DON CARLOS AND THE AESTHETICS OF PERSECUTION

The Inquisition on stage; the Inquisition as a stage to be succeeded, indeed overruled, by a new regime that is both represented on stage and inhabited off stage by the reader or audience: this is the logic that governs the dramatic works I investigate in this concluding chapter. To bring my previous discussions to a close in this way is to look both backwards and forwards. We return full circle now to the Gothic novel – to the mechanisms through which the Gothic surveyed, enclosed, and regulated the terrors of confessional uniformity. But we also add a new dimension to that discussion by expanding the implications of Godwin's striking way of representing the enclosure of confessional uniformity as a new source of terror in Mandeville. The hero's plight, as we saw in chapter 1, is to experience the loss of any sense of profound opposition that might derive from his religious or political dissent. Political membership is no longer characterized by a communion of beliefs that must exclude other conflicting beliefs, but by a more capacious Providential state whose triumphant authority achieves its most sublime expression precisely by relinquishing its demand for doctrinal agreement.

In the dramas that I discuss in this chapter, writers showed the continuing currency of the Gothic's politics of religion while capitalizing on the convergence between the theatrical techniques of confessional authority (its practices of oath- and test-taking, its numerous celebrations and rituals of conformity) and the conventions of theater itself.