The main plotline of echoes themes in ; in both, an ambitious and rebellious younger brother (Antonio in , Ordonio in ) plots to kill a virtuous older brother (Prospero, Alvar) and sends that virtuous brother into exile. (The differences can be illuminating to discuss. Prospero can set up circumstances to awaken Antonio to his wrongdoing, but cannot ultimately transform Antonio’s inner self; while Prospero expresses forgiveness in the end, Antonio does not appear to express remorse.) In , while Alvar is gone (Ordonio had arranged to have him killed, and assumes him dead), Ordonio tries to win over Alvar’s beloved, Teresa. She wants nothing to do with Ordonio, and, anyway, is waiting with hope for Alvar’s eventual return, since his body has never turned up. Ordonio designs a spectacular illusion to convince Teresa of Alvar’s death: a glowing altar which will summon the image of the dead Alvar. Unbeknownst to all (except the audience), Alvar is not dead; he had escaped the assassin and has returned with a plot to awaken Ordonio to his evil deeds. Notably, this plan is not to seek revenge on Ordonio, but to bring him to remorse. Alvar manipulates the altar trick, making it boomerang on Ordonio: the altar bursts into flames to reveal a picture of the assassination attempt on Alvar, masterminded by Ordonio. Thus Ordonio realizes (1) Alvar is still alive, and (2) he knows about the plot to kill him.

(1813) is a reworking of an earlier revolution-oriented play entitled (1797) into a deeper, more psychological study of consciousness: the revision of title alone gives us a clue. In Coleridge is staging a shift in consciousness, which brings about a change in conscience.The psychological state of remorse was a familiar theme in Gothic plays, although Jeffrey Cox points out that Coleridge's work, as one in the second wave of Gothic popularity, reassesses the theme and can be read as a “culminating work in the Gothic tradition” (30). Cox charts two major surges of Gothic drama, the first in the 1790s, which Coleridge catches onto with (1797), the second hitting its peak in 1815, which Coleridge anticipates with (1813). Cox links these two surges to political issues surrounding the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, particularly the fall of the Bastille and the fall of Napoleon. See Cox, ed. and intro., (Athens: Ohio UP, 1992), 30-32. In the jottings, Coleridge expressed a special fondness for : “the ‘Remorse’ is certainly a great favourite of mine,” he stated, “the more so as certain pet abstract notions of mine are therein expounded” (II: 360). Exactly what those pet abstract notions were was never explicitly stated, but reading within the communality that is characteristic of holy theatre illuminates the play as a tragedy intended to wake not just the character Ordonio but the audience from their dogmatic slumbers or wrongdoings and force them to confront the Otherness that exists inside as well as outside themselves. As has been discussed in a number of studies,As well as Sophie Thomas’s “Seeing Things (‘As They Are’)” from (included on the Reading List), see John David Moore, “Coleridge and the ‘modern Jacobinical Drama’: , , and the Development of Coleridge’s Critique of the Stage, 1797-1816” 85.4 (Winter 1982): 443-64; and Peter Mortensen, “The Robbers and the Police: British Romantic Drama and the Gothic Treacheries of Coleridge’s ” in , ed. Avril Horner (Manchester UP, 2002): 128–46. in order to present this concept effectively, Coleridge drew upon the spectacular stagecraft of the popular Gothic drama, which contradicts his theoretical writing, where he finds the Gothic weak and even dangerous.

As a companion text, students can read “Letter II” of “Satyrane’s Letters”—included in Chapter XXII of the 1816 but written in 1798—where Coleridge as much as accuses the Gothic theatre of inciting terror. He found the self-reflection of Gothic drama dangerous on at least two counts. The Gothic drama had a tendency merely to reflect, rather than to challenge, the selves of the audience; the values often reflected an easy morality that kept the audiences complacent and inert. Also a dangerous aspect of facile self-reflection, and a more tempting one for Coleridge and others, was, as Jeffrey Cox notes in his discussion of North's , that the emotions can be “more deeply rooted by reflection,” a feature much glamourized in Gothic hero/villains. One ideally wants neither passive reflection nor the dangerous inward turn to self-consciousness, both of which can result in fixation and a resistance to change, but instead a self-consciousness which has its ultimate origin in a moral relation to others and which develops dialectically in continual relation to others. One way to break out of a potentially solipsistic cycle is to engage with others, and for a writer, the stage is therefore an ideal medium. Coleridge was frustrated with the limitations of the commercial stage of his day, but he knew that that was the means through which to present such ideas visibly and publicly, and to reach the widest audience for his ideas. As William Galperin points out in , issues of the visible continually verge upon issues involving community (164) and, though Coleridge in his criticism may have occasionally demonstrated an anti-theatrical bias, he reached for the visible to present the transformation of a consciousness to and for a community. In he adapted the Gothic formula to his own purpose, and used the Gothic spectacle to affect his audiences, as he advises in “Satyrane’s Letters,” “in union with the activity both of [their] understanding and imagination” (XXII:437).

