Tag Archives: genre

Romantic Drama and Romantic Theatre

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Some time ago, we posted some thoughts on the staging of unstaged Romantic-era plays and on the phenomenon described by critics as mental theater.  I’d like to return to the subject of Romantic-era drama. When was the last time your English department offered a course examining the dramatic material of the Romantic period as drama? While staging is acknowledged to play an important role in understanding a Shakespearean tragedy and what’s being staged is a political issue in the early eighteenth century, Romantic drama is not widely viewed as dramatic, and the drama being staged in the period is not often made an object of study.

Romantic drama, and particularly the dramatic works of the “big six” Romantic poets, is generally viewed as poetry rather than as drama. For one thing, the drama of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron is lyrical, often employing long soliloquys and other marks of interiority. For another, few of these plays were ever staged, and in some cases the authors claim that they are not intended for the stage. However, there is evidence that the writers sought to have their plays staged without theatrical success, or in several cases, without acceptance by the managers. Wordsworth could find no one
to take The Borderers. Coleridge’s early Osorio was revised into Remorse before it took to the stage. Although The Cenci was the only work of Shelley’s to go into a second edition in his lifetime, no public performance made it onto a London stage until well into the nineteenth century. The vexed relationship between Byron’s dramas and their staging I’ll leave to my esteemed colleague Randall Sessler to discuss at another time. Joanna Baillie, one of the most esteemed dramatists of the period both critically and popularly, published multiple editions of her Plays on the Passions, and had several of her plays staged, but none achieved commercial success on the stage. Baillie, like the Romantic poets, was more concerned with tracing a character’s psychology than with spectacular stage effect. Critics have suggested that this focus on interiority and lyric
expression may have made the plays difficult to stage.

Some of the poets themselves suggest that they lack stage success because the stage is degenerate. As Jane Moody indicates in Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840, Romantic poets dismissed the theaters as “places of noise, dirt, spectacle and unbridled sexual commerce, where Shakespeare was being mangled into opera, and ignorant audiences preferred performing dogs to the pleasures of Sheridan and John Gay” (2-3). Nor are these criticisms without basis. In addition to physical and moral contributions to “illegitimacy” to which Moody refers, the stage was subject to censorship and supervision unmatched by any other medium in the period, thanks to the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, which, although relaxed by the Theatrical Representations Act of 1788 and the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, was not repealed until the passage of the Theatres Act of 1968. Plays intended for performance had to be approved by the Licenser, a position in the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and could be censored by him. The Act particularly censored political commentary and satire. Although political statements would generally be excised from performance texts, the published versions of plays were not often censored. So although drama remained a legitimate form for political commentary, dramatic compositions approved by the Licenser could be viewed with suspicion.

Moreover, the plays being staged emphasized sentimentality and spectacle. The gothic dramas of Matthew Lewis and others, the Orientalism of, for instance, George Colman the younger’s Blue-Beard, the spectacle of trained animals as in The Quadrupeds of
Quedlinburgh, and the popularity of pantomime are only a few examples of what poets and other critics denounced as the degeneracy of the stage. Additionally, changing stage practices and public taste made adaptations of Shakespeare more popular than the original works—Nahum Tate’s happy-ending version of King Lear was rather popular throughout the nineteenth century. Yet despite condemnations of the theater from poets rejected by the managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, at various points Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Baillie all sought to have their plays staged as a way of legitimizing their dramatic efforts.

We can contextualize and historicize the retreat from the stage of the Romantics and other major poets working in dramatic genres during this period. But if, as argued in our earlier post Romantic Drama: Experiments, Mental Theater, and Media, the retreat from the stage of some of the period’s most talented dramatists led to the invention of a new dramatic form, and a new dramatic space, what does that do to our study of the Romantic-era stage and the drama performed there? How ought we to approach a dramatic performance? As scholars and critics of English literature, we are trained, at least primarily, to study texts. Text and performance are significantly different objects of study, and should be treated differently, but in what ways? How can we, as textual scholars, contribute to a reading of the staging of Byron’s Marino Faliero or Baillie’s
De Montfort, in addition to the texts?

