Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship 9781501737428

Citation preview

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

.

.

.

&

oman tic 1 heatricality

Gender; Poetry, and Spectatorship

Judith Pascoe

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES A GRANT FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA THAT AIDED IN THE PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK.

Copyright © 1997 by Cornell University. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1997 by Cornell University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pascoe, Judith, 1960Romantic theatricality : gender, poetry, and spectatorship / Judith Pascoe. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8014-3304-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English poetry—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Robinson, Mary, 1758-1800—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Feminism and literature—England—History—18th century. 5. English poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 6. Women and literature—England—History—18th century. 7. Authors and readers—England—History—18th century. 8. Romanticism—England— History—18th century. 9. Performing arts in literature. 10. Authorship—Sex differences. 11. Self in literature. I. Title. PR575.W6P37 1997 82i'.6o99287'o9033—dc20 96-34905

Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on Lyons Falls Turin Book, a paper that is totally chlorine-free and acid-free.

Cloth printing

10987654321

for my mother and in memory of my father\

Mary O’Hara Pascoe and William James Pascoe

Contents

Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

i

1 • Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

12

2 • The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

33

3 • “That fluttering, tinselled crew”: Women Poets and Della Cruscanism

68

4 • Embodying Marie Antoinette: The Theatricalized Female Subject

95

5 • The Spectacular Flaneuse: Women Writers and the City

130

6 • Theatricality and the Literary Marketplace: Poetry Publication in the Morning Post

163

7 • Performing Wordsworth

184

Coda * Letitia Landon and the Deathly Pose Index

229 245

■

.

E’S

Illustrations

i

Joshua Reynolds, The Tragic Muse, 1798

zz

z

James Gillray, Melpomene, 1784

30

3

Isaac Cruikshank, Cool Arguments!!!, 1794

49

4

Artist unknown, Evidence to Character, 1798

50

5

Isaac Cruikshank, The Sedition Hunter Disappointed, 1798

53

6

James Gillray, Councellor Ego, 1798

66

7

[Isaac Cruikshank], The Death of Mariae Antoniette [sic] Queen of Trance, 1793

8

Isaac Cruikshank, The Martyrdom of Marie Antoinette Queen of France, 1793

9

113

114

Jacques-Louis David, Marie-Antoinette conduite au supplice, 1793

115

10

Thomas Rowlandson, Vaux-Hall, 1785

141

11

James Gillray, The Thunderer, 178Z

14Z

iz

T. Colley, Perdito & Perdita—or—the Man & Woman of the People, 178Z

13

148

Artist unknown, The new Vis-a-vis, or Florizel driving Perdita, 1783

149

14

Artist unknown, Perdita upon Her Last Legs, [1784]

158

15

Benjamin Robert Haydon, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, i8zo

185

16

William Westall, Room at Rydal Mount, 1840

199

17

Henry Fuseli, Blind Milton Dictating to His Daughters, 1793

zoi

18

George Romney, Milton Dictating to His Daughters, 1793

zoz

19

Eugene Delacroix, Milton Dictating “Paradise Lost" to His Daughters, 18Z7-Z8

Z03

ILLUSTRATIONS

X

20

Benjamin Robert Haydon, pencil and chalk drawing of Words¬ worth, 1818

212

21

Edward Nash, pencil drawing of Wordsworth, 1818

213

22

Benjamin Robert Haydon, Wordsworth on Helvellyn, 1842

214

23

Henry William Pickersgill, oil portrait of Wordsworth, 18505i

216

Acknowledgments

asserts that the writer must seek inspiration in solitude, that the encroachments of the social world (recall Cole¬ ridge’s visitor from Porlock) wreak havoc on the composition process, and that the written text is a diminished version of the perfect cre¬ ation lodged in the poet’s mind. In this book, with its emphasis on poets as self-conscious performers, I set out to counter the first two of these three suppositions; writing it has served to increase my suspicion of the last claim. My early muddled thoughts on romantic theat¬ ricality have been encouraged and clarified through the intervention of a number of patient and perceptive audiences. At the University of Pennsylvania, Stuart Curran’s inspirational support knew no bounds; my first and deepest thanks go to him. Marjorie Levinson provided an intellectual standard I will always be striving to emulate. Nina Auer¬ bach instigated and fostered the interest in theatrical stratagem which culminated in this book. Vivienne Rundle and Ruth Lindeborg, gradu¬ ate student comrades, were my earliest readers and greatest sources of moral support. The members of the Women in the Eighteenth Century colloquium, led by Susan Lanser at the Folger Institute, helped me to feel a part of a lively community of scholars while I was still a gradu¬ ate student. Much of the research for this book was carried out in British ar¬ chives and facilitated by British scholars. I am particularly indebted to the intellectual companionship and detective work that Andrew Ashfield, Margaret Maison, Martin Levy, and William St. Clair shared with me. For initiating me into a quite different kind of creative en¬ deavor, one that provided an endlessly diverting respite from this proj¬ ect, I am grateful to the Senate House Lacemakers and the patient instruction of Bobby Hodgson. I gratefully acknowledge the generous contribution from the Uni¬ versity of Iowa Office of the Vice President for Research toward the publication of this work. The University of Iowa also provided mate¬ rial support for work on two chapters of this project in the form of two Old Gold Summer Fellowships. But more important, it has given Romantic mythology

Xll

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

me access to a circle of benevolent readers of the sort Wordsworth tried to construct in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Miriam Gilbert and Huston Diehl enriched this project by sharing their knowledge of Shakespeare and Milton. Teresa Mangum and Kim Marra remained enthusiastic through an endless barrage of revised chapters; this book was greatly enhanced by their input. Catherine Burroughs (just up the road at Cornell College) shared her important research on Joanna Baillie and romantic era theater theory, and read the final manuscript very quickly so that I could meet a looming deadline. Eun-Jung Yook and David Stafford provided efficient and Effective research assistance. I have relied heavily on the kindness of librarians and have rarely been disappointed. I am grateful for access to collections and cura¬ torial assistance at the University of Pennsylvania (especially in Spe¬ cial Collections), the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library, the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library, the Bodleian Library (locus of Lord Abinger’s remarkable manuscript collection), the Greater London Rec¬ ord Office, Dr. Williams’s Library in London, and the University of Iowa Main Library. At this last institution I owe special thanks to Helen Ryan, and to the staff of the Inter-Library Loan Department. Ellen Garvey walked me through the final stages of the publication process and helped me find ways to describe my project in brief. Alan Richardson and Julie Carlson provided astute suggestions for revision, which I have tried, if not always successfully, to carry out. Amanda Heller, Carol Betsch, and Kay Scheuer made me wish that everything I ever write could come under the supervision of these guardians of graceful prose. Bernhard Kendler was an attentive and efficient editor; I am grateful for his support of this project. Versions of two sections of the manuscript have appeared else¬ where: Chapter 5 as “The Spectacular Flaneuse: Mary Robinson and the City of London” in The Wordsworth Circle 23.3 (1992) and Chapter 6 as “Mary Robinson and the Literary Marketplace” in Ro¬ mantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices (University Press of New England, 1995). I thank the publishers for permission to reprint these essays in revised form here. I dedicate this book to my mother, an English teacher and propo¬ nent of careful proofreading, and in memory of my father, an avid reader. Because of their enthusiasm for books, instilled in me very early, the writing of this book retained a magical excitement to the very end. Jean Weinschenk, Ann Pascoe, and Marie Pascoe McDonald

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Xlll

took an interest in the project from afar, as the latest of their sister’s preoccupations. My husband, Perry Howell, supported my work in more ways than it is possible to enumerate. Most important, he and my daughters, Emma and Maisie, made it tremendous fun on a daily basis for me to leave the library or office and come home. J.P.

■

Abbreviations

A and M

The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1/86-1846). Ed. Tom Taylor. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, [1926].

B and M

William Gifford. The Baviad and Maeviad. 8th ed. London: Becket and Porter, 1811.

BWP

Betty Bennett, ed. British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism: 1793-1815. New York: Garland, 1976.

CLGB

William Godwin. Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills, Concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices, and Unlawful Assemblies. London: J. Johnson, 1795.

DBRH

The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon. Ed. Willard Bissell Pope. 5 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, i960.

ER

Jane Taylor. Essays in Rhyme, on Morals and Manners. London: Taylor and Hessey, 1816.

EY

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Vol. 1. The Early Years, 1787-1805. Rev. Chester L. Shaver. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

FA

Letitia Elizabeth Landon. The Fate of Adelaide, A Swiss Romantic Tale; and Other Poems. 1821. Rpt., Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1990.

FN

The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth. Ed. Jared Curtis. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993.

FR

Mary Wollstonecraft. An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. In vol. 6 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

I

Letitia Elizabeth Landon. The Improvisatrice. In Poetical Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon “L.E.L.” Ed. F. J. Sypher. 1873. Rpt., Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1990.

IR

Mary Robinson. Impartial Reflections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France. London: John Bell, 1791.

xvi

LLP

ABBREVIATIONS

William Hazlitt. Lectures on the English Poets. In vol. 5 of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe. London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1930.

LJT

The Life of John Thelwall. 2 vols. London: John Macrone, 1837.

LLR

Thomas De Quincey. Literary and Lake Reminiscences. In vol. 2 of The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson. 1889. Rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1968.

LY

The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt. Vols. 6 and 7. The Later Years, 1835-1839 and The Later Years, 1840-1853. Rev. Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982 and 1988.

MC

Morning Chronicle

ML AO

Cecelia Lucy Brightwell, ed. Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie. London: Longman, Brown & Co., 1854.

MLTH

Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft. 3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816.

MM

Monthly Magazine

MMR

Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself. 4 vols. London: R. Phillips, 1801.

MP

Morning Post

MTH

Thomas Hardy. Memoir of Thomas Hardy. London: James Ridgway, 1832.

NF

Thomas Holcroft. A Narrative of Facts, Relating to a Prosecution for High Treason; Including the Address to the Jury, Which the Court Refused to Hear. London: H. D. Symonds, 1795.

O

Oracle

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

P

William Wordsworth. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979. (All citations are given as book and line numbers from the 1805 edition.)

PAM

Hannah Cowley. The Poetry of Anna Matilda. London: John Bell, 1788.

PCS

The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Ed. Stuart Curran. Women Writers in English, 1350-1850, gen. ed. Susanne Woods. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

ABBREVIATIONS

Prose

XVII

The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1974PWMR

The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson. 3 vols. London: Richard Phillips, 1806.

PWWW

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. 5 vols. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952-59.

RRF

Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: J. M. Dent 6c Sons, i960.

SA

William Hazlitt. The Spirit of the Age. In vol. 11 of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe. London: J. M. Dent 6c Co., 1930.

S and P

Mary Robinson. Sappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets. New York: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1995.

ST

T. B. Howell, ed. A Complete Collection of State Trials. 33 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818.

T

John Thelwall. The Tribune. 3 vols. London: H. D. Symonds, 1796.

TB

True Briton

VRM

Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Men. In vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

W

World

’■

\

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

Introduction

It is impossible to write about women authors of the early roman¬

tic period without taking into account the political events and cultural changes that made it “bliss to be alive” in the decade of the 1790s. For the poet and novelist Mary Robinson, life in that decade was, in many respects, less than blissful, encompassing as it did financial hardship and physical disability, but the excitement William Words¬ worth projected backward onto the decade was a lived reality for a writer whose published works grew in number from two to more than twenty titles over the course of ten years. Any attempt to name her the representative poet of the 1790s, however, runs afoul of a favored tenet of romantic ideology, a concern for the originality and authenticity of the poet’s creations. The Robinson of the 1790s was a cultural chame¬ leon, adopting every literary fashion, penning Della Cruscan verse, Jac¬ obin novel, feminist tract, and lyrical tale, this last in a direct imitation of Wordsworth’s dearest project. One can add to this sketch of Robinson’s career her unabashed self-promotion (as poetry editor of the Morning Post she almost certainly wrote her own puffs). The result is a romantic monster—a blatant publicity hound, a poetic panderer, a staged self. There are, however, other, less pejorative, ways of describing these same career strategies. One might credit Robinson with a concern for audience, a sensitivity to popular taste, an awareness of the Active nature of self-representation. One might read into Wordsworth’s dis¬ turbed reaction to Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (Dorothy Wordsworth re¬ ports that her brother considered changing the name of the second volume of his similarly titled project) an uncomfortable awareness of the similarities, rather than the essential differences, between his guarded and Robinson’s aggressive ventures into the literary market¬ place. One might, as I intend to do here, examine the performative aspects of early romantic literary culture as a whole. Rather than con¬ sidering the Wordsworthian persona as a reaction against the obvious staginess of Robinson and her female peers, I instead situate it as the

2

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

most durable performance of the era. And rather than consider women writers’ overtly theatrical self-representations as a deviation from the norm, or as a falling-off from a standard of sincerity—a Words¬ worthian gold standard—I advocate a more detailed attention to and respect for the artificiality of authenticity. A few preliminary words are necessary to define the central term of my title and to make clear that while I use the world of the theater here as a contextual and theoretical framework, I do not, in fact, deal with the most obviously staged texts, that is, plays. The Oxford En¬ glish Dictionary defines “theatrical” in three ways, all of which come into focus in the pages that follow: (i) pertaining to or connected with the theater or stage, or with scenic representation; (2) representing or exhibiting in the manner of an actor; artificial, affected, assumed; (3) calculated for display, showy, spectacular. The uneasy sallies into the theatrical realm of the six male poets whose work has come to define the period—think of Wordsworth’s vexed portrayal of London spec¬ tacle in book 7 of The Prelude, or that romantic era oxymoron, the closet drama—have been fruitfully examined by Mary Jacobus, Timo¬ thy Webb, Alan Richardson, Marilyn Gaull, and Julie Carlson, among others.1 But when one looks beyond the forcibly conjoined coterie of male poets, one finds that connections proliferate between the literati and the stage. Among the more prominent female writers of the pe¬ riod, Mary Robinson and Elizabeth Inchbald were successful actresses before moving on to literary careers; Germaine de Stael and Letitia Landon invented literary improvisatrici fashioned after the most fa¬ mous actress of the era, Sarah Siddons; Anna Seward carried “Siddonian idolatry” to new heights; Helen Maria Williams took on the role of Liberty in a Parisian staging of the Revolution; and Joanna Baillie set out to incorporate the full range of human emotion in her Plays on the Passions. Material links to the stage, particularly among the fe¬ male writers of the early romantic period, run wide and deep. Although these historical associations between poets and the thea1 Mary Jacobus, “ ‘That Great Stage Where Senators Perform’: Macbeth and the Poli¬ tics of Romantic Theatre,” in Romanticism, 'Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on “The Prelude” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 33-68; Timothy Webb, “The Ro¬ mantic Poet and the Stage: A Short, Sad History,” in The Romantic Theatre: An Inter¬ national Symposium, ed. Richard Allen Cave (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 9-46; Alan Richardson, A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988); Marilyn Gaull, “Romantic Theater,” Wordsworth Circle 14 (1983): 255-63; Julie Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Introduction

