In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote that “it scarcely seems necessary to consider again the influence of the tragedies of Joanna Baillie upon the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.”¹ Yet more than sixty years later, discussions of Baillie's influence on writers who lived during or beyond the Romantic period are relatively rare.² The author of twenty-six plays,³ pages of poetry, and a number of play prefaces in which she articulated her theory of theater and drama, Baillie has suffered the fate of nearly all of the remarkable women who wrote for and about the theater between 1798 and 1832: their contributions have, until recently, been forgotten, neglected, or dismissed. In Baillie's case, this fate is all the more striking given that a number of her contemporaries readily acknowledged her significance.⁴ Mary Berry, to whom a copy of Baillie's first volume of plays was sent in 1798, summarizes the tone of the early responses to Baillie's work: “everybody talks in raptures (I always thought they deserved) of the tragedies and of the introduction as of a new and admirable piece of criticism.”⁵ The “rapture” of Elizabeth Inchbald survives in the introductory preface to Baillie's tragedy De Monfort in the British Theatre series (1806-9): “Amongst the many female writers of this and other nations, how few have arrived at the elevated character of a woman of genius! The authoress of ‘De Monfort’ received that rare distinction, upon this her first publication.”⁶

Published anonymously in 1798 with two other plays that comprised the first part of Baillie's three-volume series called Plays on the Passions (1798-1812), De Monfort dramatizes what would become Baillie's abiding critical interest throughout her writing career, the relationship between “the closet” and public staging. In exploring this relationship, the dramaturgy of De Monfort sets in conflict two styles of performance that competed for audience attention during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the mode of statuesque stasis cultivated by the French neoclassicists and the emotive school of acting characteristic of German Romanticism.⁷ These acting styles are embodied in the social performances of the two major characters in De Monfort, a sister and brother who struggle throughout the play to enact each other's vision of the ideal gendered person. Jane De Monfort, portrayed as the epitome of perfect womanhood by the standards of middle-class London society during the Romantic era, performs with carefully controlled gesture and speech; even her simple costume evokes the classical acting mode associated with Sarah Siddons and her brother John Philip Kemble, both of whom starred in De Monfort when it was first staged in 1800.⁸ In contrast, De Monfort's inconsistent and erratic performances are filled with Sturm und Drang, anticipating the style of acting popularized by Edmund Kean in his fiery portrayals of Elizabethan and Romantic heroes when he made his stage debut in 1814. (Kean, like Kemble, also appeared as De Monfort, in 1821).

The dramaturgical tension that results from the play's conflicting acting modes suggests Baillie's ambivalence about prescribing a particular style of performance for characters navigating her fictionalized social settings. While her dramatic theory clearly expresses a preference for a more emotive, psychological style of acting, conducive to performing closeted passions in public arenas—a style that could be labeled, in the context of the Romantic period, feminine—Baillie's prefaces enact a conflict similar to that of her title character. Just as De Monfort struggles with how to perform his gender identity correctly for public audiences while still giving vent to his closeted emotion, so in her preface writing Baillie enacts her own conflicts with how to “be” a successful playwright. Despite the fact that many of her male colleagues heralded the closet as a retreat from the vulgarities of the public stage, Baillie argued that full-fledged theatrical productions could help her determine how successfully she had brought the drama of the closet into public view. Her whole body of work may be read as an attempt to negotiate the space between text and performance—between plays read and plays acted—while also negotiating a dramaturgical ambivalence about the performance of gender on and off the stage in the late eighteenth century.⁹

Elsewhere I have noted that Baillie's first play preface, the “Introductory Discourse” to the first volume of Plays on the Passions (1798), uses the trope of the closet to articulate her vision of what she believed was a new kind of play, one that focuses on the closeted passions in “an infant, growing, and repressed state”¹⁰ in order to trace their development to full-blown, mature expression.¹¹ For Baillie, the closet is the location of some of the most interesting theater, because here one may observe how public and private identities diverge. The closet is not, as the term came to be associated with the Romantic blank verse dramas, the site of the unperformable, the disembodied, or the only read. For in contrast to a number of her contemporaries for whom the closet play signaled a retreat from the stage, Baillie struggled to disassociate herself from the antitheatrical sentiment that permeated Romantic criticism. This struggle makes her theory important for closet drama revisionists, who have recently begun to argue against the traditional dismissal of closet plays as undramatic and unactable. These theorists view closet drama, by virtue of its anomalous position in theater history, as indispensable to their reconsideration of the traditional use of critical terms and categories. Michael Evenden, for example, has sought alternative models of theatrical staging in the closet plays of Seneca, Roswitha, Byron, Stein, and Brecht, recognizing that the closet play offers theater historians a genre whose very dramaturgy raises questions about the relationship between performance and theoretical endeavor.¹²

