Episode 111: Warning: Armed Women! (w/ Dr. Sarah Burdett)

Introduction

0:00Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Liger. At the height of the French Revolution, a new fear gripped many people in England. Armed women. Scenes like the storming of the Bastille and riots over the price of bread in Paris, in which women figured prominently, led to concerns like the one expressed in a 1795 letter to a magazine, in which the writer worried

0:34that young and beautiful women might quit the quiet scenes of domestic life to riot in the scenes of blood that were occurring across the English Channel. In fact, there were already plenty of arms-bearing women in Britain, but in this case, on the stage. The figure of the armed woman is the subject of our guest's new book. Dr. Sarah Burnett is the author of The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789 to 1815. Sarah is a member of the Faculty of

1:08English at the University of Cambridge, and she was one of our guests for episode 43 of this show, when we discussed her work on melodrama and the Napoleonic Theatre Project. Sarah, welcome back.

French Revolution Context

1:19Thank you for having me back. I mentioned the French Revolution in the intro to this episode, but could you tell us more about that time period? What's going on in the world, both politically and theatrically? And why does that time make the figure of the arms-bearing woman such a provocative one? Yeah, so the French Revolution really does have a profound impact across the whole of Europe. So the movement sought to establish a government that was founded on the precepts of equality,

1:51liberty and fraternity. It witnessed the efforts of the French people to overthrow the Anchant Regime and introduce a constitutional monarchy with the aim of benefiting the many over the few. Now, early on, the movement was widely supported by British liberals, who viewed it as comparable to Britain's own glorious revolution of 1688. But this early enthusiasm for the revolution begins to wane in late 1792, around that time, as the movement deteriorates into anarchy and bloodshed. So the years, like I say,

2:241792 to 1794, which constitute the reign of terror, witness a series of bloodthirsty massacres. The French king and queen are both executed, and we get the outbreak of war between Britain and France. As such, revolutionary sympathisers in Britain are forced to withdraw their prior support for the revolution, publicly at least, to avoid aligning themselves with the anarchy and barbarity that had come to characterise the movement. But despite this decline in enthusiasm for the revolution itself,

2:57the movement introduced a sort of political rhetoric that had a profound and lasting impact right across Europe, especially when it came to arguments regarding sex and gender. So while the revolutionaries fought specifically for the rights of man, you know, hence that that term fraternity being part of their motto, the language of natural rights and inherent equality that was used to make this case was readily appropriated by women, such as Alain de Gouges in France and Mary Wollstonecraft

3:29in Britain, in order to champion the rights of women. It seemed really hypocritical ultimately to these women that the revolutionaries should be limiting supposedly natural human rights to just one half of the human race. So the French Revolution really opened the floodgates for a barrage of what we'd now call proto-feminist literature that created major anxieties among patriarchal commentators desperate to uphold the established sexual hierarchy. And this gender panic was amplified hugely by the martial

4:03activism of women in revolutionary France, to which you alluded in your introduction. The key event that really put French women on the map in terms of military mobilisation was the March to Versailles of October 1789, which is often referred to, in fact, as the Women's March. And this really set the tone for things to come. So the event saw a host of Parisian market women march to Versailles before forcing the royal family out of the palace and back to the capital in protest over the rising price of bread. Really significantly, the women involved in the march had been armed. And this is something that's widely

4:38commented on by the British press, who expressed their absolute horror and indignation at the sight of women who were brandishing pikes and poignards. In the years that followed, French women took part in armed parades provoked by the massacre at the Champ de Mars. They were actively involved in the killing of the Swiss guard during the attack on the Tuileries. And in July 1793, the Republican woman, Charlotte Corday, who features, in fact, in a chapter of my book, very famously stabbed and

5:09murdered the revolutionary leader, Jean-Paul Marat. Now, I think what's really important to state is that these women weren't necessarily championing female rights, you know, in the way that, say, Mary Wollstonecraft was, or even the radical cause in many cases. But the mere fact that they were venturing into the public sphere and occupying military roles that ought to be reserved for men was considered immensely troubling. So against this contextual backdrop, the figure of the armed woman, who had been really popularly presented in the Georgian Playhouse right throughout the 18th

5:43century, becomes a striking symbol of revolutionary disorder and chaos. So her negotiation on the stage now has to be really carefully policed in ways that it didn't quite need to be in centuries prior.