3

ter are suggestive, I am more interested in the OED’s two latter defini¬ tions of “theatrical.” The second, to play a part or assume an identity, has an obvious relevance to Mary Robinson, who, in her proliferation of pseudonymous identities, evoked a heterodox and fluid notion of self. But when one considers Della Cruscan verse as the most obvious and immediate precursor to the poetry we know as romantic, the cul¬ tural significance of a performed self moves well beyond one shapeshifting writer. Inspired by Robert Merry, writing in the persona of the histrionic “Della Crusca,” British women writers poured forth a torrent of poetry predicated on a fabrication: an affectional alliance between sympathetic poet friends. The falsity of this fiction was brought home most forcibly when the two most impassioned of the poetic communicants, “Della Crusca” and “Anna Matilda,” met for the first time in the disappointing flesh of Robert Merry and Hannah Cowley. But on a larger scale, the subterfuge inherent in Della Cruscanism as a phenomenon becomes obvious when one notes how poems that present themselves as emissaries to a desired other turn inward, focusing ultimately on their authors’ emotive states rather than on the encounter or exchange. This strategy should sound famil¬ iar, providing one more reason for looking with suspicion on roman¬ tic conventions of authenticity and sincerity. Given the frequency with which the word “tinsel” appears in con¬ temporary reviews of poets ranging from Merry to Keats, it seems worthwhile as well to attend to that aspect of theatricality most at odds with the received ethos of the period, that is, the showy and spectacular quality of dramatic performance. I trace a propensity in romantic era verse that is directly at odds with Wordsworth’s advo¬ cacy of a plain style. Fascination with dramatic modes of self-repre¬ sentation in the period is frequently coupled with stylistic excess, with a penchant for ornamentation which in Keats led to charges of vul¬ garity and in women poets led, ultimately, to erasure from the roman¬ tic canon. That theatrical modes of representation are also associated with feminization in critical literature of the period such as Hazlitt’s, powerfully supports my contention that women writers played a con¬ stitutive if not a permanent role in romantic ideation. My aim is to take a neglected facet of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture, an attraction to and appropriation of performative modes of self-representation, and use it to construct narratives that link “high” and “low” literary texts, that explore con¬ tinuities rather than disjunctions between, for example, the Della Cruscan effusion and the “greater romantic lyric.” In doing so, I nec-

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

4

essarily work to complicate distinctions between public and private, masculine and feminine spheres, building on the work of historians such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, who, writing on the English middle class in the period 1780-1850, confidently aver: “Pub¬ lic was not really public and private was not really private despite the potent imagery of ‘separate spheres.’ ”2 Nancy Armstrong, in her influ¬ ential work Desire and Domestic Fiction, similarly notes the impos¬ sibility of detaching women’s history from politics and issues of gen¬ der from issues of class. My emphasis on poetry rather than the novel, on the comparatively tight focus of the early romantic period rather than the broad sweep of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, al¬ lows me to attend to some fascinating deviations in the general march toward that Victorian domestic ideal, the Angel in the House. For example, Armstrong convincingly argues that the construction of fe¬ male subjectivity is bound up with the criticism of public display asso¬ ciated with aristocratic women.3 A possible line of resistance to this association is evinced in British women poets’ fascination with the corporeal presence of Marie Antoinette, the focus of Chapter 4. Mary Poovey, who three years before Armstrong similarly underscored how female subjectivity is constructed through a variety of public dis¬ courses in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, claims that literary authorship, predicated as it was on the illusion of art as a discrete, apolitical domain, reinforced bourgeois ideology.4 For the poets I dis¬ cuss in Chapter 6, who published their work in daily newspapers, this illusion of a private literary sphere would have been impossible to sustain. Despite the several efforts to complicate the dialectic between pub¬ lic sphere and private sphere, especially in feminist articulations of the rise of the novel, it still underpins recent critical work on romantic women writers which posits a feminine romanticism in opposition to, and fundamentally different from, the more familiar masculine ro¬ manticism. For example, Marlon Ross, in his groundbreaking study of men and women poets of the romantic period, focuses on Felicia Hemans as representative of a “heartfelt coterie” of women writers.

2 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Century Hutchinson, 1987), 33. 3 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 257, 77. 4 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 243-44.

Introduction

5

Ross claims, “The contours of feminine desire are necessarily different from masculine desire in early nineteenth-century poetry,” and he coins the phrase “affectional poets” to contrast women writers’ em¬ phasis on affiliation and community with male writers’ preoccupation with the self and its conquests.5 Anne Mellor creates a similar opposi¬ tion in her bluntly titled essay “Why Women Didn’t Like Romanti¬ cism: The View of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley,” arguing: “In direct opposition to the romantic poets’ celebration of love, the leading woman writers of the day urged their female readers to forswear pas¬ sion . . . and to embrace instead reason, virtue, and caution.”6 In

Romanticism and Gender Mellor identifies a “feminine” romanticism predicated on an “ethic of care,” which she contrasts with the more familiar “masculine” romanticism typified by the Wordsworthian ego¬ tistical sublime.7 As a result of both this volume and her earlier edition of essays, Romanticism and Feminism, which included “The I Al¬ tered,” Stuart Curran’s essay recovering a multitude of now not quite so little-known romantic women poets, Mellor can be credited with moving gender concerns to the center of romantic studies. But her choice in “Why Women Didn’t Like Romanticism” of two novelists as representative women writers of the romantic period reinforces the notion of poetry, the genre on which definitions of the romantic are founded, as an all-male bastion. Although in Romanticism and Gen¬

der Mellor quotes a statistic that counters such a view—Curran’s identification of 339 women poets publishing in England between 1760 and 1830—she in large measure ignores the poets on her own list of “twenty or so women writers acknowledged at the time or later to be the most influential, gifted, or widely read” (2). The list includes Anna Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, and Helen Maria Williams, but Mellor grounds her arguments primarily in discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth and Emily Bronte. I maintain that the most productive arena in which to interrogate the relationship between men and women writers of the romantic period is through the poets who were writing when “the romantic” was still in its formative stages. That this relationship might best be understood in symbiotic rather

5 Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of 'Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 315, 13. 6 Anne K. Mellor, “Why Women Didn’t Like Romanticism: The Views of Jane Aus¬ ten and Mary Shelley,” in The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 281. 7 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3; here¬ after cited in text.

6

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

than antagonistic terms is suggested by Julie Ellison’s observation that “the key terms of romantic poetics—the sublime, the haunted, the grotesque, the sentimental, the ironic, memory, desire, imagination— are accompanied by the demand to be understood intuitively.” She continues: “Intuition is marked as a feminine quality, just as most objects of romantic longing are, including childhood, nature, and the demonic. The invention of the romantic subject as the hero of desire is therefore wholly bound up with the feminine.”8 Ellison’s positing of an integral link between the romantic subject and the feminine pro¬ vides a useful context in which to consider the work of Robinson and Smith, two poets whose serial enactments of private longing have more in common with the poetry of their male peers than with the novels of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, or the work of a secondgeneration romantic female poet such as Hemans. The vexed relation¬ ship to human passion and the physical body that Mellor rightly notes in the works of Shelley and Austen, and that Cora Kaplan and Mary Poovey discern in the Vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft, does not figure as prominently in the poetry of Smith and Robinson, if it is indeed a component of their work at all.9 This is not to say that these poets are unconcerned with human passion and the physical body; I note merely that their representations of female sexuality do not uniformly echo Wollstonecraft’s ambivalence. Attention to the appeal for women writers of the actress Sarah Siddons, whose public persona was predicated on a striking physique and a strong ego, necessarily complicates any attempt to align women writers of the romantic period with either the disem¬ bodied mind or an altruistic emphasis on communal regard. Two other recent critical studies provide convincing reinforcement for my insistence on uniting public and private as well as masculine and feminine realms. Mary A. Favret’s strategic reading of romantic correspondence to emphasize the connections between public and pri¬ vate experience underscores how even the most seemingly private and feminine of texts, the personal letter, must be situated within the polit¬ ical paranoia of the 1790s. Favret writes, “The undisputable truth of letters resides not in individual expression, but in public, institutional control.”10 And William Galperin focuses on the vast encircling view 8 Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Under¬ standing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 10-11. 9 Cora Kaplan, “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism,” in Sea Changes: Es¬ says on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986); Poovey, Proper Lady, 69-81. 10 Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 47.

Introduction

7

of a landscape or cityscape provided by the Panorama in order to argue that this popular spectacle’s destabilizing effect on a privatized subject position calls into question the commanding gaze we have come to associate with the male spectator. Galperin argues that the tendency of the Panoramas to reflect their audiences-—for example, in vast cityscapes filled with milling people not unlike the mass of people surrounding the Panoramas’ spectators—resulted in a “theatricalization of the audience” that denied the individual beholder a secure subject position.11 Throughout this book I argue that subject and ob¬ ject positions, those of spectator and spectacle, were not always deter¬ mined by gender. Although two basic arguments underlie all the chapters that fol¬ low—the contention that romanticism is founded on theatrical modes of self-representation and the corollary that women played active and influential roles in public life—they manifest themselves in a wide va¬ riety of venues. In the first two chapters I set out to complicate the conventional bifurcation between public and private realms, partic¬ ularly as they relate to women, by, in the first instance, focusing on the most public woman of the day, the actress Sarah Siddons, and in the second, examining the role women played in the seemingly masculinist domain of the 1794 treason trials. In Chapters 3 through 7, which proceed in roughly chronological fashion, I explore how re¬ liance on theatrical personas facilitated public performance not just for women writers but also for that most putatively private male writer, William Wordsworth. In Chapter 1, “Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female,” I use the sonnet sequences of Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson to dem¬ onstrate how women authors managed to merge theatricality and sin¬ cerity. Situating these literary works in a culture awash in “Siddonian idolatry,” I argue that Smith and Robinson are influenced by Siddons’s strategic deployment of her “private” life in the construction of her public persona. These poets, similarly, use the public’s awareness of their personal circumstances to temper or heighten their poetry’s passionate claims. My discussion in Chapter 2, “The Courtroom The¬ ater of the 1794 Treason Trials,” is grounded in court transcripts, newspaper accounts of the trials, political caricature, and personal narratives of trial participants and witnesses. This contextualization allows me to demonstrate the subtle ways in which the trial partici-

11 William H. Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 94_95-

8

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

'

pants’ “performances” were pitched to the female spectators who made up a substantial part of the courtroom audience. I argue that these female spectators brought to the courtroom a sense of empower¬ ment they had acquired as members of increasingly demanding and demonstrative theater audiences. The treason trials reveal that women writers’ reliance on performative modes of self-representation mir¬ rored the proclivities of the culture at large. The trials also suggest how theatrical conventions leaped the boundaries of the patent house stages and permeated public life. In Chapter 3, “‘That fluttering, tinselled crew’: Women Poets and Della Cruscanism,” I examine the role Della Cruscan poetry played in launching women’s literary careers and creating a readership for the self-referential and spontaneous poetic effusions we know as romantic poetry. I read Della Cruscan verse against the accounts of King George Ill’s madness, with which it shared space in the daily news¬ papers, arguing that the theatricality and ornamentality of this mode of poetry provided a mask for women poets and a distraction for the newspapers’ readers. And I show how William Gifford’s attack on Della Cruscanism allies the theatricality of the poetry with the bodies of its female practitioners in a rhetorical maneuver that writes women out of romanticism. Chapter 4, “Embodying Marie Antoinette,” es¬ tablishes the French queen’s central place in British literary culture. Whereas Edmund Burke famously reduces her to a star on the hori¬ zon, his female contemporaries emphasize her dramatic presence, though differing widely in their reactions to and uses of her theat¬ ricality. I read the representations of Marie Antoinette penned by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith to discuss women writers’ fetishization of the French queen. Chapters 5 and 6 present the city of London and the periodical press as venues for literary performance. In Chapter 5, “The Spectacu¬ lar Flaneuse,” I contrast Mary Robinson’s city poems with Words¬ worth’s representations of London in book 7 of The Prelude, noting the extent to which Wordsworth mutes and Robinson highlights women’s place in the urban street. Associated in print caricatures with the kind of decorative carriage that was rendered notorious by Marie Antoinette, Robinson uses the vantage point of the carriage rider to become both object and purveyor of an urban gaze, and complicates the conventional gendering of public space as masculine. In Chapter 6, “Theatricality and the Literary Marketplace,” I examine the phe¬ nomenon of newspaper poetry, arguing that the poetry column of the Morning Post was ideally suited to performative modes of self-repre-

Introduction

9

sentation and, for this reason, inspired very different responses from the poets who published there—most notably Southey, Robinson, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. I read these responses as part of a larger anxiety about the commodification of poetry which is expressed in the familiar rhetoric of antitheatricality. In Chapter 7, “Performing Wordsworth,” I take my ongoing argu¬ ment concerning the staginess of early romantic literary culture to its extreme, arguing that even Wordsworth, the standard-bearer of sin¬ cerity and authenticity, indulged in theatrical strategies. By exploring three discrete instances of Wordsworthian performance—his perambulatory mode of composition, his collaborations with portrait painters, and his self-reflexive commentary in the Preface to the Lyri¬

cal Ballads and in the Fenwick notes—I document his participation in the theatrical imperative of the culture at large. In reciting his poems to the captive audience provided by his sister, wife, and daughter, and in posing for Benjamin Haydon’s life-size painting Christ’s Entry into

