The Unaccountable Pleasure of Eighteenth-Century Tragedy

Abstract

Scholars have been quick to dismiss Georgian tragedy as mere rant and have thus failed to examine why tragic plays were regularly staged in the eighteenth century. This essay explores the “unaccountable pleasure,” in David Hume's words, that spectators of the genre experienced. Hume compared the feeling of witnessing a tragedy to the sweet misery of watching high-stakes gamblers risk their fortunes. Part of the attraction derived from star actresses who performed the mixed genre of tragedy topped off with a comic epilogue in plays such as Edward Moore's The Gamester, George Lillo's The London Merchant, and David Garrick's The Fatal Marriage. This essay argues that eighteenth-century tragedies portray the struggles of a genre caught between a world ruled by poetic justice and one flung about by uncontrollable economic powers. Further, in its democratization of grievable subjects and its metatheatrical relation to the tragic, Georgian tragedy anticipates modern developments of the genre.