A decade and a half after The Carmelite, there appeared on the enlarged stage of the Drury Lane (rebuilt in 1794) a play that fully synthesizes Cumberland's exploitation of mental distress with the pictorial atmospherics evident since Douglas. But the synthetic qualities of Joanna Baillie's De Monfort, important though they are, are secondary to its innovations. The issues raised by this uncommonly ambitious tragedy reflect at once the imminently crucial dilemma of the patent houses and the complex problems of dramaturgy implicit in the rise of the Romantic hero. "The scenery was magnificent," observed the theatrical composer Michael Kelly of the production at Drury Lane in April of 1800, and "the cathedral scene, painted by Capon, was a chef d'oeuvre…"¹⁰ Despite such magnificence, Kelly recalled, the play "would not suit the public taste" and was withdrawn, a demonstrable failure, after eight poorly attended performances.¹¹ It is possible to speculate why, and in doing so to explore some of the characteristics that even then were "stigmatizing" the legitimate drama, from which, as if to spite itself, the closet drama was splitting off and beginning its own anemic growth. Without taking a vindictive attitude toward playwrights who write from theory instead of from first-hand experience, one may see in De Monfort the inordinate influence of psychology on a playwright concerned perhaps as much as any other living writer with the forces that drive men to act.

Man has a natural desire to see his fellow human beings tested for "the fortitude of the soul," Joanna Baillie asserted in her lengthy "Introductory Discourse" in the first volume of her Plays on the Passions, as they are familiarly called.¹² The idea is based on a predilection that informs all of her writing. It is not so much with culmination that Joanna Baillie is concerned, but with process. The trouble with the common tragic hero of the day, she claims, is that he is introduced at the very apex of his fury; similarly, the fault of contemporary theatrical production is that it concentrates too much on events (pp. 38–39). In effect, she points out, these qualities are gross distortions of the true purpose of tragedy, which is "to unveil to us the human mind under the dominion of those strong and fixed passions, which, seemingly unprovoked by outward circumstances, will from small beginnings brood within the breast, till all the better dispositions, all the fair gifts of nature are borne down before them …" (pp. 30–31).

From dissatisfaction with the superficial display of current drama, both serious and comic, grew Joanna Baillie's plan for reform. In a series of plays she would "delineate the progress of the higher passions in the human breast," each passion forming the subject of a tragedy and a companion comedy (pp. 41, 56). Certainly few more ambitious projects had fired the lofty minds of her age. The "scientific" comprehensiveness of the idea rivals Sir Joshua Reynolds' design to set forth the history of western art in a series of carefully inclusive lectures. Yet, while it vividly reflects contemporary intellectual and cultural tendencies, just as Reynolds' Discourses do, the fruits of her plan bear only minimally on the practice of playwrights who succeeded in mounting their products on early nineteenth-century stages. Minimally, that is, except in one major area where the resemblance is crucial: in the concept of dramatic character.

The relationship of her concept to that evident on the boards of London theaters and in contemporary criticism appears both in De Monfort itself and in the brief description of the tragedy included in the "Introductory Discourse." Expectedly, she defines the passion that forms the subject of the play. Hate, she affirms, is "that rooted and settled aversion, which from opposition of character, aided by circumstances of little importance, grows at last into such antipathy and personal disgust as makes him who entertains it, feel, in the presence of him who is the object of it, a degree of torment and restlessness which is insufferable" (p. 64). The play will be devoted to depicting this insupportable agony, and the character who manifests the passion in all its subtlety will be one with whom we wholly sympathize. Hate itself is vicious, without question. But, under Joanna Baillie's direction, "it is the passion and not the man which is held up to our execration" (p. 65). This statement of a fundamental divorce of character from the emotion that consumes him places her theory and the play which endeavors to support it in the mainstream of developing notions apparent in the drama, acting, and criticism of this new age. The date of the production of De Monfort at Drury Lane just at the turn of the century conveniently sets it at a point of transition from influential eighteenth-century tradition to the innovations that swiftly followed.

The first three acts, comprising some eight scenes dominated almost completely by the chief character, establish the inveterate hatred for Rezenfelt which De Monfort has for many years harbored in his heart. Not until the second scene of Act III do we discover, from Rezenfelt himself, that from their youth De Monfort had allowed this fixed hatred for him to feed almost unaccountably on boyish rivalries. Rezenfelt's unsympathetic description of De Monfort's proud youthful vying for "pre-eminence" (p. 362) can do little at this late point to displace the sympathy for him already established over the space of two and one half acts. This "retrospective" structure (p. 64) allows room both for the attention the playwright gives to the present circumstances of her troubled hero and for her unorthodox way of relating him to other characters. From his first entrance in Act I, De Monfort appears possessed by a melancholy which, try though he may, he cannot shake. Having returned to the house of his former landlord, he must greet the local gentry and so confronts his dread enemy, now a wealthy landowner and suitor for the hand of his sister Jane. In the first two acts the dramatist openly departs from several well-established Gothic patterns. The mutual discovery and reunion of brother and sister take place, not in Act V, but in Act II. More important, the conventional evil genius who predictably torments hero and heroine for almost the whole play has here been transformed into the discreetly polite and friendly Rezenfelt. De Monfort considers him a consummate hypocrite, but Rezenfelt's behavior contradicts this judgment. The most he can be accused of is an understandable impatience with De Monfort's monomania.

