The Theater of Experiment

Abstract

Abstract The first book-length study of the relationship of science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was “staged” in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance—that is, the ways in which eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that reverberated across the laboratory, lecture hall, anatomy theater, and public stage. Not only did the representation of science and scientists in Restoration and eighteenth-century plays influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play in modern life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take as well. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, what was then called natural philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge.