Tudor and Stuart Drama || The Domestication of Religious Objects in "The White Devil"

Rice University

The Domestication of Religious Objects in "The White Devil"Author(s): Elizabeth WilliamsonSource: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 47, No. 2, Tudor and Stuart Drama(Spring, 2007), pp. 473-490Published by: Rice UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4625120 .

Accessed: 08/10/2013 07:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Rice University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in EnglishLiterature, 1500-1900.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 130.102.42.98 on Tue, 8 Oct 2013 07:40:21 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rice

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4625120?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


SEL 47, 2 (Spring 2007): 473-490 ISSN 0039-3657

473

The Domestication of Religious Objects in The White Devil

ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON

It seems obvious to state the centrality of the crucifix, the material representation of Christ's sacrifice, to pre-Reformation worship in England. The large wooden crucifixes that stood atop the rood screens in parish churches literally framed the divine service and served as the focus of a universal Christian history, while in the medieval theater smaller crucifixes played a vital role in dramatizations of the entombment and the resurrection, literally standing in for the body of Jesus.' These objects were crucially important and implicitly accepted as the visual supports for an invisible faith. Consequently, roods and other crucifixes were among the first targets attacked by the iconoclasts during the early years of the Reformation. The overt physicality of the corpus, the three-dimensional image of Christ hanging on the cross, was equated with the pagan idols described in the Old Testament, and hundreds were publicly defaced or burned to prove that they were merely dead pieces of wood, not sacred em- bodiments of God's mercy.

The controversial nature of the crucifix might lead us to conclude that all such objects were necessarily absent from the theaters of Shakespeare's London, just as they were absent from churches and cathedrals. But in John Webster's The White Devil (1612), a stage property designed to resemble a crucifix takes on a major role within the dramatic fiction where it functions as the embodiment of family unity. The play thus reinforces a point made elsewhere by historians of the Reformation: namely, that in many cases Catholic objects survived by being translated into

Elizabeth Williamson is a member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College. This article has been adapted from the third chapter of her current book project, "Staging Sacred Things: The Circulation of Religious Objects in Seventeenth-Century Drama."



474 The White Devil

new contexts. In this essay, I take up the crucifix as stage property (in fact, as I will explain below, there are two of them in this unusual play) in order to address the public theater's response to the shifting status of these highly charged objects.

Cornelia, the crucifix's owner, is one of the few admirable characters in The White Devil, but she is also the mother of Flamineo, its malcontent antihero, and her crucifix becomes the focus of the tragic family drama he provokes in act V, scene ii. Flamineo has been arguing with his younger brother Marcello and the two have chosen their weapons for an upcoming duel. Instead of staging their fight, however, this scene brings the sword and the crucifix together in an unexpected juxtaposition:

MARCELLO. Was not this crucifix my father's? CORNELIA. Yes. MARCELLO. I have heard you say, giving my brother suck, He took the crucifix between his hands Enter Flamineo, And broke a limb off. CORNELIA. Yes; but 'tis mended. FLAMINEO. I have brought your weapon back. Flamineo runs Marcello through. CORNELIA. Ha, O my horror! MARCELLO. YOU have brought it home indeed.2

By bringing "home" his brother's weapon, Flamineo has empha- sized the connection between the broken crucifix and his broken family. Marcello's death speech, delivered a few lines later, provides an even more explicit link between the desecration of the cross and that of the family unit as he urges his mother to

remember what I told Of breaking off the crucifix:- farewell- There are some sins which heaven doth duly punish In a whole family.

(V.ii. 18-21; I3v)

The crucifix calls to mind the family tree, which Flamineo has violated by severing one of its branches, and in this scene its theatrical power is associated with its role as a repository of personal memories.

Thus, the play not only shifts the crucifix into a new sphere- the aristocratic household-but it also creates a new kind of iconoclasm, for it is not the figure of Christ but the arm of the



Elizabeth Williamson 475

cross that has been broken, and the threat of further disruption comes not from outside the family but from within it. Crucifixes did not appear frequently on the public stage, but when they did, as in this play, they were often presented in domestic contexts. In The White Devil, Cornelia's heirloom is still a symbol of the Catholic faith, but because of the domain in which it is presented, it carries an affective charge rather than an overtly religious one, signifying Cornelia's piety within the realm of the family. I argue here that the precedent for valuing this stage object as an heirloom rather than as an emblem of Catholicism lies in the social history of post-Reformation England.