The Drury Lane playbill for advertises all new sets, which, according to the dictates of the stage directions, included “wild and mountainous” country scenery and a desolate cavern dripping with water; the setting is the Spanish Inquisition, a remote and terror-ridden time. Coleridge commissioned a score from Michael Kelly, who had composed the music for the most successful of all Gothic dramas, Matthew Lewis’s (1797). As Paula Backscheider has noted, “Gothic drama used music in sophisticated ways to engage the senses while subliminally both exercising and containing anxieties” (173); it was as crucial to the play as scores are to film and, increasingly, theatre today. The dramatic structure of the play, however, is focused on Ordonio's consciousness. Coleridge wastes no time getting to his purpose; very little exposition is given before Alvar declares that he has returned to confront his brother and “rouse within him / REMORSE!” in order to “save him from himself” (I.i.18-19). Preparations begin at once for the visible spectacle which will force upon Ordonio a cathartic experience, described by Alvar as “the punishment that cleanses hearts” (I.ii.319)—remorse, rather than revenge. This experience is designed to raise Ordonio's self-consciousness which will in turn prick his conscience and force him to face his transgressions. The visual elements are crucial: Alvar queries his servant Zulimez concerning what they need, “Above all, the picture / Of the assassination—.” “—Be assured / That it remains uninjured, Zulimez answers him (I.i.92-4). The spectacle will work in such a way, Alvar discloses when alone, that “That worst bad man shall find / A picture, which will wake the hell within him, / And rouse a fiery whirlwind in his conscience” (II.ii.172-74).

In order to understand how Gothic techniques can work to present onstage the awakening of a consciousness—and, perhaps, to model a transformation of consciousness in the audience—try staging the key scene of the play in your classroom. This is the moment of the climactic trick that boomerangs on Ordonio, the overwhelming spectacle that results in the first awakening of his conscience.It should be noted that the scene enacted, III.i, is not the scene in which Ordonio feels remorse. It works much like “The Mouse Trap” in in that the consequence is that Ordonio (like Claudius) has been aroused to the point where he is conscious that someone is working on him, and so he becomes watchful. He feels guilty, yes, but only to the extent that, again, like Claudius, he is anxious to rid himself of the external causes of his pain; in other words, he seeks to kill the “traitors” (Isidore, and the “sorcerer” [the disguised Alvar]) rather than experience fully the internal pain and attempt to alleviate it through conversion and reformation. However, others notice the experience he underwent, and become players in the process of forcing his essential confrontation with what he tried to do to Alvar, which finally occurs in V.i. Unfortunately, Ordonio has hardly begun to experience the pangs of true remorse when Alhadra and a band of Morescos enter and demand Ordonio's life in exchange for his murder of Isidore, a conclusion that comes far too quickly for many spectators (and readers) to feel the full impact of the remorse, and undercuts Coleridge’s apparent design. This spectacle is the showpiece of the evening. It was well-advertised, and no theatrical elements were spared. Thomas Barnes’s review of the play (included in the ) provides an eyewitness description: “the altar flaming in the distance, the solemn invocation, the pealing music of the mystic song, altogether produced a combination so awful, as nearly to overpower reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted our senses” (392). Barnes’s choice of words—“mystic,” “awful,” “overpower reality,” and “half believe the enchantment”—are all central to the desired effect of the holy theatre.

In this exercise students will perform Act III, scene I of , recreating the Gothic setting for the “altar scene” in order to understand how the stagecraft works to convey an experience of an awakening of consciousness. You will need at least six actors to play Alvar, Ordonio, Teresa, Valdez, Monviedro, and a few “familiars of the Inquisition” who act but don’t have speaking parts. Others can create music “expressive of the movements and images” of the scene, play it according to the stage directions, and sing the Chorus parts. A third crew can construct the altar spectacle.

