SOURCE: Burroughs, Catherine B. “‘A Reasonable Woman's Desire’: The Private Theatrical and Joanna Baillie's The Tryal.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1996): 265-84.

[In the following essay, Burroughs examines Baillie's exploration in The Tryal of the “theatre of the closet,” or private theatricals performed by amateurs to invited audiences, showing that Baillie presents amateur acting as a means by which women could have temporary control of their domestic spaces.]

Designed primarily to amuse those who had enough money to buy off boredom, late eighteenth-century British private theatricals were often unabashedly elitist projects not only in the sense that many took place in exclusive environments but because they required—in addition to time—a great deal of money to arrange. Sybil Rosenfeld writes that Lord Barrymore's expenses for cake alone at the opening night reception of his private theater at Wargrave in 1789 were “rumoured” to be £20, small change after the £60,000 that was spent on the theater building itself.¹ To overcome the luxury of boredom is the impetus behind the staging of Elizabeth Inchbald's 1798 translation of August von Kotzebue's Lovers' Vows (1791) in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), perhaps the best-known work of literature that features the late eighteenth-century phenomenon of amateur acting. The eagerness with which most of Mansfield's youthful residents embrace John Yates's proposal to put on a play is not only indicative of “a love of the theatre,” which the narrative labels “so general.”² Yates arrives onto an already indolent scene embodied by the frequently supine Lady Bertram, and his proposal to do a private theatrical follows on a painfully aimless visit to Mr. Rushworth's country house during which each person's “spirits were in general exhausted.”³

From the perspective of a feminist theater historian, however, the exclusivity of private theatricals was important for providing certain women (and sometimes their servants) with a forum for experimenting with the theater arts.⁴ It would be misleading to suggest that British private theatricals constituted some sort of avant-garde movement at the height of their vogue (1780-1810).⁵ Even though new works were performed on private stages, they often derived from the canonical plays⁶ that dominated eighteenth-century patent theaters and which comprised the bulk of private theatrical offerings.⁷ Yet because private entertainments were usually produced in isolated settings—making theatrical activity accessible to a group of people who were not necessarily theatergoers—they inevitably deviated from London productions in spirit; they were certainly more conducive to spontaneity. Often rehearsed in the context of a house party that could go on for several weeks and in small spaces that rendered more permeable the customary barriers between spectator and actor, the private theatrical could offer its participants a deeply personal and imaginative experience, not only allowing for a great deal of playfulness and delight in the act of improvisation but also encouraging a serious self-consciousness about the performative features of social acting.

Because scholars have been preoccupied with debating the degree to which the turn to the closet in the period's canonized theater criticism does—or does not—express an “antitheatrical prejudice,” the actual theater that was produced in the closeted spaces of the private sphere during the romantic period has often been overlooked. This theater of the closet, while not exclusive to women, was particularly friendly to women's creative endeavors, and it is this theatrical context that Joanna Baillie's earliest comedy, The Tryal (1798), explores. Written during the British private theater movement and considered for a private theatrical production at Bentley Priory in 1803, The Tryal probes some of the tensions caused by the trend among certain aristocratic women to write and direct improvisational performances in domestic space. Through the character of Agnes Withrington, an heiress who directs two women in a plot designed to determine the motives of the men who would marry her, The Tryal looks closely at those “ordinary” and “familiar” circumstances that comprised “Characteristic Comedy,” Baillie's term for plays like her own that featured emotional trials on domestic stages.

Defined as “performance wholly or mainly by amateurs [presented] to selected or invited audiences, as opposed to the general public,”⁸ private theatricals are usually distinguished in narratives of theater history from those plays that were acted privately by professionals.⁹ Therefore, as Sybil Rosenfeld notes, the first amateur actors in England may be considered the priests and guild members who performed church-sponsored mystery and morality plays.¹⁰ By contrast, because the performers of early Tudor “household revels” were on retainer as specialists of acting, they conform to a position that we would today refer to with the label “professional.”¹¹ As Keith Sturgess has written, by 1620 the word “private” in reference to theater meant that a play was to be performed “indoors,”¹² and these private theaters—conceived along the lines of “a club, an academy, and an art-house”¹³—were attended largely by aristocratic audiences looking to distance themselves from the rowdier playgoers of outdoor stages. The associations of aristocracy with theater in an exclusive setting were reinforced by seventeenth-century masques and “aristocratic entertainments,” such as John Milton's Arcades performed at Harefield in the early 1630s. Yet the rage for private theaters in England did not take off until the eighteenth century, when this mostly aristocratic pastime was encouraged by developments in France, which had more than sixty private theaters by 1750 in Paris alone¹⁴ and during the latter quarter of the century boasted variations on the private theatrical, such as the pornographic dramas often featured in “clandestine theatres.”¹⁵

These “clandestine theatres” require a brief mention here, since the fact that French women “assumed great importance in the development of this theatre culture”¹⁶ points to some parallels in Great Britain. Neither England, Scotland, Ireland, nor Wales produced a figure comparable to France's Duchess de Villeroi, who—in a move forecasting certain aspects of feminist theater in the 1980s¹⁷—sometimes excluded men from the audience for the purpose of featuring “plays glorifying lesbian love and setting the scene for huge sapphic orgies involving women from the opera and the Comedie Francaise.”¹⁸ But just as the private theater scene in mid-eighteenth-century France had its Marie-Antoinette and Marie-Madeleine Guimard, and the German court theater Charlotte von Stein in the 1770s,¹⁹ so the British private theatrical community enjoyed the passionate commitment to private entertainment of many (primarily aristocratic) women.

