THE stories emerging from the Aurora, Colo., cineplex shooting are excruciating: the 6-year-old girl who will never grow up; the young men who shielded their girlfriends from the spray of the assault rifle; the killer in court in the grips of some evil unfathomable even to himself. The senselessness of the crime stands in contrast to its setting. The theater, the place where we are supposed to purge our pity and horror, has been converted into a wellspring of horror itself.

We have, mercifully, largely passed the point where we ask whether art causes such disasters. The parochial debates from the ’90s about whether rap and video games led to increases in the murder rate have been firmly, and happily, filed in the dustbin of intellectual history. A new cliché has taken hold, though, one that insists on an absolute separation between violent art and real violence. Only a few hours after the shooting, Indiewire proclaimed: “Don’t blame the movie.” As if an army of cultural warriors was poised over the hill, ready to charge Warner Brothers.

The truth is that real violence and violent art have always been connected. One possible etymology of “tragedy” — much debated by scholars — is “goat song,” suggesting that the performance of each play followed the sacrifice of an animal. Some of the most violent scenes in American history have emerged from theatrical spaces. The Astor Place riot in 1849 started in competing performances of “Macbeth,” one by the Englishman William Charles Macready and the other by the American Edwin Forrest. The theater in that case brought to the surface underlying tensions that were rampant in New York at the time — between immigrants and nativists, between the lower classes and the police. More than 20 people died in the ensuing struggle.

The connection between the violence onstage and off was even closer for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the original spectacular murder in American history. John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln during the play “Our American Cousin,” firing immediately after the line that always got the biggest laugh: “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap!” Booth’s choice of that moment to shoot the president must have been significant. Was Lincoln the man-trap, or Booth? Was the Civil War the man-trap? Or was it all just coincidence? Maybe Booth chose that moment to shoot just for the cover of the big laugh.