Members of His Body

Shakespeare, Paul, and a Theology of Nonmonogamy

Will Stockton

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823275519, 9780823275502
• eBook ISBN: 9780823275526
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare

Building on scholarship regarding both biblical and early modern sexualities, Members of His Body protests the Christian defense of marital monogamy. According to the Paul who authors 1 Corinthians, believers would do well to remain single and focus instead on the messiah's return. According to the Paul who authors Ephesians, plural marriage is the telos of Christian community. Turning to Shakespeare, Will Stockton shows how marriage functions in The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and The Winter's Tale as a contested vehicle of Christian embodiment. Juxtaposing the marital theologies of the different Pauls and their later interpreters, Stockton reveals how these plays explore the racial, religious, and gender criteria for marital membership in the body of Christ. These plays further suggest that marital jealousy and paranoia about adultery result in part from a Christian theology of shared embodiment: the communion of believers in Christ.In the wake of recent arguments that expanding marriage rights to gay people will open the door to the cultural acceptance and legalization of plural marriage, Members of His Body reminds us that much Christian theology already looks forward to this end.

PART I

Neither Male nor Female

CHAPTER 1

Paul in Ephesus: Self and Sexual Difference in The Comedy of Errors

In the final scene of The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare resurrects Christ on stage as the abbess Emilia—wife of Egeon, the condemned man from neighboring Syracuse, and mother to the Antipholus twins, whom she pronounces “deliverèd” (5.1.404) after “Thirty-three years . . . in travail” (5.1.402). The Duke immediately begins the work of interpreting Emilia’s self-revelation as the “same Emilia” (5.1.346) whom Egeon “once called Emilia” (5.1.343). And like one of Christ’s apostles, the Duke does so in accordance with older testament: “Why, here begins his [Egeon’s] morning story right: / These two Antipholus’, these two so like, / And these two Dromios, one in semblance” (5.1.347–49). The Antipholus and Dromio twins are each identified as four separate men consequent to the selfidentifi cation of an abbess who herself figures Christ dead and resurrected at age thirty-three—as mother, minister, and spouse to multiple bodies delivered from error. In the parlance of modern evangelicalism, this family and its servants have been “born again” (John 3:3). In the parlance of the play’s principle apostolic source, the epistle to the Ephesians, this family and its servants are no longer “strangers and foreners” to each other or in Ephesus. They are now “citizens with the Saints, and of the housholde of God” (Ephesians 2:19).¹

Promising to “make full satisfaction” (5.1.401) on all the day’s mistakes of one body for another, Emilia issues an invitation inside the abbey that formerly separated the saintly and the seekers of sanctuary from the rest of the citizenry:

The Duke, my husband, and my children both,

And you the calendars of their nativity,

Go to a gossips’ feast, and joy with me.

After so long grief, such festivity! (5.1.405–08)

Or really “such nativity”—which is the Folio’s rendering of line 408, emended by the Oxford editors to “such festivity.”² Although the emendation avoids the repetition of “nativity” in lines 406 and 408, I wager that the Folio’s “error” is correct. In this comedy of confounded selves and signifiers, where words wander between misidentified and mystified bodies, the emendation to “festivity” mutes the ideological work of “nativity”: a signifier that seals—and awkwardly seals again—this company’s union in Christ.

If not purposeful, the repetition of “nativity” is at least symptomatic of the term’s figural density. Doubled like a set of twins, “nativity” references four different events in the life of the incarnated Son of God. It references the first nativity, or Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. It references the baptism, an event often followed in early modern England with a “gossip’s feast.”³ It references the resurrection, or the rebirth of Christ’s body after a three-day span that Shakespeare elides with the age of Christ at his death (thirty-three).⁴ And it references the second coming, or the future return of Christ to deliver those still wandering in error.⁵ Here at the play’s end, this doubled “nativity” unites these four events with the simultaneous rebirth of the household and neighborhood as a single political and religious body. Glossing Ephesians 2:19’s jointure of citizens and saints, Julia Lupton emphasizes that the Pauline “politico-religious body” contains “persons from diverse backgrounds, likely with continuing multiple memberships.”⁶ Among its members in The Comedy of Errors are men and women, masters and servants, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, merchants, an abbess, a courtesan, an executioner, sundry officers, and a prince. They collectively hail from cities including Ephesus, Syracuse, Corinth, and Epidamnum. Furthermore, this body’s members seem located at once in Plautine (third to second century BC) and Pauline (first century AD) antiquity, (post-)Reformation-era urban England, and a Catholic Ephesus shaped by an English Protestant imagination. The clunky doubling of “nativity” indexes this dense coexistence of so many differences—the strained unity of person, place, and time—in Christ.

