Women's Romantic Theatre and Drama

History, Agency, and Performativity

Keir Elam, Lilla Maria Crisafulli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351871181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

As theatre and drama of the Romantic Period undergo a critical reassessment among scholars internationally, the contributions of women as playwrights, actresses, and managers are also being revalued. This volume, which brings together leading British, North American, and Italian critics, is a crucial step towards reclaiming the importance of women's dramatic and theatrical activities during the period. Writing for the theatre implied assuming a public role, a hazardous undertaking for women who, especially after the French Revolution, were assigned to the private, primarily domestic, sphere. As the contributors examine the covert strategies women used to become full participants in the public theatre, they shed light on the issue of women's agency, expressed both through the writing of highly politicized or ethicized drama, as in the case of Elizabeth Inchbald or Joanna Baillie, and through women's professional practice as theatre managers and stage producers, as in the case of Elizabeth Vestris and Jane Scott. Among the topics considered are women's history plays, domesticity, ethics and sexuality in women's closet drama, the politics of drama and performance, and the role of women as managers and producers. Specialists in performance studies, Romantic Period drama, and women's writing will find the essays both challenging and inspiring.

Part I
Historical Drama and Romantic Historiography

Chapter 1
Baillie, Mitford, and the 'Different Track' of Women's Historical Drama on the Romantic Stage

Greg Kucich

London’s recent theatrical sensation, Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, features a feminist critique of history tantalizingly applicable to women’s historical drama of the romantic era. During a practice interview for sixth-form English boys at a middling northern school trying to make the improbable leap to 1950s Cambridge, the school’s one female historian scornfully derides the marginalization of women in world history. ‘Can you for a moment’, she asks the room of male auditors, ‘imagine how dispiriting it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude? ... History’s not such a frolic for women as it is for men ... They never got round the conference table. In 1919, for instance, they just arranged the flowers then gracefully retired ... History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men ... History is women following behind with the bucket’.¹ Lady Morgan anticipated the point in Woman and Her Master (1840) with similarly caustic irony: ‘From the earliest aggregations of society, man, in his shallow pride, has laboured to perpetuate the memory of his own imperfection, the story of his selfishness and his errors ...’.² If female writers of the romantic era anticipated current theatrical denunciations of women’s historical elision, they also initiated a wide range of discursive historical innovations and exerted great political energy in seeking, particularly through historical drama, to write women back into the story of the past.

Although Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s complaint about the creative impoverishment of the British stage – a ‘haunted ruin’ of its Elizabethan grandeur – found much contemporary assent,³ many dramatists, particularly women playwrights, advocated the public theatre’s unique educational possibilities for the improvement of morals, national politics, and gender relations. Thus Hannah Cowley envisions the theatre as a ‘great National School’ where ‘a mother can ... lead her daughters [to] ... UNDERSTANDING, DISCERNMENT, and EDUCATION’.⁴ For Cowley’s female contemporaries in theatre circles, the special appeal of that schooling through the medium of historical drama registers in their avid inclination to the past for the setting of so many of their plays, such as: Hannah More’s Percy (1778); Frances Burney’s Edwy and Elgiva (1788/89); ann Yearsley’s Earl Goodwin (1791); Jane West’s Edmund Ironisde (1791); Mary Devrell’s Mary, Queen of Scots (1792); Hannah Brand’s Huniades, A Tragedy (1792); Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil (1798), Ethwald Part First and Second (1802), Constantine Paleologus (1804), and The Family Legend (1810); Felicia Hemans’s The Siege of Valencia (1823); Mary Russell Mitford’s Foscari: A Tragedy (1826), Rienzi (1828), and Charles the First (1834); Francis Ann Kemble’s Francis the First (1832). If women’s general reclamation of history during the romantic era produced numerous discursive avenues for joining Mary Hays in ‘the generous contention between the sexes for intellectual equality’,⁵ the historical drama proved unusually fit for a literary mother wishing to ‘lead her daughters’ into that liberating fray.

