Overview

What does queer death have to do with early modern England? This collection interrogates the profoundly queer, strange, excessive, camp and uncanny dimensions of death in early modern English literary, theatrical, and material archives. Contributors provide new insights on death by using the analytic tools of queer theory, via non-binary analyses of gender, sexuality, humanity, nature, embodiment, and temporality. Turning queer analysis to questions of death allows it to be understood as non-dualist, non-linear, a-teleological, and fruitfully muddled. The essays illuminate early modern experiences before the ascendancy of Cartesian dualism occluded alternative understandings of death. They also speak to a present and a future where many received paradigms no longer hold. Key dramatic texts from the early modern period, including The Duchess of Malfi, The Alchemist, The Spanish Tragedy, The Winter’s Tale, Richard III, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, show the expansive possibilities of death and dying in a queer mode. Further essays consider queer dimensions of death in lyric poetry, animal husbandry, typology, and Shakespearean authorship. These approaches make clear why readers interested in queerness and death should immerse themselves in the cultural life of sixteenth and seventeenth century England.

Full Product Details

Author:   Lauren Shohet (Villanova University, USA) ,  Christine Varnado (State University of New York Buffalo State University, USA)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   The Arden Shakespeare
ISBN:  

9781350458642

ISBN 10:   1350458643
Pages:   264
Publication Date:   18 September 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  

Table of Contents

List of Figures Notes on Contributors 1. Introduction: What's queer about early modern death? Christine Varnado (State University of New York-Buffalo, USA) and Lauren Shohet (Villanova University, USA) 2. (Un-)/Dead again: dying and undying in The Duchess of Malfi Penelope Meyers Usher (Barnard College, USA) 3. John Donne and the queer wit of early modern death Miriam Jacobson (University of Georgia, USA) 4. How to laugh at death and why (or, “Pyramus and Thisbe” as suicidal camp) Drew Daniel (Johns Hopkins University, USA) 5. Queer uses of disease, death, and other crises: a jugaad reading of The Alchemist Tripthi Pillai (Coastal Carolina University, USA) 6. “Some part of his funerals”: playing the part of the departed in Nicholas Udall’s Roister Doister Joseph Kidney (Stanford University, USA) 7. Surviving Richard III James Y. Mulder (Bentley University, USA) 8. Baited bulls and crammed capons: queer animal death in early modern England Karen Raber (University of Mississippi, USA) 9. The Queerness of typology Lauren Shohet (Villanova University, USA) 10. Queering the death of the author: temporal multiplicity and Shakespeare’s literary authorship Wolfram Keller (Free University of Berlin, Germany) Afterword: “And is this the end?” “Oh, no, there is no end” Alice Dailey (Villanova University, USA) Index

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Author Information

Lauren Shohet is Professor of English, Villanova University, USA. Christine Varnado is Associate Professor of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, USA.

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