[CALL FOR PAPERS]: Victorians and the Law (deadline 1 April 2013)

Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed online journal devoted to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies.

The eighth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Cathrine Frank (University of New England), will take a fresh look at the interfaces between literature and legal cultures in the Victorian period. From the Reform Acts through the growth of colonial law to the establishment of divorce courts, nineteenth-century legislature shaped and responded to the same cultural developments – the rise of the middle class, industrialisation, imperial expansion, and shifting ideas about gender, to name but a few – that were also eagerly debated by literary writers. The politics and aesthetics of many nineteenth-century novelists, poets and playwrights were informed by a sustained engagement with legal debates and practices. Their works often reflected on, and sometimes challenged, the law’s construction of civic, social and gender identities, while also casting a critical (or appraising) eye over the bureaucratic apparatus on which legal practice was built.

We are inviting submissions of no more than 7000 words. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• wills, trusts and guardianship accounts: the materiality of the legal archive
• Victorian trials, sensation and theatricality
• criminal law, lawlessness, realist epistemologies and the detective plot
• Victorian law and gender
• the reaches of the law: imperialism and the legal & literary creation of colonial identities
• intersections between genres of legal and literary writing
• “brought up a barrister”: nineteenth-century authors, legal training, professionalization and the bar
• radical politics, social change and the working class in Victorian literature and the law
• debates about rights to intellectual and literary property
• the spaces and cultural venues of legal practice.

All submissions should conform to MHRA style conventions and the in-house submission guidelines. The deadline for submissions is 1 April 2013.

Contact: victoriannetwork@gmail.com

[I am, as ever, the Submissions Editor for Victorian Network. I encourage you to send me emails containing your excellent postgraduate and recent postdoctoral work as per our guidelines. If I know you research law, crime, or anything in the above list, you can expect me to start nagging you on Twitter &c in the coming weeks...]

Celebrity Illness

[Before we start, I'm jubilant that the Equal Marriage Bill has been passed by the Commons. Obviously, I hope that the Lords don't now mess this up, and that (Mostly)-Straight-People's-Views-On-Gay-Marriage Day is followed by an equally successful (Mostly)-Straight-People-Views-On-Gay-Marriage Day, Now With Coronets. Anyway, enough. I opened the gin to watch the result, and I don't like Bercow's face.]

A couple of weeks ago, I was delighted to attend the first study day of Oxford’s new interdisciplinary discussion network, ‘Spotlight on Celebrity’. The study day, hosted in Oxford’s new Humanities Building, brought together researchers of all levels, from a wide range of disciplines including English, Theology, Music, Modern Languages, History, Classics and Medieval Studies. Some of my favourite papers dealt with such diverse topics as the Soviet media’s presentation of sports stars in the USSR (this was brilliant, and made me want to research sport), and the local celebrity of (frequently grotesque) ballad singers throughout nineteenth-century British cities. A large number of the participants worked on performance in one form or another, which was a joy for me. I was the first speaker of the day and talked about the relationship between performance and celebrity in my own work, and the various research methodologies which I’ve found particularly helpful. Discussion ranged everywhere imaginable, and it was actually a brief tangent about Club 27, Pete Doherty and The Indelicates which came into my mind today.

I’m currently rewriting the central chapter of my thesis. When I’ve cracked it, Thesis 2.0 will seem a far less Sisyphean task (forgive the hyperbole; I am mid-gin, we’re getting marriage equality, and my French tutor says my R sounds are now less rubbish). It is not a cheery chapter. It is about Mrs Patrick Campbell and her various Shakespearean exploits, and while Mrs P.C. herself is all that is lovely (just ask Shaw), much of the chapter seems to be about such ghastly topics as the sexualisation of children, the Victorian rape culture and, of course, death.

Chatterton (1856). Henry Wallis. Tate, London.

