Dead march: Liturgy and mimesis in Shakespeare's funerals

TY - JOUR

T1 - Dead march

T2 - Liturgy and mimesis in Shakespeare's funerals

AU - Cummings, Brian

PY - 2012/12/1

Y1 - 2012/12/1

N2 - This essay considers the dramatic topos of the dead march, a form of funeral procession used on the stage which enjoyed a peculiar vogue at the end of the sixteenth century. The dead march mimics religious ritual, and also seems to have inspired some borrowing in the opposite direction, as a form of procession used in later state funerals in historical reality, in which (we might say) death imitates art. This also raises some general questions about the interpretation of religious ritual in the Reformation, and also about the interpretation of religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. In what way is ritual an event and in what way is it a representation? Some anthropologists have used the theatre to create a rigid distinction between participation in ritual and the spectatorship of the theatre. They thus invoke the concept of mimesis to define ritual practice in reverse. Historians of theatre have then applied a version of the same theory to explain Elizabethan theatre as an emptying out of medieval functions of religion. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, King Lear is haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out. This essay questions the boundaries used in such discussions between ritual and mimesis, and uses Shakespeare's dramatic representation of medieval religion to suggest new ways of interpreting the relation between religion and theatre.

AB - This essay considers the dramatic topos of the dead march, a form of funeral procession used on the stage which enjoyed a peculiar vogue at the end of the sixteenth century. The dead march mimics religious ritual, and also seems to have inspired some borrowing in the opposite direction, as a form of procession used in later state funerals in historical reality, in which (we might say) death imitates art. This also raises some general questions about the interpretation of religious ritual in the Reformation, and also about the interpretation of religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. In what way is ritual an event and in what way is it a representation? Some anthropologists have used the theatre to create a rigid distinction between participation in ritual and the spectatorship of the theatre. They thus invoke the concept of mimesis to define ritual practice in reverse. Historians of theatre have then applied a version of the same theory to explain Elizabethan theatre as an emptying out of medieval functions of religion. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, King Lear is haunted by a sense of rituals and beliefs that are no longer efficacious, that have been emptied out. This essay questions the boundaries used in such discussions between ritual and mimesis, and uses Shakespeare's dramatic representation of medieval religion to suggest new ways of interpreting the relation between religion and theatre.

KW - death

KW - funeral

KW - ritual

KW - theatre

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84871328301&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/17450918.2012.731708

DO - 10.1080/17450918.2012.731708

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:84871328301

SN - 1745-0918

VL - 8

SP - 368

EP - 385

JO - Shakespeare

JF - Shakespeare

IS - 4

ER -