by Catherine Burroughs
[Burroughs, Catherine. "Teaching the Theory and Practice of Women's
Dramaturgy." Romanticism On the Net 12 (November
1998) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/bwpteaching.html>]
At the 1997 MLA session on "Women Playwrights Around 1800," my contribution
to the panel was to share some of the
discoveries I have made--and problems I have encountered--when teaching
British women playwrights who wrote for the
London theatre at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the context
of a course I taught at Cornell University in 1996 called
"Theoretical Approaches to Romantic Theatre and Drama, 1790-1840" (the
syllabus is reprinted below), I found that reading
plays by writers such as Sophia Lee, Elizabeth Inchbald, Joanna Baillie,
and Mary Russell Mitford helped me and my students
address with particular urgency a series of topics that a study of
Romantic theatre and drama inevitably raises:
antitheatricalism
generic experimentation (the rise of monodramas,
melodramas, nautical burlettas, and opera)
the cultural significance of the gothic play
translations and adaptations of Continental
dramaturgy
the revival of closet drama
the position of the actress in London theatres
the categorization of plays into "legitimate"
and "illegitimate," and the separation of theatres into "major" and "minor"
the private theatrical
But why would a study of Romantic women dramatists in particular have the effect of bringing these topics into focus?
I believe the answer lies in the fact that teaching the theory and practice
of women's dramaturgy around 1800 requires one to
theorize about the topic simultaneously with studying it. To varying
degrees, one theorizes about the teaching of all courses in
the process of creating a syllabus, but it is unavoidable in the case
of presenting materials on British Romantic women
playwrights, since there are a number of practical problems endemic
to the enterprise.
First, one needs to determine how to provide an historical overview
of the period--one that judiciously represents the significant
contributions of women in acting, playwrighting, criticism, and theory--and
one that addresses how a focus on women theatre
artists challenges those representations of the period currently available.
Although Joseph Donohue's two hardback texts from
the 1970s--Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age and Theatre
in the Age of Kean--are still suberb, women
receive little attention in them. Ellen Donkin's Getting into the Act
provides a helpful analysis of the conditions women
playwrights encountered in what she calls the "post-Garrick era," and
Kristina Straub's Sexual Suspects is a tour de force of
scholarship that admirably refuses to discuss the construction of masculinity
and femininity on the eighteenth-century stage
except by attending to the complicated interface of sexuality, gender,
class, race, and ethnicity. Still, we need a paperback text
that revises representations of British theatre and drama between 1790
and 1840, one that discusses women's contributions
through references to male writers and artists who worked within, and
outside of, the London theatre scene.
Next, one must decide how to present a variety of dramatic genres by
women. Because there is no paperback anthology of
Romantic women playwrights--not even of Inchbald's or Baillie's plays--it
is necessary to create an anthology that can
effectively demonstrate how women's dramaturgy developed between 1790
and 1840. Jeffrey Cox's excellent paperback
edition of Seven Gothic Dramas includes Joanna Baillie's De Monfort,
John Franceschina's hardback Sisters of Gore
supplements this text by presenting gothic plays by women, and Adrienne
Scullion's paperback collection Female Playwrights
of the Nineteenth-Century contains three plays written before 1840
(Baillie's The Family Legend, Marie Therese DeCamp's
Smiles and Tears, and Frances Anne Kemble's Francis the First). But
there is no collection--not to mention an affordable
text--that gives us a sense of women's varied dramaturgical experiments
between 1790 and 1840.
Third, if one wants to provide a context for these writers' discussion
of their navigation of domestic and social arenas--a
situation that adds significant information to our understanding of
the era's preoccupation with the dichotomy we have come to
identify with the terms "closet" and "stage"--a text collecting together
the range of critical writings about the stage by women
from the Romantic period is an important resource. This theatre theory
dramatically demonstrates to students the seriousness
and care that lay behind the fictional writing projects produced by
women during the period. Women Critics, 1660-1820,
edited by the Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, is a good text
with which to start, since it provides important
documents from the Romantic period, and is available in paper.
Because one will have to spend time confronting the problematic omissions
in the field when planning a course on British
women playwrights around 1800, I think it makes sense to foreground
this situation in one's course right from the start. This
strategy can help students become more engaged in a discussion about
the theoretical and practical problems that have made
the Romantic era particularly fraught and challenging for theatre historians.
Indeed, one of the aims of the course that I taught at
Cornell was to teach students to become more reflective about how theory,
history, and dramaturgical analysis are intricately
connected and unavoidably interdependent.
