The early modern corpse and Shakespeare's theatre

Abstract

The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre, by Susan Zimmerman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 216. Cloth $80.00. Reviewer: HEATHER HIRSCHFELD Susan Zimmerman's Early Modern Corpse is a wonderful paradox: steeped in the contemplation of death, decomposition, and putrefaction, its language, critical argumentation, and theoretical and historical insight are continuously vibrant, vital, and intellectually alive. Zimmerman's overarching achievement lies in bringing together, in historically responsible ways, Reformation religious debate with contemporary theory, thereby generating a series of sharp insights not only into the structure of individual early modern tragedies but also into the shapes and commitments of competing Reformation doctrines. Ultimately the book demonstrates the tremendous rewards of bringing postmodern theories of tragedy and the gendered subject to bear on early modern concerns about theological and scientific meanings of the body. Zimmerman's project, as articulated in the introductory chapter, is to assess the staging of corpses-that is, the staging of live bodies as though lifeless-in relation to the early modern theater's participation in ongoing controversies concerning the (10). Although those controversies have been the object of considerable critical scrutiny, including recent monographs by Michael Neill and Robert Watson, Zimmerman locates them specifically at the root of Reformation doctrinal conflict, and she offers a focused account of the terms of Catholic-Protestant hermeneutical debate by concentrating on the status of idols, relics, and saints as a particular illustration of the logics of confessional differences in understanding the material and spiritual body. Looking at the Homily against Idolatry and John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, Zimmerman carefully lays out the structure of iconoclastic controversy, identifying the Reformers' virtually intractable of reformulating] the prevailing concept of the body/soul relation so as to counteract the materiality of Catholicism, but without repudiating the paradoxes at the heart of Christian doctrine (25). This dilemma reaches its apogee in the figure of the corpse-the ultimate relic, as Zimmerman says, since it foregrounds most dramatically the complexity of the relation between redeemed and debased bodies in the Christian system (27). Relying on a substantial survey of historical scholarship to trace the movement from Catholic to Reform notions of corporeality, Zimmerman explores Foxe and the Homily as two works that reconceptualise the materiality of the body and of the corpse in self-conscious opposition to Catholic beliefs and practices by envisage[ing] its materiality, like that of the idol, as (46). It is in her reading of these kinds of texts as exercises in demystification that Zimmerman proves the dexterity and sharpness of her critical and theoretical methods, as she traces in both works a shared horror of bodily process and a shared effort to represent the corpse not as something potentially transcendent and redemptive but as something fundamentally dead and empty (65). The following chapters, which pair the tragedies of The second Maiden's Tragedy and The Duchess of Milan, The Revenger's Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi, and Macbeth and Hamlet, translate the theological resonances of the corpse to the realm of the theater, a realm already preoccupied with the dilemma of representing soul and body. Influenced by Walter Benjamin's theories of Tragodie and Trauerspiel, Zimmerman offers a compelling account of these plays' melodramatic excesses-particularly their characters' necrophilic obsessions-in relation to idolatrous tyranny; even more important, she explains the plays' seeming ideological inconsistency (their simultaneous iconoclasm and spiritual investment in the corpses of dead women) as the performative effect of early modern theatrical display, particularly but not restricted to the cross-dressing of boy actors. …