The Modern Appeal of Susanna Centlivre’s "The Busybody"

Two young women of marriageable age.
Two young men, interested in these two young women.
Two parents determined to keep the young men well away from the young women.
Two servants, full of cunning plans.
And one busybody.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I always find it interesting (and often cringeworthy) to see what kind of taglines are given to modern adaptations and republications of literature… for instance, I once saw a horrible play version of Pride and Prejudice starring B-list celebrities that reduced the story to a “sparkling battle of the sexes.” Another example: Andrea has a copy of an unfortunate new chick-lit edition of Persuasion with the tagline “You never forget your first love”... oh dear.

Looking online for material on Susanna Centlivre’s The Busybody (1709), I found a variety of modern productions with more or less the same kind of tagline/blurb.

Fordham University’s upcoming production in November-December 2006 sums up the play as follows: “Featuring audacious beauties and the beaux who desire them, Centlivre's invention of the geriatric guardians who strive to keep the lovers apart remains a hilarious, cautionary tale for parents who cross their children in love. Quick-thinking servants, and Sir Marplot, the slow-thinking busybody who can't help gumming up the works, drive the breakneck action to a fevered pitch.”

The University of Kentucky’s version in April 2006 (below) called the play “a vivacious comedy” with “intriguing male characters, charming and intelligent young heroines, sparkling wit, a bustling plot, and delightful gaiety.”














The Villanova Players' adaptation in Brisbane, Australia, in July 2003 called it a “wonderful romp” and a “witty, romantic, and strong play.” (This link is fun because it refers back to a 1796 production of The Busybody in the penal colony of Sydney Cove for an audience of free settlers, officers, officials, and their wives, who would probably have seen the play back in the old country. Apparently the convicts' acting was of "high quality" and the theatre owner--who had been transported to Australia for housebreaking and highway robbery--found himself quite wealthy! An English newspaper reported with astonishment that “His sentence has been expired two or three years, but he does not wish to return at present, being in a fair way of making a rapid fortune”!)

Back to my meandering and maybe not very profound point... Thinking about taglines, I think sometimes they are used to try and smooth out or gloss over elements of works that are less than palatable to a modern sensibility, thereby playing up the more acceptable bits. Aphra Behn's "The Rover," for instance, is called a "rollicking Restoration comedy" a lot, but I know several people in our class who find aspects of the play, i.e. its undertones of rape, a bit too unfunny to be called "rollicking."

Centlivre, maybe more than any of the playwrights we've encountered thus far, seems to need little "smoothing out" to make her attractive to modern theatregoers. In his article "Marriage and Marrying in Susanna Centlivre's Plays," Richard C. Frushell writes:

“Restoration stereotypes were still discernable along with a changed comedy. Her plays use Restoration comedic traditions in plot and theme, intermixing them with that strain of the ‘new’ comedy today called risible and humane.” (Frushell 16)

As Frushell says, "the cynicism of earlier Restoration drama is gone" (17), keeping up with the vogue of what he calls “laughing, affable comedy” (16). This lack of cynicism, coupled with the fact that Centlivre is "realistic, clear-eyed, unsentimental" (26), is what makes her, I think, not just of intellectual interest to feminist academics, but enjoyable to a general audience.

Lastly, I found this observation of Frushell's really interesting: "Centlivre's plays appealed to audiences already leaning toward opera, farce, and that new fiction just on the horizon, the novel" (19). Reading Centlivre has helped me further understand the transitional period between the Restoration era and the so-called Augustan age.

Jane Eyre humour!!! (not 18th century material, I know)

I couldn't resist taking this link from Andrea's page about the new "Illustrated Jane Eyre" by comic-book artist Dame Darcy, whose "neo-Victorian, funky, Addams-family-style creations have won her a cult following." Governess Gone Goth... ha ha ha ha!!!!!

Since we're on the subject... I wrote this for the amusement of a fellow bookish friend of mine... thought I'd spread the nerdiness...

"Ode on a Governess"

Mad, Mad, Woman upstairs
She burns my bed down, I am scared.
But he, he, is so broody and hot
He fell off his horse and into my heart.
Oh gods! We cannot be one
I must run, far away from here
But wait, he's calling me,
With supernatural charm
I hear my name, and I must return...
He's blind but he's mine, now we are free
Our love burns through the ashes.
Too bad about his hand though.

