Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lodhia, Sheetal

Titel

'The house is hers, the soul is but a tenant': Material Self-Fashioning and Revenge Tragedy

Ist Teil von

• Early theatre, 2009-01, Vol.12 (2), p.135-161

Ort / Verlag

Hamilton, Ont: CRRS Publications

Erscheinungsjahr

2009

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Where most readings of ghosts and corpses on stage rely on a Christian, neoplatonic, and stoic notion of the body's unity with the soul, in which the soul governs the body and the body is a mere vessel for the soul, Lodhia argues that Thomas Middleton's "The Maiden's Tragedy" and "The Revenger's Tragedy," and John Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" all participate in a larger trend of the early modern period in which the body is progressively evacuated of the spirit. All three plays anticipate Cartesian (René Descartes) mechanistic dualism where consciousness constitutes subjectivity and where bodies can be automata. These Jacobean plays feature the modification of the body in its totality, either through the use of a corpse or the deployment of a "false" body or a simulacrum, and they epitomize the power and identity crises at stake in bodily fashioning, where bodies devoid of souls still possess agency.