Closet Drama of the 18-19th Centuries as a Phenomenon of Dramatic Form Novelization

The article examines some aspects of the emancipation of dramatic form from theater under the influence of the process of novelization in the 18-19th centuries and the genre of closet drama as its result. Closet drama (non-stage drama) refers to a stable literary form that inherits dramatic and epic generic traits and is a kind of dramatic genre that is not meant to be put on stage. It is noted that the assimilation of elements into a dramatic form is a consequence of the development of the theory of cognition in the 18th century and changes in reading practices in modern times. Drama's novelization is accompanied by a movement from choralism, publicity, to solitary reading. A decisive role in the development of closet drama as a separate dramatic form is played by the novel and the related tendency of novelization. Novelization (the concept was proposed by M.M. Bakhtin) means an expansion of novelistic principles to other literary genres and forms. The most illustrative examples of closet drama of the 18-19th centuries belong to an experimental and radical literature of romanticism. Among the principles of novel poetics, adopted by romantic closet drama, the following could be identified: narrativeness, the scale of the events depicted, contrast, subject-descriptive character of the text, dialogism, psychologism. The application of principles intrinsic to poetics of the novel to closet drama is illustrated by the example of the dramas "Getz von Berlichingen" and "Faust" by J. W. Goethe, V. Hugo's "Cromwell" and G. Flaubert's "The Temptation of Saint Anthony".