Copyright © 1999 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this header included, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribed institution. No copies of this work may be distributed electronically outside of the subscribed institution, in whole or in part, without express written permission from the JHU Press.
Theatre Journal 51.1 (1999) 1-20
 

'To allure vnto their loue': Iconoclasm and Striptease in Lewis Wager's The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene

Patricia Badir *

Lewis Wager's Reformation play The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene purports to be a "godlie, learned and fruitefull" play designed to teach and extol Protestant virtue. 1 From the outset, this Edwardian morality play assumes that the agendas of Protestantism and of the theatre are not necessarily incompatible, as the heroic drama of the Reformation is staged by means of the vita of Mary Magdalen. 2 Never acquiescing to the scourge of the antitheatricalist pen that apparently marked the play as "spitefully despised," the play's Prologue insists that the work encourages [End Page 1] manly virtue, praises God with unyielding vehemence and teaches true, stalwart devotion to the King. "[T]here was neuer thyng inuented," one is informed, "[m]ore worth, for mans solace to be frequented" (ll. 12, 36-37). 3 Making its robust Calvinism absolutely clear, Life and Repentaunce assures that the Magdalen's exquisitely dressed, pre-penitent body reflects not only the dangerous entrapments of femininity but also the pitfalls of perverse piety and, by extension, the decadent and degenerate Catholic Church. At the point of her conversion, the stone tablets of God's Law are presented to Mary by a personified looking-glass in whom she finds "knowledge of sinne." The figure of Lawe announces:

Wherefore as I sayd to a glasse compared I may be,
Wherin clerely as in the sunne lyght,
The weakenesse and sinne of him self he may se,
Yea and his owne damnation as it is ryght.

[ll. 1137-40]

Mary is hereafter re-fashioned into a Protestant exemplar: "sadly apparelled," supine and pious in her contrite posture. The play closes with long, sobering speeches from grave characters such as Justification and Love and the spectator witnesses the conversion of an immoderate, Catholic image into an appropriately fortified Protestant exemplar of the Word.

A mirror is, however, at once the vehicle of the plain and simple truth and a tool for vainglorious deception. Wager's play, this essay will argue, is a similarly paradoxical glass. Mary's return to the stage in decent dress is conceived of as analogous to the stripping of the altars as the spectator's idolatrous gaze is redirected to the naked truth of the scriptures. But, as in the presentation of the modern striptease, the divestment of Mary does not reveal the truth as promised. The magical and seductive trappings of the Magdalen's sumptuous past, like the stripper's exotic costume and props, go on pervading the saint's figure even once they have been cast aside. The metaphorically naked Mary invokes Roland Barthes' semantic of the striptease as she is re-dressed in "the enveloping memory of a luxurious shell." 4 The spectacular allure of the old faith permeates her body enacting "the dialectic between iconophilia and iconophobia" now recognized as integral to the propagation of Protestant culture. 5 Life and Repentaunce beguiles and deceives by means of the very scenography it condemns as degenerate. [End Page 2]

The allegorical representation of Mary Magdalen as the prototypical parishioner is not Wager's invention. Magdalen's medieval biography begins with the conflation of at least three New Testament figures: Mary Magdalen from whom Christ expels seven devils and who attends the sepulcher, Mary of Bethany who anoints Christ with her precious oils and Luke's unnamed sinner who bathes Christ's feet in the home of Simon the Pharisee. 6 By the thirteenth century, exegetical commentary and popular legend had further transformed this composite figure into the ex-prostitute whose exemplary penance rendered her the patron saint of all sinners. 7 Though initially the embodiment of material worldliness, Mary denies the temptations of luxury and the pleasures of the flesh and becomes the most sober and chaste of Christ's devotees. Katherine Jansen has argued that this "masterful stroke of endowing the concept of penance with corporeal existence" helped to diffuse the cult of penance in the late middle ages. 8

The degree to which Wager was familiar with the medieval Magdalen, represented in the English canon by the surviving Digby Mary Magdalene, is impossible to fully ascertain. Paul Whitfield White points out that Wager's sinner, like the East Anglian Mary, is of noble decent; she dines at the home of Simon the Pharisee and she associates with allegorical as well as biblical characters. 9 However, Wager was Protestant and, along with other Reformation publicists such as John Bale, he was [End Page 3] principally and actively "involved in the dissemination of Protestantism." 10 Wager's manipulation of the medieval psychomachia plot, therefore, initially establishes his protagonist as a representative of the unreformed church constituency; Mary's encounters with Infidelitie and his minions, Carnall Concupiscence, Cupiditie and Pride of Life (dressed as Catholic clergy) illustrate the depravity of the church and the pusillanimity of its concomitants. As observed by Laura King, Wager's reworking of the conversion narrative dramatizes the Reformation by means of "the topos of the transfer from Old Law to New Law"; Magdalen effectively becomes the Reformation Everyman. 11

The regeneration of Mary Magdalen transforms her into a Protestant exemplar whose words and works illustrate that salvation is awarded only by means of grace. In her final entrance, Mary is accompanied by the character of Justification who righteously reminds the audience that salvation is by no means the direct result of the love of Christ; it is by virtue of Christ's mercy alone that Mary is granted grace. Only after this postulate is fully understood, can divine Love enter the stage. The final lines of the play, spoken by Love himself resume the progress of Mary's repentance:

Fyrst, the lawe made a playne declaration,
That she was a chylde of eternall damnation:
By hearyng of the law came knowledge of synne,
Then for to lament truely she dyd begynne.
Nothyng but desperation dyd in hir remayne,
Lokyng for none other comfort but for hell payne.
But Christ whose nature is mercy to haue,
Came into this world synners to saue,
Which preached repentence synnes to forgeue,
To as many as in hym faithfully dyd beleue.
By the word came faith, Faith brought penitence,
But bothe the gyft of Gods magnificence.
Thus by Faith onely, Marie was iustified,
Like as before it is playnly verified,
From thens came loue, as a testification
Of Gods mercy and her iustification.

[ll. 2119-34]

This passage confirms that Wager's Reformist agenda was specifically Calvinist. Allegorical correlations between the Magdalen and the membership of the church are adapted in this post-Reformation incarnation to suggest that the sinful Mary stands for the lascivious excesses of Catholic allegiance while the penitent Mary upholds the rigorously Calvinist principles that conceptualised, for many, membership in a truly Protestant church. 12 [End Page 4]

Further investigation into the history of the Magdalen image, however, suggests the figure's exemplary devotion is qualified by the fact that the medieval church could not forget, as Haskins observes, that Mary Magdalen's sin "was the sin of her sexuality." Mary is remembered primarily as Luke's sinner, "the putative prostitute, embodying sexuality, sin, and woman kind." 13 Debora Shuger has further noted that Mary's "erotic fragrance" continues to pervade post-Reformation representations of the penitent. "In English Protestantism," she argues, "the protomodern chimerical self does not simply replace medieval erotic subjectivity; the popularity of Magdalene narratives in England through the first quarter of the seventeenth century points to cultural continuity rather than disjunction." 14 Magdalen's sensuousness is called into service in Life and Repentaunce in order to extend the allegorical use of the figure and render her as the embodiment of Ecclesia per se.

