Joanna Baillie’s Emblematic Theatre

Abstract

Joanna Baillie, best known as the author of the 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 (1798–1812), was at once the most respected female dramatist of the early nineteenth century and perhaps the most under-staged. The British Critic called her ‘one of the brightest luminaries of the present period’, and the Critical Review, comparing her work with Shakespeare’s, agreed that ‘Miss Baillie’s dramatic powers are of the highest order’.1 Yet of Baillie’s twenty-six plays, only seven were produced during her lifetime, and those achieved at best a moderate success. Thus despite her insistence that she wrote to be performed, Baillie was frequently read as a closet dramatist, a literary figure rather than a playwright. Recent critics, however, have emphasized Baillie’s intense theatrical investments, including the way many of her plays specialize in particular theatrical techniques: the use of closet spaces to evoke closet theatre, tableaux displays, mini-dramas foregrounding metatheatrical concerns, and so on.2 Alan Richardson, addressing the ‘neural’ theatre of Baillie’s plays, highlights a particular use of spectacle, arguing that in Baillie’s tragedy of love, ‘Basil’s inanimate body provides a grisly emblem, as the action closes, of the corporeality that the play has insisted upon all along.’ Richardson is most interested in linking Baillie’s drama to ‘the embodied approach to mind being worked out in Romantic brain science’3; I want to suggest the centrality of emblems to Baillie’s theatre practice.