By organizing, sponsoring, writing, and performing in private theatricals, eighteenth-century women were following the example set in earlier eras by English aristocrats such as Alice Spenser, Dowager Countess of Derby, who acted in Jacobean masques and attended country-house entertainments,²⁰ Queen Henrietta Maria, who in the early seventeenth century took the then unusual step of appearing in two court pastorals,²¹ and the Princesses Mary and Anne, who performed in Crowne's Calisto in 1675. By the dawn of the next century it was not unusual to find wealthy women directing their children, grandchildren, or friends in an evening of theater for which they were the primary organizers, or writing plays for them, as in the case of the Countess of Hardwicke, whose Court of Oberon blended together a French piece with her original composition in order to “render it more suitable to her juvenile performers, the youngest of whom was but two years old.”²² An anonymous letter to the editor of the European Magazine written in 1788 indicates how firmly the private theater movement had taken hold by century's end:

The practice of people of distinction and fortune to erect theatres, and commence actors to perform in them, en famille, is now so general, and is indeed, under certain restrictions, so very praise-worthy and innocent, that a sort of general account of all the play-houses and players of ton, to be continued occasionally, would perhaps be a pleasant, not to say profitable, companion or vade-mecum to those places of resort: and it might, appositely enough, be called The Fashionable Rosciad.²³

Among the better-known amateur playwrights and actresses in Great Britain were Elizabeth Cobbold, whose memoirist wrote that not only was she “a very frequent attendant on the theatre,” but she “herself also possessed much taste and skill in dramatic composition, and wrote several pieces of great merit.”²⁴ While it was not the case, as the character of Bombast says in Archibald Maclaren's play, The Private Theatre (1809), that “little theatres furnish actors for the great, as little rivers furnish salmon for the sea,”²⁵ nevertheless amateur performer Charlotte Twistleton received acting training on the private stage at Adlestrop House sufficient to launch a professional career. Between 1780 and 1805 Elizabeth Berkeley Craven either composed, translated, adapted, or altered nineteen plays.²⁶ As Lady Craven she organized and appeared in private performances in Warwickshire, and upon relocating with her second husband from Germany to England, as the Margravine of Anspach she supervised the building and operation of a private theater in the 1790s at Brandenburgh House in Hammersmith. Here she alternately performed the functions of actress, playwright, producer, translator, musician, and singer. “My taste for music and poetry, and my style of imagination in writing, chastened by experience, were great sources of delight to me,”²⁷ she wrote in her memoirs in 1826:

I wrote The Princess of Georgia, and the Twins of Smyrna, for the Margrave's theatre, besides Nourjad and several other pieces; and for these I composed various airs in music. I invented fetes to amuse the Margrave, which afforded me a charming contrast to accounts, bills, and the changes of domestics and chamberlains, and many other things quite odious to me.²⁸

Craven's reference to the domestic context in which her comedies, pantomimes, and musical dramas were forged reminds us to pay particular attention to private settings in constructing women's theater history. For it is often in domestic spaces, far away from the traditional stage, that much of women's drama and theatrical art has actually been produced. For instance, Kirsten Gram Holmstrom's study of monodrama, “attitudes,” and tableaux vivants devotes a large portion of the text to an analysis of a trend among upper-class European women to create “mimoplastic art” in the public spaces of their homes between 1770 and 1815.²⁹ Whether striking neoclassical poses and manipulating costume pieces as in the case of Lady Emma Hamilton (whose stark gestures framed by special lighting effects anticipated photographers' models in the twentieth century), miming scenes to music as did Ida Brun,³⁰ or creating “art-historical etudes” as did Henriette Hendel-Schutz (in which academic audiences could discuss with her the intellectual and artistic choices she had made), it is clear that the domestic setting was essential to these women for developing “a new genre on the borderline between pictorial art and theatre.”³¹

Conceived and rehearsed on the homefront and attended by a group of acquaintances, friends, and relatives theoretically inclined to tolerate women's ventures into acting and playwrighting, the British private theatrical gave those who would otherwise have had no theatrical experience a mode for exploring the theater arts. In the case of professional female actors, private performances also afforded opportunities for participating in theater in ways often unavailable to them on the public stage. Professional actress Harriot Mellon complained that “there never was such a stupid task as drilling fine people!,” but an evening of private theater at Strawberry Hill was nevertheless an occasion for her to manage the stage, in addition to occupying the position of “privy-councillor in all matters relative to costume and other little etceteras known only to the initiated in Thespian mysteries.”³² Elizabeth Farren frequently undertook the task of directing the amateur actors at Richmond House's private theatricals in 1787-88, “the most fashionable and exclusive … of their time.”³³

Although women who participated in private theatricals did not own their domestic dwellings or necessarily get credit for their contributions to private entertainment, their role as organizers of domestic space gave them at least a measure of control over some of the ways in which their social identity was configured and represented. Reginald Brimsley Johnson has noted how the English bluestocking circle, for example, arranged domestic space in specific ways—from Elizabeth Montagu's semicircle to Elizabeth Vesey's zig-zags to Mrs. Ord's “chairs round a table in the centre of the room”³⁴—in order to encourage different approaches to conversational topics. The private theatrical also encouraged audiences to appreciate domestic space for the fact that it allowed them to “indulge in delicacies and subtleties that would be thrown away at Drury Lane or Covent Garden,”³⁵ a fact that could make social issues more vivid. Anthropologist Victor Turner has written at length about the idea that “theatre is the most forceful, active … genre of cultural performance, … a play society acts about itself.”³⁶ It is “this proximity of theatre to life”—in Turner's view—that “makes of it the form best fitted to comment or ‘meta-comment’ on conflict.”³⁷ “When we act in everyday life, we do not merely re-act to indicative stimuli, we act in frames we have wrested from the genres of cultural performance.” It therefore follows, Turner writes, that stage acting should concentrate on “bring[ing] into the symbolic or fictitious world the urgent problems of our reality.”³⁸

Those who made theater in their homes between 1770 and 1810 confronted the performative aspects of their actual experience through the process of self-consciously adopting roles for the private stage. Especially for women, whose performance of femininity was tested perhaps most stringently in the semipublic spaces of the domestic sphere, the private theatrical provided often unlooked-for opportunities to analyze how social identities are constructed and represented. As Bruce Wilshire has observed in Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatrical Metaphor (1982), “theatre is an aesthetic detachment from daily living that reveals the ways we are involved in daily living—particularly our empathetic and imitative involvements.”³⁹ But it was just this potential to disturb domestic harmony by revealing “the ways we are involved in daily living” that made the private theatrical particularly problematic where women were concerned.

