L’essenza e l’assenza. Il teatro di Frances Burney tra lungo palcoscenico e neverstage

Abstract

This article discusses the neglected dramatic works of Frances Burney and how they were overshadowed by her father's opposition to the theatre. Despite the publication of her Complete Plays in 1995, there has been little interest in examining the tragic aspect of Burney's work. "L’essenza e l’assenza. Il teatro di Frances Burney tra lungo palcoscenico e neverstage" adds a new dimension to the study of Burney's serious drama by focusing on Hubert De Vere, a pastoral tragedy written during Burney's years at court. Despite the apparent interest of John Philip Kemble, the greatest tragic actor of the day and longtime manager of R. B. Sheridan's Drury Lane, Hubert De Vere never saw the stage or the printed page, foreshadowing its subsequent critical eclipse. Burney continued to rewrite, reread and reflect on this text for the rest of her life, thus justifying my definition of the 'long stage.' A veritable intertextual and intermedial crucible, Hubert de Vere bears witness to the fault lines of the transformation of models and forms in Burney's dramaturgy, combining them within this neverstage, an imaginary stage on which Shakespeare, the eighteenth-century tragic tradition, Gothic drama and, not least, familiar anti-theatrical shadows dominate.

This research was funded by the Horizon 2020 project 'Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences' (OpeRaNew) ID 892230, under the Horizon 2020 MSCA-IF-2019 programme. Francesca Saggini is the Principal Investigator of the project.