However, the assertion that a play is a closet drama depends on accepting either statements by authors about their intentions or assessments by historians of theatrical conditions and their effects on writers. For the most part, plays written for theatrical production and those written to be read are closeted together in universities today. Scholars may study plays in their classrooms, but they and their students read them more frequently in private than aloud in class. Dramatic texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have in fact become a private cache of closet dramas for scholars and their students. The size of the dramatic closet increases to include all the classrooms reading and studying plays from any period because historians of dramaturgy feel a complex familiarity with the shape of the dramatic closet.
Scholars build closet classrooms.
Of course, professors themselves perform, in some sense, all the dramatic and non-dramatic texts they teach, but their performances are professional, scholarly, readerly, and resistant to a more unsettling amateur theatricality. The study of literature is built close to the dramatic closet, and in both of these rooms, theatrical bodies seem peculiar and excessive. We might consider our predecessors to be the women playwrights in Britain around 1800 who, to be at home in literary and scholarly professions, often drew upon past experiences of mastering display in professional and social theatres in order to learn new forms of professional conduct that could play in the study. To understand the bodily theatre of scholars today in all its professional decorum, we can look first to the metamorphosis of British women whose skills as performers and performance theorists helped them become literary professionals. These women held open the doors as the study of literary scholarship was being built so that formerly theatrical women could retire to professional closets.