Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Series Number 30)

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.