The meaning of these dramaturgical innovations, slight as they may seem, is of great importance for understanding the concept of dramatic character developed in this tragedy. Heavily indebted to notions of man's essential goodness, late eighteenth-century drama and criticism had contrived to remove the source of evil from man himself and place it outside him in the form of gratuitous chance, usually labeled fate or destiny. Joanna Baillie has gone one step further: she returns the source of evil to the breast of man; but in doing so she does not compromise the sentimental premise under whose weight her pen moves. The relegation of evil to this interior position creates a character who manifests a fundamental division between virtuous nature and vicious passion. The Fletcherian disjunction of character and event has been redefined as an ethical disjunction of human virtue from human acts. Gothic drama, beginning with Home's Douglas, placed special emphasis on an event that took place years before and continues to exert its effects thereafter. De Monfort internalizes this convention by redefining it as a psychological process in which an evil passion inexplicably takes root in the fallow soul of man and slowly chokes away his life force. Since the operation of fate has now been relegated to the human soul, the dramatist has no reason to base her play on a series of impassioned encounters with forces in the outside world, least of all anything so pettily obvious as the machinations of a villain or the fifth-act discovery of a sister. She has informed the reader in her introductory treatise that she eschews the sensationalism of performed drama. What she does not say is that she has single-handedly (and perhaps unwittingly as well) effected on the stage a transformation in the nature of dramatic character whose repetition in the closet drama of subsequent years appears unmistakably evident. The reader's comparison of De Monfort with Manfred will go far toward illuminating the unexplained sickness of soul which drives Byron's melancholy hero to attempt suicide by hurling himself from a precipice in the Alps.

A reason may now be suggested for the failure of De Monfort on the stage. To call the play undramatic is to cloud the issue. Its failure more probably lies in the simple fact that it was too revolutionary in concept for an audience so accustomed to convention. Strictures may justly be applied to many dramas of this period for merely exploiting .sensationalism. But the author who wrote such dramas to order was nevertheless able to catch up his audience in an intriguing series of predictably "unpredictable" events to which characters respond with passion and often with utter bewilderment. Reactions of this kind may bear only superficial fidelity to the psychological processes explored by Locke, Hume, and others; they nevertheless demonstrate a theatrical correlation of events and mental responses missing from De Monfort and from the closet drama that enshrines the tendencies it manifests. "Some sprite accurst within thy bosom mates To work thy ruin," Jane De Monfort laments to her brother early in the play (II.ii, p. 339). This force, and not that of exterior happenings, brings about his unspeakable death, by a kind of spiritual internal bleeding. The events especially of the fourth and fifth acts serve only as inconsistent and distorted reflections of what is essentially interior and formless.

To be sure, the play has a share of qualities eminently realizable on the Drury Lane stage. The wood in which De Monfort murders Rezenfelt in Act IV is genuine horrific Gothic, a perfect environment for a man wandering the trackless forest of his own mind where, De Monfort mutters to himself,

As in the wild confusion of a dream,
Things horrid, bloody, terrible, do pass,
As tho' they pass'd not; nor impress the mind
With the fix'd clearness of reality.
(IV.i, p. 377)

Similarly, the pencil of William Capon, a master of atmospheric and antique scenery, contributed great effectiveness to the closing scenes, including the celebrated "cathedral" scene, laid in the halls and chambers of a convent isolated in the wood.¹⁴ But no amount of scenery and lighting, even when complemented by the musical savoir faire of Kelly and the acting virtuosity of Kemble as De Monfort and Mrs. Siddons as the noble Jane, could apparently compensate for the lack of theatricality implicit in the fact that the essential conflict of the play is severed from objective reality and entombed within the mind and heart of its chief character.

Notes

¹⁰Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, 2 vols. (1826), II, 177.

¹¹ Of the last few performances Thomas Dutton wryly observed, "The crowded houses, and unbounded applause, with which De Montfort [sic] continues to be received, are unhappily confined to the Play-bills"— The Dramatic Censor; or, Weekly Theatrical Report, II (1800), 134.

¹²A Series of Plays: In Which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. Each Passion Being the Subject of A Tragedy And A Comedy, p. 7. Published in London in 1798, it was augmented by a second and yet a third series over succeeding years; for full citations see Allardyce Nicoll's handlist in his History, 2nd edn., IV (Cambridge, Eng., 1960), 257–258… .

¹⁴ See Sybil Rosenfeld and Edward Croft-Murray, "A Checklist of Scene Painters Working in Great Britain and Ireland in the 18th Century," TN, XIX (1964), 13–15; and Rosenfeld, "Scene Designs of William Capon," TN, X (1956), 118–122 and plates.

Bibiliographical Note

Two recent articles … maybe mentioned here: M. M. Kelsall, "The Meaning of Addison's Cato," RES, XVII (1966), 149–162, and C. F. Burgess, "Lillo Sans Barnwell, or The Playwright Revisited," MP, LXVI (1968), 5–29, a badly needed re-assessment of Lillo's dramaturgy.