The illegitimate drama also represented the prevailing tendencies of Romanticism. Its fondness for Shakespearean and Elizabethan motives, its medievalism, its terrors, its democratic and humanitarian sentiments indicate the popularization of romantic ideas. These found expression suited to immediate public approval, not in Wordsworth but Kotzebue, not in Coleridge but Colman, not in Southey but in melodrama. And as the popularization of literature has increased, this illegitimate offspring of the drama has continued to respond to changes in public sentiment and thought by a recourse to well-worn theatrical means. During the nineteenth century, melodrama has thrust tragedy from the theatres and from public favor. Crowded out by the opera and again by the novel and now by the melodrama, tragedy has tended either to assume the garb of its rivals, or to conform its appeal to a select audience.
In the period from 1800 to 1830 the novel and the melodrama and the melodramatized novel all united to restrict the demand for pure tragedy. The breach between the theatre and literature which the eighteenth century had opened was widened. In the theatre new plays and especially new plays with tragic, romantic, or heroic plots, were adapted from Scott's novels or otherwise devised by a comparatively small group of men. These men, Reynolds, Morton, Soane, Terry, Dibdin, and others, were associated with the theatres, understood the arrangement of scenery and spectacle, were quick to foresee the taste of the audience, and pretended to little literary skill, for none was required. Their work created a new distinction in the drama, a species, melodrama, or tragedy if you please, that can be acted but cannot be read. On the other hand, the literary romanticists, while usually having no connection with the stage and despairing of its reform, by no means relinquished the field of tragedy. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Scott, Keats, and many other lesser poets wrote tragedies, and most were not unwilling to have these acted. These plays fall into two main classes, those that were acted and carried on the tradition of tragedy in the theatres, and those that were not acted. This second class, which for the first time becomes of some importance in the history of literature, has itself several divisions. There are tragedies intended for the stage but failing to get a trial there. There are others which, while not intended for the stage, conform in the main to its requirements, and might easily be adapted for presentation. There are others, like "Cain" or Wells's "Joseph and his Brethren" or Swinburne's later plays, which violate almost all the requirements of the theatre. These form another dramatic species, the opposite of melodrama, plays that can be read but cannot be acted. Some of these various classes of closet drama influenced the acted drama, others have so little dramatic quality that they are at most "dramatic poems," but all have a connection with the tradition of tragedy. Most of the literary tragedies are indeed, despite variations in degree, alike in kind. They are all written in verse; they are all romantic rather than realistic; they mostly return to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans for models; and they nearly all disregard the stage demand. Whether they loathe the stage or ask for admittance there, they seek literary rather than theatrical excellence. At the time when the stage demanded action and was superseding dialogue and speech by music, spectacle, and dumb show, the romanticists conceived of tragedy only in terms of poetry, and wrote mainly in order to clothe their tragic themes in the beauty of verse.