Table Of ContentPlaying Dead: Living Death in Early Modern Drama
Submitted by James Alsop to the University of Exeter
as a thesis for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in English
In September 2014
This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright
material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper
acknowledgement.
I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been
identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for
the award of a degree by this or any other University.
Signature: ……………James Alsop……………
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Abstract
This thesis looks at occurrences of "living death" – a liminal state that exists
between life and death, and which may be approached from either side – in
early modern English drama. Today, reference to the living dead brings to mind
zombies and their ilk, creatures which entered the English language and
imagination centuries after the time of the great early modern playwrights. Yet, I
argue, many post-Reformation writers were imagining states between life and
death in ways more complex than existing critical discussions of “ghosts” have
tended to perceive.
My approach to the subject is broadly historicist, but informed
throughout by ideas of stagecraft and performance. In addition to presenting
fresh interpretations of well-known plays such as Thomas Middleton’s The
Maiden’s Tragedy (1611) and John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), I also
endeavour to shed new light on various non-canon works such as the
anonymous The Tragedy of Locrine (c.1591), John Marston's Antonio's
Revenge (c.1602), and Anthony Munday's mayoral pageants Chruso-
thriambos (1611) and Chrysanaleia (1616), works which have received little in
the way of serious scholarly attention or, in the case of Antonio's Revenge,
been much maligned by critics. These dramatic works depict a whole host of
the living dead, including not only ghosts and spirits but also resurrected Lord
Mayors, corpses which continue to “perform” after death, and characters who
anticipate their deaths or define themselves through last dying speeches. By
exploring the significance of these characters, I demonstrate that the concept
of living death is vital to our understanding of deeper thematic and symbolic
meanings in a wide range of dramatic works.
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Contents
Abstract .............................................................................................................. 2
Notes on the text ................................................................................................ 4
Living death: An Introduction .............................................................................. 5
Section 1: “The Living Dead”
Chapter 1
Living Death in Early Modern England ............................................................. 20
Chapter 2
Fashioning Death: The Dead and Dying in The White Devil and The Maiden’s
Tragedy .................................................................................................... 60
“In a mist”: Death and Self-Fashioning in The White Devil ............................... 78
“I am not to be altered”: Body and Soul in The Maiden’s Tragedy.................. 128
Section 2: “The Dead Living”
Chapter 3
A Brief History of Haunting ............................................................................ 167
Chapter 4
Antonio’s Revenge: the metatheatrical ghost ................................................. 200
The Political Dead in Anthony Munday’s Chruso-thriambos ........................... 230
“There’s an End”: Conclusion ......................................................................... 291
Appendices..................................................................................................... 298
Bibliography .................................................................................................... 299
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Notes on the text
Wherever possible, the original spellings of all cited early modern texts have
been retained. The only exceptions to this are the archaic “vv”, “i" “v” and “u”
characters, which, in the interests of clarity, I have modernised to their modern
equivalents: “w”, “j”, “u”, and “v” respectively.
In the rare instances where it has not been possible to retain the original
spellings of certain sources, I have made this clear in my notations.
For all early modern publications, I have referenced quotations by page
signature number.
Unless stated otherwise, all citations from the works of William
Shakespeare refer to the 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company edition of William
Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.
All Biblical citations refer to the 2008 Oxford World’s Classics edition of The
Bible: Authorized King James Version.
No part of this thesis has been previously submitted for examination. The
conclusion does reproduce, however, a brief commentary on the 2011 RSC
Macbeth, directed by Michael Boyd in Stratford-upon-Avon, which I presented
as part of a larger, unpublished paper at the “Devils and Dolls: Dichotomous
Children” conference at Bristol University in 2012.
My bibliography and footnotes are referenced in the New Oxford Style as
per the 2012 edition of the New Oxford Style Manual.
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Living death: An Introduction
This thesis explores the prominent role of “living death” – a liminal state that
exists between life and death, and which may be approached from either side of
th
the divide – in early modern drama between the end of the 16 and first part of
th
the 17 centuries. Living death is a broad concept that encompasses a whole
range of on-stage bodies which exist in states that are neither entirely dead nor
unequivocally living, and includes such phenomena as ghosts, body parts,
fresh-bleeding corpses, resurrected Lord Mayors, dying characters carefully
choosing their last words (or having those words carefully chosen for them by
the living) and living actors playing any of the above and more besides. Living
death occurs between states of life and death, and presents what Mary Louise
Pratt would call a “contact zone” in which travellers from both directions come
1
and go and exchanges take place on a number of different levels. My
argument thus builds upon, but also presents a radical departure from, previous
studies of ghosts, death, bodies and the performances of the dead on stage.
