For nineteenth-century actors, dying onstage commonly meant dying tragically. As such examples suggest, gender crucially shaped how theatrical deaths were scripted, simulated, and spectated. Whereas the century’s Mercutios had minutes of onstage dying time and routinely lurched about the stage, wounded and raving, Ravenswood’s Lucy Ashton died in mere seconds after descending into madness, her demise punctuated by a single scream and a quick collapse. The exigencies of storytelling further contoured the temporal and spatial dimensions of performed dying. Embodying the act of dying required that performers bring into affective alignment a constellation of inputs and impulses from the medical, theatrical, and sociocultural spheres. Deaths on the nineteenth-century stage were not just histrionic claptraps indeed, the era’s critics publicly chastised actors who they felt milked or cheapened such moments (both before and after the advent of theatrical realism). Her repertoire – devised to appeal to white, bourgeois European and US American audiences – customarily featured an array of doomed women who died onstage or just out of the audience’s view: Greek heroines, Shakespearean wives, terminally ill ingenues transposed from French and Italian novels, and perhaps even a few contemporary ‘neurotics’ like Hedda Gabler or the second Mrs.
#Dying of consumption how to#
The late nineteenth-century star actress knew how to die. Guest post: Meredith Conti, University at Buffalo, SUNY
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