Appropriately, in an era that famously dichotomized the activities of playreading and theatergoing, Baillie attended in the prefaces and letters that she wrote after 1804 to the boundaries that separate dramatic literature into “drama” (playscript) and “literature.” Often, she expressed her regret that even her most loyal fans (with the general exception of Walter Scott) did not readily identify her as a playwright of the theater. In an earlier letter (1804) to William Sotheby she had urged against “setting me aside as a closet writer” because a “play certainly is more perfect for being fitted to play upon the stage as well as the closet,”

and why should I not aim with all my strength to make my things as perfect as possible, however short I may fall of the mark. Don't be afraid that I shall injure them as reading plays on this account. It is endeavouring to suit pieces to the temporary circumstances of particular theatres, and not to the stage in general that injures them in this way. One who never expects as long as she lives to see a play of her own acted, and who never intends to offer a play to any theatres under their present management, is not very likely to do her works much harm by keeping the stage in her eye.¹³

Indeed, Baillie's prefaces show her negotiating the space between what Harry Berger has described (in reference to contemporary Shakespearean criticism) as “New Histrionicism” and “conventional armchair reading”;¹⁴ her theoretical interest in the movement between closeting and uncloseting passion finds a parallel in her characters' negotiation of several identities as they discover the difficulty of performing a single socially sanctioned gender role. In order to navigate what Count Freberg in De Monfort refers to positively as “the culture of kind intercourse” (3.2, 90)—an ideology that extols politely superficial behavior so as to reinforce rigid class and gender distinctions¹⁵—some of Baillie's characters choose performance modes that demonstrate how gender identity may be viewed as a theatrical “act.”¹⁶

The relationship between performance style and gender in Baillie's plays is clarified by Judith Butler. Butler draws upon phenomenology to assert that the successful social actor, like the theater performer, has managed to memorize a script in which the boundaries for the performance of gender identity have been carefully delineated. This circumstance occurs as the result of an often arduous process similar to the rehearsal period preceding a play in which a culture's “directors” shape the body of the social performer to meet spectatorial demands. Butler stresses the community effort behind this project to remind us that one does not perform his/her identity in isolation—as a role put on and discarded as easily as one might exchange a theatrical costume. Rather, the performance of gender constitutes and is the product of a complex act shaped by many people. Butler exposes the difficulties inherent in resisting cultural imperatives to perform gender in scripted ways, as well as suggests how one might gain greater control over one's performance of gender in the course of any social interaction.¹⁷

Moving from Butler's postmodernist feminist perspective back to De Monfort brings into focus the play's equation of socially successful characters with carefully prescribed ways of acting gender. It also reveals those moments when characters in De Monfort alternate between several social postures as a means of exerting cultural critique. This alternation does not in itself reveal a recognition that “the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated” (Butler, “Performative Acts, 528), but it does signal the dramaturgy's preoccupation with identity as performative. For it is in the improvisational moment—in that instant when a character experiments with a variety of performance modes—that he or she can be said to express an unease or weariness with, or even a distrust of, traditional social performance methods. Although this essay does not have space to discuss explicitly the development of a “feminine” or “feminist” theory of Romantic acting and the cultural implications of that development, it points toward such an exploration by locating in Baillie's plays a debate about performance style and its corresponding assumptions about gender identity.

Baillie's overt commentaries on acting appear primarily in 1812, when she wrote her preface to the third volume of Plays on the Passions, but they are also forecast in 1798, in the “Introductory Discourse” that she attached to the series' first volume. Baillie valued the “natural and genuine acting” cultivated in the smaller “country theatres” because this mode allowed for “that variety of fine fleeting emotion which nature in moments of agitation assumes” (“Preface to the third volume of Plays on the Passions” [1812], 232-33). Such emotional “variety” was the central focus of Baillie's “passion plays.” As an antidote to the “exaggerated but false” (232) acting style encouraged by the large auditoriums of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, Baillie argued for the preservation of rural training grounds that would develop in actors a method analogous to “a rough forest of our native land,” to the “oak, the elm, the hazel … the bramble” and the “humble cottage” (“Introductory Discourse,” 6). Her theory of performance, with its vision of secret souls coming uncloseted, certainly cried out for the acting methods of the impassioned Edmund Kean rather than the emotionally distant Kemble, and, in effect, De Monfort predicts Keanian acting through its portrayal of the title character. Indeed, according to Jeffrey Cox, Baillie's plays may be read as investigating “the ways in which … the acting style of Mrs. Siddons entrap[s] women within conventional forms of emotional response” (Seven Gothic Dramas, 57). By speculating how “the gradual unfolding of the passions” (“Preface to the third volume,” 232) might occur within the soliloquies of her plays, Baillie's theoretical discourse likewise is prophetic. Her plays are designed for actors capable of performing in a style that would come to be called “romantic,” making use of “muttered, imperfect articulation, which grows by degrees into words”; “that heavy, suppressed voice, as of one speaking through sleep”; “that rapid burst of sounds which often succeeds the slow languid tones of distress”; “those sudden, untuned exclamations … with all the corresponding variety of countenance that belongs to it” (232-33).