Celebrity death is a tabloid staple, since not merely the good but also the bad, and, crucially, the notorious regularly die young or just messily. I’ve mentioned Club 27 and stopped off at the shrine of Chatterton. What I’m really interested in is the idea of celebrity illness: the idea of a celebrity (above all an artist, writer or performer) whose health is sacrificed for their work, or whose creative output involves the self-destruction of their health. This seems to have been resonant for (some of) the women I write about (particularly Campbell and Bernhardt) and their publics, and I’d like to explore why. I’ve jotted down some thoughts on possible factors below, but this post really is a case of me thinking out loud and contributions (on any period, including contemporary celebrity culture) are hugely welcome!

Why have the illnesses and addictions of celebrities (particularly artists) fascinated the public, and resonated through culture?

Ideas:

• Celebrity/artist illness can make their art seem more “authentic” when their illness indicates clear emotional and physical investment. In acting, the nervous breakdown or exhaustion of a performer seems to indicate that their performance involves “real” emotional and carries a “real” emotional cost. They can’t rely on “cold” technique.
• Celebrity/artist illness seems to indicate an individual’s greater commitment to their work, since they are prepared to “suffer for their art”.
• A visibly ill or suffering artist (or one presented as such by PR/the media) can play into narratives of the artist as a marginalised/persecuted figure (e.g. the “starving artist”). A comfortable or economically viable artist is perceived to have “sold out”.
• Communities/cultures which believe in the Romantic figure of the  “tortured genius” or “tortured artist” privilege those over the alternative.
• Celebrity/artist illness identifies the ill artist with respected or admired professional forbears who suffered similar illnesses or a celebrity death – this is particularly true of Campbell, who constantly self-fashions to be like Bernhardt. Bernhardt’s memoirs are FULL of descriptions of her mental health issues, physical illness, fragility etc. Links to tragedy brings a spurious glamour in some cultural settings.
• Celebrity/artist illness can attract sympathy from fans, and boost press coverage. Narratives of illness or addiction can “humanise” the celebrity subject, making them seem less intimidating or career-driven, and creating admirable narratives of overcoming obstacles.
• Conservatives opposed to certain kinds of artists can draw on evidence of celebrity illness to present certain public professions, activities, or lifestyles as innately dangerous, with the illness as evidence.
• Some illnesses and their manifestations are of interest for different reasons; so the tabloid press might be more interested in the risky or embarrassing public behaviour of a celebrity addicted to alcohol or drugs, while images of a very thin female celebrity (e.g. one known or suspected to have an eating disorder) proliferate in women’s magazines and “thinspiration” blogs. The aestheticising and fetishising of illness happens in all sorts of ways.

Finally, if you’re interested in being part of the Spotlight on Celebrity network, which is run by Jess Goodman (Modern Languages) and David Kennerley (History), please do get involved – there will be further study days, seminars and hopefully a conference or symposium at some point! You can email spotlightoncelebrity [at] gmail [dot] com for more details, or just comment below.

[not really a REVIEW]: Julius Caesar, Harriet Walter and all-female Shakespeare

The cast of Julius Caesar. Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

Long-time readers will know that Harriet Walter is not irrelevant to my interests. I have purchased a certain number of theatre tickets in order to see her perform. I have a certain degree of familiarity with her first book, Other People’s Shoes. She was central to Clamorous Voices, the book after which this blog was named, and she appears in my thesis more than is seemly or subtle for a work that’s supposedly about the nineteenth century. I think she’s the most perfect actress of her generation, I hope to God I’m never called upon to be articulate in her presence, and I have still not forgiven the Queen for making Helen Mirren a Dame first.

(c) Helen Maybanks

For these reasons, I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to review Julius Caesar. Not in a balanced way, or even a way that manages to eschew capital letters and superlatives. Harriet Walter plays Brutus, which automatically precludes all chance of a review that doesn’t devolve into my myriad feelings and/or an anecdote about the time my friend Charlie and I (both then aged sixteen) spent half an hour in a biting wind outside the old RST, so that Walter could sign our programmes for (I think) The Hollow Crown.*

Frances Barber plays Julius Caesar. This is also bad news for my sang-froid. Walter may have played Fanny Dashwood, Lady Macbeth, and Harriet Vane, but Barber played the Bolter and the first Shakespearean heroine I ever saw. She was an Edwardian Viola in the snowy Twelfth Night that may not be as good as I remember it, but the fact is that my six-year-old self fell simultaneously in love with her and Anton Lesser. As Feste, Lesser had ringlets and eyeliner; Barber had a waistcoat. I didn’t know which one I more wanted to be.

