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National Supernaturalism: Joanna Baillie, Germany, and the Gothic Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Extract

As the most critically lauded dramatist of her time, Joanna Baillie recently has received considerable attention from critics interested in arguing that our neglect of Romantic drama has arisen from “conventional and mistaken assumptions about its strategies and principles.” In a recent issue of Wordsworth Circle devoted exclusively to Romantic drama, Baillie figures in three of its seven articles as a central dramatist of the period, while Jeffrey Cox devotes an entire section of his introduction in Seven Gothic Dramas 1789—1825 (1992) to her work. Even more recently, she has been the subject of special sessions of recent Modern Language Association meetings, and an edition of her Selected Works is scheduled to be published by Pickering and Chatto Press in 1998.

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Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1997

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References

1. Kucich, Greg, “‘A Haunted Ruin’: Romantic Drama, Renaissance Tradition, and the Critical Establishment,” The Wordsworth Circle 23:2 (Spring 1992), 64Google Scholar.

2. See Hoagwood, Terence Allan, “A Prolegomenon for a Theory of Romantic Drama,” The Wordsworth Circle 23:2 (Spring 1992): 4964Google Scholar; and in the same issue, Kucich, “‘A Haunted Ruin,’” 64–76; and Watkins, Daniel P., “Class, Gender, and Social Motion in Joanna Baillie's De Montfort.” 109117Google Scholar. Cox, Jeffrey, Seven Gothic Dramas 1789–1825 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1992), 5057Google Scholar.

3. Cox 16; Watkins, Daniel P., A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 7Google Scholar.

4. This tendency in criticism of Romantic drama is most recently addressed in Catherine Burroughs's Introduction to Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

5. In pointing to this distinction, however, I by no means wish to criticize Cox's and Watkins's studies. Along with Backscheider's, PaulaSpectacular Politics (1993)Google Scholar, Cox's introduction is, I think, the first substantial study of gothic drama since Evans's, BertrandGothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley (1947)Google Scholar. Watkins's Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama, on the other hand, correctly isolates what he calls “the drama-theater distinction” as needing exploration and reformulation (5).

6. The full bibliographic reference is Baillie, Joanna, A Series of Plays: in which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind. Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy, (Volume 1: London, 1798; Volume 2: London, 1802; Volume 3: London, 1812)Google Scholar. Hereafter, I will refer to this text as Plays on the Passions.

7. Lloyd, Robert, “The Actor” (1760), in The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper, ed. Chalmers, Alexander, 21 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1810), 15:78Google Scholar.

8. See Boaden, James, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble (Philadelphia: Robert H. Small, 1825), 313Google Scholar: “[I] admired, as every one else did, the singular address by which Mrs. Radcliffe contrived to impress the mind with all the terrors of the ideal world; and the sportive resolution of all that had excited terror into very common natural appearances. …But, even in romance, it may be doubtful, whether there be not something ungenerous in thus playing upon poor timid human nature, and agonizing it with false terrors. The disappointment is, I know, always resented, and the laboured explanation commonly deemed the flattest and most uninteresting part of the production.”

9. See The Analytical Review 19 (1794): 187Google Scholar; and The Monthly Review, 2nd Series, 14 (July 1794): 352Google Scholar.

10. See “To the Reader” of Lewis, Matthew Gregory, The Castle Spectre (1798)Google Scholar in Cox, Seven Gothic Dramas 1789–1825, 224.

11. Interestingly, in responding to Lewis's defense of his spectre, the February 1798 Analytical Review of Castle Spectre reversed its views. Arguing against the reasoning of its previous 1794 dismissal of Fontainville Forest: “If, in truth, the belief in ghosts no longer existed, their appearance, in the serious drama, would be altogether as impertinent and intolerable as that of Jupiter or Juno; and we are persuaded, that the laughter and hisses of the audience would soon drive them from the stage…but so congenial to the human mind is the apprehension of something supernatural, that the impression of these stories is seldom perfectly erased during the subsequent periods of life; and many a man in particular situations, feels influenced by a belief, which he may be reluctant to acknowledge even to himself; and awed by terrours, for which he cannot account, and at which he may affect to laugh” (27:183). For this reviewer, audience pleasure signifies at least residual belief.

