You Can't Spell Tragedy Without Rage

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 attending (rather than reading) 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.