The Tryal: A Comedy

Joanna Baillie followed "Basil", her tragedy of romantic passion, with "The Tryal", a comic exploration of the same subject matter. But aside from the thematic material, the two plays are startlingly different. "Basil" saw Baillie attempting a grand Shakespearean mode, writing entirely in verse, set in an exotic foreign land in the distant past, peopled mostly with Counts, Dukes, and other nobility. In The Tryal, she sets her gaze on ordinary people in contemporary Britain, forsakes verse for prose, and ends up with a charming mixture of romance and social satire poised somewhere between the comedies of Sheridan and  Goldsmith, and the novels Jane Austen would write a decade or so later.

The Tryal is fascinating on a number of levels - certainly as a piece of early feminism, with its plot being a sort of Taming of the Shrew in reverse, where the spirited female protagonist puts her pursuer through a series of tests to see if his love is truly worth having. It is an interesting development in Baillie's proposed "Plays on the Passions", where we see her actively experimenting with how exactly this grand project can work without getting monotonous, and moving the character experiencing intense passions a step to the side of the spotlight. The play also has some unique things to say about love that resound especially loudly in the 21st century, where so much of our media tends to portray the euphoric emotions of romantic love as an end in themselves.

Like most of Baillie's plays, the plot is a simple one. Agnes, a wealthy young heiress recently arrived in Bath, decides to take advantage of a new city where no one knows her, and switches places with her poorer cousin Marianne in order to find a suitor who isn't just interested in marrying her for her fortune. Meanwhile, Marianne, already secretly engaged above her station, takes the opportunity to torment the gold digging men of fashion who mistakenly swarm around her in hopes of a profitable marriage. But one man is attracted to the plainly dressed, supposedly poor Agnes - a young attorney named Harwood, who falls for her so hard that he himself is alarmed at the change in his behavior. When Harwood praises Agnes' good-natured ways to her uncle, Mr. Withrington,  Agnes bets her uncle that Harwood will still love her even if she behaves like a violent-tempered vixen. When Harwood comes around the next day, he finds Agnes pitching a fit and throwing things at the servants, but still cannot bring himself to part with her even though he finds her behavior contempible. This concerns Mr. Withrington, and not just because he loses his bet with Agnes. He begins to suspect that Harwood is more in love with being in love than he is with Agnes as a person. As he tells Agnes, "... there are men whose passions are of such a violent, over-bearing 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-eminence amonst women than chalk, lime, or oatmeal may do amongst 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 honor and decency." In short, is Harwood's love worth having if he accepts any behavior whatsoever, and doesn't challenge Agnes to grow as a person? Agnes somberly decides it isn't, and puts Harwood to one last test: she arranges him to intercept a letter where Agnes confesses to telling malicious lies about a friend to the relatives the friend is financially dependent upon, then contrives to watch from behind a screen as Harwood is confronted with seemingly air-tight evidence of Agnes' dishonorable nature. If Harwood still wishes to marry her after finding out she is a conniving gossip, she will have nothing to do with him, but if his conscience can rule his passion, she will reveal her true identity and marry him. Confronted with the fact that his object of affection has knowingly slandered an innocent woman who may suffer severe consequences for it, Harwood is so distressed that he faints, but when he comes to, he renounces his intentions to marry her. Agnes is overjoyed, the truth is revealed, and Agnes ends up with a husband of her own choosing whose love and honor have been tested and proven.

The play has a very unique take on issues of love and morality, one that is bound to provoke debate in a culture that idolizes romantic love far more than personal honor or virtue, and yet the touch remains light, with Baillie exploiting the topsy-turvy comic possibilites of a scene where a woman is beside herself with joy at overhearing her true love reject her. When Harwood faints, Agnes can no longer contain herself, and rushes to his side. When he wakes, she clings to him adoringly, while Harwood, still under the impression that she's a wicked liar, and puzzled at how she got there, tries like mad to get away from her. It's a funny scene, one of many in a play full to the brim with colorful personalities.

Once again, it is Baillie's characters that stand out, and what truly baffles me about her work being neglected for so long - as an actor, I would jump at the chance to play any number of characters in The Tryal. Harwood, for instance, has a lot more to do than the typical romantic male lead. Through the course of the play, he goes from being a clear-eyed wit and social critic to being a bewildered slave to his own emotions, finally mastering them at the end. Indeed, the success of the play in performance may very well hinge on the actor's ability to show us Harwood's many conflicting impulses. Mr. Withrington is a plum role for a middle-aged actor, outwardly contankerous to hide the fact that he's really a big softie, yet also possessing a wise and penetrating gaze that keeps him from merely being comic relief, though he provides that as well. Here's one of my favorite rants:

Withrington: Let this be as it may, I don't chuse to have my house in a perpetual bustle from morning till night, with your plots and your pastimes. There is no more order nor distinction kept up in my house than if it were a cabin in Kamschatka, and common to the whole tribe! I can't set my nose in a room of it but 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; kitchen wenches flaunt up stairs with their new top-knots on to look at themselves in the pier glass; and the very beggar children go hopping about my hall with their half-eaten scraps in their hands as though it were the entry to a work-house!

