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.

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...

De Montfort: A Tragedy

Joanna Baillie concludes her first volume of "Plays on the Passions" with "De Montfort", the clearest and most focused distillation of her aims and principles. With her first tragedy, she hewed closely to the expansive example of Shakespeare and the Jacobean playwrights (especially John Fletcher, whose comedy "The Mad Lover" may have been the inspiration for it), and wrote a large, boisterous work full of interesting characters, incidents, and pageantry to surround her single-minded hero. In "The Tryal", the hero's overwhelming passion becomes a complication to the plot rather than the main focus of the work, and the hero is, in fact, demoted in favor of the heroine and a number of other colorful personalities, much in the style of Sheridan or Goldsmith. But everything about "De Montfort" is direct and to the point, with an almost claustrophobic narrowness of purpose that yields undeniable power to her portrayal of a man whose increasingly narrow viewpoint leads to his own destruction. Both "Basil" and "The Tryal" showed a playwright finding her own unique voice, but "De Montfort" is the first time she shouts with it.

Once again, the plot is deceptively simple. Since childhood, the Marquis De Montfort has had a passionate dislike of schoolmate Rezenvelt that finally results in a duel, which De Montfort loses. Fleeing in shame when Rezenvelt spares his life, De Montfort's dislike grows into blind hatred. When circumstances bring Rezenvelt to cross De Montfort's path again, De Montfort does his best to heed his saintly sister Jane's advice, and master his emotions, but his hatred colors everything he sees. When he hears a rumor, spread by the jealous Countess Freberg, that his sister Jane and Rezenvelt are secretly lovers, his loathing overpowers his reason, leading to murder and a tragic, guilt-ridden death.

That's really all the plot there is, and the play revolves around a series of encounters between De Montfort and Rezenvelt where the veneer of normal social interaction slowly wears away, as seemingly small acts and remarks fuel De Montfort's hateful passion to the point where it overwhelms his humanity and leads him to commit an act that he just can't live with. The play's focus is relentless - there are no subplots like those found in "Basil", and no pleasant side characters that have little bearing on the plot, as in "The Tryal". "De Montfort" has the shortest cast list of all Baillie's plays so far, listing only ten characters by name, and of those ten, five are mainly there to serve specific functions. Characters like Manuel and Jerome certainly aren't cardboard cutouts, but mostly, they quietly do what needs doing while Baillie's gaze rests firmly on De Montfort, Rezenvelt, Jane De Montfort, and the Count and Countess Freberg.

Lord Byron was a great admirer of Baillie's, and this play makes it easy to see why, for in the character of De Montfort, Baillie gave the English stage a prototypical Byronic hero while Byron himself was still a 10 year old schoolboy. De Montfort is a man of many contradictions - arrogant yet sensitive, coldly intelligent yet moody, with a rigid nobility that takes offense easily, while at the same time making him capable of wild generosity. By nature a social critic, he can quickly take stock of society's foibles, but cannot see his own situation clearly enough to avoid the doom that awaits him. Even as he loathes the venomous hatred that gnaws at him, he places the blame fully at the feet of his enemy, who he repeatedly refers to as a reptile.

De Montfort: Think'st thou there are no serpents in the world

                       But those that slide along the grassy sod,

                       And sting the luckless foot that presses them?

                       There are who in the path of social life

                       Do bask their spotted skins in Fortune's sun,

                       And sting the soul - Ay, till its healthful frame

                       Is chang'd to secret, fest'ring, sore disease,

                       So deadly is the wound.

Rezenvelt, meanwhile, is everything De Montfort is not - carefree, always at ease, a merry wit to whom everything is fodder for a joke. In their first scene together, De Montfort tries to employ a cold formality with Rezenvelt, hoping to show that he isn't bothered by Rezenvelt's presence. But Rezenvelt completely flummoxes him with exaggerated praise and backhanded compliments, that to any other hearer would sound completely innocent. But coming after they have met each other in a duel, the subtext is not so benign:

Rezenvelt: (to Count Freberg) And know you not what brings De Montfort here?

Freberg: Truly, I do not.

Rezenvelt: O! 'tis love of me.

