Far from the clamor of the stands, far from those royal stages that overlooked ever wider rooms, capable of accommodating a heterogeneous audience and eager to be entertained more than educated, the dramas of romantic writers have long been perceived as closet dramas, texts intended for reading only, from whose pages all the indignation of the authors towards a theater often characterized by gross and popular character, object of severe censorship by the examiner of plays. Inserting itself in the critical debate that has animated the last decades, this study aims to observe how the mental theater (byronian expression, often used as a synonym of closet drama) has been adopted by Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, P.B. Shelley and Mary Shelley as perimental typology and highly provocative of stage writing, able to awaken the imagination of a public strategically involved in the creative process, not passive user of representations dominated by the spectacular component. In identifying the traces of a common tendency, we chose to dwell on some of the best known plays in which the artists opted for the insertion of references to classical mythology and to the Arcadian dimension; conveying profound contents of political reform and moral renewal, such works would have had the purpose of realizing a real metamorphosis in the mind of the single reader, the harbinger of a regeneration to be implemented in society.
Author
Elisabetta Marino teaches English literature at the Macroarea di Lettere e Filosofia of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata". In the last years she has mainly dealt with English Romanticism (with particular reference to the work of Mary Shelley), travel literature, Asian British and American Asian literature. Among his main publications: Tamerlano from English literature to American literature (2000), Introduction to British Bangladeshi literature (2005), Mary Shelley and Italy. The journey, the Risorgimento, the female question (2011).
