During the spring 2006 semester, I taught a senior-level course in British Romantic Drama for English majors, a course that satisfied for them a genre upper-division requirement. My first-day assessments of my students revealed that several had taken an introductory course in drama, and some had taken a junior-level course in Shakespeare, but no one enrolled in the course had pursued a course in the Romantic period. This course was, therefore, the students’ only contact with the Romantic period as well as a course involving the reading, discussing, writing, and performing of drama from the 1780s to the 1830s.

During the spring 2005, when I was teaching the senior capstone course in English, I included Joanna Baillie’s 1798 () in a culminating activity I termed “The Baillie Project,” and during the fall 2006 semester, I included Baillie’s in a sequence of plays for an Honors College course entitled Introduction to Drama: Tragically Monstrous, a course that is offered as a First-Year Experience requirement for incoming Honors College students. The first-year students read in tandem with Euripedes’ and Shakespeare’s . When I teach the junior-level course in the British Romantic period, I routinely include two or three dramas, including and Thomas Bellamy’s 1789 (both are anthologized in Mellor and Matlak’s ). And when I teach the graduate-level course in British Romantic literature, I add P. B. Shelley’s 1819 and Lord Byron’s 1822 to the two plays from the undergraduate course. My point is that while I had integrated Romantic drama into other courses I had taught, I had never taught an entire course devoted to Romantic drama until the spring of 2006. In spring, 2007, I taught the graduate version of the course as an Advanced Problems topic entitled British Romantic Drama. This course was actually a “piggy-back” course in that it was taught as a graduate seminar and an Honors College seminar for 4000-level credit for English majors and minors with the appropriate prerequisites.

To help students identify what a course entitled Senior Seminar in Studies in Drama: British Romantic Drama was about, I supplied the following description, which provided them a sense of the cultural and political aspects of the course we would emphasize as well as strategies they could use for reading the plays:

After more than a decade of recovering and recontextualizing Romantic drama in Great Britain, we have come to recognize the central role that drama played during the period. Romantic drama, staged and read, was its culture’s most popular medium, crossing class, national, and gender divisions, as well as a serious literary form written by the period’s major writers. Manifested in diverse ways (melodrama, gothic, verse drama, opera, pantomime, puppet shows, children’s drama, monodrama, tragedy, comedy, burlesque), Romantic drama performed, reflected, and influenced the political, social, and cultural issues of its day. The Licensing Act of 1737, granting patents to the Royal Theatres of Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket, and the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship (willingness to grant performance licenses) meant that playwrights had to be clever in their stagings of controversial and taboo subjects.

In this seminar, we will examine diverse plays from the period as negotiations of theatrical politics. We will look at the performative aspects of Romantic drama, including the role of the actor, the design of stages, non-dramatic performances (such as itinerant medical shows), and private theatricals. We will consider the thematic and dramaturgical handling of the revolutionary and changing Romantic culture from which its drama emanated. We will contextualize the ways in which Romantic drama engaged with the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries as British society became increasingly democratized, commercialized, and bourgeois. We will discover how the theatre was a site for performing gender and how playwriting was particularly problematic for women. We will situate Romantic drama in the history of theatre.

I ask students to come to this seminar prepared to engage in interactive learning, to be willing to explore all dimensions of Romantic drama as reading and performance texts, as stage spectacles, as serious commentary on the period and its culture. I inform them during our first class meeting that because my pedagogy and scholarship are informed by feminism and feminist theory, they will encounter a learning environment of decentralized authority with an invitation to participate in their own learning/discovery process, their own knowledge- and meaning-making. I tell them that because Romantic drama is a genre that uses performance as well as the printed page, they should be prepared to engage in some reading and performance activities that will require them to learn affectively as well as intellectually. Students are given multiple opportunities to pursue their own interests and lines of inquiry involving the drama, and my writing and discussion prompts are directive but open-ended.

