The english romantic closet: Women theatre artists, Joanna Baillie, and Basil
While revisionist studies of English Romantic drama began to proliferate after 1966,' they nevertheless tended in several directions that reinforced traditional perceptions of the era as antitheatrical and therefore less important to theatre historians: they highlighted the poetic over the performative element (and thus the aesthetic over the historical) in their discussion of closet plays; and they ignored women's contributions to the theatre and dramatic literature of the period. Addressing the former problem, scholars have recently investigated the historical contexts of Romantic drama to show how these plays respond to the era's political, cultural, and theatrical events.8 One of these contexts is the performance history of particular closet plays, a study of which has helped undermine the closet/stage dichotomy used in the past to hinder appreciation of what Marilyn Gaull has called "the apparent necessity of theatrical experience" during the Romantic age (255). Anne K. Mellor's work is indispensable for addressing the second problem, the neglect of women theatre artists. Both. Romanticism and Feminism (1988) and Romanticism and Gender (1993) show how conceptions of the English Romantic period change when its texts are read from feminist perspectives.' The same is true for the period's theatre and drama. Once we begin to look at the issues raised by women associated with early—nineteenth-century London theatre and how their ideas were framed in relation to these writers' gendered position on public and private stages, then other scenes appear that reveal the era's astonishing theatricality. The lens of gender brings into crisp focus the contours of the Romantic stage. For instance, the closet play comes into view as a genre especially well suited for providing women with a forum for dramatic experimentation within the privacy of their homes, just as the late-eighteenth-century private theatrical underscored (and capitalized upon) the theatricality of domestic life by giving women unusually intensive experiences in playwrighting, stage management, and acting/ Read in the