Joanna Baillie Critical Essay | Critical Essay by M. Norton

Critical Essay by M. Norton

SOURCE: Norton, M. “The Plays of Joanna Baillie.” Review of English Studies 23, no. 90 (April 1947): 131-43.

In the following essay, Norton presents an overview of Baillie's dramatic works.

The dramatists of the early nineteenth century have been condemned for their slavish imitation of Elizabethan traditions on the grounds that ‘every age, however fully it may be conscious of the beauties and virtues of the past, must work out its own methods, its own character and its own aims’.¹ This is but a more emphatic statement of the case hinted at by one of the Romantics himself when reviewing his contemporaries' efforts to lead a dramatic revival: ‘I am convinced that the man who is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling fellow—no reviver even, however good. Just now the drama is a haunted ruin’.²

That the plays written during the half century following the outbreak of...
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