ABSTRACT
London’s theatrical sensation, Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, features a feminist critique of history tantalizingly applicable to women’s historical drama of the romantic era. For women writers of the romantic era, the appealing concept of historical drama as a ‘National School’ emerged out of a wider, intensive cultural dispute about the present epoch’s relation to Britain’s illustrious literary traditions and the attendant question of any remaining creative opportunities following the exhaustive accomplishments of the past, particularly those seemingly inimitable triumphs of Britain’s golden age in the Renaissance. Mark Salber Phillips has demonstrated how the growth of middle-class commercialism in eighteenth-century British society inspired hume’s generation of historians, dissatisfied with the dominant plots of military strife and monarchial power struggles in conventional historiography, to place a new emphasis on commerce, industry, the arts, social relations, and domestic life and its affective components.
