Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780-1800

Betsy Bolton's Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage examines politics during the early Romantic period as an arena of performance complementary to the performance of gender. Bolton links the three major areas of inquiry indicated in her title by "acknowledging the common importance of theatricality-performance, costume, staging-in the apparently disparate practices of politics, theatre, and femininity" (2). She traces the popular Romantic analogy between the stage and the nation, explaining that the comparison was used alternately to praise and to damn: "the conflicted analogy between theatre and state deployed in the 1780s and 1790s captured both a fantasy of the British coming together as a nation, schooled by their drama, and the fear that the nation was coming apart, that the drama of national identity was nothing but a spectacular fraud, a deception" (19). Despite this anxiety, the theater remained an important site for the construction and articulation of popular opinion, offering, Bolton argues, "an intermediate public sphere, producing political fictions and commentary in a mixed-gender, mixed-class setting" (4). By the end of the eighteenth century, popular actresses had attained "celebrity" status, granting them notoriety and influence reaching even beyond the stage; at the same time, female playwrights, if not commonplace, were growing in numbers and had gained a degree of social acceptance. Although, or because, the stage as a public venue was considerably less prestigious or respectable than, say, Parliament or a court of law, a few women managed to use their newfound footing in the theater to communicate their political views to a large audience. More frequently, however, as Bolton goes on to demonstrate, women were invoked either as figures of ridicule or as damsels in distress, and the response to female participation in politics was often hostile. While British dramatists, whether on the stage or in Parliament, might be quick to exploit the spectacle of virtue in distress to arouse a "chivalric" response from an audience or a citizenry, women's active attempts to wield political power were met with derision and disciplined by means of comedy. Providing insightful readings of a number of political caricatures, as well as a satirical epilogue, Bolton reveals that "laughter and mockery repeatedly marked the boundary between women and politics" (30).

Reading the careers of "public women," Bolton draws her examples from a broad array of contexts, citing queens in Romantic drama, actresses, playwrights, political hostesses, and mistresses of famous men. Britannia and Catherine the Great of Russia also earn brief mention. As this list suggests, not all of Bolton's subjects are explicitly connected with the theater: the chapter on Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson, for instance, is concerned with self-promotion, conducted on "the stage of the nation," with theatrical panache. Underlining the association between politics and the stage, however, Bolton explains that women who attempted to interfere in the public sphere were almost invariably compared-metaphorically reduced-to actresses. Response from within the theater followed a parallel course: "dramatic romances worked to resolve the ambivalence of the analogy between state and stage by projecting that ambivalence onto public women" (63). As Bolton demonstrates, powerful women made frequent appearances in early-Romantic drama as threats to national prosperity, invariably to be removed from power before the happy ending and the marriage of the properly submissive female character.

The first section of the book, "Staging the Nation," establishes the late-eighteenth-century public's taste for sentiment and spectacle, articulating what Bolton calls the "sentimental code of honor" to which both playwrights and politicians appealed, mandating "benevolent mastery of domestic and international affairs" (21). The "spectacle of female vulnerability" was employed to justify political maneuvering of any stripe, permitting partisans and audience members to congratulate themselves for their fictional defense of threatened innocence from either bestial Turks, lustful Russians, or scheming Frenchmen, as the case required. The book's second section, "Romancing the State," reads the "life performances" of women who earned notoriety through their sexual connections with influential men. Bolton examines texts ranging from diaries to satirical illustrations, revealing how powerfully expectations internalized from stage romance dictated popular interpretations of such women's lives and relationships, casting them as conduits between men of power. "Within the mode of romance nationalism," Bolton argues, "women like [Emma] Hamilton and [Mary "Perdita"] Robinson seemed to embody the nation through their perceived promiscuity: a model of public union which raised fears about infection, impotence, and prostitution operating within the body public" (235). The third, and most compelling, section of the book, "Mixed Drama, Imperial Farce," analyzes the work of female playwrights Hannah Cowley and Elizabeth Inchbald, uncovering the pointed political and cultural critiques these writers were able to disguise by careful manipulation of the conventions of genre. By setting their scenes in "oriental" climes but ostensibly focusing on the relations between the sexes, Bolton explains, Inchbald and Cowley were able to comment on the exertion of power in sexual and international politics, subtly illuminating the parallels between mythical foreign despotism and the more "benevolent" domination practiced in and by the West-whether upon its colonies or within marriage.

This book's very range may also be its greatest weakness. Bolton asks so many interesting questions that it proves impossible to explore them all to the depth readers may desire; but the gallop through farcical after-pieces, parliamentary debates, and the Lyrical Ballads is entertaining as well as admirably researched; the readings are illuminating; and Bolton delivers an important reminder of the continuing power of the stage in the Romantic era.