Joanna Baillie: The Female Shakespeare
McGill University
Joanna Baillie, one of the most important dramatists of the Romantic period, was known to her contemporaries as ‘the female Shakespeare’. Walter Scott, for example, identified her with the Bard in the introduction to canto three of Marmion:
Or, if to touch such chord be thine,
Restore the ancient tragic line,
And emulate the notes that rung
From the wild harp which silent hung,
By silver Avon’s holy shore,
Till twice an hundred years rolled o’er;
When she, the bold Enchantress, came,
With fearless hand and heart on flame!
From the pale willow snatched the treasure,
And swept it with a kindred measure,
Till Avon’s swans, while rung the grove
With Monfort’s hate and Basil’s love,
Awakening at the inspired strain,
Deemed their own Shakespeare lived again.1
Baillie is here positioned as the inheritor of Shakespeare’s natural genius, able to convince her contemporaries that his spirit lives again in her. This view was widely shared: the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany for January 1818 ranked her only behind Shakespeare as a dramatist and Fraser’s Magazine greeted the publication of her last volume of plays in 1836 by exclaiming ‘Had we heard that a MS. play of Shakespeare’s, or an early, but missing novel of Scott’s had been discovered, and was already in the press, the information could not have been more welcome’.2 In a poem published in 1827, William Sotheby also echoed Scott’s assessment of Baillie, describing her as ‘Sister of Shakespeare!’ and ‘artless Nature’s simple child’.3
Author of seven volumes of plays, which contain lengthy prefatory material in which she theorizes about drama and the state of the contemporary theatre, Baillie was certainly prolific in print.4 Her work was praised for its language but her plays were seen as less successful on the stage than on the page.5 Recent critics have addressed Baillie’s apparent lack of theatrical success and made a strong case for her significance to the Romantic stage. Catherine B. Burroughs explores Baillie’s identification as a closet dramatist to argue that this should not preclude her from being considered as a writer for the theatre. Closet drama for Baillie, Burroughs contends, does not mean a play that is unperformed or unperformable but rather one that ‘actually dramatizes scenes from a character’s private closet’, recognizing the theatrical potential of representing ‘private emotions’ or ‘closeted moments’ on stage.6 Ellen Donkin counters the marginalization of Baillie’s stage success by laying out the details of her achievements in the theatre. De Monfort was produced at Drury Lane in 1800 starring John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons and had a good run of eleven nights. It was revived in 1821 with Edmund Kean in the lead role. The Family Legend was successfully staged in Edinburgh in 1810.7 Donkin ultimately ascribes Kemble’s about-face over Constantine Paleologus, which he initially encouraged but later refused to stage, to the desire of the critical community to ‘contain’ Baillie, whose authoritative criticism of contemporary theatre practice posed a threat to the establishment.8 This essay argues that one of the reasons for Baillie’s success as a closet dramatist but apparent failure as a writer for the stage lies in the identification of her with Shakespeare, who was himself becoming increasingly divorced from the stage by critics at this time, despite his theatrical popularity.
There is ample evidence in Baillie’s prefatory writing of her knowledge of current theatrical practice and much critical engagement with the state of the contemporary stage. In the address to the reader in the third volume of the Plays on the Passions, published in 1812, Baillie explores why her play De Monfort has not been revived in the theatre. She writes that while it may have had some ‘merit in the writing’, this could not be adequately transmitted ‘in a theatre, so large and so ill calculated to convey sound as the one in which it was performed’ so that ‘it was impossible this [merit] could be felt or comprehended by even a third part of the audience’.9 The patent theatres had become vast spaces – by the 1790s, both Covent Garden and Drury Lane accommodated over 3,000 people each – and this was a state of affairs much lamented by those who sought to promote the development of a canon of English dramatic literature. Indeed, the size of the patent theatre auditoria was cited as a reason for Edward Lytton Bulwer’s call for a Parliamentary Inquiry into the State of the Drama in 1832 as he claimed that theatre had come to rely on ‘noise, and glitter, and spectacle’ rather than poetry because ‘the enormous size of these houses rendered half the dialogue lost to half the audience’.10
Baillie notes particularly that soliloquy is ‘the department of acting that will suffer most under these circumstances’, a point which is crucial to her plays since she had earlier identified soliloquy as a key means for the dramatist ‘to open to us the mind he would display’, making it central to the unfolding of the passions which were at the heart of her drama.11 Shakespeare’s works continue to succeed on the Romantic stage because ‘being familiar to the audience, they can still understand and follow them pretty closely, though but imperfectly heard’.12 However, as long as the theatres remain at their current size, ‘it is a vain thing to complain either of want of taste in the Public, or want of inclination in the Managers to bring forward new pieces of merit’.13 Not only does Baillie effectively contextualize the fate of her drama by elucidating the state of the contemporary stage, she also offers suggestions for reform, for example in her detailed footnote on lighting effects. Here Baillie criticizes the use of footlights for distorting the actor’s face and making it unable to achieve subtlety of expression and advocates instead ‘bringing forward the roof of the stage as far as its boards or floor, and placing a row of lamps with reflectors along the inside of the wooden front-piece’ in order to provide a more subtle light.14
