Salvation, Race, and Gender on the Early Modern English Stage
Behind the racial and religious themes of Othello there lurks an uneasiness about romantic relationships between non-European men and European women.1 Early modern English comedies and tragicomedies, however, suggest that the English had less of a problem with romantic relationships between European men and infidel women. These types of relationships were staged often, in plays such as Greene’s Orlando Furioso (circa 1590) and The Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon (circa 1590); Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1621); and Massinger’s The Renegado (1623/4) and The Emperor of the East (1632). In these plays there is either an implicit understanding of or an explicit reference to the infidel woman’s conversion to Christianity. The frequency of interreligious and interracial relationships in early modern English comedy gains greater significance when we realize that no English comedy (to my knowledge) staged a relationship between a non-European man and a European woman.2 Moreover, whereas numerous infidel women convert to Christianity on the early modern English stage, relatively few infidel men convert—only (again, to my knowledge) Corcut in Greene’s Selimus, Emperor of the Turks and Joffer in part 2 of Thomas Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West (and possibly, though less certainly, Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice).
This chapter considers the dynamic interplay of race, gender, and romance’s infidel-conversion motif in early modern English tragicomedy. On the one hand, the frequent appearance of the infidel-conversion motif in comedies demonstrates the English stage’s adaptation of Catholic romance’s union of baptism and marriage as sacraments that work in tandem to confer Christian identity. On the other hand, the persistent gendering of eligibility for conversion—women far more than men—and the tendency of these comedies to veer toward tragedy register concerns about the reproduction of Christian identity. The stage’s dictates concerning what kinds of relationships can achieve comedic resolutions reflects the confluence of early modern medical understandings of human reproduction and a Protestant view of marriage and child-rearing as the chief means of reproducing Christian identity; in both cases the female body was a critical site of investigation as early moderns attempted to understand what a mother contributed both biologically and spiritually to her children.
Protestant theology and early modern understandings of sexual reproduction converged in three ways: one, in describing the role of the male seed in creating a child’s identity; two, in articulating a belief that women could be redeemed through childbirth; and three, in asserting that marriage and sexual reproduction were the chief means of producing Christian identity. This triad reinforced the developing system of racialized religious identity in England and delimited the kinds of romantic relationships that early modern English comedy could acceptably accommodate. The triad further demonstrates, as Joyce Green MacDonald has shown, that in early modern England the “raced body [is] a sexual body, so that the social aspects of sexual behavior—including but not limited to procreation, monogamy, infidelity, and the inheritance of property and goods—have been simultaneously racialized.”3 In this chapter I examine the theological significance of race and sex.
Although there are numerous English plays that feature relationships between European Christian men and infidel women, I focus on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. I examine these three plays not only because each incorporates numerous romance motifs and revises romance sources, but also because the conversion of the infidel woman is an important element in each plot. These plays use the infidel-conversion motif self-consciously and ask playgoers to consider the authenticity of the conversions.4 Additionally, these three plays are designated (either by critics or the playwrights themselves) as that genre cousin of romance, tragicomedy. As I mentioned in the last chapter, Cinthio saw overlaps between tragedy, tragicomedy, and romance, most notably in their plot trajectories from happiness to unhappiness (or vice versa), and in their concern with anagnorisis and the recognition of identity. Both romances and tragicomedies move from the unhappy to the happy—thus the structures of these modes run parallel to the Christian narrative of redemption.5 Tragicomedies featuring the infidel-conversion motif link their concerns about the confirmation and establishment of identity to the redemptive resolutions of texts. More than The Merchant of Venice, however, in which Jessica’s religious identity is left ambiguous, The Island Princess and The Renegado attempt to verify the women’s conversions by persuading the audience that the infidel heroines acquire Christian faith. Quisara in The Island Princess and Donusa in The Renegado embrace Christian martyrdom, demonstrating their willingness to die for their newly acquired Christian beliefs. Employing a discourse of martyrdom in which bodily death leads to the heavenly union with Christ, the tragicomic form provides a structure for plotting a narrative of transformation from tragic (tragic in the sense that they are damned within a system that links false faith with race and biology), racialized object to redeemed Christian.
These plays also reveal that infidels prove unfit for the typical comedy that reflects Protestant ideas about marriage and its purposes; their racialized bodies signify death. The ideological work of comedy can go largely unnoticed in plays featuring romantic relationships between people who share the same racial and religious background; the religious ideology of comedy most clearly surfaces at its potential breaking point, as playwrights feature interreligious and interracial relationships. Comedy sans tragedy is unable to incorporate infidels into a theological system and a dramatic tradition in which blackness and Jewish, Moorish, Turkish, and pagan identity all signify evil—irrespective of a character’s actual religious state and moral character. As is the case in Othello, such characters’ racialized bodies and costumes signify death.6 In tragicomedy, however, tragically racialized subjects are transformed and saved through the embrace of death. Testing the limits of comedy through tragicomedy, these plays intertwine romance conventions with theology and biology; they thereby explore, in John Smyth’s words, the possibilities and limits of “continu[ing] a Church by succession of a carnall line.” These plays marry the theological and the biological, asking whether the infidel woman can be a legitimate sexual partner, and whether the infidel woman’s racial identity impedes comedy’s ideological reproduction of the Christian race.7
Salvation and Paternity
After Jessica offers her farewell to Lancelot, she explicitly links her marriage and conversion in an apostrophe to her future husband: “O, Lorenzo, / If thou keep promise I shall end this strife, / Become a Christian, and thy loving wife” (2.3.19–21). In typical romance mode, religious conversion and marriage work hand-in-hand to produce Christian identity. In the previous chapter I briefly mentioned that Jessica’s religious identity, much like Othello’s, is determined by the desire of Europeans; it seems that Jessica will not become a Christian if Lorenzo refuses to marry her. But now I wish to consider more fully whether Jessica can truly become a Christian through marriage—whether marriage can alter a racially determined religious identity. Janet Adelman, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Julia Reinhard Lupton have already provided persuasive answers to this question. In this chapter I build upon their insights and more fully consider connections between theology and early modern “biology.”8 Moreover, I probe the extent to which Jessica’s religious identity is determined by her biological relationship to her father, Shylock.
The notion that Lorenzo can turn Jessica into a Christian is reiterated later in the play, in the scene in which Lancelot questions if she can be saved:
CLOWN Yes, truly, for, look you, the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children; therefore, I promise you, I fear you. I was always plain with you, and so now I speak my agitation of the matter. Therefore be of good cheer, for, truly, I think you are damned. There is but one hope in it that can do you any good: and that is but a kind of bastard hope neither.
JESSICA And what hope is that, I pray thee?
CLOWN Marry, you may partly hope that your father got you not, that you are not the Jew’s daughter.
JESSICA That were a kind of bastard hope indeed, so the sins of my mother should be visited upon me.
CLOWN Truly, then, I fear you are damned both by father and mother: thus, when I shun Scylla your father, I fall into Charybdis your mother; well, you are gone both ways.
JESSICA I shall be saved by my husband; he hath made me a Christian!
CLOWN Truly, the more to blame he; We were Christians enough before, e’en as many as could well live one by another. This making Christians will raise the price of hogs; if grow all to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money. (3.5.1–33)
Salvation and damnation are hardly laughing matters, and the tension between Lancelot’s statements and the comedic language exemplifies the play’s use of tragicomedy to explore the relationship between racial damnation and salvation. Lancelot’s comment adumbrates the theological connections among race, lineage, and religious identity that I have been exploring throughout this book. His belief that “the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children” also suggests that he believes fathers, more than mothers, dictate a child’s religious identity and the child’s status as saved or damned.
