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‘The carcasse speakes’: Vital corpses and prophetic remains in Thomas May’s Antigone

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Abstract

This article examines Thomas May’s Antigone (c. 1631), a play deeply engaged in making sense of somatomancy (body divination) in the context of violence and tragedy, in demonstrating the paradoxical vitality of the prophetic corpse (which occupies an indeterminate position between life and death, between being an active prophetic agent and a passive prophetic instrument), and in puzzling out the role of the mutilated body in producing tragic knowledge. In its reworking of Sophocles, Lucan, and other tragic source material, May’s tragedy brings to light a crucial triadic relationship between the violated body, knowledge, and tragic form, showing how the body – because of the violence to which it is submitted, and via the privileged knowledge it produces – propels tragic action.

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Notes

  1. May’s primary model is Robert Garnier’s French Antigone, ou la piété (1580), which itself draws on Sophocles, Seneca, and Statius. May also draws on English sources and, as I will show, on Lucan (Miola, 2014; Britland, 2006).

  2. Both examples are among those listed by Herr Trippa in Rabelais’ Tiers-Livre (1997, 269).

  3. See Floyd-Wilson (2010) Schoenfeldt (2004, 60–1), and Hoffman (2014).

  4. On the divining rod and debates about its agency, see Agricola (1556, 39–42).

  5. See Traister (1984), Waite (2003), and Friesen (2010), for example.

  6. On Lucan’s necromancy episode, see Santangelo (2015) and his bibliography on 182, n. 21.

  7. In the Latin, the inward parts [‘medullas’] are being washed of gore, not infused with it (Lucan, 1928, 6.667–9).

  8. All citations of May’s Antigone refer to May (1631) and signature number.

  9. On the early modern body in parts, see Hillman and Mazzio (1997). The prophetic body is in almost all cases a body in parts, since most somatomantic practices focus upon a specific member of the body.

  10. Antigone herself will occupy a similarly liminal position when buried alive.

  11. The corpse ‘not dead, not yet alive’ is fleshed-out at more length in Lucan’s text (1627, sig. L6r; 1928, 6.750–60), which describes the clotted blood growing warm, life’s heat mixing with cold death, etc.

  12. A deeper analysis of the ways in which human and animal bodies speak (or fail to speak) to each other in the context of prophecy could usefully be the focus of future study, given the important critical work on the subject (Raber, 2013; Fudge, 2006; Steel and McCracken, 2011; and others).

  13. See, inter alia, Thumiger (2013).

  14. See Bushnell (1988) and Kamerbeek (1965).

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  1. English Department, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Penelope Meyers Usher

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Usher, P.M. ‘The carcasse speakes’: Vital corpses and prophetic remains in Thomas May’s Antigone. Postmedieval 10, 82–94 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0114-2

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