Confession and Memory in Early Modern English Literature

Penitential Remains

Paul D. Stegner, Kenneth A. Loparo, Teichmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349556854, 9781137558633
• eBook ISBN: 9781137558619
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first study to consider the relationship between private confessional rituals and memory across a range of early modern writers, including Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.

1

Confession and Memory in the Age of Reformations

Near the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Scottish Doctor of Physic provides two contradictory solutions for curing Lady Macbeth’s troubled mind. On observing Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking and allusions to Banquo’s wife, the Doctor admits to the maidservant that “the disease is beyond my practice,” but remains agnostic about her spiritual condition (5.1.59). After Lady Macbeth unwittingly confesses her complicity in the murders of Duncan, Banquo, and members of the Macduff family, he offers a more conclusive spiritual diagnosis:

Unnatural deeds

Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds

To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.

More needs she the divine than the physician. (5.1.71–4)

His analysis foregrounds the common early modern belief that a guilty conscience will compel confession, and his explanation that Lady Macbeth needs the assistance of a divine, “a curer of souls” rather than “a curer of bodies,” points to the necessity of external penitential intervention for assuaging her conscience (Merry Wives 2.3.34–5). The Doctor’s second prognosis is given in reply to Macbeth’s question about whether he can “[p]luck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff” weighing on his wife’s heart (Macbeth 5.3.41–4). The Doctor’s terse explanation, “Therein the patient / Must minister to himself,” indicates that Lady Macbeth has the potential to recover independently her spiritual well-being (5.3.45–6). Yet in both approaches precisely how Lady Macbeth would be cured is unclear. Shakespeare does not address how a divine would cure her infected mind. Would it be through a minister’s private spiritual guidance, or the reception of the rite of private confession—a form of auricular confession authorized in the Book of Common Prayer? Nor does Shakespeare specify how Lady Macbeth alone could cleanse her conscience of “that perilous stuff.”

Even as these two scenes from Macbeth indicate the uncertainty about how one should confess, both identify the same cause of Lady Macbeth’s distress: she suffers from the persistence of the memory of her past sins. Macbeth’s request for “some sweet oblivious antidote” would raze the memory of her misdeeds and, in a sense, confirm Lady Macbeth’s earlier boast that “[a] little water clears us of this deed; / How easy is it then!” (2.2.64–5). Instead of pursuing this medically induced form of forgetting, Shakespeare demonstrates the validity behind the Doctor’s explanation of the causal relationship between unnatural crimes and their spiritual repercussions. Lady Macbeth cannot remedy her troubled mind not merely because she discharges her guilt while sleeping, but because her “deaf pillows” are also dumb. They can offer neither counsel nor forgiveness. All of her confessions function as hollow imitations of Christian penitence. The Doctor accordingly prescribes repentance to a divine, whatever the religious context might be, to alleviate the effects of her sinful crimes and the weight of their memory on her conscience.

Shakespeare’s staging of the ambiguity surrounding repentance forms the historical point of entry of this book. The primary issue for Shakespeare and his contemporaries was not if but rather how sins should be repented. The Protestant Reformation did nothing to alter the Christian mandate that repentance is necessary for salvation, for, as John the Baptist commands, “Repent: for the kingedome of heauen is at hand” (Matt 3: 2). The architects of the English ecclesiastical reforms, following Luther and Calvin on the Continent, did reject much of the medieval penitential system. Sacramental confession had been a focal point of Protestant resistance because of the rite’s close association to ecclesiastical authority. Indeed, Luther begins the Ninety-Five Theses (1517) by stating that the “entire life of believers [is] to be one of repentance” in order to counter the medieval requirement that all sins must be confessed (Luther’s Works 31: 25). After Erasmus cast doubt on confession’s scriptural foundation when he translated the Greek term metanoia (conversion of the heart) used in Matthew 3: 6 as resipiscite (to change one’s mind or repent) instead of the Vulgate’s rendering of the term as pœnitentiam agite (to do penance), Protestants contended that mandated auricular confession was unscriptural.¹ The majority of Protestant reformers would go on to identify the medieval penitential system and its post-Tridentine successor as a symbol of papal abuses of power. The English Church’s most significant change to confessional practices was the 1548 abolition of confession as a sacrament instituted by Christ and the removal of its role as a necessary rite for salvation. In so doing, the English Church eliminated the medieval requirement instituted by the Fourth Lateran Counsel in 1215 that every member of the faithful confess his or her sins annually. The rejection of the sacramental status of confession radically transformed the penitential process by shifting the rite from the center to the margins. Moreover, it redirected penitence into the private sphere (unmediated, private confession) and the public sphere (general confession in a liturgical setting, as prescribed in the liturgical rituals in the Book of Common Prayer). As a result, confessing one’s sins to a priest “most likely … entered a terminal decline” after 1548, and effectively disappeared by the 1590s (Marshall Catholic Priesthood 32).

