Catholic Martyrdom in Dekker and Massinger's The Virgin Martir and the Early Modern Threat of "Turning Turk"

Abstract

While largely neglected by modern critics, Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger's 1620 tragedy The Virgin Martir enjoyed considerable popular success in its time.1 It was performed at the Red Bull Theater, where according to the first quarto's title page, it was "divers times publickely Acted with great Applause, By the seruants of his Maiesties Reuels," and underwent four printings in the seventeenth century as well as a stage revival in 1660.2 What is striking about the play's popularity is its seemingly controversial adaptation of a medieval virgin martyr legend, a genre that was largely suppressed by the English Reformation. Following attempts in the 1570s by religious authorities to ban the cycles of mystery plays in English towns and cities, most if not all remnants of hagiographical drama had disappeared from the stage.3 The record of a fee of forty shillings paid to the Master of the Revels on 6 October 1620, for a "new reforming" of the play, seems to suggest both its potentially controversial content and the formal scrutiny that forced London playwrights to comply with official Church doctrine.4 The small body of critics who have addressed the play over the past fifty years either focus, like Louise Clubb (1964), on the striking anomaly of its apparent Catholic content or else attempt, like Larry Champion (1984) and Jose M. Ruano de la Haza (1991), to explain away this content by emphasizing the play's iconoclastic elements or arguing that its religious categories are mere "pretext" to "a simple and clear struggle between good and evil."5 But despite these scattered attempts to raise or refute the question of The Virgin Martir's Catholic affinities, the question remains largely unanswered: what accounts for the dramatic appeal in 1620 of an early Christian saint who is martyred in Catholic fashion? Or more specifically, what is appealing at this time about a martyr whose religious constancy is signified through her bodily resistance to torture and, above all, through the preservation of her virginity? Leaving aside the obvious, [End Page 83] though admittedly complex, explanation of persisting Catholic sympathies in Reformation England, I attempt to account for the significance of The Virgin Martir's particular representation of martyrdom by taking a broader global view of the political and religious threats that surrounded its production. I begin with the premise that the appeal of Catholic martyrdom and its emphasis upon physical inviolability can be better appreciated in light of England's increased commercial engagement with the Ottoman empire during the early seventeenth century and the particular anxieties that the English stage began to attach to the threat of Islamic conversion. As an emerging body of critical work in the field of literary studies has observed, the commercial and colonial threat that the Ottoman empire posed by virtue of its incredible size, wealth, and military capacity was acutely felt by the English during a period when they began to rely increasingly on eastern Mediterranean trade and to imagine themselves as a tiny player in an international arena of commerce and power. Popular English discourses represented the Turkish threat as one of conversion or of "turning Turk"—a phenomenon that constituted both a genuine predicament for Christian seamen who were captured by Turks and an imaginative theme or trope on the London stage. The Virgin Martir is roughly contemporary with a number of plays that overtly thematize Christian resistance to "turning Turk," including Robert Daborne's A Christian Turned Turke (1609–1612); John Fletcher, Nathan Field, and Philip Massinger's The Knight of Malta (1616–1619); and Massinger's The Renegado (1623–1624). In each of these plays, Islamic conversion is figured as the direct result of sexual intercourse between a Christian man and a Muslim woman. Conversely, Christian resistance is exemplified through the chastity of the Christian woman...