Baillie also suggests that actresses suffer more ‘from the defects of a large theatre’ and her playwriting and advocacy for more intimate performance spaces might also be seen as a way to rethink women’s involvement in contemporary performance.15 Female readers and spectators such as Hester Piozzi and Mary Berry noted that there was something different and indeed innovative about Baillie’s portrayal of women characters: Piozzi commented of Baillie’s work, ‘I felt it was a woman’s writing; no man makes female characters respectable – no man of the present day I mean, they only make them lovely’.16 And Siddons reportedly visited Baillie to request that she ‘Make me some more Jane De Monforts!’17 Siddons’s appreciation of Baillie’s dramaturgy may also have sprung from her own awareness of the limitations imposed by the size of the contemporary stage: she referred to the Drury Lane theatre as ‘this vast wilderness’.18
It is clear from the detailed discussion of the Romantic stage in her prefaces that it was not a lack of knowledge about the practicalities of the theatre that prevented Baillie being taken seriously as a dramatist for the stage as well as the page. Baillie’s identification with the literary rather than the theatrical forms part of her connection with Shakespeare, who was at this time increasingly being moved from the stage to the closet. As Baillie noted, Shakespeare’s plays remained popular in the theatre but influential critics such as William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb argued that his works were better read than performed. Perhaps the most famous expression of this view comes from Lamb, who polemically claimed that ‘the plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of almost any other dramatist whatever’.19 Instead, Lamb believed that Shakespeare should be read in the study, suggesting that acting the plays in some way debased them and was merely a novelty which ‘instead of realizing an idea, […] materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood’.20 Seeing the plays staged was limiting since it provided the audience with a physical embodiment of a character in a situation, rather than allowing the imagination mentally to construct that character and situation for oneself in order to achieve empathy. The imagination was considered by the Romantics to be the highest creative faculty and Shakespeare was of course the supreme embodiment of the imaginative writer.
Julie A. Carlson contends that Romantic antitheatricalism is ‘a misogynist reaction against the visibility of “public women” in theatre’, an argument which is pertinent to Baillie’s position as a female dramatist.21 Lamb objected to the performance of Shakespeare because ‘the stage inverts all natural hierarchies by subordinating poet to player, forfeiting dreams to realities, privileging sense over imagination and action over intellect’.22 But more than this, gender hierarchies were inverted on the stage since the most influential performer of the age was female, not male: it was Siddons who embodied Shakespeare in the Romantic period, elevating his female characters over the male ones. Furthermore, watching Siddons perform Shakespeare feminized the audience since she invariably provoked an intense and publicly demonstrated emotional reaction amongst her spectators.23 The move to restrict Shakespeare to the page was therefore in part an attempt to keep his works free from this feminine influence. By advocating that her plays be performed, Baillie sought to make herself the kind of public and influential woman of the theatre that troubled the antitheatrical critics.
Baillie herself acknowledges in her writing the deep divide emerging between drama deemed fit for performance and that regarded as better suited for reading. In her 1812 preface, published the year after Lamb’s essay, she explains why she intends this to be the last volume of her plays to appear in print:
The Series of Plays was originally published in the hope that some of the pieces it contains, although first given to the Public from the press, might in time make their way to the stage, and there be received and supported with some degree of public favour. But the present situation of dramatic affairs is greatly against every hope of this kind; and should they ever become more favourable, I have now good reason to believe, that the circumstances of these plays having been already published, would operate strongly against their being received upon the stage. I am therefore strongly of opinion that I ought to reserve the remainder of the work in manuscript, if I would not run the risk of entirely frustrating my original design. Did I not believe that their having been already published would not afterwards obstruct their way to the stage, the untowardness of present circumstances should not prevent me from continuing to publish.24
Baillie reaffirms her commitment to writing for performance, rather than print, and asserts that play publication hinders the staging of her works. This seems to be a clear response to the attempts of critics such as Lamb to render great drama, epitomized by Shakespeare himself, antithetical to performance.
