Footnotes for "Romantic Electra"

1. A.W. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, translated by J. Black, 2 vols (1815), I, p.91.

2. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures, I, pp. 46-7. For the analogy between historical painting and tragedy in this period, see M.S. Wilson, "Ut Pictura Tragoedia: An Extrinsic Approach to British Neoclassic and Romantic Theatre", Theatre Research International, 12.3 (1987), pp.201-220.

3. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chapter XXII: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by H.J. Jackson, Oxford Authors edition (Oxford, 1985), p.438. This opinion is voiced by an imaginary plaintiff at the bar. Coleridge's juridical metaphor for the relevance or irrelevance of ancient drama for early nineteenth-century theatre is significant in the light of my later discussion of generic precedent and casuistry.

4. Hazlitt, review of Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Literature, first published in Edinburgh Review 26 (February 1816) pp.67-107: Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, edited by Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London, 1998), I, pp.286-287.

5. G.E. Lessing, Laokoon (1766), translated by Beasley, new edn. (London, 1914), pp.24, 11.

6. Peter Bayley, Orestes in Argos; A Tragedy in Five Acts: as first performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, on Wednesday April 20 1825 (London, 1825).

7. The London Magazine, 6.2 (May 1825), p.85

8. Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry", in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, edited by D.H. Reiman and S.B. Powers, Norton Critical Edition (New York and London, 1977), p.490

9. Shelley, "The Triumph of Life~, ll. 143-147. There is no record, unfortunately, that Shelley actually read The Bacchae specifically, only that he read "Euripides" on a number of occasions. For the Dionysiac transformation of the classical Greek figure Prometheus, see the brief aside in Michael Rossington, "Shelley and the Orient", Keats-Shelley Review, 6 (1991), p.34.

10. "Shelley reads Electra & Ajax", Wednesday June 3rd 1818: The Journals of Mary Shelley [MSJ], edited by P.R. Feldman and D. Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford, 1987), I, p.212. Mary Shelley copies the "Cenci MS", an account of the story of Beatrice Cenci copied from the archives of the Palazzo Cenci in Rome and lent to her by Maria Gisborne, on 23rd and 25th May 1818: MSJ, p.211.

11. Shelley, preface to The Cenci, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, p.239.

12. Shelley to John Gisborne, 22nd October 1821: The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by F.L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford, 1964), II, p.364. The Cenci, V.iv. 52, 115-116. This, of course, recalls Antigone, ll. 806-816: "see me ... looking my last at the bright sun....No one has sung the marriage song for me, but I will marry Death" (my translation).

13. Cenci, V.iii.9-12. Lear, V.iii.8-9.

14. Cenci, III.i.64-66. Lear, IV.vii.64-65, 68-70: "Methinks I should know you and know this man; / Yet I am doubtful ... Do not laugh at me; / For, as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia".

15. Cenci, preface, p.242.

16. Cenci, preface, p.240.

17. See J. Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998), especially p.196 and the discussion of the The Cenci, pp.498-507.

18. Cenci, V.iii.24-27.

19. J. Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge, 1994), p.192ff.

20. Cenci, V.iii.77-80. Compare Antigone ll. 449-455.

21. Electra, l. 1415: "Strike again, if you have the strength".

22. Electra, l. 1181: "O body so disgracefully and godlessly wasted".

23. Electra, l. 621: "For shameful things are taught by shameful example".

24. Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 20 July 1819, Letters, II, p.102.

25. London Magazine and Monthly Critical and Dramatic Review, I (April 1820), p.402.

26. The Cenci opened on November 13 1922 at the New Theatre, London, and ran for about three weeks. There had, in fact, been a private performance of the play by the Shelley Society at the Grand Theatre in Islington on May 6 1886. See S.Curran, Shelley's Cenci: Scorpions Ringed With Fire (Princeton, New Jersey, 1970), pp.183-193, 225. For the signifiance of the censorship of both The Cenci and Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, see Fiona Macintosh, "Tragedy in Performance: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Productions", The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, edited by P.E. Easterling (Cambridge, 1997), pp.295-296.

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