How to Do Things with Dead People: History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol

By Alice Dailey

How to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare's English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things—technologies such as literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning.

By situating Shakespeare's historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological order. Working from an eclectic body of theories, pictures, and machines that transcend time and media, Dailey composes a searching exploration of how the living use the dead to think back and look forward, to rule, to love, to wish and create.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501763663

Book preview

Cover: How to Do Things with Dead People, HISTORY, TECHNOLOGY, AND TEMPORALITY FROM SHAKESPEARE TO WARHOL by Alice Dailey

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH DEAD PEOPLE

HISTORY, TECHNOLOGY, AND TEMPORALITY FROM SHAKESPEARE TO WARHOL

ALICE DAILEY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Adam

Freedom of thought always has to be reinvented.

—Michel Serres

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Little, Little Graves

2. Haunted Histories

3. Dummies and Doppelgängers

4. The King Machine

5. Fuck Off and Die

Postscript

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Sir George Scharf, cigarette box of Richard II’s relics (August 31, 1871)

2. Sir George Scharf, sketches of the skull and brain of Richard II and the skull of Queen Anne of Bohemia (August 30, 1871)

3. Alexander Gardener, portrait of Lewis Payne (1865)

4. Oscar Gustave Rejlander, The First Negative (1857)

5. David Tennant as Richard II, dir. Gregory Doran (2016)

6. William H. Mumler, Mary Todd Lincoln with the Spirit of Her Husband (1870–1875)

7. Frederick Hudson, The Medium Florence Cook and Frank Herne (1872)

8. Wilhelm Röntgen, the first X-ray: the hand of Röntgen’s wife, Anna Bertha Ludwig (1895)

9. Duane Michals, The Spirit Leaves the Body (1968)

10. Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) (1992)

11. Andy Warhol, Little Electric Chair (1964)

12. Andy Warhol, Big Electric Chair (1967–1968)

13. Andy Warhol, Orange Disaster #5 (1963)

14. David Montgomery, Andy Warhol’s Shooting Scars, The Factory (1968)

15. Andy Warhol, Skull (1974)

16. Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych (1962)

Postscript figures (uncaptioned)

17. Sondra Rosenberg, Adam Dailey as David Bowie (2017)

18. Alice Dailey, Adam Dailey as William Shakespeare (2019)

19. Alice Dailey, Adam Dailey as Andy Warhol (2019)

20. Adam Dailey, Polaroid (2020)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has three origins that I want to acknowledge. The first was the Histories Project directed by Michael Boyd at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 2007–2008. I had not given Shakespeare’s history plays much thought until I saw Boyd’s stunning production of Richard II in the summer of 2007, an experience that led to my returning to England, in the excellent company of Regina Buccola, to see all eight plays over a four-day weekend in spring 2008. When I began to teach a course on the histories at Villanova, I had the benefit of an enormous cache of production photos from the Boyd cycle that were generously shared with me by John of Gaunt himself, RSC cast member Roger Watkins. My fascination with these plays has been indelibly shaped by those productions, Roger’s photos, and the experience of seeing and thinking with Gina.

The book’s second origin was a 2010 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York titled Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, which I attended as I was writing my first essay on the histories and preparing to teach them for the first time. In the wake of seeing Haunted, I became interested in Andy Warhol’s electric chair paintings, and I formed from that exhibit my earliest intuition that the paintings and their subject had something to teach me about the history plays. This intuition led me to an essay in the exhibition catalog by Peggy Phelan, whose work I only passingly knew at the time. Along with Mourning Sex, Unmarked, and her writing on Andy Warhol, Phelan’s essay on Haunted, Haunted Stages: Performance and the Photographic Effect, was my entry point into performance theory and eventually into the scholarship of Phelan’s students Rebecca Schneider and Daniel Sack, whose work has been important to my thinking in this book.