~FINIS~

Philosophies of Human Nature in Catherine Trotter’s “Love At A Loss”

“…I know how to value myself…”
~Beaumine, V.iv.307-308

Doing a quick browse of internet material for this week’s playwright, Catherine Trotter, I was interested to see that she seems to be just as often talked about as one of the most important women philosophers of her time as she is as a writer, just as often discussed for her connection to John Locke and Enlightenment thinking as for her plays. In her introduction to Catherine Trotter: An Early Modern Writer in the Feminist Vanguard, Anne Kelley suggests that Trotter explored in her philosophical writings “concerns that had always been evident” in her literary works, and that “Trotter’s plays are unusual in that the resolution of ethical problems is their principal focus” ( Kelley 97). I could certainly see how philosophical questions about human nature permeate Trotter’s Love at a Loss (1700).

I found it interesting that, as a courtship play, Love at a Loss seems to really hinge upon whether men and women can in fact change their natures and be transformed into married people. A debate over human changeability seems integral to the play, and complicates the very possibility of happiness in marriage. Both the Lesbia and Beaumine and the Miranda and Constant plots involve a skepticism about the possibility of genuine changes in people’s personalities and actions, and whether Beaumine and Miranda can be domesticated—whether either will give up their radical expressions of personal freedom—is the main obstacle to marriage and the central complication of the plot.

In scene after scene, Trotter presents her audience with staged debates regarding conceptions of human nature and opinions about the institution of marriage. One key topic of conversation throughout the play, mainly between the rake Beaumine and the virtuous Phillabell, is that of novelty. If humans are irresistibly drawn to new sensations and experiences, argues Beaumine, and these things must come to an end when singledom does, then by definition married life can never be satisfying.

If liberty is indeed “the dear prerogative of nature” (I.ii.33-34), as Beaumine says, then marriage is an unnatural state. After Phillabell’s statement, “I secure my happiness, With a chaste wife, like my Lucilia, true,” Beaumine’s response, “I, with a mistress, ever gay and true” (I.ii.142-144) is that of a philosopher who recognizes the impossibility of lasting marriage. This makes him “considerably less morally degenerate than the rakes in some of the earlier works of male playwrights” (Kelley 104). Beaumine does not display a destructive contempt of the female sex in particular like other Restoration rakes we have encountered, but a belief in flawed human nature in general.

But through the speeches of Phillabell as well as those of Lesbia, Lucilia, and Constant, Trotter endorses the idea that the greatest happiness does in fact lie in security. Security, reason, and happiness are shown to be bound up in each other: "I have all the security for a lasting love and happiness that reason can desire or give" (I.ii.79-80), says Phillabell. Beaumine is ultimately dismissed--he is not allowed to dominate the action of the play, his duplicitousness results in none of the women actually being in love with him, and of course in the end he is made to reform.

Perhaps Trotter’s gentle debunking of Beaumine’s libertine rake philosophy can also be seen as a rejection of his false reason and pessimistic world view. Trotter seems to show more of an “optimistic view of society” and a “belief in the fundamental benevolence of humanity” (107) than the bleak view of human nature espoused by libertinism. The conception of human nature sketched for us by Trotter is that man is more than just a savage animal, and that there is potential for human development and the constructive power of reason. This, I think, is the chief didactic end of the play, and in keeping with the content of her later philosophical writings.

See also: Paula R. Backscheider's "Stretching the Form: Catharine Trotter Cockburn and Other Failures"

Mary Pix’s "The Innocent Mistress": Welcome to the 1690s

Wildlove…Lywell…Cheatall…the same old Restoration elements, or are they?

For those of us who needed to brush up on our later 17th century history (I for one had a big gap in my memory between Charles II and all the King Georges), I found that Juliet McLaren’s article really cleared some things up. I know this is a literature and not a history class, but sometimes I need to go back to the one before I can make sense of the other.

Reading Mary Pix’s The Innocent Mistress (1697), we’ve gone forward twenty years since Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677). Times had changed, Charlie the “Merry Monarch” was two kings ago, and “writing for the theatre was not at all what it had been during the Restoration” (McLaren 85). The Restoration comedy model (what I like to think of as the Rakes and virgins and cuckolds, oh my! model) had become “stale and repetitive in the hands of less talented imitators” (88).

