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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
If such a period ever occurred in the Dramatic History of this country, the present is avowedly the crisis … Avarice, combined with Dullness; Ignorance, with Pride; Arrogance, with Meanness; and the whole of this unhallowed mass fermented with the vile leaven of selfishness and venality, have long threatened, (and nearly accomplished those threats) to obscure the theatrical horizon with a total eclipse; with worse than Gothic darkness and barbarity.
(Prospectus to The Dramatic Censor [1800])In calling Lewis's Castle Spectre “a spectre indeed … [c]lothed with the flesh and blood of £400” that “fitted the taste of the audience like a glove,” Wordsworth in the previous chapter privately invoked sentiments abounding in the published dramatic criticism of his contemporaries: that the national drama was dead or dying and that theater audiences, managers, and monopolies were squarely to blame for its demise. Such refrains occur so frequently in the dramatic criticism of the day that one is hard pressed to find any British drama critic who does not lament in apocalyptic tones the state of the theater. Among these voices were two new Reviews, both of which claimed as their vocation the reform of current “abuses” of the stage.
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