Warlike Heroines and Anglo-German Drama in an Age of Europhobia

In 1800, English dramatist Richard Cumberland adapted August von Kotzebue's dramatic romance Joanna of Montfaucon for the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Chief among the amendments made by Cumberland to Kotzebue's play is the drama's denouement. In Kotzebue's original drama, the eponymous heroine intervenes in a duel fought between her husband, Albert, and the villainous rival for her affections, Lazarra, by fatally stabbing the latter with a sword while dressed in a suit of armour. In Cumberland's adaptation, Joanna maintains her role as the agent of Lazarra's death, yet her murder weapon becomes a dagger as opposed to a sword, and her coat of mail is supplanted with plain clothing. In his preface to Joanna, Cumberland describes at length the specificities of Kotzebue's denouement before justifying the revisions made to the combat scene on grounds of practical necessity. He writes:

On the German stage, Albert, in combat with his rival, stumbles over the root of a tree, and falls to the ground; in this instant Joanna rushes in accoutred in the complete armour of a warlike knight, and with a huge sword of two-handed sway dispatches Lazarra at a stroke. Albert, thus critically rescued, rises and requests the unknown knight to put up his visor, when to his astonishment he discovers his preserver in the person of his wife. How they manage these matters on the German stage I cannot pretend to say; perhaps … their actresses [are] more adroit in warlike operations than our own; but if we found difficulty in the action, simplified as it is, how much more should we have been embarrassed in point of execution had we undertaken to perform it in the spirit of the original? ¹

According to the commentary, Cumberland's primary motivation for altering the scene is his awareness of the physical difficulties that such ‘warlike operations’ will inevitably impose upon the British actress. Cumberland deems it unfeasible for his actress to appear in ‘the complete armour of a warlike knight’ as the cumbersome costume is liable to hamper her mobility. He is opposed to her being armed with ‘a huge sword’, a weapon apparently too substantial for his actress to control, and he takes umbrage with her enacting a ‘two-handed sway’ of the sword, a manoeuvre seemingly perceived to surpass the athleticism of his female performer. ²

Cumberland is not alone in his recourse to female biology as a means of justifying dramatic alterations. In 1795, for instance, a reviewer writing for the London Packet had similarly observed that the sword-bearing antics of Lady Surrey in George Watson's patriotic tragedy England Preserved (1795) were ‘actually beyond the bodily powers of the female frame’ and would therefore require ‘considerably cutting down’. ³ What is curious about Cumberland's reasoning, however, is his amalgamated emphasis on gender and nationhood: it is not merely the actress's sex that is shown to disable her from performing Joanna's required martial feats, but her Britishness, too. While Joanna's original exertions were achievable by the German actress, whose exploits betray an unnaturally masculine ‘adroit[ness] in warlike operations’, the manoeuvres are considered entirely ill-suited to Britain's appropriately feminine equivalent, whose conformity to the dictates of her sex cause her to find ‘difficulty in the action’, even ‘simplified as it is’.

Cumberland's adamant distinction here between British and European females speaks to the political climate in which he was writing. At the time that Cumberland was adapting Kotzebue's play, women across the Channel had earned themselves a reputation for extreme political and social disruption. As has been documented, the militarised French woman, mobilised for active participation in her country's revolution, had become synonymous with social anarchy and chaos. Presented both as symptom and cause of revolutionary disorder, the foreign virago, it was insisted, had to be prevented at all costs from infecting British culture. Not only did her masculine actions threaten the gendered division of labour and the gendered division of spheres, but her divestment of femininity deprived her menfolk of the pacifying influence needed to prevent a replication of the mass-scale rebellion exhibited in revolutionary France. ⁴ If, as the review in the London Packet attests, practical necessity served as a viable excuse for keeping even the most politically conservative dramas free of combatant heroines who threatened to enhance nascent challenges to essentialist theories of gender difference, it might reasonably be conjectured that the British actress's supposed bodily limitations provided a particularly effective guise behind which dramatists such as Cumberland, transporting armed heroines from the continent to England, could mask overtly patriarchal and Europhobic agendas. ⁵

In his preface to Joanna, Cumberland hints at the reputation acquired by the German drama at the turn of the nineteenth century. Making no secret of the mercenary motives behind his staging of Joanna, he laments that ‘where fashion points, the stage will follow’. He bemoans that as ‘[t]he enlarged expenses of our royal theatres do not warrant their proprietors in opposing themselves to the public taste’, he has had to abandon his endeavours ‘to write according to nature and good morals’, as he had done in his original dramas, so as not to find himself ‘deserted by the town’. ⁶ The popularity and alleged immorality of the Anglo-German drama, to which Cumberland alludes, was debated prominently in contemporary theatrical discourse. In a scathing attack published in the Critical Review in 1815, the journalist complains that German drama has become ‘so fashionably prevalent’ in Britain ‘for the past twenty years’ that the country's inhabitants are being transformed by ‘an indulgence in foreign principles’ into disciples of ‘German morality’. The writer subsequently defines German drama as ‘a dangerous intruder’ on national conduct and insists that if ‘English sensibility’ is to remain intact, the public must uphold its ‘native delicacy’ and ‘spurn the gaudy subterfuges elicited by false philosophy!’ ⁷

