ABSTRACT
I am fortunate to be in sole possession of the notes that Jonas A. Barish was making for the book he planned to write as a follow up to his well-known and influential study, The Antitheatrical Predjudice (University of California Press, 1981). At the time of his death in 1998, Mr. Barish had done extensive research for a book that would have been the first sustained study of “the closet play,” and my chapter describes the contents of that research, which focused on not only British writing but also on closet plays composed in Italian and French, and I speculate about what his own book on Closet Drama might have looked like; announce to scholars the contents of Barish’s six boxes of hand-written note cards and plans for the book, which they will be able to use in their future work (the notes will be housed in the archives of Cornell University’s Olin Library as of 2018); and to suggest some of the ways in which Barish’s ideas about closet drama are crucial for furthering the emerging field of Closet Drama Studies.