Before looking more closely at De Monfort, the play that received the most stage productions during Baillie's lifetime (Aloma Noble documents fourteen different mountings), I will briefly trace its dramaturgical contours. Set in Germany in an unspecified era (in keeping with the tendency of English plays in the 1790s to draw on German culture for translations, technique, and stage devices), the play concerns De Monfort's ungovernable disdain for Rezenvelt, a man whose talent for performing the cultural code of polite behavior arouses De Monfort's fury. The play starts with De Monfort's arrival at the Frebergs' estate; he has found it necessary to flee his home and beloved sister, Jane, because Rezenvelt has made De Monfort beholden to him by sparing his life in a duel (an event that will occur again during the drama). Jane De Monfort, described from play's start as the consummate social performer, soon follows De Monfort to the Frebergs and urges him to make peace with Rezenvelt, who has also arrived on the scene. But although De Monfort tries to please Jane De Monfort by going through a public ritual in which he expresses his intent to behave according to the cultural code, his performed reconciliation with Rezenvelt is short-lived. Conrad, “an artful knave,” repeats to De Monfort rumors about an attraction between Jane De Monfort and Rezenvelt. From this moment, De Monfort no longer tries to closet his overwhelming passion: he murders Rezenvelt in a wild wood. Apprehended and taken to a convent, De Monfort's greatest trial occurs when he must confront his sister, who persists in trying to persuade him to behave according to her vision of the manly man and noble brother. After nursing him for a short interval until he dies, supposedly from remorse, Jane De Monfort eulogizes De Monfort as someone who should be remembered, although the play does not make it clear on what basis her brother merits such adulation. The final scene, which Baillie later suggested might be unnecessary in a future staging¹⁸, seems indispensable in light of the play's preoccupation with both closeted and public performances. It shows Jane De Monfort performing a eulogy of De Monfort in which she lauds him as “noble” (a synonym in the play for the admirable social actor) in spite of his having committed an inexcusable crime.

That the play is titled De Monfort should not, as Cox has suggested, compel readers to focus solely on the way in which the dramaturgy moves the male member of the De Monfort family through the culture of the play. Why Jane De Monfort has so much at stake in De Monfort's performance of the politely aristocratic and emotionally repressed man is one of the play's more interesting questions. One can certainly sympathize with Jane De Monfort's compulsion to act as guardian of a particular code of behavior even while observing that her commitment to a particular performance of gender oppresses both her and her brother. For Jane De Monfort seems so bent on assuring herself that De Monfort has indeed performed according to her ideal that she spends time telling others how to interpret his public scenes. When, for instance, Freberg calls De Monfort “suspicious grown” at the start of the play, Jane De Monfort counters with language suggesting that De Monfort is only masking his true identity, urging the count toward an alternative interpretation:

Not so, Count Freberg; Monfort is too noble.
Say rather, that he is a man in grief,
Wearing at times a strange and scowling eye;
And thou, less generous than beseems a friend,
Hast thought too hardly of him.

(2.1, 82, my emphasis)

Jane De Monfort also rescues from De Monfort's murder of Rezenvelt an interpretation that maintains the illusion of his heroic stature. Knowing that he has killed a man because he hates him so intensely, still Jane De Monfort distinguishes De Monfort from more common criminals: “He died that death which best becomes a man, / Who is with keenest sense of conscious ill / And deep remorse assail'd, a wounded spirit. / A death that kills the noble and the brave, / And only them” (5.6, 103, my emphasis). Straining on, she ends the play with an epitaph that rings hollowly: De Monfort's “nameless tomb” will be consecrated to one “[w]ho, but for one dark passion, one dire deed, / Had claim'd a record of as noble worth, / As e'er enrich'd the sculptur'd pedestal” (5.6, 104, my emphasis). Of course, this “one dire deed” is one too many. Jane De Monfort may try to minimize De Monfort's murderous action in the interest of proclaiming his “dignity,” but her words do not convince. Instead of speaking “what we feel, not what we ought to say” as Edgar urges at the end of King Lear (5.3.322)—the play to which Baillie alludes several times and that, perhaps more than any other Shakespearean drama, argues against the use of “pomp” and empty rhetoric—Jane De Monfort seems driven to control public opinion about her brother's identity, to cast De Monfort in the mold of an idealized hero whom the play never shows us. This is because the play's focus is elsewhere: on the charting of discrepancies between the noble, manly figure whom Jane De Monfort desires and De Monfort's oscillation between identities both sanctioned and devalued by the play's culture and clearly allied with closeted and public spaces as well as with the performance of gender.

