This thesis focuses upon the issues involved in the ‘rediscovery’ of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists in the early nineteenth century. The investigation concentrates particularly upon the critical writings of Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge, and then moves on to consider the contradictions which underwrite imitative nineteenth-century tragedy which recalls seventeenth-century dramatic models. Under this heading I discuss Byron’s Sardanapalus and Marino Fallero, and Shelley’s The Cenci.
Of particular interest are the works of Joanna Baillie and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who received much contemporary acclaim, but whose work is not often discussed. Joanna Baillie offers perhaps the most intriguing and problematical association with the revival of interest in Renaissance tragedy. This study discusses Baillie’s theories of tragic representation, and the extent to which these doctrinaire statements are addressed within her major work, A Series of Plays on the Passions. In these plays, Baillie aims to reconstitute and sanitise issues and themes which run throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. The particular textual references which Baillie recalls, however, may be seen to resist the moral demands of her own “extensive design”. Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Lytton Strachey’s “Last Elizabethan”, presents a more direct interest in his Renaissance forebears than Joanna Baillie.