4
Iphigenia in Israel

Anna Karenina has escaped from my control.
Tolstoy

Et nos servasti [...] sanguine fuso.
Inscription in the Mithraeum of Santa Prisca, Rome

Donne's fourth Holy Sonnet ends with the curious, if unambiguous, couplet: "Or wash thee in Christs blood, which hath this might / That being red, it dyes red soules to white."^[1] This seems an unlikely sort of washing, but since the previous line equates "red" with "blushing"—that is, penitence—the distich evidently means something along the lines of "Christ's atonement is able to redeem and sanctify penitent souls." The peculiar notion that washing a red object in red blood could make it turn white apparently depends on the trivial pun whereby "wash" means both "to launder" and "to remove spiritual pollution." But, in fact, the trope is both deeper and simpler. In New Testament Greek, "wash" and related terms generally do not refer to cleaning something with soap and water. As in Donne's couplet, they signify sacrificial purification—that is, cleaning something with blood. Hebrews 9:22 thus reads "and almost all things are by the law purged [mundantur in the Vulgate] with blood"; similarly, 1 John 1:7 describes how "the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth (emundat ) us from all sin." The literal sense of cleaning in both passages is ritual rather than hygienic. And in both passages the original Greek word for this sort of bloodbath is katharsis .^[2]

Since the modern discussion of katharsis , which centers on Aristotle's Poetics , defines it either as "purgation" in a medical sense or "purification" in a moral one, the notion of katharsis as blood sacrifice seems startling.^[3] I noticed it only because the word occurs repeatedly in the last section of De satisfactione , where Grotius undertakes to show that sacrificial concepts and terms underlie all ancient religious discourse. Grotius, who regularly cites his Greek authorities in the original, giving a Latin equivalent in brackets, translates it (or a cognate) nine times as expiare / expiatio (to make atonement, to purge by sacrifice), nine again as mundare / emundare

(to purify, to purge by sacrifice), and once each as piamen (expiatory / propitiatory sacrifice) and averrunca (a charm to ward off evil).^[4] While the Aristotelian katharsis of pity and fear cannot refer to blood sacrifice^[5] —and no Renaissance commentary on Aristotle suggests that it does—the fact that the Aristotelian term for the telos of tragedy and an ordinary Greek term for ritual sacrifice, including the sacrifice of Christ, are identical would have been obvious to any Renaissance Graecist.^[6]

De satisfactione also suggests a further connection between tragedy and sacrifice. The specific legal and quasi-legal issues Grotius treats in connection with the Atonement include exemplary punishment, expiation, inherited guilt, mystical pollutions, penal substitution, innocent victims, and purification. But this could also be a list of the principal themes in both ancient and Renaissance tragedy. Given Walter Burkert's convincing hypothesis that Greek tragedy evolved from ritual sacrifice, as well as the traditional derivation of Renaissance drama from the sacrificial liturgy of Holy Week, such philological and thematic parallels provide additional evidence for the ritual origins of tragedy. However, it by no means follows that this origin has any bearing on the subsequent development of the genre, particularly its postclassical development.^[7] To determine whether these origins remain present, even if vestigially, in the Renaissance, one needs to trace Burkert's investigation in reverse. The remainder of this chapter attempts to locate the discursive sites where katharsis , tragedy, and sacrifice (including Christ's sacrifice) intersect. It begins with the connections that early modern philology posits between these terms and then takes up the staging of sacrifice in the earliest postclassical biblical drama to have been influenced by Attic tragedy.^[8]

The Name of the Goat

To the best of my knowledge, no Renaissance ars poetica associates the tragic katharsis with sacrifice. However, a good deal of indirect evidence does suggest that the imbrications of tragedy and sacrifice would have been, if not evident, at least available in this period. The thematic connection could have been observed even by the Greekless reader. With the partial exceptions of Medea and Electra , all translations of Greek tragedy (including both Latin and vernacular) printed before 1560 concern human sacrifice, especially female sacrifice: Euripides' Hecuba (1506), Iphigenia in Aulis (1506), Alcestis (1554), and Phoenissae (1560) and Sophocles' Antigone (1533).^[9] The texts selected for translation would have left the distinct impression that tragedy was, in its origin and essence, a staging of sacrifice. As Goethe later remarked, tragedy seems to be "eine Art Menchenopfer ."^[10]

Renaissance philology corroborates and complicates this impression. The earliest humanist Greek lexicon, Guillaume Bude's Commentarii linguae Graecae (1529), and its magisterial successor, Stephanus's Thesaurus Graecae linguae (1572), provide particularly valuable information, since they would have been the primary reference works available to a Renaissance literary scholar trying to determine the meaning of the mysterious Aristotelian katharsis . For a modern reader, their definitions seem startlingly beside the point. Neither Bude nor Stephanus associates katharsis with a specifically aesthetic discourse; neither cites the Poetics . While both lexica recognize that katharsis may refer to any sort of cleaning and that it has a specific medical sense, they unmistakably consider its ritual context primary. Bude defines it as a purgatio (cleansing, religious purification) and lustratio (purification by sacrifice).^[11] Stephanus gives a similar account; he begins by defining katharsis as purgatio or expiatio (atonement, purgation by sacrifice) and then (in the same entry) translates katharsion as piamen, lustratio, piaculum —basically equivalent terms for propitiatory or purificatory sacrifice. In its principal significations, the term belongs to the sacrificial vocabulary of ancient Greek religion.^[12]

Renaissance commentaries on the ninth chapter of Hebrews give a similar reading of katharsis . Discussing the passage "almost all things ... are purged (katharizo ) with blood," Matthew Poole remarks that "although certain legal cleansings (mundationes ) took place without blood, nevertheless there were no ceremonies instituted for the remission of sins that did not require the effusion of blood."^[13] Quite clearly, Poole connects purging and cleaning not with removing dirt by water but with expiating sin by blood. Calvin's Commentaries on the Epistle to the Hebrews makes this point explicitly. Noting that "purgation under the Old Testament ... was done by means of blood," Calvin then remarks that the apostle says "almost all things ... are purged with blood" because

doubtless they often washed themselves and other unclean things with water. But even water itself derived its power to cleanse from the sacrifices; so that the Apostle at length truly declares that without blood there was no remission.... And as without Christ there is no purity nor salvation, so nothing without blood can be either pure or saving.^[14]

Cleanliness, finally, is next to godliness.

But katharsis also has a relation to human sacrifice—the subject of tragedy and the Crucifixion. Bude's and Stephanus's entries under katharma (a cognate of katharsis ) begin by defining it as basically equivalent to ka-

tharsis ; it is a purgamentum , a piaculum . But each entry then specifies the term along similar lines:

In this sense, sinful men were called katharmata as being sacrificial victims (piaculares ); that is, men consecrated for the sacrificial purification (lustratio ) and expiation of their fatherland. The Romans also called them the Holy Ones (Sacri ), those whose death atoned for all the sins of the city or people and who were sacrificed (mactare ) in order to avert the wrath of the Gods.^[15]

To be sacred is to be sacrificed, an etymological connection preserved both in Latin (sacer/sacrificare ) and Greek (hieron/hiereion ).

As before, the biblical commentaries register the same reading. In his Apologia confessionis (1537), for instance, Melanchthon identifies Christ with the 'asham (expiatory victim) of Isaiah 53:10 and then notes: "The word 'asham is better understood in the context of pagan customs.... The Latins called piaculum the victim which in the great calamities was offered up to placate the wrath of God .... The Greeks called it katharmata ."^[16] The chain of signifiers thus links the katharmata to apotropaic human sacrifice, to expiating the sins of one's land and people, to Christ. The katharmata are scapegoats.

This identification presents itself in Stephanus's entry under pharmakos (scapegoat). He explains that "sacrificial purification (lustratio ) took place by means of blood, as history attests.... The Athenians call masters of this art 'pharmakous,' or expiators of cities.... But the pharmakos ... is also called to katharma ."^[17] Like the katharma , the scapegoat also signifies Christ, a reading of Leviticus 16 that remained standard from the patristic era through the Renaissance; as Poole summarizes, "This goat sent into the wilderness foreshadows the salvation Christ offers to the gentiles."^[18] Poole additionally links the scapegoat to another aspect of Greek sacrificial practice, noting that the scapegoat corresponds to the pagan apheton zoon , an animal allowed to roam freely without a master (libre sine custode ) prior to being ritually slaughtered.^[19] The significance of the apheton for sacrificial tragedy in the Renaissance will become clear in what follows.

In the meantime, one further meaning of katharsis emphasized in the Renaissance lexica deserves mention. Among the principal senses of the term, both Bude and Stephanus list menstruation, since women are cleansed (purgantur ) by the menstrual flow.^[20] This definition, in turn, yokes the ritual and medical/Aristotelian senses of katharsis , both being

types of purificatory bleeding, a restoration of humoral or moral balance through the shedding of blood.^[21] The complex semantic field of katharsis thus suggests, however obliquely, a connection between ritual death and female bodies.

Renaissance definitions of katharsis and its cognates locate these terms in ritual sacrifice but do not, except at one point, relate them to tragedy. The exception appears under the explanation of katharsion , which according to Bude and Stephanus refers to a piglet sacrificed to purify (lustrare ) a theater audience and which, Stephanus adds, could also be called a katharma .^[22] While this definition throws little light on the relation between drama and sacrifice, it does indicate that sacrifices took place at the site of tragedy and thus may serve as a bridge to the second part of this philological investigation: the Renaissance definition of tragedy.^[23]

Like the pharmakos/katharma , tragedy concerns slaughtered goats. Burkert's argument that "tragedy" derives from the trugos or goat sacrificed to Dionysus during ancient religious festivals corresponds to the etymology preserved in all Renaissance discussions of tragedy.^[24] Stephanus thus explains that "when the altars had been lit and the goat brought forth, the song that the sacred chorus offered to Father Dionysius was called a tragodia ."^[25] In his Poeticarum institutionum libri tres , Gerhard Vossius—an early seventeenth-century Dutch scholar and close friend of Grotius—offers a fairly detailed account of the sacrificial origins of poetry in early Greek harvest festivals, describing how the dithyrambic hymns sung by ecstatic worshipers in honor of Dionysus gave birth to tragedy proper.^[26] For the Renaissance, as for the late Romantics, tragedy evolves from the frenzied, Dionysian song chanted around the sacrificial victim.

