A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age

Certain works of Romantic drama--- Prometheus Unbound, Cain, The Cenci-- have received a good deal of critical attention, by as a whole the genre has been misunderstood and only slightly considered. Alan Richardson redresses a tradition of critical neglect by considering the works of Romantic drama not as failed stage-plays ("closet drama") but as constituting a new, distinctively Romantic genre. In turning from the contemporary stage--which was marked by spectacle, rant, and melodrama--the Romantic poets developed an altogether new kind of drama, one which they hoped could recapture the intensity of Shakespearean tragedy that Neoclassical writers had scarcely approached.Richardson class this genre (after Byron) "mental theater," both because its works are concerned with portraying the development of self-consciousness and because it fuses the subjectivity of lyric with the interaction of dramatic poetry. Moreover, these works are addressed directly to the mind of the reader, bypassing the medium of stage representation. This study places Romantic self-consciousness in a fundamentally new light. Far from uncritically pursuing an egoistic stance, the Romantics criticize through their poetic drama the attempt to attain psychic autonomy. The protagonists of Romantic drama are seduced by their antagonists into entering such a condition only to find in it a hollow, deathly isolation. They find in self-consciousness not their promised liberation, but a tormented fate modeled after that of their betrayers. Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley delineate the limitations of "Romantic" self-consciousness in their works of mental theater; Shelley alone envisions their transcendence through his radical transformation of consciousness in the conclusion to Prometheus Unbound.This interpretation of mental theater will lead to a new evaluation of the Romantics as dramatic poets. It brings back to critical attention neglected but challenging works such as Byron's Heaven and Earth and Bedd

Alan Richardson teaches English at Boston College.