Reflect on how the class’s performance affected you as an actor, designer, and/or spectator. How did the Gothic elements, particularly the music and the altar spectacle, highlight the emotional relationships between the characters and the theme of awakening remorse?

It is likely that the Gothic elements felt awkwardly phony, even laughable, to you. Imagine the original performance circumstances: you are watching in the 3,000-plus seat theatre at Drury Lane. You go to the theatre eager for spectacle, delighted with and amazed by the technological developments in theatre and the effects they have on you as they lure you into a belief in their reality. (To imagine this, fast forward to the spectacular theatre of today, such as , , or .) How do you think you would have reacted in those circumstances?

Shelley’s sonnet “Lift not the painted veil” (1818) provides an effective lead-in to this reading of because holy theatre, like Orra herself, seeks to lift the painted veil, with often (and necessarily) painful—or, as Artaud later famously phrased it, cruel—results. Baillie’s tragedy on fear in the , ’s dramaturgical concept is to show the progression of fear in Orra, which starts in a somewhat playful fashion with the enjoyment of ghost stories, and ends in a terrible madness; this aspect of the play takes precedence over the plotline about Orra’s resistance to a forced courtship. shows Orra’s internal state; the audience doesn’t physically see any ghosts, but instead watches the actor playing Orra unveil her hauntedness, or, in other words, react to fear.

Julie Carlson’s essay “Baillie’s : Shrinking in Fear” (included in the recent collection ) works well as a contemporary supplement to the play. Carlson proposes the idea that “hauntology” rather than ontology describes our current being and time, and writes that is a haunted and haunting play; it is the exception rather than the rule in the and undermines Baillie’s usual emphasis on rational morality. Orra herself is a “spectral subject” in the play (216), a position between the “twos” of binaries (much like Baillie’s own unusual situation in Romanticism and theatre history—not yet acknowledged as a truly “major” figure, yet too major to be “minor”).This conundrum is discussed in Thomas Crochunis’s introductory essay to , ed. Crochunis (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 3. Like , draws upon the conventions of the Gothic and of Romantic medievalism, and similarly, the spectacle is utilized, Carlson argues, as a way of transporting us to a psychic space of sensory perceptions—a “before-human” state that precedes meaning-making (217)—a technique used in Artaud’s twentieth-century performance events that gave audiences a “sensory overload” to break down their habitual rational responses. Gothic spectacle provided “a way of exploring the psychological even before twentieth-century constructions of it,” and “becomes linked to the internal state of the characters’ minds as authors explore how individuals react in times of great stress,” Christine Colón explains (xxiii). Furthermore, since the Gothic “compels an audience to derive pleasure from fear,” it “clearly allies itself with the idea of the sublime”; and “for a playwright like Baillie who desperately wishes to stir her audience members’ imaginations and compel them to transform their lives, the spectacle of the Gothic sublime would have been appealing. It had the potential to awaken audiences and cause them to act” (Colón xxii-xxiii).

