Course Description: To help students identify what a course entitled Senior Seminar in Studies in Drama: British Romantic Drama was about, I supplied the following description, which provided them a sense of the cultural and political aspects of the course we would emphasize as well as strategies they could use for reading the plays:

After more than a decade of recovering and recontextualizing Romantic drama in Great Britain, we have come to recognize the central role that drama played during the period. Romantic drama, staged and read, was its culture’s most popular medium, crossing class, national, and gender divisions, as well as a serious literary form written by the period’s major writers. Manifested in diverse ways (melodrama, gothic, verse drama, opera, pantomime, puppet shows, children’s drama, monodrama, tragedy, comedy, burlesque), Romantic drama performed, reflected, and influenced the political, social, and cultural issues of its day. The Licensing Act of 1737, granting patents to the Royal Theatres of Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket, and the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship (willingness to grant performance licenses) meant that playwrights had to be clever in their stagings of controversial and taboo subjects.

In this seminar, we will examine diverse plays from the period as negotiations of theatrical politics. We will look at the performative aspects of Romantic drama, including the role of the actor, the design of stages, non-dramatic performances (such as itinerant medical shows), and private theatricals. We will consider the thematic and dramaturgical handling of the revolutionary and changing Romantic culture from which its drama emanated. We will contextualize the ways in which Romantic drama engaged with the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries as British society became increasingly democratized, commercialized, and bourgeois. We will discover how the theatre was a site for performing gender and how playwriting was particularly problematic for women. We will situate Romantic drama in the history of theatre.