Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Naked History Displayed
- 1 ‘Merely a Superior Being’: Blake and the Creations of Eve
- 2 The Last Strumpet: Harlotry and Hermaphroditism in Blake's Rahab
- 3 Sex, Violence and the History of this World: Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Enoch
- 4 Bridal Mysticism and ‘Sifting Time’: The Lost Moravian History of Blake's Family
- 5 ‘A Secret Common to Our Blood’: The Visionary Erotic Heritage of Blake, Thomas Butts and Mary Butts
- 6 Changing the Sexual Garments: The Regeneration of Sexuality in Jerusalem
- 7 Philoprogenitive Blake
- 8 ‘Seeking Flowers to Comfort Her’: Queer Botany in Blake's Visions, Darwin's Loves and Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
- 9 ‘Or Wilt Thou Go Ask the Mole?’: (Con)Figuring the Feminine in Blake's Thel
- 10 Gendering the Margins of Gray: Blake, Classical Visual Culture and the Alternative Bodies of Ann Flaxman's Book
- 11 The Virgil Woodcuts Out of Scale: Blake's Gigantic, Masculine Pastoral
- 12 Closet Drama: Gender and Performance in Blake and Joanna Baillie
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
12 - Closet Drama: Gender and Performance in Blake and Joanna Baillie
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Naked History Displayed
- 1 ‘Merely a Superior Being’: Blake and the Creations of Eve
- 2 The Last Strumpet: Harlotry and Hermaphroditism in Blake's Rahab
- 3 Sex, Violence and the History of this World: Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Enoch
- 4 Bridal Mysticism and ‘Sifting Time’: The Lost Moravian History of Blake's Family
- 5 ‘A Secret Common to Our Blood’: The Visionary Erotic Heritage of Blake, Thomas Butts and Mary Butts
- 6 Changing the Sexual Garments: The Regeneration of Sexuality in Jerusalem
- 7 Philoprogenitive Blake
- 8 ‘Seeking Flowers to Comfort Her’: Queer Botany in Blake's Visions, Darwin's Loves and Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
- 9 ‘Or Wilt Thou Go Ask the Mole?’: (Con)Figuring the Feminine in Blake's Thel
- 10 Gendering the Margins of Gray: Blake, Classical Visual Culture and the Alternative Bodies of Ann Flaxman's Book
- 11 The Virgil Woodcuts Out of Scale: Blake's Gigantic, Masculine Pastoral
- 12 Closet Drama: Gender and Performance in Blake and Joanna Baillie
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
I.
To begin with a basic point: Blake is not usually associated with the theatre, though obviously he shared physical proximity, subcultural links and perhaps personal connections with actors and audiences. Partly this is a consequence of his own assumed anti-mimetic aesthetic and statements such as ‘at a trajic scene / The soul drinks murder & revenge, & applauds its own holiness’ (J 37:29–30, E183). Yet according to John Linnell, his tastes were mainstream (and far from inexpensive): attendances in 1820–1 are recorded at Sheridan's Pizarro, the opera Dirce or the Fatal Urn and Lee's Oedipus, and as Bentley points out there might have been many others. Blake may be regarded as at least a proto-dramatist throughout his career from Edward III to The Ghost of Abel. If regarded as comic libretto, An Island in the Moon would certainly be a contender for most successful piece of romantic drama. Think of the alternatives: The Borderers, Otho the Great?
Yet Blake's ‘Visionary forms dramatic’ (J 98:28, E257) seldom, if ever, merit attention in accounts of romantic theatre (though Julia Wright relates the form of his Lambeth Prophecies to ‘closet dramas’). There is one reference in G. Russell's Theatres of War (1995) in a routine name check of the Big Six, and nothing whatsoever in her Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (2007); his work is also wholly absent from J. Carlson's In the Theatre of Romanticism (1994), and B. Bolton's Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage (2001).
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- Blake, Gender and Culture , pp. 165 - 176Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014