The Theatre of Shelley

Front matter

Jacqueline Mulhallen wy WV,

> pme m

A TETS TREZE

Chapter One: The Theatrical Context — the Georgian Theatre in England 21

Chapter Two: Shelley’s Theatregoing, Playreading and Criticism 53 Chapter Three: Practical Technique — The Cenci 85 Chapter Four: Turning History into Art — Charles the First 115 Chapter Five: Ideal Drama — Prometheus Unbound 147 Chapter Six: Drama for a Purpose — Hellas & Fragments

of an Unfinished Drama 177 Chapter Seven: Satirical Comedy — Swellfoot the Tyrant 209 Conclusion 235 Appendix I: List of Performances Seen by Shelley 243

Appendix I: The Programme of Songs with the Performance of Douglas 257 Select Bibliography 259 Index 275

List of Illustrations

Front cover: ‘Drury Lane’ (detail) by Edward Dayes (1792). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

‘Richard III’, engraving by John White from a drawing taken in the theatre by Mr. R. Cruikshank, c. 1824, from Cumberland’s British Theatre, private collection.

‘Macbeth’, engraving by John White from a drawing taken in the theatre by Mr. R. Cruikshank, c. 1824, from Cumberland’s British Theatre, private collection.

‘Bernard Blackmantle reading his Play in the Green Room of Covent Garden Theatre’, drawn and engraved by R. Cruikshank, 10 June 1824, from The English Spy (1825). Private collection.

Scenes from ‘La Sylphide’: 4.1 Engraving by T. Williams; 4.2: lithograph from a drawing by A. Laederich, c. 1832. Kind permission of Ivor Guest and Dance Books.

Covent Garden, 1828, unknown artist, from Fanny Kemble by Dorothie de Bear Bobbé, private collection.

‘Henry IV Pt I’, engraving by John White from a drawing taken in the theatre by Mr. R. Cruikshank, c. 1824, from Cumberland’s British Theatre, private collection.

‘Cut wood with bay and mountains’, watercolour, artist uncknown. Grieve Family Collection. Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London, MS1007/10. Set Design for ‘Winter’s Tale’, undated.

‘The School for Scandal’, wood engraving by Mr. Bonner from a drawing taken in the theatre by Mr. R. Cruikshank, c. 1824, from Cumberland’s British Theatre, private collection.

‘Eliza O'Neill as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Act II, Scene ii’, lithograph after George Dawe (1781-1829) by F.C. Lewis. By kind permission of The Art Archive/Garrick Club.

page x

‘Beatrice Cenci, an etching by W.B. Scott adapted from the painting that in Shelley’s day was commonly attributed to Guido Reni’, from The Cenci, edited by Alfred Forman and H. Buxton Forman (Shelley Society Publications 1886).

‘Charles Kemble as Giraldi Fazio’ by Thomas Sully, 1833. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. John Ford.

‘Elliston as George IV’, toy theatre illustration, c. 1820. From David Powell, The Toy Theatres of William West (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2004), p. 54.

‘Interior of Westminster Abbey’, toy theatre illustration, c. 1820. From The Toy Theatres of William West, p. 54.

‘Mountains’, set design undated. Grieve Family Collection. Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London, MS1007/409.

‘Auguste Vestris’, contemporary print (artist unknown). From Ethel L. Urlin, Dancing, Ancient and Modern (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1914), p. 140.

‘Eastern Palace’, watercolour, set design undated. Grieve Family Collection. Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London, MS1007/349.

‘View out to sea through colonnade’, watercolour, set design undated. Grieve Family Collection. Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London, MS1007/398.

T.P. Cooke, toy theatre illustration, c. 1829, unknown artist, private collection.

‘Sea Battle and sailing ships’, watercolour, set design undated. Grieve Family Collection. Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London, MS1007/350.

‘Arlecchino’, 17th century print. From Pierre Duchartre, The Italian Comedy (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 131. ‘Punch and Joan’, 18th century woodcuts (artist unknown).

From George Speaight Punch and Judy, A History (London: Studio Vista, 1970), p. 67.

Acknowledgements

This study started life as a Ph.D. thesis for the English Department of Anglia Ruskin University. I would like to thank the staff of the English Department for their warm academic support and also for awarding me a major research bursary and further bursaries to attend conferences and to study in Italy. I owe a great debt to Professor Nora Crook, not only for her meticulous supervision of my thesis but also to both her and Dr. Keith Crook for all their encouragement, generosity and hospitality.