Historians such as Marie Rowlands have shown that English recusancy took many forms and was not always the focus of public controversy.3 One of the less overtly controversial items associated with recusant life was the "family" crucifix, which func- tioned as part of an inheritance system and played an important role in the lives of private citizens throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In fact, one of the primary reasons the visitors charged with enforcing religious injunctions had so much difficulty eliminating the use of crosses and crucifixes in England was that in many parishes individuals were hiding them in their own homes. The large wooden roods that formed the cen- terpiece of the medieval liturgy were easily identified and defaced, but it was more difficult to eliminate smaller objects, including those worn about the body. In the decades after the Reformation, therefore, objects such as crucifixes and rosary beads not only continued to function as important anchors of private devotion but also served as markers of family unity, passed down from generation to generation among those who still adhered to the traditional religion. Cherished by their individual owners, these objects also accumulated a considerable affective value over the years as part of secular inheritance systems. By foregrounding Cornelia's crucifix as a memento, The White Devil references the actions of individuals who were determined to preserve Catholic objects as a means of maintaining continuity within their families. As a result, it complicates any simple connection between Catholic objects and idolatry.

Like many recusants, Cornelia has inherited her crucifix from a family member, in this case her husband, and she hopes someday to pass it on to her children. As the events of the play unfold, however, both the status of the crucifix and the stability of Cornelia's family are called into question. Cornelia attaches emotional weight to the crucifix because it was her husband's,



476 The White Devil

and because it connects her to a set of familiar social customs and beliefs. But the fact that the heirloom is broken dramatizes the way in which inherited objects and the traditions associated with them can be jeopardized as they pass from hand to hand, even within the domestic sphere. Thus, although The White Devil assigns the crucifix a positive role within the family unit, Cornelia's desire to secure its meaning as a family treasure is complicated by its fluctuating value within the play. In making the crucifix susceptible to desecration at the hands of her son, Flamineo, The White Devil acknowledges the changing status of religious objects that circulated as family heirlooms but suggests that they maintained an emotional charge even as their worth was being renegotiated.

In order to access the sympathetic potential of the family crucifix, The White Devil must overcome typical associations linking religious objects with Catholic superstition. One of the most influential attacks on idolatry, the Elizabethan Homilies (1563), announces that the practice of venerating images is in constant danger of being resurrected whenever popish objects are pres- ent. The very "seeking out of Images," the homilist writes, "is the beginning of Whoredom." By taking them "out of their lurking corners" and displaying them in the light of day, idol makers tempt both men and women to "spiritual Fornication." The fear expressed by Protestant iconoclasts was that if devotional objects were being harbored in private households, they would soon begin to creep back into parish churches as they did during the Marian restoration, resulting in what the homilist calls a "tragedy."4 It was this tragedy ecclesiastical visitors were struggling to avert by eliminating crosses from homes as well as from churches.

The White Devil addresses the survival of Catholic objects by dramatizing the destruction of a small crucifix within the domestic sphere, in which the threat from the inside, from the rotten branch of the family tree, is more real than any possibility that the object will be worshipped on stage. By causing audience members to identify with Cornelia who is struggling to protect her heirloom and the values associated with it, and by demonstrating how that object can be re-inflected in a new context, the play prompts them to reconsider an object that most Protestants treated as idolatrous. In The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O'Connell has argued that Renaissance playwrights were deeply aware of antitheatrical critiques linking the theater with Catholic superstition and that this awareness was one of the major forces shaping their work.5 This essay makes a slightly different claim about the way early




modern drama responded to antitheatrical rhetoric and the way it staged religious practices. In addition to positing, as O'Connell does, that dramatists developed their craft in opposition to puri- tan antitheatricalists, I also want to suggest that in some cases the drama encouraged playgoers to step outside the language of iconoclasm altogether.

Webster's play deftly skirts the problem of idolatry by distancing Cornelia's crucifix from any kind of religious ceremony and focusing its audience's attention instead on the tragedy of a family's disintegration. Through its depiction of Cornelia's struggle to preserve the integrity of her family, The White Devil allows the specific resonance of the family crucifix to come to the forefront.6 On the other hand, the play does not manage to avoid the associations between crucifixes and idolatry altogether. Rather, the complex interplay between Cornelia's crucifix and a second stage crucifix works to ensure that audience members will not confuse her heirloom with an emblem of idol worship.

The White Devil separates Cornelia's crucifix from what Prot- estants called "the ornaments of papist superstition" by supplying another crucifix, one that directly invokes familiar anti-Catholic stereotypes. If Cornelia's small, jeweled crucifix is positively inflected as a key element of a family inheritance system, its worth determined by the virtuous woman who continues to believe in its power as a token of family unity, then this second crucifix property is a counterfeit liturgical object, falsely appropriated by the men who use it to taunt the dying Bracciano. The theme of papist hypocrisy is especially prevalent in this scene, as his murderers-dressed as Capuchin monks-taunt the duke with a fake crucifix, the apparent symbol of his salvation, before brutally strangling him.

