Romantic Revolutions in Europe: Suggestions for Teaching
Drama
Wendy C. Nielsen
Montclair State University
In the past two decades, scholarship on British Romantic drama has illustrated
the centrality of theater to understanding the era’s “geo-historical and
geo-political” issues, and to appreciating women writers’ previously
unacknowledged roles in public debates (Purinton,
On Teaching 353).
Regarding British Romantic drama and
international politics, see monographs by Matthew S. Buckley, Julie Carlson, Jeffrey Cox, Daniel
O'Quinn, Jane Moody, Gillian Russell, and
George Taylor. Key among these geo-historical and geo-political
issues was the French Revolution. The dramatic events of the French Revolution
shaped British Romantic writers’ thinking on social justice campaigns such as
democracy, women’s rights, and abolitionism. However, our critical lens for
these international crises often remains rather Anglo-centric, perhaps because
dramas from Continental authors do not receive enough attention, except in
contemporary translations. Oft-cited examples include
Elizabeth Inchbald’s
Lovers’ Vows (1798),
adapted from
August von Kotzebue’s comedy
Child of Love (
Kind der
Liebe) or
Richard
Brinsley Sheridan’s
Pizarro (1799), adapted
from
Kotzebue’s
The Spaniards in
Peru (
Die Spanier in
Peru) (
Burwick,
“German Romantic Drama” 157). This paper reflects on the pedagogical benefits of
incorporating Europe and its drama into Romantic coursework. An eight-day
teaching unit on
[Romantic Revolutions in
Europe](commons4.2011.nielsen_syllabus.html) explores the international dimensions of Romantic
drama.
Recommending introductory reading about the French Revolution is a rather
difficult task, and Matthew S. Buckley’s
recent book,
Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution
in the Making of Modern Drama, explains why: the ostensible truth
about the Revolution is as elusive as the tragic drama it evokes. As
Buckley and others maintain, one can only
understand the French Revolution by dissecting its theater.
Paul Friedland, Marie-Hélène Huet, Mona Ozouf, and
Susan Maslan all dissect theater in order to explicate the
Revolution. Republicans employed the methodologies of theater in
order to broadcast Revolutionary propaganda abroad. These theatrical techniques
also resembled those of the aristocracy and the Church, who communicated with
the masses through allegorical parades and pictorials.
Fêtes publiques (or public festivals) replaced
religious feasts, and actors, actresses, playwrights, and artists such as
Jacques-Louis David participated in their
production.
On Revolutionary
festivals, see Ozouf and Nielsen ("Staging Rousseau's
Republic"). The first ever use of the term "theatricality" in
English, as
Tracy C. Davis points out, appears in
Thomas Carlyle’s
The French Revolution: a History (1837), and his
accounts of festivals demonstrate the
theatrum
mundi sense of the word (
Davis 132). The playhouses experienced a transformation as well.
Strict licensing for spoken-word dramas disappeared in January 1791, and
theaters reenacted the happenings on the streets of
Paris with astonishing rapidity. After
Charlotte Corday assassinated
Jean-Paul
Marat, theaters adorned their buildings with the bust of the “Friend
of the People,” and dozens of productions recreated the event for
spectators.
On productions of
Marat's assassination onstage in France, see Marie-Hélène Huet's
book. New playhouses and authors were founded to meet the demand for
these spectacles, although after 1792, Jacobins began to censor dramas that
questioned the new order. For example,
Jean-Louis
Laya’s comedy,
The Friend of the Laws
(
L’Ami des loix), faced
scrutiny because it satirized Jacobins like
Robespierre and
Marat.
L'Ami des
loix premiered 2 Jan. 1793 and played through 15 January before
being suspended against the will of the public. See Susan Maslan, esp.
61-64.
The British press represented the French Revolution in similarly theatrical
terms. Thus when Burke calls the Revolution “this
great drama” in
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), he appears to mimic the Republicans’ rhetorical mode (74). Many critics
have noted the histrionics in the following passage from
Reflections on the Revolution in France:
Some reflections on Reflections include those written by Steven Blakemore, Paul
Hindson and Tim Gray, Jacqueline M. Labbe, Ronald Paulson, Elizabeth D.
