Experimentation and transformation: The dramas of Percy Bysshe Shelley reconsidered.

摘要

Any portrait of the lauded poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is incomplete without an examination of his "failed" dramas, which have been viewed as unfit for the stage Shelley's disparagement as a dramatist, however, fails to recognize that Shelley's representation of the dramatic Romantic hero and heroine are unique, especially when contextualized within the framework of Shelley's personal and political history and, more importantly, within the framework of popular productions of the English stage between 1790 and 1830.;Like Shelley, the drama of Romanticism has also been disparaged, deemed unworthy of scholarly pursuit. This has long remained the unwritten chapter of English theatre history, but scholars have recently succeeded in reviving the study of this lost chapter, uncovering many hitherto neglected and "lost" stage plays by writers who have never made it into anthologies of Romanticism. This reassessment of the age includes Romantic drama as a central feature. Percy Bysshe Shelley's plays remain among the least discussed, perhaps because so much ink has been devoted to his prose and poetry both during and since his life and death.;This dissertation attempts to unify the disparate parts of Shelley the poet, the playwright, the philosopher, the defender, the rebel, the tyrant, the oppressed, the savior, the abused, the reformer and the lover within the backdrop of his cultural and political history and lends new meaning to the connections between crisis and terror, revolution and reaction, and spectacle and performance. In addition to assessing Shelley's activism in Ireland, the history of the Romantic stage, and, finally, a detailed review of his "failed dramas," this investigation reviews artifacts such as handbills, reviews, and theatrical portraits which materialize the "ethereality" of Shelley's works and also lend a more complete and honest assessment of English culture in the aftermath of the French Revolution. We see that Shelley's dramas were intentional vehicles of change and transformation.