Abstract

Celia Daileader explores the paradoxes of eroticism in early modern English drama, where women and their bodies (represented by boy actors) were materially absent and yet symbolically central. Accounting for the significance of the space offstage, where most sexual acts take place, Daileader looks to the suppression of religious drama in England and the resulting secularization of the stage. She draws together questions about sexuality and the sacred, in the bodies--of Christ and of woman--banished from the early modern English stage.