdale. The
eponymous protagonist is led astray by Pride and by Riot, who steals
purses in order to pay his way in the tavern. Pride and Riot fetter Charity:
RIOT
Lo, sirs look what I bring.
Is not this a jolly ringing?
By my troth, I trow it be.
I will go wit of Charity.
How sayest thou, Master Charity?
Doth this gear please? (520–525)32
Charity’s answer quotes from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew

5:10): “Blessed are they who have suffered persecution because of
righteousness:”
32
Two Tudor Interludes: Youth and Hick Scorner, edited by Ian Lancashire (Manchester:
Manchester University Press 1980), 136–137.
CHARITY
They please me well indeed.
The more sorrow, the more meed;
For God said, while he was man:
Beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter justiciam.
Unto the apostles he said so
To teach them how they should do. (526–531)
Kent also suffers on account of his righteousness, and Catholics in the

audience would have clearly identified with the king’s true servant. For
many Catholics watching Lear, the violent treatment of Kent and the
interrogation and torture of Gloucester would have resonated with the
interrogations of recusants who had shown hospitality to Campion and
other missionary priests twenty-five years earlier. Two of these, Lord Vaux
and his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Tresham, had been implicated in
Campion’s mission and had allegedly shown him welcome. The importance
attached to hospitality in early modern England is suggested by Gloucester’s
reproach to his hosts, who have made him a prisoner in his own house: “I
am your host./With robber’s hands my hospitable favors/You should not
ruffle thus” (3.7.39–41). The same sense of indignation animated
Tresham’s and Vaux’s replies to their interrogators, who insisted on know-
ing the names of those to whom they had given hospitality. Whether
Campion divulged their names under torture is not known, but the
Catholic gentlemen were brought to London for interrogation. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Walter Mildmay of Apethorpe, was
responsible for questioning Thomas Tresham: “Whether were they, or any
such, or any seminary men or priests at your house, and at what time and
how often?” (God’s Traitors, 76). This form of pointed questioning echoes
Regan’s and Cornwall’s interrogation of Gloucester in act 3, scene 7 of
King Lear:
CORNWALL
Come sir, what letters had you late from France?
REGAN
Be simple-answer’d, for we know the truth.
CORNWALL
And what confederacy have you with the traitors
Late footed in the kingdom?
(3.7.42–45)
172 A. THOMAS
The fate of Cornwall’s servant, who intervenes to save Gloucester from

blinding and who is killed by Regan, may also have reminded the recusants
in Nidderdale of the fate of Margaret Clitherow, who also harbored mis-
sionary priests, and whose crushed body was thrown naked on a dunghill
(according to her spiritual adviser John Mush). At the end of the blinding
scene, Cornwall, mortally wounded by one of his own servants, orders
Regan to throw out blinded Gloucester and cast the body of the servant
on the “dunghill”:
CORNWALL
I have received a hurt; follow me, lady.—
Turn out that eyeless villain; throw this slave
Upon the dunghill. (3.7.95–97)
Twenty years later another of Campion’s associates, Edward Oldcorne,

was rounded up as an accessory to the failed Gunpowder Plot, tortured,
and executed on April 6, 1606. Following the ritualistic half-hanging and
disemboweling, the executioner struck the priest’s head so ferociously
with his axe that the martyr’s right eyeball flew out of its socket. It was
found by a Catholic sympathizer, who kept it and had it placed in a silver
reliquary still preserved at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. This execu-
tion probably postdates Shakespeare’s play but it certainly resonates with
its violence. As Shakespeare’s audience watched the horrific torture of
Gloucester, they may also have associated the interrogators’ insistent ques-
tions about “Dover” with “Douai,” the Flemish college in Flanders where
many Catholic missionary priests like Oldcorne were trained and prepared
for their eventual return to England:
CORNWALL
Where hast thou sent the king?
GLOUCESTER
To Dover.
REGAN
Wherefore to Dover? Wast thou not charg’d at peril—
CORNWALL
Wherefore to Dover? Let him answer that.
GLOUCESTER
I am tied to th’ stake, and I must stand the course.
REGAN
Wherefore to Dover? (3.7.50–55)
Helen Cooper has also reminded us of the probable influence of the

Buffeting of Christ from the medieval mystery plays in the scene of
Gloucester’s blinding. As she points out, in distinction to Shakespeare’s
earlier dramatic depictions of extreme violence (such as Titus Andronicus),
King Lear follows the example of the Passion plays in replacing words
with moving silence (Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World, 66–67).
Moreover, in some medieval paintings of the Passion, Christ is seated, just
as Gloucester is strapped to a chair during his blinding. And Michael
O’Connell has even suggested that Gloucester’s blinding recalls Caiaphas’
impulse to put out Christ’s eyes in the Towneley play: “Nay, but I shall
out-thirst/Both his eyen on a raw” (O’Connell, “Blood Begetting Blood:
Shakespeare and the Mysteries,” 187).
King Lear: Penitence and Mourning

As noted earlier, Catholics appear to have shown a special interest in pre-
serving and reading medieval penitential romances: the recusant Edward
Banyster copied two manuscripts for personal use, one containing Sir
Isumbras and Sir Eglamour of Artois, the other Robert the Devil (based on
Sir Gowther).33 The latter seems to have provided Shakespeare with a
source for King Lear in the form of an extended prose version by Thomas
Lodge, titled The Famous true and historicall life of Robert second Duk of
Normandy, surnamed for his monstrous birth and behauiour, Robin the
Diuell (1591).34 To quote from Donna Hamilton’s excellent article on
this source:
The correspondences to the Lear story begin at the point when Robert
becomes dismayed with the fact that people run from him in fear, and as he
turns to God to confess his wretchedness: “I am worste of all yll” (p. 19).
Upon journeying to Rome in hope of remission of his sins, Robert meets
the Pope and is sent to a holy hermit who specifies his penance: he must
counterfeit a fool, he must eat only the food he can take away from dogs,
and he must remain speechless. Robert returns to Rome leaping and run-
ning like a fool. The people mock him and throw dirt and mire on him.
Unaware of Robert’s true identity, the emperor takes Robert into his palace
33
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 261 and British Library, MS Egerton 313A. See
Wade, “Penitential Romance,” 95 (footnote 17).
34
See Donna B. Hamilton, “Some Romance Sources for King Lear: Robert of Sicily and
Robert the Devil.” In Studies in Philology vol. 71 (1974), 264–269.
174 A. THOMAS
where he is regarded as a “natural” and “innocent” fool (p. 34). He scram-

bles with the dogs for his food and sleeps with them on straw under the
stairs. As a fool he is treated kindly by the emperor and even indulges in
pranks on a Jew and a bride which amuse the lords, “for he made moche
myrth without harme” (p. 37). (180)
Banyster’s interest in the story of Robert the Devil may consist partly in
the mediating role of the Pope, who sends the offender off to a hermit to
receive penance. For a recusant like Banyster the Roman subtext in the
story would have had a political as well as an edifying significance since
Henry VIII had denied the papal supremacy of the English Church. It is
also of interest that Lodge later converted to Catholicism (in 1597). The
question naturally arises: what motivated Shakespeare’s interest in the same
story? Of course, the subplot of the Pope is absent from King Lear but its
significance would have been familiar to the Catholics in his audience who
were familiar with the original story. At all events, what Banyster (the tran-
scriber) and Shakespeare (the interpreter) have in common is the desire to
perpetuate the memory of a man who sins and must undergo penitence.
Thus the Catholic inhabitants of Nidderdale might have identified not
only with Edgar and blinded Gloucester but also with Lear in the wilder-
ness, the true king who has been exiled and discarded by his ungrateful
daughters. As Catholics who had been made internal exiles—and in many
cases rendered destitute—by the Protestant government’s policies of fines
and imprisonment, they would have related to Lear’s sufferings and the
sufferings of his subjects. They would also have understood the damage
wrought by flattery and false praise, and the fawning treatment of kings as
gods, as Lear himself finally comes to understand in his dialogue with
blind Gloucester:
LEAR
Ha Goneril with a white beard? They flatter’d me like a dog and told me I
had the white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say “ay”
and “no” to everything that I said “ay” and “no” to was no good divinity.
When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter; when
the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt
’em out. Go to, they are not men o’ their words: they told me I was every-
thing; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof. (4.6.96–105)
Lear’s words “no good divinity” are clearly an allusion to the “divine
right of kings” and to King James’ sentiments on the subject as expressed
in a speech to parliament in 1609: “Kings are justly called Gods, for that
they exercise a manner or resemblance of Divine power on earth.”35 Lear’s

words are a direct repudiation of such absolutist claims. The Catholic
members of the audience would also have identified with Lear’s disillu-
sioned insight into the double standard whereby those who are rich and
privileged escape the justice of the law while the poor and disenfranchised
are subject to its full rigor:
LEAR
Thorough tatter’d clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtles breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it. (4.6.164–167)
Lear’s statement articulates the penitential worldview of the medi-

eval romances. In particular his prayer “O, I have ta’en/ too little care of
this! Take physic pomp! /Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,/ That
thou mayst shake the superflux to them,/ And show the heavens more
just” (3.4.32–36) chimes with the medieval emphasis on charity and good
works in contrast to the Protestant belief that vagrancy was a sin. As Debora
Shuger has pointed out, “Lear’s prayer does not voice subversive hetero-
doxies—whether popular or humanist. But the social teachings of the medi-
eval church. In his painful epiphany, the pagan king for a moment grasps
the nature of Christian caritas.”36 Through Lear’s “medieval” discourse
Shakespeare is also able to comment on the corruption of power and wealth
in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, a world where flattery and deceit
usurp truth and honesty. Medieval penitential romances include Sir Orfeo
(ca. 1300), based on the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the
Middle English version, Orfeo resembles Shakespeare’s King Lear in having
to give up his kingdom and become a homeless waif before finding redemp-
tion. Only through atonement and suffering can Orfeo finally be reunited
with his beloved wife (in contrast to the Greek myth, which ends with
Orpheus losing Eurydice because he looks back at her). Of course,
Shakespeare does not provide such a redemptive ending in his play, but
what is important for our purposes is recognizing the medieval trope of the
king or ruler who must atone for his pride by giving up his kingdom.
35
James Harvey Robinson, Readings in European History, 2 vols. (Boston: Ginn and
Company, 1906), 2: 219–220.
36
Debora K. Shuger, “Subversive fathers and suffering subjects: Shakespeare and Christianity.”
In Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688, edited by
Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
46–69 at 53.
176 A. THOMAS
The final scene of King Lear in which the distraught Lear enters carry-
ing his murdered daughter Cordelia may also have reminded Catholic
members of his audience of the medieval motif of the Pietà—the tableau
in which the Virgin Mary mourns the dead Christ. This devotional image
was common in medieval and Counter-Reformation Europe but was
strictly prohibited in Protestant England. It is all the more shocking that
it should have been reproduced in the final scene of King Lear as the dis-
traught king enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms. As Katharine
Goodland has shown, the scene of King Lear inverts the traditional Pietà
by placing the daughter in a father’s arms rather than a son in his m
other’s.37
This may have been intended to camouflage the Catholic nature of the
motif, but it does not reduce its affective impact. On the contrary, as
Goodland has argued, the sight of a father weeping instead of a mother
would have shocked Protestant sensibilities, according to which excessive
weeping and mourning was considered unmanly and effeminate.
Mourning, however, was deemed appropriate to Catholic men as well
as women as witnessed by the popular “tear poetry” of Shakespeare’s dis-
tant kinsman, Robert Southwell, the author of a work known as A Short
Rule of Good Life, written for Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel.
Southwell’s poem “Man to the Wound in Christ’s Side” is a reworking of
a popular medieval devotional poem known as the “Anima Christi,” in
which the suppliant contemplates the suffering body of Christ on the cross
and pleads to be concealed within his wounds. The original prayer dates
from around 1330, but the founder of the Society of Jesus, St Ignatius of
Loyola, placed the “Anima Christi” at the beginning of his Spiritual
Exercises and referred to it frequently.38 Southwell’s poem includes the
kind of tear imagery for which he was well known to Shakespeare and his
contemporaries:
Here is the spring of trickling teares,

The mirror of all mourning wights,
With dolefull tunes, for dumpish cares
And solemn shows for sorrowed sights. (21–24; Collected Poems, 62)
37
Katharine Goodland, “Inverting the Pietà in Shakespeare’s King Lear.” In Marian
Moments in Early Modern British Drama, edited by Regina Buccola and Lisa Hopkins
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 47–74. For a discussion of the Pietà motif, see also Margreta de
Grazia, “King Lear in BC Albion.” In Medieval Shakespeare, 138–156.
38
St Robert Southwell, Collected Poems, edited by Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney
(Manchester: Carcanet, 2007), 164 (note).
“Is This the Promised End?”

Shakespeare’s audience might have been forgiven for expecting this unnat-
ural, immoral state of things to be abolished and a happy ending to prevail
by the end of the play. But as we have seen, Shakespeare, for reasons of his
own, did not give his audience what they expected. Instead he gave them
the bleakest ending imaginable, a world bereft of justice as Lear succumbs
to his daughter’s hanging by literally dying of grief. Why Shakespeare
changed the ending of Geoffrey’s medieval story and the old play King
Leir is ultimately unknowable. What can be asserted with some degree of
certainty is that he intended to shock his audience. Kent’s despairing
words—“Is this the promised end?” (5.3.265)—must have echoed the
reaction of the original audience. That both Lear and Cordelia die, within
minutes of each other, must have devastated spectators familiar with the
older ending of reconciliation and survival. Was he taking sides with the
numerous men and women in Protestant England who had died and suf-
fered for their faith? Or was he suggesting that the Cordelias of this world
bring it to ruin because of their dangerous absolutism?
It is impossible to say for certain. Perhaps more important than trying to
establish the playwright’s own position in the matter is to recognize that dif-
ferent audiences of the play would have reacted to it in different ways.
Certainly, the beleaguered Catholics of Nidderdale would have responded
very differently from a predominantly Protestant London audience in
London. For them, perhaps, the themes of sin, suffering, and penitence were
crucial to their own experience as internal religious exiles in Protestant
England. Of course, in King Lear the dramatic arc from pride to penitence,
and from suffering to salvation is no longer as clear-cut or as straightforward
as in the original medieval romance. Indeed, James Wade sees a world of dif-
ference between the late medieval emphasis on penitence and Shakespeare’s
foreclosing of its possibility: “If Guy of Warwick can die on stage as a romance
hero, it is because his reward in bliss is assured. But it is only when Lear dies
on stage, with Cordelia, in his arms, that the audience realizes that the whole
of his penitential process counted for nothing. There is no one checking the
‘amendes makyng’ ledger-balance, and there is no grace. Lear’s promised
end is indeed a wheel of fire” (Wade, “Penitential Romance,” 106).
But perhaps the gulf between the medieval world view and that of
Shakespeare was not as great as Wade suggests. Was Shakespeare an exis-
tentialist avant la lettre—as Wade’s reading implies—or was he simply
bearing witness in a realistic fashion to the violent, unforgiving times in
which he lived? The people of Nidderdale might have seen the play’s
178 A. THOMAS
e nding in similarly realistic terms. The disordered world of Lear’s king-

dom may have reminded them of rebellious northern England in 1569,
especially its gruesome aftermath. Instead of their being paraded as peni-
tents, with nooses round their necks, later to be pardoned by a merciful
monarch—as previous rebellions against the Crown had ended—the cap-
tured rebels of the uprising were hanged in hasty proceedings conducted
under martial law (Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569, vii). As we
have seen, these punitive measures marked a major departure from previ-
ous royal policies. In witnessing Cordelia’s lifeless body on stage with a
noose around her neck and her dead father holding her in his arms, the
recusants of Nidderdale might have been mindful of the similar fate of
their family members and coreligionists in the ruthless world of Tudor
absolutism, not a world from which God had absconded, but rather one
from which all human pity had been eradicated.
Echoes from the Grave: The Duchess of Malfi

John Webster (1580?–1625?), the most talented Jacobean dramatist of the
next generation after Shakespeare, is famous for two great tragedies, The
White Devil, first performed in 1608, and The Duchess of Malfi, first per-
formed in 1614 and published in 1623. Both plays deal with bold heroines
who choose love for themselves and in so doing refuse to submit to male
authority. The White Devil is based on real events that took place in Italy
in 1581–1585. Its plot concerns a woman named Vittoria, who defies a
courtroom full of corrupt magistrates who convict her of adultery and
murder. The Duchess of Malfi is based on an Italian novella. In the play the
spirited heroine marries her steward Antonio for love, defying her broth-
ers, Duke Ferdinand and the Cardinal of Aragon, who demand that she
remain a widow. They are motivated by greed for her wealth, pride in their
own noble blood, and—in the case of her deranged twin Ferdinand—
desire for her body. The theme of a strong-minded woman who refuses to
play the social role assigned to her by patriarchal convention recalls the
opening scene of King Lear in which Cordelia deviates from her scripted
role as an all-loving, obedient daughter to an absolutist father. But Webster
goes one step further than Shakespeare by making more or less explicit
what the author of King Lear simply implies—that the relationship
between family members is always fraught with Oedipal desire and vio-
lence. What Shakespeare chooses not to explore explicitly, Webster takes
infinite delight in exploring in great detail. In this respect Webster recalls
Marlowe’s keen interest in the psychology of human sex and violence.
If Ferdinand’s desire for his sister recalls the Oedipal underpinnings of
King Lear, the Duchess’s defiantly morganatic marriage to her steward
recalls Marlowe’s Edward II in his willful and self-destructive devotion to
his lowborn lover Piers Gaveston. It is not Edward’s homosexuality that
alienates his magnates but his preference for lower-class favorites. Like
King Edward, the Duchess of Malfi causes double offence to her brothers
by not only refusing to remain a chaste widow but also choosing a com-
moner as a husband. Thus in Webster’s play incestuous sexual desire inter-
sects with social transgression: issues of gender, sex, and class become
inextricably intertwined.
In many ways this scenario recalls the virgin-martyr narratives of the later
Middle Ages, in which the martyrs invariably refuse to marry their social
peers, and instead choose their celestial spouse, Christ. A famous example
of this narrative of defiance was St Winifred, a seventh-century Welsh virgin
martyr who was beheaded by her pagan suitor for refusing his advances. A
well sprang up on the site of the martyrdom. The well of St Winifred in
Holywell became a popular shrine and a site of pilgrimage for Elizabethan
and Jacobean Catholics; the family of the Gunpowder plotters went there
to pray shortly before the disastrous plot was hatched. In his autobiography
the missionary priest John Gerard tells the story of how his fellow-priest
Edward Oldcorne was cured of cancer by visiting the well of St Winifred
and kissing a stone relic from the shrine.39 In the words of Alexandra
Walsham, the shrine “became the jewel in the crown of the Welsh Catholic
revival” (Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape, 196). Walsham con-
tinues: “Even in the sixteenth century the spring and chapel had been the
headquarters of the Catholic mission to this region, and by the mid-seven-
teenth, served by the Jesuits and seculars from within the town.”
Interestingly, the Duchess of Malfi actually swears by this saint (2.1.301)
when her steward Antonio advises her to remarry. Although a virgin mar-
tyr may seem an odd choice for a woman who marries her steward against
her brothers’ wishes, the point is that the Duchess has refused to accept
their patriarchal command, thus placing herself in a long and illustrious
tradition of female saints who defy the dictates of their fathers and broth-
ers. In Webster’s day, the well and shrine at Holywell would not have been
an obscure reference but a well-known lightning-rod for recusant defi-
ance. Intriguingly, in his so-called Spiritual Testament, Shakespeare’s
father John Shakespeare pledged his faith to the “Catholic, Roman, and
39
John Gerard, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, translated by Philip Caraman (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 55–58.
180 A. THOMAS
Fig. 5.2 View of St Winifred’s Well at Hollywell, Flintshire (1811). British

