Although some twenty-five to thirty-five percent of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English marriages were remarriages,⁷ censuring remarriage was tantamount to a convention for early modern writers. Pernicious clichés about widows (but not widowers) are found in polemics, and can be household manuals, and plays of the period⁸ and can be explained politically, in that, of the socially endorsed roles available to women—maid, wife, widow⁹—the last is most perplexing for patriarchal theory. Solanio's quip in The Merchant of Venice about a hypocritical widow who "made her neighbors believe she wept for the death of a third husband" (3.1.9-10)¹⁰ reminds us that widowhood is problematic because the weaker vessel survives the stronger but because she may remarry, thus, some would say, cuckolding her former husband(s), albeit belatedly. In consequence, remarrying widows are liable to be figured as "lusty widows."

Of some thirty-one widows in Shakespeare, ten remarry—Elizabeth Woodville, Anne Neville, Tamora, Hortensio's wife, Hostess Quickly, Gertrude, Mistress Overdone, Cleopatra, Octavia, and Cymbeline's Queen; one might also include Lear's Regan, who intended to remarry. These, lusty or not, were more liable to wed calamity than joy. Six of them die—or seven, if we include Regan. Two of them are killed by their husbands (Anne by Richard III and Gertrude by Claudius), and two die by their own hands (Cleopatra and Cymbeline's Queen). For the survivors the future is less than reassuring: Elizabeth Woodville, widowed yet again, has also lost her sons and brother; Hortensio's wife, having publicly discomfited her new husband, has gotten the marriage off to an unpromising start; Mistress Overdone, nine times a bride but "Overdone by the last" (Measure for Measure, 2.1.202), remains in prison; and Octavia, deserted by Antony, is an object of pity in Rome. Little wonder that Paulina remains silent when Camillo is thrust upon her. Because remarrying widows consistently fare ill, genre as the determinant of their destinies seems less relevant than a residual ideology of revered celibacy which the widows have violated, even though both desire and economics encouraged the Elizabethan social practice of remarriage.

In Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale," while we are invited to scoff at January's wishes for his young wife, May, his words nevertheless voice a widespread medieval ideal of widowhood:

For neither after his deeth nor in his lyf
Ne wolde he that she were love ne wyf,
But evere lyve as wydwe in clothes blake,
Soul as the turtle that lost hath hire make.¹¹

These lines echo Catholic discourse on proper behavior for the devout. Following biblical, apocryphal, and patristic writings, the Church allowed but denigrated remarriage. In Leviticus 21:14 the widow is grouped with the divorced woman, the profane woman, and the harlot as an inappropriate wife. Paul honored pious matrons who were "widows indeed"; those over sixty who had been married only once were deemed fit to join the congregation (1 Timothy 5:3, 5, 9). Asserting that Jerome implied a similar binarism when he wrote "Fly the company of those widdowes, who are widdowes not in will, but of a kind of necessity," Father Fulvius Androtius, a Jesuit, describes "the Mantle and the Ring," a rite honoring the patristic view and celebrated in England from about 660 AD until the establishment of the Anglican Church.¹² In this rite widows who had remained celibate for a number of years after the death of their first husbands knelt before the high alter during the Mass. After vowing never to remarry on pain of punishment by the Church, each widow was clothed by the bishop in a consecrated black mantle. On her fourth finger he placed a silver or gold wedding band, and over her head a veil. The bishop then blessed the widow as a sacred person, and Te Deum laudamus was sung before the widow was accompanied to her home by two pious matrons.¹³ It is note-worthy that her habitlike apparel did not signify the widow's mourning for the loss of her husband but rather her perpetual mourning for sin—her own and that of others. That the celibacy of a widow who had been unhappily married would be more an act of will than of sorrow presented no problem.¹⁴ Inclusivity promoted participation in the rite.

