Seven Gothic Dramas: 1789-1825. (Book Reviews) Theatre Journal Dec 1, 1993

REVIEWS

Seven Gothic Dramas: 1789-1825. (book reviews) Theatre Journal Dec 1, 1993
Michael Gamer. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon-Formation. (Book Review) Studies in Romanticism Dec 22, 2003
Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation & Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes. (book review) Wordsworth Circle Sep 22, 2001
Gothic Documents. A Sourcebook 1700-1820. (Review)_(book review) Journal of European Studies Sep 1, 2000
Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840. (Reviews of Books). (Book Review) Albion Jun 22, 2002
Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. (book review) Yearbook of English Studies Jan 1, 2001
Gothic Pathologies: The Text, The Body and The Law. (Review)_(book review) Studies in Romanticism Dec 22, 2000
Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography. (Review)_(book review) Studies in the Novel Jun 22, 2001
D. L. Macdonald. Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. (Book Review) Studies in Romanticism Jun 22, 2003
Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. (Reviews of Books). (book review) Albion Mar 22, 2002

Theatre Journal, Dec 1993 v45 n4 p562(3)

Seven Gothic Dramas: 1789-1825. (book reviews) Patten, Janice E.

SEVEN GOTHIC DRAMAS, 1789-1825 Edited by Jeffrey N. Cox. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992; pp. 425. $45.00 cloth.

Opinions about the plays which filled London stages during the decades at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century have been plentiful, but readily accessible texts of these theatrical productions have not. Now, critical opinions about the theatre can be based on actual facts and on actual texts. Readers of Gothicism, of the theatre, and of Romanticism can turn to Jeffrey Cox's impressive edition Seven Gothic Plays 1789-1825 to study some of the plays which have been unavailable in a practical sense to the general profession. This volume offers meticulous textual information, as well as comprehensive introductory contextual material of the theatrical world of 1789-1825. Cox is conscientious and painstaking in his introduction to the excellent collection of plays: Francis North's The Kentish Barons, J.C. Cross's Julia of Lotvain, "Monk" Lewis's The Castle Spectre and The Captive, Joanna Baillie's De Montfort, C.R. Maturin's Bertram, and R.B. Peake's The Fate of Frankenstein. During the tumultuous revolutionary period surrounding the rise and fail of Napoleon, these plays were at the heart of London's theatrical world.

In addition to the texts of the plays themselves, Cox supplies a compendium of some of the acting practices of the day as well as performance history and brief critical reviews of each play. As he also mentions in his "Introduction," Gothicism, as a literary tradition, needs to be reconsidered by today's scholarly community, not primarily relegated only to the genre of the novel, but to the genre of theatre. Sadly, it is true that within theatre history, Gothic drama during the period from 1789-1825, as Cox notes, has been neglected, disappearing "down a vampire trap of dramatic history" (2). In fact, Cox argues that we as teachers of drama and as teachers of poetry have contributed to this "devaluation of the past" (3). Extending Jerome McGann's conception of "Romantic ideology," Cox postulates a "dramatic ideology" found in the treatment of this period's drama. Dramatic ideology becomes defined by two contrary forces: a peak phenomenon which accentuates key periods in theatrical history leaving others in relative silence and a "culture gap" in which canonized plays are only seen by their commonality to other eras and other dramatic traditions, Therefore, Cox argues that drama during this key period (he carefully avoids its more conventional terminology of Romantic period) is viewed as either reflective of Elizabethan drama or deeply divided as closet drama or as popular "stagey" performance drama.

After setting up this initial binary division by standard critics, Cox then shows why his bringing forth new textual editions of significant Gothic plays of the period is particularly important to a general understanding of the whole period. Gothicism, in particular, affords its writers a way to subvert the standard or conventional viewpoints of the day. Revolutionary in subject matter, Gothic drama becomes the dynamic alternative to traditional ways of presenting drama. He suggests that Gothicism, particularly Gothic drama, is at odds with more prominent ideological and aesthetic structures, for "changes within the theater and the drama offer an opportunity for writers to work out in artistic terms the ideological struggles of the era of Burke and Paine" (12). It is significant that Cox links the development of the dramatic form during this period to the revolutionary trends of the day, illustrating the importance of marginal and subversive elements toward new and startling changes, specifically those which move from imprisonment to liberation. This movement can be seen in all aspects of the drama during this period. According to Cox, "The Gothic, particularly in the drama and the theater, is a collective, historical construct" (8).

