Last Acts

Maggie Vinter

Description

Last Acts argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Psychoanalytic and new historicist scholars have exhaustively documented the methods that early modern dramatic texts and performances use to memorialize the dead, at times even asserting that theater itself constitutes a form of mourning. But early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grief than as an action to be performed, well or badly.Active deaths belie narratives of helplessness and loss through which mortality is too often read and instead suggest how marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some early modern strategies for dying resonate with descriptions of politicized biological life in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, or with ecclesiastical forms. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, alongside devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 07 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823284283
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

L a s t A c t s

Last Acts The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage

Maggie Vinter

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2019

Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance and support provided for the publication of this book by Case Western Reserve University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vinter, Maggie (Magdalena), author. Title: Last acts : the art of dying on the early modern stage / Maggie Vinter. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2019. |  Revision of author’s thesis (doctoral)—Johns Hopkins University, 2013,  titled Last acts : the arts of dying, the good deathbed and the early  modern stage. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018059010| ISBN 9780823284269 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN  9780823284252 (paperback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan,  1500 –1600 —History and criticism. | English drama—17th century—History  and criticism. | Death in literature. | Theater—England—History—16th  century. | Theater—England—History—17th century. Classification: LCC PR658.D4 V56 2019 | DDC 822/.3093548—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059010

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

for my parents,

Donna and Richard

c o n t e n t s

 Introduction: The Art of Dying

 1. Dying Badly:Doctor Faustusand the Parodic Drama of Blasphemy

 2. Dying Politically:Edward IIand the Ends of Dynastic Monarchy

 3. Dying Representatively:Richard IIand Mimetic Mortality

 4. Dying Communally:Volponeand How to Get Rich Quick

 Epilogue: Afterlife

Acknowledgments Notes Index

vii

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5

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4

87

120

147

169 171 207

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