CLOSET DRAMA

A 'closet drama' is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or, sometimes, out loud in a small group.
While all plays can be read as literature without being performed, closet dramas are designed especially for reading and do not concern themselves with stage technique. Featuring little action but mostly philosophical rhetoric, they are rarely produced for the stage, though this does happen on occasion.
The philosophical dialogues of ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Plato were written in the form of conversations between "characters" and are therefore similar to closet drama.
The tragedies of Seneca in the first century AD, though modelled on Greek tragedy, were probably never meant for performance. They were intended to be read or recited at small gatherings of the wealthy. The emperor Nero, a pupil of Seneca's, may have performed some of them, however. Some of the drama of the Middle Ages was also of this type, such as the drama of Hroswitha of Gandersheim, or dialectical works such as ''The Debate of Body and Soul'' or the ''Interludium de Clerico et Puella''.
Closet drama has been practiced even in eras when stage drama was at its height. Fulke Greville and Mary Sidney wrote closet dramas in the age of Shakespeare and Jonson. Thomas Killigrew is an example of a stage playwright who turned to closet drama when his plays could no longer be produced (he was in exile from England during the English Civil War). John Milton's play ''Samson Agonistes'', written in 1671, is another example of Early modern drama never intended for the stage.
Closet drama written in verse form became very popular in Western Europe after 1800; these plays were by and large inspired by Classical models. ''Faust, Part 1'' and ''Faust, Part 2'' by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among the most acclaimed pieces in the history of German literature, were written as closet dramas. Nonetheless, both plays are often performed onstage today in Germany and France. Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as a host of other figures, also devoted much time to the closet drama. The genre also influenced other forms of literature and theatre; the portions of Herman Melville's novel ''Moby Dick'' that are in dialogue form are at least a casual allusion to closet drama. Some of the poems of William Butler Yeats are in dialogue form,suggesting a similar inspiration, although the closet drama genre was not one Yeats was fond of. The austerity of many of the plays he wrote for the Abbey Theatre derives largely from his study of Japanese Noh drama; their closest analogue for contemporary Europeans, however, would have been the Romantic closet drama.
The popularity of closet drama at this time was both a sign of, and a reaction to, the decline of the verse tragedy, so popular during the Neoclassical period, on the European stage in the 1800s. Popular tastes in theatre were shifting toward melodrama and comedy, and there was little commercial appeal in staging verse tragedies (though Coleridge, Robert Browning, and others wrote verse dramas that were staged in commercial theaters). Playwrights who wanted to write verse tragedy had to resign themselves to writing for readers, not actors and audiences. Nineteenth-century closet drama became a longer poetic form, without the connection to practical theatre and performance.
According to Robertson Davies, closet drama is "''Dreariest of literature, most second hand and fusty of experience!''". However, a great deal of it was written in Victorian times and afterwards. Some continues to be written today, although it is no longer a very popular genre.

Contents

List of writers who have created closet drama

List of writers who have created closet drama

★ Book of Job (an epic rather than a drama)

★ Cicero

★ Strabo

★ Seneca the Younger

★ Hrosvit of Gandersheim

★ Jane Lumley

★ John Milton

★ Samuel Daniel

★ Fulke Greville

★ Samuel Brandon

★ William Alexander

★ Elizabeth Cary

★ Margaret Cavendish

★ Joanna Baillie

★ Anne Finch

★ Imre Madách

★ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

★ Alexander Pushkin

★ Lord Byron

★ Percy Shelley

★ Robert Browning

★ Thomas Hardy

★ Michael Field

★ Gordon Bottomley

★ Karl Kraus

★ Eugene Ionesco