If you successfully complete this course, you should be able

The selection and sequencing of the dramas for the course reflects quasi-chronological progression, quasi-generic groupings, and thematic clustering so that plays can be read dialogically.For another syllabus and discussion of teaching British Romantic drama by women, see Catherine Burroughs, “Teaching the Theory and Practice of Women’s Dramaturgy,” 12 (November 1998) [22 February 2010] http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1998/v/n12/005823ar.html One reason for my including so much drama by Joanna Baillie is that about one third of my students needed to satisfy a major requirement for a single author, and so they were able to do so by taking this course that highlighted Baillie as its major playwright. I tried to include representative plays by male and female playwrights, but we began with three late eighteenth-century comedies by women: Hannah Cowley’s (1783), Elizabeth Inchbald’s (1793), and Joanna Baillie’s (1798). These comedies opened onto discussions of Georgian courtship and marriage customs that cast men and women in stereotypical relationships that favored men. We discovered how Cowley displaces British manner and customs onto Madrid, and, like Baillie, relies on disguise and cross-dressing to suggest gender-bending in which women gain control over their lives. Inchbald’s comedy, we agreed, brings the legal issues of divorce, custody, adoption, bankruptcy, and robbery into the contexts of women’s rights and gender stereotypes. While is also a play that stages ambivalent, gender-bending heroines, we looked at how gender was even more complicated in performances featuring Mary Robinson as Victoria. All three plays show the centrality of marriage for women of Georgian Britain. All three comedies also push generic bounds. Cowley deploys conventions of Spanish intrigue and recycles the motifs of the comedy of manners.See my essay “On Teaching and Other Comedies by Romantic Women Playwrights,” 17.3 (July 2006): 351-60, for an extended discussion of teaching Hannah Cowley’s comedy. Inchbald’s play resonates with pathos of character and novel-like structure. Baillie’s comedy revolves around subplots of play-making; Marianne and Agnes are themselves playwrights in this metadramatic comedy. Because these comedies are critical of the culture’s dominant practices, the students find them fun, but they help to draw students into Romantic period culture as well as into the playwrights’ resistance to its dominant ideologies.

We next turned to tragedies, beginning the next cluster of plays with Baillie’s (1798), (1812), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1813)—three plays that address sensibilities of the early nineteenth-century, including the Gothic. In , we continued our exploration of gender-bending strategies, but here in tragic forms, and we considered whether or not the play holds up a tragic hero for emulation or admiration, whether it hints at homoerotic or incestuous relationships, and whether it presents the tragic consequences of immoderate passions, especially hatred.For a discussion of the teaching of Joanna Baillie’s dramas, see my essay, “Pedagogy and Passions: Teaching Joanna Baillie’s Dramas,” in , ed. Thomas Crochunis (New York: Routledge, 2004), 315-47. We learned how Baillie stages the Gothic, more fully developed, in the kidnapping and brainwashing of the tragic heroine in . Like the other plays we had read, puts marriage center stage, as well as the heroine’s resistance to patriarchal control. We found that also demonstrates the power of storytelling and the consequences to those whose naïve understandings of the world give them limited critical ability to discern reality from fiction. Similarly, , we agreed, explores gender-bending and mistaken identities so as to expose the fallacies and inconsistencies in social orders that are shaped by misogyny. While Baillie’s tragedies explore the crises for female identity and expose the subjection of femininity within patriarchal structures, Coleridge’s tragedy brings early nineteenth-century constructions of masculinity under scrutiny. All three plays can be read through postmodern lenses as historically specific—both in terms of their medieval settings and their Romantic-era contexts of composition—enactments of gender; the tragedies’ theatricality and performance, furthermore, expose the artificiality and even the fluidity of gender roles and gendered behaviors at the very time when codifications of those roles were being scripted off-stage as well as on-stage.

The next grouping of tragedies—P. B. Shelley’s (1816), Baillie’s (1798), and Lord Byron’s (1821)—took us into deeper and darker spaces of Romantic thought by way of historically based incidents and characters. All three of these plays involve despotic rulers of corrupt governments, but they similarly feature stories of dysfunctional families, thus bringing the crises of public and private spaces together in shared space on the stage. , like from the previous cluster, is a play that opens onto discussions of censorship and licensing of plays in the Romantic period. The settings of Italy for and , and Assyria for offer spaces where taboo and disturbing issues affecting early nineteenth-century British culture could be displaced and displayed. These three tragedies open onto explorations of criminal behavior and punishment, the efficacy of language, the function of the public body, and the pathology of madness. exposes the folly of excessive passions, coded masculine or feminine, and the segregated and gendered spaces that impede an individual’s healthy participation in the public sphere. P. B. Shelley’s tragedy presents us also with the problem of morality sanctioned by state and religion. adds layers of colonialism and orientalism to its questioning of gendered agency and effective leadership. All three tragedies hint at Romantic preoccupations with transgressive public figures under surveillance and then put on trial for their moral and legal infractions.

