Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
English
Major Professor
Nicole Discenza, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Emily Jones, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Patrick Finelli, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Thomas Williams, Ph.D.
Keywords
death, allegory, theatre, religion, salvation
Abstract
Historian Albrecht Classen’s contention that “the culture of death . provides us with a measuring stick for human society at large” is particularly illuminating when analyzing death and Christian salvation near the religious chasm of the Reformation divide. My study focuses on reckoning as it is illustrated in late medieval and early modern allegorical English drama. The Christian belief in a soul’s redemption or damnation after death was preceded by a crucial supernatural happening, a reckoning. Informed by God’s judgment, this event became the crux of the ars moriendi (the art of dying) tradition that permeated medieval and early modern religious culture and became a reflection of the shifting religious climate in England. I argue that although the late medieval and pre-Reformation death-as-performance is more about the efficacy of the final moments, and the early modern and post-Reformation death-as-performance is more about illustrating the consequences of immoral living, the drama of reckoning endures as an inherently dramatic performance of dying with the same desired outcome: the performativity remains steadfast in a culture characterized by religious fluidity. In looking at the late medieval Castle of Perseverance and Everyman, I illustrate how dying well is privileged through imagery and appropriation. Similarly, my analysis of William Wager’s Enough is as Good as a Feast and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus reveals a focus on living well through theological leanings, socioeconomic contexts, and complexities of character. Ultimately, my study is a chronological exploration of how these plays dramatize reckoning, revealing a unifying parallel in human agency and a unique relationship between perceptions of the nature of sin, death, and eternal life.
Scholar Commons Citation
Daniels, Spencer M., "The Drama of Last Things: Reckoning in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama" (2024). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10178