Library
Apostolic Church” and appointed St Winifred, as well as “the glorious and

ever Virgin Mary,” as “chief Executress” of his will (Kastan, A Will to
Believe, 22). It is reasonable to assume therefore that for Shakespeare, as
for Webster, the cult of St Winifred had strong associations with recusant
defiance. The Gunpowder plotters and their families are known to have
visited the site in 1605 (Fig. 5.2).
As we have seen, the most famous Catholic virgin martyr to defy her
family by devoting herself to Christ was Catherine of Alexandria, who not
only chooses Christ over all earthly suitors but actually rejects the most
eligible earthly suitor of all, the emperor’s son. This audacious rejection is
emphasized in the medieval Czech life of St Catherine (ca. 1360–1375),
in which the virgin refuses to marry the son of the Emperor Maxentius:
“I will not be the empress! I would be mad to take a husband I have never
set eyes on and whom I do not know, whether he is hunchbacked or hand-
some, whether he has castle or run-down houses, whether he is blind or can
see, hideous or lovely, generous or stingy, beautiful or ugly, foolish or wise,
false or true, sickly or healthy, or what his manners are like. I would rather
preserve my chastity forever until I die, since no one alive is equal to my
wisdom or beauty.” (Thomas, Reading Women, 103)
The gems enumerated in the description of the celestial hall in the

Czech version of the legend symbolize not only the celestial paradise
evoked by St John but also Catherine’s pure virginal body:
That maiden, faultless and of great renown, truly found herself in a hall
more beautiful than anyone living had ever seen. It contained wondrous
wonders fashioned from the richest material: the floor was made of beryls,
the walls from diamonds set in gold, many windows were fashioned from
emeralds and sapphires, and, instead of glass, were glazed with precious
stones: hyacinths, rubies, turquoises, carnelians, spines set in ivory; there
were jaspers, chalcedons, topazes, garnets, olivines, amethysts, and pearls, all
most beautifully cast and assembled. (Thomas, Reading Women, 106)
Gem imagery is invoked by the Duchess of Malfi when she is con-

fronted with the sight of the cord to be used to strangle her. Like the vir-
gin martyrs of medieval tradition, the Duchess speaks with the resignation
of one who does not fear but actually welcomes death:
BOSOLA
Yet, methinks
The manner of your death should much afflict you;
This cord should terrify you.
DUCHESS
Not a whit.
What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds, or to be smothered
With cassia, or to be shot to death with pearls? (4.2.203–206)40
In his tenth-century vita of St Ludmila of Bohemia, the monk Christian

describes the saint as “adorned with the jewels of virtue” (virtutum gem-
mis ornans). This tradition of evoking the pure bodies of Christian martyrs
in terms of precious gems is also attested in Aldhelm’s description of holy
maidens as “Christi margaritae, paradise gemmae” (“the pearls of Christ,
the gems of paradise”). In the Middle English Life of St Margaret, the
40
John Webster and John Ford, The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil, The Broken Heart and
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, edited by Jane Kingsley-Smith (London: Penguin Classics, 2014), 279.
182 A. THOMAS
eponymous saint similarly refers to her own virginity as a “precious jewel”

(deore gimstan).41 In Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale” the martyred little virgin
is lauded in terms of precious gems, including emeralds and rubies:
O grete God, that parfournest thy laude

By mouth of innocentz, lo here thy might!
This gemme of chastitee, this emeraude,
And eek of martyrdom the ruby bright,
Ther he with throte ykorven lay upright …. (607–611) (The Riverside
Chaucer, 211)
In Measure for Measure—in response to Antonio’s offer to spare

Claudio in exchange for her willingness “to lay down the treasures of [her]
body” (2.4.96)—the nun Isabella compares the whip marks on her body
with rubies:
Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies

And strip myself to death as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield
My body up to shame. (2.4.101–104)
Like the virgin martyrs, Isabella defies the sexual advances of Angelo,
the Duke of Vienna’s deputy, and is rewarded for her virtue and her devo-
tion to her brother at the end of the play by being offered the hand of the
Duke himself.
The manner of the Duchess of Malfi’s death—strangulation—is antici-
pated in the monk Christian’s life of the Bohemian proto-martyr Ludmila
(860–921). According to her vita, Ludmila was a royal princess who con-
verted to Christianity and brought up her grandson Wenceslas in the Christian
faith. Christian gives her faith as the reason for her assassination, although in
reality the murder was more likely motivated by political intrigue and the
rivalry between Ludmila and her daughter-in-law Drahomira for control of
the minor Wenceslas. According to Christian, Drahomira was a pagan who
ordered her mother-in-law to be killed in her castle as Tetin in 921.
The Duchess of Malfi is set in Renaissance Italy, but the religious condi-
tions that allowed men increasing control over women’s lives—in effect
making the former masters of their own household—have more in com-
mon with Protestant England, where patriarchy was replacing the Catholic
41
Alfred Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 102.
matriarchal household of the Middle Ages. In pre-Reformation England

women had been religiously and economically empowered in ways that
became increasingly difficult in early modern England. Under Elizabeth I
and James I female recusants like the spinster Anne Vaux and her widowed
sister Eleanor Brooksby continued the medieval tradition of the matriar-
chal household in spite of state interference. Priests may have said Mass in
their houses, but these redoubtable ladies governed their households by
harboring the priests in the first place. The Elizabethan and Jacobean pur-
suivants’ attacks on their houses can be read as reflecting the Protestant
patriarchal war of aggression against these holdouts of Catholic medieval
matriarchy. In the early hours of All Saints’ Day, 1611, Harrowden Hall,
the home of Eliza Roper, Baron Vaux’s daughter by his second marriage
to Mary Tresham, was attacked by pursuivants. There had been a false
rumor that John Gerard, the Jesuit priest, was back in England after hav-
ing fled the country on the same day as Henry Garnet’s execution:
As its inhabitants slumbered, its walls were scaled and the locks were picked
or otherwise smashed in. The chapel, which was prepared for the feast day,
was desecrated. About one thousand pounds’ worth of plate and jewels,
including some diamonds, were seized. Eliza was stoic about the destruction
of the walls, floors and ceiling. It was, she said, ever thus, but she was dev-
astated by the loss of her garden. Her plants and fruit trees were uprooted
and flung across the fields “and they knocked down and flattened the charm-
ing shaded enclaves and summer houses which she had made there for their
enjoyment.” John Gerard had spent many happy hours in Eliza’s garden.
Perhaps this was the pursuivants’ revenge. (Childs, God’s Traitors, 356)
It is conceivable that Webster had heard of this real-life incident since

the man in charge, Gilbert Pickering of Titchmarch, returned to London
in triumph—having captured two Jesuits, if not Gerard—and was publicly
knighted by the king on November 10 (Childs, God’s Traitors, 357).
Certainly, Ferdinand’s fantasy of obliterating his sister’s property, gardens,
and lands is similarly motivated by the desire for revenge and the need to
strip his sister of her political and economic autonomy:
CARDINAL:
Why would you make yourself so wild a tempest?
FERDINAND:
Would I could be one,
That I might toss her palaces ’bout her ears,
184 A. THOMAS
Root up her goodly forests, blast her meads,

And lay her general territory as waste
As she hath done her honors. (2.5.16–21)
As in King Lear, women’s economic autonomy from male control is

seen as contingent on the very patriarchal power structure that it threatens
to undermine: King Lear can strip Cordelia of her dowry just as easily as
he can give her a third of his kingdom. Women’s independence is thus
increasingly defined not only as contingent on male power but as a con-
struct subordinated to the “natural” order of patriarchy. To deviate from
that order is to incur the wrath of nature itself, as illustrated by the violent
nature imagery of Lear’s and Ferdinand’s fiery speeches.
In act 5, scene 3 of The Duchess of Malfi, where Antonio and Delio visit
the Duchess’ grave, the ruined setting evokes Protestant England with its
dissolved abbeys transformed into the residences of powerful magnates.
Delio’s opening speech equates the corrupt Cardinal with men like Lord
Burghley and his son Robert Cecil who profited from the dissolution of
the English monasteries, while Antonio’s response expresses nostalgia for
the civic piety of medieval men and women:
DELIO
Yond’s the Cardinal’s window. This fortification
Grew from the ruins of an ancient abbey,
And to yond side o’th’ river lies a wall,
Piece of a cloister, which in my opinion
Gives the best echo that you ever heard:
So hollow and so dismal, and withal
So plain in the distinction of our words,
That many have supposed it is a spirit
That answers.
ANTONIO
I do love these ancient ruins.
We never tread upon them but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history,
And, questionless, here in this open court,
Which now lies naked to the injuries
Of stormy weather, some men lie interred
Loved the church so well, and gave so largely to’t,
They thought it should have canopied their bones
Till doomsday. But all things have their end:
Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men,
Must have like death that we have. (5.3.1–19)
Implicit in Antonio’s speech is a contrast between the defiant piety of

the Catholic faithful and the unscrupulous financial corruption of the
Protestant regime. That defiant tradition had not vanished completely but
lingered on in the form of an echo emanating from the Duchess’ tomb, a
voice that warns Antonio against visiting the Cardinal’s residence:
ANTONIO
’Tis very like my wife’s voice.
ECHO.
Ay, wife’s voice.
DELIO
Come, let us walk farther from’t:
I would not have you go to th’Cardinal’s tonight.
Do not.
ECHO
Do not. (5.3.25–30)
The echo from the grave recalls the well-known motif of posthumous
miracles performed at the tombs of the holy that is such an important
feature of medieval hagiographies. Sometimes these miracles assume the
form of sweet odors coming from the tomb and signaling the incorrupt-
ibility of the saint’s body. After the death of Catherine of Alexandria two
posthumous miracles were reported to have occurred—milk oozing from
her neck instead of blood (signifying her virginity) and angels from heaven
translating her body to Mount Sinai (testifying to her holiness):
After this great sorrow, God wrought on that day two miracles which are wor-
thy of remembrance. For this reason I do not wish to conceal them. Her blood
lost its ordinary nature, for it flowed there as white milk from her body. The
other miracle God performed was that he sent to her his angels from heaven.
They bore her body away with them and laid it on Mount Sinai. They placed
it there with great honour. It lies there to this day, where God has performed
many a miracle and does and will do for all our age. From the tomb where she
lies, oil flows even now. By this oil many are cured of their illness, to the praise
of the creator for whom she suffered mortal pain. (Virgin Lives, 42)
Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger: The Virgin

Martyr (1620)
The Virgin Martyr is the product of an intergenerational collaboration by
Philip Massinger and Thomas Dekker. The latter first came to prominence
in the 1590s and was a Catholic, which helps to explain the subject matter
186 A. THOMAS
of his late play. The Virgin Martyr was licensed for performance on October
6, 1620; the license refers to a “reforming” of the play, which has been
taken to indicate an element of censorship. This is not surprising given the
subject matter of the drama, which tells of the martyrdom of the Catholic
virgin martyr Dorothea of Caesaria, a second-century Christian martyr
who renounced her pagan origins and was tortured and beheaded for her
fidelity to Christ. Images of St Dorothea are also common in English
churches dating from prior to the Reformation, as in the Tudor rood
screen at North Tuddenham, Norfolk (Fig. 5.3).
Fig. 5.3 St Dorothea with a basket of flowers (1500). North Tuddenham

Church, Norfolk
Although the martyrdom of Dorothea can be read as simultaneously

pro-Catholic and anti-Catholic, depending on how one interprets it, the
play generally aligns the persecution of the early Christians during the
reign of Diocletian with the oppression of Catholics in early modern
England. Theophilus, a zealous persecutor of the Christians, betrays all
the fervor of a committed pursuivant of Catholics: “So I to all posterities
may be cal’d/the strongest Champion of the pagan gods, and rooter out
of Christians.” The atmosphere of the play also resonates with the para-
noia of late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In the opening scene of
the play, Supritius, Governor of Caesaria, commands Sempronius, Captain
of the Guard, to keep the ports closed and to disarm all Christians as a
potential threat to the state:
SUPRITIUS
Keep the Ports close, and let the guards be doubl’d,
Disarm the Christians, call it death in say
To wear a sword, and in his hands to have one.
SEMPRONIUS
I shall be careful of it.
SUPRITIUS
It will well become you,
Such as refuse to offer sacrifice
To any of our Gods, put to the torture,
Grub up the growing mischief by the roots,
And know, when we are merciful to them,
We to ourselves are cruell.42
Theophilus even threatens his own daughters with torture when they
convert to Christianity:
THEOPHILUS
I put on
The scarlet robe of bold authority;
And as they had been strangers to my blood,
Presented them (in the most horrid form)
All kind of tortures, part of which they suffer
With Roman constancy.
42
Philip Messenger and Thomas Decker, The Virgin-Martyr: A Tragedie (London, 1651).
Newberry Library (special collections).
188 A. THOMAS
There is perhaps a conscious echo in these lines of Lear’s repudiation of

Cordelia after she refuses to swear her absolute love to her father: “Here I
disclaim all my paternal care,/ Propinquity, and property of blood,/And
as a stranger to my heart and me/Hold thee from this forever” (1.1. 113–
16). Dorothea is also faced with torture for refusing to abjure her Christian
faith. Her arrogant words of defiance are characteristic of the medieval
virgin-martyr tradition in which the saint’s earthly suitor (Antoninus)
compares unfavorably with her celestial spouse Christ: “Sir, for your for-
tunes were they mines of gold,/He that I love is richer; and for worth/
You are to him lower than any slave/ Is to a Monarch.” The details of
execution resembles the grisly fate meted out to Catholic priests in early
modern England:
DOROTHEA
The visage of a hangman frights not me;
The sight of whips, racks, gibbets, axes, fires,
Are scaffoldings by which my soul climbs up
To an eternal habitacion.
Dorothea’s rival in love, Artemia, daughter of Diocletian, betrays all

the acquisitive instincts of the Protestant oppressors of recusants, eager to
demoralize them through the confiscation of their property and goods,
while Dorothea’s reply smacks of the acquiescence of Catholics impover-
ished by the statutes:
ARTEMIA
Rifle her estates;
Christians to beggary brought, grow desperate.
DOROTHEA
Still on the bread of poverty let me feed.
Dorothea’s nemesis, Theophilus, refers to the Christians as “supersti-

tious fools”—the modifier suggesting an association with Catholics, who
were often dismissed as “superstitious” in Protestant polemics against the
veneration of saints. And when, in act 5, scene 1, Theophilus is himself
converted to Christianity thanks to the miraculous appearance of the mar-
tyred Dorothea, he orders that all Christians be released from prison and
sent to safety on ships, which recalls the fate of recusants forced to flee
Elizabethan and Jacobean England:
THEOPHILUS
Haste them to port,
You shall find there two tall ships, ready rigg’d,
In which embark the poor distressed souls,
And bear them from the read of tyrannie.
CHAPTER 6
“Remember the Porter”: Memorializing

the Medieval Drama and the Gunpowder
Plot in Macbeth
The previous chapters have focused on how Shakespeare and his contem-
porary dramatists of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage drew upon non-
theatrical medieval genres (such as the romances and virgin-martyr
narratives) and adapted them to the dramatic needs of the secular theatre.
In this chapter we will be concerned with tracing the continuity, as well as
the differences, between the late medieval religious drama and the theatre
of Shakespeare’s time. As Michael O’Connell has pointed out, there are at
least a dozen references to the mystery plays in Shakespeare’s dramatic
corpus, suggesting that he had more familiarity with the mysteries than
any other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist (O’Connell, “Blood
Begetting Blood,” 178). But he was not alone; Christopher Marlowe was
also familiar with the mystery and morality plays. The allegorical figures of
Vice and Virtue from the morality plays form the basis of the Good and
Bad Angel who vie for Faustus’ soul in Doctor Faustus, the former exhort-
ing him to read Scripture, the latter to abandon Scripture for the dizzying
pleasures of necromancy. And Everyman’s lament that time is passing
and his life slipping away—“the day passeth and is almost ago” (194)—
underlies Faustus’ great closing soliloquy in Faustus1:
1
Everyman and Mankind, edited by Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen (London:
Arden, 2009), 194 fn. 192.

