"Great is Diana" of Shakespeare's Ephesus

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 43, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 347-374

  Hart, F Elizabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950660733     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2003.0019     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. See Glyn Austen, "Ephesus Restored: Sacramentalism and Redemption in The Comedy of Errors," Journal of Literature and Theology 1, 1 (March 1987): 54-69;
2. Arthur Kinney, "Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds," SP 85, 1 (Winter 1988): 29-52;
3. and R. Chris Hassel, Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 40-4
4. and "The Comedy of Errors in Context and Performance," UCrow 17 (1997): 23-39.
5. Laurie Maguire, "The Girls from Ephesus," in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Roberts. Miola (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), pp. 355-91, esp. 360-6;
6. and Caroline Bicks, "Backsliding at Ephesus: Shakespeare's Diana and the Churching of Women," in "Pericles": Critical Essays, ed. David Skeele (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 205-27.
7. Walter Cohen stresses this diversity in his introduction to A Reconstructed Text of Pericles, Prince of Tyre in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 2709-18, esp. 2712.
8. See also Linda McJannet, "Genre and Geography: The Eastern Mediterranean in Pericles and The Comedy of Errors," in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1998), pp. 86-106, esp. 98-100.
9. Emphasizing the three-tiered towers that Cybele often wears as a crown, Virgil figures her in the Aeneid (trans. Robert Fitzgerald [New York: Vintage Books, 1984]) as an emblem of civilization and Roman imperialism (see, for instance book 10, lines 348-55, Aeneas's prayer to "Benignant / Lady of Ida, Mother of Gods . . . / . . . and towered cities" [lines 348-50]). For a discussion of Cybele's transmission through medieval and early modern English poetry, in which she comes to represent English nationhood, see Peter S. Hawkins, "From Mythography to Myth-Making: Spenser and the Magna Mater Cybele," SCJ 12, 3 (Autumn 1981): 51-64.
10. For a study of Cybele's presence in Rome-her retention of cult practices associated with Anatolia even after her integration into official Roman religion - see Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 28-74.
11. Jeanne Addison Roberts notes the fertility symbolism in Diana's "multi-breasted" statue in Ephesus with respect to both Pericles and The Comedy of Errors ("Shakespeare's Maimed Birth Rites," in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992], pp. 123-44, 136).
12. Maguire's essay on The Comedy of Errors mentions Diana's fertility cult and documents the early modern renown of her temple (pp. 364-5).
13. Bicks offers the most extended discussion, giving a detailed history of the cult, citations of sources - including Protestant sermons and early English historiography - that situate the Ephesian Diana in early modern discourse, ending with a comparison between Catholic and Reformed doctrines on the "churching" of postpartum women as reflections of traditional responses to Diana and her temple and as exemplified through Thaisa's character in Pericles. My article "Cerimon's 'Rough' Music in Pericles, 3.2" (SQ 51, 3 [Autumn 2000]: pp. 313-31) touches on Diana's fertility function but places more emphasis on the "rough" aspects of her cult.
14. Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 23.
15. Roberts, Shakespearean Wild, p. 124.
16. Acts 19:28, 34, quoted from the Geneva Bible, 1599 edition, as are subsequent citations.
17. Sampson Price, Ephesus Warning before Her Woe. A Sermon Preached at Pauls Crosse on Passion Sunday, the 17. Of March Last (London, 1616), cited in Maguire (p. 364) and Bicks (p. 206);
18. Edward Chaloner, Ephesus Common Pleas. Handled in a Sermon before the Judges in Saint Maries, at the Assises Held at Oxford, An, 1618 (London, 1623), cited in Maguire (p. 364) and Bicks (p. 213);
19. John Prideaux, Ephesus Backsliding Considered and Applyed to These Times (London, 1614), cited in Bicks (pp. 210-1);
20. and John Vicars, Babylons Beautie (London, 1644), cited in Bicks (p. 211).
21. I discuss James Mason's The Anatomie of Sorcerie Wherein the Wicked Impietie of Charmers, Inchanters, and Such Like, Is Discouered and Confuted (London, 1612).
22. "Cerimon's 'Rough' Music," pp. 321-2.
23. The mythographies were guidebooks based on the model of Giovanni Boccaccio's fourteenth-century Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri. For detailed descriptions, see Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara Sessions, Bollingen Series 38 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953; rprt. 1995);
24. and Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970).
25. See, for instance, the 1632 edition of George Sandys's Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures (Oxford, 1632);
26. eSandys's Ovid was highly derivative (and therefore representative) of a number of preceding editions and commentaries, including Georg Schuler's Metamorphosis Seu Fabulae Poeticae (Frankfurt, 1589)
27. Natale Conti's Mythologiae Sive Explicationum Favularum Libri Decem (Venice, 1567)
28. and Lilio Gregorio Giraldi's De Deis Gentium (Basel, 1548). The closest Sandys comes in his commentary to identifying Diana with Ephesus is to point out her fabled birthplace at Ortygia, a grove near Ephesus (see pp. 197, 223, Garland facsimile).
29. Margaret Doody calls these works "novels" in The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1996), finding their generic traits and even aspects of their realism to be continuous with eighteenth- and post-eighteenth-century novels.
30. Doody's work is an invaluable guide to understanding these novels' influence on the medieval and early modern periods and on the Renaissance in particular. At least three booklength studies have been published on Shakespeare's uses of them: Carol Gesner's Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1970);
31. Barbara Mowat's The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976);
32. and J. J. M. Tobin's Shakespeare's Favorite Novel: A Study of "The Golden Asse" as Prime Source (Lanham MD, New York, and London: Univ. Press of America, 1984). Incidentally, while these critics carefully document Shakespeare's interest in these fictions, none but Doody highlights the novels' emphasis on female deities and mystery rites.