A second aim was to demonstrate how a study of Romantic women playwrights
focuses current debates about the degree to
which any "reading" of a play can serve the needs of theatre practitioners,
and conversely, the degree to which any
"performance" can be isolated and then studied as a site for cultural
information. This demonstration logically emerges from
studying the historical fact that the Romantic period was--in its theoretical
discourse--particularly concerned with the
differences between reading and performing a playscript. Thus, in addition
to plays by Romantic women writers, the syllabus
below has us look at different critical perspectives--from phenomenology
to new historicism to post colonialism and that
amorphous field "performance studies"--in order to appreciate how certain
approaches bring into relief certain aspects of a
theatre period. My experience of teaching British women playwrights
has taught me that perspectives which privilege the study
of what Carol Simpson Stern and Bruce Henderson call "performative
behaviors" reveal the potential of Romantic drama by
women to help us revise traditional narratives of theatre history.
But why would this be the case?
When we consider the centrality to Romantic women's dramaturgy of the
performance of gender on social stages--in plays such
as Sophia Lee's The Chapter of Accidents, Joanna Baillie's De Monfort,
Elizabeth Inchbald's adaptation of Kotzebue called
Lovers' Vows, and her own Wives as They Are, Maids as They Were--we
can begin to see that approaches associated with
performance studies help us view dramaturgy as another form of theory
and therefore as a source of information about how the
navigation by historical female theatre artists of a variety of performance
venues indelibly marked their fictional writing.
Emphasizing the importance of live bodies onstage and the idea that
the concept of "performance" creates a spectrum
encompassing the rituals of daily life as well as those of formal theatres,
performance studies instructs us how to read Romantic
drama in ways that highlight its theatricality, in contrast to scholarship
that has all too often sacrificed performance history and
theatrical contexts to close readings.
Indeed, those of us who study women playwrights around 1800 need to
consider how the scholarship on these writers by
literary critics in Romantic studies has affected--and will continue
to affect--the presentation and reception of this material.
Why, for instance, does the "literary" over "the theatrical" content
of Romantic playwrights' dramaturgy continue to be
emphasized in scholarship to the point where--for instance--closet
drama by women gets more attention than the actual
performances of women's plays on London and provincial stages? While
literary critics and theatre historians are supposed to
resemble each other these days--since each supposedly teaches playscripts
in the context of theatrical culture and
history--there are still enough significant differences between the
approaches each group of scholars uses to require those of us
who teach British women playwrights to theorize our pedagogical position.
(It would be interesting to have statistics about
which universities and colleges are teaching Romantic women playwrights
and about which students are currently receiving
information about these writers. Are there more graduate students in
English or Theatre encountering this period of theatre
history? Which critical perspectives, theoretical positions, and methodological
approaches are being employed? Are the jobs in
this period of theatre going primarily to literary critics or to theatre
historians?).
At a recent meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism,
Thomas Crochunis challenged the
membership to think more deeply about why--in spite of a spate of recent
studies of Romantic drama and theatre--"institutional
structures continue to sidestep the implications of how epistemologies,
theoretical concerns, and textual canons might be altered
if performance becomes more than a metaphor in romantic studies." Raising
"the possibility of a performance-influenced
romanticism," Crochunis reminded listeners that "performance, too,
is a form of theater theory, and a form that, contrary to a
positivist historicist model, is not lost in the mists of history."
I do not have time here to summarize Crochunis's intriguing analysis
of the reasons that institutions resist "performance as a critical
method to unwrite our ideological dependence on the text," or to
encapsulate his suggestions for how this "performance-influenced romanticism"
might be implemented. His essay in this issue of
Romanticism on the Net points to some of the structures of thought
that block new performance-based approaches. Here is
what I hope will happen in the future when we teach Romantic theatre
and drama.
I believe it is absolutely vital for students of both theatre history
and literary history to focus on Romantic drama not only to
understand how the generic experimentation of the period helped prepare
the way for modernist theatre but also to teach
students to recognize how their own ways of reading drama may prejudice
them against performance and align them with the
closet against the stage. A period particularly preoccupied with this
dichotomy provides students of theatre and literature with
the opportunity to contemplate their interpretive methods. And because
current anthologies tend to skip from Sheridan to
Wilde--with an occasional gesture toward Shelley's The Cenci or Buchner's
Woycek--students' understanding of theatre and
literary history could be enormously improved by including several
playscripts by Romantic women, a move that would remind
students of the fact that the British female tradition established
by Aphra Behn and flourishing in the eighteenth century with
Susannah Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Hannah More continued to develop
before 1836 through the forty-odd plays
composed by Elizabeth Inchbald and Joanna Baillie alone. But not just
that it continued--was there--but that the era elicited a
number of theoretical discussions from women writers, appearing in
a range of fictional and nonfictional texts (in informal and
formal writing), which propel us--by prompting us to consider some
of the ways in which these women turned to theatre as a
medium for recording their responses to their experiences as women
on both cultural and theatrical stages--to theorize about
the choices we in the 1990s make in relation to curricular and theatrical
contexts. This realization that the impetus for our own
theoretical discussions can be traced back to the subject of our study
should prompt us to look with greater scrutiny at the
specific information Romantic women playwrights imparted about their
cultural position as the means for developing an
approach for recuperating the discourse women have historically produced
when discussing performance in general. In other
words, dramas by Romantic women playwrights provide but one of the
textual sites for locating this discussion. Because the
teaching of women playwrights around 1800 encourages us to embrace
an approach to reading their plays that will begin to
close the wound inflicted on the Romantic period by the closet/stage
dichotomy, we find ourselves indebted to their work and
encouraged to keep promoting the teaching of this vastly neglected
period of theatrical production.