So, then, when I found myself in the front row of Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse, watching Barber, Walter, and a monstrous regiment of miraculous women turn Julius Caesar into a mashup of Shakespeare, Sarah Kane, Bad Girls, Chicago and Our Country’s Good, I asked myself a question. Am I going to review this production in a careful, analytical, balanced manner, soberly locating the play in its aesthetic, historical and dramaturgical contexts? Shall I make solemn interrogation of the directorial choices, and cast a cool eye over the production’s lasting influence, and longevity? If you should never meet your idols, you probably shouldn’t review them, either.

This is not a production to be solemn or cautious about. This is a production which demands you enter its world; a women’s prison wing, where the inmates are performing – and in some cases living – Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Until now, Julius Caesar is a play I’ve actually preferred to read rather than see, which is a) anathema to everything else I feel about Shakespeare, and b) a direct result of the play having almost no women, and going on about war for too long.

This production’s play-within-a-play conceit interrupts Shakespeare’s action with the inevitabilities of the prison day. Med checks and lockdowns tear up the script, daring to put modern-day swearing next to Roman rhetoric. But deliberately breaking this suspension of disbelief only makes the Shakespeare more real, as the play becomes increasingly important to the prisoners, racing to complete their performance before they’re returned to their cells.

Jenny Jules as Cassius. Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

At its quietest – as when Brutus, played with ravaged elegance by Walter, tells Jenny Jules (a highly flammable young Cassius, all-consuming as the military leader) of Portia’s death – the Donmar production is tender, understated and mesmeric. In exhilarating contrast, the play’s battles become a cross between a riot and a 90s video nasty, with chaotic sequences of lights, drums, and drugged-out dancing.

It’s so rare to see a show that feels so dynamic and experimental, headed by actors who also speak verse with virtuosic ease. Walter and Barber are, as expected, marvellous. Barber, in particular, can slide from sublime poetry to sounding like the Missing Mitchell Sister without missing a single Shakespearian beat. Two of the supporting cast, Carrie Rock (Soothsayer) and Jen Joseph (Trebonius) are alumnae of Clean Break theatre company. Clean Break exists both to stage the experiences of imprisoned women (via award-winning plays), and empower women who are at risk of offending, or who already have experience of the criminal justice system, via theatre-based educational courses.

Frances Barber with Carrie Rock. Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

Both Rock and Joseph gave excellent performances; Rock’s disturbed, too-knowing child has stayed in my mind ever since. Both Rock and Joseph speak blank verse as though it’s not only instinctive, but imperative; that their characters cannot and must not be expressed in any other way. The total absence of anything unnatural – stagey hangups, theatrical tics – meant that they never seemed to be acting. Ironically, Joseph’s overwhelmingly warm stage presence (tell me the name of Trebonius in any production you’ve ever seen) also meant that I assumed I was watching someone who was already very famous, as opposed to someone who merely deserved to be.

Cush Jumbo as Mark Antony. Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

The joy of single-sex Shakespeare lies in creating amazing and unanticipated combinations of actors and roles. Without cross-casting, Cush Jumbo’s performance as Mark Antony would never have existed; Jen Joseph would have been no more likely to play Trebonius than Mark Rylance was to play Olivia.

But one of the most challenging and unsettling things about all-female Shakespeare is that it tips the audience into a world where femininity, not masculinity is the default setting. All-male Shakespeare has the simultaneous advantages of historical justification and novelty. Notions of authenticity and original practice legitimise all-male productions, offering us a glimpse of a history that’s sufficiently distant to make the all-male theatrical event unusual. All-male Shakespeare is affirmed and celebrated where other aspects of “original” performance – the cavalier addition of togas to Elizabethan dress, for example – are largely discarded; nor has the modern Globe begun casting pre-pubescent Juliets. I’m not disparaging any of this; productions like Mark Rylance’s Richard II make theatre far richer. Sometimes the consequences veer towards pantomime, as when the (sorely-missed) Peter Shorey’s Duchess of York harangued Liam Brennan’s Henry IV in the BBC’s 2003 broadcast of Rylance’s Globe show. But that merely shows how Shakespeare thrives on the broadest comedy – else why send Falstaff into a laundry basket, then change him to the Fat Woman of Brentford?

