Persecution, Plague, and Fire

Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England

MacKay Ellen

The theater of early modern England was a disastrous affair. The scant record of its performance demonstrates as much, for what we tend to remember today of the Shakespearean stage and its history are landmark moments of dissolution: the burning down of the Globe, the forced closure of playhouses during outbreaks of the plague, and the abolition of the theater by its Cromwellian opponents.

"Persecution, Plague, and Fire" is a study of these catastrophes and the theory of performance they convey. Ellen MacKay argues that the various disasters that afflicted the English theater during its golden age were no accident but the promised end of a practice built on disappearance and erasure – a kind of fatal performance that left nothing behind but its self-effacing poetics. Bringing together dramatic theory, performance studies, and theatrical, religious, and cultural history, MacKay reveals the period's radical take on the history and the future of the stage to show just how critical the relation was between early modern English theater and its public.

Reviews

"Theater practitioners have drawn crowds with catastrophe since the first ancient chorus swooned and fell to the ground, but Ellen MacKay shows how the Elizabethans added plague and perdition to their preoccupation with 'soundrie slaughters and mayhemmings' caused by the devilish engines of the stage, literal and figurative. 'Persecution, Plague, and Fire' is written with pyrotechnics that rival the stage fires it witnesses" – Joseph Roach, Yale University

"How did the Elizabethan theater manage to achieve its incomparable greatness – or even to survive – in a time of relentless plague, Puritan hostility, fires, and other vicissitudes of adverse fortune? Ellen MacKay's brilliant insight is to narrate a story of theatrical enterprise based on disastrous accidents, erasure, and a taxonomy of fatal performance, leaving an undiscovered poetics in its wake. This book superbly captures the sense in which the Elizabethan theater is so quintessentially like all theater at its best and most evanescent: now you see it, now you don't. The life of performance resides apocalyptically in its impermanence" – David Bevington, University of Chicago

"'Persecution, Plague, and Fire' is a provocative and important book, one of the few – in some senses, the only – to engage both pro- and antitheatrical discourse in early modern England. MacKay's effort to track a kind of conceptual aporia in the early modern theater's understanding of its historical position, and indeed of its effective means, is developed in great detail, and with significant interpretive flair and originality. It's a very powerful book" – W. B. Worthen, Barnard College, Columbia University

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