Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship.(Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-00

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Judith Pascoe. Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii+251. $39-95.

Hand in glove with its well-known anti-theatrical prejudice walks the less recognized "theatrical imperative" of British romantic culture. In fact, Judith Pascoe argues, the former testifies to the pervasive power of the latter in an age fascinated by spectacle, publicity, emotional display and highly wrought performance. Though much literary history has swept aside the theatricality of this period with demands for sincerity, spontaneity, and authentic feeling, Pascoe finds that the development of a romantic aesthetic cannot be dissociated from this rejected alternative. In Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry and Spectatorship, Pascoe enacts a wholesale revision of a commonplace about romantic literature; making theater, rather than, say, nature, the governing metaphor and inspiration for poetic self-fashioning in the 1790s. By repositioning the emergence of romanticism under the glittering banner of the theatrical, Pascoe is able to give women, especially popular writers such as Mary Robinson, center stage. At the same time, by focusing on the carefully cultivated public images of a range of poets (including Robinson, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Letitia Landon), Pascoe calls our attention to the performance of poetry in this period, in a way that undermines easy divisions between publicity and privacy.

Pascoe's interest in romantic theatricality follows in the wake of work by Alan Richardson, Julie Carlson, Jeffrey Cox, Catherine Burroughs and others who have sought to raise the visibility of romantic theater. Yet she approaches theatricality not through the stage and written drama (though these recur as touchstones in her study), but rather through the stage-y and spectacular aspects of fashionable life. "Theatrical conventions," she writes, "leaped the boundaries of the patent house and permeated public life" (9). Though her primary interest is the intersection of theatricality and self-representation for poets of the period, Pascoe imaginatively situates most of her readings within chapters illustrating the period's preoccupation with...

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