In their entries under tragodia , Bude and Stephanus also cite the sixth book of Polybius's Histories , the crucial book on the Roman constitution.^[27] Toward the end of this book, Polybius turns to the question of Roman religion; it is to this section that Bude and Stephanus refer. The passage requires close consideration inasmuch as it is the Renaissance's principal ancient authority for the religious connotations of the "tragic" and its relation to sacrifice.

Polybius observes that while a wise man (sophos andros ) does not need holy fictions to be virtuous, the common people do. Religion therefore "maintains the cohesion of the Roman State" because, by filling its rituals with theatrical marvels (ektragodein ), it inspires the fickle and lawless multitude with terror and wonder (tragodia ), which produce civic virtue.^[28] Having offered this demystified analysis of state religion, Polybius concludes with a story exemplifying how the moral fiber produced by such

rituals led to Roman imperial hegemony. It is a story about sacrificing sureties. After Hannibal captured the Roman garrison at Cannae, he sent ten hostages back to Rome to negotiate ransom, making them swear to return. The Romans, however, refused to ransom the garrison; nor did they "allow their pity for their kinsmen ... to prevail" but also sent back the sureties, "who returned of their own free will, as bound by their oath."^[29] Such greatness of soul (megalopsychia ), in turn, terrified Hannibal and, Polybius implies, caused his ultimate defeat. While Polybius does not explicitly state that the "tragic" staging of religion creates sacrificial patriotism, the implication seems unmistakable, if only because it itself restates the tacit link between tragedy and patriotic sacrifices common to much Greek tragedy, particularly Euripidean tragedy, whose heroes and heroines die (whether ironically or not) for the greater glory of Hellas.

This passage probably stands behind a good deal of what strikes the modern reader of Renaissance texts as "Machiavellian." It also bears centrally on Renaissance interpretations of tragedy. Both Bude and Stephanus cite Polybius, defining ektragodein/tragodein as "to fill with wonder (admiratio )" or, more specifically, "the wonder and terror of religion infused into the people by augurs and priests"—a definition that may have contributed to the emergence of wonder as a primary tragic emotion in the sixteenth century.^[30] The triple relation Polybius implies between the tragic, religion, and patriotic sacrifice—a relation already implicit in the definition of the katharmata —both assimilates tragedy to religion and associates both with the problematic of sacrificial substitution discussed in chapter 2. The religious character of tragedy, which seems obvious to modern readers, was not, one should remember, part of the Renaissance's basically political and/or erotic understanding of tragic suffering. Plays that brood over the ways of God to men, like Doctor Faustus and King Lear , are fairly rare. But the Polybian equation seems implicit in the genesis of Renaissance biblical tragedy.

The philological evidence available in sixteenth-century lexica, poetics, and biblical commentaries indicates that katharsis, tragodia , and cognate terms overlap to construct a semiotic field composed of multiple links between tragedy and sacrifice, one that draws into its ambit not only patriotic expiation, female blood, and the scapegoat but also the Crucifixion. The "tragic" nature of Christ's sacrifice was not a theological topos. Prior to the Renaissance, the Crucifixion was virtually never described as a tragedy. The considerable erudition devoted to identifying the sources for Herrick's extraordinary Good Friday poem, "Tragicus Rex," has located numerous patristic and medieval references to the Passion as a drama, a spectacle, a

play, or a pageant, but not (except in Herrick) as a tragedy; even during the Renaissance, such references rarely occur.^[31] Likewise, prior to Quintianus Stoa's Theoandrothanatos , first published in 1508, the word tragedy seems not to have been applied to passion plays. As Stoa's ostentatiously Greek title suggests, the conceptualization of the Atonement as a tragedy is bound up with the recovery of Attic drama and the beginnings of Greek philology in Western Europe. It remains to be seen what significance this entanglement might possess for the development of Renaissance tragedy, its possible connection to the inverted pietas in the final scenes of Shakespearean tragedy—to the passions of tragic women. Does the development of Greek tragedy out of ancient ritual repeat itself in the Renaissance, linking this rebirth of tragedy to the Grotian moment when sacrifice begins to slip toward the archaic?

Among Schoolchildren: Sixteenth-century Biblical Tragedy

Why, Sir, I should not have said of Buchanan, had he been an Englishman , what I will now say of him as a Scotchman ,—that he was the only man of genius his country ever produced.
Samuel Johnson

To pursue this line of questioning, the rest of this chapter will consider one of the earliest and most influential neoclassical tragedies, itself the first Renaissance biblical drama modeled on Greek tragedy: George Buchanan's Jephthes sive votum tragoedia , composed sometime between 1540 and 1547 and published in 1554.^[32] Buchanan (1506–1582) is probably better known as the Calvinist regicidal-republican tutor to James I, but these commitments belong to the last two decades of his life and thus do not concern us here. When he was writing Jephthah , Buchanan, still an Erasmian Catholic although probably inclining toward Protestantism, was teaching at the College de Guyenne in Bordeaux; Montaigne, who was enrolled in the college at the time, later recalled having a leading role in a performance of the play.^[33] A brilliant neo-Latin poet and translator of Greek tragedy, Buchanan belonged to the small circle of midcentury French humanists; he was a friend of Dorat, Lazare de Baif, Muret, du Bellay, Ronsard, and Turnebe. Stephanus and the younger Scaliger describe him as the foremost Latin poet of the century.^[34] Buchanan's friendship with the elder Scaliger, author of Poetices libri septem and preeminent sixteenth-century authority on Aristotle's Poetics , has particular signifi-

cance, because it strengthens the likelihood that Buchanan would have known the Poetics , before Robertello's 1548 edition still a fairly esoteric text, making Jephthah perhaps the first Renaissance drama written by a poet cognizant of the relation between katharsis and tragedy.^[35]

Jephthah is a neo-Latin school play, written for the annual dramatic performance put on by the boys at the College de Guyenne. Despite its pedagogical origins, it became stunningly successful after its first publication in 1554. Eighteen more Latin editions followed in the sixteenth century, and twenty-eight in the seventeenth. The play was translated into French seven times before 1614 (not counting multiple editions of individual translations), as well as into Italian, German, Hungarian, and Polish.^[36] Although not translated into English during the Renaissance, the original Latin text went through three London printings before 1600 and two more in the seventeenth century as part of Buchanan's Opera omnia . In The Scholemaster (1570), Roger Ascham praises Jephthah as one of only two modern tragedies "able to abide the true touch of Aristotle's precepts and Euripides' examples."^[37] Similarly, after traducing the indecorums of native English drama, Sidney proposes as an alternative "the tragedies of Buchanan [which] do justly bring forth a divine admiration."^[38] In Children of Oedipus , Martin Mueller makes a convincing case for Jephthah's influence on Samson Agonistes , the sole English biblical tragedy à la grecque ."^[39]Jephthah remained influential through the eighteenth century, supplying the basis for Handel's oratorio of the same name.^[40]

The play itself transposes Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis into the story of Jephthah and his daughter (Judges 11:30–40), which tells how the Israelite chieftain Jephthah vowed before a battle with the Ammonites that if he were victorious he would sacrifice the first "thing" he met on his return home; to his horror, his daughter, an only child, greets him. He confesses his vow, to which she responds, "My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth," asking only two months' reprieve to bewail her virginity. This granted, the daughter then returns to fulfill her fathers' vow. The chapter ends by noting that it became an annual "custom in Israel" for young women to lament Jephthah's daughter. Like Iphigenia, Jephthah thus narrates the scene of sacrifice; it also raises the question—the same question that will reappear in the following chapter—of the significance of neoclassical imitatio for the representation of biblical stories: the literary significance, that is, of Christian humanism. Additionally, since both Jephthah and the texts considered in the next chapter focus on female suffering,

we need to look at Buchanan's play in terms of the triple relation among neoclassical mimesis, biblical narrative, and the representation of women.

The obvious question the text initially raises is, why dramatize this story at all? Lynda Boose has made a plausible case that "within the patriarchal narrative is something more specific than just a general erasure of women. What is specifically absent is the daughter ."^[41] If Buchanan had wanted to write a tragedy about child sacrifice, why not use the story of Abraham and Isaac, as his friend Beza would do in his Abraham sacrifiant (1550), a play likewise influenced by Euripides' Iphigenia ? Why focus on the daughter's sacrifice? Buchanan's play, in fact, alters the biblical narrative to give prominence to female roles. His two principal deviations from the scriptural account (along with the debate between Jephthah and a priest) emphasize the woman's part. He adds a mother, loosely based on Euripides' Clytemnestra but without her deadly resentment, a difference apparent from the fact that Buchanan names her "Storge," the Greek term for the natural affection between parents and children, and a word, as I have elsewhere attempted to demonstrate, that beginning in the sixteenth century frequently replaced both agape and eros as the term for the love binding God to humanity and rulers to people, as well as parents to children; in Renaissance usage, the term implies that the affectionate family provides the most adequate symbol for both supernatural and political society.^[42]

Buchanan also enhances the role of Jephthah's daughter, whom he calls "Iphis"—an obvious allusion to Iphigenia, but moreover a neuter Greek word that means strength. It is also, oddly, the name of the lesbian transsexual in Ovid's Metamorphosis (a connection Heinsius notes in his hostile analysis of the play at the end of On Plot in Tragedy ).^[43] Such changes only further problematize the significance of gender in a Latin play for boys—a play, that is, neither written for a female audience nor capable of being read by the vast majority of Renaissance women. Moreover, the question of why Buchanan represents the daughter's sacrifice raises the equally pressing question of why he represents the daughter's sacrifice . Sixteenth-century parents were not in the habit of ritually slaughtering their children, and in any case infanticide was generally a crime attributed to mothers during this period. What sort of cultural negotiations attach themselves to this narrative that would render it of interest to an audience where daughters are not present and to a society where human sacrifice is not an issue?^[44]

The following discussion attempts to answer these questions by examining the text itself, but some preliminary information concerning the exegetical and literary afterlife of the biblical episode elucidates the historical

context of Buchanan's reading. The story of Jephthah quite suddenly became important in the sixteenth century. Wilbur Sypherd's Jephthah and His Daughter documents the pan-European proliferation of Jephthah poems, plays, ballads, oratorios, and operas from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, most later than Buchanan's version and hence worth mentioning only as evidence of the pervasive cultural investment in this story. More directly relevant to Buchanan are the biblical commentaries, beginning with Augustine's remark that the Jephthah episode differs from the sacrifice of Isaac because in the former the Bible passes no judgment on either the vow or the sacrifice, instead leaving the moral to be discerned by the reader.^[45] The ethical opacity of the biblical text opens a space for interpretive maneuvering—for using narrative to discern meaning rather than merely enforce it.