Jerusalem, Wordsworth was, in the one instance, performing his po¬ etry and, in the other, publicizing his persona, two activities that run counter to the normative conception of the romantic poet which he helped to construct. My Coda chronicles how the fluid theatricality of Mary Robinson and her peers evolves into something less creatively enabling. Letitia Landon’s poetic propensity for deathbed scenes stands as a continua¬ tion and intensification of the theatrical strategies that served to con¬ stitute a romantic subject. Her poetic death scenes simultaneously lure an audience and guard against this audience’s encroachment. In Landon’s work the fluid theatricality of the 1790s is transformed into a static gesture of grief, a funereal monument. As these chapter descriptions make clear, Mary Robinson figures repeatedly in many of the cultural moments on which I focus here. Although I make no claim that she is typical of women poets of the period, I do think that her tendency to situate herself at the center of popular developments—Della Cruscanism, city spectacle, newspaper reportage—warrants sustained attention to her literary maneuvers. Rather than scatter the names of lesser-known women poets through¬ out my book at the risk of seeing none of them emerge as distinctive voices, I have opted to focus primarily on Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Hannah Cowley, and Letitia Landon, with Wollstonecraft, Anna Maria Jones, and Jane Taylor serving at various points to complicate or broaden my arguments. Though this project situates itself within a discrete historical milieu

IO

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

(primarily London of the 1790s) and seeks to address a specific criti¬ cal issue (the place of women in romanticism), it participates as well in the ongoing theoretical debate over the performative status of gen¬ der. Women writers’ fascination with and literary deployment of the bodies of Siddons and Marie Antoinette provide a context in which to test Judith Butler’s understanding of the body as “a materiality that bears meaning” in a “fundamentally dramatic” manner and her asser¬ tion that “bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.” Butler’s at¬ tention to both the possibilities inherent in and the constraints acting on gender performance is particularly apposite, given the delicate bal¬ ance that was constantly being negotiated by women poets. She em¬ phasizes that distinctions are not easily drawn between theatrical and social roles, before going on to assert that while “theatrical perfor¬ mances can meet with political censorship and scathing criticism, gen¬ der performances in non-theatrical contexts are governed by more clearly punitive and regulatory social conventions.”12 The experiences of romantic women writers provide historical proof and specific en¬ actments of the entanglement of theatrical and social roles, and point to the difficulty of delineating theatrical (literary, published) from nontheatrical (lived, private) contexts.13 Talking about self-representation in the 1790s, and in particular about men and women poets’ different uses of and relations to perfor¬ mance, allows me to stake a claim for the signal importance of women poets during the romantic period, not as outsiders, nattering about on the fringes of the more ambitious productions of their male peers, but as serious and influential artists who made a virtue out of the necessity of gender constraints and used performative strategies to bridge the gap between private woman and publishing author. In do¬ ing so, I do not wish to write over blithely the material reality of those 12 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenome¬ nology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 272, 270, 278. 13 Catherine B. Burroughs’s illuminating analysis of the gendering of closet space, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theatre Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), further serves to com¬ plicate the split between private and public realms. With her focus on women’s theater theory and on the writings of Joanna Baillie in particular, she provides a much-needed treatment of women writers’ negotiations of the romantic stage. I am grateful for hav¬ ing been allowed to read this work in advance of publication. Ellen Donkin, Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776-1819 (New York: Routledge, 1995), which became available too late to inform my study, also promises to establish women writers’ prominence in romantic era theater.

Introduction

ii

constraints. Rather, I concur with the conclusion Wayne Koestenbaum draws concerning performative potential in a different cultural con¬ text, the appropriation of the opera diva by gay culture. Koestenbaum writes: “No single gesture, gown, or haughty glissando of self-promo¬ tion will change one’s actual social position: one is fixed in a class, a race, a gender. But against such absolutes there arises a fervent belief in retaliatory self-invention.”14 For reasons rooted in British law, eti¬ quette, economy, and literary culture, women writers of the romantic period had a particularly pressing need to turn to the kind of retalia¬ tory self-invention Koestenbaum describes. But this need was felt as well by their less commercially successful contemporary William Wordsworth. The difference of temperament that has worked to di¬ vide the ostensibly antitheatrical Wordsworth from the overtly theatri¬ cal Byron may no longer seem so insuperable if we place their oppo¬ site constructions of self within the context of romantic performance provided by their female peers. Romanticism as a movement has been, with slight exception, staged without women. I propose another, more inclusive perfor¬ mance, one that takes into account not just Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley but also a number of women writers who were, for better or worse, not tethered to the major male players of the time. In my staging of romanticism the female actors assume their rightful place at center stage, and there are no bit parts. 14 Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mys¬ tery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993), 133.

•

I

•

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

The guilty pleasure

offered by a private staging of Lovers’ Vows

permeates Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, lingering long after the ar¬ rival at home of Sir Thomas Bertram puts an end to the performance. Conjuring up its special significance, Henry Crawford recalls: “We were all alive. There was employment, hope, solicitude, bustle, for every hour of the day.” The home theatrical casts into relief the pur¬ poselessness of the actors’ lives off stage, a quiescence perfectly em¬ blematized by Lady Bertram’s irreproachable but lusterless engage¬ ment with carpet work and fringe production. The insipidity of female occupation as represented by Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris (whose vocation lies in “preventing waste and making the most of things”) underscores the liberating power of the stage for female performers. In conversation with Fanny Price, Mary Crawford looks back long¬ ingly on her brush with the stage, claiming: “If I had the power of recalling any one week of my existence, it should be that week, that acting week. Say what you would, Fanny, it should be that; for I never knew such exquisite happiness in any other.”1 The figure of the performing female serves a useful function for Austen, embodying an enticing although problematic alternative to the more traditional roles of daughter, wife, and mother, an alterna¬ tive that Austen entertains but never endorses. The parallel between the aspiring actresses in the novel and the author’s own position as publishing novelist is one that is avoided by Austen’s masked presence within her public text: “author of” her prior published works substi¬ tutes for Austen’s name on the title page. Austen’s strategy of distanc¬ ing the public author from the private woman was a common one for women writers around the turn of the century, but it was by no means 1 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814; rpt., New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 236, 165, 354.

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

i3

the only one. For women poets of the 1790s, another way of “going public” involved blurring the line between public author and private woman, fashioning a public persona from a dramatic version of one’s private self. Poets as disparate as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson participated in the creation of such public roles for themselves, be¬ coming “the sorrowful Charlotte” and “the English Sappho,” popular characterizations that helped sell poems. This adoption of a performed subject position by early romantic women poets runs counter to conventional literary paradigms of the period, threatening to substitute theatricality for sincerity and multi¬ plicity for authenticity. More accurately, rather than a substitution, one witnesses in these women’s poetry a melding of seemingly con¬ trary terms, the creation of a theatrical sincerity and a multiple au¬ thenticity. Of course, the self-constructions of romantic era poets have already been rendered suspect by the shrewd critical interventions of Jerome McGann, Alan Liu, and Marjorie Levinson, to name the most influential proponents of a New Historicist critical project that has left its greatest mark on Wordsworth studies. Although “sincerity” has been labeled an “old-fashioned term” by Jerome McGann, and coupled with “spontaneity” as part of “a set of stylistic conventions developed by the Romantics to give the illusion of ‘spontaneous over¬ flow’ to their verse,” thus far no one has paid enough attention to the illusory aspect of this procedure and its situation within both a liter¬ ary and a political culture in which theatrical modes of public display increasingly ruled the day.2 Joseph Litvak’s insightful reading of Mans¬

field, Park, in its recognition of the theatricality of Lanny’s “sincere” role as well as the theatricality of everyday life at Mansfield Park, underscores the interconnectedness of public and private realms, the way in which theatrical practices permeate every facet of life.3 And the notion of the romantic period as deeply antitheatrical has been com¬ plicated by the critical interventions of Mary Jacobus, Timothy Webb, Marilyn Gaull, Alan Richardson, and Julie Carlson, all of whom have demonstrated the male romantics’ fascination with the stage.4 But one 2 Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 63. Peter T. Murphy, Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), initiates a discussion of sincerity as a mode of theatricality in his attention to the “dramatically sincere” style of Robert Burns’s correspondence with Agnes M’Lehose (61). 3 Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 21. 4 Mary Jacobus, “ ‘That Great Stage Where Senators Perform’: Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre,” in Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on “The Pre-

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

14

must look to theater and military historians and biographers to realize the full extent of late Georgian society’s absorption in and by the theater. Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dorothy Jordan provides amusing glimpses of the royal family as aspiring thespians. Sarah Siddons was appointed “Preceptress in English Reading to the Princesses” by the king and queen and in this capacity gave frequent readings to their elder daughter. Tomalin writes: “[Queen Charlotte] enjoyed having [her children] dressed up in specially made theatrical costumes, togas, tunics, Harlequin suits, frocks, feathers and tiny swords, as though they were little actors. Their portraits were painted wearing these fancy-dress outfits, and sometimes they put on performances of their

own.”* * * * 5 Of course, monarchical life involved the performance of king¬ liness and queenliness on a regular basis, but Tomalin’s anecdotes at¬ test to the royals’ fascination with a performance that was specifically theatrical, in the sense of being adopted from the stage. Marc Baer, in his study of late Georgian theater riots, chronicles appropriations of theatrical practice by less affluent sectors of British society. Writing specifically of disturbances at Covent Garden in 1809 which were fueled by widespread discontent at increased ticket prices and less le¬ nient admission practices, Baer describes how the rioters performed to dramatize their cause: “Pit, boxes, and galleries became stages them¬ selves, with perorations, dances, mock battles, and demonstrations.”6 The popularity of romantic era private theatricals might seem to provide evidence of some fundamental aversion to the public stage, but Gillian Russell’s fascinating study of military theatricality counters the impulse to see these parlor performances as divorced from the public sphere. Russell writes: “For events which were supposedly ‘pri¬ vate,’ they received as much, if not more, publicity than performances at the patent houses: newspapers and journals printed accounts of bon

ton theatricals, including ‘private’ playbills; caricaturists lampooned the activities of amateur thespians; dramatists and novelists conlude” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 33-68; Timothy Webb, “The Romantic Poet and the Stage: A Short, Sad History,” in The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium, ed. Richard Allen Cave (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 9-46; Marilyn Gaull, “Roman¬ tic Theater,” Wordsworth Circle 14 (1983): 255-63; Alan Richardson, A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988); Julie A. Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, National¬ ism, Women (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), hereafter cited in text. 5 Claire Tomalin, Mrs. Jordan’s Profession: The Actress and the Prince (New York: Knopf, 1995), 39, 146 Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 33-34.

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

15

structed narratives around them.” Although Russell focuses in partic¬ ular on the theatricality of the military and the theatricalization of war, she provides abundant evidence of the prevalence of theater “in a world where performance, display, and spectatorship were essential components of the social mechanism.” Her discussions—of the funeral of Lord Nelson, of playacting as an intrinsic part of public school curriculums, of the soldier as “the empire’s stroller”—all underscore the interconnectedness of theatrical, political, and social practices.7 I take this interdependence as a given. Still, a period in which se¬ rious critics could be moved to argue for the removal of action from the Greek stage, or to suggest that Shakespeare’s plays were better read than performed, would seem to harbor a hostility toward perfor¬ mance at odds with the theatrical self-representations of its female poets.8 One might borrow Michel Foucault’s analysis of Victorian so¬ ciety and its proliferating, ostensibly repressive discourses on sexu¬ ality: “Never have there existed more centers of power; never more attention manifested and verbalized; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere.”9 For Foucault, the Victorians’ multiple eschewals of sexuality testify to a productive obsession. Similarly, the antitheatrical writings of Lamb and De Quincey serve notice of an abiding preoccupation with theat¬ ricality. And in Wordsworth’s curious endeavor to write a play “with¬ out any view to its exhibition on stage,” one witnesses a peculiar permutation of the same theatrical impulse that finds less tortured manifestation in the works of his female peers (PWWW 1:343). The extravagant theatricality of the actress Sarah Siddons’s perfor¬ mances quite possibly motivated the literary ones this book takes as its focus. Siddons’s performances both on the stage and off, in charac¬ ter roles and in the role of respectable matron, served as an enabling model for other women looking for ways to enter the public sphere without damaging their personal reputations in the process. In the 7 Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 17931813 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 124-25, 17, 77-88, 131, 160. See also Sybil Rosenfeld, Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theaters and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700-1820 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1978). 8 Thomas De Quincey, “Theory of Greek Tragedy,” in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (1889-90; New York: AMS Press, 1968), 10:342-59, esp. 350; Charles Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 5 vols. (1903-5; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1968), 1:97-111. 9 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 49.

16

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

performances of Siddons and of the literary women I discuss here, public and private realms were so fundamentally intertwined that it is impossible to speak about one as distinct from the other. As literary and social actors, Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson were perma¬ nently situated in the midst of public life, a stationing that encouraged or rewarded theatrical enactments of self. Through fifteen editions of the Elegiac Sonnets, published from the 1780s to the early 1800s, Charlotte Smith evolved a poetic persona that shared much in common with the role women most commonly performed on stage, that of the tragic heroine. The narrative voice of Smith’s additive, evolving opus is sorrow personified. Every poetic ef¬ fect ultimately contributes to underscoring and amplifying the tragic situation of the narrator. To a certain extent the poetry seems stuck, Smith’s gift for close observation of the outside world subsumed by the inevitable inward turn. Sonnet 44, “Written in the church-yard at Middleton in Sussex,” a poem that dramatically reenacts the ocean’s encroachment on a graveyard, provides a representative example of this tendency. Smith writes: The wild blast, rising from the Western cave, Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed; Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead, And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave! With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave; But vain to them the winds and waters rave; They hear the warring elements no more. (PCS 42) The moment proves so striking for Smith that its specific details spill over into a footnote in which she enumerates “the remains of bodies interred washed into the sea” and human bones “found among the sand and shingles on the shore” (PCS 42). Despite this obvious fas¬ cination with the exigencies of shore erosion and the violent exhuma¬ tion of the dead, the poem’s final couplet shifts focus with its abrupt inward turn: “While I am doom’d—by life’s long storm opprest, / To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest” (PCS 42). This sonnet is finally, perhaps even reluctantly, made to participate in a cult of the beleaguered and self-dramatizing female, a poetic iden¬ tification that brought Smith considerable success. Whereas her prede¬ cessors Thomas Gray and William Collins had utilized a similar pose, the quality and extent of the usage differed considerably. Smith’s pro-

