ABSTRACT
As with many of the essays in this volume, I begin with a particular moment, a unique encounter: Claudius, bent before the altar, before the crucifix. Of course I’m immediately jumping the gun, no altar is specified, no crucifix, though innumerable productions have supplied them. Such religiously charged material objects may indeed have been there in 1601, but as easily may not have. What is there is Claudius, speaking. And it is his body—his “cursèd hand,” his “stubborn knees,” his “teeth and forehead”—that occupies his thoughts and engages our attention. What I propose in this “coda” is to think through some of the implications of Claudius’s vain effort to repent, approaching it as a highly charged theatrical/religious scene; and I do so in a context provided by the work of my co-authors. Most of the essays here focus on the specific, but at the same time they aim to expand from particular instances to investigate in precise terms just how the theater and religious culture speak to each other; they seek to chart exchanges between the two spheres, many of which are surprising and unique, and to detail the concrete means by which the theater recalibrates religious discourse. In doing so, they raise questions that I wish also to explore, about, for example, how metatheatricality infiltrates and undermines the stability of religious identity, and how the theater re-makes religious discourse for purposes of its own.
