The Sublime Actor and the Poetics of Emotions: Agency, Affect, and the Theatrical Sublime

This dissertation traces the history of the theatrical sublime from classical, neoclassical, and British eighteenth-century texts and performances to identify the emergence of the sublime actor, a figure who demonstrates a crucial tension in affect theory and in understanding the individual subject. To theorize this figure, I develop what I call the poetics of emotions—an original approach to understanding affect and its representation, one that borrows from Aristotle’s theory of drama to argue that through the power of representation, attempts to delineate emotions necessarily flip into depictions and demonstrations of agency. If affect is the seat of our interiority, it is also universal, objective, and predictable, an effect, apropos Aristotle, of plot. In cognizing, representing, or performing them, our feelings can be summoned, manipulated, and contained. The sublime actor masters this process, turning helplessness into agency, and the emotional labour of this transformation models the ideal subject of emotional capitalism. I render this sublime actor visible by bringing theories from Aristotle, Longinus, Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, and Sir Henry Irving to bear on performances by Marie Champmeslé, Sarah Siddons, and John Kemble, in plays that focus on the myth of Phaedra by Euripides, Jean Racine, Joanna Baillie, and Eugene O’Neill. These plays are of significance not just because of their thematic interest in powerful emotions and their expression, but because they express these themes through a shared formal device, which I call the scene of inquiry. These scenes, I argue, create a space in the theatre to stage the sublime drama of the mind such that a poetics of emotions can readily emerge. By following the intertextual history of these scenes, this dissertation observes how the fiscal pressures of the commercial theatre twist the theatrical sublime into becoming an aesthetic of economic success and celebrity, one that culminates in the theatrical innovations of Baillie and the social and theatrical performances of Siddons.