While it is true that "the Gothic... can tell us much about the drama and culture of its day" (4), we must be beware of the dangers of this approach. Unfortunately the term Gothicism itself has a negative connotation which, when used to inform an already negatively-biased audience, may not help as much as Cox anticipates. If, however, we read his "Introduction" with a careful eye to appreciate only the overview he is presenting and not read it as if it were purposing the final work on the theatrical experience during this period, then we are very well informed. For Cox does historicize and contextualize Gothic drama of this period with methodical scholarly details. He provides here, as he did in his previous, excellent book In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England and France, a clearly-written, coherent, and comprehensive summary of the development of a specific movement within an interdisciplinary flamework.

The textual editing of each of the plays in this volume is impressive. It offers to students of these dramas a textual apparatus of the highest quality. The difficulty of compiling the minutiae of these editions, as well as comparing the various versions of each of these dramas, is barely evident because of Cox's meticulous and skilful editing. As many Shakespearean scholars have discovered, different texts mean different things. For example, in Michael Warren's 1991 edition of King Lear, folio and quarto versions are presented on facing pages, emphasizing gaps which create complex variations in meaning. Confronting similar problems of textual considerations head on, Cox develops an elaborate system of differentiating between the acting, the Lord Chamberlain's (Larpent), first, variant, and final versions.

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of Cox's edition is that it opens up questions of performance drama during this controversial episode of theatre history. Critics clearly point to the differences between acting and written texts, In choosing all aspects of these dramas in his texts, Cox also articulates his own bias as he follows McGann's assertion in A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism that "literary works are fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products" (44). Cox further argues that these texts are "complex social products, subject to pressures from authors, theaters, printing houses, the government, and of course, the audience, and reading public" (80), The one slight problem with this approach is that when Cox begins to analyze an individual play, he does so from this ideological perspective. For example, in the case of Joanna Baillie, it can certainly be argued that there is a great deal more to her plays than that "they offer a critique of various conventional modes of dramatizing women, particularly those modes we identify with the Gothic" (52-3). One might argue, that Baillie, in her systemized, almost analytical approach, articulates man's sublime and unconscious fear of death, disintegration of self, and the play of illusion in man's consciousness. In fact, John Philip Kemble once referred to her as the "metaphysical" dramatist, suggesting that she dealt with conceptions about the passions which seemed to be beyond the physical world. But this debate is precisely the provocative appeal of Cox's edition, which needs to be read in connection with other books that have also recently opened up the subject of theatrical works of this period. What we have needed for a long time is a book such as Jeffrey Cox's Seven Gothic Dramas which opens up this whole period for intellectual investigation. Seven Gothic Dramas raises "questions about our accepted dramatic and theoretical histories" (71), and it introduces to readers plays which have been until now only on dark musty shelves, unopened and unappreciated.

JANICE E. PATTEN

San Jose State University

Studies in Romanticism, Winter 2003 v42 i4 p587(6)

Michael Gamer. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon-Formation. (Book Review) Richter, David H.

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 255. $59.95.

The gothic was a harbinger of romanticism, but, aside from asserting the priority of the gothic, that post hoc formula leaves the historical relationship entirely unexplained. We often talk loosely about movements in literary history affecting other movements, but just what does that involve? Exactly how did the gothic cause the romantic movement to be what it was? What were the agents and agencies involved and how did they operate? Michael Gamer's astute monograph has not only given a convincing historical account of how the prior existence of the gothic as a genre affected three important writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but has done so in a way that suggests the more general value of his methods.

The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky said that, in literary history, descent passes not from father to son but from uncle to nephew, and indeed Michael Garner imagines the first generation of romantic writers as young adults embarrassed by their familial relationship to a wealthy but utterly disreputable uncle with libidinous personal habits and dangerous political associations. Around 1798, the gothic was undoubtedly the most popular literary genre in England: gothic novels written by imitators of Ann Radcliffe dominated not only book sales but, even more spectacularly, borrowings from circulating libraries, while gothic dramas such as Matthew Lewis' Castle Spectre (1797) could run for three solid months at Drury Lane.

But it was also the most despised literary genre. The gothic had been gendered as female reading, the facts about its actual readership to the contrary notwithstanding. And the female reader was characterized as vague and dreamy, unruddered, literal-minded, easily influenced, seducible into strong emotions and unenlightened thoughts by intense representations of unusual, extreme, sometimes supernatural events. Women were in danger from such literature, and so, with their greater responsibilities, were the men who surrendered to it. That Ambrosio, or The Monk, had been written by a member of parliament was revealed with the publication of the second edition in September of 1796, and the immediate result was an unparalleled orgy of vilification of the novel for its supposed obscenity and blasphemy. In the wake of this drubbing, the monthly periodicals that molded critical opinion among the cultural elite, the Monthly Review, the Critical Review, and the more recently founded British Critic and Anti-Jacobin Review, closed ranks to attack gothic novels and other works that could be associated with the gothic, not only on aesthetic but on political grounds. As the war with Napoleonic France grew ever fiercer, the periodicals attacked anything that smacked of German romance, of the Sturm und Drang movement, as a dangerous foreign influence, revolutionary or anarchistic, and therefore deeply unpatriotic, just as French cuisine in recent days has been politicized as unpatriotic in the United States during the current Gulf War.

