Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas: British Tragedy on the Regency Stage

Description

This book reinterprets British dramas of the early-nineteenth century through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. Unlike most playwrights of previous generations, the writers of British Romantic dramas generally did not work in the theatre themselves. However, they closely followed the careers of star performers. Even when they did not directly know actors, they had what media theorists have dubbed "para-social interactions" with those stars, interacting with them through the mediation of mass communication, whether as audience members, newspaper and memoir readers, or consumers of prints, porcelain miniatures, and other manifestations of "fan" culture. This study takes an in-depth look at four pairs of performers and playwrights: Sarah Siddons and Joanna Baillie, Julia Glover and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edmund Kean and Lord Byron, and Eliza O'Neill and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These charismatic performers, knowingly or not, helped to guide the development of a character-based theatre―from the emotion-dominated plays made popular by Baillie to the pinnacle of Romantic drama under Shelley. They shepherded in a new style of writing that had verbal sophistication and engaged meaningfully with the moral issues of the day. They helped to create not just new modes of acting, but new ways of writing that could make use of their extraordinary talents. Acknowledgments Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: The Age of the Actor Chapter 2: The Progress of British Romantic Drama: A Brief Tour The Characteristics of Romantic Drama Drama of the Borderlands Enacting Romantic Drama The Rise of Melodrama The Murder of Romantic Drama Chapter 3: Summoning Siddons: Joanna Baillie’s Play for the Stage Passionate Playwriting Siddons’s Celebrity Image Making Sarah Siddons as Jane De Monfort Closeted (Mis)interpretations Chapter 4: Remorse and a Certain Glover: Coleridge’s Unapologetic Dramatics The Search for the New Siddons Revising Remorse Julia Betterton Glover Determining the Dramatic Embodying Revolution Chapter 5: Kean for the Stage: Byron’s Self-Fashioning in Manfred Kean and Byron Bertram’s Use of Kean (and Kean’s Use of Bertram) Creating Manfred Becoming Manfred Chapter 6: Succeeding Siddons: Shelley’s Unsung Muse Embodying Romanticism Inspiring Shelley Shelley’s Sea Change The Importance of Fazio Critical Resistance Chapter 7: Conclusion: The Long Shadow Bibliography Index