                  I have but two short days in Amberg been,

                  And here with postman's speed he follows me,

                  Finding his home so dull and tiresome grown.

Freberg: (to De Montfort) Is Rezenvelt so sadly miss'd with you?

                   Your town so changed?

De Montfort:                                   Not altogether so;

                      Some witlings and jest-mongers still remain

                      For fools to laugh at.

Rezenvelt: But he laughs not, and therefore he is wise.

                  He ever frowns on them with sullen brow

                  Contemptuous; therefore he is very wise,

                  Nay, daily frets his most refined soul

                  With their poor folly, to its inmost core;

                   Therefore he is most eminently wise.

Rezenvelt meets De Montfort's veiled insult with praise that actually exposes De Montfort's arrogance for what it is. Granted, Rezenvelt has no idea what turmoil is going on inside De Montfort, but even so, he is not completely guiltless. Just as De Montfort misconstrues much of Rezenvelt's actions due to his burning hatred, Rezenvelt is equally unable to view De Montfort clearly, seeing only a spoiled, arrogant brat rather than a man troubled by deep, uncontrollable emotions. Late in the play, Rezenvelt confides to Count Freberg his true feelings toward his adversary:

Rezenvelt: But since he proudly thinks that cold respect,

                  The formal tokens of his lordly favour

                   So precious are, that I would sue for them

                   As fair distinction in the publick eye,

                   Forgetting former wrongs, I spurn it all;

                   And but that I do bear that noble woman,

                   His worthy, his incomparable sister,

                   Such fix'd profound regard, I would expose him;

                   And as a mighty bull, in senseless rage,

                   Roused at the baiter's will, with wretched rags

                   Of ire-provoking scarlet, chafes and bellows,

                   I'd make him at small cost of paltry wit,

                   With all his deep and manly faculties,

                   The scorn and laugh of fools.

Because he can only see the pride, as opposed to the fear and desperation of his opponent,  he grossly underestimates the danger of continuing to provoke De Montfort.

Rezenvelt: In short, I still have been th' opposing rock,

                  O'er which the stream of his o'erflowing pride

                   Hath foamed and fretted. See'st thou how it is?

Freberg:  Too well I see, and warn thee to beware.

                Such streams have oft, by swelling floods surcharged,

                Borne down with sudden and impetuous force

                The yet unshaken stone of opposition,

                Which had for ages stopp'd their flowing course.

                 I pray thee, friend, beware.

Rezenvelt: Thou canst not mean - he will not murder me?

Freberg: What a proud heart, with such dark passion toss'd

               May, in the anguish of its thoughts, conceive,

               I will not dare to say.

Rezenvelt:                                 Ha, ha! thou knows't him not.

                  Full often have I mark'd it in his youth,

                  And could have almost loved him for the weakness:

                  He's form'd with such antipathay, by nature,

                  To all infliction or corporeal pain,

                  To wounding life, e'en to the sight of blood,

                  He cannot if he would.

Freberg:                                          Then fy upon thee!

               It is not gen'rous to provoke him thus.

Though Rezenvelt's easy discourse and De Montfort's brooding, confused mind are often contrasted throughout the play, they share one thing in common: their pride in their own wisdom blinds them to the true nature of the other. Both the contrast between their views, and the comparison of their misreading of the world around them is brought to a splendid climax in Act Four, Scene One. De Montfort lies in wait for Rezenvelt in the woods under cover of night. From De Montfort’s warped perspective, all of nature conspires to make the spot a place of terror –

De Montfort: What sound is that? It is the screech-owl’s cry.
                       Foul bird of the night! What spirit guides thee here?

                        Art thou instinctive drawn to scenes of horrour?

                        I’ve heard of this.

                        How those fall’n leaves so rustle on the path,

                        With whisp’ring noise, as tho’ the earth around me

                        Did utter secret things!

                        The distant river too, bears to mine ear

                        A dismal wailing O mysterious night!

                        Thou art not silent; many tongues hast thou.

