Michael Simpson. Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. 469. $56.00.

Largely by "recycling the trope of materialization" in print forms which consign them to mental consumption rather than material enactments, dramas by Shelley and Byron reconstruct the radical political discourse of the 1790s (Wollstonecraft, Paine, Godwin) "in coded form" (3). Closet Performances states that apparent paradox at the outset and interprets it with great learning and with intellectual rigor. This book shows that the dramas' "vaunted confinement in the closet allows them to assert the political necessity for action more vehemently" (6) and that these dramas become "rhetorical fantasies about themselves and about how they `perform' politically and culturally" (10). The book's theoretical sophistication appears equally in two salutary contentions: one involves notice of academicians' customary "practice of referring all issues to the empirical ground of their articulation in language, in a text" whereas to those "who do not inhabit the grove of academe, and especially to those who live on the other side of the tracks crucially dividing mental from manual labor in a class society, texts and the notion of them are a much rarer item" (12-13). Another trenchant argument that...

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