The Gothic Novel and the Stage

Romantic Appropriations

Francesca Saggini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848934146
• eBook ISBN: 9781317319504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this ground-breaking study Saggini explores the relationship between the late eighteenth-century novel and the theatre, arguing that the implicit theatricality of the Gothic novel made it an obvious source from which dramatists could take ideas. Similarly, elements of the theatre provided inspiration to novelists.

Part I The Gothic Stage

1 A Stage of Tears and Terror: Introducing the Gothic Stage

DOI: 10.4324/9781315654584-1

A thoughtful analysis of ‘Gothic’ should challenge the kind ofliterary history that organizes, delineates, and defines: a literaryhistory that also confines us with some inherited literary concepts,particularly ideas about genre, that can be as confusing asUdolpho’s amazing structures.

Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics ofGothic ¹

Beginning a study of the English Gothic theatre with a chapter entitled‘A Stage of Tears and Terror’ has several implications. Intentionallyventuring across Gérard Genette’s textual thresholds,² the liminal sites that connectprinted text, author and reader, such an introduction wishes to offer asynthesis of the genre and, most of all, to highlight three of the mostdistinctive characteristics of the Gothic drama: the theory ofmise-en-scène, the acting style of its performersand the emotional participation elicited in the audience and physicallydemonstrated by them. From my viewpoint, the complex performative eventwhich I define with the expression ‘Gothic stage’ must be analysed byenquiring into the peculiarities of its nature as ‘spectacle’ – as dramaand performance – rather than just by reading and interpreting itsdramatic texts, however fascinating such an undertaking might be. As aconsequence, I propose a model of analysis of the theatricalcommunication activated by the Gothic which privileges first of allaudience–stage interaction together with the interaction among themembers of the audience, and secondarily the interaction between theaudience and the actors.³

Contemporary theatre historians who have investigated and catalogued thesignifiers of Gothic theatre and the complex meanings associated withthem have critically classified the easily recognizable atmospherics andrecurrent themes of the genre,⁴ comparing it on the basis of these elementswith the better-known manifestations of the Gothic novel. Such anapproach may perhaps miss the mark, overlooking the very essence of acomplex cultural phenomenon, which is very far from our own aestheticsas well as from contemporary theatre practices. The Gothic spectacle –dependent as it was upon the non-verbal – was intrinsically ephemeral,and has been condemned too long to the indifference of the historians. The taskof historically reconstructing this genre is rendered even more elusiveby the fact that most contextual evidence has reached us in the form ofwritten documents: reviews, theatrical critiques,thespian biographies, printed versions, along with the often unreliablecopies of plays deposited with John Larpent, the Lord Chamberlain’sExaminer of Plays from 1778 to 1824. To these we may only addiconographical documents – the actors’ portraits incostume and a few reproductions of theatre interiors.⁵

My project entails the analysis of Gothic drama as a peculiarlytheatrical phenomenon – hence, the emphasis on the word ‘stage’, in ‘AStage of Tears and Terror’, to convey themorphological space and ontological limit of the Gothic theatre. Thestage was the place where the actors moved and spoke, surrounded by thefragile ontological diaphragm of the proscenium arch – thestage–auditorium barrier – behind which bustled teams of stage handswith their increasingly intricate machinery. The interaction betweenstage and stage hands was thus exposed in plain view: if the audiencewas enthralled (and they were), it was owing to collective and vigoroussuspension of disbelief. In other words, as explained by PaulaBackscheider, they enjoyed the sets in a ‘somewhat detached, analyticalmode’,⁶ thuscoupling aesthetic appreciation with emotional engrossment. Only at theend of the century did machinery definitively supersede the liveryservants needed for scene changes, as by then complex stagecraft hadmade human intervention offensive to stage propriety.⁷ Rather temptingly, we might see theGothic performance as a collective rite, which effected ‘atheat-ricalization of the audience’.⁸ The latter was at the same timeself-conscious and reflective, impassioned and detached, as we realizefrom the following review, which describes how the fabulistic horrors ofBlue Beard’s chamber in George Colman’s highly successful BlueBeard; or Female Curiosity! (Drury Lane, 1798) couldquickly give way to laughter:

