During the upheavals of the Reformation, Marian shrines throughout England were destroyed. The Walsingham Shrine was stripped at Cromwell's orders in 1538. The statue of the Blessed Virgin was taken by cart to Chelsea, where it was publicly burnt (Thérèse 1947:122). Hyperdulia became a thing of the past in England, and Catholics were pressurised to worship in secret and disguise their religious convictions. Extracts from stanzas of A Lament for Our Lady's Shrine at Walsingham recorded in the Rawlinson manuscript in the British Museum read:
Oules do scrike where the sweetest himnes screech
Lately wear songe, sung
Toades and serpents hold their dennes have; dance
Where the palmers did throng palmers; pilgrims
(33-36)
Sinne is where Our Lady sate, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .sin; sat
Heaven turned is to helle
Sathan sitte where our Lord did swaye . . .held sway
Walsingham, oh farewell!
(41-44)
The reformation of the cultus of the Blessed Virgin Mary in England with the resultant moving away from hyperdulia led to the paradox that whereas the Elizabethan Age, which lasted until Elizabeth I's death in 1603, marked a flowering and growth of English literature, England's most brilliant writer, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) apparently composed no surviving Marian poetry. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) and Ben Jonson (1573-1637) produced their great works in this era, and although Jonson's
The Ghyrlond of the Blessed Virgin Marie survives, the composition of Marian poetry which had flowed so copiously during mediæval times almost came to a halt.
That the corpus of English literature was impoverished by the termination of the genre was emphasised by one of its curious effects: the manifestation that humanity needs a woman figure to glorify and dote upon. The cynical, oft-quoted remark by Voltaire that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him, might likewise apply to the Blessed Virgin. In the lacklustre poetic climate that followed the outlawing of hyperdulia, which had never really bothered anyone while it prevailed, it seems that the poets of the Elizabethan Age, baulked of their model woman, sought another to replace her. They composed luminous poetry in praise of the charms of woman, be she a mistress, a pagan goddess (in which Elizabethan poetry abounds) or Queen Elizabeth herself.
Edmund Spenser (155201599) wrote his greatest work The Faerie Queene for the glorification of England and its monarch, whom he chose as the figure of his fairy queen, Gloriana. In his work Spenser inter alia calls her fair Elisa (10), the flower of virgins (12), Syrinx's daughter without spot (14) and another sun (41) and praises her angelic face (27) and heavnely haviour (29). Like Spenser, the poet George Peele (1558-1598?) glorifies Queen Elizabeth in his poetry in extravagent terms, writing:
Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well
Curst be the souls that think her any wrong
Goddess, allow this aged man his right
To be your beadsman now, that was your knight.
(15-18)
The flower imagery formerly applied to the Virgin Mary is liberally bestowed on his beloved Diaphenia by Henry Chettle (whom Ryland (1910:258) presumes to have lived and worked in the latter half of the sixteenth century, while Sampson (1970:242) estimates the date of his death at approximately 1607). Chettle addresses his lady as; daffadowndilly/white as the sun, fair as the lily (1-2). However, unlike Marian poetry, which extols the indestructable beauty of Mary's virginity and holiness and generally ends on a triumphant note, the love for the human beloved not infrequently turns into jaundiced disillusionment, betraying the lover's disappointment in the venality of his mistress, and causing him to sigh, like Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542):
. . . in mischief misery
I suffre grief
For of relif
Sins I have none, since; no one
my lute and I,
Continually,
Shall us apply
To sigh and mone.
(41-48)
Far from having Mary's compassionate heart, the beloved object is sometimes accused of having one of stone. She is most fair, though she be marble-hearted (7), says Walter Davison of his lady love. His brother, Francis Davison, curtly warns his Sweet (1) that If others do the harvest gain/That's due to me for all my pain (14-15), she had better find herself some new-fangled mate (18) as his doting love shall turn to hate (19). Love leads Anthony Munday (1554-1663) to call his mistress softer than feathers of the fairest swan (8) :
yet curster than the bear by kind,
and harder-hearted than the aged oak,
more glib than oil, more fickle than the wind,
stiffer than steel, no sooner bent but broke
(13-16)
Dr Luky Whittle
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