Spanish stages: British Romantic tragedy and the theatrical politics of Spain, 1808–1823

Abstract

British Romantic‐period theater features a sizeable number of plays and other spectacular entertainments centered on Spanish themes and located in Spanish settings. No mere continuations of the Spanish plays in the Restoration and eighteenth‐century repertoire, these works actually respond to a renewed interest in Spanish culture and contemporary political and military events. And if Spain is an important presence on the early nineteenth‐century stage, at the same time commentaries on current developments, from the outbreak of the Peninsular War in 1808 to the end of the constitutional monarchy in 1823, repeatedly imagine this country in overtly spectacular ways as a theater of war and the stage of crucial historical events. Starting from this intersection of theater and politics, this essay considers the presence and significance of this country in Romantic‐period drama and theater, particularly the usually overlooked historical tragedies written for the “legitimate” or patent theaters in London. Focusing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Remorse, Richard Lalor Sheil’s The Apostate and Bellamira, and Lord John Russell’s Don Carlos, the essay examines how these works employ the Spanish geo‐cultural construct in order to develop reflections on racial contrasts and conflicts, cross‐cultural exchanges, despotism and autocracy, obscurantism and fanaticism, the fall of empires, and the emergence of new polities. In the process, it also throws light on some of the dramatic mechanisms and strategies by which these plays address such concerns and address them to their public of readers and spectators.

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