I am most grateful to the staff of Anglia Ruskin University Library, the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Eton College Library, Horsham Museum. I am especially grateful to the London Library, which granted me membership under the Carlyle Scheme. I had a great deal of help from the staff of Archivio Storico del Teatro La Fenice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Biblioteca Casa Goldoni, Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze, Gabinetto Vieusseux, Teatro della Pergola and Museo della Scala who encouraged and advised me and tolerated my inadequate Italian. The Committee of the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) granted me the Stephen Copley Award (2006) for travel to Italy. I would like to thank the following organisations and individuals for kindly allowing me to reproduce their material as illustrations: the Garrick Club, Senate House Library Special Collections, the Huntington Library, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Ivor Guest and Dance Books and Anthony Speaight. David McGowan, BBC Written Archives Centre, helped me locate Shelley’s Hellas (1976), which the British Library Sound Archive allowed me to hear.

Dr. Hilary Porriss, University of Cincinnati, Dr. Kai Merten, University of Giessen, Professor Jacky Bratton and Dr. Gilli Bush-Bailey, University of London and Professor Angela Esterhammer, University of Western Ontario, all gave me generous advice. I am particularly grateful to Professor Marcello de Angelis, Universita di Firenze for his help in tracing a performance which Shelley might have seen. Many thanks to Colin Blumenau, Director xii The Theatre of Shelley of the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, for inviting me to become voluntary researcher for the ‘Restoring the Repertoire’ project (2004-2006).

All my friends and family have been very supportive, but I would not have completed the work without the optimism and enthusiasm of my husband, William Alderson. I benefited in a practical way from his knowledge of Greek and Greek drama, his passion for secondhand bookshops, his computer literacy and our discussions, but of course I owe him far more than this. Hope Stallybrass found me many out-of-print books on the theatre which proved invaluable, David Bookallil sent me, from Australia, a score of the overture to Thomas Dibdin’s The Cabinet and Stephanie Shaw read chapters with the eagle eye of a professional subeditor. I especially thank Jane and Felix Blunt for their wonderful hospitality while I was in Italy, Jane in particular. She not only took me to see places which Shelley knew, but without her help in contacting Italian libraries by phone before my visit, I could not have accomplished anything there in the two weeks available.

Last but not least, my thanks to Rupert Gatti, William St. Clair, Alessandra Tosi and Corin Throsby of Open Book Publishers, who have all been sympathetic and very generous with their time. I am grateful for their encouragement, enthusiasm and advice.

Note on the Text

Since there is no complete modern edition of Shelley’s drama, I have used a variety of texts.

For Prometheus Unbound, Tasso and The Cenci I have used The Poems of Shelley edited by Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, but I have also noted the stage directions in BSMIX which comprises the intermediate fair copy of Prometheus Unbound which Shelley transcribed into three notebooks for safe-keeping.' For Hellas I have used Shelley’s Poetry and Prose edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (2002), supplemented by The Hellas Notebook; Bodleian MS adds e.7 edited by Donald H. Reiman and Michael Neth. Ihave used The Poetical Works of Shelley edited by Thomas Hutchinson and revised by Geoffrey Matthews, for Swellfoot the Tyrant, since it is based on the editio princeps.

However, as the version of Charles the First in The Poetical Works of Shelley is inaccurate and the new editions of Charles the First in the Longman and the Johns Hopkins editions have not yet appeared, I have derived a text based upon The Charles the First Draft Notebook: A Facsimile of Bodleian MS adds. e.17, edited by Nora Crook, Shelley’s 1821-1822 Huntington Notebook : A Facsimile of Huntington MS. HM 2111, edited by Mary A. Quinn and the notes in the Hellas Notebook. I have received helpful information from Nora Crook on certain doubtful points and about her latest thoughts and revisions through which I have modified some of the readings, but the responsibility for the quotations remains mine. I have adopted the reading that appears to be Shelley’s latest intention. I have not shown cancels where a cancelled word is needed to complete the sense and I have expanded ampersands and silently corrected Shelley’s misspellings and miswritings, supplying minimal punctuation. This also applies to the text of the Fragments of an Unfinished Drama where I have used a text based on The Faust Draft Notebook: A Facsimile of Bodleian MS adds. e. 18, edited by Nora Crook and Timothy Webb.

