Distance, Theatre, and the Public Voice, 1750-1850

As theatres expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the distance between actor and audience became a telling metaphor for the distance emerging between writers and readers. Writers experimented with different theatrical situations as they crafted a voice that could sound intimate and personal even as it broadcast itself to an imagined public. Distance, Theatre, and the Public Voice, 1750-1850 explores the ways in which theatre helped authors imagine connecting with a new mass audience. Nuss presents case studies from variety of genres: popular theatre, closet drama, the canonical Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the understudied criticism of Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Thomas DeQuincey.