ABSTRACT
Part 1: Haunting Allegories showed how the development of a fragile sense of individual and collective identity was contingent on a form of historical transmission that disavowed the past even as the popular stage archived historical reflection. The question posed by Richard II to his murderer, “What means Death in this rude assault?” (5.5.104), ramifies beyond the immediacy of the crime scene once we begin to understand that early modern identity was predicated on disavowing traumatic insight. And Titus’s insistence that he can read Lavinia’s martyred signs demonstrates the extremes to which a character will go in order to deny the loss that comingles with the fantasy that historical events have an end point separating the moment of loss from its afterlife. Part 1 conveyed how the residual demands of the past interrupt narratives designed to overcome the loss associated with personal and historical crisis. Where the first part of this study speculated about ghosts that haunt the archives of history, Part 2 considers how loss persists in the formal properties of early modern art, specifically revenge drama, poetic elegies, and odes. In this interrogation, Part 2 exhumes effigies of the dead and observes how the formal properties of these representations enact a crisis of inheritance for generations of history’s survivors intent on overcoming the past. By examining popular revenge plays in light of the pressures of the Reformation and looking closely at how prose and poetry respond to the regicide of 1649, Part 2 asks how literary form participates in the process of historical transmission. This chapter shifts the focus of Performing Early Modern Trauma from the fantastical narratives that seem, mistakenly, to transcend history to an interrogation of revenge narratives that make history present. Since Michel Foucault’s highly influential account of public execution in Discipline and Punish (1995), many critics have understood the violated body on stage as a site on which multiple authorities enact power in order to reconstitute their own fractured sovereignty. The significance of the sundered body provides critics of early modern culture with an example of how the tortured human form “did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.”1 Understandings of the body and its relationship to justice enabled by Foucault’s evocative study tend to produce synchronic explanations of the cause and effect of bodily violence limited to contemporaneous discourses such as Privy Council documents, laws of treason, and antitheatrical tracts-all of which
register immediate and intersecting anxieties which eventually get enacted in public playhouses in English cities. Jacques Derrida, however, helps us to recognize the limits in purely contemporary accounts of cause and effect, reminding us that “synchrony does not have a chance, no time is contemporary with itself.”2 While recognizing the appeal of the synchronic explanation of staged violence, this chapter argues that the violence in revenge tragedy articulates the frustrated cultural desire in the period for the dead to remain part of the living community in a post-Reformation society experiencing a shift in the meaning of death. The exaggeration of revenge as the method of exacting justice for the dead raises the possibility that the structure of revenge itself as represented on the early modern stage takes into account the period’s altered sense of temporality. Read in this way, the genre of revenge tragedy is one site where the past appears to make claims on the present by extending its unpredictable influence forward. Indeed, this chapter considers plays that-I contend-dramatize the ambivalent desire for the dead to continue to exert their force in the still-living world. The violent genre that flourished in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England literally embodies the notion of past’s revenge, as the scorned return to transmit a loss thought to be overcome. Plays such as The Duchess of Malfi, The Spanish Tragedy, and The Revenger’s Tragedy emerge during an historical period that sought to determine what the place of the dead should be. Together, these plays demonstrate how the culture managed to place the dead in spiritual, physical and cultural terms. Eamon Duffy claims that death rituals were the most recalcitrant of the older religious practices. Despite Protestant insistence that no exchange existed between the living and the dead, “a recognition of the reciprocal bonds between present and past generations was too deep-rooted in popular consciousness to be easily eradicated.”3 Where the dead had been considered an age group that was a part of still-living communities, many reformers championed a concept of death as annihilation, calling for the eradication of commerce between the two communities. This shift forced communities to redraw the boundaries between the living and the dead. The legislated amnesia on Protestant communities transforms the act of inheritance from a reciprocal exchange between the living and the dead to a process designed to transcend the past, denying the claims previously accommodated in unreformed religious practices. This chapter proposes a rereading of revenge tragedy as a genre that registers the impact on post-Reformation society of the loss of the reciprocal relationship between the dead and the living during the period.4 By placing The Duchess of Malfi, The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy into conversation, the chapter aims to demonstrate how these violent plays create a space for the pressing claims of the dead through the form and logic of revenge. The figure of the bastard emerges in The Revenger’s Tragedy as an embodiment of the cultural ambivalence to reformed religious practice that tries to eliminate commerce between the living and the dead. In tracing the impact of altered funerary practices in the plays, this
chapter asks how the revenge plot functions as a compensatory site of exchange between the present and the past. Registering a generation’s inability to move beyond the loss of the community of the dead, the revenge stage offers its vision of early modern communities-peopled with body parts, skeletons, bastards, corpses, and disembodied voices-that try to compensate for, even as they repeat, the traumatic loss of the place of the dead.5 The Duchess of Malfi and the Echo of The Dead in Reformed England In early modern England, attitudes toward death reflected a major shift in theological ideologies and practices. John Webster’s Jacobean play The Duchess of Malfi demonstrates how this process of transformation was contested well into the seventeenth century. First performed in 1614, Webster’s play is set in Italy during the years 1505-1513, but its representations of funerary practices and of the unsettled dead reflect contemporary concerns about the status of the departed over a half century after the doctrine of purgatory and other popish customs had been eliminated from official Protestant theology. In order to frame the discussion of the history of funerary rituals and other mortuary customs that follows, the chapter turns first to a scene in Webster’s play that illustrates the crisis produced by the shift in ritual practices surrounding death during the period. In an exchange with the Duchess before her strangulation, the duplicitous Bosola tells her that he is a tombmaker whose job it is “to flatter the dead, not the living” (4.2.148).6 He then goes on to describe the changing nature of the images that adorn his tombs:
... Princes’ images on their tombs Do not lie as they were wont, seeming to pray Up to heaven, but with their hands under their cheeks, As if they died of tooth-ache. They are not carved With their eyes fixed upon the stars, but as Their minds were wholly bent upon the world, The self-same way they seem to turn their faces. (4.2.156-62)
Webster satirizes the replacement of religious narratives with secular depictions of the deceased on tombs, with the focus of the image on the corpse. The tombmaker’s attention shifts from a focus on the process of dying properly to a concentration on the finality of death. Bosola’s description suggests that the narrative imparted by depictions of a proper death-that is, one prepared for with adequate prayers that serve as models to those who visit the tomb-has changed to an image that locates death in the body. The shift from death as a proper process to one that locates it like a “tooth-ache” in the corpse itself demystifies death.