192 A. THOMAS
Ah, Faustus, now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come.
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul. (A-Text, 5.2, 62–69)2
The influence of medieval drama on the Elizabethan and Jacobean the-

atre has often been presented in terms of traces like the outlines of wall
paintings in medieval churches. Kurt Schreyer, for example, refers to the
“remnants” of the medieval stage in Shakespeare’s drama. But we should
remember that—like the whitewashed wall paintings of Elizabethan
churches—the mysteries were systematically phased out of English cultural
life by the Elizabethan government. However, this official fiat on traditional
religion did not always translate into total compliance. Although Elizabethans
usually conformed to the Protestant government’s regulations, they also
found ways to resist, particularly in areas where traditional religion was
strong such as Warwickshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, where objects of
devotion were often hidden. The same might be said for the influence of the
mystery plays in these counties. It is most likely that Shakespeare saw the last
of these performances in Coventry before they were phased out. If so, they
clearly made a lasting impression on his imagination.
I argue in this chapter that Marlowe and Shakespeare consciously drew
upon medieval theatre for political reasons of their own. In doing so they
were following the precedent of the fifteenth-century mysteries which
used the biblical stories to comment on the political corruption of their
own time. Medieval writers often invoked historical or biblical figures to
highlight the vices and failings of the rich and powerful. A. C. Cawley has
pointed out that the fifteenth-century audience of the play Herod the
Great would have recognized in the murderous King Herod an allusion to
contemporary corrupt politicians such as Henry VI’s favorite, William de
la Pole, duke of Suffolk:
In his (Herod’s) imagination the three kings of the Epiphany are planning
an alliance with Christ which may result in his downfall. He lives in a world
of intrigue and counter-intrigue, of ruthless means and bloody ends. And
2
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, edited by David Scott Kastan (New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 2005), 51–52.
“REMEMBER THE PORTER”: MEMORIALIZING THE MEDIEVAL DRAMA… 193
his fear, greed and anger find their natural outlet in verbal violence and
abuse. To a fifteenth-century audience he would certainly have suggested a
latter-day tyrant like the Duke of Suffolk, whose choleric behavior in a court
of law is compared with that of Herod, in a letter written to Sir John Paston
in 1478: “There was never no man that played Herod in Corpus Christi play
better and more agreeable to his pageant than he [Suffolk] did.”3
Just as the Protestant establishment whitewashed the scenes of the Last

Judgment and the lives of the saints from the walls of churches in order to
induce collective forgetting among the Catholic faithful, so, conversely,
Shakespeare defiantly reinscribed them in the memory of his audiences in
order to address religious-political concerns that were officially off limits.
This is especially true of the play Macbeth, written at a time of great reli-
gious turmoil in England.
The Harrowing of Hell

A key example of Shakespeare’s debt to the medieval mystery-play tradi-
tion is the knocking episode in act 2, scene 3, of Macbeth. Following the
murder of King Duncan and before the discovery of his bloody corpse, we
hear a loud knocking on the gate of Macbeth’s castle. A drunken porter
comes on stage in response to the knocking, but before he opens the gate
to admit Macduff and Lennox, he addresses the audience and imagines
himself as a “porter of hell gate.” The ensuing speech alludes to the medi-
eval mystery pageant The Harrowing of Hell, which derives from the apoc-
ryphal Gospel of Nicodemus in which Christ descends into hell on Easter
Saturday and delivers Adam and Eve, John the Baptist, and the biblical
patriarchs and prophets from the snares of Lucifer. The episode was one of
the most frequently illustrated motifs in medieval art, as in the French
Holkham Library Picture Book in the British Library (Fig. 6.1).
It also receives a lively treatment in written sources such as Piers
Plowman, in which Lucifer tries in vain to block out Christ’s divine light
by barricading himself in his castle and attempting to defend it like a
besieged fortress. Lucifer commands his diabolical subordinates (the
ridiculous-sounding Ragamoffyn and Coltyng) to secure all the gates
against the invader:
3
Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, edited by A.C. Cawley (London: J. M. Dent,
1993), 105.
194 A. THOMAS
Fig. 6.1 The Harrowing of Hell. The Holkham Library Picture Book (ca. 1320).
British Library
Ar we thorw brightness be blent, go barre we the gates.

Cheke and cheyne we and uch a chine stoppe,
That no liht lepe in at louer ne at loupe. (C-text, 283–285)4
[Even though we be blinded with its brightness, let’s go and bar up the
gates. Let us check his course, and chain our doors, and stop up every chink,
so that no light can get in at the louver nor loop-hole.]
4
See Piers Plowman, edited by Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall (Evanston: Northwestern
If the setting of the Porter’s speech derives from the Harrowing of Hell
pageant, the Porter himself is an anarchic type familiar from the medieval
drama, recalling the subversive figure of the clown Robin in Doctor
Faustus, the Jewish Rewfin in the English Coventry Play, or Rubín in the
Czech Ointment Seller. In Marlowe’s play Robin serves as a parodic coun-
terpart to Faustus himself when he is offered money by Wagner:
WAGNER
Well, do you hear, sirrah? Hold, take these guilders.
[Hands Robin coins.]
ROBIN
Gridirons? What be they?
WAGNER
Why, French crowns.
ROBIN
Mass, but for the name of French crowns, a man were as good have as many
English counters. And what should I do with these?
WAGNER
Why, now, sirrah, thou art at an hour’s warning whensoever or wheresoever
the devil shall fetch thee.
ROBIN
No, no, here; take your gridirons again. [Tries to hand them back.]
(A-Text, 1. 4, 31–39)
Marlowe reprises the medieval dramatic device of juxtaposing sacred

scenes with their parodic secular equivalent in the mystery plays. Just as
Robin serves as a lowlife parody of Faustus, so in the Chester version of
The Harrowing of Hell the corrupt alewife is welcomed into hell by Satan
and his devils in a parodic counterpart to Adam being welcomed into para-
dise by Christ:
SATAN
Welcome, dear darling, to us all three;
Though Jesus be gone with our meny,
Yet shalt thou abide here still with me
In pain without end. (309–312)5
And the second devil’s greeting to the alewife also parodies Christ’s
bridal song as Sponsa Christi in the medieval tradition of Brautmystik:
Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, edited by A.C. Cawley (London: J.M. Dent,
5
1974), 160.
196 A. THOMAS
SECOND DEMON
Welcome, dear lady, I shall thee wed!
For many a heavy and drunken head,
Cause of thy ale, were brought to bed,
Far worse than any beast. (313–316)
In similar fashion, Shakespeare mimics Robin’s words in Faustus when

the Porter echoes Marlowe’s burlesque jokes on “French crowns” and
“English counters” as he welcomes into hell “an English tailor come
hither for stealing out of a French hose” (3.3.13–14).6 Like the comic
scene of Robin and Wagner, the Porter’s speech appears to be an ostensi-
bly lighthearted interlude between the murder of Duncan and the discov-
ery of the deed; and that is often the way it is presented in staged
productions of the play. But as in Marlowe’s Faustus, the scene has a more
serious function in raising religious and political questions about the sub-
ject’s allegiance to the state and the contractual implications of conform-
ing to the state religion. Moreover, the Porter’s speech allows Shakespeare
to make risqué references to the Gunpowder Plot, otherwise strictly off
limits in the feverish, tense atmosphere of 1606, as we shall see later.
Medieval literary and visual representations of the Harrowing of Hell
involve either a hell-mouth (in particular those influenced by the mystery
plays) or a fortress or castle, as in Piers Plowman or in the fourteenth-
century illumination from the Petites Heures du Duc de Berry, where Christ
knocks down the gate of a castle with a staff while terrified devils perch
precariously on the battlements. In using the Harrowing of Hell scene
Shakespeare seems to have had a fortified setting in mind since the drunken
Porter is responding to the sound of knocking on the gate of Macbeth’s
castle. The Harrowing of Hell episode provided an opportunity for medi-
eval dramatists to castigate the corruption of fraudulent tradesmen and
artisans. In what is probably a later addition to the Chester pageant, an
alewife who cheats on her customers finds herself in hell. The corrupt
alewife was a frequent figure in medieval drama and art, as reflected in the
carving of an alewife riding naked on the devil’s back and holding aloft a
tankard in the carved roof boss of Norwich Cathedral7:
6
Presumably the tailor stole cloth brought to him by a customer for making French
breeches.
7
See Martial Rose and Julia Hedgcoe, Stories in Stone: The Medieval Roof Carvings of
Norwich Cathedral (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 113.
Sometime I was a taverner,

A gentle gossip and a tapster,
Of wine and ale a trusty brewer,
Which woe hath me wrought.
Of can I kept no true measure:
My cups I sold at my pleasure,
Deceiving many a creature,
Though my ale were naught.
And when I was a brewer long,
With hops I made my ale strong;
Ashes and herbs I blent among,
And marred so good malt.
Therefore I may my hands wring,
Shake my cans, and cups ring;
Sorrowful may I sigh and sing,
That ever I so dealt. (269–284; Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, 159)
Just as the alewife is a product of the seamy side of medieval tavern life,
so is the “English tailor” in the Porter’s speech a figure straight out of the
Jacobean commercial world. The Porter’s speech would have resonated
with the audience’s experience of life in early seventeenth-century London.
But it may also have triggered memories of the mysteries. Shakespeare’s
London was full of immigrants from the countryside (newcomers like
Shakespeare himself ) who would have been exposed to the mystery cycles
in smaller cities before they were prohibited by the Protestant regime.8
Kurt Schreyer sees the knock-knock episode as an acoustic prop borrowed
from these plays: “It may be helpful to think about the acoustic affinity
between Macbeth and the Harrowing in terms of material stage proper-
ties—as if Shakespeare had borrowed an aural prop, rather than a Hell
mouth or devil’s costume, to momentarily suggest the setting of Hell”
(Schreyer, Shakespeare’s Medieval Craft, 137). Seen in this light, the
acoustic prop of the knocking might have triggered the subversive memory
of the original pageants.
But there is more to the Porter’s speech than a satire aimed at crooked
artisans; there is also a critique of the rulers of the world that recalls the
medieval drama and medieval attitudes to political corruption in general.
Medieval homilists frequently railed against worldly injustices and i niquities.
8
G. W. Bernard maintains that the mystery plays were still flourishing and vital as late as
the 1530s, before they were suppressed. See The Late Medieval English Church, 101.
198 A. THOMAS
The English friar Nicholas Bozon promised in a sermon that “At the Day
of Judgment the simple folk will be exalted for their good deeds and the
haughty abased for their pride.” John Bromyard, another English preacher
of the fourteenth century and author of the influential Summa predican-
tum, went further by insisting that the ruler’s “soul shall have, instead of
palace and hall and chamber, the deep lake of hell, with those that go down
to the depth thereof. In place of scented baths, their body shall have a nar-
row pit in the earth, and there they shall have a bath more foul than any
bath of pitch or sulphur.”9
In The Harrowing of Hell, the triumphant Christ addresses Satan and
his minions as “the princes of pain” and commands them to open up the
gates of hell:
JESUS
Open hell gates anon,
You princes of pain, everyone,
That God’s son may in gone,
And the King of bliss! (145–148; Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, 155)
The opening phrase derives from the words of Psalm 24 Tollite, portas, o
principes, vestras. These powerful words were frequently set to music in the
medieval and early modern period. One of the most beautiful renditions
was by Shakespeare’s contemporary William Byrd—a court musician and
Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. Byrd was also a recusant, but his beliefs
were tolerated by the government because of his musical talent. Nonetheless
he was tenacious in his devotion to the old faith and composed three Masses
for a small number of voices so that they could be performed in the private
and intimate setting of a recusant household. Composed in 1603, the year
of Elizabeth’s death, Byrd’s Tollitas portas was later incorporated into the
Gradualia (1605). It expressed renewed hopes for the deliverance of
Catholics from persecution under the new King James I just as Christ deliv-
ers the just from hell. As we have seen in Chap. 1, Shakespeare appears to
have articulated similar hopes for a brighter future after Elizabeth’s death
in Sonnet 107. These hopes were soon dashed when James reneged on his
promises to his Catholic subjects, and the Porter’s speech in Macbeth, in
which Christ’s salvific role is usurped by the drunken Porter, may have
reflected the disillusionment of the king’s recusant subjects.
Quoted from T. S. R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgment and
9
Remembrance (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972), 44.

By contrast, the original medieval play depicts the overthrow of worldly

potentates through Christ’s divine intervention. At first the devils resist
Christ’s commandment but the power of heavenly light forces them to
acknowledge the latter’s power over Satan:
3 DEMON
Yea, Satanas, thy sovereignty
Fails clean; therefore flee,
For no longer in this see
Here shalt thou not sit.
Go forth! Fight for thy degree,
Or else our prince shalt thou not be;
For now passeth thy postie,
And hence thou must flit.
(Then let them hurl Satan from his throne) (161–168; Everyman and
Medieval Miracle Plays, 155–156)
The flight of the devils at the sound of Christ’s knocking on the gates
of hell is paralleled in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s reaction to the sound
of knocking on their castle gate even before the Porter’s appearance:
(Knock)
LADY MACBETH
I hear a knocking
At the south entry. Retire we to our chamber.
A little water clears us of this deed;
How easy is it then! Your constancy
Hath left you unattended. (Knock)
Hark, more knocking.
Get on your night-gown, lest occasion calls us
And show us to be watchers.
(2.2.62–68)
In Elizabethan and Jacobean England “watchers” was a loaded term,

meaning both “observers” (as understood by Lady Macbeth) but also
state-sponsored spies hired to observe the movements of recusants and
other political dissidents. These were particularly common during Sir
Francis Walsingham’s tenure as spymaster of Queen Elizabeth I.10
10
See Stephen Alford, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2012).
200 A. THOMAS
Shakespeare’s audience—in particular Catholics—would have detected in

this word a topical allusion to the oppressive atmosphere of Elizabethan
and Jacobean England. Paranoia and mistrust were characteristics of
both reigns. Reared in the treacherous and deceitful world of feudal
Scotland, King James was accustomed to spying upon his nobility:
“Nothing was done secretly by the lords that he did not know, by means
of having spies at the doors of their rooms morning and evening, who
came and reported everything to him.”11 Following Banquo’s murder,
Macbeth shows a similar mistrust of his thanes by planting a spy in every
household: “There’s not a one of them but in his house/I keep a servant
fee’d” (3.4.130–131).
Significantly, the redeeming figure of Christ so central to the Harrowing
of Hell pageant is absent from Shakespeare’s infernal interlude. We get the
knocking at the gate, but not Christ’s triumphal demolition of it. In
Macbeth it is not Christ who knocks and enters, but the servants of the
murdered King Duncan, Macduff and Lennox. Crucially, it is not Christ
who liberates the just from hell but the drunken Porter who admits the
sinful into hell. This apocalyptic vision of hell is the direct outcome of
Macbeth’s murder of Duncan in his own castle: Macbeth and his wife have
created a living hell that parallels the eschatological world of the mystery
play. Usurping Christ’s role as judge of the living and dead, the Porter
becomes an anti-Christ figure, the opposite of Charity in the morality play
Youth, who presents himself as the gate to heaven:
CHARITY
I am the gate, I tell thee,
Of heaven, that joyful city.
There may no man thither come
But of charity he must have some,
Or he may not come, iwis,
Unto heaven, the city of bliss. (16–21; The Interlude of Youth, 102)
In the episode of “hell’s porter,” Shakespeare also evokes memories of

the apocalyptic scene of the Last Judgment or Doom that was frequently
depicted on the walls of medieval churches, such as the chancel wall of the
Church of St James the Great in South Leigh, Oxford where the dead are
11
Quoted in Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (London: Chatto
and Windus, 2003), 76.
depicted rising from their graves. On the right, the damned are pulled
with chains into the mouth of hell, while on the left-hand side St Peter,
holding the keys to paradise, welcomes the blessed into heaven. The image
of the Doom explicitly occurs in Macduff’s speech following the discovery
of King Duncan’s murdered body:
MACDUFF
Ring the alarum-bell! Murther and treason!
Banquo and Donalbain! Malcolm, awake!
Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit,
And look on death itself ! Up, up, and see
The great doom’s image! Malcolm! Banquo!
As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites,
To countenance this horror! Ring the bell! (2.3.74–80)
Macduff likens the sleeping sons of Duncan to the dead, who will liter-
ally rise from their graves and witness the great Doom or Last Judgment.
The Church of the Trinity in Coventry (just a day’s ride from Stratford in
Shakespeare’s time) contains a powerful image of the Last Judgment, as
does the Tudor Doom in Wenhaston Church in Suffolk (Fig. 6.2).
Equivocation and the Gunpowder Plot

But it is not just the acoustic memory of the medieval drama that is evoked
in the scene of “hell’s gate” in Macbeth. It is also the medieval tradition of
using the mystery and morality plays to reference contemporary poli-
tics and personalities. The Porter’s speech alludes to a recent political
event: the exposure of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 and the
subsequent trial and execution of the plotters:
Here’s a knocking, indeed! If a man were Porter of Hell Gate, he should

have old turning the key. [Knock.] Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there i’ th’
name of Belzebub?—Here’s a farmer, that hang’d himself on the e xpectation
of plenty: come in time! Have napkins enow about you; here you’ll sweat
for’ t. [Knock.] Knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ th’ other devil’s name? Faith,
here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either
scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivo-
cate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator. (2.3.1–11)
The “equivocator” welcomed into hell has been identified as an allusion

to the superior of the English Jesuit Province, Father Henry Garnet, who
was executed on May 3, 1606 as an accessory to the Gunpowder Plot.
202 A. THOMAS
Fig. 6.2 The Last Trump from the Wenhaston Doom (ca. 1500–1520).
Wenhaston, Suffolk
Garnet had been in hiding for twenty years when he was finally captured.
During this time he had used various aliases to conceal his identity; one of
these aliases was the name Farmer, hinted at in the line “Here’s a farmer,
that hang’d himself on th’expectation of plenty.” Another cryptic line—
“He should have old turning the key”—may refer to two Catholics exe-
cuted after the exposure of the Gunpowder Plot: Father Edward Oldcorne
and the layman Robert Keyes. Garnet was the author of A Treatise against
Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulations, a copy of which had been recently
discovered by the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke in the rooms of the
arrested recusant Sir Thomas Tresham in the Inner Temple on December
5, 1605, one month after the failed plot and Tresham’s death of a stran-
gury in the Tower.12 Garnet’s treatise allowed Catholic suspects who were
under oath and faced with the prospect of torture to sidestep incriminating
questions by giving equivocal or evasive answers. For example Garnet
states, “If one should be asked whether such a stranger lodgeth in my
house, meaning that he does not tell a lie there, although he lodges there.”
Here the double meaning of the word “lie” allows the interrogated sus-
pect the possibility to escape incriminating himself and others without
actually lying as such.
Ostensibly, the Porter’s joke about equivocation would seem to be at
Garnet’s expense: “Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both
the scales against either scale” (3.2.8–9). The usual critical response to this
line is that Shakespeare is satirizing the Jesuitical practice of equivocation
as hypocritical lying. This, at least, is how scholars have traditionally read
the reference—as an implicit condemnation of Jesuitical casuistry, thereby
aligning Shakespeare with the government condemnation of the Jesuits as
nefarious plotters against the Crown. But as Robert Miola has shown in
his subtle and sensitive examination of the Jesuits’ plight in Jacobean
England, Shakespeare need not be seen as an apologist for the Jacobean
regime but rather as a nuanced observer of the Jesuits’ predicament as an
oppressed minority.13 As Miola points out, no one in their right mind
would criticize those who sheltered Anne Frank in the attic in Amsterdam
for lying to the SS; and yet scholars have tenaciously clung to the Whiggish
line that the Jesuits were to be condemned for trying to protect them-
12
Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1991), 50.
13
Robert Miola. “Two Jesuit Shadows in Shakespeare: William Weston and Henry Garnet”
in Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives, 25–45.
204 A. THOMAS
selves and their supporters by not incriminating them through equivocal

responses. Although the Protestant regime demonized all Jesuits as agents
of the devil—a reputation that has stuck in a great deal of scholarship on
the period—Shakespeare did not necessarily subscribe to that opinion. He
must have known what many of his contemporaries in the English
Midlands knew—that priests like Campion and Garnet were not fanatics
but mild-mannered and temperate, more interested in performing their
pastoral work than stirring up sedition.
In fact, the Porter’s line—“who committed treason enough for God’s
sake”—could actually be read as sympathetic to the Jesuit since he was
committing treason “for God’s sake” (i.e., on God’s behalf). Moreover, in
being welcomed into hell, the Jesuit might be also equated not with the
damned but with the just (Adam and Eve and the patriarchs) who are
liberated by Christ in the Harrowing of Hell. The comic exchange between
Macduff and the Porter with the punning on the word “lie” provides a
further allusion to Garnet’s controversial treatise:
MACDUFF
Was it so late, friend, ere you went to bed,
That you do lie so late?
PORTER
Faith, Sir, we were carousing till the second cock; and drink, sir, is a great
provoker of three things.
MACDUFF
What three things does drink especially provoke?
PORTER
Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and
unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but takes away the performance.
Therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it
makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades
him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to: in
conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him.
(2.3.22–36)
The inclusion of these lines does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare
was using them to mock Garnet and the Jesuits. In fact, the word “equivo-
cation” goes to the very heart of the play since equivocation is also the
modus operandi of the Three Witches in ensnaring Macbeth. The Sisters
use equivocal pronouncements to goad Macbeth into committing
Duncan’s murder and taking his crown. In act 4, the Witches deliberately
mislead Macbeth by playing on the ambiguous meaning of words when

