"A sensation of the action": the inscription of performance in the verse dramas of Augusta Webster.

In an 1886 issue of the Athenaeum, the Victorian writer and political activist Augusta Webster wrote a tepid review of Lewis Morris's poetic drama Gycia, tactfully evading outright condemnation by ruminating on the genre more broadly. Webster, a writer of poetic dramas as well as a critic of them, penned this review a year before the publication of the last of her four verse dramas, and, therefore, her words speak to her own mature approach to dramatic writing. What Webster's critical consideration of Gycia makes clear is that poetic drama sets its sight on a rare--but important--kind of reader who revels in creating the world alongside the author, who possesses "the faculty of inward sight and hearing," and who seeks to inhabit the world of the literature he or she reads. Since the reader of drama desires "a sensation of the action" above and beyond "passive absorption" of novel reading, it is imperative, explains Webster, that such a work "need not, indeed should not, be written with any modifications of dramatic treatment to differentiate it from acting plays" and that authors of this genre remember that "the plays that act best read best." (1) Her lackluster response to Morris's instantiation of this genre results from his subordination of the dramatic element of the piece to the poetic and, therefore, his failure to see the reader as one who desires to experience the physicality of the world of the play and to participate viscerally in its creation.

Webster's four full-length plays reflect her desire to blend stage drama and closet drama, and as Patricia Rigg has noted Webster drops abstract themes typical of closet drama for the sake of conventional dramatic structure and stage directions. (2) However, Webster's works enact this hybridity with more than just a stage-worthy plotline; they also continually invoke the embodied nature of theatrical performance in the confines of the printed page both through references to Victorian stage practice and through uses of, what the linguist J. L. Austin terms the "performative" functions of language. I argue that Webster, in her dramas, plays with the physical potential of language to remind readers of the embodiment implicit in the printed page and to encourage them to see the process of reading as an active, physical engagement with the text. By doing so, Webster redefines literature as inherently performative--the book is like a stage; its characters, the actors; its writer, the director; and the reader, its audience--and that, as a result, it is an enterprise of body as well as mind. Yet Webster's plays never advocate the superiority of the stage to the printed page; these literary dramas harness the visceral realities of performance to remind readers of their role as active consumers in print's seemingly unidirectional transaction and of literature's contributions to their embodied reality.

Webster's conception of literary drama that allows audiences to see the play "acted to them only in the theatre of their minds" alludes to but also provides a feminist reworking of the closet drama form conceived of by male Romantic writers such as Byron and Coleridge, who envisioned this genre as a safe retreat from the anti-intellectual stage. Webster invokes and challenges Byron's aesthetic choice to exchange the theatrical stage for "the mental theatre of the reader" (3) and Coleridge's belief that Shakespeare's greatness lies in the fact that he wrote not for any stage so much as "the universal mind." (4) Byron's and Coleridge's words envision the reader's mind as a sufficient substitute for the stage (the mind, for both of them, is already a theater) and assume that there is a universal mental landscape, invariable across time and peoples. In contrast, Webster's characterization charges her readers to visualize that stage and re-create its spatial and temporal realities anew in each of their own minds. In an 1887 letter that Webster wrote to William Michael Rossetti, responding to his critique that the action in her final drama, The Sentence, is not obvious enough, she reiterates that her "stage is in the reader's head." (5) This difference in phrasing--"theatre of the mind" or "stage in the reader's head," as opposed to "mental theatre"--speaks to Webster's subtle revision of the genre. Rather than striving to remove all concerns for embodiment, poetic drama, Webster contends, allows readers to grapple with their imaginative theatrical embodiment. Since Webster's drama encourages considerations of actors or stage dimensions, it never asks readers to forsake physicality, neither the play's nor their own.