The third origin of this project was my timely introduction to the art of David Maisel, whose photograph of an X-ray of a sculpture belonging to the Getty Museum, History’s Shadow (GM1), is the cover image of this book. I am indebted to a college friend, Alan Rapp at Monacelli Press, for distinguishing the murky contours of my aesthetic curiosity and inviting me to what would become a formative gallery show: Maisel’s History’s Shadow at Yancey Richardson in 2014. Maisel’s work—especially History’s Shadow and Library of Dust—has significantly shaped this project, and I am deeply grateful to the artist for the gift that his photographs have been to me. The Maisel photograph on the book’s cover generated my early thoughts about much of what came to occupy this book: the temporality of X-rays, the sensation of being observed by inanimate objects, the afterlives and afterdeaths of historical and aesthetic artifacts, the intermediality of those artifacts and their collapse of linear time, the ontological status of the reproduction, and the aesthetic generativity of death. Although I do not address Maisel’s photography directly in these pages, I am everywhere indirectly addressing it—using it to think through and toward many of the major claims this book makes. The cover image by Maisel has been my polestar, map, and muse.

I am indebted to a generous, supportive community of scholars, especially in my home city of Philadelphia. Lauren Shohet offered invaluable comments on every chapter of this book, and her own wide-ranging interests have made her an inspiring colleague throughout my career at Villanova. This project was made better by Melissa Sanchez’s incisive, thoughtful reading of the full manuscript—reading that was critical to my late-stage thinking and revising. Long after this book is out in the world, I will continue to be enriched by Melissa’s magnanimous feedback and her example of scholarly generosity. Joseph Drury, Matt Kozusko, Zachary Lesser, and Kristen Poole have been readers, dear friends, and fonts of moral support through the tricky process of bringing this unusual project into being. I have learned from collaboration and conversation with Rebecca Bushnell and Gina Bloom, whose curiosity about territory new to early modernists has been a precedent for my own. I am grateful for the many colleagues who have listened, read, commiserated, offered insight, and otherwise supported me in this work: Beth Burns, Brooke Conti, Travis Foster, Matthew Harrison, Andrew Hartley, Peter Holland, Wendy Beth Hyman, Shawn Kairschner, Farah Karim, Jeremy Lopez, Genevieve Love, Jim Marino, Paul Menzer, Marissa Nicosia, Chelsea Phillips, Holly Pickett, Richard Preiss, Donovan Sherman, Tiffany Stern, Andrea Stevens, Maggie Vinter, Sarah Werner, and Katherine Schaap Williams. I owe special thanks to Jonathan Walker for leading me back to David Bowie, an old love and one of this project’s genii. For mentorship that keeps giving, I thank Linda Bannister, Lowell Gallagher, Holli Levitsky, and James Simpson. And I thank the women scholars before me who have written much of the very best work on Shakespeare’s history plays, especially Phyllis Rackin, without whose Stages of History my project would not have been possible.

I owe thanks to graduate research assistants who worked on various stages of this project—Brendan Maher, Amanda Piazza, and Casey Smedberg—and to our English subject librarian Sarah Wingo, who helped both them and me. This book would have taken a great deal longer to complete without the many kinds of support provided by my department chairs Heather Hicks and Evan Radcliffe and the time and resources made available by my home institution, Villanova University. I owe particular thanks to the Villanova Publication Subvention Program and College of Arts and Sciences for supporting image reproduction. I am indebted to the Shakespeare Association of America, the Blackfriars Conference of the American Shakespeare Center, the World Shakespeare Congress, and the American Society for Theatre Research for opportunities to try out several of the ideas developed in the book. I thank the artists whose work appears here and the many people who helped me with images and permissions, especially Lisa Ballard at Artists Rights Society and Robbi Siegel at Art Resource. Portions of the first chapter appeared in my earlier article Little, Little Graves: Shakespeare’s Photographs of Richard II, Shakespeare Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2018); I thank the journal for permission to republish this material. I am grateful for the dedication and hard work of my wonderful editor at Cornell University Press, Mahinder Kingra; the press readers, who offered invaluable feedback; the production teams at Cornell University Press and Westchester Publishing; my copyeditor, Karen Brogno; and my indexer, Kate Mertes.

