This study examines the adoption and adaptation of the classical lament by English playwrights of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As a complex demonstration of sorrow, lamentations were traditionally performed by women, but in the drama of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, such displays came to be performed by men with startling frequency. By noting the ways in which medieval and Renaissance dramatists construct heirs to antiquity’s grieving women, this dissertation enables us to better understand the complexity of religious tensions as well as constructions of masculinity in the years preceding and following the English Reformation. Beginning with the drama of the Middle Ages, this dissertation reveals how the English dramatic tradition is built upon the performance of the lament. Moving from the liturgical drama into a detailed analysis of The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Everyman, this study argues that lamentations appear repeatedly in these moralities, performed by a variety of earthly and heavenly characters. This discussion is then juxtaposed with the Ars Moriendi tracts, works meant to prepare the dying Christian for the afterlife. Despite their intent to show people how to “die well,” however, the tracts are nevertheless infiltrated by the unsettling presence of the lament, thus undermining their ostensible objective.

With this context in mind, the dissertation examines a number of plays by Elizabethan dramatists, including Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage and Doctor Faustus, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, and King Lear, arguing that the tradition of the lamenting man is continued and developed in their works. Writing in the wake of the English Reformation, these playwrights deploy the lament, a deeply ritualistic performance of grief, in ways that not only reveal the intense cultural tensions between Catholic and Protestant belief, but also complicate early understandings of what constituted appropriate masculine behavior. In drawing on a variety of discursive traditions, this study shows the continuity of experience between men and women in responding to death, while at the same time revealing the profound cultural anxieties and their manifestations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in England.