Romantic Drama

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.

China from the Ruins of Athens and Rome

Fascinated and often baffled by China, Anglophone writers turned to classics for answers. In poetry, essays, and travel narratives, ancient Greece and Rome lent interpretative paradigms and narrative shape to Britain’s information on the Middle Kingdom. While memoirists of the diplomatic missions in 1793 and 1816 used classical ideas to introduce Chinese concepts, Roman history held ominous precedents for Sino–British relations according to Edward Gibbon and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. John Keats illuminated how peculiar such contemporary processes of Orientalist knowledge-formation were. In Britain, popular opinion on Chinese culture wavered during the nineteenth century, as Charles Lamb and Joanna Baillie demonstrated in ekphrastic responses to chinoiserie. A former reverence for China yielded gradually to hostility, and the classical inheritance informed a national identity-crisis over whether Britain’s treatment of China was civilized or barbaric. Amidst this uncertainty, the melancholy conclusion to Virgil’s Aeneid became the master-text for the controversy over British conduct at the Summer Palace in 1860. Yet if Rome was to be the model for the British Empire, Tennyson, Sara Coleridge, and Thomas de Quincey found closer analogues for the Opium Wars in Greek tragedy and Homeric epic. Meanwhile, Sinology advanced considerably during the Victorian age, with translations of Laozi and Zhuangzi placed in dialogue with the classical tradition. Classics changed too, with not only canonical figures invoked in discussions of China, but current interests such as Philostratus and Porphyry. Britain broadened its horizons by interrogating the cultural past anew as it turned to Asia: Anglophone readers were cosmopolitans in time as well as space, aggregating knowledge of Periclean Athens, imperial Rome, and many other polities in their encounters with Qing Dynasty China.

Dialectics of Improvement

This book develops new insight into the idea of progress as improvement as the basis for an approach to literary Romanticism in the Scottish context. With chapter case studies covering poetry, short fiction, drama and the novel, it examines a range of key writers: Robert Burns, James Hogg, Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie and John Galt. Improvement, it shows, was not a unified ideal in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland but rather a contested body of different ideas, some of which were mutually contradictory. The book untangles the complexity of this term that was applied variously to field drainage, elocution lessons, a taste for landscape scenery and the macrohistory of Western civilisation. As it explores, improvement provided a dominant theme for literary texts in this period, just as it saturated the wider culture. It was also of real consequence to questions about what literature is and what it can do: a medium of secular belonging, a vehicle of indefinite exchange, an educational tool or a theoretical guide to history. The book makes a significant contribution to debates around the relationship between Enlightenment and Romanticism, stressing a series of aesthetic innovations across the turn of the nineteenth century in a culture that was saturated by the dialectical workings of improvement.

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

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.

A facilidade do apagamento da história: Orra, a rasura da voz feminina e a tragédia na loucura

A perversidade do século XIX vai além da simples definição do que é perverso no dicionário, a perversão de então estava no apagamento não somente da voz feminina, mas no apagamento do ato de ocultar os problemas da sociedade a serem discutidos na cena inglesa. Suprimir, esconder, tirar do palco as vozes que tinham o que dizer e eliminar o que poderia ser apresentado ao público a fim de faze-lo pensar. O teatro de Joanna Baillie tentou ser diferente enquanto argumentava que a mulher, isoladamente, não era suscetível ao medo supersticioso. Este artigo questiona o fato da peça Orra: A tragedy perfazer um caminho oposto ao defendido pela dramaturga em sua teoria da tragédia. No ato de enlouquecer ao final da peça, Orra, a mulher independente e forte de Baillie, se transforma na típica mulher fraca do século XIX e o apagamento acaba, por sua vez, sendo duplo, o da memória da dramaturga na história e o da sua personagem feminina.

Writer-Physicians

The study of literature and medicine in the Romantic period is an established and expanding field. However, scholars have tended to focus on a few canonical writers and a small number of texts, thereby obscuring the age’s huge diversity of medical writing. This chapter takes a wider view, presenting five case studies of medically trained or medically connected writers who demonstrate the broad intersection between medical and literary culture: John Aikin, Benjamin Rush, Joanna Baillie (sister of the physician Matthew Baillie), Erasmus Darwin, and John Keats. The chapter uses these case studies to show what is distinctive or innovative about interactions between literature and medicine in the period. The case studies also represent different genres of medical literature, or different genres that became in some sense medicalized: biography, autobiography, drama, didactic poetry, and epic. Each case study includes some consideration of the reception history of the genre in question.

Trial Literature

The increasing visibility of trials in the press, at a time when changes in trial procedures and dispute over political reform occupied national attention, stimulated Romantic-era writers to give trials a prominent place in fictional works. The need for defence against law’s invidious fictions encouraged the incorporation of fictional strategies into trial writings, and into legal proceedings themselves. Scepticism about institutions, allied with a crisis in epistemological trust, encouraged writers like William Godwin to challenge inadequate representation of the accused, reliance on circumstantial evidence, and dominance of judges. Thomas Holcroft, William Hone, and Robert Watt used fictional techniques in their defence writings to recover control over representation of their intentions. Other writers such as Percy Shelley, Walter Scott, and Joanna Baillie, using a historical perspective in their fictions, attempted to avert revolutionary crisis by making trials the focus for training sympathetic discernment and thus promoting gradual reform.