Abstract . Capitalizing on the ructions prompted by his ceremonial address at Drury Lane Theatre in October 1812, Byron wrote ‘Parenthetical Address, by Dr Plagiary’. This essay will argue that this rapidly published parody projects an encompassing poetic amphitheatre, wherein every related action and publication that led to its composition is framed as part of a rolling show. It will also argue that these quick, tense, hilarious dynamics between theatre and press might be read retrospectively as an early model for how Byron’s later epic satire Don Juan ‘amphitheatrically’ provokes, anticipates, and masters the responses of reviewers and readers. As instalments of Don Juan are published serially between 1819 and 1824, they accumulate critical responses to earlier instalments and selectively answer them, reducing interlocutors to silence or more noise. Parody at Drury Lane replays as parody compounded in Don Juan.

Byron's The Curse of Minerva, his Address, Spoken at the Opening of Drury-lane Theatre Saturday, October 10th, 1812, and his Monody on the Death of The Right Honourable R.B. Sheridan are texts that have not attracted a great deal of sustained critical attention. This essay begins with the proposition that behind Byron's two theatrical addresses commissioned by Drury Lane stands his earlier The Curse of Minerva, just as it stands behind Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. The argument is that these two addresses respond, in part, to the challenge entailed in Minerva's curse against Britain, by proposing two, largely distinct models for British theatre, as centred on the new Drury Lane. In doing so, the addresses intervene in both a theoretical debate concerning contemporary drama and a political debate about Britain's imperial crimes against a larger cultural heritage, thereby conjoining, and dramatising, the two debates. Such dramatisation before an audience in the theatre stimulates and invites participation in these debates. The conclusion is that Byron's designs for Drury Lane, and for a new British drama, are, partly and indirectly, efforts to compensate for Elgin's depredations on the Acropolis.

Oedipus, Suez, and Hungary:T. S. Eliot's Tradition and The Elder Statesman Michael Simpson (bio) On a scale of bangs and whimpers, T. S. Eliot's dramas have been regarded as inclining toward the less explosive end. From The Rock in 1934 to The Elder Statesman in 1958, Eliot's attempts to rehabilitate verse drama in English theater have been seen as brave but inherently challenged, and ultimately unavailing. There have been honorable exceptions to this critical consensus, and most recently at the Donmar Warehouse in London, a creative, theatrical effort has been made, in the form of a "T. S. Eliot Festival" to refute and even replace it.1 This festival was refreshing not least because it did not seek to justify itself with explicit reference to any historical abacus of centenaries or other anniversaries. More compelling, though, was the extent of the dramatic offerings, as the festival not only staged The Family Reunion, but also theatricalized some of Eliot's more strictly poetic works, such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets, as rehearsed readings. In its effort to promote Eliot's dramas, and others of his works, as dramatic, the festival had more history on its side than the received critical wisdom about these plays suggests. The Cocktail Party, also presented as a rehearsed reading at the Donmar, and The Confidential Clerk enjoyed some significant commercial success, as well as critical acknowledgment, when they were first produced in 1950 and 1953 respectively. There was one play, however, that garnered no such accolades at its premiere and that the Donmar's Festival did not include.2 This play was The Elder Statesman, which nonetheless put in an isolated appearance in 2008 as a rehearsed reading at the King's Head, Islington, where it was performed by the theater group Primavera, as part of its series of "Forgotten Classics."3 Unlike the efforts at the Donmar, however, this brave attempt required the pretext of a fiftieth anniversary. [End Page 509] As the fourth and final instance of the English drawing-room dramas that were Eliot's favored generic template, The Elder Statesman was singularly unfortunate in its timing: in 1956, just two years before its premiere, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger had opened in London, triggering a revolution in British theater that probably served to obscure retrospectively even the mixed success of Eliot's drama.4 The elder statesmen meet the angry young men.5 But another historical intersection will be the subject of this essay, and it is one that Robin Grove has observed independently: For the close of the 1950s, the plot could hardly be more old-fashioned. Europe may have torn itself apart, Hungary be crushed, Soviet and American empires threaten each other with destruction, Suez heap humiliation on top of dishonour, and Macmillan (1957) have come to power in a year of unprecedented industrial non-cooperation, but not a tremor from public event disturbs the protected milieux of the play.6 Against this backdrop, of course, Look Back in Anger itself looks not just parochial but also bathetic. Whereas Grove asserts a disjunction between this context and Eliot's play, I propose a conjunction. And the pressure to do so may well derive from our recent historical vantage. As the fiftieth anniversary of Suez impinged on the public consciousness, there were articles in the news media that took this opportunity to plot the vicissitudes of the special relationship between the UK and the USA.7 My argument about the play will be that it articulates a vision of loving inclusion that extends beyond the characters into an allegory of how European, and more widely "Western" culture retains its historical and transatlantic integrity, specifically after the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. This cultural tradition thus compensates for political division among those parties that share in the tradition and externalizes that division by emphasizing where this sharing ceases to apply, namely in the Second and Third Worlds. Intersecting with this urgent political moment are new forms of exciting theater, and Eliot's play will be understood to react to and against these innovations, in part by assimilating some of them to...