For their gifts of friendship pure and true, I am indebted to Carl Bradley, Arianna Brooke, Jean Lutes, Niki Rosas-Baines, Taije Silverman, and especially Sondra Rosenberg.

I lost my mother, Margaret Leary, during the writing of this book. I am grateful every day for the love of literature that she imparted to me and for the family she made during her too-short life; for my father, Steven Leary, who always believes in me; and for Joyce, Kent, Paul, Vangie, Mahlia, and Molly, with whom I am thankful to share all that my mother gave us. To the Daileys—Patrick, Suzi, Jake, and Ryan—the family-by-marriage who have so enriched my life lo these many years: thank you for your love and support.

There are no thanks deep enough for my beloveds, Josh and Adam. To you I belong, and to you I am grateful, at the end of a long day’s work, always to return.

Introduction

The Luminous Spiral and the Cigarette Box, or Technologies of the Afterdeath

This is a strange book. This book is a manifesto on the imperative of thinking strangely.

In this book, I consider Shakespeare’s English history plays among reproductive technologies and representational media spanning several centuries, such as selfies, Victorian spiritualist photographs, minimalist sculpture, Andy Warhol’s Factory-produced portraits, and capital punishment machines. These artifacts, along with the many others studied here, have in common with Shakespeare’s histories a preoccupation with undead afterlives—with how that which appears still or unchanging hosts an other that is dynamic, participatory, and charged with the potential to initiate change. I argue that like the history plays, media such as spiritualist photographs figure a relationship between the living and its dynamically undead other, an other who is often also a self. The representational technologies I explore in this book seek to dramatize, picture, or otherwise render visible this other/self, whose ontological indeterminacy reflects its liminal state between past and present, dead and alive, here and gone. Giorgio Agamben describes this state in his essay on Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: What shows itself on the threshold between Being and non-Being, between sensible and intelligible, between word and thing, is not the colorless abyss of the Nothing but the luminous spiral of the possible.¹

How to Do Things with Dead People tarries in the luminous spiral, arguing that Shakespeare constitutes history at the threshold of possibility between dead and alive, object and subject, and that his histories occupy this threshold with a multitude of other reproductive technologies that my study only begins to address. Although some of the technologies that this book sets in conversation with the history plays are conventionally associated with specific mechanical devices, such as the still camera or X-ray machine, I show how such technologies generate and depict phenomena that are not chronologically confined. Shakespeare’s histories contain photographic selfies and X-ray images, just as the glitchy machinery of the electric chair mirrors the reproductive operations of the plays’ English throne. The throne and the electric chair share conceptual infrastructures that transcend the specific chronologies of technical innovation attending either apparatus. To observe such infrastructures at work and to generate conversation among them, as this book does, is therefore neither a historicist nor a presentist project, because those infrastructures cannot be properly located in either the past or the present. Identifying the common underlying phenomena that such technologies reproduce enables movement beyond distinct histories of literary production or mechanical innovation. Such work opens a transhistorical, intermedial conversation about the generative forms, ontological questions, and representational aesthetics that collect around the undead dead.

The strange thinking I experiment with in this book is compelled by the strangeness of historical materials themselves. Consider, for example, an object from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London: a cigarette box of Richard II’s relics that was found in the museum’s basement in 2010. Discovered in the process of a cataloging project, the box contained fragments of wood thought to be from Richard’s coffin, a piece of leather from a pair of gloves, and some fabric, all taken by the Gallery’s first director, Sir George Scharf, at the exhumation of Richard’s Westminster Abbey tomb in 1871 (Figure 1). Scharf attended multiple royal grave openings during his nearly 40-year career with the Gallery, including those of Henry VII, Edward VI, and James I. What facilitated the identification of Richard’s relics was a sketchbook kept by Scharf in which he made detailed drawings of Richard’s skull and desiccated brain, drawings dated the day before the cigarette box (Figure 2).² The contents of the box were discovered by assistant archivist Krzysztof Adamiec, who remarked in a subsequent interview that it just looked like a simple, empty box of cigarettes. But when I opened it up there were strips of leather and pieces of wood. It was very exciting for me—it’s one of the biggest pleasures of this job to literally feel that you are touching history.³

