You Can't Spell Tragedy Without Rage

ABSTRACT A powerful performance focuses and unifies the diverse perspectives of pit, box, and gallery into a singular audience and teaches it (how) to feel. Spectatorship is both an embodied and an out‐of‐body experience that encourages identification with an Other. Looking at the experience of eighteenth‐century tragedy and the impact of Mary Ann Yates (1728–1787), the celebrity actress who personified the genre for a generation, show us the centrality of rage, not pathos, to tragedy.