Armed Women on Stage

5:59Now, for all this need for careful policing, this anxiety that you mentioned about, you know, armed women on stage, there's a really striking fact that you mentioned in the introduction to the book. None of the plays in which you find armed women is an original work by a female playwright. That doesn't mean that women playwrights couldn't still use that trope in other ways, though. You mentioned, for example, Elizabeth Inchbald. What happens in some of the plays that she didn't write

6:32herself, but that she adapted from other sources? Yeah. So I think one thing that's really important to mention here, actually, to give a bit of broader context, is the parameters of my study. So my book focuses specifically on dramas written and staged in the patent theatres of London and Dublin. So by patent, we mean those stages which are licensed to perform spoken drama. We do again find armed women who are authored by women in original plays on the patent stage, but they tend to appear far more frequently

7:06in comic or farcical entertainments than they do in the relatively serious and sentimental genres that the book focuses on. So for instance, Charlotte Smith writes a comedy titled What Is She? And this features a remarkable character named Lady Zephyrine, who hunts and shoots and rides a military carriage and lays claim to all these military pretensions. But her portrayal is so mocking and so ludicrous, you know, it fits into a real category at the time for these ridiculing representations of arms-bearing

7:41women. So her subversiveness is considerably undermined by the laughter that she incites. As you've hinted, however, we do find sympathetic and even celebratory portrayals of armed heroines in serious and sentimental plays adapted by female playwrights for Britain's patent stage. And Elizabeth Inchbold is a really great example here. So Inchbold was a prolific playwright, novelist and later drama critic, whose success in the theatre really points her out as one of the period's most accomplished female

8:15dramatists. Inchbold moved in radical circles, she corresponded with revolutionary sympathisers such as William Godwin and Thomas Hallcroft, and she intervened actively in her writings with the period's sexual politics. In her plays in particular, we see her engage in debates about women's right to martial forms of self-defence. So Inchbold's sentimental drama of 1791, titled Next Door Neighbours, that's staged at the Haymarket Theatre, features probably one of my favourite heroines named

8:48Eleanor, who starts out as this really Pamela-esque sentimental heroine, yet later arms herself with a pistol and threatens to shoot the play's aristocratic rake, Sir George, when he attempts to sexually assault her. So Next Door Neighbours is adapted from a French drama by Louis-Sebastien Mercier, and it's Mercier's source text that provides Inchbold with her armed heroine. But this isn't to say that Inchbold doesn't do something really quite progressive here when it comes to the representation

9:20of gender. So Inchbold really significantly alters Mercier's original script to grant her heroine Eleanor far greater martial agency than she demonstrates in the source text. So Mercier's heroine named Charlotte, she becomes really hysterical when she acquires access to the gun. She drops the gun, she starts to cry, she then accidentally fires the gun, it nearly hits the villain. And so there are

9:53strong hints here about the sort of disastrous consequences, if you like, to result from women's inability to control firearms. But in Inchbold's script, Eleanor's occupation of the pistol is far more controlled. She's composed the whole time that she has the pistol in her hand. And she speaks with this authority that simply isn't present in the source text. So I think what we see here in this play is the extent to which adaptation could be used by female playwrights as a strategic ploy for bringing

10:29subversive ideologies to the stage without having to take full ownership of the ideologies that these women convey. And this is something Jane Moody speaks on really brilliantly and refers to as theatrical disguise. So it's this idea that for a woman to adapt a play, especially if that play is originally authored by a man, is to kind of shield themselves behind the mask of the male playwright. So if their play does give offense, and if they're accused of perhaps unwomanly sentiments, they're able to defend

11:03themselves by ultimately saying, well, this wasn't my play, it was it was his, it was his work. And I

Elizabeth Inchbald's Plays

11:10think that's what Inchbold does with Next Door Neighbours. And certainly we see a lot of this throughout the period and later on as well. It's particularly interesting, because as you get into a little bit later, Inchbold had personal experience with having to use force, or at least the threat of force to ward off assault. I'm just sort of curious how you see her personal experience with such an awful, traumatic, you know, episode, then sort of comparing that with the fact that she's kind of using that defense you mentioned of, well, hey, this is just a play that somebody else wrote. How did those two

11:43things work together? I mean, what does that sort of say about attitudes towards, you know, force and armed women on stage versus in real life, the very real need sometimes for self-defense? Yeah, I think Inchbold's personal experiences really do go hand in hand with the type of plays that she produces. So Inchbold worked as an actress before becoming a playwright, which was quite a common trajectory, actually, for women working in theater during this period. And across the 18th century, the actress was especially vulnerable to threats of sexual assault from male co-workers. And this