The two crucifix properties are also physically distinct, for the prop with which Lodovico and Gasparo taunt Bracciano is a hand- held object, while Cornelia's crucifix is a piece of jewelry worn about the body. Despite the absence of any material resemblance between the two implements, however, the play creates a the- matic connection between them that complicates the apparently stereotypical aspects of the revengers' crucifix. According to the stage direction, Lodovico and Gasparo appear to Bracciano "in the habit ofCapuchins" outfitted with "a Crucifix and hallowed candle" (V.iii. 116-8; K2r). Murmuring a standard set of Latin phrases, the two murderers then perform an imitation of the commendatio animae, a Catholic ritual designed to comfort the dying and commit their souls to God.7 Left alone with Bracciano, however,



478 The White Devil

they curse him for his evil deeds and consign him to hell. Forms of this ceremony are common to the ars moriendi genre, in which the good Christian is lauded for his or her fortitude in the final moments of life. John Fisher's account of the death of Henry VII in 1509, for instance, praises the king's piety by describing his abiding attachment to the symbol of his salvation: "[t]he ymage of the crucyfyxe many a tyme that day full devoutly he dyd beholde with grete reverence, lyftynge up his head as he myght, holdynge up his handes before it, & often embracynge it in his armes & with grete devocion kyssyng it, & betynge ofte his brest."8 The commendatio is also described in several English liturgical guides, including the Monumenta Ritualia, which instructs the dying man to "[p]ut alle thi trust in [Christ's] passion and in his deth, and thenke onli theron, and non other thing." The dying man's confessor, meanwhile, is instructed to "have the crosse to fore the."9 Parodying this tradition, the revengers pretend to offer the crucifix as an image of his salvation, until, left alone with their victim, they begin to taunt and curse him, telling Bracciano that he will be damned to hell for his sins, and "forgotten / Before thy funeral sermon" (V.iii. 168-9; K2v).

We can read this scene both as a mockery of "the good death" and as an indirect attack on Catholicism itself, for by the time the play was first performed, the Church of England had dismissed the commendatio and other traditional ceremonies as dangerous forms of papist superstition. The hypocritical actions of the revengers, who dress as holy men and pretend to comfort their enemy, also echo standard Protestant rhetoric used to critique the false trappings of the priesthood. Priests were accused of being as hol- low as stage players, and the mass itself was said to be no more than a set of gestures designed to provoke blind idolatry; Thomas Becon even called the priests' robes "game-players' garments."'0 The falseness of the revengers, who hide their true intentions by donning the clothing and gestures of Capuchin monks, thus mir- rors the falseness that Protestants perceived as being at the heart of the Catholic faith, and the actors playing Lodovico and Gasparo become even more "false" when their characters take on deceptive roles within the fiction of the play. Construed in this light, the revengers' crucifix is nothing more than an element of their false show. Emptied of its sacrality, and used satirically as a weapon against Catholicism, the crucifix's function in the scene seems to directly mirror its function in The White Devil as a whole.

But although act V, scene iii invokes well-known stereotypes concerning priests and players, the self-conscious use of the




crucifix as a prop within the fiction emphasizes the potential for abuse rather than prompting the audience to dismiss this aspect of Catholic practice altogether. Because the audience knows that these are not real Capuchins and that their crucifix is a mere device, there is no threat that they will promote idolatry through their actions; the ceremony is rendered ineffective from the mo- ment they don their disguises. Moreover, this scene contains moments of poignancy that play off the sympathetic quality of Cornelia's crucifix, which appears in the previous scene. The play takes Bracciano's suffering seriously and acknowledges the fact that the crucifix, which should be used to comfort the dying man, has instead become an instrument of torture. By taunting Bracciano with salvation and then confronting him with the consequences of his sin, Lodovico and Gasparo are, like Flamineo, waging an attack upon the traditional objects and customs that preserve collective memory. The real duke, whose story was famous enough to make its way into a London playhouse, is here depicted as a man whose life will be summarily erased from the annals of history. Ironically, Webster's theatrical creation, a mere fiction, succeeds in memorializing Bracciano's life.

If these scenes are similar in their treatment of the issue of remembrance, they are also consciously designed to play off one another, for the spectacular nature of the revengers' false commendatio masks the social problem that is so forcefully manifest in act V, scene ii. The hypocrisy practiced by the fake Capuchins overshadows the more serious implications of Bracciano's murder, namely, the reality that his family can no longer hold itself together through traditional religious practices. In both scenes, Webster is using the crucifix to concretize the threat posed by iconoclastic attacks on memory-laden objects and practices. And although the play ultimately reinforces the controversial nature of the crucifix in post-Reformation England, recalling familiar rhetoric about the evils of papist superstition, both objects promote a more compassionate view of Catholic practice by pointing to the interpenetration of religious rituals and social traditions. This combination is not always successful, however, for the tragedy of The White Devil arises when the commingling of sacred and secular concerns-exemplified in Flamineo's campaign to gain influence at court-threatens to corrupt the values manifested in objects such as the crucifix. Thus, the play also questions the assumption that the family crucifix can continue to function in the same way from generation to generation.

