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.
Author(s): James Armstrong
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 236
City: Cham
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
