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Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern
Culture
Tobias Döring
Palgrave Macmillan
£45
Dateline: 26th October, 2006
Shakespeare's Hamlet is surely the archetypal mourner of English literature.
His grief is made all the more conspicuous by the Danish court's celebration
of his mother's over-hasty second marriage, yet the prince himself hints
that there is something self-consciously stagey about "the trappings
and the suits of woe" - the outward signs of mourning can all too
easily "seem" to show grief where there is none (and, as Feste
reminds Olivia, it is foolish to mourn if the deceased is believed to
be in heaven). Tobias Döring's intriguing new book explores the
ways in which theatrical shows of mourning reflect their real-life counterparts
in post-Reformation English culture.
One of the most controversial changes introduced by Protestant reformers
was of course the abolition of Purgatory. If the living could no longer
help the dead by offering prayers and masses, their grief had to find
an outlet in other ways. Remembrance of the dead took on a new importance,
and in Shakespeare's history plays the famous dead are resurrected to
re-enact their stories.
In Henry VI Part One Winchester and Gloucester trade insults
over the coffin of "that ever-living man of memory" Henry
V and Salisbury is memorialised by Talbot; in Richard III Lady
Anne's tears over the body of the murdered Henry VI substitute for the
lavish state funeral to which he should have been entitled, and later
in the play she is one of the three queens who mourn for Richard's victims.
Indeed, Döring suggests that in these and other history plays it
is women who perform heartfelt national grief and men who stage-manage
"official" ceremonies of mourning.
One such stage-manager is Claudius, who goes through the motions of
mourning his murdered brother and chides Hamlet for wallowing in grief.
Hamlet, like many lesser revenge tragedies, is driven by the
protagonist's inability to express his grief openly or in an acceptable
manner (a theme Shakespeare had handled as early as Titus Andronicus,
in which the hero's overwhelming grief finally expresses itself as manic
laughter). In Hamlet's exhortation to Gertrude to "assume a virtue
if you have it not", Döring hears overtones of the Act of
Uniformity's assumption that compulsory church attendance would eventually
bring about genuine conversion through learning the gestures of Protestant
worship.
One of the most interesting sections of Performances of Mourning
deals with early modern attitudes to tears. How reliable was weeping
as a sign of genuine grief? In A Midsummer Night's Dream Lysander
says to Helena, "Look, when I vow I weep; and tears so born, in
their nativity all truth appears," yet crocodile tears were a stock
in trade of the Machiavellian villain - most notably Richard III - and
a tool of the actor's trade.
Of course, not all scenes of mourning in Shakespeare are meant to be
taken at face value. Döring points out some curious similarities
between Claudio's song for Hero's fake funeral in Much Ado About
Nothing and Bottom's lament for the (un)dead Thisbe, both of which
are chiefly notable for dreadful rhymes and uninspired sentiment - the
difference being that actors and directors don't have to worry about
how to make Bottom a likeable character…
Performances of Mourning reveals just how rich Shakespeare's
works are in deathbed and funeral scenes, prophetic last words, ghosts
and memories of the dead. Lovers of Shakespeare and students of early
modern England will find it a fascinating read.
J D Atkinson
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