‘For Show or Useless Property’: Necrophilia and The Revenger’s Tragedy

Abstract

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 eroticised 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 literalisation of the conventional love / death conjunction as the Duke kisses — and ‘like a slobbering Dutchman’, at that — the skull’s poisoned maw. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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