In the Blue Room, or Charnel House, where theashes of Blue-Beard’s Wives are deposited, thewhole contrivances were thrown into ridicule by want of celerityin the intended transitions. [Michael] KELLY attempted in vainto remove the Spectre of Death. … The Spectre remained, however,incorrigible; and shewed uncommon attention to the audience, bythe most polite bows we ever witnessed from aSpectre! The spectators could not resistthe temptation, and laughed very heartily at thisphenomenon.⁹

The ritual arena par excellence for the exorcism of anxieties andfears,¹⁰ thestage is in my opinion the only space that allows us to concretelyenvision and critically reconstruct the Gothic theatrical event.

In my critical system, ‘tears’ and ‘terror’ represent the constituenttheatrical enactment inscribed upon the Gothic theatre text, which wascreated, and at times intentionally constructed, around the specifictalents of the great tragic and comic actors and actresses whointerpreted its roles. The recurrent and simplistic role coding ofcharacters as villain, heroine and hero (what the Lithuanian semioticianA. J. Greimas called actants, see below, Part Two, Chapter 9) – each with their predictablespheres of action – did not always derive exclusively, as PaulaBackscheider has noted, from the ritualistic aspects of the genre. Wemay assume that it was in fact influenced by the typecasting of theactors, whose specialized repertories, strongly self-referential andhence reassuringly predicable, contributed to the public’s emotionaldetachment, shaped its expectations, and furthered its aestheticpleasure. As recalled by Joseph Donohue, ‘[t]he theatre of the age wasemphatically not a playwright’s theatre but an actor’s theatre, and thesuccessful playwright was one with the knack of tailoring his piece tothe abilities and tastes of players’. Donohue goes on to add:

The play was chiefly a wagon for a star, and the sooner theplaywright realized that his task was to fashion such vehicles,in a self-effacing, even self-degrading way, the sooner heachieved his goal of performance – and counted the proceeds ofhis benefit night. … The orientation of the theatrical eventtowards the actor in character is unmistakable in all theevidence of theatrical life that survives from the period, mostnotably in the playbills. Virtually never is the dramatist’sname mentioned.¹¹

In a theatre associated more with the talent of its performers than withthat of its authors (this period is remembered as the age of John PhilipKemble and Edmund Kean, certainly not of George Colman, Thomas Morton,or John O’Keeffe), the succession of two different acting styles – onelinked to tears and the other to terror – became the metonym of twocontiguous but not coinciding cultural systems, which we maysimplistically define as the neo-classical and the Romantic systems. InAristotelian aesthetics as re-elaborated by eighteenth-centuryplaywrights, the spectators’ tears – a manifestation of tragic catharsisand the fruit of the homeopathic purification of the passions – were thesymbol of an acting style (and therefore a typology of reception) whichwas rational, chastening and, ultimately, re-socializing.

On 10 June 1776, David Garrick, sublime embodiment of the scientificstudy of the passions which formed the basis of the eighteenth-centurynaturalistic school of acting (Denis Diderot’s Paradoxe sur leComédien had appeared c.1773),¹² withdrew from thestage. This event is a sign of the deep changes in the sensibility,morality, didacticism and edifying satire proper to eighteenth-centurytheatre which took place in the last quarter of the century, even inmore mature forms of drama (for example, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’sSchool for Scandal, Drury Lane, 1777), and whichslowly gave way to the increasingly sensational exaltation of thepassions. According to the new aesthetics prevailing at the century’send, tragic action was no longer intended as an instrument for theintellectual refining of the passions. Its purpose became rather theamplification and elevation of those passions, analysed in theirsolitary development, in obedience to an anti-rational and emotional processthat would itself become the focus of meta-literary representation indrama, novel and poetry. Joanna Baillie’s dramatic series, Playson the Passions (published in three volumes between 1798and 1812), Charlotte Dacre’s novel The Passions (1811),and William Collins’s poetic after-piece ‘The Passions. An Ode forMusic’ (first performed in 1750 with music by William Hayes)¹³ are just threesignificant examples of what in Foucauldian terms we might call the lateeighteenth-century aesthetics of emotions and desire.