12. Boaden, James, Cambro-Britains (London, 1798), iv–viGoogle Scholar.

13. Monthly Review, 2nd series, 26 (May 1798): 96Google Scholar. The Monthly Mirror, Reflecting Men and Manners, with Strictures on Their Epitome, The Stage, 6 (August 1798): 108Google Scholar.

14. Hazlitt, William, The Collected Works of William Hazlitt. 12 vols. ed. by Waller, A. R. and Glover, Arnold (London, 1902), 1:138Google Scholar.

15. See especially The London Stage 1660–1800: part 5: 1776–1800, ed. Hogan, Charles Beecher (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

16. European Magazine (May 1794): 384; Boaden, James, Memoirs of Mrs. Jordan, 2 vols. (London: Edward Bull, 1831) 1:260Google Scholar. Both passages quoted from The London Stage, 5:1638Google Scholar.

17. Reno, Robert P., “James Boadea's Fontainville Forest and Matthew G. Lewis's The Castle Spectre: Challenges of the Supernatural Ghost on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage,” Eighteenth-Century Life 9:1 (October 1984), 97Google Scholar.

18. The grandiosity of Kemble' spectacle in the 1794 Drury Lane opening of Macbeth was notable enough for Scott to remember it thirty-two years later when reviewing Boaden's Life of Kemble (1825) for the Quarterly Review in 1826. See Scott, Walter, Prose Works, 28 vols. (Edinburgh, 18341836), 20:207Google Scholar.

19. See Thespian Magazine (March 1794): 127–28; European Magazine (March 1794): 236; Boaden, James, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq., 2 vols. (London 1825), 2:116Google Scholar.

20. See Bartholomeusz, Dennis, Macbeth and the Players (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 133134Google Scholar, for a somewhat different interpretation of these issues. Bartholomeusz stresses Kemble's “classicism,” his comparatively fidelity to Shakespeare's texts, and his expressed regret in private to Joseph Farrington over resurrecting Banquo's ghost when Covent-Garden audiences called for it. He ignores, however, many of Kemble's other attempts to achieve spectacular effect through music and dance, as well at Kemble's strategy of marketing himself as the true heir to the legacies of Shakespeare and the English stage.

21. Among the many excellent critical studies on the eighteenth-century reception and eventual adulation of Shakespeare, the two that inform this article most closely are Bate, Jonathan, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Schoenbaum, S., Shakespeare's Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1970, revised 1991)Google Scholar.

22. For a full and provocative treatment of Baillie and the dilemma of the female playwright backstage, see Donkin's, Ellen chapter on Baillie in Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776–1829 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 159181Google Scholar.

23. The Theatrical Inquisitor 2 (March 1813): 111116Google Scholar; Critical Review, 4th Series, 3 (April 1813): 402405Google Scholar.

24. See Critical Review, 4th Series, 3 (April 1813): 402405Google Scholar, and The Quarterly Review 11 (April 1814): 188189Google Scholar.

25. Lamb, Charles, “Prologue” to Remorse, in The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coleridge, Ernest Hartley (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 816817Google Scholar.

26. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Remorse, in The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coleridge, Ernest Hartley (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 851Google Scholar. All references to this drama will be made by act, scene, and line number of this edition. The corresponding scene is 4.2 of Castle Spectre, the stage directions of which are as follows:

(A plaintive voice sings within, accompanied by a guitar). “Lullaby!—Lullaby!—Hush thee, my dear, “They father is coming, and soon will be here!” Angela: Heavens! The very words which Alice—The door too!—It moves! it opens!—Guard me, good Angels!

