Comparative Drama

I. Introduction

From Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1582-92) to John Ford's The Broken Heart (published in 1633), Renaissance tragedies bear witness to the histrionic appeal of onstage stabbing.¹ A particularly effective example figures at the end of Shakespeare's revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus (ca. 1593-94). When Titus exclaims, "witness my knife's sharp point" to announce his murder of Tamora and the consummation of his revenge, the imperative also draws attention to the knife paused in midair.² This creates a powerful moment of suspense that proclaims the violent encounter between knife and skin not only to Titus's victim, but also to [End Page 139] playgoers.³ Shakespeare's playing with the audience's excitement for and enjoyment of such violence highlights the early modern fascination with theatrical skin penetration and the generic expectations of tragedy.⁴ The popularity of onstage stabbings throughout the Renaissance provoked Stephen Gosson to include "murther ... violent by sworde" among the faults of tragedy (Plays Confuted in Fiue Actions, 1582); more elaborately, I. G. (John Greene?) differentiated between "killing, hewing, stabbing, dagger-drawing, fighting, butchery" in his Refutation of the Apology for Actors (1615).⁵ Although skin penetration was thus perceived as a defining aspect of tragedy by Renaissance writers,⁶ it has received little critical attention so far. This is especially surprising as over the past fifteen years, literary and dramatic criticism has explored the significance of the Renaissance body, dead and alive, in the drama and poetry of the early modern period.⁷ Also, in 2003, Steven Connor published The Book of Skin, a cultural-philosophical examination that elaborates on the historical and contemporaneous implications of skin; among others, he discusses the term complexion in Shakespeare's plays.⁸

One reason for the neglect of skin penetration in drama criticism may be that stabbing is only one of many possible ways to die in Renaissance tragedies. Dramatists were indeed particularly resourceful in continuously inventing spectacular and gruesome deaths, which also involved poison, death traps, unfortunate accidents, and mutilation. I contend that skin penetration warrants a detailed analysis because its histrionic onstage representation illustrates critical notions of the workings of tragedy and reflects early modern views of the body's vulnerability. The precariousness of skin as the fragile boundary between the interior and the exterior is perhaps best illustrated by the early modern physician Helkiah Crooke, who remarks that "there is betwixt vs and our dissolution, not an inch boord, but a tender skinne, which the slenderest violence euen the cold aire is able to slice through."⁹ Engaging in the interaction between skin and violence, and the discourses of tragedy and the body, this article assesses the representation of skin penetration with regard to its theatrical and dramatic aspects. It addresses the performative opening of the carnal envelope from the vantage point of stage pragmatics, before focusing on the way skin penetration was thematized and enacted in Renaissance drama. This article also expands upon the relevance of medical imagery, [End Page 140] more precisely that of surgery, in protracted stabbings. What makes such a discussion especially valid is the use of surgical metaphors of skin penetration in theoretical assessments of tragedy, which suggests a conceptual continuity between the theory and practice of drama.

II. Staging Skin Penetration

From the Elizabethan to the Caroline age, tragedies abounded with sensationalist displays of blood and violence, which were in no small part indebted to the influence of Seneca.¹⁰ This predilection for bloody scenes was shared by playgoers and dramatists alike: to the former, it was a much-anticipated spectacle, to the latter, an integral part of their artistic vision and commercial feasibility.¹¹ The efficacy of these scenes depended on the interaction among three main performative factors, namely, the actor's use of gestures, posture, and voice; the use of stage properties and trickery; and the dramatic text.¹²

