The Theatre of Shelley

The account of Shelley's plays is the book's strength, with Mulhallen's previous book, The Theatre of Shelley (2010), and her background in theatre serving her well here.

—Christy Edwall, The Times Literary Supplement, 7 September 2016

This is the first full-length study of Shelley’s plays in performance. It offers a rich, meticulously researched history of Shelley’s role as a playwright and dramatist and a reassessment of his "closet dramas" as performable pieces of theatre. 

With chapters on each of Shelley’s dramatic works, the book provides a thorough discussion of the poet’s stagecraft, and analyses performances of his plays from the Georgian period to today. In addition, Mulhallen offers details of the productions Shelley saw in England and Italy, many not identified before, as well as a vivid account of the actors and personalities that constituted the theatrical scene of his time. Her research reveals Shelley as an extraordinarily talented playwright, whose fascination with contemporary theatrical theory and practice seriously challenges the notion that he was a reluctant dramatist.

Prof. Stephen Behrendt (Nebraska) has described the book as "wonderfully convincing" and "something wholly new in Shelley studies", while Prof. Tim Webb (Bristol) describes Mulhallen as having a "more precisely developed sense of the theatrical possibilities of Shelley's work than almost anybody who has written about Shelley".

The Theatre of Shelley is essential reading for anyone interested in Romanticism, nineteenth-century culture and the history of theatre.

Jacqueline Mulhallen studied at the University of New South Wales and the University of Helsinki before receiving her doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University in 2008. She has worked as a performer and writer with Lynx Theatre and Poetry and BBC Radio, and her plays Sylvia and Rebels and Friends have toured England and Ireland. Her academic publications include ‘Samuel Johnson: Amateur Physician’ in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (1982), ‘Sylvia Pankhurst’s Northern Tour’ at www.sylviapankhurst.com (2008) and ‘Sylvia Pankhurst’s Paintings: A Missing Link’ in Women’s History Magazine (2009), plus she is a contributor to Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Playhouse 1737-1832 (2014).

Overall, The Theatre of Shelley is a valuable contribution to critical understanding of an often-neglected aspect of Shelley’s work. Mulhallen’s greatest achievement, perhaps, lies in gathering together in a single volume the disparate strands of a particular area of Shelley scholarship. What emerges from this synthesis, however, is an undeniably new sense of the importance of the theatre in Shelley’s workThe Theatre of Shelley is a detailed and enjoyable account of Shelley’s dramatic writing in its historical context. […] Mulhallen is equally adept at discussing Swellfoot the Tyrant and discussing his debt to Schlegel’s dramatic theory. Much of the book is dedicated to presenting the fruits of Mulhallen’s wide-ranging historical research and investigations into the composition of all Shelley’s theatrical writings. Yet some of its best moments come when Mulhallen, clearly drawing on her experience as a practicing actor and dramatist, attempts to imagine how, for example, an actor might most successfully interpret the part of a "fanatical character" like Count Cenci, or how Shelley might have envisioned a scene working with particular actors […] I certainly share Mulhallen’s hope that it won’t be too long before Shelley’s plays are staged again.