From the beginning of the play, De Monfort is described in ways that forecast the typical Romantic hero, also prefiguring, as Joseph Donohue has noted, Byron's antisocial and melancholy protagonist in Manfred (1817) (Dramatic Character, 81), and, one could add, Emily Brontë's Heathcliff. De Monfort's “violent conflict of mind” (5.6, 103), his sporadic desire for oblivion—“I now am nothing,” he says toward play's end, “I am … / Out of the pale of social kindred cast” (5.4, 99)—as well as his characterization of himself as “a sullen wanderer on the earth” (2.2, 85), comprise, from Donohue's perspective, an innovation in the English theater's development of dramatic character for which Baillie is responsible. She redefines the “Fletcherian disjunction of character and event” as “an ethical disjunction of human virtue from human acts,” internalizing the Gothic tradition of allowing “an event that took place years before … to exert its effects thereafter” (Dramatic Character, 81).

Reminiscent also of the Gothic villain-hero that Ann Radcliffe popularized in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797),¹⁹ De Monfort is presented as a personality whose agony is self-inflicted and whose sense of identity is confused. In contrast to Jane De Monfort's seemingly unreflective enactment of her social role of noble womanhood, De Monfort arrives on the scene a self-consciously troubled person, and others recognize the change: from “comely gentleman” his hatred for Rezenvelt has transformed him into one who now possesses “that gloomy sternness in his eye / Which powerfully repels all sympathy” (1.1, 77). De Monfort's oscillation between hidden and uncloseted pensiveness is also contrasted with the consistently cheerful actions of the revel-loving Frebergs, who seem to live from one “midnight mask” to another. Theirs is a world of flattery, of false, feigned and indiscriminate friendships, of hyperbolic and superficial discourse. “[A]ll men are thy friends” (1.2, 80), De Monfort complains to Freberg, whose grand gestures are evocative of the “exaggerated” and “false” acting style indigenous to the large, licensed London theaters that Baillie criticized in her preface to the third volume of Plays on the Passions (1812).

De Monfort protests against the kind of cheerful social theater that his acquaintances perform, and he often tries to read bodies for the discrepancies between what they reveal and conceal. In De Monfort's view, Rezenvelt must mask a soul corrupt in proportion to the zealous consistency with which he enacts the fluttering, chivalric courtier. That others do not seem to mind Rezenvelt's exaggerated gesture causes De Monfort no end of agony. The ecumenical Freberg, for instance, wants the two men to reconcile, exulting that Rezenvelt is “so full of pleasant anecdote, / So rich, so gay, so poignant in his wit, / Time vanishes before him as he speaks, / And ruddy morning through the lattice peeps / Ere night seems well begun” (1.2, 78).

Nor can Jane De Monfort appreciate De Monfort's desire to wear openly his hatred for Rezenvelt, even though she begs him to confess to her his feelings. At the start of the drama De Monfort has left Jane De Monfort precisely because he knows that, in her presence, he may not experiment with performing as the spoiler of social play because she directs his social behavior with an eye to audience approval. Once at the Frebergs', however, he does experiment with a number of performance modes that confound his social audience, and by act 4, when he duels with Rezenvelt, he dares to shout, “now all forms are over” (4.2, 94). These “forms” refer to what Freberg has earlier called the “culture of kind intercourse” (3.2, 90), a system requiring an upbeat cheerfulness to mask “open villainy” (4.2, 94) or any expression not in the social repertoire. While De Monfort's rebellion against the “forms” finds its most extreme expression in his murder of Rezenvelt, this rebellion may also be read as either a conscious or unconscious resistance to imitating the performance style embodied by Jane De Monfort, a style grand and classical, indeed antithetical to the performance mode that Baillie discusses in her prefaces as conducive to bodying forth the subtleties of a character's most intimate passions.