Samet, and Linda M. G. Zerilli.
A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with
[her sentinel’s] blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced
with a hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this
persecuted woman had but just time to fly almost naked, and, through ways
unknown to the murderers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king
and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment (71).
A
Gothic cast of characters populates
Burke’s
melodrama: the vulnerable queen in distress, the chivalrous father/king, and the
villainous masses seeking revenge.
Burke evokes a
domesticated ideal of the queen as wife and mother in order to lament the loss
of chivalry. Other women, notably the tragic actress
Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), reminded
Burke about his
true feelings for
Marie Antoinette, whom he met in 1777.
Recalling the “tears that
Garrick formerly, or
that
Siddons not long since, have exhorted” from
him,
Burke admits to feeling “truly ashamed” for
these “tears of hypocrisy” and “folly;” “that superficial, theatric sense of
painted distress” hardly compares to exulting “over it in real life” (71).
While Burke’s histrionic rhetoric has long
puzzled and amused modern readers, we might compare it to the ambivalent
theatricality of the Revolution. French theater, politics, and journalism—in
some respects, one and the same entity—played with the lines between realism and
abstract representation. Direct representation was a powerful tool of the Old
Regime, which equated the royal body with divine right and power. So in
broadsheets, Republicans advertised the death of the nation as
corpus mysticum, or the mystical
body.Dorinda Outram has brought this
type of iconography to light. In his book
Political
Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French
Revolution,
Paul Friedland insists
that French theatricality is not what it seems: “Theatrical actors were
prevailed upon to represent their characters abstractly, in a manner that
seemed realistic to the audience, rather than a manner that
the actors experienced
as real” (6). Politicians, according
to
Friedland, practiced this methodology as
well: “unlike previous political bodies that had claimed to
be the French nation, the National Assembly merely claimed to speak on
the nation’s behalf” (6). So in fact,
Burke’s
sympathetic portrait of
Marie Antoinette,
that “Roman matron,” resembles the representational strategies of the Old Regime
and the counter-revolution, which also rely on metaphors (
Burke 72). Moreover,
Burke’s portrait contrasts with
Marie
Antoinette’s reputation in
France. Revolutionaries charged the Queen with incest, pornography,
and other acts of debauchery.
Lynn Hunt
documents the Republicans' attack on the morality of the
Queen.
In the undergraduate classroom, sharing this theatrical history might help to
clarify why the French Revolution remains such an opaque subject. Reading
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789)
alongside the United States'
Declaration of
Independence (1776) further orients students to the similarities
between the American and French Revolutions (see Day 2 of my online syllabus for
[Romantic Revolutions in Europe](commons4.2011.nielsen_syllabus.html#n2)). A wealth of information
about the Revolution exists in standard anthologies, and students can learn a
lot about the early 1790s in
Britain and
France by reading
Helen
Maria Williams’s
Letters Written in France,
Thomas Paine’s
The Rights of
Man,
Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, and
William Godwin’s
An Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice alongside
Burke’s text. However, sometimes when students attempt to decipher
the complex events of the Revolution, they may become frustrated with the
pointed rhetoric that writers like
Burke and
Wollstonecraft employ to debate the
rights of man and woman. Whereas
Paine writes
with what my students claim is uncomplicated clarity,
Wollstonecraft sometimes baffles these
twenty-first century readers with her series of rhetorical questions, and
Burke, likewise, carries a few of his metaphors so
far that the impatient reader might mistake their meaning.
An example of Burke's use of extended metaphors is the following: "When
the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by
freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions
of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations
will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and
that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of
all power, not standing on its own honour, and the honour of those who are
to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from
principle" (Reflections 74).
Pedagogy rooted in the dramatic arts could very well lead to a deeper
appreciation of the Revolution and its legacy in Romantic writing. As
instructors, we can paint pictures of the different scenes of the Revolution.
