‘Partizans of the German Theatre’: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Dramatic Translation

Abstract

Among the most inspiring developments in recent Romantic criticism has been the ongoing revival and reappraisal of Romantic drama. As Greg Kuchich noted already a decade ago, British Romantic drama has undergone ‘an important revaluation […] with numbers of critics […] showing that the dismissal of Romantic drama has arisen from conventional and mistaken assumptions about its strategies and principles’.1 Kucich may overstate his case here, for it is no recent discovery that most canonical Romantics, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron and Shelley, wrote and published plays designed for the stage, most often with limited commercial success. Still, whereas earlier scholars tended to study High Romantic drama in isolation from the period’s dramatic production, and while they, perhaps echoing the canonical Romantics themselves, took a generally dismissive view of popular dramas like M. G. Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) and Charles. R. Maturin’s Bertram (1816), more recent efforts have increasingly been oriented towards recovering and reassessing hitherto neglected forms, authors and plays. One telling manifestation of this trend is Jeffrey N. Cox’s Seven Gothic Dramas, which heroically undertakes to restore an entire genre to critical consciousness.2 KeywordsAustrian EmperorFrench RevolutionGerman TheatreContinental InfluenceHistorical DramaThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.