Staging Pain, 1580-1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater

The essays in Staging Pain investigate the relationship between pain and theatre in historically specific ways between 1580 and 1800, a period "book-ended" (7) first by the founding of the London theatre and second by an increasing lack of faith both in spectacular modes of punishment and stage effects, and framed as well by essays on Marlowe and on Baillie. John D. Staines brilliantly demonstrates this effect through his discussion of the radicalizing effect of pity in King Lear, specifically how the blinding of Gloucester forces the audience to reevaluate vengeance and the political order. Allard and Martin recognize that "trauma's temporal complexity poses problems for narrative and for historiography and literary criticism based on conventional understandings of narrative as linear and referential" (13), but theatre's active and interactive nature allows for a more complex and ironically realistic working out of these traumatic possibilities.