In an essay called “Remarks upon the Present Taste for Acting Private Plays” (1788), playwright Richard Cumberland expressed his anxiety about amateurism by referring specifically to female actors in private theaters: the

Andromache of the Stage may have an infant Hector at home, whom she more tenderly feels for than the Hector of the scene; he may be sick, he may be supperless; there may be none to nurse him, when his mother is out of sight, and the maternal interest in the divided heart of the actress may preponderate over the Heroine's.⁴⁰

Disturbed by a trend in which the act of playwrighting seems demystified, is “thoroughly bottomed and laid open,” and is “now done by so many people without any difficulty at all,”⁴¹ Cumberland warned that this fashion “should be narrowly confined to certain ranks, ages, and conditions in the community at large” and that “young women of humble rank and small pretensions should be particularly cautious how a vain ambition of being noticed by their superiors betrays them into an attempt at displaying their unprotected persons on a stage, however dignified and respectable.” If they “have both acting talents and charms,”⁴² Cumberland continues, “I tremble for their danger.”

Because women powerfully influenced the dynamics of domestic space, fictional works from the British romantic period that treated the private theatrical often focused their anxiety on women characters. The issue of women acting on any stage (whether public or private) is throughout British history a source of deep concern for certain segments of the population, and the idea that closet spaces were becoming formally theatricalized during the late eighteenth century often aroused strong responses.

For instance, Richard Brinsley Peake's Amateurs and Actors (1818) links private theatricals to disorder and impropriety through a plot in which the two main female characters run amok. It is the lot of a retired manufacturer named Elderberry—“simple in wit and manners, and utterly unacquainted with Theatricals”⁴³—to try and retrieve his ward, Mary Hardacre, from an elopement that uses a private performance as a strategy to override parental consent. Mary's lover, David Dulcet, has arranged to announce their marriage to his relatives immediately after he and Mary have participated in a private production of Romeo and Juliet, which will be attended by Dulcet's family. The plot also contains the conflict between Wing and his estranged wife, Mary Goneril, a “Strolling Tragedy Actress,” who has run off with a manager but who finds herself employed to act Juliet on the same private stage with her former husband.

As the person who perceives Dulcet's house “a receptacle for lunatics,”⁴⁴ Elderberry is presented as a ridiculous figure for his ignorance about amateur acting. But amateur performances are also satirized with equal force, especially in the exchanges between O. P. Bustle—the manager of a provincial theater hired to supervise this private production—and Wing, a poor country actor. “We who know something of the matter,” says Bustle, “must laugh at private performers. As Garrick observed, one easily sees, when the Amateurs are acting, that there is not an Actor among them.”⁴⁵ This is a theme anticipated by Archibald Maclaren's musical drama, The Private Theatre (1809), which ties together private entertainment, domestic disorder, and moral corruption. Modewart chastises his brother for writing private plays by saying, “Let us have no more of your Pantomimical Funerals. Convert your private theatre into a public school, or useful workshop. Mind your own business, and leave the trade of acting to those who make it their profession.”⁴⁶

But although private theaters made many uneasy because they brought acting into the home, the idea that amateurism could provide a corrective to professional stage practices was a theme also consistently sounded during this period. In the same essay cited above, Richard Cumberland admits that the aristocracy was usually better suited than the professional actor to perform a variety of theatrical roles, since in

all scenes of high life they are at home; noble sentiments are natural to them; low-parts they can play by instinct; and as for all the crafts of rakes, gamesters, and fine gentlemen, they can fill them to the life.⁴⁷

Yet the fact that the amateur can narrow the gap between actor and character in the service of greater realism and less artificiality worried those for whom theater was threatening precisely because the medium could blur for audiences the distinction between what was acting and what was not.

This fear lay behind the era's concerns with controlling theatricalized space, and it is one of the central issues in Joanna Baillie's The Tryal, which presents amateur acting as the means by which certain women can assert themselves, even if only temporarily, over the plot that shapes their domestic lives. It is interesting to contemplate the fact that Baillie's first comedy was almost performed for the first time on a private stage by amateur actors,⁴⁸ since such a mode of representation might have caused its participants to view The Tryal metatheatrically, to appreciate some of the ways in which this play investigates amateurism and private entertainment in relation to gender and space. Caught between what she calls “a reasonable woman's desire”⁴⁹ to direct her own future and cultural imperatives that require her to marry, for the first part of the play Agnes Withrington attempts to take charge of her destiny by creating, performing in, and directing an improvisational theatrical in the privacy of her uncle's home: the social and closeted spaces of a fashionable English house in Bath become the setting for amateur acting. For a time female laughter reigns as Agnes—using winks and gestures to control the movement of bodies in domestic space—directs her cousin Mariane and her maid Betty in an improvisation designed to expose the greed of Agnes's suitors and determine the true character of Harwood, the man whom Agnes wants to marry.

The frequency and ease with which Agnes and Mariane touch their uncle's body underscore the relaxed atmosphere over which Withrington presides, as well as show how the dynamic of this domestic space encourages the women to use their imaginations. Introduced by the stage directions as “hanging upon [Withrington's] arms, coaxing him in a playful manner as they advance towards the front of the Stage” (I.i, 195), Agnes and Mariane are subsequently described as “clapping his shoulder” (I.i., 196), “stroaking his hand gently” (I.i, 199), resting an “arm on his shoulder” (I.i, 200), “leaping round his neck” (I.i, 201), and taking “him by the hands and begin[ning] to play with him” (I.i, 238).

