Kean, Dumas, Sartre

Edmund Kean has been called the greatest actor of the Romantic era, perhaps even the greatest actor of all time. (Kean wouldn't disagree with that.) However, his genius also attracted other geniuses, and he became the subject of a play by Alexandre Dumas that was later adapted for the 20th-century stage by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Dumas's play Kean is a comedy, while the actual Kean's life was more of a tragedy. (Like Molière, he collapsed onstage and subsequently died.) The play premiered in 1836--just three years after Kean's death--at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. No mention of the actor's famous death is made in the piece, as Dumas's play ends happily. It originally starred Frédérick Lemaître in the title role. Lemaître was a highly respected performer, and would go on to originate another title role in Victor Hugo's play Ruy Blas.

The play opens at a society soirée attended by the Danish ambassador and his wife, Elena, who is rumored to be in love with Edmund Kean. The fact is Kean had many lovers, but I'm not familiar with his ever being linked with the wife of a Danish ambassador. It hardly matters, since the scene is an excuse for Kean to at first decline an invitation to the party, and then show up and make a brilliant speech, entreating Elena to read aloud a letter. He then quietly asks her to flip the letter over and read the other side, which is an invitation to a private assignation with him.

Act II takes place in Kean's chambers. (In Sartre's adaptation, it's explicitly his dressing room at the theatre.) Dumas's stage directions state: "Au lever du rideau, le théâtre présente toutes les traces d’une orgie." (As the curtain rises, the theatre presents all the signs of an orgy.) A woman arrives in disguise, but it's not Elena, rather another woman, Anna, who wants to learn acting from Kean.

The third act takes place at the tavern of Peter Patt, which is called the Black Horse in Sartre's adaptation. This might be based on the Coal Hole, a pub Kean frequented with the members of his infamous Wolves Club. Kean agrees to act the role of Romeo at a benefit for a performer down on his luck. Kean was considered weak in that part, so Sartre changed it to Othello.

The performance is a disaster and causes a scandal which Kean is only extricated from by Anna. The French versions of Kean's life--both Dumas's and Sartre's--are historically inaccurate and leave out his wife Mary and son Charles. Still, they are a great deal of fun.

Insurrection and Drama

I was unable to attend in person this year's conference held by the North American Association for the Study of Romanticism, but this morning I spoke on a virtual panel of the conference.

The panel was called "Insurrection and Drama" and all three panelists discussed historical insurrections that were staged in London theatres during the Romantic era, both in patent theatres and in the "illegitimate" minor houses.

I went first, discussing Felicia Hemans' verse tragedy The Vespers of Palermo which premiered at Covent Garden in 1823. Based on a 13th-century uprising in Sicily, the play used its remote historical setting to comment on more recent revolts, including the French Revolution.

Next, Yasser Khan talked about Tippoo Saib, an extravaganza that re-enacted the Third Anglo-Mysore War at Astley's Amphitheatre. Khan discussed how the physical layout of Astley's, which had a circus ring for equestrian acts in front of a traditional proscenium stage, could create a binary opposition, in which the "real" is staged in the ring in the middle of the audience, while the proscenium stage might be used for a more defined illusory world that could only be viewed from one perspective.

The third speaker, Abiodun Bello, gave a fascinating paper on Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack, the story of the Jamaican folk hero Jack Mansong recorded in a novel by William Earle and later staged repeatedly in London. I was particularly interested in Bello's contention that the character of Quashee effectively commits "class suicide" in betraying and killing Jack.

Incidentally, the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library has numerous toy theatre plates depicting Three-Fingered Jack. Here's one of them:

Sadly, I'll miss the in-person portion of the conference, but our panel was quite illuminating.

Reviewed in THE BYRON JOURNAL

I'm pleased to find that my new book Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas has been positively reviewed in The Byron Journal.

Julie Carlson previously reviewed the book for The Coleridge Bulletin, paying particularly close attention to the chapter I have on S.T. Coleridge's Remorse. Given that the book also has a chapter on George Gordon Byron's Manfred, it's not surprising that The Byron Journal reviewed it as well.

Timothy Ruppert of Slippery Rock University wrote the review. "I think it is quite likely that Romantic Actors will help to foster a desperately needed renovation in the study of Shelley, Byron, and other theatre-makers whose contributions have been unacknowledged or poorly understood," Ruppert wrote. "Armstrong merits commendation for his vision, lucidity, and persuasiveness, as well as for his fortitude in positing a new way of seeing Regency-era stagecraft."

This issue of The Byron Journal also has an article by Jane Stabler, who gave the Annual Byron Scotland Lecture at the opening of last month's conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies. Susan J. Wolfson, Maria Schoina, David Duff, and Peter W. Graham also contributed articles to the issue.

BARS 2024

I’ve been in the United Kingdom for the 2024 conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies in Glasgow.

 

The conference kicked off on Tuesday with a talk by Michelle Levy on women writers and publishing. Though we often think of authors in the 18th and 19th centuries as selling their copyrights outright, Levy noted that this often was not the case. She gave particular attention to the poet Phillis Wheatley, who appears to have received half of the print run of her poems to sell herself for her own profit.

 

Next, I chaired a panel on Faustian Romanticism. Three speakers addressed how the Faust dramas of Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe influenced British Romantic writers. Martin Potter discussed Faustian elements in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while also addressing the E.T.A. Hoffmann short story “The Sandman.” Liz Wan talked about how William Godwin’s novel St. Leon could be read as a Faust story, and Maddy Potter addressed Faustian elements in both John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.

 

Later in the afternoon, I went to a panel on P.B. Shelley, since multiple speakers were scheduled to address Shelley’s play The Cenci, with which I have a particular interest. Anna Mercer compared the play to Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga, which also features a Beatrice who suffers a horrible fate. She mentioned that Mary Shelley even quoted from her husband’s play in her journal long after he had died. Nora Crook later went into detail about the various manuscripts that the Shelleys might have had access to that discussed the story of Beatrice Cenci. She also drew parallels between the play and G.E. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti.