Lancelot has scriptural justification for his belief: He alludes to a passage in Exodus 20, in which Moses relates the law God has given to the people. It is worth recalling the context of the passage, a context that Lancelot ignores: “Thou shalt not bowe down thyself to [graven images] neither serue them: for I the Lord thy God, am a iealous God, visiting the iniquitie of the fathers vpon the children, vpon the third generacion and vpon the fourth of them that hate me: And shewing mercie vnto thousandes of them that loue me and kepe my commandments” (Exodus 20:5–6). Lancelot’s decontextualization of the passage reinforces a racialized understanding of damnation; Jessica is damned because her father is a Jew and therefore, in Lancelot’s view, an idolatrous sinner. It may also be significant that Lancelot (or Shakespeare) excludes what follows in verse 6: God’s equal willingness to show mercy. Doing so allows the play to uphold what some critics have seen as an oversimplified version of the Pauline dichotomy between Christianity as a religion of mercy and Judaism as a religion of the law.9 Lancelot’s belief that Jessica is damned by her father also raises questions about the extent to which a biological father contributes to his child’s racial/fleshly and religious/spiritual identity.10
Concerns about race and lineage in The Merchant of Venice may also reflect a confluence of medical theories about human reproduction and a Protestant theology that yoked the spirit to the flesh. Medicine and theology were interwoven in Reformation England. Attention to the convergence of these discourses, therefore, can help us understand Lancelot’s position that Jessica is damned because she is Shylock’s daughter. English Protestant interpretations of the Genesis 17 covenant illustrate the belief that salvation could come through lineage; the importance of “seed” in these readings gives rise to a correlation between human reproduction and religious reproduction, a correlation between sex and conversion. The Genesis covenant, which was used to justify infant baptism and to assert that Christian offspring (or “seed”) are saved without the sacrament, is sealed through circumcision. “Circumcision,” James Shapiro argues, “was an extraordinarily powerful signifier, one that not only touches on issues of identity that ranged from the sexual to the theological but, often enough, on the intersections of the two.”11 Moreover, according to Lupton, the ritual marking of the male organ of sexual generation was read in Jewish contexts, not only Christian ones, as signifying the genealogical nature of the covenant.12
Circumcision thus linked the sexual and the spiritual and made sexuality spiritually significant. The spiritual consequence of male sexuality, namely the consequence of begetting children, also registers the gendered nature of the Genesis covenant and its English appropriations: The promise is made to Abraham and his “seed.” In early modern England, the word seed, which appears so often in English Protestant discussions of baptism, connoted both generation or progeny and semen.13 As such, the language used in Protestant discussions of Genesis 17 could also have implied that the promises of God were transmitted through male semen, and that semen determines a child’s religious identity.
Aristotelian understandings of sexual reproduction that circulated in medieval and early modern Europe would have made such a belief plausible. In Generation of Animals, Aristotle asserts, “Surely what the female contributes to the semen of the male will be not semen but material. And this is in fact what we find happening; for the natural substance of the menstrual fluid is to be classed ‘prime matter.’ ”14 The female’s matter is then acted upon by the male’s seed: “The male provides the ‘form’ and the ‘principle of the movement,’ the female provides the body, in other words, the material.”15 The form/matter distinction is certainly an important Aristotelian concept, but in Generation of Animals it is explicitly gendered. The creation of life—the shaping of matter necessary for life and the soul—is a masculine principle in Aristotle: “It is clear that semen possesses Soul, and that it is Soul, potentially.”16 Although Aristotle’s concept of the soul (mortal and unable to exist apart from the body) contrasts with the immortal soul of Christian theology, the theory of reproduction described in Generation of Animals nevertheless provided medieval and early modern Europeans with a way to privilege the role of the father in creating a child’s identity.
The power attributed to male seed could allow the infidel woman to be a legitimate sexual partner, even within a culture that asserted that Christian parents unequivocally produce Christian infants. In her reading of The Merchant of Venice, Kaplan argues that medieval and early modern neo-Aristotelian theories were used to render the Jewish female body as matter that could be re-formed by Christian masculinity; through procreation, male seed was believed able to convert Jewish matter into Christian identity.17 I would add that what is true of Jewish women in particular is true of infidel women in general, but Kaplan’s argument explains why Jessica may be an acceptable marriage partner. If, as a Christian man, Lorenzo has the power to re-form Jessica, then, as she says, her husband has made her a Christian. Even if Jessica has not truly been converted—Gratiano refers to Jessica as an “infidel” even after her conversion and marriage (3.2.217)—the importance of seed in both the Church of England’s baptismal theology and the Aristotelian theory of reproduction suggests that her religious and racial identity does not matter because she will still be able to produce Christian offspring. The Aristotelian theories Kaplan examines also provide an explanation for the problematic nature of relationships between infidel men and Christian women on the English stage; Aristotelian theories offer another way of understanding why a work like Othello (if Othello is an infidel and not a Christian) rejects what Susan Snyder recognized as the “comic matrix” operating in the play.18
Shylock’s story, then, is very different from Jessica’s. According to Aristotelian reproductive theory, his stubborn male Jewishness might be congenital.19 Although we know that Shylock will be baptized following the conclusion of the staged action, the Protestant distinction between sacramental sign and grace received—and here we should recall Frith’s statement about the baptized unbelieving Jew—would make it difficult for audiences to believe that Shylock experiences a true conversion; early modern audiences would have viewed Shylock’s conversion—partially, at least—through the lenses of their personal understandings of the efficacy of the baptism. Moreover, as scholars who have examined the trial and execution of Elizabeth’s doctor Roderigo Lopez have shown, no matter how much Lopez insisted that he loved Christ, he was condemned as a Jew and a traitor.20 Shylock’s gender, Protestant theology, and a distrust of Jews in early modern England would all conduce to the view that Shylock remains a Jew at the end of the play. Shylock is thus bracketed from the comedic ending of the play. If, as Northrop Frye suggests, “Unlikely conversions, miraculous transformations, and providential assistance are inseparable from comedy,” racialized male bodies resist the transforming impulses of not only comedy but also of romance.21 The Merchant of Venice seems to fulfill comedy’s genre obligations through Shylock’s forced acceptance of the sacrament that signifies the death of his infidel identity, his rebirth as a Christian, and his incorporation into Christian community; but his exclusion from that community at the end of the play raises questions about the authenticity of his Christian identity.
Shylock’s body may also remain untransformed in order to uphold what critics like Barbara Lewalski have observed as the play’s development of an allegorical relationship between Jews and Christians.22 Suzanne Penuel and Adelman, moreover, have suggested that the play produces an allegory in which the fraught relationships between fathers and children signify pervasive Christian anxieties about the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. According to Penuel, the play “imagines the connection between Judaism and Christianity as a parent-child tie burdened by uncomfortable debt in an analogy that both feeds on and fuels early modern anxiety about the authenticity and genealogy of Christianity.”23 Penuel and Adelman also posit an allegorical relationship between the plot of the play and Christian history: Jessica’s (and potentially Shylock’s) conversions at the end of the play, problematic as they may be, may signal a belief in the eventual conversion of all Jews to Christianity.24 Boyarin’s assertion that “hermeneutics becomes anthropology” is certainly useful for understanding the allegorical structure in the play. Moreover, a biologically constructed Jewish male body supplies a biological surety necessary for signifying a stable Christian racial identity.25 If The Merchant of Venice is an allegory for Christian history, it forges a link between the biological and the spiritual; the biological parent-child relationship has spiritual implications. The Church of England also created this link in a theology that racialized religious identities and allegorized Abraham’s seed.