Given this jocular familiarity between uncle and nieces, one might expect that Agnes and Mariane could persuade Withrington temporarily to become an actor in their plot. But he will not participate, foreshadowing Fanny Price's staunch refusal in Mansfield Park to perform in a private production given by her cousins. The language with which Withrington refuses suggests that the nexus of amateurism, women, and private performance is central to the dramaturgy of The Tryal: “It would be very pleasant, truly,” he says teasingly, “to see an old fellow, with a wig upon his bald pate, making one in a holy-day mummery with a couple of mad-caps” (I.i, 195). This comparison between Agnes and Mariane's proposed improvisation and “holy-day mummery” recalls that the origins of English amateur acting were in the Christian church, once the locus of theatrical activity in spite of its anxiety about theater's potential to lure audiences into identifying with and imitating characters represented on stage.

Christianity's historical ambivalence toward British theater is embodied in Withrington's ambivalence about his nieces' amateur acting. As The Tryal progresses, Withrington's seeming approval of amateurism gives way to his attempt to regain control of his domicile, which he fears is becoming, under Agnes's direction, the scene of what we might call “street theatre.” In Act 3, Withrington says that his house seems foreign to him—like “a cabin in Kamschatka,⁵⁰ and common to a whole tribe”—because it has been penetrated by entertainers, animals, and indigent children:

In every corner of it I find some visitor, or showman, or milliner's apprentice, loitering about: my best books are cast upon footstools and window-seats, and my library is littered over with work-bags; dogs, cats, and kittens, take possession of every chair, and refuse to be disturbed: and the very beggar children go hopping before my door with their half-eaten scraps in their hands, as if it were an entry to a workhouse.

(III.i, 60)

Alarmed at the means by which Agnes and Mariane reveal the absurdity of their suitors' performative postures, Withrington expresses his anxiety about the stability of his nieces' gender and class position by saying that “all this playing, and laughing, and hoydening about, is not gentlewomanlike; nay, I might say, is not maidenly.”

A high-bred elegant woman is a creature which man approaches with awe and respect; but nobody would think of accosting you with such impressions, any more than if you were a couple of young female tinkers.

(III.i, 240, my emphasis)

Indeed, although he is extremely fond of his nieces and seems at times to enjoy the exuberance of Agnes and Mariane's high-spirited acting, Withrington continually criticizes their jolly improvisations by equating theatricality with foolery, witchery, and madness. It is therefore no surprise when he comes to complain that he “can't approve of every farce you please to play off in my family, nor to have my relations affronted, and driven from my house for your entertainment” (III.i, 239), or when he declares a few lines later, “I am tired of this” (III.i, 240).

The “this” is Agnes's plot, which requires that Mariane pretend to be Agnes in order to “get the men to bow to us, and tremble” (240-41) and that Agnes and her servant Betty produce a feminist variation of The Taming of the Shrew.⁵¹ By acting peevishly and staging several tantrums for the sole purpose of discerning how well Harwood can tolerate a woman who expresses herself passionately, Agnes investigates why female anger is so upsetting to many men. She senses that the veneer of tolerance worn by her suitors during the courtship ritual masks their disgruntledness at having to effect such a pose; that such seeming delight in the woman wooed will give way to a desire to control her person. Therefore, much of the fun for Agnes in staging this improvisation rests with exposing the real motives of her suitors, such as Sir Loftus Prettyman who, when treated to a dose of Mariane's affected indifference, vows in a series of asides: “when she is once secured, I'll be revenged! I'll vex her! I'll drive the spirit out of her. … I'll tame her!” (IV.iii, 271).

Harwood has no difficulty passing Agnes's test. But the play does not allow the lovers to get together so easily, and it is this complication that underscores some of the problems faced by women who would do theater in the privacy of their homes. A monologue in Act 5 marks the turning point of the play, since it is at this juncture that Agnes abandons the trajectory of her original improvisation in order to devise another plot responsive to her uncle's concerns. Here is Withrington's speech:

To be the disinterested choice of a worthy man is what every woman, who means to marry at all, would be ambitious of; … But there are men whose passions are of such a violent, overbearing nature, that love in them may be considered as a disease of the mind; and the object of it claims no more perfection or pre-emininence among women, than chalk, lime, or oatmeal do among dainties, because some diseased stomachs do prefer them to all things. Such men as these we sometimes see attach themselves even to ugliness and infamy, in defiance of honour and decency. With such men as these, women of sense and refinement can never be happy; nay, to be willingly the object of their love is not respectable.

(V.ii, 276-77)

On the one hand, this monologue reads as the expression of Withrington's concern for Agnes's welfare; but on the other, it seems designed to make her incredulous that any man could actually desire her as his wife. Withrington “withers” Agnes's spirits with the insinuation that Harwood's apparent devotion to her may be something to shun rather than to admire, since “there are men whose passions are of such a violent, overbearing nature, that love in them, may be considered as a disease of the mind.” If Harwood is indeed the indiscriminately passionate man that Withrington implies, then the object of his love can be discounted. For such a man—in claiming from women “no more perfection or pre-emininence … than chalk, lime, or oatmeal may do amongst dainties”—can be assessed as having a “diseased stomach.” This diseased appetite might cause a man to “attach” himself “even to ugliness and infamy,” a choice of words that Agnes in all probability hears as a reference to herself, accustomed as she is during the play to having her physicality criticized. Though Withrington implies that Agnes is a woman “of sense and refinement,” he goes on to say that if one “willingly” allows herself to be the object of such a diseased person, then she is “naughty.” This is a statement the harshness of which Withrington apparently recognizes when he disingenuously trivializes his judgments as “niceties.” You are still “respectable,” he tries to convey to Agnes after having implied just the opposite.

Agnes is stunned. The young woman who has earlier described herself as “light as an air-ball!” (III.i, 238) in reference to the fun she derives from her private theater now becomes quite somber and quiet, telling Withrington that she has “ventured farther than I ought” (V.ii). She apologizes for her direction of the first plot, through which she has already achieved her goal of proving Harwood genuinely attracted to her character. Mariane, coming onto the stage after Withrington's speech to find Agnes looking glum, immediately asserts that she is “very sure the plot is of [Withrington's] hatching, then, for I never saw Agnes with any thing of this kind in her head, wear such a spiritless face” (V.ii, 279). From this point on in the play Agnes “seems thoughtful” and speaks with “a grave and more dignified air” (V.ii, 277). By contrast—as if to symbolize his regaining control of domestic space—her uncle borrows a gesture that we have come to associate with Agnes and Mariane when they were at their most confident: he “claps” Agnes on “her shoulder affectionately” (V.i, 278).

