ABSTRACT
Joseph Roach tells us that performance and memory operate ‘as both quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past’. 1 Theatre, street performances, caricatures, portraits, icons and written histories dramatize cultural memories as well as the aesthetics and the politics of cultural memory. Shelley wrote The Cenci, Swellfoot the Tyrant and ‘Charles the First’ in an effort to locate memories that were tied to British tragedies produced – both on and offstage – throughout the Romantic period. The Cenci locates the taboos – incest, patricide and treason – of dramatic and historical tragedies in mute performances, which can be both complicitous and oppositional and are often both simultaneously. My discussion focuses on portraiture as a form of mute performance and how Shelley in his Preface attempts to direct his audiences away from casuistic interpretations that restlessly anatomize and condemn historic and literary figures. The Cenci portrays an untenable ‘state’ of domestic abuse and incestuous violence exacerbated by a corrupt government and a compromised judicial system. These characters and events parallel and mirror a contentious period in the early nineteenth century when the British government employed agents provocateurs – radicals turned government spies – to instigate acts of treason, which Leigh Hunt and others identified as British tragedies. Swellfoot identifies the allegorical figure of Liberty as a critical site for the production of British cultural memories. Reproduced in caricatures, reviews, theatrical and street performances, Liberty functions politically as little more than a ridiculous parody, a ‘plaything of the imagination’ in contemporary political affairs, in this case, the Queen Caroline affair of 1820, which arguably took the country to the brink of civil war. Swellfoot the Tyrant juxtaposes the absurdities of the Queen Caroline affair with the equally ludicrous and abhorrent oppression of the poor and disenfranchised perpetrated in the name of Liberty and an ethnocentric patriotism. ‘Charles the First’ links cultural memory to the material objects and the human bodies – actors – that animate the King's portrait: a site for creative iconography and the production of ideology as well as iconoclastic energies. ‘Charles the First’ takes the twinned tragedies of the King's execution in 1649 and the failed English republic (1640–60) and begins the process of recasting it as a history play and a politics of forgiveness. Shelley never completed this drama. Locating and reproducing the networks of tragic production in these plays, Shelley portrays the ‘sad realit[ies]’ that haunted the British people and dramatizes how these performances effectively locked the cultural gaze in performative frameworks of memory. These tragedies facilitated the construction of a national consciousness, a complex psychological and ideological figuration, which wove together an assemblage of violent transgressions that emblematically represented the British nation. Each of Shelley's dramas portray the too often repressed and resurrected traumas that shaped Britain's cultural and political dynamics throughout the period.
