Displaced to Italy by their politics and morals, Byron and Shelley
wrote, between 1816 and 1823, a series of closet dramas that the
author reveals as being deeply embedded in contemporary radical
culture. Why did they write dramas in Italy that were to be
published in England but not to be produced theatrically? Why do
these dramas invoke and apparently oppose textual and theatrical
versions of themselves? In answering these questions, this book
addresses other questions about the historical invention of English
literature, the relation between literature and drama, and the
relation between literature and political culture.
The plays are shown to acquiesce in, and yet also resist, subvert,
and ironize by means of a parodic self-censorship, the political,
theatrical, and ecclesiastical censorship of the post-Waterloo
period. The author argues that they not only explore questions of
political action in their plots but also reconstruct, by
reconvening, a radical audience that had been virtually eliminated
in England during the period of the counterrevolutionary and
Napoleonic wars.
Like the radical culture of the 1790's, Byron and Shelley's plays
are informed by a "new" politics of language. Focusing on the
discursive conditions of radical culture and the plays, and
bringing the procedures of cultural materialism into contact with
those of deconstruction, the author highlights the political and
literary operation of the plays' language. In the process, he shows
how the plays contributed to the recrudescence of a polite
radicalism that sought to align itself with and establish control
over its plebeian counterpart.
Detailed discussion of individual plays--"Manfred, Sardanapalus,
Prometheus Unbound, Marino Faliero, Hellas, Cain, Heaven and Earth,
The Two Foscari, " and "The Cenci--"is supported by investigations
into Romantic criticism of the drama, the dynamics of the reviewing
journals, and the philosophical construct of the "closet" of
reasoning and reading.
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