At the beginning of The Tryal—in answer to Withrington's question about “who will fall in love with a little ordinary girl like thee”—Agnes pointedly reminded him that “an old hunks of a father” once prevented his marrying the beautiful rich lady who was in love with him (I.i, 197). Withrington comes dangerously close to activating this kind of patriarchal control when he suggests the insufficiency of Agnes's first plot to determine Harwood's suitability. Indeed, in an apparent gesture toward Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise (1761)—in which Wolmar, the reigning patriarch at novel's end, devises a two-tiered trial to test the virtue of his wife, Julie, and her former lover, Saint-Preux—Baillie has Withrington contrive a second test that will determine whether Harwood elevates desire for virtue over his desire for Agnes's person. (Agnes's original plot was constructed not to discover whether Harwood would choose virtue over the flawed woman in a quest after some feminine ideal but rather to see how he would deal with imperfections, idiosyncrasies, and mood swings.) In the scenes that follow Agnes designs a new plot, but her contributions as an actor and director are curtailed. Instead, her cousin Royston takes center stage, performing in an improvisation to which Agnes is but a silent witness, sequestered behind a screen. In fact, at several points during this scene, Agnes chafes at her passive position, complaining about Royston's inability to understand what good acting is and about his compulsion to explain to others what is intended as stage illusion.

That it is a serious risk for Agnes to undertake this second plot is confirmed when the scene is later performed. Presented with a letter written by Agnes, Harwood is so undone by the implications of Agnes's impropriety that “his hand trembles” and he has trouble retaining it. Subsequently “staggering back, [he] throws himself into a chair, … and covers his upper face with his hand” (V.ii, 289-90). “See how his lips quiver,” Royston exclaims, “and his bosom heaves! Let us unbutton him: I fear he is going into a fit.” As Harwood starts to rise to leave the room, “he falls back again in a faint” (V.ii, 290). The potential danger to Harwood's health casts a skeptical light on the merit of what in retrospect can be seen as Withrington's unnecessary interference in Agnes's private improvisation, even though Harwood proves himself to be vitally concerned that Agnes not behave immorally, thus passing the test and satisfying Withrington's concerns.

I want to suggest that Withrington's misgivings about Harwood do not derive simply from Withrington's uneasiness with the dramaturgy of Agnes's plot, which reveals the potential of private theatricals to destabilize domesticity. Withrington's worry over Harwood's virtue may also mask his unease about the way in which Harwood “does” his gender. Described as wearing “a plain brownish coat” (I.i., 204)—Baillie's sartorial signal that Harwood is destined for the physically plain Agnes (whom he recognizes as “the most beautiful native character in the world” [I.ii, 210]), Harwood the future lawyer is characterized in direct opposition to “your men of fashion” (I.ii, 211), the pretentious Sir Loftus and his sidekick, Jack Opal. Harwood's idealism about his profession, his scholarliness, and his open enthusiasm pair him with Agnes as the “heartwood” of the play. Both are genuinely interested in extending themselves to help others, as Agnes's private staging suggests when she opens up Withrington's fashionable home to poverty-stricken children. Likewise, Harwood is praised for conceiving of the practice of law as more than “a dry treasuring up of facts in the memory,” as the profession of one “who pleads the cause of man before fellow-men,” who must therefore “know what is in the heart of man as well as what is in the book of records” (II.ii, 228). When Agnes thanks Harwood for promising to marry her at play's end, she predicts that he “shall … exert your powers in the profession you have chosen: you shall be the weak one's stay, the poor man's advocate; you shall gain fair fame in recompense, and that will be our nobility” (V.ii, 299). Throughout the play Harwood claims that he is looking for a real partner rather than an idealized paragon: “insipid constitutional good nature is a tiresome thing” (IV.i, 253), he says to himself; “we ought not to expect a faultless woman” (IV.i, 258), he confesses to his friend Colonel Hardy; “I can't bear your insipid passionless women: I would as soon live upon sweet curd all my life, as attach myself to one of them” (V.ii, 288), he exclaims to Royston.

Yet though clearly the hero destined for Baillie's heroine, Harwood is also characterized as a man who often assumes an exaggeratedly expressive gesture and speech typically associated with femininity: he runs breathlessly onto the stage; he hangs around Agnes without apology; he blurts out his feelings. Furthermore, in Act 4, Harwood offers to thread Agnes's needle, albeit “awkwardly” (IV.ii, 66), and in the final act of the play, like many of the heroines in English romantic drama—who, when confronted with surprising news, sink to the ground—Harwood does something quite unusual for a male character in a play from this period: he swoons. Given Withrington's concerns about Agnes's femininity in the context of her original improvisation, Harwood's characterization seems to require that Uncle Withrington assert his role as patriarch of a fashionable home and propose a further test for the young lawyer, one designed to answer some of the questions that Withrington has about the degree to which Harwood's masculine identity can be regarded as secure and one that requires Agnes to restrict her involvement in private improvisation.