they assure him that “none of Woman born/Shall harm Macbeth”
(4.1.80–81). Here they are exploiting the double meaning of “born,”
which in Shakespeare’s time meant both “born” in the modern sense and
“delivered” in the gynecological sense. It turns out that Macduff was deliv-
ered by Caesarian section, that is to say, he was “born” of a male physician,
not a midwife. Of course, Macbeth takes the pronouncement to mean only
one thing—that he is invincible to harm from all mortals and in focusing
on the word “Woman” misses the ambiguous use of the word “born.”
The connection between the Witches’ use of equivocation and the
Jesuits’ apology for its use has traditionally led scholars to see a diabolical
link between witches and Jesuits in Shakespeare’s play.14 But it is perhaps
more accurate to suggest that they were linked not in Shakespeare’s mind
but in the paranoid imagination of King James and his government, for
whom witches and Jesuits were equally malevolent. After all, it was James’
insistence on demonizing the Jesuits (as well as witches) that led to
Garnet’s trial and execution for high treason on May 3, 1606. Shakespeare’s
own view of the Jesuits and witches is more difficult to pin down. Indeed,
his complex treatment of equivocation in Macbeth challenges the tradi-
tional assumption that the play was commissioned—or written—as a piece
of pro-Jacobean propaganda. Henry Paul’s influential The Royal Play of
Macbeth (1950) argued that the play was written at the command of the
king and first performed at the Jacobean court in August 1606 on the
occasion of the state visit of Anne of Denmark’s brother, King Christian
IV. But there is in fact no firm evidence that it was ever performed before
King James and his brother-in-law.15 It is true that Shakespeare’s company
was paid to stage three unnamed plays, one at Hampton Court on August
7, and the other two, probably before that date, at Greenwich.16 As James
Shapiro suggests, the play’s interest in equivocation and hellish practices
would have resonated with a powerful sermon on the subject delivered by
Lancelot Andrewes at court on August 5, 1606, to commemorate the
sixth anniversary of the Gowrie Plot against James’s life (Shapiro, The Year
of Lear, 257–259).
14
See Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996).
15
Henry Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth: When, Why, and How it was Written by Shakespeare
(New York: Macmillan, 1950).
16
See James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2015), 257.
206 A. THOMAS
But even if the play was performed at court in August 1606, it does not
follow that Shakespeare intended it as a piece of pro-Jacobean propaganda.
On the contrary, the speech may have been intended for the ordinary
spectators in the theatre rather than for members of the royal court.
Indeed, recent scholarship has detected considerable ambiguity in the
treatment of royal power in the play as a whole. If Shakespeare was equat-
ing equivocation with the Witches (and hence with the Jesuits, as is tradi-
tionally assumed), he was not necessarily equating it exclusively with the
Witches or with the Jesuits. Rather, the play shows how equivocation is
not unique to one group but is employed by all politicians for the unscru-
pulous purpose of reinforcing their power and authority, especially in
times of political turmoil. For example, Rebecca Lemon argues that equiv-
ocation, practiced by Malcolm in his dealing with Macduff and usually
attributed to traitors in general, proves essential to monarchical rule in
general (Lemon, Treason by Words, 86–87). And, according to Nicholas
Brooke, “Attention is not focused on the political theory of kingship in
the way it had been in earlier plays, from Richard II to Julius Caesar. All
the significant figures, who might have pointed to James, are sooner or
later involved in equivocal judgment.”17
If the play shows—as Lemon argues—that equivocation is essential to
the exercise of power in general, what does this say about Shakespeare’s
attitude to King James in particular? Typically, Shakespeare is himself
equivocal on the subject. On the one hand, the playwright appears to be
flattering King James, particularly in act 4, scene 1, where the last of eight
kings holds up a magic glass to point up James’s ancestors (and possibly
James himself seated on a dais at the end of the hall if there was indeed a
royal command performance in 1606). This would have been intended as
a compliment to the king since he was the eighth monarch of the Stuart
dynasty. And yet, as Shapiro has pointed out, James’ mother, the Catholic
Mary Queen of Scots, was the eighth representative of the Stuart line. As
Shapiro suggests, it is likely that the Queen of Scots was deliberately
excluded from the official Stuart pedigree since she was beheaded in 1587
on the reluctant orders of Elizabeth I (Shapiro, The Year of Lear, 209). But
this is not the same thing as saying that Shakespeare is excluding Mary from
the line of succession. In fact, the numerical discrepancy raises an equivocal
question about who is really being flattered here: King James or his mother,
17
See the introduction to William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, edited by
Christopher Brooke (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990), 73.
who was venerated as a martyr by many English Catholics. Moreover, it

could be argued that the play implicitly condemns James since his descent
from Banquo is predicted not by the neutral Three Graces (as in his princi-
pal source Holinshed) but by three evil sisters. As Peter Herman points
out, “James’s future is not predicted by three rather dignified faeries or
nymphs, women who may even be the Fates, but by three obviously Satanic
hags, and the switch from a positive to a negative origin effectively taints
the entire line and the ideologies propounded by that line.”18
The crucial point then is that the Porter’s speech not only addresses
equivocation; it is itself equivocal. Not surprisingly, the word equivocation
occurs more frequently in this speech than in any other part of the play.
James Shapiro has argued that Macbeth equivocates when, in his letter to
his wife, he withholds the Sisters’ prophecies that he will be King of
Scotland; and when, following the assassination of Duncan, he justifies his
murder of the grooms because of his great love for King Duncan (Shapiro,
The Year of Lear, 186–187). If so, he is not alone. Even Duncan equivo-
cates when he promises to make Macbeth “full of growing” before
appointing his son as his successor to the throne by giving him the title
Prince of Cumberland. It has been argued that Malcolm alone transcends
this world of duplicity, but, as Rebecca Lemon argues, Malcolm also uses
Machiavellian strategies of caution, duplicity, and evasion, especially in his
attempts to test Macduff’s loyalty in their English exile.19
In the tyrannical world of Macbeth—and by implication the absolutist
world of Jacobean England—equivocation becomes the universal practice
not only of bad rulers like Macbeth but also of “good” ones like Duncan
and Malcolm, anxious not to incriminate themselves by revealing their
true motives. The Jesuits defended its occasional use in extreme circum-
stances like interrogation and torture for the same reason. In his autobi-
ography written many years later in the safety of Rome, the Jesuit priest
John Gerard justified the Jesuits’ use of equivocation in certain cases to
the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke while under interrogation in the
Tower of London:
18
Peter C. Herman, “Macbeth: Absolutism, the Ancient Constitution, and the Aporia of
Politics” in The Law of Shakespeare, edited by Constance Jordan and Karen Cunningham
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 208–232 (218).
19
For a reading of Macbeth that presents Malcolm as the true hero of the play, see Richard
C. McCoy, “Spectacle and Equivocation in Macbeth” in Spectacle and Public Performance in
the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Robert E. Stillman (Boston: Brill, 2006),
145–156.
208 A. THOMAS
Wrong acts, that are merely internal, are reserved to God’s judgment alone.
Again, there must be some evidence adduced against the accused person. In
England it is the custom for the accused, when asked if he is guilty or not,
to answer “Not Guilty,” until witnesses are produced against him or a ver-
dict of guilty returned by the jury who examined the case. This is the general
practice and no one calls it lying. In general, equivocation is unlawful save
when a person is asked a question, either directly or indirectly, which the
questioner has no right to put, and where a straight answer would injure the
questioned party.20
Gerard is making two points, one Protestant or non-sectarian, the other

Jesuitical, and he is implying an analogy, not an identity, between the two.
The first is that the courts customarily participate in a legal fiction, which
is often false but is nonetheless not considered lying. This argument rejects
a simplistic, uncircumstantial, or uncontextualized standard of legal truth.
Gerard’s second point is that the Jesuits have a right to equivocate because
they are not obliged to incriminate themselves. In short, Gerard offers
two defenses, the one based on legal fiction and judicial practice, which
observes a circumstantial legal standard of truth, the other that Jesuitical
equivocation is like the legal fiction English courts regularly accept and is,
further, specifically justified by the right of the accused not to self-
incriminate/self-injure in this circumstance. Gerard is not admitting the
persecutors’ charge that equivocation is simply lying.
Moreover, Gerard is quick to discern the connection between political
absolutism and judicial abuse: in arrogating to himself control of his sub-
jects’ consciences through the Act of Allegiance, King James was essen-
tially denying them the right to a fair trial. The Act was passed at the same
time that Shakespeare was writing Macbeth, which explores, with ruthless
and unrelenting logic, the drastic legal-political as well as spiritual implica-
tions of the divine right of kings.
It is not just The Harrowing of Hell pageant that is referenced in
Macbeth. Scholars have long since made clear that the ranting figure of
Herod the Great, who orders the murder of the Innocents in the Wakefield
mystery pageant of the Towneley Cycle (a tradition that starts with
Matthew 2.16), is a crude prototype for the tyrant Macbeth. Macbeth’s
anger toward the end of the play mimics Herod’s ranting, as if murder has
turned him into the one-dimensional stock-figure from the mysteries. Like
20
John Gerard, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, translated by Philip Caraman (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 154.
Herod faced with the threat posed by the newborn Jesus Christ, Macbeth
is haunted by the specter of a more powerful rival that he cannot destroy:
MACBETH
Bring me no more reports, let them fly all
Till Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane
I cannot taint with fear. What’s the boy Malcolm?
Was he not born of woman? The spirits that know
All mortal consequences have pronounc’d me thus:
“Fear not, Macbeth, no man that’s born of woman
Shall e’er have power upon thee.” Then fly, false thanes,
And mingle with the English epicures! (5.3.1–8)
And when a messenger arrives to inform Macbeth that Malcolm’s army

is approaching disguised as a wood, the tyrant (like Herod faced with news
of Christ’s birth) lapses into splenetic rage:
MACBETH
The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon!
Where got’st though that goose-look?
SERVANT
There is ten thousand—
MACBETH
Geese, villain!
SERVANT
Soldiers, sir. (5.3.11–13)
Faced with an opponent whose birth seems supernatural (like Christ’s),

Macbeth—like Herod—is reduced to paranoid threats. Herod calls for
those who whisper of Christ’s coming to be hanged: “But I shall tame
their talking,/And let them go hang them!” (80–81. Herod the Great, In
Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, 109). Macbeth similarly threatens
all fear-mongers with the same fate:
MACBETH
Send out moe horses, skirr the country round,
Hang those that talk of fear. Give me mine armor. (5.3.35–36)
Macbeth’s increased alienation as his tyranny unravels also echoes

Satan’s isolation after Jesus has led away the blessed in The Harrowing of
Hell. Macbeth’s sole remaining supporter is the aptly named Seyton:
210 A. THOMAS
MACBETH
Seyton!
I am sick at heart
When I behold—Seyton, I say!—This push
Will cheer me ever, or [disseat] me now.
I have liv’d long enough: my way of life
Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have. (5.3.18–26)
SATAN
Out, alas! Now goeth away
My prisoners and all my prey;
And I might not stir one stray,
I am so straitly dight.
Now comes Christ, sorrow I may
For me and my meny ay;
Never, since God made the first day,
Were we so foul of right. (205–212; Everyman and Medieval Miracle
Plays, 157)
The image of Satan confined and rooted to the spot (“and I might nor
stir one stray”) recalls Macbeth’s “They have tied me to a stake; I cannot
fly,/But bear-like must I fight the course” (5.7.1–2). And, one short scene
later, Macduff addresses Macbeth as a “hell-hound” (5.8.3), an epithet
that recalls the infernal terminology of The Harrowing of Hell:
SATAN
Hell hounds, all that be here,
Make you boun with boast and bere,
For to this fellowship in fere
There hies a ferly freke. (89–92; Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, 153)
It is Macduff, we should recall, who knocks on the gate of Macbeth’s

castle; and it is Macduff who ultimately prevails over the tyrant Macbeth,
just as Christ vanquishes Satan and the power of evil in The Harrowing of
Hell:
MACDUFF
Then yield thee, coward,
And live to be the show and gaze o’ th’ time:
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,

Painted upon a pole, and underwrit,
“Here may you see the tyrant.” (5.8.23–27)
The phrasing “rarer monsters” comes from the “King’s Book,” a

printed account of the entry of the surviving Gunpowder plotters into
London. In a passage attributed to King James himself, the Gunpowder
plotters are described as “the rarest sort of monsters” whom the populace
gazed at in wonder (Shapiro, The Year of Lear, 124). These surviving plot-
ters were interrogated, tortured, and executed in two batches, hanged,
drawn, and quartered in a grisly public ritual that haunts Macbeth from
beginning to end. The severed heads of the condemned were then
mounted on poles and displayed on London Bridge for the purpose of
public deterrence, as echoed in Macduff’s jeering threat to Macbeth.
What makes these lines equivocal—and even subversive—is that they
effectively switch the roles of perpetrator and victim: instead of the plot-
ters’ heads being placed on display, Macduff imagines the head of the
tyrannical Macbeth being held up for public mockery and scorn.
Central to Macbeth’s interrogation of the oppressive Protestant state is
the inevitability of equivocation in a society in which not just the Jesuits
but also the Protestant establishment equivocated in temporal and spiri-
tual matters. Although the Protestant state condemned the Jesuitical
equivocation as blasphemous lies, it was itself founded on a series of equiv-
ocations dating back to Henry VIII’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon
and the split with Rome. As Herschel Baker has pointed out in his subtle
discussion of Shakespeare’s last and coauthored play Henry VIII, the
eponymous king:
Equivocates so much about the crucial question of the divorce, on which

the large dynastic implications of the play depend, that his “conscience” is a
subject of derision [2.2.17–19, 4.1.47], and on this—as on other matters—
his position is so morally ambiguous that his judgements seem to be the
dictates of his will. Therefore he not only fails to exercise the God-like func-
tions that were arrogated to the Tudor kings, he even fails to comprehend a
justice commensurate with his power. Remembering Shakespeare’s strenu-
ous efforts to define a monarch’s rights and obligations in the earlier history
plays, one sees Henry as conclusive proof that these efforts now were
ended.21
21
See introduction to Henry VIII in The Riverside Shakespeare, 979.
212 A. THOMAS
In its attempt to establish theological coherence from the muddled

Henrician reformation, the Elizabethan via media was also forced to
equivocate in its desire to steer between Catholic and extreme Protestant
interpretations of Christian belief. For example, Sarah Beckwith has high-
lighted “the piece of equivocation” at the heart of the Elizabethan
Protestant Book of Common Prayer: “For although in many ways a full-
scale attack on the notion of transubstantiation, the BCP still called the
new service ‘Holy Communion commonly called the mass’ and there were
still crosses at all the words for bless and sanctify that were expunged
utterly in the 1552 version” (Beckwith, Signifying God, 137).
Nor did the practice of equivocation end with Elizabeth’s rule. On
coming to the English throne in 1603, King James let it be known to his
Catholic subjects that he would favor a measure of religious toleration.
But he soon reneged on that promise. King James’ Attorney General, Sir
Edward Coke, also equivocated in interpreting Henry Garnet’s crime of
misprision of treason (his knowledge of the Gunpowder Plot) as high trea-
son. Garnet had heard about the plot through the confession from another
priest and therefore was unable as a Catholic priest to break the seal of
confession. For the government prosecution, the seal of confession carried
no weight and Garnet was found guilty of misprision of treason. After
Macduff has discovered Duncan’s violent murder in act 2, scene 3, of
Macbeth, he compares the king’s body to the “Lord’s anointed temple”:
MACDUFF
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!
Most sacrilegious murther hath broke ope
The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence
The life o’ th’ building. (2.3.66–69)
Protestants in the audience might have construed these lines as a refer-

ence to the failed Gunpowder Plot and the “Lord’s anointed temple” as
an allusion to the intended murder of King James. But Catholic spectators
may have understood the lines in a very different way—not as an allusion
to James (who did not die) but to Garnet (who did), not to the king’s
sacred body but to the priest’s innocent blood and the sacerdotal seal of
confession that the state prosecutors had shed and “broke ope” in their
determination to execute Garnet as a traitor. Shakespeare may well be
equivocating in writing a play that appears to glorify King James and the
Stuart dynasty while simultaneously casting the king in a dubious light as
a murderer of innocent priests.
King James’ mistrust of Catholic priests also extended to his English

recusant subjects, especially in the wake of the failed Gunpowder Plot and
the execution of the plotters. As we have seen, Garnet was not directly
involved in the Gunpowder Plot but had heard about it through aural
confession. He failed to disclose the details of the plot to the government
because the secret seal of Catholic confession forbade him from doing
so—not because he was a traitor but because he was a priest. It is not
known if Shakespeare was present on that occasion to witness the hanging
and evisceration of an innocent middle-aged man who, in Jacobean terms,
was considered elderly.
Reflecting the carnage of the scaffold, Macbeth is a play full of blood. It
is this memory of blood that also haunts Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. As he
approaches his damnation, Faustus catches a glimpse of Christ’s salvific
blood in the sky: “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firma-
ment./One drop of blood would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ/
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ” (A-Text, 5.1.74–76).22
But salvation has come too late for Faustus, since he has signed away his
soul to Satan in a contractual agreement that recalls the English bishops’
repudiation of Rome. Macbeth also signs away his soul when he murders
Duncan and usurps his throne. Like Faustus’ compact with the devil, the
murder is an act of free will, a Catholic theme that goes to the very heart
of the play. For medieval people, Christ’s blood on the cross was under-
stood positively as abundant, nurturing, and food-like.23 This copiousness
of blood is reflected in late medieval visual depictions of the Crucifixion,
but also in the mystery plays and in recorded visions of the Passion. Drops
of Christ’s blood as a source of salvation were central to the revelations of
Julian of Norwich, the late fourteenth-century female mystic. This obses-
sion with imagery of blood is central to Macbeth and is clearly indebted to
the sacramental symbolism of the medieval mystery plays. As Michael
O’Connell reminds us, Macbeth begins with a man covered in blood. The
“bloody captain” speaks of Macbeth and Banquo as so besmeared with
blood as seeming “to bathe in reeking wounds, or memorize another
Golgotha” (1.2.39–40) (O’Connell, “Blood Begetting Blood,” 187).
The operative word here is “memorize.” Shakespeare is deliberately recall-
22
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, edited by David Scott Kastan (New York, W. W.
Norton, 2005), 120.
23
See Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval
Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
214 A. THOMAS
ing not only the biblical Passion but also the imagery of blood in the
medieval drama such as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, in which blood
gushes from the mutilated host, or in the Wakefield pageant of Herod the
Great, in which the soldiers slay the innocents in a scene that must have
been graphically represented on stage:
3. WOMAN
Will ye do any dere to my child and me?
3. SOLDIER
He shall die, I thee swear; his heart’s blood shalt thou see.
3. WOMAN
God forbid!
Thief, thou shedest my child’s blood!
Out, I cry! I go near wood!
Alas, my heart is all on flood,
To see my child thus bleed. (372–378. Everyman and Medieval Miracle
Plays, 119)
As in Herod the Great, in Macbeth the shedding of innocent blood cul-

minates in despair and madness both for those who shed it and those who
suffer it. King Herod lurches into madness, but so does Lady Macbeth by
the end of the play. Here she recalls not only Herod but also the damned
alewife in The Harrowing of Hell, who wrings her hands in torment just as
the demented Lady Macbeth rubs her hands in a forlorn attempt to
remove the stain of blood in the famous sleepwalking scene of act 5:
“Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not
sweeten this little hand” (5.1.50–51). As she sleepwalks through Macbeth’s
castle she is clearly tormented by the memory of the king’s mutilated
corpse: “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much
blood in him?” (5.1.34). For Catholics present in the audience this line
may have been understood as an allusion to the execution in May 1606 of
the elderly Garnet, whose blood would have splattered the scaffold on
which he was butchered. Moreover, in using the formulation another
Golgotha, Shakespeare may be consciously alluding to this recent event.
Significantly, the use of the word “Golgotha” in the bishop of Carlisle’s
speech in Richard II may have been intended as a similar reference to
Robert Southwell, who was executed in February 1595.
The all-pervasive imagery of blood in Macbeth can thus be understood
not just as a memory of its sacred function in the mystery plays but also of
its political significance on the scaffold. When the bloody captain goes on
to announce to King Duncan the good news of Macbeth’s victory over the
king’s enemies and the execution of the traitor Macdonwald, Shakespeare’s
audience would have immediately recognized the fates of Garnet and the
Catholic Gunpowder plotters, who were half-hanged, eviscerated, and dis-
emboweled while they were still alive, after which their heads were impaled
on London Bridge:
For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name),

Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel,
Which smok’d with bloody execution,
(Like Valor’s minion) carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;
Which nev’r shook hands, nor bade farewell to him
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’chops
And fix’d his head upon our battlements. (1.2.16–23)
Rather than seeing the influence of the medieval mystery and morality
plays in Macbeth as mere remnants or vestiges of a forgotten past, it might
be more accurate to interpret these medieval motifs in Shakespearean the-
atre as providing a veiled means of articulating dissent among Catholic
spectators in the audience. In the end, Christ’s descent into hell and his
deliverance of the just from Satan in The Harrowing of Hell is iterated not
only in the acoustic device of the knocking on the gate of Macbeth’s castle
(as Kurt Schreyer argues) but also in the subsequent denouement: just as
Christ defeats Satan in his diabolical fortress and liberates the just, so
Macduff, who knocks at the gate like Christ, returns at the end of the play
to slay the tyrant Macbeth and deliver Scotland from oppression.
Composed at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, William Byrd’s hymn Tollite
portas (1603) implicitly equates the new King James I with Christ as the
liberator of the just. Written only two years later in the aftermath of
Garnet’s execution, Macbeth now suggests the opposite: James is no lon-
ger the hoped-for Christlike deliverer of the Catholic oppressed, but their
diabolical oppressor in the guise of the tyrant Macbeth.
CHAPTER 7
Conclusion: Shakespeare “Our

Contemporary”
This book has argued that Shakespeare’s plays consciously deploy medieval
themes and motifs to shed critical light on the all-powerful Protestant state
in the last full decade of Elizabeth I’s reign and the early years of James I’s
reign. Drawing upon the medieval “mirror for princes” and penitential
romances (Richard II), the anti-Judaic blood-libel narrative (The Merchant
of Venice), epic revenge themes (Hamlet), the virgin-martyr narratives
(King Lear and The Winter’s Tale), and the mystery/morality plays in
Macbeth, Shakespeare is harnessing and energizing the political potential of
medieval dissent in the interests of his own agenda. As we have seen, this
strategy also characterized the work of some of his most important dra-
matic contemporaries and successors like Marlowe, Webster, and Massinger.
It has often been argued that Shakespeare’s plays send mixed messages.
The important question here is not that but why they do so. I have argued
that Shakespeare’s mixed messages are not simply a desire to please all and
sundry but are an integral feature of his critique of the political and reli-
gious status quo. Unfortunately, there are no surviving letters or personal
documents to tell us what the playwright thought about the world around
him; for that we must look to the internal evidence of the plays them-
selves. But I believe that there is enough internal evidence in the plays to
point to Shakespeare’s investment in a non-violent, tolerant movement
called irenicism that developed in sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-
century Europe in an attempt to unify Catholics and Protestants.

218 A. THOMAS
To be sure, Shakespeare was also trying to be careful. As we have seen,

in the medieval period criticism of the state was not as dangerous as it
would subsequently become in the Tudor era, although writers like
Chaucer and Langland still needed to be cautious in expressing criticism
of the Church and the state. Medieval homilists frequently got away with
castigating the corruption of the rich and powerful, reminding the prelates
and kings of this world of their mortality and the moral dangers inherent
in pride and worldly ambition. Nonetheless, overt political criticism was
hazardous in both the medieval and early modern periods. By using the
reign of the tyrant Tiberius as a blueprint for his own political disaffections
in the play Sejanus: His Fall, Ben Jonson was playing with fire. If Jonson
intended to get away with using the Roman imperial past for allegorical
political purposes, he was unsuccessful and ended up being summoned
before the Privy Council for sedition and popery. I suggested in Chap. 5
that Jonson’s failure to fly under the political radar with Sejanus may have
motivated Shakespeare to set his plays King Lear and Macbeth in the
remote British past, suitably camouflaged in allegorically distant locations
(pagan Britain and early medieval Scotland).
In setting King Lear in pagan Britain rather than in England,
Shakespeare was also cleverly sending mixed messages by catering to King
James’ fantasy of uniting Scotland and England while critiquing his vul-
nerability to flattery and poor counsel. The same is true of Macbeth,
which, as we saw in the previous chapter, obliquely addresses the religious
violence of Jacobean England during and following the Gunpowder Plot
of 1605. Paradoxically, the most damning criticism of the corruption of
the Jacobean court in King Lear is articulated in the speeches of the most
well-intentioned characters in the play—Cordelia, Kent, Gloucester, and
the Fool—not because they are the king’s adversaries, but because they
are his most loyal supporters. Kent’s warnings to the king in scene 1
reprise the medieval “mirror for princes” tradition in which kings are
admonished for their faults as well as praised for their virtues. The genre
became obsolete after the Protestant Reformation, not because the criti-
cisms of the monarch diminished but because they became too danger-
ous. In order to achieve his revolution and make himself Head of the
Church of England, Henry VIII needed to silence all clerical dissent by
violent means. Religious and political dissidents like the Bishop of
Rochester John Fisher, Thomas More, and the five Carthusian friars, suf-
fered the ultimate penalty for expressing dissent.
CONCLUSION: SHAKESPEARE “OUR CONTEMPORARY” 219
With the crushing of public religious dissent by Henry VIII and his
successors, the mantle of public defiance passed from clerics like John
Fisher to playwrights like Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare. In the later
seventeenth century this mantle was passed on to John Milton. Marlowe
and Jonson suffered the obvious price for their defiance. Shakespeare
alone, it seems to me, successfully navigated the treacherous waters of late
Elizabethan and early Jacobean absolutism by using his dissenting charac-
ters to give voice to public disaffection with the failings of the monarch
and the government. Central to this dissenting project is not just the
deployment of the medieval past (Lear’s Britain or Macbeth’s Scotland)
but the persistence of medieval motifs, images and ideas. Faced with his
mortal wounds in the duel with his brother Edgar, the repentant villain
Edmund invokes the medieval motif of the Wheel of Fortune to describe
his own undoing. Richard II also conjures up the fickleness of fortune in
the abdication scene of Shakespeare’s play, which is probably why this
scene was cut from all performances during Queen Elizabeth’s lifetime
and only restored in 1608. In the famous gravedigging scene Hamlet uses
the medieval trope of vanitas and alludes to the example of Alexander the
Great to highlight the transience of earthly power.
Early modern rulers like Elizabeth I did not like to be reminded of their
mortality and their vulnerability to the vicissitudes of fate, which is why
writers like Shakespeare insisted—against all the odds—in doing so.
Shakespeare persisted in such criticism not because he was opposed to the
monarchical system per se but because he wished to highlight the moral
and political constraints within which it should operate. Shakespeare
believed in the need for some measure of religious toleration in order to
avoid violence and bloodshed in the present and in future. This makes him
not only a universal writer but a topical one. Whether we like it or not,
religion—and the related question of religious intolerance—has once again
become the central issue in the West today. As Douglas Murray has pointed
out, this has much to do with mass migration to Europe from the Muslim
world. Whereas fifteen years ago, the issue was race, now it is religion:
In the 1980s or 1990s almost nobody predicted that the first decades of the
twenty-first century in Europe would be riven by discussions about religion.
The increasingly secular continent had expected to be able to leave faith
behind it, or at least recognized that after many centuries the place of reli-
gion in the modern state had been pretty much settled. If, more specifically,
anybody in the later part of the twentieth century had said that the early
220 A. THOMAS
years of the next century in Europe would be rife with discussions about
blasphemy and that death for blasphemy would have once again have to be
expected in Europe, any audience would have scorned the prediction and
doubted the sanity of the claimant.1
In 1989 the Supreme Leader of the Revolutionary Islamic Republic of

Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against the British writer Salman
Rushdie for his offensive portrayal of Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses.
Rushdie went into hiding, protected by the police, and less than 24 hours
later thousands of British Muslims were on the streets supporting the
imposition of blasphemy laws in Britain. In Bradford, in the north of
England, the offending novel was nailed to a piece of wood and then
burnt in front of thousands of cheering Muslims (Murray, The Strange
Death of Europe, 128–129). It was in the north of England, we may recall,
that Catholic rebels stoked bonfires with the offensive prayer books of the
Protestant reformed church just before the outbreak of open rebellion
against the Crown (1569).
Three hundred years after the religious wars of the sixteenth century,
religion has once again become a source of violent discord in Europe. But
the same is true of the United States. The fortress mentality that character-
ized Shakespeare’s England (monitored ports, the suspicious scrutiny of
newcomers, restricting the arrival of people with different religious ideolo-
gies) foreshadows the similar paranoia and fear of twenty-first-century
America. The current phenomenon of “Fortress America”—a godly land
that needs to protect itself from its internal and external enemies—has its
ideological origins in the Protestant England of the sixteenth century.
Stephen K. Bannon’s identification with Thomas Cromwell, the architect
of that reformation, is both ironic (given his own Catholic faith) and
highly revealing. Like Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII, Bannon
became the most powerful political player of the Trump presidency, the
ideological manipulator behind the throne who tells the president every-
thing he wants to hear and confirms everything he already believes: that
America is in imminent danger of invasion from hostile internal and
external enemies, that it must erect a literal and figurative wall between
itself and the outside world, and that its renewed greatness resides in its
splendid isolation from that world. America’s Muslims have become the
1
Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (London:
Bloomsbury, 2017), 128.
equivalent of Protestant England’s Catholics: the enemy within. The so-

called Muslim ban is the most crude and obvious expression of that para-
noid construction of the “Other.” We are told that a third of Americans
feel safer because of the ban, even though there is no objective evidence to
support the claim that it will make any difference in terms of enhancing
national security.
Another area of similarity between Shakespeare’s world and ours is the
polarized nature of political discourse. Just as the Trump White House
brands negative news reporting as “fake news” so did Protestant broad-
sides such as The Ballad against Rebellious and False Rumours (1570) cas-
tigate the “false” statements of the Catholic supporters of the northern
uprising of 1569 (Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569, 45). Like
our world of waterboarding and Guantanamo Bay, Elizabethan England
saw a dramatic increase in state-sponsored torture (Brownlow, “Richard
Topcliffe,” 164). Contemporary anxieties about immigration, terrorism,
and religious extremism were all too familiar to Shakespeare and his con-
temporaries. London was flooded with displaced Huguenots following
the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572, in which 3000
French Protestants were slaughtered. The presence of these refugees in
England led to violent xenophobia, although, as Scott Oldenburg has per-
suasively argued, there was also a great deal of cultural rapprochement
between the native population and these mainly Protestant “aliens” flee-
ing persecution in France.2 The high point of the tensions between the
English and the immigrant population occurred during the economic cri-
sis of the 1590s. The xenophobic hysteria and fears of a Catholic “fifth
column” that came in the wake of the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605
remind us that terrorism has a long history in the West and that the con-
nection between religious extremism and terror is far from a uniquely
modern phenomenon.
The iconoclastic despoliation of churches and pilgrimage sites in Tudor
England bears a striking similarity to the removal of Confederate-era stat-
ues in the United States. The Tudor authorities often resorted to stealth in
dismantling shrines under cover of darkness. The shrine of St Swithun at
Winchester was taken down at three o’clock in the morning to avoid antag-
onizing local adherents of the saint’s cult; and the statue of Our Lady at
Penrhys was removed “with quietness and secret manner” (Bernard, The
2
Scott Oldenburg, Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2014).
222 A. THOMAS
Late Medieval English Church, 128). On August 18, 2017, night workers
used a crane to lift the monument dedicated to US Supreme Court Chief
Justice Roger Brooke Taney after it was removed from outside Maryland
State House, in Annapolis, Maryland; and the mayor of Baltimore ordered
the statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson be taken
down under cover of darkness “in the best interest of my city.”3
Living in a similar climate of political polarization, Shakespeare was not
interested in taking sides but in articulating dissent from all forms of abso-
lutism, regardless of which side of the political-religious spectrum it came
from. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, “Shakespeare was allergic to the
absolutist strain so prevalent in his world.”4 It was Shakespeare’s antipathy
to extremes and absolutes that sometimes incurred the disapproval of his
more zealous Catholic contemporaries. The Puritans’ attack on the the-
atre and profane literature is well known. But as Alison Shell has high-
lighted, criticism of secular culture also came from the Catholic side of the
religious spectrum. Shakespeare’s cousin, Robert Southwell, reproved the
playwright, obliquely at least, for favoring the composition of Ovidian love
poems like “Venus and Adonis” over religious verse.5 Shell mentions other
recusant texts such as the devotional poem Saint Marie Magdalens
Conversion, with its disdainful allusions to several of Shakespeare’s plays,
arguing that there was a vocal chorus of Shakespeare critics eager to con-
trast their own pious verse with the playwright’s misappropriated talent.
The most intriguing of these Catholic polemics against Shakespeare is the
reference to King Lear by the anonymous author identified only as I.C.
who penned a hagiographical biography of a martyred Catholic priest—
The Life and Death of Mr. Edward Geninges Priest (1614)—published at
St. Omer in the Netherlands (Shell, Shakespeare and Religion, 94).
The disparaging reference to King Lear in the verse preface may appear
to complicate my argument in Chap. 5 that King Lear struck a chord
among northern recusants. However, the allusion actually strengthens my
claim that the tragedy was known to Catholics beyond London. The inclu-
sion of King Lear in the repertoire of the Simpson Brothers equally sug-
gests that Shakespeare was—at the very least—sympathetic to the plight of
Catholics and was perhaps understood to be so. Just as today, the play
compels complex and sometimes contradictory responses. There would
3
New York Times, August 16, 2017.
4
See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010), 3.
5
See Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Methuen, 2010), 89ff.
have been diverse and mixed reactions to King Lear in Shakespeare’s time
precisely because of its shocking transformation from an old familiar plot
into a modern and highly topical drama. Catholics—like Protestants—
would have interpreted it according to their own worldview, sometimes
negatively, sometimes positively. But the point is that the play seems to
have had a powerful impact on recusant members of the audience, one
way or the other.
Professor Shell quotes Graham Greene’s critical remarks about
Shakespeare in the controversial speech Greene made upon receiving the
University of Hamburg’s Shakespeare Prize in 1969: “Perhaps the deepest
tragedy Shakespeare lived was his own: the blind eye exchanged for the
coat of arms, the prudent tongue for the friendships at Court and the
great house at Stratford” (Shell, Shakespeare and Religion, 118). The
imputation here is that Shakespeare sold his soul for the benefits of fame
and friendship. Greene’s speech was delivered in the immediate aftermath
of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the crushing of the
reform movement in that country (August 1968). Greene perhaps saw
Shakespeare as a “fellow traveler” along Cold War lines who chose a com-
fortable life of conformity rather than opposing an authoritarian regime.
It is true that Shakespeare was no Southwell or Campion. However, as
Father Thomas McCoog asserts, the parallels between Shakespeare’s
England and Communist Eastern Europe are very real. Writing of
Campion’s famous challenge to the Protestant regime known as
“Campion’s Brag” (1580) McCoog opines: ‘“Not until the spectre of
communism arose would a literary image so haunt a country’s as Campion’s
enterprise did England.”6 Campion’s challenge to the Protestant estab-
lishment soon circulated in samizdat throughout Catholic England. Its
open address to the oppressive authorities foreshadows Ludvík Vaculík’s
famous “Two Thousand Words” manifesto of June 1968, in defense of the
political reforms within Communist Czechoslovakia which helped to pre-
cipitate the Soviet invasion of August 1968. Campion’s challenge also
recalls Václav Havel’s open “Letter to Dr. Gustav Husák” (1975)—Husák
was the first Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party—that warns
the state of the dangerous consequences of the repression of social life and
the humiliation of human dignity.
6
See Thomas M. McCoog, “‘Playing the Champion’: The Role of Disputation in the
Jesuit Mission.” In The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits,
edited by Thomas M. McCoog, S. J. (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996), 119–139
(128).
224 A. THOMAS
If Campion is the forerunner of human-rights champions like Vaculík

and Havel, Shakespeare may be compared with Soviet writers who were
allowed to publish their work but had to exercise caution and restraint in
doing so. Writers like Boris Pasternak and Bohumil Hrabal come to mind,
both of whom were accused of being colluders by their more overtly critical
fellow writers. Unlike Graham Greene, I believe that Shakespeare’s reluc-
tance to take sides in the religiously polarized world in which he lived was
not motivated by a desire to collude with the authorities but by a conscious
rejection of religious and political extremism. This involved, as we have
seen, a subtle critique of the Protestant hegemony in the 1590s and after-
wards. To this extent chastising Shakespeare’s lack of moral courage (in
contrast to Southwell’s bravery) misses the point and overlooks the play-
wright’s close involvement in the religious politics of his time. This involve-
ment necessitated caution and circumspection, as in the late medieval
period. It was easy enough for a writer like Greene living in the modern
democratic West to criticize Shakespeare, who lived in a very different world.
Certainly, as McCoog points out, Eastern Europe under communism offers
a closer analogy to Shakespeare’s England than Greene’s. Significantly, in
the eyes of oppressed Eastern European writers languishing under the
shadow of Stalin and his successors, Shakespeare was not a moral coward
but the very opposite—a heroic spokesman of freedom and toleration. The
famous Russian poet and translator of Shakespeare’s plays, Boris Pasternak,
emulated Shakespeare in choosing to steer a careful course between confor-
mity and resistance. I have argued elsewhere that one reason why Pasternak
admired Shakespeare so deeply was not simply because he was a great writer
but that he regarded him as a writer of conscience like himself.7 We see clear
evidence of this empathy in Pasternak’s poem “Hamlet” from the novel
Doctor Zhivago. The poet identifies not only with Hamlet, who is forced to
play a role in order to survive and who is watched by all sides as he appears
on stage, but with Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane:
Through thousands of binoculars

