The Function of the Dramatic Closet at the Present Time

Might "closet drama" be at the center, rather than the margins, of British dramaturgical and scholarly history? No idea about dramatic writing is more closely associated with the Romantic period in Britain or more revealing of the interaction between American scholarship and theatre practice than the idea of "closet drama." Although plays written to be read had been around for some time before the Romantic period—and continue to be written to the present day—still we associate the term with the Romantic period in Britain. Furthermore, the term "closet drama" has played an especially important role in marking the boundaries between literary and theatrical culture and male and female authors. Because the idea of "closet drama" continues to influence our historiographic and pedagogical discourse about women's writing, theatre history, and literary history in the years around 1800 in Britain, I want to suggest a conceptual framework for thinking about what we do when we write about closet drama. As a case in point, I will look at the effect of "closet drama" on contemporary thinking about British women's playwriting in the years just after the French Revolution. The effect of this concept can be seen by looking from several different perspectives at the simple statement "Women around 1800 wrote closet dramas." From one perspective, when scholars make this statement—"Women around 1800 wrote closet dramas"—they are emphasizing the significance of decisions by some women writers to use certain dramaturgic forms and venues of publication. Drama written to be read rather than performed—or whose performance was not its author's main measure of her work's successful delivery to the public—came to matter in new ways around 1800 in Britain, perhaps particularly to women writers and readers. Although the historical record shows that many women did in fact write dramatic pieces for public performance, the story of the closeted female dramatist is one that, under the influence of a high literary feminist historiography, has a stronghold on scholarly imaginations. However, to make the assertion that women wrote closet dramas is not to end all inquiry. A woman playwright may have written dramas to be read for many reasons. She may have sought to reach the public in new ways, to avoid the aesthetic interference of theatrical practitioners, or to exploit the formal, aesthetic, and psychological potentials of writing drama for readers. Typically, however, scholars do not identify the differences between the closets for which various writers—both women and men—wrote, nor how writers like Joanna Baillie and Lord Byron, for example, inhabited their particular closets. (For Byron the idea of "mental theatre" provides an aggressive defense against the public's judgment; for Baillie the closet enables a strategic humility and flexibility in the face of theatrical pragmatics while guaranteeing a public for her plays.) The "Introductory Discourse" to Baillie's A Series of Plays (1798—volume 1 of the multi-volume project referred to as the "Plays on the Passions") states Baillie's interest in publicly staging private passions. Not surprisingly, Baillie's plays confound any neat distinction between writing for the closet and for the stage. Furthermore, how critics and readers received a writer's plays was influenced by public discourse about that writer's relationship to both the stage and the closet. So, by implying that "closet drama" was a distinct historical phenomenon, rather than an array of strategic maneuvers, the statement "Women around 1800 wrote closet dramas" imprecisely blurs the nuances of how the concept of "closet drama" was used by authors—particularly women—and by their publics. In addition to being a description of an historical phenomenon, the statement that women around 1800 wrote closet dramas is also an historiographic utterance, a …