Such Stuff as Death is Made on

: Materialities of Grieving and Mortality in Early Modern English Performance

Abstract

This thesis investigates the various material things which surround death and grief in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, with chapters exploring the clothing of the deceased, burial shrouds, effigies in funerals and pageantry, and effigial bodies on the stage. These objects mediate and represent mortality, simultaneously asserting the ongoing material presence of the dead and encoding their absence. By considering how mortality is experienced with and through objects, this thesis builds on recent work that brings early modern studies into dialogue with the ‘extended mind’ paradigm: a set of theories of cognition which posit that ‘cognition and subjectivity extend across brain, body and world’. Case studies detail how props and costumes prompt memory, provide embodied contact with the dead, mediate the deceased’s ongoing influence over their survivors, and structure mourners’ psychological adjustment to loss.

Death exposes the cognitive-affective interactions between minds, bodies, and their material environments by poignantly suspending these relationships, and by forcing the bereaved to reappraise the significance of objects related to the deceased. In post-Reformation England, ruptures in signification were also occurring at a societal level. Reformation changes, including the abolition of intercessory prayers and a denial of the existence of ghosts, severed long-held links between the living and the dead and formed part of a difficult and drawn-out reappraisal of death and mourning practices. While Protestantism emphasised both the immaterial status of departed souls and how mortality generally rendered matter worthless and transient, early modern England continued to produce objects that enabled reconnection with the dead. In this context theatre functions as an experimental space, modelling and interrogating complex relationships between subjects, bodies, and objects. These interrogations reveal anxieties about the contingencies of human embodiment and the changeable material environment, but also reclaim objects as essential components in processes of grief and coming to terms with death.

Date of Award	13 May 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Tamsin T Badcoe (Supervisor), Giovanna Colombetti (Supervisor) & Lesel D Dawson (Supervisor)