The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003. ISBN 1551112981. Price: $44.95 (US$29.95).

Collections of British drama from the Medieval to Modern periods have proliferated through the years, but the British Romantic era—a field which has recently seen an explosion of publications that feature noncanonical novels and poems written between 1780 and 1830—has had no anthology to represent its various generic experiments or bridge the gap between “literary” and “theatrical” perspectives. Paul Baines and Edward Burns’s anthology, Five Romantic Plays, 1768-1821 (2000), is organized around the themes of family and history, featuring what the editors call “some of the most radical and unusual examples of Romantic drama” (iii). But The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama is a more comprehensive collection because it demonstrates the range of playscripts produced during the era and thus highlights some of the major strands of Romantic theatre. As a result, The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama promises to change the ways in which British theatre history is taught to undergraduate and graduate students around the world. Because this is the first anthology to represent Romantic drama as a “version of the period’s restless eclecticism” (Cox and Gamer xvii) with its “proliferating forms and generic hybrids” (xxiv)—“its fundamental strangeness” (x)—scholars will inevitably quibble with the selection of plays. For how could one anthology adequately capture the drama of a theatre that offered “high and low, legitimate and illegitimate, past and present, elite and popular” (xxiv)? And yet The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama does an excellent job of highlighting these oppositions, arguing that “what we now see as disparate pieces—poetic tragedies, successful stage dramas, and staged spectacles—were part of a coherent, if complex, cultural configuration” (xii). As the co-editors, Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer, state in their highly readable and historically rich introduction, “this anthology seeks to restage the fruitful interaction between Romantic writers and the contemporary stage, and between theatrical writers and the cultural movement we call Romanticism. For however, we try to define it, we inevitably can find Romanticism’s counterpart in the theater” (xiv). This is the first anthology of Romantic drama to show demonstrably why the category of “Romantic drama” can be confounding. For when one reads a commercially successful play like Hannah Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783) or George Colman’s Blue-Beard; or, Female Curiosity (1798) alongside texts that never made it to the stage until much later in time or not at all—such as Percy Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) or Joanna Baillie’s Orra (1812)—one realizes that the difficulty in characterizing Romantic drama springs from its alternately public and private impulses. On the one hand, in the search for commercial success, playwrights like Baillie and Coleridge mined Renaissance playscripts for dramaturgical models that they subsequently imitated to varying degrees of audience acclaim, and, on the other, playwrights like Byron used Renaissance models (such as the genre of the Senecan closet play) to protest the limits of the popular stage. As Cox and Gamer point out, the fact that so many Romantic writers known for their achievement in the novel or poetry turned, at least once in their careers, to playwrighting, and the fact that “romantic theatricality” helped to structure social, political, and cultural discourse of the period (as Judith Pascoe has argued) indicate the centrality of Romantic drama and theatre to understanding the cultural history of the Romantic era. I will use this anthology immediately in the classroom. Not only does it offer playscripts that work collectively to showcase the dramatic variety of the Romantic stage, but it also helps to lay to rest many of the critical objections that have been promulgated through the years and misrepresented Romantic drama. As Cox …