The exegetical tradition on this passage, in fact, evinces a good deal of interpretive maneuvering, some of it highly suggestive. Prior to Nicholas de Lyra's Postilla , medieval commentators generally held both that Jephthah is a type of Christ who (in Chrysostom's words) "sanctified His Church by the blood of martyrs during the time of persecution" and that Jephthah's sacrifice was an abomination, displeasing to God and morally wrong.^[46] From de Lyra through the Renaissance, the interpretation changes drastically. Drawing on Jewish sources, Lyra and subsequent exegetes, particularly Protestant ones, argue that Jephthah did not kill his daughter but consecrated her virginity to God; that is, he offered her up as a sort of proto-nun.^[47] The overt motive for this shift is to get rid of the embarrassing fact that the Epistle to the Hebrews mentions Jephthah among the Old Testament heroes of faith—a tribute seemingly incompatible with infanticide—but one also suspects deeper discomforts with blood sacrifice motivating this attempt to restrict paternal power to the sexuality of the daughter. The important early seventeenth-century biblical scholar Louis Cappel offers the sole Protestant critique of this sanitized reading. But Cappel himself was almost certainly influenced by Buchanan's play—an interesting instance of the bilateral relation between literature and exegesis. As a reading of the play as well as the biblical text, Cappel's interpretation will prove useful for corroborating the apparent implications of Buchanan's Jephthah .

Alien Transcendence

To keep that oath were more impiety
Than Jephthah's, when he sacrific'd his daughter.
3 Henry VI

Jephthah is about the moral heteronomy of God: whether, according to the judgments of human reason, God delights in evil. The play begins with an angelic prologue announcing Israel's victory over the Ammonites that concludes with the ominous decree:

Further, lest Jephthah, he too, should aspire
To measure his own prowess by the event
Of battle, and presume on his success,
Full soon domestic sorrow shall bedim
His shining victory. Triumph and woe shall meet,
And woe shall triumph.^[48]

This sounds like standard Renaissance penal pedagogy, but nothing in the character of Jephthah warrants the angel's charge of incipient arrogance. When the messenger enters to describe Jephthah's triumph, he portrays him as a warrior of unwavering piety and justice who attempts to negotiate a bloodless settlement and, that failing, trusts in God to deliver his army. The devout faith in God's fatherly love that suffuses Jephthah's first speech is, in the wake of the angelic prologue, bitterly ironic:

Monarch of all the world, my voice to thee
I lift in adoration—lift to thee,
For thou alone art God, and thou alone
Bendest to kneeling worshipper an ear
Attentive to his prayer. Omnipotent!
What mortal tongue may speak thee as thou art,
Or frame fit words to name thy character?
A stern avenger art thou, yet thy heart
Melts with a father's pity; to thy foes
A God of terror and severity.
But to all those that love thee thou art good
and gentle.^[49]

Jephthah is not arrogant but pious and grateful—and then stricken by God.^[50]

Buchanan intensifies the tragic ironies here by having Jephthah offer his vow after the victory. As he returns home, Jephthah prays,

O most High!
Remembering thy covenant of old—
Gentle and gracious as thou ever art—
Deign to accept my vow.^[51]

He then goes on to promise to sacrifice "whatsoever" first meets him at his return home. The vow is presented not as a self-interested bargain with

God but "the gift ... [of] a grateful heart."^[52] Moreover, since the angel relates both the vow and its terrible consequences before the audience hears Jephthah promise that "whatsoever first / Shall come to meet me from my threshold forth / To thee shall be devoted," a dark possibility emerges that the same power that punishes Jephthah's vow has also, in some sense, staged it.^[53] Consequently, as Donald Stone observes, "the situation in which man is wholly responsible for his punishment becomes one in which disaster derives from those forces outside man who are responsible for ordering the universe."^[54] The specter of predestination to evil—the grim corollary of Calvinism and, for Ricoeur, the theological essence of Greek tragedy—reverberates through these scenes.^[55]

The realization of the vow's murderous entailment devastates the pieties of Jephthah and the play's chorus of Jewish maidens. They lapse into classical pessimism.^[56] Until the final scene, no character prays to or addresses God as a loving father. Instead, they lament the malicious indifference of what the text now calls fortune or fate:

For so the Power Supreme enacts
That change shall ever follow change
Swiftly through life's allotted range;
And 'tis immutably decreed
That sorrows shall to joys succeed....
A gleam of joy shine on our hearts,
'Tis but a gleam and soon departs.^[57]

Classical pessimism is perhaps too limiting a description. What is at stake here is whether the Christian God wishes to destroy human happiness—a good question to ask a religion whose central symbol is an instrument of torture and whose praxis celebrates fasting, celibacy, and martyrdom. It is the persistent question of Renaissance sacrifice dramas, raised in the final choruses of Greville's Mustapha as well as Dekker's Virgin-Martyr (although with opposite answers).^[58] In Dekker's play, the principal argument the pagan maidens make against Christianity is that it compels its adherents to abjure "those blessings which our gods gives [sic ] freely, / And showr'd upon us with a prodigall hand, / As to be noble borne, youth, beauty, wealth."^[59] Instead, they tell the saintly Dorothea,

by our example
Bequeathing misery to such as love it,
Learne to be happy, the Christian yokes too heavy
For such a dainty necke.^[60]

In this play, the joys of heaven make ample recompense for all worldly losses—a solution absent both in the Islamic world of Greville's tragedy and Buchanan's Jewish setting, where characters contemplate the possibility that religion is a masochistic fiction or that the gods themselves demand human suffering "and why, I know not," Buchanan's Storge confesses, "if it be not mirth / And sport to her [Fortune] to thwart our purposes."^[61]

Jephthah is the earliest exemplar of what Walter Benjamin calls the Trauerspiel or baroque drama "of suffering and despair in which a full vision of transcendence is systematically withheld," in which characters grope in a twilight world emptied of providential order.^[62] By the middle of the play, the chorus has already entered this selva oscura :

But, as the dim and scanty light,
That half dispels the lingering night
From underneath the leafy boughs
Of the deep forest, dimly shows
In interlaced perplexing maze
The windings of a thousand ways
That wind and part so endlessly
The traveller knows not which to try,
And wanders in the forest dim
All paths become alike to him:
So in life's journey still we stray,
Uncertain where to choose our way.^[63]

In Utramque Partem

Take heed, lest, by gendering errors and discords ... [you] turn into a sacrifice to Satan the very same law of God which has been given for hindering sacrifices to Satan.
Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule

In order to specify the theological and ethical crisis at stake in the play, Buchanan expands Euripides' stichomythic exchanges into two full-length debates, first between Jephthah and a priest, then between Jephthah and Storge, both interlocutors attempting to dissuade Jephthah from carrying out his vow.^[64] Although their arguments overlap, the priest primarily considers human sacrifice as an irrational perversity; Storge, as a violation of natural law.

The debate between Jephthah and the priest begins with the father in agony, staggering under his conviction that God requires him to commit what he can regard only as a loathsome crime, begging to sink into hell

"if only I may there abide unnamed / A parricide, the slayer of my child."^[65] The priest, however, cannot fathom Jephthah's sense of entrapment; instead, he invokes the capacity of the ethical subject to fashion his own destiny.

The choice is thine
To be, or not be, miserable.No power
Compels the dreadful sacrifice; 'tis left
In thine own choosing.^[66]

The priest's defense of human freedom against the mystified notion of an inviolable vow rests on his identification of the divine will with the dictates of right reason. He thus counters Jephthah's primitive and legalistic sense of the word as vow with a more philosophic conception of the word as logos or unchanging rational order.

Be thy vow
Whate'er thy folly framed it ...
.... The voice divine
Sounds one clear note, one ever with itself,
And self-accordant—all is purest truth.^[67]

Identifying the divine with natural law, the priest argues that the love all creatures feel for their offspring demonstrates that this "voice divine" forbids fathers to kill their children. In fact, God takes no delight in "gory sacrifice ... [or] the blood of bulls" but instead requires only the offering of "a heart polluted by no villainy, / A mind by simple truth informed and ruled, / A conscience that is sullied by no stain."^[68] The priest thus opposes sacrifice to the related standards of ethical rationalism, moral autonomy, and religious inwardness. These are, of course, also the central virtues of Protestant humanism, which, like the priest, attempts to avert the sacrificial ending of this story.

But an odd word that occurs in the chorus immediately preceding this debate gives a further resonance to its theological positioning. The chorus laments that Iphis shall be killed by "patrio ... mactatu ," a "fatherly slaughtering."^[69] The word mactatu is highly unusual, occurring only once in the extant corpus of Latin literature. It appears in the first book of De rerum natura as part of Lucretius's own account of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, whose moral immediately follows in the famous line: "tantum religio potuit suadere malorum ."^[70] The Lucretian invective against religion as the source of human misery—epitomized in its legitimation of murder disguised as sacrifice—carries over into the priest's arguments. He thus

informs Jephthah that his conviction that God demands the promised sacrifice is his own "mocking dream," for "too rashly we impute / To Heaven itself crimes ... / And hideous things beyond all utterance." As in Lucretius, the sacrificial gods turn out to be fabrications, the projection of human cruelty onto the divine: "We feign the Eternal Deity to delight / In gory offerings."^[71] The priest's humanist rationalism, that is, opens out onto a Lucretian critique of sacrificial religion—and therefore, implicitly, of biblical religion.

Jephthah responds to the priest by lashing out at the comfortable and casuistical deceptions invented by intellectuals, who, despite their seeming wisdom, are typically "negligent / In their observance of the ancient rites" and devoid of "reverent regard / [for] religion's mysteries."^[72] For Jephthah, the priest's sophistic rationalism conceals the terrible otherness of the divine will and its ineluctable demands. Jephthah bitterly recognizes that the sacrifice is a "crime" that will bring "nought ... but sorrows ever new / And still succeeding sorrows."^[73] He will not morally justify the sacrifice of his daughter, yet he refuses to abjure his conviction that God requires performance of vows. Unlike the priest, Jephthah has no rational defense of his position; instead, entangled in the contradictory imperatives of paternal love and archaic legalism, he can only struggle to articulate his tragic recognition that the God of Israel is in fact the inscrutable Deus absconditus , the alien God.

