The Dumb Show of Life: Rough Justice and Silent Speech in 'The Spanish Tragedy'

Abstract

Gilles Deluze writes that pantomime is internal to language, it is 'a discourse or a story within the body... the body seals and conceals a hidden language'. This insight provides us with a useful way to think about a hermeneutics of the body in the dumb show in Thomas Kyd's play, 'The Spanish Tragedy', in terms of the play's engagement with the imagery of Elizabethan judicial punishment. In its innovative treatment of the dumb show 'The Spanish Tragedy' insists that the silenced body bears testimony to a story of revenge, betrayal and violence. In early modern England the theatrical dumb show, a highly stylised theatrical device, provided a useful image for talking about life and death.