Time in Romantic Theatre

The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the consequence of internal as well as external developments: internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of “Unity of Time” and the expectation that the events of the play must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time functioned.

Ch. 1. Flashback and Flashforward

Ch. 2. Fatal Hour

Ch. 4. Time Stopped

Ch. 6. Longitudinal Time

Ch. 8. Forgotten Time

Frederick Burwick, Emeritus Professor at UCLA, is author and editor of thirty-four books and one hundred sixty-five articles. He has worked extensively on Romantic drama and Anglo-German literary relations. He is the general editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature (2012) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2009). Recent monographs include A History of Romantic Literature (2019), British Drama of the Industrial Revolution (2015) and Playing to the Crowd, London Popular Theatre, 1780-1830 (2011).