Audiences began wanting “plays to reflect their familiar reality and their familiar ethical and social values” (86), what Robert Hume called “humane” comedy. After all the overt raping, wenching, and railing against educated women we’ve been reading about—culminating in The Female Wits and our dear old friend Robert Gould (the guy who said that all poetesses were punks, i.e. prostitutes)—the pendulum of moralism had started to swing back again.

It seems to me that Pix makes sense in this light. Without “directly attacking” anyone, as McLaren says, Pix “gently satirizes their misogynist and cynical plays” (90). Pix takes all the figures we are familiar with, twists them slightly, and gives them back to us to reconsider. Sir Charles, a man trapped in an unhappy marriage (for a change), is not charmed by Bellinda’s beauty or her money, but by her mind and character. And (I like how McLaren phrases this), “Instead of the seductive rake and helpless virgin or courtesan of other comedies, Mary Pix gives us the helpless rake” (93) in the character of Wildlove.

As for the women in the play, they represent a wide range of different types (indeed, at a time when a play might have 2 to 4 roles for women, Pix wrote plays with roles for 8 to 9 actresses). Most, like Bellinda, are witty, intelligent, and independent without sacrificing their virtue, while the two ridiculous women, Lady Beauclair and Peggy, serve to "set off better wives" (3.2.152), as Wildlove says.

Furthermore, the women "encourag[e] one another with their problems of the heart" throughout the play, and with the exception of Jenny Flywife, all "end up with appropriate marriage partners, and even she [as a kept woman] is not scorned but treated with a certain sympathy" (McLaren 95). Pix isn't didactic or idealistic, but she seems to present a view of marriage that does not have to be cynical, if the terms are right for both partners.

All we can do, Pix seems to say, is choose wisely and hope, like Cheatall, that there will continue to be "pantings, heavings, and raptures" (5.5.64) on the other side of matrimony.

...hmm, Mary Pix, in this portrait at least, wasn't exactly a looker...

my Wikipedia article on Joanna Baillie (draft)

Joanna Baillie

Joanna Baillie (September 11, 1762-February 23, 1851), Scottish poetess and dramatist. Baillie was very well-known during her lifetime and, though a woman, intended her plays not for the closet but for the stage. Admired both for her literary powers and her sweetness of disposition, her cottage at Hampstead was the centre of a brilliant literary society. Baillie died at the age of 89, her faculties remaining unimpaired to the last.

Contents
1 Biography
2 Literary and dramatic works
3 Defending her works as stage plays
4 Religious writing
5 Philanthropic efforts and literary advice
6 Reputation and legacy
7 External Links

Biography

Born at the manse in Bothwell in the county of Lanarkshire (now South Lanarkshire), Scotland. Her father Rev. James Baillie (c.1722–1778) was a Presbyterian minister and briefly, during the two years before his death, a Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow. Her mother Dorothea Hunter (c.1721–1806) was a sister of the great physicians and anatomists, William and John Hunter. The Baillies were an old Scottish family, and claimed among their ancestors the Scottish patriot William Wallace.

Joanna Baillie was the youngest of three children; she had had a twin sister, but this child had died unnamed a few hours after her birth. Baillie grew up in close companionship with her sister, Agnes (1760–1861), and brother, Matthew Baillie (1761–1823), who became a celebrated London physician.

Baillie’s early years were marked by a passion for the outdoors. Uninterested in books, she preferred playing in the garden, riding her pony, splashing on the banks of the River Clyde, and listening to ghost stories by the fireside. Baillie’s own gift for narrative invention revealed itself early in stories told to her companions or acted out in impromptu amateur dramatics.

In 1769 the Baillies moved from Bothwell to Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, where Rev. Baillie had been appointed to the collegiate church. A few years later, at the age of ten, Joanna Baillie was sent to Glasgow to attend a boarding-school known for “transforming healthy little hoydens into perfect little ladies” (Carswell 266). Her intellectual and artistic faculties were here stimulated, and she displayed a talent for drawing, considerable musical ability, and a love of mathematics. Above all, however, was her facility in the writing and acting of plays. It was in Glasgow that she visited the theatre for the first time, kindling a passion which was to continue for the rest of her life.

