Please enjoy the following by Dr Maria Elena Capitani as she introduces us to her fascinating research project.
In early 2022, I started working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Parma on the project “Reprising Romanticism: Romantic Re-Creations in Contemporary British Theatre (1980-2020s)”, under the supervision of Gioia Angeletti (PI) and Diego Saglia (internal member). This project is based on their solid expertise and strong profile in Romantic studies, especially Romantic-period theatre – they are members of BARS and members of the Centro Interuniversitario per lo Studio del Romanticismo (https://site.unibo.it/cisr/it), which I joined in May 2023. We also share research interests in contemporary British theatre, with a special focus on rewritings, adaptations, and appropriations. Moreover, this project benefits from the expertise of three external members – Mireia Aragay (University of Barcelona), Andrea Peghinelli (Sapienza – University of Rome), and Graham Saunders (University of Birmingham) – who assess, validate or correct our findings and results at regular intervals. Specializing in contemporary British theatre from different perspectives, these scholars bring their different strengths to this innovative project.
Rewriting, reimagining, and adapting the past – and particularly earlier literary phases, works, and figures – are key features of contemporary British drama and theatre. Since the 1980s, the British stage has seen a persistent return to the nation’s literary and cultural heritage as a means of exploring present-day issues. This is by now a widely studied phenomenon, particularly in relation to rewritings of Greco-Roman drama and Shakespearean adaptations. On this basis, “Reprising Romanticism” addresses a neglected area within this broader field. This phenomenon presents a variegated canon, ranging from the 1980s to the present and comprising well-known authors and plays as well as less familiar ones – a corpus of works of different typologies, originating on the contemporary English and Scottish stages, as well as in radio or digital media.
It is no surprise that the Romantic heritage should be the object of sustained theatrical reimaginings; instead, what is remarkable is that this corpus, its performance history, and cultural significance have not yet been investigated as a cohesive phenomenon. Indeed, there is a visible lack of comprehensive knowledge and critical contributions about a substantial body of texts and performances that amounts to a cultural manifestation in its own right. Addressing this deficit, the project aims to produce transformative research that will put dramatic rewritings and recreations of the Romantic age on the map as a multifaceted and resonant phenomenon.
Through a mixed approach combining theatre studies and Romantic-period literary studies, we aim to reconstruct and analyse contemporary dramatic/theatrical investments in Romantic materials as a significant and pervasive object of study on a par with the much more widely examined and well-established Neo-Victorianism. Ultimately, the outcomes of the project will offer a newly delineated and critically focused cultural category to the international community of scholars specializing in contemporary drama and theatre, Romantic studies, adaptation, and appropriation.
Our project originates from the existence of a corpus of contemporary plays on Romantic-period themes, which includes:
– Liz Lochhead, Blood and Ice (1982)
– Howard Brenton, Bloody Poetry (1984)
– Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993)
– David Greig, Consider the Dish (1993)
– Lucy Gough, Head (1996)
– George Costigan, Trust Byron (1997)
– Simon Rae, Grass: The Life of John Clare (2003)
– Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem (2009)
– D. C. Moore, Town (2010)
– Nick Dear, Frankenstein (2011)
– Helen Edmundson, Mary Shelley (2012)
– Isobel McArthur, Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) (2018)
– Laura Wade, The Watsons (2018)
– Carl Miller, Frankenstein (2019)
– Rona Munro, Frankenstein (2019)
– Margaret Lynn Rose, Shelley: A Diet for Peace (2022)
The scholarly and critical state of the art appears extremely developed and solid in relation to general criticism on adaptation, appropriation, and rewriting, with landmark contributions such as Christian Moraru, Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (2001); Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (2006); and Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (2006). Contemporary reworkings of certain canonical authors and areas such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Victorianism have also been examined from a variety of points of view with stimulating results. More relevantly, the emerging field of theatre adaptation has been recently explored by Margherita Laera in Theatre and Adaptation (2014) and Kara Reilly in Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre (2018).
As for reprises of Romantic-era themes and materials in drama, as well as other genres and media, the state of the art is patchy, if not altogether inadequate. There are essays on the best-known plays in the corpus indicated above (e.g. Arcadia and Blood and Ice); poetry (e.g. Paul Muldoon’s “Madoc”); or single authors (e.g. Byron). However, no systematic studies of the phenomenon – in itself, or in a specific genre – are available. An exception is a 2012 collection on the digital dissemination of William Blake’s work (Blake 2.0, ed. S. Clark et al.). The intersections between Romanticism and Postmodernism have been investigated in Edward Larrissy’s edited collection Romanticism and Postmodernism (1999). The same year also saw the publication of Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama, ed. by Martin Middeke and Werner Huber, examining contemporary novels and plays reimagining Romantic lives from a postmodern perspective.
This panorama makes clear that there is a lack of specific studies on rewriting and intertextuality about Romantic-era works, authors, and narratives in contemporary British theatre and drama. Therefore, there is ample scope for our project to produce knowledge that will prove to be transformative in several disciplinary areas. “Reprising Romanticism” seeks to put ‘Neo-Romanticism’ on the critical map and simultaneously stimulate new research in this field (e.g. Romantic presences in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and poetry). Ultimately, it aims to promote further the relevance of Romanticism as a major force of modernity in contemporary literature and culture.
The first outcome of the project was a workshop held in May 2022 at the University of Parma. Vicky Angelaki (Mid Sweden University) and Andrea Peghinelli presented the joint paper “Engagements with Landscape in Contemporary British Theatre”, while my contribution was entitled “‘Please Put the Head in the Pot. You’re Losing the Script’: Lucy Gough’s Keatsian Remediation for BBC Radio 4”.
Our next objectives comprise the creation of a web page with searchable lists of works and authors, a timeline, information on performance and reception histories, bibliographic references, iconography, links to useful resources, and other materials; a conference involving senior and early career scholars; a collection of essays, with contributions by the members of the research team and selected papers delivered during the conference.
For information on the project, you can write to me at mariaelena.capitani@unipr.it
Thank you for your interest!
I will keep you posted!
Dr Maria Elena Capitani holds a BA and an MA in English and French from the University of Parma (Italy), by which she was awarded the title of ‘Doctor Europaeus’ in 2016. In 2014 and 2015 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Barcelona (Spain) and Reading (UK). Her research interests lie in twentieth- and twenty-first-century British literature and culture, with a special focus on drama, fiction, identity, intertextuality and adaptation/translation for the stage. She has presented papers at international conferences across Europe and published various articles and book chapters on contemporary British drama. She teaches Anglophone Literatures at the University of Parma, where she is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on the project “Reprising Romanticism: Romantic Re-Creations in Contemporary British Theatre (1980-2020s)”. She is also writing her first book Contemporary British Appropriations of Greek and Roman Tragedies: The Politics of Rewriting (Palgrave Macmillan). Maria Elena is a member of “Gender, Affect and Care in Twenty-First Century British Theatre”, a three-year research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2021-126448NA-I00) (PI: Clara Escoda, University of Barcelona).
