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The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying on Stage
By Laurence Senelick
It is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting.
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About This Book
This is a book about dying, or, more accurately, about the representation of dying in the theatre. Its chief concern is how actors undertook to translate words and concepts into forms legible and significant to an audience. It deals with the ways in which playwrights wrote about death and attitudes towards death in their cultures. Nevertheless, the emphasis is on the practice of acting.
Before the nineteenth century, when death began to be confined behind closed doors, it was widely available as a spectacle. Death and the suffering that preceded it were in plain sight; no effort was made to hide the diseased and moribund. The absence of medical means of alleviating pain or of hygienic measures meant that the most distressing and abhorrent aspects of dying were out in the open. The contempt for human life shown by the law-courts and the death penalty for the slightest offence occasioned frequent and enthusiastically attended public executions. In addition, the Church and religion generally hoped, through elaborate rites and ceremonies, both before and after death, to invest it with an edifying value that could be extended for the greater good. The sacred and social ceremony makes a transition into an aesthetic and political performance, marking a more modern frame of mind.
Neoclassic decorum eschewed such displays; and, after a heyday of spectacular dying on the nineteenth-century stage, critics again began to insist on more moderate displays. This conformed to the growing emphasis on mental processes and psychological complexity. However, it runs counter to the theatre’s need for high color, extreme situations and fanciful invention. Denied house-room in literary drama, these desiderata found a welcome haven in the various manifestations of performance art.
Reviews
“Audaciously wide in its reach across centuries and cultures and rich in observed detail of innumerable stage performances, Laurence Senelick offers an eloquent and graphic review of the Western theatrical canon seen through enactments of death and that moment’s impact on audiences. And always there are two Professor Senelicks: the scholar-historian and the sharp-eyed (and sometimes bemused and quietly ironic) critic. A brilliant tour de force.” —David Mayer, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Research Professor, University of Manchester, UK
“A compendiously learned and thoroughly entertaining account of how the inexorable reality of death is conceived, engaged and enacted through the many phases of Western playmaking and performance, from the Greeks to the era of the AIDS disaster. Senelick as always finds a pearl of interest in every seeming quirk and divagation in theatrical practice while evoking the surrounding cultural attitudes, fixations and avoidances, and brings to bear an encyclopedic knowledge of theater and all that relates to it. Writing with verve and lucidity and a nice balance of irony and humanity, Senelick never loses sight of the serious challenge in the sentient lives of the audience of coming to terms with the inevitable.” —Martin Meisel, Brander Matthews Professor Emeritus of English and Dramatic Literature, Columbia University, USA
Like Senelick's other works, the present work is well researched and well written, and his sardonic humor shines through. [...] Particularly interesting are Senelick's explorations of the cultural standards and reactions to death in each historical period and the process of critiquing performance and recording immediate audience reaction in each social era. —CHOICE
Readers interested in the history of stagecraft will find value in Senelick’s description of how techniques for staging death developed alongside technologies of death (advancing from swordplay to dueling with pistols), medical understanding, and the constantly shifting aesthetic preferences of audiences. —Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
The Final Curtain is exemplary in its perceptive treatment of evidence from reviews and memoirs, complemented by an acute sense of historical context.—Theatre Notebook
Author Information
Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many books include The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre; The American Stage (Library of America); and Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture.
Series
Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance
Table of Contents
List of Figures; Introduction; 1. Early Stages; 2. Murther Most Foul; 3. Death- Defying Exploits; 4. Sick unto Death; 5. Shadow and Substance; Epilogue: Post- Mortem; Bibliography; Index.
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