The Nineteenth Century: Romantic and Victorian Macbeth

Abstract

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw, in Romanticism, an explosion of cultural energy across Europe which linked up with the tumultuous political events of that period — the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars — to give a sense of a world in turmoil. In the drama, fiction and poetry which emerged at this time, the constraints of the eighteenth century were challenged, stretched and sometimes snapped and thrown off, and this had its impact on the way that the dramatic and literary texts of the past were understood — and certainly on the way in which people responded to Shakespeare. Those elements of his work which seemed faults in the perspective of neoclassical criticism appealed much more to the Romantic imagination. This did not mean a wholesale rejection of eighteenth-century approaches, however: the emphasis on character which had emerged in the later eighteenth century was continued and developed as Shakespeare, and some of his protagonists, were reconstructed as proto-Romantic figures. A key text in this process was Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), a work of great vivacity and perception by the essayist, journalist and critic William Hazlitt.