Although the Reformation introduced a unique set of problems for Catholic families by forcing them to remove sacred objects



480 The White Devil

from parish churches and to perform traditional rituals in secret, the circulation of items such as crucifixes within the devotional sphere of the family predated the events of the sixteenth century. Indeed, Cornelia's belief in the crucifix as the anchor of her family's stability can be traced back through a rich tradition of pre-Refor- mation practices in England. For example, Gail McMurray Gibson reports that in the early sixteenth century, Sir William Clopton willed to his son "my crosse of gold which I where dayly abowtte my necke." Clopton's bequest was contingent on the son's promise that he and all his heirs would in turn "lenne this same crosse unto women of honeste being with child the tyme of ther laboure and immediately to be surely delivered unto hours ayen.""1 The language of Clopton's will explicitly highlights the social value of the gift and suggests the affective meaning attached to such objects is more likely to endure when they are kept within a stable parish community.

In the decades after the Reformation, however, Catholic objects were more likely to be confined to the sphere of the family, and the historical record provides several seventeenth-century examples of jeweled crucifixes that circulated within individual inheritance systems. In 1614, the Earl of Northhampton bequeathed to the Earl of Suffolk a diamond cross that he, in turn, had inherited from his mother.12 And in 1623, the head of another prominent recusant household, Viscount Montague, bequeathed his gold reliquary cross, "which I usually were about my necke," to his son Francis.'3 It is these aristocratic bequests that resonate most powerfully with Cornelia's "mended" crucifix.

It is also worth remembering, however, that religious objects sometimes made their way into private homes only because they had already been neglected or attacked. During the final years of Elizabeth's reign, a churchwarden named Roger Martyn recalled rescuing the crucifix from his church in Long Melford, Suffolk. "[I]n my aisle called 'Jesus aisle,"' he recalls in a diary written sometime around 1600, "[there was] a table with a crucifix on it, with the two thieves hanging, on every side one, which is in my house decayed; and the same I hope my heirs will repair and restore again one day."'4 In order to secure its value and to prevent it from falling into the hands of the ecclesiastical visitors, Martyn kept the crucifix in his home and instructed his children to return it to the church when conditions became more favor- able. But Martyn's own account acknowledges a problem with the crucifix: it is already "decayed." By making the rood a part of his own household, Martyn places his trust in the stability of his




family and in the continuance of intangible beliefs through the preservation of tangible objects.'5 On the other hand, Martyn's journal does not tell us whether the crucifix was ever repaired or returned to the church. It thus raises more questions than it answers about the trajectory of such objects in post-Reformation England.

Although the rood described in Roger Martyn's diary is an exception to the general rule that parishioners only took small crosses into their homes, the issues raised by this narrative echo those addressed by Webster's play. Can a sacred object continue to serve as a conduit of religious traditions in a secular context such as a family inheritance system? And how will its status change as it passes from one generation to the next? Although circulation may put the object itself at risk of desecration, The White Devil indicates that in spite-or perhaps because of-these threats of violence, heirlooms such as Cornelia's crucifix continue to carry a powerful affective charge. The focus, then, is not on Flamineo's act of iconoclasm but on its aftermath. Iconoclasts often made the breaking of idols into a public spectacle, thereby demystifying them in front of the largest possible number of believers.16 Rather than replicating this highly theatrical aspect of Protestant policy, however, Webster uses the story of the crucifix as a backdrop to the fratricide. The play does not stage the actual breaking of the limb, for such a scene might distract from the spectacle of Marcello's death. As a result, it draws most directly not on nar- ratives of iconoclasm, but on the efforts of English recusants to preserve traditional Catholic objects and practices.