In addition, Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse” and note “To the Reader” to the should be taught alongside .Baillie is slowly becoming recognized as a significant theorist of theatre; each year a larger number of articles, it seems, appears on Baillie, and Catherine Burroughs’s (1997), Judith Bailey Slagle’s critical biography (2002), and Thomas C. Crochunis’s edited collection of essays, (2004) have all been major contributions. Excerpts or complete versions of her “Introductory Discourse” have been anthologized for some time in collections of Romantic-era writing, particularly of women’s writing, e.g., (1991) and (1995), and in Peter Duthie’s edition of the 1798 (2001). However, she is not yet included in the major, much-used critical studies or anthologies of theatre theory or dramatic criticism such as Marvin Carlson’s ; Daniel Gerould’s or Bernard Dukore’s . She has been given a paragraph in the latest (tenth) edition of the standard textbook , by Oscar Brockett and Franklin Hildy, but as a playwright, not a theatre theorist. Furthermore, while scholarship on Baillie has been impressive, it hasn’t yet penetrated drama scholarship deeply to show Baillie’s influence on the modern avant garde. For instance, one description of expressionist drama is not just that it is a highly subjective art form in which “internal acts become externalized,” but, more specifically, that the “drama becomes concentrated to a point of ‘pure’ emotion” (Innes, 44, 45), an innovation of Baillie’s. (Both are excerpted in .) As do the other dramatist-theorists in the holy theatre tradition, Baillie is writing a manifesto: creating drama for a theatre that could be—that is, the theatre she wants rather than the theatre she has. It is in the “Introductory Discourse” that Baillie develops the idea for which she’s become best known, that of “sympathetic curiosity.” She does not just make the point that we are curious about other humans, especially when they are experiencing emotional trauma, but that we want to fix our eyes on the manifestation of such trauma on their bodies and faces—to observe their symptoms, as it were. To take just one example that works well with teaching , Baillie writes that one of the things humans are most curious about, yet most scared of, are ghosts. “No man wishes to see the Ghost himself, which would certainly procure him the best information on the subject, but every man wishes to see one who believes that he sees it, in all the agitation and wildness of that species of terror” (359). In other words, we are more interested in reactions to ghosts, in witnessing the experience of having seen a ghost, than in the ghosts themselves. We are aware that it is rude to stare at people, yet we have an overwhelming urge to watch people in distress: “how sensible are we of this strong propensity within us, when we behold any person under the pressure of great and uncommon calamity!” Out of courtesy we will turn our eyes away, yet “the first glance we direct to him will involuntarily be one of the keenest observation, how hastily soever it may be checked; and often will a returning look of enquiry mix itself by stealth with our sympathy and reserve” (359). In short, we enjoy staring at others who are experiencing emotional turmoil; while we restrain ourselves, and offer merely expressions of sympathy, we covertly observe in minute detail the features and physicality that indicate the person’s suffering. Such gazes are inappropriate in polite society; however, our sympathetic curiosity is satisfactorily aroused and exercised by attending the theatre. It gives spectators the opportunity to vicariously steal into the closet—and into the mind—of another. For, as Baillie writes, “there is, perhaps, no employment which the human mind will with so much avidity pursue, as the discovery of concealed passion, as the tracing the varieties and progress of a perturbed soul” (360).

The success of Baillie’s designs to allow audiences to trace the varieties and progress of Orra’s perturbed soul depend heavily on the skill and style of the actors, and thus it is no surprise that her script is filled with detailed prescriptions for gesture and movement to convey the internal state of the character. Here, too, she is advocating for a transformed, intimate theatre in opposition to the conventional performance spaces of her day, which were growing ever larger; in “To the Reader” she writes that the “department of acting that will suffer most under these circumstances, is that which particularly regards the gradual unfolding of the passions, and has, perhaps, hitherto been less understood than any other part of the art—I mean Soliloquy” (375). The plays she is creating need actors who can exhibit “the solitary musings of a perturbed mind” with “muttered, imperfect articulation which grows by degrees into words” or “that rapid burst of sounds which often succeeds the slow languid tones of distress” (375). These precisely observed descriptions remind us of what may be most remarked upon about Baillie’s playwriting, in her own day as well as ours: her diagnostically observant eye and analytic, “anatomical” dramaturgy. The reviewer from writes in 1818 (excerpted in the ) that “no one” except Baillie ever thought of giving, in dramatic form, “an anatomical analysis, a philosophical dissection of a passion” (381). Her plays work as a kind of “microscope, by means of which she seems to think that she has brought within the sphere of our vision things too minute for the naked intellectual eye” (381-2). The reviewer thinks this is the “radical defect” of her plays, but today it is considered perhaps her most brilliant endeavor, an innovative theatrical experiment.

The names of Joanna Baillie and Constantin Stanislavski are rarely, if ever, linked, but he too taught a form of anatomical observation, telling his students that, when creating a role, they should first read the text carefully for the “physical truths” about the character. The fame of American Method acting’s “inside out” approach has obscured other ways of building characters and distorted part of Stanislavski’s original teachings; he instructs his actors not to “truncate” the “inner line” of a role and replace it with their own “personal line,” but to begin with the “physical life” of the character, which is tangible. “The spirit cannot but respond to the actions of the body, provided of course that these are genuine, have a purpose, and are productive,” he explains ( 149). Put differently, instead of the later Method acting technique of drawing on the actor’s own emotional and sense memory, the actor was to take on the physical stance, gestures, posture that signaled the emotional feeling of the character. By putting oneself into the physical position, the emotion would follow.

