But if brothels and prostitutes were implied how did such a dichotomous conflation occur? How were nuns perceived at the time? And more to our purpose how were nuns and other clerical figures seen when portrayed on the Elizabethan stage?
Shakespeare’s plays are vastly populated with such characters as is much of the other drama from the period. We have the duplicitous friars of Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing, the scurrilous magicians Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the gluttonous Zeal-of-the-land Busy of Bartholomew Fair; we see the horribly manipulated Ophelia, the disconsolate lover Hermia and Greene’s trifled-with Margaret, all of whom are threatened with the constraining chastity of the convent. All of these characters are bound together by common identities that shed a negative light on the devoted life. They are marked by habits and behavior that run counter to our currently sanctified images of members of the cloth: the monks and friars are power-mad panderers to young lovers, reveling in Epicurean delights; nuns and prospective nuns are characterized by a tendency toward sexual indiscretions. Such personages are stock comic figures of the period familiar to the contemporary audiences as hypocrites and buffoons, manipulators and whores. And it is this perspective that is of paramount importance to us for understanding the social constructs that governed the creation of such characters must by necessity alter drastically the way we understand those characters and what they represent.
Elizabethan views of the clergy grew out of the antimonastic satire of medieval literature which in turn resulted from the historical record and accounts of the repeated indecencies of wayward nuns and monks. Such indecencies, particularly those sexual in nature, have plagued the church since the inception of monasticism in the late fourth century. In his book examining the history of celibacy in the church Gordon Thomas states that the decree of celibacy
coincided with the spread of monasticism, replacing martyrdom as the ultimate witness to Christ. During the fourth and fifth centuries Mary’s popular appeal greatly increased, and her virginity became widely accepted, providing a still more secure basis, in the teaching of the Church, for its priests and later its nuns to accept compulsory celibacy . . . It is, nevertheless, a matter of clerical rather than divine law, and as a result to question celibacy has often been seen as a challenge to the Church’s authority. (9)
Thomas’ point is that members of the clergy have historically viewed celibacy as a human construct and thus as unnatural and profane and have routinely challenged the Church’s position. The implication is that the clergy, specifically nuns, have just as routinely broken their vows of celibacy. Graciela Daichman’s study into English conventual records of the medieval period bears out this belief. She found that “incidents of misconduct were alarmingly frequent, if we are to trust the historical documents of the period” (Daichman 3). Bishops called in to investigate conventual scandals often issued injunctions against the sisters for sins that “ranged from the trivial to the cardinal, from failure to attend services to incontinence and child-bearing” (4). As Daichman points out records of such immorality “date as far back as the early twelfth century, although they do not become common until the beginning of the fourteenth, increasing in number and severity throughout the entire fifteenth century, almost to the end of the medieval period . . Prolifigate nuns were not a rare phenomenon in the Middle Ages” (5). In other words the wayward nun was a common sight in Medieval England right into the 1500’s and thus would make a readily identifiable sight on the Renaissance stage.
Of course not all nuns were prolifigate, as Daichman puts it. Most were sincerely devoted to their vows and dedicated to their spiritual beliefs. And of those who were disobedient not all were sexually active or promiscuous; many were only guilty of mere recalcitrance or willfulness and relatively few were found to be apostate for reasons other than sexuality. But it is the sensual nun who presents the greatest aberration from the norm and it is always the aberration that receives the most interest.
Even though the aberrations were in the minority they were still numerous enough to become a stereotype. So what could create such aberrations? What would make a nun willing to reject her vows in the pursuit of sexual pleasure? One explanation is that posed by Thomas that the Church’s decree of celibacy was perceived as unnatural. Daichman goes further, claiming that such behavior was caused by the reasons women joined the convent in the first place.
