The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama

Abstract

Cox, Jeffrey N., and Michael Gamer, eds. The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama. New York: Broadview, 2003. 432 pp. ISBN 1551112981.While most scholarship of Romantic drama focuses on the emergence of Gothic drama or the generic manifestations of closet drama, Cox's and Gamer's anthology provides a solid introduction to this period of theatrical history as a whole, educating readers regarding the actual theatrical experience of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury audiences and suggesting the inherent ideologies that link what appears to be contrasting dramatic genres. One primary intention of this collection is to capture the sheer eclecticism of the Romantic period by presenting popular pieces-George Colman the Younger's Blue Beard and Matthew Lewis's Timour the Tartar-alongside plays of more canonical writers-Joanna Baillie's Orra and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Remorse. This aim, therefore, requires including works (and genres) that would not normally appear in a dramatic anthology, whether it be a hippodrama such as Colman the Younger's The Quadrupeds of Quedlinburgh (which capitalized on the audience's admiration for seeing horses on stage) or Thomas John Dibdin's Harlequin and Humpo, a pantomime that frequently followed the primary drama of the evening. However, as Cox and Gamer remind us, including such a variety of texts also reinforces the extent to which Romantic ideals permeate British society. In Romantic drama, as in Romantic poetry and prose, we find an emphasis on nature in the increased naturalism of theatrical representations, an elevation of the quotidian especially in the domestic melodrama, and both conspicuous discussions of the French Revolution and more indirect vision[s] of contemporary politics.Regarding the plays of Cowley, Inchbald, Lewis, and Baillie specifically, it is refreshing to read texts that receive little attention when compared to their more famous works. For example, rather than including Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem, perhaps her most popular comedy and one included in Katherine Rogers' anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Plays by Women and Broadview's earlier Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama, Cox and Gamer choose to present A Bold Stroke for a Husband. This was a successful comedy in its own right which directly invokes A Bold Stroke for a Wife, the work of Susannah Centlivre, a woman playwright of the early eighteenth century. Including the play that alludes to Centlivre and not Farquhar reiterates the continuing emergence of women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead of presenting Lewis's The Castle Spectre, the most important and popular Gothic drama of the period, Cox and Gamer anthologize Timour the Tartar, Lewis's last play, which represents the pinnacle of Romantic spectacle, one that includes not only an elaborate equestrian procession but a final pitched battle with full cavalry. It is Baillie's Orra, as opposed to the far more popular De Montfort or Count Basil, that addresses the same issue as Colman the Younger's Blue-Beard, the potential consequences of arranged marriages. Finally, Cox and Gamer anthologize Inchbald's Everyone Has His Fault, instead of Such Things Are or Wives as They Were, and Maids as They Are, two plays that receive more scholarly attention. But Everyone Has His Fault is nonetheless an excellent representation of Inchbald's comedic vision and, as Cox and Gamer point out, reveals the hypocrisy of contemporary criticism levied against women playwrights.After the plays themselves, readers of The Broadview Anthology are well served by a selection of contemporary reviews that further illustrate the cultural climate of the Romantic theater. …