"A Sensation of the Action": The Inscription of Performance in the Verse Dramas of Augusta Webster

Abstract

In an 1886 issue of Athenaeum, Victorian writer and political activist Augusta Webster wrote tepid review of Lewis Morris's poetic drama Gycia, tactfully evading outright condemnation by ruminating on genre more broadly. Webster, writer of poetic dramas as well as critic of them, penned this review year before publication of last of her four verse dramas, and, therefore, her words speak to her own mature approach to dramatic writing. What Webster's critical consideration of Gycia makes clear is that poetic drama sets its sight on rare--but important--kind of who revels in creating world alongside author, who possesses the faculty of inward sight and hearing, and who seeks to inhabit world of literature he or she reads. Since of drama desires a sensation of above and beyond passive absorption of novel reading, it is imperative, explains Webster, that such work need not, indeed should not, be written with any modifications of dramatic treatment to differentiate it from acting and that authors of this genre remember that the plays that act best read best. (1) Her lackluster response to Morris's instantiation of this genre results from his subordination of dramatic element of piece to poetic and, therefore, his failure to see as one who desires to experience physicality of world of play and to participate viscerally in its creation. Webster's four full-length plays reflect her desire to blend drama and closet drama, and as Patricia Rigg has noted Webster drops abstract themes typical of closet drama for sake of conventional dramatic structure and directions. (2) However, Webster's works enact this hybridity with more than just stage-worthy plotline; they also continually invoke embodied nature of theatrical performance in confines of printed page both through references to Victorian practice and through uses of, what linguist J. L. Austin terms performative functions of language. I argue that Webster, in her dramas, plays with physical potential of language to remind readers of embodiment implicit in printed page and to encourage them to see process of reading as an active, physical engagement with text. By doing so, Webster redefines literature as inherently performative--the book is like stage; its characters, actors; its writer, director; and reader, its audience--and that, as result, it is an enterprise of body as well as Yet Webster's plays never advocate superiority of to printed page; these literary dramas harness visceral realities of performance to remind readers of their role as active consumers in print's seemingly unidirectional transaction and of literature's contributions to their embodied reality. Webster's conception of literary drama that allows audiences to see play acted to them only in theatre of their minds alludes to but also provides feminist reworking of closet drama form conceived of by male Romantic writers such as Byron and Coleridge, who envisioned this genre as safe retreat from anti-intellectual stage. Webster invokes and challenges Byron's aesthetic choice to exchange theatrical for the mental theatre of reader (3) and Coleridge's belief that Shakespeare's greatness lies in fact that he wrote not for any so much as the universal mind. (4) Byron's and Coleridge's words envision reader's mind as sufficient substitute for (the mind, for both of them, is already theater) and assume that there is universal mental landscape, invariable across time and peoples. In contrast, Webster's characterization charges her readers to visualize that and re-create its spatial and temporal realities anew in each of their own minds. In an 1887 letter that Webster wrote to William Michael Rossetti, responding to his critique that action in her final drama, The Sentence, is not obvious enough, she reiterates that her stage is in reader's head. …