The Introduction locates my inquiry with respect to current critical notions of Romantic drama, theater, and publicity. Explicitly engaging the last two decades’ renewed attention to these concerns, I develop an historical model of “theatrical experience” that attends to the commercialization of theater, the rapid expansion of theatergoing audiences, and the proliferation of print venues for theatrical writing and reading. Focusing on theatrical periodicals as a “field”—a large group of contemporaneously published texts responding to each other in form and content—I describe how the book will trace theater’s growing importance to British writers working in a variety of literary genres.