Liquid Politics: Toward a Theorization of "Bourgeois" Tragic Drama

Take but degree away, Ulysses warns in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and chaos would reign—“the bounded waters should lift their bosom higher than the shores, / And make a sop of all this solid globe.” For this classical personage, “degree” (the entrenched distinctions of the social solid) is fixed and dry, from which disorder appears as “a sop.” This rhetoric of the wet and the dry, the wet washing out of degree, happens to become a future governing political metaphor for eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy, whose effects are active today. While the unclassical idea of centering tragedy on someone other than the highest royalty gained legitimacy in the Elizabethan domestic play, what I call “liquid politics”—the visible melting down (crying) of stage persons as a self-conscious promotional aesthetic of the bourgeoisie—is as absent from the Elizabethan and Jacobean domestic play as it is from the classical high tragedy of the time. In George Lillo’s well-received, long-running play The London Merchant (1731), for example, the power of truth is figured as a confluence of fluids that gushes from within (blood and tears) or pours down from above (as “mercy” from heaven). “Everything flows,” laterally among the stage characters and across the proscenium to the audience. Compassion and pity, the province of heroines in Shakespeare, are enlisted for new projects—public, masculine, and transnational.

The first reference to tears in the European canon helps to orient the issue of “liquid politics.” Early in the Iliad (1.42), Khryses, a Trojan high priest, tries to ransom his daughter (a captive of the Danaians), but their king (Agamemnon), rejecting the offer, brutally humiliates the priest. Khryses then prays to Apollo: “May the Danaians atone for my tears with your arrows.”¹ What goes in as a solitary passion (as a power that penetrates the individual, a pathos) comes back (or out) as a cosmic action (as a power to penetrate others). A simple structure of exchange in this broad theme is clearly defined in the inaugural tears of this Homeric line: mine for yours—my tears (ema dakrua) for your arrows (soisi belessin), or, my tears for your (FILL THE BLANK: arrows, plague, other). Two lexical features of the Homeric model may be noted, features that “set the stage” for later traditions: (1) these “first” tears are uttered in the mode of a wish (optative) rather than a declaration (indicative); and (2) the last element, “your arrows,” is emphatic by position (as the last element in an end-stopped line that also ends a speech). That is, the tears themselves are subordinated to what “you” are (hopefully, wishfully) going to bring to the exchange. What you (as the apostrophized god, landscape, dramatic character, spectator, or reader) are to bring to this exchange is more important than what I (as the humiliated official, the sobbing domestic servant, the narrator, or the merchant) bring (namely, tears), especially when what you bring are your tears (tears instead of plague, perhaps, or tears as plague). This pattern of “tears for tears” may call to mind the copious tears traditionally ascribed to women, with the difference that these proverbial “women’s tears”—being depoliticized or depotentiated by the same tradition that makes it “natural” for women to cry—cannot be annexed to the scenic tears of a “liquid politics.”

The bourgeois tragedy of the eighteenth century defines itself as a movement away from the classical past. Royalty, when it cries, need not make a show of its tears. An aesthetics of crying clears a path for bourgeois drama (and culture) by politicizing the difference between the high classical and the bourgeois domestic: in a conscious usurpation which serves as a linchpin in Lessing’s drama theory, tradition (i.e., dramatic classicism) is embodied in the cold, unfeeling, and uncrying royal character. As against the dry dust of the classical, tears water the historical grounds of the modern bourgeois drama. Tears are the insignia of historical difference, such that no tears equals no history—or at least no tears equals no bourgeois history—no self...