For Adamiec, opening the box to reveal its contents opens a miniature portal into the past, one that generates both tactile and affective contact across centuries and joins the moment of his discovery to prior time. Through its opening, the simple, empty box comes to function like a wormhole—a wormhole through which he literally … touch[es] history in a collapse of space-time. That history is multiple, itself a nexus of wormholes. The box likely dates from the early 1870s, when Scharf visited the tomb of Richard II and collected the objects. Those objects were themselves discovered in the box that is Richard’s second resting place, his first having been opened in 1413 when his remains were moved from his original grave at Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, to be reinterred at Westminster Abbey with those of his queen, Anne of Bohemia. (Shakespeare’s Henry V refers to this reinterment in his soliloquy the night before the Battle of Agincourt: I Richard’s body have interred new, / And on it have bestowed more contrite tears / Than from it issued forced drops of blood [H5 4.1.277–79]).⁴ The cigarette box of Richard’s relics marks the juncture between Adamiec’s present and the boundless pasts it bears into that present, which include the pasts of Richard’s two burials and disinterments, of Scharf’s collection, of the cigarette box’s storage within another box of Scharf’s effects, of the royal hand that once wore the glove, of the glover who sewed it, of the animal from whose hide it was made, of the tobacco and tree and laboring human bodies that generated a box of cigarettes, ad infinitum.⁵ To touch history is not to make contact with an object fixed in a past time but to index the very unfixedness of time—the inhabitation of the present by an expanse of not only pasts but futures. For as Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever would remind us, Scharf’s act of relic collection is itself a futureward gesture, one that stages a later encounter with Richard’s remains.⁶ That future moment of the past’s return—a return reprised here and now as you, my reader, encounter the photograph of the cigarette box—is anticipated by the very acts of collecting, storing, dating, photographing, and cataloging relics from Richard’s tomb. Encounters and reencounters with the revenant pasts of the cigarette box are composed by the mechanism of the souvenir itself (Souvenir, v., to remember). In this sense, the souvenir—a technology through which the past returns to be re-experienced in the present—is not unlike a history play, which scripts the reappearance of pasts in an expanse of potential futures played out through bodies yet unknown.⁷ The death that renders historical figures dust, / And food for— For worms, as Hotspur and Hal collaboratively remark near the end of 1 Henry IV, opens worm holes and wormholes through the corpse of history, making the dead available as participants in live encounters that unfold now and in the time to come (1H4 5.4.85).

Figure 1: Cigarette box opened to reveal Richard II’s relics collected by Sir George Scharf, written on the right side with the date, August 31, 1871.

FIGURE 1. Cigarette box of Richard II’s relics collected by Sir George Scharf, August 31, 1871 (NPG7_3_6_2). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Figure 2: Hand-drawn sketches of the skull and brain of Richard II and the skull of Queen Anne of Bohemia by Sir George Scharf, with notes from August 30, 1871.

FIGURE 2. Sketches of the skull and brain of Richard II and the skull of Queen Anne of Bohemia by Sir George Scharf, August 30, 1871 (NPG7_3_4_2_97_pg41). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

