The Tyranny of Tragedy: Catharsis in England and The Roman Actor

A story rehearsed repeatedly and variously in Renaissance England prompts Hamlet's now famous assertion "The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King":

I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a playHave by the very cunning of the sceneBeen struck so to the soul that presentlyThey have proclaimed their malefactions;For murder, though it have no tongue, will speakWith most miraculous organ.¹

Inspired by tales of tragedy eliciting confessions from murderous playgoers, Hamlet designs The Mousetrap to displace all doubt about Claudius's guilt and thus to legitimize retaliatory justice.² Yet when Hamlet returns from England he is intent less on avenging a former murder than on preventing "future evil" (5.2.71). The bifold function of tragedy as corrective and prophylactic also underlies Philip Sidney's definition of "high and excellent tragedy" in An Apology for Poetry. Tragedy, he contends, "maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humors" and "maketh us know, 'Qui sceptra saevus duro imperio regit, / Timet timentes, metus in auctorem redit'" (The savage tyrant who wields his scepter with a heavy hand fears the timid, and fear returns to its author).³ These accounts of tragedy catching guilty consciences and terrorizing unjust rulers exemplify a uniquely Renaissance English interpretation of catharsis. In book 6 of the Poetics Aristotle describes tragedy as a specific type of action—mimetic, complete, and weighty—that has a particular, if ambiguous, emotional impact upon audiences: "Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude . . . through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions."⁴ Whereas medieval writers did not touch on the subject of catharsis, beginning in the sixteenth century writers focused considerable attention on this enigmatic element of Aristotle's theory of tragedy. Early Renaissance writers produced more accurate translations of the Poetics, but Continental and English commentators differed on how to reconcile Aristotelian catharsis with the Horatian maxim that poetry should teach and delight.⁵ Continental writers viewed catharsis in terms of medicinal cleansing; tragedy, they posited, refines debilitating emotions such as sorrow and terror, so as to render the individual physically and mentally ready for civil service.⁶ By contrast, English authors privileged a more legalistic interpretation.⁷ Catharsis stirs up admissions of guilt, they argued, rather than empties out harmful emotions; it leads to the exposure of vicious offenders, not the creation of virtuous citizens.

Scholars who observe this "very special application of the Aristotelian doctrine" of catharsis tend to dismiss its particular legalistic quality and collapse it into moral interpretations.⁸ In this essay, I argue that Renaissance English catharsis is not merely "an expansion ad absurdum" of the theory propagated on the Continent, as Stephen Orgel asserts.⁹ Rather, I contend that it constitutes a radical and significant break from contemporary interpretations. Moreover, when we take seriously this legalistic quality, we begin to see the place of Renaissance English catharsis in an extended literary history that reaches back to the classical world and forward to today. The dueling positions of Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world, and of Raymond Williams and George Steiner in the modern one; plays by Euripides, Shakespeare, Brecht, and Beckett; romantic notions of "the Tragic" and more recent expansions of tragedy to include the novel, photography, and film—the magnitude and complexity of tragedy's history makes it beyond the scope of this essay.¹⁰ Instead, I focus on one play that self-consciously contributes to tragedy's literary and cultural legacy. Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor scrutinizes the uniquely Renaissance English explication of catharsis as a facilitator of law and order. The play shows catharsis falling short of its legalistic mission as time and again tragedy occasions rather than deters or punishes adultery, murder, and tyranny.¹¹ Despite its representation of cathartic inefficacy, The Roman Actor is not an antitheatrical play, as some scholars have suggested.¹² Massinger's play, I will show, aims less at a critique of the...