The actor, as the "primary agent of meaning,"¹³ the first in this chain, has at hand a studied repertoire of paralinguistic signs, such as body movements, gestures, and miming,¹⁴ with which to play or, in Renaissance terminology, to "personate" a role.¹⁵ When necessary, he can use his physique to imitate the sensation of skin penetration and subsequent bleeding, thus mapping his own body onto the body of the character he portrays. Early modern writings corroborate the efficacy of such skillful acting. In Pierce Pennilesse (1592), Thomas Nashe recounts an actor's personation of Talbot in Henry VI, claiming that he performed so well that "in the Tragedian that represents his person," the spectators "imagine[d] they beh[e]ld him fresh bleeding."¹⁶ The sheer physical presence of the actor's body and its dramatic movement on the stage are hence directly responsible for the intense experience of the audience.¹⁷ The sixteenth-century intellectual John Bereblock similarly underscores the impact of onstage fighting in his eyewitness account of Richard Edwards's Palaemon and Arcyte, as performed by students at Oxford in 1566, when he describes the final battle scene: "at the third onset, when not only the movements of their bodies and the parrying of their swords, but even their wounds and blood are visible to everybody, Palaemon sinks to the ground and lies prostrate before his victorious cousin."¹⁸ This testimony is noteworthy in [End Page 141] that it documents the actors' successful exploitation of gesture, posture, and miming, and its impact on the author's lively imagination.

Bereblock's reminiscences also testify to the audience's intense experience of theatrical skin penetration, which is here represented by blood and the semblance of wounds. Such representations of onstage violence were rendered viable by the use of stage properties, as is attested by the frequent display of threatening daggers or swords,¹⁹ of wounded bodies, severed body parts, or hands so bloody that "all great Neptune's ocean" (Macbeth, 2.2.59) would not wash them clean.²⁰ Yet how exactly blood was staged is difficult to determine from written evidence, as a recent roundtable discussion at the Globe Theatre has shown.²¹ One of the extant manuscript plots of Renaissance plays does, however, suggest that violent acts were staged rather realistically. The marginalia to the plot of a dumb show enacted at the beginning of act 3 of George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar (published in 1594)²² specify that "3 vials of blood and a sheep's gather"²³ be used as hand props for a triple murder sequence. Andrew Gurr similarly argues that the actors used bladders or glasses filled with pig's blood²⁴ or sponges of vinegar, which were hidden in the actors' armpits or under their clothing and could be squeezed to good and ghastly effect.²⁵ Such substitutes for human blood were vital for creating the theatrical semblance of a genuine piercing of the characters' skin.

Evidence for staging techniques can also be gathered from other contemporary sources. As Farah Karim-Cooper argues persuasively, the performance tricks ascribed by Reginald Scot to fake witches and magicians in his treatise The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) may have also been used in the theater.²⁶ Among other tricks, Scot describes a dagger whose blade can slip into the hilt, sponges filled with blood or wine, fake bellies stuffed with "a gut or bladder bloud," as well as "dough kneded with bullocks bloud" to be placed around the performer's neck.²⁷ Quite differently, the stage directions to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy suggest that red ink may have also been used to signify blood.²⁸

Playwrights augmented the effect of the visual spectacle or compensated for the lack of more convincing special effects by using a language that described the different aspects of skin penetration, namely, its exterior manifestation in the issuing forth of blood, the precise moment [End Page 142] of the incision, and its possible reaching into the characters' interiors. John Ford's Love's Sacrifice (published as a quarto in 1633) evinces the measures playwrights would take to verbalize the outer effect of skin penetration particularly well. At the end of the play, Phillippo Caraffa, Duke of Pavia, stabs himself, and exclaims,

        Sprightful flood,Run out in rivers! O that these thick streamsCould gather head and make a standing pool,That jealous husbands here might bathe in blood.So; I grow sweetly empty. All the pipesOf life unvessel life.²⁹

The Duke's death wallows in the bloody sensationalism characteristic of Caroline tragedy and exemplifies the effective interaction between the emotional language of agony and the performance of violence. The impact of the passage depends on metaphor and hyperbole: as the process of bleeding is described as the violent emission of vital fluid, which in Phillippo's fantasy flows from his veins ("the pipes / Of life") into a standing pool, this sequence stages the opened body as a gruesome spectacle.³⁰ The performative deixis "these thicke streames" serves here as a cue for the actor's gestures³¹ and draws attention directly to the blood, which is the performative trace of the Duke's self-inflicted skin penetration. The vivid description of the wound punctuates the onstage presentation of a bloody scenario featuring a dagger, stage blood, and the actor's body, and prompts the actor to make the death of his character the emotive apex of the play.³² Together these individual elements create a powerful theatrical moment of intense suffering that provokes horror and commiseration at the same time. Hence, playtext and performance interact to great effect in order to create the semblance of cutaneous incision and to add to the visceral impact of the scene.