The review is by no means anomalous but reflects cultural consciousness in and around 1800. The commentary provides a stark exemplification of that which Peter Mortensen terms the ‘discourse of Romantic “Europhobia”’ that prevailed in Britain from the late 1790s. During this epoch, explains Mortensen, a strong parallel was formed between Britain's ‘very real fears of French invasion’ and the ‘spectre of cultural invasion’ introduced by the vast importation of foreign literature. ⁸ Featuring only sparsely in previous theatrical seasons, German drama rapidly became prominent within Britain's patent theatres in the period spanning 1798 to 1800, with adaptations of Kotzebue, Goethe, and Schiller appearing regularly on Britain's major stages. ⁹ Dramas by such authors were considered especially dangerous given the political liberalism detectable within Sturm und Drang writing, which could easily be reappropriated for revolutionary ends. ¹⁰ The extent to which German authors were aligned with political leftism during this period is indicated overtly by William Hazlitt, who, in 1820, described German dramatists as ‘incorrigible Jacobins’ whose ‘school of poetry is the only real school of radical reform’. ¹¹ Anticipating Hazlitt in 1800, a journalist writing for the Gentleman's Magazine derided German plays on the grounds that ‘French principles are to be met with in almost every sentence’, and characters ‘professing Jacobinical opinions’ are ‘held forth as deserving of supreme pity’. ¹² German drama was construed consequently ‘as an overwhelming menace to Britain's moral and political health’, espousing the very gallic principles against which the nation was desperate to defend itself. ¹³ Interpreted through this Europhobic lens, Cumberland's Joanna can be seen to embody a double threat to social and national mores: while the heroine's military deportment brought to England a patent evocation of the gender transgression plaguing revolutionary France, the vehicle of German drama by which she was imported to Britain was considered equally culpable, on account of its foreignness, of contaminating the country with dangerous revolutionary ideals.

Romantic theatre scholarship interrogating the perceived cultural and political threats detectable within Anglo-German plays has tended to focalise British anxieties around the German drama's hybridised form and its politically controversial protagonists. We have seen, for instance, how the drama's amalgamation of tragedy and comedy is accused of aligning it too closely with the ‘monstrous tragi-comic scenes’ witnessed across the Channel. ¹⁴ It has been observed, moreover, how the glorification of German protagonists such as Schiller's Karl Moor, leader of an execrable band who responds with vengeance and violence to social injustice, acquired strong affiliations in the 1790s with Jacobinical practices. ¹⁵ While the genre's female characters have not been ignored, scholarship has privileged the ‘ideology of sexual liberation’ projected by the figure of the promiscuous German heroine who partakes in adulterous or non-marital affairs. ¹⁶ Scope consequently remains for an interrogation of the equally pervasive figure of the violent German heroine: that is, the heroine who, like Joanna, commits or attempts armed violence and/or murder.

Though a peripheral figure in Romantic theatre scholarship, the violent heroine who takes her cue from German source texts appears ubiquitously in dramas staged and published in England at the close of the eighteenth century. In a spoof of the German drama titled The Benevolent Cut-Throat, published in The Meteors in 1800, a ghost appears with ‘a dagger in her hand’, which she uses to stab the drama's quasi-villain, Stilletto. ¹⁷ The scene is recognisable as an overt parody of Matthew G. Lewis's dramatic romance The Castle Spectre (Drury Lane, 1797), a play exhibiting content described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as ‘Schiller Lewis-ized’ on account of its debt to the German author. ¹⁸ In this play, audiences see the ghost of the deceased Evelina appear, like her satirical counterpart, with a dagger in her hand. She grants the weapon to her daughter, Angela, who uses it to stab the play's villain, Osmond, before famously declaring in the play's humorous epilogue, ‘I drew my knife and in his bosom stuck it/He fell, you clapped, and then he kicked the bucket’. ¹⁹ While offering a mockery on the one hand of German-derived stage ghosts, or, to use the Analytical Review's terminology, those deplorable ‘German spectres’ which have ‘driven Shakespeare and Congreve from the stage’, the satire's knife-wielding woman also offers a nod to the multitude of armed and murderous heroines imported into Britain from Germany at the close of the 1790s. ²⁰ Alongside Lewis's The Castle Spectre and Cumberland's Joanna, English adaptations of Schiller's The Robbers (1788) by Alexander Fraser Tytler (unperformed, 1792) and Joseph George Holman (Haymarket, 1799) each see Amelia/Eugenia partake in armed combat with her lover's brother; Benjamin Thompson's Adelaide of Wulfingen (Drury Lane, 1799) features the crazed eponymous heroine's fatal stabbing of her children; and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's hugely popular rendition of Kotzebue's Pizarro (Drury Lane, 1799), along with unstaged translations of the same play by Lewis, Matthew West, and Anne Plumptre, each dramatise the attempts made by the warlike mistress, Elvira, to seek murderous vengeance against the titular villain. ²¹

