The english romantic closet: Women theatre artists, Joanna Baillie, andBasil

Abstract

While revisionist studies of English Romantic drama began to proliferate after 1966,' they nevertheless tended in several directions that reinforced traditional perceptions of era as antitheatrical and therefore less important to theatre historians: they highlighted poetic over performative element (and thus aesthetic over historical) in their discussion of closet plays; and they ignored women's contributions to theatre and dramatic literature of period. Addressing former problem, scholars have recently investigated historical contexts of Romantic drama to show how these plays respond to era's political, cultural, and theatrical events.8 One of these contexts is performance history of particular closet plays, a study of which has helped undermine closet/stage dichotomy used in past to hinder appreciation of what Marilyn Gaull has called the apparent necessity of theatrical experience during Romantic age (255). Anne K. Mellor's work is indispensable for addressing second problem, neglect of women theatre artists. Both. Romanticism and Feminism (1988) and Romanticism and Gender (1993) show how conceptions of English Romantic period change when its texts are read from feminist perspectives.' The same is true for period's theatre and drama. Once we begin to look at issues raised by women associated with early—nineteenth-century London theatre and how their ideas were framed in relation to these writers' gendered position on public and private stages, then other scenes appear that reveal era's astonishing theatricality. The lens of gender brings into crisp focus contours of Romantic stage. For instance, closet play comes into view as a genre especially well suited for providing women with a forum for dramatic experimentation within privacy of their homes, just as late-eighteenth-century private theatrical underscored (and capitalized upon) theatricality of domestic life by giving women unusually intensive experiences in playwrighting, stage management, and acting/ Read in