In the eighteenth century, the use of ritualized gestures and poses to convey specific states of emotion had been made popular, codified in acting manuals that illustrated the proper appearance of the gesture or pose and explained what each indicated. (This often seems oddly nonrealistic to us. Similarly, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century avant garde theatre, actors would strike archetypal poses, rather than move and pause in the realistic manner that’s familiar to us now; these poses were meant to convey certain emotional effects, indeed to heighten the emotional effect altogether.)It is not unusual for playwrights to prescribe the acting style that fits the view of how consciousness is presented in the play, particularly in this holy theatre tradition in which realistic causal explanations for behavior are eschewed or excised. For instance, Sam Shepard told the cast of , one of his earliest experimental plays (written right before and predating his turn to more naturalistic family dramas with and ): “Instead of the idea of a ‘whole character’ with logical motives behind his behavior which the actor submerges himself into, he should consider instead a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme . . . . In other words, more in terms of collage construction or jazz improvisation” (105). See Don Shewey, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997). The unveiling or revelation of a character’s internal state was a primary feature of late eighteenth-century and Romantic acting theories; the matter of expressing a character’s “passion” is considerably more complicated than having the actors constantly emoting onstage, which would eventually result in a flattened-out performance and not move the audience. To express internal states convincingly, performers developed a number of techniques that included drawing upon their own memories, thoughts, and emotions and transferring them to the character; focusing on communicating explicitly the specific shifts of feeling of thought that a character experiences from one moment to the next; and cultivating an attitude of sympathy among the triangle of character, performer, and viewer by finding the vulnerability of the character and inviting the audience to experience it. As we see featured in , one way an actor would reveal the interiority of a character was by focusing on the way the character reacted to the dramatic situation. As Jonathan Bate has written, the popular view among Romantic theatre artists was that “the essence of human nature is to be found in reaction, not action, and so it was that their performances were most intense at certain moments of reflection” (“The Romantic Stage” 97).

Baillie’s detailed descriptions of Orra’s physical actions and gestures, particularly in her mad scene, instruct the actor on how to accurately depict the progression of her fear. To see how Baillie’s stage directions “direct” the play and help her actors create their roles through anatomical analysis, and to experience how physical gestures can work to help performers feel for themselves and reveal to spectators the characters' emotions, try the following exercise.

In this exercise students can test Baillie’s instructions to the actor playing Orra in the key scene where she finally goes mad from fear (IV.iii). To play the entire scene you will need actors for Orra, Rudigere, Cathrina, Theobald, and Franko. You could also choose to play just Orra’s soliloquies (IV.iii.27-52 and IV.iii.147-165), as these are the moments for which Baillie provides most specific direction.

What did performing the gestures and actions feel like? Did you ever feel fear rising in yourself simply from doing the physical gestures associated with a person feeling fear? If so, when in particular did you feel it? Of Baillie’s descriptions of a person becoming overwhelmed with fear, in what ways were they accurate and in what ways merely literary?

How did others look when they played Orra? Which gestures or postures most effectively conveyed fear? Which looked most outdated or stagy?

The final scene of makes a nice pairing with Strindberg's (1907). Orra returns to the stage, completely mad, and tells her guardian Hughobert, upon hearing the news that his son died, that “the damn’d and holy / The living and the dead, together are / In horrid neighbourship. – ‘Tis but thin vapour, / Floating around thee, makes the wav’ring bound” (V.ii.208-12). also takes up the notion that the living and dead are in “horrid neighbourship” together, with only the finest boundary between them, although it does so to more psychological ends. In the second act’s famous “ghost supper,” the characters “look like ghosts” and have been drinking tea together for twenty years, “always the same people, saying the same things, or else too ashamed to say anything” (279). “God, if only we could die! If only we could die!” the character named the Mummy cries (283). can be reintroduced at this point because it also pairs well with when the characters seek to make Jacob Hummel (“Old Man” in the dramatis personae) awaken to his past evil actions and feel remorse for them. Like and , is rather Gothic and could profitably be brought into a discussion of distinctions between “Gothic,” “Romantic,” “symbolist,” and “expressionist,” for the same elements of stagecraft are alternately labeled “Gothic” when describing , , and many other Romantic dramas and are thus often considered “low,” pandering to the masses’ love of being surprised with special effects; or they are labeled “Romantic,” “experimental,” or “avant garde,” and then considered “high art.”