Salvation and Maternity
Indeed, the racialized father created particular anxieties for the English. In addition to Shylock, we should consider George Best’s account of an “Ethiopian black as cole brought into England, who taking a faire English woman to wife, begat a sonne in all respects as blacke as the father was … whereby it seemeth this blackness proceedeth rather of some naturall infection of that man, which was so strong, that neyther the nature of Clime, neyther the good complexion of the Mother concurring, could anything alter.”26 Lancelot and Best emphasize worries about fathers, but The Merchant of Venice and early moderns were no less worried about the role of mothers in shaping their children’s identities (cuckold jokes raise questions about the ability to verify paternity). Observing that mothers—Leah and the Moorish woman pregnant with Lancelot’s child—are mentioned in close proximity to discussions of Jessica’s conversion, Adelman provocatively asks, “But why should Jessica’s mother turn up in the conversation about the efficacy of her conversion?”27 For Adelman, the answer resides in an understanding that Jewish identity is transferred from mothers to children—a point evidently lost on Lancelot, however. I would like to take Adelman’s question in another direction: Perhaps the play connects motherhood to Jessica’s conversion precisely because it is through becoming a mother—which is, to be sure, the female telos of Christian marriage—that she might be saved. Although Kaplan’s exploration of Aristotelian theory provides one way of understanding how Jessica might be saved by becoming a mother, Aristotle was not the only authority on human reproduction in the early modern period.28 Early moderns also turned to Hippocrates and Galen to understand human procreation, and their theories, unlike Aristotle’s, asserted that women, too, contributed seed that formed children. Moreover, discussions of reproduction in early modern England usually reflect Christian views of marriage and redemption; women’s writings on childbirth and child-rearing often linked motherhood with Christian redemption as well.
Jessica’s belief that she will be saved by her husband may be based on Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 7:14: “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean.” For Paul belief is not a requirement for this sanctification. As I noted in chapter 1, this Pauline assertion was used to deny the necessity of baptism for the infant’s salvation. But Paul’s primary concern is saving children of interfaith marriages from being “unclean”; he sanctifies the unbelieving parent out of seeming necessity. The nature of this sanctification, however, is the source of a long-standing theological conundrum because it does not seem to require the conversion of the nonbelieving parent. Protestant commentators did their best to make sense of it, however. Calvin, for example, asserts that “thys Sanctification doth nothing at all profite the unbeeleuing spouse: only it serveth this farre, that his faythfull mate be not defyled, and Matrinonye it self prophaned.”29 The gloss for this passage in the Geneva Bible ignores the issue of what it means to sanctify the unbelieving spouse altogether: It merely states, “They that are born of either of the Christian parents faithful, are also counted members of Christ’s church.”30 The gloss makes no mention of sanctifying the “unbelieving” wife or husband, but it still imbues the children of interfaith marriages with Christian identity, just as Jewel does in Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562).31 Thus, although Jessica, or any other infidel women who marries and begets the child of a Christian, may or may not be made a Christian through the telos of Christian marriage, from Paul forward the chief concern has always been the spiritual state of the child.
What is also striking is that Paul and the Geneva gloss are gender-neutral. If both Paul and the glossers wish to assert that certain children are born as Christians, linking as they do sexual and spiritual reproduction, they usually do not insist upon a gendered hierarchy or a particular understanding of religious identity as passed exclusively through either the male or female parent. Paul and the Geneva Bible may be gender-neutral in this instance, but early modern English culture surely was not (Calvin and early modern English drama imagine relationships between Christian men and an infidel women), especially in the religious and medical discourses on women. Moreover, Paul’s argument resides uneasily next to Protestant appropriations of the gendered covenant of Genesis 17, which is passed down through male seed. It is here that Protestant readings of Genesis 17, when placed next to Paul’s argument that a child of an infidel father and Christian mother would be sanctified as well, confront Hippocratic and Galenic understandings of human reproduction and Protestant discourses on marriage.32
Hippocratic and Galenic understandings of reproduction and Protestant views of marriage and motherhood can provide an alternative understanding of how and why the infidel woman could be redeemed through childbirth. According to Mary Lindmann, “More influential than the Aristotelian tradition … was the Hippocratic/Galenic theory in which both sexes contributed in equal measure to conception. Now the two sexes became complementary in that both produce seed.”33 Galen’s theory was based on a “one sex” model, in which, as Thomas Laqueur’s influential Making Sex has taught us, “man is the measure of all things, and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category.”34
Although women were understood to be unperfected men, this imperfection was indeed seen as necessary for reproduction. In Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia (1615), for instance, the Galenic theory of reproduction is explained in terms of a redemptive telos:
A woman is so much less perfect then a man by how much her heate is lesse and weaker than his; yet as I saide is this imperfection turned vnto perfection, because without the woman, mankinde could not haue beene perfected by the perfected sexe. The Maister workman therefore of set purpose, one made the one halfe of mankinde imperfect for the instauration of the whole kinde, making the woman as a receptacke of the seede of which a new man was to be created.35
The Galenic theory—though here bearing some marks of Aristotelianism—is rendered completely compatible with the “purpose” of the “Maister workman.” The language of transformation is palpable here; as “imperfection [is] turned vnto perfection,” the unperfected female body becomes a kind of felix culpa for the “instauration” of the whole human race.
Crooke’s discussion demonstrates how religious concepts informed medical understandings of the female body. Indeed, as Patricia Crawford has argued, “Medical understandings of the female body reflected Biblical ideas about the female as a contingent being.”36 The importance of the “imperfect” female body for the propagation of the race is given a more explicit religious context when Crooke moves to his discussion of Hippocrates, in which he discusses reproduction in the context of Christian marriage:
The man therefore and the woman together in holy wedlocke, and desirous to raise a posterity for the honour of God and propagation of their family; in their mutual imbracements doe either of them yeeld seed the mans leaping with greater violence. The woman at the same instant doeth not only eiaculte seede into her self, but also her womb snatcheth as it were and catcheth the seede of the man, and hideth it in the bottom and busome thereof.37
The primary desire—in Crooke’s sentence—is to produce Christian posterity. Here, Crooke’s medical explanation echoes the Church of England’s The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony, which places the propagation of God-fearing children first in the list of reasons for the creation of holy matrimony: “One was the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord and praise of God.”38 This echoing, too, demonstrates that even the medical theories of sexual reproduction were governed by understandings of Christian truth. In fact, to understand human reproduction was to understand the mysteries of God. In the often-published The Englishemans treasure: with the true anatomie of mans bodie (first published in 1587), for example, Thomas Vicary writes, “And for as much as it hath pleased the Almightie God to giue knowledge of these his misteries & works unto his Creatures in this present world, here I propose to declare what thing Embreon is, and his creation … of which is made by the might and power of God in the mothers wombe a child.”39 Crooke, Vicary, and other early modern doctors and anatomists collapse the distinctions between biological knowledge and religious truth.
