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Home > EARLYTHEATRE > Vol. 8 > Iss. 1 (2005)

 

Abstract

This article argues that the medieval English Lazarus plays attempt to resolve the inherent opposition between the residual practice of lament and the dominant Christian eschatology, redirecting and containing the potentially subversive ethos of this construction of female grief. The N-Town and Towneley plays construct mourning as a form of confinement, akin to sin, from which Christian faith provides release. The York play similarly acknowledges the centrality of the sisters’ mourning, even as it re-inscribes their grief as excessive and contrary to faith. In contrast, the Chester version characterizes the sisters as models of Christian humility, whose helplessness paradoxically endows them with the power to summon the son of God himself. Perhaps the most ambivalent representation of female grief, however, is in the characterization of the heroine of the Digby Mary Magdalene as tearless and firm in the face of her only brother’s death. As an aristocratic heroine, this stoic lady claims her superior social and spiritual status by not weeping. Instead, she acquiesces to the custom of hiring weepers to carry Lazarus to the grave, a practice that she places herself above. As the plays attempt to assimilate residual mourning practices to Christian eschatology, they also perform resistance to that teleology. On the one hand the cultural work done by these plays reinforces the gendered assumption that women are naturally more prone to excessive sorrow than men, and that grief itself is an excessive, feminine emotion. On the other hand, they acknowledge the resistant power of female grief, constructing it upon the underlying paradox that women’s tears are not only excessive and subversive, but also necessary and efficacious.

Author Biography

Katharine Goodland is assistant professor of English at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island where she teaches courses in medieval and early modern culture and early drama, including Shakespeare. Her article, '"Obsequious Laments": Mourning and Communal Memory in Shakespeare's Richard III' recently appeared in The Journal of Religion and the Arts. She has articles forthcoming in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and in a collection edited by Lisa Perfetti entitled The Representation of Women's Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Her book reviews have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly and 'The Marlowe Society Newsletter,' and her play reviews have appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin. She is on the editorial board of Shakespeare Bulletin and the Executive Board of the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar. She is completing a manuscript for Ashgate entitled 'Female Mourning in Early Modern English Drama,' and is co-editing a directory of Shakespeare in performance for Palgrave.


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