 

The final panel I attended on Tuesday was on remediating the supernatural. Natalie Tal Harries mentioned that Walter Scott collected books on witchcraft and demonology and justified his use of superstition in a note on his poem The Lady of the Lake. Orianne Smith also discussed Scott, focusing on his novel Guy Mannering, a book from which Sarah Siddons often performed readings after her retirement from the stage. The character of Meg Merrilies in the book became a favorite in stage adaptations of the novel. Haya Alwehaib spoke last, comparing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with The Arabian Nights. We then headed over to Glasgow City Chambers for a drinks reception in a beautiful setting.

 

Wednesday there was a plenary roundtable with Elizabeth Edwards, Craig Lamont, and Tim Fulford. My big activity for the day, though was chairing a session on Romanticism’s legacies in fantasy literature. Will Sherwood talked about William Blake’s influence on J.R.R. Tolkien, noting that while most people focus on how Tolkien’s work as a medievalist influenced his fiction, he was greatly influenced by Romantic writers as well. Annise Rogers discussed the Romantic legacy in Ben Aaronovitch’s fantasy series The Rivers of London. Jason Whittaker then spoke on the influence William Blake had on Glasgow’s own Alasdair Gray, who like Blake was both a writer and a visual artists. That evening, the conference banquet was held at Òran Mór, a restaurant in a former church that is graced by murals designed by Gray.

 

My own paper was scheduled for Thursday. I began the day at a panel on the Gothic. Samiha Begum discussed Ann Radcliffe, a writer who appears as a character in my own play The Mysteries of the Castle of the Monk of Falconara. Radcliffe, who was influenced by the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, was propelled to fame with her novel The Romance of the Forest and received 500 pounds for her next book, The Mysteries of Udolpho at a time at which the average royalty payment for a novel was only 80 pounds. Interestingly enough, gossip recorded by Anna Seward held that Radcliffe had written Joanna Baillie’s anonymously published Plays on the Passions. I was also interested to hear Jakob Lipski speak on the 1803 historical novel Thaddeus of Warsaw and Laura Eastlake discuss links between vampires and volcanos.

 

In my completely neutral, unbiased, unprejudiced opinion, however, my panel was the best. It began with Bethan Elliott discussing the plays of Baillie (not Radcliffe). She quoted from an 1804 letter Baillie wrote to fellow dramatist William Sotheby. Though Sotheby (who had not had the success on stage that Baillie achieved) urged her to focus on “reading” plays rather than “acting” plays, Baillie held that the qualities that make a play good for acting also make it good for reading. Baillie was not snobbish about how her plays were performed, either, and in 1810 wrote to Walter Scott about being pleased that one of her plays had been performed at a fair. The one play Baillie wrote that she did not think was fit for performance was The Martyr, but that was because of its religious subject matter, not because she didn’t deem it an “actable” piece.

 

My paper was on J.H. Amherst’s play The Death of Christophe King of Hayti. Its depiction of armed women was naturally interesting to the third panelist, Sarah Burdett, who has written extensively on that subject. Her paper was on stage adaptations actresses had written of the poems of Walter Scott. Sarah Smith, who was a favorite of Scott’s, wrote adaptations of both The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake performed at the Crow Street Theatre in Dublin. Eliza Macauley, an actress who had a difficult relationship with the Crow Street Theatre, wrote an adaptation of Scott’s Marmion that took a character who only appears in a single Canto of the poem and made her the center of the adapted drama.

 

On Friday, conference delegates could opt for a trip to New Lanark and the Falls of Clyde, which provided some very dramatic landscapes. All in all, it was a wonderful conference!

The Forces of Destiny

Last night I saw the premiere of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of La Forza del Destino by Giuseppi Verdi.

The opera has a reputation for being unlucky at the Met, given that the baritone Leonard Warren died on stage while performing it in 1960. No such disasters occurred last night, and the audience particularly cheered soprano Lise Davidsen, who played the heroine Leonora.

Though the role of the young gypsy Preziosilla (who in this contemporary-set production, is simply an entertainer) might not be as coveted as that of Leonora, it still gives performers a chance to shine. In this production, it was played by a singer making her Met debut, Judit Kutasi. Hopefully she'll be returning to the Met frequently in the future.

Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave based the opera on a Spanish play by Ángel de Saavedra called Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino. The 1835 drama was important for bringing Romanticism (a bit belatedly) to the Spanish stage. The opera also adds a scene with a pedlar selling goods to soldiers, based on Friedrich Schiller's drama Wallenstein's Camp.

The Met utilized a modern-looking setting, which aided by massive projections, seemed to me to echo the war in Ukraine. The characters are battered about by war and fate, caught up in forces of destiny they cannot control. In the end, Christian forgiveness seems to be the only way out of the cycles of vengeance portrayed in the opera.

This production is playing until March 29th. If you're a fan of opera in the grand manner (and at four acts, it's not exactly short), I heartily recommend it.

Reviewed in COLERIDGE BULLETIN

Noted scholar Julie Carlson has reviewed my new book Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas: British Tragedy on the Regency Stage in the latest issue of The Coleridge Bulletin.

The journal is published by The Friends of Coleridge, which celebrates the life and work of the poet and dramatist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of the tragedy Remorse, among other works. My book contains a chapter on Remorse, which made it an apt piece to be reviewed in the journal.

Carlson is a major figure in the study of British Romanticism, and is perhaps best known for her 1994 book In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women. I was thrilled to find she's reviewed my own book, noting that it offers a "bold corrective" to those who resist acknowledging Coleridge's standing as a practical playwright.

