ABSTRACT
The reputation of John Thelwall as a political thinker and writer has steadily risen on a gathering tide of revisionary scholarship. Like Thelwall, the people of Albion have been bullied, silenced and left hanging, frozen by their own eavesdroppings; but they retain an irrepressible vitality, thumbing their noses at the 'fisticuffDivinities' whose tools they have become. If the public court scenes in The Hope of Albion allegorize Thelwall's political lectures, and the floating shipwreck scene the neverending disaster of their aftermath, then the pastoral mysticism of The Fairy of the Lake dramatizes the poetic crisis of the Llyswen years. Thelwall's move from politics to poetry and elocution was not a diversion from but the completion of his principles, and thus a careful reading of his poetry in its elocutionary context promises to complete our understanding of his profoundly 'double-visag'd' career.
