Description
Book SynopsisPresents a study of playhouse catastrophes and the theory of performance they convey. Bringing together dramatic theory,theatrical, religious, and cultural history, this title 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.
Trade Review"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)"