I. The Ghost Bride Most early modern tragedies end in multiple deaths, and many feature ghosts, but Michael Boyd's 1994 staging of John The Broken Heart (c. 1629) at the RSC's Swan Theatre began with haunting before the character who appeared as phantom was actually dead. In the production's prologue, the spectator encountered Orgilus (lain Glen), gaunt and black-clad, playing on lute (Figure 1). He sang of the joys of marriage, of by holy union wedded, / More than theirs by custom bedded; / Fruitful issues; life so graced, / Not by age to be defaced (III.iv.74-7). These were pleasures he himself had lost. The Broken Heart hinges on the abortive betrothal between Orgilus and his beloved Penthea, destroyed when her brother Ithocles forces her into marriage with Bassanes. As Glen's Orgilus finished singing, Boyd's production evoked those broken nuptials. The frail, white-clad figure of Penthea (Emma Fielding) appeared, her face hidden by bridal veil. Orgflus drew it aside to gaze at her face, but immediately his father Crotolon (Tony Britton) entered, speaking the first words of playtext: Dally not further (l.i.1). At this, Penthea turned from Orgilus and began to walk slowly upstage. Crotolon did not register her presence as she passed him, for she was not bride of flesh and blood, but figment of Orgilus' imagination--or ghost. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The spectral quality of this initial image pervaded Boyd's whole production, which jack Tinker likened to a deathly masque being played out. Set in lavish Caroline version of Spartan court, it followed The Broken Hearts recent critics by emphasizing the entrapment of within kind of living death. After all, this tragedy sees its four leading accept willingly, one of them with the frightening affirmation, Welcome, thou ice, that sittest about my heart; / No heat can ever thaw thee (vii.154-55). Set in classical Sparta, it portrays men and women who bear suffering in silence until it kills them. Many critics have focused on the codes of virtue that govern these characters, tracing their relationship to ancient and early modern versions of stoicism; most argue that the play exposes the destructive effects of stoical philosophy on Spartan society. In recent article, Kristin Crouch cogently shows how the imagery of Boyd's production supported such interpretations by depicting world whose citizens bury all unacceptable human experience, inner desire and emotional impulse under the weight of silence, stillness and death (270). (1) Her analysis agrees well with that of R. J. Kaufmann, who describes the play as Ford's Waste Land, and remarks that its characters re doomed by tragically narrow, nonorganic identifications of their own natures (184). Yet if these identifications are narrow, they are also multiple, and not limited to the workings of stoical philosophy. During crucial scene between the playtext's leading female characters, Penthea traces the confines of her own identity by describing how on the Of my my youth hath acted Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length By varied pleasures, sweetened in the mixture, But tragical in issue. (III.V.15-9) With these words, Penthea seems to turn on her rapidly fading life in motion of self-condemnation that is also motion of self-definition--and of self-dismissal. This paper explores that paradoxical motion as it was performed repeatedly by Penthea and by other throughout Michael Boyd's production of The Broken Heart, where stage of mortality became the on which fatally conflicted discourse of gender was exposed for the death-trap it was. The appearance of Pentheas ghost epitomized the theatrical strategies that facilitated this exposure in production whose restrained style defined world deeply inflected by regulatory ideals. …