"For show or useless property": necrophilia and 'The Revenger's Tragedy.'

"Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, Your tongue's like poison"

The Cure

The intersection of death and the erotic throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy is a virtual commonplace of the genre; from Hamlet's leap into Ophelia's grave to the perversities of Tourneur and Middleton, the body of death is at least symbolically conflated with the body of desire. Indeed, while granting that theatrical personae as yet do not "go so far as making love to the corpse," Philippe Aries notes "an almost imperceptible shift |in early modern England and France~ from familiarity with the dead to macabre eroticism."(1) Yet in Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), the eroticized body of death is more than a symbolic presence or moody memento mori: Gloriana's skull is a prop endowed with remarkable spectacular and material efficacy. Peter Stallybrass's argument that death removes Gloriana from the corrupting realm of sexual desire is doubly belied by Vindice's notably prurient obsession with the skull of his nine-years-dead betrothed and by his all but literal prostitution of the skull in pursuit of revenge against the lecherous Duke.(2) I suggest that this latter machination constitutes the play's emblematic moment: a savage literalization of the conventional love/death conjunction as the Duke kisses--and "like a slobbering Dutchman," at that--the skull's poisoned maw.

Without denying the rather obvious connotations of patriarchal anxiety about female sexuality--or falling into the tempting though anachronistic trap of having Tourneur "have read" Freud or Bataille (to paraphrase Baudrillard), I would like to claim that necrophilia in The Revenger's Tragedy serves at once to parody and to interrogate contemporary, increasingly scientistic notions of the body. The constitution of the body as the object of scientific enquiry--perhaps most strikingly though not exclusively demonstrated in the relatively recent phenomenon of public dissection--is brutally travestied in Tourneur's insistent displacement of an "objective" knowledge of the body by spectacular, defiantly perverse desire. Necrophilia yokes together science and seduction; discipline does not replace the unruly erotic but instead precariously displaces it in the elision of the body by the cold medium of the scientific gaze.(3) Tourneur's play does not simply eroticize "the idea of death"--it does not disembody death by rendering it into a discourse as does that paradigm of proto-modern subjectivity, Hamlet; rather, the play theatricalizes death in the specific, material dead body. Gloriana's skull becomes perversely seductive, in Baudrillard's sense of the term, playing alternately at being pure referent and pure signifier, the revenger's "form and cause" at once conjoined and confounded: "Every interpretative discourse... wants to get beyond appearances: this is its illusion and fraud. But getting beyond appearances is an impossible task: inevitably every discourse is revealed in its appearance, and is hence subject to the stakes imposed by seduction, and consequently to its own failure as discourse."(4) The Jacobean spectacle, situated as it is in a liminal position between the emblematic and mimetic--between theatricality and interpretation--undermines its own ostensible truth value by foregrounding the instability yet opacity of appearances. Confounded as well in the play's erotics of death is the distinction between an emergent scientism and the repressed, residual otherness of the transgressive corporeality identified with madness, witchcraft, and necromancy.

Even among the grotesqueries of Jacobean theatre, The Revenger's Tragedy is notably macabre; it is small wonder that Eliot singled it out for its "cynicism . . . loathing and disgust of humanity."(5) Yet the morbid interest in the corporeality of death and decomposition that so distinguishes Jacobean tragedy is at least as residual as emergent, given what Lynn White has called a pervasive "socially manifested necrophilia" of the fifteenth century.(6) As Foucault, Aries, and others have remarked upon, the Cimitiere des Innocents, Danse Macabre, and artes moriendi are cultural productions of late fourteenth and early fifteenth century Europe, phenomena that have been attributed, alternately though not exclusively, to a burgeoning humanism, the lingering psychic, social, and economic effects of the Black Death, and an ecclesiastical interest in promoting anxiety about death and hence the economic and political well-being of church bureaucrats.(7) Literary treatments of Eros/Thanatos tend to be more decorous in the Middle Ages than in Jacobean tragedy, if not terribly less frequent; the intertwining of love and death figures prominently in the Tristan tales, and Mallory's Morte d'Arthur features a number of implicit and explicit necrophiliac episodes.(8) In fact, in the fifteenth century occurred the most notorious documented case of necrophilia in early modern Europe, that of Gilles de Rais, a French nobleman who had fought alongside Jeanne d'Arc, and who was to become the inspiration for the fictive Bluebeard. After Jeanne's capture and execution, Gilles evidently retired to his castle, where he proceeded to seduce, murder and mutilate scores of young boys, not only copulating with the corpses but preserving various body parts for posterity. Upon his arrest, Gilles confessed to his crimes, his pre-execution repentance likely of greater edification to the Church than to the soul of the necrophile himself, for "|Gilles's~ confession, repentance, and resignation were acclaimed as an elaborate example of Christian penance."(9)

Yet despite these fifteenth-century analogs, death, and dead bodies, seemed to retain a kind of quotidian respect due the inexplicable if not the magical; it was seldom the focus of derisive parody such as one finds in Tourneur, Webster, and Middleton. Compared to post-Reformation Europe, a relative tolerance for the magical seems at least partly responsible for the "familiarity" with death that Aries notes about the late Middle Ages. Unlike the lofty ritual of public anatomy, in which an audience of cowed, reverent observers watched an expert dissector anatomize, analyze, and label the dead body, popular practices well into the seventeenth century treated of the corpse in every-day, efficacious terms; various parts and fluids of the corpse were commonly assumed to have medicinal value--"the perspiration of corpses is good for hemorrhoids and tumors, and the hand of a cadaver applied to a diseased area can heal, as in the case of a woman suffering from dropsy who rubbed her abdomen with the still-warm hand of a corpse."(10) As late as the Restoration, so lofty a personage as the ailing Charles I of England "drank a potion . . . containing forty-two drops of extract of human skull."(11)

One is tempted, perhaps, to concur with Giovanna Ferrari's claim that the practice of anatomy descends from traditional, popular pharmaceuticals of the dead body.(12) Yet the relation between popular practice and science in the early modern period is less one of integration than of co-optation. By 1604 in England, it was a felony "to take up a dead body in whole or part for magical ...