ABSTRACT
It is probably too late to reinstate ‘decorum’ as a live critical term, which is unfortunate. It has become too closely associated with the neoclassical categorizing criticism, with its insistence that every work of literature belonged to a particular ‘kind’, and must be bound by the general rules applying to that ‘kind’. It belongs, too, to an age in which the social sense of ‘decorum’ was still a living force. The history of the theatre in France is rich with occasions on which an audience has expressed its disapproval of what it held to be breaches of decorum, like the celebrated first night of Hugo’s Hernani. However, the romantic notion of decorum as a mere clog on inspiration is quite misleading, and probably has its origins in the eighteenth-century idea of Shakespeare as an inspired natural genius (‘native wood-notes wild’) somehow miraculously exempted from the ‘rules of art’.
