The second half of the project pivots to plays that take up the interpellative and affective force of complaint within their narratives in order to reflect on the particular agency, and social value, of tragedy itself: my third chapter reads Hamlet as a meditation on how the structure of complaint, incorporated into tragic narrative, might strike theatrical audiences’ consciences, while my final chapter, on Richard II, shows how performances of complaint, even if they do nothing else, might move audiences to tears. As a staging ground for complaint, the early modern theater and its tragic shows oriented audiences to respond to and participate in social modes of complaining—and taught them to be more sophisticated spectators and consumers of tragedy.

In this volume, 8 lively, original essays by eminent scholars trace the kaleidoscopically shifting dramatic forms, performance contexts, and social implications of tragedy throughout the period and across geographic, political, and social references. They attend not only to the familiar cultural lenses of English and mainstream Continental dramas but also to less familiar European exempla from Croatia and Hungary. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

A woman returns to wreak end-of-the-world vengeance on her Pennsylvania hometown Disfigured since birth, Joanie Musser has endured decades of taunts and torments from the “normals” in Hoadley, Pennsylvania. Her only friend is a boy named Barry Beal, who has an ugly birthmark on his face. A few days after Barry lends her $500 and his welder’s mask, Joanie disappears. Cally Wilmore, a vaguely discontented mother of two and the wife of the local funeral director, sees Joanie first: a breathtaking blond apparition galloping through town on a white steed. Rebel and resident cynic Gigi Wildasin senses that something peculiar is happening. The cicadas are crying out of season—modern-day locusts who swarm the town bearing dead children’s faces—and a blacksnake appears next to the most beautiful and erotic naked man anyone has ever seen. Cally and Gigi, along with Shirley Danyo and her lover, Elspeth, all ride horses to escape their everyday lives, unaware that they are the Four Horsewomen of doom. A familiar stranger has come to Hoadley with a terrible purpose, and for the inhabitants of this struggling coal-mining community, it seems that Judgment Day is nigh. An allegorical novel about small-town prejudice and the secrets that fester beneath the surface, Apocalypse is also about the power of love to triumph against all odds.