Dr Sarah Burdett
University of Cambridge, Faculty of English, Faculty Member
- Folger Shakespeare Library, Visiting Fellow, Post-DocSt Mary’s University, Twickenham, London, English, Faculty Member, and 7 moreadd
- Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century Theatre, Eighteenth-Century Drama, French Revolution, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Corday, and 16 moreMary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, Sarah Siddons, Women warriors, Gender and Sexuality, Sensibility, Helen Craik, eighteenth-century Irish drama, The 1790s, Matthew West, Lady Macbeth, Margaret of Anjou, Jacobinism, Women and Armed Conflict, Eighteenth-century theatre and performance, and Melodramaedit
- My research focuses on representations of arms-bearing women in the British theatre during the French revolutionary a... moreMy research focuses on representations of arms-bearing women in the British theatre during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic years. My debut monograph (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) foregrounds the extent to which Britain's perpetually shifting relationship with home and European nations, and the importation of new dramatic genres from Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, serve to facilitate the emergence in Britain's patent theatres of a refashioned female warrior: one whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her 1790s predecessor.
I was awarded my PhD in English from the University of York In 2016, having been based in the department of English and Related Literature, and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. In 2017 I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, where I collaborated with Professor Katherine Astbury (project lead), Dr Devon Cox (theatre historian) and Dr Diane Tisdall (musicologist) on the AHRC-funded project 'Staging Napoleonic Theatre'. I took on the role of dramaturge for the revival of two nineteenth-century melodramas performed at Portchester Castle and the Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, Yorkshire, in July and August respectively.
I have been awarded and pursued Visiting Fellowships at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (BSECS-Bodleian Visiting Fellowship, Sep-Oct 2017, £1000), and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC (Folger Shakespeare Short-term Visiting Fellowship, Oct.-Dec. 2017, $5000). I have also received independent and collaborative research grants and bursaries from funding bodies including the Royal Historical Society (Conference Organisation Grant, £500); the York Georgian Society (Patrick Nuttgens Award, £500); British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Events Funding Grant, £250, and Annual Conference Bursary, £100); University of York's Humanities Research Centre (PG Project Grant, £500); York's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (PG Grant, £500); York's F.R. Leavis Fund (£250); and Warwick's Public Engagement Fund (£500).
I have co-organised academic colloquia and public workshops including 'Difficult Women, 1680-1830' (two-day academic conference, University of York, Nov. 2015); '19th-Century Melodrama: Practical Workshop and Audition' (part of SNT project - University of Warwick, in affiliation with Georgian Theatre Royal, Yorkshire, July 2017); 'Melodramatic Acting Styles and Traditions: A Level Workshop' (part of SNT project - University of Warwick, July 2017 - Sep. 2018, in affiliation with English Heritage at Portchester Castle); and 'Melodramatic Acting Styles: Adoption UK Workshop' (part of SNT project - University of Warwick, in affiliation with Adoption UK and FabLab Coventry).
I have devised, taught on, and convened English Literature and interdisciplinary modules at Universities including York, Plymouth, St Mary's, Warwick and UCL (present).
I am currently serving as general editor of the 'Teaching Romanticism' series of Romantic Textualities.
Email: s.c.burdett@ucl.ac.uk. Twitter: @sburdett22edit
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... more
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.
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This essay draws attention to Irish playwright Matthew West’s rarely studied drama Female Heroism, A Tragedy in Five Acts (1803), performed at the Crow Street Theatre, Dublin, in 1804. The tragedy dramatizes republican woman Charlotte... more
This essay draws attention to Irish playwright Matthew West’s rarely studied drama Female Heroism, A Tragedy in Five Acts (1803), performed at the Crow Street Theatre, Dublin, in 1804. The tragedy dramatizes republican woman Charlotte Corday’s murder of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, committed in July 1793. My paper contends that West’s tragedy blends an explicitly anti-Jacobin narrative, with a covertly embedded strain of Irish oppositional politics. Focusing centrally on West’s incorporation of a fabricated rape scene, which alludes strongly to contemporary allegories of the Act of Union, I hypothesize the possibility for Female Heroism to be interpreted by its Dublin theatre audience as a subtle rebuke of the union, which positions Corday as the personification of Irish independence, and Marat as the unlikely embodiment of tyrannical British rule.
