2026 Theses Doctoral

Performing Stage Corpses in Early Modern English Drama

Verma, Ayesha

This dissertation examines how early modern playwrights transformed the stage corpse into a distinct theatrical agent that reshaped the dramaturgy of late Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. Focusing on drama from 1590 to 1621, the dissertation argues that “performing corpses” —stage cadavers that bleed, speak, seduce, testify, and generate myth—occupy a liminal category neither fully character nor inert property, and that their unruly agency exposes and exploits fault lines in gender, theology, and political power.

Building on and revising scholarship primarily by Andrew Sofer, Carol Chillington Rutter, and Susan Zimmerman, the study shifts attention from what theatrical corpses signify to what they do, proposing a taxonomy that distinguishes performing corpses from non-performing stage bodies whose function is limited to marking death. It describes shared, complex agency as forms of dramatic action that emerge from collaborations between the dead character, its material embodiment onstage, the labor of other figures who handle and arrange it, and the theatrical mechanisms—stage directions, costume, spatial framing, and props—that frame the corpse as active.

Methodologically, the project brings theater history and performance studies into dialogue with the history of science, theology, and material culture, situating performing corpses within a cultural matrix that includes royal funerals and exhumations at Westminster Abbey, monument tourism, crime print, public execution spectacle, and anatomical dissection. Three analytic modes—seduction, testimony, and mythmaking—organize the archive and clarify how performing corpses operate across genres: in Jacobean tragedy, seductive female corpses exceed the control of those who manipulate them; in domestic tragedy, testifying corpses enact providential justice through discovery, bleeding, and posthumous speech; and in historical tragedy, exemplified by Julius Caesar, Caesar’s perpetually bleeding body transforms political assassination into martyrdom and sovereign myth.

Tracing these figures across the transition from Elizabeth I to James I, the dissertation shows that performing corpses intensify in the first Jacobean decade and recede with the rise of the court masque, and argues that they constitute a historically bounded yet theoretically generative phenomenon, offering a model for rethinking agency, embodiment, and the politics of death both within early modern English drama and in broader accounts of how theatre makes the dead act.