ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers the late-medieval play that is virtually synonymous with death, the English Everyman, in relation to its Dutch source, arguing for the English play’s greater emphasis on death as an intimate and emotionally fraught event. It explores the meditations on death in the theatre by considering how counterfeiting illness and death onstage necessarily foregrounds boundaries between the artificial and the real—between playing and being dead. The book recognizes the stage “as a most fitting place for examining these increasingly amorphous boundaries” and finds compelling resonance between that boundary which separates stage and audience and that boundary which separates the living from the dead. It explores the ways in which narratives of death can reach across the border that separates death from life.
