Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Virgin Martyr

Abstract

This chapter explores the dramatic “afterlives” of medieval saints in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (performed 1614), and The Virgin Martyr, coauthored by Philip Massinger and Thomas Dekker (1622). A possible source for Cordelia’s spirited resistance to her father’s demand for absolute love may be the precedent provided by the extraordinary popularity in late medieval England of stories of the early Roman virgin martyrs. These powerful accounts of dissenting women who speak truth to power in the name of their Christian faith, represented by the apocryphal lives of Margaret of Antioch, Catherine of Alexandria, and Dorothy continued to haunt the imagination of early modern playwrights and provided them with a means to critique the oppressive patriarchy of Protestantism.