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This introductory chapter identifies the central feature of closet drama as its undecided—and undecidable—relationship to performance. Like the visionary Saint Therese in Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, “half in and half out of doors,” closet drama is always half on and half off the stage; it also opens a window onto energies that refuse containment by any single performative iteration. The chapter then discusses the queer potential of closet drama, and argues that modernist closet drama remained closeted until the end of the twentieth century because the conditions of the theater had not yet caught up to the drama's vision.

In its 1820–40 efflorescence, the poetic closet drama staked out a space that renewed epic also made its own during the heyday of British national Reform. Literalizing poetic ‘argument’ into debate, and expanding the classical topos of the epic consult, epoists of the 1830s wrote poems whose narrative took the form of an extended, dialogical deliberation. These works addressed their readers as an auditory convened to assist at a process of judgment affirming national unity on a basis liberal rather than authoritarian — or else, in an epic undersong like the Chartist Cooper's, they appealed to liberal principles on behalf of those whom the 1832 compact had left out. As rising Victorian stars like Carlyle and Disraeli worked this forensic vein, Browning took it to extremes that all but wrecked his career. Even Bible epoists (Heraud, Bulmer) now discarded the 1820s mass rush to Judgment, in favour of persuasive rhetoric; and epics of church history that overlaid Protestant Reformation on contemporary Reform supervened upon the dogmatizing of former decades.

This chapter presents some reflections about the potential limitations of his work. It explores the possibility that most, if not all, theaters are closets. It pursues and extends the claim made by Anne Fleche—in an essay on the theater of (and critical responses to) Tennessee Williams—that theater as such configures a kind of closet because of the ways in which theatrical space “has to be bounded, modified, organized, relativized, [and] quoted” in order to appear legibly as theater; like the space of a closet, theatrical “space requires a frame, a garment, a proscenium, a limit”.

This chapter points out Cavendish and Philips's shared concern with feminized spaces of retreat or interiority, arguing that these participate in the Interregnum royalist impetus to represent the space of retirement or inwardness as the actual centre of power. Philips's verse develops the notion found elsewhere in contemporary royalist writing that political agency may exist apart from its conventional military or governmental expressions, and underlines the fact that this constitutes more than a simple strategy of quietism or evasion. The borrowings from her verses to be found in the manuscript writings of imprisoned Restoration Puritan, Robert Overton, attest to the resonance of these ideas beyond the Interregnum royalist context of their inception. Although Cavendish's explorations of empowerment through retreat forge far fewer direct links with the wider political dilemmas of her contemporaries, they provide a central catalyst to her fantasies of enhanced female agency. Communal female retirement as a dramatic motif is markedly transformed as she draws on the political dynamics of closet drama.

This chapter discusses the strategies which Harriet Beecher Stowe mobilized from her religious background in order to further the abolitionist cause. In Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) revivalist and camp-meeting religion informs character and action. Dred (1856) focuses on the struggles between self-serving American pro-slavery clergy, heroic abolitionist ministers, and prophetic African-American Christianity, dramatized in the context of the role reversals of a camp-meeting. The Christian Slave (1855), a dramatized reading or ‘closet drama’, written for Mary Webb, one of the first African American dramatic performers, developed the role reversal topos of abolitionist closet drama (as did Herman Melville's Benito Cereno) for abolitionist purposes.

This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were more than nonce works, instead retaining commercial appeal long past their performance dates. This chapter cross‐reads masques from different venues, contained within plays, intertextually mentioned in pageants, parodied in ballads, and recorded in gossip. Masques' habitual intertextual allusiveness contributes to the genre's self‐conscious explorations of how drama constitutes authority, their canniness contradicting New Historicist symptomatic readings. Case studies include two intertextually related masques of 1617–18 (White's Cupid's Banishment, produced by a London girls' school, and Jonson's courtly Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue); a cluster of 1630s masques of temperance (Milton's Ludlow masque Comus, Davenant's courtly Luminalia, Thomas Nabbes's public theatrical masque Microcosmus, Thomas Heywood's Lord Mayor's show Porta Pietatis); and Shirley's spectacular 1634 Triumph of Peace.

This chapter examines the work of Djuna Barnes. It argues that honoring the complexity of her literary output means not to speculate without great care about what personal experiences might be at the back of her writing, but to back that writing in all of its disturbing dimensions. It proposes a move away from Barnes'closet trauma—the purported abuse that leaves her capable of only quasi-coherent expression—and toward her closet drama, a deliberately nonnormative and possibly unperformable theatrical idiom that reflects the nonnormative nature of her subject matter, taboo sexuality. It is in Barnes' dramatic writing—her short play The Dove, her long verse play The Antiphon, and her unpublished play Biography of Julie von Bartmann—that she explores most acutely and provocatively her failed utopic visions of lesbian incest.

