Bombast Circumstance: Linguistic Creativity and Aesthetic Judgment in Early Modern Tragedy

This essay recovers bombast as an aesthetic category with singular importance to early modern tragedy. Its argument is that bombast, as language which feels irremediably wrong to its occasion, discloses the secret subject of the genre, which is the challenge—if not the impossibility—of finding language that will be judged right to the occasion of suffering. By attending to moments of bombast in Tamburlaine, The Spanish Tragedy , and Othello , this essay shows how early modern tragedies drive a wedge between linguistic creativity and aesthetic judgment, cultivating language that feels aesthetically and ethically off, as a way of turning tragedy itself into a genre in which language will not fit with its genre.