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

17

longed exploration of self—her Elegiac Sonnets approached one hun¬ dred in number—invited the association of her poetic representation of life with her actual life, underscoring the performative aspect of both of these social fictions. The comments of Sir William Jones serve as representative of the contemporary reading audience that propelled her volume into more than a dozen editions. Responding to a friend who had forwarded a copy of the Elegiac Sonnets to Calcutta, Jones wrote: “I thank you heartily, my dear Sir, for the tender strains of the unfortunate Charlotte, which have given us pleasure and pain; the sonnets which relate to herself are incomparably the best.”10 Perhaps by force of this kind of endorsement, penned in 1787, the distance between the tragedienne who narrated the poem and Smith’s personal tragedy—nine children were dependent on her financial earnings in the wake of her separation from a profligate husband— grew shorter with subsequent editions. Her poetic persona grew into a dramatic version of her equally dramatic private self, a development that can be traced in the evolution of increasingly personal prefatory introductions to the Elegiac Sonnets. By the sixth edition Smith is narrowing the distance between author and narrator of her poems, declaring, “I wrote mournfully because I was unhappy,” and alluding for the first time to her personal life, to the details of a legal battle she waged unsuccessfully over an inheritance (PCS 5-6). Similarly, in a note to one of the later sonnets Smith writes, “It has been my misfor¬ tune to have endured real calamities that have disqualified me for finding any enjoyment in the pleasures and pursuits which occupy the generality of the world” (PCS 68). Smith’s literary career stands as an extreme but not atypical exam¬ ple of British women writers’ reliance on performative subject posi¬ tions; Anna Seward’s designation as the “Swan of Lichfield” connotes a public persona with links to the balletic or dramatic stage. For many late eighteenth-century women writers, the connections between stage and printed page were grounded in personal, material circumstances: Elizabeth Inchbald and Mary Robinson began their working lives as actresses, and Robinson, Smith, and Hannah Cowley (among others) 10 William Jones to J. Shore, August 16, 1787, in The Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols. (1806; rpt., Delhi: Agam Prakashan, 1976-80), 2:119. A further, less respectful testimony to the popularity and familiarity of Smith’s sonnets is provided by a parody of her fourth sonnet, “To the Moon,” published in the Monthly Magazine 4 (1797): 288. The author, identified only as addresses his poem to a fish-woman rather than to the moon, writing: “Queen of the silver Thames, on thy squab form, / And face empurpl’d, I delight to gaze; / And watch the impetuous unresisted storm— / The ris¬ ing clamour of thy tongue betrays.”

i8

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

wrote both poetry and plays. But one also finds among the women writers a range of negative contacts with the stage that rivals the bad treatment of Wordsworth and Byron at the hands of theater man¬ agers. When Mary Robinson’s farce Nobody was featured at Drury Lane, its run was disrupted by an irate female audience for whom the satire struck too close to home; ladies of rank purportedly sent their servants to hiss, and the actress Miss Farren refused to perform. Whether from greater financial need or a greater affection for the stage, women writers seem not to have let such setbacks color their attitude toward the theater to the same extent as their male peers. In contrast to the male romantics’ propensity for writing unstageable plays, Joanna Baillie claimed to prefer presenting her plays from the stage rather than in published volumes: “A play but of small poetical merit, that is suited to strike and interest the spectator, to catch the attention of him who will not, and of him who cannot read, is a more valuable and useful production than one whose elegant and harmonious pages are admired in the libraries of the tasteful and refined.”11 Distinctions between male and female responses to and interactions with performance (and, as I hope to demonstrate, this was no simple balance of revulsion and attraction) must be attributed, at least in part, to the differently charged cultural resonances of the actor and the actress at the end of the century. According to Timothy Webb, when the male romantics wrote for the stage, they did so in the hope of securing the tremendously popular actor Edmund Kean to play the lead; but actors such as Kean also represented a form of “tyranny over the text,” the brilliance of their performances threatening to overshadow the author.12 In addition, a performing man presented a threat to definitions of manhood predicated on the spectatorial nature of masculine authority. As Kristina Straub demonstrates in her work on eighteenth-century actors, the actor who displayed himself on a stage that featured female as well as male performers risked an asso¬ ciation between the seductive body of the actress and his own. The objectification of the male body in such a venue carried with it a threat of feminization, a threat only partially neutralized by the devel¬ opment of a new “natural” style of acting that demanded that “the actor behave as if unaware that he was being watched—as if he were 11 Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays in Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Strong Passions of the Mind, 4th ed., 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell, Jun., and W. Davies, 1802), 1:65. 12 Webb, “The Romantic Poet and the Stage,” 18, 37.

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

19

not, in short, a spectacle.”13 When women poets adopted theatrical poses, they were tapping into the transformative power of the actress, fashioning themselves as author as well as performer, a conflation of roles less easily appropriated by male writers of the period, and one that might not have been available to women were it not for the change brought about in the status of the actress by the most famous performer of the day, Sarah Siddons. Siddons was arguably the most popular actor of the romantic pe¬ riod. Her performances regularly moved audiences to tears and near¬ hysteria; she inspired an enthusiasm among her fans that is amusingly demonstrated by Anna Seward’s desperate efforts to acquire seats for her performances. Seward writes: “Every attempt fruitless to procure boxes, I saw her for the first time, at the hazard of my life, by strug¬ gling through the terrible, fierce, maddening crowd into the pit. She only could have recompensed the terrors and dangers of the attempt.”14 Seemingly every prominent theatergoer of the day left a testimonial to her talents. Hazlitt proclaimed, “Power was seated on her brow, pas¬ sion emanated from her breast as from a shrine; she was tragedy per¬ sonified.”15 Seward gushed: “Powers which surpass every idea I had formed of their possibility, press so forcibly upon my recollection that my pen has more than once stood still upon my paper, transfixed by the consciousness how poor and inadequate are all words to paint my Siddonian idolatry.”16 Siddons was best known for her Lady Macbeth, a role she re¬ defined and made her own. Mary Jacobus argues compellingly for the special significance of Macbeth for the romantics, claiming that the disordered hierarchy of the play resonated with the concerns of the late-century political moment: a revolution in France and an enfeebled British king.17 In Siddons’s realization of the role of Lady Macbeth another kind of hierarchy threatened to topple, one that assumed the title character to be the primary focus of the play. Paired against an actor whose stage presence did not match her own, Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth was capable of transforming the title role into a bit

13 Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33. 14 Anna Seward, The Swan of Lichfield, ed. Hesketh Pearson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), 68. 15 William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, in The Complete Works of Wil¬ liam Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930), 4:189. 16 Seward, Swan of Lichfield, 68. 17 Jacobus, ‘“That Great Stage,’” 36-37.

20

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

part. Hazlitt testified to the “masculine firmness” of this character.18 If Macbeth served for male romantic writers as an embodiment of poli¬ tical anxiety, Siddons’s Lady Macbeth served for female romantic writers—who had no role in the political hierarchy and who derived little benefit from seeing it maintained—as an exciting representation of female power.19 Julie A. Carlson provides the richest reading of Siddons in relation to romantic era literary culture, arguing that romantic antitheatri¬ cality is bound up with “the contradictions that structure the place of ‘women’ in early nineteenth-century aesthetics, formulations of na¬ tionhood, and conditions of theatre” (136). Specifically, Carlson con¬ tends that Siddons remains “entrapped throughout her career by a cultural logic that acknowledges her beauty at the expense of sexual difference.” She finds evidence of this entrapment in contemporary accounts of Siddons’s performances which she accuses of “downplay¬ ing her body, when they do not disembody her altogether.” According to these accounts, Siddons “allegedly presents a femininity that is de¬ void of sexuality and ‘animal spirit’”; she is as transcendent as Burke’s Marie Antoinette (162-63). But the reports Carlson cites as evidence for this assertion are those of Hazlitt and of Siddons’s biog¬ rapher James Boaden. Other accounts, even by these same writers (re¬ call Hazlitt on the “masculine firmness” of Lady Macbeth), suggest that it was the ambiguous sexuality of Siddons’s performances that pro¬ vided a large part of their fascination. Among the array of Siddons’s pictorial representations that Paula R. Backscheider includes in her analysis of gothic drama is one that accentuates the bulk of Siddons’s arms, leading Backscheider to posit Siddons’s body as a “Foucauldian 18 Hazlitt, Characters, 4:188. 19 My reading of Siddons’s effect on women poets of her time corroborates the view presented by Pat Rogers in “ ‘Towering Beyond Her Sex’: Stature and Sublimity in the Achievement of Sarah Siddons,” in Curtain Calls, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 50. The power of Siddons’s self-repre¬ sentations is also supported by Ellen Donkin’s fascinating discussion of an October 5, 1784, performance that occurred after Siddons had been falsely accused of charging an exorbitant sum to appear in benefits for two fellow actors. Faced with a hostile audi¬ ence, Siddons “stepped outside of both character and dramatic narrative, turned in righteous anger, and looked back at her audience. In that moment she registered what she thought of them. She forced her audience to deal with her, not as object, but as speaking subject. ... In other words, she reversed the direction of the gaze.” Ellen Donkin, “Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger: Feminist Historiography for EighteenthCentury British Theater,” in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 285.

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

21

site for the representation of warring sexualities and powers.”20 Carl¬ son’s own reference to the fact that Siddons played Lady Macbeth while six months pregnant underscores how hard commentators would have had to work to displace her physicality in discussions of her performances. For her female contemporaries, whose views of Sid¬ dons Carlson does not canvass, the sexual ambiguity of her perfor¬ mance was an enabling reality. In perhaps the most cogent and influential discussion of a romantic woman writer’s treatment of the female body, Cora Kaplan percep¬ tively registers Mary Wollstonecraft’s anxiety about female sexuality, her need to divide the creative from the affective self in attempting to construct an empowered female subject. According to Kaplan, roman¬ tic women writers had to look to men to find a way of fashioning a libidinized female imagination, a commingling of reason and desire. Kaplan writes: “Authority for such an unmediated and eroticized rela¬ tion to art and life had to be sought in and stolen from male romantic manifestos. Nothing suggests more unequivocally how deep the effects of separate gender sexualities went, than a quick look at the 1802 introduction to Lyrical Ballads after a long look at A Vindication.”21 Although models of authority for female writers may have been in short supply, the proliferation of impassioned verse emanating from poets such as Smith and Robinson in advance of Wordsworth’s Pref¬ ace suggests that women writers were finding other sources of em¬ powerment. Given her cultural currency at century’s end—besides be¬ ing figured in several dozen portraits as Lady Macbeth, she also served as the model for the queen in a Wedgwood chess set designed by John Flaxman—Siddons provides the most obvious model of fe¬ male creative power.22 If Siddons as the passionate Lady Macbeth offered one suggestive possibility for her female viewers, Siddons as “The Tragic Muse” in Joshua Reynolds’s famous portrait (now in the Huntington Art Gal¬ lery) supplied an even more resonant image (figure 1). Siddons’s status as a performer of exceptional power enabled her to bridge the dis20 Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 215. 21 Cora Kaplan, “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism,” in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 47. 22 For a useful listing of Siddons portraits in a variety of media, see the entry on Siddons in vol. 14 of A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, et. al., ed. Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).

Figure i

Joshua Reynolds, The Tragic Muse, 1798. (By courtesy of the

Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.)

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

2-3

tance between Woman figured as inspiration and woman figuring as actor, in the broadest sense of that word. Siddons’s biographer writes of her performances: “Where there was little or no poetry, she made it for herself; and might be said to have become at once both the drama¬ tist and the actress.”23 Siddons represented the possibility that a woman could be her own muse and her own author.24 The pleasures Smith’s readers derived from participating in her personal sorrow were a product of the same refined sensibility that stirred Siddons’s audiences to wallow in a “luxury of grief.”25 Siddons similarly put her private self to use in constructing her public persona. Siddons managed to hold in abeyance a passionate public identity with a tranquil private one, to achieve success on the stage without diminishing personal reputation. In tandem with David Garrick, an¬ other actor who was lauded for exemplary personal decorum, she is praised for raising “a profession that had hitherto been despised and looked upon as one unbefitting a modest woman, or an honorable man, into a position of respectability and consideration.”26 Accounts of Siddons’s life tend to emphasize the disparity between the public actress and the private woman, relegating public and private to sepa-

23 Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons (New York: Harper and Bros., 1834), 121. 24 Anecdotal evidence suggests that Siddons’s performances held a fascination for women writers who fall outside the temporal bounds of my project. A brief periodical entry from 1852 recalls the Bluestockings’ interest in Siddons. “Mrs. Siddons and the Bas Bleu!” depicts Siddons being interrogated by Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter, Miss Hannah More, and “sundry other members of the bas bleu.” The item continues: “The object was to examine her, and to get from her the secret how she could act with such wonderful effect. Mrs. Montague was deputed to be the prolocutress of this female convocation. ‘Pray, madam,’ said she to Mrs. Siddons, addressing her in the most for¬ mal manner, ‘give me leave to interrogate you, and to request that you will tell us, without duplicity or mental reservation, upon what principle you conduct your dra¬ matic demeanor. Is your mode of acting, by which you obtain so much celebrity, the result of certain studied principles of art? Have you investigated, with profound re¬ search, the rules of elocution and gesture, as laid down by the ancients and moderns, and reduced them to practice? Or do you suffer nature to predominate, and only speak the untutored language of the passions?’ ‘Ladies,’ said the modern Thalia, with great diffidence, but without hesitation, ‘I do not know how to answer so learned a speech; all I know of the matter, and all I can tell you, is, that I always act as well as I can.’ ” Home Magazine 1 (1852): 76. 25 James Boaden, recalling Siddons’s performance in jane Shore, writes: “We then, indeed, knew all the luxury of grief; but the nerves of many a gentle being gave way before the intensity of such appeals, and fainting fits long and frequently alarmed the decorum of the house, filled almost to suffocation.” James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), i:xv. 26 Nina A. Kennard, Mrs. Siddons (Boston: Robert Brothers, 1887), 4.

