Abstract
This chapter discusses the phenomenon of ‘de-conversion,’ moving away from a converted state, through the loss of faith, into a sinful one. Many Protestants felt this was likely, even for the elect, and The Winter’s Tale shows the close association between a religious and an erotic loss of faith. As in other Shakespeare plays, the jealous man’s suspicion of his wife marks a refusal to accept, on faith, the holy ‘nothing’ of her chastity; instead, he looks for evidence, which can never be found. In contrast to Leontes’s jealousy, his wife, Hermoine, and his friend, Polixenes, offer an alternative and superior view of Protestant marital chastity that involves integrating the discourses of friendship and marriage and thereby beneficially intensifying the eroticism in both realms.
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Notes
- 1.
Qtd. In John Witte , Jr., From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition, 2nd edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 235.
- 2.
For comments about early modern Protestant miracles, see Alexandra Walsham who summarizes the widespread Protestant insistence (in contrast to the miracles attributed to Catholic saints) that ‘the age of miracles had passed.’ Walsham notes, however, that even among Protestants, “very few were prepared to declare that God never interrupted or overrode the laws of nature. To do so would be to imply that the Lord had tied himself exclusively to the use of secondary causes and this would derogate seriously from His supereme majesty.” Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 229.
- 3.
As James Schroder Lambert points out, the heart palpitations or “tremor cordis” felt by Leontes (1.2.110) signal an imminent and dramatic transformation of spirit, one which can take the subject closer to, or in this case, further away from God. Unspeakable Joy: Rejoicing in Early Modern England (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 2012), 172.
- 4.
In As You Like It, Touchstone also claims “the forehead of a married man [is] more honorable than the bare brow of a bachelor” (3.3.56–7).
- 5.
Aristotle explicitly demeaned the standard Athenian erotic relationship between the erastes (the older man) and the eromenus (the younger man) as an example of the detrimental effects of building friendships on “pleasure”; another alternative, building friendships on “utility,” was even worse.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Loeb-Harvard University Press, 1926; rpt. 1999), especially 464–469; 1157a. For definitions of erastes and eromenus, see K. J. Dover , Greek Homosexuality (1978) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 16. Lorraine Smith Pangle summarizes Aristotle’s overall stance in the Nicomachean Ethics as one that degrades “eros as based only on emotions and impulse and the pleasures of the senses, in contrast to the finest friendships, which rest on virtue and rational choice” as well as on equality. Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 41.
- 6.
C. Stephen Jaeger , Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 13–8, 44–9.
- 7.
Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 44.
- 8.
Jaeger , Ennobling Love, 243. See M. R. Godden , who summarizes a section of Alcuin’s text, “Interrogations el responsiones in Genesin.” When asked why God flooded the world in Noah’s time but burned Sodom , Alcuin’s answer, as Godden summarizes it, is that “God employed the milder element of water to punish lechery with women, this being a natural sin, and invoked the fire of the fiercer element to punish lechery with men, this being a sin against nature.” M. R. Godden , “The Trouble with Sodom: Literary Responses to Biblical Sexuality,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 77.3 (1995), 100.
- 9.
Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 94.
- 10.
Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 42.
- 11.
Michel de Montaigne , “Of Friendship ,” trans. Donald M. Frame , in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 140.
- 12.
Desiderius Erasmus, “In Praise of Marriage,” trans. Charles Fantazzi , in Erasmus on Women, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 70.
- 13.
Catherine Belsey, “Love in Venice,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992), 51.
- 14.
Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 62.
- 15.
This reading is commensurate with what Berry Waller stresses was the “elegiac tone” of much friendship discourse as bequeathed to the genre by Cicero’s Laelius (De Amicitia) (45 BC) which “centers on a dead friend.” Barry Weller, “The Rhetoric of Friendship in Montaigne’s Essais.” New Literary History 9.3 (1978), 504.
- 16.
James Holstun , “‘Will you Rent our Ancient Love Asunder’: Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton.” English Literary History (ELH) 54.4 (1987), 841.
- 17.
Traub , The Renaissance of Lesbianism, 174. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hermia presents the same idealized depiction of youthful same-sex “friendship” as “childhood innocence” (3.2.202) that is seen in Polixenes . The similarity of the presentations of this period of love in plays written so many years apart testifies to the significance of the theme for Shakespeare . For a different perspective, see Stephen Guy-Bray, who critiques the use of the adjective ‘mature’ to describe heterosexual relationships in Shakespeare . Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 204. In his rich discussion of As You Like It , Mario DiGangi suggests that this process of disentangling the competing erotics of friendship and marriage is not restricted to childhood but continues into early adulthood; Mario DiGangi argues persuasively that Rosalind is anxious about Oliver’s potentially excessive attraction to men and boys rather than women, and tests his resolve by pretending to seduce him in the guise of Ganymede. The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, 57–60.
- 18.
See Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 220–38. Adelman does not focus on this point in her analysis.
- 19.
Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 221.
- 20.
Guy-Bray, Homoerotic Space, 205.
- 21.
The similarity of the traits most desirable in both friendship and marriage—including loyalty, commensurability of values, the ability to offer honest advice and have it received respectively—may not include one quality, that of ‘equality,’ which is most highly treasured in deep friendships, according to Aristotelian tradition, but may not be so honored in marriage. There remains debate on the extent to which early modern marriages promoted, in either theory or practice, the goal of equality between spouses. It seems to me that any discourse stressing early modern marital ‘friendship’ would also need to emphasize equality, since equality was, almost by definition, so important to friendship. David Halperin argues that in Montaigne’s expressions of friendship for La Boétie, cited earlier, the erotic element is downplayed simply by virtue of the emphasis on equality: “by banishing any hint of subordination on the part of one friend to the other, and thus any suggestion of hierarchy, [Montaigne’s ] emphasis on the fusion of two souls into one actually distances such a love from erotic passion.” David M. Halperin , “How to Do The History of Male Homosexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6.1 (2000), 101. But equality and eroticism are not necessarily at odds in the language of early modern English marriages, despite Aristotelean precedent.
- 22.
Martin Luther, “Luther to George Spalatin; December 6, 1525,” in Luther’s Correspondence and other Contemporary Letters, trans. and ed. Preserved Smith and Charles M Jacobs . 2 vols. (Philadelphia: The Lutheran Publication Society, 1918), 356 (letter 719). I’m grateful to Andrew D. Weiner for this reference.
- 23.
In As You Like It, this possibility is played for laughs with the “lusty horn” that “thy father’s father wore … and thy father bore” (4.2.16–8); perhaps the all-male environment of Duke Senior and his men in the forest of Arden made the situation of infidelity more acceptable.
- 24.
Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 133.
- 25.
Huston Diehl , “‘Strike All that Look Upon With Marvel’: Theatrical and Theological Wonder in The Winter’s Tale,” in Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage, eds. Bryan Reynolds and William N. West (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005) 29.
- 26.
Richard McCoy, Faith in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 142.
- 27.
Calvin, Institutes, 2.8.3, 369. Elsewhere Calvin wrote that conscience “presses us within and shows in our sin just cause for [God’s] disowning us and not regarding or recognizing us as his sons.” Calvin, Institutes, 2.6.1, 341.
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Gleckman, J. (2019). Apostasy in The Winter’s Tale . In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_11
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