Last Scene of All
Representing Death on the Western Stage

Edited by Jessica Goodman

Legenda (General Series)

Legenda

13 September 2022  •  210pp

ISBN: 978-1-781886-86-1 (hardback)  •  RRP £85, $115, €99

ISBN: 978-1-781886-90-8 (paperback, forthcoming)

ISBN: 978-1-781887-20-2 (JSTOR ebook)

Access online: Books@JSTOR

EnlightenmentFrenchDrama


Death in classical tragedy is an ending: a symbolic moment of catharsis, read by the audience according to theatrical and cultural tradition. Yet any stage death is also a non-ending: just one in a series of repeated (re)presentations, by an actor who will live (and die) again. Spanning six centuries and seven countries, this study considers how different dramatic authors have engaged with this tension, examining the representation of death as theme and practice; culturally-inflected symbol and never-ending ending. In tracing how Western authors since the sixteenth century have played with and against classical notions of endings and closure, these essays explore the potential and limits of the physical stage for confronting human mortality.

Jessica Goodman is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in French at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Contents:

1

Introduction
Jessica Goodman

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2

Death on Stage: A Never-Ending Ending
Jessica Goodman

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3

Killing Coligny: Staging the Admiral’s Death in Sixteenth-Century France and England
Jonathan Patterson

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4

Corneille’s Aggressive Suicides: Rodogune and Théodore
Joseph Harris

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5

‘’Tis Gallia’s hopeless Queen!’: Resurrecting the Dead in John Philip Kemble’s Macbeth (1794)
Sarah Burdett

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6

Crypts, Corpses, and Living Tombs on Stage during the French Revolution: Crises of Burial and Mourning
Cecilia Feilla

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7

Twilight for a Myth: Images of Death in Luigi Pirandello’s The Mountain Giants
Stefano Giannini

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8

The (Un)performability of Death and Violence on Stage
Dominic Glynn

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9

Rewriting Death on Stage: Two Recent British Productions of Lorca’s Rural Tragedies
María Bastianes

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10

Death of Tragedy: Modernist Drama and the Sense of a Non-Ending
Barry Murnane

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11

‘Much like at home’: The Quiet Eloquence of Death in Our Town (Thornton Wilder) and Eurydice (Sarah Ruhl)
Julie Vatain-Corfdir

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12

‘The whole point of living is preparing to die’: Dying into Death in Tragic Drama
Fiona Macintosh

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Bibliography entry:

Goodman, Jessica (ed.), Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage (Legenda, 2022)

First footnote reference: 35 Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage, ed. by Jessica Goodman (Legenda, 2022), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Goodman, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Goodman, Jessica (ed.). 2022. Last Scene of All: Representing Death on the Western Stage (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Goodman 2022: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Goodman 2022: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)


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