The circumstances under which these women entered the cloister were precisely the determining factor for their behavior once inside. Those who became nuns of their own volition because of a strong religious vocation, still found the fourteenth-century nunnery the ideal place for a spiritual communion with God that it had been when St. Jerome founded the first convent in Rome around the year 400. There were other women, however, forced into the nunnery for social, economic, or political reasons and often totally unsuited for the religious life who seem to be the ones guilty of the immodest or indecent behavior described above. (12)The other reasons that Daichman cites include forcing young girls into the convent as a means of disposing of them in order to steal their inheritances, to insure that they don’t marry and produce children or to place a check on their behavior (13). Still other women like wealthy widows entered the nunnery as a matter of social convention without regard for religious calling and often engaged in fierce rivalry with the abbesses (16). It was also a social convention especially among large families to have at least one daughter enter the sisterhood. It is all these girls and women who joined nunneries for reasons other than religious vocation that proved to be the most problematic. They rebelled against being forced into chastity against their wills and in the cases of the wealthy wished to maintain their lavish lifestyles.
Another cause for their immodest behavior was the punishments levied against it. While punishments for men who were declared guilty of seducing nuns or leading them into indecency were harsh, ranging from fines and imprisonment to public beatings and excommunication, the punishments for nuns were relatively mild. Although apostasy was treated severely by the Church carnal sins were reprimanded only by such soft punishments as segregation and house arrest (Daichman 7-10). Though this served the Church by allowing it to conceal scandals it didn’t serve to dissuade the sisters from committing such breaches of morality and their reputations as bawds were reinforced in the public conscience.
It is this public perception that is reflected in the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The tradition of antimonastic satire, a genre designed to provoke laughter that would find its greatest outlet in the works of Chaucer, Boccacio and Aretino, ironically began in the Church itself as moralist sermons.
The French moralists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, like Guiot de Provins and Hughes de Berzé in their Bibles and Matheolus in his Lamentations, indignantly denounce the unchaste behavior of religious women whom they accuse of concealing their boundless concupiscence with an aura of spirituality and devotion. (Daichman xviii-iv)These tracts related salacious tales of nuns’ sexual escapades that were meant to be edifying for the sisters, pointing out their folly and heaping scorn upon their apostate souls. The focus was not on the incidents described but on the messages and morals they conveyed. It is therefore delightfully irreverent that the jongleurs appropriated the very same tales for their fabliaux. The aim of the jongleur was quite different from that of the moralist, blasphemously setting out to expose the nuns and by extension the Church to ridicule for the purposes of entertainment. “Thus, the reprobate nun was the target of countless ribald tales that eventually found their way into vernacular verse; scurrilous and unredeemed by any sense of moral decency, the fabliaux mock the immoral habits of certain religious women with total impunity”
(Daichman xv).
The other two literary forms in which the degenerate nun appears at this time are satiric parodies and the “chanson de nonne.” The medieval parody, perhaps the most recognized of which is William Langland’s Piers Plowman, exists between the moralist tract and the fabliau. While largely meant to be humorous like the latter the parody being satiric takes a darkly caustic look at monastic corruption. “In the Spill or Libre de les dones, the Portuguese Jacme Roig gives a detailed picture of a medieval nunnery where vices and corruption are rampant, much like the section in Nigellus Wireker’s Speculum Stultorum in which, half seriously and half in jest, the decay of the female monastic order is exposed” (xiv). The parodist merges the moralist and jongleur, creating works whose function is to shame and entertain at the same time.
The other genre, the “chanson de nonne” or “song of the nun,” is rather similar to the Elizabethan Mirror for Magistrates. While the tone is “often highly indecorous and most of the ‘chansons’ have an air of almost irrepressible frivolity” they depict “the plaint of the nun unwillingly professed” and are clearly sympathetic to her plight (xv). One example of a chanson quoted by Daichman goes:
My father has no other daughter; he has sworn a hundred times that he will make me a nun, but I will not be one and I do not want to. I would rather have a husband who would kiss me in the night three times, once in the morning and once at night, once at midnight; these are the three. (xv)Even though this example shows an understanding of why a nun would choose to be prolifigate its irreverent tone and mocking of the trinity clearly encapsulates the popular view of nuns and the Church current at the time. This view in English literature reaches its greatest expression and model in the work of Chaucer.
