Blackwell Reference Online

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In his Defence of Poetry , Shelley surveys the repertoire of new tragedies inherited from the eighteenth century and finds it wanting: Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in common with his auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison's “Cato” is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! ( Shelley 1821 : 285) While eighteenth-century scholars might want to dispute this bleak assessment of a century's work in the drama, Shelley points to two main lines of development, long noted by scholars, that preceded romanticism's own experimentation with tragedy: first, classicizing tragedies that follow French models in seeking inspiration from antiquity; and, second, personal or domestic tragedies developing out of a line of affective realism that runs from Thomas Otway through Nicholas Rowe to George Lillo, and that, by Shelley's time, had yielded what we might see as the anti-tragic melodrama. For Shelley, neoclassical tragedy strives to reanimate the ... log in or subscribe to read full text