                        A distant gath’ring blast sounds through the wood,

                        And dark clouds fleetly hasten o’er the sky:

                        O! that a storm would rise, a raging storm;

                        Amidst the roar of warring elements

                        I’d lift my hand and strike! But this pale light,

                        The calm distinctness of each stilly thing,

                        Is terrible. Footsteps are near –

                        He comes! He comes! I’ll watch him farther on –

                        I cannot do it here.

Enter Rezenvelt, and continues his way slowly across the stage, but just as he is going off the owl screams, he stops and listens, and the owl screams again.

Rezenvelt: Ha! Does the night-bird greet me on my way?

                  How much his hooting is in harmony

                  With such a scene as this! I like it well.

                 Oft when a boy, at the still twilight hour,

                 I’ve leant my back against some knotted oak,

                 And loudly mimick’d him, till to my call

                 He answer would return, and thro’ the gloom

                 We friendly converse held.

                  Between me and the star-bespangled sky

                  Those aged oaks their crossing branches wave,

                  And thro’ them looks the pale and placid moon.

                  How like a crocodile, or winged snake,

                  Yon sailing cloud bears on its dusky length!

                  And now transform’d by the passing wind,

                  Methinks it seems a flying Pegasus…

                                                               (a bell heard at some distance)

                  What bell is this?

                  It sends a solemn sound upon the breeze.

                  Now, to a fearful superstitious mind,

                  In such a scene, ‘twould like a death-knell come;

                  For me it tells but of a shelter near,

                  And so I bid it welcome.

Both men don’t see their surroundings so much as they see themselves. To De Montofort, full of dark desires, the woods are a dark, foreboding place. To the unsuspecting Rezenvelt, the very same location is full of familiar fancies to practice his wit upon. These contrasting monologues are effective in two different ways: First, Rezenvelt’s monologue vividly shows us just how much De Montfort’s perception has been poisoned by his hatred, revealing what De Montfort sees as haunting omens to be just as validly interpreted as a perfectly pleasant night. On the other hand, it also reveals the flaw in Rezenvelt’s nature that leads immediately to his own death – his joy and confidence in his own cleverness. Just as he judges De Montfort as a man incapable of murder and cannot conceive that his judgment might be faulty, he spends his last few living moments congratulating himself on having too much good sense to feel foreboding about the murder that waits right around the corner.

The third point in the play’s main triangle of opposing personalities is Jane, De Montfort’s sister. A paragon of virtue that every man in the play comes close to worshipping,  Jane shows us what De Montfort himself may have aspired to be had he not been slowly gnawed at by his consuming hatred. It is her belief in De Montfort’s goodness that convinces him to try to make peace with Rezenvelt, and ultimately, it is De Montfort’s possessive attachment to her that drives him to murder when he mistakenly thinks his saintly sister has agreed to be joined to the man he most hates in the world. It is a role on which much depends, but manages (perhaps consequently) to be the least interesting of the three major characters. With Baillie’s previous track record of heroines, this is a shock, especially since on a thematic level, Jane both completes the triangle, and adds a compelling twist to it. Every character in the play is blinded by something – De Montfort by hate, Rezenvelt by his own wit and self-regard, but where the men are distracted by vices, Jane’s vision is clouded by virtue – her own goodness keeps her from seeing what hatred has wrought in her brother’s heart. Her advice is always sound and loving, urging her brother on toward what would normally be the right course. But as loyal and loving a sister as she is, her urgings are not completely altruistic. There is a certain enjoyment she derives from both her and her brother receiving acclaim from the world, as she comes to realize, too late, at the end of the play, standing over the corpse of her beloved brother -

Jane:

He to whose ear my praise most welcome was,
Hears it no more; and, oh our piteous lot!
What tongue will talk of him? Alas, alas!
This more than all will bow me to the earth;
I feel my misery here.
The voice of praise was wont to name us both:
I had no greater pride.

