Романтическото представление
The Romantic performance

Summary/Abstract: The paper gives in broad strokes the inconsistency of drama with performance in the period of Romanticism as evidenced mostly from the history of English theatre. The period of Romanticism movement in theatre is less well explored. Typical of this movement is the gap and inconsistency between drama and its performance. The fact that a good part of the plays by Romanticists have not been staged at all, is really telling. The authors’ dramatic fantasies went beyond the conventions of the coetaneous theatre practice and a major part of texts that have been meant for the staged, proved inadequate or went beyond its capacities. That was rather in tune with the Romantic perception of Shakespearean oeuvre, which began to be deemed as too good for the harsh materiality of theatre. Romanticists’ dramatic pieces drastically changed the conventional idea of action, composition and personages and as such they aroused anticipations of the development of drama in modern and post-modern times. On the other hand, these were highly charged with sensuous and visual imagery, which could be deemed to evidence that these texts held a potential for being much more than just ‘plays for reading’ and were potentially stageable.

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