**2. Onward Christian Soldiers**

The play's reversal of gender is readily apparent in the martial terms used to describe the characters. Like the image of Askew taking up arms for battle, throughout *The Virgin Martyr* pagan and Christian faiths are posed in stark opposition, as two armed forces locked in battle, with conversion representing a successful military strike. The play expands on its martyrological sources to establish the Roman religion as a threatening religious system that idealizes masculinity and stoicism (Monta 2005, p. 201). The character Harpax, secretary to Theophilus, uses terms of warfare to depict the threat of Dorothea's religious fervor: "a Firmament of Clouds being fild with *Joves* Artillery, shot downe at once to pash your Gods in peeces, cannot give with all those Thunderbolts so deeps a blow to the Religion there, and Pagan lore as this" (II.ii.58), and at the climactic moment at the end of the play, occurring only moments after his conversion, Theophilus's final words before his martyrdom read: "I die a souldier in the Christian warres" (V.ii.233).<sup>13</sup> The heroic martyr figure exists in—but is also *defined* by—a landscape of war-like imagery, which creates an ongoing drive to be inwardly armed against external spiritual forces.<sup>14</sup>

The female martyrs in the play are also described by masculine, martial language. By combining the soldier image with an idealized female form, Dekker and Massinger draw upon a motif of Roman stoicism. Set in fourth-century Caesarea, the story lends itself to Roman allusions that might not otherwise fit in Jacobean London. Monta has argued that this helped to strengthen the play's political resonance.<sup>15</sup> Theophilus's virgin daughters, Calista and Christeta, "sufferd with Roman constancy" when they were splayed on the rack and fell victim to the hangman's whip (I.i.177). Dorothea similarly evinces a Roman stoicism in her lack of fear in the sight of death and forthcoming torture: "The visage of a hangman frights not me; The sights of whips, rackes, gibbets, axes, fires are scaffoldings, by which my soule climbes up to Eternall habitation" (II.iii.166). Her stoic demeanor is consistent with accounts of female martyrs in Foxe's *Book of Martyrs* by which "God masculinizes his elect" (Moretti 2014, p. 260).

The play contrasts the female martyr's soldierly disposition with the effeminacy of a real soldier, Antoninus. The strongest example of this is when he develops a mysterious lovesick illness and lies in bed alone crying out in torment for Dorothea to "deliver him" from his pain. His father and friend, making jest about his ill-fitting behavior, claim Antoninus can only be cured if a midwife will "deliver him" (IV.i.20). The sick soldier is given the opportunity to claim Dorothea's virginity, which is described as the best remedy for his illness, yet he is unable to go through with the act. His father chastises him, "a souldier, and stand fumbling so", heightening the contradiction between Antoninus's

<sup>12</sup> I use the word "martyr" in terms of its Greek origin meaning "to witness".

<sup>13</sup> This and all other citations from the play are drawn from *The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, v. 3*, edited by Fredson Bowers, see Dekker and Massinger (1958).

<sup>14</sup> The view of Christian faith in martial terms falls into the reading strategies of the early modern audience, a group already primed to view spiritual forces of good and evil as in direct, continual opposition. Brad Gregory's *Salvation at Stake* highlights these reading strategies of the early modern audience, and makes a valuable point that the symbolic value of the martyr figure could actually be *more* real to the early modern interpretative community than their temporal reality, see Gregory (2001, p. 10).

<sup>15</sup> Monta argues that the play's work as political allegory could in part be based on the easy connection between classical Rome and the "newly revived Roman (and, in Ferdinand's hands, threateningly Catholic) Empire on the continent", see Monta (2005, p. 199).

militant strength, role as masculine soldier and "penetrator" and his inability to go through with the sexual act (IV.i.98).<sup>16</sup>

Significantly, Dekker and Massinger use early modern rhetoric of the body to conceptualize Antoninus's reversal. The father ridicules the lovesick soldier further, explaining the emasculation of his son by specifically drawing upon the Galenic model and classical humoral theory:

Cold, Phlegmatike Bastard, th'art no brat of mine, One sparke of me, when I had heate like thine By this had made a Bonfire: a tempting whore (For whom th'art mad) thrust even into thine armes, And standst thou puling!

(IV.i.111)

Early modern scientific accounts, such as those detailed by Thomas Laqueur and Gail Kern Paster, emphasize the porous, penetrable, cold, and essentially weaker nature of the female body. Laqueur's study of gender and anatomy identifies a one-sex model of gender, largely driven by heat in the body. He describes this model as follows:

It is to begin with, the sign of perfection, of one's place in the hierarchical great chain of being. Humans are the most perfect of animals, and men are more perfect than women by reason of their 'excess of heat'. Men and women are, in this model, not different in kind but in the configuration of their organs; the male is a hotter version of the female, or to use the teleologically more appropriate order, the female is the cooler, less perfect version of the male.

(Laqueur 1986, p. 5)

The female sex is characterized as inadequate or lacking, with heat—the perfecting agent—typically being bestowed upon the male, the dominant sex. Antoninus's father refers to the coldness of his son, equating this with weakness. He describes how "when I had heate like thine", presumably a reference to his own virile younger years, "one sparke" would create a bonfire. This claims a fiery libido for himself that—with the one-sex model—is associated with the male sex.

