“‘The Carcasse Speakes’: Vital Corpses and Prophetic Remains in Thomas May’s Antigone.” Postmedieval 10:1 (2019): 82-94.
This article examines Thomas May’s Antigone (c. 1631), a play deeply engaged in making sense of somatomancy (body divination) in the context of violence and tragedy, in demonstrating the paradoxical vitality of the prophetic corpse (which occupies an indeterminate position between life and death, between being an active prophetic agent and a passive prophetic instrument), and in puzzling out the role of the mutilated body in producing tragic knowledge. In its reworking of Sophocles, Lucan, and other tragic source material, May’s tragedy brings to light a crucial triadic relationship between the violated body, knowledge, and tragic form, showing how the body – because of the violence to which it is submitted, and via the privileged knowledge it produces – propels tragic action. |
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“Greek Sacrifice in Shakespeare's Rome: Titus Andronicus and Iphigenia in Aulis,” in Rethinking Shakespearean Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies, ed. Dennis Britton and Melissa Walter (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 206–224.
This chapter examines the Greek elements of the depiction of ritual sacrifice in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and argues that Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis figures as an important intertext for the play. As critics are increasingly demonstrating the importance of Greek sources—and Greek drama in particular—to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, this chapter argues for new ways of understanding the interaction between early modern playwrights and the Greeks. Exploring the ways in which Titus enters into tacit dialog with Greek tragedy, I argue that the new source study will benefit from not just “proving” sources, or examining sources explicitly referenced, but thinking instead about the open and fluid nature of early modern intertextuality. The widespread exposure (often second-hand) of authors to classical sources led plays to be inflected by, and thus interact and engage in dialog with, Greek precedents. Shakespeare’s collaborator on Titus, George Peele, was an avid scholar and translator of Greek tragedy, having composed a vernacular translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis roughly a decade earlier. Whether or not Shakespeare read Iphigenia, however, and while Titus is by no means a simple re-writing or adaptation of Iphigenia, Titus engages in complex ways with the depiction of sacrificial killing Euripides’ play. In its depiction of parents sacrificing children, of the rite of hiketeia (or supplication), and of ritual modes of sacrificial killing, Titus calls up and puts into play the elements of Greek tragic sacrifice staged in Iphigenia. The recognition of these points of engagement between Titus and Iphigenia allows us to bring different ideas to bear on our understanding of Shakespeare—in this case, to our understanding of the meaning of sacrifice, and of ritual killing, in revenge tragedy. |
"'I Do Understand Your Inside': The Animal Beneath the Skin in Webster's Duchess of Malfi." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 30 (2017): 105-125.
This essay explores Webster's Duchess of Malfi and its interest in dissecting the human body in order to explore the animal body (and bodies) within. Webster illuminates a version of tragedy in which human skin works to conceal an inner-body inhabited by animals, and in which human corruption is at once a state of rot and decay, and simultaneously generative of (animal) life. This discourse of intermingling human-animal bodies engages with the dissections of human and animal bodies taking place in contemporary anatomy halls, evoking deep inner relationships between the human and animal. Webster thus reveals the important role of animals within the tragic ecosystem. |
"Pricking in Virgil: Early Modern Prophetic Phronesis and the Sortes Virgilianae." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45.3 (2015): 557–571.
This essay explores the early modern re-emergence of the sortes Virgilianae, a practice that involves opening a bound copy of Virgil and finding prophecy in the verse upon which the seeker lands. Examining the accounts of the sortes Virgilianae in antiquity and in the Renaissance, as well as Renaissance writings which explicitly propose the sortes as a mode of reading, this essay will argue that the practice, while undoubtedly oracular and prophetic, is linked to a particular mode of Renaissance pragmatic reading, which is concerned with (figurative) cutting, excerpting, and re-affixing textual fragments in new contexts. The practice presents a tension between assigning the prophetic book agency over the fate of the reader, and the reader actively mining (and interpreting) the text for knowledge to be extracted and applied to life. In this way, the sortes Virgilianae become an act of both cutting and collage, involving both the reader, who excerpts for practical knowledge to be applied, and the object of the prophetic book itself, which directs its own cutting. |