My book emphasizes the roles of actors in shaping dramas during the Regency period in Britain. In the case of Remorse, the magnificent Julia Glover played a crucial role in the play's success. Though Glover is not as well known as other actors I examine in the book--including Sarah Siddons, Edmund Kean, and Eliza O'Neill--she helped to make Remorse a rousing success on stage.

As Carlson notes in her review, during the rehearsal process Coleridge exhibited a "new receptiveness to the revolutionary power of women and the strength of their influence." This is no doubt attributable at least in part to Glover, who has been sadly neglected by historians of the theatre.

I hope other publications review the book with the sensitivity and insight Carlson displayed.

MLA in Philadelphia

Sunday was the last day of the Modern Language Association's annual convention, held this year in Philadelphia. I delivered a paper on Lord Byron and modern drama, and also presided at a session on Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence.

The first session I attended was on Byron's legacy. Sadly, none of the panelists talked much about Byron's dramas, but Ghislaine Gaye McDayter gave an interesting talk on his poem "The Waltz" and Matt Sandler discussed the influence of "She Walks in Beauty" on the poem "Harlem Shadows" by Claude McKay.

Later in the afternoon, I went to a session on Eugene O'Neill, so there was much more discussion of drama. Bess Rowen spoke, comparing the stage directions in O'Neill's The Emperor Jones with those in Marita Bonner's The Purple Flower. Next, Nicole Tabor made some interesting comments on the representation of Standard Oil in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Reagan Venturi gave a comparison between O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and the Tracy Letts play August: Osage County. The last speaker, Donald Gagnon, compared O'Neill with August Wilson.

Friday morning, I delivered my paper, beginning with an overview of Byron's reception during the Victorian era, and then looking at his impact on 20th- and 21st-century dramatists. O'Neill, of course, was one of the playwrights to be strongly impacted by Byron, and his play A Touch of the Poet quotes Byron numerous times. Romulus Linney put Byron on stage as the opium-induced hallucination of his daughter in Childe Byron, and Howard Brenton portrayed him with other Romantics in Bloody Poetry. Byron appears as an off-stage character in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, and more recently, he provided the namesake of Johnny "Rooster" Byron in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem.

After my session, I was able to catch a panel on "Disabling Environments of the Romantic Era." Unfortunately, there wasn't much talk about Romantic drama, but Diana Little made some nice observations on the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, and Jane Kim linked the Korean poet Yun Dong-Ju with Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Next, I went to a session on Victorian gaslighting inspired by Patrick Hamilton's play Gaslight. After that, I attended an interesting panel on Pan-European Romanticism, which included Jonathan Gross talking about Alexander Pushkin, Martin Prochazka discussing the Czech poet K.H. Macha, Andra Bailard comparing Byron and George Sand, and and Omar Miranda speaking on Madame de Staël.

While Dickens and Lawrence both wrote plays, there wasn't much talk about their dramas at the convention. Still, I very much enjoyed a panel on Lawrence and Affect sponsored by the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America. That organization co-sponsored with the Dickens Society the panel I presided at on Saturday morning. Bridget Chalk and Tara Moore both gave excellent papers. Unfortunately, Holly Laird was ill and wasn't able to come, but I read her abstract for her, along with Lawrence's poem "Dreams Old" which mentions characters from David Copperfield.

It's been a while since I last attended the MLA convention, but I enjoyed seeing people I knew as well as meeting new folks.

Romantic Futures

Today I went to the Stuart Curran Symposium on "Romantic Futures" and got to meet up with various people and hear about the novel behind an important play of the early nineteenth century.

I've previously written about W.H. Murray's melodrama Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack, which is based on the story of the Jamaican folk-hero Jack Mansong. The piece was later published in the Dicks' Standard Plays series, and I've also seen illustrations of the play for the toy theatre.

Kristina Huang gave a paper at the symposium about the play's source text: Obi; or the History of Three-Fingered Jack. The 1800 novel by William Earle is written as a series of letters from a resident in Jamaica to a friend living in England. The novel was adapted as a pantomime by John Fawcett prior to Murray's adaptation, and Murray's printed text attributes its plot and principle incidents to the pantomime.

Later at the symposium, we heard from the editors of The Routledge Handbook to Global Literature and Culture in the Romantic Era. Those editors include Arif Camoglu, whom I had only met virtually, when we were both on a Zoom panel on Lord Byron last year.  The other editors are Bakary Diaby, Omar F. Miranda, Gaura Narayan, and Kate Singer

Next up on my academic calendar is the Modern Language Association's convention in Philadelphia this January. I'll be delivering a paper on Byron and modern drama, as well as chairing a panel on Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence.

Jerusalem

When Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem premiered on Broadway, all the talk was about Mark Rylance's performance in the leading role, but he never could have made the impression he did without Butterworth's writing.

For Americans, the title of the play might provoke a bit confusion, but for British people, the hymn "Jerusalem" (based on a poem by William Blake) is an iconic part of national heritage. The play name-checks Blake and even includes a passage of the hymn, which runs in part:

               And did those feet in ancient time

               Walk upon England's mountains green:

               And was the holy Lamb of God,

               On England's pleasant pastures seen!

               And did the Countenance Divine,

               Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

               And was Jerusalem builded here,

               Among these dark Satanic mills?

In the play Jerusalem, though, just after the word "Satanic" thumping music starts to play and the stage is transformed into the trailer home of the protagonist, Johnny "Rooster" Byron, played so memorably by Rylance. His name is an obvious reference to another Romantic poet, George Gordon Byron, whose specter haunts the play.

Lord Byron was as famous for his sexual exploits as he was for his poetry (perhaps even more so). When the play's "Rooster" Byron is threatened with expulsion from his illegal dwelling after a crisis meeting in the village hall, he remarks that he "shagged" one of the leading complainers only last June. Butterworth's Byron is not a poet by trade, but a daredevil who once leapt over rows of busses on his motorcycle, though he has now declined to selling drugs to local teenagers.

