“Says Shakespeare, who just now is much in fashion”. Shakespeare in the Theatre of Byron

Mirco Stober

“Says Shakespeare, who just now is much in fashion”. Shakespeare in the Theatre of Byron

ISBN 978-3-98940-011-5, 226 pp., paperback, € 29,50 (2024)

This study focusses on Byron’s largely disregarded career as a playwright and establishes Shakespeare as an important infl uence on his plays. This brings them closer to stage representation although Byron himself claimed that his plays are unsuitable for the contemporary London stage and that Shakespeare, the dominant presence on said stage, is “the worst of models—though the most extraordinary of writers”. Following an introduction to the Romantic stage and a brief survey of Shakespeare’s status in the Romantic age and on its stage, this study analyses examples of Byron’s engagement with the London stage during the years 1812-16 – his “Address, Spoken at the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre”, his friendship with Edmund Kean, as well as his time on the Drury Lane Subcommittee – showing that Byron is a clear advocate for the representation of Shakespeare’s plays on the contemporary stage. Next this study reconciles Shakespeare with other elements of Byron’s poetics such as neoclassicism or the Gothic before finally demonstrating that five of Byron’s plays – Manfred (1817), Marino Faliero (1821), Sardanapalus (1821), The Two Foscari (1821), and Werner (1822) – are heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s plays and that this influence brings each play closer to representation on the contemporary stage, belying both of Byron’s claims.

Preview / Table of Contents (pdf)

Review

"The major hypothesis of Dr. Mirco Stober’s doctoral study of Shakespeare and Byron in the theater is that the influence of Shakespeare not only increases the theatricality of Byron’s plays, raising his stagecraft to a level where his plays were closer to stage representation than those of most of his contemporaries, but also shows that they were actually written very much with the early nineteenth-century professional London stage in mind: a claim which Byron constantly denied. To prove his thesis Stober undertakes an investigation of the Romantic stage and Shakespeare’s presence on it, as well as an analysis of Byron’s personal engagement with this stage, together with a survey of the legal and social conditions surrounding the London 'duopoly' of the royal Drury Lane and Covent Garden theaters, and a demonstration of Shakespeare’s dominant cultural status within emerging British cultural nationalism from the 1790s onwards. He includes an analysis of each of Byron's plays, discussing their genesis, their relationship to the stage and to Byron’s politics and poetics (such as the classical and the gothic), demonstrating the influence of Shakespeare on individual scenes, parts, and lines, and indicating how this increases the theatricality of each drama. This is a massive undertaking, showing not only Stober’s thoroughness and deep knowledge of Byron, Shakespeare, and the Regency stage, but also his originality and perceptive literary analysis: and he more than deserves the doctorate this thesis earned him."

Christine Kenyon Jones, European Romantic Review 36.3 (2025)