The context in which the cigarette box was identified—a cataloging project undertaken by the National Portrait Gallery—situates its various artifacts as adjuncts to visual portraiture, especially the portraiture represented by Scharf’s drawings. Notably, on the page of Scharf’s sketchbook I have chosen for reproduction here, Scharf labeled the larger of the two skulls, in the bottom left foreground, Richard 2nd and the smaller Queen Anne of Bohemia—rather than the skull of Richard II and the skull of Anne of Bohemia. Scharf produces an unusual kind of royal portrait, one that does not consign the couple to a static past but reproduces them in his present as currently dead, making them available as such for indefinite futures. They are figures whose histories continue to unfold into the present as they are disinterred in 1871 and as Scharf’s drawings are digitized and cataloged. Like the cigarette box’s staging of future encounters through the mechanisms of preservation and return, Scharf’s drawings of Richard’s skull and brain host subsequent encounters through images archived for future viewing. In this way, the images function as uncanny visual representations of the brain and soul described by Shakespeare’s Richard II at the end of the play that bears his name: My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, / My soul the father, and these two beget / A generation of still-breeding thoughts (R2 5.5.6–9). Neither the stillness of Scharf’s drawings nor the inert state of Richard’s brain—a spongy redish brown object measuring a mere one and five-eighths by one and two-eighths inches—relegates the brain to the past. Through our rendezvous with it in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery or the pages of this book, Richard’s brain is still breeding: still returning, still reproducing, still generating live encounters.⁸ If Scharf had Richard’s lines about his brain in mind when he chose it to draw—rather than choosing, say, his femur—we might observe that the brain Richard describes in Richard II begot an 1871 portrait of itself.⁹

The itinerary of another dead king made famous by Shakespeare, Richard III, suggests other kinds of return that may yet be in store for Richard II. In view of the afterdeath of Richard III’s scoliotic spinal column, which has been fabricated repeatedly to appear in theater and screen productions of Shakespeare’s Richard III since its exhumation in 2012, it is not difficult to imagine replicas of Richard II’s artifacts breeding future generations in the theater.¹⁰ Richard’s description of himself in a little grave, / A little, little grave, an obscure grave, and his reference to the hollow crown where Keeps Death his court almost beg for stage reproductions of the cigarette box and skull, perhaps to be held and contemplated by the character of Richard himself (R2 3.3.52–53, 3.2.156, 158). Given that the Scharf archive dates from the reign of Queen Victoria and that its 2012 discovery occurred during the reign of the wrong Queen Elizabeth, would the appearance of these objects in a staging of Richard II constitute anachronism, a preoccupation—an unpardonable sin, as Margreta de Grazia puts it—for scholars concerned with the historicity of Shakespeare’s plays?¹¹ Since the historical Richard II is always already dead at the beginning of any production of Richard II, what, precisely, would be anachronistic about the character of Richard peering into the facsimile of a box that holds his own future/past remains in a play that repeatedly figures him imagining his own future/past remains? Or does the problem of anachronism arise when we look backward from Scharf’s futureward-looking archive to re-see Richard’s little grave as an uncanny anticipation of the cigarette box, itself something of a miniature coffin for Richard? In consigning the remains of Richard to a cigarette box, is Scharf restaging a scene from the play? And if the text of Richard II is before me now as I pose these questions, in what sense is reading the play through Scharf’s archive looking backward, as though Shakespeare’s play were fixed in some prior time? In sum, what does anachronism mean in relation to the textual, dramatic, and material production that occurs and recurs around a literary-historical figure like Richard II?

These questions, which will themselves reappear in different forms across this book, expose the analytic imprecision of the term anachronism and its relative uselessness for describing the phenomena that circulate in and around Richard II. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood usefully propose ‘anachronic’ … as an alternative to ‘anachronistic,’ a judgmental term that carries with it the historicist assumption that every event and every object has its proper location within objective and linear time.¹² This assumption is confounded by the phenomenal afterdeaths of Richard II. The cigarette box of his relics is a site where not only time frames but multiple media—themselves complexly anachronic—intersect. In its anticipation of the past’s return in the present through future reopenings, such as the one activated by the archivist’s (or archivists’) hands-that-hold and visual-cortex-that-recognizes, the archive composed by Scharf works like a theater, a site where history appears "as the recomposition of remains in and as the live," to borrow a formulation from performance theorist Rebecca Schneider.¹³ Like a theater, the Scharf archive generates multitemporal effects that transcend the boundaries marked off by the historical periods and academic disciplines that conventionally organize scholarly work. To encounter the archive here, on a page of this book, is to encounter a photograph that is also—at minimum—a text, a theater, a portrait, a corpse, a technology, and a constructed material artifact that is multiply mediated by human bodies, including yours and mine. The result is a history that is not past but still: still becoming.

