Abstract
This chapter examines the role of imagined pain in performances of sanctioned killing by the state, both on stage and off. Central to my comparison are differing notions of sympathy, now understood as an extension of the imagination but in the Middle Ages as a radical connectedness. This difference has implications for actual execution in each period, with the gallows rituals of late-medieval France providing reintegration for the community and the opaque American death chamber doing its best to efface the humanity of the condemned. Both the premodern and the post-modern state stage-manage their executions carefully as a mechanism for social control; however, the fact that they must kill always reveals their failure of control. The spectacle of suffering presents a danger to the state because, as Foucault points out, authorities cannot control spectator reception, and executions have often enough caused people to glorify the condemned.3 Theatrical events typically exploit the same dynamic here as with torture, placing simulated execution within a dramatic framework that highlights the weakness and even the wrongful nature of the regime that puts people to death. Each of the plays at the center of this chapter presents a morally upright person facing execution, and each death produces a relic that continues to work in the world: for Le Geu Saint Denis, the saint’s head; for The Pillowman, the manuscript that the protagonist dies in order to preserve.
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Notes
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 63.
For a historical overview of the period, see Jacques Le Goff, “Résistances et Progrès de l’État monarchique (XIVe’XVe Siècle), in L’État et les Pouvoirs, vol. 2 of Histoire de la France, ed. Robert Descimon, et al. (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 127–80.
Also see C.T. Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c. 1300’c. 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. 141–44, for a discussion of France and nationhood.
See also David Nicholas, The Evolution of the Medieval World: Society, Government and Thought in Europe, 312–1500 (London: Longman, 1992), 399–499.
J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Susan Reynolds, “The Historiography of the Medieval State,” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997), 117–38.
Claude Gauvard, “Le Royaume de France au XVe Siècle,” in Art et Société en France au XVe Siècle, ed. Christiane Prigent (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1999), 21–30.
Petrus Cornelis (Pieter) Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 200–207.
For the transition from trial by ordeal to torture, see Esther Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1993), 55–56.
Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
Peters, Torture. For the argument that “the real period of tortured bodies arrives” in the sixteenth century, see Robert Muchembled, Le Temps des Supplices: de l’Obéissance sous les Rois Absolus, XVe–XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: A. Colin, 1992), 28.
See Esther Cohen, “Symbols of Culpability and the Universal Language of Justice: The Ritual of Public Executions in Late Medieval Europe,” History of European Ideas 11 (1989): 410.
Merback, Thief, Cross, and Wheel, 138. Cities in Northern Europe had begun to welcome the king with dramatic pageantry in the late fourteenth century. See Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 6, 11.
For a detailed discussion, see Lawrence M. Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1986).
See also Bernard Guenée and Françoise Lehoux, Les Entrées Royales Françaises de 1328 à 1515 (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968).
For the entry of Henry VI, see Guy Llewelyn Thompson, Paris and Its People under English Rule: the Anglo-Burgundian Regime, 1420–1436 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 199–205.
Lawrence M. Bryant, “Configurations of the Community in Late Medieval Spectacles,” in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3–33.
For the execution as a liminal ritual, see Cohen, Crossroads, 77–83. For the relation of the royal entry to coronation, see Bryant, King and City, 225. The Parisian entry occurred after the coronation, except in the case of Henry VI’s dual regency; however, even that entry marked a change in the city’s relationship to the new king. For variations in the ceremony during this period that show what sorts of issues were at stake, see Bryant, King and City; Kipling, Enter the King; and Thompson, Paris and Its People. See also Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1984), 3–19.
Cohen, Crossroads, 187–90. See Jacques Hillairet, Gibets, Piloris et Cachots de Vieux Paris (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1956), 15–29, for places of execution in Paris.
Cohen, Crossroads, 193–95. See PJ 245 for an example. Miraculous rescues from execution also provide evidence of a persistent belief in immanent justice. See Michael Goodich, ed., Other Middle Ages: Witnesses at the Margins of Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 42–57.
Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 202.
Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross Huston, ed. Fredric L. Cheyette (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 23–39. In 1120, e.g., Abelard was forced to retract his criticism.
Jelle Koopmans, Le Théâtre Des Exclus Au Moyen Age: Hérétiques, Sorcières Et Marginaux (Paris: Imago, 1997), 27–28.
Brigitte Cazelles, “Introduction,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 2.
Edward J. Gallagher, “Civic Patroness and Moral Guide: The Role of the Eponymous Heroine in the Miracles De Sainte Geneviève (c. 1420) from MS 1131 from the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris,” Studia Neophilologica 80.1 (2008), 31–34.
Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, 9, quoted in Austin Sarat, “Killing Me Softly: Capital Punishment and the Technologies for Taking Life,” Pain, Death, and the Law, ed. Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 43.
Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer, “Jurors Reject Death Penalty For Moussaoui,” Washington Post, 4 May 2006, A.01.
Joshua Partlow, “Guard at Hanging Blamed for Covert Video of Hussein,” Washington Post, 4 January 2007, A.14.
William Glaberson, “Arraigned, 9/11 Defendants Talk of Martyrdom,” New York Times, 6 June 2008, A.01.
Lorne Dwight Conquergood, “Lethal Theatre: Performance, Punishment, and the Death Penalty,” Theatre Journal 54.3 (2002): 352.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2003), 41.
Ibid., 361, quoting Frank Bruni and Jim Yardley, “Inmate Is Executed in Texas as 11th-Hour Appeals Fail,” New York Times, 23 June 2000, A.18.
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, “Reviving the Late Liberal State: On Capital Punishment in an Age of Gender Confusion,” Signs 24.4 (1999): 1123–24.
For a more complete discussion of allegory, see Hana Worthen and W.B. Worthen, “The Pillowman and the Ethics of Allegory,” Modern Drama 49.2 (2006): 155–73.
Frank Rich, “At Last, 9/11 Has Its Own Musical,” New York Times, 2 May 2004, 2.1. The first production of Assassins opened at Playwrights Horizons in December 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War, and ran for 71 performances (Lortel Archives: The Internet Off-Broadway Database, http://www.lortel.org/LLA_archive/index.cfm [21 November 2009]). A Broadway production was planned for 2001, postponed as a result of 9/11, and finally opened in April 2004, running for 101 performances. Director Joe Mantello won a Tony award as did Michael Cerveris for his performance as John Wilkes Booth (Internet Broadway Database, http://ibdb.com[21 November 2009]).
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© 2010 Marla Carlson
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Carlson, M. (2010). Imagining Death. In: Performing Bodies in Pain. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230111486_3
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