The Theatre of the Body: Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early-Modern London (review)

The aim of this book is to demonstrate some of the ways in which the understanding and experience of embodiment changed during the seventeenth century in London. Dr Cregan approaches this topic by analysing the performative aspects of death in three specific contexts: judicial, medical, and theatrical. Her attention is therefore directed to those corresponding sites of practice that involved a straightforwardly public dimension – the courtroom and scaffold, the anatomical theatre, and the urban playhouse.

An investigation of these venues, concentrating on their respective practices relating to death, provides much concrete information for Cregan’s study. I think, however, that she exaggerates the interrelatedness of these locations by treating them all as ‘authorised sites of knowledge production in seventeenth-century London’ (p. 26), thus attributing the same epistemic status to dramatic representations on the stage as to court findings or anatomical investigations.

Her cross-comparisons between the ‘performance of death’ in the playhouses and in the other sites under consideration are sometimes weakened by this tendency to place theatrical ‘knowledge’ on the same epistemic plane as juridical or medical knowledge – an equivalence that the inhabitants of seventeenth-century London would never have countenanced. Nevertheless, this issue aside, the wealth of empirical material that Cregan brings forward is valuable and suggestive, making the book a useful contribution to the cultural history of the period.

Broadly speaking, the work also makes a contribution to the more general question of the transition ‘from the dominance of traditionalism to the dominance of the modern’ (p. 4), but it is not clear that the theoretical apparatus which Cregan deploys for this purpose is entirely helpful. The key concept used in this regard is ‘abstraction’, on which topic Cregan has previously published a sociological study. My reservation about the centrality given to this concept in the present work is that it seems to be so widely and omnivorously applied that it soon ceases to do any real conceptual work. When virtually every social transaction discussed is glossed as an instance of abstraction, the repetition of the term tends to yield diminishing cognitive returns. I would not wish to suggest, however, that this theoretical quirk should be a deterrent to potential readers, since for anyone interested in the history of early modern culture many other aspects of the book are highly rewarding.