As Rachel Weil has noted, there is a the long-standing tradition of representing the Catholic church as an "overmighty, sexually profligate and obscenely rich woman." Upon occasion, "prostitution was itself imagined as an idolatrous religion: brothels were described as 'temples to Venus,' whores as 'nuns' or 'votaries of Venus,' sex as a sacrifice or act of worship." 15 Like her medieval precedents, Wager's pre-penitent Mary draws attention to herself by explicitly presenting her body as a pregnable space of erotic possibility. Through her, the Catholic Church becomes the familiar whore of [End Page 5] Rome--a habitus of vices, the devil's stable, the filthiest place in Hell (ll. 400, 417-18). Infidelitie says of Mary's body and his potential position within it, "[e]uery great house. . . [i]s full of naughtie seruantes both night and day" (ll. 518-19). He is, he believes, the "Serpents sede" dwelling in a noxious, putrid "receptacle." All effective devils must have their proper "habitacle" and Infidelity is confident that "the diuell at pleasure shall haue his recourse." "You shall see," he continues, with increasing repugnance, "that Maries heart within short space, For the diuell hym self shall be a dwellyng place" (ll. 322-30). Mary's easy seduction at the hands of Infidelitie and company is represented as an erotic spectacle of penetration: Infidelitie procures the lovers; Cupiditie opens the gate; Carnall Concupiscence kindles a fire so that "she beginneth to burn in carnall desyre" (l. 368). Infidelitie promises a titillated Concupiscence that "I would haue hir cleaue vnto you so fast, That she shall not forsake you while her life doth last" (ll. 371-72) and Pride of Life makes "an entrance" by Infidelitie's wicked craft "[s]o that we may come into hir at pleasure, Fillyng hir with wickednesse beyond all measure" (ll. 374-76). 16 Mary's response to this innuendo is to greet each vice character with a coy kiss lending justification to Infidelitie's remark: "[t]he more closely that you kepe fyre, no doubt The more feruent it is when it breaks out" (ll. 547-48). The lecherous bond between Mary and Infidelitie is secured by means of a punning match in which Mary demonstrates her vulgar rhetorical skill. When asked if she can play upon the virginals, she responds, "Yes swete heart . . . [t]here is no instrument but that handle I can, I thynke as well as any gentlewoman." At which point Infidelitie, picking up the pun, produces his recorder, noting, "[t]ruely you haue not sene a more goodlie pipe, It is so bigge that your hand can it not gripe" (ll. 838-44). Mary's inviting body and her bold, salacious words constitute, according to the vices, a bewitching, predatorial form, an irresistible image of pungent carnality that allures and entraps the most innocent and unsuspecting of prey.

Penetrability is, incidentally, characteristic of bodies other than Mary's. As Infidelitie "enters" the Magdalen, he himself is entered by the seven deadly sins described as "impes" that press upon him. Pride of Life further remarks that "[i]n vs foure without faile be contained As many vices as euer in this world raigned" (l. 125; ll. 377-78). Furthermore, the contents of each body of vice is enumerated in abhorrent detail: within Carnal Concupiscence there lies lechery, fornication, whoredom, adultery, rape, incest, sacrilege, softness, bestiality, blindness of mind, inconstancy, headines, and inconsideration (ll. 389-93); in Cupiditie there lurks theft, fraud, perjury, dissimulation, lying, rapine, inhumanity, inquietness of mind, falsehood and vanity, vengeance, envy, rancor and ire, murder, war, treason, greedy desire and usury as well as dice and card playing (ll. 407-14); in Pride of Life there lies idolatry, boasting, arrogance, and vainglory not to mention obstinacy, disobedience, idleness and negligence (ll. 427-32). The vices are both willing corrupters of Mary's body and labile, pregnable spaces themselves apparently effeminized through their proximity to a libidinous and promiscuous woman. To borrow from Stephen Orgel's important discussion of [End Page 6] Renaissance sexuality, "in an age in which sexuality itself is misogynstic," Mary is dangerous to men because sexual passion for Mary renders men effeminate. By extension, the Catholic Church is also effeminizing in that those allured unto its love become weakened and corrupted by the predatorial power of its idols. 17

The play's antifeminism is always at surface level and yet the caricature of Mary's lascivious pale-haired lover reconfirms that the play's critique is continually redirected at Rome. 18 Mary narrates her encounter with the mysterious man with the "flaxen beard," flirtatiously recounting her shock upon discovering him in her bed. She tells of her seduction, aided by smells of musk and civet, and concludes by defending her fall as the result of natural feminine submission to the will of men. Infidelitie confirms Mary's self-analysis by suggesting that she alone is responsible for her insatiable sexuality.

I beshrew your hearts, whore and thefe wer agreed
You knew the spirit wel inough before you cam there
I am sure, that so honestly he had you feed,
That the reward dyd put away the feare.

[ll. 1105-8]

As White has remarked of John Bale's Protestant interludes, "this dramatic inversion of the old Virtues as new Vices gives the satire a double-edge, for it not only identifies the Catholic priesthood as agents of evil, it exposes their duplicitous behavior in masquerading as proponents of religious truth." Indeed much of Wager's project is similar to that of John Bale who makes use of the theatre to detach the icons and the authority figures of the old faith from their sacred history and to realign them with idolatrous indulgence and licentious obscenity. Wager, like Bale, "wants his audience to question their conditioned responses to the external signs of religious truth in an age when competing institutions were laying exclusive claim to it." 19

It can be argued, however, that Life and Repentaunce, while packed with Calvininst theology, stops short of the overt iconoclasm of Bale's King Johan in which the devil administers the sacrament of Confession or his Thre Lawes in which one of the vice figures is literally named Idolatria. 20 And yet, the image of Wager's Magdalen, casting lewd glances toward those too weak to look away, summons forth caustic Reformist descriptions of the often lavish three-dimensional carvings, in wood or in stone, of saints whose veneration, was also conceived of in ambiguously pornographic terms. Protestant iconoclasts railed vociferously against free-standing images thought to be "great puppets for old fooles to play with"--a statement remarkably similar in tone and sentiment to Wager's take on the Magdalen for, in both cases, the tricks of [End Page 7] "puppetry" slip both alliteratively and metaphorically into a lewd critique of "popery." 21 More specifically, Pride of Life's command that the Magdalen let her "eies roll" (followed by the stage direction indicating that she does so) is evocative of the most notorious of the old Catholic puppets, the Rood of Boxley, that apparently had movable eyes and lips (ll. 616-18). The Rood was brought into the marketplace in Maidstone in 1538 where its mechanics were exposed to public view. The exhibition was followed by a sermon from the Bishop of Rochester and it was then destroyed and burned on a bonfire. 22 White suggests Bale's iconoclastic treatment of Catholic ceremonies works in a fashion analogous to the rood burning in that both demystify the object of veneration by displacing it from its original holy context. White's argument applies directly to Wager's play wherein the once-venerated saint's statue is vigorously debased by its relocation in a morally and physically corrupted universe. 23

But there is more going on here. Wager is not concerned with just any form of holy image; he rails specifically against the statue. His concern is typical of early Reformist iconoclasm directed more pointedly toward the three-dimensional image. The statue, because it invited physical proximity and even direct contact, was thought to promote idolatrous attitudes with greater efficiency. Protestant anxiety thus appears to have arisen from the knowledge that there is something fundamentally "dangerous" about the free-standing figure. 24 Theorizing the allure of the statue, Roland Barthes argues that the presence of volume intimates that there is an "inside" to the image that solicits further scrutiny; the statue implies both a "plenitude" and a "truth" with respect to its significance. I would argue that it is this sense of the powerful "inside" of Mary Magdalen's medieval iconic representations, that is reimagined by Wager as inviting salacious "visitation, exploration, penetration." 25

In keeping with the pornographic subtext, and in preparation for the climactic striptease, the stage action of first half of Life and Repentaunce dwells on the dressing of the Magdalen. In the same way that devotees dressed and adorned the statues of popular saints with fine clothing, jewels and incense, Wager has Infidelitie and his cohorts in vice decorate the body of their star pupil. The spectator is provided with [End Page 8] peep-show perspective as the dialogue suggests that the stage becomes a dressing-room mirror in which the performer is adorned for public consumption by her lecherous disciples. In the words of the Elizabethan homilist denouncing "the idoles of our women Saints" Mary becomes a "nice and well-trimmed" harlot who is, Wager confirms, "plesant to euery man's eye" (l. 130). 26

From her first entrance her words draw attention to the erotic possibilities of her costume. Her problem, it seems, is that her tailor has sold her, at considerable expense, an ill-formed garment which does not show off what she deems to be a waist more proper than that of any gentlewoman in the land. Infidelitie takes his cue and notes that the garment cannot be mended ("it is past amendement, Meddle with it, and you spyll it vtterly"), alerting the spectator to the seeping carnality of Mary's flesh (ll. 173-74). "Of taylers craft," Infidelitie, not surprisingly, has "some skill" and, drawing upon both sartorial and pedagogic meanings of the verb "to dress," he proclaims:

Shortly my ofspryng and I shall her so dresse,
That neither law nor prophets she shall regard,
No though the sonne of God to her them expresse.

