Description
- Abstract:
- The dissertation examines the lives and afterlives of Christ's body on the English stage as they relate to theories of representation, religious reformation, and embodiment. Through readings of medieval drama, early modern plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton, as well as the theological writings of More, Luther, and Calvin, the dissertation argues that the liturgical, sacramental, and aesthetic iconographies of the Eucharist significantly influenced dramatists' representations of the body at the intersection of corporeal experience and poetic creation. Early modern dramatists appropriated Eucharistic theology and iconography in plays written for a secular public theatre that otherwise prohibited staging religious materials. A "Eucharistic semiotics" suggests that the theological disputations over the corporeal identity, spiritual efficacy, and aesthetic function of Christ's body intersect with early modern theories of language and representation. Moreover, the complicated definition of "sacrament" as both sign and substance illuminates ways in which the body itself must be defined as both physical and rhetorical. The dramatic appropriations of Christ's body as both word and flesh are evident in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which stages the confluence of imago Christi (the "image of Christ") and Corpus Christi (the "body of Christ"). This relationship is also taken up by Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus, where he defines Lavinia's body as a problematic signifier and concludes the play with a banquet that relies significantly on Eucharistic topoi. In other dramas, such as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, the concept of a Eucharistic semiotics extends beyond the Mass toward liturgical books and devotional traditions, especially the use of images and the worship of relics. Finally, in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, theatrical creation counteracts transubstantiation as sacraments are defined as figures of speech rather than material events sacralized unto themselves.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2011)
Access Conditions
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Citation
Zysk, Jason C.,
"Reforming Corporeality: Eucharistic Semiotics in Early Modern English Drama"
(2011).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z05X2768