A difficult dilemma thus greeted any young writer hoping for both popularity, with its financial rewards, and admission into the literary canon, which seemed to be controlled by the Kulturtrager who wrote for the literary reviews. Gamer's chapters on William Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie, and Walter Scott explain how each figure negotiated this dilemma, performing an exquisite dance in response, appealing to the popular audience's taste for elements of the gothic while simultaneously distancing their work, each in different ways, from the taint that genre had acquired.

In this way the gothic became part of what Garner calls the "ideology of romanticism"--using that contested word "ideology" in both of its opposed senses. Romanticism was informed by the world-view of the gothic in many ways, including its intense subjectivity, its preference for the sublime over the beautiful, its supernaturalism, natural and otherwise. But the gothic was also its "ideology" in the sense of false consciousness: it was the genre belonging to "low" culture that romanticism absorbed while pretending to reject it. "Given the cultural status of gothic after 1797 ... this book argues ... that poets working with gothic materials at the turn of the nineteenth century to some degree must take on a double perspective" (95, italics Gamer's).

Gamer understands Wordsworth as beginning in a rather haphazard way the negotiations between the part of himself that had an all-too-human "craving for extraordinary incident" and the other part, the bard of humble life that he was to become. The poetry he was composing at the last stages of formation of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798) included both "strongly gothic" material (such as his play The Borderers) and material that takes shape as anti-gothic parody (such as "The Idiot Boy" and "The Thorn"). This initial negotiation works, according to Garner, in terms of modes of reading: in Lyrical Ballads gothic materials were to be deployed, but not the credulous mode of reading associated with the genre. Instead, the fully dramatized speakers of the most gothic poems were set up to be viewed with ironic distance by the reader. When Wordsworth returned in March of 1799 from Iris trip to Germany with Coleridge, he was greeted by the hostile notices of Lyrical Ballads, including Southey's attack in the Critical Review on its prevalent "superstition" and "German sublimity," which set the tone for the other reviews. Implicit irony, apparently, was just not enough to distance the poetry from the despised gothic.

In reshaping the book for the second edition (1800), Wordsworth in effect responded to this criticism. He composed enough pastoral poetry to make that genre, rather than gothic or gothic parody, set the dominant tone. Within the two volumes, Coleridge's contributions are both less significant, less prominent, and less apt to scream "gothic." "The Ancient Mariner," for example, was subtitled "A Poet's Reverie," and moved from the position of first poem in the volume to somewhere around the middle. "The Ballad of the Dark Ladle" was retitled "Love." And Wordsworth decided not to include at all Parts 1 and 2 of "Christabel," which Coleridge had intended for the new edition, but whose resemblance to "The Ancient Mariner" was too close for comfort. The volume concluded instead with "Michael." Finally, Wordsworth wrote an introduction to the volumes that argued, among other things, that his own writings were dedicated to reforming the public taste that the reviewers had just accused him of pandering to: "the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse. When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort with which I have endeavoured to counteract it." The "heavy irony," for Garner, is that the critical opinions Wordsworth adopted in the 1800 Preface were derived from the periodical publications and private notes of the friend whose poem Wordsworth was rejecting (126).

Around the same time as Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie, a dramatist generally considered today as working in the gothic tradition of Lewis' Castle Spectre, was also taking a Wordsworthian tack, arguing in the preface to her first volume of Plays on the Passions (1798), that the supernatural does not appear onstage, except in terms of the superstition operating in the disturbed minds of her characters who consider themselves in the grip of the supernatural. As this plays out on stage, of course, the audience is able to have things both ways: the excitement of the supernatural without the need for spectacular staging (Gamer 139). Her play De Monfort, set in Germany in the Middle Ages, was a success when staged at Drury Lane in 1800 with Kemble and Siddons in the male and female leads. But it was the critical reaction to her success, coming at a time when the London stage was dominated by the melodramas of Kotzebue, and when the monitors of culture were ever more hostile to anything German, that pushed Baillie in a different direction, one that, ironically, transgressed the post-enlightenment distaste for supernatural spectacle. Ethwald (1802) included Druids and Druidesses, "crowds of terrible specters," and all the special effects of light and sound of which the theater was capable. The saving grace of Ethwald was that all the mysteries and magic were home grown--British spectres rather than imported German ones--so that the play could be viewed culturally as in the tradition of Shakespeare's Macbeth, than which nothing could be more popular or more respectable.