How do you solve a problem like Isabella?

As the previous chapter's discussion showed, violence characterizes relations between men at the court in The Nice Valour, and Lapet tried to transform the violence of that space into a form of intimacy. Place similarly exerts a shaping influence over the intimate economy of many early modern texts in which convents play a role because the convent offers a space for non-marital intimacy. For instance, at the end of Measure for Measure (1603–1604), the Duke's offer of marriage to Isabella is met with her silence. The text refuses to guarantee a future for the couple, and this textual indeterminacy has prompted critical discussion of the implications of the choice Isabella faces between returning to the convent and marrying a man in whom she has not shown the slightest interest romantically, an act which would involve her reintegration into the city-state of Vienna. While Measure for Measure does not stage Isabella's decision, a number of Renaissance dramatic texts do represent a heroine choosing or compelled to choose between a convent and a husband, often in favor of the husband. Frances E. Dolan argues that some early modern texts ridicule nuns for taking themselves out of marital circulation in order to manage concerns that “normative expectations for women institutionalized through marriage and the family are just as excessive and doomed as those institutionalized through the cloister.” However, as I will show, Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589), the anonymous Merry Devil of Edmonton (c. 1602), and Measure for Measure at the very least fail fully to denounce, ridicule, or manage their representations of convents in ways that we might expect in English drama after the Reformation. To the extent that these texts invest in the Catholic cloister as a potentially desirable alternative to Protestant marriage, the nun remains a subversive figure.

The nun's subversion is only partly related to religion, however. Kate Chedgzoy rightly notes that the convent is “a fictive space in which women's ambiguous relation to central institutions of early modern society could be reimagined.” Targeting Chedgzoy's analysis to the nation as a whole, I argue in this chapter that the figure of the nun is a threat because of her simultaneous involvement in a supranational religious organization and a single-sex community; this threat reveals that our assessments of the early modern analogies between the female body and the space of the early modern nation and between the early modern household and the monarchical state are limited insofar as they fail to account for marriage as an intimate economy of mediated circulation. Renaissance dramatic representations of the convent challenge the nationalist uses and implications of the consolidation of intimacy around marriage, interiority, and futurity. When the plays I discuss in this chapter show women desiring to be installed in economies of insufficient circulation with men and unprofitable, non-reproductive circulation with other women, by implication they imagine alternatives to dominant understandings of the nation as a space and the subject's participation in the life of the nation. Advancing this book's rethinking of Renaissance intimacy, my analysis of representations of convents reveals that intimate life was situated along a continuum of sexual and non-sexual relations of care and that forms of affiliation not usually associated with intimate life, such as national identity and political subjection, were in fact tethered to the Renaissance intimate sphere.