Staging Romanticism and Dissidence in Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry

Ramin Farhadi,Mohammad Amin Mozaheb

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.8n.6p.12

Abstract

Staging history is an approach of historicism that is widely practiced by the post-1968 British playwrights. Historical playwriting not only helps to identify and unmask repressive power institutions, but also to question the conventional trends in writing history in general. One of these playwrights is Howard Brenton. By staging the history of romanticism in the early nineteenth century and the self-imposed exile of Romantic figures in his play Bloody Poetry (1984) Brenton attempts to achieve multiple purposes. By using literary analysis and historical reading, the researchers identify the causes of Shelley-Byron circle’s self-exile and the way in which a dissident discourse is formed as an opposition to the mechanism of disciplinary power and one of its powerful discourses which is journalism. In addition to this, they explore Brenton’s main politics of representation of the role and function of poet-intellectual in public and how literature as a dissident discourse may function under the administration of Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the 1980s.

Highlights

Britain in the first half of 1980s witnessed radical changes in economics, society and politics
The setting of Bloody Poetry is the romantic period in the early nineteenth century, Brenton draws parallel the events of Peterloo Massacre in 1819 and Thatcher’s confrontation with the miners and Northern Irish dissenters
By staging the Romantic poets like Shelley and Byron Brenton in Bloody Poetry makes a comparison between the early nineteenth century and his contemporary British society

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Britain in the first half of 1980s witnessed radical changes in economics, society and politics. Of authority that attempts to write history for its own ideological ends, and the discourse of dissidence that challenges this politics of historical writing by subversive activities In the former, it is concerning the performance of a controversial play about Winston Churchill, and in the latter play the poetical and intellectual resistance of the major poets of romanticism, Percy and Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and Claire Clairemont, by writing political verse and harassing the character Polidori, a journalist and agent of power. Bloody Poetry deals with the question of effective resistance and the role of intellectuals in public, and it identifies the exercise of power and the forced exile of the free-thinkers resulted in that exercise

DISCUSSION

The Role and Function of Poetry and PoetIntellectual in Bloody Poetry

Power and Dissident Discourse

CONCLUSION