In some cases, vivid dramatic language evokes the actual penetration of the skin and describes the wounds made by these incisions. A good example of such complex textualized theatricality is the protracted suicide sequence at the end of Ford's Spartan tragedy The Broken Heart. In this scene, Orgilus is sentenced to death after his bloody revenge on Ithocles [End Page 143] has been found out. As a true Spartan, he chooses to be his own executioner. He performs this task standing up, after he has bound his arms with cloth, supporting himself on two staffs, while the other characters watch him:

Orgilus:

Thus I show cunning
In opening of a vein too full, too lively.

Armostes:

Desperate courage!

Orgilus:

      Honourable infamy.

Lemophil:

I tremble at the sight.

Groneas:

Would I were loose.

Bassanes:

It sparkles like a lusty wine new broached;
The vessel must be sound from which it issues.
Grasp hard this other stick. I'll be as nimble.
But prithee look not pale. Have at 'ee; stretch out
Thine arm with vigour and unshook virtue.
Good.

(5.2.121-30)

Ford orchestrates this scene with Orgilus and Bassanes carrying the main action, while Armostes, Lemophil, and Groneas watch in horror as sometime stand-ins for the audience.³³ The immediacy of the bystanders' reactions bridges the gap between the artificiality of the acting process and the authenticity of Orgilus's experience, thereby mediating the onstage action for the audience.³⁴ Assigning no emotive speeches to the self-executing revenger (after all, he is Spartan),³⁵ Ford instead emphasizes the surgical precision of Orgilus's incision, thereby mapping the image of venesection, the main method of bloodletting, onto the tragic hero's self-execution.³⁶ Orgilus's self-diagnosis that his vein is "too full, too lively" underlines the medical implications of his suicide: his veins need to be drained because they contain overheated blood.³⁷ The heavily performative language describes two actual incisions and their effect, even demonstrating the exact moment of entry, thereby conveying to the audience the semblance of suffering and bleeding.³⁸ Orgilus's demonstrative statement, "Thus I show cunning / In opening of a vein," and Ithocles' imperative, "Have at 'ee," are here the verbal doubles of the performative skin penetrations. At the same time, the description textualizes the incision as the violent but calculated transgression of the outside into the vulnerable interior of the body, which is here further [End Page 144] anatomized by a cluster of terms referring to veins and blood.³⁹ Through the performative use of the dagger, this critical theatrical moment stages human skin by simultaneously making and marring its function as corporeal boundary.

The surgical, or "anatomical," undercurrent that informs the depiction of Orgilus's death comes to the fore more fully in those cases in which the dramatis personae tease their perpetrators into penetrating their skin to probe their interiors. Two short segments, one from John Webster's The White Devil (performed and published in 1612), the other again from Ford's The Broken Heart, display the playwrights' explicit engagement with the surgical discourse that encroached upon the arts due to the dissemination of medical knowledge.⁴⁰ In the first example, Flamineo, the scheming villain in Webster's White Devil, while tied to a pillar urges Lodovico to stab him again:

    Flamineo:            O what blade is't?A Toledo, or an English fox?⁴¹I ever thought a cutler⁴² should distinguishThe cause of my death, rather than a doctor.Search my wound deeper, tent it with the steelThat made it.

(5.6.233-38)

In the second example, taken from Ford's The Broken Heart, Ithocles, trapped by Orgilus in a trick chair,⁴³ taunts the revenger with the same adhortation:⁴⁴

    Ithocles:            Strike home; a courageAs keen as thy revenge shall give it welcome.But prithee faint not; if the wound close up,Tent it with double force, and search it deeply.

