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“The High Roman Fashion”: Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lorraine Helms
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Abstract

Like the “tragic ways of killing a woman” that Nicole Loraux explores in Attic tragedy, Renaissance ways of killing a woman (including Shakespeare's in Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra, Marston's in Sophonisba, and Heywood's in The Rape of Lucrece) draw on ancient narratives of sacrificed virgins and suicidal wives. The theatrical practices that shape these narratives on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage challenge a critical discourse that has located the counterhegemonic impulses of Renaissance drama exclusively in popular theatricality. The moments that most enfranchise the boys who play Lavinia and Cleopatra and enable them to intervene in the meanings of their characters' deaths are those moments during which the Shakespearean stage most reveals its debt to the elite traditions of Senecan tragedy and the private playhouses of the children's companies.

Type
3. Rewriting Performance: Masquerade, Parody, Translation
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 3: Special Topic: On Poetry , May 1992 , pp. 554 - 565
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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