| This dissertation examines the use of gallows humor to voice dissent during an age of extensive repression and censorship. It explores the relationships between public punishment spectacles and the comic treatment of death in Shakespeare's second tetralogy and Measure for Measure, paying particular attention to changing uses of the corporate body metaphor which result from its religious and political appropriations.;Chapter One examines the logic of privileging the relationship between spectacles of punishment and the theater. Public executions were designed to transform the victims' bodies into signs of the state's power, but the cruelty of the executions of heretics and traitors dramatizes the regime's insecurity, allowing its victims to use humor to subvert the spectacle's intended effect. Such gallows' humor created a recognizable code which allowed comic representations of punishment spectacles to signal treatment of delicate issues and yet evade censorship.;Chapter Two examines epistolary accounts of royal pardons which create "happy endings" for spectacles of punishment and the public theaters' comic treatments of royal pardons in Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Measure for Measure. Treating the majestic gesture of mercy comically calls attention to the theatrical and self-serving nature of public pardons to reassert the players' control over spectacle.;Chapter Three examines the impact of the saints' cult, which exemplified the tragicomic mode of dying, on the Elizabethan struggle to control the rhetoric of martyrdom and on iconoclastic impulses. Shakespeare's depiction of Oldcastle (Falstaff) contests both Protestant and Catholic versions of his death, problematizing the polemicization of piety. As the grotesque body, Falstaff resists appropriation by sectarian politics and theatricalizes the effects of Protestant representational theology on royal legitimation strategies which originated in appropriations of Catholic incarnational doctrine.;Chapter Four interprets Henry V as an anamorphic portrait depicting Henry as both Christian prince and tyrant. The play's ambivalence depends on the comic scenes and allusions to anecdotal material concerning Alexander the Great, allusions which reappear in Charles I's scaffold speech, itself an artifact which epitomizes the connection between the two scaffolds created by an event which marks a new phase in the significance of the corporate body. |