This is not to say anything especially revelatory about history. We know already that history is manifold and intermedial, that it is under continuous negotiation, and that it is resistant to closure. These are the lessons of post-structuralism and post-colonialism. In the field of early modern literary studies, the principal of this book’s several homes, our ideas about history have been informed by diverse models of overlapping temporality, such as the palimpsest posited by Jonathan Gil Harris; David Kastan’s shapes of time; the rough, thick embodied time described by Matthew D. Wagner (after Husserl); Gilles Deleuze’s pleat or fold; and Michel Serres’s crumpled handkerchief.¹⁴ We have at our disposal, then, a rich vocabulary of metaphors for describing what has variously been called polychronicity or multitemporality, and we have absorbed the skepticism imparted by post-structuralism and post-colonialism about generating monolithic notions of reality. And yet early modernism as a field has remained committed, by and large, to the methods of historicism, which idealize the retrieval of a past located in the historical archive, however broadly construed. In its core commitment to recovering the contexts of literary production, historicism insists on the pastness of the past—on its marked difference from the present. Although we acknowledge that history is multifarious and indeterminate, we continue to reproduce a critical methodology that seeks to stabilize the past by constructing authoritative narratives about it, narratives founded on archives that are themselves radically contingent and politically determined. It is a methodology that cuts us off, via the taboo of anachronism, from engaging with the phenomenology of media that we date after the early modern period, even if those phenomena occur inside early modern texts. It is a methodology that discounts as hermeneutically unstable—if indeed it can see at all—the wormhole effect of the cigarette box, an effect that detonates the very concept of linear temporality from which historicism draws its logics of contextualization. What, for example, can that darling of historicism, the medieval political theology of the king’s two bodies, tell us about the temporal effects of the cigarette box or the Richards it restores to us through its opened portal?¹⁵ Alas, not much.

We need not look to such remarkable objects or even to the domain of live theater to be confronted with historicism’s insufficiencies. The literary texts studied in this book reveal those insufficiencies at every turn. This revelation is one of the book’s aims: to expose the limits of historicism through the very corpus of early modern drama that would seem most to lend itself to historicist methodology: Shakespeare’s English chronicle plays. As an ahistoricist study of historical drama, this book jettisons received definitions of literary context that confine our thinking about the histories to the immediate cultural affordances of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. Contesting the dominant critical assumption that historical consciousness means chronological specificity, this project rethinks what history is and does by contextualizing the plays within the ongoing human enterprise of representing and relating to the dead. How to Do Things with Dead People describes Shakespeare’s historical drama as, fundamentally, a reproductive technology by which living replicas of dead historical figures are animated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in such terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things—technologies like literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imagery, glitch art, silk-screening, and cloning. By situating the plays in this broader, intermedial context—one that includes current as well as developing technologies, especially technologies of imaging—How to Do Things with Dead People deconstructs conventional period boundaries that mark off Shakespeare’s reproductive arts as substantively different from our own. This methodological shift enables a wholesale rethinking of what constitutes the context of a work of literature and challenges many basic assumptions about linear temporality that underwrite the theses of historicism and periodization.

Conventional scholarly work on the history plays has been organized by several presuppositions about how time works and what historical drama can and cannot do. Chief among these is the assumption that time is fundamentally linear—an assumption that excludes the dead people of history from participation in the present or future. According to this logic, historical drama can bring likenesses of the dead into an active present, either through text or on stage, but the dead themselves remain dead and irrecoverable. These assumptions underwrite formative scholarship on the plays, such as Phyllis Rackin’s important Stages of History, which describes Shakespeare’s histories as nostalgic for past kings and heroes who are never to be recuperated.¹⁶ For Rackin, historical drama is a site of absence that exposes the inadequacies of theatrical representation to validate the historical record, a position that Brian Walsh echoes in his subsequent claim for the poverty of theatrical representation and the double absence of historical figures from either the present time or the stage.¹⁷ Such influential readings of the histories—readings that have gone relatively uncontested—rely on the binaries of now/then, present/absent, and living/dead that artifacts like the cigarette box, as well as the plays themselves, profitably resist. If we take such binaries as given, we miss the density of roles performed by the dead in these plays, who serve as mirrors and doubles, as speakers and audiences. They are actors in embedded mini-theaters, sites for constructing sovereign time, opportunities for temporal experimentation, and generators of futures that are still unfolding.

