You Can't Spell Tragedy Without Rage

Abstract

A powerful performance focuses and unifies the diverse perspectives of pit, box, and gallery into a singular audience and teaches it (how) to feel. Spectatorship is both an embodied and an out-of-body experience that encourages identification with an Other. Looking at the experience of eighteenth-century tragedy and the impact of Mary Ann Yates (1728–1787), the celebrity actress who personified the genre for a generation, show us the centrality of rage, not pathos, to tragedy.