Crooke’s theo-biological explanations correspond with Protestant discussions of the redemptive power of motherhood. Although pregnancy and the accompanying pains of childbirth had long been viewed as evidence of woman’s fallen nature, it is equally true that in Christian belief, as Julie Crawford notes, “it was through a woman, Mary, and a birth, the incarnation of Christ, that humanity was redeemed. While the Reformation displaced the Virgin Mary from her central role in Christian worship, it nonetheless understood women in marriage and the household as key to the implementation of the Protestant faith.”40 In Protestant England the figure of Mary remained a foundation of Christian belief in childbirth and child-rearing as central to redemption, and at least one early modern English mother made an explicit comparison between her motherhood and Mary’s; in The Mother’s Blessing (1616), Dorothy Leigh interprets her own pregnancy and maternal care for her children in relation to the incarnation of Christ:
My dear children, have I not cause to fear? The Holy Ghost saith by the prophet, Can a mother forget the child of her womb? As if he should say, is it possible, that she that carried her childe within her so near her heart and brought it forth into this world with so much bitter pain, so many groans and cries forget it? Nay rather, will she not labor till Christ be formed in it? Will she not bless it every time it sucks from her breasts, when she feeleth the blood come from her heart to nouristh it?… And can any man blame a mother (who indeed brought forth her child with much paine) though she labor till Christ be formed in them?41
In The Mother’s Blessing the travail of childbirth is not a consequence of Eve’s curse but rather that which produces Christ in the child. Leigh in fact conflates the labor of childbirth with the labor of child-rearing: Both are mainly the mother’s duty, and both found Christian identity.42 The pregnant female body, then, reenacts a kind of Marian fiat (“let there be”) every time a child is conceived. Crooke’s assertion, “The woman at the same instant doeth not only eiaculte seede into her self,” reflects a common early seventeenth-century belief that female orgasm was necessary for reproduction.43 Consequently, the sexually desiring female body, chaste within the bounds of Protestant marriage, becomes essential for the propagation of Christians. In spite of widespread anxieties about uncontrollable female sexual desire, religious and medical discourses on motherhood sublimate that desire for religious purposes.44
Leigh’s argument concerning the primacy of the mother’s influence on her children also corresponds to the Galenic view of motherhood. The volition of the male seed in the Galenic model did not undermine the influence of the female seed and the womb—the womb Crooke describes actively “snatcheth.” In Thomas Raynalde’s translation of Eucharius Rösslin’s The byrth of mankynde (1540), moreover, the mother has more influence on the child than the father: “And although that man, be as princypall moovar and cause of the generation yet (no displeasure to men) the woman doth confer and contribute much more what to the encresement of the child in her womb, & what to the nourysshment therof after the byrth, then doth the man.”45 Despite the male’s role as “princypall moover,” the female womb and breast are believed to have greater power to shape the child and his or her race. Mothers shape their children in the womb and after their birth through breastfeeding.
Scholarship on breastfeeding in early modern England has shown that racial identity was believed to pass through the milk of the mother or the wet nurse; mothers were therefore encouraged to nurse their own children. The Galenic model viewed mother’s milk as a product of the mother’s blood; as Rachel Trubowitz has shown, the centrality of debates about breast-feeding responded to “anxieties about England’s cultural and racial (in)coherence.… One key medical/moral concern was that breast-milk physically transmitted the moral and bodily character of the nurse to her charge, ideally complementing, but more often compromising or even eradicating the familial identity the child had inherited from its parents.”46 The biological mother’s milk, however, allayed fears about racial/moral contamination for it was believed to nurture the child and maintains its racial purity.47 I see neither implicit nor explicit references to breastfeeding in the plays discussed in this chapter; nevertheless, this scholarship on early modern breastfeeding is germane to our analysis because it demonstrates the link between anxieties about maternal influence and concerns about racial identity and purity. Early modern English discussions of breastfeeding provide another example of the view that a child’s racial, religious, and moral identity might be influence more by a mother than by a father.
The harnessing of sexual reproduction to the propagation of the Christian race suggests another way to think about the spiritual consequences of sexual desire in early modern culture: Improper desire—especially the sexual desire that commingles people of different races and faiths instead of reproducing Christians—can damn the soul and sever the link between desire and redemption. The early modern English stage attempted to police desire in plays featuring the dangerous consequences of “turning Turk”—an inversion of the infidel-conversion motif. In contrast to the numerous romance tales in which interfaith desire leads to a conversion to Christianity, a play like A Christian Turned Turk equates desire for the infidel with the loss of Christian identity and death: At the end of the play, Ward, an English pirate, laments his love affair with a Turkish woman and his conversion to Islam; here sex leads to death, not reproduction. The same minatory, policing themes pervaded tragicomedies of the time that featured interfaith and interracial relationships. Yet these plays remained tragicomedies rather than tragedies because of the conversion of the infidel woman through sexual or other means.
Notwithstanding Pauline theology and the various theories of pregnancy and character/cultural/racial transmission, the plot of The Merchant of Venice leaves Jessica’s religious identity ambiguous; Jessica’s final line in the play, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (5.1.69), suggests that she cannot be fully incorporated into the harmonious reunion of friends and lovers at the end of the play.48 The play’s ending may reveal lingering uneasiness about Jessica’s marriage to Lorenzo, but this union is portrayed as less problematic than the potential pairing of Portia and Morocco—perhaps because it was the Jewish and Moorish men, more than the women, who posed the most serious threat to the reproduction of Christian identity. In The Merchant of Venice, there is no shortage of anxiety about economic and sexual commingling—and hence miscegenation—among people of different races and religions, but the degree of anxiety varies with gender.49
Martyrdom and Recuperating Romance
Unsure as Shakespeare’s play may be about the ability of romance to produce true Christians, the imaginative and ideological work of the infidel-conversion motif was too useful to abandon completely. Romance had found ways to sublimate desire and to transform the foreign but desirable into the acceptable. I would now like to turn to The Island Princess and The Renegado, in which Fletcher and Massinger similarly attempt to revise and recuperate the infidel-conversion motif.50 Although the love/conversion/marriage romance trajectory may seem the same as that found in Catholic romances, these plays introduce two critical steps in the process: erotic detachment and the acquisition of belief. Unlike Jessica, who may or may not become a Christian through her husband, Quisara and Donusa become verifiably Christian not through marriage but through their imitation of Christian men who prove willing to die for their faiths. Armusia’s and Vitelli’s willingness to die rather than “turn Turk” persuades the two women that they too should become Christians and martyrs; indeed, Quisara’s and Donusa’s willingness to die as Christian martyrs is used as proof that they have acquired Christian faith. It is only after the women’s conversions that the romantic relationships are restored and lead to marriage. The plays make it clear, however, that the women do not convert merely for love; by verifying that the two women acquire faith, the plays seek to allay anxieties about the religious identity of the children of interfaith relationships; the plays produce two Christian parents.
The Island Princess asserts that its heroine experiences a true conversion as it explores the connections between sex and conversion that I discussed in the preceding section. This becomes clear in the words spoken by Pyniero, a Portuguese captain, to an “Indian” waiting woman, Panura: “If thou wilt give me leave, Ile get thee with a Christian, / The best way to convert thee” (5.4.14–15).51 Pyniero states outright what theological discussions seemed to imply but could never say explicitly: Having sex with a Christian has the power to convert the unbeliever. Moreover, this proposal suggests that sex with a Christian and begetting a Christian child are the “best” means of religious conversion, with even greater power than the sacrament of Christian initiation to produce Christian identity. If The Island Princess advances a cultural ideology in which the infidel women can be redeemed through motherhood, it simultaneously features the power of Christian masculine desire to redeem female sexuality. Even so, the play also stages an infidel conversion that is based on faith rather than sex or sacrament.