Early modern playwrights were, I argue, keenly aware of the symbolic potential
o f characters who blur the lines between living and dead, and so it is that
wherever we see in drama from this period living characters engaged in the
process of confronting death, or dead characters who in some way stare back
from the abyss, these characte rs tend to represent the themes at the very heart
of texts in which they appear.
These themes are, as with the different permutations of living death itself,
wonderfully diverse. While existing critical discussions of the dead and dying in
early modern drama tend to read such characters in terms of the supernatural
1
Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Profession, 91 (New York: MLA, 1991), 33-40,
33 and passim.
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or religious contexts of the period, in fact, I argue, the significations of living
death are far more varied and complex than has been hitherto perceived. As I
demonstrate over the course of this thesis, the living dead are immensely
versatile, and are used by writers as powerful signifiers to represent and explore
– either implicitly or explicitly – a range of ideas, from the historical and socio-
political to notions of theatrical convention. Ghosts can be used
metatheatrically, to engage directly with the audience on a singularly macabre
level, as they are in John Marston’s tragedy Antonio’s Revenge (1602).
Resurrected politicians in Anthony Munday’s Chruso-thriambos (1611) and
Chrysanaleia (1616) uniquely embody the connection between civic power and
memory. The dead and dying bodies in tragedies including The White Devil
(1612) and The Maiden’s Tragedy (1611) serve as powerful visual
representations of commemorative anxieties and the conflict between the
individual self and the external other. In short, when an early modern dramatist
presents characters either dead or alive as somehow straddling the line
between this world and the next, it is rarely a simple matter of life and death.
In order to explore the function of living death as a ubiquitous symbolic
force in early modern drama, however, one must establish the terms within
which such symbols would have been interpreted and understood. To this end,
my methodological approach in this thesis is largely historicist, but I am
informed throughout by ideas of stagecraft and performance. During my
exploration of living death I engage with concepts such as last dying speeches,
the afterlife, ghosts and London civic politics, all of which occupied a very
different place in the English public consciousness at the time these texts were
written than they do for today’s theatregoers. In order to fully appreciate what
writers were attempting to achieve through their representation of living dead
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characters, we must therefore understand both the circumstances from which
these characters arose, and the audiences for whom they were intended. As
such, while I treat the dramatic works which I discuss as products of and
reactions to their historical context, the focus of my argument always returns to
how these works would have been understood as performances in front of a live
audience.
I arrange this thesis into two halves in order to reflect the fact that the
nebulous realm of living death may be approached from two different sides, as
the dying lovers Jane and Shore identify in Thomas Heywood’s 2 King Edward
IV (1599). Mortally wounded, Jane and Shore climb into a coffin containing the
corpse of their recently-deceased friend and give voice to their peculiar liminal
situation, providing as they do so one of the first examples in English drama of
the phrase “living death”:
Shore. O happy grave! To us this comfort giving!
Here lies two living dead! Here one dead living!
Here for his sake, lo, this we do for thee:
Thou lookst for one, and art possessed of three.
Jane O, dying marriage! O, sweet married death!
Thou grave, which only shouldst part faithful friends,
Bringst us together, and dost join our hands/
2
O, living death! Even in this dying life.
In Heywood’s terms, then, a state of living death might be experienced by either
the “living dead” (that is, individuals alive but on the very brink of death), or the
“dead living” (those who are dead but retain living characteristics). There is
undoubtedly some overlap between the two sides; characters such as Polonius
in Hamlet (c.1602) and Sophonirus in The Maiden’s Tragedy, for example, who
die but whose corpses, played by living actors, remain on stage afterwards,
2
Thomas Heywood, The First and Second Part of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland
(Manchester: MUP, 2005), 205-311, 307.
