| The eighteenth-century reconstitution of acting as an aesthetics of the body marks a pivotal moment in the history of the stage. In its role as an interpreter and transmitter of symbolic meaning and as a material organism, the acting body became a key focal point in the era, a site of signification and substance through and around which meaning was created and circulated. By the dawn of the Romantic period, however, even as the body gained power as a vehicle for conveying meaning both on stage and off, critics began to question the seamlessness of corporeal signification. As a result, communicative clarity within the theater and within culture at large became threatened. It was an epistemological crisis that, in turn, instigated acts of recovery both on the stage and on the page. These recovery acts included attempts to celebrate the open-ended nature of physical expression, as in the work of the actress and dramatist Mary Robinson; to reclaim the semiotic immediacy of the performing body, as in the acting practices of Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble; and to channel thespian animation---which had spilled into social communication as a whole---into morally and socially acceptable forms, as in the novels of Elizabeth Inchbald and Maria Edgeworth. This study---in addition to examining literature such as Robinson's Nobody, Inchbald's A Simple Story, and Edgeworth's Belinda---investigates commentary, plays, poems, and prose works by authors such as George Anne Bellamy, William Blake, James Boaden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Colman, Denis Diderot, David Garrick, Charles Gildon, William Hazlitt, Aaron Hill, John Hill, Thomas Holcroft, Leigh Hunt, Samuel Johnson, Charles Le Brun, Michel Le Faucheur, The Rambler's Magazine, Joshua Reynolds, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Henry Siddons, Joseph Talma, and Heinrich von Kleist. It argues that Romantic culture and literature can be understood, in many significant ways, as a response to the changing state of the theater and its acting bodies. While the theater and the drama remain on the margins of conventional accounts of the Romantic period, this dissertation reveals how they are central to exploring the era's complex response to the body as a locus of meaning. |