But there is a certain poetry in the lies he tells, including his tall tale of meeting a giant who built Stonehenge. The giant supposedly gave him a drum, telling him that if he ever needed help, he should beat on the drum, and giants will hear it and come to his aid. His companions mock his story at first, but when he challenges one of them to beat on a drum inscribed with something that looks like runes, the companion declines, just in case the giants might actually show up and be miffed by a false alarm.

Though Lord Byron was a lover and a poet (in addition to being a fine dramatist, penning plays like Manfred), he died a man of action, fighting for Greek independence against the armies of the Ottoman Empire. When the police come to evict him at the end of the play, "Rooster" Byron's friend warns him, "They got an army." Though we don't see Rooster die onstage, as Lord Byron died in Greece, Rooster's mad drumming at the end of the play could be seen as a symbolic death.

Butterworth's writing is quite powerful, and Jerusalem is a play well worth seeing, with or without Mark Rylance.

My Book on Sale!

If you've been wanting to order a copy of my new book, Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas, but were putting it off because copies were too expensive, now is the time to get one, as the book is currently on sale for $24.99!

That's only if you get the hardcover edition, of course. If you want the e-book, you still have to pay $89. Yes, the illustrations are in color in the electronic version, but not only is there no substitute for paper, but the hard copy is currently cheaper, so why not get it?

Click here to order the book. I'm not sure how long the sale will last, so you might want to order it soon. The publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, is also advertising free shipping on select orders. Oh, and if you're in Europe, they're advertising books for €24.99 as well. (That's slightly more expensive at current exchange rates, but might be cheaper than paying conversion fees.)

The full title of the book is Romantic Actors Romantic Dramas: British Tragedy on the Regency Stage. It reinterprets British dramas of the Romantic era through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. In addition to providing an overview of the period, the book provides four in-depth case studies of actors and the playwrights they influenced: Sarah Siddons and Joanna Baillie, Julia Glover and S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Kean and Lord Byron, and Eliza O'Neill and P.B. Shelley.

Hopefully, you'll find it insightful and filled with interesting surprises!

NASSR Conference This Week!

This week, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism is holding its annual conference in Huntsville, Texas. I'll be attending, but online rather than in person.

Last year, NASSR held a joint conference with the British Association for Romantic Studies, which was also held in a hybrid format. I presented a paper virtually on George Gordon Byron's play Marino Faliero, and even chaired a panel on Byron.

This year, the theme of the NASSR conference is Romanticism and Justice. The conference opens on Thursday, and though I'll have to teach during the morning sessions, I plan on attending a virtual coffee hour with Julia Wright from Dalhousie University. Then, the Keats-Shelley Association of America is sponsoring a virtual seminar called Percy Shelley for Our Times.

My panel will be on Friday morning. I'll be discussing imprisonment in the plays The Convent by Olympe de Gouges and The Black Doctor Ira Aldridge. I'll be joined by Marjean D. Purinton discussing dramas that put justice on trial, Shavera Seneviratne discussing T.W. Moncrieff's The Cataract of the Ganges, and Young-ok An discussing women on trial in the work of Percy and Mary Shelley.

Sophie Thomas of Toronto Metropolitan University is currently scheduled to be chairing my panel. I'm looking forward to it!

Year-End Sale!

Yesterday, my sister and I drove down to Trenton to see the closing performance of my adaptation of A Christmas Carol at Passage Theatre Company. It was great to see some fellow Dickens enthusiasts there, and the audience seemed to enjoy themselves.

Now there's a special holiday gift from Palgrave Macmillan, the publisher of my book Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas. Until December 31st, you can get 70 percent off Palgrave hardcover books. That means my definitive study of British tragedy on the Regency stage is only $42.

Go to the Springer website to order the book online and use the code PALHC at check-out to receive your discount. At this price, it's considerably cheaper to order the hardcover book than to buy the volume as an ebook.

So if you want to read about Romanticism in both acting and English verse drama, here's your chance!

The Book Is Finally Out!

After a long wait, my new book Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas: British Tragedy on the Regency Stage is now available from publisher Palgrave Macmillan.

The book reinterprets British dramas of the Romantic era through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. It is the first book-length study to examine the interplay of early 19th century actors and the dramatists writing for them.

I've tried to answer questions about how and why actors from the Romantic period influenced major writers. The work focuses on four pairs of actors and playwrights: Sarah Siddons and Joanna Baillie, Julia Glover and S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Kean and Lord Byron, and Eliza O'Neill and P.B. Shelley.

If you're interested in any of those people, you'll want a copy of this book. Unfortunately, both the e-book and the hardcover version are rather pricey at the moment, but Palgrave Macmillan does frequently have sales, so keep your eyes open for possible discounts to come.

In the meantime, ask your local library to order a copy. The hardcover is still not officially released, but you will be able to pre-order the physical book soon. Electronic versions are available already.

The cover image features Eliza O'Neill. Interior images include a mezzotint of Siddons, a toy theatre version of Coleridge's play Remorse, a close-up photograph of a screen owned by Lord Byron, and a cartoon comparing Siddons and O'Neill.

Byron's Plays... and Mine

Today I chaired a panel on "New Approaches to Lord Byron" for the BARS/NASSR 2022 "New Romanticisms" conference, and tomorrow I'll be attending my own play My Fellow Americans at the Secret Theatre in Queens.

Byron was a tremendous dramatist, penning such plays as Manfred, Marino Faliero, and The Deformed Transformed. The first panelist we had was Arif Camoglu, who spoke on Byron and the Ottoman gaze. He showed a rather trivializing account of Byron published within the Ottoman Empire that reproduced the famous portrait of Byron in Albanian dress. Oddly, there was no comment given in the publication about the famous writer wearing dress that was normally worn in the Ottoman Empire, not in Britain!

