**3. Divine Fire, Holy Tears, and Celestial Rays**

Dekker and Massinger find further ways to theatricalize the androgynous female martyr defying her bodily limitations in physically "impossible" ways. One way is how Dorothea claims the "fire" or "heat" typically associated with male agency. When Harpax speaks of Dorothea and Antoninus's possible relationship, it is a "fire of love", driven by sexual desire, contrasting with divine heat (II.ii.50). Harpax defines women as cold, insisting that they rely on a man through the passionate "fire of love" for access to heat. However, Dorothea, as a virgin, refuses this source, relying instead on *holy* fire for heat that has an atemporal source. Within the play, this spiritual fire is also described as the means by which she defies penetration (in multiple senses). Antoninus specifically warns her to "quench not out the holy fires within you" to avoid death during her persecution (II.iii.190).

Dekker and Massinger also use heat to dramatize conversion through gender transformations. This technique is used for Dorothea, the other converted female characters, as well as several males. Antoninus describes this phenomenon, as he gains heat, or the more "perfect" condition, in the moment of his conversion to the Christian faith: "I feele a holy fire, that yeelds a comfortable heate within me. I am quite alterd from the thing I was" (IV.iii.160). By this stage, Antoninus has already transformed from the masculine "hot" soldier to the "cold" and "phlegmatic" ill-struck lover. Divine heat offers the miraculous cure to his early gender reversal, by which he previously lost power. Similarly, following his own conversion, Theophilus redefines fire not as a means of torture, but as a means of purification:

I stand Accomptable for thousand Christians deaths, And were it possible that I could die A day for every one, then live againe To be againe tormented, twere to me An easie pennance, and I should passe through A gentle clensing fire.

#### (V.ii.178)

This newfound stoicism parallels Dorothea's use of the hangman's tools as "scaffoldings by which my soul climbs up to an eternal habitation" (II.iii.166). The blaze at the scaffold, converted into a "gentle clensing fire", becomes a way to theatricalize spiritual or supernatural conversion.

Similarly, Dekker and Massinger present tears, associated with the "leaky" body, as the potential by-product of a holy purification as well. In the first scene of the play, Theophilus establishes the common understanding of "womanish teares", as a derogatory sign of feminine weakness (I.i.59). Yet when tears are placed within the discourse of Christian martyrdom later in the play, their meaning is altered; as with the sensation of the "holy fire", they become a theatrical representation of spiritual transformation. When Dorothea converts Theophilus's daughters to Christianity, tears become a divine representation of the spirit:
