This essay examines theatrical damnation as a mode of censorship and how it proved to be a particularly fraught experience for women playwrights. The argument unfolds in two sections. The first section looks at how and why audiences shouted Hannah Cowley’s The World as it Goes (1781) off the stage after two performances. The damnation of such a successful playwright, in many ways at the height of her powers and popularity, discloses a great deal about what kinds of satirical commentary were viable for women writers at this historical moment. The play’s re-presentation, equally doomed, as Second Thoughts are Best, allows us to speculate on how class and gender converge in this scenario to produce the unproduceable. The second section focuses on the damnation of a far less accomplished playwright. Lady Eglantine Wallace’s comedy The Ton (1788) generated increasing levels of disapprobation over its four nights. In this case however the press played a crucial role in the censorship because it closely aligned Lady Wallace’s moral culpability with the play’s aesthetic shortcomings. The outrage was directed at elite sociability and thus it also offers a useful counterexample to Cowley’s excoriation of the middling ranks. Finally, the argument offers a snapshot of how the repertoire itself was changing over the 1780s.

Traditional Christianity includes a number of ideas with affinities to decadence, notably the eschatological belief that the end of the world is imminent (a belief that has its secular counterpart in the idea of historical and social decline) and the dogma of original sin. This chapter sketches out ‘a theology of decadence’ by showing how particular theological ideas ? principally those concerned with transgression, punishment, and apocalypse ? grew anew in the strange and modern hothouse of decadent literary form. Baudelaire and his use of original sin as formulated by the Catholic theologian Joseph de Maistre ramifies into the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans before moving on to the apocalyptically-charged flowering of decadence in England at the Victorian fin de siècle. These theological influences are particularly evident in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where Wilde reflects the dual inheritance of an aesthetic relativism derived from Walter Pater and theological ideas of sin and punishment as a form of apocalyptic crisis.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.