Eleven years before The Tryal was published, James Powell's farce about the rage for amateur acting, Private Theatricals (1787), also featured a plot in which the head of a household tries to control his family's and servants' enthusiasm for putting on private plays. But unlike Baillie, Powell reserved for his leading female character a subversive moment at play's end. The actress playing Lady Grubb is allowed to advance “to the front of the Stage” where she asserts her love of private theater: “But if my audience do but approve, I shall bless the day when I first commenc'd my PRIVATE THEATRICALS.”⁵²

By contrast, The Tryal charts the process by which the owner of a fashionable home reasserts his control over domestic space, in his view rendered chaotic by amateur performance. As we have seen, Anthony Withrington resembles several other characters in the fiction of the private theatrical movement who function to suggest that amateur acting on private stages is potentially disruptive. While not consistently an antitheatrical force like Austen's Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, who is so upset by his children's experiment with private theater that he burns “every unbound copy of ‘Lovers' Vows’ in the house” when he returns from the West Indies,⁵³ still Withrington closes The Tryal with words that evoke Austen's description of how Sir Thomas “reinstates himself” upon his arrival at Mansfield Park: one of the tasks that Sir Thomas performs before he can resume “his seat as master of the house at dinner” is to oversee the dismantling of the little theater in the billiard room.⁵⁴ Similarly reestablishing himself as the benevolent host of an orderly domicile, Withrington says to the company gathered on stage at the end of The Tryal: “Now, let us take our leave of plots and story-telling, if you please, and all go to my house to supper” (V.ii, 299).

Read in the context of the amateur entertainment vogue, Baillie's first comedy emerges as an exploration of how some women sought to theatricalize domestic space in order to respond to “a reasonable woman's desire” to control the representation of women's social reality. Indeed, Baillie's eight comedies richly reward students of late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century culture by attending to some of the more pressing social issues of the period. Yet because Baillie's comedies address topics that would have interested early-nineteenth-century playgoers through a subtle exploration of her characters' emotional trials, critics have generally had difficulty appreciating them. Baillie alluded to this problem in her preface to the second edition of Miscellaneous Plays (1805) when she wrote that the comedy, The Country Inn (1804), “has been generally disliked.”⁵⁵ Seven years after publishing The Tryal, Baillie had come to realize that to

those who are chiefly accustomed, in works of this kind, to admire quick turns of thought, pointed expression, witty repartee, and the ludicrous display of the transient passing follies and fashions of the world, this play will have but few attractions.⁵⁶

Time has proved her thus far prophetic. In 1930 Allardyce Nicoll wrote that every one of Baillie's comedies “is stilted. Not a laugh rises from a single scene.”⁵⁷ More recently, in 1974, Terence Tobin overlooked Agnes's dilemma to focus on the subplot—Mariane Withrington's secret engagement—and concluded that a lack of “complications” dooms The Tryal,⁵⁸ a critique that echoes Margaret Carhart's over fifty years earlier. The Tryal's complications arise from Baillie's characterization of Agnes, whom Alice Meynell summarized in 1922 as “hard to capture.”⁵⁹ Meynell is almost alone in appreciating Baillie for making

such pretty eighteenth-century sport of her theme (her hero keeping the fine sensibilities, expressed with impassioned elegance, of Steele's Conscious Lovers) that it is not easy to realize that she passed the middle of the nineteenth century, albeit in extreme old age. … It is the exceeding sweetness of the two good girls bent upon their frolic (which is also a romp) that makes the charm of this happy play. They exchange names upon the wildest impulse consistent with their Georgian manners.⁶⁰

But it was the painter Thomas Lawrence—who proposed The Tryal for a private theatrical in 1803—who praised the play for those very features that Baillie herself advocated in her theory of comedy, natural speech, and characterization. In a letter to his sister, Lawrence wrote that he was “for Miss Bailey's Comedy, ‘The Trial,’ one slightly spoken of by the world, but which I am sure, Mr. Homer would like for its truly natural dialogue and character.”⁶¹

Baillie articulated her theory of comedy at length in her “Introductory Discourse”—the essay she attached to the 1798 volume of plays in which The Tryal first appeared—which suggests that domestic spaces are fruitful sources of theater and drama. Baillie's belief that it is comedy's “task to exhibit” people “engaged in the busy turmoil of ordinary life, … and engaged with those smaller trials of the mind by which men are most apt to be overcome” caused her to prefer realistic situations that she could have encountered in her own life.⁶² In contrast to the “satirical, witty, sentimental, and, above all, busy or circumstantial Comedy,” Baillie advocated what she called “Characteristic Comedy,” a genre that represents “this motley world of men and women … under those circumstances of ordinary and familiar life most favorable to the discovery of the human heart. …”⁶³ Eschewing contrivance, artificiality, and self-conscious wit, Baillie's theory argues that the most interesting kind of comedy derives from what we might today be inclined to call “situational” writing in which “even the bold and striking in character, should, to the best of the author's judgment, be kept in due subordination to nature.”⁶⁴

But even as Baillie argued for a more subtle kind of dramatic writing—one focused on “the harmonious shades” of character—she wanted to avoid dwelling on “senseless minuteness.”⁶⁵ Thus, she criticized eccentric characterizations, remarking that “Above all, it is to be regretted that those adventitious distinctions among men, of age, fortune, rank, profession, and country, are so often brought forward in preference to the great original distinctions of nature,”⁶⁶ since such an approach has

tempted our less skillful dramatists to exaggerate, and step, in further quest of the ludicrous, so much beyond the bounds of nature, that the very effect they are so anxious to produce is thereby destroyed, and all useful application of it entirely cut off, for we never apply to ourselves a false representation of nature.⁶⁷

It is in “ordinary life,” Baillie emphasized throughout her theater theory, that “strong passions will foster themselves within the breast; and what are all the evils which vanity, folly, prejudice, or peculiarity of temper lead to, compared with those which such unquiet inmates produce?”⁶⁸ By seeking to justify a focus on “unquiet inmates” in domestic settings, Baillie's theory of comedy suggests that we should pay close attention to the drama and theater produced in closet spaces, a theatricality largely controlled by women confined to the private sphere. Thirty-six years old when she published her first plays—which, in addition to The Tryal, included Count Basil and De Monfort—Baillie argued the need for a mature comedy, one that featured characters in “the middle stages of life.”⁶⁹ Margaret Carhart finds the characterization of Agnes “typical of the busy comedy that Miss Baillie criticized so sweepingly.”⁷⁰ But Agnes is also nothing if not “thoughtful,” and the complexity of her struggle to determine whether her beloved Harwood is morally the best match for her is at the heart of the play's plot. While her uncle eventually restrains Agnes's theatrical experiments, Baillie gives us a play in which the struggle of her heroine to assert “a reasonable woman's desire” centers on her attempt to theatricalize domestic space according to her own design.

