ABSTRACT
Joanna Baillie, The Election (ed. Thomas C. Crochunis, Shippensburg University)
Joanna Baillie, the most prolific of the playwrights included in this collection (27 plays published), placed The Election as the first play in her second volume of the Series of Plays [on] the Stronger Passions in 1802. Baillie’s first anonymously published volume had received considerable attention and criticism, and the second volume continued the project begun in the first and, in part, responded to the criticism that the precursor had received. A comedy on the passion of hatred that serves as the companion to her now-familiar DeMonfort, the play dramatizes the agonistic, class-inflected enmity of one man for another and the local election upon which it centers. As in many of Baillie’s plays, class and homosocial struggle play a crucial role, as do the complex effects of the passionate excesses of individuals on families and communities.