After the priest departs, a more poignant debate ensues between Jephthah and his angry, terrified wife. The wife, as her name indicates, represents storge , the divinely implanted law of nature that commands parents to love and protect their children. The debate between mother and father thus dramatizes the Erasmian conflict between the maternal instinct of self-preservation and the sacrificial law of the father. Storge claims it as the mother's duty, "armed with a right as strong as nature's law, / ... [to] snatch her girl from a stern father's hand / Who dooms her to destruction."^[74] Moreover, her opposition to this sacrificial law leads her to reiterate the priest's Lucretian suspicions that the "air of sad religion veils ... / the horror under Duty's guise."^[75]

In addition, she emphasizes what was already implicit in the priest's argument: that the sacrifice of Iphis erodes the distinction between Israel and the pagans Jephthah has just conquered. As the latter "with rites abhorred have laid / Upon thine altars fire profane / And victims impiously slain," so now in Israel "the altar smokes / With the warm blood of human sacrifice, / As in the lands that worship idols grim."^[76] The sacrificial law of the

father undoes the stable opposition between the people of God and the barbaric enemy and therefore also collapses that between Israel's God and the idols. As in Grotius, sacrifice establishes uncanny parallels at the site of absolute difference.

Although Storge personifies the claims of the family, the priest, chorus, and Jephthah himself likewise acknowledge its moral and emotional primacy. Jephthah passionately loves his daughter—and also his wife.^[77] The priest begins his arguments with a defense of storge as the common source of natural, human, and divine law and therefore also the analogical bond that guarantees the moral intelligibility of the universe.

Parental love—is there a stronger power
Implanted in our breast?....
           Eternal Providence
This strong affection deeply hath infixed
In mortal bosoms....
           And deeper still
To engrave upon our minds the hallowed name,
It is his will to be, and to be called,
Our Father; sanctioning the primal bond
Of love parental.^[78]

Because all the characters, and not only the mother, regard the family as the paradigmatic ground of ethical relations, the opposition between storge and sacrifice does not precisely correspond to the usual Vergilian conflict between the private and public, where the man must choose between domestic happiness and sacred duty.^[79] By shifting the focus of the conflict from eros to storge , Buchanan allows the claims of the private sphere a moral validity independent of personal gratification. Conversely, Jephthah's insistence that God demands child sacrifice does not merely assert the rights of the polis over those of the oikos but calls into question the intelligibility and goodness of God. Hence, like the priest's rationalism, the mother's storge exposes the tragic heteronomy of ethical consciousness and divine will. The fact that the characters refer to Jephthah's deed as a "parricide"—the primal taboo—merely underscores this drastic rupture between moral and supernatural law.

The claims of moral rationalism and of the family are linked as the two primary manifestations of what, loosely speaking, we may call the bourgeois ethos; that is, although both obviously existed earlier, in the sixteenth century a rational ethics set itself over and against customary authority while at the same time the nuclear family engulfed the more

diffused social groupings of the Middle Ages; More's Utopia exemplifies both shifts. Moreover, they seem internally related, since (as Jephthah suggests) the early modern patriarchal family supplied the rationally apprehensible model for all social and supernatural obligations. Hence, the debates in Jephthah can be viewed as arraying the defining commitments of bourgeois society against an earlier cultural system based on the quasimagical word-as-vow and, more important, on sacrifice. The sacrificial economy opposes any rational ethic precisely because (in Hegel's words) it epitomizes the abandonment "of man's inmost to an alien transcendence."^[80] Or, put in the legal terms discussed in chapter 2, sacrifice brings into sharp focus the conflict between the notion of a person as part of a mystica conjunctio and as a suppositum within the bourgeois family. The ethical significance of this connection between the conjunctio and sacrifice is starkly articulated in Isidore's seventh-century commentary on the Jephthah story. Jephthah, Isidore observes, is a type of Christ, "who fulfilled all the sacraments of human salvation and offered God his own flesh—his daughter, as it were—for the redemption of Israel."^[81] Here the daughter simply disappears into the flesh of her father; she possesses no independent existence, and therefore her sacrifice poses no moral dilemma.

During her debate with Jephthah, Storge contests this view of the daughter as the sacrificial flesh (or property) of the father. She asks her husband, "Canst thou promise that which is not thine?" He responds in apparent surprise, "Is not my daughter mine?" Her answer is "Thine wholly, no! / Thine is she even so as mine she is, / No otherwise."^[82] Who owns the daughter: the nurturing mother or the sacrificial father? "Reason," Storge suggests, "would urge the mother's stronger claim," since she tends the child and guards it from harm.^[83] In fact, the ambiguous relation between fathers and their families has come up earlier in the play, in the ominous dream Storge relates before her husband's return. She thought she saw, she tells the chorus, a pack of starving wolves descend on a defenseless flock, when

Alert, and instantly, a faithful dog,
Intrepid guardian of the trembling fold,
Rushed forth and drove the wolves away—and then,
Returning to the timid flock that still
Panted in wildest terror, suddenly,
From where I held it in my folded arms,
A trembling lamb he snatched, and with his fangs
Remorselessly its quivering flesh he tore.^[84]

In the dream, the father is the watchdog, the protector of his family but yet descendant of the wolf and still capable of reverting to his ancestral nature. Moreover, even as dog, the father is not part of the flock; he guards the family but does not really belong to the domestic units composed of ewes and their lambs. Storge's dream raises the question of the father's place in the family—a question implicated in the play's theological agon since the father is the agent of sacrifice, in which God is disclosed as the secret threat to the domestic enclosure and hence to ethical consciousness.^[85]

But Storge's picture of the father as wolfish alien misrepresents Buchanan's Jephthah. The play insists on the abiding mutual affection between father and daughter. Iphis herself admits that "no man than he was tenderer, / Nor ever child by parent held more dear."^[86] Their intimacy comes to the fore in the dreadful scene where she rushes toward her returning father, exclaiming, "O next to God to be revered by me! / Suffer me now to feel my fathers' arms / Enfold me to his bosom," and again when she later pleads with him to spare her "if e'er, with little arms enclapsed around, / I hung upon thy neck, and thou wast glad / To feel the pendent burden."^[87] Jephthah's deep love for his daughter is everywhere apparent; Buchanan, in fact, departs from Euripides by making the father in the end decide not to kill his daughter (a decision she overrides) but to die himself in her place.^[88] Heinsius criticizes the play primarily because he finds the domestic tenderness of its diction—the affectionate diminutives, the colloquial intimacies of father and child—indecorously "low" for tragedy.^[89]

But this affectionate father-daughter relationship poses its own problems. Modern feminist scholarship reads the narrative of the sacrificial daughter as encoding the father's incestuous desire for his nubile daughter and unacknowledged jealousy of the man who will take her from him. In Mieke Bal's analysis of Judges, for example, Jephthah "blame[s] his daughter, not, of course, for celebrating his victory but for being prepared to marry the real victor, for being ready to leave him."^[90] In the important essay "The Father's House and the Daughter in It," Lynda Boose generalizes this paradigm, suggesting that the father generally turns away from his adolescent daughter as a defense against "conscious recognition" of his incestuous propensities and that "the daughter's movement to cross that threshold and move out of the father's house" into the arms of another man "threatens the father ... with loss."^[91] In other words, daughter sacrifice is a doubly sexualized signifier, enacting both the father's avoidance of the desirable object and the loss he sustains by her marriage. So one could speculate that when Jephthah turns away from Iphis after she "crosses the

threshold" to meet him, he ceases to be a loving father in response to her new sexual maturity and that her death—and his grief over that death—represent the father's ambivalence about "giving away" his daughter to a rival.

Renaissance commentaries on the Jephthah episode tend, on the whole, to bear out this reading, since their substitution of celibacy for death implies some sort of equivalence between sacrificial and sexual narratives. As de Lyra notes, virginity is a form of civil death; hence, canon law treats castration under suicide.^[92] Buchanan, by contrast, suppresses virtually every reference to Iphis's sexuality until the final scene. He totally omits the biblical passage where the daughter asks her father to spare her life for two months so that she can bewail her virginity, and he mutes any reference to her as a prospective wife; Storge mentions it once, Jephthah never. Buchanan, in fact, seems deliberately to exclude an erotic subtext by adding an episode immediately after Iphis comes to greet Jephthah. Hurt by his cold and bizarre response, in the next scene she worries that her father has heard false rumors of her unchastity, that somehow, as Boose puts it, her crossing "over the threshold of the father's house unaccompanied by a male ... signifies random sexual availability."^[93] But Jephthah has not been upset by lewd gossip; the whole matter of the daughter's chastity is brought up only to be rejected as profoundly irrelevant. Throughout these scenes Iphis remains a child—still daddy's girl (and mommy's too), who is loved and valued but not, until the end, sexualized.^[94]Jephthah , as we shall see, profoundly engages the relationship of daughters and fathers, but it does not advert to the erotic possibilities latent in this domestic scenario; the tragedy is not about these.

We have yet to look at Iphis, since she does not have an important role in the first half of the tragedy. Up to this point, Mueller's summary perceptively states the implications of the play: "deferral [of salvation] had virtually become denial: nothing mitigates the appalling vision of a God who for reasons of his own rejects rulers who are pious, prudent, and humane.... Buchanan asserts the inevitability of sacrificial violence and stresses its indifference to reason and justice."^[95] What is at stake in the play is whether or not the biblical God is, in human terms, morally perverse. But to stop here, as Mueller does, leaves out the final scenes—leaves out the daughter.