This chapter challenges the assertion that Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare poses marriage as a vessel for containing excesses of subjectivity, desire, and mutability within the bounds of artistic mastery, and therefore provides a lens through which to understand the generally conservative impulses of Zukofsky's later work. It argues that a queer interpretation of Bottom, which can be read as the first of Zukofsky's “closet dramas,” offers a blueprint not for a confirmation of Zukofsky's growing conservatism but for an illumination of the devious and deviant energies that continue to animate his later work. Readings of the late dramatic experiments in his long poem “A,” Rudens and L. Z. Masque demonstrate how Zukofsky's turn from normative dramatic conventions entails a concomitant turn from normative sexuality.

This chapter considers Pound's various “fronts” or personae and conducts a frontal assault on his homophobia. It argues that Pound's most intense identification as a translator associates him with Electra—and that the complex and multilayered interplay of his voice with hers creates a node of specifically sexualized disturbance in the already disturbed and disturbing world of Sophocles' drama. Similarly, Pound's cross-gender identifications with the unusual female figures in Nō drama—and his willful mistranslation of at least one Nō play constitute an actively, and at times aggressively, queer approach to his source texts. In what is perhaps a more passive and unwitting role, Pound is also the transmitter, along with more perfunctory information about performance practices in the Japanese theater, of a tradition of same-sex erotic practices inextricably linked to the origins, composition, and staging of Nō drama. Furthermore, in both his active and passive guises as a queer translator, Pound is continually and consistently drawn to material in which eruptions of violence stand in for “unnameable,” transgressive sexual confrontations.

The introduction places the book and its aims in the context of on-going reassessments of Roman Imperial theatre. It outlines the way Romantic bias against Roman tragedy and historical drama, as opposed to its Greek forerunners, still influences the conceptual frame of debate and the handling of the evidence. After surveying links and parallels with Greek forerunners as well as recent scholarly contributions, it moves on to define two key issues which must be examined first: (i) what fragments illustrating the genre’s history allow us to infer about the genre’s original role and impact; and (ii) how far we can speak of continuity reaching from the Late Republic down to Octavia, a hundred years later.

Samson Agonistes engages with two heated Long Restoration debates: the use of rhymed verse in tragedy and the status of the tragic chorus. Each might seem pedantic now or merely technical, but they were vitally important to Milton and his contemporaries. Indeed, Samson Agonistes’s chorus remains at the very heart of current (widely varied and fiercely contested) readings; our understanding of Milton’s rhyming chorus thus determines our overall understanding of this disturbing Restoration tragedy. This chapter reads Samson Agonistes’s chorus closely in order to understand the dramatic poem in contemporary terms.

This chapter suggests that all the works discussed in this study—both canonical and minor, composed in verse or in prose—ask profound questions about the nature of the tragic mode and its relation to Christian thought. The nineteenth-century dramatic imagination is deeply political, staging memorable protests against the rhetoric of utilitarianism in political economy, Calvinism in religion, and the unjustifiable sacrifice of the one for the welfare of the many in ethics and anthropology. In contradistinction to the many studies which sideline dramatic writing in the long nineteenth century, this chapter concludes that dramatic form retains its value in this period as a significant vehicle for comment upon far-reaching questions of justice and ethics. Ultimately, theology raised too many important questions to be permanently excluded from the public stage—and the theatre was too valuable a forum to ignore religious experience.

This chapter offers close readings of a series of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century play-scripts about the murder of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, including works by Douglas Jerrold, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Alfred Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. Tracing their performance over 100 years involves the exploration of changing attitudes to the performance of Christian worship and sacrifice on stage and, more broadly, the changing status of the Established Church itself. In the repetitions and variations of Becket’s narrative deployed over time, we can chart changes in the idea of Christian tragedy, renewed appreciation of the communal significance of religious ritual, especially in the revival of the classical chorus, and a growing sense that sacred drama was not just an aberration to be carefully policed and perhaps suppressed, but part of the living fabric of English national drama with a performative future as well as a past.

The chapter argues for strong generic continuity between the Republican and Imperial praetextae and the Octavia, the latter being ‘similar to tragedies’ but still emphatically Roman, be it in its handling of topography, social hierarchy, and various social formats, rituals and customs. In the employment of language and of characteristic turns of phrase (sermocinatio) one finds a clear effort to ‘get it right’. Challenging readings anachronistically arguing for the genre’s traditional observance of the so-called dramatic unities, it is argued that the typical praetexta plot would allow for changes of settings probably from Rome to battlefield, but certainly from battlefield back to triumph in Rome. The plots of Pacuvius’ Paullus, Accius’ Brutus and the Balbus’ praetexta confirm the use of a teleological perspective as well as changes of settings and time. The open and episodic structure of the Octavia seems a generic characteristic, not a sign of ineptitude.