In an 1886 issue of the Athenaeum, the Victorian writer and political activist Augusta Webster wrote a tepid review of Lewis Morris's poetic drama Gycia, tactfully evading outright condemnation by ruminating on the genre more broadly. Webster, a writer of poetic dramas as well as a critic of them, penned this review a year before the publication of the last of her four verse dramas, and, therefore, her words speak to her own mature approach to dramatic writing. What Webster's critical consideration of Gycia makes clear is that poetic drama sets its sight on a rare--but important--kind of reader who revels in creating the world alongside the author, who possesses "the faculty of inward sight and hearing," and who seeks to inhabit the world of the literature he or she reads. Since the reader of drama desires "a sensation of the action" above and beyond "passive absorption" of novel reading, it is imperative, explains Webster, that such a work "need not, indeed should not, be written with any modifications of dramatic treatment to differentiate it from acting plays" and that authors of this genre remember that "the plays that act best read best." (1) Her lackluster response to Morris's instantiation of this genre results from his subordination of the dramatic element of the piece to the poetic and, therefore, his failure to see the reader as one who desires to experience the physicality of the world of the play and to participate viscerally in its creation. Webster's four full-length plays reflect her desire to blend stage drama and closet drama, and as Patricia Rigg has noted Webster drops abstract themes typical of closet drama for the sake of conventional dramatic structure and stage directions. (2) However, Webster's works enact this hybridity with more than just a stage-worthy plotline; they also continually invoke the embodied nature of theatrical performance in the confines of the printed page both through references to Victorian stage practice and through uses of, what the linguist J. L. Austin terms the "performative" functions of language. I argue that Webster, in her dramas, plays with the physical potential of language to remind readers of the embodiment implicit in the printed page and to encourage them to see the process of reading as an active, physical engagement with the text. By doing so, Webster redefines literature as inherently performative--the book is like a stage; its characters, the actors; its writer, the director; and the reader, its audience--and that, as a result, it is an enterprise of body as well as mind. Yet Webster's plays never advocate the superiority of the stage to the printed page; these literary dramas harness the visceral realities of performance to remind readers of their role as active consumers in print's seemingly unidirectional transaction and of literature's contributions to their embodied reality. Webster's conception of literary drama that allows audiences to see the play "acted to them only in the theatre of their minds" alludes to but also provides a feminist reworking of the closet drama form conceived of by male Romantic writers such as Byron and Coleridge, who envisioned this genre as a safe retreat from the anti-intellectual stage. Webster invokes and challenges Byron's aesthetic choice to exchange the theatrical stage for "the mental theatre of the reader" (3) and Coleridge's belief that Shakespeare's greatness lies in the fact that he wrote not for any stage so much as "the universal mind." (4) Byron's and Coleridge's words envision the reader's mind as a sufficient substitute for the stage (the mind, for both of them, is already a theater) and assume that there is a universal mental landscape, invariable across time and peoples. In contrast, Webster's characterization charges her readers to visualize that stage and re-create its spatial and temporal realities anew in each of their own minds. In an 1887 letter that Webster wrote to William Michael Rossetti, responding to his critique that the action in her final drama, The Sentence, is not obvious enough, she reiterates that her "stage is in the reader's head. …

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“行动的感觉”：奥古斯塔·韦伯斯特诗歌剧中的表演题词

在 1886 年发行的雅典娜神庙中，维多利亚时代的作家和政治活动家奥古斯塔·韦伯斯特对刘易斯·莫里斯的诗歌剧《吉西亚》进行了不温不火的评论，通过更广泛地反思这一类型，巧妙地回避了直接的谴责。韦伯斯特既是诗剧作家，也是诗剧批评家，在她的四部诗剧中的最后一部出版前一年撰写了这篇评论，因此，她的话说明了她自己成熟的戏剧写作方法。韦伯斯特对吉西亚的批判性考虑清楚地表明，诗剧着眼于一种罕见但重要的读者，他们陶醉于与作者一起创造世界，拥有“内在视觉和听觉能力”，并且谁寻求居住在他或她阅读的文学世界中。既然戏剧的读者渴望“ 正如帕特里夏·里格 (Patricia Rigg) 所指出的，韦伯斯特为了传统的戏剧结构和舞台方向，放弃了壁橱戏剧典型的抽象主题。(2) 然而，韦伯斯特的作品表现出这种混合性，而不仅仅是一个值得舞台的情节线；他们还通过引用维多利亚时代的舞台实践和语言学家 JL Austin 所说的语言的“表演性”功能，不断地在印刷页面的范围内调用戏剧表演的具体化性质。我认为韦伯斯特在她的戏剧中发挥了语言的物理潜力，以提醒读​​者在印刷页面中隐含的体现，并鼓励他们将阅读过程视为对文本的一种积极的、身体上的参与。通过这样做，韦伯斯特将文学重新定义为固有的表演性——这本书就像一个舞台；它的角色，演员；它的作家，导演；和读者，它的观众——因此，它是一个身体和心灵的事业。然而韦伯斯特的戏剧从不提倡舞台优于印刷品。这些文学戏剧利用表演的发自内心的现实来提醒读者他们在印刷品看似单向的交易中作为积极消费者的角色，以及文学对其具体现实的贡献。韦伯斯特的文学戏剧概念允许观众看到戏剧“只在他们心中的剧院里表演”，这暗示但也提供了对拜伦和柯勒律治等男性浪漫主义作家设想的壁橱戏剧形式的女权主义改造，谁将这一流派视为从反智主义阶段的安全撤退。韦伯斯特援引并挑战拜伦的美学选择，将戏剧舞台换成“读者的心理剧场”（3），柯勒律治相信莎士比亚的伟大在于他不是为任何舞台写作，而是为“普遍心灵”写作。(4) 拜伦和柯勒律治的话将读者的心灵想象为舞台的充分替代品（心灵，对他们两人来说，已经是一个剧院），并假设存在一个普遍的心理景观，不随时间和民族而变化。相比之下，韦伯斯特的刻画要求她的读者想象那个舞台，并在他们每个人的脑海中重新创造它的空间和时间现实。