1 BSMIX, p. lxii.

xiv The Theatre of Shelley

Shelley’s Notebooks are an endearing mixture of poems, accounts, doodles and jottings. He would commence one work at the front and another at the back with perhaps others in between. When page numbers are reversed in the facsimile editions, it is because they follow the page order of the Notebooks.

I have used Shelley and His Circle, Vol. VI, edited by Donald H. Reiman for A Philosophical View of Reform, and Shelley’s Poetry and Prose edited by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat for A Defence of Poetry. For other prose extracts, I referred to Shelley’s Prose, or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. by David Lee Clark.

I have also used a number of contemporary collections of plays such as those published by Dolby, Cumberland or Longman, where an example will illuminate Georgian stage practice. In these collections, pages are either not numbered, or the numbering is confusing, so I have not given any numbers. The dates I give for Shelley’s own plays are when they are generally agreed to have been written rather than publication dates. Unless otherwise stated, the translations in the text are mine.

List of Abbreviations

BL]

BSM

BSMIX

BSMXII

BSMXIX

BSMXVI

CC]

ELN ELH KS] KSMB MWS]

Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. by Leslie Marchand, 12 vols (London: John Murray, 1973-1994)

The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, gen. ed. Donald H. Reiman, 22 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1986-1997)

Volume IX: The Prometheus Unbound Notebooks: A Facsimile of Bodleian MSS. Shelley e. 1, e. 2, and e. 3, ed. by Neil Fraistat (New York: Garland, 1991)

Volume XII, ‘Charles the First’ Draft Notebook: A Facsimile of Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 17, ed. by Nora Crook (New York: Garland, 1991)

Volume XIX: The Faust draft notebook: A Facsimile of Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 18, ed. by Nora Crook and Timothy Webb (New York: Garland, 1997)

Volume XVI: The Hellas Notebook, A Facsimile of Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 7, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Michael Neth (New York: Garland, 1994)

The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. by Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968)

English Language Notes English Literary History Keats-Shelley Journal Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin

The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-44, ed. by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

xvi The Theatre of Shelley

MWSL

MYR

MYRVII

OSA

PBSL

PMLA SC

SIR SP

SPP

Wolfe

The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. by Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980-1988)

Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley, gen. ed. Donald H. Reiman, 9 vols (New York and London: Garland, 1985-1997)

Volume VII: Shelley’s 1821-1822 Huntington notebook: A Facsimile of Huntington MS. HM 2111, ed. by Mary A. Quinn (New York: Garland, 1996)

The Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson, corr. by G.M. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970)

The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. by F. L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964)

Publications of the Modern Languages Association

Shelley and His Circle, 1773-1822, ed. by Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fischer, 10 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961-2002), vols 1-4 ed. by Kenneth Neill Cameron, vols 5-8 ed. by Donald H. Reiman, vols 9-10 ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fischer

Studies in Romanticism

The Poems of Shelley, ed. by Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1989, 2000)

Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002)

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1933)

Introduction

There has never been a full-length, in-depth study of Shelley’s dramatic work as a whole, nor one which places it fully in the context of the theatre of the late Georgian, or Romantic, period, 1780-1830. It has long been considered that Shelley rarely attended the theatre, disliked it when he did and was therefore unable to write successfully for the stage. This, however, is not a description of Shelley’s views and abilities and is based on assumptions about both Shelley and the Georgian theatre which are gradually being shown to be misunderstandings. Shelley not only had a knowledge of practical theatrical techniques and dramatic criticism current in his lifetime but evolved a theory of drama consistent with this knowledge and used them as a framework for writing his own dramatic works.

The first difficulty encountered in writing about Shelley’s drama is the argument that the Romantic poets disdained the stage as being too popular for their intellectual and artistic abilities and instead wrote ‘closet drama’. Among those holding this view are Allardyce Nicoll and Michael Booth who praise playwrights such as James Planché and Edward Fitzball whose work accorded with popular culture; Marilyn Gaull, who thinks that ‘closet drama helped playwrights to overcome the restrictions of the theater’; and Joseph W. Donohue who believes the poets refused ‘to accommodate the relationship between private reality and [...] human action’.* While there is some truth in these views, they underestimate the extent to which theatre interested the Romantic poets, and indeed the majority of their contemporaries.

