Stages of dismemberment

"With a focus on visual representations of beheading, dismemberment, and mutilation in medieval and early modern drama, this study traces the impact of the Reformation on the semiotics of the body. What emerges from this exploration of violent spectacle is a sense of the complex and powerful ways in which the legacy of the pre-Reformation religious drama informed the commercial drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries." "This study has essentially two focuses, two stories to tell. One story traces the secularization, theatricalization, and uncanny returns of suppressed religious culture in early modern drama. The other story concerns the tendency of the theater to expose contingencies and gaps in politico-judicial practices of spectacular violence." "The investigation covers a broad range of plays dating from the fifteenth century to the closing of the theatres in 1642; however, three chapters are devoted to extensive analysis of single plays: R.B.'s Apius and Virginia, Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus."--Jacket.