Last Acts : The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage / Maggie Vinter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vinter, Maggie, Author.

Series:

Fordham scholarship online.

Fordham scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Theater--England--History--17th century.

Theater.

Theater--England--History--16th century.

Death in literature.

English drama--17th century--History and criticism.

English drama.

English drama--Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600--History and criticism.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (225 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction. The art of dying

Chapter 1. Dying badly: doctor faustus and the parodic drama of blasphemy

Chapter 2. Dying politically: Edward II and the ends of dynastic monarchy

Chapter 3. Dying representatively: Richard II and the politics of mimetic mortality

Chapter 4. Dying communally: Volpone and how to get rich quick

Epilogue. Afterlife

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

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.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

9780823286133

0823286134

9780823284276

0823284271

9780823284283

082328428X

OCLC:

1090539878