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A contribution to: Working Papers in the Humanities 1

Edited by Astrid Ensslin and Jennifer Shepherd

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 1

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  Often more honoured in the breach than the observance, the prevailing discourse of early modern England encouraged widows to live as celibates, to epitomize piety, and to devote themselves to safeguarding their children’s interests. Of these injunctions, celibacy was crucial. Among Shakespeare’s elderly widows, all but Mistress Quickly remain single, a condition most vehemently prescribed by Catholic writers, who reluctantly exempted only the youngest widows— prejudged as concupiscent by virtue of their nubility and gender. In print, if not practice, Catholics and Protestants alike appeared to regard celibacy as the only suitable state for older widows. My paper briefly considers five widows of a certain age: Mistress Quickly, who violates the injunction when, between Henry IV, Part 2 and Henry V, she weds Ancient Pistol; Paulina of The Winter’s Tale who, by the end of Act V, has not formally accepted Camillo as a substitute for Antigonus; and the celibate, child-focused widows of Coriolanus and All’s Well That Ends Well, ‘widows indeed’. Whether these characters remarry or remain celibate depends, to a significant extent, on their financial situations, those with greater economic needs remarrying if they can.

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