"Bodied Forth": Spectator, Stage, and Actor in the Early Modern Theater

Abstract

COMPARATIVE Volume 39 · No. 1 · Spring 2005 "Bodied Forth": Spectator, Stage, and Actor in the Early Modern Theater Jennifer A. Low Picture the original staging ofthese two death scenes: In BussyD'Ambois, the title character fights offa host of assassins, then turns to combat the man who has hired them. Upon conquering his enemy, Bussy grants mercy to him just as a pistol shot from an assassin standing offstage wounds him mortally. Amazed that his body is "but penetrable flesh," Bussy swears to die standing, like Emperor Vespasian, and then apostrophizes his sword: "Prop me, true sword, as thou hast ever done! / The equal thought I bear oflife and death / Shall make me faint on no side; I am up / Here like a Roman statue! I will stand / Till death hath made me marble. O, my fame, / Live in despite of murder" (5.4.78,93-98).l In contrast, the heroine of Romeo andJuliet rises from her catafalque only to learn, as the Friar gestures toward Romeo's body, that "A greater power than we can contradict / Hath thwarted our intents" (5.3.153-54).2 The Friar almost immediately leaves Juliet. Seeking a means ofsuicide, she finds Romeo's dagger: "Yea, noise? Then 2 Comparative Drama I'll be brief. O happy dagger, / This is thy sheath [stabs herselfl; there rust, and let me die" (5.3.169-70). Bussy's death is a public one—Monsieur and Guise look on from above—and his final speeches demonstrate his concern with his position in the social hierarchy rather than with his private life. The action foregrounds his wounded but upright bodywhich, because ofthe crowd of murderers, must necessarily be located at the forefront of the stage; similarly, because ofthe combat with Montsurry, he must be close to or at center stage. Although Bussy is surrounded by others, his opponent and the assassins would be sure to stand well out of reach of his sword. Turned to watch him, Montsurr/s face would reflect the audience's own interest in the extent ofBussy's injury. Tamyra and the shade ofthe friar might clutter up the visual tableau by approaching Bussy—or strengthen it by allowing Bussy to stand unimpeded until his death. Audience involvement would have been affected by two extra-dramatic factors: intensified, perhaps, by their proximity to the indoor stage of St. Paul's and distanced, perhaps, by the fact that the actors were children: the Children of Paul's. Produced by the Lord Chamberlain's Men almost a decade earlier, Romeo andJulietwas performed on the public stage. The tomb to which the stage directions refer several times would, logically, have been represented by the tiring-house, receding from the facade at the back of the large platform stage.3 Audiences might even have had to squint or lean forward to see Juliet's exact gesture in that shadowy recess. Aside from the prone bodies of Romeo inside and Paris just on the threshold, Juliet wouldhavebeen quite alone as she stabbedherself.Thevisual focus would have emphasized the narrowing perspective created by distance and detail : a significant but not broad gesture, staged in a visually uncluttered space, far back from the audience. Such staging would have pulled the audience in, forcing their involvement by making them strain to see the action. Both stagings enclose the death scene. Bussy's is enclosed by the watching actors who mirror for the audience their spectatorial involvement . The death scene is also enclosed mimetically (though not visually) by the scene's setting: Tamyra's closet, the small room where she has already received Bussy and the Friar as they rise through a trapdoor. The JenniferA. Low3 necessary staging suggests Chapman's enjoyment of visual paradox. Everything about Bussy's death emphasizes its public nature: his concern with fame, the watchers above, the presence of the tangentially involved assassins, the hero's steadfast insistence on dying on his feet (to impress whom if not those watching?); yet it occurs in a private place, the one in which Tamyra has engaged her lover in intimate acts and her husbandin intimateconversations.4Byhis theatricalmodeofdying,Bussy transforms Tamyra's private room into his showplace, the site ofhis...