12:17is something that scholars such as Ellen Duncan and Christina Straub have written on really comprehensively. And so Inchbold was no exception to this. Inchbold was attacked while she was working in Bristol as an actress by the theater manager James Dodd. And she was again threatened with rape by the London theater manager Thomas Harris. But as you've hinted, Inchbold managed to fight off her attackers on each occasion using physical violence. So she's recalled to have hurled scalding hot water over the face of James Dodd and to have violently seized Harris by the hair. And in both

12:51cases, she sort of strikes such fear and physical pain into her male assaulters that they, you know, they're forced to abandon their attempts on her body. And I think, you know, based on these experiences, that what really bothered Inchbold was precisely this chasm between theory and practice when it came to female self-defense. So the dominant ideology during this period was that the feminine virtues of timidity, fragility and softness provided women with their greatest shield against male violence,

13:24because these qualities were apparently capable of pacifying male aggression. This was an idea that was enforced in conduct literature, in didactic fiction, and on the stage. And it grows out of stadium models of progress, which I think it's, it's clear to see have a real strong patriarchal bias. On the stage in particular, there are numerous examples of dramas in which licentious or violent male characters are deterred from harming the drama's heroine, because that she gives way to tears or

13:56swoons, which managed to awaken her assaulter's compassion. So I think perhaps driven by her first-hand experiences of being placed on the receiving end of male aggression, Inchbold seems to foreground in her dramas the dangers of women relying solely on their, you know, female charms, if you like, to protect themselves against violent men. And she does so not only in relation to the defense of female chastity, but actually female life. So while next door neighbours, you know, as we've

14:26discussed, shows the rake Sir George to be impervious to Eleanor's tears, but restrained by her pistol, Inchbold's unstaged tragedy, the massacre of 1792, reveals the tragic consequences to ensue when women are rendered physically defenceless against revolutionary violence, right? So this play has real contemporary resonances. And it's for that reason, in fact, that it was never staged, or in fact, even published. So the heroine of this play, named Madden Trigestan, is refused the right to arm herself against the

14:57violent mob that have stormed her town on the premise, according to her husband, that her acquisition of weaponry will detract from her feminine virtues, which are needed to restrain male violence. This decision, however, results in Madden Trigestan being brutally murdered along with her children by the violent mob, whose actions ultimately fly in the face of the chivalric code upon which her husband had relied for his wife's safety. So Inchbold seems to engage here in a rebuttal of the patriarchal ideologies that equated women's strength with their weakness. And in doing so,

15:32she joins women like the aforementioned Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as Mary Robinson and Mary Hayes, all the Marys, ultimately, who are raising these same arguments in their political pamphlets. Mary Robinson, in fact, has a quote in Letters to the Women of England, where she says, men will be profligate as long as women uphold them in the practice of seduction. So this is something, you know, Inchbold is not alone in contesting these ideologies. But she is, I think, really unique and really remarkable in rebuffing these ideas on the stage.

16:06So you're talking here about contemporary adaptations, perhaps, of foreign plays, work by contemporary playwrights of the time, like Elizabeth Inchbold. But there's also something

German Drama Influence

16:18that goes on in this time period, where all of a sudden people start to look at older plays in a new light. And one of the really sort of, to me at least, seemed out of left field connections was this connection that people perceived between Lady Macbeth and, of all people, Marie Antoinette. What was going on there? Could you explain that some more? Yeah, this is a left field connection. And I hope I can sort of do this argument justice succinctly. But yeah, certainly my book makes a case for the allegorical meanings acquired by female

16:52warriors from the past when viewed through the lens of the present. And it does so by looking at figures such as Margaret of Anjo, alongside, as you say, Lady Macbeth. So in chapter three of the book, I explore John Philip Campbell's production of Macbeth, staged to reopen the new Jury Lane Theatre in April 1794. Sure. And this chapter is informed really heavily by Marvin Carlson's theory laid out in The Haunted Stage, whereby he argues that theatrical entertainments are prone to being haunted by similar events