More importantly, students benefit from applying these dramatic techniques to
their own writing. One creative writing exercise that works well is the
following. Students write a dramatic sketch between Burke and Wollstonecraft in
pairs. The setting is a London
coffeehouse, where the two meet by chance and
discuss the French Revolution. In another in-class writing exercise, students
write on an online discussion board (see [Day 4](commons4.2011.nielsen_syllabus.html#n4)). In this
exercise, half of the class adopts the personae of either Wollstonecraft, Godwin, or Paine, and the other half
writes an anti-Jacobin response to
A Vindication of the Rights
of Men,
A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman,
An Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice, or
Rights of Man in the voices of
a Church parson,
Richard Polwhele,
Edmund Burke,
Hannah
More, or another persona of their choosing. I strongly suggest using
a discussion board, because students adapt easily to aliases online.
These in-class writing exercises prepare students to write their final essay for
this unit. One formal writing assignment,
[Romantic
Revolutionaries and their Personae](commons4.2011.nielsen_assignments.html#n1), requires students to
compose a creative writing piece and a critical introduction that analyzes their
own work and one to three texts from the unit on
Romantic
Revolutions in Europe. In addition to a version of the assignment
described above, students are invited to convert a scene from a prose work into
a dramatic sketch. Olaudah Equiano’s
Interesting
Narrative or Mary Prince’s
History work
well as potential screenplays since they feature episodic styles. The success of
these creative writing pieces depends on how well students are able to construct
their hypothetical audiences. Instructors might also support the writing process
by requiring class participants to read and perform their dialogues and scenes
aloud. These composition exercises serve two purposes. They prompt students to
articulate the debate about the rights of men and women, issues evoked by events
in
France. Secondly, class participants adopt Romantic
aliases, and this technique foregrounds authors’ attempts to construct ethos, or
the invention of authoritative and ostensibly good personae. Of course, in
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
Wollstonecraft critiqued
Burke on these very grounds, his apparent misuse of
ethos: “My indignation was roused by the sophistical arguments, that every
moment crossed me, in the questionable shape of natural feelings and common
sense” (77). Rhetoricians have recently rediscovered the powerful role that
persona, ethos, and creative writing can play in the English classroom.
On composition and creative writing, see
Starkey's collection. On ethos, see Gonçalves. As
Gary Thompson suggests, incorporating ethos into
the English classroom transforms the process of writing into a type of
performance: “Seeing writing as performance can direct attention to the nature
of literacy as dialogic. All forms of communication involve recursion, and,
ultimately, the socially constructed subject in dialogue with a wider audience”
(89).
These same subjects—writers and audiences—faced official scrutiny in the Romantic
period. To teach Romantic drama and the Revolution means to teach about
censorship. The Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays, John Larpent, censored
most British dramas about the French Revolution regardless of their political
viewpoint.An example of this
arbitrary censorship is Edmund John Eyre's The Maid of
Normandy; or, the Death of the Queen of France (1793), which
sympathizes with the royal family (see Nielsen, "Edmund Eyre's
The Maid of Normandy" and L. W. Conolly,
esp. p. 93). George Taylor and Jane Moody also
provide excellent references on censorship. This environment
encouraged self-censorship even when dramas made no reference to Revolution but
seemed nonetheless incendiary. The refusal of managers to produce Shelley’s
The Cenci
(1819) exemplifies this phenomenon. Friends also convinced
Elizabeth Inchbald to withhold her only tragedy,
The Massacre (1792), from print and the stage (see
[Day 5](commons4.2011.nielsen_syllabus.html#n5)). Given
current concerns about violence in entertainment, students appear ready to
discuss why these tragedies could or could not be produced, and their essays
might analyze the suitability of
The Cenci and
The Massacre for performance. Ostensibly set during the
massacre of French Protestants in the late sixteenth century,
Inchbald’s play actually refers to the slaughter
of Parisians during August/September 1792. The leading man, Eusèbe, gets caught
up in the violence offstage, and he fails to defend his wife and children, who
are presented on biers in the final scene.
