Abstract
AbstractThomas Shadwell’s dramatic satire The Virtuoso is the period’s most trenchant
formal examination of an ideological crisis associated with the new science. While
Robert Boyle and his fellow virtuosi sought to make natural philosophy increasingly
autonomous from discourses of theatricality, Shadwell short-circuited their message
by representing the new empirical work onstage and “inside,” as it were, the more
capacious and flexible empirical space of live theater. The Virtuoso claims that Royal
Society science ought to be seen as little more than a species of drama.
