In the period of the French Revolution, the armed or martial woman comes to stand in Britain as the representative of extreme political and social disruption. She embodies, in striking form, the revolutionary chaos witnessed across the channel, which threatens to infect British culture. This thesis traces shifting representations of the female warrior, and examines the complex processes by which the threat that she personifies is handled in British tragedies and sentimental comedies, written and performed in London and Dublin between 1789 and 1804. The study presents the British theatre as an arena in which the significance of the arms-bearing woman is constantly re-modelled and re-appropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political rebellion in England, France and Ireland. Combining close readings of dramatic texts with detailed discussions of production and performance histories, this thesis tells a story of the martial woman’s evolution in British dramas, which emphasises her multifaceted and protean identity, and shows her development not to have followed a stable or linear pattern, but to have been constantly redirected by an expansive range of contextual factors: historical, social, and theatrical.

Gothic and the ghost of Hamlet

Martial Women in the British Theatre, 1789-1804

The Ghostmodern: Revisionist Haunting in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature (1887-1910)

This essay considers the limited presence of the dead body in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto . The near absence of gory death from the novella is striking, given both its intensive borrowing from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its status as the founding work of the Gothic tradition. The essay argues that Walpole’s selective use of Shakespearean materials is symptomatic of an eighteenth-century ambivalence towards the use of death as spectacle, an ambivalence that manifests itself in the critical dispute over the stage corpse. The analysis of this dispute reveals two contradictory impulses at work: on the one hand, there is a desire to push such images out of sight in hopes of advancing a more refined sensibility; on the other hand, especially in the latter half of the century, there is a gradual emergence of a patriotic wish to embrace the spectacle of death as part of a native literary tradition, with which Shakespeare’s name is rapidly becoming synonymous. The final section of the essay considers The Castle of Otranto ’s reworking of Shakespeare’s macabre materials as a complex and ambiguous reflection of these contradictory urges.

Shakespeare, The Castle of Otranto, and the Problem of the Corpse on the Eighteenth-Century Stage

This chapter examines the authority Shakespeare provided in the eighteenth century and Romantic period as a rule-breaker whose genius transcended both Classicism and the Gothic. Specifically, it considers his appeal to the architect John Soane, who referred to Shakespeare’s plays (not always accurately) in his lectures to the Royal Academy and whose house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields exemplified the eclecticism Shakespeare’s ‘infinite variety’ supposedly mandated. It discusses Shakespeare criticism by Alexander Pope, Elizabeth Montagu, and Samuel Johnson, as well as the ideas of Soane’s associates John Britton, Joseph Gandy, and Barbara Hofland. Rudd argues that Shakespeare acted as an authority for Soane to reconcile both personal crises and stylistic divisions between Neo-Classicism and Romanticism.

Gothic and the ghost of Hamlet

Citations

Martial Women in the British Theatre, 1789-1804

The Ghostmodern: Revisionist Haunting in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature (1887-1910)

Shakespeare, The Castle of Otranto, and the Problem of the Corpse on the Eighteenth-Century Stage

Shakespeare, Rule-Breaking and Artistic Genius: The Case of Sir John Soane