After Arif, I spoke on shaping a new Marino Faliero at Drury Lane. Byron published the play in 1821, not intending to have it performed (at least not any time soon). However, Robert William Elliston, the lessee of Drury Lane at the time, wanted to perform it anyway, so he sent a cut copy of the text to the Examiner of Plays to get it approved by the censor. Unfortunately, in order to get the play passed the censor, quite a bit had to be excised, including some of the most stirring passages. I got a chance to see the cut copy of the script at the Huntington Library, though images of it are now available online.

Our third panelist was Lesley Thulin, who spoke on deformity in Byron's unfinished drama The Deformed Transformed. Lesley is writing a dissertation on disability and political economy in Romantic literature. She noted that Byron, who had a clubbed foot, could in some ways relate the the play's disabled protagonist, but in general, she tried to steer clear from biographical readings of the drama, since the aristocratic Byron was economically insulated from many of the effects of a disabled body that the title character had to endure. Though Byron left the play unfinished at his death, Mary Shelley later wrote a short story called "Transformation" that re-envisions Byron's story and supplies it with an ending.

The conference continues until August 5th, the rest of it held in person at Edge Hill University outside of Liverpool. I couldn't get back over to the United Kingdom to attend in person, though, in part because tomorrow is the fourth performance of My Fellow Americans, which is being produced as a part of the Secret Theatre's One Act Festival. If you haven't seen it yet, please come! Make sure you get tickets to Program D.

Rachael Langton directed the play, which stars Rebecca Ana Peña as the President of the United States. I hope you can make it!

The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre

Yesterday, I tuned in for a very informative online panel on "The Visual Life of Romantic Theatre" which previewed some of the work that will be published in a forthcoming book offered by University of Michigan Press.

Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson hosted the event, which began with with a fascinating talk by Susan Brown on the diary of Mary Rein, who oversaw the design and construction of costumes at Drury Lane beginning in the late 18th century. While we don't have any of her own sketches of costumes, we do have images of costumes she designed and constructed with the help of the theatre's wardrobe staff.

One thing I found fascinating was that even though performers were generally expected to supply their own costumes, many of the dresses Rein recorded making were for the leading ladies of the stage. In one case, she provided a dress for the star actress Dorothy Jordan for her "personal use" though the outfit might also have been worn on stage as well. Though scenery costs far eclipsed theatre expenditures on costumes, Brown argued that clothing was an important part of Romantic spectacle.

Next, Uri Erman spoke on the Italian singer Angelica Catalani, who was rumored to be mistress to the controversial politician Lord Castlereagh. Erman showed a cartoon by James Gilray entitled "Delicious Dreams!" The image, which dates from 1808, shows a cat (-alani) whispering into Castlereagh's ear. Foreign opera singers like Catalani became a target for xenophobic forces. They also were used by those who opposed the encroachment of opera into London's patent theatres, replacing the castrati, which had previously been used as images of operatic monstrosity, but by the 19th century had fallen out of favor.

I was particularly excited to hear Danny O'Quinn discuss the Romantic toy theatre. Though toy theatre production increased during the Victorian period, he said it was essentially a Regency art form. O'Quinn discussed William Webb's toy theatre version of Aladdin, which showed several Aladdins in different positions, so they could be switched in and out during the performance. This, he said, made changes in character indistinguishable from the changes in physical objects frequently used in pantomime. O'Quinn also mentioned that screens were sometimes used by toy theatre performers to hide the operators and make the performance all the more dramatic.

Deven Parker spoke about a play that was frequently adapted to the toy theatre, Isaac Pocock's The Miller and His Men. She noted that play texts could serve to mediate live performances, helping the reader to visualize what would otherwise be seen on stage. Even the use of punctuation--such as dashes--can help convey to the reader what the visual experience of watching a play is like.

Last to speak was Dana Van Kooy, who discussed Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack, a play by John Fawcett about the Jamaican folk-hero Jack Mansong. The piece premiered at the Haymarket Theatre in 1800 with Charles Kemble as Mansong, and Maria De Camp as Rosa, the plantation owner's daughter.

It was a great panel, so I'm glad I tuned in for it!

There was a king in Thule...

J.W. Goethe's two-part poetic drama Faust is perhaps the greatest work of German Romanticism, which is why it's such a shame there aren't better translations of it.

A while back, I began writing my own translation of Faust, and I even posted my version of the Dedication to this blog. Perhaps my translation still leaves something to be desired, but I wanted to capture the raw power of the original.

Recently, I've been revisiting Faust, and I was stuck by the ballad Goethe has Gretchen sing in the scene entitled "Abend" or Evening. The song begins "Es war ein König in Thule" and tells the story of a king who lived in the mythical land of "Ultima Thule" at the northernmost edge of the world.

Thule has two syllables, making it rather tricky to rhyme in English. (What does one use? School-day?) No English translation of the ballad matches the simplicity and emotionality of Goethe's language. The verse is in trimeter, with an ABAB rhyme structure, and packs a great deal of meaning into a few simple words.

I decided to try my hand at translating the passage. English is rarely as concise as the language in the poem, but this is how I rendered it:

                    The King of Thule

               The King in Thule above

               Was true unto the grave,

               His dying Queen and Love

               A golden cup to him gave.

               He kept it always near,

               Grasped it at every meal;

               His eyes would swell and tear,

               For how it made him feel.

               And as he came to die,

               He gave away cities and land,

               All to his son on high,

               But he kept the cup in his hand.

               He sat with advisers all,

               The knights who followed him free,

               There in his ancestors' hall

               In the castle above the sea.

               But then he rose him up,

               And drank with the last of his blood,

               Then threw the holy cup

               Down into the raging flood.

               He saw it plunge and drink

               The waters that lapped at the shore,

               His heavy eyes did sink,

               He drank not one drop more.

I'm still not completely satisfied with it, but perhaps it's getting there....

