| This dissertation investigates the experience of tragic spectatorship in the context of England's post-Reformation suspicion of representation. The few and glancing accounts of the theatre circulating in this period acknowledge but leave unexplained tragedy's capacity to provoke authentic sensations from its artificial exercises; consequently, the felt force of tragedy provokes an epistemological crisis that haunts its apprehension. In response, a variety of figures denounce playgoing as dangerous in terms chosen to persuade civic authorities to shut the theatres down. With a marked fidelity to historical fact, these anti-theatricalists lay out the pernicious symptoms of dramatic spectatorship in terms of the playhouse's dissemination of guilt, fire and plague.; Surprisingly, playwrights do not fend off these accusations, nor do they prudently tiptoe around them. As numerous dramatizations of criminal discovery, conflagration and pestilence demonstrate, tragedians instead situate these theatrical dangers at the heart of their plays. Central to this dissertation's inquiry is the belief that this dramaturgical tendency is both self-conscious and self-serving, for these fearful scenaria become the idiom in which tragedians wrestle with, and account for, the sensations provoked by their own medium.; Each chapter takes up a different risk attached to the playhouse and illustrates its phenomenological equivalence to those tragedies that dramatize it: the first examines the inquisitional force of domestic tragedy and the capital confessions that it unleashes, the second considers the risk of fire with regard to dramas of inflamed and illicit desire, and the third traces the link between the plague and what might be called tragedies of obliteration—plays that end, as Othello says, in “chaos…come again.” Via its spectacular deployment, each danger stands is for a way in which tragedy, in its undeniable but inexplicable force, is felt to consume its consumers; each provides a visceral metaphor for the queasy thrill that comes with sensing the “real presence” of a cultural phenomenon that has been labeled senseless and fraudulent. |
