Abstract
The question that immediately came to my mind upon receiving this book to review was, how does it relate to Roland Mushat Frye's seminal study The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600, published almost forty years ago? The answer came early in the introduction (p. 11), in which the editors, William E. Engel and Grant Williams, acknowledge Frye's influence, while reasserting the importance of cultural reconstruction in placing Shakespeare's plays within the early modern cultural milieu. In many ways this volume proves a worthy successor of Frye's seminal study.
This collection of 15 essays falls in two main sections. The first explores cultural, intellectual, social and religious issues in situ, all the better to understand the reception of Shakespeare's plays (2 Henry IV, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Pericles) in early modern England. The main goal of Part 1 is to identify and contextualise key aspects of the Shakespearean death arts. Part 2 sheds light on the way in which death arts developed more particularly with respect to Hamlet which, as Williams observes, could be ‘called a handbook or even a compendium of the memento mori’ (p. 173) tradition. The authors delve into Hamlet's dramaturgy of mortality, using death arts to uncover new perspectives on and approaches to what is one of the play's main motifs.
In their introductory essay (chapter 1), Engel and Williams define death arts as a ‘historical category’ (p. 1) which owes much to the enduring legacy of the medieval ars moriendi in early modern culture. The concept is described as a hermeneutic category. Its purpose is to recast the specificity of premodern cultural production and offer a reassessment of the theme of death in Shakespeare's plays by shifting our perspective and approach on premodern death. According to the editors, death arts offer three interrelated positions, with epistemological, cultural and phenomenological differences which throw light on the ‘materiality of the public expression and production’ (p. 4) rather than on the inwardly experienced feeling of death and mortality. While following in the footsteps of Philippe Ariès (The Hour of Our Death, 1977) in considering evolving Western attitudes of dying, their methodological focus is divergent. Engel and Williams posit a ‘firewall’ (p. 4) between premodernity and Enlightenment, and consider death not only as an attitude but as an art in its own right. In chapter 2, Andrew D. McCarthy focuses on the lineaments of the medieval tradition of the ars moriendi in the Elizabethan perception of death. Throughout the analysis of how and to what purpose ‘speaking corpses’ are featured in early modern drama, chapter 3 considers acts of commemoration that play a central part in funerary rites. Dead bodies are ‘unstable signifiers’ (p. 50) on stage and rely on the audience (Brian Harries) to be deciphered. In chapter 4 Eileen Sperry explores the numerous paradoxes contained within the motto “tu fui, ego eris” (as you are, so once was I. As I am, so shall you be), which Shakespeare stages in 2 Henry IV in Hal's misrecognition of his father's death; Sperry thus brings to light the relationship between literary form and early modern understanding of mortality. The tu fui tradition rests on a set of internal binaries (the soon-to-be-dead speaker and the healthy young listener) and temporal relationships (between past and present/present and future), highlighting a dialectical approach to mortality. Chapter 5 analyses the rhetorics of death in Antony and Cleopatra. Williams claims that Shakespeare was more interested in rhetorical memorials than in physical ones. The argument developed in chapter 6 rests on Kurt Schreyer's conception of mould and its divergent meanings. Dorothy Todd traces ‘three distinct but related’ (p. 114) images of decay and fecundity in Pericles, as she examines tombs and the idea of marking the places of the dead. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the presence of death arts in Othello. While Jessica Tooker demonstrates how the play implicates the tragedy's characters in an early modern death art involving empathetic language or what the author refers to as ‘thana-rhetoric’ (p. 133) – establishing Othello as a ‘moriens figure’ (p. 147) – Maggie Vinter draws our attention to the fabric of the theatre and the limits that exist between dramatic and performative strategies (music, the representation of gender and race). Vinter also recontextualises the cultural performance of memento mori within the play by analysing the Willow Song. She convincingly shows how the song reproduces ‘the disturbing effect of a corpse reaching out to the living’ (p. 168).
Part 2 throws a new light on the tradition of cultural reconstruction which Frye developed in his seminal work, more precisely in chapter 6, ‘The Prince amid the Tombs’, by adding the lens of death arts to their scrutiny. The first two chapters focus on the mnemonic rites of death. Jonathan Baldo (chapter 9) revisits the Graveyard Scene, which hinges more on Memory than memento mori, as Hamlet unearths disturbing memories while the scene unfolds. Zachariah Long (chapter 10) interprets the death arts in the play as two symbolic topographies that are based on Giulio Camillo Delminio's Theatre of Memory and Dante's Theatre of God's Judgement. In chapter 11, Amanda K. Ruud examines how the figures of descriptio and enargeia ‘absorb their audience in a rhetorical-theatrical illusion’ (p. 223) by representing both absence and presence on stage. Both figures also prove to be key rhetorical devices in the portrayal of mourning in early modern drama. In chapters 12 and 13, Pamela R. Macfie and Lina Perkins Wilder respectively explore how the female characters (Ophelia and Gertrude) come to terms with their mortality and act upon Hamlet's brooding speculations. MacFie argues that Ophelia's drowning performs a burial rite that counters her final interment, recalling the theory of humours and the critical importance of gender. Wilder investigates the question of death arts through the gender lens in her discussion of Ophelia's silenced tale. In chapter 14 Isabel Karreman describes how the memento mori theatricality of Hamlet suffuses its dramatic fabric, thus enabling the spectators to meditate on the various forms of death depicted in the play. In chapter 15, Michael Neill, who authored Issues of death. Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (1997), explores issues of interruption and incompleteness, while examining the rhetorical construction of Shakespeare's death arts. Hamlet exploits the structuring principle of temporal interruption and dislocation, denying characters the comfort of closure. In his conclusion, Neill asserts that no death art can really deliver closure. Rory Loughnane's Afterword sums up the vast array of issues examined throughout the book, ranging from the monumentalisation of the dead, through the figural and rhetorical aspects of the death arts, to the rituals of death and mourning.
For the modern scholar, a thorough assessment of the dramaturgical representations of death and mortality in early modernity can prove challenging because of the plurality of knowledge and practice one needs when exploring these issues in the context of early modernity. The authors in this collection are attentive to these hurdles and are well aware of the challenges posed by their task to reinvigorate ‘an old, tired theme’ (p. 4). Their essays make an important contribution to a better understanding of the thanatological proliferation in the Shakespearean canon as well as its reception in the early modern period. The volume demonstrates convincingly the importance of death arts as an effective critical approach to widen the scope of scholarly inquiry, paving the way for new directions in Shakespeare studies.