"T is not in man/To change or alter me'. Bekering, sekse en gender in Philip Massingers The renegado (1624) en William Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice (1596-7)
Auteurs
Lieke Stelling
Samenvatting
This article investigates the role of gender in
the representation of religious conversion in
two early modern English plays: Philip Massinger’s
The Renegado (1624) and William
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596-
7). It seeks to demonstrate that these plays
respond both to the rise of capitalism and
to the religious upheavals in early modern
England that gave the idea of conversion an
unprecedented urgency. Consistently drawing
parallels between changes of faith and protocapitalist
commerce, the two plays depict
conversion as an undermining of Christian
identity. Both comedies also attempt to solve
this problem by drawing an analogy between
conversion and gender-related transformations.
That is, they link changes of faith to
castration and deflowering (in the case of
The renegado), and to marriage. They present
marriage as the strict condition under which
a Christianization can be a clear triumph, and
it is only the female characters who convert to
the faith of their spouse. For the male characters,
both Christian and non-Christian, conversion
always entails a loss of masculinity or
identity. Both plays attempt to rescue Christian
identity from the destabilizing effects of
exchange by investing it with an absoluteness
that they find in the domain of gender.