The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1815

Among dramas written in the period between 1795 and 1800, Sarah Burdett reminds us, “we find a whole array of dagger-wielding and murderous women” (194)—and we might add pistol-packing mamas, whose maternal status complicates all the interpretative questions that surround the phenomenon. In the opening words of her book, Burdett defines its subject matter concisely: “In the period of the French Revolution, the arms-bearing woman comes to stand in Britain as a representative of extreme political and social disruption” (1). She notes the attention that the general topic has attracted in recent years, with more specific reference to the theatre in Wendy C. Nielsen’s Women Warriors in Romantic Drama and, for a slightly earlier phase, Paula Backscheider’s Women in Wartime. These leave substantial room for “a diachronic assessment that fully unpacks the far-reaching and eclectic implications attached to arms-bearing women on the British Romantic stage” (8).These statements adequately serve to indicate what is to follow. The chapters are organized topically but follow a loose chronological sequence. They cover a broad range of concerns, relating to the course of events in France and the reactions in Britain as expressed inside and outside the dramatic world. Burdett insists on the need to consider popular shows in the playhouse as well as the more literary vein of closet dramas and study as far as possible performances as well as texts. She discusses works by canonical authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Inchbald, Ann Radcliffe, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Robert Southey but juxtaposes these with little known works such as a tragedy by the Irish vicar Matthew West called Female Heroism (1803) that few of us can ever have heard of. One merit of the study is that its scope is extended to performances in Dublin as well as London, though not much to the English provinces or Edinburgh. Another is that it also looks at the state of texts as presented to successive examiners for the stage (John Larpent and George Colman the Younger, neither popular with the playwrights of their time) to explore possible censorship of radical material. As the passages cited indicate, Burdett has a wide command of secondary sources, bolstering her argument with frequent allusions to a litany of recent books and articles. It will be apparent that her interest is primarily in the ideological issues at stake and only secondarily in matters that may concern theatrical historians regarding the qualities of a given play in terms of setting, characterization, dramatic tempo, speech patterns, style of dialogue, audience reaction, and so on. But the chosen thrust of the book is open and explicit, and we cannot have everything.As one proceeds through the book, a clear structure emerges, with sharply defined themes assigned to each chapter. The first chapter consists of an introductory section discussing methodology and setting out the underlying historical context, touching on matters such as the way in which “French women’s mass participation in revolutionary violence earned them a reputation as monstrous, savage, and entirely unfeminine” (11). Burdett does not disguise her feeling that this response—as reflected, for instance, in the caricatures of Thomas Rowlandson—was based on crude stereotypes, and throughout the work she displays little sympathy for conservative views such as those of Hannah More, Laetitia Hawkins, and (on this issue of female warriors) Mary Wollstonecraft. Unsurprisingly, Edmund Burke’s views—reflected, for example, in his comments on “the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women” (qtd. 14)—do not fare any better.The two chapters that follow are perhaps the most successful in the book. Chapter 2 uses plays by Inchbald to show how she converts the urtext that she is adapting to a more progressive end, for example, in Next Door Neighbours (1791), in which she aligns Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s L’indigent (1772) to a different end. The French author “supports contemporary theories of male amelioration” (i.e., the idea that rakes can be reformed by the supine delicacy of women). While his characterization of a leading man in the drama “enforces the efficacy of feminine weakness in mollifying male severity,” in Next Door Neighbours “Inchbald revises [her equivalent character] Blackman’s conduct so as to rebuff the conjecture” (49). A strong and sometimes violent response is needed to deter male predators, a mode of self-defense that the pistol-bearing heroine is, unlike Mercier’s, willing (and potentially able) to employ. Chapter 3 makes an interesting dual case. The first is that Shakespeare’s fictional Lady Macbeth, as performed by Sarah Siddons in 1794, “ghosts” the fate of the recently executed Marie Antoinette. The second concerns the portrayal in 1797 by Sarah Yates of Margaret of Anjou (the wife of Henry VI, best remembered for her role in Shakespeare’s Henry VI) in a revival of the near forgotten tragedy by Thomas Francklin The Earl of Warwick (1766), that “encapsulates the surprising kinship between the eighteenth-century actress and the contemporary female warrior” (120). This reading invokes the currently hot topic of celebrity, with the vast “circulation of celebrity news and gossip” (Felicity Nussbaum qtd. 105) leading to a shift of emphasis from dramatists to actors and (principally) actresses as private and public roles confusingly merged.The remaining chapters are less striking. Chapter 4 considers the theatrical impact of Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Marat—Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793) is appositely reproduced—but Burdett defeats expectations by choosing not to discuss David’s rendition of the murdered revolutionary. In chapter 5, Burdett examines the often melodramatic versions on the British stage of German plays by Friedrich Schiller and August von Kotzebue, among others. This is where Sheridan’s Pizarro (1799) and Coleridge’s Remorse (1813) make their entrance. The latter, much revised play is given its own consideration in chapter 6, suitably in view of the greater presence of the work in modern Coleridge scholarship. Burdett mentions the passage in the first canto of what she bafflingly terms Byron’s “ballad Childe Harold” (253), where the hero reflects on the heroic actions of the “Spanish maid … all unsex’d,” meaning Agustina de Aragón, who resisted the French at the siege of Zaragoza in 1808. An epilogue describes the exit of the armed woman from postwar drama and ends with somewhat inflated claims for significance in multiple areas, not in keeping with the overall tone and texture of this otherwise intelligent study.