Copyright: Helen Maybanks.

The history of all-female Shakespeare, meanwhile, is the histories of girls’ schools and women’s colleges; organisations like the Mothers’ Union and the Women’s Institute; women’s prisons, and private reading circles from the eighteenth- to the twenty-first century. These may not be traditional arenas for academic attention, but they are – I hope – attracting more and more work from scholars. I’d love to know about Shakespeare as read and performed by all kinds of female groups: Shakespeare by and for landgirls, Shakespeare by nuns (did he make it into convents, or only convent schools?), Shakespeare in nursing schools (back when nursing was a female profession). The final chapter of my thesis is about Shakespeare and the suffragettes – the chapter of my thesis that most excited me, and one which (happily) other people seem to find exciting as well – but I’d love to know more about different, all-female groups. Tangentially, I really regret not seeing the RSC’s partially cross-cast King John last year, because it might have addressed my unease regarding partially cross-cast Shakespeares; I’ve yet to see one that seemed truly successful.

On Monday, the Donmar will release its last Barclays Front Row tickets for the run. While wary of schemes that force people to jump through hoops to get affordable tickets, Barclays Front Row is infinitely better than day-tickets, London-only tickets, or ostensibly benevolent schemes that use young theatregoers to fill unsellable seats. I hope everyone reading this gets a ticket. I hope I’m successful for a second time. If we’re there together, say hello. I really loved this production; I hope you get a chance to do so.**

*Charlie and I could also give a deeply moving rendition of the final seconds of Greg Doran’s The Taming of the Shrew, with both of us simultaneously playing both Alexandra Gilbreath and Jasper Britton at the moment of “My hand is ready; may it do him ease”. I want you to really imagine two schoolgirls, each one of whom is trying to be two Shakespearean actors at once (while providing very loud commentary on how brilliant they were). Charlie is now a professional actress (in fact she’s Charlie Ryall), but sticks to being one person at a time.

**Film version, anyone?

[Lectures] Before Oscar 2013

Before Oscar:

Reading Gender and Sexuality Pre-1880

a cross-period lecture series

Hilary Term 2013

2pm Wednesdays – Weeks 1-8 – Seminar Room K

Oxford University Faculty of English, Manor Rd, Oxford

Crossing period and national boundaries, this lecture series will introduce the pleasures and dangers of reading pre-twentieth century literature through a queer-studies and gender-studies lens.

1^st Week, 16th January, Sophie Duncan

“The Reinvention of Love”:

or, why the Victorians didn’t think Oscar Wilde was built that way

2^nd Week, 23rd January, Emma Smith

The Room in the Elephant: Shakespeare and Sexuality Again

3^rd Week, 30th January, Bronwyn Johnston

Gendering Magic: Male Witches and Female Magicians on the Early Modern Stage

4^th Week, 6th February, Anna Camilleri

Que(e)rying Poetics from Pope to Byron, or, Doing Boys Like They’re Girls and Girls Like They’re Boys in the Long Eighteenth Century

5^th Week, 13th February, Liv Robinson

Reading Gender in the Romance of the Rose

6^th Week, 20th February, Daniel Thomas

Belocen on ecnysse: the spatialization of gender in Old English literature

7^th Week, 27th February, Anna Caughey

Blood, Sweat and Tears: Chivalry and Masculinity

8^th Week, 6^th March, Naomi Wolf, title TBA*

* please note that in Week 8, lecture will take place in Lecture Theatre 2.

Building on the success of last year’s Before Oscar lecture series, we’re back in 2013 – now with added Emma Smith and Naomi Wolf. I hope to see many of you there (you may have noticed that I’m first up, this coming Wednesday…).

Advent Calendar Day 9: Hamlet!

Marcellus:
[...]Some say that ever, ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.

