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Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England

Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England

Paperback

Series: Women and Gender in the Early Modern World

Literary CriticismShakespeare

ISBN10: 1138268119
ISBN13: 9781138268111
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Nov 17 2016
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare's England offers a new approach to evaluating the psychological 'loss' of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England by illustrating how, in the wake of Mary's demotion, re-inscriptions of her roles and meanings only proliferated, seizing hold of national imagination and resulting in new configurations of masculinity. The author surveys the early modern cultural and literary response to Mary's marginalization, and argues that Shakespeare employs both Roman Catholic and post-Reformation views of Marian strength not only to scrutinize cultural perceptions of masculinity, but also to offer his audience new avenues of exploring both religious and gendered subjectivity. By deploying Mary's symbolic valence to infuse certain characters, and dramatic situations with feminine potency, Espinosa analyzes how Shakespeare draws attention to the Virgin Mary as an alternative to an otherwise unilaterally masculine outlook on salvation and gendered identity formation.

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