The loss of a religious object could be devastating to church- wardens and individual parishioners, but in many cases the de- facing or breaking of Catholic objects was a necessary condition for their survival. In 1583, a resident of Kelvedon named Thomas Baker was forced to defend himself on a charge of "keeping idols and images" in his home, although he stoutly asserted that they had been damaged and were thus innocuous.17 For Baker and other recusants, resistance to religious conformity manifested itself in their willingness to hold onto all the physical remnants of the traditional faith, even those that were broken or ruined. Their attachment to these objects was often tolerated as long as they were deemed unusable. According to Susan Brigden, whose work documents the impact of the Reformation on the lives of ordinary Londoners, "only Catholic sentiment or traditional piety could explain why little broken, wooden images were bought for a few pence."'8 In the metropolitan injunctions of 1605, Bishop



482 The White Devil

Richard Vaughn asked specifically "[w]hether there be any in your parish who are noted, knowne, or suspected to conceale or keepe hidden in their houses any masse bookes, portesses, breviaries, or other bookes of popery or superstition, or any challices, copes, vestments, albes, or other ornaments of superstition, uncancelled or undefaced, which is to be coniectured, they doe keepe for a day, as they call it?"'19

One of the first statutes enacted during James's reign, "An Act to Prevent and Avoid Dangers which May Grow by Popish Re- cusants," specified that any "crucifix or other relic of any price" found in a private home should be defaced and returned to its owner.20 This statute set out to preserve the rights of property owners while giving officials legal permission to ensure the desecration of potentially dangerous objects. But such leniency did not change the fact that even small, broken crucifixes made the reformers uneasy. Just as strict Protestants feared the seductive power of visual displays on the public stage, so they feared the influence that such objects might exert on individual worshipers. Webster's play picks up on this anxiety and on the issues surrounding the survival of Catholic objects in private homes, but it tells the story from the point of view of the owners rather than that of the iconoclasts. What is at stake in the play, then, is not whether Cornelia's faith will promote acts of idolatry but whether she can preserve the affective value of her crucifix.

Once a community in and of itself, the family and its traditions become subject to the violent tendencies of the Court as The White Devil approaches its tragic conclusion. In the wake of Marcello's murder, for instance, Cornelia bemoans the fact that the proper function of her winding sheet has been horribly displaced:

this sheet I have kept this twenty year, and every day Hallowed it with my prayers. I did not think He should have wore it.

(V.iv.70-3; Llr)

Cornelia believes that her virtue is rooted in her sons, and their quarrel ultimately destroys her, but that destruction is located very concretely in objects such as the winding sheet and the crucifix, the physical connections between family stability and traditional faith. Rather than adopting his mother's crucifix, Flamineo has broken it, and, rather than burying her in her hallowed shroud, he has caused Marcello to be buried in it. More so than the wind-




ing sheet, the crucifix clearly references Catholic practices, but both objects demonstrate the problem of maintaining the affective meaning of an object from generation to generation, even within a single family. In examining Cornelia's role as the purveyor of family heirlooms, it is important to pay attention to the name Webster chose to give her. Cornelia was the mother of the Gracchi, two of the most renowned landowners in Republican Rome, and she herself gained notoriety for her unflinching devotion to her sons. When one of her wealthy houseguests encouraged her to display her collection of jewelry, Cornelia is said to have pointed to her sons and replied, "[tlhese are my jewels."21 Along the same lines, Webster's character views her children and her crucifix as two portions of the same inheritance, the best gifts her husband has left her.

Even as it links Cornelia to the stoic Roman matron, however, The White Devil draws upon the social realities of post-Reforma- tion religion in England in order to challenge the assumption that the meaning of objects such as Cornelia's crucifix can be fixed. Indeed, by contrasting the virtue of Cornelia's crucifix with the fake Capuchins' malevolent appropriation of a crucifix property in act V, scene iii, the play suggests that the value of a given object is determined in part by the way the theater appropriates these objects for its own purposes. The latter object clearly acknowledges the perceived similarity between Catholicism and theater and uses this perception to vilify the revengers, whereas the former promotes a more positive view of the crucifix as an integral part of an inheritance system. The White Devil does acknowledge, however, that such items often survive only because they have been somehow altered or adapted to suit their new surroundings. And through both stage properties, the play points to the fact that corruption within the family can threaten both sacred objects and the faith systems associated with them.

I have argued throughout this essay that The White Devil draws upon a set of social practices that were prevalent in seventeenth- century England, especially among members of the aristocracy. It is also possible, however, to develop a richer understanding of the play by reading it alongside other dramatic scripts that use crucifix properties. All of these stage objects, which tend to appear in domestic settings, reinforce the importance of recontextual- izing this controversial remnant of Catholicism. They also throw Webster's tragedy, unique in that it contains not one but two stage crucifixes, into further relief. Arden ofFeversham (1591), a domestic tragedy that has been designated as the first example



484 The White Devil

of the genre, contains one of the public theater's more famous examples of this type of stage property. Like the one in The White Devil, this crucifix has been converted to a more secular purpose, but rather than being an emblem of family unity, it serves as one of the many implements that Alice Arden and her lover consider using to kill her husband.22 Although Alice and Mosby ultimately select a more ordinary set of murder weapons, this stage property clearly registers as a manifestation of the dissolution in Arden's household.

