Beyond the Cloister. Jenna Lay
her duty to her family: “others also came to her at divers times, and said she died desperately, and had no care on her husband and children, but would spoil them, and make all people to exclaim against her” (426). The urgency of these interventions reveal the divisions among York’s Catholics, who were by no means a unified or homogeneous group. As Peter Lake and Michael Questier have demonstrated, these divisions were part of a complex “struggle between different local claimants to or versions of what English Catholicism should be like—a struggle conducted in terms of a range of different responses to, on the one hand, the regime’s demands for conformity and, on the other, to the no less totalizing claims of certain priests and lay people for a completely separatist recusancy.”63 Clitherow’s response—that she loved her husband and had done her duty in raising her children to fear God—did little to convince her interlocutors that she was the “true and … chaste wife” she claimed to be (407).64 According to their logic, if she did not accept the patriarchal authority of the state, attend church services, or acknowledge her domestic responsibilities, she must also disregard the sexual mores of English society: “when they saw that they could not persuade her, nor make her yield in anything, they brought ridiculous slanders against her, and told her how the boy had confessed that she had sinned with priests” (427).65 Clitherow’s reputation for chastity depends upon her conformity with the religiopolitical order that she rejects, and her narrative demonstrates how the political resistance of recusant Catholic women was frequently read as evidence for sexual promiscuity, even by fellow Catholics.66 Because they embraced separatism over church attendance and conformity with the state, recusant women were imagined to be outside the ideological space occupied by the chaste and obedient wife. Thus literary representations of women situated at the margins of society—whether through devotional vows that suggested Catholic monasticism, sexual choices that undermined marital chastity, or, in Hero’s case, both—can offer indirect reflections on female recusancy.
Recusant women posed a conceptual difficulty, not just for poets and playwrights of the late sixteenth century but even for their own biographers. Mush, as we have seen, was at pains to depict Clitherow’s adherence to domestic hierarchies, despite the fact that she frequently took part in religious activities without her husband’s knowledge or consent. As a result, Mush’s Life does more than “reveal to us the sort of traumatic and tension-filled gender and family politics in and through which religious change was often effected during this period”;67 it also reveals that Clitherow and her fellow recusants did not fit easily into the cultural constructions of either post-Reformation England or post-Tridentine Catholicism: they were neither the contemplative nuns of Catholic ideology, enclosed within the ecclesiastical hierarchy and subject to new restrictions imposed by the Council of Trent, nor the obedient and conformist wives of Protestant marriage manuals.68 Mush’s representation of female recusancy illuminates the limitations of even his own hagiographical understanding of Clitherow’s martyrdom, as his narrative resists its narrator’s attempt to control interpretation, raising questions for the reader about Clitherow’s actions and intentions (how did she send her son to the continent without her husband’s knowledge? why does she refuse to go to trial? does she deliberately create the circumstances of her own death?).69 Historians have studied the religious and political effects of women such as Clitherow, but the cultural implications of their paradoxical status in Protestant England have not yet drawn the attention of critics focused on canonical English literature, perhaps because married recusant women’s unsettling disruptions of social categories seem to have forestalled contemporary literary representations of them. But while Margaret Clitherow’s life and martyrdom were not performed on the London stage or printed in elegiac verse, plays and poems of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries do register both the indeterminacy and the impact of recusant women.
While textual representations of women such as Margaret Clitherow were largely confined to martyrologies, these narratives—shaped not only by religious and political considerations but also by literary concerns—can facilitate new readings of perplexing female characters whose ethics and actions seem at odds even with the poems and plays in which they feature. Hero, for example, is not simply a divisive figure for literary critics; she is also divided and divisive within Hero and Leander, and her position leads Chapman to create a remarkably conservative ending to Marlowe’s potentially subversive poem. Hero never quite fits into her society; she stands apart, and Marlowe makes her separation visible through a vow of virginity that signifies her religious devotion and individual autonomy. Though the personal and political dimensions of religious choice figure prominently in Hero and Leander, these issues have frequently been overshadowed by the erotic force of Marlowe’s verse in the first sestiads and by the abrupt shift in the sexual and lyric sensibility of Chapman’s continuation.70 But Hero’s initial desire to be a virgin and her ultimate (and ambiguous) renunciation of that vow are not simply aspects of her sexuality; these choices position her as a religious authority and an autonomous woman who lives in Sestos but does not seem entirely of Sestos.
In social terms, virginity marks Hero much as Catholicism marked recusant women: she is at once incorporated into the practice of daily life in her community and yet she remains imaginatively distinct from the world that surrounds her. This division between Hero and her society intensifies throughout the course of the poem: Marlowe imagines a Hero who lives apart but conforms to social expectations while Chapman allegorizes her silent postcoital rejection of the social order. At the same time, Chapman implicates Hero more completely in the ceremonial forms and institutional structures that the lovers have avoided, turning Marlowe’s vacillating and sexually conflicted heroine into a figure of religious hypocrisy and deceit. The two halves of the poem enact the paradoxical status of recusant women in English society, as Marlowe’s rumination on female exceptionalism and the pressure to conform to a patriarchal sexual order turns sinister under Chapman’s pen, which depicts Hero’s religious devotion as a misguided subversion of the state-supported ideology of marriage. Hero and Leander is thus a poetic instantiation of the implicit conflict between Mush and Huntingdon regarding the interpretation and importance of recusant women.
When Marlowe introduces Hero, he establishes the magnetic force of her presence in Sestos while at the same time demonstrating that her importance is almost wholly dependent upon her position as an independent and potentially disruptive woman—a position that nonconformist Catholic Englishwomen occupied in the wake of Clitherow’s execution, as Parliament became increasingly concerned with the question of how to legislate against married recusant women. The enigmatic and untouchable Hero is an object of desire for the gods (Apollo courts her and Cupid rests in her bosom in the early lines of the poem), and her presence in mortal company highlights her singularity. The artificial flowers adorning her veil cause those around her to “praise the sweet smell as she passed, / When ’twas the odour which her breath forth cast” (1.21–2). Hero’s countrymen do not know how to interpret her clothing or her physical presence, and she remains separate from them even in the midst of communal celebrations. At the feast of Adonis, Hero ranks “far above” her peers in beauty, and all eyes are upon her (1.103). Yet even those who “near her stood” do so only to observe: “so ran the people forth to gaze upon her, / And all that viewed her were enamoured on her” (1.112, 117–18). Hero travels “thorough Sestos, from her tower / To Venus’ temple” and never fully integrates into the community she passes in transit, perhaps because the very attributes which draw men’s eyes to Hero—her physical appearance and her clothing—also point to her position as a devotee of the goddess of love.
In these early descriptions, Marlowe establishes how Hero’s devotional stance shapes her personal and public relationships: despite the fact that she is well respected and admired, she is very much alone until Leander sees her performing a sacrifice in the temple. While watching this devout act, Leander is “enamourèd”; like the people of Sestos, he falls in love with Hero when her status as a nun is clear (1.162). But Leander does more than gaze: “he touched her hand,” and this physical interaction inspires him “to display / Love’s holy fire, with words, with sighs and tears” (1.183, 192–93). Hero’s virginity, as one element of her devotional affect, is part of what inspires Leander’s desire, and yet he immediately asks her to reject the very things that attracted him to her. “This sacrifice,” he argues, “Doth testify that you exceed