As afterpieces to the course, we read George Colman the Younger’s (1798), and Matthew Lewis’s (1811), two plays that demonstrate to students the kind of experimentation that was occurring with drama, particularly staged drama, during the Romantic period. These two fantasies are fanciful but disturbing in their staging of the abuses of misogyny and of orientalism (both set in the Near East) under the guise of children’s theatre, harlequinade, pantomime, and spectacle. Both Bluebeard and Timour are representations of actual figures whose stories become thoroughly mythologized and fantasized. Their stories and depictions, like that of Beatrice Cenci, have been replayed in multiple forms—theatre, novels, visual arts, opera, and film—and we talked about why Romantic theatergoers would find these characters so interesting and engaging.

To supplement each clustering of dramas, we read, as the schedule above indicates, the performance reviews that Cox and Gamer have included in the Broadview anthology and that Duthie has included in his edition of and that are relevant to the play we are discussing. The creative discovery activity enables students to work closely with these reviews and to think critically about performance aspects of the plays. Graduate students work beyond the reviews of the anthology, seeking additional performance information and reviews from online and traditional scholarly sources in the preparation of their assignment. They may also look at reviews of contemporary stagings of Romantic plays.See, for example, Jeffrey N. Cox, “Theatrical Forms, Ideological Conflicts, and the Staging of ,” , ed. Charles Rzepka (February 4, 2005), [March 24, 2006] and Jerrold E. Hogle, “Directing in 2000,” , ed. Charles Rzepka (February 4, 2005) [March 24, 2006]

As the syllabus indicates, our class frequently read parts aloud (often in character) to get a feel for the language and the performance aspects of the play. For example,

Sometimes for these oral readings, we wear masks. I have a collection of paper cardboard masks that can be easily distributed and worn from such sources as , and .Lionel Lambourne, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987). Occasionally, students make their own masks for the parts they are reading.

Additionally, I rely on a select but valuable collection of AV materials to supplement our readings and discussions of these plays. When students entered the classroom on the first day of class, they were greeted by the sounds of the CD Playhouse Aires: 18th-Century English Theatre Music, performed by The London Oboe Band to set the stage for the Introductory reading in the Cox and Gamer Broadview anthology.Playhouse Aires: 18th-Century English Theatre Music, The London Oboe Band, lead by Paul Goodwin (France: Harmonia Mundi, 1996). With I played excerpts from the CD , from the production directed by Frederick Burwick, original music composed by Brian Holmes. Burwick and Paul Douglass have created an invaluable resource, a website entitled “Theatre and Popular Songs, Catches, Airs, and Art Songs of the Romantic Period,” which features CD recordings at nominal cost, thereby making them accessible for pedagogical use.See , maintained by Paul Douglass and Frederick Burwick: Two other recordings Burwick and Douglass have made and that are useful for the teaching of British Romantic drama are the recording of a live performance of Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s and Inchbald’s .

As we moved to the cluster of tragic plays with gothic overtones, I introduced the cluster with a small segment of the video of the Readers’ Theatre production of (1806) that was performed and video-taped at the 2003 meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The setting of the reading in the St. Joan of Arc Chapel on the Marquette University campus was a spectacular way for students to get a visual clue about how to read settings in and . The live accompaniment of the reading gave students a sense of how music was, in fact, a vital component to the play—something I asked them to pay close attention to in their readings of the plays’ stage directions. Likewise, our reading and discussion of was enriched by two video supplements. In March of 2002, in celebration of Women’s History Month, the Women’s Studies Program and the Theatre Department at Texas Tech University worked together to present a parlour reading of Romantic period dramas by Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Joanna Baillie. We held the reading in the parlor of a local, private home, and relied on student and faculty volunteer performers, and I served as dramaturg for the production. We videotaped the performance, and thus, I have a segment of as amateur readers’ theatre that I can show the students. In August of 2003, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism brought a Horizons Theatre production of to Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus for the association’s annual meeting. Having procured a DVD recording of that professional production, I can show my students parts of the play or the entire performance of . I can also refer students to reviews of that production that were published in .See Reviews of the Horizons Theatre Production of Joanna Baillie’s , New York City, August 2003, edited by Catherine B. Burroughs in 15.2 (June 2004): 351-85.