(The folding-doors unclose, and the Oratory is seen illuminated. In its centre stands a tall female figure, her white and flowing garments spotted with blood; her veil is thrown back, and discovers a pale and melancholy countenance; her eyes are lifted upward, her arms extended towards heaven, and a large wound appears upon her bosom. Angela sinks upon her knees, with her eyes riveted upon the figure, which for some moments remains motionless. At length the Spectre advances slowly, to a soft and plaintive strain; she stops opposite to Reginald's picture, and gazes upon it in silence. She then turns, approaches Angela, seems to invoke a blessing upon her, points to the picture, and retires to the Oratory. The music ceases. Angela rises with a wild look, and follows the Vision, extending her arms toward it.)

Angela: Stay, lovely spirit!—Oh! stay yet one moment!

(The Spectre waves her hand, as bidding her farewell. Instantly the organ's swell is heard; a full chorus of female voices chaunt ‘JUBILATE!’, a blazeof light flashes through the Oratory, and the folding doors close with a loud noise.) Angela: Oh! Heaven protect me!—(She falls motionless on the floor.) (Cox, 206)

27. See Critical Review 19 (February 1797): 194200Google Scholar.

28. See Parker, Reeve, “Osorio's Dark Employments: Tricking Out Coleridgean Tragedy,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 119160CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a particularly cogent analysis of Coleridge's revisions of Osorio: “Recognizing [the merits of Osorio] entails, paradoxically, seeing that the very elements at the heart of the play's unconventional power made production at Drury Lane in the late 1790's unthinkable. The further irony is that later readers mistook those elements for the dreary Gothic trappings of humdrum plays that were popular in that venue, plays that Wordsworth and Coleridge deplored as sickly and stupid.… Osorio is a cannily constructed appropriation and extension of the promiscuously circulating fashions in Gothic fiction and in contemporary staging of spectacular tableaux, or ‘situations’” (122–23). Parker's secondary argument—that the Gothic trappings of Coleridge's play have caused subsequent critics to dismiss its dramaturgy as derivative and its characters as flawed—further attests to the ways in which critical aversions to Gothic's popular stigma have shaped the way in which Romanticism has been defined as a category and movement in this and the previous century.

29. Indeed, at least one reviewer of Remorse noticed the resemblance of the play to Baillie's work. See The Satirist 12 (March 1813): 269283Google Scholar.

30. See particularly Baillie's introductions to her Miscellaneous Dramas (London, 1804), and her Dramas, 3 vols. (London, 1836).

31. See Ross, Marlon, “Joanna Baillie,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 93Google Scholar: British Romantic Poets, 1789–1832, ed. Greenfield, John R. (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman-Gale Research, Inc., 1990), 9Google Scholar.

32. She is quite vocal, however, about her dislike of sentimental drama. Elsewhere in her “Introductory Discourse,” Baillie severely criticizes sentimental comedy: “I am afraid plays of this kind, as well as works of a similar nature, in other departments of literature, have only tended to encrease amongst us a set of sentimental hypocrites; who are the same persons of this age that would have been the religious ones of another; and are daily doing morality the same kind of injury, by substituting the particular excellence which they pretend to possess, for plain simple uprightness and rectitude” (1:48).

33. Baillie, Joanna, Miscellaneous Plays (London: Longman, 1804), 5455Google Scholar.

34. On Baillie's handling of character and the relation between the closet and the stage, see in particular Burroughs', Catherine essay “English Romantic Women Writers and Theatre Theory: Joanna Baillie's Prefaces to the Plays on the Passions” in Wilson, Carol Shiner and Haefner, Joel, eds., Revisioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 274296Google Scholar.

35. The setting for Act Two is as follows: “A Wood: dark night, with a pale gleam of distant lightning seen once or twice on the edge of the horizon. Advancing by the bottom of the stage, a few moving lights, as from lanthoms, are seen, and at the same time several signal calls and loud whistles are heard, with the distant answer returned to them from another point in the wood. Enter Count Zaterloo, Rayner, Sebastian, and others of the band, armed, and a few of them bearing in their hands dark lanthoms. It is particularly requested if this play ever be acted, that no light may be permitted upon the stage but that which proceeds from the lanthoms only” (35).

36. Mathias, Thomas James, The Shade of Alexander Pope on the Banks of the Thames, By the Author of the Pursuits of Literature (London, 1799), 5764Google Scholar.