The Sacrificial Virgin

O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!
Hamlet

Iphis enters with her mother at the beginning of the second debate. She speaks only after Storge has finished, initially pleading with her father to spare her; however, upset by her parents' quarrel, she assents to the sacrifice as soon as she grasps that her father is not angry, that he is "unwillingly, by strong compulsion, driven / To do this deed."^[96] But her filial obedience swiftly gives way to further motives. Unlike Jephthah's tormented submission to a command he can neither justify nor comprehend, her response modulates toward a joyful affirmation of sacrificial duty; hence, she will, Iphis declares, "of free accord / And with a grateful heart, requite to Heaven / The slaughter of so many thousand foes."^[97] "Requite," in the original, is piemus —expiate; she recognizes the sacrificial logic that transforms her from a victim into a patriotic katharma , outstripping her father, whose relation to transcendent structures, like his relation to domestic ones, remains problematic. The supernatural and the domestic, the arenas figured by Iphis and Storge, are female spaces, ones in which the father seems an awkward, marginal presence.^[98]

But again the conventional contrast between private/female and public/male has only a limited explanatory value here. Piemus , one notes, is plural—the royal "we"; this is the first time Iphis has referred to herself this way, as a public persona. In subsequent speeches, her civic role as deliverer and defender of her people repeatedly recurs: the following chorus asserts her "honour" (laus ) and "fame" (gloria ), declaring that her "name shall spread to many a land" and distant peoples "shall in their lays remembrance yield / Of her who for her country died / ... A maiden, yet as warrior brave."^[99] The chorus thus calls her a "virile virgin" (virgo virilis ), as if by dying she had attained heroic manhood. The messenger who reports her death likewise terms her a "noble heroine" (nobilis virago ) and tells how her courage "had drawn / The eyes of the whole multitude, who gazed / Awe-struck and wondering"—not typical praise for a Renaissance woman but strongly reminiscent of the Polybian associations of patriotic sacrifice and tragic wonder.^[100] Iphis herself acknowledges her public, "patriarchal" status, invoking the shades of her "dead forefathers" (morte defuncti patres ) to receive her spirit and justifying her resolution by declaring,

Nor ever, while day follows day to mark
The lapse of time, shall it be said of me,
I am unworthy of my name and race:
And I am Jephthah's daughter.^[101]

Nor does she die only for her "fatherland." Throughout these last scenes, her understanding of her own death changes rapidly. Iphis first seems to

view her sacrifice as an act of filial obedience, then as submission to the fates (fata ) in order to save her country, and finally as a voluntary self-oblation to a being she addresses as "the eternal Father of all things" (aeterne rerum genitor ).^[102] She moves from domestic and patriotic motives to a new insight into the supernatural justice of expiatory sacrifice and the mystica conjunctio , to what Kierkegaard calls the "acceptance of inherited guilt ... [as the] essential act of piety."^[103] As in Shakespeare's Lucrece , it is the female victim who grasps the sacrificial law of the father, while, curiously, the men surrounding her persist in trying to assign punishment in terms of individual responsibility.

Iphis's breakthrough to a new moral vision differentiates her from the Euripidean Iphigenia, who simply assents to Agamemnon's prior realization that she must die for Hellas since the gods demand her blood in exchange for a Greek victory (which may or may not be worth it); as Johann Sturm observed in his 1567 edition of Buchanan's play, Jephthah's daughter "surpasses the Greek Iphigenia in greatness of soul."^[104] She likewise differs from Beza's portrayal of Isaac in Abraham sacrifiant . Beza's Isaac is a good child who obeys his father, but that is all; the plot concerns Abraham's theological understanding. But Iphis's grasp of her death as an expiatory sacrifice transforms her into a type of Christ—the first female type, strictly speaking, in Christian literature. The Christic resonances in her final speech are unmistakable:

Maker of all things, Father of mankind,
Eternal God, at length thy love restore,
Forgive thy people's errors, and accept
This offering in thy great benignity,
O, if to turn away thy enkindled wrath
An expiating victim needs must die,
Lo, here I stand! let the avenging stroke
Fall on me, on me only, and the guilt
Of proud and stubborn revolt from thee
Be rased and quitted by the life I give.^[105]

Medieval commentators regularly considered the father a typological figure (while still condemning his rash vow) but never his daughter. However, in Cappel's commentary on Judges 11, which, as mentioned previously, shows clear signs of Buchanan's intertextual presence, the identification of the daughter with Christ is explicit:

And perhaps God seems to have allowed Jephthah to conceive this rash vow ... so that in this example might appear a notable type of Christ

consecrated by the Father as a katharma .... In the deed of Jephthah's daughter we find a type of Christ, who was consecrated to death (devotus ) by his Father for our salvation and made a curse (katharma ), and who, like her, willingly obeyed and at the same time [felt] a natural terror at that cursed death—and of the solemn annual commemoration of His death by participation in the holy Eucharist [which was prefigured by the annual celebration of her sacrifice].^[106]

In casting the daughter as a type of Christ, Buchanan in one sense "solves" the theological crisis pervading the earlier part of the play by irradiating the scene of sacrifice with an ardent caritas that, as for Colet, transforms torture into theophany. The symbolic plenitude released here empties out moral objections; they seem largely beside the point. But this resolution still leaves untouched Buchanan's unprecedented typological cross-gendering. Cappel provides no help on this, since he passes over the peculiarity of daughter sacrifice in silence. But in Jephthah , Iphis's femaleness alters and complicates both the theological implications of the plot and its sexual politics (which, incidentally, turn out to be inseparable).

From the moment when Iphis accedes to her sacrifice, the narrative switches focus from Jephthah to his daughter. He offers to die in her place, and she cuts him off in a manner reminiscent of the way male heroes typically dismiss fearful women; that is, she tells him to be quiet: "Father, cease to contrive these delays, and to weaken my purpose with soft words."^[107] And at this point, the father simply disappears for the rest of the play. Likewise, beginning with this scene, the play's attention shifts to the daughter's moral subjectivity, to her choice rather than her father's. Iphis thus stresses that she offers herself voluntarily (sponte ), perhaps echoing Storge's earlier accusation that her husband intends voluntarily (sponte ) to kill his daughter.^[108] But Storge's accusation ironically calls attention to the terrible compulsion pinioning Jephthah; conversely, Iphis's surrender marks the first truly voluntary act in the tragedy and hence the restoration of heroic agency—for the decision to die for one's patria is not specifically female, all heroism entailing the preference for glorious death over ignoble survival.^[109]

By giving her assent to the vow, one Renaissance exegete notes, Jephthah's daughter in effect declares "herself free from her father's authority (a potestate patria emancipata ) and henceforth subject only to God."^[110] That is, according to Grotius's commentary on the same passage, the text constitutes her as an apheton , since "among the Greeks, animals consecrated to the gods are called apheta , because they do not serve a master."^[111] Paradoxically, by freely choosing to obey her father, Iphis slips out of his

power. Yet (through a second paradox) she gains the autonomy of a subject only by renouncing her autonomy as a suppositum , for, like all ancient heroes, she achieves heroic selfhood by submerging her individuality in the communal identity of the group. Iphis thus imagines herself as embodying her father's "name and race," as becoming one with her "dead forefathers." This tension between autonomy and identification echoes the rhythms of Dionysian myth: on the one hand, the sparagmos of the infant Dionysius—the child's "dismemberment" from parental bonds—symbol of the individuation that is the source of all suffering; on the other, the self's ecstatic dissolution in the "mystical experience of the collective."^[112] This Nietzschean distinction between sparagmos and exstasis enables one to resist collapsing these moments into equivalent assertions of patriarchal control over daughters; by herself entering this ancestral genealogy (as by entering its typological correlate), Iphis renders her father unnecessary. She no longer requires him to mediate her participation in either her spiritual or tribal lineage.

Hence, the gender of the Dionysian victim in Buchanan's play casts a further shading over this scene. The configuration of heroic moral choice as openness to the male hints at a homology between female sexual passivity and daughterly sacrifice, but this openness also entails appropriation of masculine strength, transfiguring Iphis, in the chorus's words, into the virgo virilis (the inverse equivalent to the ephebic virginalis vir of the Calvinist passion narratives).^[113] This appropriation has a transgressive edge precisely insofar as it allows the daughter to displace her father as both tragic protagonist and Christic type, in turn "feminizing" the father as one who shrinks from the heroic choice with "soft words."^[114] Iphis simultaneously images and replaces her father—a female text transcribed by a male pen, perhaps, but a New Critical text whose meaning is independent of authorial intention.^[115]

Jephthah, as previously mentioned, disappears after Iphis proclaims her willingness to die; Storge, however, comes back on stage for the final scene of the play, where the messenger relates to her the circumstances of her daughter's death. As in Paradise Regained , the play ends with the return to the "Mother's house." The messenger concludes his report by describing how, after the fatal blow,

a murmur of relief rose high;
And many kindly voices spoke of thee
As one ...
That justly might be named, in thy sole self,
At once the happiest and most miserable

Of womankind. For be it that her wounds
Have cleft thee to the marrow, deep and sore,
Yet hast thou given thee solace with thy grief
Great as thy sorrow.^[116]

Curiously, the messenger reports that the crowd praised Storge, not Jephthah, who seems to have been forgotten. Furthermore, the messenger's words mark her as a type of the Blessed Virgin; "feminam unam beatam maxime " echoes the Magnificat's "blessed art thou among women" (Luke 1:42), while "plaga quamvis alte ad ossa sederit " recalls Simeon's prophetic "a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also" (Luke 2:35). This second allusion also resonates in Storge's last lines—the final lines of the play—where she responds to the messenger's consolations by declaring that "grief/Shall pierce my soul till this heart too is cold."^[117] But if Storge is a type of the Virgin, as Iphis is a type of Christ, then the final scene of Jephthah becomes a pieta in which the daughter takes the place of the Son in the domestic triad of mother, child, and the heavenly Father Iphis invokes in her dying prayer. This closing passage thus restructures the nuclear family central to the first half of the play into a type of the Holy Family—a family without human fathers (and hence one that may also distantly recall the lesbian lineage of the daughter's name).

Why is the father absent here? It seems possible to read the domestic relations in the play as an allegory of nature, law, and grace, so that the deadly transition from instinctive self-preservation to sacrifice would correspond to Iphis's progression from mother to father, while the second shift from the bleak legalism of the vow to Iphis's intuition of redemptive sacrifice signals the movement from law to grace. By returning to Storge rather than Jephthah in the end, the play hints at a dialectic whereby grace redeems nature but abolishes the law by fulfilling it.

Yet this allegorization seems more than a little mechanical. Whether valid or not, such an interpretation fails to account for the triple displacement that concludes this play: of father by Father, of Son by daughter, and of father by daughter.^[118] Any satisfactory reading of these displacements, furthermore, needs to take into account their gendering while keeping in mind, first, that this play was written for boys, who in all likelihood would not be very interested in daughters per se, and second that, in both antiquity and the Renaissance, the sacrificial child need not be female.^[119]

The Absent Father

Medieval and Renaissance paintings of the infant Jesus often omit Joseph, sometimes substituting Saint Anne as the third figure in the domestic

grouping; when he is present, he tends to be portrayed comically—frequently asleep. He never, of course, appears in representations of the Passion. By granting the father only a marginal status within its aphallically conceived Holy Family, Christianity seems to intensify anxieties already visible in the Old Testament concerning the father's procreative role.^[120] It has thus historically given rise to a destabilizing tension between the claims of domestic (whether filial or marital) and spiritual kinship—of father and Father—to unconditional allegiance.^[121] From the subapostolic period on, the virgin daughter who defies paternal and civic authorities comes to symbolize Christian liberation from the ancient constraints of the household and city. In early Christian narrative, the daughter who unescorted crosses the threshold of the paternal oikos is perceived as the radiant harbinger of a new, spiritual community. In the apocryphal Acts, Peter Brown notes, the apostles

were regularly portrayed drawing unmarried girls out of staid seclusion and wives out of the beds of their husbands.... Thecla, the exposed, virgin traveler, did not merely resist the advances of the noble Alexander of Antioch; she boxed his ears with such force that the great golden crown of a priest of the Imperial cult, heavy with images of the Emperors themselves, toppled from his head....

