SOURCE: "Romantic Heroism and Its Milieu," in Dramatic Character in the English Romantic Age, Princeton University Press, 1970, pp. 70–94.

In the following excerpt, Donohue contends that the public failure of De Montfort was due largely to Baillie's unpopular but important innovation of internalizing conflict within the play's characters.

A decade and a half after The Carmelite, there appeared on the enlarged stage of the Drury Lane (rebuilt in 1794) a play that fully synthesizes Cumberland's exploitation of mental distress with the pictorial atmospherics evident since Douglas. But the synthetic qualities of Joanna Baillie's De Monfort, important though they are, are secondary to its innovations. The issues raised by this uncommonly ambitious tragedy reflect at once the imminently crucial dilemma of the patent houses and the complex problems of dramaturgy implicit in the rise of the Romantic hero. "The scenery was magnificent," observed the theatrical composer Michael Kelly of the production...