Plays on the Passions, Volume 2

It took a while, but eventually the publication of Plays on the Passions became an enormous success, going through five printings in six years, and its anonymous author became the talk of London literary society. It wasn't long before people began clamoring for a theatrical production of one of the tragedies from the volume, and in 1800 the famed Drury Lane Theatre in London presented De Monfort on stage, starring John Phillip Kemble, and his sister, legendary actress Sarah Siddons, as Jane. Shortly thereafter, Joanna Baillie finally revealed herself as the author of the plays. Unfortunately, the production was not a success, and the knowledge that the plays were written by a woman did little to burnish their reputation. As Baillie reported in a letter to her nephew William:

....so passed away the earliest & brightest part of my career, till the feeble success of de Monfort on the stage, and the discovery of hitherto conceald Dramatist being not a man of letters but a private Gentlewoman of no mark or likelihood, turned the tide of public favour, and then influential critics and Reviewers from all quarters North & South, attacked the intention of the work as delineating in each of the Dramas only one passion, and therefore quite unnatural & absurd....the inferences drawn from their own remarks was all that they deigned to lay before their Readers.

The second volume of Plays on the Passions was published in 1802, featuring The Election -the comedic counterpart to De Montfort on the subject of hatred, Ethwald - a two-part tragedy of ambition, and The Second Marriage, a comedy on the same subject. Baillie was of the opinion that this second volume of her project contained some of her best writing. Personally, I think that couldn't be further from the truth. If someone were to come across the second volume of Plays on the Passions before reading the first, they might very well (and fairly justifiably) conclude her to be exactly what history has consistently painted her as - an interesting but mostly inconsequential literary oddity quite rightly relegated to scholarly discussions as opposed to actual performance. Ethwald is the first of her tragedies to completely succumb to the limitations and difficulties of her scheme to have her protagonist's struggle focused not on external pressures but internal ones, and it doesn't help that Baillie liberally borrows elements from Shakespeare's MacBeth (she even admits to as much in the stage directions), which only points out how dramatically inert and overblown her attempt at similar subject matter is. Meanwhile, the comedies suffer from various flaws in their structure, and contain several of the hoary devices, quite popular at the time, that Baillie herself rebuked in the Introductory Discourse of the first volume. What made for such a change?

My suspicion is this: Baillie documented at length that her true desire for her plays was to see them performed, not just read, and the relative failure of De Montfort on the London stage cast the possibility of future performances very much in doubt. So in continuing her project, she made certain concessions to public taste in hopes that this would lead to greater success on the stage. Sadly, it did not, and had the unfortunate side effect of making these plays feel much less timeless and inventive than those of the first volume, and - unlike Basil, The Tryal, and De Monfort - almost completely unstageable for a modern audience. Indeed, in my reading of this volume, I began to wonder if the first volume of her plays was something of a fluke. Luckily, I persevered, and found to my delight that much of her best writing still lay ahead of her. But for a moment here, the journey through her plays becomes something of a slog...