In her reading of The Island Princess, a play dramatizing the Portuguese mercantile activities in the East Indies, Claire Jowitt suggests that “conversion—particularly of the woman to Christianity—was an accepted part of Christian patriarchy from the Crusades onward.… Hence Quisara’s conversion to Christianity in order to marry Armusia at the end of The Island Princess is an example of a literary staple.”52 Jowitt rightfully notes the literary tradition with which Fletcher engages, but the play’s participation in romance tradition, I suggest, is mediated by the Protestant emphasis on sola fides and the theological understandings of racial and religious identity that I have been describing throughout this book. The princess of Tidore, Quisara, is portrayed as a desirable object, and thus ripe for conversion, from the very beginning of The Island Princess. Moreover, although the tragicomic form, Valerie Forman argues, provides a structure for redeeming European mercantile endeavors, I read the form as structuring the play’s recuperation of the infidel-conversion motif and a more literal story of redemption.53 Quisara is first described in the play as “the faire and great Quisara” (1.1.29), signifying her desirability to Europeans. Moreover, she is part of a familiar romance storyline: She will marry whoever frees her brother, the king of Tidore, from captivity.54 Quisara wishes to marry the Portuguese Captain Ruy Dias, but the Portuguese nobleman Armusia proves victorious. The play aligns the infidel princess with a nobleman rather than a captain, thus betraying a proclivity to pair characters according to social status. Jean Feerick argues that the play’s interest in social status is not divorced from its engagement with national and racial difference: “The logic of social difference thus inter-animates the play’s representation of national and religious difference, urging us to consider how the spatial displacement that lies at the center of this and other tragicomic plays might be a tool for reconfiguring the laws of difference structuring England from within.”55
Although the play represents Portuguese activities in the East Indies, Feerick shows that its concerns are resolutely English. Feerick is most interested in the play’s negotiation of social difference, but her analysis suggests a connection between that theme and the integrity of national and religious identity. At the moment that Quisara redirects her desire from Ruy Dias to Armusia (she despises Ruy Dias’s cowardice and falls in love with Arumsia because of his bravery) the play resolves an anxiety about a particular kind of mixed relationship: that between individuals from different social statuses. I would add to Feerick’s reading that the play also resolves the remaining religious difference between Armusia and Quisara.56
The religious difference between Armusia and Quisara bears the seeds of tragedy. This becomes evident when the Governor of Ternata (an enemy of Tidore who disguises himself as a “Moorish priest” in order to wreak havoc on the island) convinces Quisara that she should ask Armusia to convert to their religion. Quisara does just that: She tells Armusia, “Worship our Gods, renounce that faith ye are bred in; /’Tis easily done, I’ll teach ye suddenly; And humbly on your knees” (4.5.36). Here the play introduces the fear of “turning Turk,” which we will see in The Renegado as well. Quisara’s words also show that changing religion is not only a matter of belief but also a rejection of one’s breeding. For Armusia, rejecting Christianity would mean renouncing “the faith [he] was bred in.” Vitelli expresses a similar sentiment in The Renegado; he fears that his captured sister, Paulina, may have “turn[ed] apostata to the faith / That she was bred in” (1.1.138–9). Moreover, later in The Renegado, the pirate Grimaldi repents for rejecting “the Faith, / that [he] was borne in” (4.4.96–7).57 Because the verb “breed” denotes generation, engendering, and the like, these sentiments express the plays’ explorations of the interconnectedness of race, reproduction, and religious identity.58 In the early modern context, rejecting one’s religion seems equivalent to rejecting one’s race.
But Armusia cannot reject either his race or his religion if, as it is commonly argued, The Island Princess is to legitimize proto-imperial and mercantile projects by demonstrating that Europeans can remain unaltered by contact with the East. He must reject Quisara’s proposal. “Ha? I’ll be hang’d first” (4.5.36), Armusia responds, and he makes it clear that he had hoped that their love would lead Quisara to convert to Christianity—an outcome that is common in the romance tradition. Nonetheless, Quisara initially believes that Armusia is merely playing hard to get, and she reads the rejection as a kind of foreplay to his conversion; she simply replies, “Come, come, I know ye love me” (4.5.50). Quisara’s various attempts to use her romantic relationship with Armusia to convert him illustrate what critics like Vitkus, Burton, and Degenhardt have identified as the seductive allure of Islam and the East. Non-Christian women like Quisara (and Donusa) who hope to use romantic ties to coax religious conversion are thus part of a tradition that carries a stigma after the Reformation; the conversion motif of Catholic romances is now demonized, a portent of the dangers of the East.
Armusia does not deny that he loves Quisara, but he notes at length—fifty-eight interspersed lines—all the reasons he will never convert. Images of death permeate his speeches, culminating in his most violent response:
Now I contemn ye, and I hate my self
For looking on that face lasciviously,
And it looks ugly now me thinks.
It looks like death it self, to which ’twou’d lead me;
Your eyes resemble pale despair, they fright me,
And in their rounds, a thousand horrid ruins,
Methinks I see; and in your tongue hear fearfully
The hideous murmurs of weak souls have suffer’d;
Get from me, I despise ye; and know woman,
That for all this trap you have laid to catch my life in,
To catch my immortal life, I hate and curse ye,
Contemn your Deities, spurn at their powers,
And where I meet your Mahumet gods, I’ll swing ’em
Thus o’r my head, and kick ’em into puddles,
Nay, I will out of vengeance search your Temples.
And with those hearts that serve my God, demolish
Your shambles of wild worships. (4.5.105–18)
Armusia’s love is converted to hate; as Michael Neill asserts, “at the point when Quisara urges her lover to forsake his faith, her beauty is ultimately transformed to a black ugliness that ‘looks like death itself.’ ”59 Quisara becomes a deathly blazon, a racialized figure of death and damnation: Her face now “looks like death it self,” her “eyes resemble pale despair,” and her voice sounds like “hideous murmurs of weak souls.” On the stage, however, it is likely that Quisara looks just as she always has: a boy actor wearing white pancake makeup and a costume that makes him appear exotically foreign and female. What has changed is Armusia’s and the audience’s perception of Quisara. At this moment he and the audience turn from seeing her as “faire and great” to seeing her as a casualty of the forsaking of Christianity. The play’s insistence on maintaining (and also reproducing) Christian identity requires that Armusia and the audience now view her non-Christian body as disfigured by sin and damnation. The maintenance of male Christian identity mandates that her outward beauty fall victim to the less tangible ugliness of racial and religious otherness.
Armusia’s blasphemy—to kick and swing Quisara’s Mahumet gods over his head and throw them into puddles—cannot go unpunished; he is sentenced to die by the very king he freed from prison. The play, at first, seems ready to punish Armusia and veer toward tragedy because of Armusia’s misrecognition of Quisara and his misreading of her body. Her outer fairness conceals her inner wickedness. Quisara, like Crashaw’s baptized Ethiopian, tests the limits of color-coded religion. In The Island Princess fair skin, indeed whiteness, does not necessarily signify spiritual purity—though it cannot be denied that her fairness makes her a desirable convert. At the same time, Armusia’s punishment for misreading Quisara’s body is a prerequisite of the tragicomic genre; there can be no tragicomedy without the threat of death.
