Prosaic Suffering

This chapter examines the uses and meanings of prose in tragedy during the eighteenth century. It offers a close, comparative reading of Aaron Hill’s The Fatal Extravagance (1721) and Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753), and places the developing conventions of bourgeois tragedy in conversation with the insights of Samuel Richardson, Denis Diderot, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and the actors called upon to embody its emotion. In doing so, this chapter argues that prosaic suffering performed its grief under an illusion of immediacy, in ways that were absorptive rather than theatrical, and provocatively disenchanted in their implications. Hence, bourgeois drama’s “natural picture” adapted the novel’s “writing to the moment” and embodied emotional practices characterized by quotidian concerns and an ambivalence about middle-rank life.

Close to Home

This chapter explores many of the domestic elements that were central to the creation of bourgeois tragedy in Georgian Britain, focusing especially on George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1736) and his posthumous adaptation of Arden of Faversham (1759; with John Hoadly). The chapter begins by broadening the archive of the genre’s source material, situating its eighteenth-century repertoire alongside the true crime narratives it in many cases adapted, as well as early Stuart predecessors, Shakespeare’s Othello (1603), and Restoration she-tragedy. It thereby claims that the genre represents important advances in realism as it was practiced onstage that worked to exploit the intimacy of the home and stage during the period. This chapter also examines a major theme in contemporaneous theorizations of the genre by considering what it means for a play to “strike close to home,” linking that trope to changes in affect, aesthetics, and performance during the period.

An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy

This Introduction situates bourgeois tragedy in relation to the period’s literature, social history, and critical theories of tragedy. Against claims of tragedy’s demise in the period, it argues that depictions of middle-rank misfortune formed a vital body of text and performance in the eighteenth century, encompassing not only the drama but also early novels and other cognate forms concerned with the serious representation of what it defines as “ordinary suffering.” Briefly tracing the genre’s history, and reflecting upon the conditions of its emergence in early modernity, the Introduction recuperates these texts as part of a more capacious canon of tragedy that predated and therefore complicates post-Kantian philosophies of the tragic. In doing so, it reads the enactment, depiction, and discourse of everyday affliction enabled by this genre in light of contemporary work on affect theory and the history of emotion. It concludes with an outline of the chapters to follow.

Tragic Sensibilities

This chapter considers the parallel development of bourgeois tragedy, genre serieux (the serious genre), and the era’s early sentimental literature. It reads Sarah Fielding’s pathbreaking sentimental novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), and Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751) in light of the siblings’ close connection to the first generation of bourgeois tragedians in order to claim that sentimental fiction refigures tragedy’s aesthetic frames, with both adopting the tableau in order to invest simple, pathetic scenes of ordinary suffering with dignity. The chapter then considers how these formal elements navigate between realism, sentimentality, and ironic detachment by looking briefly at scenes from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and Sophia Lee’s adaptation of Diderot’s Le Pere de famille (1758) as A Chapter of Accidents (1782). Finally, it considers this cultural and affective work in light of recent theories of “public intimacy.”

The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy

This chapter continues the argument begun in the Introduction, proposing a revised, reparative approach to the earliest bourgeois tragedies. It focuses especially on George Lillo’s landmark drama, The London Merchant (1731), and examines its unique re-interpretation of neoclassical theories of tragedy and poetic decorum. This chapter narrates its debut alongside burlesques and satires on the middle and lower sorts by Edward Ravenscroft, John Gay, William Hogarth, Henry Fielding, and John Kelly, making a case for Lillo’s radical valorization of ordinary life and a new aesthetic of identification. Its argument thereby describes the beginnings of a new appreciation for the trials of these social ranks in the era’s art, and offers a substantive reading of the text and its paratextual apparatus in light of this shift.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter revises accounts of British bourgeois tragedy’s importance to the drama and fiction of the turn of the nineteenth century, presenting evidence of the genre’s lasting influence and intervention in political and social debates as the century closed. It connects the English tradition to the serious fiction of the continent, offering detailed readings of Frederic Reynold’s stage adaptation of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1786 and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s adaptation of G. E. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti in 1794. Placing both in their immediate historical contexts, it links them to the radical politics of their day. Together this body of literature, the chapter argues, sees modernity as a tragic condition and the stage of revolutionary conflict in which ordinariness itself is conceived as a kind of affliction.

A Fine Subject for Tragedy

This chapter reads Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) alongside dramatic precursors such as Charles Johnson’s Cælia; or, The Perjur’d Lover (1733) and public responses to the novel in order to argue that Richardson’s seminal text staged a debate over the basic interpretability through which affliction’s experience is navigable and thus ultimately made bearable. Responses to the novel are analyzed, tracing contemporary theories of poetic justice in order to account for readerly expectations and their frustration as crucial to Richardson’s broader moral project. In doing so, the chapter reads poetic justice as a secular theology against which tragedy is positioned. The chapter then turns to consider Clarissa’s own fractured response to her suffering, placing her “Meditations” in dialogue with the epistolary of the novel in order to analyze her rhetorical and practical responses to pain.