Though not generally regarded as a women's movement, the British private theatrical is significant for those scholars trying to fill in the picture of women's history in theater. In addition to affording certain classes of women with increased opportunities for theatrical endeavor, the private theatrical movement anticipated subsequent developments that highlight the achievement of women in theater. For example, Madame Vestris's management of the Olympic theater in the 1830s—conceived as an alternative to the London patent stages—is a logical outgrowth of an eighteenth-century phenomenon in which a number of women had the experience of managing small theaters for the first time.⁷¹ In praising Vestris's management of the theater in the dedication letter he attached to The Two Figaros (1836), playwright James Robinson Planché wrote that “the model is not less instructive because it is made on so small a scale and preserved in the cabinet of a lady.”⁷² Likewise, Frances Maria Kelly's “Little Theatre in Dean Street,” which was built in the 1830's “as an extension to her private house,”⁷³ resembles the private theaters of the previous era in that Kelly planned to feature those fledgling performers whom she trained in the acting school, which she also moved to her house from the Strand.⁷⁴ Biographer Basil Francis describes Kelly's “‘modern’ Little Theatre,” as “well-appointed, both from the view of the player and playgoer, with ‘modern’ machinery, ample entrances and exits, comfortable dressing-rooms and above all a stage that would incorporate every new improvement that the mind of man could devise.”⁷⁵ Though Kelly's dream went unrealized (as the result of stage machinery that was so noisy that the actors could not be heard), her desire to create a space for actor training and performance within the bounds of her home reminds us that many women's theatrical experiments have originated within domestic settings.

A study of the late eighteenth-century British private theatrical movement reminds us that a particular class of women⁷⁶ have had a long history of theatricalizing closet space and helps us more readily appreciate the degree to which some plays from the romantic period—such as Baillie's The Tryal—confront the issue of how women have sought to control domestic spaces for both theatrical and nontheatrical purposes. Moreover, the act of opening up British romantic closets in order to expose the variety of theatrical activities that actually took place there can deepen our understanding of how private spaces and domestic settings influenced public stages—before, during, and after the romantic era.

Notes

1. Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700-1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978), 18-19.

2. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Penguin Books, 1966 [orig. 1814]), 147.

3. Austen, 133.

4. A partial list of those women who participated in late eighteenth-century private theatricals (through a combination of acting, writing, and organizing) includes Joanna Baillie, Mary Berry, Frances Burney, Marianne Chambers, Elizabeth Knipe Cobbold, Elizabeth Berkeley Craven (the Margravine of Anspach), Mary Champion Crespigny, Elizabeth Farren, Catherine Galindo, Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Anne Kemble, Harriot Mellon, Eliza O'Neill, Amelia Opie, Sarah Siddons, Mariana Starke, Peg Woffington.

5. Although the private theatrical movement in England took place primarily between 1780 and 1810, Marvin Carlson notes that as late as 1833 in England a private theater was erected at the castle of Chatsworth (Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture [Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1989], 56).

6. These canonical works included plays by women writers, among them Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald.

7. For a list of the most popular plays performed on the eighteenth-century private stage, see Rosenfeld 169-70.

8. Rosenfeld, 9.

9. My information for this history is collected from the following sources: Charles Kendal Bushe's The Private Theatre of Kilkenny, with Introductory Observations on Other Private Theatres in Ireland, before it was opened (1825), composed mostly of the information on playbills, along with the prologue and epilogue to each play and reviews of performances; Tom Moore's review of that volume in the Edinburgh Review (46 [1827]: 368-90), which after stating—“There is no subject that we would sooner recommend to a male or female author, in distress for a topic, than a History of the Private Theatres of Europe” (368)—discusses British private theatricals in the context of private theaters in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, modern Russia, and France; Sybil Rosenfeld's Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700-1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978), which includes two helpful appendices drawn from Rosenfeld's survey of records pertaining to “120 places in which private theatricals were held” (7): one listing the performance of private theatricals by year and the other identifying those English plays “first performed at private theatricals” (180); and Marvin Carlson's chapter, “The Jewel in the Casket” in Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1989). Nina Auerbach's Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990), while promisingly titled, is focused not on the private theatrical phenomenon, but rather uses the term to discuss “the source of Victorian fears of performance,” which Auerbach argues “lay in the histrionic artifice of ordinary life …” (114).

10. Rosenfeld, 8-9.

11. Further information about these players is provided by Suzanne R. Westfall in Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

12. Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 3.

13. Sturgess, 4.

14. Carlson, 51.

15. See Karl Toepfer's fascinating account of this phenomenon, including erotic marionette theater, in chapter 2 of Theatre, Aristocracy, and Pornocracy: The Orgy Calculus (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1991).

16. Toepfer, 66.

17. See chapter 4 of Sue-Ellen Case's Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988) for a discussion of this trend, led by theater groups such as Lavendar Cellar Theatre, Medusa's Revenge, and Red Dyke Theatre.

18. Toepfer, 66.

19. For more information on von Stein and her theatrical activity, see Katherine R. Goodman's “The Sign Speaks: Charlotte von Stein's Matinees” in In the Shadows of Olympus: German Women Writers Around 1800, ed. Katherine R. Goodman and Edith Waldstein (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 71-93.

20. Cedric C. Brown, John Milton's Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 15.

21. Sturgess, 57.

22. This quotation is from the preface to the Countess of Hardwicke's play, The Court of Oberon, or The Three Wishes, in which the writer explains why it took so long for the play to “see the light.” (The play was written in the late seventeenth century.) On the occasion of Princess Victoria's intent to patronize “a Bazaar, for the succour of the distressed Irish,” it was “suggested that among the contributions made by Ladies of their Fancy works for the profit of the Bazaar, this [play] might also find a place.—Yet it could scarcely have been ventured upon without the condescending permission of Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent, to dedicate this little work to Her Royal Highness the Princess Victoria” (Anonymous, preface, The Court of Oberon, or The Three Wishes, by the Countess of Hardwicke [London, 1831]).

