A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader. The earliest use of the term recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1813. The literary historian Henry A. Beers in 1907 considered closet drama "a quite legitimate product of literary art."
Definition
A closet drama (or closet play) is defined as a play created primarily for reading, rather than production. Closet dramas can be defined in narrower terms as belonging to a genre of dramatic writing unconcerned with stage technique. However, stageability is only one aspect of such works: historically, playwrights might choose the genre of 'closet' dramatic writing to avoid censorship of works which had political implications. Closet drama has also been used as a mode of dramatic writing for those without access to the commercial playhouse, and in this context has become closely associated with early modern women's writing. Closet dramas were sometimes published (or circulated in manuscript form), to include dramatis personae and elaborate stage directions, allowing readers to imagine the text as if it were being performed. This created an "unusually tight fusion between book and reader as it endeavours to stimulate the theatrical imagination." Print is the crucial factor behind closet dramas: "a play that is not intended for commercial performance can nevertheless cross between private playreading and the public sphere" through this medium.
Beginning with Friedrich von Schlegel, many have argued that the tragedies of Seneca the Younger in the first century AD were written to be recited at small parties rather than performed. Although that theory has become widely pervasive in the history of theater, there is no evidence to support the contention that Seneca's plays were intended to be read or recited at small gatherings of the wealthy. The emperor Nero, a pupil of Seneca, may have performed in some of them. Some of the drama of the Middle Ages was of the closet-drama type, such as the drama of Hroswitha of Gandersheim and debate poems in quasi-dramatic form.
Between 1642 and 1660, the English government banned public performance. During this time, playreading became a "substitute" for playgoing. Thus, playwrights were moved to take on "propagandist aims" against parliament and topics beyond the theatre in their writing, meaning reading such work could be considered a revolutionary act. However, playwrights could write in relative security, protected by the anonymous means of print. Thomas Killigrew is an example of a stage playwright who turned to this form of writing when his plays could no longer be produced during this period; he was in exile from England during the English Civil War.
Following the Restoration in 1660, some authors continued to write in this form, proving in the view of some modern academics that the form "served a cultural function distinct from that of commercial drama." John Milton's play Samson Agonistes, written in 1671, is an example of early modern drama never intended for the stage.