A Reconciled Maid: A Lover\u27s Complaint and Confessional Practices in Early Modern England

In A Lover\u27s Complaint, Shakespeare registers concerns about a penitent\u27s inability to overcome the effects of sin and emphasizes the importance of private or auricular confession. By representing what amounts to be the confession ofa \u27fickle maid\u27 (5) to a \u27reverend man\u27 (57), Shakespeare underscores the paradox of the Protestant confessional model: if a penitent can be forgiven of sins without priestly intervention, what happens when he or she does not experience consolation?\u27 By modeling the poem on the conventional rite of penance, Shakespeare creates a poetic space in which to explore the intense effects of seduction and desire (as James Schiffer, Stephen Whitworth, and Jon Harned indicate in their respective essays in this volume), but also to demonstrate the limitations of individual subjectivity in overcoming the Christian economy of shame and guilt

Try what repentance can : Hamlet, Confession, and the Extraction of Interiority

In his film adaptation of Hamlet (1996),Kenneth Branagh under scores the confessional themes present in the play by setting two scenes in a Roman Catholic confessional box. In the first scene, Polonius interrogates Ophelia about her relationship with Hamlet-an interaction that reinforces the common association of the confessional with an obsession over female sexuality. In the second scene, Hamlet listens to Claudius\u27s penitential prayer and becomes,as Mark Thornton Burnett notes, an unpunctual but unconsoling father confessor. l By depicting Hamlet and Claudius in the confessional box, Branagh introduces a conspicuous anachronism since the device was never used in early modem England and did not experience widespread use in Catholic countries on the Continent until the seventeenth century

Of þam him aweaxeð wynsum gefea”: The Voyeuristic Appeal of \u3ci\u3eChrist III\u3c/i\u3e

Christ III’s representation of the rewards offered to the blessed in Heaven raises this question: Why would anyone offered the opportunity to enjoy the beatific vision turn his gaze toward the suffering of the damned in Hell? The poem’s emphasis on vision has conventionally been interpreted as indicating its didactic purpose of effecting repentance in the reader. Critics such as Frederick Biggs, Thomas D. Hill, and, most recently, Sachi Shimomura have connected the poem to standard theological interpretations of the Last Judgment and the penitential tradition.1 However, the unique, and perhaps troubling, issue of how and why the blessed choose to direct their gaze remains an interpretive problem.2 In this essay, we argue that Christ III’s representation of the blessed gazing upon the damned forwards its penitential aims by offering the gaze as voyeuristic pleasure and promising the reader that such pleasure, experienced through reading, will continue in heaven. The poet emphasizes scopophilic pleasure as part of a rhetorical strategy that makes the conception of heavenly bliss immediately available to readers of the poem