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The Arms-Bearing Woman and British Theatre in the Age of Revolution, 1789-1815

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  • © 2023

Overview

Authors:
  1. Sarah Burdett

    1. English Language and Literature, University College London, London, UK

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  • Examines the shifting representations of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage
  • Considers the armed heroine across a range plays produced from the French Revolution to the defeat of Napoleon
  • Explores how the martial woman both challenges and reinforces the notion of sex and gender difference

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xv
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  2. Introduction: The Armed Woman Enters

    • Sarah Burdett
    Pages 1-35

  3. ‘Unbrutifying Man’: Armed Women and Male Reform in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Dramas

    • Sarah Burdett
    Pages 37-79

  4. ‘The Ruthless Queen’: Lady Macbeth and Margaret of Anjou on the Post-Reign of Terror London Stage

    • Sarah Burdett
    Pages 81-131

  5. ‘The Merit of her Patriotism’: Charlotte Corday in British Drama, 1794–1804

    • Sarah Burdett
    Pages 133-187

  6. ‘I Drew my Knife and in his Bosom Stuck it’: Armed Heroines and the Anglo-German Drama

    • Sarah Burdett
    Pages 189-228

  7. ‘Yet Are Spain’s Maids No Race of Amazons’: Spain’s Female Warriors in Anglo-European Drama

    • Sarah Burdett
    Pages 229-271

  8. Epilogue: The Armed Woman Exits

    • Sarah Burdett
    Pages 273-279

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 281-293
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Keywords

About this book

This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British Romantic theatre as an arena in which the significance of the armed woman is constantly remodelled and reappropriated 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 and social rebellion at home and abroad. Magnifying heroines who appear on stage wielding pistols, brandishing daggers, thrusting swords, and even firing explosives, the study spotlights the intricate and often surprising ways in which the stage amazon interacts with Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German, and Anglo-Spanish debates at varying moments across the French revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, it foregrounds the extent to which new dramatic genres imported from Europe –notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama– facilitate possibilities at the turn of the nineteenth century for a refashioned female warrior, whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her tragic and sentimental predecessors. 

Authors and Affiliations

  • English Language and Literature, University College London, London, UK

    Sarah Burdett

About the author

Dr Sarah Burdett is Lecturer in English Literature at University College London, UK. She received her BA in English from the University of East Anglia and completed her MA and PhD at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York. Sarah has published work on female violence, practice-led theatre research, eighteenth-century Irish drama, and the Georgian actress, and has been awarded Research Fellowships from the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC.

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