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

24

rate compartments or, in the case of James Boaden, a famous chron¬ icler of actresses’ lives, refusing to write about Siddons’s domestic life at all, as if to preserve a sacrosanct private space.27 Yet Siddons herself participated in blurring the line between public and private, most fa¬ mously in the “three reasons” episode. Before making her final bow on the Bath stage, Siddons advertised that she would produce for the audience three reasons why she was leaving this theater for London. After performing in The Distressed Mother, she came back on stage and recited a poem she had written on the topic of her departure. She left the stage midpoem and returned with her three children, continu¬ ing with these lines: These are the moles that bear me from your side; Where I was rooted—where I could have died. . . . Have I been Hasty? Am I then to blame; Answer, all ye who own a parent’s name? This personal address to the audience was surely enhanced by the fact that she was then eight months pregnant with her fourth child.28 The actuality of those three children and her stable home life served to mitigate the extraordinary spectacle of female passion she created on stage. An audience could call on their knowledge of this safer Siddons to allay any anxiety they might feel before the powerful performing one. Siddons as wife and mother was just as public a persona as Sid¬ dons as Lady Macbeth, but the former role contained the latter one, rendering it less threatening to a society unused to demonstrable fe¬ male desire. In a similar fashion, the specter of fatherless children which hung over Charlotte Smith’s text served to soften the offense of its passionate extremes. Smith’s brood of children exerted a double influence over readings of her poems, their large number suggesting a sexual appetite and activity that served to emphasize Smith’s status as desiring female, while their impoverished situation underscored her constrained and duty-ridden role as mother. If the decorous personal lives of Smith and Siddons acted to miti27 Boaden writes: “Her private life! What is there, then, in the private life of the most excellent wife, mother, sister, friend, the detail of which could be interesting to the public? The duties of such a character are unobtrusive, unostentatious, and avoid the pen of history. They confer the best of blessings; but they shun all record and reward, save the internal consciousness, which renders every other, in this life, of little moment.” Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, i:xv. 28 Roger Manvell, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 64-65. See also Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 45-46.

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

2-5

gate the threat posed by their extravagant emotionalism, the personal history of Mary Robinson functioned in a more complicated way. Robinson’s earliest occupation was as an actress, and, like Siddons’s, her stage career was advanced by her association with Garrick. But whereas Siddons managed to convince the public of her irreproach¬ able adherence to standards of female deportment, Robinson carried out a highly publicized liaison with the adolescent Prince of Wales and gained a greater prominence as royal mistress than she had achieved as an actress. This biographical fact exerted its influence over all of Robinson’s future social and literary engagements; when she turned to a writing career years after the affair, Robinson as “Perdita” (the role she was playing in The Winter's Tale when the prince was first smitten and the name subsequently used in scurrilous publications represent¬ ing the event) determined the reception given to Robinson as poet and novelist. Although the evidence of Robinson’s Memoirs suggests that writing was for her in part a redemptive exercise, aimed at transforming her in the public eye from fallen woman to respectable author, the fact remains that when Robinson assumed the role popularized by Smith and Siddons, she created a different effect. Robinson in the guise of sorrowful female conjured up not a mother struggling to support her family but a more sexualized persona, the rejected object of the prince’s amorous affection. The title granted her by the press, “the English Sappho,” stands as a kind of loaded compliment, conjuring up the oracular power of the Greek poet but also calling to mind that figure’s eroticism.29 Given Robinson’s close ties with the periodicals of her day—she was a regular contributor to the Oracle and the Morning Post—it is entirely possible that she herself was the originator of this tag. Cer¬ tainly she fostered the association with her 1796 volume, Sappho and

Phaon, a sequence of sonnets written in Sappho’s voice. The preface to the volume indirectly alludes to her own mistreatment at the hands of the Prince of Wales—he purportedly reneged on a promise to pay her £20,000 upon his coming of age—as she invokes her “illustrious

29 A review of Robinson’s 1791 Poems in the Monthly Review provides the earliest reference to Robinson as the English Sappho that I have found. The piece claims that the poems in this volume are equal “to the best productions [so far as the knowledge of them is come down to us,] of the Lesbian Dame, in point of tenderness, feeling, poetic imagery, warmth, elegance, and above all delicacy of expression, in which our ingenious countrywoman far excels all that we know of the works of the Grecian sappho.” Monthly Review, n.s. 6 (1791): 448.

26

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

countrywomen” who, “unpatronized by courts, and unprotected by the powerful, persevere in the paths of literature, and ennoble them¬ selves by the unperishable lustre of mental pre-eminence!” (S and P 16). The connection between Robinson and her poetic heroine was compounded by her description of Sappho as “enlightened by the most exquisite talents, yet yielding to the destructive controul of un¬ governable passions” (S and P 17). As Smith’s personal life served primarily to temper the passion of her verse, Robinson’s acted to heighten it, whether she wished it so or not. Readers faced with Sappho’s description of Phaon in Sonnet 15 as the eroticized object of female desire—“O! happy buds! to kiss his burning breast, / And die beneath the lustre of his eyes!”—could read into it Robinson’s desire for the prince, or, in a more timely reference, for Banastre Tarleton, the military hero with whom she was inti¬ mately associated for nine years (S and P 53). Robinson’s personal circumstances allowed readers of her poems a frisson of pleasurable recognition. Robinson’s infatuation with Siddons was as complete as that of Anna Seward. She wrote to John Taylor in October 1794: “We shall wait long—very long—before we see anything like that inspiration which characterises a Siddons—that soul beaming through every veil of fiction, and making art more lovely than even nature in all its fairest adornments. For after all acting must be the perfection of art; nature, rude and spontaneous, would but ill describe the passions so as to produce effect in scenes of fictitious sorrow. Mrs. Siddons, in my humble opinion, is the most perfect mistress of the character she undertakes to represent of any performer I ever beheld—Garrick not excepted.30

Robinson sent Siddons poems, likely seeking a meeting that the ac¬ tress would not allow to take place. Siddons thanked Robinson indi¬ rectly, asking Taylor to convey her gratitude and explaining her reluc¬ tance to do this herself: If she is half as amiable as her writings, I shall long for the possibility of being acquainted with her. I say the possibility, because one’s whole life is one continual sacrifice of inclinations, which to indulge, how30 Mary Robinson to Mr. John Taylor, October 13, 1794, in Catalogue of the Collec¬ tion of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents Formed between 1865 and i88z by A. Morrison, ed. A. W. Thibaudeau, 6 vols. (London: Strangeways and Sons, 1891), 5:287.

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

27

ever laudable or innocent, would draw down the malice and reproach of those prudent people who never do ill, “but feed and sleep and do observances to the stale ritual of quaint ceremony.” The charming and beautiful Mrs. Robinson: I pity her from the bottom of my soul.31

This mediated interaction underscores the delicate balance both women labored to strike (one clearly with greater success than the other) between public performance and private decorum. Given the dramatic nature of the poetic poses struck by both Rob¬ inson and Smith, one wonders why a seemingly antitheatrical form such as the sonnet, with its demanding formal strictures, was chosen by both as the vehicle of their operatic explorations of loss. Stuart Curran presents a compelling argument for these two poets’ roles in the rebirth and transformation of the sonnet at century’s end, describ¬ ing the sonnet of sensibility which they helped to define as “reared on a modest island in the flowing waters of self-regard.”32 In Curran’s characterization lies a clue to the sonnet’s reward for writers of a verse that can, not unfairly, be described as “enervated, morbid and supremely self-obsessed.”33 The tight formal control of the sonnet form served as a haven in the midst of a storm of wild feeling. Just as the rectitude of Siddons’s personal life mitigated the passionate excess of her performances, so the sonnet served to tether women poets safely to a known and respected verse form and tradition. That both Smith and Robinson opted to highlight their knowledge of this tra¬ dition lends credence to this supposition. Robinson, rather incon¬ gruously, uses the opportunity provided by the publication of her Sap¬ phic effusions for an excursus on the history of the sonnet, complete with footnoted reference to Smith’s similar exercise. Commenting on the lawlessness of contemporary sonnets, Robinson writes: I confess myself such an enthusiastic votary of the Muse, that any innovation which seems to threaten even the least of her established rights, makes me tremble, lest that chaos of dissipated pursuits which has too long been growing like an overwhelming shadow, and menac¬ ing the lustre of intellectual light, should, aided by the idleness of some, and the profligacy of others, at last obscure the finer mental 31 Quoted in J. Fitzgerald Molloy’s introduction to Memoirs of Mary Robinson (Lon¬ don: Gibbings and Company, 1895), xiy32 Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford Univer¬ sity Press, 1986), 38. 33 This is Janet Todd’s characterization of William Wordsworth’s contribution to the mode, “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress.” Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 63.

28

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

powers, and reduce the dignity of talents to the lowest degradation. (S and P io)

Whereas in the poems Robinson writes an allegory of female desire, in the introductory lecture she proclaims herself the standard-bearer of British prosody. She claims for herself a formal respectability while playing to the reading public’s knowledge of her past. The sonnet’s diminutive size must also be factored into this analysis of the form’s benefits. The “little room” of the sonnet suggests a con¬ nection between force and concentration which was useful for an eas¬ ily trivialized group of poets. The compactness of the sonnet form was advantageous on a more material level as well: the proliferation of sonnets at the end of the century is partially attributable to the in¬ creasing prominence of newspaper poetry. Short poems met the space demands of newspaper editors better than long poems. Mary Robin¬ son, whose literary career was built on publication in the dailies, took these demands seriously. Charlotte Smith’s habit of shuttling poems back and forth between her novels and her editions of the Elegiac

Sonnets also favored the economical sonnet form, for when the thoughts of a character such as Orlando in the novel The Old Manor House “assum[e] a poetical form,” there is less strain on credibility and on the forward momentum of the narrative if that form is a di¬ minutive one.34 The creation of a public and clearly identifiable persona was sim¬ ilarly inflected by financial and professional concerns. In considering Sarah Siddons as a model of female self-fashioning at the end of the eighteenth century, we must remember that one source of her fame was financial success: her first performance in London as Lady Mac¬ beth was a benefit that netted her a well-publicized £346. The cult of Sarah Siddons was in large part the result of a publicity campaign. Even the most transcendent portrayal of Siddons—that is, Reynolds’s famous portrait—was likely commissioned by Sheridan as an adver¬ tisement for his theater.35 The portrait was further exploited for com¬ mercial ends on the occasion of Garrick’s jubilee in 1785, when Sid34 Orlando’s poetic effusion resurfaces in the Elegiac Sonnets under a new and spe¬ cific title (“Written on passing by moon-light through a village, while the ground was covered with snow”). Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House (1794; rpt., London: Pandora, 1987), 440-41. The newly titled poem is found in PCS 55. 35 According to David Mannings, the author of the catalogue entry “Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse” in Reynolds, ed. Nicholas Penny (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 324.

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

29

dons was carried across the stage as the Tragic Muse in a popular realization of the painted image. Siddons exemplified female professional and financial success, but she also represented the threat posed by a woman who made good in the marketplace. Even Siddons could not escape criticism of her finan¬ cial dealings. Despite her vociferous denials of the truth of this charac¬ terization, she gained a reputation for being miserly which stemmed from her purported refusal to appear in benefits for colleagues with¬ out reimbursement. James Gillray’s portrayal of Siddons as Melpo¬ mene, a takeoff on Reynolds’s more respectful and respectable render¬ ing, shows Siddons weighed down with coins and banknotes, grasping after a moneybag dangling from off stage (figure 2). This negative image was likely motivated by anxiety concerning the degree of fe¬ male independence occasioned by Siddons’s affluence. If the decorous Siddons could be tarnished by association with mer¬ cenary concerns, the marketplace presented an even greater threat to reputation for Mary Robinson. While Robinson worked to recon¬ stitute herself as a blameless woman, the association between her pri¬ vate self and her shifting public personas, an association her poetry encouraged, influenced the critical reception she received. In a notice of her 1791 Poems a reviewer for the Gentlemans Magazine writes:

Without at all detracting from the merits of her publication, we are inclined to apprehend that, had she been less distinguished by her personal graces and accomplishments, by the impression which her beauty and captivating manners have generally made, her poetical taste might have been confined in its influence, and might have excited the complacent approbation of her friends, with little attention, and with less reward, from the public.36

This censure of Robinson’s tendency to capitalize on her social alli¬ ances, to call attention to her performances—both within the poems (her “poetical taste”) and outside them (her “captivating manners”)— stands as symptomatic of a more general hostility toward theatrical modes of self-representation of the sort Smith and Robinson found it advantageous to employ, an aversion that was not precipitated exclu¬ sively by women writers. William Thackeray, looking back on Lau¬ rence Sterne’s contribution to the literature of sensibility, was repelled by an author who brought “his private thoughts and feelings to mar36 Gentlemans Magazine 61 (1791): 560.

30

Figure 2

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

James Gillray, Melpomene, 1784. (By courtesy of the Trustees

of the British Museum. Copyright British Museum.)

ket,” labelling him, in telling progression, “this man of genius, this actor, this quack.”’7 To employ a version of one’s private self for pub¬ lic representation, to play a part instead of maintaining a stable and singular identity, evoked a troubled response. Witness Keats’s reaction

37 W. M. Thackeray, The English Humourists, Charity and Humour, The Four Georges (New York: Dutton, 1968), 233.

Sarah Siddons and the Performative Female

3i

to Wordsworth clothed in the formal apparel of the Distributor of Stamps rather than in the humble garb of a rural poet: “On Saturday I called on Wordsworth before he went to Kingston’s and was surprised to find him with a stiff Collar.”38 Wordsworth’s favored apparel in the early 1800s, the hand-me-down clothing that Dorothy is so often found mending in her journal, is no less a costume than his later, more official attire.39 The plainness of the rustic bard’s persona, however, situates him at a distance from the more overtly theatrical personas of his female peers. The Wordsworth of the 1790s represents a paradox: the antitheatrical performer. Mary Jacobus explains the romantic prejudice against the theater by positing a “metaphysical pressure” necessitating the maintenance of “what is represented over its representation,” a force she claims “help[ed] to retire Shakespeare into the closet; and if not Shakespeare, then at least action, acting, and actors.”40 This pressure clearly did not exert itself in the same way on women poets of the period; one source of this difference lies in the gendered aspect of representation both during the period and long before it. Historically relegated to being objects of artistic portrayal, women perhaps had less faith in the in¬ tegrity of an object once it is appropriated for the artist’s use and, as newcomers to the role of creator, possessed a greater enthusiasm for the tricks of the trade, the stage smoke and glitter of representation. Additionally, in presenting her work to the public, a woman poet could count on having every aspect of her life seized and shaped by public accord; the use of theatrical modes of representation afforded her a level of control over this public construction. Sarah Siddons served as an enticing example of creative power for women artists struggling to find ways to represent themselves and their concerns at the end of the century, but she cast her spell over the male imagination as well. Siddons is the only woman granted pride of place in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1795 “Sonnets on Eminent Char¬ acters,” a poetic exercise that by its very nature points to the central importance in the 1790s of public personality and its representation. The Siddons of Coleridge’s poem materializes through allusion to a series of magical and frightening female tale tellers. The poem begins 38 John Keats to George and Tom Keats, January 5, 1818, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:197. 39 Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Claren¬ don Press, 1991), 4, 61-62. 40 Jacobus, ‘“That Great Stage,’” 56.