One of the most memorable characters Chaucer created is Madame Eglentyne the Prioress of The Canterbury Tales. Madame Eglentyne represents the beginning and arguably the culmination of a tradition of wayward nuns in English literature. While the sisters of the chansons and fabliaux are largely continental figures, Madame Eglentyne is one of the first to appear in the literature of England. This is not because her real-life counterparts didn’t exist; there was simply no literary precedent for her in the English language. At the time English was considered a crude vernacular language that wasn’t fit for proper literary expression. Chaucer was one of the first to embrace the language and write for the English people in their own tongue, providing an archetype for the English writers of the Renaissance. Chaucer imported the immodest sister into English literature and it is largely because of his example that she existed into the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages.
Although Madame Eglentyne is not described as sexually promiscuous like the Wife of Bath she is the prototypical wayward nun. She is a gaudily dressed figure, swaggering and swearing, who blatantly flouts her vows by joining the pilgrimage in the first place. “Her head dress, her manners, her rosary, and her brooch caused her to stand out among the other pilgrims; in fact, her very presence in such company ought to have attracted everyone’s attention, since nuns were not allowed to go on pilgrimages by ecclesiastical ruling” (Daichman 137). In fact Madame Eglentyne, with her attention to medieval fashion, her “pynched wympul” and her “ful symple and coy” smile, sounds more like a courtesan than a nun. Chaucer describes her in a way that suggests flirtation and romance, focusing on her physical attributes. “It is quite possible that if Chaucer could convey to his audience the image of a nun who, like ‘the sensual anchoress’ was weighted down by her flesh, that is, by the magnitude of her carnal appetites, everyone would laugh at her too” (151). It is hardly the image that comes to mind today when we think of a nun.
The image of the nun actually seems to have become more barbed during the English Renaissance thanks largely to the Reformation and the outlawing of Catholicism. As Darryl Gless points out in his book Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent:
the question of monastic devotion retained this vitality because it brought into focus a fundamental doctrinal conflict between Catholics and Protestants, a disparity that bulked large in the religious controversies of Shakespeare’s lifetime . . . These orthodoxies constituted shared ideas or types that the playwright could exploit to communicate meaning. (66)In other words Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights could draw on established stock figures, including religious figures such as the wayward nun, to embellish their plots and attack the Catholics. And draw on them they did, particularly in the “city comedy.”
The city or citizen comedy as opposed to the more pastoral forms are marked by a heightened sense of the prurient, of strong libidinous urges, and the man or woman of God was not immune. The overwhelming majority of these plays are about sex and sexual politics. The work of Thomas Middleton is preoccupied with examining how sexuality is constructed and how everyone should have the right to pick their own sexual partners. The city comedy of Jonson shows how all social classes are prone to the same follies and confusion when it comes to sex. Even Shakespeare’s city comedy of which The Merry Wives of Windsor is a prime example looks at the machinations of sex and how people try to manipulate others for sexual gratification. It is in these plays that we see the most equality in how both genders are depicted; the women are often as lusty as the men and as smart or dumb as their masculine counterparts.
While the figure of the nun is relatively rare on the stage in city comedy or otherwise (possibly because of the nature of the transvestite theatrical tradition) the image of the duplicitous or gluttonous man of God abounds. In the early Tudor interlude The Four PP we see a Pardoner like Chaucer's hawking religious relics who is clearly a scoundrel. The relics, “blessed” jawbones, toes, slippers, teeth and bees are all fakes contrived to cheat the truly pious of their money; we then see him enter into a lying contest in which he speaks of going to hell where he talks freely and casually with devils. In another early comedy, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, we are presented with Doctor Rat, a curate who spends his days in taverns swilling ale. Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-land Busy, a puritan, gorges himself on piglets, claiming that he will “eat exceedingly and prophesy.” And let’s not overlook Greene’s friars who delight in conjuring tricks and conversing with devils and Friar Bacon’s idolatry in fashioning the giant head of brass. These are hardly the pursuits of truly holy men.