It’s a very revealing admission, and colors her previous scene, where she begs De Montfort to repent, in a not quite so saintly light. So why does Jane seem more like a romantic ideal of womanhood than a living, breathing person? Partially because Baillie breaks one of her own rules. In her Introductory Discourse, Baillie says one of her aims is to create “characters who are to speak for themselves, who are to be known by their own words and actions, not the accounts that are given of them by others”. But the other characters CONSTANTLY talk about Jane, profusely, and always with glowing praise. Before she appears onstage, a page describes her as

“So queenly, so commanding, and so noble,
I shrunk at first in awe; but when she smiled,
For so she did to see me thus abash’d,
Methought I could have compass’d sea and land
To do her bidding”

He goes on like this for an entire page of script, only to be joined by Count Freberg singing her praises, albeit in a less blatantly expository fashion. Granted, these effusions of worship do contribute to the plot, in making the Countess Freberg jealous enough of the way men lavish Jane with attention that she actively plots to slander her. But it’s pushed so far, that I was practically on the Countess’ side by the time she got around to it. And while Jane’s graveside confession of pride gives any actress playing the part much to work with in the scenes leading up to it, Baillie couches this real, tender moment amidst a scene of two servants swearing their undying loyalty to Jane because she’s so great, and a rather gratuitous bit where authorities (from where, it’s never said) suddenly show up and demand to know just how De Montfort died so that the assembled company can be outraged at how they can suspect foul play from such a noble lady as Jane. To an audience at the onset of the Romantic movement, it all seemed quite thrilling. As mentioned in my earlier review of Basil, before Baillie’s authorship of the plays became known, and most assumed them to be the work of a man, Jane De Montfort was one of the characters author Mary Berry cited as evidence of a female playwright: “… no man could or would draw such noble, such dignified representations of the female mind as the Countess Albini and Jane De Mountfort. They often make us clever, captivating, heroic, but never rationally superior …”. The famous actress Sarah Siddons told Baillie to “write me more Jane De Montforts”, giving the impression that the role was considered something of a triumph. But it is definitely a role very much of its time. Still, there’s just enough difference between how Jane is perceived and how she really acts to give the right actress plenty of room to humanize her. And in a play where everything hinges on peoples’ misperception of others, perhaps that was Baillie’s intent … but it doesn’t always feel that way.

Filling out the major cast are the Count and Countess Freberg, who echo the problems of vision and understanding that plague the main trio of characters in a less extreme, more socially acceptable form, but still with dire consequences. The Count is a trusting, amiable man, generous to a fault, who, like Jane, only comprehends what De Montfort is capable of when it is too late. The Countess, bothered by Jane’s high standing among men, including her husband, isn’t gripped by hatred as De Montfort is, but her petty jealously is a subtle reflection of his all-consuming passion, and turns out to be harmful in its own right.  Unlike “Basil” or “The Tryal”, “De Montfort” has no clear-eyed friend or relative to forstall or postpone the inevitable tragedy. Everyone, even the angelic Jane, has a blind spot that keeps them from seeing what’s coming, leaving De Montfort (and the audience) alone in his torment. This compounds the tragedy in a way most or Baillie’s verse dramas don’t – rather than just focusing on a man or woman being swept away by ungovernable passion, “De Montfort” turns an accusing eye to the way the society around that person tries to pretend that everything is fine rather than put itself out to deal with an unpleasant problem.

Dramatically, “De Montfort” is the most satisfying of the works in the first volume of Plays on the Passions. It has a clearer overall direction than “The Tryal”, and fewer elaborate side steps than “Basil”.  It is also the first of Baillie’s plays to demonstrate her grandly gothic sensibility, with scenes awash in old castles, haunting forests at night, and a climax in a moldering cathedral full of torchlight and stained glass. It’s one of the play’s more impressive tricks to feel so emotionally claustrophobic while at the same time employing wide variety of scene and spectacle. Most of the scenes themselves are well crafted and full of tension. There are a few Romantic Era trappings that might be a bit much for modern audiences – some overwrought stage directions, Jane’s over-praised purity, De Montfort’s death from guilt and shame, but the right staging could smooth these elements over. As usual, the play could use a good edit, and is all the more frustrating because, being one of the few plays actually performed within Joanna Baillie’s lifetime, it actually got one. We just don’t have it anymore. Baillie herself reworked portions of “De Montfort” before it premiered at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, but because the play was not quite considered a success, and had already been published, there is no existing record of what she cut out or rewrote. We have letters where she agonizes over whether to leave in the second to last scene of the play– in my opinion, a huge momentum killer where a bunch of characters we literally just met discuss what’s happening to the characters we actually care about offstage – but left us no record of what she decided.