Byron's Manfred was staged in a single performance of a 'rehearsed reading' at the King's Head Theatre, London in March 2007. Poised dynamically between theatrical production and closet reading, this rehearsed recitation played creatively into the critical debate about Byron's dramas as requiring one or the other mode of reproduction. This hybrid staging of Manfred also recast this theme of reproduction in the terms of incarnation and resurrection. These terms, charged here with an irony derived from Frankenstein, served to amplify within Byron's dramatic text the comic critique of the post-Waterloo resurrections of both Napoleon and the Bourbons. The thrust of this critique is that such resurrections do not derive from any intrinsic power incarnated in these political figures but rather from the rhetorical power accorded to them by an audience. Reception rather than inception is the prime mover here. The rehearsed reading went a stage further, by applying a similar critique to Manfred itself. Playing up the Orphic contours of Manfred resurrecting Astarte, the reading sought to shift the balance of poetic power from the text to the collectivity of the players and the audience. Collective, public reading contested the closet of Orphic poetry as much as it challenged the spectacle of political theatre.

Abstract This book seeks to explain the prominence of Sophocles' Theban plays among those Greek tragedies adapted by dramatists across the African diaspora. It argues that the Theban plays reflect on three themes which have become crucial in the postcolonial context: identity, the grounding of civilization on barbarism, and transmission of culture over time and space. To adapt the Theban dramas is thus a massively theoretical as well as an audaciously practical act, because they have been installed as the script that both legislates and explains how they, and indeed all other cultural artefacts, are conveyed. African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American adaptations engage with the cultural politics of the so-called Western canon, and use their self-consciously literary status variously to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and the place of the Greek ‘originals’, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission. The book is informed by and contributes to postcolonial theory and theories of classical reception. In particular, it develops a new analytic concept, the ‘Black Aegean’, with which to theorize the ways in which colonialist and postcolonialist discourses have staged various encounters between ancient Greece and contemporary Africa. This construct mediates through the plays the later debates about the Black Atlantic and Black Athena.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe High-Tech Luddite of Lambeth: Blake's Eternal HackingAndrew Cooper and Michael SimpsonAndrew Cooper Search for more articles by this author and Michael Simpson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 30, Number 3Summer 1999 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044106 Views: 1Total views on this site © 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Like most of Coleridge's major poem, "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" was constituted by a substantial number of drafts and revisions. These revisions, moreover, seem to have been motivated by multiple factors. Certain revisions of this poem in particular are conditioned on the one hand by Coleridge's quarrel and reconciliation with Southey over the issue of pantisocratic endeavor, and, on the other, by the documented shift in his philosophical allegiances from an affiliation with Hartley to a more Kantian orientation. "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" seeks to vindicate the Kantian model of an active mind by using it to explain both the rapprochement with Southey and the resulting revisions of the poem itself. This proving the efficacy of the Kantian mind, the poem can complete the reconciliation with Southey by proposing that this mind has established the previously aborted pantisocracy in a lime-tree bower. What the poem does not do, however, is share this active mind with its audience. As long-lost friend, but more particularly as the editor of the anthology in which the poem was first published, Southey is permitted no reciprocity, since the poem has already rationalized the loss and regaining of the friendship and has editorially revised itself. Southey is thus preempted, as are those recent editorial commentators on the text's genesis.

