Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Queen Mary (1875), one of a series of historical dramas, is unusual in at least one respect: Mary herself actually appears in it. While novels about the Marian persecutions are almost a dime-a-dozen in the Victorian period--some of them, like Anna Eliza Bray's anti-Emancipationist The Protestant (1828), cannibalized from John Foxe--Mary rarely features in them as anything other than an ominous name. More often spoken of than seen, experienced at a painful remove through the fires of martyrdom, Mary haunts English history from the margins. Nevertheless, some early Victorian historians tried to rescue Mary from her posthumous Protestant reputation, most notably the great Catholic historian John Lingard.* The High Church Agnes Strickland represented the very act of writing about Mary as "a task at once the most difficult and dangerous that could fall to the lot of any Englishwoman to perform"**: to explain and historicize Mary's actions seemed to hover dangerously on the brink of justifying them, and, indeed, Strickland's enthusiasm for Mary (and concomitant lack of enthusiasm for Elizabeth I) proved controversial.
Queen Mary doesn't exactly loom large on the critical radar screen, and for good reason: while as poetry it's certainly better than a lot of other Victorian verse dramas out there--it is Tennyson, after all--in the end it offers little more than competent blank verse. Robert Bernard Martin doesn't mince words: "It is an inordinately long work, with twenty-three scenes and forty-four characters, betraying little dramatic sense, either in construction or in characterization."*** Although, as Martin goes on to note, the play clearly responds to anxieties raised by Vatican I (513), it's a bit of a loose cannon when it comes to politics. Drawing a parallel between Victorian and Tudor Catholic politics, Tennyson distinguishes between Catholics who put the Pope first and Catholics who put England first; as one Catholic character says after Cranmer's martyrdom, "Peters, you know me Catholic, but English./Did he die bravely? Tell me that, or leave/All else untold" (IV.iii). Tennyson represents Mary herself as a truly devout Catholic, but the persecutions emerge not from religious zeal but her own subjective emptiness. Believing herself wholly unloved, she turns to Philip as a means of filling the emotional void--yet in the end she finds a world apparently united only in its desire for her absence:
Mary (reads): "Your people hate you as your husband hates you."
Clarence, Clarence, what have I done? what sin
Beyond all grace, all pardon? Mother of God,
Thou knowest never woman meant so well,
And fared so ill in this disastrous world.
My people hate me and desire my death.
Lady Clarence: No, Madam, no.
Mary: My husband hates me, and desires my death.
Lady Clarence: No, Madam; these are libels.
Mary: I hate myself, and I desire my death. (V.ii)
Mary's drive towards oblivion echoes the Court's religious policy, which eradicates heretics instead of evangelizing for the faith. It is also part and symbolic parcel of her literal infertility: her spiritual and emotional allegiances fail to reproduce themselves, leaving only disease and death in their wake. There may be a silent but pointed comparison to the fecund Victoria here.****
Mary is pursued throughout the play by these "libels," the broadsides which denounce her reign. Their dreadful power over her imagination forms part of a larger pattern: the power of written texts, whether manuscript or printed. "It was never merry world/In England, since the Bible came among us" (V.v), remarks one of Mary's servants, and Cecil's cool Protestant rejoinder--"It never will be merry world in England,/Till all men have their Bible, rich and poor"--partly sums up the play's sense of a historical divide. Both the Catholic and Protestant characters identify Bible-reading with independent thought and, more dangerously, potentially radical politics; those who presume to read the Bible also presume to judge their rightful masters.
The play is perhaps at its most sophisticated when it comes to figurative language. An exchange between Cardinal Pole and Gardiner proves perhaps unintentionally revealing:
Gardiner (muttering). Here be tropes.
Pole. And tropes are good to clothe a naked truth,
And make it look more seemly.
Gardiner. Tropes again! (III.iv)
While this exchange certainly has to do with rhetorical propriety, it also illuminates their respective characters. Pole spends this scene advocating toleration, for those "that dare the stake and fire" inspire a more figurative fire, the "hot desire to imitate." Literal flames spawn figurative flames that prove much harder to extinguish. Gardiner, the supposed proponent of plain speech, has certainly had no aversion to tropes himself: after figuring Mary and Philip as "our two suns in one" and Catholicism as a flower fed by "your light," he then moves to "heat." This heat quickly proves literal, not figurative: "There must be heat--there must be heat enough/To scorch and wither heresy to the root." Gardiner, in other words, wants to literalize the heat of his two "suns," and in some ways the play represents the fires of martyrdom as externalized versions of Mary's own interior fires of passion and hatred. By the end, she too "burns" (V.ii)
*--There's a good article about early Victorian attempts to rehabilitate Mary; see John Drabble, “Mary’s Protestant Martyrs and Elizabeth’s Catholic Traitors in the Age of Catholic Emancipation.” Church History 51 (1982): 172-85.
**--Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest..., new ed., corr., 9 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1844), 5:453.
***--Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Faber & Faber, 1983), 512. Michael Thorn, more charitable, simply complains that "[e]verything is on too even a keel"; Tennyson (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), 437.
****--A quick hunt through the MLA database indicates that someone has pursued this point in more serious detail, but my library doesn't subscribe to the journal in question--must ILL it.
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