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Staging the Shelleys: A Case Study in Romantic Biodrama
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- Author / Creator
- Reid, Brittany
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Although it has been nearly two hundred years since they lived and wrote, Romantic writers Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley continue to haunt the theatre in the twenty-first century. However, it is not only their plays, poems, and novels that have been adapted for the modern stage. Beginning in the twentieth century, renewed interest in the Shelleys’ lives led to the composition of numerous biographical plays based on Mary and Percy’s personal and creative partnership. But while these nineteenth-century writers enjoyed particular moments of such interest in the 1980s, the early twenty-first century has seen this interest flourish like never before. Consequently, the turn of the twenty-first century coincided with an unprecedented increase in the number and variety of plays about the Shelleys’ lives, writing, and literary legacies. As a testament to this recent resurgence, more than twenty theatrical adaptations of the Shelleys have been created and staged in the last twenty years. But although these plays continue to feature both Shelleys, most contemporary biographical plays about the couple now privilege Mary as their focal figure and prioritize her life, writing, and perspective. In this way, these plays represent a creative corollary of a broader cultural shift in interest from Percy to Mary as a biographical subject, which was first initiated in the 1980s through the recovery efforts of Mary Shelley scholars. Consequently, while Percy was the favored biographical subject for more than a century after his death, Mary Shelley has since emerged as a Romantic celebrity and her life story is now being reimagined and retold on the contemporary stage. With this theatrical history and active cultural interest as my point of departure, this project explores this efflorescence through a focused consideration of the Shelleys’ representations through contemporary biographical plays. To that end, I investigate the “Shelleyan project” through its representation in contemporary biographical plays—what I call Romantic Biodramas. This dissertation is therefore devoted to the critical examination of the Shelleys’ personal and authorial entanglement, as it has been theatrically imagined in the last twenty years: from 1997 to 2017. I am documenting and examining how theatrical practitioners are relating to the Shelleys, adapting their lives and writing, and practically representing them onstage for contemporary theatre audiences. Most significantly, I have not limited my research to reading the scripts for meaning. Instead, I go beyond the texts themselves to recreate material conditions of production, recover the stories surrounding these plays-in-performance, and actively contribute to the archive of existing performances. To complete my study of these plays and recompose their performance histories, I rely on close reading of play texts and secondary sources, such as reviews, playbills, prompt books or practitioner interviews. Furthermore, my dramaturgical approach entails situating each play by looking at its unique conditions of production, such as geographical location, company mandate, or performance venue, as well as formal, generic, and stylistic elements. My exemplary performance case studies include three plays-in-production: Rose Scollard’s Caves of Fancy (1997) and Darrah Teitel’s The Apology (2011 and 2013). Additionally, my research into Romantic Biodrama also involved a creative approach to the subject through a Performance-as-Research (PaR) component of the project: the writing and staging of a new Romantic Biodrama. Accordingly, my fourth performance case study chronicles the process of bringing Justified Sinners (2017) to life. Finally, I include the full performance text for Justified Sinners, as well as key paratextual resources from its premiere production, to preserve and re-create the unique conditions of production surrounding this Romantic Biodrama.
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2019
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.