The crucifix property in Thomas Dekker's The Noble Span- ish Soldier (1622) resembles the one in The White Devil more closely insofar as it inverts typical iconoclastic behaviors.23 As a gesture of mourning and of defiance, the play's heroine Onelia puts a portrait of her former lover, the king, opposite a crucifix on a table in her chamber. Because she still adores the man who abandoned her, Onelia places his picture in a position of honor opposite the crucifix, but because she simultaneously despises him, she scratches the image with her nails. Like Cornelia, Dekker's heroine is a woman struggling to preserve traditional beliefs and practices within the hostile environment of the Court; one of her main objectives is to ensure that her son, the king's legitimate issue, will be the next heir to the throne. Her situation is less pitiable than Cornelia's, however, for she is the perpetrator rather than the victim of iconoclasm, and she eventually gains the upper hand in wreaking her revenge on the king. A further examination of these plays would allow us to tease out the various roles religious properties play in theatrical representations of domestic space. Even at a glance, however, they provide a matrix of dramatic conventions that help us to rethink the apparently bizarre elements of The White Devil.

Arden ofFeversham and The Noble Spanish Soldier clearly echo the domestic themes that underpin The White Devil, but there is another Jacobean play that employs the same dramatic strategy that Webster does in presenting a small crucifix as part of an inheritance system. In Dekker and John Ford's tragicomedy, The Spanish Gipsie (1623), the crucifix property allows Clara, a young woman who has been raped, to recognize and claim her right to marry the young man who attacked her. Rather than staging the breakdown of the family unit, this play presents its crucifix as an object whose value is only temporarily called into question as it passes from hand to hand. And while the themes of The Span- ish Gipsie parallel those of The White Devil, the comic ending of Dekker and Ford's play, in which the young man's father correctly




identifies the crucifix as his son's and oversees his marriage to the heroine, requires that the crucifix remain intact as an indicator of aristocratic virtue and family unity. In The Spanish Gipsie, the recovery of the crucifix successfully preserves the family honor of both the rapist and his victim while simultaneously forging a new alliance between two noble houses.24

If The White Devil implies that neither Cornelia's crucifix nor her family can be "mended," The Spanish Gipsie suggests that the crucifix can override the misdeeds of its owners, allowing for the maintenance of a sense of unity despite the actions of individual family members such as the young villain Roderigo. Webster's play insists on questioning the status of inherited objects, but The Spanish Gipsie presents a case in which pieces of property are no less recognizable than faces, perhaps even more so because they are associated with the permanence of the aristocratic family unit. When Clara asks her rapist's father, "My Lord, d'ee know this Crucifix?" he immediately supplies her with the story of its origin. The old man explains that his son Roderigo received it from his mother on her deathbed, and adds that it is "deare to him as Life" (III.iii.43; F2v). Thus when Clara returns the crucifix to Roderigo, saying, "By this Crucifix / You may remember me," he has no choice but to recognize her as his bride (V.i.46-7; H4r). Both plays recontextualize the crucifix within the private realm of the family while distancing the object from its ritual origins and from the physical landscape of post-Reformation England. But, unlike The White Devil, The Spanish Gipsie creates an artificial happy ending premised on the stability of an object that is dis- tinctly unproblematic. At no point does Dekker and Ford's play introduce the possibility that the crucifix might lose its meaning as it passes from generation to generation.

As we have seen, elements of revenge tragedy consistently darken the relationship between family inheritance and religious objects in The White Devil. The audience witnesses a mother mourning her son's death at the hands of his own brother, forced to admit that her crucifix is not truly mended and that she will have no one to whom she can pass it on. As a piece of property once belonging to Flamineo's father, and now owned by his mother, the crucifix ought to be an appropriate symbol for the way lineage can overcome mortality. The first time it is introduced, however, Marcello immediately alerts the audience to the fact that it is broken, indicating that neither the crucifix nor the family has survived the consequences of Flamineo's ambition. The events of the play eventually bear out Marcello's fear that



486 The White Devil

Flamineo's iconoclastic actions will lead to the family's downfall, for Marcello's death is closely followed by Cornelia's, and then by the murders of Flamineo and Vittoria. By foregrounding the continual threat posed by the hostile secular environment of the Court, Webster's play is able to create a heightened level of sympathy for the heirloom and its owner that is entirely absent from The Spanish Gipsie.