(4.4.39-42)

Both characters, now the victims of their opponents' superior planning, have become immobilized and, thus fixed, comment on their demise by employing "tenting" as a metaphor,⁴⁵ which refers to the medical procedure of probing a wound. A tent, Latin tenta (from medieval Latin tentare, to try), is a surgical instrument of various shapes, also known as [End Page 145] a specillum or mela in Renaissance handbooks, which is used to examine wounds or to cleanse them.⁴⁶ Here the figurative language of surgery is mapped onto the actual stage performance: the lethal weapons are turned into surgical instruments used to probe tissue and to find the cause of a malady. The metaphor thereby marks a discontinuity between the action and its verbal representation, for Flamineo and Ithocles take on the role of patients bound before a painful, invasive procedure. Depth is also at issue. The use of the words "deeper" and "deeply" in these passages suggests that the characters, both guilty parties in their respective plays, boldly ask for the experience of physical interiority.⁴⁷ In the larger context of the play, this could be taken as a metaphor for searching their inwardness,⁴⁸ which is corroborated by the traditional causal nexus between inner anatomy and the corrosive impact of moral corruption.⁴⁹ The passages therefore not only engage with the invasive surgery of tenting wounds, but also relate to the discourse of vicious and diseased inwardness characteristic of seventeenth-century tragedy.⁵⁰ Although such core-finding is ultimately short-circuited in the context of a sensationalist killing, it momentarily stages the body of the malefactor as a diseased, because morally depraved, entity. One could indeed take a leap from these spectacles to the overall context of the plays, which in their entirety stage the symptoms of corruption and pry open their sources at the same time. Hence the skin penetration in these two instances suggests a surgical procedure that exposes and removes the source of evil from the worlds of the plays.

III. Skin Penetration, Renaissance Literary Criticism, and the Question of Genre

The significance of breaching the carnal envelope is corroborated by evidence from contemporaneous dramatic criticism, which at times resorts to images of surgery and skin penetration. Sir Philip Sidney uses such an image in his Apology for Poetry (published in 1595) to describe the workings of actio and affectus in "high and excellent Tragedy." According to him, this dramatic genre, which he thought best represented in England by Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc (1581-82), "openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue."⁵¹ Sidney here sees the benefit of tragedy in its performance of a quasi-pathological [End Page 146] surgery that can penetrate the tissue of wounded skin and probe the actual wound, thereby laying open the inner source of the symptom. However, drama does not eradicate the corruption covered with tissue. Rather, it poignantly demonstrates to the spectators the source of the malady through theatrical performance:⁵² like a surgeon, tragedy is a mediating agency that gives ocular proof of the corruption of kings and tyrants.⁵³ The actio of histrionic exposure is hence critically geared toward affecting playgoers. As Sidney explains, echoing Aristotle's Poetics, tragedy, through such demonstrations, makes "tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours," and "stir[s] the affects of admiration and commiseration" in the audience; he illustrates the effect of tragedy by referring to Alexander of Pherae's emotional reaction to Euripides' Troades, which moved the tyrant to tears.⁵⁴ Tragedy hence uses the "sweet violence"⁵⁵ of histrionic exposure to conjure up an emotive effect that triggers catharsis in the audience, a method that places the genre firmly in the tradition of didactic suasion.

Sidney was not the first writer to deploy surgical imagery in drama criticism. Shortly before him, Stephen Gosson used a similar cluster of terms in his antitheatrical manifesto The Schoole of Abuse (1579). In the dedicatory epistle to Sidney, Gosson chooses medical terms to explain his didactic telos:

A good Physition when the disease cannot bee cured within, thrusteth the corruption out in the face, and deliuereth his Patient to the Chirurgion: Though my skill in Physicke bee small, I haue some experience in these maladyes, which I thrust out with my penne too euery mans viewe, yeelding the ranke fleshe to the Chirurgions knife, and so ridde my handes of the cure, for it passeth my cunning to heale them priuily.⁵⁶

