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is to another place (i.e., to the New Jerusalem). 4 I refer to Gless’s 1994 monograph, Interpretation and Theology. My interpretation of the betrothal/wedding ceremony in canto xii as an allegory of the sacrament of Communion has been anticipated by John King who, in the final sentence of his Spenser Encyclopedia entry under the heading ‘Sacraments’, describes the ceremony as ‘an act that mirrors the union of Christian and Christ in the Communion service’ (624). King has not, however (in so far as I have been able to discover), expanded upon this inspired
societies accustomed to forthright, uncensored modes of expression. In today’s literature, cinema, and Internet entertainment, and in our print and electronic journalism, we expect bald, unmodulated frankness. Shakespeare’s contemporaries didn’t. Unlike our unbuttoned society, Elizabethans knew there were rules against the staging of the sacraments or treating with
increasingly acquired the status of sacrament (Albrecht/Weber, 2002a: 2; Targoff, 2008: 158). In England, even fairly close to the beginning of the Reformation, the sermon also gained in significance: ‘The Book of Common Prayer has from its first version in 1549 prescribed a dual ministry of word and sacrament’ (Carrithers, 1972: 10) – under different monarchs, one or other of these ministries was emphasised more (McCullough, 1998: 6). As a priest of the English Church under King James I, Donne appears to have ‘favoured communication over Communion’ (Ferrell, 1992: 63), and
held, with Luther against Swiss Christology, that ‘Christ is truly present in His sacrament’, 24 but on other matters, of Catholic ceremony and extreme unction, for example, he was prepared to compromise: these were ‘ adiaphora —things indifferent, unnecessary and generally unwanted by Lutherans, but hardly cardinal sins either’. This moderation characterized Melanchthon’s attitude at the diet of Augsburg (1530) and his acceptance of the distinctly Catholic Leipzig Interim (1548), the latter precipitating what has become known as the ‘adiaphora controversy’. 25
the sanctity of wedlock through repeated banter about cuckoldry and horns, and Rosalind’s description of a wife’s unruly behavior (4.1.39–46). In 4.2 a deer is given a funeral – another sacrament slighted. All this is pure Marlowe. Shakespeare debunks blood sports with his description of the weeping deer (2.1.33–43), Duke Senior’s doubts about the legitimacy of hunting (2
forthrightly refers to her marriage as ‘Nought but a sacrament of misery’. This is certainly not typical fare in a funeral elegy: the Earl of Rutland had died just a few weeks before his wife, although there were already (according to Chamberlain) rumours about her considering a new marriage. Her marriage to Rutland had changed only her name, and she lived ‘Like a betrothed virgin’ rather ‘than a wife’ – it
funeral elegies gesture towards the sorrow of the widower, Beaumont outspokenly belittles Rutland’s marriage. Early on, he puts the name of Rutland aside as he reverts to her maiden name of Sidney (which may ‘more force a tear’), and he then forthrightly characterizes her marriage as ‘Nought but a sacrament of misery’. 17 This is hardly typical fare in a funeral elegy. 18
History and the Protestant Cause in Sir Philip Sidney’s Revised Arcadia (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018), includes two chapters that discuss Cecropia and Amphialus, though with a rather different approach from my own: chapter 7 argues that ‘Sidney links Cecropia allegorically to the Church of Rome, the papacy, the Mass, and the Roman sacrament of auricular confession’; chapter 8 suggests that in Amphialus, ‘Sidney densely aggregates images, metaphors, and other language recurrent in works by zealous contemporary Protestants who
there is a surprising acknowledgement by Hermione of the historical association of her femininity with sin even within the sacrament of marriage: Th’ offences we have made you do we’ll answer, If you first sinned with us, and that with us You did continue fault, and that you slipped not With any but with us. (1.2.83–6) 49 Hermione’s pregnancy and the period of time of Polixenes’s stay in Bohemia sow doubts in Leontes’s mind about his
while in private carrying out his ministry in full, risking his life with every sacrament; if it comforted his secret congregations, it had not seemed to alter those minds that could make a difference. None the less, Southwell had brought treasures back to England, word-painting a new sort of Catholicism, the visions of the Counter-Reformation opening in the new churches in Rome, the sacralisation of