With the death of their father in 1778, the Baillie family found themselves with little to live on. Matthew Baillie went to Balliol College, Oxford, following in his uncles' footsteps in the study of medicine. Mrs. Baillie and her daughters retired to Long Calderwood, her family home near East Kilbride, where they led quiet lives as country gentlewomen.

Dr. William Hunter of Windmill Street, London, died in 1783, leaving Matthew Baillie his house and private museum collection (which is now the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery). The following year Joanna, Agnes, and their mother moved to London to keep house for Matthew. There Joanna Baillie had access to literary society through her aunt Anne Hunter, the wife of Dr. John Hunter. Anne Hunter was a poet of some renown and the hostess of a salon, which included among its circle Fanny Burney, Elizabeth Carter, and Elizabeth Montagu. Encouraged by her aunt’s example, Baillie began to write poetry. While at Windmill Street, Baillie also began seriously writing drama. She had a ready supply of books and studied the French authors Corneille, Racine, Molière, and Voltaire, as well as Shakespeare and the older English dramatists.

In 1791, Matthew Baillie married Sophia Denman, the daughter of a leading obstetrician, and relocated to the more fashionable Grosvenor Street. Mrs. Baillie and her daughters settled, after two or three moves, in Colchester. There, Joanna Baillie conceived the idea of her great work, the Plays on the Passions.

By 1802 Joanna Baillie had moved from Colchester to Hampstead, then on the outskirts of London, where she and her sister passed the remainder of their lives. In 1806 Mrs. Baillie died. The two sisters, having inherited a small competence from their uncle Dr. William Hunter, chose not to marry. They were on intimate terms of friendship with many eminent figures in the arts and sciences, and were sociable, hospitable, and much admired and visited. Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Lucy Aikin were neighbours and close friends, and Sir Walter Scott was a regular correspondent with whom Joanna Baillie stayed in Scotland and who visited her whenever he was in London.

In 1823, Baillie's much-loved brother Matthew died. His children and grandchildren continued to display the affection and pride in their aunt's achievements which had always marked the family. As she reached her seventies, Baillie experienced a yearlong period of unusual ill health which left her too weak to keep up her correspondence. However, she recovered and returned to her work.

Joanna Baillie was anxious that all her works with the exception of her theological pamphlet (see Religious writing) be collected in a single volume, and had the satisfaction of seeing this ‘great monster book’ as she called it, which appeared in 1851, shortly before she died. Though no longer robust—‘Ladies of four score and upwards cannot expect to be robust, and need not be gay. We sit by the fireside with our books’ (Carhart, 62)—she had remained in good health until the end. She died in 1851 in Hampstead, having almost reached her ninetieth year. Her sister, Agnes, lived on to be 100. Both sisters were buried alongside their mother in Hampstead parish churchyard, and in 1899 a sixteen-foot-high memorial was erected in Joanna Baillie's memory in the churchyard of her birthplace at Bothwell.

Literary and dramatic works

Poetry
1790
· Baillie’s first publication: Poems: Wherein it is Attempted to Describe Certain Views of Nature and of Rustic Manners. Baillie later revised a selection of these early poems which were reprinted in her Fugitive Verses (1840).
· Her first poem, ‘Winter Day,’ was evocative of the winter sights and sounds in the neighbourhood of Long Calderwood.
1821
· Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters, which told in verse the heroic stories of such historical figures as William Wallace, Christopher Columbus, and Lady Grizel Baillie. These were inspired in part by the huge popularity of Walter Scott's heroic ballads, her enthusiasm for which had, she admitted, made writing drama 'less interesting for a time' (Baillie, ‘Memoirs’).
1836
· three volumes of Dramatic Poetry.
1840
· encouraged by her old friend the banker poet Samuel Rogers, Baillie issued a new collection, Fugitive Verses, some of which were old and some recently written. It was generally agreed that her popular songs, especially those in Scots dialect, would live on.
1849
· Baillie published the poem Ahalya Baee for private circulation [subsequently published as Allahabad (1904)].

