Dying to Learn, Learning to Die, The Craft of Dying in Early Modern English Drama and the Cultivation of Dying-Voice Literacy
type: CreativeWork
description: DYING TO LEARN, LEARNING TO DIE THE CRAFT OF DYING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA AND THE CULTIVATION OF DYING-VOICE LITERACY by SIMON G. FORTIN Adviser: Professor Mario DiGangi This dissertation contends that, through their relentless dramatization of agonies, the early modern English dramatists taught their audiences how to die. Attending a play where characters devised, discussed, prepared for, plotted, inflicted, endured and witnessed death, constituted an apprenticeship I demonstrate, akin to going to school, though informal it may have been, where audiences learned about mortality, death as an event, and dying as a process. Thus, this study points to the early modern English stage as a locus of human achievement that acculturates the experience of dying during the long Reformation, this complex historical unfolding that recalibrates many doctrines relating to death, dying, funereal rites and the afterlife. The dramatists accomplish this acculturation by positing 'literacies of the liminal' that are alternatives to the pervading religious protocols of preparation for death known as the ars moriendi (the craft or the art of dying), a continental literary tradition born in the late medieval period. Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists I show, aim at more than merely representing the agonal process; living in a moment of religious fluidity, these stage artists interrogate mortality; they embody and encode 'the living death' by resorting to their two-fold agency: the creation of an imaginative/literary stage-bound idiom and the immediacy of performance required for its expression. Like any living language, this stage-bound idiom is an assemblage of influences and social energies and as such, the dying-voice literacy I suggest this canon of drama fosters is not sui generis. This dissertation examines this novel theatrical idiom against the background of its inspirations and influences. This study posits the craft of dying literary tradition as one of many catalysts fo…
abstract: DYING TO LEARN, LEARNING TO DIE THE CRAFT OF DYING IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA AND THE CULTIVATION OF DYING-VOICE LITERACY by SIMON G. FORTIN Adviser: Professor Mario DiGangi This dissertation contends that, through their relentless dramatization of agonies, the early modern English dramatists taught their audiences how to die. Attending a play where characters devised, discussed, prepared for, plotted, inflicted, endured and witnessed death, constituted an apprenticeship I demonstrate, akin to going to school, though informal it may have been, where audiences learned about mortality, death as an event, and dying as a process. Thus, this study points to the early modern English stage as a locus of human achievement that acculturates the experience of dying during the long Reformation, this complex historical unfolding that recalibrates many doctrines relating to death, dying, funereal rites and the afterlife. The dramatists accomplish this acculturation by positing 'literacies of the liminal' that are alternatives to the pervading religious protocols of preparation for death known as the ars moriendi (the craft or the art of dying), a continental literary tradition born in the late medieval period. Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists I show, aim at more than merely representing the agonal process; living in a moment of religious fluidity, these stage artists interrogate mortality; they embody and encode 'the living death' by resorting to their two-fold agency: the creation of an imaginative/literary stage-bound idiom and the immediacy of performance required for its expression. Like any living language, this stage-bound idiom is an assemblage of influences and social energies and as such, the dying-voice literacy I suggest this canon of drama fosters is not sui generis. This dissertation examines this novel theatrical idiom against the background of its inspirations and influences. This study posits the craft of dying literary tradition as one of many catalysts fo…
author: Fortin, Simon Gaston
keywords: Ars Moriendi; Death Studies; Elizabethan Drama; Jacobean Drama; Poetics; Shakespeare
date published: 2016-02-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:58:22Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York