Despite the amount of respect Augusta Webster's poetry has garnered in critical conversations about the Victorian period, this writer's four verse dramas--The Auspicious Day, Disguises, In a Day, and The Sentence--have received little attention, in part because the hybrid nature of the form creates confusion about how to evaluate them. Nineteenth-century reviews of Disguises and The Sentence heap praise on these two pieces; most notably, William Michael Rossetti lauded The Sentence as "one of the masterpieces of European drama." (6) However, insecurity arises about the method of evaluation; critics judge these pieces on either their literary merit or performance potential but not both. The Academy praises Disguises as "a just tribute to the literary ability of its author," (7) while the Spectator and the Month, respectively, exalt The Sentence for being "a play that would be effective on the stage" (8) and a piece in which "the Dramatis Personae live." (9) While feminist scholars have recovered Augusta Webster's overtly feminist, poetic oeuvre, with special attention to her dramatic monologues featuring a female speaker, her full-length dramas have slid into critical obscurity. Not at all antithetical to her dramatic monologues or her nonfiction pieces, these verse dramas also employ a protofeminist aesthetic by striking down male writers' claim to universality through the erasure of their own bodies and their claim to literary greatness through the disregard for mass appeal.

Two of Webster's four verse dramas--Disguises (1879) and The Sentence (1887)--which are representative of two key moments of her dramatic aesthetic, serve as the basis for my analysis. Patricia Rigg has divided Webster's dramatic output into two distinct phases: her earlier, less stageable plays (The Auspicious Day and Disguises) and her later, more stage-conscious plays (In a Day and The Sentence) (Rigg, "Present," p. 118). In choosing one play from each phase, I challenge the assumption that her earlier plays give less consideration to stage presentation and suggest that Webster's use of performative language across both phases demonstrates her foundational commitment to issues of embodiment. Disguises features characters repeatedly adopting and discarding identity through language and illustrates the way in which identity is as much a performance in text as on the stage. Similarly, The Sentence depicts spectators seemingly on the sidelines who use language to enter the forward thrust of the plot and alter the course of the narrative. At each turn in these two dramas, Webster bends the poetic to the dramatic quality, enacting the standard for literary dramas that she sets for Morris's Gycia; yet her incorporation of theatrical embodiment is not the end goal itself but rather is used alongside the poetic text to create a reading experience in which the reader becomes an active participant and in which the world of the play reverberates into the reader's own embodied world.

Disguises (1879): The Acting Debates of the 1880s and the Performance of Identity

"The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted," Charles Lamb mandated in his 1811 essay "The Tragedies of Shakespeare," a move that ignores the fact that Shakespeare's plays were, in fact, written as plays but also reveals the nineteenth century's textual bias. The "corporal" dimension of a staged version of King Lear, Lamb proceeds to explain, ruins for the audience the play's higher intellectual potential, weighing down the awesomeness of the eponymous tragic hero with the inevitable frailties of a human body. The glorious Lear no longer remains glorious when nineteenth-century audience members see one of their real contemporaries bring this character to life. Engaging with the text is the only way to access the Lear that Shakespeare envisioned, argues Lamb, when he says, "while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, we are in his mind." (10) For him, to "be Lear" means to be "in his mind," unmediated through a body. Lamb seeks an ideal fusion of character and reader--an empathetic mingling--that happens mentally and never physically. The theater, with its embodied actualization of a text, is always, for Lamb, too much (because it heaps multiple physical signifiers onto a character at once) and not enough (because it blocks the audience's potential for affective identification). Reading the text of King Lear, according to Lamb, offers a more accurate picture of the protagonist's identity.

Lamb is not alone: this antitheatrical sentiment pervades much nineteenth-century discourse, even as late as the 1880s, when Augusta Webster is writing. At best, theater offered a less accurate view of a person's identity; at worst, it threatened to dismantle the very concept of a stable self that Victorians held dear. As critics such as Nina Auerbach, Joseph Litvak, and Rebecca Stern have pointed out, the Victorians were plagued by the idea that performance could leak from the stage into their private lives and expose selfhood as a mere fiction. (11) The touchstone literature of the century--from the Romantic poetry that records the author's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (12) to the Victorian novel that represents an individual's inner life and personal growth--asserted the unique value of a person. In contrast, theater, employing actors who performed another identity differently every night, threatened the notion of an authentic self. As such, the text was not just a way to access a character's identity more fully; it became the only way to ensure that a person had identity. Whereas nineteenth-century writers believed that the body could evade, mislead, and perform, they were assured that the mind never could.

