Striking the Posture of a Whore: The Bawdy House Riots and the “Antitheatrical Prejudice”

Sept. 1, 2009

[1] In his oft-cited defense of metaphysical poetry T.S. Eliot provocatively comments on what he terms a seventeenth-century “dissociation of sensibility,” an aesthetic sea change “from which we have never recovered” (288). For Eliot, the English Restoration saw the emergence of a new aesthetic economy that divorced idea from sensation,...