Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume of Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections is the standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States throughout the 20th century and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors.
George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, was one of the most controversial figures of the late 17th century. He was the principal author of 'The Rehearsal' (1671), a burlesque play. This edition addresses the difficulties in both attribution and annotation that almost all of his works present.
Romantic Appropriations of History: The Legends of Joanna Baillie and Margaret Holford Hodson focuses on Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821) and on various historical tales, either written or translated, by one of her very close friends, Margaret Holford Hodson. While Baillie’s plays have garnered significant critical attention over the past few years, little has been written about her poetry. Further, virtually no attention has been given to Hodson’s works, yet critic Stephen Behrendt argues that her Margaret of Anjou is a “minor masterpiece that has not been accorded the attention it deserves.” Romantic Appropriations of History offers a look at how two early nineteenth-century women, each under her own “anxiety of influence,” appropriated original tales to produce completely new texts of political and cultural significance. The book addresses appropriation and translation in various ways and provides an introduction to the lives and alliances of Joanna Baillie and Margaret Holford Hodson, both to each other and to two significant poets and friends who were proponents of this historical tradition in literature—Walter Scott and Robert Southey. Employing the language of fancy, Baillie and Hodson joined the pathos of historical situations and archetypical characters with their own cultural and ethical sensibilities at a time of literary, social, and political disorder. The atmosphere not only provided Baillie and Hodson with the therapeutic power of appropriating history, but it also established them as creative, political women with distinct voices in a patriarchal, yet dynamic, nineteenth-century world.
Baillie’s eminently readable dramas stand at the crossroads of the Scottish Enlightenment and early Romanticism, and compellingly engage with questions of women’s rights. Her exploration of the passions, first published in 1798, is here reissued with a wealth of contextual materials including “The Introductory Discourse,” Baillie’s own brand of feminist literary criticism. The three plays included here are “Count Basil: A Tragedy,” and “The Tryal: A Comedy,” which show love from opposing perspectives; and “De Monfort: A Tragedy,” which explores the drama of hate. Among other appendices, the Broadview edition includes materials on the contemporary philosophical understanding of the passions, and contemporary reviews. Baillie’s work is enjoying a revival of interest. She lived a long life, (1762-1851), and had a wide circle of literary friends including Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott (who termed her a “female Shakespeare”). Scottish born, she moved to England in her twenties where she then resided. Her Plays on the Passions, alternatively known as A Series of Plays in which it is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion being the Subject of a Tragedy and Comedy was produced in three volumes between 1798 and 1812. The first volume created quite a stir amongst the literary circles of London and Edinburgh when introduced anonymously. The speculation into the authorship concluded two years later when Baillie came forward as the writer of the collection, thereby causing a subsequent sensation since no one had considered the shy spinster a candidate in the mystery.
These annotated letters present the first personal glimpse of this Scottish playwright as she wrote and lived. It documents her problems with publishers, describes her encounters with Wordsworth, Byron, Southey, Berry and other literary figures, outlines a long relationship with Scott and places an active literary woman in the historical and social setting of early to mid-nineteenth century Britain.
