William Blake

Drama During the Romantic Period

Although positive for the essay, literary conditions in the early 19^th century were difficult for the stage. The Licensing Act of 1737, which severely censored theatrical performances, was not cancelled until 1843, so only the Drury Lane and Covent Garden theatres had the right to stage spoken drama. The other theatres could only produce entertainments, with dialogue set to music, much dancing and pantomime, and musical plays. Audiences at both theaters were usually boisterous and rough. The drama of that period was leaning towards either extreme farce or simplistic melodrama.

Inspired by their beloved Shakespeare, almost all Romantic poets tried their skill at poetic plays. Some were written just for reading, the so called closet drama, such as Byron's Manfred and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and some look as if intended for the stage.

Byron was not successful as a practical dramatist. His plays were readable, but they lacked theatrical dynamism. In addition, the author himself refused to have them performed. Coleridge achieved a success with his tragedy Remorse, which ran for the whole twenty nights at the Drury Lane in 1813. But the most-successful among Romantic dramatists was Shelley's play, The Cenci (1820), based on a true Italian story of a monstrous father.

William Blake, one of the most intellectually challenging of English poets and an engraver artist, is a unique figure in English literature, who followed no style but his own. He created an exceptional form of illustrated verse, and his poetry, motivated by magic vision, is among the most original in the English language. He discarded Neoclassical literary style and its thematic conventions, his graphic art opposed that of earlier schools. Even as a child, he was captivated by the Bible, by the ideas of the German mystic Jacob Bцhme (1575-1624) and the Swedish scientist and thinker Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).

William Blake (Nov. 28, 1757, London — Aug. 12, 1827, London) led a simple and uneventful life, completely at odds with his rich, free, and remarkable spiritual one. Born into a family of a haberdasher, he entered a drawing school at the age of ten and later studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, but he rebelled against the aesthetic dogmas of its president, the English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). For seven years he served as an apprentice to a well-known engraver, James Basire, read eagerly in his free time, and tried his pen at poetry. At 24, he married a daughter of a gardener, taught her to read and she helped him in his engraving and printing. When the demand for his work lessened, the Blakes moved to a country cottage on the South coast. There, in 1803, Blake quarrelled and fought with an abusive soldier of the Royal Dragoons. He was charged with an offence against King and state, by supposedly shouting insults at them. This black incident haunted his imagination ever afterwards, and sharpened his awareness of wakeful evil forces.

Three years later, Blake came back to London, though he knew it meant isolation, conflicts and poverty. After his personal exhibition failed in 1809, he lost touch with the outside world, until in his 60s when a devoted group of aspiring painters supported him as audience for his work.

Poetical Sketches, Blake's first book of poems, appeared when he was 26; it showed his disapproval of the accepted poetic norms and eagerness to search for new forms and techniques. For those, he turned to the Elizabethans and early 17^th century poets, as well as experimenting with new rhythms, incomplete rhymes and the use of symbols. In 1788, he applied himself in another artistic field of relief etching, a very complicated form of printing where the relief metal plates were prepared by hand and colours were added later. In this manner Blake produced 28 copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 16 of The Book of Thel, nine of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and five of Jerusalem. These heavily symbolic works reflect his ever-growing concern about God and man, his interest in the supernatural and verse experimentations.

Printed alongside with his own illustrations, Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) typify two opposing sides of the human growing soul; one touches upon good, passivity, and reason; the other, on evil, violence, and emotion, contrasted in such exemplary poems as The Lamb and The Tyger. Blake's writings also include An Island in the Moon (1784), a lively satire on his early life, a collection of letters, a notebook with sketches, and shorter poems dating between 1793 and 1818.

In his sixties, Blake devoted himself solely to pictographic art, and soon produced hundreds of paintings and engravings, mainly as illustrations for other poets, including Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, an excellent set of designs for the Book of Job and the works of Dante.

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