Verse Tragedy/Closet Drama: Callirrhoë (1884)

2021 ◽  
pp. 57-90
Author(s):  
LeeAnne M. Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Closet Drama

The Hydra of Tyranny, The Fall of Robespierre and the Early Demise of Robert Southey's Revolutionary Enthusiasm

Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Later Life ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
Principled Explanation ◽  
Closet Drama ◽  
Prevailing View

This article explores Robert Southey's pessimistic re-appropriation of the popular revolutionary symbol of the hydra in the closet drama The Fall of Robespierre (1794). Challenging the prevailing view that Southey was an enthusiastic revolutionary throughout the 1790s, the study progresses from an exploration of the hydra's ubiquitous use in revolutionary and loyalist propaganda to an account of Southey's damning re-appropriation of the monster as a symbol for recurrences of tyranny in France's revolutionary governments. Analyses of The Fall of Robespierre, Southey's closet drama Wat Tyler (1794) and epic Joan of Arc (1796) demonstrate that Southey acquired an early conviction that tyranny was a recurrent obstacle to democracy, which rendered revolution futile. Arguing that Southey's revolutionary zeal had largely abated by 1793, I contend that his youthful incredulity about the plausibility of establishing a republic informed, and constitutes a principled explanation for, his notorious apostasy and conservatism in later life.

Privacy, Playreading, and Women's Closet Drama, 1500-1700

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 1105
Author(s):  
Margaret Dupuis ◽  
Marta Straznicky
Keyword(s):  
Closet Drama

Joyce Unperformed

Empty Houses ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kurnick
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Theatrical Space ◽  
Dramatic Form ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Closet Drama ◽  
The One

This chapter examines the collective spaces invoked in James Joyce's career-long obsession with dramatic form—from the epiphanies he wrote as a teenager through his 1918 play Exiles to the closet drama of the Nighttown (or “Circe”) episode of Ulysses. Joyce's experiments with theatrical form constitute a running commentary on his interest in the “depths” of the psyche. The different conceptions of theatrical space embedded in the idea of epiphany lend a dual valence to this keystone of Joycean aesthetics. If, on the one hand, epiphany imagines a humiliating theater of psychic exposure, on the other it gestures toward a perverse collective space where such exposures would lose their policing force. These isolating and collectivist impulses are both visible in Joyce's play Exiles, which follows Ibsenesque naturalism in its representation of psychic motivation but allows its characters to mount a notable collective resistance to the diagnostic imperative structuring their stage existence.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document