Physical and Spiritual Conversion: Femininity and Religious Materiality in Three Early Modern English Plays

Abstract

The act of adopting or removing religiously coded clothing in early modern English drama has long been overlooked in contemporary scholarship. The costumes worn to signify the religious affiliations of principal female roles in Lewis Wager's ca. 1566 The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene, Robert Greene's ca. 1588–1592 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and Christopher Marlowe's 1589–1590 The Jew of Malta function to indicate perceived identity while also acting as part of an ongoing religious conversion. Such use of religious clothing in staged drama, contextualized alongside vestiarian controversies and the commonplace practice of playhouses using Catholic vestments as costumes, reveals the tensions surrounding the power of clothing to completely transform the wearer into someone else. Just as the vestments themselves were transformed for use on the stage, so too do the costumes transform the wearers' religious identities in each of these plays.