Adriana and the Discontents of Companionate Marriage; Apostolic Marina

Abstract Following the preceding Prologue outlining the thematic and dramaturgical connections of Chapters 3 and 4 with Pauline and Bakhtinian rhetoric of heteroglossia, this chapter frames Adriana’s equitable reinterpretation of the duties of wives and husbands in Ephesians 5 with Dorothy Leigh’s early seventeenth-century advice book, The Mother’s Blessing. Both texts question the Protestant theory of companionate marriage based on Paul’s ideal of ‘one flesh’. Yet in speeches combining timely interventions (kairos) and bold speech (parrhesia) of the kind approved by Paul, Adriana exposes the subversion of his ‘one flesh’ trope by modern venereal infection because of her husband’s infidelity. I briefly trace Shakespeare’s idea of marital ‘pollution’ to The Rape of Lucrece before returning to The Comedy of Errors to discuss how Adriana becomes a tragic-comic figure because her crisis is displaced by the play’s joyful revelations of fraternal and parental identity, and in the absence of a scripted reconciliation with her husband. In Pericles, Marina’s transgressive role as a female preacher in the Mytilene brothel, and her use of Pauline kairos and parrhesia first to thwart Lysimachus’s rape and then to convert him, allows her to avoid Lucrece’s tragedy or Adriana’s tragicomic limbo. Afterwards, Marina’s Mytilene community of economically self-sustaining women aligns her symbolically with the female leadership of first-century house churches acclaimed by Paul and rediscovered by Erasmus’s Paraphrases. Like her scriptural predecessors, Marina joins the truth of her creaturely body with female public works in the community. She then applies this regenerative energy to the nearly broken Pericles and secures the fully inclusive reunion that was missed in The Comedy of Errors.