Plays
1790
· a tragedy, Arnold, which was never published.
· ‘a serious comedy’ which was later burnt.
· Rayner was written, though it was heavily revised before it was published in Miscellaneous Plays (1804).
1791
· Plays on the Passions first conceived: Baillie began by writing Basil, a tragedy on love, The Tryal, a comedy on love, and De Monfort, a tragedy on hatred.
1798
· the first volume of Plays on the Passions published anonymously under the title of A Series of Plays. In a long introductory discourse, Baillie defended and explained her ambitious design to illustrate each of the deepest and strongest passions of the human mind. The plays, the author explained, were part of a larger design and were a completely original concept. They arose from a particular view of human nature in which sympathetic curiosity and observation of the movement of feeling in others were paramount. Real passion, ‘genuine and true to nature’, was to be the subject; each play was to focus on the growth of one master passion. This unusually analytic approach generated much discussion and controversy, and in “a week or two Plays on the Passions was the main topic of discussion in the best literary circles” (Carswell 273). The authorship, though at first attributed to a variety of established male and female poets, was revealed in 1800 in the title-page of the third edition.
1800
· De Monfort was produced at Drury Lane, London, with John Kemble and Sarah Siddons in the leading parts. Splendidly staged, the play ran for eleven nights but was not a theatrical success. Henriquez and The Separation were coldly received.
1802
· second volume of Plays on the Passions published under Joanna Baillie's name, with a preface which acknowledged the reception given to volume one: ‘praise mixed with a considerable portion of censure’. Volume 2 consisted of The Election, a comedy on hatred, Ethwald, a tragedy in two parts on ambition, and The Second Marriage, a comedy on ambition. Baillie herself was of the opinion that these plays, especially Ethwald, exemplified her best writing.
1804
· published a volume entitled Miscellaneous Plays: the tragedies Rayner and Constantine Paleologus, and a comedy, The Country Inn.
1810
· the Scottish-themed Family Legend, produced at Edinburgh under the enthusiastic patronage of Sir Walter Scott, had a brief though brilliant success. It included a prologue by Scott and an epilogue by Henry Mackenzie. Its success encouraged the managers of the Edinburgh theatre to revive De Monfort, which was also well received.
1812
· third and final volume of Plays on the Passions published. It consisted of two tragedies, Orra and The Siege, a comedy, The Alienated Manor, and a serious musical drama, The Beacon. The tragedies and comedy represented the passion of Fear, while the musical drama represented Hope. Introducing what she described as ‘probably the last volume of plays I shall ever publish’ she went on to explain that it was her intention to complete her project by writing further dramas on the passions of Remorse, Jealousy, and Revenge, but she did not intend to publish them since publication had discouraged stage production.
1815
· The Family Legend produced at Drury Lane, London.
1821
· De Monfort produced at Drury Lane, London, with Edmund Kean in the title role.
· Constantine Paleologus, though written with John Kemble and Sarah Siddons in mind, was declined by Drury Lane. It was produced at the Surrey Theatre as a melodrama, Constantine and Valeria, and, in its original form, at Liverpool, Dublin, and Edinburgh.
1836
· three volumes of Miscellaneous Plays published. They included, along with nine other new plays, the continuation of Plays on the Passions promised earlier: a tragedy and comedy on jealousy and a tragedy on remorse. Their publication created a stir, and critics were almost universally enthusiastic and welcoming. Fraser's Magazine declared: ‘Had we heard that a MS play of Shakespeare's, or an early, but missing, novel of Scott's, had been discovered, and was already in the press, the information could not have been more welcome.’ (Fraser's Magazine, 236)

Baillie's reputation does not rest entirely on her dramas; she also authored poems and songs admired for their great beauty. Considered the best of them are the Lines to Agnes Baillie on her Birthday, The Kitten, To a Child and some of her adaptations of Scottish songs, such as Woo'd and Married an'a'. Scattered throughout the dramas are also some lively and beautiful songs, The Chough and the Crow in Orra, and the lover's song in the Phantom.

Defending her works as stage plays

In an 1804 prefatory address to the reader, Baillie defended her plays as acting plays. The criticism that she had no understanding of practical stagecraft and that her plays were torpid and dull in performance rankled throughout her life, and she was always delighted to hear of a production being mounted, no matter how humble it might be. She believed that critics had unfairly labelled her work as Closet drama, partly because she was a woman and partly because they had failed to read her prefaces with care. She pointed also to the conventions of the theatre in her time, when lavish spectacle on huge stages was the order of the day. Her own plays, with their attention to psychological detail, worked best, she argued, in well-lit small theatres where facial expressions could clearly be seen.

