PANEL REPORTS: (Trans)National Identities – Reimagining Communities, CISR/NASSR conference, Bologna, March 12-15, 2008
Photo: Left>Right - Kelvin Everest, Carlo Bajetta, Stuart Curran and Paul Chirico.
We are very pleased to present the following panel reports from the recent (Trans)National Identities – Reimagining Communities, CISR/NASSR conference, held in Bologna, March 12-15, 2008. Carlo Bajetta provides an overview of the double sesssion he organized on ‘Editing Romantic Texts in a Globalized World’, while Diego Saglia provides insight into the panel on ‘The Italian Plays of Mary Russell Mitford’. Isabella Imperiali then rounds things off with a detailed look at the panel on ‘Romantic Performances’. As usual, do feel free to use the comments feature below to provide feedback or pose questions!
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Panel Report - Carlo M. Bajetta (Università della Valle d’Aosta)
‘Editing Romantic Texts in a Globalized World’
This double special session intended to explore an area which, curiously, seems to have been neglected by editorial theory. Computer technology has had an impact both on the presentation of literary texts and on the sales of traditional book forms. Consequently a large number non-native speakers of English (who may also have a limited knowledge of British history and culture), access electronic texts via their computer screens or purchase printed editions through on-line bookshops.
Modern editorial thinking related to Romantic texts has been crucial in establishing new principles for scholarly editing: it has prompted a new way of looking at, and reinterpreting, textual criticism. The question which the panel speakers had to answer was: can Romantic editors cope with such a significant change both in medium and potential audience?
[Carlo M. Bajetta’s Powerpoint presentation is available here]
Friday 14th March
Kelvin Everest’s paper (’Shelley’s Adonais: Keats as a Classic’) helped the audience to understand the nature of editing itself, both from a theoretical point of view and from a practical perspective. Everest considered two basic questions of definition. What is the mode of existence of a literary culture, and in particular how should we conceive such a culture when it is historically remote? This (double) question connects with the different problem of the mode of existence of a literary text, and the relevance to that question of editorial activity. Everest took as an example Shelley’s elegy for John Keats, Adonais, which itself addresses these questions. His brilliant examination of this text showed that the efficacy of an edition is linked to one’s ability to defend one’s procedures and that the material presentation of the literary past is, first and foremost, a matter of ethical choice.
Stuart Curran, who has just finished his tasks as general editor of the Pickering & Chatto 14-volume edition of The Works of Charlotte Smith, focused on Smith’s extensive intertextual citation. Faced with the almost hypertextual nature of Smith’s texts, the editorial team decided to use internet resources extensively, but also to look at these resources with due caution and much critical consideration. To quote but an example, transcriptions such as those from Milton’s Paradise Lost included in some well-known (and expensive) on-line repertories turned out to rely on conventions which made text searches quite ineffective. This experience, as Curran explained in his talk (entitled ‘Charlotte Smith and Multiculturalism’), was very valuable; it suggested some radical re-thinking on how we present texts online, and may constitute an example for any Romantic scholar willing to tackle the complex task of source-hunting, and that of how to present readers with a coherent set of notes.
Paul Chirico’s ‘Extending the Community of the Text: Forms of Publication and Readership in the Early Nineteenth Century’ was informed by his experience in collecting an edition of John Clare’s hundreds of ‘fugitive’ publications from 1818 to 1864. Chirico reflected both on these documents and on the practical experience of engaging a broad twenty-first century public with Clare’s poetry through the publications and activities associated with the new cultural centre at his birthplace. As Chirico noted, many writers in the 1820s and 1830s (an era notorious for its poor sales of poetry volumes, yet famous for its widening and diversifying reading public) reached their audiences primarily through the pages of newspapers, journals, annuals, memoirs and anthologies. Chirico brilliantly discussed the interactions between editors and contributors to these diverse publications, their selection criteria, readerships and distribution methods, considering in particular the role of these popular but in many cases ephemeral channels in mapping culture according to (or across) divisions of class, gender and nationality. Individual editors clearly differed in their attitude to the anthologising nature of their publications, some seeking to resist a decontextualising (and depoliticising) aesthetic by fostering a collaborative spirit among contributors. With editors including the ageing radicals William Hone and James Montgomery, and prominent contributors including Shelley, Byron and Landon, these publications occupy diversely nuanced positions in literary history, especially in the neglected period which has tended to fall between accounts of the Romantic and Victorian eras.