[l. 179; ll. 318-20]

It is Cupiditie, who is elected responsible for Mary's fashion education and he advises his pupil to assure that her garments be of the "newest guise" while Pride of Life joins voices with Carnall Concupiscence to lecture Mary on the proper uses of "bodies geare" (l. 623; l. 150). Mary proves a star pupil, responding to her teachers' fervor with: "[y]our wordes do not onely prouoke my desire, But in pleasure they set my heart on fyre" (ll. 686-87). She is shamelessly established as a highly sought after article of desire within a depraved culture of relic consumption. Her decorated body is more than a simple reiteration of the covetous Mary of medieval legend; she is pointedly figured as a three-dimensional object of erotic idolatry to be adorned, worshipped and ravished by her bedazzled patrons. 27

The concern over the potency and allure of fashionable femininity extends beyond Mary to the effeminate vice figures who are themselves "dressed up" as Catholic clergymen. This dissembling is further evidence of Mary's corruption--Carnall Concupiscence becomes Pleasure, "And that pretie Marie loueth beyond all measure." Moreover, the vices' ability to make artifice pass for virtue ensures that the duplicitousness of Catholicism remains associated with the affectations of femininity (ll. 32, 33, 51, 466). 28 [End Page 9]

The use of costume as erotic accessory is clearest in the vice figures' promotion of Mary's lingerie as luxurious finery that embodies not only the extravagance (and implicit physical discomfort) that were the demarcations of class status, but also the illicit allure of fetish gear. 29 Of Mary's breasts Pride of Life suggests "[y]our garments must be so worne alway, That your white pappes may be seene if you may." Concupiscence concludes that "[b]oth damsels and wiues vse many such feates, I know them that will lay out their faire teates, Purposely men to allure vnto their loue, For it is a thyng that doth the heart greatly moue" (ll. 674-81). Pointing once again to the centrality of artifice in the advancement of seduction, Infidelitie insists that Mary wear nothing over her bodice ("overbody") in order to fully display the contorted features of her refined figure. "Let your body be pent," he insists, "and togither strained, As hard as may be, though therby you be pained . . . Your nether garments must go by gymmes and ioynts Aboue your buttocks thei must be tied on with points" (ll. 690-701).

The recurring references to underwear determine that this is the business of exposure; the dialogue implies that the stage is a dressing-room mirror within which the spectator views, illicitly, the fleshy, corrupt body of the woman beneath the stays and joints. 30 For the Mary of Life and Repentaunce, transgression lies not only in her bedroom femininity, but particularly in the way in which her costume suggests the possibility of there being no costume at all--a prospect alluded to by Infidelitie early on in the play when he suggests men would "liefer haue you naked, be not afrayde, Then with your best holy day garment" (ll. 303-4). Interestingly, the flesh promised by the text is described as "clean." Pride of Life calls Mary "a prety wench and a cleane" (l. 358), and the vices' song refers to Mary as "[s]o cleane, so swete, so fayre, so good, so freshe, so gay" (l. 885). Cleanliness, in these instances, signals decadence and inattention to matters divine, an observation consistent with Keith Thomas's conclusion that "bathing, particularly in warm water, long retained undesirable associations with decadent Romans, brothels and sexuality." 31 Moreover, the make-up, the silks and the satins as well as the "wiers and houpes" [l. 700] of Mary's prurient boudoir amount to a mock inventory akin to the lengthy lists of the contents of shrines provided by cranky commissioners under the employment of the Reformed church. [End Page 10] Of particular interest here are the combs, caps, shrouds, bodices, girdles and sleeves, not to mention the teeth, locks of hair, and other miscellaneous body parts that filled parish reliquaries and fortified clerical coffers. 32 The Reformist scorn for the bodily materiality of idol veneration by means of perfume, incense or candle light is also reflected in Infidelitie's suggestion that Mary sprinkle her garments with rose water and use her civet, pomander and musk so that "the odor of you a myle of, a man may smell" (ll. 770-74).

The idolatrous treatment of body parts and their covering is behind John Calvin's derogatory description of the revered head of Mary Magdalen allegedly located in Marseilles. "Men do make a treasure of her," Calvin writes disdainfully, "as it were a god descended from heaven." 33 Richard Layton's 1535 inventory of parish artifacts expresses similar suspicion of the abject corporeality of the cult of the saints when it notes "a great comb called St. Mary Magdalene's comb." 34 Calvin's and Layton's remarks alert one to the awareness, both before and after the Reformation, of the sensuous appeal of the Magdalen's hair--a luxuriant covering that, in Wager's play, seems to function as a metaphor for the practice of gilding statues in gold and other precious metals. Cupiditie concludes of Mary's hair, "[a] craft you must haue, that yellow it may be made, With some Goldsmyth you may your selfe acquaint, of whom you may haue water your haire for to paint." 35 Gilded hair, like the gilded statue "yong men vnto your loue it will allure," while flowing curls articulate and accentuate (as does the bon grace upon her head) each of the Magdalen's physical features (ll. 639-43). 36 Hair, like the fetish gear of pornographic spectacle, determines the contours of the artful figure; her face, in particular her eyes, are framed by the strands that have been controlled and tamed to seduce.

The haire of your head shyneth as the pure gold,
Your eyes as gray as glasse and right amiable,
Your smylyng countenance, so louely to behold,
To vs all is moste pleasant and delectable,
Of your commendations who can be wearie?
Huffa mystresse Mary, I pray you be mery.
Your lyps as ruddy as the redde Rose,
Your teeth as white as euer was the whales bone,
So cleane, so swete, so fayre, so good, so freshe , so gay . . .

[ll. 877-85] 37 [End Page 11]

The above-cited passage completes the extended blazon of Mary's anatomy which is decked out, like the statue of the parish saint, inviting, as Barthes argues, "visitation, exploration and penetration." The truth of the inside is enticing and depraved, commanding nothing less than the wickedly licentious gaze of the spectator. This scene seems to be the play's centerfold, marking the mid-point of the drama where the three-dimensional puppet will be replaced by the flattened, two-dimensional surfaces of the Word. The stage ceases to serve as the mirror of vanity or as the vehicle for voyeuristic idolatry when the looking-glass is handed to Mary who sees in it the naked truth of her own odiousness.

Jansen has convincingly argued that, subsequent to the Fourth Laterine Council in 1215, the reformulation of the doctrine of penance helped to "rejuvenate the cult of the Magdalen" with the result that "the saint effectively came to represent the sacrament of penance in the late medieval period." 38 Wager's staging of the conversion of Mary Magdalen is in keeping with this tradition in its exoneration of idolatrous worship through the recognition of the supremacy of God's Law. To this narrative, and consistent with Protestant rhetoric on the drama of the Reformation, Wager adds the element of heroic struggle. The moment of conversion is incited by the appearance of the defiant figure, the Lawe, whose presence before the fallen Mary makes possible the entrance of the equally confident Knowledge of Sinne. These two robust figures battle valiantly against the lecherous and effeminate Infidelitie for control over the forlorn Ecclesia and their success becomes a manly victory of reason over desire and of the future over the past.

The triumph of Lawe and Knowledge drive Mary's eye's upward, away once and for all from the now tarnished appeal of the lurid Infidelitie (l. 1160). This triumph is signaled by the presence of Christ himself who exorcises the demons from Mary's now contrite body. It is at this jubilant moment that one notes a radical shift in the discussion of clothing and undress.

Auoide out of this woman thou Infidelitie,
With the .vii. diuels which haue hir possessed,
I banish you hence by the power of my diuinitie,
For to saluation I haue hir dressed.

