Displaced to Italy by their politics and morals, Byron and Shelley
wrote, between 1816 and 1823, a series of closet dramas that the author
reveals as being deeply embedded in contemporary radical culture. Why
did they write dramas in Italy that were to be published in England but
not to be produced theatrically? Why do these dramas invoke and
apparently oppose textual and theatrical versions of themselves? In
answering these questions, this book addresses other questions about the
historical invention of English literature, the relation between
literature and drama, and the relation between literature and political
culture.
The plays are shown to acquiesce in, and yet also resist, subvert, and
ironize by means of a parodic self-censorship, the political,
theatrical, and ecclesiastical censorship of the post-Waterloo period.
The author argues that they not only explore questions of political
action in their plots but also reconstruct, by reconvening, a radical
audience that had been virtually eliminated in England during the period
of the counterrevolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
Like the radical culture of the 1790's, Byron and Shelley's plays are
informed by a "new" politics of language. Focusing on the discursive
conditions of radical culture and the plays, and bringing the procedures
of cultural materialism into contact with those of deconstruction, the
author highlights the political and literary operation of the plays'
language. In the process, he shows how the plays contributed to the
recrudescence of a polite radicalism that sought to align itself with
and establish control over its plebeian counterpart.
Detailed discussion of individual plays-Manfred, Sardanapalus,
Prometheus Unbound, Marino Faliero, Hellas, Cain, Heaven and Earth, The
Two Foscari, and *The Cenci-*is supported by investigations into
Romantic criticism of the drama, the dynamics of the reviewing journals,
and the philosophical construct of the "closet" of reasoning and
reading.
