The Suffering Stage: Joanna Baillie, Spectacle, and Sympathetic Education

Abstract

Joanna Baillie utilized both large- and small-scale stage spectacle to enact her theory of sympathetic engagement. Placing Baillie's Introductory Discourse in conversation with Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, I show how Baillie uses the figure of the condemned criminal as her prototype of what I call small-scale spectacle. For Baillie, such moments of individual suffering could be located by audiences in the movement and gestures of the sufferer. Nevertheless, Baillie also found sympathetic, as well as cautionary, potential in large-scale stage spectacle, which she identifies as banquets, battles, and processions. Baillie both uses and critiques such large-scale spectacle in Count Basil as she instructs her audience on the most productive ways of seeing and on sympathetic identification. I argue that, for Baillie, the theatre was a classroom where sympathy could be taught, and the various types of stage spectacle could be productive of a more sympathetic populace.