The shimmering, ethereal figures of daimones , of heroes and of the souls of the wise, that had linked heaven to earth, towering above the human race in the middle regions of the late Platonic universe, were eclipsed, in the Christian imagination, by the bodies of the virgin young on earth.^[122]

This symbolization survived through the seventeenth century. The religious drama of the Renaissance abounds with daughters who deliberately violate their fathers' commands and thereby attain sainthood.^[123] As in the early church, these texts announce the breakthrough to a new order not based on human paternity.

John Christopherson's Greek Jephthah (c. 1544) eloquently marks the Christian displacement of father and husband with their heavenly rival in the daughter's affections. Before being led away to her death, the (unnamed) daughter implores God's help, reminding him that "husband art Thou/To me, Thou art my children and my father;/Thou art my light, my life; Thou art my all."^[124] These lines, of course, come from the Iliad , from Andromache's final speech to Hector as he departs to encounter Achilles. In Christopherson's version, however, God takes the place of husband, father, and family as sole object of the daughter's love. Likewise, by aligning Jephthah's daughter with the apheton —the sacred animal that

passes out of male control—Renaissance exegesis structures this story around a similar distinction between paternal and sacred space. As the loving, obedient daughter whose submission to her father's authority displaces him from the typological chain of sacred signifiers and annuls his paternal potestas , Iphis embodies all that gives value to the oikos and also represents the site of its rupture, where the heteronomous pieties of the family and the transcendent conflict, allowing the Beyond to shatter the domestic enclosure. As Boose notes, "The tangent at which the father and daughter meet is the line that potentially threatens almost every enclosing structure of the family unit."^[125]

Buchanan's absent father thus belongs to a centuries-old narrative structure created by men to represent their own marginalization within the new social forms developed by Christianity. But the proliferation of Jephthah and virgin-martyr texts during the Renaissance suggests a more specific historical context for the competition between father and Father. Throughout Europe, but particularly in Buchanan's France, domestic and religious loyalties came into direct conflict. During the early years of the Reformation, as Donald Kelley observes, filial defiance suddenly erupted "on a grand scale.... The massive defection of sons and daughters was surely one of the fundamental elements of historical change in this period."^[126] For many, conversion to Protestantism entailed repudiating paternal authority out of obedience to the Father's will. Thus, French archives record a massive surge "of family divisions, disinheritances and confiscations reflecting a fundamental social disruption a generation before the civil wars" (the same period, that is, during which Buchanan composed his tragedy). Exiled from the patriarchal oikos , young Protestants found substitute fathers in their ministers and, often, a heavenly Father in their martyrdoms. In its social praxis, as in its theology, early Protestantism thus moved from immanence to transcendence, from locating the sacred in social forms—whether ecclesiastical or domestic—to restoring the holy to its "metahistorical and immaterial" heteronomy, a heteronomy reproduced in the opposition between sect and family.^[127] In Jephthah , this movement is played out in terms of the tragic tension between the biological continuity of the paternal domus and the sacrificial economy, precisely because sacrificial killing is "the basic experience of the sacred" and hence symbol of the rivalry between spiritual and familial ties.^[128]

In sixteenth-century France, paternal authority also clashed with religious doctrine over the question of marriage. In 1556 Henri II declared marriages contracted without parental permission to be criminal offenses punishable by disinheritance of both parties. This legislation climaxed an

increasingly bitter struggle between the Roman church, which since the twelfth century had held that mutual consent constituted a valid marriage, and parents who resented this infringement of their right to control such alliances for their own dynastic and political ends.^[129] In the modern marriage ceremony of both the Anglican and Roman communions, the father must first "give away" his daughter to the priest, who then places the woman's hand in her husband's. This transfer captures the superimposition over the nuclear family

of a more powerful geometry constructed around a rival father.... By standing directly above the bride, the representative of the divine Father creates the dominant triangle that visually defeats the earthly one.... Once a father has performed his prescribed role, it is he who becomes the displaced and dispossessed actor of the script. And—like every father of every bride—he must leave the sanctified space alone.^[130]

The struggle between the clergy and laity over clandestine marriages configures the daughter—the child who is given away—as the contested center of the agon between the father and the Father.

The conflicts between paternal rights and sacred authority fissuring the social fabric of the sixteenth century provide the historical connection between Buchanan's theological grappling in Jephthah and his representation of the family. The alien God manifests himself when sacred obligations transgress a culture's ordinary sense of goodness and justice embodied in its basic social forms. Hence, the generational conflict attendant on the Reformation and (more tangentially perhaps) the debate over clandestine marriage seem implicated in Buchanan's Hegelian intimations of "die in das Diesseits und Jenseits zerrissene Welt " or, paraphrasing Herbert, of a culture "tortur'd in the space/Betwixt this world and that of grace."^[131] But, unlike Hegel, Buchanan does not locate the major fault line between the claims of the private conscience and the state nor, as previously mentioned, between those of the "female" oikos and the "male" polis . This latter tension corresponds to the secondary conflict between Storge and Jephthah, but since both the priest and Jephthah himself acknowledge the moral primacy of the family—a primacy that only Iphis rejects—there exists no real opposition between domestic and social ideologies. Moreover, since Jephthah (who is the Israelite chieftain as well as Iphis's father) and his daughter both acknowledge the same sacred imperative, it seems awkward to describe the play's tragic agon in terms of conscience and the state. Rather, the play inscribes the specifically Renaissance clash between

an ethical rationalism grounded in the duties and affections cementing the nuclear family and a sacrificial theology based on the alien economics of blood expiation. The Renaissance discovered its own theological aporia reflected in the parricidal sacrifice of Iphigenia —along with Euripides' Hecuba (another drama of child sacrifice), the most widely translated and imitated Greek tragedy during the sixteenth century. Antigone belongs to a later era.

A curious passage in the final chorus suggests a further relation between the play's daughter and the sons who performed and watched her tragedy. The chorus first praises Iphis's heroic death and then addresses an unspecified "vos ":

But ye, the opprobrium of your land,
Craven in heart and slack of hand,
Too craven and unnerved by fear
To meet the thrust of hostile spear,
And in your country's cause to yield
Your life-blood on the battlefield—
Your name and memory shall die
And buried in oblivion lie.^[132]

The implicit parallel here between sacrifice and death in battle seems to echo another Euripidean staging of daughter sacrifice; in Erechtheus , the victim's mother justifies herself by explaining, "If I had sons I would send them out to fight; my daughter equally can face death and be sacrificed."^[133] Sacrifice, in other words, is the female equivalent of war. Jephthah's daughter thus provides an idealized mirror for Buchanan's pupils, who will perhaps be sent to their deaths by their own fathers or perhaps, given the religious persecutions of the 1540s, by their Father. The play projects the boys' anxieties about having to die for their country or their faith and, by ennobling the sacrificial daughter, consoles these fears—holding out the promise, as it were, of displacing their own fathers by risking death for the Father/fatherland.^[134]

Yet sacrifice is not merely the female equivalent of war. The shadow of the cross, and hence the whole spiritual value of Christianity, marks the scene of the daughter's sacrifice, giving the story a theological weight generally absent from the father/son plots of Renaissance political narratives. Jephthah is not Henry IV in drag. Moreover, while the displacement of the father by his child seems gender-neutral, the Son's displacement by the daughter is not. If only because Iphis is (to the best of my knowledge)

the first female type of Christ, her gender seems odd, or better, oddly significant. The usual explanation—the daughter is the sacrificial victim because daughters are always sacrificial victims—conveniently overlooks the fact that Christianity venerates male sacrifice; by ignoring the Son, this explanation makes his displacement invisible and hence cannot account for it.

Tragic Katharsis

Throughout most of Jephthah , one has the impression that Iphis is still quite young. Unlike Iphigenia, she evinces no interest in either men or marriage, her attachments remaining confined to her beloved parents. But the final scene portrays her differently. In the messenger's account of her death, for the first time Iphis is represented as a beautiful and self-consciously erotic young woman:

When at the altar steps the maiden stood,
As the appointed victim now displayed—
Unwont to meet the gaze of men, who there
Gazed on her crowding—maiden modesty
O'er her wan cheeks ...
Suffused a glowing crimson; as if one
Should stain the purest ivory of Ind
With dye of Tyrian shell, or intermix
With the red rose the lilies white as snow.^[135]

In this passage, the crimson staining Iphis's ivory skin seems a proleptic allusion to the sacrificial spectacle, eliding the images of chaste feminine beauty and bloody death. The rose and lily associate her virgin blood with Christ's, a typological overtone strengthened in subsequent lines that liken her heightened beauty on the verge of death to "the descending glory of the sun,/When speeds his fiery orb to sink below/The western ocean."^[136] But the description also closely resembles Vergil's portrait of Lavinia in the last book of the Aeneid .^[137] Iphis's mortal loveliness thus simultaneously evokes the dying Christ and the Classical text, the latter configuring the sacrificial victim as the radiantly lovely woman of Greco-Roman poetry; the Scriptures know no such persona. The following lines, which combine allusions to Polyxena's sacrifice in Seneca's Troades with additional echoes of Iphigenia , further specify this woman as the sacrificial heroine of ancient tragedy—a figure found in virtually all the Greek tragedies translated before 1560. Interestingly, the one other Renaissance text that sees Jephthah's daughter as a type of Christ—Cappel's commentary—also identifies her with Iphigenia. The typological woman derives

from the superimposition of the Greek sacrificial daughter onto the Gospel narrative.

Iphis's beauty transforms her death from a revolting crime into a scene suffused with majestic loveliness and solemn grandeur. As she approaches the altar, in her face

           there shone
A fixed unfaltering purpose, and, alone
Tearless amid the weeping, meek she stood.
Serenely calm, and to her fate resigned.