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French melodrama of the Napoleonic era was a form of total theater with text, music, and gesture inextricably linked in the creation of effect for the post-Revolutionary audience. Theater scholarship in France has long been dominated by... more
French melodrama of the Napoleonic era was a form of total theater with text, music, and gesture inextricably linked in the creation of effect for the post-Revolutionary audience. Theater scholarship in France has long been dominated by textual analysis and, as a result, the interconnections between these elements of melodrama performance have been underexplored, although attempts "to 'sonorize' the study of melodrama" are becoming more widespread. 1 Even the groundbreaking volumes of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt's theater being produced currently perpetuate the subservience of music to text in that the play texts receive full critical apparatus whereas the scores do not. 2 The creative possibilities of practice as research as a way of moving beyond the study of words on the page is well established in the UK but has only recently begun to gather pace in France and this is leading to an important rapprochement between theory and practice with conférences-spectacles, séminaires-ateliers and historically informed performances
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This paper analyses Sarah Siddons’s performance of Lady Macbeth in John Philip Kemble’s 1794 production of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Staged to open the new Drury Lane theatre, on 21 April 1794, Kemble’s drama was performed just six months... more
This paper analyses Sarah Siddons’s performance of Lady Macbeth in John Philip Kemble’s 1794 production of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Staged to open the new Drury Lane theatre, on 21 April 1794, Kemble’s drama was performed just six months after the execution of Marie Antoinette: an event which greatly enhanced British antipathy to the French Revolution. Interpreting Kemble’s tragedy alongside British representations of Marie Antoinette, I argue that Siddons’s innovative interpretation of Lady Macbeth, as well as the visual components accompanying her performance, create parallels between Shakespeare’s murderous Queen, and the late Queen of France. Focusing on the correlation established in literature of the 1790s between ghosts, vengeance, and moral culpability, I theorise that Siddons’s allusion to Marie Antoinette’s ghost furnishes Kemble’s tragedy with two contrary, yet equally monarchical meanings: dependant on their political sympathies, theatregoers are either impelled to avenge the Queen’s death by contributing to the war effort, or they are left as desperate as the play’s heroine to out the ‘damn’d spot’ of royal blood.
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In 1803, Irish vicar and playwright Matthew West published a drama titled Female Heroism: a tragedy in five acts (1803), which was performed at the Crow Street theatre, Dublin, in 1804. The tragedy offers an account of Charlotte Corday's... more
In 1803, Irish vicar and playwright Matthew West published a drama titled Female Heroism: a tragedy in five acts (1803), which was performed at the Crow Street theatre, Dublin, in 1804. The tragedy offers an account of Charlotte Corday's murder of Jean-Paul Marat, and was written in response to a drama on the same subject, titled The Maid of Normandy or Death of the Queen of France (1794), written by John Edmund Eyre, and performed in Dublin a decade previously.
Scholars have paid little attention to West's drama in its own right, and tend to conflate their somewhat disengaged readings of Female Heroism with their more thorough analyses of Maid. Consequently, it is commonly hypothesised that both dramas would have prompted homogenous readings from their Irish audiences. To adopt this stance, however, is to ignore not only West's fundamental deviations from Eyre's script, but to disregard also the differing cultural contexts within which the plays were read and staged. It is to overlook, in particular, the way in which Ireland's relationship with England had altered in the interim between 1794 and 1803. Published just three years after the passing of the Act of Union between England and Ireland, my paper illustrates the potential for West's tragedy to be interpreted as an anti-Union allegory. In contrast to prior scholars who have argued that, in accordance with Eyre, West dramatises Corday’s assassination of Marat as a pro-British event, I argue that, when situated firmly within its post-1800 context, West’s Corday can be seen to personify Irish independence, while the drama’s villain, Marat, acts as the embodiment of tyrannical British rule.
