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

Ellen MacKay’s Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England offers an important history of non-Aristotelian dramatic theory as it appears embedded in the scripts, stage practices, anti-theatrical tracts, and performance anecdotes of early modern theatre. MacKay demonstrates this theatre culture’s resistance to the strict Aristotelian separation of imitation and action (memorably articulated in the period by Philip Sidney as the impossibility of mistaking the theatrical “Thebes” for the actual Thebes). The counter-tradition that MacKay tracks is alert to the unruly power of performance to trouble the boundary between the simulated and the real. Persecution, Plague, and Fire articulates several frames through which people during the period conceptualized the contradiction between theatre’s felt impact and its fleeting irreality.

This vivid, powerful book has been faulted for its promiscuous sense of evidentiary decorum. Alternatively, we might simply accept that MacKay is practicing a form of theatre history more oriented toward performance theory than archival discovery. She dispenses with chronological ordering and darts among seemingly incommensurate forms of evidence because the cultural logic she is mapping itself makes these associative leaps. Indeed, the most valuable methodological insight of this book may be its intrepid pursuit of complex ways of thinking in the period about what theatre was and could do, ways of thinking that are equal to the complexity of early modern drama itself. Persecution, Plague, and Fire recovers the performance paradigms that do not announce themselves as “theory,” but that nevertheless manifest repeatedly in theatre lore, dramatic devices, and anti-theatrical screeds. MacKay’s introduction recuperates the spotty, anecdotal quality of the evidence of early modern stage practices as “reflect[ing] a broad cultural recognition of performance’s conflict with historicization” (6). The book recovers discourses that anticipate contemporary performance theory’s attention to theatre’s inherent transience. Throughout, MacKay insists that early modern theatre culture was sensitive to the self-consuming nature of performance, and keenly aware of the paradoxical relationship between theatre’s strong effects and its ephemerality.

Divided into three parts, Persecution, Plague, and Fire presents its titular triptych of disasters as emblematic modes in which the theatre was understood to generate real consequences from its illusions. Chapter 1, “The Theater as Persecution,” deals with the early modern English theatre’s reputation for violently exposing the guilty souls of spectators. MacKay opens with a discussion of the figure of the widow moved by a play to confess her husband’s hidden murder, arguing persuasively that the recirculation of this familiar guilty creature across decades of playscripts and theatre lore registers a broader sense of the theatre’s capacity to catch consciences. MacKay neatly distinguishes catharsis from the catastrophes that Thomas Heywood credits the stage with inciting: “whereas Aristotle’s tragedy clears the air of any sins in the making, Heywood’s exposes the sinners in its midst . . . the theater enacts a justice denied by the state” (25–26). Chapter 2, “Tyrannical Drama,” demonstrates the ways in which the image of the stage as a guilt-extracting mechanism of justice was understood to be a necessarily unfulfilled ideal. The theatre’s power to force false confessions indexes its larger ability to make fictions as potent as reality. Through sensitive readings of Hamlet and Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor, MacKay shows the drama reflecting on its own wayward refusal to serve any edifying project.

“The Theater as Infection” (chapter 3) unpacks the cultural connection between plague and playhouse. Productively reading anti-theatrical writing for its insights into performance, MacKay traces a link between theatre and the plague as analogous forms of “spectatorial affliction” (91). The “persistent equivalence” drawn in the period “between the theater and the epidemic’s causeless impact” (93), she suggests, anticipates Antonin Artaud’s description of theatre as a fatal infection from an intangible source. Chapter 4, “Stigmatical Drama,” takes up the religious implications of the stage’s...