**4. Gender and the Martyr Paradox**

Dekker and Massinger illustrate how a dual reception is formed around the virgin martyr's gender transformation, resulting in two concurrent opposite interpretations: the virgin as martyr and witch. Consequently, Monta has argued that the play longs nostalgically for a "a searingly clear conflict between right religion and damnable falsehood" (Monta 2005, p. 195). The playwrights show how the performance of gender can work as a theatrical tool to strengthen—if not *make*—a persuasive and affectively engaging martyr legend. There may even be ways by which the play's audience members could have gained critical insight, allowing them to view and understand martyrdom as inherently an act of interpretation.<sup>22</sup> Through the theatrical medium, the audience is able to see the resurrection of Dorothea's body made manifest and hear the extraordinary "celestial music" that begins to play at Dorothea's death.<sup>23</sup> Yet the audience sees different characters perceive this moment in contrasting ways: whereas some hear "heavenly music", others hear "illusions of the devil, wrought by some witch of her religion, that fain would make her death a miracle" (IV.iii.189). The simultaneous process by which both the martyr and the witch are concurrently made is called into question.<sup>24</sup> Significantly, in both cases, the female martyr's power is inherently paradoxical: it is either characterized as witchcraft or divine spirit, but what remains clear is that the virgin's agency, her source of "heat", is never quite her own.

Through the martyr/witch dichotomy, the play offers insight into the relationship between the performance of female martyrdom and early modern patriarchy. Significantly, Dorothea is first characterized as a witch not simply for her display of supernatural powers, but because of her ability to control the men around her and resist control herself. Her defiance of domestic hierarchies and gender norms is a primary factor in her demise, and not solely her transgressive religious beliefs. The impetus for critical attack against Dorothea stems from the fact she is not viewed as the ideal wife for Antoninus. In the opening scene, the emperor's beautiful daughter Artemia is given the opportunity to select her own husband. It is decided before she picks her partner that any man she chooses will have to be beneath her rank, with some potential suitors uttering prayers to "Gods of Love" in the hope of being selected (I.i.312). When she selects Antoninus, who shies away and blushes at her advances, a precursor of his emasculation, he is admonished by his father to "welcome, foole, thy fortune, stand like a blocke when such an angell courts thee!" (I.i.320). This fortune is quite literal since Artemia is the daughter of the emperor, making her undoubtedly one of the most powerful and wealthy women of Caesarea. This union would raise Antoninus's class, turning him from a subject into a lord, while even making it Artemia's duty to honor him (I.i.338). Antoninus's friend Macrinus tries to make sense of his lack of interest in the emperor's daughter, but Antoninus has defiantly bestowed his love on Dorothea already (I.i.413). Consequently, the virgin is formulated from the opening of the play as enemy primarily because of her ability to threaten the social system and thwart Antoninus's economic, political, and social aspirations. The driving force behind the later witch hunt that develops against her begins before Dorothea's religious beliefs are even known. Similarly, Anne Askew's Protestant beliefs, for example, *o*ffi*cially* characterized her as a heretic, but this cannot be easily separated from her defiance of proper gender roles. In particular, Anne was canonized in her maiden name Askew, rather

<sup>22</sup> Myhill argues that this appears in the shift of the play's genre, which turns from a drama towards a more traditional saint's play in the final two acts, moving the play from more representational to more presentational, see Myhill (2004, p. 25).

<sup>23</sup> Moretti reads the final line at Dorothea's death, "she lived a virgin, and a virgin *dies*", as a double entendre that eludes to mystical sexual union with God, an abrupt return to her chaste *female* body in death, see Moretti (2014, pp. 262–63).

<sup>24</sup> Marla Carlson illustrates how the virgin martyr's body occupies a dialogical position, "silent and obedient as the church and society would have her but also a figure for the mystic who transgresses and exceeds those limits through her embodied imitation of the Passion", see Carlson (2010, p. 164).

than her married name Kyme, which reflects a transgressive denial of the patriarchal social order of early modern England.<sup>25</sup>

Antoninus's immediate lack of interest in marrying the emperor's daughter drives his father, Sapritius, into a fury. His father, of course, has much to gain from this strategic union. Sapritius develops into the play's biggest critic of Dorothea, largely because of her "bewitching" powers over his son:

She's a Witch,

A sorceresse Theophilus, my sonne Is charm'd by her enticing eyes, and like An image made of waxe, her beames of beauty Melt him to nothing; all my hopes in him, And all his gotten honours, finde their grave In his strange dotage on her.

(III.i.3)

He characterizes Dorothea, once again, as harnessing defiant powers, exemplified by "beames of beauty", a fire that will "melt him to nothing" and emasculate his soldier-son. Here the characteristic "beams" of the martyr, a signifier of attractiveness, is strategically reframed. Sapritius illustrates the dual reception of the virgin martyr/witch. Antoninus's "strange dotage" on Dorothea defies logic; her transgressive sway over Antoninus makes him act against his masculine nature and his own economic best interest.
