Donovan Sherman. Second Death: Theatricalities of the Soul in Shakespeare’s Drama.

Abstract

Donovan Sherman’s study of the theatricalities of the human soul in Shakespeare’s England sets out from two basic premises. The first is that of the soul's conflicted relation to the self: simultaneously “a metonym of identity—‘he’s a kind soul’” and “something that can be possessed—‘she has a good soul’” (1), the soul places the Christian believer at odds with an embodied self, resulting in “a human figure that by definition and design must be fundamentally split” (6). The second premise is that of the soul's resistance to representation: being immaterial, the soul is strictly speaking unrepresentable, yet lends itself to various forms of nonrepresentative theatricality both in the theater and in the lived experience of the believer. At once self-grounding and self-alienating, the human soul finds expression in an analogously paradoxical mode of performance: “a set of bodily practices such as concealment, deferral, withholding, silence, whispering, stillness, and other highly visible, though obstinately non-mimetic, behaviours” that allow Shakespeare and his contemporaries “to evoke the soul theatrically without allowing it to become represented” (39).