Abstract
Written when two-bodies-one-flesh metaphors of authority were deployed by jurists to settle the question of Elizabeth’s succession, The Comedy of Errors features a veritable pileup of accolated bodies.1 The Comedy of Errors, one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, was famously performed before an audience of law students at the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels in 1594. The play addresses a myriad of juridical topics, including property rights, clemency, inheritance, and foreign policy, that would (and probably did) stimulate the Inns of Court audience knowledgeable in legal matters.2 Indeed, Marie Axton believes the play to be primarily about the succession of the monarch and the looming possibility of a union between Scotland and England should James succeed Elizabeth, as seemed increasingly likely at the time.3 Mostly beyond the reach of city authorities, the Inns of Court were protected places where Catholics could worship relatively untroubled. Although among its members were Protestant jurists such as William Cecil, it appears that priests held Mass at Gray’s Inn on some occasions.4 Set in Ephesus, where early church fathers had asserted in 431 that Christ had one body but two natures and where the Virgin Mary went rogue as Theotokos, the play animates the varied and shifting religiopolitical meanings of accolated bodies in early modern thought that this book explores.
If thou wilt not be overwhelmed with stormes: if windes of tentations do arise, if thou doest incurr the rockes of tribulations,—looke upon the starre call upon Mary.
—Henry Garnet, Society of the Rosary, 1596
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Notes
The date of composition for The Comedy of Errors has been narrowed to between 1S92 and 1594. The first recorded performance was on December 28, i594, at Gray’s Inn Hall. No quartos exist of this play; it appears only in the 1623 Folio. See T. S. Dorsch, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. T. S. Dorsch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 38–40.
Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), chap. 2.
John Hambly, who was executed in 1587 as a Catholic priest, con-fessed to performing Catholic rituals at Gray’s Inn over the period of a year. See Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 142–143.
Editor T. S. Dorsch, for one, writes, “by turning the Dromios into identical twins serving twin masters, [Shakespeare] increased beyond measure the opportunities for confusion and error, increased too, with the reunion of a second pair of twins, the happiness at the end of the play.” William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. T. S. Dorsch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 8.
See, e.g., F. Elizabeth Hart. “‘Great Is Diana’ of Shakespeare’s Ephesus,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 43.2 (Spring 2003): 350. Jeanne Addison Roberts compares Aemilia’s voice with Volumnia’s of Coriolanus. She writes: Like Volumnia, the Abbess presides almost goddesslike over the final scene; but unlike Volumnia, she has the power to give birth to the promise of the future with her two finally mature sons. By giving the mother such power, however, Shakespeare has risked jeopardizing the patriarchal vision. He has carefully hedged the issue by making the mother an abbess — almost a virgin mother — and he has ensured that there is no united front among the women. The voice of the Abbess, like Volumnia’s, is, finally, the voice of patriarchy, incorporating but confining the female.
Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 152.
As Helen Hackett and others show, the Virgin Mary herself operated as a kind of “fertility goddess” in the early church. See Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 14. Early modern Protestants railed against what they consider to be a deification of Mary by the Catholics. As William Perkins put it, “this is to make her not onely a goddess, but also to place her above God himselfe”; Perkins, Warning, sig. C3.
Hart, “Great Is Diana,” 350. The “nagging wife” quotation comes from Carol Thomas Neely, Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 145. Martine Van Elk likewise notes the change in Aemilia from a figure of power to one of subordination: “In a single instant, she must discard her role as a religious figure and return to that of wife and mother”;
Martine Van Elk, “‘This Sympathized One Day’s Error’: Genre, Representation, and Subjectivity in The Comedy of Errors,” Shakespeare Quarterly 60.1 (2009): 67.
Quotations from The Comedy of Errors are from William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
See John Anthony McGuckin, “Introduction,” in St. Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 18.
Robert Bearman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, quoted in Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 231.
See Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1998). In the Carolingian era, abbesses were considered to be teachers, magistrae. See
Janet L. Nelson, “Early Medieval Rites of Queen-Making and the Shaping of Medieval Queenship,” in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne Duggan (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1997), 310. For accounts of the cloistered life of nuns and abbesses in the Middle Ages and early modern period, see
Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. 503, for information on rules after the Council of Trent;
Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 81–144;
Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1982), 154–159, 250–251. See also
Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, vol. 1 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 183–227.
Desiderius Erasmus, “The Religious Pilgrimage,” in The Whole Familiar Colloquies of Desiderius Erasmus, of Rotterdam, trans. Nathan Bailey (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1877), 240.
See Wallace T. MacCaffrey, “Cecil, William, First Baron Burghley (1520/21–1598), Royal Minister,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). MacCaffrey notes that Cecil was instrumental in creating an “embryonic early modern state, built not on the interests of the sovereign, but of the commonwealth”; ibid., 14.
Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 107.
Arthur Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 54.
Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts 1590–1640 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), 28.
Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), notes that the Inns of Court students were in their teens; and
Susan Amussen, “The Family and the Household,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 92, claims that students attended the universities and/or Inns as early as the age of thirteen, but more commonly the students would have been at least sixteen.
Liza Picard, Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Lift in Elizabethan London (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 207.
See Margaret McGlynn, The Royal Prerogative and the Learning of the Inns of Court (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 18.
Jeremy Taylor, A Course of Sermons for all the Sundays of the Year… with Twelve Sermons on Various Subjects (London: Longman, Hurst, 1826), 265 and 273. One of those sermons, “The Marriage Ring” was published in 16S3. See Rosalie E. Osmond, “Body, Soul, and the Marriage Relationship: The History of an Analogy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34.2 (1973): 233, 287–288.
King James I, “A Speach to Both The Houses of Parliament, Delivered in the Great Chamber at White-Hall, The Last Day of March 1607,” in Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 160.
The Act for the Queen’s Safety (1585) dealt with the sticky issue of Mary Queen of Scots’ right to the throne — it essentially excluded Mary from inheritance through the notion of the king’s two bodies. Under this act, anyone with a claim to the throne would be ineligible if they were proved to have been involved with a plot or rebellion against the sitting monarch. The Treaty of Berwick (1586) was a peace treaty between Scotland and England that paved the way for James to suc-ceed Elizabeth. See John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 451.
Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 79–81.
Luigi Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought, trans. Thomas Buffer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 403–405.
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Selections, selected and trans. Christopher Stace, with intro. and notes by Richard Hamer (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 125.
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© 2012 Sid Ray
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Ray, S. (2012). “A Joyful Mother of Two Goodly Sons”: The Madonna of Ephesus and Her Disruptive Twins. In: Mother Queens and Princely Sons. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003805_3
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