The Massacre also exemplifies a critique of Burkean
rhetoric about chivalry and its ostensible role in protecting women, and
Daniel O’Quinn’s essay on this issue (readily
available online alongside the text of
Inchbald’s play on
[British Women
Playwrights around 1800](http://www.etang.umontreal.ca/bwp1800/)) makes these connections explicit.
I like to point out to students that in the French original of the play (
Jean Hennuyer, or the Bishop of Lizieux by
Louis-Sébastien Mercier), the figure of
the wife is invited to arm herself, but
Inchbald
alters this event; Eusèbe would not have his wife’s “feminine virtues” disturbed
by engaging in violence (
Inchbald 15).
I discuss the French roots of The Massacre elsewhere (Nielsen, "A Tragic
Farce"). This commentary on women’s supposed defenselessness
highlights Burkean rhetoric about the fragility of the female sex.
Romantic drama also augments students’ study of slavery and abolitionism in the
Romantic period. My syllabus recommends reading Olympe de Gouges’s
Black
Slavery or the Happy Shipwreck (
L’esclavage des noirs ou l’heureux
naufrage), which advocates emancipation and argues for the
rights of illegitimate children. The plot of the short three-act play, available
in English, is as follows. The ex-slaves Zamor and Mirza escaped to an island
because their master’s steward made sexual advances on Mirza, and Zamor killed
him. They save the French couple Valère and Sophie, who shipwreck on the island,
but soon troops arrive and arrest the escaped slaves. Valère and Sophie help to
free Zamor and Mirza by entreating the Governor, who turns out to be Sophie’s
father (from a youthful liaison).
Black Slavery was performed in
the prestigious Comédie-Française (then called Théâtre de la Nation) in December
1789, before emancipation took effect. Among the play’s several production
difficulties, the actors refused to paint their faces black and instead dressed
as “Indians,” and lobbyists for the colonists probably influenced poor reviews
in the press.
Marie-Pierre Le Hir
provides strong evidence for the influence of colonists on the reception of
Black Slavery (see esp. pp. 81-2).
The author of
Black Slavery, Olympe de Gouges (1745-93),
is a significant figure in women’s history as well. She wrote
The Rights of Woman and Citizen a year before Mary
Wollstonecraft composed
A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
The Rights of Woman and Citizen is available
in English online as well. See [Day 4](commons4.2011.nielsen_syllabus.html#n4) of my
syllabus. Gouges was guillotined not long afterwards, and her brief
trial focused on the plot of an unfinished play,
France
Preserved, or the Tyrant Dethroned (
La France
sauvée ou le tyran détroné), because it featured the Queen as a
character. Although Gouges’s politics upset her contemporaries (she advocated
constitutional monarchy alongside her fight for human rights), she mirrored
ideas prevalent in Romantic-era Britain. Like Mary Prince’s
History of Mary Prince and Equiano’s
Interesting
Narrative,
Black Slavery addresses the
painful but important topic of sexual violence against women of color. For an
analytical essay topic, students can compare Prince’s
History, Gouges’s
Black Slavery, and
Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative and argue which text
would make Romantic audiences most sympathetic to the cause of abolitionism.
Student papers on this subject might examine the role of violence in these three
texts and address the effect of reading in the closet versus seeing a play in
performance (see
[Revolutionary Violence and Romantic Drama](commons4.2011.nielsen_assignments.html#n2)).
While several English dramas document the history of slavery and
abolitionism,See Jeffrey Cox and volume five of Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation. the case of
slavery in France exhibits the far-reaching consequences of the Revolution. The
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
provoked rebellions in the Caribbean (such as the rebellion in Saint Domingue)
when colonists refused to extend human rights to slaves. The French abolished
slavery in its colonies in 1794, but Napoleon revoked the ordinance in 1802. The
inclusion of this French drama opens up discussion about slavery in the
Americas. For example, in 1804, Toussaint l'Ouverture helped to found Haiti, the
first free Black nation in the Western hemisphere. There is material online, a
nineteenth-century biography of Toussaint l'Ouverture, for further research (see
[Day 7](commons4.2011.nielsen_syllabus.html#n7) of my
syllabus).