Scholars have paid little attention to West's drama in its own right, and tend to conflate their somewhat disengaged readings of Female Heroism with their more thorough analyses of Maid. Consequently, it is commonly hypothesised that both dramas would have prompted homogenous readings from their Irish audiences. To adopt this stance, however, is to ignore not only West's fundamental deviations from Eyre's script, but to disregard also the differing cultural contexts within which the plays were read and staged. It is to overlook, in particular, the way in which Ireland's relationship with England had altered in the interim between 1794 and 1803. Published just three years after the passing of the Act of Union between England and Ireland, my paper illustrates the potential for West's tragedy to be interpreted as an anti-Union allegory. In contrast to prior scholars who have argued that, in accordance with Eyre, West dramatises Corday’s assassination of Marat as a pro-British event, I argue that, when situated firmly within its post-1800 context, West’s Corday can be seen to personify Irish independence, while the drama’s villain, Marat, acts as the embodiment of tyrannical British rule.
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On July 13th 1793, Charlotte Corday, a twenty five year old Republican woman from Caen, Normandy, stabbed and killed the tyrannical Jacobin leader, Jean-Paul Marat, while he sat in his bath. Corday's crime shocked her contemporaries. By... more
On July 13th 1793, Charlotte Corday, a twenty five year old Republican woman from Caen, Normandy, stabbed and killed the tyrannical Jacobin leader, Jean-Paul Marat, while he sat in his bath. Corday's crime shocked her contemporaries. By stabbing a political leader, Corday transgressed the boundaries of decorous feminine behaviour to an extreme degree; not only did she violate the public/private male/female divide, by rendering herself a political agent, but she countered concurrently the association of women with pacifism and empathy, by murdering a compatriot. Following her crime, Corday became a prominent figure within British literature, both factual and fictional. This paper explores the representation of Charlotte Corday offered in two British dramas; John Edmund Eyre's The Maid of Normandy or Death of the Queen of France, performed in 1794, and Matthew West's Female Heroism, a tragedy in five acts, founded on revolutionary events that occurred in 1793, published in 1803, and staged one year later. My paper explores the differing ways in which each playwright fictionalises the details of Corday's crime, and questions the motives behind each author's divergence from fact. It engages with debates regarding notions of female patriotism, the implied incongruence between femininity and universal benevolence, and the supposedly debilitating nature of women's acute emotionalism.
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In the period of the French Revolution, the armed or martial woman comes to stand in Britain as the representative of extreme political and social disruption. She embodies, in striking form, the revolutionary chaos witnessed across the... more
In the period of the French Revolution, the armed or martial woman comes to stand in Britain as the representative of extreme political and social disruption. She embodies, in striking form, the revolutionary chaos witnessed across the channel, which threatens to infect British culture. This thesis traces shifting representations of the female warrior, and examines the complex processes by which the threat that she personifies is handled in British tragedies and sentimental comedies, written and performed in London and Dublin between 1789 and 1804. The study presents the British theatre as an arena in which the significance of the arms-bearing woman is constantly re-modelled and re-appropriated 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 rebellion in England, France and Ireland. Combining close readings...
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There is a tendency among literary scholars to confine presentations of armed women offered in British literature between 1793 and 1801 to a restrictive binary; the women are political, non-sentimental and condemned, or apolitical,... more
There is a tendency among literary scholars to confine presentations of armed women offered in British literature between 1793 and 1801 to a restrictive binary; the women are political, non-sentimental and condemned, or apolitical, excessively sentimental, and excused. This dissertation seeks to both explore, and repudiate, this binary, by revealing the existence of an idiosyncratic military heroine presented within literature of the age, who is political, rational, and heroic.