‘Closet drama’ is often taken to be drama written for reading but not for performance, but as Jeffrey N. Cox remarks, it ‘does not define a specific

2 Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama: 1600-1900, IV: Early Nineteenth- Century Drama 1800-1850, 2nd edn, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 60-63; Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965), p. 47; Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 103-104; Joseph W. Donohue, Jr., Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), p. 172.

form’? Yet he himself describes The Cenci as ‘published as closet drama’, thereby suggesting that publication defines the genre. On the other hand, Philip Cox suggests that author’s intention is what differentiates it, since he states that Prometheus Unbound ‘can clearly be seen to reject the possibility of stage performance’ unlike The Cenci which was ‘written with intention of theatrical production’.* The present definitions of closet drama seem to have been chosen with hindsight. That given by Donohue is:

stage drama manqué, drama aspiring to a state of performance either actual

or imagined, but not produced, or producible, on the contemporary stage

because of some special circumstance (for example: its language is insuffi-

ciently intelligible or unsuited to the spoken voice, the effects it calls for can-

not be realized, the kind of stage it requires no longer exists, its subject mat-

ter is indecorous, the author fears it will be damned, or praised, and so on).°

This definition happens to cover the drama of the Romantic poets: George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, all of whom wrote plays. Byron and Scott are examples of those who feared being ‘damned’, while ‘indecorous’ applied to Shelley whose play, The Cenci, was turned down for its subject-matter. Donohue adds that ‘certain plays were written frankly for the stage but not produced (at least, not in their authors’ lifetimes)’.° But, as Timothy Webb discusses in his pioneering 1985 essay, ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage’, the Romantic poets did not universally turn their backs on the stage of their day and each had different experiences in writing for it. Byron’s Marino Faliero (1821) was performed against his wishes but Keats’s Otho the Great was accepted, but shelved by Drury Lane, then rejected by Covent Garden. Coleridge’s Osorio was also initially rejected but, after much reworking, it was staged as Remorse (1813). Wordsworth was ‘angered and upset’ when The Borderers was rejected by Covent Garden in 1797, but later claimed to have ‘no thought of the Stage when he initially wrote the play’.’ Clearly, even in an author’s lifetime, the

3 Qtd in Philip Cox, Reading Adaptations, Novels and Verse Narratives on the Stage, 1790-1840 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 12.

4 Philip Cox, Reading Adaptations, pp. 12-13.

5 Joseph W. Donohue, Jr, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 160.

6 Donohue, Dramatic Character, p. 160.

7 Timothy Webb, ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage’ in The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium, ed. by Richard Allen Cave (London: Colin Smyth, 1986), pp. 12, 14-15, 18; Seven Gothic Dramas 1789-1825, ed. by Jeffrey N. Cox (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), p. 38; Philip Cox, Reading Adaptations, p. 13.

attitude of author or theatre to the play may change.

The attitude of Byron and Scott appears ambivalent. Byron repeatedly stated that he did not want his plays performed. Manfred was ‘the very Antipodes of the stage’, Marino Faliero, ‘unfit for the stage’, ‘written solely for the reader’, ‘not for acting’. David Erdman, however, believed he desired success on stage but that the possibility of failure made him deeply apprehensive.’ On the other hand, what he imagined to be the simplicity of the Greek theatre appealed to Byron, who disliked both the scenic effects which Shelley admired and the tendency of contemporary theatre to make love the main interest. His criticisms imply a genuine desire to reform the British theatre, meanwhile allowing his vision to take the form of a ‘mental theatre’ in the way Jeffrey N. Cox suggests as a blueprint for the theatre of the future." Scott, who apparently inspired Byron’s fear,” may have been put off writing for the stage by his first attempt, a play, The House of Aspen, which went into production but was terminated mid-rehearsal.' He did not, however, object to his novels being ‘terryfied’, i.e., adapted for the stage by the actor, Daniel Terry, and he encouraged the playwrights, Joanna Baillie and Charles Maturin, author of Bertram. His Essay on Drama praised the theatre.Catherine Burroughs suggests that closet drama was a choice made by women when writing or performing drama by women was discouraged; for her, just as closets might vary in size and use, ‘closet drama’ can be used to include any kind of sketch or dialogue read or performed privately by and for women." She does not distinguish between writing for and reading aloud in a private space, although as the second may be part of a process of eventual public performance the definition is unclear. The writers she gives as examples of closet playwrights, Baillie and Elizabeth Craven, wrote drama for performance in a public or semipublic situation. Craven's private theatre therefore could be classed in the

9 David V. Erdman, ‘Byron’s Stage Fright: The History of his Ambition and Fear of Writing for the Stage’ ELH 6 (1939), 219-243 (pp. 232-233).