Then there's Sir Loftus Prettyman and Jack Opal, the two pretentious men of fashion who compete for Marianne's hand - and money- in marriage. Sir Loftus is a preening peacock of a man soley concerned with appearance and distinction. His very first line is to bemoan the fact that he can't make as elaborate of a first impression as he would like - "How cursedly unlucky this is now! If she had come out but a few moments sooner, I should have passed her walking arm in arm with a British peer. How provokingly these things always happen with me!" Jack Opal, meanwhile, is an unapologetic copy-cat of Sir Loftus, and starts out as his toady until Marianne gives him enough encouragement to be a rival.  A good portion of the play deals with their misled courting of Marianne and resulting well-deserved comeuppance, and the right pair of actors could have a field day with these vapid, gold-digging dandies. But my preferred choice of role in this play would easily be Mr. Royston, a truly inspired comic creation. Another of Marianne's deceived suitors, he fancies himself a subtle and cunning man of the world, but only succeeds in making things far more complicated than they need to be. He arrives in Bath to procure an office from the Duke, and arrange a marriage to an heiress, but hasn't quite decided which he's getting for his son and which is for him - "And as for the Duke, I will ply him as close as I can with solicitations in the mean time, without altogether stating my request; for if I get the lady, George shall have the office, and if he gets the lady, I shall have the office. So we have two chances in our favor both ways." Needless to say, this doesn't work out as he plans.

Atypically, the female roles fare even better: Agnes is a fantastic protagonist, and the kind of role you don't normally find in a romantic comedy - spirited, intelligent, thoughtful, and fully in control of her own destiny. She refuses to settle for what comes her way, as society expects her to, and takes action to get what she wants. Her scheme to trade places with Marianne is no whim, as her uncle assumes. It is "a reasonable woman's desire".

Agnes: For if I am to marry at all, I am resolved to have a respectable man, and a man who is attached to me, and to find out such a one in my present situation is impossible. I am provoked beyond all patience with your greedy old lords and matchmaking aunts, introducing their poor noodle heirs-apparent to me, like so many dolts dressed out for a race ball. Your ambitius esquires, and proud obsequious baronets are intolerable, and your rakish younger brothers are nauseous; such creatures only surround me , whilst men of sense keep at a distance, and think me as foolish as the company I keep. One would swear I was made of amber, to attract all the dust and chaff of the community."

It is also interesting to note that, of the two lovers, Agnes is depicted as being the rational one, weighing and measuring her emotions before giving in to them, where Harwood is the one who falls in love instantly and gets carried away by his feelings. It's rare to see this in romantic comedies even now.  The other major female role of the play is Marianne, whose reasons for switching places are much less altruistic, namely revenge on the hypocritical fortune hunters who wouldn't give her a glance because of her lack of means. She doesn't have much of a character arch, but she does have an awful lot of fun, and is no less rich a character for her consistency. In fact, it is her single-mindedness that keeps her vibrant. I daresay any other playwright of the period (and a lot of playwrights now) would have inserted a secondary love plot between Marianne and one of her misinformed suitors, but Baillie essentially marries her off before the play even starts. In the very first scene, we discover that Marianne has been secretly engaged to Withrington's heir without Withrington's knowledge or consent. This causes some initial friction between Withrington and Marianne, but it is quickly smoothed over by some adept maneouvering from Agnes, who uses a fictional visit to a fortune-teller to reveal to Withrington what he truly values more than his wounded pride. And if Marianne is not quite so resourceful as Agnes, she is certainly bolder. Agnes merely pretends to buck class distinction by posing as lower than she is in order to obtain someone that society would deem appropriate for her. Marianne, on the other hand, actively transgresses against the social order by marrying someone several rungs up the social/financial ladder. Agnes' plot is meant to reveal someone who is worthy of her, while Marianne uses it to prove the unworthiness of the men society deems 'too good' for her. In a way, Agnes and Marianne represent two possible paths for women seeking something akin to equality in a male dominated society - trick a broken system into rewarding you by bending the rules, or break them and expose just how broken the system is. A third option might be the one Joanna Baillie chose herself - to ignore the system by not marrying at all, and going on with what you want to do whether people are paying attention or not.

The supporting role of Miss Eston, while not really serving a function in the plot, does serve as a fun comic turn, and supplies what might be the funniest scene in the play. Miss Eston is a mostly harmless gossip with astounding verbal endurance, first seen entering, crossing the stage and exiting all while talking without so much as a pause for breath. At the end of the second act, Mr. Royston arrives, and mistakes Miss Eston for Marianne (who he mistakenly thinks is the heiress). What follows is a breathtaking duel of comic self-absorbtion in which both characters do their best to monopolize the conversation, eventually just blatantly talking over each other, until a winded Royston finally admits defeat.