Redressing the limited scholarship devoted to this pervasive Anglo-German figure, this essay foregrounds the heroine's amplification of British hostilities to German-derived drama by demonstrating the extent to which she is implicated in the perceived social and political threats professedly fostered by such non-native plays. My enquiry shows the warlike German heroine to be accused in reviews spanning the late 1790s to 1810s of three key defects, not all of which are harmonious, that distinguish her unfavourably from her British tragic counterpart. These are: her inability, on account of her monolithic masculinity, to arouse sympathy from spectators; her replication, through her (conversely) hybridised portrayal, of the German drama's hybridised form; and her insidious capacity, on account of such hybridity, to provoke underserved sympathy from theatregoers, impelling them to confuse virtue with vice. The essay provides detailed examinations of British diatribes against violent heroines featured in The Robbers, The Castle Spectre, and Pizarro to illustrate these hostilities. It closes with a return to Joanna, which, read alongside Holman's The Red-Cross Knights – another play adapted from a German source text, featuring a heroine who boldly wields a sword – is used to exemplify and account for the German heroine's anglicisation on the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century stage. Spotlighting the authors’ evasions of the criticisms prevalently issued against the German drama, I make the case that the revisions made by Holman and Cumberland to their respective source texts are implemented with the chief incentive of upholding supposedly inherent distinctions between male and female conduct, and British and European females, at a moment when the blurring of such gendered and national boundaries portends the social anarchy witnessed across the Channel.

Schiller's The Robbers and the Masculine German Heroine

In 1816, Coleridge launched his famous attack on Charles Maturin's gothic drama Bertram; or, The Castle of Aldobrand (Drury Lane, 1816), performed in place of his own tragedy Zapolya (1816). Bertram's appearance at Drury Lane impelled Coleridge to protest the need for theatre managers to expel ‘pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals and taste’ from the London stage by ‘exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube’ that constitute the ‘modern Jacobinical drama’. ²² This ‘Jacobinical’ mode of theatre, to which Bertram apparently adheres, derives from that which Coleridge terms the ‘so-called German drama’ ²³ : a model of dramatic writing that, paying no tribute to the ‘sobriety of the morals’ of Lessing, or the ‘maturer judgement’ found in Schiller's later works, is ‘offensive to good taste’ and ‘sound morals’. ²⁴ While not denigrating the German drama per se, Coleridge expresses his recantation by 1816 of the enthusiasm expressed in his earlier republican days for the emotionally charged Sturm und Drang drama, of which ‘Schiller's ROBBERS was the earliest specimen’. ²⁵ Though derived from a mixture of British sentimental and gothic trends, and thereby ‘English in its origin’, Coleridge considers the ‘countless imitations which were [the] spawn’ of The Robbers to represent a mode of drama that is neither properly English nor properly German. ²⁶ According to Coleridge, the vogue for Sturm und Drung plays has been exploited and bastardised first by German authors – Kotzebue chief among them – whose works belong not within ‘the libraries of well-educated Germans’ but constitute ‘orgasms of a sickly imagination’ ²⁷ ; and subsequently by ‘the whole breed of Kotzebues’ found in Britain – Maturin included – who look ‘to abuse and enjoy’ the popularity of such contrivances in England, with little regard for the damage such productions exert over the quality of British drama or the state of national morals. ²⁸

For Coleridge, the defining feature of the ‘Jacobinical drama’ is that it presents ‘the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things’ by glorifying ‘those criminals to whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem’. ²⁹ Bertram epitomises this trend as it inspires for vicious characters ‘all the sympathies which are the due of virtue’. ³⁰ The villainous Count Bertram is painted by Coleridge as a direct descendant of Karl Moor: a figure allowed to arouse a ‘thunder of applause’ from the audience, despite being ‘a robber and a murderer by trade’. ³¹ By uniting venerable and depraved characteristics in a single dramatic figure, protests Coleridge, authors like Maturin perform the ‘trick of bringing one part of our moral nature to counteract another’: a villain who is concurrently humane ‘combat[s] our condemnation’ of ‘adultery, robbery, and other heinous crimes’, and is thereby inimical to the preservation of public morality. ³²

As Coleridge's allusion to The Robbers implies, Schiller's controversial tragedy was seen to epitomise the nefarious capacities for which the German drama had become renowned. As early as 1788 Karl Moor's bipartite characterisation was cautioned against by Henry Mackenzie in his subsequently published ‘Account of the German Theatre’ (1790). Marking the start of a period in which commentaries on German drama would become prolific, Mackenzie warned of the consequences of fostering in a character who commits clear ‘violations of virtue and morality’ a ‘loftiness and power of expression’ and a ‘degree of tenderness which melts the heart’. ³³ Mackenzie theorises that by granting such qualities to ‘this wretch, this robber, this assassin’, Schiller ‘covers the natural deformity of criminal actions with the veil of high sentiment and virtuous feeling, and thus separates … the moral sense from that morality which it ought to produce’. ³⁴ Following The Robbers’ securement of a firm affiliation with the levelling and libertarian principles associated with revolutionary France, this glorified depiction of Karl Moor carried an intensified threat. In a review printed in the Monthly Register in 1803, signed with the initial P, Karl Moor is accused of epitomising the ‘fault … of most of the German productions to corrupt the mind and mislead the feelings by seducing our pity for vices’. ³⁵ Professing that ‘a person guilty of such atrocious crimes as Schiller has painted in his hero, is an unfit subject to be represented on the stage as an interesting object’, the journalist laments that by allowing Karl's vices to ‘excite our sympathy’ and ‘escape our blame’, The Robbers places public virtue in ‘considerable danger’. ³⁶

