Sacred Space and Gender in Early Modern English Literature

Abstract

The book examines the poetics of locality and spirituality in narrative poetry (Books 1 and 2 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander) and comedy (Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the anonymous city comedy The Family of Love). These disparate works are connected by their storytelling, an essential ingredient in the fashioning of spatial perceptions. They respond, albeit in different registers, to English clergymen’s theories of sacred space that emphasize men’s kinetic energy (expended in the search of redemption) and women’s emplacement in the godly home (where they provide comfort for peregrinating men). Narrative poetry, aimed at a primarily male audience, celebrates men’s salvational mobility while depicting women as static support for peripatetic men; it cleaves closely to the model advanced by English ministers. By contrast, comedy, a capacious dramatic form capable of providing incongruent perspectives (not least of all because the commercial theater depended on diverse, paying audiences), departs from the spatial ideals prescribed in theological treatises and offers tales of mobile women whose spiritual and domestic power moves outside the gendered paradigms promoted by England’s notable clerics.