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might be said to occupy a place in both categories. Similarly dichotomous are
characters such as Banquo in Macbeth (c.1606) or The White Devil’s
Bracciano, who die during the course of their respective plays only to return as
ghosts. However, while many of the plays discussed over the course of this
thesis explore at various points living death from both perspectives, the
distinction which Heywood draws nevertheless presents a useful starting point
for accessing and interpreting the thematic significance of specific dramatic
works. The place of the dead in the world of the living – and their particular
involvement, therefore, in living death – is intrinsically related to the means by
which they entered death in the first place. To this end, the first half of this
thesis, “The Living Dead”, explores what Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi deems
the “voyage” into the afterlife (c.1612, 5.5.123) – specifically the significance of
characters who mimic or anticipate their own demise, with a central focus on the
dying moments of characters in tragedies The White Devil and The Maiden’s
Tragedy. The second half, “The Dead Living”, builds on the arguments of the
first half by considering the ways in which dramatists present living death as
navigated by the returning dead rather than the living, focusing primarily on
Munday’s mayoral pageant Chruso-thriambos, and Marston’s tragedy Antonio’s
Revenge.
This thesis thus contributes to our wider understanding of early modern
drama not only in terms of its central conceptual focus, but also in terms of its
analytical emphasis throughout on non-canon and lesser-known dramatic texts.
Plays such as the much-maligned Antonio’s Revenge and the anonymous The
Tragedy of Locrine (c.1591) have, for various reasons, received little in the way
of dedicated scholarly attention before now, but my exploration of the uses to
which they put their living dead characters reveals that these works have much
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to offer modern readers, particularly in terms of the ways in which both
capitalise on the metatheatrical potential of ghostly characters in order to
subvert audience expectations. Similarly, although Munday’s pageants Chruso-
thriambos and Chrysanaleia have been the focus of some critical study in the
past, generally speaking such analysis has been limited to smaller parts of
various broader explorations of London’s historical civic pageantry. Not only
have these two particular grandiose bespoke travelling entertainments rarely
been the subjects of extended dramatic analysis, but neither text has ever
received more than a passing mention in discussions of ghosts and
relationships between the living and the dead in early modern England. That
this should be the case is startling given that living death is not only ubiquitous
throughout these pageants, but integral to the thematic and symbolic message
of both, as I discuss. In addition, I shed fresh light on more canonical plays such
as John Webster’s The White Devil and Thomas Middleton’s The Maiden’s
Tragedy. By considering these plays through the lens of living death I am able
to build on the large body of contemporary criticism attached to both works and
present innovative perspectives on the central characters in The White Devil
(Vittoria, Flamineo and Bracciano) and The Maiden’s Tragedy (The Lady, The
Tyrant and Govianus) in terms of what I refer to as “death-oriented self-
fashioning” – that is, the manner by which characters attempt to define their
own identities in their final actions and last dying speeches.
The volume of texts investigated in this thesis attests to the fact that the
living dead were a prevalent feature not only in early modern drama, but also in
early modern society. As I explore in Chapter 1, socio-cultural influences in
early modern England caused shifts in public perceptions of death and dying.
The most prominent influence came with the Protestant Reformation, which not
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only changed how the public viewed death, but also the entire relationship
between the living and the dead, which during the Catholic years had been
neatly coded. Whereas Catholic teaching allowed for an active and healthy
relationship between the mortal world and the afterlife, Protestantism placed an
3
impenetrable “barrier between the living and the dead”. It is no exaggeration to
say that social and religious tensions were high during the begrudging shift from
Catholic to Protestant beliefs, and the dead played a prominent role in the
4
conflict of ideologies. Yet even while Protestantism sought to move away from
the Catholic - taught active relationship between the living and the dead, the
literal breaking of the “barrier” represented by a resurrected corpse on stage
directly contradicts Protestant teachings. The theatrical ‘living dead’ can thus be
seen to function as visual signifiers of existing tensions between the old order
and the new.
A second, more tangible influence on the interaction between the living
and the dead – in London especially – came with the severe lack of burial
space within the city. Churchyards in early modern London were small and
5
often encroached upon by surrounding buildings and communal areas. With
the death rate high, especially in times of plague, graveyards would literally
overflow, releasing an “inavoydable stench” of putrefaction into the air as the
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dead were forced back into the world of the living. Not only were the dead often
close at hand in day - to - day existence, but interaction between the living and the
dead had very much entered the cultural mindset. It is no surprise, then, that
writers living and dying in this particular environment capitalised on the
3
Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of Renaissance Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 122.
4
David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and
Stuart England (Oxford: OUP, 1997), 398-400.
5
Vanes sa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500-1670 (Cambridge:
CUP, 2002), 47-8.
6
Thomas Dekker, Newes from Graves-end sent to nobody (London: Thomas Creede for
Thomas Archer, 1604), sig. B2.
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