Despite the vibrant outpouring of critical studies over the last decade on romantic-era women’s writing across the genres and its important political work, the teeming variety of this historical revisionism and its keen political significance are just beginning to gain attention from such critics as Devoney Looser, Mark Salber Phillips, and Miriam Burstein.⁶ Amid the particular upsurge of recent critical work on the political impact of female playwrights of the romantic era, their massive investment in historical drama for the national lessons of a feminized theatrical school, as Katherine Newey and Betsy Bolton have shown, still awaits comprehensive examination.⁷ My general aim here is to suggest why historical drama so appealed to the period’s women writers. More particularly, I will highlight their transformative approach to the form – taking a ‘different track’, as Mary Russell Mitford put it⁸ – by examining the political functions and limitations of a specific type of performance innovation utilized by Mitford and Joanna Baillie: staging pictures of a re-imagined past that strategically revise male precedents in historiography and historical drama so as to display social models for infusing what Mitford calls ‘human sympathies’ (p. 19), gendered as an empowering female force, into the dynamics of justice and mercy in the national politics of the present. This analysis specifically addresses one of the most vigorously debated issues in the ongoing project of recovering and assessing women dramatists of the romantic era: that is, the actual degrees – the possibilities and boundaries – of political intervention they exercised in the public theatre of their time.⁹

For women writers of the romantic era, the appealing concept of historical drama as a ‘National School’ emerged out of a wider, intensive cultural dispute about the present epoch’s relation to Britain’s illustrious literary traditions and the attendant question of any remaining creative opportunities following the exhaustive accomplishments of the past, particularly those seemingly inimitable triumphs of Britain’s golden age in the Renaissance. This charged debate made the future of literature seem dependent on its ability to rival that monumental past, a daunting prospect that consumed the imaginations of so many romantic-era writers and inspired the rise of influence theory in the later twentieth century.¹⁰ The challenge tended to focus on what was widely perceived as the glorious apex of Renaissance creativity, the brilliant fecundity of its drama. Hence the urgent question of creative life for the present – did a ‘second’ Renaissance beckon forth or was the ‘scroll’ of ‘mighty Poets’, as Keats once apprehended, ‘folded by the Muses’¹¹ – turned squarely on the state of the national drama. Not surprisingly, Keats’s greatest creative ambition, for which the 1819 odes seemed to him but a preliminary nerving himself up to the challenge, centered on ‘the writing of a few fine Plays’.¹² Echoes of Beddoes’s gloomy warning against any such hope proliferated, such as Leigh Hunt’s lament about ‘the degraded conditions of the modern drama’.¹³ Yet more than a few critics, some quite prominent, found a resurgent force of cultural renewal pouring into staged and written drama. Elizabeth Inchbald, whose prefaces to the 25-volume British Theatre (1808) made her a leading voice in early nineteenth century theatre criticism, admonishes those who deplore the creative poverty of the drama to take a closer look at the teeming theatres: ‘It is said that modern dramas are the worst that ever appeared on the English stage – yet it is well known, that English theatres never flourished as they do at present ...’.¹⁴ Elaborating on this sentiment a decade later, Hazlitt reacts against ‘that general complaint of the degeneracy of the stage’ and insists that ‘our times … [are] not unfruitful in theatrical genius.’ He detects no falling-off from the drama’s illustrious past ‘either in the written or the acted performances’.¹⁵ Still more sanguine, a Blackwood’s theatre critic pronounces in a major 1825 survey of ‘Modern English Drama’ that ‘dramatic genius’ is ‘kindling over the whole land’ with a buoyancy surpassing even the prodigious energies of ‘our best dramatic writers’ of the Elizabethan age.¹⁶

Mobilizing their strongest case against ‘that general complaint’ of a crippled stage, those proponents of the drama’s new vigor applied the classic argument of theatre’s social virtues – famously articulated in P.B. Shelley’s equation of ‘the highest perfection of human society’ with ‘the highest dramatic excellence’¹⁷ – to its revitalized social role in the present. ‘The Stage’, Hazlitt declares, ‘is one great source of public amusement, not to say instruction’.¹⁸ A rejuvenated theatre, Walter Scott concludes, has ‘enriched’ national life.¹⁹ The evidence of this cultural rehabilitation came from a wide variety of texts, performances, and authors, but many writers on the drama, including Scott, based their optimism about a linked renewal of stage and society on the recent influx of women dramatists onto Britain’s literary scene.

