To the Life: Resurrection and Presence in The Second Maiden's Tragedy, Hamlet, and Fat Ham

Abstract:

Occupying a central place in Jacques Derrida’s formulation of hauntology, Hamlet’s Ghost is familiar to contemporary performance theory, standing in for the secondariness and self-division that define dramatic representation. But there was another figure more emblematic of performance in the early modern English playhouse: the revenant. Examining the convention of resurrection as it was frequently deployed in this theatre, this essay uncovers the capacity of the revenant to generate presence, the visceral sense of theatrical immediacy first championed by Antonin Artaud. Following readings of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy and Hamlet, it concludes with a coda on James Ijames’s Fat Ham (2023), a play that adopts the early modern theatre’s resurrective praxis of presence.