The Romantic Theatre

This symposium was first delivered as a series of lectures in Rome arranged under the auspices of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and the British Council. The aim was very much to interpret the drama created by the English Romantic poets from the perspective of the modern theatrical tradition. The four essays included here investigate the relationship between the Romantics and the theatre of their own time, assess the considerable body of dramatic works com­posed by Byron and Shelley, and explore the history of plays by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron in performance on the British stage. All argue that, though the Romantic poets were out of sympathy with the theatre of their day, they wrote forms of drama that to a considerable degree anticipate the theatre of the present century.