This chapter attempts to make further sense of this labored Christological nativity in terms of the play’s frequently discussed Pauline politics of marriage. At stake in most of these discussions is the tension between the unmarried Luciana’s Pauline posture of strict female subservience to men’s headship and Adriana’s “shrewish” frustration with her husband’s truancy and seeming lunacy.⁷ The strange redundancy of “nativity,” its insistence on the Christian life cycle of birth, death, and resurrection, suggests that questions pertaining to Christian embodiment subsume, or provide a larger Pauline context for, this specific conflict over women’s household roles. Put another way, this strange redundancy of “nativity” focuses the play’s titular comedy about household roles and marital offices on the body of Christ and the fungibility of its members.

In what follows, I argue that The Comedy of Errors queries the extent to which membership in the body of Christ mitigates differences in status and sex. This argument engages recent conversations about Pauline universalism via a historicist reminder that the Pauline body is teleologically male and resolutely hierarchical. This argument further implicates the one-flesh model of the body in the eruption of domestic violence, and implicates adultery in the expansion of the Christian body politic through marriage. Because this chapter offers the most detailed exegesis of Ephesians 5, I position it first in this book. Honing in on the one-sex model of the body, this chapter also sets this book’s pattern of reading Shakespeare’s female Christ-figures as characters who engage, through their bodies, with Paul’s texts. Through Emilia, The Comedy of Errors resists the disappearance of the female body within the Pauline body of Christ.

I

In the spirit of awkward resurrection, let me begin again, this time with Richard Strier’s compelling effort in The Unrepentant Renaissance to make a singularly Renaissance and Protestant sense out of Emilia’s nativity. The subject of two separate chapters in that book, The Comedy of Errors constitutes a key text in Strier’s overall challenge to New Historicist narratives about the period’s anxious subordination of the material to the spiritual. For Strier, The Comedy of Errors offers Shakespeare’s “most wholehearted evocation and celebration of bourgeois life”—and Protestant bourgeois life especially.⁸ Inviting the whole neighborhood inside for a gossips’ feast, Strier contends, Emilia repurposes her abbey in a way that endorses the Protestant dispersal of holiness among all lawful earthly affairs, including business and marriage. The abbess becomes a wife again, the abbey opens to the reunited household, and the promise of “satisfaction” (5.1.401) through storytelling mutes any Catholic ring on the term as an element in the sacrament of penance. As opposed to the reading of Emilia’s resurrection that I have just proffered—a reading wherein the apparent error of the second “nativity” sounds the strains of so much temporal, geographic, and personal union in Christ—Strier sets the textual crux beside the point that Shakespeare “seems to merge the ‘rebirth’ [of the twins] . . . with the birth that defined Christianity.”⁹ This merger holds regardless as to whether the second “nativity” should read “festivity.” Nativity is festivity, and at error’s end it matters not which word is correct. Or, as Strier puts this point using another pair of synonyms, the ending is “happy” and “holy” for Shakespeare’s audience, very few of whom could even remember a time when abbeys functioned as politically separate, Catholic institutions.¹⁰

I find this argument doubtlessly right for some immeasurable portion of the play’s late-sixteenth-century audience; on the level of its possible English Renaissance reception, Strier’s reading of The Comedy of Errors as something like red meat for the Protestant bourgeoisie is completely plausible. At the same time, Strier’s reading is so totalizing, so invested in contesting New Historicist representations of the repentant Renaissance, that it obscures the conflicting Christological figuration of Emilia available from the medieval, Catholic traditions of female monasticism the play cites by rendering her an abbess.¹¹ Strier acknowledges that Emilia would likely be required by canon law to remain a nun, and Egeon encouraged to join a religious order.¹² Yet Emilia says she will “gain a husband” (5.1.341), so Strier simply dismisses this legal likelihood in favor of reading the play’s ending as a Protestant testimony to the holiness of the bourgeois family. This dismissal does more than elevate Protestant fantasy over any Catholic reality. It ignores Shakespeare’s representation of Christ as a woman—as a mother and spouse.¹³ At the end of The Comedy of Errors, Emilia is the Christ whose “deliverance” of her children generates the Eucharistic image of her as a nursing mother at a gossips’ feast. She resembles the Christ who appears to Julian of Norwich as one who “may fedyn us with Himselfe, and doith full curtesly and full tenderly with the blissid sacrament that is pretious fode of very lif.”¹⁴ Strier’s error is to overlook, in the name of theological coherence, The Comedy of Errors’ summoning of this medieval, Catholic Christ onto the “Protestant” stage. In Shakespeare’s theater, Emilia stands for the birth that defines Christianity. She simultaneously stands for the medieval past and the sexual business it left unfinished with the creative destruction of the English Reformation.

