ABSTRACT
The word 'symptom', contained in the title of my paper, opens up a universe of discourse dealing with disease. This seems appropriate because very often decadence is treated as a disease, a situation where an ideal, healthy state has declined, and plague and sickness have taken over. From the Theatre Controversy' of the Renaissance through to Artaud and his pervasive concept of 'Cruelty', theatre in particular has been conceived as associated with plague and disease, as Keir Elam has recently remarked.1 The diseases most commonly associated with the idea of decadence are sensationalism, egocentricity, an insistent search for the bizarre, artificiality, flippancy and sometimes even perversity, with certain critics and playwrights assuming that these tendencies have an artistic quality, marking the 'decadent' state off as better than life, very often larger than life. In epochs when such an ethos becomes dominant, it spreads like a contagious disease, leaving its unmistakable mark on the times.