Kleist's Amphitryon

The Roman playwright Plautus turned the story of Hercules's conception by Jupiter into a comedy, but the mingling of gods and heroes in a comedic form must have seemed odd to contemporary audiences, since the play's prologue refers to the drama as a "tragicomedy"--the first known use of that term.

Since that time, numerous other dramatists have adapted Plautus's play, perhaps most famously Moliere, but Moliere's version was taken even further by the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. In his Amphitryon, Kleist kept Moliere's introduction of a wife for the servant character Sosa. (She is named Cleanthis in Moliere's text and Charis in Kleist's version.) However, Kleist also added a philosophic complexity lacking in both Plautus and Moliere.

According to myth, the god Jupiter took on the form of the Theban general Amphitryon while he was on a military campaign. Jupiter then slept with Amphitryon's wife Alcmena, conceiving on that night the great hero Hercules. Yes, there are consent issues here, but this is resolved in Plautus's version of the story by the fact that Jupiter is--you know--a god. In the court of Louis XIV, belief in pagan deities couldn't excuse Jupiter's deceptive sexual practices, which meant that some critics interpreted Moliere's play as a satire on the king's numerous affairs.

Instead of drawing attention to the dubious sexual practices of the powerful, Kleist focused on issues of identity that are raised by the story. When Jupiter appears with Alcmena in the first act, he tells her that he is an Olympian who descended to earth as a "sacrifice to love." But when he tries to tell her the truth, she doesn't understand him. Rather, she trusts her eyes, which tell her he is her husband. Jupiter asks her to cherish him as her true beloved, and not merely as her legal spouse. Alcmena responds that he is both, but the god presses on, saying to her:

     Alcmena dearest, what I feel for you

     Outsoars, you see, as far as to the sun,

     What any husband owes you. Disaccustom

     Yourself, beloved, to your spouse,

     Make a distinction between me and him.

Though she doesn't quite understand what the god means, Alcmena does agree to cherish the night she has just spent with him above what Jupiter calls the "humdrum days of further married life." When he leaves, Alcmena declares that he must be drunk, but then so is she. Presumably, her drunkenness is not from alcohol, but the intoxication of having loved a deity.

The play's second act goes into further detail about the nature of love between mortals and gods. After a tense confrontation between Alcmena and the real Amphitryon--who has been out in the field of battle, and has no memory of the sweet encounter she believes to have been with him--poor Alcmena is about at her wit's end. Jupiter returns, once again in the disguise of her husband, and attempts to comfort her. Though Alcmena has been loving Jupiter in the guise of Amphitryon, the god contends that in her religious devotions, she has always loved Amphitryon in the guise of Jupiter. He asks her:

     Who is it that you pray to at his altar?

     Is it to him up there above the clouds?

     Can your engrossed mind ever comprehend him?

     Or can your feelings, in their wonted nest

     There spread their pinions in such flight? And is

     It not Amphitryon, your beloved, always,

     Before whom you bow to the dust?

Alcmena protests that she cannot pray to "white marble walls" but must envision someone's features when she prays to Jupiter. The god accepts that she must have someone to picture when worshiping a deity, but gets her to promise that she will only envision the man who took her on the previous night. In a further promise, Alcmena swears to stay beside him and cling to him as a god, even if Amphitryon should appear before her.

This is precisely what happens in the third act. The general returns again, and meets Alcmena in the company of Jupiter. Since both Amphitryon and Jupiter appear identical, the assembled citizens ask Alcmena to declare which one is her true husband. She chooses Jupiter, who has been standing beside her. This sends the general into a fit, but when Jupiter reveals himself, he proclaims a divine blessing, saying:

     Let your black woe and care be now dispelled,

     And open up your heart to triumph.

     What you, in me, did to yourself, will not

     Harm you before my everlasting nature.

     If you find your reward amid my fault,

     Then I hail you in friendly words, and leave you.

     Your fame shall henceforth find, as my world finds,

     Its boundaries and limits in the stars.

The awe Alcmena feels before such infinite majesty goes beyond words. The last line she has (which is also the last line of the play) is simply: "Ach!" Kleist's reverence for Jupiter is not found in his pagan source, which gives the last line to Amphitryon. Instead of crying out with inexpressible emotion, the general in Plautus's play simply asks the audience for applause.

What we get in Kleist's version is not paganism as it was, but rather paganism filtered through German Romanticism. While Plautus saw the myth of Amphitryon as an opportunity to get laughs, Kleist viewed it as a window into the sublime.

The Battle of Hernani

Today, February 25th, is the anniversary of the so-called "Battle of Hernani" when partisans for and against Victor Hugo fought in the auditorium of the Comédie-Française.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Metropolitan Opera streamed this evening (available until Friday night) Giuseppe Verdi's operatic version of the play, Ernani. Like the original play, the opera is not terribly realistic, but it wasn't meant to be. It was the plot's over-the-top Romanticism that provoked audience members to resort to fisticuffs back in 1830.

The title character of the play is a bandit who gets into an unlikely love triangle with the beautiful Doña Sol, the King of Spain, and Doña Sol's elderly guardian Don Ruy Gomez de Silva. During the pivotal third act, the guardian has arranged to marry Doña Sol against her will, but Hernani shows up in disguise. Ruy Gomez offers hospitality to Hernani, not aware of who he is, and then the king shows up and carries off the would-be bride.

Sound crazy? It gets even crazier. Ruy Gomez refuses to give up his guest in spite of the fact that he really wants him dead, so duty-bound he is to the laws of hospitality. Hernani needs to go and rescue Doña Sol, but Ruy Gomez won't let him leave until he makes a promise. In order to escape and save his love, Hernani gives a horn to Ruy Gomez, promising to die when his enemy sounds the horn, if he will only give him a chance to rescue Doña Sol.