17:23witnessed in alternative theatrical contexts. So, Campbell's production of Macbeth was staged just six months after the execution of Marie Antoinette by the revolutionary government. The execution, which very much mimicked a theatrical exhibition in that it was performed centre stage in Paris at the Place de la Revolution before a cheering crowd, was recalled really widely in British newspapers, periodicals and visual culture. So this is an event that is very much in the forefront of audiences' minds. In Campbell's production of Macbeth, it was the notorious star

18:00actress Sarah Siddons, who performed the role of Lady Macbeth. And Siddons, as many listeners of this podcast will no doubt know, was really renowned for her elicitations of pity from spectators. You know, she could arouse sympathy for even undeserving characters. And for that reason, her embodiment of Lady Macbeth seems really quite problematic. I mean, on the one hand, Lady Macbeth becomes a really troubling figure in the 1790s. Her unsex me speech and her involvement in regicide connects her

18:33explicitly to the dangerous revolutionary energy presented by France's female reformers, who acquire a reputation in Britain as monstrous and unsexed. Richard Polwill, for instance, writes, you know, the unsexed females at the end of the 18th century. That literally makes that connection really clear. So in my chapter, however, I argue that Siddons' innovative portrayal of Lady Macbeth aligns Shakespeare's heroine less so with the revolutionary spirit than the murdered Queen of France. So across

19:05the course of the play, we see Siddons transform Lady Macbeth from a controlling and dissimulative virago into a sentimental, repentant and familial queen, and finally into a haunting apparition. And this process of development really strikingly mirrors shifting depictions of Marie Antoinette in British representations. So in Britain, Marie Antoinette is formally sort of pre-revolution, viewed as a power-hungry and domineering wife of Louis XVI. But her reputation is significantly

19:39ameliorated in Britain following the outbreak of the Reign of Terror, at which point she's presented as a loving wife to Louis XVI and devoted mother to her children. And of course, her reputation almost needs to undergo improvement due to the revolutionary backlash that Britain is experiencing. So it's really important that we sympathise with Marie Antoinette and not the revolutionary foe. Now, following her death, Marie Antoinette's ghost begins to feature really recurrently in British poetry, as well as visual print. And representations of her ghost bear strong physical similarities

20:17with Siddons's characterisation of Lady Macbeth during the sleepwalking scene in Act V, Scene II, at which point, as William Haslett very famously noted, Siddons is said to glide on and off the stage almost like an apparition. So it's this allusion to Marie Antoinette's ghost, or quasi-ghost, that I view as being really key to the production's political poignancy in 1794. In literature and drama of the late 18th century, ghosts were predominantly modelled on two Shakespearean archetypes. These were the ghost of Banquo, which appears before the guilty as punishment for wrongdoing,

20:53and the ghost of Hamlet Senior, which appears before the guiltless to inspire vengeance against wrongdoing. So my chapter argues that this allegorical appearance of Marie Antoinette's haunting apparition in Act V of Macbeth, functions in line with the Shakespearean models. Audiences conditioned to interpret ghosts in accordance with the Shakespearean archetypes are suddenly placed in a context in which Siddons's heroine is capable of being perceived either

21:23like the ghost of Banquo as a projection of guilt, so forcing audiences of prior revolutionary sympathies to acknowledge their complicity in the Queen's death, or like the ghost of Hamlet Senior, as a call to avenge the Queen's murder by defeating the revolutionary government. So that's a kind of crude overview, but I think what this chapter really seeks to exemplify is the extent to which temporal contexts, media circulating offstage, and really significantly, the creative agency brought to

21:57the performance by the actress embodying the role, can coalesce to furnish historical dramas with radically revised cultural inferences. So we've been primarily talking here about the sort of traffic across the channel between France and Britain, but it also seems like there's more going on in sort of

European Drama and Anxiety

22:18the wider world of European drama that is in turn informing what people see on the London and British stages, but also adding to some of that anxiety that we've talked about, about armed, violent women, and Germany seems to play a major role in that. What's happening in German drama at the time, and how is that in turn affecting this phenomenon that we've been talking about? Yeah, so the paranoia around German drama really goes hand in hand with the xenophobia that grows out of the French Revolution. So German drama rapidly becomes prominent in Britain's patent theatres,

22:53in the period spanning 1798 to 1800. During this period, you get adaptations of plays by Kotzebue and the early works of Schiller, acquiring particular popularity. Now, British commentators took issue with these adaptations for a number of reasons that relate both to their form and their content. So on the one hand, these German plays diverged from dramatic regulation by combining multiple genres. So they combined tragedy, comedy, and also sort of pantomimical elements. And this disruption of

