Book chapter

Macbeth and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament : Blood and Belief in Early English Stagecraft

    2018
Published in:
  • Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400-1700 / Lander, Bonnie ; Decamp, Eleanor. - University of Pennsylvania Press. - 2018, p. 183-197
English This essay discusses blood as 'proof' in the late fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and in Shakespeare's Macbeth. In Croxton, a bloody severed hand becomes a mark of the guilt of Jew Jonathas in torturing the eucharistic wafer; both Macbeth and his wife repeatedly allude to the ease or difficulty of washing blood off their murdering hands. Drawing evidence from historical records about how bloody effects were staged, the article considers blood as a theatrical phenomenon and the interpretations it invites.
Faculty
Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
Department
Département d'anglais
Language
  • English
Classification
Literature
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/308230
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