The Election: a Comedy

Joanna Baillie's second volume of Plays on the Passions picks up where the first left off, with the subject of hatred. But where De Montfort mined that passion for all its inherent tragedy, The Election seeks to ferret out hatred's nature from a comedic perspective. Unfortunately, the Election lacks the focus and tension of its dramatic twin. In short, it's a bit of a mess, acting as a foreboding signpost for problems to come in the volume's other plays.


The Election, like De Montfort before it, focuses on two men, one of whom is consumed by a bitter, unreasonable hatred of the other. But this time, Baillie finds an interesting new wrinkle to add in- one of class. In De Montfort, the title character and his nemesis Rezenvelt were both members of the nobility, as befit the rules of tragedy at the time. The Election, being a comedy,  revolves around Lord Baltimore, an aristocrat from a once high family now riddled with debt, and his loathing of Freeman, new money of the merchant class.

Pitted against each other in a local election, Baltimore's initial annoyance with his very rich but unsophisticated neighbor's usurpation of his position at the head of the community grows into something dangerous, and his obsession with beating Freeman in the election drives him even further into debt in and ruin. Meanwhile, Freeman's social climber wife, seething with her perceived inferiority compared to the genteel Baltimore family, schemes to buy up Baltimore's debts and have him imprisoned for them. When Freeman finds out what his wife has done, he's appalled, and manages to have Baltimore's debts paid anonymously. Baltimore wins the election, but is convinced his jailing was a plot by his rival, and challenges him to a duel. In the middle of the deadly contest, Baltimore's friend Truebridge bursts in, and announces that he has discovered documents that prove Baltimore and Freeman are, in fact, long lost brothers. This finally assuages Baltimore's hatred, and they all live happily ever after.


Even from the bare outlines of the plot, it's readily apparent that something is amiss. In Baillie's Introductory Discourse at the beginning of her first volume of plays, she stated that she believed true comedy "stands little in need of busy plot, extraordinary incidents, witty repartee or studied sentiments," and instead, "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." But The Election's random, coincidental resolution makes use of those very "extraordinary incidents" and "all those ingenious contrivances" she initially designed her plays to challenge. As a result, the play ends up having very little do with Lord Baltimore's heart, since nothing manages to change it except for a fairly preposterous trick of fate.


This is especially perplexing since Baillie actually manages to write a fitting conclusion to the play, only to place it in the middle where it makes little sense and accomplishes nothing. In the first scene of the fourth act, an accident befalls Freeman, and Baltimore ends up being the only person who can save his life. We see him exit, hurrying toward the call for help, and are left with his wife, Lady Baltimore, the play's most consistent voice of reason, as she waits with dread to see what her husband will do with his nemesis' life essentially in his hands. After a tense moment, Baltimore emerges, having saved his rival from drowning. It would make a fine ending, a moment of desperate choice for our protagonist, who overcomes his own raging passion in order to do the right thing. Baillie's comedy/tragedy pairing on love worked in much the same way. Basil is a tragedy because its titular hero cannot pull himself out of his impassioned state to do what his conscience demands of him. The Tryal is a comedy because its hero, Harwood, rallies at the last second to meet his own moral standards before it is too late. In The Election, however, even having made the decision to save Freeman from certain death, Baltimore cannot shake his troubled emotional state, to the point of not being able to be in the same room with the grateful man effusively praising him for his act. And within the course of another act and a half, Baltimore apparently repents his life-saving actions, challenging Freeman to a duel to the death. So we have a conclusion that ends up repeating a dilemma our hero seemingly overcame just a few scenes ago, only to resolve it in a contrived manner that doesn't feel like a choice at all. It strikes me as a serious structural blunder that sinks the whole play, which is a shame, because there are some things that The Election does well.

Freeman and Balitmore's relationship is, in certain ways, a good deal more interesting than De Montfort and Rezenvelt's in The Election's tragic counterpart. The differences in class and social standing make Balitmore and Freeman's interactions more complex, and Baillie has good fun with this. In one particularly clever monologue, we discover that Freeman has done everything that so tormented Baltimore because he was trying to please him, but so misunderstands the world of the aristocracy that Freeman's actions have the exact opposite effect without his even realizing it. It's a neat concept, but one that never truly pays off.

The play is full of these sorts of near misses. It opens in an entertainingly raucous key, with a mob of clashing Freeman and Balitmore supporters shouting each other down and eventually coming to blows. It's a great start, but it doesn't really go anywhere. Lady Baltimore, when she first appears, seems to be another intelligent, resourceful Baillie heroine who sees through her husband's foolishness, but still loves him fiercely. But unlike Baillie's previous female comic protagonist, Agnes, Lady Balitmore is given nothing to do but react.  Nothing she does to try to save her husband has any traction, and though much of the play is essentially from her point of view, you could arguably remove her from it completely, and the plot would stay pretty much the same. There are some reliable comic bits here and there, but most of them are carried off by minor characters who figure little in the plot - Peter, a wily servant who discovers how to use his master's odd passion to benefit his own pockets, and Jenkison and Servet, a pair of punctilious lawyers who would gladly risk a man's death in a duel if it keeps them in fresh lawsuits for the near future. Also amusing is Charlotte, Freeman's daughter, a free-spirited tomboy shoved by her parents into a version of "ladyhood" that obviously doesn't fit her.

In the end, though, Baillie's goals as a painter of psychological states makes for an even less satisfying dramatic structure than usual from her. Baltimore's passion is so extreme that nothing anyone else does (outside of discovering a 'BIG SECRET!') has any effect on it. Thus, we end up with several fun characters who have absolutely nothing to do beyond waiting for the protagonist to just get over himself. It makes for a frustrating experience, all the more unsatisfactory for the fact that it ultimately gives less insight into its main character than any of Baillie's previous, more structurally varied works thus far.

Where stage performance is concerned, I personally don't think The Election has much to offer a modern audience. The characters are less fleshed out, and none of them grow through the course of the play, so there's less for actors to explore, play with and get excited about. And while there is a stronger spine of plot and incident to The Election than Baillie's first go at comedy in The Tryal, the ending is so out-of-the-blue fantastical, today's audiences will have a hard time experiencing itas anything other than flat-out farce that's missing the frenetic momentum that should lead up to such a thing. Overall, I think this is a play best left to the historians and essayists to make of it what they will.

The Election finds Baillie straining more and more visibly with the restrictions of her grand scheme of the Plays on the Passions, perhaps because they get thornier as the project goes on. How do you keep the narrow focus fresh? How much should the tragedies and comedies for each passion mirror each other? How do you continue to reveal the inner depths of an overwhelming emotion without depriving the characters of action and agency? These are questions that Baillie will spend the whole volume wrestling with, but not quite figuring out. The Election is an interesting step in Baillie's overall series, and begins to establish her second volume of plays as a portrait of an artist struggling with and ultimately overcoming the traps of an unprecedented ambitious design, but as a stand-alone evening of captivating theatre, it doesn't quite hold together.