Horatio:
So have I heard and do in part believe it.
[...]

Hamlet, I.1.181-188.

2009 filmed version of the RSC production of Hamlet dir. Greg Doran; I.1. Peter de Jersey as Horatio; Keith Osborn as Marcellus; Ewen Cummins as Barnardo; Robert Curtis as Francisco.

Copyright RSC / Illuminations / BBC.

(when I worked in FOH for the stage version of this production, Keith Osborn and Peter de Jersey’s delivery of these lines were one of my favourite moments in the play – it was the mixture of chill and comfort)

n.b. I am not suggesting anyone should have A Very Hamlet Christmas. It would not end well.

Lindsay Duncan taken ill onstage, during matinee of Hay Fever – how is she doing?

Heard the very sad news this evening (from my parents, who were in the audience) that the actress Lindsay Duncan was taken ill onstage today, during the matinee of Hay Fever at the Noel Coward Theatre. After needing three successive prompts (until which she’d been incredibly good, apparently, but the action had seemed oddly slow), Miss Duncan apologised to the audience that she couldn’t go on. She held out her hand to Kevin R McNally, who plays her husband, and he led her from the stage (other cast members followed). The curtain was brought down, and subsequently two announcements were made (onstage) by the House Manager, confirming Miss Duncan’s illness. The play resumed with Miss Duncan’s understudy in the role of Judith Bliss. Apparently, Rosalind Cressy was also splendid, and duly received special recognition at the curtain call.

I’ve been checking twitter and news sources for any information/updates on Lindsay Duncan’s condition, but to no avail. If anyone does know, I’d be ever so grateful – she’s the most wonderful actress, and (way back when) someone with whom my mother worked at Stratford. I’ve loved her performances since I was a small child, too, but above all it’s just horrific to imagine somebody so talented & so professional being so unwell.

Neither of my parents, in all their years on both sides of the curtain, had ever seen anything like it; apparently, it was very upsetting and I’m glad I wasn’t there. I have huge sympathy for everyone involved and hope Miss Duncan is better soon. Again, if anyone does know (or, indeed, sees Hay Fever tonight/over the next few days), I’d be really glad to hear how she’s doing.

Humanitas Visiting Professor in Drama 2012 – Vanessa Redgrave

(c) UNICEF and Susan Markisz.

 

in association with Brasenose College.

Film Screenings, Lectures and Symposium on Theatre and Politics

Programme

THURSDAY 9 FEBRUARY 2012, 3 – 6pm
Vanessa Redgrave Lecture:
Speak What We Feel Not What We Ought To Say (Part 1) – King Lear
followed by screening of The Killing Fields (2011, dir. Carlo Nero), a documentary highlighting the importance that economics and taxation plays in wildlife conservation.
@ The Examination Schools, High Street, Oxford

THURSDAY 9 FEBRUARY 2012, 9 – 11pm
Screening of The Fever (2004, dir. Carlo Nero), introduced by Vanessa Redgrave and the film’s director Carlo Nero, with Q&A to follow.

The Fever is a psychological drama based on the play by Wallace Shawn.
@ The Examination Schools, High Street, Oxford

FRIDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2012, 3 – 6pm
Vanessa Redgrave Lecture:
Speak What We Feel Not What We Ought To Say (Part 2) – Antony and Cleopatra
@ The Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre, St Cross Building, Manor Road, Oxford

FRIDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2012, 8 – 10pm
Symposium: Theatre and Politics with Vanessa Redgrave, Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, and playwright Simon Stephens.
@ The Examination Schools, High Street, Oxford

FILM SCREENINGS (no booking required, for further information see website)
Sun 5 Feb Julia (1977, dir. Fred Zinnemann) – 7.30pm, Ship Street Centre

Mon 6 Feb Playing for Time (1980, dir. Daniel Mann) – 8pm, Ship Street Centre

Tues 7 Feb Antony and Cleopatra (1974, dir. Jon Scoffield) – 8pm, Ship Street Centre