Its initial reception in London notwithstanding, “De Montfort” went on to become Baillie’s most performed work, her standard representation in anthologies, and is one of only three plays of hers to make its way to the stage in the 21^st century. It is a forceful, original work with a unique atmosphere of foreboding that manages to blend some of the torrid thrills of melodrama with a keen psychological and social insight that was rare for her time. Our own time could certainly use an injection of the bold theatricality found in “De Montfort”. Hopefully, some daring theatre companies make that injection available to more and more people from here on out.

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.

Basil: A Tragedy

"Basil" was the first of Joanna Baillie's plays that I read, and the first blazing sign to me that the classic repertoire might truly be the poorer for its neglect of her work. While certainly not without its problems, there is more than enough wit, passion and vibrancy on display to make up for its faults and then some. The play is a veritable feast for actors, packed full of well drawn, interesting characters, witty exchanges, impassioned clashes, and soul searching monologues, and I find it quite baffling that it had not actually been performed on stage until a small company in Washington, D.C. staged it in 2003, over 200 years after it was written.

The plot of Basil is as follows:

During the Italian Wars of the 16th century, the young but already famous general Count Basil and his troops pass through Mantua on their way to the front. When paying his respects to the Duke of Mantua, Basil finds himself for the first time overwhelmed with passion for something other than war and glory - love for the Duke's beautiful daughter, Victoria. The Duke, an old friend of Basil's father, begs Basil to stay with them at Mantua for an extra day or two, but Basil refuses, as his men are needed immediately on the front lines. The Duke then enlists his daughter to use her charms to secure the presence of the stern young general, and Victoria gladly takes up the challenge. With Basil showering her with promises of love and devotion, she has no trouble trapping him in his own words so that he finally consents to stay.

But unbeknownst to either of them, the Duke has a secret motive for wanting to keep Basil in Mantua - he is working for the enemy, and knows their army is on its way. That night, while Victoria throws a masked ball for her honored guest, the Duke arranges for his minister Gauriceio to spread rumors through Basil's camp and stir his men up to mutiny. Meanwhile, at the ball,  Basil's best friend and cousin Count Rosinberg receives a warning from the Countess Albini that there is trechery in the court, and Basil should leave immediately. But Rosinberg cannot find Basil,  who is too busy professing his love to Victoria. She gives him just enough hope to keep him ensnared in his new, overwhelming passion.

Back at the camp, Gauriceio has succeeded in using a disgruntled officer named Frederick to stir the troops up against Basil. When Basil returns from the masque to find all his men demanding their own way, he finally snaps back to his former self and reclaims command in brilliant fashion.  Rosinberg then presses him to leave before things get any worse, and after a heated discussion, Basil relents. But against Rosinberg's warnings, Basil goes to tell Victoria of his departure in person. Once again face to face with the woman he worships, Basil's resolve crumbles, and he agrees to go riding with her when he should be leading his troops to the aid of their army's main force. During his gambol with Victoria, a messenger arrives with news that the army has engaged with the enemy, managing to eke out a victory against great odds, and at great loss of life. Ashamed at having abandoned his fellow soldiers in time of need, Basil commits suicide. When Victoria finds out that her vanity led to the downfall of such a gallant man, she vows to enter the cloister in repentance, just as Gauriceio betrays her father by leading the Duke's disgruntled subjects in the north against him.

