Description: Thriving during a period of profound revolution in Europe, the British Romantic theatre found itself re-examining social and sexual relations in English society. The five plays corrected in this edition -- the only one of its kind -- represent some of the most radical and unusual examples of the drama created during this period. Horace Wolpole invented gothic melodrama with his incest tragedy, The Mysterious Mother, Robert Southey imagined the theatre as a site of revolutionary protest in Wat Tyler (1794); Joanna Baillie's psychological case study in aristocratic hatred in De Monfort (1768) was thought too alarming to have been written by a woman, while Elizabeth Inchbald's hugely successful. Lover's Vows (1798) was sufficiently subversive for Jane Austen to analyze some of its illicit potential, in Mansfield Pork (1814); Byron's strenuous tragedy The Two Foscari (1821) explores an inescapable conflict between parental love and political authority. The stage imagined by these writers is an arena of culturally charged issues -- political, sexual, and social -- paralleling the ones being debated and decided in society at large.

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