PERFORMING ROBERT BURNS ‘This book is a reminder that experiencing Burns has always been as much a voice or an event as pages in a book. In our time, as in his own, Burns is encountered as recitation, on stage and screen, in speeches, preeminently as song, and in the drama and debates surrounding new discoveries and new editions. Contributors to this imaginative new interdisciplinary collection bridge the divide between performers and scholars, with readable but authoritative short essays that will spark interest in all Burnsians and open up new directions for Burns research.’ Patrick Scott, University of South Carolina Examines representations of Robert Burns and his work in a wide range of performance modes This book opens up fresh aspects of performance and performativity and their impact on our perception of Robert Burns and his work. Bringing together leading experts on music, song, drama, public ceremonial and literature, it studies Burns as a performed and performative construct. It explores ways in which he is encountered as a living author, setting the popularity of his poetry and songs in the context of his representation in popular and Gerard Carruthers Edited by Ian Brown culture. Ian Brown is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at Glasgow University and Professor Emeritus in Drama at Kingston University. WALTER SCOTT Gerard Carruthers FRSE is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. AND SHORT Cover image: www.iangeorgesonphotography.co.uk ISBN 978-1-4744-5714-9 Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk FICTION edinburghuniversitypress.com Daniel Cook Walter Scott and Short Fiction ‘I begged to have a specimen of his talent as we went along.’ Walter Scott, Redgauntlet Walter Scott and Short Fiction Daniel Cook Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Daniel Cook, 2021 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 8713 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 8715 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 8716 0 (epub) The right of Daniel Cook to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1. Scott and Shorter Fiction 13 2. Wandering Tales 36 3. Croftangry’s Narrative 61 4. The Highland Stories 79 5. An Indian Novella 106 6. Gothic Keepsakes 132 7. Fantastic and Bizarro 149 Afterword: The Modern Scottish Short Story 171 Bibliography 183 Index 198 Chapter 1 Scott and Shorter Fiction Scott was the most popular Romantic poet writing chiefly in English before Byron appeared on the scene.1 As a novelist, the ‘Author of Waverley’ dominated the marketplace throughout the nineteenth century. An experienced storyteller, it should be no surprise that he also excelled in short-form imaginative prose. In fact, Scott had been a short story writer of sorts throughout his long career – not just in the late 1820s. Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan even goes so far as to argue that the Waverley Novels resemble in spirit if not in size ‘a collection of short stories’.2 Scott’s book-length narrative poems, begin- ning with The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, also include plenty of self-contained tales, framing narratives and other features associated with the short-form prose works.3 While the poems and novels could be approached as though they contain short stories, in certain parts, there is some debate to be had about which of the outputs that look more like short stories count as single short stories. Alison Lumsden puts it well: Chronicles of the Canongate ‘may not be a novel, but nor is it simply a conventional collection of short stories’.4 ‘The substantial integration of its constituent parts’, says Gerard Lee McKeever, ‘certainly renders Chronicles more than a miscellany’.5 Print setting clearly matters when reading Scott’s shorter fiction, but in surprising and often shifting ways. By any formal or generic definition it is clear that Scott’s shorter fictions came in different shapes and sizes, and live in different types of publications, should we seek them out. Even completed novels were aug- mented with snatches of new prose that ought to be treated as separate stories. A belatedly published fictional anecdote with an unspeakable twist, ‘The Bridal of Janet Dalrymple’ extends the lurid reach of its parent novel more than a decade after The Bride of Lammermoor first appeared in print, in 1819. Here, Scott rewards loyal readers with new material that can equally stand on its own as an innovative take on the family curse subgenre of Gothic fiction. In The Antiquary, Scott 14 Walter Scott and Short Fiction surrounds ‘The Fortunes of Martin Waldeck’ with a disinterested audi- ence: the antiquary Oldbuck finds the tale too fanciful, and the conman Dousterswivel distracts his target Sir Arthur Wardour from interpreting the story’s intended purpose. Effectively commissioned by another char- acter (a fed-up law student), ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ is a masterclass of literary demonism that would have pleased fans of Robert Burns’s supernatural narrative poem ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. Continuing with the rest of the novel, Redgauntlet, only later will we appreciate the addi- tional symbolic importance of ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ as revealed in a throwaway remark: noticing that a distinguishing mark on his uncle’s face resembles a similar description within the story, Latimer (the target audience) realises that he is in fact a Redgauntlet. Within the novel, in other words, Willie’s story is simultaneously digressive and propulsive. Read on their own, as digressive, this and other inset tales still have their own structural integrity (beginnings, middles and endings). Often there is no definitive point at which we can extract the inset tale without losing some content, context or continuity. What we call ‘Donnerhugel’s Narrative’ is really another, toned-down attempt at what had initially been an overly salacious story (to the mind of the target audience within the novel, Anne of Geierstein). Are inter- polated fictions essentially ‘short stories’, or do we have to read them differently? Graham Good cautions against using the term interpola- tion when discussing in-text tales delivered by characters in novels as it seems ‘a little ill-mannered’, presumably because it implies that the tale is an expendable distraction.6 Etymologically, though, an interpo- lated fiction would suggest a creative, dynamic relationship with the wider text (interpolat means ‘refurbished, altered’; the verb interpo- lare comprises inter, ‘between’, and polare, which relates to polire, ‘to polish’). ‘Donnerhugel’s Narrative’ can be treated as a Gothic short story with its own beginning, middle and end (though it is perhaps too long for anthologists and short story historians). All the same, as with Redgauntlet, the text speaks back to larger legendary narratives around a notable family. Anthologising the tale would obscure the fact that what we call ‘Donnerhugel’s Narrative’ (as marked on the page with a chapter break and the Gothic font of the title) is in fact a second telling. And in the second telling we have at least two stories laid out before us: one that happens (the admired, benign witch is accidently killed by her husband) and one that does not (the sorcerer or his daughter will harm, curse or perhaps kill Sir Herman). Raising but quickly dashing parallel romance stories with Anne (the eponymous heroine of the novel), Scott invites us to anticipate vastly different outcomes for Sir Herman. Will the twist be something along Scott and Shorter Fiction 15 the lines of a charge of unholy sorcery levelled against the house of Arnheim, a reversal of Rudolph’s attentiveness to Arthur’s zealous vir- tuousness? Or will the twist be cancelled out completely? The shorter form does not demand resolution in the way a lengthy novel typically does; one relies on a single incident or item, the other on plotted devel- opment. Short stories reward an appreciation of the rules of fiction. Novels tend to encourage an investment in characters or events. In the shorter fictions Scott warped formulas associated with his novels and long poems. Readers of his early translations from German ballads might have anticipated reworkings of the folkloric theme of love and death in the nominally Germanic tales.7 True to form, ‘Donnerhugel’s Narrative’ introduces in turn a mysterious sorcerer, an even more myste- rious sorceress (doubling up as an exotic love interest) and (very briefly) a mischievous baroness. Far from being agents of evil, though, they are victimised by distrustful locals (and fairytale readers by extension). Scott finally shows us a working magic mirror in ‘My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror’ (The Keepsake for 1829), having merely mentioned the hearsay surrounding Dame Gourlay’s damning vision of a bigamist in his novel The Bride of Lammermoor. But plot-wise the photorealistic vision in ‘Margaret’s Mirror’ is redundant, let alone fakeable. An authoritative letter confirms the news of the husband’s bigamy, and this revelation more completely overwhelms the wife, Lady Forester. Finally adopting the theatrics of a Gothic magic lantern show, Scott ultimately delivers a neo-Restoration amatory fiction in which the wronged woman deals with the fallout caused by an out-of-date libertine.