Of course, what this summary fails to convey is Baillie's great skill with character and language, which is where the joys of this play truly lie. While a synopsis of the plot is likely to leave one with a less than exemplary opinion of Basil, Baillie makes a convincing hero of him, mainly by devoting a good amount of time to his struggle with his affections, which resemble a man dying slowly of poison, little by little losing what he is. And his ultimate downfall is made all the more tragic by our having seen the kind of commander he is when in full possession of his faculties, as in the mutinty scene. Baillie also skillfully uses language to service the character when it would be much easier (and in her time, probably more commercially viable) to have it work the other way around. Basil is a skilled warrior, but entirely unskilled in love, and Baillie isn't afraid to let his dialogue show it. Basil's rhapsodies on love are full of stammering fits and starts and simple declarations:

Basil: (speaking of the disguise he wears to the ball)
Beneath your kind disguise, O! let me prosper,
And boldly take the privilege ye give:
Follow her mazy steps, crowd by her side;
Thus, near her face my list'ning ear incline,
An feel her soft breath fan my glowing cheek;
Her fair hand seize, yea, press it closely too!
May it not be e'en so? by heav'n it shall!

Yet when he speaks of war and honor, his means of expressing himself improves greatly, as in this speech to the poor old soldier, Geoffrey:

Basil: Think not of it, thy state is not thyself.
Let mean souls, highly rank'd, look down on thee;
As the poor dwarf, perch'd on a pedestal,
O'erlooks the giant. 'Tis not worth a thought.
Art thou not Geoffrey of the tenth brigade ...
Whose glorious feats of war, by cottage door,
The ancient soldier, tracing in the sand
The many movement of the varied field,
In warlike terms to list'ning swains relates;
Whose bosoms glowing at the wond'rous tale,
First learn to scorn the hind's inglorious life?
Shame seize me, if I would not rather be
The man thou art, than court-created chief
Known only by the dates of his promotion!

It's little touches like these that help Basil feel more like a real person and less like a typically swooning romantic hero.

Also far from typical is the character of Victoria, neither the pure-hearted heroine, nor the wicked temptress so prevalent in drama at the time. What Baillie gives us instead is much more interesting - a young woman in a male-dominated society, newly drunk on the knowledge that her beauty can wield power over her supposed rulers.

Victoria: O! love will master all the power of art,
Ay, all! and she who never has beheld
The polish'd courtier, or the tuneful sage,
Before the glances of her conqu'ring eye,
A very native simple swain become,
Has only vulgar charms.
To make the cunning artless, tame the rude,
Subdue the haughty, shake th' undaunted soul;
Yea, put a bridle in the lion's mouth,
And lead him forth as a domestick cur,
These are the triumphs of all-pow'rful beauty!

Victoria's reason for manipulating Basil is much more realistic than spite or malice - she's a teenage girl testing the limits of her influence. Quite simply, she maneouvers Basil into staying at court just to see if she can. And when she finds she does indeed hold that power over him, she naturally wants to taste of it again. Now if Victoria stayed this glib throughout the play, she may well have become intolerable, but she grows, albeit too slowly to keep tragedy at bay. By Act IV, Victoria's motive for detaining Basil has changed:

Victoria: My gentle friend, thou shouldst not be severe:
For now in truth I love not admiration
As I was wont to do; in truth I do not.
But yet, this once my woman's heart excuse,
For there is something strange in this man's love
I never met before, and I must prove it.

Countess Albini: Well, prove it then, be stricken too thyself,
And bid sweet peace of mind a sad farewell.

Victoria: O no! That will not be! 'twill peace restore;
For after this, all folly of the kind
Will quite insipid and disgusting seem;
And so I shall become a prudent maid,
And passing wise at last.

Victoria does indeed wish to be prudent and wise like her friend and teacher the Countess Albini, but her naive views of love and beauty keep her from becoming so until it is too late. And this is the true tragedy of the character - that in her naive exercise of feminine power, she actually becomes the unwitting pawn of her father's machinations. As the Countess Albini warns her at the end of Victoria's first speech about the conquering power of love:

Countess Albini: And is, indeed, a plain domestick dame,
Who fills the duties of an useful state,
A being of less dignity than she
Who vainly on her transcient beauty builds
A little poor ideal tyranny?

Isaballe: Ideal, too!