For Mackenzie and P, the dangers presented by Karl Moor are confined exclusively to the German protagonist. And yet, the German heroine is considered by no means less censurable. In his ‘Account’, Mackenzie justifies his conjecture that ‘the characters of the female personages’ found in German drama ‘are by far the most defective’ by drawing attention to the ubiquitous figure of the ‘violent and profligate woman’. ³⁷ Proposing that there is ‘a degree of infamy in the vice of such a person that is scarcely suitable to the dignity of the higher drama, and which disgusts us with its appearance’, Mackenzie indicates the figures’ culpability in stripping Germany's theatrical productions of the artistic merits witnessed on the British stage. ³⁸ Complicit in depriving German drama of the ‘sorrow that melts’ and ‘pity that agitates’, Germany's aggressive heroines are shown to contribute to its dramas’ failure to arouse those ‘passions that … an audience relishes in tragedy’. ³⁹ Mackenzie's diatribe is echoed by P in his raillery against The Robbers. Commenting on Amelia's armed confrontation with her lover's brother, behaviour which, according to P, renders her ‘liable to the imputation of being unnatural’, P resolves:

The German writers seem to have no idea that modesty forms the most beautiful features in the female character, and instead of drawing their heroines as gifted with all the softer virtues, and all those minor graces which act so powerfully on the feelings, they always paint them as possessing the masculine qualities. Amelia is distinguished for everything but sensibility; she is heroic, magnanimous and bold. … Whether it is the effect of a faulty imagination, or a sacrifice to the vitiated state of the German morals, is uncertain, but Schiller has in no instance painted his female characters in a way to excite interest or inspire imitation. ⁴⁰

Conflating Amelia's flaws with those of the standard German heroine, P uses his review of The Robbers to launch an attack on the German heroine per se. According to P, Germany's ‘bold and magnanimous’ heroines are both unnatural and unpleasing as they lack the ‘modesty’ and ‘sensibility’ that is rightly understood in Britain to underpin female nature and female beauty. Concurring with Mackenzie, P shows the absence of these qualities to problematise the play's reception by mollifying the heroine's ability to arouse sympathetic identification: Amelia's lack of ‘softer virtues’ and ‘minor graces’ disables her from ‘excit[ing] interest or inspir[ing] imitation’ from her audience and thereby distinguishes her unfavourably from the British tragic heroine. For P and Mackenzie then, the German hero and the German heroine are equally irreconcilable with British theatrical tastes. Yet the defects they embody are entirely counterpoising: while Amelia's uniform display of masculinity renders her incapable of eliciting any kind of emotional response, the inconstancy of Karl Moor is conversely accused of inspiring sympathy for vice.

Heroines of a ‘Mingled Nature’: Matthew G. Lewis's The Castle Spectre

The judgments offered by P and Mackenzie point towards an apparent dichotomy in hostile British responses to violent German and Anglo-German heroines at the turn of the nineteenth century. While P and Mackenzie show the native German heroine to sit uncomfortably with British theatregoers on account of her monolithic boldness, Coleridge accuses the ‘so-called German’ heroine of provoking unease by presenting the same incongruous mix of ferocity and virtue that characterises the German hero. In his attack on Bertram, Coleridge inveighs not only against the plaudits received by the play's protagonist, but those directed at the heroine, Imogen: a woman who deceives her husband and abandons her child in a wood, it being unclear, writes Coleridge, ‘whether she murdered it or not’. ⁴¹ Mirroring the criticisms of Karl Moor offered by P and Mackenzie, Coleridge berates Imogen's characterisation for its mixture of baseness and virtue: in his words, Imogen combines a ‘foulness of … heart’ with ‘sincere religious’ sentiments. ⁴² Such duality is a flaw detected recurringly in British criticisms of aggressive Anglo-German heroines exhibited on the British stage in the years surrounding 1800: the inimical effects of which are shown to differ in severity from play to play, and from review to review.

In 1798, the Analytical Review printed an adverse commentary of Lewis's The Castle Spectre, signed by ‘W. B’. Deriding the fashion for Anglo-German plays that don the ‘harlequin coat of pantomime’, W. B's review fits neatly into the corpus of tirades on the foreign ‘dramatic romance’, which, styled as ‘a drama of a mingled nature, Operatic, Comical and Tragical’, is shown to shun the celebrated characteristics of the legitimate British drama. ⁴³ Among the features situating the play at a disadvantage from the native British drama is its knife-wielding heroine, Angela. Distinguishing Angela unfavourably from the British tragic heroine, W. B chimes with Mackenzie and P when declaring that the ‘eyes which have been thus unrelenting to the distress of Angela’ have readily wept ‘over the sorrows of Belvidera, of Monimia, of Isabella’. ⁴⁴ Though judging Angela inauspiciously against Otway's and Southerne's sentimental heroines, however, W. B does not vindicate Angela's inferiority solely on account of her boldness, as P had done Amelia. Rather, his animosity to Angela is provoked by her hybridity.