Baillie’s writing recognizes the link with Shakespeare posited by Scott but fights against the closeting of the Bard. In the preface to her 1804 volume of Miscellaneous Plays she notes that she has a strong attachment to the drama of her native country, of which Shakespeare, ‘one whom every British heart thinks of with pride’, is the chief exemplar.25 In her first preface, she extends the maxim of ‘a sagacious Scotsman’ – ‘let who will make the laws of a nation, if I have the writing of its ballads’ – to the drama, arguing that plays have an important ability to affect all classes of society.26 She thus positions herself as part of a strong tradition of native British drama with Shakespeare at its head. In this way, Baillie anticipates the Parliamentary Inquiry into the State of the Drama of 1832, which aimed above all to reverse the deterioration of the national drama that was perceived in the contemporary patent theatres, largely as a result of their size. Baillie’s advocacy for smaller auditoria and her attempts to produce plays suitable for performance in such spaces are her way of continuing the nation’s dramatic tradition. Indeed, Lytton specifically requested that the drama return to the standards of ‘the days of Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson and Shakespeare’.27 Baillie’s work attempts to revive British playwriting by returning to this heyday of the theatre. The fact that she insists so strongly on the suitability of her plays for performance throughout her writing whilst simultaneously linking herself with Shakespeare is a reaction to Romantic antitheatricality which sought to remove Shakespeare, and any form of high drama, from the stage.
In fact, Baillie responds to calls to reinvigorate British drama more successfully than her male peers. Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and Keats all experimented with writing for the theatre but, as Jeffrey N. Cox notes,
Of the major male writers of the period, only Coleridge had a clear success with Remorse (1813); even the wildly popular Byron, who had direct ties to the management of Drury Lane, saw only one of his plays, Marino Faliero, produced during his lifetime, and it was a failure on stage.28
Baillie’s work had more theatrical success and so it was she, rather than any of her male peers, whom Scott likened to Shakespeare and positioned as the true successor to the Bard. While critics such as Burroughs and Donkin have elucidated other forces that worked to constrain Baillie and that have negatively influenced her reputation, the role of her identification with Shakespeare in this process has not previously been explored. I contend that labelling Baillie ‘the female Shakespeare’ simultaneously elevated her to a position at the head of contemporary playwriting and precluded her success in the theatre by further associating her with closet drama rather than theatrical practice. However, Baillie’s prefatory writing reveals a rich engagement with the stage that suggests that she wished to argue against this closeting and make a strong case for the place of her plays in the theatre. She hoped that her works would be appreciated, as Shakespeare’s had historically been, as both literary texts and performance pieces.
Notes
1Walter Scott, Marmion; A Tale of Flodden Field, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1808), p. 122. Monfort and Basil are characters in two of Baillie’s plays. Catherine B. Burroughs notes that in some editions of the poem a footnote identifies the ‘bold enchantress’ as Baillie. Catherine B. Burroughs, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Philadelphia, 1997), p. 200.
2Quoted in Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘Baillie, Siddons, Larpent: Gender, Power, and Politics in the Theatre of Romanticism’, in Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840, ed. Catherine Burroughs (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 23–47 (pp. 27–8).
3Quoted in Burroughs, Closet Stages, p. 200.
4Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays: In Which it Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (London, 1798); A Series of Plays, vol. 2 (London, 1802); A Series of Plays, vol. 3 (London, 1812); Miscellaneous Plays (London, 1804); Dramas, 3 vols. (London, 1832). In total, Baillie wrote twenty-six plays. Her most substantial theoretical writing is to be found in the prefaces to the 1798, 1804, and 1812 volumes.
5Ellen Donkin, Getting Into the Act: Women Playwrights in London 1776–1829 (London, 1995), p. 170.
6Burroughs, p. 91.
7Donkin, pp. 163–4, p. 174, p. 171.
8Donkin, p. 172, pp. 176–7.
9Joanna Baillie, ‘To the Reader’, in Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (Peterborough, Ontario, 2003), pp. 370–8 (p. 374). Subsequent references to the 1812 volume are to this edition.
10‘State of the Drama’, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 13 (London, 1833), pp. 239–59 (p. 243).
11Baillie (1812), p. 375; Joanna Baillie, ‘Introductory Discourse’, in Peter Duthie ed., Plays on the Passions (Peterborough, Ontario, 2001), pp. 67–113 (p. 105). Subsequent references to the 1798 volume are to this edition.
12Baillie (1812), p. 374.
13Baillie (1812), p. 374. It is exactly the problem that Baillie pinpoints in 1812 that the 1832 inquiry was set up to address.
14Baillie (1812), p. 377.
15Baillie (1812), p. 375.
16Quoted in Donkin, p. 166.
17Quoted in Donkin, p. 166.
18Quoted in Iain Mackintosh and Geoffrey Ashton, The Georgian Playhouse: Actors, Artists, Audiences and Architecture 1730–1830, (London, 1975), exhibition catalogue, entry for items 227–31.
19Lamb, Charles, ‘From “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation” (1811)’, in The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (London, 1992), pp. 111–27 (p. 113).
20Lamb, p. 113.
21Julie A. Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge, 1994), p. 20.
22Lamb, p. 113.
23Carlson, pp. 168–72.
24Baillie (1812), p. 373.
25Joanna Baillie, ‘To the Reader’, Miscellaneous Plays (London, 1804), pp. [iii]–xix (p. ix).
26Baillie (1798), p. 103.
27‘State of the Drama’, p. 246.
28Cox, ‘Baillie, Siddons, Larpent’, p. 26.