The night of darkness stares at me.
If possible, O Abba, Father,
Then take this cup away from me.8
7
See Alfred Thomas, Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014), chapter 2.
8
Boris Pasternak, The Poems of Doctor Zhivago, translated by Eugene M. Kayden (Kansas:
Hall Mark, 1967), 7.
Pasternak and Shakespeare shared the sense of being beleaguered on all

sides, not only by the state but also by its Catholic critics. The criticism of
Shakespeare by his recusant contemporaries mirror some of Pasternak’s
critics during the Stalinist era and its aftermath. One of these critics was
Pasternak’s contemporary and fellow poet, Osip Mandelstam, who was far
more strident in his criticism of Stalin’s tyranny and wrote a satirical poem
about Stalin that ultimately cost him his life in a Siberian labor camp. Like
Shakespeare, Pasternak chose a more cautious path, but this did not auto-
matically make him a coward or a conformist. During the dark days of the
Terror Pasternak stopped writing poems and translated Shakespeare’s
plays. This was not a lapse into political silence but political resistance by
other means. Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet is at times more of a para-
phrase than a translation. In particular the “to be or not to be” soliloquy
encodes subversive references to Stalin’s brutal regime. Here is a literal
translation, followed by the original:
And who would bear the mendacious greatness

Of rulers, the rudeness of potentates,
The universal hypocrisy, the impossibility of
Pouring out one’s soul, the unhappy love
And services rendered in the face of nonentities
When the blow of a knife could simply end it all?9
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? (3.2.65–71)
Just as Pasternak used Shakespeare to ventriloquize his opposition to

Stalin, so, I maintain, Shakespeare deploys the medieval tradition of veiled
dissent to critique the oppressive Protestant state. In contrast to the Jesuit
polemicists Campion, Southwell, and Parsons, Shakespeare uses indirec-
tion to make his political point. But he resembles his Jesuit contempo-
raries in drawing his inspiration from medieval notions of limited monarchy
and the dangers inherent in the pride of princes. As we saw in Chap. 2,
9
See William Shakespeare, Tragedii (Moscow, 2003), 231. My translation from the
Russian.
226 A. THOMAS
Richard II not only looks back to the medieval “mirror for princes” genre
but does so in order to shed a critical light on the later years of Queen
Elizabeth’s reign, when her initial desire not to enquire in the windows of
men’s souls had given way to outright oppression and the mass execution
of Catholic priests.
None of this makes Shakespeare a modern liberal democrat.
Shakespeare’s worldview was both Christian and conservative. Indeed, I
suspect that he may have been mystified by our own failure as a Western
liberal society to comprehend the religious fanaticism that drives radical
Islam today. If Shakespeare articulates dissent in a highly oblique fashion,
this should not surprise us given the authoritarian political system under
which he had to live and work as a playwright. Shakespeare’s debt to the
Middle Ages has often been seen as limited to his feelings of cultural nos-
talgia for a more benign era. There is some truth in this claim—there are
certainly plenty of positive “medieval” figures such as Friar Lawrence in
Romeo and Juliet and the defiant nun Isabella in Measure for Measure. But
more importantly, these figures are frequently representatives of dissent,
characters like Isabella, who defies not only the sexual predator Angelo
but the blandishments of the Duke of Vienna. The ending of the play is
typically equivocal in its studied ambiguity: does Isabella yield to the
Duke’s offer of marriage or—like the virgin martyrs of medieval tradi-
tion—defy this all-powerful embodiment of the state?
Typically, Shakespeare refuses to make it clear one way or the other, and
the audience is left to make up its own mind. As Arthur Marotti puts it,
“Shakespearean drama is open to interpretation by religiously and politi-
cally different audience members in very different ways” (Marotti,
“Shakespeare and Catholicism,” 224). According to Marotti, Shakespeare’s
“multiple perspective on religion” is reflected in Henry VIII, with its alter-
native title All Is True. Following Annabel Patterson,10 Marotti perceives
the case for religious tolerance in the play and a sign of Shakespeare’s reli-
gious irenicism. Marotti speaks of a “recurrent dream of accommodationist
Catholics throughout the period, one that was threatened but not destroyed,
by the Gunpowder Treason” (Marotti, “Shakespeare and Catholicism,”
224–225). In her essay Patterson reminds us that Henry VIII was first per-
formed at court in 1613 to celebrate the marriage of King James’ daughter
Elizabeth Stuart to Frederick the Elector Palatine. This political context is
10
Annabel Patterson, “’All Is True’: Negotiating the Past in Henry VIII.” In Elizabethan
Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum, edited by R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1996), 147–166.
surely significant given the subsequent election of Frederick and his Stuart
bride as King and Queen of Bohemia. Although the couple have gone
down in history as the “Winter King” and the “Winter Queen” following
their sudden flight from Prague in November 1620 and the catastrophic
defeat of the Protestant cause by the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II at
the Battle of the White Mountain, it is important to recall that their reign
began (at least on the Protestant side) as a cause for universal hope and
optimism for a religious convivencia between the new monarchs’ Catholic
and Protestant subjects. In other words. Shakespeare’s affirmation of ireni-
cism and religious toleration in the play subtitled “All is True” can be
understood in the larger religio-political context of the play’s first court
performance.
As an advocate of irenicism Shakespeare believed that it was possible
and necessary for people of different faiths to coexist in mutual respect and
tolerance. He shared this belief with others, most notably, with Henry
Constable, who—according to Elaine Scarry—was the secret addressee of
Shakespeare’s sonnets. If this thesis is true, it suggests that Shakespeare’s
profound love for Constable was in part an irenic “marriage of true
minds.” It is interesting that Constable converted to Catholicism in 1591,
a year before he published Diana, a sequence of twenty-three sonnets
(published in London in 1592 by Richard Smith), and one of the first son-
net sequences in English. A second edition, containing five new sonnets
by Constable with additions by Sir Philip Sidney, followed in 1594. For
Constable, writing profane verse was clearly not incompatible with being
a confessed Catholic. By the same token, Shakespeare’s investment in sec-
ular genres (drama, sonnets, and narrative love poems) does not preclude
him from being a recusant Catholic; and it is possible that Shakespeare was
a moderate Catholic himself. The fact that Southwell and other recusants
had occasion to take the playwright to task for misappropriating his liter-
ary talents suggests some kind of unknown subtext—perhaps that as a
Catholic Shakespeare should have been using his artistic talents in the
interests of his faith. Certainly, all the plays discussed in this book—from
Richard II (1595) to The Winter’s Tale (1609/10)—seem preoccupied
with religious and political questions that would have been in the fore-
front of the minds of most recusants—questions of toleration, penitence,
suffering, and salvation. More we cannot say without succumbing to cir-
cumstantial biographical evidence.11
Perhaps the most important book in recent years to explore Shakespeare’s alleged ties to
11
Catholicism was E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The Lost Years (Manchester: Manchester
228 A. THOMAS
But more important than establishing Shakespeare’s own religious

beliefs is understanding his political commitment to religious toleration. If
Shakespeare’s espousal of ecumenicism does not make him a modern lib-
eral democrat, neither does it make him apolitical or disinterested in the
religious conflicts of his time. On the contrary, it makes him a profoundly
political writer in an age when religion and politics were inseparable.
Jonson and Marlowe were clearly political writers, but so too, I suggest,
was Shakespeare. This was a legacy that the Elizabeth and Jacobean play-
wrights passed on to their more radical successor, John Milton. The latter’s
paradoxical empathy with Satan as a rebel against God in Paradise Lost
(1674) not only reflects Milton’s own experience as a trenchant critic of
Stuart absolutism and a champion of parliamentarian rights but draws
upon an older tradition of anti-absolutism in the works of Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster. In contrast to Milton, Shakespeare may
have been a monarchist, but not at any price. I have argued that he advo-
cated religious freedom and free speech in a way that anticipates Milton’s
passionate defense of intellectual liberty expressed in Areopagitica (1644).12
Shakespeare was not a supporter of regicide like Milton, but he was
shrewd enough to see where the untrammeled divine rights of kings would
lead, and we can see the beheading of the Scottish tyrant at the end of
Macbeth as a prophetic foreshadowing of the execution of Charles I in
1649. Above all, Shakespeare understood that the divine right of kings
went hand in hand with the restriction of religious freedom. We are perhaps
beginning to appreciate the vital connection between religion and politics
in the twenty-first century as we witness more and more violence performed
in the name of religion. The terrorist attack on the Palace of Westminster
in March 2017 can only make us recall—with a shudder—the attempted
Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 which, if successful, would have killed
King James, his family, and the assembled lords and commons in the House
of Parliament. With the reemergence of religious violence and sectarianism
in our own post-Enlightenment moment, we are perhaps better placed
than ever before to appreciate Shakespeare’s dilemma as a tolerant writer
University Press, 1985). According to Honigmann, the young Shakespeare may have spent
his “lost years” as a tutor in a Catholic household in Lancashire named Hoghton Tower.
12
It should be added that Milton drew the line at religious tolerance of Catholics, whom
he regarded as a threat to the security of the English nation: Shakespeare by contrast evinces
no such sense of Protestant paranoia.
caught between the dictates of an absolutist Calvinist government and its

Counter-Reformation opponents. Shakespeare refused to commit himself
to the religious debate of his time precisely because the terms of that debate
had become so polarized and so fraught.
This study has highlighted many moments in the plays where
Shakespeare elicits sympathy for the suffering of persecuted recusants and
empathy with the traditional practices of medieval Catholicism. Whether
Shakespeare was himself a Catholic remains an open question. More
importantly, I think, he occupied a tolerant middle ground that was under
assault from both extremes of the religious spectrum. Of course, occupy-
ing the political center does not make Shakespeare an Anglican either, as
is sometimes assumed. As Ethan Shagan has importantly shown, the
Henrician Reformation and its successor, the Elizabethan church settle-
ment, may have been moderate in theological terms but they used vio-
lence to enforce their religious compromise. I believe that, like Henry
Constable and other fellow irenicists of the time, Shakespeare dreamed of
a tolerant, moderate England without violence that would follow the lead
of Henri IV’s France and Habsburg Germany and the Holy Roman
Empire. Although this religious convivencia ultimately fell apart with the
outbreak of the disastrous Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), Shakespeare
could not have predicted this calamity, although we perhaps see glimpses of
it in the sheer murderous violence of King Lear and Macbeth. The reli-
gious peace that had prevailed in Germany lasted for several decades; and
that was what Shakespeare recognized, as his setting of Bohemia as a ref-
uge for Perdita in The Winter’s Tale seems to suggest. Looking beyond
England to Europe, Shakespeare could only have yearned for such a world,
in which Catholics and Protestants lived together in harmony. Surely this
makes him not only “our contemporary” (in Jan Kott’s famous phrase)13
but also our best hope for the future.
13
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, translated by Boleslaw Taborski (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1964).
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Index1
A King Lear and penitence, 173–178

Abelard, Peter, 2 King Lear and virgin martyrs,
Absalon, 32 151–165
Absolutism The Virgin Martyr, 185–186
and King Lear, 175–179, 176n37 Agincourt, battle of, 37
and Macbeth, 207, 207n19 Aldhelm, Abbot, 181
and medieval romance, 13–14 Alexander the Great, 37, 145, 219
and Milton, 228 Allegiance, of Catholics,
and Richard II, 7, 13–15, 29, 152, 154, 196
35–36, 63 Allegory
Shakespeare’s attitude to, 222 in AMA, 49–57
Addled Parliament 1614, 103 in Beowulf, 120
Admiral’s Men, the, 97 in Hamlet, 29
Ad sanctam Catherinam in Le Morte Darthur, 57–60
(Southwell), 160–162 in medieval romance,
Advice manuals for rulers, 31 10, 14, 29–37
Afterlives of the martyrs, 149 in The Merchant of Venice, 13
The Duchess of Malfi, 178–185 moral, 13–15, 36–37
introduction, 149–151 political, 13–14, 29, 34, 36–37
King Lear and Catholic martyrs, in Richard II, 35–37, 60–74
165–173 in SGGK, 38–48
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90218-0
244 INDEX
Alliterative Morte Arthur Bale, Anthony, 80, 84

and Henry V, 36–37 Ball, John, 9
and Henry VI, 30, 31 Ballad against Rebellious and False
and pride, 37 Rumours, The, 221
and Richard II, 14, 22, 30, 34, Bannon, Stephen K., 220
37, 49–57 Banyster, Edward, 34, 173, 174
Alma mater redemptoris, 88 Barabas (The Jew of Malta), 93
Andrewes, Lancelot, 205 Barbara, St, 156
Angelico, Fra, Bates, Martha, 71–72
The Torment of Christ, 101 Bathsheba, 44, 44n26
Anglesey, Wales, 133 Bayless, Martha, 92
Anima Christi, 176 “Bear’s Son Tale, The,” 119
Anne of Bohemia, 39, 45, 81, 111 Beaumont, Elizabeth, 166
Anne, St, shrine of, 139 Beckwith, Sarah, 212
Aquaviva, Claudio, 164 Belleforest, François de, Histoires
Arden, Mary, 109 Tragiques, 24, 117
Arden, Robert, 109–110 Bennett, Michael J., 38, 51, 52
Areopagitica (Milton), 228 Benson, Larry, 50, 51
Arma Christi, 100 Beowulf
Arthur, King, 29–30 folk origins of, 25, 117–120
Arundel, Earl of, 56–57 and pagan/Christian mix, 122–131
Astell, Ann, 9, 41 tragedy of, 116–117
Atkinson, Robert, 106 Bernard of Clairvaux, 87, 90
Audience Bevis of Hamtoun, 12–13
for Beowulf, 127 Binsey, Oxfordshire, 140
for Gesta Danorum, 122 Binski, Paul, 54–56
for King Lear, 149–151, 177, Blasphemy, 220
222, 223 Blood, 213–215
for SGGK, 38–40 Bloodfeuds, 129
Aue, Hartmann von, Der arme Blood libel legend, 24, 75–77, 95, 98
Heinrich (Poor Lord Henry), Boethius, The Consolation of
32–33 Philosophy, 4
Augustine, St, De Civitate Dei, 127 Bohemia
Avignon, 82 and anti-Jewish narratives, 81
art of, 54–56
and blood libel, 76
B church crisis in, 79, 81, 82, 92
Babington, Anthony, 169 diversity of, 109, 110
Babington Plot 1586, 98 as refuge, 19, 109, 229
Bache, Alexander, 51 See also Prague
Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire, 162 Bolam, Robyn, 63
Baker, Herschel, 211 Bolingbroke, Henry, 40, 51
INDEX
245
Bonne of Luxembourg, 77, 83 Catesby, Sir Robert, 109

Book of Common Prayer, 212 Catesby, William, 8–9
Botticelli, Sandro, 3 Catherine of Alexandria, St
Bowers, John, 42 depiction of, 3, 4, 155, 161
Bozon, Nicholas, 198 life and prestige of, 5, 154, 157,
Bracton, Henry de, 35 180–181, 185–187
Brahe, Tycho, 19 and recusants, 159, 164
Bricriu’s Feast, 131 wheel, 162–163
Britannia (Camden), 159 Catholic criticisms of Shakespeare,
Bromyard, John, 198 217–218, 225
Brooke, Nicholas, 206 Catholic culture, memory of,
Brooksby, Eleanor, 162, 166, 183 16–17, 193
Brownlow, Frank, 166 in Hamlet, 115, 136–142, 147
Brutus of Troy, 53 in Macbeth, 197, 201, 213–214
Buffeting of Christ, The, 173 in Sonnet 73, 21
Burckhardt, Jakob, 1–3 Catholic/Jew parallels, 103–106
Burghley, Lord, 15, 64, 67, 68, 184 Catholics
Burke, Peter, 2 allegiance of, 152, 154
Burroughs, Frances, 162 and early Christians, 187
Bye Plot 1603, 152 Catholic writings, see Recusant
Byrd, William, 198 writings
Cawley, A. C., 192
Caxton, William, 57
C Cecil, Robert, 184
Cain and Abel, 120–121 Chapel of the Holy Cross, Karlstein
Camden, William, Britannia, 159 Castle, 157
Camouflaged criticism Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor,
in Hamlet, 29 52, 157
in King Lear, 22, 150, 151n3, 167, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 31,
168, 176, 176n37, 218 106–107, 144
in Macbeth, 205, 218 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3, 9,
in Richard II, 35 23–24, 79–80
in romance, 22 The Canterbury Tales, 3
in SGGK, 44, 47–48 “The Prioress’s Tale,” 23–24, 76,
Shakespeare’s use of, 9–11, 22–24, 78, 81, 84, 88, 100, 182
217–220 “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” 146
Campion, Edmund, 10, 103, Chester Castle, 42
108–112, 159, 223, 223n6, 224 Childs, Jessie, 166
“Campion’s Brag,” 108–109, 223 Chrétien de Troyes, 3
Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 3 Chrism, Christine, 50
Caradoc, 131 Christian IV, King of Denmark, 205
246 INDEX
Christian/Jew ambiguity Copland, William, 34, 57

in Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Copy of a Letter Written by
91–93 a Master of the Arts
in The Jew of Malta, 93, 96 of Cambridge, 68
in The Merchant of Venice, Coucy, Philippa de, 41
99–106, 112 Council of Constance, 46, 82
in The Passion of the Jews of Prague, Counter Reformation, 6
80, 81 Coventry mystery plays, 17
in “The Prioress’s Tale,” 84 Coventry Play, The, 195
in visual art, 76 Creation hymn (Beowulf), 128
Christian-Jewish co-operation, Crist (Cynewulf), 125
85–86, 89 Cromwell, Thomas, 139, 165, 220
Christian (monk), 181, 182 “Crossover” of sacred and secular, 13
Christian/pagan mix, 121–136 Croxton Play of the Sacrament, 91–93
in Beowulf, 122–131 and blood, 214
in landscape, 123–125, 134–136 and gem imagery, 94–106
in SGGK, 131–136 and Jews/Lollards, 14, 79, 91, 105
Cleanness, 40 Cutts, Cecilia, 92
Clemence of Barking, The Life of St Cynewulf, 125
Catherine of Alexandria, Czechoslovakia, 223
154, 159, 162–163
Clitherow, Margaret, 27, 155,
156, 172 D
Clopper, Lawrence, 16 Daniel (Bible), 103, 104
Codex Heidelbergensis, 53 David and Bathsheba, 44, 44n26
Cohen, Derek, 99 Davis, Anthony, 65
Coke, Sir Edward, 98, 203, 207, 212 Davison, William, 65
Collingbourne, William, 8 De Civitate Dei (Augustine), 127
Compostela, Spain, 145 Declaration of Egregious Popish
Conference about the Next Succession to Impostures, A (Harsnett), 168
the Crown of England, A Declaration of the True Causes of the
(Parsons), 14–15, 61–62 Great Troubles, Presupposed to be
Confessio Amantis (Gower), 7 Intended Against the Realm of
Consolation of Philosophy, The England, A (Rowlands), 63
(Boethius), 4 Dee, John, 19
Constable, Henry, 19–20, 227 De eucharistia (Wyclif), 82
Diana, 227 Dekker, Thomas, and Philip
Examen pacifique des Huguenots, 19 Massinger, The Virgin Martyr,
Cooper, Helen, 12, 15–17, 58, 26–27, 151, 185–187
132, 173 De Laudibus Legum Angliae
Copin of Lincoln, 76 (Fortescue), 35
INDEX
247
De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae E

