The bicentennial year of the French Revolution brought a great deal of scholarly energy to bear upon the events surrounding 1789 and upon the literature, usually called Romantic, that grew up in response to it. Little space, however, was found within such studies for the British antirevolutionary literature of the 1790s and none, I daresay, for its antirevolutionary drama. The British plays written against the French Revolution during the 1790s have been completely obscured from critical view by a number of preconceptions about the literary history of the period. Some of these are old prejudices, such as the opinion that the drama of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is simply not worthy of attention. Others are linked to what Jerome McGann has identified as the "romantic ideology," the tendency to see every work between roughly 1789 and 1832 from the perspective of the self-definitions of the small group of writers we call "Romantic." As Marilyn Butler has also shown, much of the literary work of this period falls outside our definitions, and the antirevolutionary drama offers another example of her point.' Our focus on the six major Romantic poets and our interest in the perceived pattern of their response to the Revolution-radical politics giving way to imaginative liberation or escape-renders alternative groups of writers and other patterns of reaction to the events of the day invisible. The antirevolutionary drama and the literary history to which they contribute challenge our standard formulations about the period. These plays were not Romantic; they should not even be read as a context for Romantic works-which would subordinate them to models with which they are not engaged-but instead as dramas significant in their own right. These plays are part of a broader reactionary literature and culture as relevant to the literary and political situation of England in the 1790s as the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge or Blake. Considering the particular contexts that shaped these texts, we will find that these dramas have an important place in the ideological struggles of the day as well as a sig-