This fear of performance led to attempts to neutralize the hazards of theater's embodied, populist form. In the decade Augusta Webster wrote her early verse dramas, acting theories cropped up in theatrical criticism in an effort to regulate the craft and to keep the ill effects of performance at bay. Denis Diderot's Paradox of Acting and Constant Coquelin's Art and the Actor, both translated into English at the beginning of the 1880s, aroused the anger of English actors and dramatic critics, including Henry Irving and William Archer. While Diderot and Coquelin asserted that actors needed to maintain distance from their characters in order to be fully effective onstage (always remaining a technician), (13) Irving encouraged and Archer supported "natural acting," by means of which actors felt, and not just imitated, the emotions they were portraying. (14) Not yet Stanislavsky's method acting, Irving's "natural acting" looks for a middle ground between an actor too intimately identifying with the character and one becoming too machinelike. "It is not mere attitude or tone that has to be studied," he says, but "you must be moved by the impulse of your being; you must impersonate and not recite." (15) The actor, according to Irving, should balance the impersonation so that it feels real enough to move the audience but not real enough to allow the actor to forget that it is a role. The British insistence on genuine emotion, even in an art that requires feigning, demonstrates an anxiety about physically playing another role and attempts to offer a way to maintain the authentic self within a craft based on artifice.

Well connected in theatrical circles and a frequent host of literary salons, Webster no doubt knew of the acting theories dominating theatrical criticism as she penned her verse dramas. Webster was close to Edmund Gosse, a literary critic noted for introducing Ibsen to England, and her daughter, Margaret Davies Webster, trained as an actress during the 1880s when Webster first tried her hand at dramas. Webster's Disguises, published by C. Kegan Paul in 1879, foregrounds the craft of acting and enters into this fomenting discussion by featuring characters who, in order to move between disparate cultures in medieval France, adopt and shed identities at a dizzying rate. On the one hand, Disguises demonstrates the consequences of acting, as these characters feel the physical toll that role-playing takes on their body and lose sight of the divisions between self and impersonation. On the other hand, the space of the text becomes a space of performance as well, rather than a safe haven of truth and authenticity. In Disguises, Webster plays with the performativity of the written word to demonstrate that textual inscription carries the power to reshape and dismantle the concept of selfhood as much as theatrical presentation does. On the pages of Disguises, words do not just record, but also enact and perform, identity.

Webster's plays stress the link between text and performance by employing the performative function of language. The linguist J. L. Austin points out in his lecture series titled How to Do Things with Words that certain utterances, called "performatives," can entail action and not only record or describe action as constative or declarative sentences do. While, on one level, speaking or writing is already an action (a locutionary act), on another level, we also perform actions in saying something (an illocutionary act) or by--or in consequence of--saying something (a perlocutionary act). For instance, saying the words "I do" during the course of a wedding ceremony enacts the marriage legally (illocutionary act) and perhaps causes your new mother-in-law to be resentful (perlocutionary act). (16) While all sentences have a locutionary force and can have a perlocutionary force, performative sentences are those that primarily have an illocutionary one--for example, the statement "I name the ship Britannia" performs the action of christening the vessel. However, although Austin focuses on the illocutionary force, he also calls attention to the visceral effects of all utterances, whether locutionary or perlocutionary.

