Bewhored Images and Imagined Whores: Iconophobia and Gynophobia in Stuart Love Tragedies*

English Literary Renaissance

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 111-137

  Diehl, Huston ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF IOWA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949166268     PISSN: 00138312     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6757.1996.tb01485.x     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. See, e.g, Edward A. Snow, "Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980), 384-412; Richard Wheeler, "Since First We Were Discovered: Trust and Authority in Shakespearean Romance," Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 150-69; Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley, 1984); Arthur Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge, Eng., 1980); Peter L. Rudnytsky, "The Purloined Handkerchief in Othello," The Psychoanalytic Study of Literature, ed. Joseph Reppen and Maurice Charney (Hillsdale, N.J., 1985); James Calderwood, "Appealing Property in Othello," University of Toronto Quarterly 57 (1988), 353-75
2. See, e.g., Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1980); Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (New York, 1985); Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers (Chicago, 1986), pp. 123-42; Naomi Schieman, "Othello's Doubt/Desdemona's Death: The Engendering of Scepticism," Power, Gender, Values, ed. Judith Genova (Edmonton, 1987), pp. 113-33; Mary Beth Rose, "The Expense of Spirit": Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca, 1988); Michael Neill, "Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989), 383-412; Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), pp. 71-93; Valerie Wayne, "Historical Differences: MiSogyny and Othello," The Matter of Difference, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 153-79
3. Erasmus, paraphrased by Carl C. Christensen, Art and Reformation in Germany (Athens, Ohio, 1979), p. 22; see also John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Stephen Reed Cattley (1837-1841), VI, 29; and Charles Garside, Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven, 1966), p. 134- In speaking of the Reformers and even Reform-minded Roman Catholics, I do not mean to imply that there was a single Reformist position on the question of images. Not only did the Reformers disagree strongly with one another on the role of religious images in the church, on whether iconoclasm was valid or necessary, and on how the removal of images should be carried out, but the position of individual Reformers also sometimes changed and developed over time. In Wittenberg, Luther, for example, attacked his fellow Reformer Karlstadt for advocating iconoclasm in eight sermons preached in 1522; yet he also wrote that " 'I seek to tear [images] out of the hearts of all and want them despised and destroyed... I have allowed and not forbidden the outward removal of images" (quoted in Margaret Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture [Boston, 1985], p. 112). On'the development of Luther's thinking about images, see Christensen
4. V
5. Elizabeth Cropper, "The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture," Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago, 1986), p. 176. See also Jacqueline Lichtenstein, "Making Up Representations: The Risks of Femininity," Representations 20 (1987), 77-87
6. "An Homily Against Perill of Idolatrie," Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1623), II, 72
7. 3
8. 3V. This argument corroborates the thesis of Natalie Zemon Davis who considers the issue of religious violence in sixteenth-century France in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975). PP-152-87
9. Davis, Society and Culture, p. 170
10. For descriptions of particular acts of violence against images see Crew, p. 12; John Phillips, The Reformation of Images (Berkeley, 1973), where he quotes an eyewitness describing an image with "one eye bored out and the side pierced," p. 90; Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), p. 126; Henry Machyn, The Diary of Henry Machyn, ed. John Gough Nichols, Camden Society (1848), pp. 82-83. David Freedberg writes in Iconoclasts and Their Motives (Maarssen, 1985) that "We fear the image which appears to be alive, because it cannot be so; and so people may evince their fear, or demonstrate mastery over the consequences of elision, by breaking or mutilating the image," P-35
11. John Calvin, The Sermons of M. John Calvin upon the Epistle of S. Paule to the Ephesians, trans. Arthur Golding (1577), p. 246V; see also Aston, pp. 458-60
12. William Perkins, A Warning Against the Idolatry of the Last Times, (1601), p. 5
13. Aston, Iconoclasts, p. 460
14. Thomas Wilson, Christian Dictionarie (1612), taken from his definition of idolatry
15. For a discussion of Othello and the genre of domestic tragedy, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 246-52. Citations to the plays I discuss below are to the following editions: John Ford, 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, Drama of the English Renaissance: The Stuart Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York, 1976); Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. George Walton Williams (Lincoln, Neb., 1966); Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, ed. Charles Barber (Berkeley, 1969); John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown (Cambridge, 1964) and The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown (Cambridge, 1960)
16. Others have mentioned the possibility that the love between Othello and Desdemona is a form of idolatry. In a brief footnote in his edition of this play, George Kittredge suggests that Desdemona alludes "to the idea that to idolize a mortal is a sin against God" when she says "They are loves I bear to you"; R. N. Hallstead argues in "Idolatrous Love: A New Approach to Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly 19 (1968), 107-24, that Othello's love for Desdemona is a form of idolatry, but he makes no attempt to locate this concept in the Reformation or its iconoclastic impulses, making only one mention of the sixteenth century, and that to the Council of Trent; Arthur Kirsch, however, argues against this thesis, insisting that Othello's love, however absolute, "is not therefore in itself idolatrous," "The Polarization of Erotic Love in 'Othello,'" Modern Language Review 73 (1978), 721-40. Shakespeare of course frequently explores this cultural fear, writing in sonnet 105, for example, "Let not my love be called idolatry/Nor my beloved as an idol show."
17. 2, commentary on the book of Hosea in The Geneva Bible (1560), ch. 1-3
18. The OED records how, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this word came to have the negative connotation of "crafty, artful, guileful" that it retains today; its original meaning of "learned, skillful" was positive
19. For an interesting discussion of this connection between women and theater, see Timothy Murray, " Othello, An Index and Obscure Prologue to the History of Foul Generic Thoughts," Shakespeare and Deconstruction, ed. Douglas G. Atkins and David M. Bergeron (New York, 1988), pp. 213-43
20. Quoted in Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, 1980), p. 88
21. Parker, p. 104; "Homily Against... Perill," p. 72; Parker, p. 137
22. -, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 78-79, pp. 116-17. In The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York, 1994), Jean Howard acknowledges "a rhetoric of idolatry" in the antitheatrical tracts, but she primarily reads these tracts as "a discursive site where the anxiety about social change was both created... and awkwardly managed" (pp. 37, 44); in Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization 1579-1642 (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), Laura Levine addresses some of the central issues surrounding the charge that the theater is idolatrous, including theories of representation, magic, and the relation between the spectator and the dramatic spectacle. She locates the antitheatrical impulse in anxieties about gender identity, however, finding the cultural fear "that there is no such thing as a masculine self" at the heart of Renaissance antitheatricality
23. Antitheatrical Prejudice, pp. 115, 87, 115
24. Warning Against Idolatry, p. 91
25. 2, Eiv
26. 5v
27. The Overthrow of Stage-Playes (London, 1599), p. 34
28. See Louis Adrian Montrose, "The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology," Helios 7 (1980), 51-74; and Michael O'Connell, "The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater," ELH 52 (1985), 279-310
29. Couliano, Eros and Magic, p. 191