ABSTRACT
How should one imagine Joanna Baillie's plays being staged? Of course, for the most part, her dramatic texts are simply analyzed apart from the stage. A strong critical tradition insists upon separating her dramas — and, in fact, Romantic literary drama as a whole — from the theatre of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 1 While some see this divorce between stage and page arising from Baillie's inability to write stageable plays, the most interesting recent work on her plays has argued that Baillie faced a hopelessly degraded theatre and was thus forced to seek to reform the stage through a turn to the “closet,” where she could create an experimental drama. 2 While we have learned much from this fine work on Baillie as a dramatic reformer, I think we misconstrue her art when we see her reforms as expressing either a generalized anti-theatrical prejudice or even a rejection of the contemporary stage; rather, her reforms seek to use the theatrical means available on the London stage of her day to create a contemporary form of tragedy. Put simply, Baillie finds in the spectacular effects of the stage of her day the dramaturgical strategies she needs to create her drama of the passions (see section II below).