Weds 8 Feb King Lear (2008, dir. Trevor Nunn) – 8pm, Magdalen Auditorium

All events are free and open to all however booking is required for the lectures, The Fever and the symposium. For more information and free registration, please visit: www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/events/HUMANITAS

Vanessa Redgrave Biography:

Vanessa Redgrave can currently be seen starring in Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut Coriolanus. During her film career she has starred in films such as A Man For All Seasons, Howards End, A Month By The Lake, Mrs. Dalloway and Atonement. She received an Academy Award in 1978 for her supporting role in Julia. Her scores of major roles on the stage most recently include recreating The Year of Magical Thinking at the National Theatre; Lady Windermere’s Fan at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket; The Tempest for the RSC at Shakespeare’s Globe; and The Cherry Orchard at the Royal National Theatre. She starred on Broadway in the landmark 2003 production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night and more recently in Driving Miss Daisy.

Vanessa has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 1995 and is an active supporter of Amnesty International and Liberty. She was awarded the CBE in 1967.

About the Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Drama

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Drama has been made possible by the generous support of Eric Abraham.

HUMANITAS is a series of Visiting Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge intended to bring leading practitioners and scholars to both universities to address major themes in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Created by Lord Weidenfeld, the Programme is managed and funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue with the support of a series of generous benefactors, in collaboration with the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford.

Oxford Seminar Series: Drama & Performance

Drama and Performance, English Faculty, seminar room A, Wednesday 2^nd week/19 October, 5.15pm;

Professor David Fuller, University of Durham

Joan Rogers in Opera North's 2006 production of La voix humaine, dir. Deborah Warner.

Jean Cocteau, La voix humaine (1930); Francis Poulenc, La Voix Humaine (1958)

 Abstract:

Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine is a play for a single actress, who speaks on the telephone to a lover who has left her. The audience hears only what is said by the woman. The main issues are about voice and the body: what can one hear in a voice; how does bodily presence and technological intervention affect how one speaks and what one hears.  The speaker supposes she can hear in the voice whether one is lying – though she fails to hear in her lover’s voice a lie she discovers by other means; and she claims one can tell from the voice what a person is doing (“J’ai des yeux a la place des oreilles”) – though her lover fails to penetrate lies about her own actions that the audience sees she is telling. The play also raises issues about how the voice is affected by technology –both how one speaks (because speaking to an instrument, not a person; or because of hearing indirectly, through technological intervention); and whether the audience supposes it understands what it hears differently from the lover, because, as well as hearing the speaking voice, it sees the speaking body. The action also presents suicidal depression; the speaker describes treatment for a failed suicide attempt (with a drug overdose), and the play ends with her apparently strangling herself with the telephone cord –with her lover’s voice (“J’ai ta voix autour de mon cou”). What can be heard in the voice may also be a subject relevant to diagnosis.

The play was used as the libretto of an opera by Poulenc. I shall consider both the play  and the opera, using recordings by the performer for whom each was written  — for Cocteau, Berthe Bovy; for Poulenc, Denise Duval. I shall also use a video recording of scenes from the opera by Denise Duval, and a television production of the play (1966, English) in which the woman was performed by Ingrid Bergman.

[Biography: David Fuller is Emeritus Professor of English and former Chairman of the Department of English Studies in the University of Durham. From 2002 to 2007 he was also the University’s Public Orator. He has held a University of Durham Sir Derman Christopherson Fellowship, and fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies of the University of Toronto, and the Yale Center for British Art. He is the author of Blake’s Heroic Argument (Croom Helm, 1988), James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Harvester, 1992), Signs of Grace (with David Brown, Cassell, 1995), and essays on a wide range of poetry, drama, and novels from Medieval to Modern, including work on Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Blake, Shelley, Keats, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, and the theory and practice of criticism. He is the editor of Tamburlaine the Great (1998), for the Clarendon Press complete works of Marlowe, of William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose (Longman’s Annotated Texts, 2000; revised 2008), and co-editor (with Patricia Waugh) of The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (Oxford, 1999). His edition, with Corinne Saunders, of a version of the medieval poem Pearl modernised by Victor Watts was published by Enitharmon in 2005. He trained as a Musicologist and has written on Jacobean stage music, on opera, and on ballet. His current research is on Marlowe and Shakespeare in modern performance, including a book on the Sonnets to be published by Continuum in the series Shakespeare Now!]