Appendix:
THETR 435 - Theoretical Approaches to Romantic Theatre and Drama, 1790-1840
(Catherine Burroughs, Department of Theatre, Dance & Film, Cornell
University, Fall 1996)
Course Description:
This course introduces students to the theatrical
culture and dramatic literature of one of the more neglected
periods of British theatre history, that time
between the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and the repeal in
1843 of the Licensing Act of 1737. To challenge
traditional misrepresentations of the early nineteenth century as
"antitheatrical" and its literature as "unperformable,"
we will study the period's striking experimentation with genre.
We will also use developments in late twentieth-century
criticism (primarily queer theory and feminist theatre
theory) to look at how the closet play--although
peripheral from the perspective of early nineteenth-century
commercial theatre--helps us focus on one
of the era's major contributions to theatre history: its deep critical
interest in what constitutes "the dramatic,"
"the performable," and "the theatrical."
Theorists, critics, playwrights, and performers
of the Romantic period raised the following kinds of questions
explicitly and implicitly: What is a "play"?
Which acting styles and performance venues allow for the most
satisfactory theatrical productions? Who decides
what is performable or what is permissable for performance?
What is the relationship between plays read
and plays acted, between "mental theatre" (Lord Byron) and
embodiment? As a result of these questions,
we, in turn, are prompted to consider which new ways of doing
theatre in the Romantic period anticipated
late twentieth-century theatrical experiments and how our
contemporary theatres can be enriched by a
deeper understanding of this historical era.
Because the theory and dramaturgy of the Romantic
period are preoccupied with the dichotomy between "public"
and "private" stages, it follows that late
twentieth-century criticism, which asks questions about social
performance, historical representation, and
the closeting and uncloseting of "identities" and "subjectivities"--is
especially fruitful for revisioning Romantic
drama and theatre. Therefore, emphasis will be given to studying
various theoretical approaches from the past
ten years in order to expand our ability to read "the past" critically.
Conversely, the theatre theory and generic
experimentation produced during the Romantic period can help us
reexamine assumptions we make about theatre
and drama in our own age.
Required Texts:
Xeroxes of dramas and articles (on reserve
in Olin Library)
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction
to Literary and Cultural Theory .
Jeffrey N. Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825
.
Ellen Donkin, Getting into the Act: Women
Playwrights in London, 1776-1829.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust. Part One
(trans. Martin Greenberg).
Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach, ed., Critical
Theory and Performance .
Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century
Players and Sexual Ideology.
Course Requirements:
1.Attendance/Participation (20%)
2.Oral Presentation (20%)
3.Papers (60%)
Course Schedule:
Seminar 1: Introduction to the Course
Seminar 2: Some Theoretical Contexts:
Barry, Introduction, Ch. 1, Ch. 2, Ch. 9, Beginning
Theory .
Reinelt and Roach, General Introduction, Critical
Theory and Performance .
Roach, Introduction to Culture Studies, Critical
Theory and Performance.
Roach, Introduction to Theater History and
Historiography, Critical Theory and Performance.
Donkin, "Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger,"
Critical Theory and Performance.
Seminar 3: Some Historical Contexts:
Cox, Introduction, Seven Gothic Dramas.
Jeffrey Cox, "Ideology and Genre in the British
Antirevolutionary Drama of the 1790s," ELH 58 (1991), 579-610
(on reserve).
Donkin, Ch. 1, Getting into the Act .
Julie Carlson, "Romantic Antitheatricalism:
Surveilling the Beauties of the Stage." In the Theatre of Romanticism:
Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 134-175 (on reserve).
Tracy. C. Davis, "'Reading Shakespeare By
Flashes of Lightning': Challenging the Foundations of Romantic
Acting Theory." *ELH.* 62 (1995): 933-54 (on
reserve).