Shakespeare’s theater of strained religious and temporal union also exaggerates the identicalness of identical twin brothers. Strier makes little room for this exaggeration other than to note the play’s indebtedness to Plautus’s Menaechmi. Shakespeare lifts the basic plot of his play from Plautus, doubling the divided twin pairs. Yet approaching The Comedy of Errors as a play about the hyperbolic sameness of twin brothers further encourages a reading attentive to theological conflicts within the play’s own Christian environs. The Comedy of Errors asks its audience to believe the impossible: not merely that the Antipholus and Dromio brothers are two pairs of identical twins who can successfully pass for their siblings (for they apparently dress and style themselves exactly the same). It asks us to believe that not even their most intimate—their nearest, most proximate—companions can discern the difference between them. This shared identity is entirely superficial, a matter of looks and names rather than personality or disposition.¹⁵ Adriana cannot tell the difference between the melancholic, wandering foreigner Antipholus of Syracuse and her successful merchant of a husband. Neither Antipholus can tell the difference between the witty Dromio of Syracuse and the frequently abused Dromio of Ephesus. The fact that these twin brothers are the same person in the eyes of others highlights the familiar thesis that any concept of selfhood in this play emerges only through a complicated relay of reflections.¹⁶ But considering Strier’s reading of the play as unapologetically Protestant, I would add that this relay of reflections does not readily lend itself to the recognition of any dimension of the self we would designate as “interior” or “inward,” and associate with Pauline, Protestant subjectivity. Reformation climates of salvational scrutiny and denominational allegiance doubtlessly intensified a Pauline bifurcation of the self into inside and outside, visible and invisible. But little in The Comedy of Errors suggests that its characters are divided by anything other than a difference between who they believe themselves to be and who others see them to be. Against its own Pauline backdrop—the city of Ephesus—selfhood in The Comedy of Errors is absurdly one-dimensional.

The apparent exception to this claim about the play’s hyperbolic rejection of interiority is Antipholus of Syracuse’s brief self-reflection, offered in soliloquy at the outset of his urban adventures:

I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.

So I, to find a mother and a brother,

In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. (1.2.35–40)

Antipholus of Syracuse’s comparison of himself to a drop of water seems deep enough (pun intended). Both substantively and grammatically, however, this comparison actually refuses the interiorization of the self, and with it any differentiation of the self predicated on a claim of inwardness. The ocean of Antipholus’s description functions as what Steve Mentz calls a “massive containing wholeness”; it disperses and circulates selves at the moment of their conjunction.¹⁷ The first sonic half of that “whole”—line 37’s “Who”—refers most intelligibly back to the line 35’s “I.” But given its syntactical location, “Who” can also reference line 36’s immediately antecedent “another drop.” Antipholus’s simile thus admits of two readings: The first drop falls into the ocean to find his fellow drop, and/or the first drop seeks another drop that itself drops into the water in search of “his fellow” who may or may not be the first drop. To whom or what, we might then ask, is the “I” of line 39 compared: the first drop, the second, both, or the whole body of water? The grammar of the self is confounding. What is clear is only that Antipholus of Syracuse fears his self-loss as a consequence of his lack of difference, not his irreducible difference, from other drops. All drops of water are basically the same. Furthermore, when Antipholus of Syracuse “finds” himself at play’s end, he does so not by looking to anything like Hamlet’s famous—and famously Protestant—“that within which passeth show” (1.2.85).¹⁸ He finds himself through self-identification as his servant’s superior: “I am your master, Dromio” (5.1.413, emphasis added).¹⁹

The Comedy of Errors further flattens surface/depth models of the self through its rendering of demonic possession as illusory. The Paul of Acts 19 spends much of his time in Ephesus exorcising demons—making the shared and split self one again by expelling the body of its unwelcome spiritual inhabitant. Antipholus of Syracuse gestures toward Ephesus’s reputation for demonic possession when he worries about “Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, / [and] Soul-killing witc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Texts
• Introduction: Marriage and the Body of Christ
• Part I. Neither Male nor Female
• Part II. The Works of the Flesh
• Epilogue: Why (Again) Are the Utopians Monogamous?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index