Chapter one focuses on portrayals of public and political military women within two anti-Jacobin novels published in 1795 and 1801 respectively. It identifies the way in which the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century novel, thoroughly devoted to domestic ideology, depicts women who favour the political and military sphere to the domestic, familial sphere, as monstrous and reprehensible. Chapter two analyses female warrior-ballads and historical narratives, and illuminates the way in which armed women exhibited in these genres are excused for their violence on account of their apolitical motives and sentimentalised portrayals, whilst arguing concurrently that the authors maintain a dissuasion of female militarism by delineating women as essentially unsuited to military activity, on account of the very characteristic which renders them virtuous; their delicacy. Chapter three, offering an analysis of literature produced by three radical authors, in 1799, 1796, and 1800, seeks to infer that, though indeed in the minority, anomalous depictions of armed women offered between 1793 and 1801, which conform to neither the political, monstrous, and condemned, nor the apolitical, sentimental and excused portrayal, did in fact exist. I reveal throughout this chapter the way in which the discussed radical authors grant their non-romanticised military women a heroic status, by intimating that it is the spirited armed woman, as opposed to the delicate, defenceless women, who is most capable of meliorating the nation.
Chapter one focuses on portrayals of public and political military women within two anti-Jacobin novels published in 1795 and 1801 respectively. It identifies the way in which the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century novel, thoroughly devoted to domestic ideology, depicts women who favour the political and military sphere to the domestic, familial sphere, as monstrous and reprehensible. Chapter two analyses female warrior-ballads and historical narratives, and illuminates the way in which armed women exhibited in these genres are excused for their violence on account of their apolitical motives and sentimentalised portrayals, whilst arguing concurrently that the authors maintain a dissuasion of female militarism by delineating women as essentially unsuited to military activity, on account of the very characteristic which renders them virtuous; their delicacy. Chapter three, offering an analysis of literature produced by three radical authors, in 1799, 1796, and 1800, seeks to infer that, though indeed in the minority, anomalous depictions of armed women offered between 1793 and 1801, which conform to neither the political, monstrous, and condemned, nor the apolitical, sentimental and excused portrayal, did in fact exist. I reveal throughout this chapter the way in which the discussed radical authors grant their non-romanticised military women a heroic status, by intimating that it is the spirited armed woman, as opposed to the delicate, defenceless women, who is most capable of meliorating the nation.
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https://collation.folger.edu/?s=sarah+burdett
Insight into the contents of the Drury Lane Prompter's Journal held at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Insight into the contents of the Drury Lane Prompter's Journal held at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
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To commemorate the two-day interdisciplinary conference 'Difficult Women: 1680-1832', held at the University of York in November 2015, myself and fellow organisers discuss our ongoing research into 'difficult women' of the eighteenth... more
To commemorate the two-day interdisciplinary conference 'Difficult Women: 1680-1832', held at the University of York in November 2015, myself and fellow organisers discuss our ongoing research into 'difficult women' of the eighteenth century.
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This article offers a case study of how revivals of two early nineteenth-century French melodramas have enabled interdisciplinary dialogue on moving from the textual study of melodrama to historically informed performance. Bringing... more
This article offers a case study of how revivals of two early nineteenth-century French melodramas have enabled interdisciplinary dialogue on moving from the textual study of melodrama to historically informed performance. Bringing together the text, the score and acting allows us to gain a much better understanding of the ways in which these elements interacted., Piecing together clues about the play as a performance in the process of preparing for 21st-century historically informed staging is a task similar to that of an archaeologist reassembling an old pot from a handful of pieces. This metaphor of archaeology comes from Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks' seminal text Theatre/Archaeology and James Mathieu, Introduction to Experimental Archeology : replicating past objects, behaviors and processes. Shanks and Pearson in particular highlight the centrality of interpretation in both archaeology and performance and see both spheres as connected by a common aim to retrieve and reco...