23:29dramatic regulation was seen to mirror the dismantling of governmental regulation that had occurred across the channel, especially at a time when the French Revolution was being described by conservatives such as Edmund Burke as a series of tragic comic scenes. The German plays, moreover, were seen to rely heavily on displays of heightened emotion and sensationalism that were accused not only of degrading the quality of British drama, so, you know, replacing kind of well-written scenes of dialogue with sensationalist spectacle, but also of rousing and exciting audiences' passions to a dangerous and

24:07potentially explosive degree. This is something that William Wordsworth, in fact, comments on in his preface to lyrical ballads. And perhaps most importantly, these plays were accused of glorifying characters who embodied the political leftism and insurrectionary sentiments underpinning revolutionary doctrine. The drama that is accused, I'd say, most frequently of this precise fault is Schiller's The Robbers of 1788, which presents as its protagonist, named Karl Moore, a bloodthirsty outlaw who advocates violence in

24:42reaction to social injustice. And The Robbers, in fact, was adopted so definitively as an espousal of revolutionary doctrine that the National Convention made Schiller an honorary citizen of France, despite Schiller not really having a say in this. You know, it wasn't that Schiller himself wanted to become aligned with revolutionary ideals. So there's, I've mentioned Wordsworth, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the authors during this period who talks really at great length about what is wrong

25:13with the German drama. Or I should mention here, in fact, what he refers to as the so-called German drama. So Coleridge argues, in fact, that German drama per se is dignified and noble. And he refers, especially in this respect to the plays of Lessing and Goethe, that he says are, you know, respectable and furnish the libraries of the German literati. But he refers to the so-called German drama as the plays of Kotzebue and those earlier plays written by Schiller, which he argues have been sort of

25:47bastardised when adapted for the British stage. And they've grown into something really quite dangerous. Coleridge, in fact, refers to them as Jacobinical. And so he's aligning them there with the revolutionary faction, the Jacobins, who are, of course, the most violent faction of all. And what Coleridge really picks up on as the key problem with figures like Carl Moore is that he combines brutality with noble sentiments. And this, according to Coleridge, is the case with most of the German dramas imported over to Britain, which present their characters as, to use Coleridge's own

26:22term, benevolent butchers. And I think that's a really useful phrase in terms of summing up really what's so wrong and so insidious when it comes to these characters. On the one hand, these figures, you know, figures like Carl Moore, are overtly monstrous and murderous, you know, and therefore deserving of reproach. But by uniting these more egregious characteristics with fleeting shows of humanity and compassion, audiences are encouraged to excuse the protagonist for his faults and therefore

26:54sympathise with a vicious figure. And it wasn't just male characters that were seen to be at fault in these German plays. British periodicals and newspapers comment ubiquitously on the immorality of the German heroine, who's accused both of loose sexual morals and of a propensity towards armed violence. And it really is remarkable, and I was really quite fascinated during my research, to actually chart the number of German dramas that are either indebted to or adapted from

27:25German source text in the latter half of the 1790s that feature armed women. So you have, for instance, Cumberland's Joanna of Montfasson, that's adapted in 1800. You've got Holman's The Red Cross Knights, which is adapted from The Robbers in 1798. Lewis's The Castle Spectre, which is very, very much inspired by Schiller and Thompson's Adelaide of Worfingen, to list, you know, just a few. These all feature women who are armed with daggers, actually, in this instance. But of all

27:56the foreign heroines brought to the British stage at the close of the 18th century, it was Elvira from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's immensely popular adaptation of Kotzebue's play Pizarro that became essentially the poster child for everything that was wrong with German drama. And it really can't be underestimated how much Elvira ruffled the feathers of conservative critics. William Gifford is perhaps the best example when speaking to this idea. He wrote in the Anti-Jacobin magazine in 1799

28:29that Elvira is, to quote him, the most reprehensible character that was ever suffered to disgrace the stage. You know, so he doesn't hold back here. There is something profoundly and deeply troubling about Elvira. And again, as with Karl Moore, the perceived problem with Elvira had less to do with her immoral conduct per se than the extent to which her immorality was clouded by her accompanying displays of heroism and sentiment. So Gifford really epitomizes this opinion when he says of Elvira that having

