Romanticism and Theatrical Experience

Writing to his friend and mentor Charles Cowden Clarke in March of 1817, John Keats asked 'When shall we see each other again? In Heaven or in Hell, or in deep Places? In crooked Lane are we to meet or on Salisbury Plain? Or jumbled together at Drury Lane door?' (Letters 1.126). By way of Macbeth, Keats's joke encompasses a universe of experience-heaven, hell, London's crooked streets, the mythical English countryside, the textual Shakespeare, the performed Shakespeare-all held together conceptually by the notion of the theater. An intrepid playgoer, Keats knew what it was to visit the street carnival of the theater district, to be 'jumbled up' with the crowds making their way down clogged byways to see Edmund Kean's latest impersonation of Shylock or Richard III. There, Keats implies, the metaphysical and the apocalyptic meet the bodily and the everyday on the threshold of the playhouse where his favorite actor reigns. Yet in a sense the letter imagines two Keatses at once: he is an actor parodying Shakespeare's lines even as he is a would-be audience member off to meet a friend. Both aspects give us a glimpse of how vital theatrical experience was to Keats's sense of himself as a social being--