The contemporary reputation of Collins’s piece may be taken as anillustration of this fruitful transmigration of forms, linkingneoclassic aesthetic hierarchies to the Romantic re-evaluation ofimpassioned expression. Collins’s verses influenced the Gothicnovelists, who appropriated quotes from ‘The Passions’ for comment onthe action and as a mood-setter. For instance, lines one to eight fromthe poem are used by Ann Radcliffe as an epigraph for chapter eleven ofThe Romance of the Forest, in which Adeline beginsher flight from the abbey.

Ah, fear! Ah frantic fear!

I see, I see thee near!

I know thy hurry’d step, thy haggard eye!

Like thee I start, like thee disordered fly!¹⁴

An extremely popular piece and a genuine tour de force of histrionics,‘The Passions’ was recited by great performers such as John PhilipKemble and Sarah Siddons, who gave mimic and oral expression to thethirty passions described by Collins. James Boaden, one of Siddons’sbiographers, recalls the transformation of the written poem into anactorial text:

[Collins’s Ode on the Passions] was acomposition for music, and it could not well have better thanthe voice of Mrs Siddons. She was in truth the organ of passion;but the poet here describes the passion by its sympathies withparticular scenes in nature, and its characteristic expressionwhen fully displayed. The human form under its influence isgiven as the symbol of the passion. The actress who describedthe character lent in a great degree her countenance and hergesture as aids to the beautiful imagery of the poet. This isunavoidable in all stage recitation, and criticism must notproudly reject the living commentary uponlanguage, however forcible.¹⁵

The reports of the second London début of Sarah Siddons (who would justone year later incarnate Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ideal of the Tragic Muse)as she ven-tured out upon the boards of Drury Lane – in the 1782–3season, less than ten years after Garrick’s farewell¹⁶ – clearly emphasize the end-of thecentury change in dramatic aesthetics.

Well I remember (how is it possible I should ever forget?), thesobs, the shrieks, among the tender part of her audience; orthose tears, which manhood, at first, struggled to suppress, butat length grew proud of indulging. We then, indeed, knew theluxury of grief; but the nerves of many a gentle being gave waybefore the intensity of such appeals and fainting fits longalarmed the decorum of the house, filled almost tosuffocation.¹⁷

Dramatic catharsis nolonger depended upon pathemic purification but rather upon theaudience’s overwhelming, empathetic identification with the actors. Thetitle of this chapter, ‘A Stage of Tears and Terror’, thus encourages usto study Gothic drama essentially as a theatrical event, not merely atextual one. At the same time, it strives to underscore the crucialinstitutional aspects that revolutionized the hierarchy of theatregenres (the morphological changes that occurred in the auditoria such asthe enlarging and remodelling of playhouses, new techniques ofillumination, increasingly marked use of stage machinery). In effect,the change in the spatial relationships between actor and audiences, aswell as between the actors themselves, contributed to alterations bothin the repertory of plays and in their actual realization on stage. Thisphenomenon created a widening rift between critical respectability andpublic popularity. It also implied an inexorable sliding away of thetheatre from the spoken word towards gestures, images and specialeffects, which initially had been restricted to the crowded circuses,amphi-theatres and other places of popular entertainment thriving in thecapital.

This slow movement was definitively sanctioned i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction – The Transforming Muses: Theorizing Stage Appropriation
• Part I – The Gothic Stage
• Part II – Performing Stage Appropriation in the Romantic Era: The Languages of the Stage and the Page
• Part III – Practising the Appropriation of the Gothic Stage: Romantic CaseStudies
• Afterword
• Works Cited
• Notes
• Index