11 Philip Cox, Reading Adaptations, p. 12.

12 Robertson Davies, ‘Playwrights and Plays’ in The Revels History of Drama in English, 1750-1880 ed. by Michael R. Booth, Richard Southern, R. Davies, and F. and L.L. Marker, pp. 194-195.

13 Information from Dr. Kai Merten, University of Giessen, private communication, 23 August 2006.

14 Catherine Burroughs, Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 11-12, 21- 22, 177 (for descriptions of closets).

tradition of aristocratic private theatres and she herself with such gifted amateur aristocratic performers as Richard, Earl of Barrymore. Baillie may have feared that ‘it may perhaps be supposed, from my publishing these plays, that I have written for the closet rather than the stage’,’° but she made it clear she would have preferred them performed. Indeed, she wrote De Monfort for Sarah Siddons and her brother, John Philip Kemble, which they performed at Covent Garden; thus she belongs with writers such as Henry Hart Milman, who hoped his Fazio would be staged, though he ‘printed it in case it was not a success’.

The weakness of these definitions may be seen when one considers that a play intended for performance on the public stage may also be read or performed privately and that, until they are performed, all plays are ‘closet plays’. There is a collaborative process in producing a play; many playwrights have found, like Coleridge, that the cuts and adaptations suggested by the theatres can help the success of the play. Since the reaction of an audience can be assessed by performing or reading plays in a small private circle, such as referred to by Burroughs, this should be borne in mind, given the Shelleys’ habit of reading plays aloud and their projected amateur drama in Pisa in 1822. On the other hand, if a play is published, and most are not, the writer may alter it to a more literary style, as Ben Jonson and, probably, Shakespeare, did, or re-insert the text excised by the censor, as Thomas Holcroft did with Love’s Frailties.'” The intention of the author, therefore, cannot be the sole criterion of a closet play. If authors claim that a play was never intended for the stage, they need not take responsibility for its failure in performance, but if it is a success they can take the credit.

Aplay may survive until, or be revived in, another era. An‘unperformable’ drama, such as Lorca’s El Pubblicò or Strindberg’s A Dream Play, may well become performable in another period because the complexity of the text becomes better understood, because of changes in public opinion towards a taboo subject or technical changes in the theatre, but there must be inherent qualities which make it stageable. Jeffrey N. Cox’s description of the closet play as ‘the theatre of the future’ may not always be appropriate

15 Joanna Baillie’s Plays on the Passions (1798 edition) ed. by Peter Duthie (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), pp. 108-109.

16 Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols (London: Effingham Wilson, 1834), p. 254; Henry Hart Milman, Preface to Fazio, 4th edn (London, 1816).

17 Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Thomas Holcroft, Love’s Frailties (London: Shepperson & Reynolds, 1794), p. A2.

since many plays were, and are, written which are merely unstageworthy, and of course some were written to be deliberately so. However, it may be applicable in cases such as Byron’s and, indeed, Shelley’s.

Fashions in style may also change; some which were successful in their time are later thought best forgotten and others considered undeservedly neglected, but falling out of favour cannot define a closet play. Furthermore, later assumptions about poor taste or overwriting may be found to be mistaken. When, in 2004, the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds began rehearsed readings of late Georgian plays which had not been performed for many years, they were found to be more effective than they appeared to be on the page, even though only semi-staged. Stage directions and effects which appeared clichéd to the reader proved very moving when performed.

The relationship between ‘closet’ drama and the stage among theatre critics of the late Georgian period was fluid and complex. Readers of plays were also theatre-goers and amateur performers, while dramas were sometimes first published in the hope of attracting a theatre manager. A.W. Schlegel believed that ‘the very form of dramatic poetry’ implied ‘the theatre as its necessary complement’ but conceded that ‘there are dramatic works which were not originally designed for the stage [...] which nevertheless afford great pleasure in the perusal’. This might apply to Baillie’s De Monfort, which two biographers of Siddons imply was more suitable for the closet since it was ‘a beautiful poem’ but ‘on the stage [...] no spectator wished it a longer life’ and required ‘more stirring incidents to justify the passion of her characters’. The performability of a new play was considered important by reviewers, at least when discussing plays by women.” To the actor, John Bernard, a closet play was merely a bad one whose author lacked ‘the power of invention, and the capability of embodying what he invents.” Suggesting that plays would work in the closet, if not on stage gave theatre managements a useful formula for softening the blow when returning scripts. John Fawcett, manager at Covent

18 A.W. Schlegel, Lectures in Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. by John Black, 2nd edn, rev. by Rev. A.J.W. Morrison (London: Geo. Bell & Sons, 1904), p. 32.