Accusing Lewis of plagiarising the concluding scene of Arthur Murphy's tragedy The Grecian Daughter (1772), which sees Euphrasia fatally stab the play's antagonist, W. B proposes that in contrast to the actions of Euphrasia, which are allegedly tolerable because they are characteristic, Angela's actions are conversely intolerable because uncharacteristic. The journalist writes that while Euphrasia's bold conduct appears ‘perfectly consistent’ with the heroine's perpetually ‘strong and masculine character’, the performance of the ‘bloody act’ that Lewis assigns his heroine is ‘completely abhorrent from the gentleness’ otherwise ‘attributed to Angela’, who, though she ‘never saw a bird die but she wept’, closes the play with the remorseless imperative: ‘Give [Osmond] a thousand lives! – and let me take them all’. ⁴⁵ Uniting the genre's form and the heroine's portrayal, W. B shows Angela to replicate the offensively ‘mingled nature’ of the ‘Comical and Tragical’ drama in which she appears, by pointing to her incongruous conglomeration of gentleness and bloodiness, virtue and vice. ⁴⁶ It is this shift in character from paragon of docile femininity to fierce embodiment of martial retribution with which W. B finds chief fault. Such inconstancy, he argues, renders Angela inferior to the ‘perfectly consistent’ heroine of the native tragic drama, as it constitutes an ‘outrage to probability’, which causes interest in Angela's character ‘to languish’ and destroys her ability to ‘elevate or to shake us’. ⁴⁷

For W. B then, the problem with the violent Anglo-German heroine, though not dissimilar in effect to that located by P and Mackenzie, stems from a contrary cause: Angela is shown to prevent emotional investment from spectators as her inconstancy furnishes her with an improbable characterisation that serves to render her ‘unsuccessful in [her] attempt on us with pathos’. ⁴⁸ In the years following the debut performance of The Castle Spectre, criticisms of the violent and hybridised Anglo-German heroine increased in intensity. No longer defective simply for her inability to provide the pathos transmitted by the British tragic heroine, denigrations of the figure come recurrently to anticipate Coleridge's criticism of Maturin's Imogen in pointing to the figure's status as an undeserving ‘object of interest and sympathy’. ⁴⁹ The arguable catalyst for such augmented hostilities towards the violent Anglo-German heroine was Sheridan's immensely popular rendition of Kotzebue's Pizarro.

Glorifying Vice in Sheridan's Pizarro

In an overt example of Europhobic discourse published in two instalments in the Edinburgh Magazine between 1802 and 1803, dramatist and staunch conservative William Preston presented England as being under attack from the ‘invading swarms’ of plays intruding ‘from the northern hive’ of Europe. ⁵⁰ Attributing to these plays a ‘ferocious character and revolutionary bias’, he postulates their design to induce audiences ‘to be discontented with the government under which they live’ and ‘to become active partizans of anarchy and disorder’. ⁵¹ Plays derived from the German school, insists Preston, ‘bear strong internal marks of the affection which the writers bear to the new philosophy and the revolutionary spirit’, as ‘their heroes and heroines are bedlamites’. ⁵² Consonant with chastisements directed against Karl Moor, Preston shows German plays to hold forth ‘monster[s] of guilt and depravity’ as ‘deserving of supreme pity’. ⁵³ Yet, diverging from P and Mackenzie, Preston postulates that the menace posed by such portrayals reaches its apex when the ‘monsters’ in question are female.

Preston inveighs against the presence on the British stage of German-inspired dramas in which ‘mannish manners, and bold ferocity’ are ‘ascribed to females, nay, to females which the poet announces as feminine, good and amiable’. ⁵⁴ Given the supposed malleability of female theatregoers, Preston protests that characters of ‘ferocious and censurable’ conduct, whose crimes are exhibited ‘as amiable or estimable’, or ‘even panegyrised, as acts of virtue and heroism, in swelling declamation’ are ‘particularly injurious’ when held out as examples ‘to the female world’, as they offer ready ‘objects of imitation to their sex’, liable to encourage in women the ‘impious sentiments’ and ‘dangerous energies’ which serve to spread ‘the poison of anarchy’. ⁵⁵ Preston consequently denigrates venerations of German-imported heroines who are to ‘be found only in Bedlam’, decrying such ‘horrid and disgusting’ female characters as figures rife with potential to catalyse conduct inimical to national peace. ⁵⁶

Surpassing the fervency expressed by W. B four years earlier, the vitriol with which Preston writes at the turn of the nineteenth century of the hybridised Anglo-German heroine is typical of his day. The urgency of his invective reverberates in reviews of the most popular German adaptation to appear on the British stage throughout the 1790s: Sheridan's Pizarro. As John Britton noted in 1800, Sheridan's play ‘excited the greatest variety of praise and censure from the critical fraternity of any production ever brought upon the London stage’. ⁵⁷ Though frequently lauded as a patriotic response to the imminent threat of French invasion, Pizarro was simultaneously singled out by Europhobic commentators for depicting one of the most dangerous embodiments of foreign energy in the form of its heroine, Elvira. ⁵⁸ While troubling on the one hand due to her status as Pizarro's mistress, Elvira's provocation of hostility from British reviewers stemmed concurrently from her embodiment of the ‘mannish manners and bold ferocity’ vilified by Preston. Actuated by her love of Pizarro to support him in his despotic conquest of Peru, Sheridan's Elvira endures ‘the tumults of [the] noisy camp’, involves herself in the ‘manly business’ of military affairs, and is lauded by Pizarro for being ‘in war the soldier's pattern’. ⁵⁹ Vengeful as well as combative, when Pizarro resolves to murder the innocent Peruvian, Alonzo, despite Elvira's disapproval, Elvira, convinced both that Pizarro ‘no longer love[s]’ her, and that his conduct will make him ‘hateful to all future ages – accursed and scorned by posterity’, resolves that ‘a poignard’ be ‘plung’d into [the] tyrant's heart’. ⁶⁰ She consequently shuns the ‘drops of weakness’ indicative of her sex in order to embrace the ‘hate’ and ‘fury’ necessary to seek ‘the vengeance [her] heart has sworn against the tyrant’. ⁶¹

