“Neo-Renaissance Drama in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Notes for a Backdrop to Fernando Pessoa’s Duke of Parma”

This essay recovers the presence of plays that reworked themes and situations from Renaissance drama into British drama and theater of the Romantic era to the late Victorian period. Studies of this phase of Britain’s dramatic and theatrical history feature references to neo-Renaissance plays, yet there is no available overview of this “Elizabethanizing” phenomenon that, over the entire century, characterized the production of original, serious drama, both for the stage and for the closet. In sketching out a tentative history of neo-Renaissance plays in nineteenth-century Britain, this essay seeks to offer a possible background for Fernando Pessoa’s Duke of Parma, and thus a further contribution to contextualizing it within the development of Britain’s nineteenth-century drama and theater.