Religious writing

Growing up as a Presbyterian minister’s daughter, religion had always been important to Baillie. In 1826 she published The Martyr, a tragedy on religion, intended for reading only; and in 1831 she entered publicly into theological debate with a pamphlet, A view of the general tenour of the New Testament regarding the nature and dignity of Jesus Christ, in which she analysed the doctrines of the Trinitarian Order, Arianism, and Socinianism.

Philanthropic efforts and literary advice

Financially secure herself, Joanna Baillie customarily gave half her earnings from her writings to charity, and engaged in many philanthropic activities. In the early 1820s she corresponded with the Sheffield campaigner James Montgomery in support of his efforts on behalf of chimney sweeps. She declined to send a poem, fearing that was ‘just the very way to have the whole matter considered by the sober pot-boilers over the whole kingdom as a fanciful and visionary thing’ whereas ‘a plain statement of their miserable lot in prose, accompanied with a simple, reasonable plan for sweeping chimneys without them’ was far better strategically (letter, 5 Feb 1824).

Such pragmatism was also in evidence where literary matters were concerned. Joanna Baillie had a shrewd understanding of publishing as a trade marked by gender and class distinctions and driven by the profit motive. Authors down on their luck, women writers, and working-class poets like the shoemaker poet, John Struthers, applied to her for assistance. Baillie took seriously the power her eminence gave her. She wrote letters, drew on all her contacts, and used her knowledge of the literary world either to advise or to further a less well-connected writer. She advised one aspiring author not to publish at his own expense because then publishers would not take the trouble to promote his book as they would if they were publishing at their own risk. In 1823, she edited and published by subscription a collection of poems by many of the leading writers of the day, in support of a widowed old school friend with a family of daughters to support.

Reputation and legacy

Few women writers have received such universal commendation for their personal qualities and literary powers as Joanna Baillie. Her intelligence and integrity were allied to a modest demeanour which made her, for many, the epitome of a Christian gentlewoman. She was also shrewd, observant of human nature, and persistent to the point of obstinacy in developing her own views and opinions. Her brand of drama remained essentially unchanged throughout her life, and she took pride in having carried out her major work, the Plays on the Passions, more or less in the form she had originally conceived. Her inventive faculties were widely remarked upon by “practically everybody whose opinion on a literary matter was worth anything” (Carswell 275), and she was on friendly terms with all the leading women writers of her time.

One of her few detractors was Francis Jeffrey, who in 1803 published a long condemnatory review of the Plays on the Passions in the Edinburgh Review. He attacked the narrow theory, practice, and purpose of the plays; and though he also praised her ‘genius,’ Joanna Baillie marked him down as her literary enemy and refused a personal introduction. It was not until 1820 that she agreed to meet him; characteristically, they then became warm friends.

Maria Edgeworth, recording a visit in 1818, summed up her appeal for many:

Both Joanna and her sister have most agreeable and new conversation, not old, trumpery literature over again and reviews, but new circumstances worth telling, apropos to every subject that is touched upon; frank observations on character, without either ill-nature or the fear of committing themselves; no blue-stocking tittle-tattle, or habits of worshipping or being worshipped. (Hare, 268)

Joanna Baillie offered the literary world a new way of looking at drama and poetry. Revered by poets on both sides of the Atlantic, many of her contemporaries placed her above all women poets except Sappho. According to Harriet Martineau she had ‘enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and … been told every day for years, through every possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare’ (Martineau 358). At one time her works were translated into Cingalese and German, and were performed widely in both the United States and Great Britain.

But even when Martineau met her, in the 1830s, that fame seemed to belong to a bygone era. There were no revivals of her plays in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; and yet, as psychological studies, her tragedies would seem very suited to the intimacy of television or film. It was not until the late twentieth century that critics began to recognize the extent to which her psycholoanalytical depictions of the human psyche influenced Romantic literature. Scholars now recognize her importance as an innovator on the stage and as a dramatic theorist, and critics and literary historians of the Romantic period concerned with reassessing the place of women writers are acknowledging her significance.