(de Bracton), 35 Earl, James W., 130
Denunciations, 165–168 Earl, Thomas, 57
Der arme Heinrich (von Aue), 32–33 Edict of Nantes 1598, 19–20, 151
De Regimine principum, Giles of Edward I, King of England, 53
Rome, 31 Edward II (Marlowe), 178–179
Destruction of Troy, The, 42–43 Edward III, King of Englan, 8, 50
Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex, Edward IV, King of England, 9, 60
60–61, 66 Edward VI, King of England, 8
Deviant groups, 88 Edward of Lancaster, 35
Diana (Constable), 227 Edward the Black Prince, 30
Diet of Worms, 144 Edward the Confessor, King of
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 40, 40n19 England, 38
Diocletian, Emperor, 188 Elegy, 6–8
Dirt, see Fecal imagery Eliot, George, 166
Disguises, 169, 170 Elizabeth I, Queen of England
Dissident writings, see Recusant flattery of, 68–70
writings and King John, 63
Divine right of kings, 174, 228 and punishment, 11–13, 36, 98
See also Absolutism and Richard II, 15, 35, 60–62, 66,
Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 73, 68, 167
191–192, 195–196 and Richard II, 22, 34–36, 60–63,
Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), 68, 73, 168
224, 224n8 and Sonnet 107, 19–21
Dolan, Frances E., 60 and statute on treason, 7
Doleman, R., 61 Elizabeth Stuart
Donaldson, Ian, 167, 167n30 (“Winter Queen”), 226
Doom, paintings of, 200–202 “Ennobling love,” 153
Dorothea, St, 26, 185–188 Epistemological crisis
Douai, 65, 172 of Protestantism, 115, 117
Drahomira, mother Equivocation, 203–208
of St Wenceslas, 182 Erasmus, Institutio principis
Drant, Thomas, 11 Christiani, 31
Druids, 133 Eusebius, 54
Duccio di Buoninsegna, 3 Eve, 91
Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), Everyman, 72, 145,
7, 26–28, 178–188 145n23, 191
Dudley, Lord Guildford, 11 Examen pacifique des Huguenots
Duffy, Eamon, 21, 138, 138n18, (Constable), 19
160–163, 163n21 Executions, 10–12, 71–72
Dundes, Alan, 80, 80n8 Exile, 36, 65–67, 72–74
Dyntner, Edmund de, 53 Exiles, internal, 174, 177
248 INDEX
F Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia

Faerie Queene (Spenser), 34 regum Britanniae, 29, 150
Famous true and historicall life of Gerald of Wales, Liber de principis
Robert second Duk of Normandy instructione, 31
(Lodge), 173 Gerard, John, 169–170, 179, 183,
Fate vs. providence, 126 207–208
Fecal imagery, 77, 89–92 Gesta Danorum (Saxo Grammaticus),
Ferdinand II, Holy Roman 24, 113, 117–118, 121, 142
Emperor, 227 Gildas (cleric), 123, 126, 138
Fiedler, Leslie, 104 Giles of Rome, De Regimine
Fisher, John, 218 principum, 31
Fitzherbert, Thomas, 166 Gloucester, Duke of, 56
Flagellation of Saint Catherine, 4 Golden Calf, the, 128
Flattery, 32, 50–51, 68, 174–175 Golden Legend, The (Jacobus de
Fletcher, Richard, 129 Voragine), 155, 159, 163
Folklore, 117–122, 125, 131, 132 Goodland, Katharine, 176
Fools, 77, 143–144 Gospel of Nicodemus, 193
Forgetting, 115–116 Gower, John, 9
Forker, Charles, 63 Confessio Amantis, 7
Fortescue, John, 35 Gowlthwaite Hall, Yorkshire, 149
Fortune motif, 14, 57, 59, 70, 145, Gowrie Plot 1600, 205
146, 219 Great Hospital, Norwich, 54
France, 37, 72 Great Schism, 82
Fraser, Antonia, 71 Green Chapel, 46, 133, 134
Fratricide, 120–121 Greenblatt, Stephen
Frederick, Archbishop of Cologne, 56 on absolutism, 222
Frederick, Elector Palatine on Hamlet, 25, 115, 137, 144
(“Winter King”), 226 on King Lear, 169
Free will, 213 on the Renaissance, 1, 3, 6
Frideswide, St, 140 Greene, Graham, 223
Grettis Saga, The, 120
Grey, Lady Jane, 11
G Guantanamo Bay, 221
Garnet, Henry Guibert of Nogent, 2
and Anne Vaux, 26, 164 Gunpowder Plot 1605, 152, 201,
and equivocation, 201–204 218, 221, 228
and Gunpowder Plot, 212–214 Guy, John, 11–12, 61–62
A Treatise against Lying and Guy of Warwick, 34
Fraudulent Dissimulations, 203
trial and execution, 205, 214, 215
Gawain poet, 9, 32 H
Gawain returns to court, 48 Haigh, Christopher, 10
Gem imagery, 93–95, 181–184 Hall, Susanna (née Shakespeare), 152
INDEX
249
Hamel, Mary, 50, 51, 53, 57 and executions, 10–11

Hamilton, Donna, 173 and Speculum principis, 31
Hamlet (Shakespeare) and Youth, 8
and allegory, 29 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 13,
and Catholic rites, 114–116, 211–212, 226
136–138 Henslowe, Philip, 97, 98
and Catholic writing, 141–142 Herman, Peter, 206–207
and elegy, 6–7 Herod the Great, 7, 192, 208–210, 214
and madness, 142–147 Histoires Tragiques (Belleforest),
and mourning, 137 24, 117
origins, 23–25, 114 Historia regum Britanniae (Geoffrey
Pasternak’s translation, 225 of Monmouth), 29, 150,
and revenge, 24–25, 136 153–154
“Hamlet“ (Pasternak), 224 History of the Danes (Gesta Danorum)
Harrowden Hall, (Saxo Grammaticus), 24–25, 113,
Northamptonshire, 183 117–119, 122, 142
Harrowing of Hell, The, 7, 27, Hoccleve, Thomas,
193–204, 214, 215 Regement of Princes, 7
Harrowing of Hell, The, depiction, Holinshed, Raphael, 57
193, 194 Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, 152
Harsnett, William, A Declaration of Holywell, Flintshire, 133, 134,
Egregious Popish Impostures, 168 137, 179
Harwood, Nicholas, 168 Homosexuality, 40, 48
Hastings, Francis, 166 Howard, Anne,
Havel, Václav, 223–225 Countess of Arundel, 176
Hayward, John, Life of Henry IV, Howard, Henry,
61, 167 Earl of Northampton, 167
Helen of Troy, 73 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 10
Henri IV, King of France, 19–20, 229 Howard, Philip, Earl of Arundel, “In
Henry, Bishop of Winchester, 37 the Wracks of Walsingham,”
Henry I, King of England, 30 139–141
Henry III, King of England, 76 Hrabal, Bohumil, 224
Henry V, 37 Hugh Hervorst, Archdeacon of
Henry VI, King of England, 30 Cologne, 56
and allegory, 9, 22 Hugh of Lincoln, 76–77
and AMA, 30 Huguenots, 19, 96, 97, 221
and Herod the Great, 192 Humanism, 3
and Le Morte Darthur, 30, 59, 60 Humble Supplication to her Majesty, A
and SGGK, 30 (Southwell), 105
Henry VI (Shakespeare), 37 Humor, 85–88
Henry VIII, King of England See also Parody
and absolutism, 9, 35–37, 219 Hus, Jan, 82
and equivocation, 211 Hussites, 53, 79, 83, 92
250 INDEX
I rulers identifying with, 53, 65, 98

Iconoclasm, 138, 139, 221 Sermon on the Mount, 170
Igerna, mother of Arthur, 30 Jew/Catholic parallel, 98–100,
Ignatius of Loyola, St, 176 103–107
Immigrants, 96–97 Jew/Christian ambiguity
Incest, 131, 133 in Croxton Play of the Sacrament,
Institutio principis Christiani, 91–93
(Erasmus), 31 in The Jew of Malta, 93–96
Internal exiles, 174, 177 in The Merchant of Venice, 99–107
“In the Wracks of Walsingham” in The Passion of the Jews of Prague,
(Howard), 139–141 83–84
Ireland, 36 in “The Prioress’s Tale,” 84
Irenicism, 18–20, 107 in visual art, 78
Israelites, 128 Jewels, 93–95, 181–184
Jewish-Christian co-operation, 85–86,
88–89
J Jewishness, as metaphor, 105
Jackson, Thomas J., 222 Jew/Lollard parallel, 14, 79, 92, 105
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe)
Legend, 26, 155, 159, 163 and Christian/Jew binary, 95–97
Jacques de Vitry, 82 and ethnic hatred, 97–98
Jaeger, Stephen, 153, 154 and Jew/Catholic parallel, 24,
James VI of Scotland and I of England 98–100
and divine right, 174 and jewels, 93
and Jesuits, 205 and usury, 23, 78
and Henry Constable, 19 Jews as ”Other,” 75–112
and King Lear, 22, 151–153, background, 23–24, 75–80
167–169 in Croxton
and “King’s Book,” 211 Play of the Sacrament, 91–93
and Macbeth, 198, 200, in European sacred drama, 85–91
207–208, 213 in The Jew of Malta, 93–99
and Richard II, 36 in The Merchant of Venice, 99–106
and Sonnet 107, 19–21 in The Ointment Seller, 86–91
and spying, 200 in The Passion of the Jews of Prague,
and toleration, 20–21, 151–152, 212 81–84
James, St, shrine of, 145 in “The Prioress’s Tale,” 79–80
Jesuits, 203–206 toleration and The Winter’s Tale,
Jesus Christ 106–112
and Beowulf, 122, 125, 130 Jews in Christian art, 76–77, 100,
blood of, 213 102–103
and King Lear, 173 Joan of Arc, 157
in Pasternak’s poem, 224 John, King of England, 15
INDEX
251
John of Gaunt, 31, 67 and Simpson brothers, 149

John of Jenštejn, Archbishop and Virgin Martyr, 186
of Prague, 82 and virgin martyrs, 5, 7, 26, 27,
John of Lexington, 76 154, 156
John of Salisbury, Policratus, 31 King Leir, 150
John the Evangelist, St, 163 “King’s Book”, the, 211
Jonson, Ben, 3, 9, 10 King’s Men, the, 20
Sejanus His Fall, 166–167 Knox, John, 79, 138
Julian of Norwich, 4 Kott, Jan, 229
Kruger, Steven, 84
Kyd, Thomas, 24
K
Karlstein Castle, Bohemia, 53, 54,
56, 157 L
Kastan, David Scott Lake, Peter
on Hamlet, 115, 116, 138 on history plays, 17, 61, 61n53,
on The Merchant of Venice, 78, 100, 62, 64, 67
104–106 on Margaret Clitherow, 155
on religion, 18 on Robert Devereux, 66
Katz, David, 97 on Sejanus His Fall, 166–167
Kempe, Margery, 4, 146, 157 Lambarde, William, 61–62
Kesselring, K. J., 150 Lancashire, Ian, 8
Keyes, Robert, 203 Lancecrona, Agnes, 41–44
Khomeini, Ayatollah, 220 Landscape, Catholic, 138
Kiddush-ha-shem, 81 Langland, William, 4, 9, 39, 196
Kiefer, Frederick, 14 Piers Plowman, 193, 196
Kilroy, Gerard, 16, 115, 144 Last Judgment, paintings of, 200, 201
King John (Shakespeare), 17, 62–64 Lateran Council 1215, 103
King Lear (Shakespeare) Latrine (privy) motif, 78, 84, 88
audience of, 149–151, 177, 223 Lavezzo, Kathy, 78, 86
background, 151–153, Le Goff, Jacques, 1, 2
168–169, 174 Lee, Robert E., 222
and Bevis of Hamtoun, 12–13 Leicester, Earl of, 15, 32
and camouflaged criticism, 22, 151, Leicester’s Commonwealth
168, 176, 218 (Morgan), 32
ending of, 177–178 Lejre (Iron Age capital), 126, 135
and exile, 67, 72 Lemon, Rebecca, 7, 206, 207
the Fool, 144 “Letter of Majesty” (Rudolf II), 110
and Le Morte Darthur, 59 “Letter to Dr. Gustav Husàk”
and monarchy, 22 (Havel), 223–225
and penitence, 173–177 “Letter to the Council”
and recusants, 149, 154–156, (“Campion’s Brag”), 108–109
162, 168–174 Lewis, C. S., 36
252 INDEX
Liber de principis instructione Madness, 142

(Gerald of Wales), 31 Madonna and Child (Raphael), 5
Liber Regalis, 54, 55 Maidstone, Richard, 32
Life and Death of Mr. Edward Geninges Maisel Synagogue, Prague, 108
Priest, The (I. C.), 222 Malory, Sir Thomas, Le Morte
Life of Henry IV (Hayward), 61, 167 Darthur, 9, 12, 22,
Life of St Catherine of Alexandria, The 29–30, 57–60
(Clemence of Barking), 154, 159, Mandelstam, Osip, 225
163–165 Mann, Jill, 38–41, 43
Lindisfarne, 127 Man of Sorrows, icon, 168
Lipton, Sara, 76–77, 82–83 “Man to the wound in Christ’s side”
Lives of the Painters (Vasari), 107 (Southwell), 176
Locrine, 53 Margaret of Antioch, St, 26, 27, 155,
Lodge, Thomas, 174 160–161, 163, 182
The Famous true and historicall life Marie de France, Lays, 3
of Robert second Duk of Marlowe, Christopher
Normandy, 173 and atheism, 28
Lollard/Jew parallel, 14, 79, 92, 105 and Catholic memory, 15, 21
Lollards, 45–47, 79, 92 death of, 10
Lopez, Roderigo, 98 Doctor Faustus, 73, 191–192,
Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 60–61, 168 195–197
Louthan, Howard, 18 Edward II, 178–180
Loveday ceremony, 58 and humanism, 3
Lovel, Francis, 9 The Jew of Malta, 24
Ludmila, St, 27–28, 54, 182 and Jews, 23, 24, 97
Lud’s Church, Staffordshire, 46 and Ovid, 3
Luther, Martin, 114, 144 Marotti, Arthur, 64, 65n58, 226
Lyford Grange, 166 Martin of Tours, St, 124
Martin V, Pope, 82
Mary I, Queen of England, 11
M Mary Queen of Scots,
Macbeth (Shakespeare) 63–67, 169, 206
and blood, 213–215 “Mary’s Dowry,” 111, 112
and camouflaged criticism, 218 Massada, 81
and Charles I, 228 Massinger, Philip, and Thomas
and equivocation, 203–209, Dekker, The Virgin-Martyr,
211–212 26, 151, 185
and executions, 214–215 Mass, parodic, 92, 93
first performance, 206 Mathew, Gervase, 38, 42
and The Harrowing of Hell, 7, 27, Matilda, Empress, 30, 75, 154
193–203, 214 Matriarchal households, 183
and Herod the Great, Maxentia, St, 157
7, 208–210, 214 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor,
knocking scene, 193–203 18–19, 107, 108
INDEX
253
McCoog, Thomas, 223, 224 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A

Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), (Shakespeare), 13
116–117, 182, 226 Migration, 219
Medieval dramas, 7 Mildmay, Sir Walter, 171
See also Morality plays; Mystery plays Milton, John, 228
Medieval romance and Richard II, Milward, Peter, 71, 72
29–74 Miola, Robert, 203
Alliterative Morte Arthur, 49–59 Miracles, 185
background, 29–34 Mirror for princes, genre, 31, 218
critiques of rulers, 36–37 Mirror motif, 36, 72–74
Le Morte Darthur, 57–60 Moore, R. I., 88
and Richard II, 60–74 Morality plays, 5
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, More, Sir Thomas, 3, 10, 12, 71, 218
38–48 Morgan, Thomas, Leicester’s
“Medieval Shakespeare,” 17 Commonwealth, 32
Memory, and revenge Morte Darthur, Le (Malory), 12, 22,
in Beowulf, 25, 127, 130–131 29–30, 57–60
in Hamlet, 24–25, 113–117, Moryson, Fynes, 109
136, 142 Mountjoy family, 19
in SGGK, 131, 136 Mourning, 137, 176
Memory, Macbeth, and medieval Murray, Douglas, 219
drama, 191–215 Mush, John, 155, 172
The Harrowing of Hell, 193–209 Muslims, 219–221
Herod the Great, 208–215 Mystery plays
introduction, 191–193 influence of, 6, 17, 191–193
Memory, of Catholic culture, 15–17, and King Lear, 173
191–193 and Macbeth, 196, 205, 213–215
in Hamlet, 115, 136, 147
in Macbeth, 197, 205, 213–214
in Sonnet, 21 N
Memory, of pagan culture, 134 Nantes, Edict of, 1598, 151
See also Pagan/Christian mix Newark Grange, Leicestershire, 166
Merchant of Venice, The Newman, Barbara, 13, 81, 83–84
(Shakespeare), 99 New Testament, 102
and Jew/Catholic parallel, 13, 24, Nicodemus, Gospel of, 193
104–106 Nidderdale, Yorkshire, 149, 155,
and Jew/Christian ambiguity, 174, 177
100–106 Norris, Sir Simon de, 75–76
Merciless Parliament, 9, 31, 56 Northern Uprising 1569, 11, 150,
Michelet, Jules, 1, 2, 6 155, 178
Middle-Ages - Renaissance North Tuddenham church,
continuum, 1–7 Norfolk, 186
254 INDEX
Norwich, 75 Paul, Henry, 205–206