           ... And others wept
To mark her bloom of youth, and eyes that shone
Clear as twin stars behind a white-rimmed cloud,
And the profusion of her golden hair
Twined with the lingering sunbeam, and her firm
Intrepid bearing, far beyond the strain
Of woman's nature. And perchance on her
Nature had breathed a beauty that excelled,
To dignify with her supremest gifts
The obsequies of the heroic maid.
As the descending glory of the sun,
When speeds his fiery orb to sink below
The western ocean, all the waves ablaze
Under his dipping rim, is beautiful
More than the light of other sunlit hours;
Or as the hue and fragrance of the rose
That lingers latest of the blooming year
Compels the sense and holds the eye enthralled
With a peculiar power; even so this maid,
Her foot upon the threshold of her doom,
To death addressed, and resolute to die.^[138]

The daughter's beauty transfigures the horror of this scene, disclosing the stately and mysterious splendor of the sacrificial rite. In the end it is her beauty, at once moral and physical (kalokagathia in Greek), that justifies the ways of God to men, that, in Nietzsche's words, "vanquishes the suffering that inheres in all existence"^[139] —a beauty intensified in death, created by death, for such death is "the mother of beauty." The play reconciles us to the sacrificial law by the sheer aesthetics of it all. Iphis's radiant dignity is thus itself answer to the bitter theological doubts pervading the earlier scenes of the tragedy.

But since the beautiful victim derives from Classical tragedy—an ancestry underscored by the passage's thickly woven allusions to Euripides, Seneca, and Vergil—one may view the daughter's beauty as a synecdoche for the tragic poem itself. The persona seems so specifically linked to the genre that she may represent it.^[140] Her beauty in particular marks her as a figure of the text, since, according to the discursive conventions of Renaissance aesthetics, "the portrayal of a beautiful woman ... stands characteristically for the descriptive power of words."^[141] Petrarch's puns on "Laura" and "laurel," for example, depend on this entanglement of erotic and aesthetic intentions. It is not, of course, finally the daughter's beauty but the beauty of Buchanan's neoclassical Latin that effects the reconciliation with the alien God; her beauty figures the formal consolations of the tragic text. The theophantic beauty of the poem, symbolized by the radiant loveliness of its heroine, takes over the offices of revelation, much as Iphis supplants her father in the typological genealogy.

Such recuperation has transgressive edges: the displacement of the Son by the feminized text, but also his resemblance to the pagan woman. Although Buchanan's classically beautiful daughter affirms the mysterious decorum of the sacrificial economy against rationalist cost-cutting, she also diminishes the uniqueness of Christ's atonement by assimilating it to tragedy's pagan self-oblations. The play itself registers this threat; thus, both Storge and the priest object that the human sacrifice Jephthah intends nullifies the distinction between Israel and the Ammonites. The same recognition that this sacrifice blurs cultural difference surfaces in Poole, who raises the possibility that the god to whom Jephthah offered his terrible vow was, under a different name, in fact "Moloch, the god of the Ammonites, against whom he was about to fight."^[142] Iphis's sacrifice at once betrays the kinship between Christ and Iphigenia and compromises the opposition between Israel and idolatry; or rather—as in Grotius—precisely by disclosing this unsettling fraternal likeness, it deconstructs the ideological opposition. The sacrificial daughter of ancient tragedy turns out to be a suspect guest in the Father's house, a foreign presence who threatens the stable contours differentiating this enclosure from external profanations.^[143] Timeo Danaides et dona ferentes .

Here, too, the daughter can be seen as standing for the literary text. The cultural syntax that Poole describes—a syntax in which ideological distinctions are erased in the process of being inscribed, so that the victorious antagonist ends up resembling his opponent—has an odd affinity to the strategies of Christian neoclassicism. The religious poet appropriates the pagan text for his own purposes, but the intertext (like the sheep that

the boa constrictor swallows in The Little Prince ) remolds the surfaces of the containing narrative. Buchanan's project, the Christian humanist project of giving aesthetic form to sacred subjects, itself seems to efface the boundaries dividing culture from holiness. It is this category confusion to which the Council of Trent objected in prohibiting all "seductive charm" in religious art and which likewise elicited Milton's scornful charge that Charles I had made "the living God" into "a buzzard Idol" by "borrowing to a Christian use Prayers offer'd to a Heathen God," offered, that is, by "Pammela in the Countesses Arcadia ." For Milton, the presence of Sidney's lovely Greek—although not Attic—sacrificial daughter "hath as it were unhallow'd, and unchrist'nd the very duty of prayer it self."^[144] The Reformation and Counter-Reformation both demanded "the depaganization of Renaissance literature and culture, the repression or removal from Christian culture of the large admixture of pagan theology or mythology that early humanists with their love of Greek and Latin letters had allowed to color their own religious attitudes."^[145] The ancient texts, like Jephthah's Greekling daughter, seem to anticipate Christian revelation—vestiges of an ancient theology or distant recollections of biblical events—but their pagan beauty, Iphis's beauty that draws "the eyes of the whole multitude, who gazed/Awe-struck and wondering," upstages both father and Son. Religious reformers (whether Catholic or Protestant) preferred to exclude such distractions from sacred precincts. The result of walling off the holy in this way, however, was to secularize the arts, particularly the theater, where pagan associations clustered most thickly.

Hence, despite its popularity, Jephthah had few successors. Instead, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a majority opinion expressed firm antagonism to dramatizing biblical narratives. On this matter, Jonas Barish notes, "Protestant and Catholic polemicists are in firm agreement."^[146] Henry Crosse's 1603 Vertues Commonwealth thus attacks scriptural plays on the ground that they "intermixe the sacred worde of God, that never ought to be handled without feare and trembling, with their filthy and scurrillous Paganisme."^[147] In England, the 1589 ban against playing "matters of divinitye," while partly motivated by political considerations, expressed the Protestant conviction that actors should keep their hands off holy things; Reformation scripturalism itself tended to make the Bible unavailable for theatrical exploitation.^[148]

But these objections generally postdate Buchanan's play; prior to 1560, even militant Calvinists like Bale and Beza wrote biblical dramas without any apparent qualms. Furthermore, to claim that Jephthah is somehow transgressive implies that it is transgressive of something , that one can

locate a relevant orthodoxy against which to measure deviations. But at least before the Council of Trent, the ideological landscape conspicuously lacked such clearly defined boundaries; what was permissible in Bordeaux might be dangerous in Paris and could (as Buchanan discovered) be considered heresy in Lisbon. Even after the hardening of confessional lines, transgression and orthodoxy remained slippery terms; clearly Ascham and Sidney did not find Jephthah offensive despite the general Protestant disapprobation of religious drama. Greenblatt's observation that we label subversive those ideas that no longer seem subversive to us suggests the need for caution in these matters.^[149]

Literature and Dogma

If, however, we give "transgression" a more limited reference by contrasting Buchanan's play with works of unimpeachable Calvinist slant, the startling otherness of Jephthah becomes apparent. While the play may or may not engage Reformed theology directly (Buchanan claimed that it criticized Bucer's position on vows, but that was during his trial before the Portuguese Inquisition), there is a particular reason for specifying this contrast.^[150] Beza's Abraham sacrifiant is crucial here. Although this play appeared in print four years before Jephthah , the latter had previously been circulating in manuscript and was almost certainly known to Beza, who had become friendly with Buchanan during their joint residence in Paris in the mid-1540s—the same time Buchanan was busy revising the original text of Jephthah .^[151] Since Abraham sacrifiant also is a biblical play about child sacrifice modeled in part on Euripides' Iphigenia , it would seem to be a deliberate rewriting of Buchanan's tragedy, a Calvinist response, as it were, to the neoclassical daughter.

The differences between the two texts are instructive. Beza's play is far closer to the Mysteries than to Greek tragedy: the language in particular has none of Buchanan's poetic luxuriance, none of its richly metaphorical and allusive splendor; instead, it uses the homespun plain style characteristic of medieval biblical drama. Since one cannot paint without colors, the absence of verbal beauty entails the absence of the beautiful victim. The story obviously dictated the child's gender, but Beza could have, and did not, emphasize Isaac's youthful grace and majestic bearing. Beza also allows the mother—the only woman in the play—a far less significant role than Storge. Since Abraham never reveals God's dreadful command to his wife, she cannot respond to the theological issue at stake; she remains outside the spiritual arena where men struggle with God.

The issue at stake, however, closely resembles that in Jephthah : the moral perversity of a God who commands a father to murder his adored child. But Beza handles the matter differently. He replaces the aesthetic transfiguration of sacrifice that resolves the ethical crisis in Buchanan with a theology based on faithful obedience to the incomprehensible and terrible dictates of the divine will. Abraham points the moral with painful clarity. Golding's 1577 translation has him resolve:

O my God, my God, sith thow
Doost bid me, I will doe it. Is it right
That I so sinfull and so wretched wight,
Should fall to scanning of the judgements
Of thy most perfect pure commaundments.

For sith it is thy will, it is good right
It should de [sic ] doone. Wherefore I will obey.^[152]

Interestingly, Beza gives Satan some of the arguments the priest had used against Jephthah. Rational considerations turn out to be the insidious whispers of the devil; whereas in Buchanan such considerations appear mistaken, in Beza they are evil. "Nothing," Abraham concludes, "is good or reasonable,/Which to Gods will is not agreeable."^[153]

Abraham's faith—which in this play means a willingness to violate human reason and moral sense—takes the place of expiatory sacrifice. For Isaac of course does not die. The sudden entry of God's angel just as Abraham lifts the knife averts the tragedy, in contrast to Jephthah , where reconciliation, if achieved at all, is achieved by means of sacrifice, by its typological evocations as well as by the mortal beauty and courage of the victim. In Beza, God justifies his own ways to man by stopping the sacrifice, which thus turns out to have been a trial of obedience rather than a pagan lustratio , an ethical test rather than a ritual expiation. In Buchanan, however, the Classical beauty of the daughter and of the poetry jointly disclose the beauty of holiness "transfiguring all that dread."

But if Beza's play differs from Buchanan's, it has significant affinities with the Calvinist passion narratives. One notes in both the absence of the beautiful victim, the radical heteronomy of the divine will, the insistence on obeying God even when he seems to be an enemy, the marginalization of women. In these texts, men struggle to submit to an alien God: to be patient, self-controlled, dutiful, subservient. They (both the texts and the men) lack the daughter's joy and loveliness and exquisite poise. Moreover, since Beza's play rewrites Buchanan's, one may regard the Calvinist

sacrificial plot as a counternarrative to sacred neoclassicism as well as medieval exegesis. The transgressiveness of Jephthah thus emerges retrospectively in its radical divergence from the narrative paradigms crystallizing within sixteenth-century Protestantism.

