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COPYRIGHT 2007 Associated University Presses
The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare's Theatre, by Susan Zimmerman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 216. Cloth $80.00.
Susan Zimmerman's Early Modern Corpse is a wonderful paradox: steeped in the contemplation of death, decomposition, and putrefaction, its language, critical argumentation, and theoretical and historical insight are continuously vibrant, vital, and intellectually alive. Zimmerman's overarching achievement lies in bringing together, in historically responsible ways, Reformation religious debate with contemporary theory, thereby generating a series of sharp insights not only into the structure of individual early modern tragedies but also into the shapes and commitments of competing Reformation doctrines. Ultimately the book demonstrates the tremendous rewards of bringing postmodern theories of tragedy and the gendered subject to bear on early modern concerns about theological and scientific meanings of the body.
Zimmerman's project, as articulated in the introductory chapter, is to assess the staging of corpses--that is, the staging of live bodies as though lifeless--in relation to the early modern theater's participation in "ongoing controversies concerning the dead" (10). Although those controversies have been the object of considerable critical scrutiny, including recent monographs by Michael Neill and Robert Watson, Zimmerman locates them specifically at the root of Reformation doctrinal conflict, and she...
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