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6 Joanna Baillie.Pdf Joanna 13aillie (1762-1851) Walter Scott called Joanna Baillie "the best dramatic writer" in Britain "since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger." 1 Between r8oo and r826 all of the leading theaters in England, Ireland, Scotland, and the United States produced plays by Baillie, sometimes with great success, with the most widely acclaimed actors playing the leads-among them Edmund Kean, Sarah Siddons, William Charles Macready, Helen Faucit, Ellen Terry, and John Philip Kemble. Her songs in Scots dialect, such as "Woo'd and Mar­ ried and A,'" "The Maid of Llanwellyn," "Saw Ye Johnny Comin?" and "The Gowan Glitters on the Sward," continue to be sung to this day. Baillie was born in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland, on rr September 1762, the child of Dorothea Hunter and the Reverend James Baillie; her twin sis­ ter died within hours of birth. Joanna was a year younger than her brother, Matthew, and two years younger than her sister Agnes, who was her mentor and companion throughout her life. In 1769 her father was appointed minis­ ter of the collegiate church at Hamilton, a town of six thousand, to which the family then moved. Baillie's father was an unpleasant man who discouraged the expression of emotion, and his daughter grew up starved for affection. He also proved a neglectful teacher, imparting to Joanna a firm knowledge of ethics and the Bible but little instruction in reading and writing. In fact, she was unable to read well until she was ten years old, when she was sent to a boarding school in Glasgow; there she became a prankster and a leader. She studied history, writing, geography, drawing, music, and mathematics. She often acted out dramatic scenes of her own invention alone on the roof of the house; her classmates helped perform some of these early dramas, while Joanna designed costumes and served as stage manager. These happy boarding school days came to an end, however, in 1778, when I. Scott to Miss Smith, 4 March r8o8, Familiar Letters ef Sir Walter Scott, vol. r (Boston, r894), 99. 21 22 Joanna Baillie her father died, leaving his family unprovided for. Her mother's brother, William Hunter, a famous London physician, took over support of the family and became the girls' surrogate father. They moved to his estate in Scot­ land, where Joanna took long walks in the countryside, reading the works of Shakespeare and other writers. When William Hunter died in 1783, Joanna and her mother and sister moved to London to keep house for her brother. In 1790 Joanna Baillie published, with Joseph Johnson, Poems; Wherein it is Attempted to Describe Certain Views ef Nature and ef Rustic Manners. The book was barely noticed in the reviews. During this time, Baillie probably met a number of writers and artists in the Joseph Johnson circle. When Matthew married Sophia Denman in 1791, Dorothea Baillie and her daughters moved to Hampstead, where they were to spend the rest of their lives. Hampstead proved a particularly congenial environment for the young poet and budding playwright. In 1798 she published anonymously A Series ef Plays: in Which It is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions ef the Mind. Each Passion being the Subject ef a Tragedy and a Comedy, preceded by an elo­ quent, revolutionary, and immensely influential "Introductory Discourse," from which Wordsworth silently borrowed two years later in his preface to the second edition of his Lyrical Ballads. Her aim, as stated in the "Introduc­ tory Discourse," was a "series of tragedies, of simpler construction, less em­ bellished with poetical decorations, less constrained by that lofty seriousness which has so generally been considered as necessary for the support of tragick dignity, and in which the chief object should be to delineate the progress of the higher passions in the human breast." She strove, she said, to excite the sympathetic imagination and to foster identification with her characters, for "in examining others we know ourselves." Thus, she preferred to portray the ordinary life of ordinary characters speaking more natural language, for, as she observed, "let one simple trait of the human heart, one expression of passion genuine and true to nature, be introduced [into a work full of poetic diction] and it will stand forth alone in the boldness of reality, whilst the false and unnatural around it, fade away upon every side, like the rising exhala­ tions of the morning." Basil and De Monfort, two of the three plays contained in this volume, were among the masterpieces of Baillie's dramatic career. The book created a sensation and was widely and enthusiastically re­ viewed. Mary Berry stayed up all night reading it and wrote in her diary, "The first question upon everybody's lips is, 'Have you read the series of plays?' Everybody talks in the raptures (I always thought they deserved) of the trage­ dies and of the introduction as of a new and admirable piece of criticism." 