ROMANTIC DRAMA
In romantic age,drama did not search for new forms, there was a restoration of Shakespeare on the page in the form of reading anthologies and critical reviews as well as on the stage in productions. Shakespearean "thoughts and beauties" was Romantic drama.
Shakespearean plays were standard fare at Romantic theatres, with the great Shakespearean roles performed by Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble.
The London theatres arguably were the central cultural institutions in England during the Romantic period. While existing anthologies of Romantic drama have focused almost exclusively on "closet dramas" rarely performed on stage, The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama instead provides a broad sampling of works representative of the full range of the drama of the period.
It includes the dramatic work of canonical Romantic poets (Samuel Coleridge's Remorse, Percy Shelley's The Cenci, and Lord Byron's Sardanapalus) and important plays by women dramatists (Hannah Cowley's A Bold Stroke for a Husband, Elizabeth Inchbald's Every One Has His Fault, and Joanna Baillie's Orra).
melodramas and operattas In the 18th century, the highbrow and provocative Restoration comedy lost favour, to be replaced by, domestic tragedy such as George Lillo's The London Merchant (1731), and by an overwhelming interest in Italian opera.
the operas of the great Italian composers, as well as those of Mozart, Beethoven and Meyerbeer, continued to dominate the musical stage in England.
Popular entertainment became more dominant in this period than ever before. Fair-booth burlesque and musical entertainment flourished at the expense of legitimate English drama, which went into a long period of decline. By the early 19th century, the drama was no longer represented by stage plays at all, but by closet drama, plays written to be privately read in a "closet" (a small domestic room).
The effect of romanticism in Britain In Britain Romanticism develops in a different form slightly later. It is mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose book "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) sought to reject Augustan poetry in favour of more direct speech derived from folk traditions. Both poets were also involved in Utopian social thought in the wake of the French Revolution.
The poet and painter William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain, epitomised by his claim 'I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's'. Blake's artistic work is also strongly influenced by Medieval illuminated books. The painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism.
Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain. The historian Thomas Carlyle and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood represent the last phase of transformation into Victorian culture.
In England landscapes suffused with Romantic feeling became the chief expression of Romantic painting but the English artists were more innovative in style and technique. Samuel Palmer painted landscapes distinguished by an innocent simplicity of style and a visionary religious feeling derived from Blake.
John Constable, turning away from the wild natural scenery associated with many Romantic poets and painters, infused quiet English landscapes with profound feeling. The first major artist to work in the open air, he achieved a freshness of vision through the use of luminous colours and bold, thick brushwork.
J. M. W. Turner achieved the most radical pictorial vision of any Romantic artist. In Roman Catholic countries Romanticism was less pronounced than in Protestant Britain, and tended to develop later, after the rise of Napoleon.