19 James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols (London : Henry Colburn, 1827), II, p. 330; Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols (London: Effingham Wilson, 1834), p. 254.

20 Greg Kucich, ‘Revising Women in British Romantic Theatre’ in Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance and Society, 1790-1640, ed. by Catherine Burroughs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 59-60.

21 John Bernard, Retrospections of the Stage, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), IL p. 137.

Garden in 1822, rejected The Promise, a play by Shelley’s friend, Edward Williams, saying that it had “poetical beauties but not dramatic’.” But it should be borne in mind that many plays, regardless of their dramatic skill, could not be performed because the Examiner of Plays would not grant them a licence, or the theatre feared that one would not be granted, as was the case with The Cenci.

As a professional actress and playwright, Elizabeth Inchbald, when editing The British Theatre, carefully considered the question of which plays succeeded better on stage and which in the closet. In her preface to The Dramatist, she said that ‘plays of former times were written to be read’ but that nowadays they are bothread and performed. Despite Antony & Cleopatra and As You Like It having been written for the stage, she classes them among those she finds more successful in the closet. Although Hannah Cowley and John O'Keeffe were both professional playwrights writing for the stage, Inchbald considers Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband equally successful in both areas, but believes ‘a reader must be acquainted with O’Keeffe on the stage to admire him in the closet’. She suggests that Colley Cibber’s A Careless Husband, although written for the stage and frequently performed, does not satisfy ‘the present demand for perpetual incident’ on stage, and that As You Like It will only succeed if ‘some actress of very superior skill performs the part of Rosalind’, like ‘Mrs. Jordan’. Her position is clear when she describes ‘that fine play’, De Monfort, as ‘both dull and highly improbable in the representation... its very charm in the reading militates against its power in the acting’ despite the ‘most appropriate performances’ of Siddons and Kemble.” A ‘closet’ play is one which cannot convince in performance.

James Henry Leigh Hunt originally intended his masque, The Descent of Liberty, for the stage, but ‘as he proceeded however he found himself making so many demands on the machinist [...] that he gave up his wish and set himself with no diminution of self-indulgence, to make a stage of his own in the reader’s fancy’.** Hunt, as a theatre critic, knew the theatre

22 Gisborne & Williams, p. 124.

23 Remarks by Elizabeth Inchbald, The British Theatre, 25 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808): Antony and Cleopatra, IV, As You Like It, IN, A Bold Stroke for a Husband, XIX, A Careless Husband, IX, The Castle of Andalusia, XXII, The Dramatist, XX, De Montfort, XXIV, and qtd in Ellen Donkin, Getting into the Act (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 163. Inchbald’s comments on these and other plays leads Burroughs to a different conclusion. Burroughs, Closet Stages, p. 84.

24 James Henry Leigh Hunt, The Descent of Liberty (Philadelphia: for H. Hall, 1816), p. 44.

sufficiently to be aware that his stage directions required the machinists to follow one set of scenic effects with another so soon that they would have had difficulty in finishing one in time to perform the next, while the repetition of so many groups might have wearied rather than delighted the audience. The idea of a masque being written especially to be read when in its seventeenth-century heyday it was appreciated for scenic effects rather than literary content, no doubt appealed to his sense of humour. The definitions of Inchbald and Hunt show their relationship to their theatre; they consider the demands upon actors and machinists and the preferences of audiences, the performability rather than the author’s intention. However, their definitions applied to their own day; audience tastes are not static and technical advances might render Hunt’s masque performable.

The meaning of ‘closet drama’ for Shelley’s contemporaries, therefore, was a play unsuitable for performance on stage which might have literary merit. Although not mentioned by modern critics, this meaning has coloured the term ever since. The literary merit of Shelley’s drama is not in question, but its performability has been, although Shelley is said to have thought it ‘affectation’ not to write a play for the stage and nowhere stated it his intention to write ‘closet drama’.* If this is defined as his contemporaries suggest, a play unsuccessful on stage, then an exploration of Shelley’s drama should show how far it would achieve success in the theatre, whether Georgian or later. My analysis is therefore based on how successful Shelley’s plays have been or would have been in performance, taking into account criteria which are more appropriate to performance than to reading: dramatic qualities such as dialogue which lends itself to delivery, dramatic incident, characterisation, suspense, mystery and opportunities for dance or song.