Indeed, a substantial portion of the state of the drama controversy focused on the strength of women writers’ specific contributions, inspiriting or disabling, to theatrical life. Although the tradition of eminent female dramatists in Britain stretches back at least to the time of Behn and Centlivre, the exponential increase of women writers in the late eighteenth century gave them an unprecedented prominence in drama, as well as in the other major literary genres, and the new creative energies they brought to both written and acted plays struck many drama critics as the breadth of renewed life for a moribund theatre and possibly the key ingredient, even, to that deeply desired overall renewal of the national literary scene. The European Magazine, for instance, invokes the plays of Hannah Cowley as ‘the Works of one highly gifted’ who has stopped the flow of dramatic genius from ‘desert[ing] the realm’.²⁰ Hannah More’s ‘soundness of judgment’ in Percy, according to The Theatrical Inquisitor, brings ‘pure and enlightened piety’ back to the stage.²¹ Both The Monthly Mirror and The Lady’s Magazine agree that Harriet Lee’s The Mysterious Marriage and Elizabeth Inchbald’s many ‘dramatic pieces’ establish new models of emulation for the renewal of dramatic achievement.²² A chorus of reviewers declares with remarkable enthusiasm that Joanna Baillie, rising foremost among all dramatists of the present, brings back the glories of the Elizabethan stage and leads the charge to reinvigorate not only theatrical life but the entire national literature. Her ‘genius’ stands out as ‘a matter of peculiar triumph’, proclaims The Annual Review, because of its power to refresh the ‘dispirit[ed] drama’. It is her originality, in particular, that makes Scott sanguine about the growing movement to ‘enrich’ the ‘national tragedy’. And Blackwood’s declares that Baillie’s ‘strong influence’ has sparked a ‘reformation’ in all of ‘our poetic literature’, which transforms the current epoch into ‘another Age of Genius, only second to that of Elizabeth’.²³

To be sure, not everyone felt so thrilled about Baillie and the new surge of women dramatists. The Imperial Review, taking Baillie as representative of aspiring female playwrights, loathes the ‘insult[ing] ... effusions of female sentiment … and inferiority of genius’ in women’s drama. Francis Jeffrey, relentless in his critical antipathy to Baillie, expresses disgust at the ‘voluntary perversity’ of women who employ their ‘delicate hand[s]’ in the task of writing serious tragedy, and he ‘earnestly exhort[s] Miss Baillie’ to put her plays back ‘in her portfolio’ well out of public view. Z.’s infamous Cockney School reviews associate the intrusive effrontery of ‘vulgar’ writers like Keats and Hunt with Baillie’s ‘melancholy effect’ of inciting ‘we know not how many ... unmarried ladies … [and] superannuated governesses’ to follow her lead into the literary marketplace’.²⁴ Even these dismissive reactions betray, however, through their anxious hyperbole, reminiscent of Richard Polwhele’s diatribe against those Wollstonecraftian hordes in The Unsex’d Females (1798), a troubled recognition of the substantial literary and social impact of women’s dramatic writing. For good or ill, depending as much on the gender politics as the aesthetic values of cultural observers, the drama potentially offered women writers of the romantic era a distinctive presence in the social sphere.

Those women actively engaged in dramatic writing faced such an opportunity with some trepidation about overstepping the bounds of female decorum – Baillie cautions women not to ‘neglect’ domestic ‘occupations’ in their pursuit of learning²⁵ –, but also with an enthusiasm that registers in their confident, frequently innov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I HISTORICAL DRAMA AND ROMANTIC HISTORIOGRAPHY
• PART II DRAMATURGICAL AND CULTURAL PROCESSES
• PART III WOMEN STAGING, WOMEN STAGED
• Bibliography
• Index