audience reception

Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (University of Missouri Press, 1990) is a re-evaluation of British drama criticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Heller demonstrates that the British romantics’ bias against the staging of Shakespearean tragedy is rooted in an established and intellectually justifiable tradition in Western drama criticism. She also focuses on the misconception that the romantics were not interested in their readers. In fact, S. T. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt view the reader as an active participant in the process of interpreting literature, and they compare the reader’s imaginative powers to those of great writers. (more…)