Living Death in Early Modern Drama Submitted by James Alsop to The

Playing 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…………… 1 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. 2 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 3 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. 4 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 the divide – in early modern drama between the end of the 16th and first part of the 17th 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 and go and exchanges take place on a number of different levels.1 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 of 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 characters 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. 5 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 6 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

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