Chapter 6 investigates how the duopoly, by radically curtailing numbers, inadvertently transformed actors from vagrants in need of a patron’s protection to celebrities lionized by courtiers and commoners alike. Managerial choices coalesced with the historical accident of a monarch so intimately associated with the theatre that he took two actresses as mistresses. Playhouse architecture also exerted an unexpected phenomenological effect on their status. The intimacy characteristic of the Restoration playhouse transmogrified performed intersubjectivity into the crackling exchange of eroticized energy. Unprecedented social freedom, economic mobility, and even contemporary portraiture attest to their new stature after 1660. That new prominence, however, invited attacks in print and person – against women especially – from men anxious about their own precarious hold on respectability. The choices, contingencies, and memories that made Restoration theatre such an unforgiving business nonetheless catapulted the acting profession toward the celebrity culture that would flourish in the following century.

Don DeLillo, this chapter argues, has created innovative narratives from the typecast materials of popular genre fiction. It demonstrates that genre novels and films, from spy thrillers and noir to mafia stories and horror, have often served DeLillo as, counterintuitively, a blank canvas – not as a narrowing template or pre-determined plot but as grounds for subversion, especially of the ideologies popular genres tend to encode, including the myths of individual agency with which DeLillo’s characters often strongly (and wrongheadedly) identify. DeLillo has remained interested in responding to generic narratives throughout his nearly fifty-year career because genres’ tired conventions and predictable endings often act as foils to his far more distinctive explorations of violence and death, that real-world ending, particularly in his late-career invocations of horror. The chapter examines primarily examples from Running Dog, Players, Libra, Underworld, The Body Artist, and Point Omega.

This chapter delves into one of DeLillo's frequently recurring themes, terrorism, yet develops the ways in which different novels' approaches to understanding terrorism significantly differ despite their surface similarities.