ABSTRACT
This very title of Joanna Baillie's 1798 volume “Plays on the Passions” gives us a starting point to think about the teaching and presenting of her dramas. Her curious use of the word passions, a term frequently invoked in relation to British Romanticism, has been variously interpreted by recent scholars. In Romantic Ideology Unmasked, I connected Baillie's references to passions to her political, proto-feminist agenda (Purinton 1994: 125–62). Catherine Burroughs has demonstrated how we might understand passions in relation to the transitional acting styles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Burroughs 1997: 110–42). Jeffrey Cox and Michael Gamer associate Baillie's passions with the legacy of the Gothic upon which many of her dramas draw (Cox 1992: 50–57; Gamer 2000: 127–62). Terence Hoagwood has suggested that passions may have been the marketing strategy that Baillie recognized as essential to sell her dramas to the public (Hoagwood 2001: 293–316). Andrea Henderson has connected Baillie's passions to the period's aesthetic tastes, particularly those of fashion, and Anne Mellor associates Baillie's passions with the “Wise woman” who combines the nation's exemplary characteristics of rational prudence and sympathetic understanding (Henderson 1997: 198–228; Mellor 2000: 40–46). My most recent work on Baillie's dramas (2001) suggests that the passions might be associated with the medical and scientific revolutions of the Romantic period, particularly in their examination of female sexuality and hysteria. Baillie's uncle, Dr. William Hunter, and her brother, Dr. Matthew Baillie, were renowned physicians whose anatomical theatres were the sites of medical experimentation and instruction (“Life of Joanna Baillie” 1853: ix). 1