In Continental literary traditions, the term Romantic extends further into the
nineteenth century than is the case within English Romanticism.It is also worth considering Romantic
drama as a genre after 1830. After all, the Danish Romantic writer Adam
Oehlenschläger (1779-1850) influenced Henrik Ibsen's early historical
plays. The Warrior's Barrow (prem. Sept. 1850
in Christiania, now called Oslo) resembles Romantic drama more than
Ibsen's later Naturalist plays. French Studies reserves the label
Romantic for writers like Alfred de Musset (1810-57) and Victor Hugo (1805-85),
whose “Preface to Cromwell” (“Préface à Cromwell” 1827) announces the arrival of
the movement. For Hugo and Stendhal, in
Racine et Shakespeare (1823), “the proving
ground of romantic doctrine” is not lyrical poetry, but rather historical
tragedy, the genre that
Shakespeare
introduces to French audiences (Roussetzki 493). Thus Hugo’s accessible text
demonstrates the impact of
Shakespeare on
literature beyond Britain’s borders, while acquainting students with key terms
such as the Gothic, melancholy, and the sublime. Musset’s greatest drama,
Lorenzaccio (1834) pairs well thematically with
Shelley’s
Cenci.
Hugo’s
Hernani (1829, prem. Paris Feb. 1830) echoes
Schiller’s
The Robbers (
Die
Räuber 1781, prem. Mannheim Jan. 1782) in its raucous reception.
However,
The Robbers’ theme of the outlaw hero ties it
to
Wordsworth’s tragedy,
The Borderers (1795-96/1842), as well. At least two translations
and performances of
The Robbers appeared in
London in the 1790s, and Matthew Lewis translated
Schiller’s politically-charged comedy,
Intrigue and
Love (
Kabale und Liebe 1783/84), as
The Harper’s Daughter (Covent Garden, May 1803).
G. G. and J. Robinson Keppel published a
translation of The Robbers in 1795. Keppel
Craven's translation of The Robbers (Die Räuber, 1781) was performed at Brandenburgh House
Theatre in 1798 and published in 1799. Perhaps that is the same translation
that appeared at the Haymarket on 21 August 1799. For Schiller's
connections to Coleridge, see Carlson. Other German dramas—notably
Lessing’s
Emilia Galotti (1772), Goethe’s
Iphigenia (1787), and Kleist’s
Penthesilea (1808)—resemble English she-tragedies because they
feature female protagonists who sacrifice themselves for love and patriotism.
Another commonality between the study of British and European Romantic drama is
the recovery of women writers.The work
of Catherine Burroughs, Thomas C. Crochunis, Ellen Donkin, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, Judith
Pascoe, and Marjean Purinton reminds us
of some of the important scholarship on female dramatists. The canon
of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature does not include many
women writers, with the exception of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848,
once a face on German money), Sophie von La Roche (1731-1807, author of one of
the first female Bildungsromane), and more recently, her granddaughter, Bettina
Brentano von Arnim (1785-1859). In fact, women played integral roles in
eighteenth-century German theater. The actress Caroline Neuber (1697-1760)
founded one of the first national, non-court-based theaters in Leipzig (where
she produced Lessing’s first play), and Luise Adelgunde Gottsched (1713-62)
translated several dramas for the stage. Gottsched—also commonly called by the
feminine form of her name, “die Gottschedin,” in order not to confuse her with
her playwright husband—struggled with a problem that plagued other female
dramatists in Germany: anonymity.Susanna Kord wrote a compendium that traces the multiple pseudonyms of over
200 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female dramatists. On censorship of
women dramatists in Germany, see Becker-Cantarino and Kaiser.
Gottsched’s most famous comedy,
Pietism in a Whale-Bone Corset
or the Learned Lady (
Die Pietisterey im Fischbein
Rocke; Oder die Doctormässige Frau, 1736), was attributed to her
only after her death because it was published anonymously. The field is rich
with under-researched female dramatists. Christine von Westphalen (1758-1840),
Schiller’s sister-in-law Caroline von Wolzogen (1763-1847), and even Catherine
the Great (1729-96) wrote tragedies in German. Writing under the pseudonym of
Tian, Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806) composed dramas that typify some of
the Gothic and poetic tendencies of Romantic drama. Only a few of these dramas
are available in English such as Gottsched’s
The
Witling (1745) or Charlotte von Stein’s dramatic sketch,
Rino (1776).