37. Keven Bowen argues along similar lines, in his unpublished dissertation entitled “The Gothic Novel in England: Studies in a Literary Mode,” linking the critical response to Gothic romance to growing suppression of domestic turmoil: “Reaction in England to the Gothic novel after 1795 proved often to be a barometer of fears of domestic unrest.…the rise and decline of the genre is attributed as much to active campaigns of suppression and restrictions put in place by the conservative press as to the supposed excesses of the Gothicists.” See Dissertation Abstracts International 52/01A, 166.

38. See Ashton, Rosemary, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 1, 9Google Scholar. Earlier studies of the British reception of German literature place date the high-water mark of anti-German reviews as occurring around 1798. Ashton's dating stems from her interest not so much in the condemnation of German writers as in the settled indifference” to them exhibited by British reviewers after 1800. See also Nicoll, Allardyce, A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 6167Google Scholar; Furst, Lilian, Romanticism in Perspective: A Comparative Study of Aspects of the Romantic Movements in England, France, and Germany (London: St. Martin's Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Ewen, Frederic, The Prestige of Schiller in England 1788–1859 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932)Google Scholar; and Stockley, Violet, German Literature as Known in England, 1750–1830 (London: G. Routledge, 1929)Google Scholar.

39. Monthly Review, 2nd series, 33 (October 1800): 128129Google Scholar. The other two reviews of Wallenstein are The Critical Review, 2nd series, 30 (October 1800): 175185Google Scholar; and The British Critic 18 (November 1801): 542545Google Scholar.

40. Jeffrey, Francis, “Hermann und Dorothea,” The Monthly Review, 2nd series, 29 (December 1802): 384Google Scholar; Jeffrey, Francis, “Southey's Thalaba,” Edinburgh Review 1 (October 1802): 63, 64Google Scholar. Cited from Ashton, 9. An even more striking blanket assessment occurs two years earlier in The Gentleman's Magazine in May 1800:

Theatrical entertainments have an extensive influence upon the manners of Society. When well regulated, and the pieces for representations well selected both as to matter and manner, they may be esteemed friendly to morality, and improvers of public taste. But what shall we say when both these ends are disregarded; when moral virtue is banished from the scene, and purity of taste is destroyed by affected language and pantomimical decorations? Improvements in almost every art and science have been, within a few years, rapid and important. But that is not the case with the stage; nor can it be, while Kotzebue and his friends usurp the venerable boards of Shakspeare.…French principles are to be met with in almost every sentence; those principles, I mean, which, in Scripture language, have turned the world upside down. Kings are reviled for no other reason but because they are kings: the ministers of kings are upon all occasions the objects of calumny and reproach; the distressed veteran, who has been dismissed from his public employments for professing Jacobinical opinions, is held forth as deserving of supreme pity; chastity is despised if it opposes sentiment; the prostitute becomes the faithful wife; the faithful wife sacrifices her marriage vows to fulfil any other imaginary duty; Religion, under every description, bends before Philosophy. (70: 406—407)

41. See Curran, Stuart, “Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context,” in Wilson, Carol Shiner and Haefner, Joel, eds., Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 1735Google Scholar.

42. The process by which this construction of British aesthetic moderation occurs is most recently analyzed by Simpson, David in Chapter Four of Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

43. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Griggs, E. L., 6 vols. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 19561971), 1:435Google Scholar.

44. The repetitiveness of attacks against German drama by conservative British writers at the end of the eighteenth century is testimony to the extent to which they read each other with more attention than they did the objects of their vilification. West, Jane, for example, attacks German plays in her own Poems and Plays (London, 1799)Google Scholar as “blasphemies against our Maker, these libels upon all governments…[these] demons and monsters of philosophism.…Our rulers, in their care for the security of the body politic, must carefully watch against the introduction of that seed of immorality which generally ripens into anarchy, sedition, and every public ill” (101–102). The Anti-Jacobin, in this same year, reiterates with equal patness and certainty this equation of immorality, German drama, and French politics: “In short, such a scene of corruption as Germany now exhibits, the English mind shudders to contemplate. The young women, even of rank…sacrifice their virtue to the first candidate for their favour, who has the means either of captivating their fancy, or gratifying their avarice; while the dreadful number of abortions serves to proclaim the frequency and extent of their crimes.…To immoralize a nation is the surest way to revolutionize it.” The Anti-Jacobin 4 (1799), xii, xiiiGoogle Scholar.