32-

romantic THEATRICALITY

with a child clinging “affrighted” to its Grandam’s knee, listening with “perturb’d delight” to

strange tales of fearful dark decrees Mutter’d to wretch by necromantic spell; Or of those hags, who at the witching time Of murky Midnight ride the air sublime, And mingle foul embrace with fiends of Hell.

The poem perfectly represents the complex^ of attraction and revulsion characteristic of male romantics’ responses to the theater and perfor¬ mance. Coleridge invokes both the sentimental bond between grand¬ mother and child and the “foul embrace” of witch and fiend. Siddons’s performance is both enthralling and disturbing, eliciting the double re¬ sponse of the sonnet’s final couplet: “Even such the shiv’ring joys thy tones impart, / Even so thou,

siddons!

meltest my sad heart!”41

Sarah Siddons’s presence was an enduring one, spanning the dis¬ tance between the sentimental sonneteers of the 1790s and the largerthan-life heroines of Percy Shelley. It achieved iconic immortality in the figure of Corinne, Germaine de Stael’s fictional oracular poet, her¬ self a Siddons devotee.42 But the fascination with Siddons was only one manifestation of a culture’s increasing reliance on performative modes of representation. What Jerome McGann has identified as a shift toward “a naked and powerful sensationalism in the later Ro¬ mantics—an aesthetic of arresting surface effects, a physique of po¬ etry,” can usefully be situated within an ongoing discursive conflict between the private, felt self and the public, performed representation.43 Although this conflict played a role in the careers of both women and men from a range of class backgrounds, it was felt most pressingly by women writers whose need to maintain personal reputation and achieve financial remuneration determined every literary move.

41

The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Cole¬ ridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 85-86. It is not certain whether this poem was written by Coleridge or Charles Lamb; at various times in its publishing history it was attributed to each. E. H. Coleridge details the various attributions in a note to the poem. 42 Stael writes: “The actress’s noble face and a deep sensitivity so captured Corinne’s attention, that she did not turn her eyes from the stage during the first acts.” Germaine de Stael, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger (1807; rpt., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 340. For an illuminating account of women writers’ fascination with Stael’s theatrical heroine, see Ellen Moers, “Performing Heroinism: The Myth of Corinne,” in Literary Women (London: W. H. Allen, 1977), 173-210. 43 McGann, Romantic Ideology, 115.

•

2

•

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

For several weeks in 1794 a legal battle was waged between the

British government and the members of radical societies who had or¬ ganized to seek parliamentary reform. The conflict, waged in court¬ rooms and in newsprint, focused on the question whether the British king was or was not in imminent danger of death from the machina¬ tions of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and the Society for Promoting Constitutional Information (SCI), among other reformist groups. The government lawyers and the accused radicals launched publicity campaigns aimed at winning the hearts and minds of the British people, campaigns that reached their culmination in the most showy and famous of the proceedings, the 1794 treason trials of Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke. Adherents of either side were acutely aware that they were performing for a rapt audience—the attorney for the accused would swoon at key moments in his defense like an actor in melodrama—and were also quick to accuse their op¬ ponents of playing to the audience, of striking an affected pose. Cap¬ tivating the spectators was at least as important as convincing the jury; consequently, the legal battle within the courtroom was carried into the streets and amplified by competing press coverage. Minis¬ terial and opposition newspapers worked hard to shape public per¬ ception of the daily proceedings. I am not the first commentator to highlight the theatrical nature of the trials. E. P. Thompson long ago noted the histrionic propensities of the English Jacobins, and more recently, John Barrell has examined how the ambiguous wording of the statutory definition of high trea¬ son (“when a man doth compass or imagine the death of our lord the king”) was deployed during the trials as part of a “dramatised and staged conflict between the various discourses in which politics was

34

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

debated in that decade.”1 Whereas Barrell’s work focuses on the intri¬ cacies of the rhetorical debates that took place during the trial, how¬ ever, I am most interested in the outer trappings, the costumes and poses adopted by proponents of both sides, the consciousness of an audience which colors every public move and ensures that every move will be made public. My point in focusing on these stage borrowings is to demonstrate that theatrical stratagem in the 1790s is not limited to the relatively circumscribed realm of starstruck fans of Sarah Siddons. In the preceding chapter I underscored how female writers, following Siddons, worked to control public representations of them¬ selves through canny deployment of more acceptable private per¬ sonas. “Public” and “private,” far from being opposite ends of a spec¬ trum, were inextricably interconnected. Here, similarly, I wish to demonstrate the extent to which domestic narratives dominated the “public” domain of the courtroom. Male barristers, judges, and de¬ fendants exhibit the same reliance on theatrical modes of self-repre¬ sentation evident in the writings of their female contemporaries. Poli¬ tics and histrionics unite. A second objective is to call into question the exclusively masculine nature of the political realm in which the trials took place. Although the radical societies’ members were all male, and for the most part not imaginative enough to include women in the broader cross-section of society for whom they sought enfranchisement,2 women played two crucial roles in the staging of the treason trials. The letters of Amelia Alderson, an enthusiastic courtroom devotee and a witness to the Hardy and Horne Tooke prosecutions, in addition to transcripts of the proceedings, establish a significant female presence in court and suggest that this faction influenced the participants’ performances. Women were used by the male principals to enhance their own self¬ representations; the wives and daughters of the accused men and even of the prosecuting attorney were offered to the public eye in an effort to increase the sentimental appeal of these men’s plights. Thomas 1 Thompson writes, “The vice of the English Jacobins (except for Hardy) was self¬ dramatisation, and in their histrionic postures they sometimes seem ridiculous.” E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English 'Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 157; John Barrell, “Imaginary Treason, Imaginary Law: The State Trials of 1794,” in The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Philadelphia: Univer¬ sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 119. 2 An exception can be found in a two-part article in the Cabinet, a periodical pro¬ duced by Norwich reformists, which moves beyond Wollstonecraft in its argument for full political enfranchisement for women, imagining “a court of alderwomen, and a bench of female bishops.” Cabinet 2 (1795): 45.

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

35

Hardy’s dead wife, in particular, haunted his trial; her melodramatic death helped to avert his jury-contingent one. The 1794 treason trials are in no way unique in their participants’ reliance on theatrical stratagem. One can situate them within a con¬ tinuum of romantic era stagy trials extending from the 1788 impeach¬ ment proceedings against Warren Hastings to the 1820 divorce action against Queen Caroline, legal events that, as Sara Suleri and Thomas Laqueur have separately argued, assumed public significance far in excess of their respective political ends. Both critics argue for the cru¬ cial involvement of the public in the spectacle of the trials. Of the Hastings proceedings Suleri writes, “Burke converted the legal space of the trial into a rhetorical arena that was designed to implicate each member of its audience in its catalog of the Indian sublime.”3 Laqueur documents the demonstrative artisanal support which the queen was able to rally to her side: “In London the braziers and leatherworkers and butchers and glassworkers and paperhangers and indeed almost every organized craft sent addresses, presented gifts, and marched on Caroline’s behalf.”4 In the context of the 1794 trials I want, first, to make a specific claim for the influential presence of women as specta¬ tors and interpreters who helped to constitute the proceedings as thea¬ ter. Second, I seek to demonstrate the extent to which actual women were called on to serve as actresses for lawyers and defendants who were banking on the emotive power of melodrama to win public sup¬ port. A brief overview of the dramatis personae and the key incidents leading up to the Hardy and Horne Tooke trials will provide a useful preamble to my argument.5 The Society for Constitutional Informa¬ tion was organized in 1780 with John Horne Tooke, a freelance poli¬ tician and philologist, as one of its founding members, but its level of activity and its membership rolls had dwindled by the decade’s end. The society revived in March 1792, when it began meeting in new quarters at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in London and boosted its 3 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 56. 4 Thomas W. Laqueur, “The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV,” Journal of Modern History 54 (September 1982): 427. 5 Much more comprehensive surveys of these events are afforded by Philip Anthony Brown, The French Revolution in English History (London: Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1918); Carl B. Cone, The English Jacobins: Reformers in Fate 18th Century En¬ gland (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968); Alan Wharam, The Treason Trials, 1794 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992); and Thompson, Making of the En¬ glish Working Class.

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

36

membership. Among the members who appear in the minutes of the SCI in 1792 and who will figure in this chapter are Thomas Holcroft, an actor turned playwright, and Joseph Gerrald, a man of property who had been born in the West Indies, gone to school in England, and practiced law in Philadelphia. At about the same time that the SCI was enjoying a new vitality, the London Corresponding Society was founded with Thomas Hardy, a Scottish-born shoemaker, as its trea¬ surer and secretary. The LCS shared members (notably Gerrald) and correspondence with the SCI. The efforts of these organizations (and others modeled after them) to disseminate ideas and organize likeminded reformers led to a series of repressive measures by the British government aimed at abolishing what the king’s ministers perceived as seditious and treasonous activities. Among the most spectacular of these measures was a series of famous trials beginning with that of Thomas Paine, whose Rights of Man was determined in December 1792 to contain seditious libel, and culminating in accusations of trea¬ sonous activity leveled against a broad swath of the radical commu¬ nity. Seven members of the LCS (including Hardy) and six members of the SCI (including Horne Tooke and Holcroft) were charged together in October 1794. The London Corresponding Society was predicated on a vision of its members as public performers. The manuscript drafts of its consti¬ tution lavish a considerable amount of attention on questions of or¬ atorical deportment: “No Member shall be allowed to speak longer than 10 Minutes at one Time”; “No Delegate shall speak out of his turn, nor more than twice to one question unless to explain or to retract”; “Visitors should be at liberty to deliver their sentiments sub¬ ject to the same regulations as the Delegates.”6 It is clear that the group saw public speaking as one of its members’ central duties, a duty that was carried to humorous extreme by Thomas Holcroft, one of the defendants caught in the 1794 government sweep of radical societies. Although Holcroft faced charges along with Hardy and Horne Tooke, he was never actually brought to trial; their not guilty verdicts led to acquittals without trial for Holcroft and most of the other defendants. Thus, Holcroft was spared being hanged and dis¬ membered, the punishment for treason, but was frustrated in his pub¬ lic speaking ambitions. Holcroft’s Narrative of Facts, Relating to a

Prosecution for High Treason; Including the Address to the fury; 6 “Report of the Committee of Constitution of the London Corresponding Society,” Add. MSS 27,813, fol. 22, and 27,812, fol. 20, Department of Manuscripts, British Library.

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

37

Which the Court Refused to Hear (1795) is motivated in no small part, as the title indicates, by a desire to publish a speech that had been rendered superfluous by his acquittal. He reprints in full the “ad¬ dress I intended to have delivered, at the bar of the Old Bailey on the morning when the Jury were directed to acquit me,” as well as his altercation with Lord Chief Justice Eyre over the address (NF 50-51).7 While insisting that Holcroft had no right to address the court, Eyre at first decided to allow him his moment in the spotlight. “Conduct yourself properly,” he told Holcroft, “and I will not stop you” (ST 25:746). He became much less tolerant, however, when Holcroft an¬ nounced that he would speak for “only” half an hour, a time span the judge finally ruled was “not a thing to be endured” (ST 25:747). Holcroft spent his time in prison preparing for his moment on the courtroom stage; he writes to William Godwin on November 24, 1794: “I know I must not apologize to you for wishing to communi¬ cate serious and beneficial facts to the public.”8 Similarly, John Thelwall, a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, whose series of public speeches given to benefit the society led to his being indicted at the same time as Holcroft, spent his stint in the Tower reading Shakespeare’s plays and composing poetry about his plight.

The Life of John Thelwall, published by his widow in 1837, quotes him on his propensity for making literary hay out of the horrors of the moment. When Thelwall first entered the prison where he was to be confined, a cell reeking of vinegar used to overcome the stench of a dead body which had just been removed, he recalled, “the proud con¬ sciousness of suffering for truth and virtue rushed instantly again upon my soul, and I set myself down immediately and composed the underwritten little sonnet” (LJT 1:226). In writing of Holcroft’s overarching desire to deliver a speech be¬ fore a jury (and, by so doing, to reach the larger audience provided by press accounts and published trial transcripts), and of Thelwall’s ten¬ dency to burst into verse in the face of death, I do not mean to belittle the hardship these two men faced. When Holcroft, in his undelivered speech, writes of having “his character blasted, his means consumed, his labour impeded, his days spent in the torments of uncertainty, his night in the terrors which impossible endeavours to forget these tor¬ ments cause,” he is not exaggerating the suffering he endured (NF 7 The incident is also recorded in ST 25:745-48. 8 Thomas Holcroft to William Godwin, November 24, 1794. By courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Pressmark: F, 48 G. 4/15. Forster MSS Catalogue no. 267.

