ENGL 90315 - Romantic Era Drama and the Public Theater

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

One of the conventional stereotypes about British romanticism involves its alleged failure to produce significant drama. With stage flops, vapidly sensationalist quadruped entertainments, and unperformable "closet dramas" littering romanticism's theatrical landscape, it seems that lyrical drama like Shelley's Prometheus Unbound emerged as the period's sole achievement in dramatic form. Yet if Beddoes's vision of a "haunted ruin" characterized the era's anxiousness about the state of its drama, Blackwood's championship of a teeming "dramatic genius" tapped into a counter vein of enthusiasm for the age's theatrical fecundity. Recent historicist scholarship, alert to the problematics of staging meaningful drama in the romantic era, has also begun to recover the prolific richness of the period's stage life while demonstrating the political importance, especially for women dramatists and actors, of the public theater. The cultural significance of the drama has thus become one of the more compelling new topics in studies of romanticism, inspiring special conferences, journal issues, and book collections. Our seminar springs from these new developments with the aim of joining the burgeoning critical effort to relocate the drama and the social life of the theater within the centers of romantic era culture. Focal points of this enterprise will include: the material history of stage performance and state censorship; archival work on prompt books, pantomimes, licensing documents, and theatrical criticism; the relationship between so-called "closet drama" and stage plays; the politics of gender, empire, and abolition as manifested in the public theater. Readings will address major figures like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron but we will also engage with a number of lesser known dramatists, many of them women, who achieved prominence in their time: Joanna Baillie, Matthew Lewis, Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Beddoes, Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney, Ann Yearsley, Hannah Cowley, Sophia Lee, Jane West, Felicia Hemans. We will also read the theatrical criticism of Hazlitt, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hunt, as well as contemporary theater theory. Students will produce a book review, a substantial research paper, and, possibly, stage entertainments of their own.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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