When works of the modern avant garde are studied immediately after and , the kinship with Romantic drama becomes clear in both the shared vision of theatre and the stagecraft employed to realize it. As Peter Brook explains, the holy theatre does not only present the invisible in drama, it “also offers conditions that make its perception possible” (56), such as theatrical spectacle, lighting, a use of ritualistic devices, dance and movement, musical scores and other kinds of sound, and even, in some cases, smell.Amiri Baraka’s use of smell in to convey a sense of “atmosfeeling” is a good example. Far from being “mere” spectacle or surface—an entertaining painted veil—these elements, whether labeled Gothic, Romantic, or Holy, are employed to lift or transcend reality. Paula Backscheider writes in , in a discussion of , that Gothic playwrights who added the word “romance” to their titles “signaled their freedom from the referential, veridical world of realist texts and allied themselves with a highly symbolic art, often reaching for a higher reality or a deeper psychology” (156). Theorists of the Gothic, Backscheider continues, have argued that the form “is best distinguished by the experience its readers or spectators have, and it is now widely accepted as an expression of dissatisfaction with the possibilities of conventional literary realism” (156). This dissatisfaction leads to the modern avant garde tendency to elevate mood over plot, or internal over external states, presaged by Baillie’s work in particular.

The twentieth century part of the course looks at Strindberg’s (1901); one-act experiments (1891) by Maurice Maeterlinck, (1910) by Valery Briusov, and Wassily Kandinsky’s (1909); Beckett’s (1953), the text seen by Peter Brook as the apotheosis of holy theatre; Sam Shepard’s (1976) and the off-off Broadway movement; Amiri Baraka’s Artaudian “historical pageant” (1967) and Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975); and ends with consideration of the career of Sarah Kane, particularly her plays (1995) and (2000). We also discuss the influence of director-theorists Antonin Artaud ( [1938])It might be interesting for students to note that Artaud’s Théâtre Alfred Jarry planned seasons that included Strindberg’s (a favorite, intended for his first season, 1926/27, but produced in 1928), Büchner’s and Shelley’s (perhaps Artaud’s best-known production—as well as the best-known version of ), as well as an archival reconstruction of the story of Blue-Beard and the Jacobean drama ) (Esslin, 96; Artaud, 99-100). and Jerzy Grotowski ( [1968]—probably best known to people outside the theatre from Andre Gregory’s descriptions of his participation in Grotowski’s life-changing rituals in the film [1981]), whose methods and experiments are probably what first come to mind when one learns about holy theatre. What often strikes twenty-first-century students about this current of theatre is how raw it seems, how earnest or even naïve in its search for authenticity; there’s an openness and vulnerability that can make contemporary audiences conditioned to irony uncomfortable. Contemporary traces of holy theatre are difficult to find; we see them more in rave music, light shows, art installations, and communal performance events such as Burning Man than in staged drama. Postmodernism so changed the tenor of much of the aesthetic that when consciousness is examined in contemporary performance, the tendency has been toward a deconstruction rather than a search for universals and communality. An important response comes in the form of Jill Dolan’s argument for “reanimating humanism (after we’ve deconstructed the blind, transcendent universalisms it once espoused)” (163) and her conceptualization of “utopian performatives” in (2005).

Film is probably the most engaging and accessible contemporary porthole for entering the realms of the holy theatre tradition. As Bert Cardullo notes of modernist avant-garde plays, Romantic dramas would perhaps have been “better suited to the screen than to the stage, assaulting as they did the theater’s traditional objectivity or exteriority and its bondage to continuous time and space” (3). Film is a medium that has been friendly to experiments with the concerns of holy theatre—consciousness, dream states, alternative realities, magic—as can be seen in the popularity of films about consciousness, such as Richard Linklater’s (2001) and the documentary (2004), critical acclaim for Julian Schnabel’s evocation of human consciousness in (2007), the work of Michel Gondry ( [2004], [2006]), and Christopher Nolan’s (2010), to name just a few recent examples. A work like (1820), for example, seems to call out for a film adaptation (although the first known staging, by the Rude Mechanicals theatre company in Austin, Texas, in 1998 would challenge that statement. It was excellent.) While film lacks the communality in liveness called for in holy theatre, it can conjure the images and experience of transcendence that were desired onstage. Students probably bring a curiosity about the philosophical, scientific, and psychological matters explored in these films, which may raise interest in seeing how Romantic drama attempts to explore them, too, with the result that Romantic drama is seen as relevant, even prescient, to our artistic concerns, and as a fertile ground for theatrical experimentation.