Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas

British Tragedy on the Regency Stage

James Armstrong

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English

Palgrave Macmillan
10 November 2022

Theatre Studies; Theatre: individual actors & directors; Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800; Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 ; History: specific events & topics

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.

By: James Armstrong
Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan
Country of Publication: Switzerland
Edition: 2022 ed.
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 148mm,
Weight: 447g
ISBN: 9783031137099
ISBN 10: 3031137094
Pages: 233
Publication Date: 10 November 2022
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Age of the Actor.- Chapter 2. The Progress of British Romantic Drama: A Brief Tour.- Chapter 3. Summoning Siddons: Joanna Baillie's Play for the Stage.- Chapter 4. Remorse and a Certain Glover: Coleridge's Unapologetic Dramatics.- Chapter 5. Kean for the Stage: Byron's Self-Fashioning in Manfred.- Chapter 6. Succeeding Siddons: Shelley's Unsung Muse.- Chapter 7. Conclusion: The Long Shadow.

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.

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

“Those of us partial to the theatrical aspects of S. T. Coleridge’s literary life have fresh material to explore thanks to James Armstrong’s Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas.” (Julie Carlson, The Coleridge Bulletin, Vol. 62, 2023)