On the whole, The Tryal is a thoroughly charming comedy, but not without its problems. Much of the humor between Marianne and Sir Loftus stems from adherence to and breeches of a strict code of formality that the audience was familiar with at the time, but might leave modern spectators scratching their heads. This mostly takes place in their first scene together, but it also pops up in what should be the climax of their plotline - Sir Loftus' proposal and Marianne's refusal of him. Much is made of Sir Loftus' reluctance to kneel, and when he does, Agnes and Miss Eston burst out of a closet they have been hiding in, knocking him to the ground. They then pretend to try to help him up while really hindering his efforts. In the 1790's, seeing a proper man of fashion splayed out on the floor may have counted as a major humiliation that would make the victim flee the scene in rage, but in our much less restrained age, it comes off as a trival blow to ego at the very most. Were I staging a production of The Tryal, I might try to highlight the moment by having Sir Loftus wear one of the more extravagant wigs of the period, which gets knocked off in the ensuing tussle, revealing him to be bald, for as written, the scene just doesn't have the punch of a final comeuppance that it may have had in its own time.

The play has another major challenge, and that is its plot structure. I call it a challenge rather than a flaw because it is very clear from Baillie's Introductory Discourse that the atypical structure is intentional, and meant as a reaction against much of the comedy on London stages at the time. Baillie refers to what she calls Busy or Circumstantial comedy, in which "all those ingenious contrivances of lovers, guardians, governantes and chamber-maids; that ambushed bush-fighting amongst closets, screens, chests, easy-chairs and toilet-tables, form  a gay varied game of dexterity and invention ... so leaving all wisdom and criticism behind us, we follow the varied changes of the plot, and stop not for reflection. The studious man who wants a cessation from thought, the indolent man who dislikes it, and all those who, from habit or circumstances, live in a state of divorce from their own minds, are pleased with an amusement in which they have nothing to do but to open their eyes and behold; the moral tendency of it, however, is very faulty." In her plays, Baillie is doing nothing short of attempting a new type of comedy, what she terms "Characteristick Comedy", "which represents to us this motley world of men and women in which we live, under those circumstances of ordinary and familiar life most favorable to the discovery of the human heart". This form of naturalistic comedy, she believes "stands little in need of busy plot, extraordinary incidents, witty repartee or studied sentiments. It naturally produces for itself all that it requires: characters who are to speak for themselves, who are to be known by their own words and actions, not by the accounts that are given of them by others". In other words, comedy should come from characters rather than contrived situations. It is a creed she adheres to resolutely, more interested in the humor inherent in an interesting person going about their business than that which comes from mix-ups and complications. In fact, Baillie even manages to use some of the devices she critiques  - in The Tryal, we have characters that hide in closets and behind screens - but in each instance, Baillie uses the device to specify character rather than cause complications or threaten discovery. What's funny about Agnes and Miss Eston hiding in the closet is that A) their seeing Loftus act in private in a way he'd never act in public, and B) the fact that being hidden in a closet doesn't keep Miss Eston from wanting to continue a conversation. Likewise, with the scene where Agnes hides behind a screen to overhear what Harwood will do, the humor comes from Royston's micro-managment of where to place the screen and how to explain it should Harwood ask about it, and Agnes' overjoyed reaction to hearing that her lover never wants to see her again.  It's a neat trick, and really one of the major aims of Baillie's Plays On The Passions - to use the current conventions of the stage in an unconventional way.

What results is a romantic comedy that is unusually refreshing, while being the theatrical equivalent of tightrope walking without a net. Most of the plot points we are used to seeing in a comedy revolving around a courtship just aren't there. There is no rival to Harwood for Agnes' affections, no unfortunate misunderstandings between the lovers, no antagonist to reveal or complicate Agnes and Marianne's stratagems, and while a case of mistaken identity catapults the plot forward, it never goes awry or gets out of control, but rather accomplishes exactly what it was designed to do. There is only one conflict - whether Harwood's love for Agnes will prove to be a love she values and desires. As with her tragedy "Basil", the true antagonist is Harwood's unruly passion, but in The Tryal, Baillie doesn't even bother with a secondary one, counting on her characters to carry the day. And for the most part, they do. But if the actors involved in a production of The Tryal don't really nail the colorful personalities of their parts, there are very few plot mechanics to camoflage or distract from their shortcomings. This may be one of the reasons why, even two hundred years after its publication, The Tryal still hasn't seen a single stage production (at least not one with any record I can find). Which is a shame, because it's much more stageable than the grandiose "Basil". The Tryal has a managable cast of 13 (but could easily be performed by 11 or 12 with some shrewd double-casting), and two simple locations. If done well, I think it could make for an exhilarating evening of theatre - especially for the first company that tries (there's always something special about a World Premiere). But for now,  two centuries after she wrote it, Joanna Baillie's The Tryal still remains a little too stubbornly unconventional.