Figures of Pain in Early Modern English Tragedy

Abstract

the relationship between physical pain and figurative language, metaphor in particular, is highly fraught, yet many early modern English tragedies are built upon a dual foundation of spectacular episodes of suffering and elaborate poetic conceits. Ingenuity in both language and spectacle certainly helped sell tickets in a saturated dramatic marketplace, but the cooperative conjunction of pain and metaphor more importantly helped these plays achieve the didactic and cathartic goals of the genre. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the many ways sensory experience contributed to understanding in the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Unlike the sights, sounds, or even smells of a performance, however, the sensation of pain was neither felt by actors nor shared with audience members, hindering direct communication of an experience central to tragedy. Compounded with the potential meaninglessness of pain and the isolation that can accompany extreme suffering, this lack of direct communication could impede audience engagement with the subject matter and characters of the play. Metaphor and other types of figurative language are a means for tragic playwrights to meet the challenges of the dramatic representation of pain. These tropes offer a way to “make sense” of pain: to unite the physical sensation portrayed by the actor with an intellectual, emotional, and meta-