Romantic Drama

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Burwick
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Spoken Dialogue ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Charles Lamb ◽  
Romantic Drama ◽  
Exclusive Right

Among all modes of literary expression, drama was the most popular, most lucrative, and most influential of the era. S. T. Coleridge, Joanna Baillie, Lord Byron, Mary Mitford were among the poets whose plays were successfully performed, and Coleridge joined Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt as critics of the drama. To shield church and state, censorship was exercised under the Licensing Act (1737). This Act granted to the licensed Theatres Royal the exclusive right to perform traditional comedy and tragedy. Originally directed to perform only musical entertainment and pantomime, the unlicensed theatres gradually introduced more spoken dialogue and relied on melodrama to attract audiences.

scholarly journals Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its Construction

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Douglass
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Madame De Stael ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
Charlotte Dacre ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Hannah Cowley

Abstract Lord Byron took a highly ambivalent attitude toward female authorship, and yet his poetry, letters, and journals exhibit many proofs of the power of women’s language and perceptions. He responded to, borrowed from, and adapted parts of the works of Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Lee, Madame de Staël, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, Joanna Baillie, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Dacre. The influence of women writers on his career may also be seen in the development of the female (and male) characters in his narrative poetry and drama. This essay focuses on the influence upon Byron of Lee, Inchbald, Staël, Dacre, and Lamb, and secondarily on Byron’s response to intellectual women like Lady Oxford, Lady Melbourne, as well as the works of male writers, such as Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth, who affected his portrayal of the genders.

scholarly journals The Moor's Last Sight : Spanish-Moorish exoticism and the gender of history in British Romantic poetry

2002 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
Diego Saglia
Keyword(s):  
Lord Byron ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
Felicia Hemans ◽  
Romantic Literature ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Letitia Landon ◽  
New States ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
Poetic Texts

Legends and tales of Islamic Granada were among the most frequently re-elaborated exotic subjects in British Romantic literature. A popular theme in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Spanish Orientalism attracted both famous writers such as Lord Byron, Joanna Baillie, Washington Irving, Felicia Hemans or Letitia Landon, and less familiar ones such as Lord Porchester, George Moir and Lady Dacre. This essay concentrates on one component of the myth of Granada which enjoyed great diffusion in Romantic-period literature, the tale of the Moor's Last Sigh and the tears shed by the last Muslim monarch on leaving his capital forever after the Christian conquest in 1492. The aim is to illustrate how, in migrating from its original context, this tale comes to signify and emblematize issues of gender and notions of history as progress specific to British culture. The poetic texts examined here employ the Spanish-Orientalist myth to elaborate ideas of masculinity and femininity, as well as reflections on power and its extinction, the fall of empires and the emergence of new states. Thus King Boabdil's tears were exotically popular also because they were removed from their original meaning and import, and refashioned into vehicles for ideological concerns proper to British Romantic-period culture

William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and the "London Magazine", 1821

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-44
Author(s):  
Heather B. Stone
Keyword(s):  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Charles Lamb

Shelley, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Revolutionary Imagination

2019 ◽  
pp. 78-92
Author(s):  
Michael O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Charles Lamb

This chapter is concerned with the revolutionary imagination and Shelley’s relationship with Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. It examines the personal and critical tensions between Shelley and his older contemporaries. Although Lamb and Hazlitt were outspoken in their objections to Shelley’s poetry and politics, the chapter traces their many affinities. It focuses mainly on Hazlitt’s response to Shelley and the conflicting feelings of contempt and admiration that Hazlitt has for Shelley and his poetry. The chapter identifies the ways in which the two writers converge and depart in their revolutionary, poetic, and philosophical ideals. Hazlitt, who places great value on disinterestedness, is identified as at first hopeful but ultimately aware of the difficulty of sustaining his revolutionary ideals. Thus, Hazlitt criticizes in Shelley an optimism that he believes to be naive. For Hazlitt, Shelley’s idealism isolates him and diminishes the potential achievement of his poetry. The chapter draws out the brilliance of Lamb’s and Hazlitt’s prose, and identifies ways in which the other Romantic poets’ antipathy toward Shelley is often accompanied with admiration. The chapter argues that Lamb’s and Hazlitt’s dislike of Shelley coexists with admiration, and that many of their condemnations of Shelley’s poetic, philosophical, and political ideals reveal an underlying acknowledgement of Shelley’s poetic genius.

‘[T]o see the work of God / Achieved for others’

2019 ◽  
pp. 87-122
Author(s):  
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Copyright Protection ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Joanna Baillie ◽  
The Common

Hone’s work exerted a profound influence over the nineteenth-century antiquarian and almanac traditions. Perhaps more importantly, his influence was also felt in the sacred dramatic literature of the period, with Lord Byron and Richard Carlile in particular expressing strong affinities with Hone’s radical politics and his appropriation of the plays as foundational to a demotic genealogy of blasphemy. Whilst Joanna Baillie, Richard Hengist Horne, Henry Hart Milman, and Digby Starkey also experimented with the form of the mysteries in the decades which followed Hone’s trials, they were compelled by law to position their work as closet drama, and even then their texts remained vulnerable to either prosecution for the common law offence of blasphemy or a denial of copyright protection from pirates as a consequence of their allegedly amoral tendencies. This chapter looks at a number of nineteenth-century sacred dramas to assess their contribution to political protest in their period.

Creative Shipwrecks: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Byron’s Don Juan

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Michelle Baker
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
As If

Abstract Contemporary discussions of English Romantic philosophers and their theories often include such names as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Thomas DeQuincey, and Charles Lamb, but rarely do they treat of George Gordon, Lord Byron. While Byron’s reputation was not built upon complex philosophical explications of literary theory, the passion of his life did not preclude that of his mind. He has left us with no overtly philosophical work, and yet, many of the digressions in Don Juan are directed at the poets and philosophers of his time and some others seem to point us to a coherent system of thought about literature and how it works. Specifically, Juan’s voyage at sea contains several passages which parody Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Some of these similarities have been explored, but are frequently treated as if Byron were simply creating a pastiche of contemporary literature. However, Coleridge had used the Rime to elucidate a portion of his understanding of how literature works. It seems possible that Byron is purposely answering Coleridge in the second canto of Don Juan. Thus, we may be able to use Byron’s natural imagery and poetic technique to piece together a philosophical statement from that most unphilosophical of Romantics, Lord Byron.

The Spirit of His Age

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uttara Natarajan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Individual Personality ◽  
Charles Lamb

This essay treats Walter Pater's engagement with two key Romantic precursors, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. Hazlitt's influence is on Pater's characteristic genre, the verbal portrait that delineates a historical and cultural moment, as it manifests itself in an individual personality. Lamb's importance to Pater, on the other hand, is as paradigm or type: the man himself, as much as his writing. For Pater, Lamb's value is especially in his antiquarianism (an extraordinary, intimate relationship with the past), which is, at the same time and paradoxically, the indicator of modernity. The combination of past and present that Pater posits in Lamb captures the modern consciousness first described in The Renaissance (1873); equally, Lamb also embodies Pater's “reserve,” the ruling tenet of Appreciations (1889). Lamb's centrality to Pater's particular concerns and critical positions, illuminating in itself, also indicates a continuity from Pater's earliest to his later writings. Further, by uncovering the close and direct connections between Hazlitt, Lamb, and Pater, this essay establishes an identifiable line of succession in the practitioners of an important, but still largely neglected, prose genre of the nineteenth century.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document