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6/6/09 10:24 AMHeretic’s Foundation V: Shakespeare’s Spoofs of the Virgin Mary « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 1 of 5http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=2324
 
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Heretic’s Foundation V: Shakespeare’s Spoofs of the Virgin Mary
Saturday, June 6, 2009Bylines
 By John Hudsondarkladyplayers@aol.comSpecial to the Clyde Fitch Report 
 The Virgin Mary has beengetting around a lot in recent years, appearing inthe griddle of a Mexican restaurant, in a patch of damp on the concrete of a motorway underpass, even in ahalf-eaten grilled cheese sandwich. Perhaps we should not besurprised, then, that 400 years ago she also “appeared” in the plays attributed to William Shakespeare, since it is generally thought that the Man from Stratford was a practicing Catholic. We should be utterly astonished, however, that when the VirginMary“appears,” it is in situations even less salubrious than partly munched food. The allegorical depictions of the Virgin Mary in the playsare not merely bad taste, they are scathing, even shocking parodies of the most sacred Christian doctrines.At the time, the encoding of underlying allegorical meanings in plays was a conventional literary technique.It was used, for example, in the allegorical theater of John Lyly. Queen Elizabeth, in hercommentson
 Richard II 
, recognized that the author was making a contemporary allegorical reference to her, whilelecturer-criticGabriel Harveynoted obliquely that the Shakespearean plays contained secret meanings that
 
6/6/09 10:24 AMHeretic’s Foundation V: Shakespeare’s Spoofs of the Virgin Mary « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 2 of 5http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=2324
would only be recognized by “the wiser sort.”The same allegorical technique is used in the plays to depict the Virgin Mary. For instance, several playsdepict the Annunciation, that picturesque account of an angel appearing to Mary and telling her she wouldconceive a child through the Holy Ghost. In
 Romeo and Juliet 
, the nurse’s name is Angelica, which inherbal medicine isthe root of the Holy Ghost. The Nurse addresses Juliet as a “lady-bird” (1.3.3), anestablished symbol for the Virgin Mary; the account of Juliet being weaned is derived from the account of the Virgin Mary being presented in the Temple at the age of 3, as it appears in theInfancy Gospel of James.This same apocryphal account that mentions Mary being a dove and dancing with her feet may have led tothe dance scene in which Romeo calls her “a snowy dove trooping with crows” (1.5.48). The Nurse’s scenealso occurs onSt. Anne’s Day. St. Anne was the mother of the Virgin Mary. Finally, the Nurse refers toSusan (which in Hebrew is Susannah, meaning a lily, the standard symbol of the Annunciation), and thatshe is ‘with God’ — or in Hebrew, ‘Emmanuel,’
 
referring to the prophecy in the Gospel of Matthew that avirgin shall conceive a baby
.
The Nurse addresses Juliet/Mary as “God mark thee to his grace” (1.3.59),echoing the traditional address of Mary as being full of grace. Taken as a whole, it appears that the Nurse’sscene is a comic parody of the Annunciation which this virgin comically wants to refuse!The Annunciation scene in
Othello
is more attenuated: one has to notice the references to a messengercoming from Signior Angelo and letters to Marcus Luccicos (referring perhaps to the gospels of Mark andLuke) all taking place at the same moment it is rumored that a virgin is having sex. Later, however, there aredirect connotations of the worship of Mary when Desdemona is addressed by kneeling men (”Hail to thee,lady!”) and surrounded with heavenly grace.The most blatant Annunciation parodyis in
 Hamlet 
. Ophelia is twice interrupted, once while reading, theother time while sewing, which were the two traditional ways the Virgin Mary was shown in Renaissanceart being interrupted by the angel of the Annunciation. Hamlet warns that Ophelia may conceive if exposedtoo much to the sun; he compares her to the way the carcass of a dead dog can generate maggots in the sunby a “God kissing carrion.” This revolting image was used by Christian theologianAlanus de Insulisas away of explaining how Mary might have conceived Jesus by supernatural means. A less repulsive image of the Annunciation in Renaissance art was that Mary conceived Christ, while remaining a virgin, in the sameway sunbeams pass through a glass window. In the play, Hamlet, as the son of Hyperion,represents Heliosthe sun god, and he bends the light of his eyes/sunbeams to Ophelia without looking away, even while hewalks out of the room. In Hamlet’s behavior, such as holding his head, there are parallels to the account inthe Infancy Gospel of James of how Joseph behaved when he found out his wife was mysteriously pregnant.To understand the overall allegory being made, we need to look at what happens to the characters next. Inthe case of Desdemona, the men of Cyprus fall on their knees to her, saying “Hail to thee, lady” (2.1.84) asan equivalent of a ‘Hail Mary’; her handkerchief is embroidered with strawberries —the Virgin Mary’semblem – not in the source text. This is perhaps why there are references to the “divine Desdemona”(2.1.73), “full of the most blest condition” (2.1.247), with a “blest disposition” (2.3.315) who acts as anintermediary or intercessor and engages in religious exercises of “fasting and prayer” and “exercise devout”(3.4.40-1) and is “heavenly true” (5.3.133). She is a virgin nun or “votarist” (4.2.190) that kneels and prays(4.2.23), a chaste virgin like Diana (3.3.390), deceived by charms, including fantastic stories and the gift of the handkerchief.Audiences might also recognize Desdemona as a dying Christ figure who dies a guiltless death (5.2.121),saying “Commend me to my good Lord” (5.2.122) — a plea similar to that made by the dying Jesus in theGospel of Luke. Her death is described in Christological terms as a “sacrifice” (5.2.65), and associated with
 