Gosson here likens his role to that of a doctor but explicitly differentiates between the physician, who diagnoses the physical cause of a malady by cutting into skin, and the barber-surgeon, who removes the actual inflammation.⁵⁷ Accordingly, the pen is to the writer of the pamphlet what the knife is to the physician, namely, a surgical, analytical instrument that can probe the cause of an infection in order to expose an inner corruption or depravity. Gosson's effective use of this central analogy illustrates his twofold strategy, as he damns the vices of the theater by [End Page 147] resorting to surgical terms charged with moral meaning ("corruption," "maladyes," "ranke flesh") and by making them public ("thrusteth ... out in the face," "too euery mans viewe"). The two examples taken from Gosson and Sidney, while both depicting the performative exposition of hidden causes, hence interact differently with the drama of the late sixteenth century: while the former uses the metaphor to illustrate his laying bare the aberrations of drama, the latter uses it to show the desired effects of good tragedy.

The anonymous author of A Warning for Fair Women, a domestic tragedy first published in 1599, goes one decisive step further by having Tragedie herself appear to guide playgoers through the events of the play. Not only does she carry a whip in one hand, a knife in the other, to represent her taste for blood and violence (induction, st. d.); she also comments explicitly on the function of the tragic action in a metatheatrical epilogue, whose beginning is especially significant for the present discussion: "Here are the launces that have sluic'd forth sinne, / And ript the venom'd ulcer of foule lust" (2718-19).⁵⁸ In these lines, Dame Tragedie uses surgical terminology to illustrate the moral of the play. She explicitly likens the retributive justice characteristic of tragedy to invasive surgery, which cuts into skin to let out infected blood and expunge pustules. Tragedy's capacity to cure through skin penetration goes beyond Sidney's notion of tragedy as the mere display of inner corruption and Gosson's distinction between the duties of the physician and the barber-surgeon. The passage establishes a close connection between lethal and remedial skin penetration, partly because the term lance is ambivalent: in early modern usage, it not only referred to a weapon, but was also synonymous with lancet, a medical tool used to open skin and abscesses.⁵⁹ Hence these lines refer to onstage stabbing as much as to invasive surgery, with skin penetration as the common ground between them.⁶⁰ By blending the emotive language of moral didacticism with that of surgery, the unknown author of A Warning for Fair Women characterizes the world of his play as a diseased patient who can only be cured by an operation and thus establishes onstage skin penetration as the central image for the remedial workings of this representative tragedy, in both the play world and the world of the playgoers. In this context, the knife that Tragedie holds in her hand points beyond mere bloodshed to the quasi-surgical performance of tragedy. [End Page 148]

The notion of tragedy as surgical skin penetration is supported by evidence from Shakespeare's Hamlet, which profoundly elaborates on the pragmatic aspects of staging a play as well as on the theater's potency to draw unpremeditated reactions from its audiences. It is Hamlet's own immediate response to the Player King's recital of "Priam's slaughter" (in act 2, scene 2) that prompts him to stage The Murder of Gonzago to catch his uncle off-guard, in an effort to prove the Ghost correct and Claudius guilty:⁶¹

    I'll have these playersPlay something like the murder of my fatherBefore mine uncle. I'll observe his looks;I'll tent him to the quick. If a do blench,I know my course.

(2.2.590-94)