29:02been, and again, I'll sort of quote him here, he says, having been rendered amiable by the poet's aid, the poor girl, by which he means the female theatregoer, loses sight of the flagitious part of the woman's character in the more dazzling one of the heroine. So he's arguing ultimately that women will go to the theatre, they'll witness Elvira perform these, you know, egregious acts, but then those those moments wherein she gives way to sentimental expressions of magnanimity and heroism essentially

29:34encourage the theatregoer to admire and to respect Elvira despite the violence that she's committed. And the reference here to female theatregoers is really significant. It was widely believed in this period that women were far more impressionable than men to behaviours exhibited on stage, and for that reason that women were far more liable to imitate characters that they were made to admire. And so in line with these ideas, Elvira and the German heroines that are cast in her mould were shown to

30:06embody and encourage a revolutionary spirit among British women, which obviously spelled absolute disaster for the nation's manners and morals, and of course for its national peace. So we've ranged over Western Europe here talking about the influences and the anxieties caused by French drama, German drama, obviously the military and political shifts on the continent during the course of the French Revolution. Somewhat later, as we move through this period into what are sort of

30:38broadly known as the Napoleonic Wars, it seems like there's a shift in attitudes, at least somewhat, from these earlier examples that you're describing. And a lot of that has to do with another part of

Spanish Involvement and Melodrama

30:51Western Europe, namely Spain. What's going on in Spain, particularly with regards to British involvement in the war? And how is that being reflected on the London stage in terms of armed, potentially violent women? Yeah, this, I think, was one of my favourite parts of the book to research, actually, this profound effect of Spanish debates and the Peninsular War in altering the reception of arms-bearing women, both on and off the stage. And I'm really heavily indebted to the work of Diego Saglia, Susan

31:25Balladez and Simon Bainbridge, among others, for the research that went into this chapter. So yeah, the dates, 1808 to 1814, witnessed the event of the Peninsular War. And this marked a distinct turning point, as you've alluded to there, in Britain's relationship with Spain. So for centuries, Britain had viewed Spain as a national enemy. British discourses on Spain employed the language of the Black Legend, which painted Spain and the Spanish people as gratuitously violent and cruel. The outbreak of the Peninsular War,

31:58however, and specifically the interventions of British military forces within this campaign, turned Britain and Spain from national adversaries into national allies by uniting them in the joint fight against the shared enemy of Napoleon. And so where do female warriors come into this? Well, the women of Spain, much like their forerunners in France, were again prominent among the patriots who mobilised themselves for martial warfare against Napoleon's troops. And as such,

32:30the armed woman who was previously aligned in the British imagination with revolutionary disorder and chaos comes to acquire a contrary affiliation, or at least a simultaneous affiliation in the 1810s, with francophobic and anti-Napoleonic sentiment. So she suddenly comes to represent the opposite to that with which she'd been aligned in the 1790s. So we might argue that, you know, the figure kind of transforms ultimately from foreign enemy of national peace to British ally

33:01in the securement of such peace. And a really important figure when it comes to Spain's female warriors is Augustina de Aragon, or the Maid of Saragossa, as she later became known. And again, a really fascinating figure who I was so sort of excited to discover. So during the siege of Saragossa, Augustina is reported to have joined her male compatriots in defending her city against Napoleon's army by firing a cannon against the French invaders. Augustina's actions were widely recalled in British

33:32journalism, poetry and paintings. So she fixes, for instance, in writings by Robert Sovey, Lord Byron, and in a famous painting by David Wilkie. And her presence also becomes felt on London's patent stage. So the final chapter of my book is devoted to a melodrama titled Charles the Bold, adapted from French playwright Pixeracourt, who in fact was featured very prominently when I joined you on this podcast in 2017. And this play was staged in London in 1815. Now, the final scene of this play

34:08sees the heroine named Leontina fire a cannon against the historical French tyrant Charles the Bold and ultimately blow him to smithereens. So I argue that what we see here is yet another example of a female warrior whose actions on stage allude allegorically to contemporary affairs. Reviews of Charles the Bold attest to its historical resonances by invoking Wellington's victory against Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. But the manner in which the French tyrant Charles the Bold is destroyed in the melodrama and

34:40the distinct parallels which are also detectable between Leontina's heroic yet feminine characterisation and British depictions of the maid of Saragossa strongly encourage an interpretation of the play as a celebration, not necessarily of Wellington and England alone, but rather of the role played by Britain's Spanish allies and their Spanish female allies in particular in conquering Napoleon. Yeah, it's interesting to hear about this, this sort of change. It seems like there's an arc that

