Ineffable Bodies

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.