[ll. 1385-88, emphasis mine]

When Mary next returns to the stage, she is described as "sadly apparelled" and carrying a jar of ointment (l. 1765). Her body, now free of vice as Faith and Repentaunce have taken the places of Pride of Life, Cupiditie and Carnall Concupiscence, is no longer an abused icon. Mary is re-dressed, re-formed and properly
pious.

At the moment of the conversion, Life and Repentaunce becomes a dramatic reenactment of Edward's third set of injunctions issued in 1547, roughly the same time the play was written. These resolute pronouncements ordered visitors to "take way, utterly extinct, and destroy all shrines, covering of shrines, all tables, candlesticks, [End Page 12] trindles and rolls of wax, pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition, so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glasses, window, or elsewhere within their churches and houses." 39 Cranmer's catechism (1548), also roughly contemporary to Wager's play, was adapted to the same purpose, ordering that "thou shalte not gilylte [statues], and set them in costlye tabernacles, and decke theim with coates or shertes, thou shalt not sense them, make vows or pilgremages to them, sette candelles before them, and offer vnto them, thou shalt not kysse their feete, and bowe down vnto them." 40 Visitation reports are replete with evidence suggesting that Reformers did indeed go after the richly adorned statues in English parish churches. For example, one of Cromwell's agents stripped the shrine of St. Anne at Buxton of its "cruchys, schertes, and schetes, with wax offeryd," while Dr. London, writing to Sir Richard Rich, reports "I have pullyd down the image of your lady at Caversham, with all trynkettes abowt the same, as schrowdes, candels, images of wexe, crowches, and brochys . . . The image ys thorowly platyd over with sylver. I have putt her in a chest fast lockyd and naylede, and by the next bardge that comythe uppe it schall be browgt to my lorde, with her cootes, cappe and here." 41

Evidently, the Reformation stripping of the altars makes divestment a profoundly moral act. Likewise, Wager's Mary Magdalen is demystified when she returns undressed, her eroticism absorbed in Protestant polemic. This paradoxical process by which a woman is desexualized the very moment she is stripped down, flirts with the logic of the striptease. The stripper's process of undressing provides but "a few particles of eroticism" which are "in fact absorbed in a reassuring ritual which negates the flesh as surely as the vaccine or the taboo circumscribe and control the illness or the crime." Wager initially uses clothing to make voyeurs of his public but, like the striptease, the props and participants in Mary's decadent past serve to inculcate readers and viewers with "a touch of evil," the better to plunge them, afterwards into "a permanently immune Moral Good." 42 The body of Wager's reformed penitent is not supposed to be the subject of erotic spectacle because she is cloaked in a "whole series of coverings," those of the model female penitent.

What Wager's Magdalen is actually wearing when she returns is unclear in the text, although the directions appear to allude to the convention of performing public penance en chemise or in loose undergarments, so that the penitent is released from the trappings of her covetous and unnatural style in order to convey a modest humility [End Page 13] before God. 43 In this sense, Wager's compunctious Mary may be an allusion to the ideal female penitent whose exemplary piety is demonstrated by extraordinary humility, devotion and, most importantly, silence. 44 On the other hand, given the frequency with which metaphors of nakedness figure in Puritan rhetoric, the modestly dressed penitent may hold further significance for those who read or gaze upon her. The above-cited iconoclastic injunctions reveal an appropriation of the language of clothing, and subsequently of nudity in order to advocate the superiority of the naked truth. Judy Kronenfeld argues that this kind of slippage proves that the rhetoric of religious controversy did not systematically place the idea of nudity in binary opposition to that of "decent and comely apparel." Nudity could also be associated with the "naked truth." Within the framework of Renaissance Christian cultural [End Page 14] expectations, the assumption that "clothing is a good if the alternative is a shameful or uncomely nakedness," operates in conjunction with the assumption that "clothing is not a good if the alternative is the naked truth." Christ, within this rubric, is both the naked truth at the source of all doctrine and belief and he is also the metaphoric salvic clothing that swathes the nakedness of sinners. "Christ embodies," writes Kronenfeld, "at one and the same time, the values of appropriate nakedness and appropriate clothing." 45 A similar case could be made for Wager's Mary who, in the tradition of the Magdalen nude, is metaphorically stripped bare in order to embody the purity of the church she represents and yet, on stage, remains sadly dressed, conveying a comely modesty appropriate to her penitent status before God. 46

But neither the recognition of the sanitizing properties of the striptease nor of the sanctity of nudity fully explains the bold staging of the bathing of Christ's feet in the home of Simon the Pharisee at the end of Life and Repentaunce. The performed gesture, wherein the once sinful hair becomes the humble means to cleanliness, demands intimate physical interaction and thus threatens to undercut the intended sobriety of the stage image. What is unsettling is that the relationship between Christ and the penitent Magdalen is palpably corporeal, a fact that is intensified when Christ directs attention to the touchability of his own body. "[T]ouche any partes, Of my body," he says, as if in anticipation of the noli me tangere sequence that illustrates the transformation of corporeal to divine love at the moment of the resurrection (ll. 1871-72). 47 Mary's physical knowledge of Christ supports Debora Shuger's conclusion that representations of the Magdalen are partly concerned with "the body of Christ, that is, the real [End Page 15] presence" and as such they are "eucharistic as well as erotic--or, rather both at once." 48 Moreover, physical proximity and bodily contact, the pathological epistemologies of the first half of the play, serve, at this point, to teach recalcitrant bodies to serve the body of Christ.

When I came into your house the truth to say,
You gaue me no water to washe my feete withall,
The woman hath washed them here this day,
With the teares of her eies which on them did fall,
With the haire of hir head she hath wiped the same,
Thinking all other clothes therto ouer vile,
Horrible in hir sight is hir synne and blame,
Thinkyng her self worthy of eternall exile.
You gaue me no kisse as the maner of the countrey is
But this woman since the tyme that I came in,
Would not presume my head or mouth to kisse,
But my feete, lamenting in her heart for hir syn.
My head you did not anoynt with oyle so swete,
As men of this countrey do their guestes vse,
But with most precious balme she anointed my fete,
No cost about that oyntment she doth refuse

[ll. 1901-16]

The play seems to acknowledge, however, that it treads across highly disputed territory as it relentlessly reasserts the integrity of its intentions. The stage direction that precedes the bathing intercepts and mediates the seemingly anticipated antitheatricalist blast by instructing Mary to "creepe vnder the table, abyding there a certayne space behynd . . . as it is specified in the Gospell" (between ll. 1828 and 1829). This instruction may well be theatrical shorthand but the authoritative reference to Luke, as well as the implication that Mary does in fact retreat behind a table, would direct readers' as well as spectators' attention to the Gospels, here represented by the long, sobering speeches of Justification and Love. 49 As in Bale's Thre Lawes where the resolutely two-dimensional virtues demand what Ritchie Kendall describes as "critical detachment" rather than the all too playful "emotional spontaneity" encouraged by [End Page 16] the artful vice figures, the dialogue of Life and Repentaunce regulates the disturbing corporeality of the penitent's actions by reconfiguring the act of gazing itself. 50 Diehl says that "the breaking of familiar and well-loved images necessitates the making of new ones" and that these "new ways of seeing" were more "skeptical, more self-reflexive, and more attentive to what lies beyond visual representations." 51 Described on the title page as "very delectable for those which shall heare or reade the same," Life and Repentaunce may well be an example of the Reformation "way of seeing" in which lookers are conceived of as listeners. Having denounced the empty visuality of Catholic stagecraft, Wager will now convey, to those who care to hear, "what is true beleue, Wherof the Apostles of Christ do largely write."

Of the Gospell we shall rehearse a fruictuful story,
Written in the .vii. of Luke with wordes playne
The storie of a woman that was right sory
For that she had spent her life in sinne vile and vain. . .

[ll. 53-54, 59-62]

Hearing and reading become the privileged epistemologies as the visual representation of the new faith is flanked and flattened by words and by text.

