3. A Waste of Shame: The Heroics of Marriage in English Renaissance Tragedy

Abstract

and visionary formation of an ideology, were aware of the contradictions they were articulating . The value of their discourse does not lie in its self-consciousness or its prescience. 95 Rather, because of its historical position, Puritan marriage ideology in the Renaissance provides a remarkable index of the ways in which modern sexual values were being created, terms were being con­ structed, and conflicts were taking shape. The apprehension and exploitation of ideological inconsistencies became the task not of sermons , but of the drama, in which a greater attachment to the concrete, an obligation to action, and a dependence on conflict brought paradox into the light of representation, giving visibility and significance to contradiction and seeking to resolve it through the operations of form.