Representative of the outrage caused by Elvira's unfeminine conduct, in his extensive raillery against Pizarro, the Reverend Thomas Comber berated Elvira for fostering the ‘fell passions of fury and revenge’ and rejecting the ‘patience and resignation’ that ‘are the only arms’ the virtuous female ‘calls to her aid’. ⁶² While Elvira's ‘masculine manners’ are accordingly flagged as significant defects of character, what is shown to render Elvira especially injurious on the London stage, and, ultimately, what distinguishes her from Mackenzie's and P's benumbing German heroine, is that, like the ‘monster[s] of guilt and depravity’ condemned by Preston, she is painted as estimable and imitable. ⁶³ Comber labels Elvira as yet another German-derived figure who exemplifies ‘the new adventure on the stage to render vice amiable’. He complains that ‘the author of this tragedy, as if desirous of confounding all distinctions between right and wrong, virtue and vice, holds up this woman’ to ‘the admiration of his audience’ by shrouding her baseness beneath ‘such noble sentiments of justice and liberality’, as ‘could only become, and ought only to proceed from, the mouth of virtue’. ⁶⁴ Comber concludes, ‘for these reasons’, Elvira constitutes ‘a great blemish in this popular drama’, which threatens to promote ‘the cause of immorality’ and to result in the ‘dissolution of morals’. ⁶⁵

Elvira's insidiousness is shown to result from the magnanimous proclamations of humanity interspersed into her speech; most crucially, in the play's revised denouement, in which Sheridan magnified Elvira's display of contrition and atonement. ⁶⁶ Indicating visually the recantation of her formerly public role, Elvira appears on stage dressed as a nun seconds before Pizarro is slain by Rolla. With Pizarro dead, Elvira declines the offer from the ‘grateful nation’ of Peru to remain in their ‘rescued country’, pledging instead that ‘Humbled in penitence’, she will ‘atone the guilty errors’ that ‘have long consum’d [her] secret heart’. She then encourages her company to ‘Cherish humanity’ so as to ‘avoid the foul examples thou hast viewed’. ⁶⁷ Elvira's articulations of philanthropy and repentance in this scene are vehemently accused by Europhobic commentators of clouding her savage conduct, rendering her an object of celebration as opposed to condemnation. A writer for the Gentleman's Magazine argued in 1799 that having repudiated all ‘female delicacy’ by following the dictates of the ‘unpitying sword’, the ‘compassion [Elvira] afterwards exhibits’ is destructive, as it exalts ‘to public admiration a heroine who, by her flagrant misconduct, had more justly deserved censure’. The journalist pinpoints Elvira's characterisation as evidence that ‘German principles now pervade our theatre’ and shows such principles to be of ‘very dangerous import’, as they ‘afford a sanction to vice’, which ‘the multitude are always too ready to embrace’. ⁶⁸ William Gifford echoes this postulation in his commentary offered in the Anti-Jacobin Review. Defining Elvira as ‘one of the most reprehensible characters that was ever suffered to disgrace the stage’, Gifford aligns Elvira's occasional declamations of feminine virtue with attempts made by ‘modern philosophers’ from the German school to ‘hide enormity under the mask of lofty expression’. Considering Elvira's portrayal ‘Perfectly reconcilable to the new system in philosophy’, Gifford declares:

Vice, of a nature the most threatening to the well-being of society, is rendered amiable by the poet's aid – There is not a girl of any elevation of spirit and ignorance of the world, who will not, on witnessing the effusion of this unusual personage in the drama, cry out ‘how admirable Elvira's sentiments and conduct are!’ The poor girl loses sight of the flagitious part of the woman's character, in the more dazzling one of the heroine. … This is no new charge against Kotzebue. … [I]t is only part of a system adopted by the new philosophy, and assiduously cultivated in every possible way, so as to loosen those bonds which have hitherto so successfully held society together; and we all of us know, by daily experience, how far the seduction of the female mind has that powerful tendency. ⁶⁹

Gifford's complaint chimes harmoniously with Preston's. With Elvira's ‘flagitious’ conduct palliated by the ‘glare of sentiment’, naïve female theatregoers, prone to seduction by what they see on stage, will feel impelled to imitate Elvira's unfeminine and violent conduct, conflating it with the virtue she at other times exhibits. Such ill-directed sympathies pose a grave threat to social cohesion, threatening to eradicate national peace, and thus to fulfil the alleged intentions of ‘the new philosophy’ currently ransacking Britain via the vehicle of German drama.

