**5. Conclusions**

Dekker and Massinger show how martyrdom, as a performance act, uses the gendered body to represent spiritual shifts, conversions, and miraculous feats. Within the play, rhetoric of the body contrast Dorothea's subversive inner-masculine nature with the complete emasculation of surrounding male figures. She takes on characteristically male attributes by assuming the role of the soldier, sealing her "leaky body", and exuding heat and sun beams that defy scientific understanding of her sex. Elizabeth Castelli describes in *Martyrdom and Memory* how gender plays a particularly important role in martyrdom since it "has to do foundationally with competing ideas about the character and legitimacy of different systems of power", with gender operating not only as a way of perceiving sexual difference but also as a way of signifying relationships of power (Castelli 2004, p. 4).<sup>26</sup> Since the female martyr creates a depiction of a female figure that opposes the general presumptions of woman's physiological/psychological nature, the figure could become a *stronger* example of spiritual fortitude than her male counterpart. At the same time, Dekker and Massinger's play suggests a further reason the *actual* performance of female martyrdom might have been such an effective rhetorical tool: her ability to defy her own body in "impossible" ways, reversing "feminine weakness" into "masculine strength", could turn the act of public execution itself into a display of the supernatural or, for some, the miraculous.

Dorothea represents a paradoxical figure on multiple fronts. Her access to agency and power, as illustrated through the performance of various "divine" reversals, are framed outside the possibilities of the female sex, reflecting a power beyond herself, whether interpreted as evil or divine. Additionally, what we know of the female martyr's swan song has always been posthumously forged, for it is through death that this idealized, androgynous female martyr is ironically made and unmade; it is only through death that her legend, one that defies temporal explanation within early modern

<sup>25</sup> Monta points out that Askew's martyrologists tended to downplay the fact that she left her husband for fear this would cause criticism (Monta 2005, p. 207).

<sup>26</sup> Castelli draws the relationship of gender and systems of power from Joan Wallach Scott, *Gender and the Politics of History*, see Scott (1988, pp. 28–50).

conceptualizations, is able to "exist". Of course, on stage in *The Virgin Martyr*, Dorothea's transgressive power was not even embodied by a female, after all, but by the representation of a boy player, created by male playwrights, drawing upon martyrologies written by men.

During the early modern era, as Monta claims, "a martyr's religion, not his/her gender, was the foundational analytical category" (Monta 2005, p. 197). Certainly, the road that leads the female martyr to the grave entwines the controversial implications of her faith system with the implications of her gender and her defiance of gender norms. However, *The Virgin Martyr* foregrounds how the performance of gender and, moreover, the virtuosic performance of gender reversal, could raise the act of martyrdom to spectacular theatrical heights.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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Gregory, Brad. 2001. *Salvation at Stake*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.


Scott, Joan Wallach. 1988. *Gender and the Politics of History*. New York: Columbia University Press.

Winstead, Karen. 2000. *Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends*. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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