23. Anonymous, “To the Editor of the European Magazine. Plan for a Fashionable Rosciad; and some account of Mr. Fector's Private Theatre at Dover,” London Review 14 (1788): 66.

24. Laetitia Jermyn, “A Memoir of Mrs. Elizabeth [Knipe] Cobbold” in Poems by Mrs. Elizabeth Cobbold. With a Memoir of the Author (Ipswich: J. Row, 1825), 16.

25. Archibald Maclaren, The Private Theatre: or, the Highland Funeral (London: A. Macpherson, 1809), I.ii, 12.

26. Elizabeth Berkeley Craven's original dramas are listed in the introduction to vol. 1 of her memoirs (1826) republished under the title The Beautiful Lady Craven: The Original Memoirs of Elizabeth Baroness Craven afterwards Margravine of Anspach and Bayreuth and Princess Berkeley of the Holy Roman Empire (1750-1828), 2 vols. (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1914 [orig. 1826]).

27. The French edition of Craven's memoirs (1828) was republished as Memoires, Edition presentée et annotée par Jean-Pierre Guicciardi (Paris: Mercure de France, 1991).

28. Craven, 2.106.

29. Kirsten Gram Holmstrom, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion 1770-1815 (Uppsala, Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1967), 128.

30. Holmstrom, 216.

31. Holmstrom, 139.

32. See vol. 1 of Mrs. [Margaret] Cornwell Baron-Wilson's Memoirs of Harriot, Duchess of St. Albans, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), 280.

33. Rosenfeld, 34.

34. Reginald Brimley Johnson, introduction, Bluestocking Letters, ed. R. B. Jonhson (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1926), 10-11.

35. Rosenfeld, 168.

36. Victor Turner, Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 104.

37. Turner, 105.

38. Turner, 122.

39. Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), ix.

40. Richard Cumberland, “Remarks upon the Present Taste for Acting Private Plays” in The European Magazine, and London Review 14 (1788): 116.

41. Cumberland, 115.

42. Cumberland, 118.

43. Richard Brinsley Peake, Amateurs and Actors: A Musical Farce in Two Acts (London: John Cumberland, 1827 [orig. 1818]), 10.

44. Peake, 30.

45. Peake, 17.

46. Maclaren, II.i, 24.

47. Cumberland, 116.

48. Baillie's associations with private theatricals extend back to her childhood. Sarah Tytler and J. L. Watson noted that at school Baillie became “the chief figure in something like private theatricals” (The Songstresses of Scotland, 2 vols. [London: Strahan and Co., 1871], 2.193)—school plays figuring as amateur performances. George Barnett Smith wrote that Baillie “was early distinguished for her skill in acting and composition, being especially facile in the improvisation of dialogue in character” (“Joanna Baillie,” vol. 1 of The Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols. [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1921], 886). Catherine Jane Hamilton made a similar observation: “at school, by her sister's report, she was principally distinguished in being the ringleader of all pranks and follies, and used to entertain her companions with an endless string of stories of her own invention. She was also addicted to clambering on the roof of the house to act over her scenes alone and in secret” (“Joanna Baillie,” vol. 1 of Women Writers: Their Works and Ways, 2 vols. [London and New York: Ward, Lock, Bowden, and Co., 1892-93], 114).

49. My text for The Tryal is the 1990 reprint of Baillie's 1798 Series of Plays published by Woodstock Books (Oxford), which includes this drama along with Count Basil and De Monfort. (N.b.: the 1851 edition of this play spells The Tryal as The Trial). Citations from The Tryal appear within the text by reference to act, scene, and page number.

50. “Kamchatka” is a peninsula of northeast Russia between the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk (Dudley Stamp, ed., Longmans Dictionary of Geography [London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1966], 224).

51. Margaret Carhart has observed that “Harwood's railing against Agnes is an echo of the tone of Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, and Agnes's description of her suitors recalls the similar scene in The Merchant of Venice” (The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie [New Haven: Yale UP, 1923], 73).

52. James Powell, Private Theatricals; A Farce. In Two Acts (1787), II.viii, 37.

53. Austen, 206.

54. Austen, 206.

55. Joanna Baillie, The Dramatic and Poetical Works (1851) (New York and Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976) 386.

56. Baillie, 389.

57. Allardyce Nicoll, vol. 1 of A History of Nineteenth-Century Drama, 1800-1850, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1930), 209.

58. Terence Tobin, Plays by Scots (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1974), 195.

59. Alice C. Meynell, The Second Person Singular (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968 [orig. 1922]), 61.

60. Meynell, 59.

61. Cited in Rosenfeld, 154. Rosenfeld also cites a letter written by Harriet Cavendish concerning the same private theater, which indicates that another Baillie play, Count Basil, was also under consideration. Like The Tryal, however, it went unperformed (158).

62. Baillie, 11, my emphasis.

63. Baillie, 12.

64. Baillie, 14.

65. Baillie, 13.

66. Baillie, 13.

67. Baillie, 14.

68. Baillie, 14.

69. Baillie, 13.

70. Carhart, 196.

71. See chapter 5 of Sandra Richards's The Rise of the English Actress (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).

72. This citation appears in Arthur Griffinhoof's Memoirs of the Life of Madame Vestris (1830).

73. Basil Francis, Fanny Kelly of Drury Lane (London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation, 1950), 156.

74. For more information about Kelly's acting career, her theater, and acting school, see L. E. Holman's Lamb's ‘Barbara S—’: The Life of Frances Maria Kelly, Actress (London: Methuen and Co., 1935).

75. Francis, 155.

76. For a discussion of “the amateur productions of the provincial gentry” as well as those performed by members of the army and the navy, see chapter 6 of Gillian Russell's The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).