As is clear from these accounts, objections to Elvira centre less on the heroine's egregiously masculine conduct in and of itself, than on the extent to which such conduct is liable to be forgiven and even admired. As theatre critic Samuel Bardsley succinctly conjectured in 1800, ‘[t]he character of Elvira is calculated to attract more admiration and esteem, than is consistent with a just sense of female decorum and virtuous sensibility’, as her ‘departure from the strict rules of female chastity and refined delicacy’ is combined with ‘lofty sentiment and energy of character’. ⁷⁰ It is this coalescence of indecorum and lofty sentiment that casts Elvira in such a baleful mould. As the quoted reviewers unanimously suggest, the latter qualities, by assuaging the former, propel Elvira upwards, undeservedly, in the audience's estimation, allowing for the misdirection of sympathy and respect.

Anglicising the Sword-Bearing German Heroine in The Red-Cross Knights and Joanna

The sources assessed thus far have spotlighted the prevalent criticisms directed against aggressive German and Anglo-German heroines throughout the 1790s and early 1800s. While P's commentary on Schiller's Amelia shows the defectiveness of the German heroine to lie in her substitution of feminine softness for masculine boldness, commentaries on Lewis's and Sheridan's Anglo-German heroines point to a shared apprehension of the figures’ incapacity to arouse an appropriate emotional response on account of their hybridity. While, for W. B, the result of this is quite simply emotional withdrawal, for reviewers such as Preston, Comber, and Gifford, the far more pernicious outcome is sympathetic identification with a heroine aligned more with vice than virtue. If the aggressive German heroine was thus to be adequately cleansed of her foreign affiliations, she would need to be stripped both of her masculinity and her inconstancy. Holman's The Red-Cross Knights (Haymarket, 1799), and Cumberland's Joanna demonstrate the meticulous methods employed at the close of the 1790s to anglicise violent German heroines in line with such requirements. Instead of appearing wholly masculine, like the ‘magnanimous and bold’ German heroine condemned by P, or presenting a jarring mismatch of masculine obduracy and feminine sensibility, like the ‘Bedlamites’ described by Preston, their heroines uphold a consistent display of feminine virtue and vulnerability even while bearing arms.

When Holman came to adapt Schiller's The Robbers for the London stage in 1799, the German tragedy had been adopted so definitively as an espousal of revolutionary doctrine that the National Convention had made Schiller an honorary citizen of France, despite the author never subscribing to Jacobinism. ⁷¹ Within this political context, it is no surprise that Alexander Fraser Tytler's largely literal translation of Schiller's The Robbers, introduced to Britain in 1792, was deemed wholly unfit for dramatic representation. ⁷² Seven years later, however, Holman successfully transported Schiller's tragedy to London's patent stage, albeit in heavily revised form, via The Red-Cross Knights. With his earlier adaptation having been ‘prohibited by the licenser’, Holman made great efforts in his second attempt at revising The Robbers to placate the play's more troubling implications. Rather than simply making ‘curtailments, and such variations as most dramas require which are not native productions’, as was his method the first time round, Holman informs readers in the play's advertisement that he determined ‘on forming a play, which should retain as much as possible of the original, with the omission of all that could be deemed objectionable’. ⁷³ And he evidently accomplished his task: not only was his drama cleared for representation at the Haymarket Theatre, but reviewers commended Holman for taking a play which ‘has been reprobated as immoral and improper for the stage’, and ‘improv[ing] on the original’ by removing all ‘these faults’. ⁷⁴ Key to Holman's success in reappropriating The Robbers for a British audience, yet largely overlooked in Anglo-German theatre scholarship, are the amendments made to his heroine's martial conduct. ⁷⁵

The Red-Cross Knights introduces London theatregoers to the character of Schiller's Amelia under the new name of Eugenia. In both Tytler's and Holman's adaptations, Amelia/Eugenia fends off her husband's amorous brother (Francis/Roderic) by partaking in armed combat. In Tytler's play, deviating scarcely from Schiller's, Amelia first ‘strikes’ her wooer, then ‘she draws out his sword’ and declares: ‘see'st now thou villain, what I can do? I am a woman – but a woman – when in fury – Dare to come near me and this steel my uncle's hand shall drive it to thy heart’. ⁷⁶ By contrast, when Roderic ‘approaches to seize Eugenia, she draws his dragger’ against him, then issues the threat: ‘Behold villain, what I can do? Although I am a woman, I am a woman desperate. Dare to approach me, and this steel shall pierce thy heart!’ ⁷⁷ The changes made to the heroine's actions in this scene are subtle but significant. Tytler's/Schiller's heroine illustrates her proclivity for violence by striking her aggressor, before demonstrating her mastery of a weapon reserved for the exclusively male realm of the battlefield, and embracing the ‘fury’ that she feels towards her enemy. In doing so, she exhibits both a physical and psychological capacity for martial warfare and combat. Meanwhile, failing to ‘strike’ her aggressor; equipped with the smaller and lighter weapon of a dagger, commonly aligned with private and domesticated violence; and described not as a ‘woman roused to fury’, but as ‘a woman desperate’, Eugenia's armed confrontation of the villain appears less like a voluntary recourse to impressive martial exertion, than it does the reluctant last resort of a physically unremarkable damsel in distress. In depicting his heroine's armed combat in this revised manner, Holman succeeds in creating a heroine of consistently feminine character. Having exploited the scope for sentimentalisation offered in Schiller's source text by foregrounding the familial affections directed by Eugenia towards her lover and her father-in-law, Holman upholds her display of feminine softness during martial combat by camouflaging her original exhibition of physical strength and masculine boldness beneath a display of womanly despair. ⁷⁸

