In the theatre of Romanticism

It is widely held that the romantic age was essentially undramatic and antitheatrical. Julie A. Carlson's original study focuses on the plays written by the canonical romantic poets, as contributions to political and aesthetic reform. Departing from the attention given by recent new-historicist studies to the theatricality of revolution, it asks instead how romantic theatre represents this connection and why it has been neglected by scholars of romanticism. Taking Coleridge as its representative case and the mid-point of his career as the central focus, the book modifies a number of standard assumptions about romanticism: that emphasis on imagination implies an antitheatrical aesthetic; that early rejection of radicalism leads to a disengagement from politics; and that formulations of nationhood demand the separation of private and public spheres. By highlighting the period during which Coleridge wrote most extensively for and about the theatre, this book recovers a large body of unfamiliar texts and the genre that displays most prominently the tensions that threaten Coleridge's (and romanticism's) aesthetic and national thinking. The project of procuring the English public's identification with the reflective space of theatre as a site of nationalist politics ultimately founders, and not only in Coleridge's work. Professor Carlson reveals these plays' inability to find a role for women in the dramas of state as symptomatic of anxieties about women which drive the age's antitheatricality. Her re-examination of romantic bardolatry, theatre criticism by Hazlitt, Hunt and Lamb, and the history plays of the second-generation romantics, confirms the Coleridgean investment in contemplative male figures, in the gender politics which underlie his drama, Remorse. Her conclusion is that romantic drama's 'closeting' of Shakespeare, and the ultimate disavowal of its stakes in the stage, serve to preserve both poetry and masculinity from active bodies of women.