Who Is Joanna Baillie, and Why Should You Care?
In "A Room of Her Own", Virginia Woolf posited the tragic fate of a woman born in Shakespeare's time with Shakespeare's genius:
"... any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty."
But what of a woman born in the 18th century, perhaps not of Shakespeare's genius, but certainly equal to if not greater than any English playwright who came after him in the years leading up to her birth? What if she was born to an intellectual family that actually encouraged her education, wealthy enough not to pressure her into marriage? What if she wrote over two dozen plays - verse plays, prose plays, tragedy, comedy and drama with nearly equal dexterity?
We do not need to theorize how the world might receive a woman in these circumstances, because such a woman actually existed. Her name was Joanna Baillie, and her contemporaries considered her one of the finest poets of the day, and a great dramatist second only to Shakespeare himself. But because an unmarried woman working on the business side of the stage would have been scandalous in the extreme, the only real avenue for her writing was not the stage, but anonymous publication. Her first volume was so successful that speculation on the writer's identity ran wild, nearly all of it supposing her to be a famous male writer like Sir Walter Scott. After its acceptance was assured, Miss Baillie began to put her name on later editions of the plays. But even with all the acclaim, the constraints of "respectable" womanhood kept her personal involvement in theatre to a minimum, so that only 5 of her 26 plays were ever produced on stage in her lifetime. And with her work never established in the theatrical repertory, the greatest, most revolutionary stage voice of the Romantic Era drifted off into the ether, and has until very recently been considered only the slightest of footnotes in English Drama.
In the last few years, though, Joanna Baillie has caught the attention of feminist scholars who are finally taking a closer look at her incredibly daring and unique body of work. And yet, there is still a considerable gap in the modern re-evaluation of Baillie's writing. Search Baillie's name on the internet, and you will find a number of interesting essays examining her work in the light of gender theory, psychology, eco-utopianism, sexism, women's history, Romantic Studies, and stage theoretics, but I can find very little that evaluates her plays as what they were truly intended to be - literary works for the stage. Many are looking into the moral meaning of her work, its attitude toward gender, its influence on writers such as Lord Byron and Edgar Allen Poe, but no one seems to be asking the question which seems to me most important - are her plays any good, and if so, why isn't anyone performing them?
Usually, this sort of neglect comes from the fact that the writing being examined is interesting to study, but ultimately unsuccessful as art. Imagine my surprise, then, at picking up her first volume of plays to find that many of them are, in fact, powerful, gripping, wildly poetic and effective pieces of classic theatre. And yet no one does them anymore, which strikes me as an injustice that is ripe for vindication.
In this blog, I propose to make my way through Miss Baillie's entire theatrical canon, examining her skill with characters, dialogue, dramatic structure and theatrical effect, always asking foremost "Is it a good play, and is it still playable, relevant and feasible to present to audiences today?" Of the six I have read so far, four of them seem to be clamoring for the chance to be staged, and finally judged by the light their author always hoped to see them in. So please, settle in, and rediscover an important voice in drama that may have been heedlessly ignored for far too long.
"... any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty."
But what of a woman born in the 18th century, perhaps not of Shakespeare's genius, but certainly equal to if not greater than any English playwright who came after him in the years leading up to her birth? What if she was born to an intellectual family that actually encouraged her education, wealthy enough not to pressure her into marriage? What if she wrote over two dozen plays - verse plays, prose plays, tragedy, comedy and drama with nearly equal dexterity?
We do not need to theorize how the world might receive a woman in these circumstances, because such a woman actually existed. Her name was Joanna Baillie, and her contemporaries considered her one of the finest poets of the day, and a great dramatist second only to Shakespeare himself. But because an unmarried woman working on the business side of the stage would have been scandalous in the extreme, the only real avenue for her writing was not the stage, but anonymous publication. Her first volume was so successful that speculation on the writer's identity ran wild, nearly all of it supposing her to be a famous male writer like Sir Walter Scott. After its acceptance was assured, Miss Baillie began to put her name on later editions of the plays. But even with all the acclaim, the constraints of "respectable" womanhood kept her personal involvement in theatre to a minimum, so that only 5 of her 26 plays were ever produced on stage in her lifetime. And with her work never established in the theatrical repertory, the greatest, most revolutionary stage voice of the Romantic Era drifted off into the ether, and has until very recently been considered only the slightest of footnotes in English Drama.
In the last few years, though, Joanna Baillie has caught the attention of feminist scholars who are finally taking a closer look at her incredibly daring and unique body of work. And yet, there is still a considerable gap in the modern re-evaluation of Baillie's writing. Search Baillie's name on the internet, and you will find a number of interesting essays examining her work in the light of gender theory, psychology, eco-utopianism, sexism, women's history, Romantic Studies, and stage theoretics, but I can find very little that evaluates her plays as what they were truly intended to be - literary works for the stage. Many are looking into the moral meaning of her work, its attitude toward gender, its influence on writers such as Lord Byron and Edgar Allen Poe, but no one seems to be asking the question which seems to me most important - are her plays any good, and if so, why isn't anyone performing them?
Usually, this sort of neglect comes from the fact that the writing being examined is interesting to study, but ultimately unsuccessful as art. Imagine my surprise, then, at picking up her first volume of plays to find that many of them are, in fact, powerful, gripping, wildly poetic and effective pieces of classic theatre. And yet no one does them anymore, which strikes me as an injustice that is ripe for vindication.
In this blog, I propose to make my way through Miss Baillie's entire theatrical canon, examining her skill with characters, dialogue, dramatic structure and theatrical effect, always asking foremost "Is it a good play, and is it still playable, relevant and feasible to present to audiences today?" Of the six I have read so far, four of them seem to be clamoring for the chance to be staged, and finally judged by the light their author always hoped to see them in. So please, settle in, and rediscover an important voice in drama that may have been heedlessly ignored for far too long.
posted by wridget at
1:56 AM
1 Comments:
this is very interesting
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