The play more fully exemplifies tragicomedy as literary mode patterned after the Christian redemption story by connecting death with redemption. Armusia willingly accepts his death and chooses to become a martyr, believing that in dying a faithful Christian he will receive a heavenly reward. Consequently, martyrdom itself is tragicomic in its structure, for the suffering of the body gives way to spiritual union and celebration. The English theologian John Bradford, for example, writes in a 1555 letter, “When the fire doth his appointed office, thou shalt be received, as a sweet, burnt offering, into heaven where thou shalt joyfully remain in God’s presence forever.”60 In the theology of martyrdom, the death and destruction of the body are joyful.
Armusia’s willingness to die for his faith leads Quisara to forsake her religion and embrace tragicomic martyrdom as well. She is a “virgin won by [Armusia’s] faire constancy” (5.2.109), and she states more fully just a few lines later that his constancy convinces her to become a Christian:
QUISARA Your Faith, and your Religion must be like ye,
They that can shew you these, must be pure mirrors,
When the streams flow clear and fair, what are the fountains?
I do embrace your faith, Sir, and your fortune;
Go on, I will assist ye, I feel a sparkle here,
A lively spark that kindles my affection,
And tells me it will rise to flames of glory:
Let ’em put on their angers, suffer nobly,
Shew me the way, and when I faint, instruct me;
And if I follow not—
ARMUSIA Oh blessed Lady,
Since thou art won, let me begin my triumph,
Come clap your terrors on.
QUISARA All your fell tortures.
For there is nothing he shall suffer brother,
I sweare by my new faith which is most sacred,
And I will keepe it so, but I will follow in,
In spight of all your Gods without prevention.
(5.2.118–34)
Armusia’s faith inspires a faith in Quisara that is authenticated by her willingness to die for it; she embraces the faith and flames, their angers, and the suffering. Significantly, rather that embracing Armusia, she embraces his faith and his path—“Shew me the way”—to martyrdom.61 The willingness to undergo bodily torture rather than baptism (though the “streams … clear and free” certainly invoke baptismal imagery), initiate her into the Christian faith; her willingness to forsake her body will allow her to “rise to flames of glory.”
Armusia joyfully responds to Quisara’s desire to endure torture; here the play turns from tragedy to comedy, for her willingness to “clap her terrors on” demonstrates that Quisara willingly accepts the death of her flesh in order to become Christian in spirit. Luckily for Armusia and Quisara, the Portuguese wage war on Tidore when they learn that Armusia has been taken prisoner. The Portuguese are successful, and the Moorish priest is revealed to be the scheming governor of Ternata. Armusia and Quisara are eventually married, but not before the play tests her faith. The tragicomic form redeems the infidel woman (who possesses great wealth to boot) whose Christian faith is verified in the end.62
At the end of the play, male faith shows power to transform racial and religious others into Christians. Armusia’s faith not only transforms Quisara but also nearly transforms the king of Tidore: The king tells Armusia, “You have halfe perswaded me to be a Christian” (5.5.76). That the king is only “halfe perswaded,” however, suggests the influence of the view that women are more alterable than men.63 With the social and religious status of Armusia and Quisara now fully aligned, they can reproduce the ideological imperatives of early modern comedy. At the play’s end, Quisara’s former suitor, Ruy Dias, celebrates the union and wishes the couple “Children as sweet and noble as their Parents” (5.5.70). Ruy Dias’s statement reminds us that comedy’s end is to reproduce children—in this case children whose parents are of the same social and religious status.
The Island Princess mostly avoids a number of important issues of the era: theological questions about the sanctification of infidel parents, the belief in the redemptive nature of motherhood, and biological theories about paternal and maternal influence on children. Moreover, although The Island Princess represents two models of conversion, Panura’s through sex and Quisara’s through rejecting the infidel faith that she was “bred in,” the play ends with the celebration of the marriage of two Christians.
Massinger’s The Renegado follows The Island Princess closely, both in its explorations of race, gender, and religious conversion, and in its investigation of the relationships among martyrdom, redemption, conversion, and the tragicomic form (the words “martyr” and “martyrdom” appear four times in the play).64 The play also matches characters of the same social status and religion: Although Donusa’s love interest, Vitelli, is disguised as a merchant, we learn that he is really a Venetian gentleman. In addition, the willingness to become a martyr is the test of true Christian faith.
The scene in which Vitelli denounces Donusa for asking him to convert to Islam is strikingly similar to the scene featuring Armusia and Quisara: Both are marked by strong hatred and violence. Donusa, however, is associated not with death but with Satan himself:
The Devil, thy tutor, fills each part about thee,
And that I cannot play the exorcist
To dispossess thee—unless I should tear
The body limb from limb, and throw it to
The Furies that expect it—I would now
Pluck out that wicked tongue that hath blasphemed
That great Omnipotency at whose nod
The fabric of the world shakes. (4.3.107–14)
Vitelli goes on at length in this vein, but what is significant here is that at the moment when Donusa attempts to turn him, she becomes an embodiment of spiritual evil—so much so that Vitelli now imagines it impossible to disconnect spirit from body. The only way to exorcise her is to destroy her body, the very body that he enjoyed sexually earlier in the play. Although the scene surely betrays European anxieties about “turning Turk,” it also exemplifies the play’s investment in embodied forms of religious identity.65
At the same time, Vitelli’s rhetorically powerful language can exorcise Donusa without his having to resort to the kinds of physical violence he mentions. Donusa is moved by the power of Vitelli’s speech, an act of preaching that persuades her to become a Christian. Unlike Quisara, who converts after witnessing how nobly Armusia endures his torture, Donusa desires to convert immediately after hearing Vitelli’s sermon, which exhorts to martyrdom: “Can there be strength in that / Religion that suffers us to tremble / At that which every day—nay hour—we hasten to?” (4.3.135–7). For Vitelli true religion requires the embrace of death, a conviction that leads Donusa to question her own religion: “This is unanswerable and there’s something / Tells me I err in my opinion” (4.3.138–9). Vitelli’s question plants the seed that later grows into her conversion.
From this point forward, the play employs a revised form of the infidel-conversion motif’s yoking of conversion to marriage: In The Renegado conversion and marriage are simultaneously linked to death. This link, reiterated throughout the rest of the play, first emerges soon after Donusa expresses that she might convert. Vitelli tells her,
Oh Donusa!
Die in my faith like me and ’tis a marriage
At which celestial angels shall be waiters,
And such as have sainted welcome us. (4.3.150–3)
Vitelli’s marriage to Donusa and their deaths are conflated both in his speech and in the plot—they will occur in the same ceremony. The earthly marriage between Donusa and Vitelli is to be superseded by their heavenly union with Christ. Vitelli’s language draws from the understanding that marriage signifies the union between Christ and his church, a union that can be consummated only in the world to come. Massinger thus revises romance’s traditional yoking of conversion and marriage by linking them with death. The play thereby asks the audience to reconsider the spiritual significance of the staged rituals; baptism and marriage both signify and will literally lead to—without the intervention of tragicomic providence—death and union with Christ after death.