To enrich our readings of and I relied on reproductions of artwork, all of which are easily available online for showing in class or for reproducing as handouts. In particular, we looked at the “Sirani Elisabetta Portrait of Beatrice Cenci” attributed to Guido Reni that P. B. Shelley saw in Palazzo Colonna in 1818. This visual served as a starting point for our discussion of the enduring interest in Beatrice Cenci, as demonstrated by the many revisions of her life story in plays, operas, novel, and film. For , we looked at Eugène Delacroix’s painting , 1827-1828 which is on display at the Louvre. For Colman the Younger’s play, we viewed Gustav Doré’s nineteenth-century illustrations of Bluebeard. became more accessible for the students with the visual enrichment of Skelt’s Scenes from the novel version of Timour’s story, J.K. Green’s illustrations of the characters and scenes of the play, and the playbill of Mrs. H. Johnston in the melodrama of We also looked at a picture of the statue of Timur in Shahrisabz, Uzbekistan.

We rely on the online sites , , , and for the enriching materials, scholarship, and visuals that these sites bring to students. For my graduate seminar, students work with at least one hypertext found on , or they work with a novel and its dramatic adaptation.For a discussion of teaching gothic dramas adapted from gothic novels, see my essay “Teaching the Gothic Novel and Dramatic Adaptations,” in , ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller (New York: Modern Language Association, 2003), 326-42. See also Susan J. Wolfson, “Teaching Hemans with Byron,” 17.1 (January 2006): 93-99 and Tricia Lootens, “New Criticism and New Classrooms: Teaching Felicia Hemans,” 17.1 (January 2006): 101-109.

In the creative discovery activity #2, one student took the reviewers of Joanna Baillie’s , in particular of an 1804 staging of , to task. She writes: “…I find Baillie’s endeavors to capture the state of one passion incredibly impressive and thought provoking. The reviewers seemed to have missed some of the points of Baillie’s unchecked and exaggerated passions.” A researched critical analysis of Baillie’s explores the “patriarchal-taught self-fear” that Orra experiences and its contribution to her madness. The student writes: “This self fear is beneficial to the patriarchal, hierarchal society because it keeps women in their ‘place’ by making them emotionally weak and easily scared. They either run to men for help and/or readily submit to men without question.” Another student astutely observes gender dichotomies: “[v]iolence directed at women in Romantic drama serves the masculine standard by placing the dramatic burden firmly on the shoulders of the female characters—both as actor and acted upon.… Clearly, Baillie is interested in how her contemporaries utilized violence and gender both to control action on stage and, in many ways, to control the making of this action.”

For the re-staging of , one student elaborates on the scenery and costuming: “Lighting would be very warm, reds, oranges, and yellows…Once Count Cenci reveals the demise of his sons and openly celebrates their death, the brightness of the stage will begin to diminish and the darkness of the Palace will take over, like a foreboding shadow. Beatrice would, like the other characters, begin the play, except for Cenci, in drab and colorless apparel, but when she starts to plan her father’s murder, she changes to richly colored costumes so that by the height of her madness, she would be donning apparel almost equal to the richness and color of the costuming worn by Cenci.” Another student proposes a contemporary cast for a new film version of P. B. Shelley’s tragedy: Scarlet Johansen as Beatrice, Michael Douglas as Count Cenci, Jessica Lange as Lucretia, and Anthony Hopkins as Cardinal Camillo. As for an interesting stage effect at the end of the play, another student writes: “The Hall of Justice would be a long hallway, with the prisoners positioned at one end, each seated in a rolling office chair, and Camillo and the judges at the other. As characters are given their turns to speak, their chairs roll forward toward the judges, and as they are dismissed, their chairs will roll into a doorway off to the side of the hall.”

