ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of the stage ghost and the representation of the afterlife have both been the subject of considerable critical attention in the recent turn to religion in early modern studies. In the process, the comic ghost provides an unlikely point of intersection between the emergent pamphlet genres of print culture and the performance culture of clowning. Throughout the transformations of comic culture in the late Elizabethan period, the comic afterlife and its denizens prove remarkably adaptable. Ghosts', as Peter Marshall has argued, offered a multivocal instrument of theological controversy and polemic', and Elizabethan theatrical culture exploited their elasticity in comic appropriations. The controversy thus illustrates the interpenetration of page and stage in a debate that encompassed the terms of Tarlton's comic style. Comedic representations of Purgatory and revenants from beyond the grave speak to the implication of comedy within the cultural politics of Reformation in often unexpected ways.
