Chapter 8 - Byron and the Theatre

Summary

Byron’s considerable body of dramatic poetry poses special challenges for literary criticism, and studies of Byron have often had little to say about the plays as plays. In part, this neglect reflects a larger failure to bring the verse drama of the Romantic poets comfortably within the standard categories of literary history. All of the canonical Romantics – Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats – wrote at least one verse play, but until the last dozen years or so these have tended to be dismissed as misguided attempts at ‘closet drama’: plays meant to be read but not performed. The counterimpulse to read at least some works of Romantic verse drama as ‘mental theatre’ (Byron’s term) – innovative and iconoclastic poetic forms rather than stage plays manqués – can work well enough for a ‘dramatic poem’ like Manfred or an intellectual drama like Cain. It tends, though, to lose sight of the productive tension between the dramatic works of the Romantic poets and the lively and politically fraught theatrical culture of their time.