Those holy women who do appear do not seem to fare much better. Throughout the drama of the period nuns and nunneries are always mentioned in relation to sexual indiscretions. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Hermia is threatened with forced chastity and “ the livery of a nun, / For aye to be in shady cloister mewed, / To live a barren sister all your life, / Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon” (1.1.74-7) for the sin of loving a man of whom her father disapproves. To return to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay we have Margaret pledging herself to a convent for being sexually used and discarded by her lover Lacy. In this light it is no wonder that nunneries were viewed as brothels and that Ophelia is commanded to get to one for they are the havens of the sexually dispossessed.
But the most interesting commentary on the devoted life in Renaissance drama is perhaps found in Shakespeare’s so-called problem play Measure for Measure. This play is unique in Shakespeare’s canon because of its focus on religion and the tenets of Christianity. The title of the play is a reference to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and the play examines the Christian concepts of mercy and justice to a greater extent than The Merchant of Venice as the plot is entirely about those dichotomous ideas. Two of the primary characters, Duke Vincentio and Isabella, represent the Catholic brother and sister and a third character, Mariana, confines herself to a holy house for the shame of being rejected by her lover. But it is Isabella who is the most compelling figure, a character who is often misunderstood and misrepresented to today’s audiences, for she is the most complex and arguably the last great comic wayward nun.
Today’s audiences see Isabella in the wrong light because no connections are made between her and the comic tradition from which she comes. Instead she is often perceived as a tragic figure akin to Ophelia. Act 3, scene 1, in which she reveals to her brother Claudio that his life could be saved if only she has sex with Angelo and Claudio then enjoins her to do so, is always staged in a highly melodramatic way that heightens the discomfort of the audience but in Shakespeare’s reality that scene is actually highly comic. The irony of that scene is not that she is asked to sexually compromise herself but that she refuses to do so. The modern audience fails to see the social construction behind the creation of Isabella and thus they fail to see her as representative of a comic type.
There are hints throughout the entire play that Isabella is a comic type and not necessarily meant to be taken seriously. As many critics point out the plot of the play blends two common folk tales, those of the Corrupt Magistrate and the Disguised Ruler. Other stock figures abound: the young lovers (Claudio and Juliet), the faithful servant (Escalus), the clowns and fools (Pompey, Elbow, and Froth), the bawd (Mistress Overdone) and the wronged woman (Mariana). Shakespeare is obviously aware of character types and uses them; how could it possibly be argued that Isabella doesn’t fit the same pattern?
Further proof that Isabella represents a character type that is associated with licentiousness is found early in the play. In 1.2 religious law and bawdiness become linked. When quoting lines 4 through 9 Gless says “The opening echo of the Litany (‘Heaven grant . . .’) and the reference to the commandments initiate this bawdy scene’s obsession with liturgical allusion, religious law, and the self-interested reinterpretation of that law” (62). In scene 3 when the Duke receives his disguise from Friar Thomas, yet another monk willing to engage in trickery and manipulation of the truth, the Duke’s first words are, “No, holy father; throw away that thought; / Believe not that the dribbling dart of love / Can pierce a complete bosom. Why I desire thee / To give me secret harbor, hath a purpose / More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends / Of burning youth” (1-6). These lines clearly show that monasteries were commonly thought of as havens of sexual offenders. A similar idea emerges in scene 4 when Lucio meets with Isabella in the convent of the sisters of Saint Clare. Lucio, as is his nature, repeatedly baits Isabella, saying “Hail, virgin--if you be” and “‘tis my familiar sin / With maids to seem the lapwing, and to jest, / Tongue far from heart, play with all virgins so” (16, 31-33). As Nicholas Radel puts it in his essay “Reading as a Feminist,” “Lucio’s banter suggests that Isabella’s decision to enter the nunnery is not a serious one in the world at large. His first greeting--playing upon a common Elizabethan-Jacobean comic stereotype--calls into question the chastity of all nuns” (111, emphasis added).