"There had been, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, grave doubts if the new century could even approach the literary level of its predecessor--that it should rise higher was unthinkable--but now all doubts were dispelled. Just as the eighteenth century had begun with Dryden, so the nineteenth century was beginning with Joanna Baillie. There was still a future for English literature." ~Donald Carswell, 1930

See Joanna Baillie's Dramatic and Poetical Works (London, 1851).

External Links

Works by Joanna Baillie at Project Gutenberg
eLook Literature: Joanna Baillie - Contains a collection of poems.
Juggernaut Theatre - The Professional Female Playwright - Joanna Baillie
Joanna Baillie on Dr. Janice E. Patten's The Literary Link

References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

‘Baillie, Joanna, 1762–1851’, Literature Online [http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:lion-us&rft_id=xri:lion:author:190, accessed 5 Oct 2006]

Baillie, Joanna. Letter, 5 Feb 1824, Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London.

-- “Memoirs written to please my nephew, William Baillie” in The Scotswoman at Home and Abroad: Non-Fictional Writing 1700-1900, ed. Dorothy McMillan. Glasgow: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1999.

Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923.

Carswell, Donald. Sir Walter: A Four-Part Study in Biography (Scott, Hogg, Lockhart, Joanna Baillie). John Murray: London, 1930.

Clarke, Norma. ‘Baillie, Joanna (1762–1851)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1062, accessed 5 Oct 2006]

Fraser's Magazine, 13 (1836), 236.

Hare, Augustus J.C. , ed. The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth. 2 vols. London: Edward Arnold, 1894.

Martineau, Harriet. Autobiography (1877), vol. 1. London: Virago, 1983.

It's all in the casting: Nell Gwyn as Angellica Bianca

More Behn... I was just reading Anniina Jokinen's The Life of Aphra Behn on the Luminarium site:

Nell Gwyn, the famed actress and mistress to King Charles II, came out of retirement to play the role of the whore, Angelica Bianca ('white angel').

I've always been kind of fascinated by Nell Gwyn, with her rags to riches biography and the supposed "Let not poor Nellie starve" deathbed wish of Charles II...

I'm wondering if having such a recognizable personage as Gwyn play Angellica would have further added to Behn's de-demonizing of the whore figure. The fact that Behn chose to keep the original name from Killigrew's Thomaso, too, could mean she liked the "white angel" idea. Any thoughts?

Reading Aphra Behn’s "The Rover" in context

"Lead on, no other Dangers they can dread,
Who venture in the Storms o’th’ Marriage–Bed."
~Willmore, Act V

On to Behn… I very much enjoyed Elaine Hobby’s article “No Stolen Object, but Her Own: Aphra Behn’s Rover and Thomas Killigrew’s Thomaso.” As with Marta Straznicky’s article about Cavendish and closet drama, I thought that putting the play in its historical context was extremely helpful. Hobby calls “for less speculation on our part, and a return—if armed with modern political and theoretical questions—to an old-fashioned business: we need to read more texts with greater attention” (Hobby 113-114). I’m a big believer in new historicism and the close reading, so I appreciated this approach.

Reviewing some major misconceptions about Behn—i.e., that she was a female libertine—Hobby goes back to Behn’s own comments about her work, in which Behn issues “a challenge to any person of common sense and reason” to read any of her comedies “and compare ’em with others of this age” (Hobby 114). She then proceeds to do just this, examining the changes Behn made from Killigrew’s original material to create The Rover.

To begin with, Hobby points to the fact that The Rover, unlike Killigrew’s version, begins with women's voices, two sisters “teasingly exploring together how they might take control of their own sexual fates” (118). The connection and cooperation between women is key, and sets Behn apart from previous portrayals of women as catty, petty, and divided against each other (as we saw in the anonymous play The Female Wits). Unlike in Killigrew’s original story, it is Valeria, a quick-thinking woman, who saves Florinda from gang rape. Rather than being indebted to her lover Belvile, it is a female rescuer to which Florinda turns, saying, “My dear preserver, let me embrace thee” (Act V, Scene I).

