Persecution, Plague and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (review)

In her latest book, Persecution, Plague and Fire, Ellen Mackay argues that the fiction of early modern theater does real violence to its audience, thereby continually and aggressively inserting itself into the historical record through a series of disappearances that emphasize the temporal constraints on performance. The book is organized according to three categories of violence: persecution, plague, and fire. Mackay finds the origin of early modern English theater’s aggression, however, in yet another violent act: “the (alleged) shooting of playgoers” that indicates a “catastrophic philosophy of the theatrical event” (3). She uses Philip Gawdy’s anecdote about the accidental shooting of a child in a theater to introduce this originary violence. Here Mackay acknowledges the potential pitfalls of her new historicist approach, but claims that the anecdote is proof of early modern drama’s “historiographic impulse” to “careen … off the course of its expected event and headlong into disaster,” taking its audience down with it (3). Critic Peter J. Smith calls this proof “idiosyncratic” in his Times Higher Education review of this book, claiming that Mackay “is often as much interested by the adroit articulation of her argument as by its validity.” Smith is correct to point out that Mackay’s argument weakens when she suggests that the lack of a clear record in Gawdy’s tale is “testimony” of early modern theater’s tendency toward disappearance. Mackay, however, justifies her claim by contextualizing Gawdy’s gunshot as a “fundamental gestus of the early modern English stage” that at once “alienat[es]” and “historiciz[es]” its audience via its violent disappearances (8).

Once the theater has viewers’ attention, Mackay argues, it then proceeds with these three categories of violence around which the book is organized. The first casts the theater as a coliseum-like site of persecution, where those who are not necessarily guilty are judged as such and punished for their crimes. Mackay explains the violent implications of this theatrical tendency toward classicism in her first two chapters, entitled “The Theater of Persecution” and “Tyrannical Drama.” The ever-watchful eye of Protestant doctrine, according to Mackay, makes the theater a force of reckoning, but the theater allies itself more closely with Roman law than with church doctrine when revealing the sins of its viewers. This alliance marks early modern performance as destructive and fatalistic. Smith mischaracterizes this downward trajectory in his review, saying that Mackay’s metaphors “gesture towards a decline in theatrical potency.” In fact, Mackay repeatedly emphasizes the opposite: that the crumbling amphitheater is a “pattern,” a “perpetual reminder” of Rome’s destruction (45). Mackay’s metaphors are consistent in this regard. They convey the theater’s aggressive agency and a sense of endlessness or patterned repetition in the inevitable downward thrust of tragedy. The distinction here is an important one. Tragedy may not be able to change its course, but each performance has the power to mark its place in history by wounding its audience in the course of its own destruction. In “Tyrannical Drama,” Mackay posits Hamlet as an example of the theater as catharsis and Plutarch’s An Apology for Poetry as its predecessor, raising the concern that tragedy frequently fails to correctly identify the villain and thus often punishes a scapegoat rather than the guilty party in its quest for justice. Hamlet and Massinger’s The Roman Actor reinforce this notion of guilt without substance that leads to tyrannical injustice and leave their audience susceptible to the damning false consciousness of the theater (78).

In chapter 3, “The Theater as Infection,” Mackay shifts her focus from guilt without substance to invisible infectious agents. Mackay imaginatively links the medieval pageant wagon to the plague and emphasizes the theater’s process of shifting guilt from the agent—the theater—onto those infected by the theater’s influence—the viewers. Early modern theatrical associations with the Middle Ages, Mackay observes, are much more intimate than early modern ties to classical...