38

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

67). I do, however, wish to note the ease, indeed even the urgency, of these men’s efforts to translate private suffering into public perfor¬ mance, to conceive of themselves as emissaries from a higher realm. In a passage that strikingly mirrors Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical

Ballads, Thelwall’s widow writes of her husband’s compositional fa¬ cility: “That he could write any species of poetry in his present situa¬ tion may appear surprising to some individuals, but to those who know what a child of the Muse must be, the circumstances will ap¬ pear natural: for the soul is never so attuned to poetry as when under strong excitement” (LJT 1:252). It is not enough for Thelwall to be remembered as a man who behaved bravely in the face of repressive and punitive government forces; his wife’s depiction is supplemented with a vision of the artist prodded into creativity by the force of his feelings. Biography always invites a degree of mythologizing, but when one reads the biographical traces left by the participants in the trials, one is struck by a particular impulse that seems in every instance to deter¬ mine each portrayal, that is, the desire to be constituted as a political martyr. Thelwall’s poem “Written on the Morning of the Trial, and presented to the Four Prisoners liberated on the same day” demon¬ strates how he and his cohorts chose to chronicle the historical mo¬ ment: Should tyrant arts my fall secure— A martyr, with my blood The seeds of freedom, I manure, Of truth and public good. {LJT 1:250)

The trope of martyrdom recurs again and again in the defendants’ accounts of the trials. Holcroft, in the defense he never had occasion to address to an actual jury, admonishes an imagined one that has found him guilty: “Let my members be cut off, my bowels burnt, my head severed from the trunk, and my body divided into four quarters and sent to be at the King’s disposal: for it matters little to me whether it be at the King’s and the hangman’s, or the vultures’ and the wolves’” (NF 78). Similarly, Thomas Hardy, as he launches into the section of his memoir devoted to the trials, situates himself within a coterie of British martyrs: We now arrive at a period which draws the subject of this Memoir forth from the humble occupation of a shoemaker, in which he had

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

39

hitherto laboured with great credit to himself, to take his stand by the side of those immortal heroes, in whose praise the tongues of Britons will never cease to speak with rapture and grateful veneration. With that patriotic band who broke the ruffian arm of arbitrary power, and dyed the field and the scaffold with the pure and precious blood, for the liberties of their country,—Hampden, Russell, Sidney; ye intrepid martyrs to freedom! (MTH 23)

Hardy’s third-person reportage of his own history enhances the the¬ atricality of his narrative; as he tells his story, he observes his younger self along with the reader. In emphasizing his own puniness (“the humble occupation of a shoemaker”), and in conjuring up the names of Hampden, Russell, and Sidney, Hardy installs himself in a line of heroic martyrs.9 Their arrests and trials become over time the defining moments of these men’s lives. They return to 1794 continually, whether through public celebrations of the anniversaries of their acquittals or through the construction of their memoirs. William Hazlitt, the editor of Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, Written by Himself and Con¬ tinued to the Time of His Death, from his Diary, Notes, and Other Papers (1816), asserts, “Mr. Holcroft may be considered from this time as a public character; for the remainder of his life in a great measure received its color from his conduct on this occasion, and from the opinion and feelings of the public with respect to him” (MLTH 2:192). The various memoirs and narratives of the defendants build to the trial or are dominated by it from the start. And the ten¬ dency to get stuck in 1794 is not unique to the defendants who con¬ structed themselves in this setting as martyrs to a heroic cause. Even Thomas Erskine, the defending attorney who had a long and distin¬ guished career in the public eye, was drawn back to the treason trials late in life in moments of nostalgic self-indulgence. Amelia Opie notes that when, in 1813, Erskine brought Germaine de Stael two books containing “his most celebrated speeches,” he took up the second vol¬ ume “which contained his speeches at the Old Bailey trials in the year 1794 . . . [and] read some favourite passages to her” (MLAO 47). Although a desire to see the treason trials as a pivotal moment in 9 Edward Hampden was imprisoned during the reign of Charles I for opposing a privy seal loan that was levied in 1625; he died in prison. William Russell and Alger¬ non Sidney were separately convicted of treasonous activity and executed in 1683. Russell was renowned for the calm with which he faced his death; his memory was ultimately exonerated by a House of Commons committee appointed to examine the circumstances of his conviction.

40

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

one’s life, as an opportunity to vault into the realms of myth, is a staple of nearly all the participants’ accounts of the events, it is most fully promulgated and theorized by William Godwin, whose distance from the real hardship incurred by the defendants was, in at least one instance, a source of tension. When Godwin learned that Holcroft had been imprisoned, he advised Holcroft’s daughter to call on him, but added rather airily, “Perhaps you should not summon me to town without the possibility of some small benefit,” a comment that pro¬ voked an angry Holcroft to accuse Godwin of “wishing to swell the sea by laving water with a tea cup.”10 Nevertheless, Godwin extended specific advice to the imprisoned defendants on how they should de¬ port themselves in the courtroom for maximum effect. He writes to the imprisoned Thelwall, recommending that he curb his “spirit of resentment,” and emphasizing “the difference of sensation produced in every spectator, by a man who yields to his unbridled anger, and a man whose equanimity no injuries can disturb, who breathes nothing but benignity.”11 Godwin’s comment underscores Thelwall’s position at the center of public attention, the importance of taking on a partic¬ ular role—that of the Stoic—and playing it well. Dorinda Outram’s discussion of French neo-Stoicism in the early years of the Revolution helps to explain the appeal of the Stoic hero for Godwin as well. According to Outram, “The ‘Stoicism’ of the Revolution is about the definition of an autonomous self through an autonomous, impermeable, controlled body.” She situates the return of the Stoic within an eighteenth-century canon of great men (for ex¬ ample, William Penn, Socrates, Newton, and Franklin) who served as “reference-figures” or “examples of men whose inner authenticity had allowed them to achieve self-sovereignty.” Using these figures as models of self-authenticating identity involved an inherent contradic¬ tion: one was playing a role in order to project a more authentic ver¬ sion of self. Playing a role assumes the necessary presence of an audi¬ ence for the performance, thus undercutting the “self-sovereignty” of the particular role’s appeal. That is, someone who is performing for an audience’s approval is not really entirely self-contained. Outram relates the intense interaction between the public men of the Revolu¬ tion and their audiences to a “secular displacement of the desire for 10 William St. Clair includes large portions of both letters in The Godwins and the

Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 129. 11 William Godwin to John Thelwall, September 18, 1794, [Abinger deposit] Dep. c. 511, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

4i

immortality away from a religious afterlife on to a desire for a post¬ humous presence in this life.”12 Godwin’s staging of heroic martyrdom reflects just such a desire for a permanent appreciative audience. His advice to Thelwall is just one facet of Godwin’s repeated efforts to image forth a heroic figure who will singlehandedly alter the terms of the polical debate; the self-mythologizing narratives of Holcroft and Hardy can be read as efforts to construct themselves as that man. Godwin writes in his 1795 Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr. Pitt’s Bills: “It is much to be desired, in moments pregnant with so important consequences, that an individual should be found, who could preserve his mind untainted with the headlong rage of faction, whether for men in power or against them; could judge with the so¬ briety of distant posterity, and the sagacity of an enlightened histo¬ rian; and could be happy enough to make his voice heard, by all those directly or remotely interested in the event” (CLGB 1-2). Godwin imagined himself playing this crucial role; the previously quoted letter to Thelwall begins with a sketch of “the line of conduct” Godwin had “chalked out” for himself: “Upon all occasions to carry my life in my hand; not to indulge a particle of selfish retrospect to life or its plea¬ sures, or the fears of pain and death,” and “to expend this treasure, which does not belong to me but to the public, with all the wisdom I am able.” Godwin’s ambivalence about the harsher exigencies of such a life’s calling comes through in his halfhearted offer of help to Holcroft’s daughter, as well as at the end of the passage just quoted, where he resolves to risk his life freely in “matters of solid and palpa¬ ble benefit, but not in matters of mere gratification.”13 Part of taking on the role of Godwinian hero, apparently, involved dressing for the part. William St. Clair determined that Godwin changed his hairstyle and attire sometime in 1794 in order to signal his political alliances; after the change he wore his hair neck-length and unpowdered.14 In so doing, Godwin mirrored the efforts of the French revolutionaries who, as Lynn Hunt has convincingly argued, attempted to use cos¬ tume as a transparent indicator of political character.15 “Powdering or not powdering the hair,” according to a chronicler of the Scottish

12 Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 81, 72, 80. 13 Godwin to Thelwall, September 18, 1794. 14 St. Clair, Godwins and Shelleys, 125. 15 Hunt’s analysis of the way costumes came to serve as a “means of enhancing the perception of natural truths” is found in Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 78.

42

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

treason trials, “was, at this time, one of the established tests of opin¬ ion. The heads of the loyal were polluted with white dust; he who meant to proclaim his admiration of France did so by natural ringlets; or, if he was very intense, by a short crop.”16 Joseph Gerrald, tried on charges stemming from his role as a delegate to the November 1793 convention of radical societies held at Edinburgh, opted for a dra¬ matic sartorial display of his political sympathies, one that may have exacerbated his offense in the eyes of the jury. He appeared at the bar “with unpowdered hair, hanging loosely down behind—his neck nearly bare, and his shirt with a large collar, doubled over; so that on the whole he was not unlike one of Vandyck’s portraits,” a costume that was accused of “savour[ing] of affectation.”17 The dilemma faced by Gerrald in dressing for his trial provides a microcosmic version of the dilemma faced by proponents on either side of the political strug¬ gle: how to dress and behave in such a way as to seize the public imagination without smacking of falseness and affectation. This theatrical double bind is implicit in one of Godwin’s letters to the imprisoned Gerrald, another of his advisory missives to the ac¬ cused. The letter begins with Godwin projecting himself into the he¬ roic role he sets forth ultimately for Gerrald—“I cannot recollect the situation in which you are in a few days to be placed without emo¬ tions of respect, and I had almost said of envy”—and then articulat¬ ing a characteristic blend of revolutionary zeal and reluctance: “I will never adopt any conduct for the express purpose of being put upon my trial, but if I be ever so put, I will consider that day as a day of triumph.” Godwin then proceeds to exhort Gerrald to imagine him¬ self in the role of England’s savior: “Let every syllable you utter be fraught with persuasion. What an event would it be for England and mankind if you could gain an acquittal! Is not such an event worth striving for? It is in man, I am sure it is, to effect that event. Gerrald, you are that man. Fertile in genius, strong in moral feeling, prepared with every accomplishment that literature and reflection can give. Stand up to the situation—be wholly yourself.” There is a conflict between Godwin’s awareness of a need to adopt a particular per¬ sona—that of the impassive, reasonable man—and his advice to Ger¬ rald to be wholly himself, a conflict that becomes more obvious in the latter part of this letter, where Godwin tells Gerrald what to say to the 16 Lord Cockburn, An Examination of the Trials for Sedition Which Have Hitherto

Occurred in Scotland, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1888), 2:43. 17 Ibid., 2:43.

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

43

jury, providing him with lines to rehearse for his performance in court and emphasizing the “manner” to be adopted as much as the words.18 The construction of a newly authentic and self-sufficient French cit¬ izen through the adoption of Stoic models of behavior or revolution¬ ary costume, as characterized by Outram and Hunt, risked being un¬ done by its inherent staginess. Hunt records the response of a foreign visitor to France who noted of the legislative costume, “As it is too far removed from ordinary dress, it has a theatrical air . . . and this defect keeps it from being, at least for now, seriously dignified and truly imposing.”19 A discomfort with the disjuncture between a theatrical imperative (the need to attract public attention and win public sup¬ port) and an antitheatrical anxiety (the result of an equation between performance and falsity) is revealed as well in the accusations lobbed back and forth between the government supporters and reform advo¬ cates in England. The minutes of the London Corresponding Society record that organization’s distrust of a government whose ministers “affected to be alarmed” by events in France and who increased their own power by their “real or pretended fear” of republicans at home.20 By the same token, one of the ministerial newspapers, the St. James Chronicle, reports Holcroft’s voluntary surrender to the court as the act of a performer eager for an audience: “This gentleman seems so fond of speechifying, that he will probably plead his own cause in part, though Counsel were assigned him. We do not understand he is in any imminent danger; and suppose, from his behaviour, he has the idea of obtaining the reputation of a martyr to liberty at an easy rate” (MLTH 2:174). Each camp claimed that adherents of the other side were playing roles, adopting a particular rhetoric and demeanor with the facility of consummate actors. John Thelwall, in his “First Lecture on the Political Prostitution of Our Public Theatres,” calls Edmund Burke “that Melpomene in breeches” (T 1:291). Godwin accuses the king’s ministers of having “laid aside the robes and insignia of author¬ ity; and leaped, like a common wrestler, upon the stage” (CLGB Si82). Of course, the accoutrements of kingliness and the wrestler’s stage persona are just different extremes of a spectrum of public theat¬ ricality. Godwin’s desire to distinguish between the two is one of 18 The letter, dated January 23, 1794, is reprinted in C. Kegan Paul, William God¬

win: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1876), 1:125-28. 19 Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 80. 20 Spence Papers, Add. MSS 27,808, Department of Manuscripts, British Library.

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

44

many contemporary rhetorical efforts to appropriate and recuperate a particular mode of theatricality.21 The charged double status of the theatrical gesture—as an eye¬ catching public avowal of a particular political sentiment and as an incriminating indicator of falsity—led to internecine struggle within the radical faction as well as rhetorical combat between the govern¬ ment and radical alliances. William Godwin was critical of the public lectures John Thelwall gave in order to profit the LCS, charging that a public lecturer inevitably falls away from the Stoic virtues Godwin repeatedly advocated for public men: “Do the audience clap their hands, or employ other demonstrations of applause? There is scarcely a Stoic upon the face of the earth so rigid, but he feels his own heart titillated and delighted with these sensible tokens of complacence. He observes what passages they are in his discourse that produce the loudest tumults of applause; he aims at the frequent recurrence of such passages; he feels discontented, if for any length of time he is merely listened to in silence” (CLGB 19). Godwin’s discomfort with the fact that a lecturer performs for an audience and that this audi¬ ence might actually influence the performance is part of a larger anxi¬ ety related to public gatherings that colors his entire tract. He writes of the public meetings of the LCS: “The collecting of immense multi¬ tudes of men into one assembly, particularly when there have been no persons of eminence, distinction, and importance in the country, that have mixed with them, and been ready to temper their efforts, is al¬ ways sufficiently alarming” (CLGB 14). “It is not,” Godwin writes, “in crowded audiences, that truth is successfully investigated” (CLGB i7>-

Thelwall was infuriated by what he took as a personal attack by Godwin but he accepts the antitheatrical subtext of Godwin’s argu¬ ment although differing in his assessment of the public lecturer. In rushing to the lecturer’s (that is, his own) defense, Thelwall insists that “no charm of voice, no elegance of person, no grace of action or, flow of modulated periods (if he [the lecturer] were fortunate enough to possess all these advantages) can support his popularity through a dozen lectures” (T z:xii). That is, the lecturer cannot rely on the ac¬ tor’s stock in trade, on gestic and vocal flourishes, to win over his audience. Continuing, Thelwall constitutes the lecturer as a sower of 21 Peter H. Melvin writes of the most famous of these, Burke’s combatting of the “ ‘imitative’ theatre of the Jacobins by the ‘naturalistic’ theatre of the genuine states¬ man,” in “Burke on Theatricality and Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 449.