Jane De Monfort's enactment of what Mary Poovey has at length described as the early-nineteenth-century “proper lady”—self-censoring, self-effacing, and self-sacrificial—is symbolized by her “homely” dress (2.1, 82) that arouses the envy of Countess Freberg; other characters (especially the count) respond to Jane De Monfort's plain clothes with enthusiasm: “Such artless and majestic elegance, / So exquisitely just, so nobly simple, / Will make the gorgeous blush” (2.1, 82), Freberg says, pointing directly to Jane De Monfort's clothing. The play's preoccupation with women's dress is significant from a feminist perspective, for throughout Western history, costume (both on and off the stage) has been used to gender the wearer and thus create and transmit messages about a person's political position. While Anne Hollander has urged scholars to study costumes “not primarily as cultural by-products or personal expressions but as connected links in a creative tradition of image-making,”²⁰ she reminds us of the cultural connotations of middle-eighteenth-century theater stage dress: classical drapery, for example, signaled that the wearer possessed an affinity for “simple truth” (p. 276). Because Jane De Monfort wears simpler lines, the dramaturgy suggests that she is to be read not only as more tasteful but also as more trustworthy, as the voice of rectitude and unshakable virtue. On the one hand, female costume and makeup are described in the play as producing “grafted charms, / Blending in one the sweets of many plants” (2.1, 83), but on the other, women who use theatrical techniques to embellish and disguise themselves are targeted as masking their actual loss of youth, physical attractiveness, naturalness, and “couth.” Their theatrical impulse evokes the fear that female identity is unstable; the prude and the coquette might, through artifice, transform their physicalities into social bodies that appear interchangeable. At the Frebergs' party in act 2, for example, Rezenvelt describes the process by which theatrical devices can obscure the “true” identity of the female performer:

                                                                      Aged youth,
With borrowed locks, in rosy chaplets bound,
Clothes her dim eye, parch'd lips, and skinny cheek
In most unlovely softness:
And youthful age, with fat round trackless face,
The downcast look of contemplation deep
Most pensively assumes.
Is it not even so? The native prude,
With forced laugh, and merriment uncouth,
Plays off the wild coquette's successful charms
With most unskilful pains; and the coquette,
In temporary crust of cold reserve,
Fixes her studied looks upon the ground,
Forbiddingly demure.

(2.1, 83)

The count's reaction to his wife's “gaudy” party costume and the dressing room scene that follows in act 3 serve to set the countess against Jane De Monfort for the purpose, it would seem, of underscoring the “desirable” traits of noble womanhood and for suggesting that, in the world of De Monfort, a woman's true character can be known through the semiotics of costume.²¹

When Jane De Monfort exits to prepare for the Frebergs' party (ironically, to dress herself in the countess's clothes in order to have access to her brother's unguarded confessions), the count expresses his dissatisfaction with his wife by berating her dress code: “How hang those trappings on thy motley gown?” he asks. “They seem like garlands on a May-day queen, / Which hinds have dress'd in sport” (2.1, 83). This is but one of several instances when Freberg portrays the countess as an unsuccessful performer of femininity, whose fashion blunders are emblematic of her failure to approach Jane De Monfort's moral rectitude and propriety. The play even suggests that the countess's gaudy taste signals a deceptive “nature,” since she may be regarded as ultimately responsible for inflaming De Monfort to commit murder. The lie that she spreads about Jane De Monfort and Rezenvelt kindles De Monfort's rage, which results in his killing Rezenvelt and then dying himself. Yet the misogyny that lies just beneath the surface of characters' chuckles about the “art” of “female cultivation” (2.1, 83), an art in which the much-maligned Countess Freberg is well practiced, might caution us against condemning the countess too readily. While Jane De Monfort's comparatively “simple” and natural style of speech and dress is valorized, the play also troubles her adherence to a code of behavior in which passionate outburst, improvisational acting—even gaudy costumes—are looked askance at in social performance.

The dramaturgical ambivalence toward the play's dominant performance styles emerges more clearly in act 2, when De Monfort and Rezenvelt nearly come to blows over the issue of who may touch Jane De Monfort's “thick black veil” (2.1, 84). At this moment Jane De Monfort's significance recedes in the face of the men's intense responses to each other as they move toward Jane De Monfort's stark hymenal costume. De Monfort may be dedicated to the idea of Jane De Monfort's chaste devotion to him and, with pride, describe how she has become “the virgin mother of an orphan'd race” (2.1, 84), but he is even more committed to the idea that Rezenvelt “woos” his hate. Certainly, De Monfort seems most confused about his sexuality and gendered identity when he is in his enemy's presence, casting him as a kind of Satan to his Eve—calling Rezenvelt “fiend,” “devil,” “villain,” and “serpent”—and locating Rezenvelt's power in his potential not only to seduce his sister but also to cause De Monfort to lose control of the tenor of his social acting.

Indeed, Rezenvelt raises the possibility that De Monfort is fighting his physical charms at the Frebergs' party. Smiling “archly” (according to the stage directions) because De Monfort refuses to be sociable, Rezenvelt says that, were De Monfort to “swerve” from his “native self” and “grace my folly with a smile of his,” one might call him a “woman turn'd” (2.1, 83). While De Monfort tries to distinguish himself from those who are “besotted” and “bewitched” by Rezenvelt, his obsession with the marquis signals a complicated, closeted longing for the knowledge of a (perhaps sexual) experience outside his own, a desire that instead takes the form of a frenzied murder and, shortly to follow, De Monfort's expulsion from the “culture of kind intercourse.”

