Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0801433045 (hardback). Price: $39.95. William Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0-8014-3352-5 (hardback). Price: $49.95. Catherine B. Burroughs, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. ISBN: 081223393X (hardback). Price: $39.95.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that romantic theatre and drama are today no longer considered a waste of a publisher's resources. But what can one learn about the scholarly interest in theatre, drama, and performance in the British romantic period from three books published within the same year? Is there an intellectual trend or merely a market vacuum waiting to be filled? How does scholarship on this subject reveal strategies emerging in scholarly work generally? The recent books by Catherine Burroughs, William Jewett, and Judith Pascoe are each grounded in thorough historical and textual scholarship and therefore share a kind of solid scholarly respectability. Each adds to our understanding of how one might interpret the largely underinterpreted intersection of romanticism and drama/performance studies, because any thorough, rigorous scholarship on romantic drama and performance is likely to illuminate previously unlit corners of early nineteenth-century British dramatic writing and its surrounding cultures. Various topics or approaches link the books: inquiry into how gender and performance interact (Pascoe and Burroughs); examination of crises in the thought of high romanticism (Jewett and Pascoe); exploration of the significance of the dramatic closet (Jewett and Burroughs); and attempts to create new paradigms for studying the romantic period and redefining the canon we study (Jewett, Pascoe, and Burroughs) And yet, the differences between these books are quite striking for each has different purposes in mind and therefore works with its historical and textual materials in distinct ways. William Jewett sets out to make the case that high romantic dramatic writing is not, as has often been argued in the past, an unfortunate generic accident—a case of great poets foolishly choosing a genre in which they were ill-equipped to write well. Rather, romantic drama represents a complex engagement with a genre—the play-to-be-read or closet drama—that these poets chose precisely because of the complex problems of agency that such a form allowed them to explore in relation to their publics. While Jewett is not unaware of the complex and fraught relationship that writers like Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron had with the idea of their plays being performed in the theatre, he suggests that it is precisely in the form of the "read play" that their explorations of agency most effectively problematize their own agency and performance as writers in relation to Britain's politics. Jewett's readings of The Fall of Robespierre & Wat Tyler, The Borderers, Osorio & Remorse, The Cenci, Marino Faliero, and Charles the First & The Triumph of Life are rigorous and find much new to say about the dramaturgical strategies of these "dramatic" works and about their development within the histories of their respective authors. For Jewett, romantic writers found in drama a genre suited to their particular crisis of agency: "[D]rama asks us—as lyric and narrative do not—to take pieces of language for persons, forcing us—out of a puzzlement that is inherently moral—to confront the ways in which our language grants us agency" (ix). Relocating the works of Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth within particular social and political contexts, Jewett teases out the complex acts of self-staging that these dramatic works represent, turning away from readings of these works that treat them as, in a sense, authored by social conditions. For example, in his reading of The Borderers, Jewett provocatively shows that we might see the play as Wordsworth's attempt "to express himself . . . to secure a space of inconsequence or neutrality for his own compulsive doubt to run wild, so that it will not express itself as Rivers's does" (61). The plays of high …