33. and Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957), 1:269-76.
34. For a discussion of these novels' frequent focus on Ephesus and on Diana as its central religious figure, see Christine Thomas, "At Home in the City of Artemis: Religion in Ephesos in the Literary Imagination of the Roman Period," in Ephesos: Metropolis of Asia: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Its Archeology, Religion, and Culture, ed. Helmut Koester, Harvard Theological Series (Valley Forge PA: Trinity Press International, 1995), pp. 81-117.
35. A selective, chronological bibliography of studies beginning in the early twentieth century would include Robert Briffault, The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1927);
36. M. Esther Harding, Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1935);
37. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, Bollingen Series 47, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1955);
38. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1948; rprt. 1966);
39. Edwin O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess (London: Thames and Hudson, 1959);
40. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1964);
41. Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 7000 to 3500 BC (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974);
42. Karl Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1977);
43. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986);
44. and Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Arkana, 1991).
45. (The other novel she considers influential is the Satyricon of Petronius.) J. J. M. Tobin's Shakespeare's Favorite Novel is the source of this estimate of twenty-eight plays, although in his recent capacity as the general editor of The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), Tobin is more conservative, limiting his assertions of Apuleius's status as a "definite" or "probable" source to one poem and seven plays (pp. 77-87). Nevertheless, Shakespeare's acquaintance with Apuleius - and the general acquaintance of the reading and theater-going public - are undisputed.
46. Apuleius, The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius, trans. William Adlington, 1566, facsimile edn. (New York: Hogarth Press, n.d.), p. 333.
47. Vincenzo Cartari, The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction: Wherein Is Lively Depictured the Images and Statues of the Gods and the Ancients, trans. R. Linche, 1599, STC 4691;
48. That the play is open to a range of theological interpretations has been attested to by the variety of approaches. For example, for a reading of the play as a descendant of the medieval mystery and cycle plays, see Kinney's "Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds"; for a new historicist reading in the context of 1580s and 1590s ecclesiastical disputes within the reformed Church, see Donna Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1996), pp. 63-6.
49. R. A. Foakes, introduction to The Comedy of Errors, ed. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. xxix-xxxii;
50. and Dorothea Kehler, "Shakespeare's Emilias and the Politics of Celibacy," in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Kehler and Susan Baker (London: Scarecrow Press, 1991), pp. 157-78, n. 172.
51. Foakes offers the most detailed correlations, speculating that Shakespeare might have read The Excellent and Pleasant Works of Julius Solinus Polyhistor (1587), which contains the remark that "The beauty of Ephesus is the Temple of Diana, buylded by the Amazons" (qtd. in Foakes, pp. xxix-xxx).
52. The Comedy of Errors in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th edn. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), V.i.398. All further Shakespeare references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.
53. Roberts, "Shakespeare's Maimed Birth Rites," p. 132.
54. I will detail momentarily how Thaisa's entrance pertains to Pericles' reconstruction of an enfeebled patriarchy; as for The Winter's Tale, perhaps the clearest indication of Leontes' restored authority at that play's end is his last-minute enforced marriage of Paulina to Camillo. Roberts writes: "A subliminal reminder of the goddess of the underworld, [Paulina] takes on also the mantle of the Great Mother as she saves the newborn child and brings Hermione, like Proserpina, back to the world of the living. But for the male her power verges on excess. Marrying her off . . . diminishes her stature . . . Paulina is surely the greatest of the invented older women of Shakespeare's comedies and romances, but she has a Wildness that must be comfortably contained to accommodate the demands of patriarchal Culture" (Shakespearean Wild, p. 165).
55. The 25 August 1997 issue of Newsweek (pp. 49-55) contains an article entitled "Hail, Mary," featuring a photograph of chapel ruins in Ephesus that the Catholic Church reportedly "accepts . . . as Mary's final home" (p. 53). For a history of the third ecumenical council and Mary's legend in Ephesus, see Vasiliki Limberis, "The Council of Ephesos: The Demise of the See of Ephesos and the Rise of the Cult of the Theotokos," in Ephesos: Metropolis of Asia, pp. 321-40.
56. For images and literary examples, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976), pp. 206-23, 285-98, and plates on pp. 32-6;
57. and Baring and Cashford, pp. 547-608.
58. See also Pamela Berger, The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectress from Goddess to Saint (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), pp. 89-104.
59. Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. 174-82, 201, 217.
60. See also Roberts's discussion of this tendency with respect to A Midsummer Night's Dream, pp. 45-56.
61. Hackett, in turn, is quoting from Penry Williams, "Court and Polity Under Elizabeth I," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 65, 2 (Spring 1983): 259-86, 270.
62. In the discussion that follows, I choose not to pursue the authorship debate surrounding the text of Pericles. I will, instead, follow the example of a number of recent critics who have declined to incorporate the issue into their analyses. See, for instance, Constance Jordan, "Pericles," in Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 35-67;
63. Stuart M. Kurland, "'The Care . . . of Subjects' Good': Pericles, James I, and the Neglect of Government," CompD 30, 2 (Summer 1996): pp. 220-44;
64. and Dana Lloyd Spradley, "Pericles and the Jacobean Family Romance of Union," Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts 7 (1992): 87-118.
65. Critics who read Pericles as a reflection of the early Stuarts include Jordan, Shakespeare's Monarchies, pp. 35-67;
66. Jordan, "'Eating the Mother': Property and Propriety in Pericles," in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson, G. W. Pigman III, and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Binghamton: State Univ. of New York, 1992), pp. 331-53;
67. Kurland; Spradley; Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986);
68. and David Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1985).
69. Jordan, "Eating the Mother," p. 332.