ABSTRACT
Although she has been neglected for close to two hundred years, Joanna Baillie is fortunate in the timing of her re-emergence, when scholars are bringing to light eighteenth- and nineteenth-century feminist thought, the operation and control of the public sphere, and the rhetoric of revolutionary politics, as well as rewriting theatre history under the influence of such studies. Because of the rich scholarship that can be brought to bear upon her drama and dramatic theory, even her apparently simple and conventional tenets can reveal their considerable resonance and range. Her classification of drama as a “species of moral writings” in her “Introductory Discourse” to A Series of Plays counts as one of these conventional tenets (1798: 2), falling in with the demand in eighteenth-century treatises on aesthetics for a literature that will both “delight and instruct” and recalling the prevalence of examples from drama in treatises on human nature and morals.