Countess Albini: Yes, most unreal pow'r;
For she who only finds her self-esteem
In others' admiration, begs an alms,
Depends on others for her daily food,
And is the very servant of her slaves

Which brings us to my two favorite characters in the show - the Countess Albini and Count Rosinberg. In the years before Joanna Baillie revealed herself to be the author of Plays On the Passions, the character of the Countess Albini was often pointed to as proof that the author was a woman, and not a man as most people supposed, as in this letter from writer Mary Berry:

"I say she because and only because no man could or would draw such noble, such dignified representations of the female mind as the Countess Albini and Jane de Mountfort. They often make us clever, captivating, heroic, but never rationally superior...".

And indeed, the Countess Albini is the most rational voice in the entire play. From her very first appearance, her clear-eyed view is apparent, seeing straight through  Count Rosinberg's considerable braggadocio:

Basil: Because they most of lover's ills complain
Who but affect it as a courtly grace,
Whilst he who feels is silent.

Rosinberg: But there you wrong me; I have felt it oft.
Oft has it made me sigh at ladies' feet,
Soft ditties sing, and dismal sonnets scrawl.

Countess Albini: In all its strange effects, most worthy Rosinberg,
Has it e'er made thee in a corner sit,
Sad, lonely, moping sit, and hold thy tongue?

Rosinberg: No, 'faith, it never has.

Countess Albini: Ha ha ha ha! then thou hast never lov'd.

Through the course of the play, she warns Victoria against her carelessness with Basil, is the first to sniff out the treason in the Duke's court, opens Rosinberg's eyes to his friend's true danger, and does it all with great wit and humanity, too charming and fully herself to ever sound like a voice of doom. The scene where she intercepts Rosinberg at the masked ball, verbally dueling over the roles of men and women in love before revealing herself and her purpose is easily the most charming exchange in the whole play. And her final monologue, sadly realizing that she cannot effect the change she hoped for in Victoria's character is one of the most affecting:

Countess Albini: Ay, go, and ev'ry blessing with thee go,
My most tormenting and most pleasing charge!
Like vapour from the mountain stream art thou,
Which lightly rises on the morning air,
And shifts its fleeting form with ev'ry breeze,
For ever varying, and for ever graceful.
Endearing, gen'rous, bountiful and kind;
Vain, fanciful and fond of worthless praise;
Courteous and gentle, proud and magnificent;
And yet these adverse qualities in thee,
No dissonance nor striking contrast make;
For still thy good and amiable gifts
The sober dignity of virtue wear not,
And such a 'witching mien thy follies shew,
They make a very idiot of reproof,
And smile it to disgrace ...
O! I could hate her for that poor ambition
Which silly adoration only claims,
But that I well remember, in my youth
I felt the like - I did not feel it long:
I tore it soon, indignant from my breast
As that which did degrade a noble mind.

Directly parrellel to her in the play is Count Rosinberg, Basil's cousin and greatest friend. Older than Basil, Rosinberg willingly allowed his cousin's preferment over him because "Our talents of a diff'rent nature are; Mine for the daily intecourse of life, and his for higher things." And Rosingberg's talent for life is a considerable one. He showers the play with wit, and though there is a bit of the rascal about him, his jests most often goad his compatriots toward more noble behaviour. Both a critic and constant enjoyer of women, there are shades of Mercutio and Benedick about him without being derivative, and it is easy to see an alternate world where actors possessed of both comic and dramatic abilities should crave a go at playing Rosinberg nearly as much as his Shakespearean ancestors. Here is Rosinberg practicing his wit on a group of women in the masque scene:

2nd Mask: Wilt thou do nothing for thy lady's fame?

Rosinberg: Yes, lovely shepherdess, on ev'ry tree
I'll carve her name, with true-love garlands bound.
Write madrigals upon her roseate cheeks,
Odes to her eye, 'faith ev'ry wart and mole
That spots her snowy skin shall have its sonnet!
I'll make love-posies for her thimble's edge,
Rather than please her not.

3rd Mask: But for her sake what dangers wilt thou brave?

Rosinberg: In truth, fair Nun, I stomach dangers less
Than other service, and were something loth
To storm a convent's walls for one dear glance;
But if she'll wisely manage this alone,
As maids have done, come o'er the wall herself,
And meet me fairly on the open plain,
I will engage her tender steps to aid
In all annoyance of rude briar or stone,
Or crossing rill, some half-foot wide, or so,
Which the fair lady should unaided pass,
Ye gracious powers forbid! I will defend
Against each hideous fly ...