In this short excerpt from the closing speech of act 2, Hamlet's ruminations culminate surprisingly in a metaphor that resorts to the idea of invasive surgery that probes the source of a malady.⁶² The use of medical imagery is a fitting choice for a play set in an Elsinore festering with injustice and intrigue, and cluttered with references to disease and corruption. Hamlet sees his task as advancing toward the most sensitive point in his uncle's conscience, where he can trigger a violent and immediate response,⁶³ in analogy to the physician who uses a tenting knife to probe beneath the skin to reach the painful source of the patient's inflammation. This task recalls the surgeon opening and pointing to diseased tissue, the disease here being Claudius's murder of old King Hamlet, which also images forth the new king's thoroughgoing viciousness.⁶⁴ As a revenger laying bare Claudius's crime, Hamlet is effectively a tragedian exposing vice with surgical precision. This notion is informed by the traditional dichotomy between a "socially visible exterior and an invisible personal interiority,"⁶⁵ whose uncovering constitutes a significant part of the dramatic action.⁶⁶ Like Sidney, Hamlet subscribes to the theatrical idea of a good and effective tragedy that successfully demonstrates the rotten inwardness of a ruler, thereby—and this compares well with Sidney—making "tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours."⁶⁷ Hence the performance of tragedy can accomplish such reactions only if it is tantamount to a surgical operation: it has to hurt to be effective. [End Page 149]

The image of skin penetration defines tragedy as a procedure that probes the surface of man's outer wholeness to reach his inner degeneracy and during that process sets off a visceral experience in the audience. Hence the lancing suggests a catharsis,⁶⁸ a cleansing of emotions apparent in Alexander of Pherae's and King Claudius's unpremeditated reactions to the tragedies they attended. The notion of cleansing as and through skin penetration in tragedy fits the concept of catharsis (or its early modern permutation) because it also derives from a medical term that denotes the excretion or emission of noxious substances to regain physiological equilibrium in the human body.⁶⁹ This suggests the role of blood in humoral physiology: according to Galenic medicine, illness results from the disproportionate mixture of the four humors; keeping the humors in balance is hence the prerequisite for physical and mental health, which can be achieved through the emission of excess fluid. Passion and anger, the symptoms of an overtly sanguine disposition, could be cured by ridding the body of surplus blood.⁷⁰ As, moreover, all four humors were "comprehended in the mass of blood," as Robert Burton put it in his Anatomy of Melancholy,⁷¹ letting blood could likewise have a more generally remedial effect.⁷²

In a recent article, Tanya Pollard has shown that tragic characters regard revenge as a therapeutic operation that offers remedy for the suffering they experience due to an act of injustice, for example, the death of a loved one.⁷³ The revengers' letting the blood of their victims to cleanse themselves is analogous to the retaliation in the world of the plays:⁷⁴ as raging anger caused by excess blood brings the emotions onstage into imbalance, so does letting the blood of revenger and revenged alike cleanse the body and re-establish harmony among the humors.⁷⁵ Such violent onstage purgation ultimately affects playgoers, who, by experiencing fear and pity at the sight of violence and suffering, undergo a cathartic process. Hence bloodletting is not just a metaphor for onstage stabbing and bleeding as inevitable properties of Renaissance tragedy;⁷⁶ the coincidence between the representation of skin penetration as effective onstage violence and its use as a medical metaphor to describe the diagnostic and affective power a well-calculated tragedy exerts on its audience establishes catharsis as the common ground between the practice and theory of tragedy. The imagery of surgical skin penetration [End Page 150] in Renaissance dramatic criticism thus coincides with the programmatic breaching of the carnal envelope in contemporary tragedies. The core and cure of tragedy lie in violating the body's integument, be it literal or metaphorical: what kills the dramatic characters cleanses the audience.

The hypothesis that the connection between theatrical presentation and its underlying theory inheres in the dramatic genre is borne out by a look at comedy and tragicomedy. Comedy, as the genre of mirth positioned at the opposite end of the dramatic spectrum, does not traditionally contain stabbings of any kind.⁷⁷ This holds true even for those comedies in which skin penetration constitutes a major theme. In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (ca. 1596-98), for instance, Antonio seals a bond that grants Shylock a pound of his flesh if he cannot repay three thousand ducats after three months.⁷⁸ Although Shylock whets his knife and Antonio bares his chest to fulfill his pledge in the trial scene (act 4, scene 1), Portia's intrigue averts the merchant's fate and inflicts punishment on Shylock: in comedies, even if they seemingly breach the boundary toward tragedy, the carnal envelope may be threatened, but never opened. Accordingly, while Renaissance literary criticism conceives of tragic writers as surgeons, comic poets are physicians administering "pills to purge, / And make" the members of the audience "fit for faire societies," as Asper explains in Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour (1600).⁷⁹ Just as comedy must not cut into the skin of its protagonists, so too the medical procedure illustrating the workings of comedy must leave the body unharmed. In this way, literary criticism observes a genre-related decorum in its use of medical metaphors to defend both dramatic genres on the grounds of their remedial, which is to say, didactic, qualities.⁸⁰