Saturday 15th March
To those who know the Romantic Circles website (http://www.rc.umd.edu), hearing Neil Fraistat and Steve Jones’s joint “multimedia” paper, ‘Editing Romantic Texts in a World of Web 2.0′ meant to see the future of one of the earliest (and, probably, one of the best) literary resources on the net. Though it arguably began as a term of commercial hype, “Web 2.0″ has by now become a conventional way to refer to a whole cluster of recent developments in internet technologies – developments that matter to scholars working in digital media, and about which literary and humanities scholars should have a great deal to say. Less a new “version” of the Web than a new emphasis and a new ethos, these developments cluster around XML and what it has made possible: Javascript applications with XML adding up to “Ajax” (e.g., Google Maps), RSS feeds for media subscriptions, including podcasts and video podcasts, basically media extensions via attachments of blogs and vlogs, user-generated and maintained content (think Wikipedia) and metadata tagging (think del.icio.us), and, most of all, a shift towards greater interest in collaborative, social, and modular applications (with “the Web as the platform”). Fraistat and Jones discussed what editors of Romantic texts working in digital media can learn from these new developments, both as practical technologies and as cultural phenomena. The preview snapshots from the new Romantic Circles they showed to the audience proved to what extent the interaction between editorial theory and internet applications can be fruitful.
Timothy Webb’s ‘What About the Thorntons?: Editing Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography’, illustrated a variety of problems which this exceptionally rich book creates for the editor, the annotator and the innocent (or even the not-so-innocent) reader. For many of the latter (whether British, American or ‘foreign’), the Autobiography has defined itself best through a few memorable anecdotes; yet, taken as a whole, it offers a much more complex and shifting presentation of the relations between the writer and those social, cultural and political forces which helped to shape Hunt, but which he, in turn, helped to shape. The editor or annotator, moreover, is faced with elements which contribute to make this a very difficult text to deal with. Among these, certainly, is Hunt’s extremely manipulative and elusive practice: he often omits entirely any mention of people or facts which are generally thought to be crucial, or which may strike the editor as significant. Hunt, for instance, devotes some attention to the atmosphere of the Thornton household but never explains that Godfrey Thornton was, among other things, Governor of the Bank of England, Chairman of Lloyd’s and the owner of a country house who employed John Soane and Humphrey Repton. An editor must regularly ask what the reader (of whatever age or nationality) must be told and what might be taken for granted. What, for example, should he/she be told about the Thorntons without sabotaging Hunt’s narrative of a London childhood? Webb’s fascinating paper concentrated on specific examples which evidenced the necessity to mediate between editorial practice and biographical information. The challenge, as Webb justly remarked, is to make these facts and the complicated genealogy of the text immediately intelligible to every reader while avoiding damage to the reading experience.
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Panel Report - Diego Saglia (University of Parma)
‘The Italian Plays of Mary Russell Mitford’
(Thursday, 13 March, 16.00-17.30)
Although playwright, poet and prose writer Mary Russell Mitford was a major figure of the British literary scene in the 1820s and 30s, she is now one of the forgotten protagonists of British Romanticism. Even the recent surge in the critical recovery of many Romantic-period women writers seems to have passed her by. Her most recent biography dates back to 1949 (Vera Watson, Mary Russell Mitford), her works (apart from the prose sketches of Our Village) are generally unavailable in recent editions, and critical appreciations of her production are still rather thin on the ground. Even if articles on Mitford occasionally appear in scholarly journals and mention is made of her works in essays or monographs, in general this author has not yet received the full attention that would enable her production to be on an equal footing with that of other female authors in contemporary Romantic-period studies. The present panel, the first one (to our knowledge) to have ever been exclusively dedicated to Mitford at a Romantic studies conference, was intended as an occasion to illuminate the depth and complexity of the author’s writings by focusing on her dramatic production and, in keeping with the conference’s wider focus on ‘(trans)national identities’ and ‘reimagining communities’, on her Italianate plays.
Frederick Burwick (UCLA) gave the opening paper concentrating on Mitford’s tragedy Foscari, performed in 1826, and its textual and performative complexities. In particular, Burwick examined the textual-performative strategies by which Mitford creates sets of alternatives in the train of events of the play, thus avoiding inevitability and giving her audience the illusion of ‘varied causality’. Burwick specifically highlighted how, in Foscari, characters’ choices and actions often remain unexplained or unspoken, or are unravelled only later in the play. In this fashion, Mitford capitalizes on the potential of mysteries, unexpressed intentions or enigmatic events, which, together with the many revelations, confessions and failures in communication, greatly enhance the dramatic tension between the characters, as well as making the audience’s work of decodification more difficult, yet also more rewarding.
