Stages Of Dismemberment The Fragmented Body In Late Medieval And Early Modern Drama Margaret E Owens by Margaret E. Owens 9780874138887, 0874138884 instant download after payment.

With a focus on visual representations of beheading, dismemberment, and mutilation in medieval and early modern drama, this study traces the impact of the Reformation on the semiotics of the body. What emerges from this exploration of violent spectacle is a sense of the complex and powerful ways in which the legacy of the pre-Reformation religious drama informed the commercial drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The proliferation of visual representations of violence in the early modern theater can be seen as continuous with the prominence that violent spectacle held in the earlier religious drama. Dismemberment and decapitation, as this study demonstrates, figured as standard types of stage spectacle from the fifteenth through to the early seventeenth centuries. This apparent continuity, however, obscures the profound rupture that intervened between the pre-Reformation and the Elizabethan theater, radically transforming the semiotic implications of staging dismemberment and decapitation. In pre-Reformation plays, the spectacle of dismemberment was subsumed within narrative and ideological paradigms that sought to reconcile fragmentation and unity. This drama of disintegration and reintegration was deeply implicated in the creation and transmission of histories that legitimated social institutions. With the Reformation and resulting secularization of the drama, the spectacle of dismemberment was detached from its signifying center in the crucifixion, and made available for new semiotic uses.
This study has essentially two focuses, two stories to tell. One story traces the secularization, theatricalization, and uncanny returns of suppressed religious culture in early modem drama. The other story concerns the tendency of the theater to expose contingencies and gaps in politico-judicial practices of spectacular violence.
The investigation covers a broad range of plays dating from the fifteenth century to the closing of the theaters in 1642: however, three chapters are devoted to extensive analysis of single plays: R. B.'s Apius and Virginia. Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. While this book participates in the attentiveness to violent spectacle that has dominated post-Foucauldian literary and cultural studies, the goal is to move beyond Foucauldian commonplaces, not only by paying close attention to cultural and theatrical contexts but also by drawing upon psychoanalytical models of recursive temporality, especially the concepts of traumatic repetition, the work of mourning, and the uncanny return of the repressed.