In her study "The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being", Gail Kern Paster questions the teleology of the Galenic model, yet confirms the importance of heat to the conceptualization of early modern gender. She takes into account the classical humoral theory of the four temperamental categories (melancholic, choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic), which were based on an excess or lack of the four bodily fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Paster recognizes the key "ideological blindspots" built into a model that "inscribed the sign of woman as normative in only one of its four categories—the cold, clammy, humor dominated by phlegm" (Paster 1998, p. 422). By incorporating humoral and Galenic rhetoric, Sapritius describes his son as taking on a phlegmatic disposition that lacks even one spark of heat, characterizing the soldier's transition as not mere lovesickness, but as an emasculation of that challenges natural order. The language of the body used in the play offers a way to both describe and dramatize spiritual transformations via gender transformation, as well as the movement of power along hierarchical lines.

Dekker and Massinger also present a miraculous reversal of gender through the theatricalization of Dorothea's "shield of faith" and the display of her impenetrability on stage. Paster observes that the female was characterized not only as cold in early modern conceptualizations but also as a *leaky*

<sup>16</sup> Similarly, in Dekker's *The Honest Whore, Part II* (coauthored with Middleton), the character Hippolito is subject to fits of love sickness resulting in extremely melancholy (see Comensoli 1989). Additionally, Massinger's *The Picture* (1629) shows a striking reversal of gender as sexual indulgence emasculates the King, allowing him to take on a "disturbingly subservient role to the queen", see Hila (2016, p. 72).

vessel (Paster 1998, p. 420).<sup>17</sup> Dorothea defies the preconceived notions of the soft, porous, and easily penetrable female body; the virgin becomes solid and impenetrable through supernatural means, creating a theatrical representation of supernatural proportions, framed here as a divine agency that can be harnessed to empower the female sex. During her climactic torture, and despite incessant beatings, Dorothea remains unscathed:

SAP. Strike. Strike at her: Angelo kneeling holds her fast. THEO. Beate out her brains– DOR. Receive me you bright Angels SAP. Faster slaves. SPUN. Faster: I am out of breath I'am sure: if I were to beate a bucke, I can strike no harder. HIR. O mine armes, I cannot lift 'em to my head. DOR. Joy above joys, are my tormentors wearie In torturing me, and in my sufferings I fainting in no limbe: tyrants strike home And feast your fury full.

## (IV.ii.85)

The virgin martyr accepts her fate in a characteristically stoic fashion; rather than fighting back, she turns to the heavens and cries to the angels to receive her. The beating becomes a physical manifestation of her spiritual fortitude: Dorothea is protected by a literal force field of her own faith, assisted by her guardian angel, Angelo (the allegorical "Angel-o"), who "holds her fast". Dorothea's body, and her beauty, is unharmed, despite the efforts of the punishers who exhaust themselves in their attempts to beat her.<sup>18</sup> The pagans take turns trying to attack her to no avail, marveling that, "these bats have power downe to fell gyants, yet her skin is not scar'd" (IV.ii.105). This personifies Katharine Eisaman Maus' account of Renaissance women whose "moral worth was inevitably involved with the fate of her vulnerable body" (Maus 1996, p. 205).

Additional attempts to "penetrate" Dorothea's body are also thwarted by supernatural means, further representing a defiance of the female body. When Antoninus is unwilling to rape the young virgin, his father, furious, calls upon a slave to do the deed to humiliate his feeble son further. The slave first has his masculinity questioned to ensure his readiness to claim Dorothea's virginity. In a comic scene that would have resonated with London's Clerkenwell audience, the slave's British heritage is said to make him more than up to the task, since "of all Nations our Romane swords ever conquer'd, none comes neere the Brittaine for true whooring" (IV.i.133). In a fiery speech, the slave describes the extreme lengths he would go to in order to gain his freedom, which includes fighting naked with a lion, shaking off his chains, and jumping off a rock ten pyramids high in order to battle to the death (IV.i.135). He clearly describes for the audience his extreme masculine potency and unquenchable desire for freedom, and yet when he is told he will gain freedom by raping Dorothea, in a surprising turn, the slave scorns to do it. The play heightens his presumed masculinity, only to thwart it, reflecting another uncanny protection of Dorothea by a supernatural source. The virgin martyr credits the slave's complete reversal to the work of "that Power supernall on whom waites my soule, is Captaine ore my chastity" (IV.i.162). Once again, wondrous gender reversal marks a performance of the divine, while also appealing to an audience preoccupied with what G.E. Bentley describes as "violence and vulgarity" (quoted in Munro 2006, p. 100).

The play enacts a gender virtuosity of supernatural proportions, built off popular early modern concepts of the weak, penetrable female and the strong, "penetrating" male. Dorothea's impenetrability

<sup>17</sup> For more of Paster's analysis on the female as "leaky" vessel, see Paster (1993).

<sup>18</sup> The inclusion of various types of miraculous displays was common in early modern female martyrologies. Several accounts of Askew's martyrdom, for example, remark on the "divine sign of thunder", see Beilin (1996, p. xxxvii).

and soldier-like fortitude creates a stark contrast to the emasculation of the male figures in the play, who are particularly emblematic of machismo and a masculine "heat". The "soldier" is redefined as a performative, with the outward appearance of the imposing military man proving less powerful than the *inwardly* soldierly disposition acquired through faith. Consequently, power is dramatized through gender reversals, with the spiritual or supernatural trumping the outward display of arms and steel.
