This study takes a look at a controversial question: what do the acts and shows of grief performed in early modern drama tell us about the religious culture of the world in which they were historically staged? Drawing on performance studies, it provides detailed readings of play texts to explore the politics, pathologies and parodies of mourning.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements A Note on Citation Introduction PART 1: POLITICS OF MOURNING Heavens Hung with Black: Elizabethan Rituals of Mourning Remembrance of Things Past Memory Battles and Stage Laments Facing the Dead: Theatricality and Historiography PART 2: PATHOLOGIES OF MOURNING Well-made Partings and the Problem of Revenge Translating Tradition: The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus Foreign Funerals and Colonial Mimesis: Historical Exchanges Hamlet and the Virtue of Assumed Custom PART 3: PHYSIOLOGIES OF MOURNING Secrets and Secretions Tears and the Uncertain Signs of Inwardness Rhetoric and the Techniques of Emotional Engineering Women, Widows and Mimetic Weeping PART 4: PARODIES OF MOURNING Mock Laments: The Play and Peal of Death Round about her Tomb they go: Much Ado About Nothing Ralph Roister Doister and the Anxiety of Borrowed Rites Noting and Ghosting: What Stage Paradoies Do Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

TOBIAS DÖRING is Professor of English Literature at the Ludwig Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany, and review editor for the yearbook of the German Shakespeare Association. His previous books include Caribbean-English Passages (2002) and Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (2005).