Shifting Attitudes to Gender and Violence

35:15you're identifying here where early on in the French Revolution, we've got these very, you know, sort of noble heroines, they're brandishing daggers in highbrow drama. You know, we mentioned for example, the parallels between depictions of Lady Macbeth and Marie Antoinette. By the time of Waterloo, it sounds like we've got more down-to-earth heroines blowing stuff up, basically. So there's a real sense of an arc there that's kind of interesting. What do you see going on there? What does that say

35:47about shifting attitudes towards gender and violence over the roughly quarter century or so since the beginning of the revolution? Yeah, so I think this transition owes a lot to genre and shifting public demands. So melodrama really is key here. Melodrama acquires huge popularity of audiences on the turn of the 19th century stage. Geoffrey Cox, in fact, has shown that melodrama ultimately replaces tragedy as the dominant form of serious drama in this period. And melodrama,

36:22much like the 18th century domestic or bourgeois drama, to which it grants a nod, is characterised by an emphasis on humble and quotidian figures. Moreover, as again, you know from our conversation back in 2017, melodrama is marked, much like the German drama by which it was preceded, by spectacular and auditory extravagance, which again scholars such as Geoffrey Cox, but also Matthew Buckley have shown, ultimately serves to provide the exhilaration and shock and surprise that audiences

36:59came to crave in the aftermath of the revolutionary horrors. So for this reason, the explosion or the conflagration scene, as it's commonly known, became ubiquitous in melodrama of the 1810s and 20s. And there's this consensus in older theatre scholarship that the heroine of early British melodrama is typically depicted as, you know, a sort of damsel in distress figure in need of protection from a heroic male protagonist. But in fact, what my research found is that the 1810s bears witness to

37:34numerous melodramas in which evil is defeated by the heroine's use of firearms. So alongside Leontina, who, as we've seen, murders Charles with her cannon, you have melodramas such as Isaac Cocock's The Miller and His Men of 1813, which sees the character Ravina activate an explosive, which destroys the villainous Miller by blowing up his bomb. In William Barrymore's equestrian melodrama The Blood Red Knight of 1810, we see the sentimental heroine Isabella save her husband and her son from the

38:07murderous villain Roland by fatally shooting the villain. And in Grosset's Gothic melodrama Raymond and Agnes of 1811, we see Marguerite manage to free herself, her child, and the virtuous title characters from their imprisonment in Baptiste's cottage when she stabs her husband to death and then shoots his male accomplices. Now, I don't necessarily resolve from this that attitudes to female violence have become more tolerant by the 1810s. You know, if anything, sort of in the

38:38immediate aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, you have this kind of desperation to force women back into the home. You know, this is something that you see so often in a kind of post-war period. So I don't think what we're seeing here is a celebration of female violence per se. I think, rather, the reason that these type of women come to pervade the British stage is because this new type of heroic yet humble and surpassingly destructive female warrior plays a key

39:11role in adorning the melodrama with the psychological intensity at which it aimed, precisely by replicating those shocks and surprises that characterised the revolutionary experience. So in all of the above cases, the assassin, who uses firearms, starts out as maternal, delicate, and sentimental. But her sudden transition into a bloodthirsty operator of cannons, explosives, or guns, consequently stuns

39:41audiences, both physically and mentally. So if you can, you know, you can imagine the sound and sort of the sight of the gunpowder on the one hand literally jolts audiences out of their seats, you know, by creating that kind of exhilarating bang. But there's also the sort of mental and emotional shock created by the fact that the agent of such carnage is female, you know, and not only female, but a female character who started out as an object of pity and compassion. And so I think what we get here is the

40:12development of plays which really tap into those feelings of confusion, amazement and anxiety that marked the revolutionary campaign. So these women then provide an allusion to revolutionary affairs that we might argue is just as much, or perhaps even more so, an experiential allusion to revolution than it is a physical or pictorial one. A lot of these plays are, you know, as you say, fairly well

Legacy of the Plays

40:46known. They cause all sorts of discussion and argument. We're probably not going to see many revivals of many of these titles nowadays, but it does seem like there's something about this time period that really, it does have lasting effects, and maybe particularly about how women and violence are thought about in both theatrical terms and in societal terms. I'm curious if you have any kind of particular takeaways about the long-term effects of these plays, these debates, these