Still further evidence for Isabella being a sexual and sexualized creature is offered by Radel when he points out that all of the other female characters in the play exist within the world of the play as sexual objects. “Mistress Overdone, Julietta [sic] and Mariana all serve as part of a stock of character types in the period that signify women’s availability to men” (110). Mistress Overdone is a seasoned prostitute and owner of one of the local brothels; Juliet is the impregnated fiancée of Claudio; and Mariana is the rejected lover of Angelo who is arguably coerced into allowing her body to be used to trick and gratify Angelo. Overdone represents the economic aspect of female sexuality while Juliet portrays the social aspect and Mariana serves for the political. Shakespeare has clearly established a pattern into which Isabella must fit and she does, fulfilling the religious role of female sexuality.
But the final proof that Isabella plays the role of the wayward nun comes from Isabella herself in her words and deeds. The simple fact that she is entering a convent calls her motives into question. Why does she feel the need to become a nun in the first place? To refer back to Daichman’s research she shows that women became nuns for religious, economic, political or social reasons. We can reasonably rule out economics as there is no evidence offered in the play to suggest that she has a wealthy dowry or is being disposed of. Likewise there is nothing to show her as a political figure, at least not initially. There is no real proof that she feels a religious calling; her behavior is marked by excessive pride and masochism rather than the humility and charity requisite of religious vocation. She constantly desires harshness and “a more strict restraint” (1.3.4). That leaves only the social, meaning she is either a) a daughter of a large family; b) a widow or spinster; or c) a disconsolate lover like Mariana. As to the first option Claudio seems to be the only relative she has and as for the second she is often described as youthful and the fact that the Duke offers to marry her in the end of the play precludes widowhood. That leaves only the last option, suggesting that she is no stranger to sexuality.
Furthermore her speech in her first meeting with Claudio supports this conclusion. She says, “Women! Help heaven! Men their creation mar / In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail; / For we are soft as our complexions are, / And credulous to false prints” (2.4.127-30). In the introduction to the Signet Classic edition of the play editor S. Nagarajan glosses this passage by saying, “Isabella’s novitiate should perhaps be regarded as her answer to the problem of the ‘prompture of the blood,’ of which she seems to have some personal knowledge if one may judge from the accents of her admission to Angelo that women, no less than men, are frail” (xxvi). Gless’s reading supports Nagarajan’s:
The unobtrusive and unintentional erotic symbolism (the printing image) in these last lines indicates that Isabella has known the yearnings of the flesh. Her determined espousal of the Poor Clares’ “strict restraint” therefore implies not purely virginal ignorance and innocence, but a deliberate flight from the world. (98)Finally the fact remains that Isabella is willing to substitute Mariana for herself in the play’s infamous bed-trick. Coaxed by the Duke (disguised as a friar, let’s not forget) she willingly aids in the violation of another woman by a man who legally is not her husband. Isabella willingly breaks the very law for which her brother is about to die, a law that she endorses as “just but severe,” endangering Mariana body and soul. Isabella in effect becomes a procuress no different than Mistress Overdone.
Gless concludes his discussion by asserting that Isabella’s “physical appearance, her speeches, and her actions repeatedly remind us that she has been developed from a special category of type figures” (141). But she is more than simply that. Modern audiences consistently overlook Isabella as a stereotype largely because she is such a complex figure. She is like Ophelia in that she is swept up into events larger than herself over which she has no real control. She becomes a comment on the futility of religious devotion and on how pointless her role in society really is. Divine law is the only law that matters, Shakespeare seems to say, and the laws of man such as decrees of chastity are unnatural. And that is the message that the tradition of the wayward nun from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance has left us.
Works Cited
Daichman, Graciela S. Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986.
Gless, Darryl F. Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. Ed. by S. Nagarajan. New York: Signet Classics, 1964.
---. Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. by Paul Bertram. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1997.
Thomas, Gordon. Desire and Denial: Celibacy and the Church. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1986.
Radel, Nicholas. “Reading as a Feminist.” Measure for Measure. Ed. by Nigel Wood. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996.