Rosinberg trades equally in this antic tone and scenes of true dramatic weight, such as challenging Basil to quit Mantua immediately to the point of endangering their entire friendship, and being at Basil's side in his dying moments. It is a huge, magnanimous role, so much so that it is nearly as much Rosinberg's play as Basil's.

Most of the smaller supporting roles also get vibrant, if not quite so complex, colors to play, and there is much an actor could do with the bitterly passed-over Frederick, not above mutiny, but not below repentence either, or Geoffrey, the brave old soldier, with a body maimed by war, but a mind still full of gratefulness and humility. Throughout the play, even minor characters are given meaty scenes and satisfying ends to their particular stories. Unfortunately, the villains of the piece don't fare so well.

At the outset, the Duke of Mantua and Gauriceio are given as much to play as the others - the Duke is a subtle, crafty man whose confidence in his own abilities isn't unwarranted, just overrated. Gauriceio, meanwhile, is his seemingly faithful gopher who sees his chance at rising above his station and grabs it with both hands. Great, scene-chewing stuff on both ends. The problem is, they aren't Baillie's true focus. In Baillie's Plays Upon the Passions, people aren't the antagonists - the emotions are. It isn't the Duke or Gauriceio, or even Victoria, who leads Basil to his downfall. It is Basil's inability to reign in his passion. Her primary interest, and whole purpose for writing Plays on the Passions, is to focus on the internal struggle rather than the outer one, and for her, the true conflict of the play is not between Basil and those plotting against him, but between Basil and himself. The Duke and Gauriceio are really only needed to create a setting where Basil's inner turmoil will have dire, possibly fatal consequences, and once they accomplish that, the characters disappear. Both the Duke and Gauriceio are nowhere to be seen for the last two acts of the play, their story coming to a close offstage - reported to everyone by Isabella, Victoria's waiting woman. And while it is a move consistent with Baillie's principles and objectives, it can't really be called a satisfying one, at least from the actors' perspectives, and I doubt from the audience's either.

As I said at the beginning, the play is certainly not without its problems. Basil's suicide is complicated by the fact that his side won the battle that he missed, and while the messenger does dwell on the fact that much life was lost, it just doesn't have the punch it should have, making his death look more the result of wounded pride than shame and remorse. The fifth act really sags just when it should be rushing to its inevitable conclusion, and even after Basil shoots himself, there is an almost laughable parade of characters that burst in to have a few words with him before he finally dies. Really, the whole play is in need of a thorough edit, but this is something that Baillie herself admits to as a casualty of her, as an unmarried woman, having to anonymously publish her plays rather than have them staged first. In the preface of one of her editions of miscellaneous plays, Baillie vents her frustration at her inability to get most of her work on the stage:

"The chief thing to be regretted in this failure of my attempts is, that having no opportunity of seeing any of my pieces exhibited, many faults respecting stage effect and general impression will to me remain undiscovered, and those I may hereafter write be of course unimproved."

The good news is that the faults here are nothing the aforementioned thorough edit couldn't solve, and "Basil" certainly would not be the only classic five act play to be shortened for modern performance. I myself have been in several shakespearean productions with several different companies, and not one of them left everything in, though some were more truncated than others.

Admittedly, the greatest bar to seeing this production on a modern stage is most likely a financial one. It is for the most part an unknown title that requires a Shakespearean sized cast. With a fair share of double casting, one MIGHT be able to get away with 15 or 16 actors, but in all honesty, 18 to 20 would probably be needed to do it with the right amount of pageantry the script requires. Still, there is much this play has to offer both actors, directors and the audience, and were it staged, I believe the audience would be surprised to find, not a literary oddity by an unknown female author, but an impressively lively and effective night of classic theatre with characters, language, and dramatic effect that actors can really sink their teeth into. It really is a shock to come to a mostly unknown, unperformed work, and find it to be this good, and as the first play in this volume definitely makes one wonder if Joanna Baillie was writing for a time other than her own, and if that time just might be now.

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.

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.