Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible

by Celia R. Daileader

Celia Daileader explores the paradoxes of eroticism in early modern English drama, where women and their bodies (represented by boy actors) were materially absent and yet symbolically central. Accounting for the significance of the space offstage, where most sexual acts take place, Daileader looks to the suppression of religious drama in England and the resulting secularization of the stage. She draws together questions about sexuality and the sacred, in the bodies--of Christ and of woman--banished from the early modern English stage.

212 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 1998

Reviews

[Tom]

The central concept of this is that the difference between eroticism and pornography is that one shows the sex and the other obscures it, and that, because Renaissance drama has to obscure it (everything has to be suggested) the offstageness of the sex becomes the erotic moment. It is very persuasive, and Celia Daileader knows her stuff (and some renaissance plays I'd never even heard of are explored in depth).

There is too much Derrida, Lacan and Foucault in here for my liking (one's a charlatan, one's a trickster, and the other I just don't get), but what I did enjoy about this is that she is fine to disagree with herself, and is happy to undermine the argument she has just spent twenty pages arguing. It makes for a brilliant and mind-expanding experience.