As the almost verbatim transcription of Calvin's Institutes in Faith's long speech suggests, Wager's finale circumvents Puritan opposition by conceiving of the stage as book and of the figures upon it as sermonizers. For the Protestant preacher, images were not necessarily demonic, particularly if one could look upon them as one "looketh upon a book." Nicholas Shaxton, for example, felt that the contemplation of a picture, when accompanied by appropriate textual interpretations, encouraged "men's minds be stirred and kindled sometimes to virtue and constancy, in faith and love towards God, and sometimes to lament for their sins and offenses." 52 The two-dimensional, printed likeness is understood as less problematic than the statue for it has no inside. As Barthes writes, "it cannot provoke the indiscreet act by which one might try to find out what there is behind" the surface. 53

The process by which the stage is reconfigured as a page is apparent but the question remains as to whether the play successfully contains the eroticism that the highly charged act of touching Christ inevitably intimates. Consider again the remarks of Wager's Repentaunce:

As thus, like as the eyes haue ben vaynly spent
Vpon worldly and carnall delectations,
So henceforth to wepyng and teares must be bent,
And wholly giuen to godly contemplations.
Likewise as the eares haue ben open alway
To here the blasphemyng of Gods holy name, [End Page 17]
And fylthy talkyng euermore night and day,
Nowe they must be turned away from the same.
. . .
The tong which blasphemie hath spoken,
Yea and filthily, to the hurt of soule and body:
Wherby the precepts of God haue ben broken,
Must hence forth praise God for his mercy daily.

[ll. 1441-56]

Mary herself participates in this blazon of contrition when she reverently insists "[b]ut like as the parts of my body in tymes past, I haue made seruants to all kynd of iniquitie, The same iniquitie away for euer I do cast, And will make my body seruant to the veritie" (ll. 1789-92). All her worldly attributes, "through vnbelief of synne" deployed in acts of carnal pleasure, will henceforth help only Him "and for his sake other innocents" (ll. 1781-1820). While conceived with eyes diverted from earthly matters and with ears open to the Word, this representation eventually returns to the physicality of Mary Magdalen, itemizing her features (particularly eyes, ears and hair) as penitential attributes.

Here Life and Repentaunce runs unwittingly into the history of the Magdalen image for it was Gregory the Great, not Luke, who determined that the blazon would be the paradigm for describing the Magdalen. Gregory writes of eyes that once gazed upon worldly objects, now cast upon the feet of the Lord; of hair, the crowning ornament of a vainglorious figure, now modestly drying the Lord's blessed feet; of lips that once spoke words of pride but now kiss chastely. Despite the play's many assertions of its textual integrity, of its scriptural authority, the woman it purports to describe is a fragmented figure the sum of whose parts supersedes that of the whole. Despite the appeal to the stability of the text, the body always comes into play again because it is the body, with respect to the Magdalen, that really matters. Her hair, her coy beguiling glances, her genuflecting body refuse to be desexualized by the text that tries to read her. Life and Repentaunce resolves the Magdalen's sin by reassembling her in a posture of pious contrition, but the end product remains a dictionary of fetishized body parts that seem to perpetually put into danger the very exercise into which they have been conscripted. Wager's point is to discover the original Magdalen of the Gospels, to put an end to the infinity of dressings placed upon her by the medieval cult of the saints and yet even stripped of all her artful gear, Mary's body continues to escape its intended bounds. 54

Paula Findlen has noted that from 1520 onwards the nudes of Titian and other continental masters (many of whom, incidentally, painted Magdalens) were reproduced by engravers such as Marcantonio Raimondi, Giulio Bocasone and Agostino Carracci for popular consumption. These Renaissance pornographers "often presented their work as the end of metaphor, a negation of the eloquence and erudition that defined humanist culture," and "loudly proclaimed that their works laid bare the truth, stripped of all the metaphorical witticisms and allegories that characterized the contemporary culture of learning." Pornography, like the stripping of the altars, [End Page 18] "purported to unveil 'the thing' itself." 55 That images of the penitent Magdalen had the potential to stray from devotion toward erotica was perhaps most intriguingly illustrated in the seventeenth-century English court where Charles II had all of his mistresses famously painted penitently à la madelen. 56

Wager's problem is not just the over-determined image of the Magdalen, but is also more generally his choice of the theatre as medium for his Calvinist message. Wager has replaced the wood or stone of the religious statue with the body of an actor that will illustrate, "figuratively to speak," the Word that is read aloud. But the Prologue's nervous appeal to "all wise men" whom he hopes will "accept" theatrical convention, suggests that, on some level, Wager knows that actors' bodies inevitably arouse both concern and curiosity. This curiosity cannot be contained once the inventory of Mary's reformed body parts reinstates the saint's three-dimensional presence. The reassembled, redeemed, "true" woman who kneels before Christ, near enough for him to touch, cannot help but connote "the luxurious shell" that once covered her body as the memory of the sequential unveiling of the statue reinstates the purloined gaze of the first half of the play. 57

Stripping cannot, in Wager's case, reveal the naked truth, but rather draws further attention to distortion and deception. Beneath Mary's sad costume, there lies, in fact, not the prurient sexuality of a woman, but the body of the boy actor. 58 Despite the fact that Life and Repentaunce is a play about the undressing of artifice, its success depends upon keeping some things artfully covered up. Cross-dressing was, of course, one of the principle concerns of Puritan anti-theatricalists and it is worth remembering Prologue's confession that some felt Life and Repentaunce ought to be "spitefully despised" regardless of its overtly Protestant theology. While Wager may have wanted his theatre to discourage sexual promiscuity, militant opponents may have surmised that those allured unto the love of the luxurious Magdalen would also gaze longingly at the "sadly dressed" boy. "The argument against transvestite actors," Orgel notes, warns that male spectators "will be seduced by the impersonation, and losing their reason will become effeminate, which in this case means not only that they will lust after the woman in the drama, which is bad enough, but also after the youth beneath the woman's costume." By dwelling upon the contours of the penitent's contrite body, Wager solicits the antitheatricalist fear that it is "art itself that effeminates." 59 Thinking back to Wager's representation of vice--as pregnable and bedecked figures whose "Catholic" antics captivate the spectator in the first half of the play--one gets the feeling that this fear is one that Wager shares as much as shuns. Wager's play promises, like the mirror, to reflect back the plain, simple, unadorned truth, freed from the tricks and trappings of an outmoded faith where every sign was thought to [End Page 19] embody the truth it represented. But, as Barthes reminds us, the process of stripping away coverings never reveals the bare totality. This is particularly true when the stripping takes place on a stage where coverings, by necessity, proliferate. Wager's inadvertent encounter with the phenomenal pressures of the theatrical experience suggest that the iconoclastic staging of reform could by no means fully reform the fundamentally iconic stage.

One further observation can be gleaned from the construction of a homology between striptease, the dramatization of the stripping of Mary Magdalen and the stripping of the altars over the course of the English Reformation. On the feast of the Assumption, 1537, Thomas Emans entered the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham where, according to his own testimony, he kissed the feet of the famed and much honored statue of the Virgin that had recently been stripped of all her adornments by Cromwell's ruthless commissioners. Emans turned to the people gathered about him and spoke the following words: "Though our Lady's coat and her jewls be taken away from her, the similitude of this is no worse to pray unto having a remors unto her above, then it was before." Eamon Duffy has suggested that the distinction that Emans made between art and its "heavenly original" reflects a politic acquiescence to the strictures of the Reformation. If Duffy is correct, Emans' testimony suggests that he had, likely for reasons of self-preservation, taken on what Diehl has properly identified as the Reformation "way of seeing." But witnesses testified that Emans also cried "Lady art thou stripped now? I have seen the day that as clean men hath been stripped at a pair of gallows as were they that stripped thee . . . This lady is now stripped, I trust to see the day that they shall be stripped as naked that stripped her." 60 Arguably Emans' retort draws its rhetorical force from the recognition of the very slipperiness of metaphors of divestment that can convey both the modesty of decent and comely apparel or the obscenity of nudity. The removal of clothing may reveal a truth that was deceptively veiled but the act of removal is itself highly charged with a performativity that fragments the image into a clutter of problematic representational conventions. Emans' description of the spectacular nature of the iconoclastic attack upon the statue of Walsingham recognizes that, like the drama of the scaffold, the stripping of the altars was, in fact, a choreographed spectacle of power as much about the material control of private bodies and the institutional regulation of desire as about theological doctrine or truth. But Emans' description is even more threatening in its exposure of the riggings and gear of Reformation iconoclasm. His outburst recognizes that Protestant enlightenment deceived by means of the obscene devices it exposed, reminding us that, like Wager's Life and Repentaunce, the drama of the Reformation placed a series of coverings upon the body of the church at the same time that reformers pretended to strip it bare. 61

Patricia Badir is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She is presently writing a book on post-Reformation representations of Mary Magdalene. Her articles have been published in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Theatre Survey, Exemplaria and other journals.

