Taking eroticism on the English Renaissance Stage as a paradigm for issues of sexuality and identity, these essays explore the nature of sexual definition and desire in early modern culture. Identifying the stage as a primary site for the display of eroticism, the authors examine how the Renaissance stage functioned as a decoder for erotic experience, both reinforcing and subverting expected sexual behaviour.
This volume also addresses a crucial theoretical problem in postmodern cultural criticism: how can subjective phenomena, such as Renaissance erotic experience, be placed in its historical, public context? And can this experience be examined without recourse to psychoanalytical theory? Contributors argue that theatrical erotic dynamics served to deconstruct gender itself, leaving conventional categories of sexuality blurred, confused - or absent. In seeking to reposition the conventions and subversions of gender and desire in terms of one another, these essays open up a new and distinctive perspective in the cultural debate.

Within a theoretical framework that makes use of history, psychoanalysis and anthropology, "The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre" explores the relationship of the public theatre to the question of what constituted the "dead" in early modern English culture.

Susan Zimmerman argues that concepts of the corpse as a semi-animate, generative and indeterminate entity were deeply rooted in medieval religious culture. Such concepts ran counter to early modern discourses that sought to harden categorical distinctions between body/spirit, animate/inanimate - in particular, the attacks of Reformists on the materiality of "dead" idols, and the rationale of the new anatomy for publicly dissecting 'dead' bodies. Zimmerman contends that within this context, theatrical representations of the corpse or corpse/revenant - as seen here in the tragedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries - uniquely showcased the theatre's own ideological and performative agency.

Features

*Original in its conjunction of critical theory (Bataille, Kristeva, Lacan, Benjamin) with an historical account of the shifting status of the corpse in late medieval and early modern England

*The first study to demonstrate connections between the meanings attached to the material body in early modern Protestantism, the practice of anatomical dissection, and the English public theatre.