Even in the opening scene of Disguises, the play warns the reader not to forget that its characters are living and breathing entities capable of change. The play juxtaposes two heterogeneous locations: the kingdom of St. Fabien and the republic of Aquitaine. When the play begins, Aymery, accompanied by his illegitimate cousin, Raymond, is leaving St. Fabien for Aquitaine to escape his arranged marriage to Claude, the daughter of Count de Peyriac and the heir to the throne. To avoid detection, the two men travel in the guise of yeomen. Raymond delivers the first line, which reminds Aymery, and subsequently the audience, of his body: "I am weary." When Aymery expresses shock, Raymond scolds him. "Why not?" he demands. "When was I dipped, / Like Sir Achilles, in the Stygian bath, / To give me statues' limbs, past prick and ache?" (17) Although a jab at Aymery, Raymond's biting remark also reminds the reader that, even though this play is set in antiquity, these characters must be read as present beings whose lives hold potential for change, rather than as depictions from an unalterable past. Simultaneously, back in St. Fabien, Claude, upon seeing a painting of her ancestor in the castle, rejects the notion that her body lives in this lifeless portrait: "Have I those bleak round eyes, / Like frozen pools? Am I blank stoniness, / All features and no face?" (p. 87). Claude echoes Raymond's sentiments, setting herself in contrast to portraiture--another art form she accuses of freezing time and representation. Her distinction between the "features" of the painting and her own living "face" suggests her identity is in the making, in a state of becoming rather than being. These two moments early in Disguises stress the way poetic drama ought to be read: rather than reading the text as a reflection of these characters' genuine selves, the text is a place of potentiality, in which its characters are susceptible to change and redefinition.

If the opening of Disguises emphasizes that its characters are living and mutable, the rest of the drama contends that language similarly has the potential to alter one's present reality. Claude's servant, Isabel, first suggests a link between the textual and the corporeal. She warns her mistress, who verbalizes a desire to resist her father's decree, that even disobedient words can produce real harm:

   Secrets too rash to tell our very selves,
   Which left not spoken might have died, in the hush,
   The death of unborn things, but, finding words,
   Live and become our masters, (p. 23)

Isabel envisions a wide moral gap between thoughts and words, in that to translate disobedient musings into language is akin to committing the act itself. This link between language and action evokes Austin's idea of performative language. In the final line, Isabel implies that language has two facets--one, it can create living realities; two, it can exercise control outside the speaker's intentions--that align with the illocutionary and perlocutionary functions, respectively. Isabel's admonition might imply that language creates this very problem and that Claude can avoid it by not speaking at all. However, since "secrets" are the subject of the sentence, and not individual speakers, Claude's statement also acknowledges that "finding words" is inevitable and that no personal intention is responsible. Like the characters themselves, the language of the play is not static; instead, Webster points out that it is capable of enacting events.

The elders of St. Fabien--Bertrade, Aymery's power-hungry mother; and Count de Peyriac--most frequently employ performative utterances in their ceaseless commands to the younger generation, and the drama demonstrates the ways in which these words have profound physical effects. In the obsessive efforts of Bertrade and the Count to determine their offspring's future, they issue an onslaught of orders: "[N]ame her to me" (p. 95), "[F]orswear her" (p. 96), Bertrade repeatedly demands of Aymery when learning of his affection for Gualhardine, a peasant in Aquitaine, and "Kneel, Raymond" (p. 134), the Count orders when he finds out Raymond's royal birth and rightful claim to the throne. These statements enact a formal command in their very form. We can expand "[N]ame her to me" to reveal the implicit performative (Austin, p. 69): "I order you to name her to me." Not only do the words themselves perform, the characters in Disguises stress that these words cause perlocutionary actions and that those consequences affect their corporeal existence. Although Claude and Gualhardine are highly desirable to their male suitors, they both comment that they are past their prime because their bodies carry with them the turmoil caused by their parents. Claude bemoans her father's crippling edicts, representing this time as "A century of strife and tediousness, / A million months of wrinkle-mapping frets" (p. 182). The experience of "strife and tediousness," but also the textual appearance of these words, writes wrinkles onto the bodies of the dramatis personae. Gualhardine and Aymery second Claude's connection between the abstract and the tangible and between the textual and the physical. Upset by their restricted circumstances, Gualhardine bemoans the "burden of blame grown heavy," and Aymery apoplectically rages that forced marriage renders him "gagged and fettered" (p. 175). These characters' responses speak to the physical effects of their parents' commanding language.

