Closet drama

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A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage. It is intended to be read by a solitary reader, or, sometimes, to be read out loud in a group. While all plays can be read as literature without being performed, closet dramas were never intended for the stage at all. The term is applied to drama which is not written for the purpose of being acted on the stage. It is designed for reading only and does not concern itself with stage technique. It is usually philosophical and there is little action; it is therefore not well suited to presentation to large groups, although they are performed on occasion.

The philosophical dialogues of ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Plato were written in the form of conversations between "characters" and are therefore similar to closet drama. In fact, it is speculated that Plato based his dialogue form on scripts for mime farces, if they existed as early as the fourth century. (The earliest extant mimes date to the Alexandrian period).

The tragedies of Seneca in the first century BC, though modelled on Greek tragedy, were probably never meant for performance. They were intended to be read or recited at small gatherings of the wealthy [1]. The emperor Nero, a pupil of Seneca's, may have performed some of them, however. Some of the drama of the Middle Ages was also of this type, such as the drama of Hroswitha of Gandersheim, or dialectical works such as The Debate of Body and Soul or the Interludium de Clerico et Puella.

Closet drama has been practiced even in eras when stage drama was at its height. Fulke Greville wrote closet dramas in the age of Shakespeare and Jonson. Claims for Margaret Cavendish as the first woman dramatist in English have been disputed on the grounds that she was only a closet dramatist, and not a real working playwright like Aphra Behn. Thomas Killigrew is an example of a stage playwright who turned to closet drama when his plays could no longer be produced (he was in exile from England during the English Civil War). John Milton's play Samson Agonistes, written in 1671, is another example of Early modern drama never intended for the stage.

Closet drama written in verse form became very popular in Western Europe after 1800; these plays were by and large inspired by Classical models. Faust, Part 1 and Faust, Part 2 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among the most acclaimed pieces in the history of German literature, were written as closet dramas. Nonetheless, both plays are often performed onstage today in Germany and France. Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as a host of other figures, also devoted much time to the closet drama.

The popularity of closet drama at this time was both a sign of, and a reaction to, the decline of the verse tragedy, so popular during the Neoclassical period, on the European stage in the 1800s. Popular tastes in theatre were shifting toward melodrama and comedy, and there was little commercial appeal in staging verse tragedies (though Coleridge, Robert Browning, and others wrote verse dramas that were staged in commercial theaters). Playwrights who wanted to write verse tragedy had to resign themselves to writing for readers, not actors and audiences. Nineteenth-century closet drama became a longer poetic form, without the connection to practical theatre and performance.

According to Robertson Davies, closet drama is "Dreariest of literature, most second hand and fusty of experience!". However, a great deal of it was written in Victorian times and afterwards. Some continues to be written today, although it is no longer a very popular genre.