Notes

* I would like to thank the students of my two graduate courses who have allowed me to entertain and develop the ideas put forth in the essay. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Gretchen Minton, Camilla Pickard, Kate Willems and Sheila Christie.

1. The full title reads as follows: A new Enterlude, neuer before this tyme imprinted, entreating of the Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene not only godlie, learned and fruitefull, but also well furnished with pleasaunt myrth and pastime, very delectable for those which shall heare or reade the same (London: John Charlewood, 1566; rpt. 1567). The only modern edition of the play is Paul Whitfield White's old spelling critical edition with introduction entitled Reformation Biblical Drama in England, The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene and The Story of Iacob and Esau (New York: Garland, 1992). Subsequent citations refer to this edition and will be noted parenthetically. White assumes that though the play was first entered in the Stationers' Register in 1566, the reference to "the Kyng" (as opposed to the Queen) as well as its obvious indebtedness to Calvin's Institutes point to an Edwardian date (xxii-iii).

2. Reformation use of theatricality has been discussed at length elsewhere. Roy Strong's groundbreaking study, The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), was an early work in this field. Mark Breightenberg's, "Reading Elizabethan Iconicity: Gorboduc and the Semiotics of Reform" (English Literary Renaissance 18.2 [1988]: 194-217) argued convincingly that text and icon (word and theatre), rather than oppositional binary terms, are "isomorphic categories which opposing political and religious ideologies sought to appropriate and govern" (217). John King has illustrated that early evangelicals, contrary to common stereotypes of the Puritans, approved of drama and that scriptural themes are the "hallmark of Edwardian drama" (English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982], 277-80). Comprehensive studies of Reformation drama have been undertaken by Ritchie Kendall (The Drama of Dissent [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986]) who argues that "repeatedly, in the non-conformist canon, the reader encounters the products of an inherently theatrical imagination" (8) and by Paul Whitfield White (Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in Tudor England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993]) who proves that "from the 1530s, playwright and players, both amateur and professional, contributed to the formation of an emerging Protestant culture" (3). Particularly relevant to this essay is Huston Diehl's influential Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), which suggests that while England's Protestant reformers invoked antitheatricalist sentiment in their denunciation of the images, spectacles, rituals, and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, they nevertheless "imagine[d] their struggle to wrest the English Church from Rome as a grand heroic drama, staging their defiant acts of iconoclasm in highly theatrical ways and constructing Protestant martyrdoms as powerful theater" (14).

3. Medieval defenders of devotional drama argued that plays assist the worship of God by allowing for the visualization of sin, by inciting great passion and wonder for the power of God; by providing palatable education in a form which entertained while it instructed; and perhaps most importantly, by imprinting the truth of redemption and salvation, in visual form upon the memories of the spectators. See Clifford Davidson, ed., A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), 97-98.

4. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 85.

5. The phrase "the dialectic between iconophilia and iconophobia" is borrowed from Diehl, Staging Reform, 26.

6. Matthew 26:6-7 describes a woman of Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, who came to Jesus "with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table." Mary Magdalen is named in Matthew 27-28 as present at the crucifixion and at the sepulchre. Mark 14:3 notes that while Jesus was at Bethany "in the house of Simon the leper . . . a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head." Mark also notes the presence of Mary Magdalen at the crucifixion and at the sepulchre (15-16). Luke 7 recounts the events in the home of Simon the Pharisee (not the leper) where "a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the pharisee's house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment." Luke goes on, in the next chapter, to mention Mary Magdalen by name as the woman "from whom seven demons had gone out" (8:2). Mary of Bethany, who in Luke's Gospel "sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying," is the sister of Lazarus whom Christ raises from the dead (10-11). Mary Magdalen appears once again at the cross and at the sepulchre (Luke 23-24). John's Mary of Bethany "annointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair" (10: 2), his Mary Magdalen is present at the crucifixion (19) and it is she who speaks to the resurrected Christ before the empty tomb (20:1-18). The biblical status of the Magdalen raged in the theological community until 1969 when she was finally dissociated from Luke's sinner.

7. The identification of Mary Magdalen with the sin of prostitution is, in part, a function of her association with the woman taken in adultery (John 8) but is, more directly, attributable to the commentary of early church fathers (particularly Gregory) who linked her with Eve. Mary's wealth and covetousness is a product of French legend as is the fascination with her golden hair derived from the story of Mary of Egypt. For further information on the medieval fashioning of Mary Magdalen, see Susan Haskins' authoritative, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 136-41. See also Katherine Jansen's Ph.D. dissertation, "Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants in late Medieval Italy" (Princeton University, 1995) that traces the relationship between mendicant preaching and the Magdalen in the context of the saint's development as the symbol of both Luxuria and penance. Jansen's article, "Mary Magdalen and the mendicants: the preaching of penance in the late Middle Ages," Journal of Medieval History 21 (1995): 1-25, looks at sermon texts in order to explore how the figure of Mary Magdalen was used, in the late middle ages, to "diffuse the cult of penance" (25).

8. Jansen, "Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants," 25.

9. "The Digby Mary Magdalene," in Early English Drama: An Anthology, ed. John Coldewey (New York: Garland, 1993), 186-252.

10. White, Theatre and Reformation, 7.

11. Laura King, "Sacred Eroticism, Rapturous Anguish: Christianity's Penitent Prostitutes and the Vexation of Allegory, 1370-1608" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1993), 336-38.

12. While it would be inaccurate to assume that English Protestantism was unequivocally Calvinist, it is important to emphasize the place of Calvinism in the dissemination of Protestantism over the course of the Reformation period. Calvinism, it has been argued, was one of the unifying principles of English Protestant theology and it stands as the foundational methodology for the conduct of the Reformation (see Peter Lake, "Calvinism and the English Church 1570-1635," in Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England, ed. Margo Todd [New York: Routledge, 1995], 179-207 and Ritchie Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979]). E.K. Chambers argues that a Lutheran-oriented English Protestantism was supportive of the theatre up until the 1560s from which point on Calvanist anti-theatricalism prevailed (The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 1 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951], 242). Paul Whitfield White has revised Chamber's argument, concluding that "such generalizations tend to ascribe too much significance to specifically 'Lutheran' and 'Calvinist' ideas and not enough to particular historical conditions in shaping religious views of drama." White suggests, with reference to John Bale, that prior to Elizabeth's reign, Calvinism, rather than Luthernism, "leaves a heavy imprint on the Protestant drama"; moreover, Puritanism (thought of as the principal conduit for Calvinist living) was not a monolithic practice inextricably associated with Elizabethan anti-theatricalism (Theatre and Reformation, 3-4). For more detail on Wager's Calvinist agenda, see White, "Lewis Wager's Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene and John Calvin," Notes and Queries 28, no. 226: 6 (1981): 508-12 and Appendix B ("Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Relgion: a source of Lewis Wager's Mary Magdalene," in Theatre and Reformation, 181-85). See also Peter Happé, "The Protestant Adaptation of the Saint Play," in The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), 205-40.

13. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 141-42.

14. Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 168, 190. Shuger's chapter, entitled "Saints and Lovers," discusses the treatment of the Magdalen in Robert Southwell's Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares (1591; Delmar: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1975) and Gervase Markham's Marie Magdalens Lamentations (London, 1601), both of which are adaptations of John 20 and were inspired by the only medieval texts still in circulation in the English Renaissance: the pseudo-Chaucerian The Lamentatyon of Mary Magdaleyne (ed. Bertha M. Skeat [Cambridge: Fabb and Tylor, 1897]); the pseudo-Origenist An Homilie of Marye Magdalene, declaring her fervent love and zele towards CHRIST: written by that famous clerke ORIGENE (London, 1565) and Omelia origenis de beata Maria Magdalena (London, 1504) possibly by the same author. Central to Shuger's chapter is the thesis that these Mary Madgalen texts are "popular devotional works articulating the fundamental spiritual anxiety of the late medieval and early modern eras--anxieties centering on desolation and the absence of God" (185). Because it is peripheral to her analysis centered upon adaptations of John 20, Shuger makes only passing reference to Wager's play (251, n3).

15. Rachel Weil, "Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter," in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 47.

16. Wager's Infedelitie appears to be modeled upon John Bale's Infidelitas, from A Comedy Concernynge thre lawes, of Nature Moses & Christ, corrupted by the Sodomytes, Pharysees and Papystes (1538), in The Complete Plays of John Bale, vol. 2, ed. Peter Happé (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986), 64-124. Bale's Infidelity appears to control the vice figures Idolatria and Sodomismus and together this unholy trinity sets about corrupting Natural Law (ll. 357-92).

17. Stephen Orgel, Impersonations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11, 26.

18. Chaucer's Pardoner has "heer as yelow as wex, But smothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex." Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, "General Prologue," ed. F. N. Robinson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 34.

19. White, Theatre and Reformation, 35.

20. John Bale, King Johan, in The Complete Plays of John Bale, vol. 1, ed. Peter Happé (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 59-60. Donald N. Mager makes the point that Bale's Idolatria is disguised as a woman as "proof of the idolatrous perversion of the natural masculine hierarchy of the deity." See "John Bale and Early Tudor Sodomy Discourse," in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 148.

21. "Homily Against Peril of Idolatry," in The Elizabethan Homilies (1623) from Short-Title Catalogue 13675. Renaissance Electronic Texts 1.2, ed. Ian Lancashire (University of Toronto Library, 1997), URL: library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/ret/homilies/elizhom/html, II:2:3:2784. Margaret Aston, in England's Iconoclasts, vol. 1, Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), writes that "Protestant disparagement (which turned ousted church images into a new sort of toy) was conveniently able to subsume its disdain for the falsities of little popes--'popetry'--into the deluding manipulations of carved and jointed images 'puppetry'" (403).

22. Aston argues that, in the context of late medieval devotional culture, the eyes of statues were thought to gaze at worshippers with a frontal directness that invited effective communication (25, 401). For a description of the Boxley Rood see Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 403; Aston, England's Iconoclasts, 234; and White, Theatre and Reformation, 36-37. The Destruction of the Rood is chronicled by Charles Wriosthesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, ed. W.D. Hamilton (London: Camden Society, ns. II, 20, 1875-77), 2:75-76, 78-81, 83. For further discussion on the veneration of statues see Ilene Haering Foresyth, "Magi and Majesty: A Study of Romanesque Sculpture and Liturgical Drama," Art Bulletin 50 (1668): 215-22; Michael Baxandall, Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 166.

23. White, Theatre and Reformation, 36-37.

24. Aston, England's Iconoclasts, 401-6.

25. See Barthes' discussion of the difference between the statue and the painting in S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 208.

26. "Homily Against Peril of Idolatry," II:2:3:2792. Also cited in Aston, England's Iconoclasts, 129.

27. Wager's fashion-conscious Magdalen is drawn from medieval sources, in particular the Golden Legend of 1276 and the Digby Mary Magdalene where she appears as noble from birth, descended from a line of Kings. In these stories Mary's fall and her expensive taste in clothing are inherited legacies (Haskins, 157-58). For references in the play to Mary's predisposition for sartorical excess, see 3, 6-10. For a Protestant take on the excesses of dress, particularly in women, see "Homily Against Excess of Apparel," in The Elizabethan Homilies, as well as Stephen Gosson's Pleasant Quippes for vpstart New-fangled Gentle-women (London, 1595).

28. Peter Stallybrass provides evidence that the church, not having any further use for its Catholic garments, sold or rented the items, on occasion, to players. Thus memories of Catholic ceremony are literally set against representations of the feminized priest and the virile over-dressed monk made popular in medieval literature. See Stallybrass, "Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity on the Renaissance Stage," in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 305-6, 312.

29. See C. Willet and Phillis Cunnington, The History of Underclothes (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 27, 32-37. See also Willet and Cunnnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Sixteenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, nd.), 53-86, 149-89; Elizabeth Ewing, Dress and Undress: A History of Women's Underwear (London: B.T. Batsford, 1978), 21-34; Ewing, Fashion in Underwear (London: B.T. Batsford, 1971), 20-31.

30. D. Kunzle, working through Foucault, has concluded that it is not a historical accident that waist confinement and décolletage remained fashionable from the fourteenth century down to World War I, for these are "the primary sexualizing devices of Western costume, which arose when people first became sexually conscious, and conscious of sexual guilt in a public and social way." Thus Mary's underwear signals both her own deviance and her society's desire to control it (D. Kunzle, "Dress Reform and Antifeminism: a response to Helene E. Robert's 'The Exquisite Slave: the Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman,'" Signs 2.3 [1977]: 570-79).

31. Keith Thomas, "Cleanliness and Godliness in Early Modern England," in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 66-67. Thomas adds that Puritan writers "shared the widespread notion that there was something effeminate and undesirable about excessive cleanliness" (66). Infidelitie further describes Mary as "a pretie mynion, Feate, cleane made, wel compact, and aptly lymmed" (ll. 193-94).

32. St. Mary Magdalene's girdle "sent to women travailing" was shipped from Burton in Somerset. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 384.

33. John Calvin, A very profitable Treatise (1561), sig, B1r. This reference is cited in Diehl, Staging Reform, 16.

34. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII (London: HMSO, 1891), 12:2:42; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 384.

35. Haskins notes that most visual and literary representations of Mary Magdalen, from the fourteenth century onward, depict the figure with red or fair hair conforming to contemporary ideals of feminine beauty. Loose hair was a moral indicator and as such was suitable only for young girls and virgins. Upon marriage, women were to wear their hair up--a custom which survived until the Victorian period. As for color, Agnolo Firenzuola's treatise on feminine beauty, Del Dialogo . . . Della belleza delle Donne, intitolato Celso (Florence, 1548, f. 91v), remarks that a woman's hair, ideally "fine and blond," was a principal factor in determining beauty. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 246-48 for further discussion of the semiotic connotations of blond hair.

36. The bon grace, a decorated cap headdress, is mentioned at line 670-71 as coming "farre ouer [her] face." See Willet and Cunnington, Handbook, 74.

37. The song at line 870 ff. repeats the blazon.

38. See Jansen, "Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants," and O.D. Watkins, A History of Penance (London, 1920). See also Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 169.

39. Tudor Royal Proclamations, vols. 1-3, 1964-65, ed. Paul Hughes and James Larkin (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2:460:123. See also Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ed. W.H. Frere and W.M. Kennedy, 3 vols. (Alcuin Club Collections, 14-16, 1910) 2:116. Aston notes that Injunction 28 was more than a reiteration of earlier Henrician and Edwardian injunctions as it appeared to be moving toward the unqualified order to eliminate images (1548), whereas earlier action had been directed toward abused images. This move, according to Aston, betrays the adoption of extreme principles by means of which "England seemed to be aligning with the ne plus ultra iconoclasts" (258).

40. Thomas Cranmer, Cathechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion for the syngular commoditie and profyte of childre and yong people (1548) sig. CVr-v.

41. T. Wright, ed., Three Chapters of Letters Relating the Suppression of Monasteries (London: Camden Society, os, vol. 26, 1843), 143-44, 224-25.