In the second paper, Diego Saglia (Università di Parma, Italy) focused on Mitford’s most successful and remunerative play, Rienzi (1828), and particularly on its ‘Petrarchan text’. Saglia aimed to show how the references to biographical and historical materials on Petrarch as sources for the plot and to the poet himself in the play-text may help us locate the tragedy (and Mitford’s dramaturgy more generally) within a cosmopolitan cultural intertext. In addition, the author’s appropriation of the Italian poet, whom Romantic-period women writers often invoked and reworked as an authoritative poetic forebear, influences her delineation of Rienzi as a feminized hero who presents himself as the fosterer and carer of a new, indeed explicitly feminized, Roman republic.
Finally, Cecilia Pietropoli (Università di Bologna, Italy) brought her skills as a Medievalist and a Romanticist to bear on her investigation of the sources of Mitford’s Italianate plays. In her paper, she concentrated both on Mitford’s use of well-known historical sources of medieval history such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Froissart’s chronicles, and on her use of less familiar sources, some of which had an intermediate status between the historical and the fictional such as Madame de Genlis’ Pétrarque et Laure or the Abbé de Sade’s Mémoires pour la Vie de François Pétrarque. Thus Pietropoli cast further light on Mitford’s voracious reading habits, her tireless search for reliable historical information, and her creation of solidly documented and skilfully crafted play-texts. In conclusion, the panel aimed to open up new spaces for the discussion of Mitford’s plays, as well as more generally stimulating further interest in her production among the scholarly community; and the first major outcome of this session was the proposal for a book of essays on Mitford edited by Frederick Burwick and currently under consideration with a major scholarly publisher in Britain.
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Panel Report - Isabella Imperiali (Università di Roma La Sapienza)
‘Romantic Performances’
(Friday, 14 March)
All three papers explored ways in which works by Romantic authors were staged in their day and can still be performed in the present. The three speakers are historians of theatre who unusually for Italy combine various expertise as theatre practitioners.
Maggie Rose’s paper, ‘Putting the Shelleys on Stage-Mary Shelley’s Stage Metamorphoses’, discussed the figure of Mary Shelley as she appears in three contemporary plays spanning a period of nearly thirty years. Focusing on Liz Lochhead’s Blood and Ice (1980), Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (1984) and Maggie Rose and Carla Sanguineti’s You in Me\Me in You (2007), (Unpublished manuscript, deposited Siae), Rose explored the complex issues when one decides to dramatise the lives of historical people as opposed to fictional characters, in other words, when one sets out to create “a stage biography”. During the creative process of You in Me\Me in You, after having carried out the usual research into papers, diaries, letters, biographies and critical exegeses, she and her co-author decided on their own line. They wished to explore the complex symbiotic relationship between the couple, whose personal and artistic relationship finished so abruptly in July 1822 when Shelley drowned off the Ligurian coast. The play, directed by Massimo Navone, will be premiered in Lerici in spring 2009. In England talks are underway for a rehearsed reading in Horsham, Shelley’s birthplace.
Isabella Imperiali’s research into British theatre has included work as director on several productions, and this experience has influenced her evaluation of the plays of Joanna Baillie (1762-1851). In her paper, ‘J.Baillie’s in Performance: Scenes from De Monfort’, she stressed how Baillie emerges as a brave and forthright woman prepared to take on not only male critics, reviewers and managers, but also the very tenets of contemporary popular theatre by presenting audiences – from the middle and working classes – with the most hidden aspects of human nature. Although – or perhaps because – Baillie was aware that ‘those who reflect and reason upon what human nature holds out to their observation, are comparatively but few’, as she writes in 1798 in the “Introductory Discourse” to Plays on the Passions, she was determined to exploit the most important theatres of the period to stage the ‘genuine representations of human nature’. The function of theatre was to instruct: ‘the theatre is a school’, she states firmly, but it can only work if the characters on stage are recognised by spectators as ‘real and natural’, and played by equally natural actors. The attentive theatre-goer, then, was offered the ultimate theatrical experience: she or he could observe, at a distance, ‘what men are in the closet’, in their intimate selves, and learn to distinguish ‘the language of the agitated soul’. Audience members would realize that when the passions become ‘tyrannic masters of the soul’, the cause lay not in external circumstances but in ‘our own minds’, where they breed and feed off their own energy. By observing the way passions are shaped and emerge, spectators would ‘foresee’ their own destruction and learn how to protect themselves.
