7 - Crushing the convent and the dread Bastille: the Anglo-Saxons, revolution and gender in women's plays of the 1790s

Summary

This essay will examine the intersection of three significant cultural trends of the late eighteenth century which are not normally considered together: the rise in importance of women as producers and consumers of literature; a vigorous British response to the events of the French Revolution and its aftermath; and an increasing interest in Anglo-Saxon history and literature. These trends coincide in a small group of plays of the 1790s, and I shall deal especially with Ann Yearsley's Earl Goodwin (begun in 1789, staged in Bristol in 1791 and published in the same year) and Frances Burney's Edwy and Elgiva (begun in 1788, and repeatedly revised until its London performance of 1795, and unpublished until the twentieth century).

Mainstream English literature in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries seems surprisingly uninterested in Anglo-Saxon history. With one partial exception, which I shall examine later, Shakespeare's history plays move straight from the Britain of King Lear to the medieval England of King John, and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dramatists are more likely to find subjects in Roman, Greek, or even Turkish history than in Anglo-Saxon. In the late eighteenth century, and especially the 1790s, however, the Anglo-Saxons again became significant in the cultural agenda.

From the mid-eighteenth century a ‘renewed interest in national origins’ produced both historical texts like Percy's Northern Antiquities (1755) and early Romantic poems creating images of a Celtic, medieval or Anglo-Saxon past.