Norwich Cathedral, 196 Paul, St, 72, 156
Nugent, Widow, 165 Pearl, 38, 39, 94–95
Peasants’ Revolt 1381, 9
Pendragon, Uther, 30
O Penitence, 69–71, 173–177
Oath of Allegiance, 152 See also Penitential romances
O’Connell, Michael, 15, 173, Penitential romances, 34, 35, 35n9,
191, 213 173–175
Oedipal relationships Penrhys, statue of Our Lady, 221
in Beowulf, 119, 122, 130, 131 Percy, Anne, Countess of
in Duchess of Malfi, 179 Northumberland, 155
in Hamlet, 143 Percy, Henry Algernon, fifth Earl of
in SGGK, 131 Northumberland, 8–9
Ointment Seller, The, 85–91, 195 Percy household, 170
Oldcorne, Edward, 169, 172, Percy, Thomas, seventh Earl of
179, 203 Northumberland, 155
Oldenburg, Scott, 221 Pericles (Shakespeare), 149
Old-New Synagogue, Prague, 86 Persons (Parsons), Robert,
Old Testament, 102 14–15, 61–62
“Othering”, and crisis, 77–79, 82, 87, Peter Abelard, see Abelard, Peter
104, 105 Peter, St, 201
See also Jews as “Other“ Peter the Chanter, 82
Ovid, 3 Peter the Venerable, 87
Petites Heures du Duc de Berry, 196
Petrarch, 3, 8
P Philip II, King of Spain, 18, 107
Pagan/Christian mix, 122–136 Philip the Fair, King of France, 31
in Beowulf, 121–133 Philippe de Mézières, 52
in landscape, 123–125, 134–137 Phillips, Augustine, 60
in SGGK, 130–137 Pickering church, Yorkshire, 155
Paradise Lost (Milton), 228 Pickering, Gilbert, 183
Parody, 86–87, 91, 195–196 Piers Plowman (Langland),
Parsons (Persons), Robert, 14–15, 9, 193, 196
61–62, 225 Pietà motif, 176
Passion of the Jews of Prague, The, 80 Pilgrimage of Grace 1536, 10–11
Passion plays, 173 Pilgrimages, 145, 146
Pasternak, Boris, 224–226 Pilgrimage sites, 115, 138–142,
Paston, Sir John, 193 179, 221
Patriarchy, 179, 182, 184 Pogroms, 81–83, 96
Patrick, St, 142 Poland, 76
Patterson, Annabel, 226 Policratus, 31
INDEX
255
Policratus (John of Salisbury), 31 R

Poor Lord Henry (von Aue), 32–33 Rachel (Bible), 84, 84n14, 104
Pounde, Thomas, 170 Raphael, 3, 5
Prague Madonna and Child, 3
Jewish community, 81–86, 89–90 Ratcliffe, Richard, 9
Jewish pogroms, 81–83, 96 Recusants, 14
and toleration, 109–112 denunciations of, 165–169
Prayer book of Bonne of Luxembourg, exile of, 36, 66–68, 72, 174, 177
76–78 and madness, 144
Preaching, by women, 45 persecution of, 98–100
Pride, as theme and virgin martyrs, 159–161, 181
in AMA, 36–37, 51 See also Individual recusants
in Der arme Heinrich, 32–33 Recusant women, 15
mirror motif, 36, 72–74 defiance of, 154–156
in Richard II, 14–15 exile of, 72–74
in SGGK, 43–45, 136 and King Lear, 27, 72–74, 154
in Sir Isumbras, 33–34 and matriarchy, 183
Primordial murder, 121–122 and Richard II, 72–74
“Prioress’s Tale, The” (Chaucer), and virgin martyrs, 26–27, 155,
23–24, 76, 78–81, 84, 163–165
88–90, 182 and The Winter’s Tale, 27, 161–163
Privy (latrine) motif, 78, 84, 88 See also Individual recusants
Projective inversion, 76, 80–83 Recusant writings, 16–17, 34,
in The Merchant of Venice, 100, 104 138–142, 222, 223
in The Ointment Seller, 90, 91 Regement of Princes (Hoccleve), 7
in The Passion of the Renaissance - Middle Ages
Jews of Prague, 81 continuum, 1–9
in “The Prioress’s Tale,” 81, 89 Revenge, and memory
Protestant broadsides, 221 in Beowulf, 25, 127, 130
Protestantism, epistemological crisis in Hamlet, 25–26, 113–118,
of, 115, 117 144–147
Providence vs. fate, 125 in SGGK, 131, 132, 136
Psalm, 77, 198 Rex, Richard, 46
Publishers, 10 Richard, Duke of York, 59
Purgatory, 25, 114 Richard II (Shakespeare), 61–74
and politics, 114, 116, 129, 137 and absolutism, 7, 13–16,
and St Patrick, 142 35–37, 63
Putter, Ad, 42–43 and allegory, 13–16, 29
and dissent, 17
and Elizabeth I, 24, 35–36, 63–69,
Q 74, 168
Questier, Michael, 155 and Essex rebellion, 60–63, 168
256 INDEX
Richard II (Shakespeare) (cont.) Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, 18,

and exile, 66–67 107, 108, 110
and Le Morte Darthur, 59 “Letter of Majesty,” 110
and pride, 70–73 Rupert of Bavaria, 56
Richard as Christ, 74 Rushdie, Salman, 220
and romance genre, 22 Rushook, Thomas, 51
and Robert Southwell, 214
Richard II, King of England
and allegory, 9, 22 S
and AMA, 14, 30, 49–58 Sacred drama, 85–93
ambition of, 37, 52–58 Croxton Play of the Sacrament,
criticism of, 9 91–93
flattery of, 32, 50–58 introduction, 85–86
identification with Christ, 54, 72 The Ointment Seller, 85–87
and King Arthur, 34, 47 Sacred farce, 85
and Le Morte Darthur, 30, 57–60 Sacred places, see Shrines
portrait of, 54, 55 Sacred/secular “crossover,” 13
pride of, 47–48 Saga of the Volsungs, 117–121
and Robert de Vere, 47–51 St Anne, shrine of, 139
sexuality of, 39–41 St Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 127
and SGGK, 38–48 St Barbara, 156
theatricality of, 63 St Bartholomew’s massacre 1572,
and Wilton Diptych, 111 96, 221
Richard III, King of England, St Catherine of Alexandria
8, 9, 157 depiction of, 3, 4, 155, 161
Richard the Redeless, 7, 9 life and prestige of, 5, 154,
Ridolfi Plot 1571, 98 157–160, 180–181, 185
Robert the Devil, 34, 173–174 and recusants, 159, 164
Romance, genre, 13, 14 wheel of, 162–163
See also Medieval romance and St Dorothea, 26, 185–188
Richard II St Frideswide, 140
Romances, penitential, 34, 35, 68–70, St Ignatius of Loyola, 176
173–175 St James, shrine of, 145
Romano, Giulio, 107 St James the Great church, South
Rome, 127 Leigh, 200
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 226 St John the Baptist, 161
Roper, Eliza, 183 St John the Evangelist, 163
Roper, Margaret, 71, 72 St Ludmila, 27–28, 54, 182
Rose, E. M., 75, 78–79 St Margaret of Antioch, 26, 27, 157,
Rowlands, Richard, 63 160–163, 182
Rubin, Miri, 76, 82 Saint Marie Magdalens Conversion, 222
INDEX
257
St Martin of Tours, 124 Shakespeare, Susanna (later Hall), 152

St Mary the Virgin, 90–91, 110, 162, Shakespeare, William
164, 176 and absolutism, 222, 227,
shrine of, Walsingham, 227n11, 228
139–142, 161 attitude to Elizabeth, 73, 74
statue of, Penrhys, 221 attitude to James I, 205–208,
St Maxentia, 157 212, 213
St Michael’s Church, Wenhaston, 201 as Catholic, 227, 227n11
St Patrick, 142 Catholic criticism of, 222–223
St Patrick’s Purgatory, Ireland, 142 and Catholic culture, 19, 21–22
St Paul, 72, 156 caution of, 224–227
St Peter, 201 and Edmund Campion, 109
Saints’ lives, genre, 26–27 and Graham Greene, 223, 224
See also Afterlives of the martyrs and Henry Constable, 227, 229
St Swithun, shrine of, 221 and humanism, 3
St Thomas Becket, shrine of, 139 as irenicist, 18–22, 28, 215,
St Winifred, 134, 137, 164, 179, 180 226–228
Samizdat works by Catholics, 14–16, and medieval romances, 12–14
18, 141–142, 223 and mystery plays, 191–193
Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 220 and Ovid, 3
Saul, Nigel, 52 and Robert Southwell, 12
Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, See also Individual works
24–25, 113, 117, 121, 142 Shapiro, James, 23–24, 78, 205–207
Scarry, Elaine, 19, 227 Sharpe, James, 154
Schism, 79, 81, 82 Shell, Alison, 110–112, 222, 223
Schreyer, Kurt, 192, 197 Short Rule of Good Life, A
Sejanus His Fall (Jonson), 98, (Southwell), 176
166–168, 218 Shrines, 115, 134, 137, 139–141,
Seven Deadly Sins, the, 36 160, 221
Shagan, Ethan, 115, 229 Shylock (The Merchant of Venice), 99
Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Simpson brothers (players),
Middle Ages 149, 165, 222
afterlives of the martyrs, 149–189 Simpson, James, 6–7, 9
conclusion, 217–229 Simpson, Richard, 65
introduction, 1–28 Sir Eglamour of Artois, 173
Jews as Other, 75–112 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
Macbeth and medieval drama, 38–48
191–215 and courtly audience, 38, 39
Medieval romance and Richard II, and Henry VI, 30
29–74 and moral critique, 44–48
writing, memory and revenge, pagan/Christian mix, 132–136
113–147 and Richard II, 30, 39–41
Shakespeare, John, 179, 180 and Robert de Vere, 41–45
258 INDEX
Sir Gowther, 34, 173 T

Sir Isumbras, 33–34, 69, 173 Tacitus, 167
Sir Orfeo, 175 Taney, Roger Brooke, 222
Skelton, John, Speculum principis, 31 Taylor, John, 109
Sonnet 73 (Shakespeare), 21 “Tear poetry,” 176
Sonnet 107 (Shakespeare), Ten Commandments, the, 36
19–20, 198 Tesimond, Oswald, 20, 162
Sonnet 124 (Shakespeare), 144 Thomas Becket, St, shrine of, 139
Southwell, Robert Thomas of Monmouth, 75–76
Ad sanctam Catherinam, 160–161 Tiberius, Emperor, 98, 167
execution of, 10–12, 65, 214, 215 Toleration, 19–20, 106–112, 151,
on “fools,” 144 152, 198, 212, 219
A Humble Supplication to Her See also Irenicism
Majesty, 105, 112 Tolkien, J. R. R., 121, 125
“Man to the wound in Christ’s Tollitas portas (Byrd), 198
side,” 176 Topcliffe, Richard, 12, 166
“New prince, new pompe,” 69–70 Torment of Christ, The
reproves Shakespeare, 222 (Fra Angelico), 101
A Short Rule of Good Life, 176 Torture, 11–12, 171–173, 221
Speculum principis genre, 31, 218 Towneley plays, 173, 208
Speculum principis (Skelton), 31 Tractatus adversus Judeaos, 87
Spenser, Edmund, Treason, 7–8, 103
The Faerie Queene, 34 See also Executions
Spiritual Exercises (Loyola), 176 Treatise against Lying and Fraudulent
Spying, 200 Dissimulations, A (Garnet),
Stanbury, Sarah, 81 203, 204
Stanley, Sir John, 42 Tresham, Sir Thomas, 171, 203
Stanley, William, 42 Trials, 103
Stansby, William, 57 Tricksters, 143
Stephen, King of England, 30, 75 Trinity Church, Coventry, 201
Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, 172 Tristan, legend, 143
Strada, Jacopo de, 107 Tristiabitur iustus, 92–93
Stubbs, John, 10 Troublesome Raigne of Iohn,
Suetonius Paulinus, 133 King of England, The, 63
Suffolk, Henry Grey, Duke of, 11 Troy, 53
Suffolk, William de la Pole, Duke of, Trump, Donald, 220
192, 193 “Two thousand words”
Superbia, motif, 132 manifesto (Vaculík), 223
See also Pride, as theme
Sutton Hoo burial, 124
Swanton, Michael, 116, 119, U
122, 126 Ubi sunt , motif, 132, 145
Swithun, St, shrine of, 221 United States, 220–221
INDEX
259
Ur-Hamlet, 24, 113, 114, 116 Walsham, Alexandra

Usk, Thomas, 9, 32 on Catholic sites, 123, 137, 141,
Usury, 23, 78 142, 159, 179
on Counter Reformation, 6
on Pagan sites, 135, 138
V on recusants, 104, 165
Vaculík, Ludvík, 223, 224 on saints’ lives, 156
Vagrancy, 169 Walsingham Abbey, 140
Valladolid, Spain, 112 Walsingham, shrine of Virgin Mary,
Vanita, Ruth, 161 139, 141, 161
Vanitas, motif, 36, 145, 219 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 15, 199
Vasari, Giorgio, 107 Walsingham, Thomas, 40, 43
Vaux, Anne, 26, 162, 164, 183 Wars of the Roses, 58, 59, 65
Vaux, Eliza (née Roper), 183 Warwick, Earl of, 56–57
Vaux, Elizabeth, 72 “Watchers,” 199
Vaux family, 168 Watson, Nicholas, 39
Vaux, Lord, 171 Webster, John, 3, 27, 28
“Venus and Adonis” The Duchess of Malfi, 26–28, 151,
(Shakespeare), 222 178–185
Vere, Robert de, Earl of Oxford, 32, The White Devil, 178
41–45, 47–50 Well of St Frideswide, Binsey,
Verstegan, Richard, 63 140–141
Vikings, 127 Well of St Winifred, Flintshire, 134,
Virgin Martyr, The (Massinger and 137, 179, 180
Dekker), 26–27, 185 Wenceslas, Duke, 56
Virgin martyr tradition, 156 Wenceslas IV, King of the Romans,
background, 27, 155–157 53, 55, 56, 81, 96
defiance in, 164, 180, 188 Wenhaston Church, Suffolk, 201, 202
and recusants, 27, 160–162, Westminster Abbey, 54
164–165 Westminster Chronicle, 41
See also Individual martyrs Westminster Hall, 54
Virgin Mary, 91, 110–112, 161, 176 Weston, Francis, 168
Virgin Mary, shrine of, Walsingham, Wheel of Fortune motif, 59, 145,
139–142, 161 146, 219
Virgin Mary, statue of, Penrhys, 221 White Devil, The (Webster), 178
Visigoths, 127 William of Norwich, 76, 95
Williams, Sara, 168
Wills, Garry, 6
W Wilton Diptych, the, 111
Wade, James, 177–178 Winifred, St, 134, 137, 164, 180
Wakefield mystery plays, 208 “Winter King”
Walker, Greg, 8 (Frederick, Elector Palatine), 227
260 INDEX
“Winter Queen” Saxo Grammaticus and Beowulf,

(Elizabeth Stuart), 227 117–136
Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare) Sir Gawain and the
and Bohemia, 19, 107, 109, 110, Green Knight, 131
112, 229 Wyatt Rebellion, 11
and recusant women, 162–165 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503–1542),
and toleration, 107–112 8, 10
and virgin martyrs, 5, 7, 27 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1521–1554), 11
and Virgin Mary, 110–112 Wyclif, John, 45, 46, 53, 79, 82, 92
Wirral, the, 42 De eucharistia, 82
Wisbech Castle, 170 Wyrd (fate), 125–126
Witches, 205
Wittenberg,
Lutheran university, 114 X
Wives of Catholics, 71–72 Xenophobia, 97–98, 221
Women, 44–46, 91–93
See also Recusant women
Worms, Diet of, 144 Y
Writing, memory and revenge, Yachnin, Paul, 65, 65n59
113–147 York, Clifford’s Tower, 81
Hamlet, 113–117, 136 York Minster, 54
introduction, 113–117 Yorke, Sir John, 149
madness and memory, 142 Youth, 8–9, 170–172

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T H E N E W M I D D L E A G E S

More information about this series at

The New Middle Ages

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941745

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: DEA / V. PIROZZI / Getty

Printed on acid-free paper

Why another book on Shakespeare? There have been numerous

radical change. At the same time, my approach differs from Cooper’s in

1 Introduction: Maimed Rights in Shakespeare’s England 1

2 Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in

3 Demonizing the Other: “The Prioress’s Tale,” The Jew of

4 Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain

5 Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi,

6 “Remember the Porter”: Memorializing the Medieval

7 Conclusion: Shakespeare “Our Contemporary” 217

Fig. 1.1 St Catherine of Alexandria Tortured (1480). By Friedrich

Introduction: Maimed Rights

Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against

In his illuminating study Must We Divide History into Periods? (2015)

© The Author(s) 2018 1

the establishment of chairs of history in the European universities.2 Le

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was

As Peter Burke has stated in his introduction to Burckhardt’s classic

Fig. 1.1 St Catherine of Alexandria Tortured (1480). By Friedrich Pacher (ca.

But skepticism was not a unique preserve of the Renaissance, as a brief

Fig. 1.2 Raphael: The

were typical of the religious fervor of the age. Conversely, Shakespeare is

Equivalents to this medieval tyrannical figure are Leontes in The Winter’s

diminution of political rights brought about the Protestant Reformation

It was within this medieval tradition of veiled dissent, I argue, that

northern insurrection—the Northern Uprising of 1569—was even more

seven yere.”24 And, of course, Bevis of Hamtoun is mentioned by the Duke

Henry VIII, 1.1.38.

as a thinly disguised representation of East Anglian Lollards or English

audience’s familiarity with references to the mystery plays suggests that “a

Never have books or writing or letters been as dangerous as they were

According to David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare’s plays are deeply

there is evidence that Shakespeare shared Constable’s hope for a measure

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

but express veiled criticism of these dangerous trends. Such suggestions

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

In these lines the physical landscape of post-Reformation England

King Lear—perhaps Shakespeare’s most medieval play—provides an

Chapter 3 seeks to locate the origins of the Marlovian and Shakespearean

There was in Asye, in a greet citee,

In the second half of Chap. 3 I suggest that the treatment of Jews in

Chapter 5 explores the dramatic “afterlives” of medieval saints in

more recent interpretations in proposing that Macbeth is deliberately

Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the audience is privy to a play within a play when

© The Author(s) 2018 29

Morte Darthur (ca. 1469–1470)—written during the dynastic faction

University Press, 2014).

earl of Leicester. In what became known as Leicester’s Commonwealth,

[When, then, the Heavenly Gatekeeper had enough of my arrogance, he

Into his herte a pryde was browghte

Shakespeare’s motivation for writing Richard II may also have been

1570 by adopting a more punitive policy toward her recusant subjects.

1 Introduction: Maimed Rights in Shakespeare’s England 1

2 Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in

3 Demonizing the Other: “The Prioress’s Tale,” The Jew of

4 Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain

5 Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi,

6 “Remember the Porter”: Memorializing the Medieval

7 Conclusion: Shakespeare “Our Contemporary” 217