Why then did private ritual confession continue to hold such a significant place in the early modern literary and cultural imaginary after this reorientation of the English penitential system? Why was auricular confession not forgotten in post-Reformation literature or, at the very least, reduced to either a subject of abuse in anti-Catholic polemic or a source of comfort in recusant and crypto-Catholic texts?

That the subject of confession remained unsettled for many despite theological and ecclesiastical changes partially answers these questions. The printing, importation, and circulation of sermons, devotional manuals, and theological treatises on confession indicate that the transition from the medieval to the early modern penitential system was neither an immediate nor a smooth process.² On the contrary, arguments for the administration of confession and literary representations of the potential effectiveness of the rite point toward its persistent appeal long after its marginalization in the Church of England. Understanding confession as part of a larger fluid religious environment departs from the more rigid model of periodization which contends that the English Reformation put an end to the debates surrounding private confession. Instead, as Brian Cummings has persuasively demonstrated, “even in protestant England, the confessional form retained a residual power” (348). The issue of the rite of private confession remained alive and dynamic during the early modern period despite the efforts of many contemporary polemicists to banish it once and for all by relegating it to England’s pre-Reformation past or spiritual corruptions of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church.

This book argues that private, auricular confession retained its appeal for early modern authors because of its vital engagements with private and social memory. These two major topics have been the subject of much important recent criticism, but they have most often been treated independently.³ This is the first study to unify private rituals of confession and memory and to examine their consequential intersections in the period after the Elizabethan Settlement. All of the authors under consideration here—Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell—manifest this strong association between confession and memory in their literary fictions. More specifically, they present confession and memory as necessary for containing and neutralizing the negative effects of past sins in the present. This engagement occurs on both the individual and social level: as a ritual administered to individuals, confession elicits the regulation of memory on the parts of penitents and negotiates the effects of sin; as part of a larger network of spiritual and communal relationships, it depends on the reintegration of penitents into the social fabric through the performative forgetting of past transgressions.

Undergirding these authors’ shared perspectives on the connections between confession and memory is their acknowledgment that although the Protestant Reformation may have largely removed priestly intermediaries between penitents and God, it also removed the assurance of forgiveness that came through the laying on of hands in the rite of absolution. The shift to a private, unmediated form of penitence could increase rather than diminish religious anxiety, scrupulosity, and even despair because of the inability of individuals to handle sin on their own. As Alan Sinfield has argued: “Protestant self-examination is in a way confessional, but it shifts the whole business inside the consciousness…. This made the whole process more manipulable, but it also made it more indefinite, for since there was no external resistance there could also be no external reassurance” (163). The subsequent “epistemological fallout,” to use Sarah Beckwith’s language, cast into doubt whether or not a confessant knew he or she was reconciled (6).⁴ The changes to private confession reflect, as revisionist historians of the English Reformation have demonstrated, the widespread and often unintended repercussions of ecclesiastical and theological reforms.⁵ According to David Cressy, “The Reformation, however slow and fitful that [it] may have been in England, had effects that were profoundly traumatic” (476–7). In response to the altered penitential landscape of late sixteenth-century England, authors like Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Southwell advanced that confession and memory should be able to work together to reconcile the penitent to himself or herself, to the community, and to God, even when they figure confessional rituals as marginalized, inaccessible, insufficient, or existing as an untimely remnant of England’s past.

Despite these authors’ wide-ranging theological affinities, their concentration on the ability of confession to respond effectively to the crisis of memory signals a particular time of uncertain transition between the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. All of the focal texts discussed in this book were either begun or published in the 1590s: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596), Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (composed sometime between 1587 and 1593, printed 1604), Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint (1595), Hamlet (1603–4), and Shake-speares Sonnets (the sonnet sequence was begun as early as the late 1580s and completed by 1609 and A Lover’s Complaint was likely composed in 1603–4, printed 1609). Each is also a product of an author whose literary career began and, with the exception of Shakespeare (who died in 1616), ended during the Elizabethan period. Representing the potential benefits of auricular confession was certainly not free from suspicion or censure during this period because of its strong association with Roman Catholicism and the old faith. Nevertheless, these writers could consider its place in the cultural and religious life of England because of its presence in the shared memories of their readers and audiences. They also enjoyed more latitude than would be the case after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and increasing polarization of the English Church between ceremonialists and their opponents in the Jacobean and Caroline periods.

