Beholding Violence: A Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Taking the final scene of Webster's The White Devil and the executions of the Duke and Piato in The Revengers Tragedy as its objects, this paper interrogates the relationship between performance, performativity and metatheatre on the early modern stage. In both plays, death is a spectacle that assumes an audience whose presence both enables and disrupts the political and ontological meanings and identities produced by this spectacle. The analogous relation of theatre to scaffold is conventional in the period, and is also reciprocal, as the drama of execution was carefully "scripted," and the success of that drama of extirpation and spiritual reintegration was measured by the closeness of its approximation of that script. In The White Devil, the malcontent, Flamineo, stages his own execution, only to rise and meet true death at the close of the play. In The Revengers Tragedy, Vindici arranges the "execution" of "himself" in disguise (a "self" that is really the Duke in Vindici's disguise), enacting a mock death whose metatheatricality troubles the boundaries of the subject. Each moment of death, mock or otherwise, collapses performativity into performance. In "dying" only to rise again, Flamineo and Vindici embody the anxiety inherent to the scaffold-as-stage concept: the specter of iterability, the potential for death itself to be construed as a "role" that one plays in the drama of the state and of the subject. In the theatre, death is not final or singular but conventional. In the context of "enacting" death--a metatheatrical preoccupation in both plays--the "performance" of oaths which should have the power to purify, to shrive, and to bind, are construed as "performances," that is, false surfaces, or vessels containing only an echoing emptiness (Vittoria's real death is practically a point-by-point rendition of the conventional "noble death," for instance). Concomitantly, these citational contexts--the sermon, the vow, the confessional, the penal spectacle--likewise threaten in an alchemy of reciprocity to collapse into the "merely grammatical," as the term "perform" problematizes the distinction between the true performative (Let there be light; I pronounce you man and wife; I confess) and the "false" performance of theatre.



	Lisa Dickson (Assistant Professor, English, University of Northern British Columbia) "Observances: Performing, Performativity and Metatheatre in The White Devil and The Revengers Tragedy" Taking the final scene of Webster's The White Devil and the executions of the Duke and Piato in The Revengers Tragedy as its objects, this paper interrogates the relationship between performance, performativity and metatheatre on the early modern stage. In both plays, death is a spectacle that assumes an audience whose presence both enables and disrupts the political and ontological meanings and identities produced by this spectacle. The analogous relation of theatre to scaffold is conventional in the period, and is also reciprocal, as the drama of execution was carefully "scripted," and the success of that drama of extirpation and spiritual reintegration was measured by the closeness of its approximation of that script. In The White Devil, the malcontent, Flamineo, stages his own execution, only to rise and meet true death at the close of the play. In The Revengers Tragedy, Vindici arranges the "execution" of "himself" in disguise (a "self" that is really the Duke in Vindici's disguise), enacting a mock death whose metatheatricality troubles the boundaries of the subject. Each moment of death, mock or otherwise, collapses performativity into performance. In "dying" only to rise again, Flamineo and Vindici embody the anxiety inherent to the scaffold-as-stage concept: the specter of iterability, the potential for death itself to be construed as a "role" that one plays in the drama of the state and of the subject. In the theatre, death is not final or singular but conventional. In the context of "enacting" death--a metatheatrical preoccupation in both plays--the "performance" of oaths which should have the power to purify, to shrive, and to bind, are construed as "performances," that is, false surfaces, or vessels containing only an echoing emptiness (Vittoria's real death is practically a point-by-point rendition of the conventional "noble death," for instance). Concomitantly, these citational contexts--the sermon, the vow, the confessional, the penal spectacle--likewise threaten in an alchemy of reciprocity to collapse into the "merely grammatical," as the term "perform" problematizes the distinction between the true performative (Let there be light; I pronounce you man and wife; I confess) and the "false" performance of theatre.