The fourth act takes place in a chapel that holds the tomb of Charlemagne. The king is awaiting his election as Holy Roman Emperor, but conspirators, including both Ruy Gomez and Hernani, are planning to assassinate him. The king (naturally) hides inside the tomb and surprises the conspirators. It turns out that Hernani is actually the exiled John of Aragon, the king is elected Emperor Charles V, everyone gets pardoned, and Doña Sol finally becomes engaged to her one true love. (That would be John/Hernani.)

You know what the problem is with giving your sworn enemy a horn and promising to kill yourself as soon as he sounds it and calls for your death? Well, sometimes he waits until the fifth act, shows up at your wedding, and then sounds the horn so you have to die. Then you and your bride both end up taking poison, your rival kills himself, and the whole stage gets littered with bodies.

Verdi's opera ends a bit differently, with Hernani (called Ernani) and his love (called Elvira in the opera) stabbing themselves instead. Also, old Gomez de Silva also doesn't off himself at the end (at least not in the Met's production). The lovers get to die to beautiful music, though, and that makes all the difference.

The Battle of Hernani in 1830 fell short of an all-out riot. A few people were arrested, but the play was allowed to finish, and it went on to run for a total of 39 performances. The Met's production won't be available for nearly that long. It disappears at 6:30 pm on Friday, so catch it while you can!

O'Neill's London Debut

On October 6th, 1814, the actress Eliza O'Neill made her London debut at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. She played the role of Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and for years afterward, the night would not be forgotten.

One contemporary said of her that "for grace, sweetness, delicacy, and refinement, she was unequalled." The painter Sir Thomas Lawrence marveled at how natural O'Neill's acting was, comparing her (as many people did) to Sarah Siddons, who had retired from the stage by that time.

Born in 1791 into a theatrical family, O'Neill allegedly made her first stage appearance being carried onstage in her father's arms. The family performed for years in her native Ireland, going back and forth between the Drogheda and Dundalk Theatres. These were decidedly small affairs, so she was quite fortunate to be spotted by a talent scout and invited to perform in Belfast.

O'Neill insisted that her entire family join her in Belfast, so her father, three brothers, sister, and a sister-in-law were all given engagements at the new theatre. It was O'Neill, however, who was undoubtedly the star, and the newspapers in Belfast were extremely favorable in their revues. After two years, the whole family moved to Dublin, where a dispute between a theatre manager and a star actress led to O'Neill getting an opportunity to appear as Juliet at the Crow Street Theatre.

After her successful appearance as Juliet, the manager of the theatre offered her a contract, agreeing to take on her father and brother as well. It was in Dublin that John Philip Kemble first spied the actress. "She has great talent and some genius," was Kemble's assessment. He offered her an engagement in London. Again, O'Neill asked that she be able to take her family with her. Kemble refused to employ them, but did agree to allow her brother Robert to accompany her as a personal protector and to have access to the theatre's green room.

And so it was that O'Neill was finally able to bring her celebrated Juliet to London. The actor William Charles Macready, recalling O'Neill's debut, hailed her "beauty, simplicity, and grace," as well as her "native elegance" and "feminine sweetness." Others commented on how as Juliet her character blossomed after she fell in love, and then fell into a heart-breaking despair. If she was ever perceived in a negative light, it was because audiences found her too boisterous and vehement for an era that still extolled classicism.

In fact, O'Neill helped to usher in a new era of Romantic acting. That January, Edmund Kean had made his debut at Drury Lane, and audiences were looking for a more emotional approach to the stage than had been taken by the previous generation. O'Neill obliged them, at least until 1819. That was when she left the stage to marry William Wrixon Becher, Esq., who soon after the marriage became a baronet. Thus, the once impoverished actress ended her life as Lady Becher.

Many theatre fans no doubt wished she had continued on the stage, but the former actress seemed happy in her retirement. She and her husband raised a family in Ireland, and she ended up living to the ripe age of 81. In any case, the revolution in acting she helped to bring about continued, and performers throughout the rest of the nineteenth century tended to adopt her emotion-filled style.

Postmodernism

Just as the failed revolutions of 1848 brought about the climax and end of Romantic movements across Europe, the year 1968 brought a climax of the dreams and ambitions of the entire world in the post-war era, as well as the collapse of those dreams for very many.

In January of that year, the Prague Spring began in Czechoslovakia, when the liberal reformer Alexander Dubček became head of the country's Communist Party, promising "Socialism with a human face" and lifting censorship. The wave of liberalization led to uprisings in Poland and other Eastern European countries, as more and more people sought liberation from the oppressive policies of the past.

In the United States, Robert Kennedy launched a campaign for president that drew millions of young, idealistic voters. Meanwhile, his ally Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a civil rights movement that continued to be peaceful, in spite of provocations by white supremacists.

But if the year promised freedom, what it ultimately delivered was death. The bloody Tet Offensive in Vietnam left a huge number of casualties. Both King and Kennedy were assassinated. Student protests in Paris devolved into riots that failed to bring about meaningful political change. Across the United States, many cities were literally burning with social strife, and authorities tried only to contain the violence, unable (and in the view of many observers, unwilling) to stop it.

The Prague Spring collapsed, and days later, so did the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as police clashed with anti-war protestors. The subsequent election of Richard Nixon as President of the United States and installment of Soviet tanks throughout Eastern Europe ensured that violence, repression, and decay would continue.

Though the following year, 1969, saw the first human beings land on the moon, what should have been a victory for all humanity came in the wake of so much chaos that many people were unsure of what humanity's future would really be. Modernism, which had thrived after World War II, seemed hopelessly naïve with its optimism of unending horizons and positive change.

Instead, art from around 1970 on is sometimes labelled postmodern, since it embraces skepticism and irony rather than grand gestures and sweeping narratives. Postmodern art engages with art from the past, but in a way that is eclectic, borrowing snatches and pieces of past art, but deliberately not synthesizing it together into a unified, comprehensive whole. The very notion of totality or universalism becomes a bitter joke in the hands of postmodern artists.

