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The aim of this volume is to re-examine late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British theatre and drama in the belief that they were rich and innovative phenomena and that they made an essential contribution to the aesthetic and ideological complexity of British culture in the Romantic period. The theatrical event represented an important part of an "Englishman's constitution",1 and many intellectuals of the time, including P.B. Shelley and Leigh Hunt, maintained that dramatic representation had a close connection to social, political and ethical conduct,2 as it "encourages and refines [the audience's] humanity".3 William Hazlitt's was, arguably, the voice that synthesized in the most suggestive way this intimate connection between the theatre and the British culture of the day. In the Preface to A View of the English Stage (1818), a volume collecting some of his most notable reviews, Hazlitt affirms:
The Stage is one great source of public amusement, not to say instruction. A good play, well acted, passes away a whole evening delightfully at a certain period of life, agreeably at all times; we read the account of it next morning with pleasure, and it generally furnishes one leading topic of conversation for the afternoon. The disputes on the merits or defects of the last new piece, or of a favourite performer, are as common, as frequently renewed, and carried on with as much eagerness and skill, as those on almost any other subject .... [P]lays and players ... are "the brief chronicles of the time," the epitome of human life and manners. While we are talking about them, we are thinking about ourselves. They "hold the mirror up to Nature;" and our thoughts are turned to the Stage as naturally and as fondly as a fine lady turns to contemplate her face in the glass .... Yet how eagerly do we stop to look at the prints from ZOFFANY'S pictures of GARRICK and WESTON!How much we are vexed, that so much of COLLEY CIBBER'S Life is taken up with the accounts of his own managership, and so little with those inimitable portraits which he has occasionally given of the actors of his time! How fortunate we think ourselves, when we can meet with any person who remembers the principal performers of the last...