After the murder, Jane De Monfort again tries to inspire De Monfort to perform according to the culture's standard for the socially valuable man. The stage directions tell us that De Monfort “endeavour[s] to look cheerful” (5.4, 101) as he leads Jane De Monfort from the convent to the prison. Perhaps because he has earlier failed to perform to her satisfaction in the reconciliation scene with Rezenvelt, De Monfort tries harder now. In act 3, De Monfort had resisted Rezenvelt's proffered bear hug (“I'll have thee [De Monfort] to my breast,” Rezenvelt exults), having said throughout the play that he cannot act what he does not feel: “I will not offer you an hand of concord, / And poorly hide the motives which constrain me” (3.2, 90). The public aspect of this third act scene—the fact that spectators assemble to watch De Monfort perform his apologies—pleases Jane De Monfort but is exactly what De Monfort rejects: “Must all the world upon our meeting stare?” he asks her before the Frebergs troop onto the stage (3.2, 89).

While at play's end De Monfort is so grateful for Jane De Monfort's presence that he assumes a posture that she can describe as “noble”—restraining his outbursts and behaving with enough classical stoicism to earn her posthumous praise—his countenance and language throughout the drama indicate his recognition that social intercourse frequently requires the performance of identities that cannot be anticipated, cataloged, or consistently defined. One of the reasons that De Monfort keeps butting up against the play's valuation of an ostensibly cheerful restraint that manifests itself in a stiff and carefully controlled gestus is that his spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings works against the cultivation of a single, unified identity with which to perform in social settings. De Monfort's general refusal to act in a familiar and consistent way challenges other characters' seeming desire to hold onto a society in which class and gender performances are carefully rehearsed, where the improvisational mode is contrasted unfavorably with the French neoclassical style. De Monfort's is an interestingly uncomfortable character primarily because he will not let others forget that they have adopted performance modes that allow them to glide by each other without the trauma of confronting their closeted selves, their secret longings, their hidden responses to a power structure at odds with unmediated expression. De Monfort's repression of his hatred, his attempt to meet the public with a “tamed countenance” (3.2, 88), has only ensured that he will, whenever he is alone, give vent “to all the fury of gesture” of which he is capable (2.1, 80). His resistance to performing a single identity in a socially sanctioned performance style ultimately results in the violent consummation he so fears: murdering Rezenvelt, he knits their fates together; in the last scene the bodies of both men, swaddled in black, lie close to each other on a low table. It is this aspect of the play that suggests it is a “closet drama” in the contemporary sense: the story of sexual suppression and of the horrific consequences that follow.

In recent years, discussions about canon formation have revealed that, when a writer like Baillie is dropped from anthologies of English Romantic literature and collections of plays, we should suspect the canonizers' motives rather than automatically doubt the author's historical, intellectual, or cultural worth. Terry Eagleton, for example, has intensively analyzed the ways in which aesthetic judgments mask ideology.²² Theater historians and literary critics have also begun to examine how ideology informs the traditional dismissal of closet drama and Romantic theater, focusing on closet playwrights in order to reconsider such categories as “theatricality,” “the dramatic,” and “performability.” Are closet dramas less theatrical because, as is the case with Baillie's canon, they did not often receive the stage productions that the author desired? What does it mean to describe a work of dramatic literature as unperformable? Might a play labeled “literary” rather than “theatrical” teach us about shifting concepts of the dramatic as we ask in whose terms, in what settings, and for what kinds of audiences certain plays have been removed to the library? As we turn to Baillie's work in the future, specifically De Monfort, it is important to keep in mind that distinctions used in the past to shelve closet drama from view—distinctions between stage and page, mind and body, text and performance—are coming under such scrutiny that Julie Carlson's suggestion that we now have the opportunity to experience a “new stage for romantic drama” (p. 419) seems a real possibility.²³

A contemporary production of De Monfort that stresses the play's various performance modes as an index to the conflicting acting methods on the London stage, which were, in turn, allied with cultural attitudes toward gender, is ultimately about the similarities and differences between one historical moment and another. The issue of closeting and uncloseting identity that De Monfort dramatizes so beautifully and that is an important feature of Baillie's canon (from the early comedy, The Trial [1798], to Rayner [1804] and later works such as Orra [1812] and The Bride [1826]) links Baillie's work to the project of contemporary theater artists, some of whom are trying to establish a tradition of women who have theorized the stage. It is my hope that when readers become more familiar with Baillie's canon of plays, as well as with her theory of theater and dramatic criticism, they will discover that Baillie's importance to the Romantic period and to our own era lies less in her identity as a female playwright than in her concept of the closet as a showcase for the subtle mechanisms that women theater artists in the Romantic era developed for questioning the ideological restraints that governed—and still govern—gendered experience. If the (re)discovery of Baillie's significance continues apace, then Mary Russell Mitford will have been prophetic when she wrote, shortly after Baillie's death: “of Mrs. Joanna Baillie, the praised of Scott and of all whose praise is best worth having for half a century, what can I say, but that many an age will echo back their applause!”²⁴

Notes

1. Virgina Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929; reprint, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 45.

