Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas: British Tragedy on the Regency Stage

This book reinterprets British dramas of the early-nineteenth century through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. Unlike most playwrights of previous generations, the writers of British Romantic dramas generally did not work in the theatre themselves. However, they closely followed the careers of star performers. Even when they did not directly know actors, they had what media theorists have dubbed "para-social interactions" with those stars, interacting with them through the mediation of mass communication, whether as audience members, newspaper and memoir readers, or consumers of prints, porcelain miniatures, and other manifestations of "fan" culture. This study takes an in-depth look at four pairs of performers and playwrights: Sarah Siddons and Joanna Baillie, Julia Glover and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edmund Kean and Lord Byron, and Eliza O'Neill and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These charismatic performers, knowingly or not, helped to guide the development of a character-based theatre--from the emotion-dominated plays made popular by Baillie to the pinnacle of Romantic drama under Shelley. They shepherded in a new style of writing that had verbal sophistication and engaged meaningfully with the moral issues of the day. They helped to create not just new modes of acting, but new ways of writing that could make use of their extraordinary talents.

Author: James Armstrong
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 11/10/2022
Pages: 233
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 8.27h x 5.83w x 0.56d
ISBN13: 9783031137099
ISBN10: 3031137094
BISAC Categories:
- Performing Arts | Theater | History & Criticism
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 18th Century
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 19th Century

About the Author
James Armstrong is an adjunct assistant professor at City College of the City University of New York, USA. He has contributed articles to European Stages, Theatre Notebook, Romard, Shaw, Keats-Shelley Journal, and Dickens Quarterly, and has reviewed books and performances for The Edgar Allan Poe Review, The Dickensian, Theatre Journal, The Shavian, and Performance, Religion, and Spirituality. He is also a playwright and member of the Dramatists Guild of America