A response to 1813 reviews of Coleridge’s tragedy indicates how the student better appreciates the importance of the play’s scenery for spectators. He writes: “With these reviews, it was somewhat easier to imagine what key scenes would have looked like, the sorcery scene specifically. They also gave me a sense of what early nineteenth-century audience thought of acting capabilities. By giving our imagination a direction, the reviews let me see different perspectives, things I can’t see from merely reading the play.” Another student recommends for a made-for-TV movie, recast as a story about high-school kids and cliques. The outsider Alvar would be chunky and nerdy, and Ordonio would be thin and popular. Ordonio teases Alvar and spreads malicious rumors about his brother, eventually causing Alvar to transfer schools, despite the fact that Teresa finds him attractive. When Alvar returns to the school months later, he has lost weight, wears contacts, and is immediately a hit with the popular crowd.” Another student recommends filming Byron’s for the big screen, with a setting in the 1940s in Washington, D.C. and involving a congressional scandal with a closeted effeminate male and a press leak, so that the story would be about the fall of democratic leadership rather than the fall of the Assyrian empire. Another student, however, sees contemporary appeal for a movie that retains Byron’s Near East setting, particularly given our political interests in the very region that was seen as vital to the emerging commercial economy of early nineteenth-century Britain. A passage from a researched critical analysis of reveals how clothing becomes code for sexuality for this reader: “Clothing is used in this play to reveal Sardanapalus’ femininity, and Sardanapalus’s preoccupation with battle clothing makes him seem less of a man. When Sardanapalus orders his servant to bring him a mirror, we see his narcissism, his feminine concern with appearances rather than the impending battle for control of Nineveh.”

In general, the course evaluations for British Romantic Drama were similar to what I receive from other courses I teach, but here are some comments that are particularly relevant to the content and delivery of the seminar and that indicate how students were able to integrate the learning experiences. One student writes: “This class taught me something very different; reading drama can be just as fulfilling or more fulfilling than actually seeing a play read.” Another student points to the ways in which the drama contributed to his self-awareness: “I learned a lot about myself over the course of this semester in class. It took me a while to learn how to read the plays, but once I learned what worked, I fell in love with some of the plays we read. I wish I had taken a course in Romanticism before my senior year.” Another student emphasizes connections between self-actualization and the drama we read: “Through this class, I have been exposed to literature and drama that, up until this point, I had not heard of and I was able to learn. I think that the most important thing that I have learned about myself this semester is that I really enjoy reading drama and that I am drawn to these plays because of their interesting content. I think that groupings of the plays are helpful since it allows for progression through the semester with smooth transition between plays.” And finally, a student admits ending up in this course quite by happenstance, but finds it a surprisingly pleasant and instructional experience: “This class has been an invaluable learning experience for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the curriculum and loved learning about, for me, a new kind of drama. Joanna Baillie was my favorite dramatist, and I must confess that I took this course because the Shakespeare class was full, but I am very glad that I had this opportunity.”

At the end of the semester, I was able to report to my department chair that students who successfully completed English 4312: Studies in Drama: British Romantic Drama during the spring 2006 were able to write analytical essays that summarized, explicated, and judged diverse cultural expressions in the plays we read. The students contributed to class discussions with analyses, comparisons, contrasts, and presentations of experiential knowledge informed by close textual readings of Romantic drama and reviews. The students demonstrated generic and periodic understandings of how literary and language studies function through their response papers and the researched critical analysis. The students integrated understandings and applications of skills acquired through the study of literature and language as part of their last response paper (see Appendix), which required them to perform a self-assessment and to discuss the ways in which the skills and strategies they had acquired in this course would be helpful to them in the future. Finally, the students composed a research essay in which secondary materials supplement and support close readings of the drama, an essay that was built, in part, by the cumulative assignments of the secondary source discovery activity, the response papers, the critical analysis proposal, and class discussions. By the end of the course, most students were able to identify historical and current developments in the study of British Romantic drama and were cognizant of the ways in which British Romantic drama reflected the cultural and historical issues of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.