6/6/09 10:24 AMHeretic’s Foundation V: Shakespeare’s Spoofs of the Virgin Mary « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 3 of 5http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=2324
a “bloody passion” (5.2.44), which are allusions to the crucifixion story. Before her death, she recites theEucharistic prayer Kyrie eleison — ‘Lord have mercy on me.’ Her life is snuffed out like a candle on HolySaturday, the day in which church ritual candles are snuffed out, because it is the day in which Christ lay inthe tomb with a handkerchief over his face, waiting to be resurrected. The gospel reading for the day is“when Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child by the HolyGhost.” So it would therefore appear that Desdemona not only represents the Virgin Mary, she represents theVirgin Mary
 pregnant 
with Jesus; she is killed by her husband a few minutes before Easter Sunday, so therecan be no resurrection.Even blacker humor appears in
 Hamlet.
When Ophelia appears with all her flowers, a careful analysis in anarticle “Ophelia’s Herbal” shows almost all these flowers areemmenagogues, meaning they cause abortion/menstruation. Why? Presumably that is what she has been using them for. The research has beenrepeated by several scholars, including in Erik Rosencrantz Bruun’s article “As Your Daughter MayConceive” (1993) and Maurice Hunt’s article “Impregnating Ophelia” (2005). There has been at least one production, directed by Darko Tresnjak at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2007, thatshowed Ophelia beingvisibly pregnant.Until now, to my knowledge, no theater company has taken the next logical step of showing the allegoricalVirgin Mary aborting the baby Jesus, then falling off the branch and hanging suspended between earth andheaven, singing Psalms, and wearing a coronet before falling into the “glassy” brook — which presumablyreflected the sky — as a parody of her Assumption into heaven. She would presumably take with her thevirgin ‘crants’ (5.1.225), a rare expression that echoes the name Rosenkrantz, or rosary, which in popularlegend was created by the Virgin Mary.Later this year theDark Lady Playerswill stage an experimental and, I hope, controversial New Yorkproduction in which the full, horrific implications of the Virgin Mary allegory in all these plays will bebrought out on stage. Ophelia, for example, will be equipped with puppet maggots.This work will thus raise a profound question: Why would a recusant Catholic like the Man from Stratfordwrite such shocking anti-Christian parodies? Surely their existence is one more indication — like thecomicparody of the crucifixion in
 A Midsummer Night’s Dream
— that the plays may have been written bysomeone else, a someone who is certainly not a Christian. In Elizabethan England, that narrows the fielddown considerably.
 John Hudsonis a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped create several telecoms and Internet companies. He has recently been consulting to a leading think tank on the future of the theater industry and is pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to the Dark LadyPlayers. This fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. He has degrees inTheater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science.
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