2 2. Mary Berry, Extracts ef the Journals and Correspondence ef Miss Berry From the Year 1783 to i852, ed. Lady Theresa Lewis, 3 vols. (London, 1865), 2:88. Joanna Baillie Baillie guarded the secret of her authorship carefully, sitting demurely silent, for example, while Anna Letitia Barbauld's circle of literary friends discussed the book. Some suspected Walter Scott. Others argued for Ann Radcliffe or Anne Hunter. Hester Lynch Piozzi insisted that the author must be a woman "because both the heroines are Dames Passees, and a man has no notion of mentioning a female after she is five and twenty." 3 Mary Berry noted that "no man could or would draw such noble, such dignified representations of the female mind as the Countess Albini and Jane de Mountfort [sic]. They often make us clever, captivating, heroic, but never rationally superior." 4 The third edition, published in 1800, removed all doubt, bearing the author's name boldly on the title page. In 1836 the Quarterly Review recalled "the curi­ osity excited in the literary circle ... the incredulity, with which the first rumour that these vigorous and original compositions came from a female hand, was received; and the astonishment, when, after all the ladies who then enjoyed any literary celebrity had been tried and found totally wanting in the splendid faculties developed in those dramas, they were acknowledged by a gentle, quiet and retiring young woman, whose most intimate friends, we believe, had never suspected her extraordinary powers." 5 Another com­ mentator described Baillie as "a small, prim, and Quaker-like looking person, in plain attire, with gentle, unobtrusive manners, and devoid of affectation; rather silent, and more inclined to listen than to talk. There was no tinge of the blue-stocking in her style of conversation, no assumption of conscious importance in her demeanor, and less of literary display than in any author or authoress I had ever been in company with. It was difficult to persuade your­ self that the little, insignificant, and rather commonplace-looking individual before you, could have conceived and embodied with such potent energy, the deadly hatred of De Monfort, or the fiery love of Basil." 6 When De Monfort opened at Drury Lane on 29 April 1800, Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble played the leads. A critic for the Dublin University Magazine noted some years later that "the critics announced the approach of a new era in dramatic literature, and the talents of great actors, then in the zenith, left no doubt that the conceptions of the author would be fully realized. The excitement was great, and the disappointment commensurate. The audience yawned in spite of themselves, in spite of the exquisite poetry, the vigorous passion, and the transcendent acting." 7 The performance was, 3. Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 1788-1821, ed. 0. G. Knapp, 3 vols. (London, r914), 2:r73. 4. Berry, Extracts of the journals and Correspondence, 2:90. 5. Quarterly Review 55 (February r836): 487-513. 6. Dublin University Magazine 37 (April r85r): 529. 7. Ibid., 530. Joanna Baillie nevertheless, repeated eight times. And the demand for the printed plays continued strong. A revised fourth edition came out in 1802, with a fifth following in 1806. Baillie earned three hundred pounds for a second volume, which appeared in 1802, containing three more plays, including Ethwald and The Election. Although she was in demand in the world of letters, she spent much of the day caring for her mother, now aged and blind. In 1804 she brought out a volume entitled Miscellaneous Plays, which went into a second edition the following year. In 1808, the year her mother died, she cemented what would become a long and intimate friendship with Walter Scott. She and her sister Agnes were his guests in Edinburgh during March and April of that year. Shortly thereafter, Scott arranged for Baillie's new play, The Family Legend, to be produced in Edinburgh, penning the prologue himself. The novelist Henry Mackenzie wrote the epilogue.8 Baillie was Scott's guest at Abbotsford in 1817; he describes her then as carrying "her literary reputation as freely and easily as the milk-maid in my country does the leg/en, which she carries on her head, and walks as gracefully with it as a duchess." 9 Admirers of Baillie's works included Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Siddons, William Words­ worth, Anna Jameson, William Ellery Channing, Annabella Milbanke (Lady Byron), Ann Grant of Laggan, Felicia Hemans, Lucy Aikin, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Harriet Martineau, George Ticknor, and Lord Byron, who wrote: "Nothing could do me more honour than the acquaintance of that Lady­ who does not possess a more enthusiastic admirer than myself-she is our only dramatist since Otway & Southerne-I don't except Home." 10 However, Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, took issue with the prevailing opinion of Baillie's Plays on the Passions and attacked them in a lead article in July 1803.
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