4 - Stone: Lost Ladies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
Summary
‘However you disguise your bodies, you lay not on your colours to think that they sinke into your soule’
Thomas Nashe, Christ's Tears over Jerusalem (1598)I turn now to two Jacobean plays that explore the shared materiality of idols, corpses, spirits, and statues: Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy. Both are King's Men plays staged at the Blackfriars; both date roughly to the same period of 1610–11, although critics typically read the less canonical Middleton play as having been inspired by, rather than inspiring, Shakespeare's tale of a statue that miraculously returns to life. Sarah Beckwith succinctly captures the revenge tragedy's ‘sustained interaction’ with the romance: ‘each play features a tyrant; each play flirts with funerary and statuary art, and with the language of superstition, idolatry, and iconoclasm; each has a lady in a sequestered “tomb“’. In The Second Maiden's Tragedy, the Tyrant, mad for the love of the unnamed ‘Lady’ who has thwarted his advances by killing herself, breaks into the Lady's tomb, steals her body, and then arranges to have her corpse painted in an attempt to mask the signs of her body's decay. The Tyrant's plans go awry via the agency of his rival Govianus, who turns the Lady's corpse into an instrument of revenge by painting poison upon her lips. Revisiting the motifs of resurrection and transfiguration I discussed at the outset of this study, the Lady's spirit – which first appears in dazzling white amidst a great light – returns to oversee the reburial of her body; soul and body thus share the stage in the play's final act.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Inventions of the SkinThe Painted Body in Early English Drama, pp. 121 - 152Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013