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Tombs in Shakespearean Drama
Monumental Theater
H. Austin Whitver
- 256 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Tombs in Shakespearean Drama
Monumental Theater
H. Austin Whitver
About This Book
Tombs in Shakespearean Drama explores the rhetorical deployment of tombs and monuments on the early modern stage, demonstrating their historiographic power and mythmaking potential. By analyzing references to tombs in plays by Shakespeare and others in conjunction with extant monuments, this volume demonstrates how these references function in two overlapping ways in period drama: monuments act as repositories of information about the past, and they allow the living to construct and preserve fictive narratives.
The stage exposes the flimsy materiality of paper, placing less value on the written word than period poetry. In this way, critics have perhaps oversold as universal Shakespeare's poetic praise of stone. Tombs within plays act as a powerful historical and narrative medium, raising the stakes to provide the stage with the illusion of permanency. Playwrights use tombs to anchor the stage action, giving a sense of lasting importance to dramatic events and combatting the ephemeral nature of the playhouse. In drama, Shakespeare and others drew on the persona preserved on tombs; this volume widens our view of how these representations interacted in the commemorative economy of early modern England. Within the playhouse, it was the tomb, not the tome, that stood as a symbol of permanence.
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Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Half-Title Page
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Monumental theater
- 1 âMy heart ⊠shall be thy sepulchreâ: Shakespeareâs early monumental experimentation
- 2 âA royal fellowship of deathâ: Tombs in Shakespeareâs second tetralogy
- 3 âHis bruisĂšd helmet and his bended swordâ: Henry Vâs material mnemonics
- 4 âLet my gravestone be your oracleâ: Fashioning tombs to speak to the future
- 5 âNo trophy, sword, nor hatchment oâer his bonesâ: Changing the status of the dead
- 6 âDoes not the stone rebuke me?â: Tombs that preach and teach
- Conclusion: âTwo dishes, but to one tableâ
- Index