Miss Scott and Miss Macauley: “Genius Comes in All Disguises”

Abstract

The first third of the nineteenth century is described by most theatre historians, from the enormously influential William Archer down to the present day, as the “winter solstice” of the British stage. The generally held estimation of the theatre in Britain at this time is that it was a wilderness of vulgarity, bad writing, and self-indulgent acting that pandered to the lowest common denominator of popular taste. This judgment is, of course, an ideological construct, and one that began to be forged at the time to which it is applied. I would contend that “the decline of the drama” was a concept generated in the press and in critical writing of the period for the particular purposes of a newly ascendant hegemonic fraction, the literate (and overwhelmingly male) middle classes, whose project was to recapture the stage, a powerful medium of communication, for the exclusive transmission of their own voice. One tool of this appropriation was the assertion of a superior public morality; and for that purpose it was necessary to cleanse the stage of its immoral associations—especially its association with independent women. It has recently been argued, by Julie Carlson, that “anxieties about women…drive the age's antitheatricality” and account for the failure of the canonical Romantic writers to produce plays.