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

45

thoughts that get mulled over by his audience members in the privacy of their own homes; he suggests that his words, in common with those of the debater whom Godwin holds up as a better alternative to the lecturer, “must undoubtedly be digested in the solitude of the closet” (T 2:xiv). The lecturer’s performance is muted in ThelwalPs defensive rendering, stripped of theatrical trappings and relegated finally to the most private of closet dramas. Godwin and Thelwall have in common an anxiety about theatrical performance that renders it necessary to distance the public performer from his audience. Antitheatricality is interwoven with, and possibly even fueled by, a fear of the spectator’s power. The adherents of government on the one hand and of reform on the other expended a considerable amount of energy in projecting a particular construction of the trials’ audiences. The spectators of Hardy’s and Horne Tooke’s trials assume a primary position in the coverage of those events as the courtrooms were packed with avid voyeurs and the interested public formed large gath¬ erings outside the Old Bailey. To demonstrate their support for the defendants or their attorneys, crowds at various times drew the car¬ riages these men rode in through the streets of London, replacing their horses. The Morning Chronicle, one of the newspapers in which the radical societies regularly published their resolutions and announced their meetings, solemnly intones in the aftermath of Horne Tooke’s trial, “Every friend to that grand palladium of British freedom, the Trial by Jury, must rejoice to have seen the respect and reverence of the Public to the Court throughout the whole of the trial last week.” Describing the defense lawyers’ exit from the court, the paper reports, “At length, Mr.

erskine

and Mr.

gibbs

came to their carriage; the

horses were instantly taken out; the people clustered about it like a swarm of bees, and in this manner they were drawn to Serjeants Inn” (MC, November 24, 1794). The True Briton, one of Pitt’s subsidized papers, depicts a similar moment at the end of Hardy’s trial: “Mr. hardy

was yesterday acquitted—We have upon this occasion to no¬

tice with admiration the temperance of an English Populace. The coach in which Mr. Hardy left the Old Bailey was followed only by an inconsiderable mob of butcher’s boys, &c. till it had reached Somerset House, when the rabble became considerable enough to be able to draw the Coach. They then took the horses from it, and drew it along the Strand” (T£, November 6, 1794). Whether the supportive crowd that gathered around the defendants and their lawyers was more like “a swarm of bees” or “a mob of butcher’s boys” depends on which paper’s coverage one chooses to believe. But both papers exhibit an

46

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

anxiety toward the crowd evident in their eagerness to compliment it. Both accounts begin by congratulating the public on its good deport¬ ment, working to shape a potentially dangerous crowd’s behavior through praise. Even the audiences for the spectacle of the trials, the gathered crowds, are implicated in the overriding debate contrasting theat¬ ricality with sincerity. Adherents on either side of the issue deride the other side’s followers for taking on paid roles in a carefully controlled public performance. Thomas Holcroft, in his Narrative of Facts, Re¬

lating to a Prosecution for High Treason, goes so far as to suggest that the government paid off ballad singers and pamphleteers, recall¬ ing “five vociferous fellows” proclaiming through the streets “the crimes and villainies of the Jacobins, and the virtues of the Adminis¬ tration.” Holcroft concludes: “ I walked with them as long as my time would permit, and saw that it was not the sale on which they de¬ pended. Long Lane never before gave copper-plate engravings, distinct from the song, with ballads which are sold, as I believe, for three pence the double quire” (NF 13-14). The Morning Chronicle sim¬ ilarly published anecdotes aimed at demonstrating how easily “a sum of money or a little beer” would serve to shift the common man’s allegiance. According to the Chronicle, a wealthy rector once offered two guineas to a group of poor people to burn Tom Paine in effigy; the group cooperated but then just as easily acquiesced to an offer of the same amount of money for burning the rector in effigy (MC, March 8, 1793). The government papers were equally quick to sug¬ gest that crowds supporting the radicals were doing so only because they had been paid off; the True Briton refers to the “hireling mob” gathered outside the Old Bailey during Hardy’s trial (November 7, 17941-

In underscoring the pecuniary interests that purportedly motivated the gathered crowds, both camps sought to undermine the authen¬ ticity of the crowds’ allegiances and to question the sincerity of their emotions. They were in effect accusing the crowd members of playing parts, allowing themselves to become itinerant actors in a large social drama. As I have already demonstrated, these kinds of accusations constantly cropped up as each side strove to capture the public imag¬ ination. But they reached their peak when leveled against an individ¬ ual who had perhaps the greatest claim to embodying the role of God¬ win’s heroic individual, the main attorney for the radicals, Thomas Erskine. Erskine, who had earned a reputation as a successful and highly

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

47

visible attorney long before the treason trials, agreed to waive his fees when he took on the role of the LCS’s chief defender, writing, “The situation of the unfortunate prisoners entitles them to every degree of tenderness and attention, and their inability to render me any profes¬ sional compensation, does not remove them at a greater distance from one.”22 His successful effort to get Hardy and Horne Tooke acquitted earned him special notice in Coleridge’s “Sonnets on Eminent Charac¬ ters”; “To the Honourable Mr. Erskine” launched the series in the Morning Chronicle of December 1, 1794. One gets a sense of the negative connotation that could be attached to his courtroom appear¬ ances during the treason trials both in Coleridge’s description of him as a “hireless Priest before the insulted shrine,” and in the particular type of praise heaped on Erskine in a hagiography published after his death in 1823. Emily Calcraft writes that Erskine’s speeches were “to¬ tally free from [the] ambition to glitter,” and goes on to assert: “The eloquence of Lord Erskine sprung, indeed, from the purest eloquence, and was directed to the noblest ends. It emanated from a mind en¬ larged by general knowledge; endowed with singular sensibility; and refined by elegant taste: it was roused to action by the justest and noblest of human passions—an ardent love of freedom and of fame, founded upon the true happiness and lasting glory of his country.”23 Both writers strive to free Erskine of any taint of mercenary interest, Coleridge by his depiction of the lawyer as “hireless” and Calcraft by her emphasis on the “pure” sources of Erskine’s eloquence and her effort to construct him as a man motivated solely by feeling. In doing so, these writers seek to undo the damage done by the derogatory press coverage of Erskine, which accused him of plying his trade for money and fame, of adopting whatever emotional pose would help him win a trial. A perception of the attorney as a kind of hired gun ran deep enough that the most suspicious of the radicals with whom Erskine allied himself felt moved to question his motives when he failed in his effort to defend Tom Paine in 1792. In a letter written to Erskine after the trial, William Godwin asks: “What sort of exhibition of himself does an orator make who employs himself for four hours as you did, in a pretended attempt to persuade an audience into the truth of a proposition, which in his personal opinion is confessedly false? What must mankind think of this purchased fatigue of the lungs, and elo22 Spence Papers, Add. MSS 27,813, fol. 3. 23 Emily Calcraft, A Sketch of the Character of the Late Lord Erskine (London, 1824), 416.

48

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

quence that is dealt out to every purchaser at so much an hour?”24 Here again we witness Godwin’s discomfort with theatrical posturing; he re¬ bukes Erskine for taking on someone else’s beliefs and passions, that is, for being a consummate actor. But Erskine’s success in the courtroom (with the exception of the Paine trial) can be attributed to his under¬ standing that the trials were, before all else, performances. The sim¬ ilarity between a lawyer and an actor was a commonplace of public discourse in the 1790s. The Attic Miscellany affirms this alliance in a caricature, “The Actor,” which traces this figure’s histrionic abilities back to his origins as “an attorney of considerable practice in the parish of St. Sepulchre.” The Miscellany resurrect^ a letter purportedly written by this figure to a prospective advocate, in which he outlines a number of successful dramatic attitudes: “In respect for external manner; in addition to the St. Giles’s shake of the head, and the one-eyed grin of the deep, knowing kiddy, you may successfully add the left-off attitude of some popular pleader; it will remind your auditors of him, and pre¬ serve in their ideas the concatenation of something clever, without their being at the trouble to examine too minutely into your abilities.”25 Erskine was the most prominent popular pleader of the day, and he was also probably the one most closely identified with histrionic gam¬ bits. A 1794 Cruikshank drawing of Erskine depicts him gesticulating dramatically with a rolled-up document titled “Treason” (see figure 3). For his tendency to swoon at strategic moments he was skewered in the ministerial press. The Anti-Jacobin's parody of an Erskine speech winds down as follows: “Mr.

erskine

here concluded a

Speech which had occupied the attention, and excited the applause of his Audience during a space of little less than three hours, allowing for about three quarters of an hour, which were occupied by successive fits of fainting between the principal subdivisions of his discourse.”26 The Attic Miscellany devotes one segment in its series called “Legal Portraiture” to “The Oratorical Swooner,” a transparently veiled allu¬ sion to Erskine: “Action, say the judges, is the life of oratory, so thinks our hero; and to so complete a degree can he exert his powers, in that respect, that a stranger, or a person unacquainted with the manoeuvre, would sometimes imagine him, by the exquisite sensibility of his feelings, deprived of all animation.”27 24 William Godwin to Thomas Erskine, [Abinger deposit] Dep. b. 227/2 (b), Bodleian Library, Oxford. This letter exists as an undated file copy in Godwin’s hand and does not carry any subsidiary evidence of postmarking. 25 Attic Miscellany, no. 13 (1790): 27. 26 Anti-Jacobin; or Weekly Examiner, December 4, 1797, 30. 27 Attic Miscellany, no. 20 (1791): 316.

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

Figure

3

49

Isaac Cruikshank, Cool Arguments!!!, 1794. (By courtesy of

the Trustees of the British Museum. Copyright British Museum.)

Running parallel to the portrayal of Erskine as an emotional fake are repeated accusations of conceit and self-absorption. He can be identified in caricatures by the multiple personal references that pep¬ per his speech (see third advocate from right in figure 4). The True

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

50

.

cU$r.( nt

1

( ktm> ttixl t't

t * ■;«’«< ,

\

K\rt& "it Jo

Figure

4

Ctmnulf >

’

Tfcfnrj a Portrait o)

u "Traitor, h hi.< h'vu ,■

K

t

\ ‘ jdOO

*' *?.*

is iy

Artist unknown, Evidence to Character, 1798. (By courtesy of the

Trustees of the British Museum. Copyright British Museum.)

Briton nearly always referred to Erskine as “Counsellor

and published a series of “Ego’s Soliloquies” aimed at demonstrating the extent to which he was motivated by self-aggrandizement. In the three poetic soliloquies Erskine is portrayed as being jealous of the praise given to his legal partner in the trials, Samuel Gibbs. In the histrionic rhetoric of a Shakespearean tragedian Ego laments: Fire, fury, torture, rage, despair— The soul’s fierce anguish who can bear? Shall gibbs of praise, without alloy, The luscious banquet still enjoy, And batten on the rich repast; While I am doom’d to pine and fast, Op’ning in vain my insatiate jaw, My jealous, thirsty, craving maw, To gather up each scrap and crum, From whatsoever mouth it come? (TB, November 29, 1794)

ego”

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials

5i

Ego’s third soliloquy begins: Let ’em praise him—what care I? Judge, Jury, Counsel, I defy— The mob shall judge my parts and speech; To them I speak, and them I teach. (TjB, November 29, 1794) These satirical poems highlight Erskine’s histrionics while also assert¬ ing that his overwrought acting was motivated by the desire to please a crowd and win applause rather than by any more solemn jurispru¬ dential ambition. Erskine apparently did win over the crowd that filled the court¬ room during the Hardy and Horne Tooke trials, or at least one of the most loyal members of the courtroom audience. Amelia Alderson, bet¬ ter known by her married name, Amelia Opie, witnessed Erskine’s courtroom appearances over the course of his career, and her descrip¬ tions of these events in her letters and memoirs make it clear that for her they were, above all else, performances.28 Seeking a lexicon appro¬ priate for describing Erskine, she resorts to the words of a poem writ¬ ten by a playwright to honor an actor, “the portrait of Garrick so admirably drawn by the pen of Sheridan.” Erskine, in lieu of Garrick, is praised for The grace of action, the adapted mien, Faithful as nature to the varied scene; The expressive glance, whose subtle comment draws Entranc’d attention and a mute applause. {MLAO 124) In short, what impresses Opie about Erskine is his ability to rivet an audience’s attention and to alter his demeanor to suit the circum¬ stances. What makes him particularly appealing for this female spec¬ tator is precisely what the True Briton refers to as the “flourishes of Counsellor ego,” and in fact there is a connection between Erskine’s appreciative female audience and the particular stripe of criticism lev¬ eled against him by the government press. The True Briton consistently compares Erskine negatively to his 28 I am grateful to Donald Reiman for calling to my attention the fact that Opie witnessed and wrote about the trials. From this point on I refer to Amelia Alderson Opie as Opie since her memoirs were published under this name. When I draw on manuscript letters she wrote at the time of the trials, my manuscript citations refer to her by her maiden name.

52.

ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY

apparently less theatrical associate, at one point claiming that Gibbs urged his arguments in defense of Hardy “in a more manly way than the other legal orator,” that is, Erskine. The critique continues, “An appeal to the feelings of the Jury is always to be expected as a thing of course; but that appeal should be made with temperate dignity, not with the meretricious parade of an actor” (TB, November 5, 1794). Erskine’s dramatic flair, which is precisely what Opie, in retrospect, finds so appealing, lays him open to charges of effeminacy; not only is he purported to be less manly than Gibbs, but also he is charged with behaving meretriciously, that is, in a way typical of a harlot, or by alluring through false show (OED). I have discussed in greater detail in Chapter 1 the dangers inherent in a man’s making a spectacle of himself, in his assuming a role traditionally gendered female. Erskine as spectacle risks being called Erskine the harlot. But in this instance it is Erskine’s success with the likes of Amelia Alderson that renders him particularly vulnerable to the True Briton's misogynistic attack. Court-going (much like theatergoing) was a popular mode of enter¬ tainment for women in the 1790s, and Amelia Alderson Opie’s letters and memoirs provide the best record of a female court enthusiast. Opie writes at length about her attendance as a young girl at the Norwich circuit court: “To a girl fond of excitement it will easily be believed that the time of Assizes was one of great interest” (MLAO 23). And her anecdotes suggest that judges demonstrated a great deal of tolerance for, and even active encouragement of, this young female devotee; one assured her the equivalent of a front-row seat. Opie re¬ calls particularly a day when she had to jockey for position with a rude man and emerged triumphant from the scuffle owing to the inter¬ vention of a judge who had seen her in court the day before. She writes: “I do not remember that on either of these days I heard any very interesting causes tried, but I had acquaintances amongst the bar¬ risters, and I liked to hear them plead, and I also liked to hear the judge sum up: in short, all was new, exciting, and interesting” (MLAO 24-25). Opie’s diary and epistolary accounts of trials, as well as contemporary print representations of courtrooms (see the upper right-hand corner of figure 5 for a glimpse of the female presence at a Winchester court of law), suggest that women were regular and even welcome witnesses to the spectacle of courtroom justice. Although the notion of courtroom trials as entertainment certainly did not originate with the treason trials of the 1790s, there is evidence that the phenomenon reached a new level of popularity, and hence marketability, at this time. This state of affairs can be traced to in-

The Courtroom Theater of the 1794 Treason Trials (fa y**- nff.r that

53

.faihfcdfW fir

1nk