Introduction: Marriage and the Body of Christ

This introduction begins with a brief survey of Reformation contests over the sacramental status of marriages. It discusses the different models of marriage on offer in the Bible, and argues that Shakespeare’s plays reflect these different models. It also sets this book’s Christian critique of monogamy against the backdrop of recent moves to legalize gay marriage.

Epilogue: Why (Again) Are the Utopians Monogamous?

This epilogue moves beyond Shakespeare to consider the relationship between marriage and Christian citizenship in three utopian texts: Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines. Reading the first against the latter two, it argues that Utopian monogamy signals of that state’s readiness to enter the body of Christ. The epilogue concludes with a brief discussion of Reformation controversy over the sacramental status of marriage.

The Ecology of Adultery: Flesh, Blood, and Stone in The Winter’s Tale

The final chapter queries how the resurrection of Hermione from stone answers to Leontes’ paranoia about his wife’s infidelity. Sourcing the play’s creaturely imaginaries to Genesis 1 and 2, as well as to Paul of Tarsus’s typological conjunction of Christ and Adam in 1 Corinthians, I argue that Leontes operates on the premise that the human flesh to which he has joined himself in marriage is constitutively adulterated. Turning the resurrection scene, this chapter further argues that Leontes’ reaction recalls the Corinthian controversy over eating meat sacrificed to idols, and thereby signals that his anxieties over the purity of his wife’s flesh have not abated. Whereas numerous recent readings of The Winter’s Tale concern themselves with the faith that Paulina makes a requirement of Hermione’s resurrection, this chapter finally contends that Shakespeare’s romance is similarly ambiguous about faith’s connection to redemption. Instead of taking a Protestant, Catholic, or even secular approach to faith, Shakespeare’s play stages a series of redemptive possibilities – among them the possibility that marriage alone, not faith at all, offers the unbeliever membership in the body of Christ.

Chaste Impossibilities: Adultery and Individuation in Othello

This chapter advances the polemical argument that Desdemona is guilty of adultery insofar as she is a creature of the flesh. Chronicling the recent turn away from the “saint or strumpet” debate about Othello’s wife that runs through the first few centuries of the play’s criticism, this chapter maintain that the current critical construction of Desdemona as a chaste but sexual subject often amounts to an essentialist guardianship of her Christian virtue. This construction protects Desdemona from the self-adulterating consequences of her marriage – her race-mixing union in the flesh with a black man and arguably a Muslim. Just as often, this construction takes Desdemona’s chastity as an object of critical certainty, ironically reinforcing the claim of so many Renaissance marriage moralizers that chaste wives must be transparent subjects – their thoughts and actions completely legible to their husbands who head the marital body. This chapter treats adultery as an inevitable effect of a wife being both too much one with and too separate from her husband.

Portia’s Pauline Perversion: The Merchant of Venice and Romans 1

Paul’s sexed exception of Christ from the Christian prohibition against male bodily penetration vexes Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a comedy about the power of marriage to simultaneously masculinize and Christianize. Dressed as a boy, Jessica elopes with Lorenzo, and later argues that she has thereby become a Christian. Also cross-dressed, Portia saves her husband’s friend Antonio from Shylock’s emasculating excision of flesh. Responding to Janet Adelman’s argument that the play shores up a Pauline ideology of Christian masculinity through Portia’s courtroom defeat of Shylock, this chapter juxtaposes contemporary queer biblical and Renaissance Protestant readings of Romans 1 to argue that the play instead perverts this ideology through its presentation of Christ as a penetrable eunuch in the character of Balthasar. As Portia/Balthasar’s ring trick opens the dyad of the married couple to the triad of married couple and friend, the “Pauline” distinction between monogamous, marital, Christian sexuality on the one hand, and sodomitical Jewish sexuality on the other, begins to erode.

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

This chapter read The Comedy of Errors as a materialist farce that reduces all persons, in language of Ephesians 5, to bodies. In Shakespeare’s Ephesus, the fiction of indistinguishable twins couples with the commodification of personhood to deprive its characters of interiority. The body of Christ, this play summarily suggests, is nothing more than body; it is flesh without inwardness, an outside without an inside. Yet to what degree does the body admit differences in sex and status among its members? To answer this question, this chapter looks to Ephesians 5:28, where Paul enjoins husbands “to love their wives, as their own bodies.” The instruction echoes with a difference the commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself. In both first-century and Renaissance contexts, the translation of neighbour to body aids in the one-sex disappearance of the female within a male body that is both the husband’s and Christ’s. Shakespeare’s materialist farce nonetheless invites us to read for the return of the repressed neighbour as the undomesticated dimension of the marital self.