| My project centers around representations of the martyred body in Shakespeare's Roman plays, and focuses on the ambiguous nature of ceremony, to consider the way ritualized presentations of the body complicate, undermine, or oppose the language used to represent the body. For Shakespeare's sources, dying in the high Roman fashion was valorized as a deed strengthening the social body of Rome, but for Shakespeare, such a manner of death acquires a Catholic, Eucharistic aspect that is exposed as grotesque and bathetic. What emerges in each play is a struggle between the visual spectacle of onstage violence and refining speech. In Shakespeare's Rome, violence elicits an expectation of social purification, and Shakespeare's refusal to provide this redemption makes the violence that we do see all the more repulsive.;By looking at Shakespeare's depiction of Rome in these tragedies, we can trace a loss of confidence in the efficacy of sacrifice in the wake of its growing politicization within the early modern English community. The grisly accounts found in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments illustrate the contradiction that Shakespeare strives to expose in his Roman plays: that, following their public deaths, martyrs were assigned a voice that was startlingly similar to the role of the saints in Catholic iconography. Characters who assume that they alone can define the meaning of their own sacrifices are exposed by Shakespeare as naive and foolish because their deaths and injuries are exploited by canny survivors and opportunists with greater theatrical skill. Shakespeare is skeptical about the glory awarded to Roman "martyrs" and the facility with which opportunists turn them into "the noblest Roman[s] of them all" (Julius Caesar 5.5.68). In spite of the fact that the spectacular violence inflicted upon Lucrece, Lavinia, Caesar, Cleopatra and Coriolanus renders these characters figures of public veneration, the plays destabilize the control of what they create through an emphasis on the ambiguities of visual interpretation. The image of bloodied flesh onstage is found to be disturbingly powerful, and "speaks" to the audience in a manner that paradoxically transcends spoken language, denying the victims the right to control the interpretation of their death, and turning religious death into a political commodity. |