Baillie was thirty-six when she decided to publish her analysis of ‘those great disturbers of the human breast’, her description of the passions in the ‘Introductory Discourse’. Of her three plays published in 1798, John Philip Kemble decided to produce the tragedy De Monfort in April 1800, choosing it as the one most in keeping with his own inclinations and those of his sister Sara Siddons. He was certainly aware of some of its limits, and made a number of changes, as well as considerable cuts during its eight performances, but the basic structure met his criteria for tragedy. Since, as Bertram Joseph (1959) explains, Kemble, the actor, ‘chiefly excelled where one single emotion or trait was to be clearly and strikingly developed’. De Monfort met these requirements perfectly. It examines how Maarqwis De Monfort’s lifelong hatred towards Rezenvelt, a member of the bourgeoisie, increases to the point of madness when the latter buys himself the title of Maarqwis, and ‘comes out’ into society, where he is socially successful.
Baillie’s vision for the theatre, Imperiali argued, was too bold and noble for the time: her attempt to go beyond the world of appearances, to show the boiling matter within each individual, needed smaller, more intimate theatres more congenial to character nuance, a space which could allow the concentration of a ceremony and a form of expression very different from the codified acting of the period. Imperiali suggested how important it is to test Baillie’s theories concretely onstage, in order to demonstrate the unexpected intensity which emerges in small spaces. One of the practical applications of her research has been a reduced stage version, in Italian and in prose, of Baillie’s De Monfort, when she directed two professional actors: Andrea Peghinelli and Francesca Muzio. They interpreted the main characters. The two remaining roles were played by students with acting experience. The performance found the ideal venue in the reading room of Rome 1 University, the neo-Gothic ex-chapel in a neo-Classicist villa. Baillie – Imperiali stated- would have loved the small, cosy room, a quasi-closet in which the word, the central character in all her plays, could prevail. The audience, for the most part composed of specialists of Romantic theatre and students, seemed gripped by the scenes between De Monfort and his sister Jane, the core of the performance. The text was pruned quite a bit, of course, and centred on the complex relationship linking the two protagonists. To our ears Baillie’s lines seem even more artificial than they did at the time, but there’s an undeniable natural rhythm in the speeches of the De Monfort brothers when they are at home, free from social constraint, and able to express their torment and anxiety. Imperiali presented the uncut version of Act II, scene 2, in a digital recording, with English subtitles. The entire production, complete with subtitles, will soon be available.
In his paper Andrea Peghinelli, ‘…Shakespeare as Distilled by the Illegitmate Theatre’, examined an anonymous and still unpublished burlesque, Macbeth Bottled into a Burletta, presented at the Strand Theatre in May 1842, the role of Macbeth played by Henry Hall. This burlesque is of particular interest because it is the first travesty of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to have been performed on the stage of a nineteenth-century illegitimate theatre. By offering a reading of this text and an account of the peculiarities of its staging, Peghinelli illustrated the way the Shakespearean burlesque, as a theatrical phenomenon, used Shakespeare as the means – and not so much as the subject – of its parody. First and foremost the burlesque aimed to parody contemporary actors, productions, and methods of staging. Mimicry, for instance, was a powerful technique which the actors of the minor theatres used to criticize the performance of their famous colleagues, and to exploit their celebrity in order to improve their reputation.
When these productions went so far as to parody the pomposity of the official Shakespearean culture upheld by the more pedantic literary critics and the so-called ‘Bardolators’, parody was exploited as a means to ‘blow life’ into canonical literary forms that had grown rigid.
Peghinelli argued that Macbeth Bottled into a Burletta can be interpreted as a burlesque inspired by Charles Macready’s and/or Charles Kean’s Macbeth, produced respectively at Drury Lane and at the Haymarket in 1842; more generally, he interpreted it as a kind of review of productions over thirty years of nineteenth-century Shakespearean burlesques and travesties. He chose to focus on burlesques of Macbeth because a chronological survey of the various versions of this particular play written or staged for the illegitimate theatres can illustrate the innovative side of the genre.
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Carlo M. Bajetta is the author of Literature Compass article, ‘Presenting Romantic Texts: Editorial Theory and Practice‘, Literature Compass 3.4 (2006): 818–839, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00354.x.
Tags: CISR, conference, NASSR, Romanticism
