Addison's Theater of the Aesthetic

Abstract

Theater is the missing term of Addison's aesthetics. Over the eleven numbers of the Spectator that comprise his 1712 essay on the "Pleasures of the Imagination" (nos. 411-421), Addison considers painting, statuary, architecture, landscape gardens, and poetry, but conspicuously not the stage.1 Of course, the trajectory of Addison's essay-which moves from consideration of imagination's primary pleasures (the experience of what we see) to its secondary pleasures (the reconstruction of the seen object in the mind)-is one that in any case privileges literariness. As Neil Saccamano notes, Addison's discussion of the secondary pleasures is "entirely determined by the substitution of poetic description, based on writing and speech, for the 'other Kinds of Representation' he singles out."2 But it's nonetheless striking that the "Pleasure" essay, an essay concerned with the experience and epistemology of the visual, doesn't so much as glance atsingle out-the theater.Striking but not surprising, for Addison was always troubled by the embodiedness, the ineluctable sensuality, of performance. As part of their recurrent call for the regulation of the public stage in the Tatler and Spectator, both he and Steele routinely inveighed against the spectacular excrescences of contemporary theater. But unlike Steele-who readily acknowledged the singular moral efficacy of "seeing generous Things perform'd before our Eyes"-Addison's conception of drama is first and foremost rhetorical.3 His essays on tragedy in the Spectator pit the "well-written" play, with "its the Dignity of Thought and Sublimity of Expression," against the "the Dresses and Decorations of the Stage" (39, 1:164; 42, 1:177, 179). "However the Show and Outside of the Tragedy may work upon the Vulgar," Addison witheringly insists, "the more understanding Part of the Audience immediately see through it and despise it" (42, 1:180). As in