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

In the three disasters of its title, Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England proposes new models for thinking about how the people who made early modern theater represented its history. As well as providing a striking new approach to telling its story, Ellen MacKay's book diagnoses and taps into the whiff of apocalypse that accompanies much contemporary performance theory and some new historicist approaches to early modern theater. But more broadly and perhaps most importantly, it advances a timely understanding of how we might approach the history of that theater—what we might use, what we might hope to find, and where we could look. MacKay describes convincingly "how the theater was thought to happen in early modern England: by careening off the course of its expected event and headlong into disaster" (3). Repeatedly imagined in terms of its spectacular failures, Persecution, Plague, and Fire suggests that theater itself, and perhaps most symptomatically early modern theater, resists being accounted for in the familiar, linear narrative of evolution from classical theaters to modernist ones. More useful in representing how the theater acts within history, MacKay suggests, are Antonin Artaud or Walter Benjamin, with their theories of causeless effect or radical, fleeting illumination, of performances as occasions of eruption rather than peripeteia. As MacKay argues, such modernist discussions of the power of theater and of history have analogues in early modern accounts of the theater, so that, for instance, the association of plague and playing "articulates an early and acute strain of performance studies" (86). This book boldly recasts not just what we know about theater, but how we can think about it.

Persecution, Plague, and Fire counters the conventional view that theater history in England begins with the Restoration, as well as the conventional view that there is a history of theater that easily incorporates the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The early modern theater, in the stories it stages and the attacks that are directed against it, offers its own Benjaminian philosophy of history, forever rupturing its developmental narratives and always threatening to return its viewers to its pasts or throw them into their futures. For MacKay, theater is one of the pressure points that wrench time out of joint. Like Jody Enders's work on the vicissitudes of recovering and retelling medieval theater history, MacKay looks beyond questions of what might have happened and turns instead to what is expected of the early modern theater, what theatrical pasts it recalls, and how it reframes them. The stories its opponents tell about the theaters catering to perverse sexualities, threatening physical and moral infections, or above all erupting in flames are no less important for not being what we might call true histories.

In place of a disciplined history of "how it really happened," Persecution, Plague, and Fire proposes one of the early modern theater's stories of itself, rewriting the conventional triptych of classical, medieval, and early modern as tyrannical, pestilential, and sodomitical stages. These categories of catastrophe can be mapped onto three loose historical moments in theater history: the bloodily real revelations in the amphitheater of Roman emperors and Christian martyrs, the ritual communions of the Mass and the cycle play, and the specifically unspeakable desires that antitheatrical writers like Stephen Gosson and William Prynne feared playhouses aroused in their audiences. The book's alternative history fractures this sequence into thematic windows, with sections on theater as instrument of interrogation and judgment, as source of contagion, and as conflagration. As MacKay shows in a series of acute readings, these histories are not initially ours, but those retold by early modern commentators, both the theater's supporters and its opponents, about the forces of their own stage and how they veered toward destruction. Thus, the mode of the Roman theater recalls the hope, or fear, that performance might...