Tobias Döring: Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture

• Katharine Goodland

In Performances of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture Tobias Döring integrates performance theory and history to deepen our understanding of “the cultural strategies of Shakespearean theatre” (3). He thus brings performance studies to the scholarly conversation about how English funerary practices were altered by the Reformation and shaped by the Renaissance stage. Echoing Huston Diehl (Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage), he observes that the “Shakespearean theatre was both a product and a producer of early modern culture” (4). Over the past decade it has generally become accepted that the Reformation disrupted and transformed mourning and burial practices in England and that the eradication of purgatory was deeply troubling, a source of social tension, if not trauma. Döring (like Diehl, Michael Neill, Issues of Death, Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon, and I, Female Mourning and Tragedy), sees the “English theatres [as having taken] over where the English church seems to have left people alone” (Döring 17). But he reframes this central question – the relationship between altered funerary ritual and theatrical representation – in “terms of the performativity involved in grieving and commemoration” (3). If his conclusions are familiar, his methodology is elegant, and his use of performance theory, apropos.

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