Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture (Early Modern Literature in History)

✍ Scribed by Tobias Doring

• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 232
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This bold and wide-ranging study takes a fresh look at a controversial question: what do the acts and shows of grief performed in early modern drama tell us about the religious culture of the world in which they were historically staged? Many rites of mourning shown in the theatre held Catholic resonances, but how did such memories of traditional worship work in post-Reformation England? Drawing on performance studies, this book provides detailed readings of major playtexts, Shakespearean and others, to explore the politics, pathologies, physiologies and parodies of mourning.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
List of Illustrations......Page 7
Acknowledgements......Page 8
A Note on Citation......Page 9
Introduction......Page 10
1.1 Heavens hung with black: Elizabethan rituals of mourning......Page 33
1.2 Remembrance of things past......Page 48
1.3 Memory battles and stage laments......Page 57
1.4 Facing the dead: theatricality and historiography......Page 67
2.1 Well-made partings and the problem of revenge......Page 79
2.2 Translating tradition: The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus......Page 87
2.3 Foreign funerals and colonial mimesis: historical exchanges......Page 98
2.4 Hamlet and the virtue of assumed custom......Page 109
3.1 Secrets and secretions......Page 119
3.2 Tears and the uncertain signs of inwardness......Page 127
3.3 Rhetoric and the techniques of emotional engineering......Page 133
3.4 Women, widows and mimetic weeping......Page 142
4.1 Mock laments: the play and peal of death......Page 158
4.2 Round about her tomb they go: Much Ado About Nothing......Page 166
4.3 Ralph Roister Doister and the anxiety of borrowed rites......Page 175
4.4 Noting and ghosting: what stage parodies do......Page 189
Conclusion......Page 198
Notes......Page 205
Bibliography......Page 210
C......Page 225
G......Page 226
K......Page 227
N......Page 228
Q......Page 229
S......Page 230
W......Page 231
Z......Page 232