Plays On The Passions -

As I mentioned in my previous post, this blog is dedicated to systematically exploring each play of the criminally overlooked Romantic Era dramatist Joanna Baillie. But before I jumped into individual evaluations of the plays themselves, I thought it necessary to include some information about the peculiar nature of her work, and what she was attempting to accomplish with it.

In 1798, Joanna Baillie published her first volume of drama, "A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind", also known by the thankfully less wordy title "Plays on the Passions, vol I". Within its pages, she introduced the public to a daring experiment she had conceived of 7 years earlier - to write a series of plays that focus on what happens when a person is seized by one overruling passion, such as love, hate, fear, anger, remorse, hope, etc. For each of these powerful emotions, she would write two plays, a tragedy and a comedy. In the tragedies, the intensity of the emotion in question overwhelms the protagonist's considerable principles and virtues, leading to their downfall. In the comedies, the emotional imbalance leads to sticky situations, but is ultimately overcome by the protagonist, or the intervention of others. She published three volumes of her project, as well as three more plays fitting that design in her volumes of Miscellaneous Plays. As her project went on, she allowed the form to become more flexible, as can be seen in the contents of the later volumes. They are as follows:

Volume One -

Love - tragedy, "Basil"; comedy, "The Trial"
Hate - tragedy, "De Montford"

Volume Two -

Hate - comedy, "The Election"
Ambition - tragedy, "Ethwald", parts one and two; comedy, "The Second Marriage"

Volume Three -

Fear - tragedy (female), "Orra"; tragedy (male), "The Dream"; comedy, "The Seige"
Hope - musical drama, "The Beacon"

Plays on the Passions in "Miscellaneous Plays" -

Jealousy - tragedy, "Romiero"; comedy, "The Alienated Manor"
Remorse - tragedy, "Henriquez"

This series makes up 13 of her 26 plays, a considerable achievement, of follow-through if nothing else! The question, of course, is what led her to such an ambitious and experimental undertaking? Miss Baillie provides the answer in her towering, 70 page long Introductory Discourse at the beginning of Volume One. According to Baillie (and I think most modern scholars and theatre enthusiasts would agree with her), English drama, and tragedy specifically, in the 18th century had stagnated to the point of petrification, dwelling only on larger than life heroes and saintly heroines who bore little to no resemblance to the audience watching them. Characters had given way to impressive marble statues, which undercut what Baillie considered the main, most noble purpose of drama:

"Every species of moral writing has its own way of conveying instruction, which it can never, but with disadvantage, exchange for any other. The Drama improves us by the knowledge we acquire or our own minds, from the natural desire we have to look into the thoughts, and observe the behaviour of others. Tragedy brings to our view men placed in those elevated situations, exposed to those great trials, and engaged in those extraordinary transactions, in which few of us are called upon to act ... it is only from the enlargement of our ideas in regard to human nature, from that admiration of virtue, and abhorrence of vice which they excite, that we can expect to be improved by them. but if they are not represented to us as real and natural characters, the lessons we are taught from their conduct and their sentiments will be no more to us than those which we receive from the pages of the poet or the moralist."

Baillie saw that the drama of her age had regressed considerably from the insights into human nature provided by Shakespeare, and was now only concerned with strong passions as elaborate, crowd-pleasing poses - here is the hero's Noble speech, now here is his moment of Fiery Anger - with little care for accurately portraying the protagonist's psyche, or charting the smaller, less showy ways in which dangerous emotions take root and dominate our reason. Therefore, by focusing on a character going through all the stages of one specific emotional state, Joanna Baillie was attempting nothing less than a revival of psychological realism on the English stage that had not been seen since Shakespeare did much the same with plays like Othello, MacBeth and A Winter's Tale. How artistically successful she was in this attempt is a subject I shall leave to further discussions of the individual plays themselves, but to this day, I can think of no other English language dramatist who attempted such a specific, ambitious and sharply analytical undertaking as this, and for that alone, she merits more attention than has been given her.

In the next post, I will explore the dramatic effectiveness of Baillie's first stab at applying her theories to an actual functioning play, the tragedy "Basil". Hope to see you then.