As in our own historical moment, the early modern English cultural imaginary exhibited an anxiety that entertainment spectacle could (and often did) spur the spectator to violent acts. How, exactly, the theater was able to influence audience members so profoundly was less clear. Most often, this relationship was expressed as a type of imaginative contagion, such as is seen in William Prynne's 1633 antitheatrical treatise, Histriomastix: “[T]he style and subject matter of stage-plays is scurrilous and obscene”¦which efferate and enrage the hearts and minds of actors and spectators”¦to anger, malice, dules, murders, revenge and more than barbarous cruelty.” However, Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (one of the most extended seventeenth-century metadramatic commentary on early modern spectators), offers another possibility: that the communicative processes through which drama engaged the spectator were imagined as a sort of psychic violence enacted upon him or her. By looking at Beaumont's play alongside other contemporaneous discourses about theatrical spectatorship, Rodgers suggests another, less-theorized, link between spectatorship and violence, one that articulates something about interpretative and affective processes rather than a cause-and-effect relationship between witnessing of dramatized violence and acting it out in the real world.

Last year, Amy Rodgers was Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Student Fellow in the Institute for the Humanities. During the summer she defended her dissertation, completing the requirements for her Ph.D. in English Languages and Literature. Currently, she teaches at Kalamazoo College.