SOURCE: Sullivan, Ceri. “Penitence in 1590s Weeping Texts.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 57, no. 5 (April 2000): 31-47.

In the following excerpt, Sullivan studies the style and function of penitence in Alabaster's devotional sonnets in relation to other late Elizabethan writers.

When without tears I look on Christ, I see Only a story of some passion … But if I look through tears Christ smiles on me … And from his side the blood doth spin, whereon My heart, my mouth, mine eyes still sucking be.(1) 

Penitential writing such as William Alabaster's is opaque to the fastidious modern gaze in the literalism of its cannibal images, its depth of self-abasement, its spurts and tides of blood, sweat and tears—however these may be cauterized with conceits. The sparse critical commentary that has been devoted to the literature of repentance in sixteenth-century England tends to follow the lead given by G. R. Hibbard when he...