劇作家としてのキーツ(松永俊男教授退任記念号)
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John Keats's excellent achievement was mainly poetry, but his keen ambition throughout his career was writing drama; in his letter to John Taylor Keats described, "the writing of a few fine Plays-my greatest ambition." However, there remain only two plays; one, Otho the Great (1819), a collaboration with his friend Charles Brown, and the other, King Stephen; A Dramatic Fragment (1819). This essay, dealing with the former, explores how Keats's interest in drama started, what motivated his dramatic composition, how the collaboration with Brown proceeded, and what are the defects caused by the collaboration. By discussing these points, I reveal Keats the playwright. Keats's concern with drama started early; he was an enthusiastic Shakespeare reader and frequently attended Hazlitt's Shakespeare lectures in 1817 and 1818. Besides, he was a keen theater-goer, which led him to write some theatrical reviews on The Champion. These theatrical experiences naturally stimulated his admiration of Edmund Kean, a Shakespeare actor in his age. Kean's stage performances inspired Keats's poetical principle as well as his playwriting. Along with these literary motivations, there was a practical reason for writing Otho the Great-that is his financial difficulty around this period. Due to Richard Abbey's deception (Keats's guardian after his parents' death), Keats lost his fortune, and in 1819 he was especially in need of money. Brown offered to collaborate a drama to help him financially, and Keats was willing to undertake the co-work. The collaboration proceeded smoothly and quickly and produced Otho the Great in a few months. In the first four acts Brown offered the plot, which Keats put into verse, whereas Keats wrote the final act based on his own idea. This discrepancy was responsible for some defects of the piece; there is a gap between the first four acts and the final act in the characterization, in the development of the catastrophe, and in the relationship of the major and minor characters. Therefore, the evaluation of the tragedy is generally low, but there are many effective Shakespearean echoes which Keats absorbed from his theatrical experiences, and the drama shows his future promising success as playwright.
- 2009-03-10
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