Literature: Liminal Ground in Early Modern Drama

In Shakespeare’s lifetime and long after, to live as a traitor or to die in suicide meant, in burial, to be treated as refuse. It is probable that Shakespeare knew at least five such people, disposed of in a ceremony whose elements were, as described in the last chapter, the night, the crossroads, and the stake. Although he largely avoids depicting subjects like imprisonment and execution, the question of outcast burial nevertheless emerges in hints and allusions found in the plays, like the shadowy revenants of unquiet thoughts. Contrastingly, George Peele is the one dramatist of the era who depicts a crossroads explicitly onstage, in his The Old Wives Tale. Peele’s treatment of the subject is varied, but comedically light. This chapter argues that the delinquent crossroads are inscribed here in what de Certeau calls a ‘procedure of delimitation’ which has the function of ‘founding and articulating spaces’. The placing of a body at a boundary like a crossroads is to write it into the margins of a story as a part of the defining frame. Refusing this interment may be to refuse this influence of the marginal, but on the dramatic stage this has a way of returning despite its excision from the script.