‘’Las sir! I’m no Ghost’: the misprision of spectral presence in Caroline drama

Abstract

Scenes containing hoax hauntings or living characters mistaken for the spectral undead occur more often in Caroline drama than in any previous period of English theatre history. What drove the fashion for scenes of spectral misprision in this period, such that James Shirley’s 1633 revision of John Fletcher’s The Night-Walker (c. 1615) – a play replete with feigned phantoms – could haunt so happily in its new, Caroline performance context? This article answers that question not by situating such scenes against early modern theological contexts or patterns of popular belief, but by reading stage hauntings and paradramatic moments of spectral misprision across Caroline drama as constituent elements to a metatheatrical aesthetic that scrutinises inherited representational traditions. As we shall see, a palimpsest-like metatheatrical overlaying of dramaturgical conventions and intertheatrical references creates a network of interpretative cues and miscues exploited by Caroline dramatists and dissembling characters alike, from trapdoors and flour-faced millers, to borrowed lines and allusions to familiar, inherited hauntings from the emerging early modern dramatic canon. What arises, in turn, is a spirit of self-reflexivity in Caroline drama, whereby the figure of the ghost, hoaxed or otherwise, foregrounds and puts stress upon the insufficiencies – and value – of dramatic representation and spectatorship.