Teaching the Theory and Practice of Women's Dramaturgy

At the 1997 MLA session on "Women Playwrights Around 1800," my contribution to the panel was to share some of the discoveries I have made—and problems I have encountered—when teaching British women playwrights who wrote for the London theatre at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the context of a course I taught at Cornell University in 1996 called "Theoretical Approaches to Romantic Theatre and Drama, 1790-1840" (the syllabus is reprinted below), I found that reading plays by writers such as Sophia Lee, Elizabeth Inchbald, Joanna Baillie, and Mary Russell Mitford helped me and my students address with particular urgency a series of topics that a study of Romantic theatre and drama inevitably raises: But why would a study of Romantic women dramatists in particular have the effect of bringing these topics into focus? I believe the answer lies in the fact that teaching the theory and practice of women's dramaturgy around 1800 requires one to theorize about the topic simultaneously with studying it. To varying degrees, one theorizes about the teaching of all courses in the process of creating a syllabus, but it is unavoidable in the case of presenting materials on British Romantic women playwrights, since there are a number of practical problems endemic to the enterprise. First, one needs to determine how to provide an historical overview of the period—one that judiciously represents the significant contributions of women in acting, playwrighting, criticism, and theory—and one that addresses how a focus on women theatre artists challenges those representations of the period currently available. Although Joseph Donohue's two hardback texts from the 1970s—Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age and Theatre in the Age of Kean—are still suberb, women receive little attention in them. Ellen Donkin's Getting into the Act provides a helpful analysis of the conditions women playwrights encountered in what she calls the "post-Garrick era," and Kristina Straub's Sexual Suspects is a tour de force of scholarship that admirably refuses to discuss the construction of masculinity and femininity on the eighteenth-century stage except by attending to the complicated interface of sexuality, gender, class, race, and ethnicity. Still, we need a paperback text that revises representations of British theatre and drama between 1790 and 1840, one that discusses women's contributions through references to male writers and artists who worked within, and outside of, the London theatre scene. Next, one must decide how to present a variety of dramatic genres by women. Because there is no paperback anthology of Romantic women playwrights—not even of Inchbald's or Baillie's plays—it is necessary to create an anthology that can effectively demonstrate how women's dramaturgy developed between 1790 and 1840. Jeffrey Cox's excellent paperback edition of Seven Gothic Dramas includes Joanna Baillie's De Monfort, John Franceschina's hardback Sisters of Gore supplements this text by presenting gothic plays by women, and Adrienne Scullion's paperback collection Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth-Century contains three plays written before 1840 (Baillie's The Family Legend, Marie Therese DeCamp's Smiles and Tears, and Frances Anne Kemble's Francis the First). But there is no collection—not to mention an affordable text—that gives us a sense of women's varied dramaturgical experiments between 1790 and 1840. Third, if one wants to provide a context for these writers' discussion of their navigation of domestic and social arenas—a situation that adds significant information to our understanding of the era's preoccupation with the dichotomy we have come to identify with the terms "closet" and "stage"—a text collecting together the range of critical writings about the stage by women from the Romantic period is an important resource. This theatre theory dramatically …