Exalted by Honour: Women’s Medievalist History Plays in the Late Eighteenth Century

Summary

“On Monday evening last, a new Tragedy, called Earl Goodwin, was performed at our Theatre before a very crowded audience, and although it does not strictly adhere to historical facts, yet was it allowed to have a considerable degree of merit,” ran a review of Ann Yearsley's Earl Goodwin in the November 7, 1789 edition of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. Reviews of the play in other papers tended to concur with the assessment published by the Bristol Journal. An extract of an anonymous reviewer's letter in the London Chronicle argues that “where the authoress has failed, the obvious want of materials in that part of our history whence her story is taken is the cause; and considering how scarce they were, her success is beyond even the expectation of friendship.” The prologue was odd, reviewers agreed, yet the epilogue much better; the plot a bit thin, but the dialogue well done. In all, a decent play, if light on historical fact.

Earl Goodwin is one of several medievalist history plays from around the advent of the nineteenth century that were written by women. The plays – which, in addition to Yearsley's Earl Goodwin, include Frances Burney's Edwy and Elgiva, and Joanna Baillie's Ethwald pt. I and Ethwald pt. II – exist at the intersection of history, playwriting, and women's writing. These plays take passages from popular history books and expand them into five-act tragedies in a Shakespearean mold, providing the characters with psychological depth, elaborate monologues, and inferred motivations along the way. Yearsley, Burney, and Baillie all center their plays on women's relationship to power in the royal courts of pre-Conquest England. As such, these plays serve as useful vehicle for exploring early English medievalism in a period often overlooked as “largely barren.” They are also a useful window into not only eighteenth-century perceptions of the lived experience of women in the early medieval period, but which elements of that experience the playwrights felt might resonate with a modern audience – the medieval as a mirror for modern anxieties and desires.

The perceived “barrenness” of Old English studies in the long eighteenth century is contested by the work of scholars such as Rosemary Sweet and Dustin Frazier Wood, whose emphasis on antiquarians and creative work argues for a century that produced plenty of work – and interest – in Old English history.