There is some critical consensus that Blake's The Fly has an ironic sting in its tail. A rough sampling of the criticism indicates a large range of such irony: Pagliaro's reading finds a merely conditional visionary defeat for the poem's narrator; Bloom reads a more destructive critique of the pious consolations of an orthodox Christianity; and Wagenknecht proposes a nihilistic final stanza that critically parodies syllogistic reasoning by demonstrating its effects as a heap of bodies at the end of the poem.(1) But I shall argue instead that it is we who are in danger in any encounter with the poem and that this danger originates not in the poem but in ourselves. I shall also propose, however, that the grammar of the poem, along with its formal identity as part of a chapbook, can enable us to recognize our destructive and ultimately self-destructive complicity in the text. It is in my emphasis on the agency of a reader, invoked by the poem, that the difference between my argument and the previous criticism consists. I. There is, perhaps expectedly, more critical agreement about the poem's plot than there is about the consequences and significance of its events: the fly always gets to die, and in the rest of the poem it is understood that the narrator's attempt to identify with his victim is variously complicated according to the degree of irony thus read into it. It is, however, this very stability, constituted by a critical consensus about the plot, that I shall challenge by the version of reader-response criticism that follows. While virtually all critics of the poem have stabilized its plot by declining to consider their own agency in this project, I shall develop the notion of stylistics, formulated by Stanley Fish, to reflect on both my own reading agency and on that of a critical consensus concerned to deny, or at least to ignore, its own complicity in the drama of this poem. My working notion of an affective stylistics will, however, differ from Fish's version by sidestepping the fairly received objection that Fish's reader never learns from his or her own experience. Jolted into self-recrimination by a disruption of its syntactic expectations, Fish's reader then approaches the next sentence, and then the next, and so on, without any suspicion that the moral lesson of the preceding sentence is about to be taught again. Since I focus here on a single lyric rather than the large narratives that Fish analyzes, I do not face the problem of an incredibly sustained credulity. But even if my reading practice were applied to the whole corpus of Blake's Songs, the problem would still not occur, both because this collection is considerably shorter than, say, Paradise Lost and because each lyric, unlike each sentence in Milton's epic, presents a different dramatic situation. Differently situated in each poem, my reader is taught a lesson that is contextually distinct. Since this lesson, staged chiefly by the genre of the chapbook, entails an exercise in reading just as much as it enjoins the exertion of moral discrimination, Blake's Songs seems proleptically to invite a version of such criticism. Despite the supposed stability of this poem's plot, the death of the fly and hence the narrator's culpability for it are highly contingent upon how we read the first stanza. What the narrator admits is that he has brushed away the fly's summer's play.(2) Either this admission is a soothing circumlocution for an act of destruction or it is an innocent account of how the narrator merely repelled, accidentally or otherwise, the fly's activity. To convict the narrator on the basis of his self-incrimination, we must first undergo a little jury selection. Virtually all the critics of this poem have established the murder by supplying the body themselves. But did they really get it from the text when the text itself does not definitively state that a death in fact occurred? In order to answer this question about whether the narrator or the reader is the dominant agent in this first stanza, we must, since the extent of the narrator's malefaction is suddenly at issue here, decide how much agency the narrator and the fly possess relative to one another. …