How to Do Things with Dead People reads the dead as undead sites of ongoing potential, as my echo of J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) suggests. Austin defines a performative utterance or speech-act as language that does not describe the world but, rather, enacts what is declared.¹⁸ Words are generative; they do things. Like words, I argue, the dead are enlisted to do, serving a generative function for the living by acting as mediums for temporal conjecture, ventriloquism, identity extension, and world-building. The dead are not simply past, nor are they merely sites of mourning or nostalgia. In the technologies I study, still and silent bodies function as figures with ongoing potential—as material for construing what is yet possible and for imagining a future that has not yet arrived.

The conversation that this project introduces through its range of artifacts rejects linear schema that situate the past and the historical dead in a dimension from which we have progressed, either temporally or teleologically. Thus the phrase in my subtitle, from Shakespeare to Warhol, does not mean to imply a narrative of historical development. Were this book’s title not already more than long enough, it would include at least several more to’s and fro’s, moving in multiple temporal and spatial directions, to suggest the project’s investment in dismantling the fiction of linear time and its attendant teleologic. That teleologic—by which we understand ourselves, our culture, and our politics as the fulfillment of an evolutionary process that has advanced us to steadily higher forms of expression—is undone by the history plays’ inbuilt theoretical machinery. In their varied and sophisticated engagement with the mechanisms of historical construction, Shakespeare’s histories reflect on the very processes by which teleological narratives come into being. The plays dramatize how those narratives, such as the narrative of genealogical succession that posits Henry VI as the natural heir of Henry V and therefore of the English crown, are underwritten by a host of technological mechanisms that fabricate not only history, sovereignty, and power but the more foundational concept of hereditary reproduction. Heredity, I argue, is but one of many ostensibly organic processes that are exposed by Shakespeare’s histories as forms of technological artifice. By staging the machinery that generates narratives of paternity, succession, authenticity, and even linear time, the histories denaturalize and demystify the teleologic that would position our own critical, techno-political constructs as inherently more developed than those represented by Shakespeare’s plays.

My movement between the book’s diverse materials is facilitated by an eclectic body of theoretical resources drawn from a broad range of disciplines. As with the phrase from Shakespeare to Warhol, the inclusion of twentieth-and twenty-first-century theorists in my study is not meant to suggest a developmental arc that positions contemporary theory as an explanatory apparatus for earlier literature. On the contrary, quite often in this book it is the Shakespearean text that offers the more refined articulation of phenomena that contemporary theorists seek to explain.¹⁹ As I treat them in my study, the history plays talk back to many of the theorists I bring into conversation here, including Roland Barthes, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Michael Fried, Joseph Roach, and Susan Sontag. Further, I seek to unsettle our canon of acknowledged theorists by expanding what constitutes an admissible theoretical resource. This is most explicit in the book’s multiple forms of engagement with the life and art of Andy Warhol, a keen theorist of replica-production, who, like a modern-day Sir George Scharf, perseverated over death and obsessively documented and archived his day-to-day life.²⁰ Set in conversation with Shakespeare’s Richard III, Warhol’s corpus—his body as well as his body of work—exposes the limits of both conventional engagement with Richard’s disability and academic queer theory. Reading Shakespeare, Warhol, and the character of Richard III as kindred dramatist-theorists yields new insight into three figures who have each generated a canon of scholarship unto themselves.

In contrast to literary criticism written during the heyday of theory in