Hobby points to a second major departure Behn makes from Killigrew: the motivations of the courtesan Angellica Bianca. She is not, as in Killigrew, insatiable female sexuality personified. Rather, she decides to sell herself out of economic necessity—precisely what men do when they marry for financial gain, as she argues in Act II, Scene II:

Pray, tell me, Sir, are not you guilty of the same mercenary Crime? When a Lady is proposed to you for a Wife, you never ask, how fair, discreet, or virtuous she is; but what’s her Fortune—which if but small, you cry—She will not do my business—and basely leave her, tho she languish for you.—Say, is not this as poor?

The dichotomy of female nature as exclusively virtuous or whorish is called into question, and Angellica becomes “a symbol of a common female fate” (Hobby 119), driven by circumstances and not innate qualities. Moreover, unlike Killigrew’s courtesan, Angellica hopes for fidelity from the man she gives herself to, lamenting, “My virgin heart, Moretta! Oh ’tis gone!” (Act IV, Scene II) when her hope is dashed. Hardly the picture of female libertinism.

Behn makes a series of connections between Hellena and Angellica throughout The Rover which further blur the absolute distinction between virgin and whore. The two start as the same woman, a woman who merely meets different fates. Willmore, for instance, is interested in bedding both Hellena and Angellica, but is only interested in wedding Hellena after finding out about her fortune. In the world as Behn portrays it, any man could turn rapist, and any woman become a whore, and those who rely on "gentlemanly respect for a lady's virtue" are "dangerously foolish" (Hobby 122). The definitions of feminity available in Behn's world are indeed "all bad news for women" (Hobby 114).

Now for a little homage to Behn from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929):
“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

From the woman who brought us "What is Liquid?"

...I couldn't resist putting this one on here. As Dr. Jones has pointed out, it is as a nice example of Cavendish's melding of science and art, but you have to see the funny side!

"A World in an Eare-Ring"
~Margaret Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, 1653

An Eare-ring round may well a Zodiacke bee,
Where in a Sun goeth round, and we not see.
And Planets seven about that Sun may move,
And Hee stand still, as some wise men would prove.
And fixed Stars, like twinkling Diamonds, plac'd
About this Eare-ring, which a World is vast.
That same which doth the Eare-ring hold, the hole,
Is that, which we do call the Pole.
There nipping Frosts may be, and Winter cold,
Yet never on the Ladies Eare take hold.

And Lightnings, Thunder, and great Winds may blow
Within this Eare-ring, yet the Eare not know.
There Seas may ebb, and flow, where Fishes swim,
And Islands be, where Spices grow therein.
There Christall Rocks hang dangling at each Eare,
And Golden Mines as Jewels may they weare.
There Earth-quakes be, which Mountains vast downe fling,
And yet nere stir the Ladies Eare, nor Ring.
There Meadowes bee, and Pastures fresh, and greene,
And Cattell feed, and yet be never seene:

And Gardens fresh, and Birds which sweetly sing,
Although we heare them not in an Eare-ring.
There Night, and Day, and Heat, and Cold, and so
May Life, and Death, and Young, and Old, still grow.
Thus Youth may spring, and severall Ages dye,
Great Plagues may be, and no Infections nigh,
There Cityes bee, and stately Houses built,
Their inside gaye, and finely may be gilt.
There Churches bee, and Priests to teach therein,
And Steeple too, yet heare the Bells not ring.

From thence may pious Teares to Heaven run,
And yet the Eare not know which way they're gone.
There Markets bee, and things both bought, and sold,
Know not the price, nor how the Markets hold.
There Governours do rule, and Kings do Reigne,
And Battels fought, where many may be slaine.
And all within the Compasse of this Ring,
And yet not tidings to the Wearer bring.
Within the Ring wise Counsellors may sit,
And yet the Eare not one wise word may get.

There may be dancing all Night at a Ball,
And yet the Eare be not disturb'd at all.
There Rivals Duels fight, where some are slaine;
There Lovers mourne, yet heare them not complaine.
And Death may dig a Lovers Grave, thus were
A Lover Dead, in a Faire Ladies Eare.
But when the Ring is broke, the World is done,
Then Lovers they into Elysium run.

I'm also putting this link from the course page, because I find it hilarious...
In Search of the World's Worst Writers: Margaret Cavendish makes the cut!