45. Hazlitt, William, “On the German Drama,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe, P. P., 21 vols. (London, 19301934), 6:362Google Scholar. Quoted in Ashton, 31.

46. Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sandition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 31Google Scholar.

47. Scott, Walter, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 4 vols., ed. Henderson, T. F. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902), 4:29Google Scholar.

48. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Collected Letters, ed. Griggs, Earl Leslie, 6 vols., (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 19561971), 1:378Google Scholar. The Critical Review 19 (February 1797): 197Google Scholar.

49. Wilson, Margaret Baron, The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis, 2 vols., (London: H. Colbum, 1839), 1:171173Google Scholar.

50. See Henry MacKenzie, “Account of the German Theatre” (read 21 April 1788), Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 2 (1790), ii: 154192CrossRefGoogle Scholar. MacKenzie also includes Steme's Sentimental Journey as a primary source for the new German theater. Steme's presence in accounts of the English roots of German drama, however, for the most part disappears in subsequent accounts.

51. Scott, Walter, “Advertisement” to The House of Aspen, in The Keepsake, ed. Reynolds, Frederic Mansel, (1830),3: 2Google Scholar. The phrase “Germanized brat” does not come from the House of Aspen's “Advertisement,” but rather from a letter from Scott to George Ellis: “At one time I certainly thought, with my friends, that it [The House of Aspen] might have ranked well enough by the side of the Castle Spectre, Bluebeard [sic], and the other drum and trumpet exhibitions of the day; but the Plays of the Passions have put me entirely out of conceit with my Germanized brat; and should I ever again attempt dramatic composition, I would endeavour after the genuine old English model.” See Scott, Walter, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Grierson, H. J. C., 12 vols., (London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1932), 1:124Google Scholar.

52. Charles Lamb recollects Coleridge playfully dressing up to “look like a conjuror” while translating Wallenstein. See The Monthly Review, 2nd series, 33 (Oct 1800): 127131Google Scholar for their review of Wallenstein, and 33 (November 1800): 336 for Coleridge's reply. See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coburn, Kathleen, 6 vols., continuing (New York: Bollingen Corporation, 1957–), entry 2598Google Scholar. Coleridge did not publicly denounce German drama until years later, in the “Satyrane Letters” section of Biographia Literaria (1817). Julie Carlson raises the story of Coleridge dressing up to translate Wallenstein; see her Command Performances: Burke, Coleridge, and Schiller's Dramatic Reflections on the Revolution in France,” The Wordsworth Circle 23:2 (Spring 1992), 125Google Scholar. Carlson's source is a letter from Lamb to Coleridge dated 6 August 1800; see Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Marrs, Edwin W. Jr., 3 vols. (Ithaca and London: Comell University Press, 1975), 1:216217Google Scholar.

53. See The Analytical Review 28 (Dec 1798): 583—87; The British Critic 8 (August 1796): 180—81, 12 (Oct 1798): 425—25, and 14 (July 1799): 63—69; The Dramatic Censor 1:4 (25 January 1800): 120126Google Scholar, 2.17 (26 April 1800): 98–102, 2.21 (24 May 1800): 201–204, 2.24 (14 June 1800): 294—300; Gentleman's Magazine 70 (May 1800): 406408Google Scholar; The Monthly Review, 2nd series, 18 (Nov 1795): 346Google Scholar, 21 (Nov 1796): 348;The Monthly Mirror 7 (June 1799): 359362Google Scholar.

54. Wordsworth, William, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen, W. J. B. and Smyser, Jane Worthington, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:129Google Scholar.