One can, I think, legitimately trace this divergent trajectory into the nineteenth century. As Grotius's De satisfactione oddly resembles Frazer's anthropological investigations, so the issues raised by Jephthah point toward the late nineteenth-century poetics of "spilt religion" and the transformation of the literary text into a secular sacrament. In these syncretic representations of biblical sacrifice, the Noah's Ark theory of cultural diffusion unexpectedly germinates comparative anthropology and Arnold's aesthetic soteriology. The origins of modern cultural analysis and the modern conceptualization of "literature" begin to present themselves to the imagination (Dryden's witty spaniel) in the shape of trilingual humanists brooding over the Cross.

Meyer Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism and the ensuing critical debate have already canvassed both the ramifications of and objections to similar generalizations. Such continuities derive from the uninterrupted centrality granted the classics and the Bible in the humanistic paideia through the first quarter of the present century and need not imply essentialist premises. In any case, the notion that literature appropriates the offices of religion is not a new one, although the precise moment of this transference of power has been variously assigned anywhere from the Homeric era to the Romantic—a confusion consequent upon the untenable premise that only beginnings possess historical importance, leading scholars (present company included) to confuse change with origin. But while the competition between literature and dogma seems to date from a very early period—it is explicit enough in Plato—it undergoes significant and culturally specific alterations. To suggest the import of this paragone in the sixteenth century, it will be useful to pursue the contrast between Buchanan's play and Beza's. We may begin with what should already be obvious, namely, that Abraham sacrifiant leaves out both the sacrifice and the aesthetic/erotic nuances that conclude Jephthah .

Clearly, the biblical story dictates the omission of sacrifice from Beza's text, but patristic and medieval exegetes tend to pass over the fact that Isaac was not sacrificed, instead viewing him as a type of Christ. Beza, however, mutes the typological overtones of the Old Testament narrative and hence largely divests the story of its sacrificial resonance. The play explores inner conflict and obedience to the divine will. This focus, coupled with the work's verbal plainness and voluntarist theology, points ahead to

the narrative structures of Calvinist autobiography, practical theology, and passion sermons. Conversely, Jephthah , with its poetic richness, debt to pagan models, and pervasive evocations of Christ's sacrifice, seems to draw on the aesthetics and thematics of the Mass: its (in Protestant eyes) pagan ceremonial, its sacrificial mimesis, its ritual splendor. This is not an arbitrary comparison. It is well known that Protestant writers frequently conflate sacrifice, theater, and Catholic worship, objecting to eucharistic sacrifice because it resembled a stage play and to plays because they resembled papist ceremonies. Thus, John Rainolds denounces the priests who "have transformed the celebrating of the Sacrament of the Lords supper into a Masse-game , and all other partes of the Ecclesiasticall service into theatricall sights ; so, in steede of preaching the word , they caused it to be played." "The Popish Masse," in Stubbes's words, "is now no other but a Tragicke Play."^[154]

Protestants found the Mass offensive because it distracted the congregation with outward "shews." But the objection was not simply or even principally directed against the "theatricality" of the Roman liturgy. Reformed theology not only abolished the pageantry of the Roman rite but rejected the sacrificial character of the Eucharist altogether, instead reading it as a sign of grace or token of Christ's spiritual presence; it thus weakened the connection between sacrament and sacrifice. Even then, in most Reformed churches, the Lord's Supper became an occasional and fairly peripheral affair.^[155] The moral inwardness of Protestantism—its ethical rationalism, which drives its antipathy to the spectacular "magic" of the Mass—also problematizes sacrifice. Radical Protestant sects like the Socinians, Zwinglians, and Anabaptists registered this discomfort most stridently, but even Calvinism, which did not overtly dissent from Anselm's theology of the Atonement, preferred to represent the Crucifixion as a trial of obedience rather than as an expiatory satisfaction.^[156] This much seems evident from the Calvinist passion narratives. Reformed spirituality stressed inner regeneration and moral duty and therefore found both ritual magic and the sacrificial economy hollow, albeit dangerously seductive, consolations.

In an article on Herrick's "Tragicus Rex," Thomas Moisan offers the interesting observation that the poem portrays Christ under a "three-fold characterization ... as God and actor and king."^[157] Where the article has "actor," the customary description of Christ's threefold office would have put "priest." The actor, that is, displaces the priest.^[158] Although Moisan does not say so, this displacement corresponds to the substitution of actor for exorcist that Greenblatt analyzes in his influential essay on King Lear .

And it also corresponds to Jephthah 's substitution of the Classical tragic daughter for the incarnate Son. In both plays, exorcism and priestly sacrifice—the spectacular rituals of medieval Christendom—migrate from the sanctuary to the stage. As Shakespeare's tragedy, according to Greenblatt, reconstitutes exorcism as theater by awaking our longing for its saving magic, so Buchanan's tragedy takes over the functions of eucharistic sacrifice: its transformation of a divinely orchestrated political murder into the longed-for drama of God's amazing grace.^[159] One thinks again of Sidney's remark that Jephthah elicits "divine admiration," a tribute that seems to echo the Polybian concept of tragodia as that which turns religion into wonder. Jephthah narrates the aesthetic recuperation of the sacrificial.^[160] Expiatory sacrifice, the narrative center of Christianity, moves from theology to art. Unintelligible to rational consciousness—to the priest and Jephthah and also, one suspects, to the Protestant exegetes who erased the offensive rite from Judges—sacrifice is recuperated as tragedy. "Only as an esthetic product," Nietzsche observes in his own study of Greek tragedy, "can the world be justified to all eternity."^[161]

The absence of aesthetic/erotic shadings from Beza's play is not unrelated to its suppression of sacrifice, because sacrifice itself releases erotic energies. Christianity, like Greek tragedy, understands sacrifice as an act of love, one that elicits an erotic response. In the Disputatiuncula , Erasmus thus remarks that Colet's Christ, whose immense love disregards all suffering in its eagerness to serve the beloved, resembles the Ovidian lovers "who are not wearied by their nightly vigils nor feel hunger nor fear meeting ghosts and goblins.... [but] eagerly endure wounds, even death itself." This comparison is not wholly serious, but Erasmus never doubts the erotic character of sacrificial pain, for "under the weight of suffering, as from under a pile of kindling, the flame of love, since it cannot be extinguished, shines more brightly." Hence, Erasmus concludes, Christ's torment itself makes him lovable (amabilis ), an object of desire.^[162] In the Calvinist passion narratives, the ephebic Christ glimpsed amid the scenes of torture hints at the seductive afterimage produced by pain, but in general Protestant texts are wary of this transcendental eros. The frustrated, grotesque love that torments Nashe's Christ, a love that finally destroys its object, seems more characteristic of the Calvinist focus on structures of violence. The passion narratives produced by Reformed theology stress the patient obedience required in the face of suffering rather than the desire aroused by self-oblation. The erotic mysticism that suffuses medieval piety has little place in the worship of Milton's God, "whom to love is to obey." Sacrifice and erotic/aesthetic beauty disappear together in Abra-

ham sacrifiant , as in Calvinism as a whole, because they are themselves intrinsically connected.

Protestantism replaces the erotic and sacrificial spirituality of the medieval church with a practical theology based on the family, obedience, and, somewhat paradoxically, ethical rationalism—the apparently incompatible copresence of the latter two items a result of the Reformation's double inheritance from late medieval voluntarism and Erasmian moralism. But storge , obedience, and ethical rationalism are precisely the values interrogated and finally superseded in Jephthah by the daughter's beautiful and erotically charged sacrifice. Yet it seems misleading to view the play as an affirmation of Catholic piety against the new Protestant ethos. In Buchanan's play, as in ancient tragedy, earlier religious forms are transmuted into aesthetic pleasures, where "aesthetic" now needs to be understood as charged with numinous as well as erotic valences—the textual/sexual transcendence proffered by Neoplatonism and the Longinian sublime as well as Romantic poetics.^[163] Tragic sacrifice simultaneously elicits and hence fuses aesthetic, erotic, and transcendent desires, an interlacing disclosed in Shelley's remarkable confession that "some of us have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie."^[164] The literary text—not the religious ritual—awakens and configures supernatural yearnings. In Jephthah , the restaging of sacrifice as tragedy becomes the overarching displacement that governs the multiple displacements structuring the play. Literature replaces religion as the space for the articulation of desires and needs unavailable or forbidden in ordinary social life—for the transcendent eroticism, sacrificial magic, theatrical wonder, and ecstatic beauty distrusted by Protestant sensibilities.^[165]

At the same time, literature partly replaces and partly supplements religion as the discourse of moral conflict, subjectivity, and volition. What modern critical theory calls the subject does not first come into being during the Renaissance; the Psalms, Augustine's Confessions, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers , and Bernard's sermons on Canticles (no less than Hamlet's soliloquies) attempt to speak "that within which passes show"—what Saint Thomas calls the "hidden interior actions of the soul" as opposed to its "external activities."^[166] The impression that subjectivity rather suddenly emerges during Shakespeare's lifetime results from the fact that literary characterization acquires a new interiority and self-consciousness.^[167] The language of introspection, desire, and inner struggle migrates from devotional praxis, from the monasteries and the confessional, to literature—a process enabled (and perhaps partly caused) by the mimetic

recovery of the ancient literary discourses of the self.^[168] If Classical tragedy, in Eric Voegelin's words, "is the study of the human soul in the process of making decisions," then the form itself engenders the subject.^[169] "Engenders" in a double sense, for, at least in Jephthah , the language of introspection, desire, and inner struggle constructs the tragic subject as an eroticized, neoclassical, female type of Christ.

Most Renaissance tragedies do not, however, concern erotic, typological women; Jephthah is not a direct "source" for later works but the seminal allegory of their means of production. It stages the displacements, exchanges, and appropriations involved in the transmutation of awe into wonder, of liturgy (the Greek term for "work") into play, of ritual into aesthetic katharsis . The beautiful, transgressive creature who displaces the Son is not the protagonist of Renaissance literature; it (or she) is Renaissance literature.

It would be nice to end on such a rhetorically satisfying note, but the claim made in the preceding paragraph, that some connection exists between the classical-typological woman and literary representations of subjectivity, seems more a flourish than an argument. Jephthah points to an unfamiliar linkage between gender, subjectivity, devotion, and desire. One's training suggests that the unfamiliar is the outward and visible sign of the significant, but to deduce cultural generalizations from a single play is not likely to be convincing—particularly given the generally held view that Renaissance texts by and large confine subjectivity to male figures, women serving mainly as props and scenery. The next and final chapter will therefore examine another group of Renaissance biblical narratives that, like Jephthah , depict the passion of a Classical and Christic virgo virilis .