2. For reevaluations of Baillie's work, see Stuart Curran, “Romantic Poetry: The ‘I’ Altered,” in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 185-207, and Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). For Baillie's influence on Mary Brunton's novel Self Control (1810), see Mary McKerrow, “Joanna Baillie and Mary Brunton: Women of the Manse,” in Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers, ed. Dale Spender (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992): 160-74, and Daniel P. Watkins's materialist analysis of De Monfort in “Class, Gender, and Social Motion in Joanna Baillie's De Monfort,” The Wordsworth Circle 23.2 (1992): 109-117. Other reassessments of Baillie may be found in P. M. Zall, “The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Question of Joanna Baillie, Wordsworth Circle 23.1 (1982): 17-20; Barbara Schnorrenberg, “Joanna Baillie,” A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660-1800, ed. Janet Todd (London: Methuen, 1987), 35-36; Priscilla Dorr, “Joanna Baillie,” in An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, ed. Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter (New York: Garland Press, 1988) 15-16; Catherine B. Burroughs, “Joanna Baillie,” Encyclopedia of Romanticism: Culture in Britain from the 1780s to 1830s, ed. Laura Dabundo (New York: Garland Press, 1992): 21-23. See also my “English Romantic Women Writers and Theatre Theory: Joanna Baillie's Prefaces to the Plays on the Passions,” in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). For Baillie's centrality to the Gothic tradition, see the introduction to Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825, ed. Jeffrey Cox (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992).

   For earlier criticism of Baillie's work, see Joseph Donohue, Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970) and Theatre in the Age of Kean (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975); A. G. Lasch, “Joanna Baillie's De Monfort in Relation to Her Theory of Tragedy,” Durham University Journal 23 (1961): 114-20; Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947); M. Norton, “The Plays of Joanna Baillie,” Review of English Studies 23 (1947): 131-43; and Margaret Carhart, The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie, vol. 64 of Yale Studies in English, ed. Albert S. Cook (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1923).

3. Carhart (Life and Work, 109) lists seven of Baillie's plays as having been professionally staged, but, as Noble notes, she provides no account of the production(s) of Basil. Noble has compiled a helpful record of the productions of Baillie's plays that occurred between 1800 and 1836 in England, Scotland, Ireland, and the United States. She lists productions of six, rather than seven, plays (Aloma Noble, “Joanna Baillie as a Dramatic Artist,” [Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1983]: 188-93).

4. Mary McKerrow, “Joanna Baillie and Mary Brunton,” has called attention to the following passage in Walter Scott's introduction to the third canto of Marmion (1808), in which the footnote identifies “the bold Enchantress” as Joanna Baillie and refers to two of the three plays in her first volume of Plays on the Passions (1798):

   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.

   (pp. 90-91, my emphases)

   In her introduction to De Monfort in the British Theatre series, Elizabeth Inchbald sought to distinguish between Baillie and Shakespeare, even though she called Baillie a “genius” in the same preface (Remarks for the British Theatre (1806-09) [Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1990]).

5. Mary Berry, Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry, ed. Lady Theresa Lewis, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Greens, and Company, 1865), 2:88.

6. Inchbald, Remarks for the British Theatre, n.p.

7. For a fuller discussion of the Romantic debate about acting style, see the following: Lily Campbell, “The Rise of a Theory of Stage Presentation in England during the Eighteenth Century,” PMLA 32.2 (1917): 163-200; Alan S. Downer, “Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth-Century Acting,” PMLA 58.4 (1943): 1002-37, and “Players and Painted Stage: Nineteenth-Century Acting,” PMLA 61.2 (1946): 522-76; William Angus, “Actors and Audiences in Eighteenth-Century London,” Studies in Speech and Drama in Honor of Alexander M. Drummond (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1944): 123-38; Earl Wasserman, “The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Acting,” Journal of English and German Philology 46 (1947): 264-72; Carol J. Carlisle's “Edmund Kean on the Art of Acting,” Theatre Notebook 12.3 (1968): 119-20; Gloria Flaherty, “Empathy and Distance: Romantic Theories of Acting Reconsidered,” Theatre Research International 15.2 (1990): 125-41; Bryan Forbes, That Despicable Race: A History of the British Acting Tradition (London: Elm Tree Books, 1980); Joseph R. Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985); Monica Murray, “English Theater Costume and the Zeitgeist of the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 265 (1989): 1340-43.

