‘Interesting illustration’: staging sympathetic curiosity in the drama of Joanna Baillie

This thesis takes a broad perspective on the dramatic works of the Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie, placing them alongside her correspondence, critical writings, and the performance histories of her plays in order to demonstrate how she creates a close relationship between the visual and psychological elements of her drama and links these to the broader didactic and epistemological framework of sympathetic curiosity. Sympathetic curiosity serves as the animating principle behind much of Baillie’s dramatic theory and, consequently, her practice. Many of Baillie’s plays highlight or privilege the act of looking and explore the role of the spectator, including scenes or motifs that either encourage or question this behaviour and the complexities of mediating the psychological processes of characters through visual and performance aspects.

In this thesis I explore Baillie’s engagement with various stage and performance practices and how she uses them to model or question the acts of looking and interpreting. I focus on Baillie’s interactions with other theatre practitioners, as well as occasions on which her works include popular, visually-driven, or spectacular elements. Baillie works to connect her didactic and epistemological interests to her audience by using visually-oriented techniques to invoke sympathy and curiosity. The psychological and didactic elements of her work are mediated through performance and its visual aspects, so she closely controls these elements in order to manage her prospective audience’s relationship to the plays and the role of the audience in visually assessing and attempting to draw psychological and moral conclusions from them, including to explore the limitations of the role of a spectator, as Baillie portrays the relationship between spectators, audiences, and drama in an increasingly complex way over the course of her career.