Like Quisara, Donusa must prove her faith. She does so through an act of blasphemy that demonstrates her full rejection of Islam and her willingness to die a Christian. After Vitelli assures her that she will be baptized, she responds, “Then thus I spit at Mahomet” (4.3.156). The Viceroy of Tunis, Asambag, is outraged and responds, “Stop her mouth! / In death to turn apostata” (4.3.158–9). That she must die because of her blasphemy is not surprising; Asambag’s words are surprising: “in death to turn apostata”—they suggest that in death she will become an apostate and a Christian convert.
The play is so invested in exploring the signifying power and spiritual efficacy of baptism and marriage that these rituals are staged as part of the action of the play. But before the play stages the conjoined baptism, marriage, and execution ceremony, it asks the audience to consider the power of baptism. Vitelli asks the Jesuit priest, Francisco, about the efficacy of baptism performed by the laity. Francisco gives the traditional Catholic position:
Midwives upon necessity perform it,
And knights that in Holy Land fought for
The freedom of Jerusalem, when full
Of sweat and enemies’s blood, have made their helmets
The font out of which with their holy hands
They drew that heavenly liquor. ’Twas approved then
By Holy Church, nor must I think it now
In you a work less pious. (5.2.34–41)
Benedict Robinson has astutely observed that Francisco describes “a scene virtually right out of Tasso … with the water drawn out of a helmet by Tancred to a dying Clorinda.”66 Francisco’s speech, then, justifies baptism through romance literary tradition. An earlier generation of critics interpreted moments such as this as evidence of Massinger’s Catholic faith, but I am not so sure that we can read the play, or the audience, as fully embracing Francisco’s theology.67 This theology of “Holy Church,” to be sure, is at odds with the theology I discussed in chapter 1, especially as regards the English Church’s rejection of lay baptism. Francisco’s belief that “’Twas approved” is associated with a past theological position, one that Francisco assumes to be still true but that conflicts with religious beliefs that the Church of England insisted on every time an infant was baptized.
At the end of their discussion of baptism, Francisco tells Vitelli, “And though now fall, / Rise a blest martyr” (5.2.45–6), signaling the play’s consideration of the salvific powers of baptism, marriage, and martyrdom. This consideration culminates in act 5, scene 3, when Dounsa is to be baptized, married to Vitelli, and then executed with her new husband. The scene has the trappings of tragedy: The impending deaths are signaled by the “dreadful music” described in the stage direction. Vitelli, however, like Armusia, responds joyfully to death:
A joyful preparation! To whose bounty
Owe we our thanks for gracing our Hymen?
The notes, though dreadful to the ear, sound here
As our epithalamium were sung
By a celestial choir, and a full chorus
Assured us future happiness. (5.3.47–52)
Again Vitelli sees earthly marriage as a prelude to spiritual union with Christ. He continues to connect the earthly to the spiritual in his ability to hear a “celestial choir” in the “notes … dreadful to the ear” that signify “future happiness.” The relationship between the music and what it signifies is similar to the figurative disunity that Jewel argued is inherent to Protestant sacraments; Vitelli’s speech thus suggests that the marriage, death, and music require the type of allegoresis that Maureen Quilligan describes; it implies a distinctly Protestant sacramental relationship between the tragic and the comedic, between earthly death and spiritual union with Christ.68
Vitelli’s speech at the beginning of the combined baptism/marriage/execution ceremony helps us understand the significance of various instances of figurative disunity in the scene. Vitelli asks Asambeg and Mustafa, Pasha of Allepo, to be allowed to perform a rite that prepares Christians for death. Vitelli is making a veiled reference to baptism:
MUSTAPHA What’s the mystery
Of this? Discover it!
VITELLI Great sir, I’ll tell you.
Each country hath its own peculiar rites:
Some, when they are to die, drink store of wine,
Which, poured in liberally, does oft beget
A bastard valor, with which armed they hear
The not to be declined charge of death
With less fear and astonishment. Others take
Drugs to procure heavy sleep, that so
They may insensibly receive the means
That casts them in an everlasting slumber;
Others—
Enter Gazet, with water.
O welcome!
ASAMBAG Now, the use of yours?
VITELLI The clearness of this is a perfect sign
Of innocence, and as this washes off
Staines and pollutions from the things we wear,
Thrown thus upon the forehead, it hath power
To purge those spots that cleave upon the mind,
If thankfully received.
Throws it on her face.
ASAMBAG ’Tis a strange custom.
(5.3.100–16)
Vitelli does not fully “discover” the “strange custom” of baptism; instead he conceals it in a number of ways. First, Vitelli characterizes baptism as an example of the “peculiar rites” of specific countries, hence as a national custom, not a religious ritual. Second, although baptism might be a way to ease fear in the face of death, he places it side by side with wine and drugs, which either dull or alter the perception of death. Vitelli thus undermines the spiritual significance of the sacrament; his explanation suggests that the impending rite is different from what it appears to be to Asambeg and Mustafa. It also suggests to the audience that what they see on stage is not necessarily the thing that it signifies.
The way in which Donusa’s baptism is enacted also undermines the audience’s ability to take it seriously: The stage direction informs us that Vitelli throws water on Donusa’s face. What the stage directions denotes may be ambiguous, but it has a comic potential that could have been realized in performance—one might imagine Vitelli doing exactly what the stage direction denotes, throwing water in Donusa’s face. Moreover, Paulina, steadfast in her religious beliefs throughout the play, finds the scene comical. She laughs on stage, noting the foolishness of the presentation of religious ritual:
PAULINA Ha! ha! ha!
ASAMBAG What means my mistress?
PAULINA Who can hold her spleen,
When such ridiculous follies are presented,
The scene, too, made religious?
(5.3.139–42)
Her metatheatrical language asks the audience to pay special attention to “the scene” it has just seen. On the one hand, according to Degenhardt, “Paulina calls attention to the very discrepancy between performance and religion that threatens to evacuate drama [and romance as well, I would add] of its religious significance.”69 On the other hand, the audience, like Paulina, may find the scene worthy of laughter. In his study of Turk plays, Burton notes that playwrights often treat Muslim-to-Christian conversion comically, as a way of producing “a source of anxiety-dispelling laughter.”70 We may see something similar here. If the “turning Turk” motif is an inversion of the infidel-conversion motif, Paulina’s laughter may seek to alleviate anxieties about conversion in general; it may also function as a skewering of romances’ conversion scenes. Paulina’s response to the baptism allows us to ask if religious conversion in romance has ever truly been about religion. Infidel conversions in romance may attempt to cover with a thin veil of religion other forms of desire: sexual, mercantile, and imperial. The audience is left to wonder whether the staged ritual they have just witnessed is actually baptism, a skepticism that might prompt larger theological questions about the capacity of religious ritual to achieve its claimed results.
