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Article Excerpt
Act I
During the early nineteenth century, there was a restoration of Shakespeare on the page in the form of reading anthologies and critical reviews as well as on the stage in productions that, like the printed Shakespeare, attempted to restore the "essential" Shakespeare that had been subsumed by eighteenth-century adaptations and editorial practices (Taylor 115-33). (1) For Romantic writers, Shakespeare was the ideal poet, unshackled by Neoclassical conventions that they sought to reject. (2) According the Michael Dobson, Shakespeare had already been elevated to Britain's "national poet," a construction of the Restoration and eighteenth century that Romantic writers inherited. The promotion of Shakespeare as symbol of national identity was especially evident in the 1769 Stratford Jubilee orchestrated by David Garrick (Dobson, 185). By 1759, Shakespeare had been rewritten in the tenor of nationalism, imperialism, and domestic morality. Shakespeare of the 1780s was seen as the father of the British Constitution and the father of British literature (Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text 98-115; Watson 74). (3)
Shakespeare was firmly established as idol in the Romantic-period imagination; he was a ubiquitous presence in British culture that simply to be British was to inherit him (Dobson 214). (4) In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), Henry Crawford proclaims that he has had a volume of Shakespeare in his hand since he was fifteen years old, and adds: "But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct" (3.3.229). One locus of Shakespearean "thoughts and beauties" was Romantic drama. Alan Richardson demonstrates that "echoes and allusions to Shakespeare proliferate Romantic drama" (16), Romantic playwrights and their dramas have been discussed in the context and shadow of William Shakespeare, notably Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, P.B. Shelley and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. (5) Shakespearean plays were standard fare at Romantic theatres, with the great Shakespearean roles performed by Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble. (6) From the Romantic period, we receive some of the most influential Shakespearean criticism, classics by William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge. (7)
Julie Carlson has argued that Shakespeare served as the "master mind" for Romantic male poets. He became national property because he was the private property of privileged men. According to Carlson, the closeting of Shakespeare, the anti-theatricality position that claimed Shakespeare was better on the page than on the stage, actually preserved the homosociality of Romantic-period men by effacing the power of women. In keeping with the Cartesian dichotomy of mind/body, writers like Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, and Coleridge insisted that the pleasure of Shakespeare resides in the text, what Lord Byron called "mental theatre," a masculine-identified activity, not in its embodiment, a feminization of Shakespeare by enactment in the play-house. In other words, the Bard's words are superior to woman's body. (8) Shakespeare's presence was infused in the spirit of Romanticism, and the National Bard was a significant player in Romantic drama, but the male-specific critical tradition has distanced Shakespeare from Romantic-period criticism and drama written by women and from the popularity of actresses playing Shakespearean roles, Sarah Siddons, Helen Faucit, and Ellen Terry, during the nineteenth century. Ironically, conventionally gendered private and public spaces were reversed by male playwrights and critics who claim their own superiority through Shakespeare's legacy. Lord Byron was especially jealous of "scribbling women" writers, and when he was sent a copy of Felicia Hemans's poem Modern Greece in 1817 by his publisher John Murray, he angrily wrote to send no more verse by this "Mrs He-Woman." Despite these efforts to separate women writers from Shakespeare's legacy, they found ways to give homage to the Bard and to revise his legacy for their use.
Act II
While there has been considerable scholarly work during the last decade in recovering and reviving women's dramatic contributions during the early nineteenth century, Shakespeare's debt as a dramatist to women Romantic playwrights has been neglected. It has been only during the last five years or so that scholarly efforts have engaged in the recovery of a distinctly "female criticism" of Shakespeare, and yet Romantic women writers were involved in the popular dissemination of Shakespeare and the reevaluation of his plays for "feminist" readers. (9) According to Younglim Han, there was "a female touch in literary recognition of the importance of reading Shakespeare's text" (47). A number of Romantic-period women wrote critical analyses of Shakespeare's plays and characters: Elizabeth Giffith's The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (1775); Joanna Baillie's "Introductory Discourse" to the Plays of the Passions (1798); Elizabeth Inchbald's The British Theatre (1806-1809); Sarah Siddons's, "Memoranda: Remarks on the Character of Lady Mcbeth" (1815); Anna Jameson's Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832). A surprising number of Romantic-period women published editions of Shakespeare's plays or revised versions for specific audiences: Inchbald's The British Theatre (1806-1809); Henrietta Bowdler's The Family Shakespeare (1807); Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespear: Designed for the Use of Young Persons (1807); Elizabeth Macauley's Tales of the Drama: Founded on the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Massinger, Shirley, Rowe, Murphy, Lillo, and Moore, and on the comedies of Steele, Farquhar, Cumberland, Bickerstaff, Goldsmity, and Mrs. Cowley (1822); Caroline Maxwell's The Juvenile Edition of Shakespeare: Adapted to the Capacities of Youth (1828).
The Romantic period marks a transitional phase in women's access to Shakespeare--both on the stage and page. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts report that in the course of the eighteenth century, women had more opportunities to attend performances of and to read Shakespeare's plays, but by the early nineteenth century, women were encouraged to read expurgated editions to protect them from Shakespeare's profanity and obscenity or forbidden to read Shakespeare altogether (1-2). The gender privilege fell to boys who were encouraged to read Shakespeare in its entirety and to memorize important scenes. Despite the obstacles of education and access, women continued to read and discuss Shakespeare's drama, something that is evident not only in the manifest content of their critical works and editions, but in the latent and intertextual content of their own plays. Given that Joanna Baillie was the most popular playwright of her day, dubbed, in fact, the "female Shakespeare," and that Elizabeth Inchbald was significantly influential as actress, playwright, adapter, editor, and stage manager (much like Shakespeare himself) during the early nineteenth century, it is time to look critically at what part Shakespeare played for Romantic women playwrights and their dramaturgy.
Both Baillie and Inchbald articulated rather ambivalent attitudes about Shakespeare's drama and influence. In her 1798 "Introductory Discourse" to the Plays on the Passions, Baillie is critical of recently staged drama for its "sentiments palpably false, both in regard to the character and situation of the persons who utter them" (7). In reflecting on Shakespeare's drama, she writes:
It appears to me a very strong testimony of the excellence of our great national Dramatist, that so many people have been employed in finding out obscure and refined beauties, in what appear to ordinary observation his very defects. Men, it may be said, do so merely to show their own superior penetration and ingenuity. But granting this: what could make other men listen to them, and listen so greedily too, if it were not that they have received from the works of Shakespeare, pleasure far beyond what the most poetical compositions of a different character can afford?... Very strong genius will sometimes break through every disadvantage of circumstances: Shakespeare has arisen in this country, and we ought not to complain. (7)
Baillie's comment reveals that Shakespeare's cultural position is due, in part, to the privilege he enjoys as a male dramatist read and staged primarily for men.
In her collection of twenty-five volumes of The British Theatre, Inchbald comments on the plays she includes. Like Baillie, her prefatory notes indicate ambivalence about Shakespeare's drama:
Romeo and Juliet is called pathetic tragedy, but it is not so in reality. It charms the understanding, and delights the imagination, without melting, though it touches the heart.... Shakespeare has shown himself versed in the passion of love beyond other dramatists, but giving...
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