Fanny Burney

Category
LITERATURE - AUTHORS

Language
ENGLISH

From 1788, Burney's diaries record the composition of a small number of playtexts which were neither performed nor published in the author's lifetime, remaining in manuscript until 1995. These are the dramatic fragment conventionally known as Elberta and three completed plays copied out in beautiful handwriting in ordered booklets, suitable for private circulation, if perhaps not publication. These are Edwy and Elgiva, Hubert de Vere, and The Siege of Pevensey. Edwy and Elgiva was the only one to be staged, although for one night only, on 21 March 1795, garnering unanimous negative reviews from the public and critics. The long-delayed publication of these plays has kept critics away, with the exception of very few.[32] Even for the handful of scholars who have dealt with them, these texts remain devoid of particular dramatic qualities, indeed 'wretched', as they are often called: in the form in which they have come to us they seem too long to be staged; characterizations are stereotyped; the endings are weak, and the plots convoluted and inconsistent. The style, rhetorical and emphatic, makes them sound clumsy and heavy to the modern ear. However, when properly contextualized and studied as theatrical texts, rather than as unfortunate second-order productions within the works of a successful novelist as Burney, the four Court plays suggest a distinct thematic-stylistic-discursive alignment, more in line with the dramatic production of the late 18th century than has been recognized thus far.[33]

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