The gaze of horror: The primal configuration of the body in English Renaissance revenge tragedy

Scholarship on revenge tragedy is often concerned with the moral ambivalence of the revenge play. Too often in these studies the crisis of the revenger or state comes to signify the productions of an age that is more and more becoming morally ambivalent and removed from the talents of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. These studies are often confined to an ethical/aesthetic reading of this genre that begins circa 1587 and ends with the closing of the playhouses in 1642. The works of Fredson Bowers (1940), Elaine Prosser (1967), and Charles and Elaine Hallett (1980), being the most thorough and extensive studies of the genre, exemplify this trend in revenge tragedy criticism.;This thesis draws most expeditiously on psychoanalytic, feminist, and film studies. But the genre is not only obsessed with these classical spectacles of ghosts and corpses, but also with the spectacle of the female body. The thesis demonstrates how revenge tragedy stages the female body as a manifestation of a horror that is always already inherent in patriarchy. Women are essential to these plays, in which the female body is subjected to a gaze which reveals the intricate link between the horror (and pollution) of her body and the crisis of the patriarchal state.;This study approximates and manipulates Freud's analysis of the primal scene by dividing the evolution of revenge tragedy into four primal scenes: the primal encounter, sadism, hysteria, and castration. This thesis examines nine plays, giving particular attention to the role of the gaze in the formation of a horrific corporeal identity or of the primal configuration of the female body. One of the main objectives of the thesis is to bring revenge tragedy into a contemporary critical discourse by showing the involvement of the genre itself with things critical.;This dissertation begins with the well-known observation that revenge tragedy is obsessed with ghosts, skulls, mad persons, tortured persons, and an excessive quantity of whole or mutilated corpses. These are the memorable and desired horrific bodies of revenge tragedy. The term "horror", while having many of its common connotations, is inspired by Judith Kristeva's psycholinguistic study of abjection and horror.