Ineffable Bodies (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare)

Ineffable Bodies focuses on early modern heroism in drama through the notion of ineffability in order to define new dramatic forms. Drawing from Vladimir Jankélévitch’s studies on the ineffable, the book focuses on heroic bodies on the early modern stage as the seat of an aesthetic shift in drama: the early modern heroic body testifies to an inability to tell heroic stories. Examples are taken from plays by Shakespeare, Chapman and Daniel in which martial heroes are placed in a position where they cannot give full sway to their heroic status or are simply revealed as failed heroes. The playwrights experiment with action and favour forms that have lost their meaning or contents, stressing the mutation from the factual or the material to the immaterial and the ineffable.

Christine Sukic is professor of early modern English literature and culture at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France, and is the current president of the French Shakespeare Society (Société Française Shakespeare). She has published studies on Shakespeare, George Chapman, Christopher Marlowe and Samuel Daniel and has edited or co-edited eight collections on the heroic body and representations of the immaterial. She is the author of a monograph on George Chapman’s tragedies and has translated and edited Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois into French for the Pléiade series (2009). She has co-translated and co-edited Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris with A.-M. Miller-Blaise, to be published by Classiques Garnier in 2025.