41:17discussions. Firstly, I just want to say it would be wonderful if these plays were revived. And in fact, people like David Taylor are doing wonderful work at the moment resurrecting plays of authors such as Inchbold and Joanna Bailey. So you never know, we may see some of these resurrected in due course. But certainly, yeah, I think there are, there is a lasting legacy. And we do see recurrences in the way that armed women are being depicted during the 18th century, and the way that they are represented

41:47now. One of the real recurrences that I see in terms of representation is this idea that the female warrior is that much more acceptable if she is fighting for spousal or maternal reasons. So many of the plays that I look at in my book introduce familial motivations to justify the female warriors foray into battle. And often these are real fabrications. So in dramas that depict real life

42:22women, Charlotte Corday is a good example of this. Narratives are introduced in which Corday is seen to murder Marat because that he killed her husband. And this is, this is not true. You know, there's, there's no emphasis placed here on the fact that Charlotte Corday is a political activist. Rather, she's partaking in armed violence on account of private emotions. And this renders her all the more acceptable because it shows that while she's acting physically like a man, she is remaining

42:53emotionally in tune with what is expected of her as a female. So certainly, I think you still get those loving female warriors pervading television and stage now. And I can't think of a sort of real mainstream example of this. But I recently watched a German film called was extra territorial or something along those lines. I don't know if you've seen that. But it's, it features this ex female soldier who's really kind of gritty and masculine. But all of her actions are underpinned by this love of her

43:29endangered son. And you know, it's so honed in upon that she's doing all of this because it is part of her loyalty to a child. And that manages, I think, to sort of win over the audience's respect for the heroine and an admiration of the heroine. So that certainly, I think, is something that we still see. I think also in a sort of filmic context, there is something very titillating about arms bearing women. So you'll often have, you know, pistol bearing heroines in particular who will

44:01feature in Hollywood films. And there's something kind of quite overtly sexual about their handling of firearms. And that, again, harks back, I'd say, to the figure of the cross-dressed female soldier, who, when she appears, especially in 18th century comedies, her role and her lasting popularity really centres on her capacity to titillate male theatregoers, right? They like seeing women dressed in clothes that accentuate their feminine physiques, and seeing them perform physical movements,

44:36that, you know, women are less prone to exhibiting in general life. I think societally, there is still very much this contention that women lack the natural intuition towards martial violence that men possess more innately. And I mean, to go back to the example in Next Door Neighbours that I alluded to previously, something, in fact, that is altered in Inchbold's play text when it reaches the stage,

45:13is that Inchbold's original version of Next Door Neighbours sees the heroine Eleanor pick up a gun unprompted and aim it at Sir George. But when the play reaches the stage, and we don't know whether this change was introduced perhaps by the theatre manager, George Coleman. In fact, he's a likely candidate because he was very much an advocate of patriarchal ideologies. But what happens when the play is staged is that Eleanor doesn't pick up the pistol until she's prompted to do so by a male

45:44servant. So the character of Bluntley kind of points to the pistol, and then she picks it up and threatens Sir George with it. So there's this suggestion, I think, in Inchbold's play, in its embodied form, that yes, okay, women have the capacity to behave physically like men, but they don't have that mental intuition to reach for weapons. It's almost as though it's more acceptable for a woman to acquire the bodily capabilities of a man than it is for her to possess the mental or

46:21emotional deportment of a man. And that's something that I find really fascinating. Because what really enticed me to this topic in the first place was, because you have so much literature that is written about attitudes towards female education, female opportunities within politics. But I wanted to know how these arguments would play out and evolve when it was women's bodies and kind of corporeal capacities that were called into question. So it really fascinated me to see that, in fact,

46:57it's thinking like a man rather than acting like a man that seems to be the biggest problem and seems to instill the most amount of fear in male commentators. And yeah, I would say that's something that hasn't necessarily changed. We'll post links in our show notes that will help you learn more

Conclusion and Further Reading

47:13about Sarah's book, The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789 to 1815. We'll also post additional information about British theatre during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

47:36If you'd like to continue today's conversation, please visit theatrehistorypodcast.net and follow at Theatre History Podcast on social media. Please note that that's theatre spelled T-H-E-A-T-R-E. Our theme music is The Black Crook Gallop, which comes to us courtesy of the New York Public Library Libretto Project and Adam Roberts. Thanks as well to Tip Kress, who designed our logo. And finally,

48:07thank you for listening.