Discursive prose
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a
debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse
on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humor of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to the
new interest in writing about the self, producing a colorful account of his early experiences in
Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift of
evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail Coach”
and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as One of the
Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the Victorian
Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its best in some
brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun
1809) and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on
contemporary writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and
independent journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken
journalism, particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William
Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling
picture, in forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theater, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble,
Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theaters created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theaters were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.”
But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic
Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas
Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from
the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial
Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theaters. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theaters, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theater (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
