ABSTRACT

Romanticism was a reaction against both the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Of the younger Romantic poets, John Keats, whose delight at Grimaldi in pantomime is recorded, wrote the unperformed Otho the Great in collaboration with Charles Brown. But, especially for women playwrights, there was hardly a choice, though they created some of the most significant Romantic drama. Joanna Baillie, perhaps the most interesting Romantic dramatist, set most of her twenty-six plays in the contested territory. Other Romantic women dramatists included Lady Caroline Lamb, patron of the Royal Coburg, whose novel a clef, Glenarvon, about Lord Byron, was adapted for this theatre in 1819. The last of the Romantic women playwrights was Catherine Gore, also a prolific novelist. Dacre of the South pits the romantic call of the village against the political ‘duty’ of the aristocratic family. Death’s Jest Book survived as ‘closet drama’, to be read not performed, and very many such plays were written in the Romantic period.