Material Grief: Death and the Centrality of Objects in Early Modern Drama

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This thesis will investigate a range of theatrical manifestations of 'feminine' violence in Jacobean Revenge Tragedy, with three principal aims:1) To develop a taxonomy of the paradoxes of representing femininity in the Early Modern theatre. Namely, to question how the drama presents and/ or attempts to reconcile representations of theatrically active women with idealised definitions of the feminine as passive, static, and relegated to domestic spaces. In doing so, I seek to put particular pressure on the sustained cultural contradiction by which women are consistently associated with theatricality, and yet barred from appearing on the stage.2) To use the presentation of acts of violence associated with women as a case study, in order to elucidate particular anxieties surrounding the ontology of bodies and bodily integrity, the nature of agency, and the question of what distinguishes human subjects from materialobjects.3) To theorise as to why drama (and especially female figures in this drama) provided a particularly apt medium for consolidating and exploring cultural anxieties and paradoxes. In this, the project will explore how dramatic texts enter into a reciprocal relationship with other contemporary texts, art-objects and cultural artefacts, which often make sustained analogical reference to the theatre (in particular, emblem books, anti-cosmetic treatises, protestant polemics, anatomical discourse, and memento mori traditions).