Ghost Complaint: Historiography, Gender, and the Return of the Dead in Elizabethan Literature

Abstract

In this study, I read Elizabethan ghost complaint poetry as a locus for understanding the era’s obsessive desire to speak with, for, and as the dead. In charting the rise to popularity of this now neglected poetic form, I employ and advance theories of haunting temporality as articulated in modern as well as early modern philosophy, historiography, and gender theory. My study of ghost complaint poems revises our understanding of how early modern poets and dramatists appropriate historiographic discourses and deploy gendered voices.