Convenors: Sos Eltis (Brasenose), Sophie Duncan (Brasenose), Laurie Maguire (Magdalen), Ben Morgan (Balliol), Emma Smith (Hertford), Tiffany Stern (University).

(this is my first time co-convening Drama & Performance. I feel both privileged and over-excited. Please do come; D&P is the most friendly & sociable of any of the Oxford seminar series I’ve attended, and engaging for anyone working or interested in performance in any/all aspects. We feature a wide range of speakers, both academics & practitioners, at all stages of their careers. Seminars may be paper- or practice-led. Undergraduates, postgrads, faculty of all institutions and none: you’re very welcome! Do get in touch with any questions.)

Sarah Daniels: Plays 1

Ages ago, the nice people at methuen drama very kindly offered to send me a free book (I forget why, but thank you very much and please, more of the same).

In an excess of irresponsibility, I decided NOT to choose anything vaguely useful to my course, and to instead pick, at random, the work of a female playwright with whom I was unfamiliar. Sarah Daniels’s Plays: 1 duly arrived at Brasenose the other day, and since the Orlando Project tells me she’s “the only radical lesbian feminist to have made it into the mainstream”, I think I chose rather well.

Sarah Daniels was born in 1956, in London. Her Orlando profile describes how, as a secondary school student, she

“hated school” and made a habit of sitting at the back of the class, not listening. She left at eighteen for work. At school she “didn’t even like drama.” Studying Shakespeare‘s Henry V for O level English was dominated by reading the play aloud and therefore, for her, anxiety about pronouncing the words right. She was astonished to discover that she enjoyed the play when she saw it in the theatre.

She was lastingly impressed by an incident at her school when a boy raped a girl at knife-point. The boy was removed to a borstal or school for young offenders, but the headmaster then addressed the whole school to tell them that in cases of rape the blame was shared equally by both parties.

Daniels’s playwriting career took off after she was able to spend a year as the writer-in-residence of Sheffield University’s English department. Her plays have been performed at theatres including the Royal Court and the National Theatre, and Daniels is also on the board of directors for Clean Break Theatre (trans: she is awesome beyond words). Her partner of many years, and civil partner, was the activist and schools inspector Claire Walton, who died in 2009.

Plays 1 comprises Sarah Daniels’s first six plays: Ripen Our Darkness, Ma’s Flesh is Grass, Masterpieces, The Devil’s Gateway, Neaptide and Byrthrite.

So far I’ve read Ripen Our Darkness (1981) and Masterpieces (1983). My ability to consume feminist 80s playwriting knows almost no bounds. Ripen Our Darkness is about marriage, mental illness and misery in the Anglican church; a bolder precursor to Alan Bennett’s Bed Among The Lentils, which followed in 1987 and also depicts a vicar’s wife in crisis. Daniels’s protagonist doesn’t receive even temporary redemption or escape.

Daniels’s next play, Masterpieces is about pornography, misogyny and mental illness. The roles across both plays are predominantly female, and, at its best, the writing is heart-stopping, combative and clear. However, Ripen Our Darkness is weakest and most uneven in its handling of the working-class lesbian Julie, who might have sounded cliched in her speech back in 1981. Yet, for a play that’s 30 years old, Ripen Our Darkness often strikes heart & intellect simultaneously: moreover, Hilary, the most obviously working-class woman in Masterpieces, is far more subtly characterised than Julie. Hilary, a single mother and sex worker, readily accepts a legitimate day job from a male friend of her social worker. The scene in which Hilary’s boss, Ron, begins to seduce and harass her is both timeless and excruciating, as are the unsympathetic responses of the other characters.

Daniels’s unabashedly anti-pornographic stance in Masterpieces has (regrettably) become unfashionable in contemporary feminism, but her emotionally direct style anticipates writers like Laurie Penny. I wish I could see ways of staging her plays for student audiences, but at the moment I’m unconvinced. For one thing, Oxford plays with all-female casts tend to do badly unless they’re Playhouse Creatures or The House of Bernarda Alba (both of which I love), or, at best, attract tedious expanses of critical shock at the goshness and novelty of a play without any boys (on second thoughts, maybe Daniels isn’t dated at all).