Massinger’s treatment of the infidel-conversion motif reflects Protestant debates about the efficacy of baptism. Although Robinson, Degenhardt, and Neill suggest that Donusa’s baptism reflects the rise of Arminianism and anti-Calvinism in the early seventeenth century, the theology of Jacob Arminius was not universally accepted in the Church of England.71 A number of printed works indicate that Arminianism was controversial, among them an English translation of a Dutch text entitled A proclamation giuen by the discreet lords and states, against the slanders laid vpon the euangelicall and reformed religion, by the Arminians and separatists containing all the points, accusations, declarations and confessions, taken out of the last prouinciall synode holden at Arnhem (1618); William Prynne’s The Church of Englands old antithesis to new Arminianisme. Where in 7. anti-Arminian orthodox tenents, are euidently proued (1629); and Francis Rous’s The truth of three things, viz, the doctrine of predestination, free-will, and certainty of saluation. As it is maintayned by the Church of England, Wherein the grounds of Arminianisme is discouered, and confuted (1633). Moreover, although sacraments may have played a more prominent role in some English churches, Arminian theology did not radically alter the efficacy of sacraments. According to Arminius himself,
The sacraments of the New Testament have not the ratio of the sacraments beyond the very use for the sake of which they were instituted, nor do they profit those who use them without faith and repentance; that is, those persons who are of adult age, and of whom faith and repentance are required. Respecting infants, the judgment is different; to whom it is sufficient that they are the offspring of believing parents, that they may be reckoned in the covenant.72
Arminius argues that sacraments have different effects on different people: in adults they work only when they are accompanied by faith and repentance; in children, however, the efficacy of the sacraments depends on the child’s genealogy. The efficacy of the sacraments is racially hedged. Arminius’s theology may have altered the Church of England’s views of free will and predestination, but it did not alter its view of the sacraments.
I do not deny that English Arminianism provides a context for understanding this scene; nor do I deny the major role played by Catholic characters and Catholic magic in leading to the comic resolution. I do, however, question the assumption that the rise of religious ceremonialism in the Church of England means that sacraments recovered the miraculous power they had lost under Calvinism’s influence. That said, regardless of Massinger’s intention or how audience members (who undoubtedly held a variety of religious views and had varying degrees of competence in theology) might have viewed Donusa’s baptism, her Christian identity is not solely dependent upon it. The confirmation of her Christian identity is so integral to the reproductive ideology of comedy that it cannot rest solely on something as controversial as baptism.
Although disagreements about the efficacy of baptism persisted, both Catholics and various Protestants sects embraced the idea that suffering and martyrdom had a cleansing power that exceeded that of baptism.73 Of the early church fathers, Origen most emphatically asserted that martyrdom, which he characterized as “baptism of blood,” was superior to baptism by water.74 In early modern England, the English Jesuit Robert Southwell argued in An epistle of comfort,
Martidome seemeth to haue a prerogatyue aboue baptisme. For though baptisme perfectlye clense the soule, and release not onley the offense, but also the temporal punishment due unto the same: Yet sticketh the roote of sinne in the flesh, & partye baptysed retaynet in him, the badge and cognizance … of a sinner. But Martidomes virtue is such, that it not onley workth the same effect of baptism, but purchaseth also to the soule, forth with a perfect radiance of all concupiscence and inclination to sinne.75
Martyrdom resolved a multitude of problems that baptism never did, especially those pertaining to the concupiscence that arises from “the roote of sinne in the flesh.” From the Protestant side, in Thomas Becon’s A New Catechism the son explains that there are three types of baptism: “baptism of water”; martyrdom or “baptism of blood”; and the inward death of the sinful nature, “the baptism of the Holy Ghost” (222). He believes, like Origen, that martyrdom is superior to water baptism: “of all these three the baptism of water is the most inferior” (222). Martyrdom could also be understood as a sign of election. The bishop of London Thomas Ridley wrote concerning his impending execution, “[martyrdom] is an inestimable and honourable gift of GOD, given only to the true elects and dearly beloved of GOD.”76
Attention to martyrdom in The Renegado allows us to put aside questions about Massinger’s confessional identity. Martyrdom was truly a universal Christian precept, and both The Island Princess and The Renegado make use of its cultural prominence to recuperate the infidel-conversion motif. Perhaps the use of martyrdom to authenticate Quisara’s and Donusa’s conversion reflects anxieties about the inconstancy of women. Scholars who have studied early women martyrs have suggested that martyrdom became a way for women to prove their depth of knowledge in theological matters, the strength of their religious character, and indeed their religious autonomy.77 If this scholarship illustrates the importance of martyrdom for constructing women as religious subjects, Quisara’s and Donusa’s willingness to become martyrs helps to portray them as true Christians. I do not wish to suggest that these plays are chiefly concerned with the religious convictions of real women at home or abroad; I suggest, rather, that the desire to recuperate the infidel-conversion motif requires a discourse as powerful as that surrounding martyrdom in order to confirm Quisara’s and Donusa’s Christian identity. The discourse of martyrdom is powerful for purging the infidel-conversion motif of the concupiscence so closely associated with romance.
Armusia, Quisara, Vitelli, and Donusa do not literally die for their faiths. Nonetheless, their willingness to become martyrs demonstrates the depth of their spiritual commitment and their transcendence of the desires of the body. The infidel-conversion motif thus emerges in sharp relief from the plays’ romantic plots. As with Armusia and Quisara, the tragicomic form comes to the rescue: The born-again former pirate Grimaldi and the priest have a boat waiting for the newlyweds’ escape, which will allow Vitelli and Donusa to have “future happiness” beyond the confines of the play. Just as the tragicomic form structures the plot’s movement from the spiritual death of the infidel to the resurrection of the Christian convert, so the play’s plot stages and literalizes the spiritual significance of the romance rites of baptism (death) and marriage (spiritual union with Christ).
Even given the recuperation of the infidel-conversion motif in the works of Massinger, Fletcher, and Shakespeare (albeit with more ambiguity), it is important to note the dynamic interplay of race and gender in these plays. Not only do these plays imply that the religious identities of women are more malleable than those of men, but they also insist that the women who do convert are racial anomalies. Ania Loomba has noted that each of these plays emphatically characterize these woman as phenotypically different from others of their race.78 In The Merchant of Venice, for instance, Salarino insists that Jessica’s flesh and her blood are different from Shylock’s: “There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory; more between your bloods than there is between red wine and rhenish” (3.1.34–36, my emphasis). We cannot know whether Shakespeare imagined Jessica’s skin color to be different from Shylock’s. Did Shakespeare’s theater give Shylock tawny skin like Morocco? Yet the language of color, especially as it is applied to flesh, suggests that for Jessica to be incorporated into the Christian community, she must be more different from her father than black is different from white—yet if there is nothing more different than black is from white, how do the Venetians understand Jessica’s relationship to her father?79 Color also marks Quisara and Donusa as different from others of their race. Loomba observes, “Unlike Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, who is ‘with Phoebus amorous pinches black’, ‘the very sun’, the Portuguese solider Christophero tells us, dares not dye Quisara ‘Into his tauny Livery.’ ”80 And unlike Mustapha, who has a “grim aspect or toad-like complexion” (3.1.50), Donusa is associated with whiteness. Vitelli says to Donusa after their sexual encounter, “the sating of your lust hath sullied / The immaculate whiteness of your virgin beauties, / Too fair for me to look on” (3.5.46). Vitelli’s language implies that Donusa’s sexual whiteness or purity previously manifested itself visually. Although Vitelli no longer sees her immaculate whiteness, her physical appearance has not actually changed. Donusa’s servant, Manto, assures her in act 3, scene 1 that no one will be able to detect visually that she is no longer a virgin. Thus her conversion works to cleanse her whiteness; as Degenhardt observes, her conversion enacts a process of “re-virgination.”81
By early modern standards of beauty, Jessica, Quisara, and Donusa are fit objects of desire for European men. At the same time, these plays lay bare the connection between conversion and desire in romance. Although the infidel-conversion motif has its origins in Christianity’s claim to embrace all who believe, the motif’s past tendency to yoke conversion to sexual desire limits the kinds of difference that can be transformed and then incorporated in Christendom. Romance has often asserted that not all infidels are desirable as converts.