42. Barthes, Mythologies, 84.

43. For discussion of the chemise see Willet and Cunnington, History of Underclothes, 32-34. The use of the word "sad" is also reminiscent of the sumptuary laws wherein the term was equated with a suitable kind of modesty. The royal proclamation of 1554, for example, permitted plays in the houses of noblemen, lord mayors, sheriffs or aldermen, gentlemen, "substantial and sad commoners or head parishioners" (emphasis mine) as well as in open streets or commonhalls, so long as they were licensed (Tudor Royal Proclamations, 1:240:341-42). From 1561 the Corporation of York was ordered to dress only in "sad" attire on Corpus Christi day as the feast was no longer officially holy after the Reformation (York Civic Records, vol. 4, ed. Angelo Raine [York: Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 1941-1953], 17). The image of the modest, remorseful figure whose eyes look, if not upon a book, then upward to God was certainly familiar and a favorite subject of continental Renaissance painters whose Magdalens provide useful templates for a reading of Wager's sinner. Savoldo's Magdalen (1530), for example, appears, like Wager's sinner, modestly draped with her hand raised chastely to her mouth conveying both her silence and her shame for the look that she incites. Titian's Magdalen wears an unassuming chemise and appears with her eyes cast upwards toward God (1567)--a gesture that is also suggested by Wager's stage directions--while a book rests upon a skull, the sign of the mutability of all vainly painted faces. In the Titian, as in other Renaissance paintings of the Magdalen, hair becomes a sign of cleanliness and purity. Other paintings of the Magdalen en chemise include Rogier van der Weyden's mid-fifteenth century Magdalen whose eyes do not meet the spectator's gaze but remain firmly fixed upon her text and El Greco's penitent Magdalen who contemplates a skull and crucifix (1580).

44. Her entrance as penitent is followed by a conversion speech which, though of considerable length (64 lines), is the penitent's last significant contribution to the dialogue. She does not speak of herself as the first of Christ's evangelists (John's Gospel has Christ calling Mary to the ministry) but, following Paul, Mary's exemplary piety is passive: "To all the worlde an example I may be, In whom the mercy of Christ is declared" (ll. 1769-72). Christ reiterates her passivity by saying "Goe thy way forth with faith and repentance, To heare the Gospell of health be though diligent, And the worde therof beare in thy remembrance" (ll. 1530-32). Patricia Crawford has noted that within the more masculine doctrine of the Reformation, where emphasis fell on the omnipotence rather than the suffering of Christ and where the denigration of images left only the masculine trinity and an all male ministry in the eyes of believers, piety was the only legitimate feminine expression of faith. Women could not become priests or theologians and with the closure of the monasteries and abbeys, a religious vocation was no longer a possibility for unmarried women (Women and Religion in England 1500-1720 [New York: Routledge, 1993], 37). Calvin seems to grant certain apostolic vocations to new testament women; however, his overall position on women is still disputed by scholars who have argued that his writing is steeped in hierarchy and hostile to sixteenth-century defenses of women. To the exceptionally pious woman, it appears that Wager accords certain ministerial functions ("I shall declare his mercy in towne and citie" (l. 1951), but this freedom to speak is considerably limited. For discussions of Calvin and feminism see Jane Dempsey Douglas (who defends him), Women, Freedom and Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985) and John Lee Thompson (who writes on his hierarchical view of women's role in faith), John Calvin and the daughters of Sarah: Women in Regular and Exceptional Roles in the Exegesis of Calvin, his Predecessors, and his Contemporaries (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1992). See also John Calvin's New Testament Commentaires, ed. D.W. and I.F. Torrence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959-72), 5:199 ff. (commentary on John 20, 17); 4:104 (commentary on John 4: 28); 9:306 (commentary on 1 Cor. 14:34) and 9:231 (commentary on 1 Cor. 11: 5).

45. Judy Kronenfeld, King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 27-28.

46. The history of the nude Magdalen is a long one. In the Anglo-Saxon Martyrology, the Vita eremitica, Mary retreats into the desert following the resurrection and she lives there both penitent and nude. The earliest visual images of the naked Mary appear in the second decade of the thirteenth century; in these portraits her hair generally covers from head to foot what is evidently a naked figure. By the fifteenth century the hair tends to be drawn back to reveal the full body of the figure though the nakedness of the subject suggests its innocence. Haskins draws attention to Bonomicus's fresco dated 1225 in the chapel of the church of St. Prospero in Perugia in which Mary's body is covered from head to toe by her hair. The altarpiece of the Apocalypse in the Victoria and Albert Museum (probably made for the Franciscan Magdalen cloister in Hamberg c. 1400) represents the figure entirely naked except for a strategically placed frond. In the panel of Quentin Metsys (1466-1530) Mary kneels facing Mary of Egypt--both are entirely naked and at the same time appear innocent and sexless. Renaissance paintings of the penitent Magdalen frequently portray an entirely or partially naked figure. Titian's earlier rendition (1531-35) and Correggio's supine penitent (d.1522) are but two examples that present a truth that is entirely stripped of its coverings. Other nude Magdalens roughly contemporary to Wager's play include Tintoretto's and Annibale Carracci's penitent Magdalens (late sixteenth century, 1600). For a thorough discussion of the nude Magdalen, see Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 232-36. For a full treatment of the use of drapery in the representation of the female body see Anne Hollander's chapter on "undress" in Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, rpt. 1992), 157-236. See also Lynda Nead's The Female Nude: Art Obscenity and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1993).

47. This sequence from John 20 is not dramatized in Wager's play. The moment is, however, a popular subject for the visual arts.

48. Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 188. Wager's representation of Christ on stage resonates powerfully against medieval debate on the uses and abuses of the body of Christ for entertainment purposes. The Lollard (or Wycliffite) A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (1380-1425) argues that the playing of the Passion is a "scorning of Crist," whose own body never laughed but was the source of "penaunse, teris and scheding of blod." The spectator, it follows, should never derive recreational pleasure (associated with carnal pleasure) from the representation of the corporeal suffering of Christ; instead the representation of Christ's Passion should be "in disciplining of oure fleyssh, and in penaunce of adversite." The greatest source of anxiety in the Tretise, however, is not just the tension between diversion and devotion but also the issue of visual representation itself. The most vitriolic antitheatricalism is, in fact, concerned precisely with the question of mimesis wherein actors' bodies reconstitute sacred events for a viewing public. The use of the disguised body to replace that of Christ and the use of the staged voice to replace the words of the sanctioned Gospel was understood as travesty and as corrupting the "earnestness" of the original holy deeds. A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, 113, 95-96.

49. The words from Luke 7.38 are as follows: "She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, as she began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair. Then she continued kissing his feet and annointing them with the ointment."

50. Kendall, Drama of Dissent, 110.

51. Diehl, Staging Reform, 46.

52. For further discussion on the relationship between books and images see Diehl's useful study of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, 22-39. For the Shaxton reference see Visitation Articles, 2:57.

53. Barthes, S/Z, 208. It is interesting to note that the image of the penitent bathing Christ's feet became a commonplace print illustration accompanying seventeenth-century mediations on the Magdalen. See for example, William Hodson's The Holy Sinner (1639) and Robert Whitehall's emblem "The Contrite Heart," in Sive Icqunum quarundum extranearom (1677).

54. See Barthes, S/Z, 113-14.

55. Paula Findlen, "Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy," in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 77.

56. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 300.

57. The analogous relation of blazon and the striptease is treated by Roland Barthes in S/Z, 113-14.

58. Life and Repentaunce was written for a troupe of "four men and a boy." The casting chart on the printed title page indicates that the child actor played Mary Magdalen and the adults doubled the vice/virtue rolls. See White, Reformation Biblical Drama, xxiii.

59. Orgel, Impersonations, 27-29. See also Laura Levine, Men in Women's Clothing: Antitheatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

60. See Letters and Papers, 12:2:587. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 403.

61. See Barthes, Mythologies, 84.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]