Both Torquato Tasso and Juan Luis Vives wrote out of this Catholic tradition of celibacy for the widowed. Although unwilling to blame those who remarry, in "The Father of the Family" (1580) Tasso instructs widowers as well as widows that "the happiest are still those who have been bound by the marriage knot only once in their lives"; for Tasso "once the knot that binds a soul to a body is dissolved, that particular soul cannot be joined to any other body … and therefore it also seems fitting that the woman or man whose first marriage knot has been dissolved by death should not form a second."¹⁵ Writing under Catherine of Aragon for the edification of Mary, Vives, on this issue a doctrinal conservative, expresses similar sentiments. In his influential Instruction of a Christen Woman, written in 1523 and translated from the Latin some six years later, Vives, like Tasso, holds that marriage is a spiritual union continuing after death.¹⁶ A truly Christian widow sought no second husband but Christ. Approvingly, Vives quotes Jerome's advice to Furia "on the Duty of Remaining a Widow," agreeing that lust is the real motive of remarrying widows, whatever other reasons they may allege: "For none of you [widows] take a husband but to the intent that she will lie with him nor except her lust prick her."¹⁷ Unlike the lusty widow, the celibate widow was serviceable to the community both as a philanthropist (if wealthy) and as an intercessor. As Androtius wrote:

It was an ancient custome in our Hand (and the same continueth in some parts of Germany vntill this day) that in tyme of warre, plagues, famyne, or of any publicke necessity, there were in many Citties and Townes a certaine number of widdowes ordayned to watch & pray continually, night and day, in the Churches, by their turnes or courses, one or more togeather: because it was held, that their prayers were of more efficacy, and power with Almighty God, to asswage his wrath, then the prayers of other common people, as persons dedicated wholy to his seruice, by the obseruation of Continency, in their Chaste, and Holy widdowhood.¹⁸

The Epistle Dedicatory reminds readers that "Virginity, and Widdowhood, haue euer been accounted Sisters, and betroathed to the same Eternali Spouse Christ Iesus,"¹⁹ and Androtius himself, looking back over the past five hundred years, takes pride in the more than thirty widowed English queens who either became nuns or lived the remainder of their lives as secular chaste widows.²⁰ It is the latter choice that Gertred seems to be gesturing toward once apprised of Claudius's crime.

Even after the Reformation stripped marriage of its status as a sacrament, many sixteenth-century English writers were loath to abandon earlier attitudes. John Webster, the probable author of the thirty-two New Characters appearing in the sixth edition of Overbury's Characters (1615), set "A vertuous Widdow" in opposition to "An ordinarie Widdow."²¹ Shunning remarriage, the "vertuous Widdow," whose celibacy is a second virginity, garners up her heart in her children and her Maker. Of particular importance to Hamlet, neither her children's persons nor their inheritance is at the mercy of a new husband or step-siblings. Several generations after the first edition of Vives's Instruction appeared, Middleton wrote More Dissemblers Besides Women (c. 1623), in which the Duke of Milan instructs his wife,

              For once to marry
Is honourable in woman, and her ignorance
Stands for a virtue, coming new and fresh;
But second marriage shows desire in flesh;
Thence lust, and heat, and common custom
  grows. …
                                (2.1.76-80)²²

The Duke may have been self-serving, but he voices persistent conventional sentiments.

Most Protestant thinkers and polemicists, perhaps suspicious of celibacy as smacking of Catholicism, or fearing fornication, or desiring male control over the widow's wealth, knew in principle that they should feel differently. Even while urging remarriage, however, they could not escape its age-old coding as a betrayal of the deceased. The aporia between Sir Walter Ralegh's two statements on this point exemplifies an ineradicable ambivalence within the culture. In 1603, expecting to be executed and realizing that his wife would need protection from his enemies, he advised her to remarry, "for that will be best for you, both in respect of God and the world."²³ But later he was to cringe at the prospect of a Ralegh widow's wedded bliss and counseled his son, as one testator to another, "if she [the son's wife] love again, let her not enjoy her second love in the same bed wherein she loved thee. … "²⁴ Ambivalence toward remarriage was most apt to become condemnation when widows no longer young thought to love again. Their breach of a generational boundary might offend both Catholics and Protestants, but especially the former, taught to prize celibacy. Reformed preachers, on the other hand, devising a theology out of difference, were prone to foster Thomas Becon's belief "that second marriages were never disallowed 'tyl the Deuyl and the Pope began to beare rule, whiche enuye no State so much, as the holy state of honorable Matrimonye."'²⁵