Matters are more complex with tragicomedy.⁸¹ In his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (1608-9), John Fletcher famously explicates that tragicomedy "is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie."⁸² Accordingly, representing skin penetration is no taboo in the world of tragicomedy. John Webster's The Devil's Law-Case (ca. 1619) is a case in point, as it contains the kind of "hewing, stabbing, dagger-drawing, fighting" that I. G. criticized in tragedies, though none of it is lethal.⁸³ Two scenes exemplify the play's proximity to tragedy particularly well. The first of these is the [End Page 151] duel in act 2, scene 2, between Ercole and Contarino, which leaves the opponents almost fatally injured,⁸⁴ the second Romelio's assassination of the still wounded Contarino in act 3, scene 2. The latter scene is especially pertinent to the present argument, as it contemplates the fragility of human skin and the fatal effect of minute cutaneous incisions.

By act 3, scene 2, the wound Ercole has inflicted on Contarino has started to fester so close to the latter's vital organs that the surgeons refuse to operate on him: "he's so weak, to make incision / By the orifice were present death to him" (3.2.26-27).⁸⁵ Contarino's penetrated skin becomes here the onstage manifestation of Webster's writing within the tradition of tragedy and the surgical imagery associated with it. This impression is at first corroborated by Romelio's attempt to hasten Contarino's death by stabbing him. In an extended soliloquy in which he prepares for the murder, Romelio defines skin as an exceedingly fragile physical boundary and stresses the deadly effect of his weapon of choice, a "desperate stiletto" (3.2.86).⁸⁶ While explaining that Caesar's soul was "let forth / At a hole no bigger than the incision / Made for a wheal" (3.2.97-99), the villain draws a significant comparison between Caesar's violent death and the surgical skin penetration that removes a pustule. As Romelio reflects here on the close proximity between killing and healing, or, to be more precise, on the inherent lethal threat of invasive surgery, his soliloquy is informed by the nexus between the medical and tragic discourses outlined above. As Contarino is the obstacle Romelio has to remove in order to achieve his aim, namely, to marry his sister Jolenta to Ercole, the villain obliquely conceives of Contarino as the pustule he has to excise to become physically whole. It is at this moment that Webster deals the play's central surprise. While stabbing Contarino (3.2.108, st. d.), Romelio unwittingly lances the infected wound and saves the nobleman's life:

    [First surgeon:] His steel has lighted in the former wound,And made free passage for the congealed blood;Observe in what abundance it deliversThe putrefaction.

(3.2.148-51)

Ironically, the stiletto, which Romelio has presented as an "engine" of death at the beginning of the scene (3.2.89), now serves as an instrument [End Page 152] of healing,⁸⁷ a peripety that inverts Romelio's observation that medical incision is close to stabbing: in notable contrast to the tenting metaphor in tragedy, the villain here literally kills to become a surgeon.⁸⁸ That Romelio's unwitting cure recalls instructions from surgical handbooks grounds his action in the methods of early modern medicine⁸⁹ and enhances the dramatic irony of his attempted murder.

