ABSTRACT
The citizens of early modern London and the suburbs that grew around it were no strangers to the sight of blood. The city's residents constantly encountered evidence in the streets of the body's susceptibility to mortal mutilation, whether stemming from diseases like the plague, from the violent actions of their fellow citizens, or from executioners who acted on behalf of the state. Such evidence of the body's physical fragility also became increasingly commonplace on the playhouse stage, where the brazen display of supposedly dead bodies - and parts thereof - often concentrated a range of horrific sights into the space of a single dramatic performance. Tragedies that rely on such gruesome scenes insist that audience members regard these dead bodies and their parts as more than simply grim proof of human mortality. Though they clearly carry resonances of traditional memento mori themes, the corpses and detached body parts of the era's tragedies demand so much attention from both on-and offstage audiences that they sometimes seem to become vital, if not vivacious, characters in their own right. Characters in Cyril Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy (1611), in The Revenger's Tragedy (1606-07),1 and in the Shakespearean King Lear (1605) not only bring the bodies of characters who have died onto the stage, but they also insist that onlookers examine these physical remains to evaluate the relative justice of the deaths they mark. The words spoken around the bodies of actors who feign death instruct spectators on the proper interpretation of the corpse as physical evidence while assigning responsibility for the individual character's demise. In such situations, the body proves more than a stage property, for the dialogue surrounding it often requires audience members to imagine the relentlessly still corpse in front of them as engaging in the actions - whether virtuous, corrupt, or simply and physically human - that preceded its death.
