The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1815 by Sarah Burdett (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1815 by Sarah Burdett
• Rebecca Nesvet (bio)

Sarah Burdett, The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1815 ( Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), pp. xv + 293, $119.99 cloth, $39.99 paperback.

In Peter Brook's film Marat/Sade (1967), the late Glenda Jackson sleepwalks through political assassination as a narcolepsy patient playing Charlotte Corday. The lyrics of the asylum patients' song about Corday invest her with agency and determination. "Charlotte Corday had to be brave," the patients sing, "had to find a man with knives to sell; had to find a man [End Page 510] with knives." Sarah Burdett's monograph locates earlier Cordays on stage in a brief but electrifying theatre tradition that foregrounds "the arms-bearing woman": a heroine who takes up a knife, dagger, pistol, sword, or even a cannon-match or explosive and who thereby signifies "extreme political and social disruption" and "revolutionary chaos" (1). Burdett reconstructs the stage arms-bearing woman to a great extent by tracing her depiction in theatre reviews, advancing the study of periodicals as a method to enhance the study of time-based media.

Burdett's study is indebted to Wendy C. Nielsen's The Woman Warrior in Romantic Drama (2012) but goes beyond it, arguing that in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, the woman bearing arms erupted into London theatre as a panicked response to French women's mass participation in the revolution (11). Edmund Burke called these women "furies of hell," and Isaac Cruikshank caricatured them in "A Republican Belle" (14–15). The theatre censor detected Jacobinism everywhere, including in Shakespeare, hence the censorship of a planned production of Julius Caesar in 1794 (18). In the uncensored minor theatres that catered to working-class audiences, the armed woman's meanings multiplied (23).

In chapter 2, Elizabeth Inchbald's Next Door Neighbours, performed at the Haymarket in 1791, and The Massacre (1792) "complicate mainstream discourses on the relationship between male civility and female militarisation" (40). Next Door Neighbours is a "quintessential sentimental comedy" but has a radical denouement when Eleanor, rejecting the Roman Lucretia narrative, turns to her would-be aristocratic rapist and announces,"'Tis not myself I'll kill—'tis you" (43–44). The plot of Next Door Neighbours was stageable, Burdett argues, in part because it was derived from an earlier play by a man, Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'Indigent (48). I would have liked to see the antagonist described as an "assailant" rather than an "assaulter," but the argument is valid (50). Inchbald's The Massacre, set during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 Paris and based on another Mercier play, was rejected by the censor for exploring "so disagreeable a subject" as the death of a mother and her children (64). The real cause for unease, Burdett demonstrates, may have been news of the 1792 September Massacres and the idea that "access to weaponry" is necessary for women to be good mothers (70–71, 61–64). Burdett documents these nuanced reactions in part by consulting a diverse list of eighteenth-century periodicals, including the Artist, the Diary, or, Windfall's Register, the Edinburgh Magazine or Literary Miscellany, the General Magazine and Impartial Review, the Lady's Monthly Museum, the New Monthly Magazine, and the Westminster Review.

Burdett's third chapter considers how this era's theatres represented two armed Shakespearean queens, Lady Macbeth and Margaret of Anjou. [End Page 511] She considers these figures through the lens of Marvin Carlson's theory of "ghosting": the haunting recollection in the theatre of something previously encountered within an altered context (82). Both ghost French Revolutionary originals: Sarah Siddon's interpretation of the role of Lady Macbeth turns that apocryphal queen into a "powerful figure in the crusade against Jacobinism," but Sarah Yates's Margaret of Anjou is "transformed from a dangerously 'Ruthless Queen' into a loving and sentimental mother" (82). Like Marie Antoinette, these queens seem to be "driving forces behind their husbands' actions" and ghostly "signifiers of [revolutionary] guilt" for Marie Antoinette's execution (91, 182).

In chapter 4...