Theatrical Space and Scientific Space in Thomas Shadwell’s Virtuoso

Thomas Shadwell’s dramatic satire The Virtuoso is the period’s most trenchant formal examination of an ideological crisis associated with the new science. While Robert Boyle and his fellow virtuosi sought to make natural philosophy increasingly autonomous from discourses of theatricality, Shadwell short-circuited their message by representing the new empirical work onstage and “inside,” as it were, the more capacious and flexible empirical space of live theater. The Virtuoso claims that Royal Society science ought to be seen as little more than a species of drama.