As texts, Daniels’s plays read wonderfully. I’m, um, apprehensive about the last in the collection, which is ominously titled Byrthrite and which I suspect of glorying in wom(y)nly gore, but I’m currently halfway through Neaptides (1986) and desperate to know what happens.

If I blink at the scene in Neaptides where Claire tells daughter Poppy a myth-cum-fairy-story about the goddess Persephone’s masturbation, I’m grateful that Daniels wrote in ways that are so combative, unembarrassed, and unashamed. The radical feminists of the 1980s cut swathes through misogyny and chauvinism, so that twenty-first-century girls like me could, if they chose, be embarrassed and Anglican and gay all at once, and in (relative) peace. In Daniels’s excellent first collection, I’m glad to find myself another feminist, literary foremother, and to take a look at another bit of feminism’s theatrical past.

Mrs Patrick Campbell and George Cornwallis-West

Mrs Pat as Paula Tanqueray.

At the moment, I’m researching Mrs. Patrick Campbell (born Beatrice Tanner; familiarly called Stella). Mrs. Campbell is most famous for her “Pinerotic” roles in the 1890s, such as The Second Mrs Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith; for her Hedda Gabler; and as the original Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

I, however, am interested in her Shakespearean roles. In the late 1880s and until about 1893, she had several successes in roles like Rosalind; then, at the other end of the decade, she played the trio of tragic roles that most interest me. These were, in order, Juliet (1895), Ophelia (1897) and Lady Macbeth (1898).

With the Bodleian Library doing various interminable and obscure things in the way of moving book depositories, I wasn’t able to get my hands on Mrs. Pat’s autobiography for weeks, and ended up reading everything but; finally, I caved, and bought it myself, on Ebay.
I originally conceived my doctoral project as a study of Shakespearean actresses’ autobiographies (and later, as a study of writings by actresses on the women of the Late Plays), and even though my textual focus has shifted (both in and out), I feel as if, until now, my research has been hobbled by not having My Life and Some Letters in front of me.

I may say that Mrs Pat’s name-dropping makes Madge Kendal and Constance Benson look positively restrained. I enjoy old theatrical memoirs very much for their own sake (and am looking forward to reading Irene Vanbrugh’s, on Simon’s recommendation), but this one balances incredibly useful, challenging/problematic insights (v. wholesome and good for thesis) with delicious and irresistible snobbery. Bless her, it seems she had no friends without titles. She makes me want to be called Frances something, COUNTESS of MADEUPPLACE. And then write gushy, borderline-homoerotic letters to actresses. An impulse which society cruelly demands I subdue.

Campbell is much more open about her life than Langtry (although omitting the affair with Johnston Forbes-Robertson) and – unlike Ellen Terry – absolutely fascinating in her detailed discussion of her children. I’ve just got to the bit where her son, Beo, dies in the First World War. For the first time reading one of these memoirs, I found myself welling up.

I’m also interested in Campbell’s apparently disastrous second marriage, which goes from huge affection (her son, particularly, seems to have held him in high esteem) to breakdown in a very few pages. Reading about the suicide of Elizabeth Robins’s first husband, who put on a suit of armour, then jumped into the Charles River; and about the complicated life of William Hunter Kendal has interested me in theatrical husbands.

George Cornwallis-West.

Mrs Patrick Campbell’s second husband was George Cornwallis-West. Major Cornwallis-West (who had been rumoured to be Edward VII’s lovechild) first married the stunning Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston and twenty years his senior; he remarried to Stella Campbell just five days after their divorce. The marriage broke down in 1921; Cornwallis-West also seems to have been plagued by financial troubles for most of his life. In 1940, the year of Stella’s death, he remarried for a third time, to a Mrs. Georgette Hirsch. In 1951, while suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, he took his own life.

Never a dull moment, with this lot, but what sad & eventful stories.