Despite Cumberland's insistence that the changes made to the final scene of Joanna straightforwardly reflect the bodily limitations of the British actress, the similarities in effect between Holman's and Cumberland's revisions strongly intimate the dramatists’ equivalently partisan agendas. Cumberland's denouement diverges fundamentally from that of Kotzebue's original. In the German source text, as we have seen, ‘Joanna rushes in accoutred in the complete armour of a warlike knight, and with a huge sword of two-handed sway dispatches Lazarra at a stroke’. Contrarily, in Cumberland's revised conclusion, Joanna ‘rushes in’ and ‘utters a scream of horror’ before ‘plunging a dagger’ in ‘Lazarra's heart’ and watching him fall ‘with the stroke’. ⁷⁹ By re-writing the denouement this way, Cumberland matches Holman in implementing narrative revisions that substantially downplay Joanna's mental and physical capacity for martial agency, depriving both his heroine and his performer of the masculine conduct requisite to Kotzebue's production.

Kotzebue's Joanna, appearing in full armour and thrusting a sword, represents an out-and-out war hero. Her actions are rational, strategic, and pre-meditated. Aware that her husband is in danger, she equips herself with the armoury and weaponry needed to come to his rescue by performing the duty of a soldier. She fulfils her military feat so seamlessly that her husband is astonished to discover that his preserver is not in fact a military general, but rather, his wife. In Cumberland's version, Joanna shifts from a military hero to a desperate lover. Rather than arriving at the scene with military command and authority, fully equipped for battle, Joanna maintains her previously sentimental characterisation: consonant with her earlier depiction as a ‘wretched wife’, whose anticipation of ‘a widow's agonies’ causes her impulsively to attempt self-slaughter, Joanna enters the scene screaming like a hysterical sentimental heroine before being prompted by ‘horror’ to take up a dagger, at the spur of the moment, and rashly stab her husband's enemy. ⁸⁰ While Kotzebue's heroine thereby communicates the radical suggestion that women parallel their male counterparts’ capability to excel on the battlefield, Cumberland enforces conservative ideas around female sensibility and hysteria: his heroine is successful in saving her husband's life not because she is well-drilled in military techniques, but because her emotions take over and force her, unthinkingly, to commit a deed at which, as we learn in her penultimate speech, she subsequently ‘tremble[s] to behold’. ⁸¹

When transported to the British theatre, and embodied by a British actress, Cumberland's Joanna consequently defends established distinctions between men and women, and British and German females. In stripping Joanna of her heroics with the sword, as Holman had done Eugenia, Cumberland downplays his heroine's masculinity, while simultaneously negating the risk of his British actress proving herself capable of the corporeal feats achieved by her unnaturally ‘warlike’ German counterpart. As his preface inadvertently implies, Cumberland is well aware of what is at stake in the conflation of the British and the German performer. For Cumberland's British actress successfully to emulate her German counterpart in simulating a military hero on stage would be to challenge not only essentialist understandings of gender, at a time when such theories were already being called into question by revolutionary activity, but to undermine the proposed polarity of British and European females, at a moment when the preservation and celebration of British women's allegedly superior femininity were deemed crucial in protecting Britain from the anarchy witnessed in France. ⁸² Whether or not the German actress is indeed more ‘adroit in warlike operations’ than Cumberland's British equivalent becomes a moot point. Cumberland's revised script, intent on upholding gendered and national distinctions, denies the actress the opportunity to prove herself capable of manoeuvres that ought to produce ‘difficulty in the action’ when attempted by a British woman, so as to nullify the risk of presenting male/female, British/German behaviours as at all interchangeable.

Holman and Cumberland consequently employ analogous methods to neutralise the challenges posed by the German heroine to the country's prevailing ideologies around nationhood and sex. While the heroines witnessed in the German theatre both act and think like military heroes, dexterously handling cumbersome battlefield weapons with zeal and self-assurance, their anglicised equivalents, armed instead with daggers, are dispossessed of such implied bodily and mental strength when acting desperately upon strong spousal affections. Re-envisaging the German heroine both physically and psychologically, the dramatists cleanse their foreign importations of the defects prevalently shown to hinder the figure's congruity with British tastes and morals. No longer wholeheartedly ‘heroic, magnanimous and bold’, like the unamiable Amazon derided by P, nor amalgamating ‘feminine, good and amiable’ qualities with ‘mannish manners, and bold ferocity’, like the ‘Bedlamites’ decried by Preston, the heroines offer constant displays of the ‘softer virtues’ and ‘minor graces’ seen to constitute female goodness, and are accordingly able to ‘excite interest’ and act ‘powerfully on the feelings’ of their British spectators, without ‘seducing [their] pity for vices’. ⁸³