In rejecting the logic of standard iconoclastic attacks in favor of references to Catholicism that emphasize the social and affective aspects of religious practice, The White Devil anticipates the complex perspectives on religion offered in Webster's subsequent tragedies. In Webster's The Duchess ofMalfi (1614), for instance, a striking confrontation between the title character and her brother the cardinal takes place at the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto. The Duchess, who has come to the shrine to pray, instead finds herself along with her husband and small children banished from their home.25 The violence of the cardinal's pronouncement stands in direct contrast to the spectacle of public devotion that the pilgrims had been expecting and emphasizes the inherent contradiction in allowing a religious official to exercise absolute control over secular affairs. As in The White Devil, however, the point is not that Catholicism is inherently superstitious, but rather that its outward ornaments have the potential to be abused and often accompany other signs of hypocrisy.

Romelio, the antihero of Webster's The Devil's Law Case (1619), is a quintessential hypocrite who, like Flamineo, has little respect for his mother's piety, which he construes as naive. But he also uses Leonora's faith against her, telling his sister Jolenta that their mother has given Jolenta's betrothed "this jewel / With a piece of the holy cross in't, this relic / Valued at many thousand crowns" as a token of her own affection.26 A few scenes later, Leonora herself admits her love for the young man, but this confession does not prove Romelio right in any simple sense. Rather, it underscores the point that religious implements can be, and often are, removed from their original context with- out losing their emotional power. Unlike Cornelia, the mother figure in The Devil's Law Case is not a pillar of virtue, but her gift of the relic as an expression of romantic love serves as yet another example of the intermixing of religious and secular aims, reminding playgoers that the sphere of the family was itself a site of devotional practice.

This last play, like The White Devil, demonstrates an interest in sacred objects that have been assigned an affective charge, and




in doing so, it disrupts standard Protestant associations between religious objects and Catholic superstition. But it also draws its own connection between those objects that circulate within individual families and the struggles that divide them. The historical record provides examples of small crosses and crucifixes function- ing successfully within aristocratic family units, but Webster often uses such objects to dramatize tension rather than continuity. Cornelia cannot give her crucifix to Flamineo because he does not value it as she does, just as Romelio perverts his mother's apparent charity in order to sow dissent between mother and daughter. In other words, while Webster may be drawing from the experiences of actual recusants, his fictionalized depiction of the circulation of religious objects selectively emphasizes their fragility as well as Cornelia's refusal to allow her own principles to be corrupted.

The plays discussed above seem to bear out the idea that, at least in the theater, the crucifix could be successfully converted to nonreligious purposes.27 Each stage crucifix carries a different valence, but all the texts that employ them reveal a fascination with the shifting status of religious objects and testify to their impact as part of a theatrical production. More specifically, this small group of "domestic" crucifixes suggests the intriguing role the crucifix played in the development of the genre of the domestic tragedy, one that used family conflicts to explore the problems surrounding the maintenance and restoration of social order. We cannot simply read The White Devil as a political tragedy because it involves aristocrats, nor can we read Cornelia and her family as mere accessories to Bracciano's demise. On the contrary, the disintegration of Cornelia's family, embodied in the desecration of domestic rituals and objects, is crucial to the play as a whole. These acts of desecration, which promote sympathy for Webster's suffering mother figure, also highlight the dangers associated with subjecting the crucifix to the violently unsettled environment of the Court. Thus, although plays such as The Spanish Gipsie cel- ebrate the stability of religious objects associated with aristocratic households, The White Devil suggests that any attempt to fix the affective value of these objects within the realm of the family will inevitably be compromised by political and social corruption. By foregrounding the violation of familiar objects and rituals, the play uses Cornelia's fictional tragedy to evoke the aftereffects of the Reformation, political events that had an impact on many English playgoers on a personal, material level.



488 The White Devil

NOTES

A version of this essay was presented at the Modern Language Association Conference in 2003. I am grateful to all those who have offered comments and references since then, especially Margreta de Grazia, Jean Howard, Erika Lin, Nicholas Moschovakis, Debora Shuger, and the readers at SEL.

IEamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), p. 157.

2 John Webster, The White Devil, ed. John Russell Brown (Manchester and New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1996), V.ii.10-4; I3v. Subsequent references to this play are from this edition and will appear in the text by act, scene, and line number, along with signature references from the quarto: Webster, The White Diuel, or, The tragedy of Paulo Giordano Vrsini, Duke of Brachiano with the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona, the Famous Venetian Curtizan, 1612 (STC 25178). Spellings from the play text have been modern- ized throughout the essay.

3 Many localized recusant communities continued to flourish throughout the early decades of the seventeenth century with little or no governmental control. Even in London there were private chapels sponsored by foreign ambassadors where English citizens could hear mass. Under Elizabeth, Londoners had begun to frequent the residences of various Catholic diplo- mats, where they secretly attended mass, but during James's reign whole crowds of would-be communicants openly flocked to the Spanish embassy. See Albert J. Loomie, "London's Spanish Chapel Before and After the Civil War," Recusant History 18, 4 (October 1987): 402-17.

