SOURCE: “‘For Show or Useless Property’: Necrophilia in The Revenger's Tragedy,” in ELH: English Language History, Vol. 61, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 71-88.

In the following essay, Coddon maintains that in The Revenger's Tragedy Tourneur uses necrophilia and the eroticization of death to satirize and examine traditional and contemporary scientific understandings of the human body.

Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, Your tongue's like poison. 

—The Cure

The intersection of death and the erotic throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy is a virtual commonplace of the genre; from Hamlet's leap into Ophelia's grave to the perversities of Tourneur and Middleton, the body of death is at least symbolically conflated with the body of desire. Indeed, while granting that theatrical personae as yet do not “go so far as making love to the corpse,” Philippe Aries notes “an almost imperceptible shift [in early modern England and France] from familiarity with the dead...