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closet drama
(redirected from Closet dramas)

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closet drama, a play that is meant to be read rather than performed. Precursors of the form existed in classical times. Plato's Apology is often regarded as tragic drama rather than philosophic dialogue. The dialogues of Cicero, Strabo, and Seneca were probably declaimed rather than acted, since only the comic theater survived transplantation from Greece to Rome. Closet dramas were particularly popular in the early 19th cent. when melodrama and burlesque dominated the theater, and poets attempted to raise dramatic standards by reviving past traditions. Byron's Manfred (1817) and Shelley's The Cenci (1819) imitate Shakespeare, and Goethe's Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832) draws in part on the Elizabethan tradition. Milton's Samson Agonistes (1671) and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1819) are based on Greek tragedies. Notable among other closet dramas are Robert Browning's Strafford (1837) and Pippa Passes (1841).


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In some ways, they had a liminality similar to the Interregnum closet dramas that Barbara Ravelhofer discusses in her essay "News Drama: The Tragic Subject of Charles I.
But we now also have a whole array of scholarship on women's diaries, wills, poetic productions, closet dramas, and letters.
More broadly, Burbery effectively contrasts frequent and detailed textual cues for visualizing Samson Agonistes on stage to the sparsity of such elements in Elizabeth Cary's Mariam, Queen of Jewry and in other closet dramas by Fulke Greville, Samuel Daniel, William Alexander, George Buchanan, and even Byron and Shelley.
 
 
 
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