4 Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory and Now Reprinted for the Use of Private Families, in Two Parts, 1687 (Wing/C4091I), pp. 182, 260, 213.

5 Michael O'Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early- Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).

6The third chapter of my dissertation, "Staging Sacred Things: The Cir- culation of Religious Objects in Seventeenth-Century Drama," addresses the use of cross and crucifix properties in a variety of dramatic settings.

7 For more on Webster's use of the commendatio animae, the commenda- tion of the soul to God, see Charles R. Forker, Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement ofJohn Webster (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1986), p. 559n10.

8 Qtd. in Duffy, p. 324. 9 Qtd. Duffy, p. 315. 10Thomas Becon, The Displayeng of the Popishe Masse, 1637 (STC 1719),

in The catechism of Thomas Becon. With other pieces written by him in the reign of King Edward the sixth, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1844; New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968), pp. 259-60.

11 Qtd. in Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 61.

12 E. P. Shirley, "An inventory of the effects of Henry Howard, K.G., Earl of Northampton, taken on his death in 1614, together with a transcript of his will," Archaelogia 42 (1869): 347-78, 375. The reference is from Diana




Scarisbrick, Jewellery in Britain, 1066-183 7: A Documentary, Social, Literary and Artistic Survey (Wilby, Norwich: Michael Russell, 1994), p. 72.

'3West Sussex Record Office, BA74, as quoted in Scarisbrick, p. 100. Even more dramatic was Viscount Montague's request that he be buried in the habit of a Capuchin monk.

14 The State of Melford Church as I, Roger Martyn, did know it" in Re- ligion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook, ed. David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 11.

1'5An additional threat posed by the persistence of Catholic objects in such places was that they gathered communities of recusants around them. Devotional objects, along with Catholic manuals and prayer books, were frequently put into circulation by renegade priests such as John Sweet, who was captured in Devon at the home of Alexander and Alice Snelgrove in 1621. When the king's officers searched the other houses Sweet had visited in Exeter, they found "many crucifixes, Popish books, Agnus Deis, grayves, beads and such other superstitious relics" (Marie B. Rowlands, ed., English Catholics ofParish and Town, 1558-1778 [London: Catholic Record Society, 1999], pp. 45, 53).

16 The most famous example is that of the Boxley rood at the Cistercian Abbey in Kent, which was said to be animated by the prayers of pilgrims, but was revealed as a mere puppet in 1538. According to Nicholas Partridge, iconoclasts made a show of exposing its engines and wires in front of the Bishop of Rochester and a large crowd of curious citizens in 1538. John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1973), p. 73.

17 F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelms- ford: Essex County Council, 1973), p. 96.

18s Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 432.

19 Qtd. in Kenneth Fincham, ed., Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Early Stuart Church, 2 vols. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester NY: Boydell Press, 1994), 1:37, emphasis added.

20 3 & 4 Jac. L Cap V, as reproduced in G. W. Prothero, ed., Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents Illustrative of the Reigns ofElizabeth and James I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), pp. 262-8.

21 The narrative is from Valerius Maximus (4:4). D. R. Shackleton Bailey, ed. and trans., Memorable Doings and Sayings (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000). For more on the significance of Cornelia's name, see Forker, p. 48.

22 Lena Cowen Orlin describes domestic tragedy as a genre invented by Arden ofFeversham to satisfy its audience's voyeuristic desire "to see through walls, to discover the intimate secrets of conjugal relationships, to identify disorder and to imagine that in this way it is mastered, to participate in a communal restoration of the preferred order of domestic things" (Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994], p. 8). A useful edition of the play is The Tragedy ofMasterArden ofFeversham, ed. M. L. Wine (London: Methuen, 1973).

23 Thomas Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1953-61), 4:231-300.



490 The White Devil

24 The Spanish Gipsie as It Was Acted (with Great Applause) at the Privat House in Drury-Lane, and Salisbury Court, 1653 (Wing M1986). The play's authorship is not specified on the title page, but it has been assigned a performance date of 1623 and several early-twentieth-century scholars have agreed that it resembles the work of both Dekker and Ford. The 1653 quarto attributes the play to Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. Along with signatures from the quarto, line numbers will be provided parentheti- cally and are cued to The Spanish Gipsy by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley: A Critical Edition, ed. Kate Parker Smith (Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Dissertation, 1944).

25 Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Brian Gibbons (London: A. and C. Black; New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

26Webster, The Devil's Law-Case, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (London: Ernest Benn, 1975), III.iii. 107-9.

27 Additionally, there are several plays that specify a "cross" rather than a "crucifix," according to Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson's Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama: 1580-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999).

