THE PROBLEM OF GENRE IDENTIFICATION OF THE CLOSET DRAMA OF 18TH-19TH CENTURIES

The article analyzes the genre features and preconditions for the development of non-stage drama in romantic literature at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. Closet drama is understood as a persistent literary form that inherits dramatic and epic generic features and is a kind of dramatic genre that is not intended to be staged. The author also analyzes the literary and non-literary factors that influenced the formation of the genre, and raises the question of its legitimacy. The author assigns a decisive role in the liberalization of the dramatic form and transformation of its understanding to the novel and the tendency of romanization associated with it.

Priestly playwright, secular priest: William Drury’s Latin and English drama

This article examines the literary career of the secular priest William Drury, with an emphasis on his drama. The Latin plays which he wrote for performance at the English College in Douai are among the best-known English Catholic college dramas of the Stuart era; markedly different from the Jesuit drama which dominates the corpus of British Catholic college plays, they suggest conscious dissociation from that imaginative tradition. Hierarchomachia: or the Anti-Bishop, a satirical closet drama which intervenes in the controversy surrounding the legitimacy and extent of England’s Catholic episcopacy, can also be attributed to Drury. In both his Latin and English drama, Drury draws imaginative stimulus from his ideological opposition to Jesuits and other regulars. Yet his characteristic blend of didacticism and comedy, and his sympathy for the plight of all English Catholics—surely fomented by the death of his Jesuit brother in the notorious “Fatal Vesper”—point to broader priestly concerns.

Variações excêntricas do corriqueiro: The Vegetable, Scandalabra e a escrita dramática como espaço experimental

The Vegetable, or From President to Postman e Scandalabra: a Farse Fantasy in a Prologue and Three Acts ainda hoje habitam o cânone dos Fitzgerald como obras de qualidade duvidosa devido ao fracasso de suas primeiras encenações – opinião esta que reflete a tendência de muitos pesquisadores em analisarem as duas peças de acordo com a tradição do teatro realista. Essa visão, no entanto, ignora por completo as expectativas do público da época, as tendências em voga no teatro que era produzido e encenado e, talvez ainda mais importante, o movimento de escrita modernista que mesclava convenções dramáticas e escrita em prosa para formular peças de natureza híbrida, os closet dramas. Este estudo analisa os dois textos dramáticos de acordo com a proposição do closet drama modernista para avaliar as rubricas criadas pelos autores enquanto um espaço de experimentação da escrita em prosa, buscando para isso paralelos com outras obras dramáticas que, escritas entre os anos 1920 e 1930, também flexibilizaram o espaço das rubricas.

Ovid’s Ghosts: Lovesickness, Theatricality, and Ovidian Spectrality on the Early Modern English Stage

This chapter applies Maurizio Calbi’s concept of Shakespeare’s contemporary spectrality, based on Derridean “hauntology,” to Ovid in the early modern era. It explores Ovid as an icon of lovesickness and theatricality, with interconnections between these terms, in early modern representations of and debates on the theatrical experience itself. The chapter moves from the height of Ovidian theatre to its shadowy afterlife – focusing primarily on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Jonson’s Poetaster, and the obscure interregnum closet drama Ovids Ghost – to explore the uncanny returns of spectral Ovids in related discourses concerning metamorphic illusion and the “self-shattering effects of painful love.”

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

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.

Introduction

This chapter describes the afterlife and reception of Greville’s poetry from Coleridge and Charles Lamb to the American school of literary criticism around Yvor Winters, arguing how Greville’s reputation for obscurity has tended to circumscribe and limit his appreciation as a poet. In discussing the various genres that comprise Greville’s oeuvre; lyric sequence; political biography; letter of consolation; closet drama and philosophical poem, the editors propose to view Greville’s obscurity as an intellectual resource that arises from the close intersection between political and religious thought and poetic form, which enables a form of philosophical exploration that works through the examination of doubt, contradiction, and paradox, as much as assertion, and which involves the reader in an exercise in critical interpretation.

Here Aphrodite Is Not

Bainbrigge’s closet drama is explored from a number of perspectives. These include its debt to Victorian classical burlesques, and responses to other versions of the myth of Achilles, including Homer’s. This chapter explores Bainbrigge’s dramatization of the secrecy that surrounds homoerotic writing, and its use of homoerotic codes. It interrogates the radical homoerotic literary heritage Bainbrigge lays claim to, and his portrayal of lesbianism as equivalent to male homosexuality, not least via a tradition of homoerotic receptions of Sappho, including those of Swinburne and John Addington Symonds. The chapter further explores Bainbrigge’s comments on the links between love between males and classical education, and the continuities between ancient and modern sexualities. The play offers an anarchic range of queer options, encompassing gender fluidity, cross-dressing, and a very wide variety of sexual possibilities and roles.