~Veronica Goosey

Romantic Drama: Experiments, Mental Theater, and Media

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In the introduction to the Cornell edition of The Borderers, Robert Osborne claims that William Wordsworth’s inability to find a theater manager willing to stage the 1797 early version of his play makes the poet’s dramatic effort a failure. Osborne notes that Wordsworth “justifiably attributed his failure ‘to the depraved State of the Stage at present,’ and was ‘underdetemin’d’ whether to wait for a change in theatrical taste ‘or publish it immediately’” (5). It is important to recognize that publication of the text of the play was not Wordsworth’s original intention. Only after his drama was rejected by the managers of both Covent Garden and Drury Lane did Wordsworth consider seeing whether his “experiment” was “adopted for the closet” (Letters 6).  Wordsworth’s own classification of his play along with the fact that he originally wrote with an eye towards the stage has led many critics to dismiss The Borderers as a dramatic experiment that ultimately failed. The success of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, a collection that Wordsworth again called an “experiment,” therefore presents critics with a convenient transition from experimental failure to experimental success. However, such critical narratives depend upon the manner in which one defines success as well as where one locates Wordsworth’s experimentation. Is contemporaneous stage production or publication of a drama necessary for one to label it a success? Is Lyrical Ballads more successful than The Borderers because it made it to the press and thus reached a contemporary audience?

The Borderers begins to show the complex position Romantic dramas occupy in modern scholarly discourse. Wordsworth and Coleridge famously looked to the staged drama as the first vehicle that would help them create the taste by which they would be received. If, as I have proposed above, we define contemporary staging as the marker of success of a given Romantic drama, then only the 1813 production of Coleridge’s Remorse and the 1821 staging of Lord Byron’s Marino Faliero would qualify for such distinction. Alan Richardson’s landmark study A Mental Theater argues for a new understanding of the Romantics’ foray into drama. According to Richardson, “Whether condemned for his elitist pose and disdain for the public, or defended as a well-meaning but anachronistic reformer, the Romantic poet as dramatist is judged against his alleged “retreat” from the theater, rather than for the invention of a fundamentally new poetic form” (3). While Richardson’s work does a tremendous amount of valuable work to resuscitate the dramatic efforts of the second generation Romantics, his book, as the preceding passage makes clear, places Romantic dramas in the larger genre of poetry. The mental drama, a phrase that first appears in Byron’s letters, or closet drama becomes part of a greater poetic history. Building on Richardson’s foundational work, Daniel P. Watkins’s A Materialist Critique English Romantic Drama attempts to implement a materialist methodology that will allow scholars to more accurately engage with the dramas of Byron, Shelley, and other prominent Romantic figures. Watkins creates what he calls the “drama – theater distinctions” (4). That is, the text of a play is a drama while its staged production is an entirely different object of study.

Together, the work of Richardson and Watkins shows the rich areas of inquiry that demand further examination. Watkins is right to recognize the medial distinction between a staged production and a text of that production. If we follow his formulation, studying Coleridge’s Remorse involves much more than simply looking at the text of the play. Scholars should ask where does each iteration of the play occur – in what can it be found? In order to examine Coleridge’s drama fully, we need to look at the original 1797 written version of the drama, titled Osorio, the excerpts that appear as poems and are retitled in the 1798 and 1800 editions of Lyrical Ballads, the context and response to the 1813 production of Remorse at Drury Lane, and the publication of the text of that production.

The example of Remorse raises a series of crucial questions: What is the relationship between media and meaning? Where did major Romantic dramas originally appear? What role did the poet himself play in the appearance/placement/presentation of a particular drama? What we can learn from that placement? And, how do we negotiate artistic intent?

Welcome to our blog!

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Welcome to our new blog!

We are the Romanticist Reading Group of New York University, a graduate student organization sponsored by the Department of English. We began our group formally in the Spring semester of 2011 to offer interested graduate students the chance to convene on occasion to read and discuss varied selections from the Romantic period. By “Romantic” we mean cross-disciplinary and multi-lingual readings from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We’ve had special sessions on Keats’ Hyperion poems, Romantic Sonnets, and Romanticism and the Visionary Poetry that were well attended. We have also had the privilege of the Faculty presence of Maureen N. McLane and Laurence Lockridge, our two official English Department advisors, at all of our events thus far.

Though our main activity has involved various informal “readings” of the texts, we have recently expanded our scope after realizing that our discussions began generating new and exciting ways to talk about these works. In addition to some collaborative works of scholarship we already have underway, we have created this blog. With this medium, we hope not only to track our activities and record the pulse of the nyuRRG but also to engender further discussion and threads. In that spirit, then, we welcome your responses, comments, and questions on this online forum, and we are delighted you’ve visited our site. We also welcome your participation at our events. Feel free to write us at nyurrg@gmail.com to join our mailing list or if you have any questions or comments.

Yours sincerely,

Veronica Goosey, Omar F. Miranda, and Randie Sessler
Organizers
The Romanticist Reading Group of NYU