The Haunted Closet: Romantic Drama and the Absent Body

Abstract: This article offers a new understanding of the ubiquitous but notoriously hard to define Romantic "closet drama," interrogating the closet's continued haunting of plays whose ties to the stage have long since been demonstrated. I argue that the ambivalence of embodiment in Romantic closet plays is not only embedded in their critical reception, but inheres in the texts themselves as issues of presence and absence, tangibility and spectrality. Romantic plays that have been identified as closet drama, I propose, can be understood as dramatizing the absence of the body, and this can and should inform how we read them.