COASTAL SQUEEZE Patricia Badir
Ovidian Transversions,
01/2019
Book Chapter
At the end of John Lyly’s Galatea (1583–5), the play’s two heroines are steadfast in love. To move the plot toward marriage and comic resolution, the goddess Venus promises to turn one of them into a ...boy. However, the play ends as the company proceeds to church, and to the nuptial ceremony, leaving the question of sex change unresolved and the metamorphosis itself withheld. The source text of the sex-change plot is Ovid’s ‘Iphis and Ianthe’ and my interest in Lyly’s reworking of this story lies in his oft-remarked upon suspension of the original final resolution.¹ Unlike Iphis whose
Lewis Wager's Reformation play The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene purports to be a "godlie, learned and fruitefull" play designed to teach and extol Protestant virtue. 1 From the outset, ...this Edwardian morality play assumes that the agendas of Protestantism and of the theatre are not necessarily incompatible, as the heroic drama of the Reformation is staged by means of the vita of Mary Magdalen. 2 Never acquiescing to the scourge of the antitheatricalist pen that apparently marked the play as "spitefully despised," the play's Prologue insists that the work encourages manly virtue, praises God with unyielding vehemence and teaches true, stalwart devotion to the King. Mary Magdalen from whom Christ expels seven devils and who attends the sepulcher, Mary of Bethany who anoints Christ with her precious oils and Luke's unnamed sinner who bathes Christ's feet in the home of Simon the Pharisee. 6 By the thirteenth century, exegetical commentary and popular legend had further transformed this composite figure into the ex-prostitute whose exemplary penance rendered her the patron saint of all sinners. 7 Though initially the embodiment of material worldliness, Mary denies the temptations of luxury and the pleasures of the flesh and becomes the most sober and chaste of Christ's devotees.
