Location: BSA 2016, Hull University

Death is a theatrical problem. Consider dying on-stage. How do you act death? You cannot perform it from experience, nor can you mimic the physical state for long without considerable personal danger. Yet the problem is larger than this: all performers are haunted by their mortality. How can any actor assert his or her own uniqueness, when it is the text that endures and not his or her body? This paper contends that the theatrical problem of death – in all its senses – is particularly acute with regard to Shakespeare.

First, Shakespeare’s own work seems to toy with the on-stage problem of death. The performance of Juliet drugged is indistinguishable from Romeo’s truly lifeless form; Hal mourns and Douglas ignores a prone Falstaff; and Hermione’s resurrection fascinates Leontes and the theatregoer alike as a convergence of art and death and life.

Second, while actors learn how to die in Shakespeare’s plays, they also have, for centuries, died in Shakespeare, disappearing from the public memory while the playwright grows ever more prominent. There are many reasons for this, but one at least is a Romantic emphasis on the reader’s imaginative engagement with Shakespeare’s text, an arena where one need not think of the actor’s fleshy, mortal presence, even though all those Shakespearean death scenes tell a rather different story.