When these authors write about confession and memory, what they are addressing is not only the operation of remembering and forgetting within personal confessional acts, but also the memory of the sacrament of confession as a ritual artifact that carried with it manifold significations. Many of these imagined confessions communicate nostalgia for the pre-Reformation church. Southwell’s repeated appeals to the order and plenitude represented by the medieval church comes as no surprise given his participation in the Jesuit mission to reconvert England to Roman Catholicism, but even Marlowe often turns to Catholic penitential rituals to energize his anti-religious tragedies.⁶ Many literary sites of confession also point to the present and future constitution of penitential practices in the English Church and society. Spenser’s handling of confession in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene offers a sustained attempt to salvage what he perceives as the benefits of the former ritual system. In this sense, it functions as an analog to his ambiguous treatment of the Blatant Beast’s despoliation of a Catholic monastery, an episode that Philip Schwyzer has identified as manifesting Spenser’s “double vision” toward the medieval past that holds both a satirical Protestant perspective and “a deeply traditionalist, indeed essentially Catholic point of view” (Archaeologies 98, 96). Spenser likewise frames confession as plagued by Roman Catholic corruption, but, at its core, as a valuable and perhaps even necessary ritual for handling sin. Even though many writers and polemicists attempted to estrange auricular confession from contemporary religious life and associate it with the corruptions of Roman Catholicism, its structure, grammar, logic, and much of the larger penitential system in which it operated still informed the religion and culture of early modern England.

This book has two primary aims, first, to explore the role of memory within confessional rituals, and, second, to examine the place of confession within the cultural memory of the late sixteenth century. It is organized according to genre rather than chronology in order to explore how the interplay of confession and memory shapes and is shaped by a variety of literary forms, including epic, tragedy, sonnet sequence, and complaint. While this book attends to the religious contexts of early modern texts, it takes as its starting point that they were not written as theological treatises or meant to be interpreted apart from their immediate narrative contexts. These imagined confessions do not aim to represent all of the varieties of auricular confession, for, in practice, the duration and intensity of the rite differed widely, varying from the rush of Lenten penitents leading up to Easter to more in-depth exchanges with a confessor to the Counter-Reformation practice of general confession.⁷ Instead, early modern authors are more interested in offering sustained explorations of the spiritual, memorial, and affective dynamics of the penitential process.

The rest of this chapter first reconstructs the Reformation debate not about the benefits of auricular confession, a point upon which all of the major churches agree, but rather about which church’s implementation of the rite is the most effective in consoling penitents. This focus on the promised end of confession provides a counter-narrative to the prevailing critical interpretation of the rite as a form of social control. The chapter then turns from the historical circumstances of the European Reformations to consider the close relationship between memory and penitence in the Christian tradition. In particular, it traces the ways ritual confession developed as a response to containing the persistence of sin within individual and collective memory. Concluding with an examination of St. Augustine’s highly influential reconceptualization of memory within the penitential process as both an obstacle to salvation and the faculty through which present and future consolation becomes possible, it addresses why sinful memory constitutes the fundamental problem that early modern authors are tasked with in their literary representations of confession.

The second chapter develops this Augustinian model of memory by examining Spenser’s treatment in The Faerie Queene of the memorial repercussions caused by sexual sins and the attempts of confessional rituals to counteract them. More specifically, it focuses on how Spenser’s memorial-penitential program in the Legend of Holiness seeks to realign Redcrosse Knight’s actions with his identity as a member of the elect. In so doing, it engages the critical debate over the theological tensions in Spenser’s national Protestant epic. Instead of reading Spenser’s anti-Catholic satire of penitential practices and his positive i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Confession and Memory in the Age of Reformations
• 2 Confession and Redemptive Forgetting in Spenser’s Legend of Holiness: Memories of Sin, Memories of Salvation
• 3 The Will to Forget: Ovidian Heroism and the Compulsion to Confess in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
• 4 “Try what repentance can”: Hamlet, Confession, and the Extraction of Interiority
• 5 Will and the Reconciled Maid: Rereading Confession and Remembering Sin in Shake-speares Sonnets
• 6 Treasonous Reconciliations: Robert Southwell, Religious Polemic, and the Criminalization of Confession
• Conclusion: Memories of Confession in Seventeenth-Century England
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index