Straub, Ch. 2, Sexual Suspects.
Seminar 4: German Romanticism and the Gothic Play in London:
Barry, Ch. 8, Beginning Theory .
Reinelt, After Marx, Critical Theory and Performance.
Bruce McConachie, "Historicizing the Relations
of Theatrical Production," Critical Theory and Performance .
Tracy C. Davis, "Reading for Economic History,"
Theatre Journal. 45 (1993): 487-503 (on reserve).
Goethe's Faust.
Charles Maturin's Bertram , (in Cox, Seven
Gothic Dramas).
Seminar 5:
August Von Kotzebue's Lovers' Vows (adapted
by Inchbald, on reserve).
Heinrich Von Kleist's Penthesilea (on reserve).
Barry, Ch. 3 and Ch. 4, Beginning Theory .
Reinelt, Introduction to Semiotics and Deconstruction,
Critical Theory and Performance.
Seminar 6: Generic Experimentation: Melodrama, Nautical Burlettas, and Opera:
Thomas Moreton's The Slave: An Opera (on reserve).
Thomas Holcroft's A Tale of Mystery (on reserve).
Edward Fitz-Ball's The Pilot (on reserve).
Barry, Ch. 6 and Ch. 7, Beginning Theory.
Paper 1 due
Seminar 7: The Closet Play:
Lord Byron's Sardanapalus (on reserve).
Percy Shelley's The Cenci (on reserve).
Straub, Ch. 3 and Ch. 4, Sexual Suspects .
Teresa De Lauretis, "Queer Theory: Lesbian
and Gay Sexualities: An Introduction," Special Issue: Queer Theory,
differences. 3.2 (1991): iii-xviii (on reserve).
Judith Butler, "Intrroduction: Against Proper
Objects." Special Issue: Feminism Meets Queer Theory.
differences. 6.2-3 (1994): 1-26 (on reserve).
Alan Stewart, "The Early Modern Closet Discovered,"
Representations. 50 (1995): 76-100 (on reserve).
Seminar 8: Women Playwrights and the 'Problem' of the Actress:
Donkin, Ch. 8, Getting into the Act .
Elizabeth Inchbald's Wives as They Were, Maids
as They Are (on reserve).
Joanna Baillie's De Monfort (in Cox's Seven
Gothic Dramas).
Burroughs, Ch. 4, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie
and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women
Writers (on reserve).
Straub, Ch. 5, Sexual Suspects.
Seminar 9:
Sophia Lee's The Chapter of Accidents (on reserve).
Donkin, Ch. 4, Getting into the Act .
Mary Russell Mitford's Rienzi (on reserve).
Seminar 10: "Legitimate' Drama: British Romantic Tragedy:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Remorse (on reserve).
Reeve Parker, "Osorio's Dark Employments:
Tricking Out Coleridgian Tragedy," Studies in Romanticism 33.1
(1994): 119-160 (on reserve).
James Sheridan Knowles' Virginius (on reserve).
Barry, Ch. 5, Beginning Theory .
Elin Diamond, "The Violence of 'We': Politicizing
Identification," Critical Theory and Performance .
Paper 2 due
Seminar 11:
Richard Cumberland's The Jew (on reserve).
Roach, "Introduction to Phenomenology," Critical
Theory and Performance .
Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,"
Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory
and and Theatre, Sue-Ellen Case, ed. (Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990) (on reserve).
Seminar 12: Romanticism Across the Channel: French Theatricality
Victor Hugo's Hernani (on reserve).
Jeannelle Laillou Savona, "Problematics of
a Feminist Theatre: The Case of A ma mere, a ma mere, a ma mere,
a ma voisine," Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics,
Karen Laughlin and Catherine Schuler, ed. (Cranbury, NJ:
Associated University Presses, 1995), 25-39
(on reserve).
Michael Hays, "Representing Empire: Class,
Culture, and the Popular Theatre in the Nineteenth Century,"
Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre,
Drama, and Performance, 1795-1995. J. Ellen Gainor.
ed.(London and New York: Routledge, 1995),
132-147 (on reserve).
Barry, Ch. 10, Beginning Theory.
Seminar 13: Performance Studies and Romanticism:
Richard Schechner, ed., "From perform-l: The
Future in Retrospect," The Drama Review 39.4 (1995): 142-163
(on reserve).
W.B. Worthen, "Disciplines of the Text/Sites
of Performance," The Drama Review 39.1 (1995): 13-44 (on
reserve).
Seminar 14:
Paper 3 due
(Revisions due during reading week)
Catherine Burroughs
Cornell University
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