“[A]n engaging and rich exploration of drama’s unique relationship with history. Readers willing to indulge Mackay’s new historicist impulses will appreciate her relentless and enthusiastic engagement with the theoretical ‘stuff’ of early modern performance.”

Jennie Friedrich | Comitatus

“The book has much to recommend it as a new approach to old stories. Its bold analysis and focus on various forms of destruction remind us that catastrophe could be creatively harnessed and exploited. The suggestion that perilousness is the point of theatre, rather than a consequence of it, revivifies and repositions the anecdotes MacKay tells. . . . [A] book for those interested in theorizing the creative potential of theatrical disaster.”

Tiffany Stern | Times Literary Supplement

“A demanding yet rewarding eschatological reading of the early modern English theater. . . . Important and erudite.”

Colleen E. Kennedy, Ohio State University | Sixteenth Century Journal

“Theater practitioners have drawn crowds with catastrophe since the first ancient chorus swooned and fell to the ground, but Ellen MacKay shows how the Elizabethans added plague and perdition to their preoccupation with ‘soundrie slaughters and mayhemmings’ caused by the devilish engines of the stage, literal and figurative. Persecution, Plague, and Fire is written with pyrotechnics that rival the stage fires it witnesses.”

Joseph Roach, Yale University

“How did the Elizabethan theater manage to achieve its incomparable greatness—or even to survive—in a time of relentless plague, Puritan hostility, fires, and other vicissitudes of adverse fortune? Ellen MacKay’s brilliant insight is to narrate a story of theatrical enterprise based on disastrous accidents, erasure, and a taxonomy of fatal performance, leaving an undiscovered poetics in its wake. This book superbly captures the sense in which the Elizabethan theater is so quintessentially like all theater at its best and most evanescent: now you see it, now you don’t. The life of performance resides apocalyptically in its impermanence.”

David Bevington, University of Chicago

“Persecution, Plague, and Fire is a provocative and important book, one of the few—in some senses, the only—to engage both pro- and antitheatrical discourse in early modern England. MacKay’s effort to track a kind of conceptual aporia in the early modern theater’s understanding of its historical position, and indeed of its effective means, is developed in great detail, and with significant interpretive flair and originality. It’s a very powerful book.”

W. B. Worthen, Barnard College, Columbia University