This Mortal Coil examines the relationship between tragedy and embodiment, focusing on the use of psychosomatic description to inform 'character' and through character, genre. The underlying premise is that early modern English dramatists not only conceived of their characters as creatures of flesh and blood, but rendered them obsessively aware of their humoral and mental constitution and the intricate relationship between the two. They are acutely responsive to being male, female, disabled, black, old, obese, melancholic, choleric, epileptic, disabled, and generally 'mortal' in all its dimensions. Such self-consciousness is shown to be born to a large degree of prevailing social attitudes, and the tendency to assess others in terms of bodily constitution, complexion, or normative expectation. While neo-classical critics insisted on canons of semantic and somatic 'decorum' that emphasized the distinction between tragedy and comedy demanded by Aristotle, popular dramatists sought rather to explore the intersection of the two genres through the medium of its enactment, freeing themselves from the prohibition against allowing anything 'low' in diction or gesture to contaminate the supposed dignity of tragic characterization. Instead, reading tragic and comic bodies as mutual palimpsests, they allowed the inevitable indecorums of the humoral body to take centre stage, even allowing heroic protagonists to assume 'antic dispositions' and 'low' disguises. Consistent attention is paid to classical precedent, as ancient drama provides the models, and ancient criticism the theories, that informed early modern thinking and practice. The first part examines the critical and theatrical contexts in which key concepts such as body, action, character, and catharsis were understood, while the second explores these issues through the work of a wide range of popular dramatists, including Marlowe, Kyd, Middleton, Marston, Chapman, Shakespeare, Webster, and Ford. These dramatists developed to the utmost the art of finding the mind's construction not just in the face but the whole body, employing 'comic' business as an integral component of, rather than a 'relief' from, tragedy.