8. See Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, for an excellent discussion of how Baillie sought to “draw upon the power of Siddons' performances in De Monfort” (53) in order to encourage audiences to “think about Siddons and her conventional roles” (55). His thesis, that “Baillie uses Gothic techniques to reflect upon the Gothic itself and its underlying ideology, particularly its construction of the feminine” (57), can be extended to include her investigation of masculinity as socially constructed.

9. For discussions of Romanticism and gender see especially Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Feminism; “Why Women Didn't Like Romanticism: The Views of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley,” in The Romantics and Us, ed. Gene Ruoff (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990): 274-87; and Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).

10. Joanna Baillie, “Introductory Discourse” to the first volume of Plays on the Passions (1798), in Dramatic and Poetical Works (1851; reprint, Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976), 15. All quotations throughout my text refer to this edition; in the case of the plays, I have included act, scene, and page numbers because no line numbers appear. Jeffrey Cox's edition of De Monfort has just become available to give readers a better sense of the play in performance (Seven Gothic Dramas, 83).

11. See my “English Romantic Women Writers and Theatre Theory.”

12. For further discussions of closet drama, see especially Michael Evendon, “Inter-mediate Stages: The Body in ‘Closet Drama,’” in Reading the Social Body, ed. Catherine B. Burroughs and Jeffrey David Ehrenreich (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1993) 244-69; Om Prakash Mathur's chapter, “The Theatre and the Closet,” in The Closet Drama of the Romantic Revival (Salzburg: Salzburg University, 1978); Murray Biggs, ed., “Byron's Sardanapulus,” Studies in Romanticism 31.3 (special issue, 1992); David Wagenknecht, ed., “The Borderers: A Forum,” Studies in Romanticism 27.3 (special issue, 1988); Richard Allen Cave, “Romantic Drama in Performance: Goethe and Schiller,” Keats-Shelley Review (1988): 108-20; and Terence A. Hoagwood and Daniel P. Watkins, ed., “Romantic Drama: Historical and Critical Essays,” The Wordsworth Circle 23.2 (special issue, 1992).

13. Baillie to William Sotheby, 12 December 1804, “The Letters of Joanna Baillie (1801-1832),” ed. Chester Lee Lamberton (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1956). In his unpublished dissertation, Lamberton compiled a complete edition of the letters by Baillie that have survived into the twentieth century.

14. Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1989), xii.

15. Class and gender conflicts in De Monfort are discussed from a materialist perspective in Daniel P. Watkins, “Class, Gender, and Social Motion in Joanna Baillie's De Monfort,” The Wordsworth Circle 23.2 (1992): 109-17.

16. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-31.

17. Butler's essay (see n. 16) evokes the work of feminist theater theorists like Sue-Ellen Case, Jill Dolan, and Elin Diamond, who suggest that fundamental changes in theatrical staging can effect transformations in the way that women are treated in social arenas. See Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988); neither Dolan nor Diamond are in the Works Cited list. Butler's postmodernist theory and the feminist materialist arguments of Case, Dolan, and Diamond constitute the most recent phase of feminist theater scholarship, which has, as Susan Steadman notes in her overview (Dramatic Re-Visions: An Annotated Bibliography of Feminism and Theatre, 1972-1988 [Chicago and London: American Library Association, 1991], 29), paralleled the contributions of feminist literary critics between 1972 and 1988.

18. In a footnote attached to the 1851 edition of her collected works, Baillie wrote: “Should this play [De Monfort] ever again be acted, perhaps it would be better that the curtain should drop here [5.4]; since here the story may be considered as completed, and what comes after, prolongs the piece too much when our interest for the fate is at an end” (101).

19. See Donohue (Dramatic Character) and Cox (Seven Gothic Dramas) for discussions of Baillie and the Gothic tradition.

20. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984); Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Viking Press, 1978), xvi.

21. Another paper is required to investigate the extent to which women in Romantic theater protested the culture's tendency to read character through costume (and, in the case of female actors, to confuse the adorned body of the performer with the behavior of the wearer, especially since women actors often wore their own clothes and jewelry on London stages). Baillie's dueling dress codes in De Monfort set the stage for such an inquiry. For a helpful article, which includes a discussion of Siddons's interest in drapery costume, see Lily Campbell, “A History of Costuming on the English Stage Between 1660-1823,” Collected Papers of Lily B. Campbell (1918; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 103-39.

22. See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

23. Julie Carlson, “A New Stage for Romantic Drama,” Studies in Romanticism 27.3 (1988).

24. Mary Russell Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life: or, Books, Places, and People, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), I, 242.