Early in Augusta Webster's dramatic monologue, “An Inventor” (1870), the speaker expresses his frustration over a contraption that he has not yet perfected. “It must,” he insists, “perform my thought, it must awake / this soulless whirring thing of springs and wheels, / and be a power among us” (119). These desperate imperatives (“it must”) are followed by a question that might betray a sense of futility were it not also the question of any innovator: “Aye but how?” The speaker seeks public exhibition or display of his thought; only then can the object be “a power among us,” and so enjoy a social and cultural import beyond even its maker. But the phrase also suggests a more pragmatic, less theatrical, and less hierarchical imperative for the object: it must execute his thought, it must accomplish or fulfill some action or deed, and it must be effectual.

The notion of creating a vehicle for the performance of thoughts may remind us of another nineteenth-century invention: the dramatic monologue itself. This chapter explores the element of performance in the dramatic monologue, the ways these poems enact or express aspects of their speakers, and the ways in which these varied monologues are "dramatic." It will also, however, pursue what we might term the performative element of the dramatic monologue, the methods by which these discursive forays, these words, accomplish various goals - some apparent, others subtle and less readily perceptible.

Representations of masculinity - what men should think and feel, how they should look, and what sorts of work they should do - shifted several times in Victorian England. During the first half of the nineteenth century, as Herbert Sussman demonstrates in Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian England (1995), a discourse about manliness was constructed in response to industrialization and changes in the socioeconomic class system. The traditional distinction between upper class landowning aristocracy versus lower-class unpropertied laborers was complicated by the rise of a middle class of industrialists, bankers, merchants, and a variety of professionals. Historians Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall point to the “delineation of gender difference” as one of the main features of the Victorian middle class. In particular, the balance between brawn and brains in the paradigm of masculinity was transformed. Manhood now involved work that might be more mental than physical. Rigorous moral as well as economic self-discipline became the hallmark of masculinity and the basis of claims to cultural authority, according to James Eli Adams in Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995). For example, the early Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle defined manliness in terms of strenuous effort, both in the workplace and in the soul. His On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840) became a guidebook for several generations of Victorian men seeking a firm gender identity.

More than two centuries ago Voltaire made a telling remark: 'All the arts are brothers, each one is a light to the other.' The career of Grigori Kozintsev (1905-73) as an interpreter of Shakespeare in Russian theatre, cinema and literary criticism is a striking illustration of this maxim.

Kozintsev’s road to his two Shakespeare films was long and not very easy. It passed through three channels, the first of which was the theatre – the director’s earliest passion. As early as 1923 the young Kozintsev was planning to perform Hamlet as a pantomime in the ‘Factory of the Eccentric Actor’ (FEKS), the experimental group he created with Leonid Trauberg and Sergei Yutkevich, but this plan was not realised.1 Seventeen years later, already a well-known film director, he returned to Shakespeare on stage. In 1940 he wanted to perform Henry IV at one of the Leningrad theatres, but this, too, did not take place. It was a year later, in 1941, that Kozintsev achieved his first Shakespearean production, King Lear, at the Bolshoi Dramaticheski Teatr in Leningrad.