Postmodernism can be seen in architecture, for instance the AT&T skyscraper in New York which is topped by a non-functional broken pediment. It can be seen in photography, for instance in the work of Cindy Sherman, whose "Untitled Film Stills" series shows the photographer herself dressed up in various costumes, looking like she is in a series fictional movies. Postmodern sculptors like Jeff Koons use grand techniques to immortalize items of kitsch, producing such objects as giant stainless steel balloon animals. 

Perhaps the defining element of postmodernism is its unwillingness (and perhaps inability) to get away from the past it always confronts. The postmodern feminist artist Judy Chicago spent years assembling "The Dinner Party" which includes 39 place settings at a giant triangular table, each place setting painstakingly handcrafted to honor a different woman from history, including the playwrights Hrotsvitha, Hildegard of Bingen, and Virginia Woolf.

In theatre, postmodernism can be seen in the work of such playwrights as Tom Stoppard, Heiner Müller, and Janusz Glowacki, each of whom wrote plays that deconstruct the most famous work in the dramatic canon: William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966, shifting the play's center of attention from Hamlet to two minor characters. The play's dialogue is deeply influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett, but its playfulness marks it as a work of postmodern drama rather than the serious modernism practiced by Beckett. Müller's 1977 play Hamletmachine goes even further in its rejection of the conventions of drama, questioning even the importance of an author at all. In 1982, Glowacki premiered Fortinbras Gets Drunk, which takes a Stoppard-like approach of focusing on a minor character from Hamlet, but to probe political issues as much as existential ones. All three writers went on to create other postmodern works, including Stoppard's Travesties, which reworks Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Müller's Quartet based on the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel Dangerous Liaisons, and Glowacki's The Fourth Sister, which sends up Chekhov.

The British writer Harold Pinter was a close associate of Beckett, and his early works, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming, all exhibit the anxieties of post-war theatre of the absurd. Dubbed "comedies of menace," these plays rely on seemingly mundane dialogue and pregnant pauses to create an atmosphere of dread that reflected the unspoken horror of the new nuclear age. In the 1970s, though, Pinter turned in a new direction. Influenced by the postmodern turn toward skepticism and questioning, Pinter wrote a series of plays that retained the sometimes comic and sometimes tragic atmosphere of his earlier plays, but that delved into the nature of memory of past events. In Old Times, three people tell stories about their past together, sometimes revising their versions of the story, and sometimes contradicting the versions of other characters. Pinter's 1975 play No Man's Land depicts two older men recalling their past lives together, but the piece gets us to not only question whether the two men ever met in the past, but also whether the men themselves know the truth. One of Pinter's most commercially successful works, Betrayal, tells the story of a marital affair, but in reverse chronological order, from end to beginning.

Another postmodern British playwright, Caryl Churchill, first rose to prominence with Cloud 9, an attack on Victorian colonialism and sexual repression that implies a link between the two. Her 1982 play Top Girls utilized overlapping dialogue and out-of-chronology scenes to critique the way women sacrifice themselves and one another to get ahead in the world. Written in the wake of the election of the rightwing politician Margaret Thatcher as the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom, the play celebrates feminism while at the same time critiquing it. Churchill's work sometimes appropriates figures from folk belief to discuss contemporary issues, as is the case in Mad Forest and The Skriker, but the hallmark of her plays is an unending drive to experiment. Her fragmented 2012 play Love and Information contains more than 100 characters in dozens of scenes, many of them less than a minute long.

One manifestation of postmodernism in drama has been the so-called Theatre of Images. While most traditional theatre has been concerned with language (one of the six elements of drama laid out by Aristotle), the Theatre of Images replaces linguistic texts with a procession of images that are not necessarily aligned with any verbal meaning. Directors such as Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer, and Robert Wilson are often identified as artists working in a Theatre of Images rather than a theatre of words. Foreman is influenced by modernist writers like Gertrude Stein, but he has also tried to make audience members active participants in the creation of theatre, as he did with his 1976 play Rhoda in Potatoland. He frequently directs plays with non-professional actors, preferring their simplistic expressions over the mannered performances of trained actors.

Breuer co-founded the avant-garde Mabou Mines Theater Company in 1970 (together with JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, Frederick Neumann, and David Warrilow). With Mabou Mines, he has re-imagined numerous classic plays from the canon. His production of Gospel at Colonus used gospel music to re-introduce the feeling of the sacred into Sophocles' play Oedipus at Colonus. Breuer's production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House portrayed Nora as physically towering over the men in the play, accentuating the absurdity of her situation. His production of Peter and Wendy used Japanese-style puppetry techniques to tell the story of Peter Pan, and has played to adult and child audiences alike.

The term Theatre of Images is perhaps most associated with Wilson, who borrows from different media, cultures, and historical time periods to create eclectic pieces of theatre that usually have no discernible plot. He collaborated with the composer Philip Glass to create the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. Because of the length of the opera (more than five hours with no intermission) audience members were invited to come and go as they pleased, selecting which parts they chose to pay attention to and which parts to ignore. For the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Wilson planned a massive 12-hour-long performance called the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, but the Olympic Arts Festival cancelled it. Since then, Wilson has frequently worked outside of the United States.

Some scholars have labeled the Theatre of Images as postdramatic, since it eschews plot in favor of creating an overall mood or feeling. Rather than creating a narrative that tells a story, postdramatic theatre focuses on physical phenomena that audiences experience directly. While this style of theatre has its roots with modernist playwrights like Beckett, as well as postmodern writers like Müller, Pinter, and Churchill, it attempts to outgrow the playwright entirely. It renders the text as merely one component of a performance, and usually not even a very important one. Postdramatic performance stretches theatre to its limits, and because of that, most audiences have tended to avoid it, opting instead for more commercial theatrical ventures.