English translations of German women writers are available, although these
feature more prose and fiction than drama. See Blackwell's and
Zantop's collection Bitter Healing and the
online database, Sophie: a Digital Database of Works by
German-speaking Women. However, French theater appears to
be more widely available for English readers. Elizabeth
Inchbald even adapted Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis’s (1746-1830)
The Child of Nature (1781,
Zélie,
ou l’ingénue) for the stage in 1788, and Thomas Holcroft translated
some of her other dramatic works.
At the graduate level, students can explore these connections further. I have
taught a graduate seminar on the European inspirations for Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. We read one of the books the monster found, Goethe’s
The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774). In addition
to this text and Frederick Reynolds’s play,
Werther
(1796), seminar participants read Charlotte von Stein’s response to her young
friend Goethe,
Rino: a Play in Three Parts. Stein wrote
this satirical piece for a matinee at the court in Weimar.
Charlotte von Stein (1742-1827) knew Goethe because
she grew up in the court of Weimar. Stein also wrote a tragedy, Dido (1794), translated partially by Goodman, p.
86-88. The Faustian motifs of
Frankenstein
merit the inclusion of Goethe’s
Faust (Part 1 prem.
1829 in Weimar) in such a seminar. Although
Faust is
written in verse (see Walter Kaufmann’s translation for an excellent rendition
of Goethe’s style), theaters have recently attempted productions of both
parts.
See Cyrus Hamlin's review
of Peter Stein's three-day-long production of Faust, Parts 1 and 2, in Berlin in 2001. In New York City, the
Classic Stage Company produced a six-hour-long version of both parts (May
2006, trans. Douglas Langworthy and dir. David Herskovits). Rousseau
also influenced the writing of
Mary
Shelley’s famous novel. Seminar participants read portions of
Emile (1762) and
Letter to M.
D’Alembert (1758). Rousseau’s
Letter
outlines theories on the theater and is useful for understanding some of the
issues involving sympathy in
Frankenstein.
See David Marshall for a comparison of
Shelley and Rousseau. I also suggest reading Hugo’s previously
mentioned “Preface to Cromwell,” since this text details Romantic theories of
the grotesque. A graduate seminar with a unit on the French Revolution might
also include Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s (1732-99)
The Follies of the Day or the Marriage of Figaro (public premier Apr.
1784 in Paris), another translation by Holcroft. The Old Regime suppressed this
sequel to
The Barber of Seville (1775) for five years
and sent its author to prison for mocking the corrupt behavior of aristocrats.
The bilingual
[César database](http://www.cesar.org.uk/) makes
researching the performance history of plays like Figaro a rewarding experience;
it includes a searchable catalog of performance dates, authors, titles, reviews
and texts of eighteenth-century French plays.
Géraud de Lavedan, Martin Nadeau, Anastassia Sakhnovskaia, and
Jean-Philippe van Aelbrouck edit César: Electronic Calendar
of Plays during the Old Regime and during the Revolution (calendrier électronique des spectacles sous l'ancien
régime et sous la révolution), a collaborative research project
begun in 2001.
Scholars of British Romanticism have long recognized the central role that
European letters played in the intellectual and cultural lives of contemporary
authors.For comparative studies of
Romanticism, see Frederick Burwick, Angela Esterhammer, Michael Ferber,
Lillian Furst, Gerald Gillespie, Gregory Maertz, Martin Meisel, and Virgil
Nemoianu. European Romantic drama offers many ways to make the past
come alive in the classroom and to augment the study of late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century literature and history. Moreover, when instructors
internationalize the Romantic curriculum, they recreate the cosmopolitan flavor
of London in the years around 1800. Romantic drama can
play a powerful role in shaping students’ understanding of personae, and through
creative writing and dialogue, class participants have the opportunity to
achieve a new sense of their own writing voices and those of the Romantics.