The central reversal of the scene produces a forceful impact on the audience: unsuspecting of the outcome, they first undergo a full catharsis brought about by an apparent death but, surprised by the unexpected peripety that heals Contarino, experience wonder and relief.⁹⁰ Hence playgoers are involved in a dual performance that exposes Romelio's moral corruption but also gestures toward the remedial potential of tragicomic action, both for the characters and playgoers. Webster's use of skin penetration underlines that both tragicomedy and surgery play with death to illustrate the affective workings of this mixed genre as implied in Fletcher's definition.⁹¹ Contarino's body thus becomes the theatrical manifestation of the lancing metaphor employed by Dame Tragedie in the epilogue of A Warning for Fair Women, where she elaborates on the tragic action as a means of washing out sin by opening the body. That such healing happens onstage in Webster's tragicomedy underscores both its similarity to and its difference from tragedy proper: as The Devil's Law-Case features onstage representations of skin penetration that bring its characters to the very brink of death but not beyond, it evidences the middle position tragicomedy takes between the bitter medicine of comedy and the sweet violence of tragedy. Read within the context of dramatic theory and theatrical practice in the early modern period, Romelio's failed assassination emerges as the playwright's metadramatic statement on the nature of tragicomedy, which cuts to heal characters and playgoers alike.

IV. Concluding Remarks

"Is my body then / But penetrable flesh?"—Bussy D'Ambois's revelatory insight into the common violability and mortality of the human body at the end of George Chapman's eponymous play exemplifies the precarious nature of skin in early modern drama: the wounds inflicted by fake onstage violence mark the carnal envelope as a potentially dysfunctional surface [End Page 153] that can be easily violated and penetrated.⁹² Hence theatrical performance does not conceive of skin only as a text to be read, as for instance in the many references to character complexion, but also as a layer that can be pierced to image forth man's vulnerability and transience. Read against this backdrop, skin penetration constitutes a significant verbal and performative, as well as critical, topos in Renaissance tragedy. As part of the sensationalist repertoire of tragedy, it has a visceral impact on the audience, guaranteed by the interplay of theatrical and dramatic codes as it links stage practices that present external signs with textual strategies that evoke what is materially absent yet symbolically present: the actor's full exploitation of gestures, postures, and miming, as well as the use of stage properties and trickery, amalgamates with the vivid depiction of stabbing in the dramatic text, which draws attention to the incision, the blood, and the piercing of the characters' interiors, to create a powerful moment of pathos.

In depicting such stabbings, Renaissance playwrights frequently resort to surgical imagery: while Orgilus's suicide is staged as a bloodletting, Flamineo and Ithocles provoke their enemies to probe their wounds as if they were surgeons using a tenting knife. The imagery of surgical skin penetration also informs dramatic criticism, where it serves a twofold goal: on the one hand, it demonstrates tragedy's task to lay bare human vices and aberrations with surgical precision, which is influenced by the corrosive impact of moral corruption on man's inner anatomy; on the other, it illustrates the cathartic experience playgoers undergo at the sight of such extreme suffering. The defining aesthetics of the dramatic genre thus determines the choice of critical metaphors: as the tragic performance represents a breach of the physical boundary, so dramatic criticism conceives of tragedy as a prying beneath the skin. Comedy, on the other hand, works like medicine because it teaches a lesson and leaves the body intact. Between the surgery of tragedy and the medicine of comedy, tragicomedy takes a firm middle position. Webster, following Fletcher's definition that tragicomedy brings its characters close to death but not beyond, uses skin penetration in The Devil's Law-Case to illustrate that both surgery and tragicomedy play with death: when Romelio harms Contarino's body to heal it unwittingly, his action becomes an in nuce representation of the experience of wonder that lies at the very heart of the aesthetics of tragicomedy. [End Page 154]

In light of the present argument, Dame Tragedie's entering the stage bearing a knife in A Warning for Fair Women is not only a theatrical device announcing that "murther ... violent by sword" is to ensue, but a programmatic emblem demonstrating the very workings of tragedy. Since the sensory image of cutting into skin blends the actio of the play with its intended affectus, the "bitter" onstage action culminating in skin penetration is reflected in the "sweet violence" that invasive tragedy exerts on the spectator. In this framework of forces, the personating actors and the audience commune in a joint experiential, visceral moment that is exemplified by violent death through "killing, hewing, stabbing, dagger-drawing, fighting, butchery."