Introduction: the theater as a loaded gun
The hurt that comes of fooling
Aeschylus's ballistic stage
The theater as persecution
Tragedy's guilty creatures
England's conscience-catching theater
The dream of theatrical justice
The widow's foregone confession
Gertrude's uncaught conscience
The fall of the unified church
"The theater and the plague"
"The sure disease of uncertaine causes"
Some symptoms of the medieval stage
"It is not words that shakes me thus"
"Look there, look there!"
The theater as conflagration
The eschatology of the Tudor stage
The theater's propensity for burning
Raising the "cry of Sodom"
Wielding the crime of Sodom
The stage's hymeneal contract
The impossible history of theater fires
The mare mortuum's infinite stage
Afterword: on the uncertainty of what comes after.
