Inside Out: Early Modern Domestic Tragedy and the Dramaturgy of Extrusion

Abstract

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• Inside Out: Early Modern Domestic Tragedy and the Dramaturgy of Extrusion
• Emma K. Atwood (bio)

Domestic tragedy has constituted a distinct genre of study for the past hundred years, beginning with a 1925 dissertation by Edward Ayers Taylor, who sought to categorize a number of largely forgotten and lost plays (Orlin, “Domestic” 390). Since the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, scholars like Catherine Belsey, Lena Cowen Orlin, Laura Gowing, Catherine Richardson, and Ann Christensen have offered a series of exciting approaches to the genre and its constitutive relationship to early modern culture. In her recent monograph Separation Scenes: Domestic Drama in Early Modern England, Christensen clearly defines the genre:

popular at the end of the sixteenth century and most often set in contemporary England, domestic tragedy is a generic grouping that modern scholars have recognized for a number of innovations: chiefly the middling or bourgeois status of their characters and concerns (as distinct from the nobility and the poor); a “reduction in scale” from tragedies of state; and the violent, often “true” crimes depicted.

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In short, she explains, these plays stage “domestic life in crisis” (Separation 5). This depiction of domestic crisis has proved especially useful for scholars invested in questions related to early modern gender, class, violence, and the economies of everyday life. As Orlin notes in her overview “Domestic Tragedy: Private Life on the Public Stage,” “in a growing body of scholarship, domestic tragedy has since proved itself to be a site in which historicist, feminist, and materialist approaches are profitably practiced” (“Domestic” 392). Entire seminars are now being offered on the topic, like Ellen MacKay’s 2022 course “Housekeeping: Domestic Drama and Material Culture” at the University of Chicago. And Emma Whipday’s recent monograph Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Violence in the Early Modern Home has sought to bring this genre into conversation with more mainstream Shakespearean plays such as Othello, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and King Lear. [End Page 1]

Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, Two Lamentable Tragedies 1 and 2, Edward IV, A Yorkshire Tragedy, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and The Witch of Edmonton make up the core canon of domestic tragedy (Orlin, “Domestic” 391). But despite the rich and persistent scholarly interest in the genre, these plays are rarely staged. Arden has perhaps had the most theatrical luck, likely stemming from its association with Shakespeare: the Royal Shakespeare Company offered an Arden in 1982 and again in 2014; the Boston University company Willing Suspensions staged Arden in 2014; the Resurgens Theatre Company in Georgia staged a four-day run of Arden in 2017 and remounted this production for a three-day run during their Death and Domesticity Conference in 2018; Santa Fe Summer Shakespeare offered a script-in-hand reading of Arden in 2020; and the off-broadway Red Bull Theater offered a high-profile Arden in 2023. A Woman Killed with Kindness was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991, but it wasn’t staged again until twenty years later with a 2011 National Theater production. In 2014, University College London staged an academic parts performance of Two Lamentable Tragedies, documented in a scholarly article by Whipday and Freyja Cox Jensen. And it was not until 2018 that Resurgens finally brought A Warning for Fair Women back to the stage, the first time this play had been performed in over 400 years.

If, as the growing body of scholarship suggests, domestic tragedies can offer a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern culture, and if this understanding is deeply rooted in an understanding of domestic space, might they not also offer a significant contribution to our understanding of early modern dramaturgy, itself a spatial art form? If we aren’t staging these plays, we are likely missing insights evident in rehearsal and performance but largely invisible on the page or in the classroom.

Ultimately, I’d like to suggest that the genre of domestic tragedy doesn’t only function as an intriguing cultural mirror in regards to its engagement with such pressing social issues as gender and class, credit and capitalism, crime and punishment, but can—and should—be studied for its...