Dido's Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response

MIRANDA		O, I have sufferèd
	With those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel,
	Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
	Dashed all to pieces! O, the cry did knock
	Against my very heart! . . .
PROSPERO			Be collected.
	No more amazement. Tell your piteous heart
	There's no harm done. . . .
	The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touched
	The very virtue of compassion in thee,
	I have with such provision in mine art
	So safely ordered that there is no soul--
	No, not so much perdition as an hair
	Betid to any creature in the vessel,
	Which thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. . . .

(1.2.5-9, 13-15, 26-32) ¹

After opening with a violent storm and shipwreck and after engaging the audience in what the ship's mariners and lords take to be their final prayers, The Tempest at last introduces Prospero as he assures his anxious daughter that no harm came to the vessel's "noble creature[s]." When Miranda exclaims, "O, I have sufferèd / With those that I saw suffer!" she draws a strong analogy between the experiences of the tempest-tossed men and her own as a helpless spectator. Because Miranda plays a double supporting role as her father's ally and foil, it is tempting to regard her emotional tumult as merely picturesque rather than unruly. Viewed through the lens of Victorian sentimentality, her "piteous heart" offers proof of her moral virtue based on her capacity for humane, or womanly, compassion. Stripped of anachronism, however, her sympathetic passions turn out to be surprisingly volatile: they press her, in fact, to ally herself with the shipwrecked men instead of her father, who has, as she suspects, conjured the storm. Although Miranda has no critical reputation for rebelliousness, she first enters the stage to insist on her emotions forcibly, not to display them decorously; she sees in her own emotions the grounds for dissent, however painful, from her father's will. For The Tempest's audiences, the play substitutes one source of anxiety for another: it is comforting to discover that the storm came by design and lacked fangs; yet it is disconcerting to learn that the sympathetic passions are strong enough to tug at the most rooted of allegiances, such as Miranda's to her father.

Miranda's outcry has intrigued scholars of the moral sentiments far more than scholars of Renaissance drama.It has drawn the attention of Romanticists, struck by Wordsworth's characterization of the Wanderer as one who "could afford to suffer/ With those whom he saw suffer." ² More directly on point, her pitying exclamation and Prospero's revelation of the storm's theatrical nature serve as the first epigraph to David Marshall's study of sympathy and theatricality in eighteenth-century narrative. ³ It is worth taking up Marshall's hint about the role of the theater in Miranda's transformative experience. To what extent do such episodes in the period's drama suggest a prehistory for the problem of sympathy familiar in eighteenth-century moral philosophy? In his study of antitheatricality Jonas Barish demonstrates that sympathy figured as a problem--made so by the artifice and mediation that rouse compassion--before Adam Smith formally identified it as one. ⁴ His study of the attacks Renaissance antitheatricalists mounted on the theater has paved the way for broad critical recognition of the extent to which early modern Londoners, including playwrights, experienced anxiety about theatrical contagion. Shakespearean tragedy, the focus of this essay, hints at an ironic "fellow-feeling" with the theater's self-appointed enemies, who worried about the susceptibility of audiences to socially disruptive passions. ⁵

Before turning to the dangerous fascinations of Shakespearean scenes of sympathy, I would like to recount an extraordinary testimony to theatrical power recorded by Stephen Gosson, the playwright-turned-antitheatricalist. In a memorable passage of Playes Confuted in fiue Actions, Gosson...