55. Figures derived from Hogan, The London Stage, 5:3.

56. The significance of the staging of Inchbald's Lovers' Vows (1798) at Mansfield Park is a question that has attracted a surprising number of scholars of stature in the last two decades—from Marilyn Butler and Mary Poovey to Syndy McMillan Conger and William Galperin—and a surprising diversity of opinions. Butler and Poovey, for example, have argued that Austen's novel constitutes an indefatigable rejection of German sensibility and its associated Jacobinism, while Dvora Zelicovici has proposed that Lovers' Vows and Mansfield Park actually share similar moral visions. These two opposing readings in turn have been examined and complicated by Conger's tracing of the reception of Lovers' Vows' in England, and by Joseph Litvak's and Galperin's explorations of the intricacies with which theatricality and anti-theatricality depend upon one another in the novel. For the purposes of this essay, I wish only to add that Austen's date of composition for Mansfield Park—1811—gives her adequate hindsight to treat Lovers' Vows with some tolerance and sympathetic irony. A synecdoche among critics, literati, and clergy for everything wrong with German culture, Lovers' Vows for Austen is a cultural legacy—a phenomenon of the past universally known and remembered, whose effects are still embarrassingly present even on the relatively removed country estate of an exemplary and upstanding aristocrat like Sir Thomas Bertram. Writing in 1811 on the eve of Madame de Stael's publication of De l'Allemagne, Austen believes that she is treating a freak cultural accident that has had its day. After the boom years of the 1790s, the importation of German plays had all but stopped after 1800, and, by 1807, even Kotzebue, the most popular of these playwrights, had all but ceased to be represented in the provincial theatres. See Butler, Marilyn, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Kelly, Gary, “Reading Aloud in Mansfield Park,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37:1 (June 1982): 2949CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zelicovici, Dvora, “The Inefficacy of Lovers' Vows,” ELH 50:3 (Fall 1983): 531540CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poovey, Mary, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Litvak, Joseph, “The Infection of Acting: Theatricals and Theatricality in Mansfield Park,” ELH 53:2 (1986): 331355CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jordan, Elaine, “Pulpit, Stage, and Novel: Mansfield Park and Mrs. Inchbald's Lovers' Vows,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 20:2 (Winter 1987): 138148CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conger, Syndy McMillen, “Reading Lovers' Vows. Jane Austen's Reflections on English Sense and German Sensibility,” Studies in Philology 84:1 (Winter 1988): 92113Google Scholar; Galperin, William, “The Theatre at Mansfield Park. From Classic to Romantic Once More,” Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (November 1992): 247271Google Scholar.

57. Boaden, James, The Life of Mrs. Jordan, 2 vols., (London, 1830), 2:34, 2:45Google Scholar.

58. Clark, Anna, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770–1845 (London: Pandora, 1987), 47Google Scholar.

59. The Analytical Review 28 (1798): 180.

60. Scott, Walter, “Essay on the Drama,” in The Prose Works Of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 28 vols. (Edinburgh, 18341836), 6:387Google Scholar.

61. See especially The Dramatic Censor 2:18 (3 May 1800): 112118Google Scholar, and 2:19 (10 May 1800): 127–29, 134. See also Hogan, , The London Stage, 5:22672271Google Scholar.

62. Between 1776 and 1800, the five most frequently produced plays of Shakespeare in London, with the number of productions in parentheses, are: Hamlet (164), Macbeth (150), The Merchant of Venice (119), Romeo and Juliet (119), and Richard III (101). See Hogan, The London Stage.

63. Genest, John, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (Bath, 1832), 7:163, 7:333Google Scholar. I am indebted to Jeffrey Cox's introduction in Seven Gothic Dramas 1789—1825 for calling my attention to this detail.

64. It is difficult, however, to assess the degree to which the politics of Ethwald are Baillie's, especially in light of Connolly's opening statement in The Censorship of English Drama that censorship on the English stage has always occurred for political reasons. See Connolly, L. W.,The Censorship of English Drama (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1976), 1Google Scholar.

65. The play opens with a Highland wedding dance, is lavishly decorated with Highland costuming, language, and customs, and contains seven songs.