As such, the protagonists linguistically attempt to resist, or neutralize, the performative force of the older generation's words. Unlike Bertrade and the Count, who swear, bid, declare, judge, and name, this trio shies away from speaking with illocutionary force, downplaying their actions with qualifiers. For instance, they put off the illocutionary act for a future time ("I'd pardon you" [p. 25]); they negate the illocutionary potential of a sentence ("I dare not bid thee stay" [p. 81], "I blame not" [p. 42], "I cannot swear thee no" [p. 84], "I judge you not" [p. 107]); and they present themselves as engaged only in perlocutionary actions ("I have been made debtor" [p. 15]). In all these cases, they bend backward syntactically to avoid committing an illocutionary action by invoking the structure of a performative sentence with a first-person singular pronoun and a present indicative verb but never completing it. This determination to circumvent performative speech is manifest in an exchange between two characters of different generations. Upset that Aymery is throwing his royal ambitions aside, Bertrade seeks to persuade him:

   Bert. Swear that--[Pauses]
   Aym. Swear what?
   Bert. I know not. To be king.
   Aym. That needs no promise now. (p. 101)

Bertrade begins with a performative utterance ("I order you to swear") cleverly devised to compel her son to speak in the same fashion; however, she fails to convince him because she focuses on acting powerfully rather than acting on behalf of anything substantive. Aymery interrupts the performative and then refuses to "swear," or to perform an illocutionary act, pushing it off until an undetermined future point.

However, despite the efforts of these characters to opt out of the system, they still find that they must fight their parents' performatives with their own.

To reclaim their identity, there is no way around renaming themselves, despite their efforts to bypass the illocutionary force of language. Aymery, in order to carve out a new future, has to rename himself: "I bad them call me Aymery de Geloz," he recounts, speaking of his first time in Aquitaine to Raymond (p. 11). These pseudonyms, which should require merely verbal and not physical changes, still manage to produce a profound, visceral effect on these characters. Aymery and Raymond's initial idea to utilize pseudonyms seems completely innocuous since both men put on their new names with as much ease as they clothe themselves in yeomen's garb. Aymery's statement that he is "lord here, there vassal" maintains a distinction between his new persona and his real identity (p. 6); however, these finely defined boundaries evaporate as the play proceeds. The problem lies in the fact that Raymond and Aymery not only adopt alternative identities but also swap identities with each other. Raymond, for instance, initially woos Gualhardine, although Aymery becomes her true suitor; Aymery originally holds the kingship, although Raymond eventually uncovers his own royal claim; Aymery is Claude's chosen husband, although that role transfers to Raymond. The tension surrounding these interchangeable identities culminates in syntactical ambiguity. While Aymery talks to his mother, he apologizes for not listening: "Pardon, I had forgotten myself in thought" (p. 110). His choice of words--"forgotten myself'--implies a fracturing of identity because losing one's thoughts suggests losing one's mind, which is the perceived core of individuality. Raymond experiences a similar moment after Aymery and he have been recognized in Aquitaine as St. Fabien nobility. Stumbling upon Raymond, Aymery tells his cousin that they have been searching for him, to which Raymond replies, "So was I.... I Why hunting for a thing I had lost; / Myself.... that I have found" (pp. 71-72). Raymond does not state that his pseudonym has disappeared but rather that the "I" or his own individual identity has. Despite his claim that he has found himself, the syntactical backwardness of the sentence suggests that the illocutionary act of naming has had a perlocutionary consequence.

This dissolution of identity is not unique to Aymery and Raymond: all of the characters experience difficulty separating their performances and duties from their identity, entertaining the notion that there is no essential referent. A signature style of Webster's in this play is to repeat sentences verbatim but to slot in new names. For instance, the Count vehemently proclaims his will to Bertrade and Raymond: "Madam, the queen can only wed my heir. / Raymond, my heir can only wed the queen" (p. 136). The Count here presumably repeats the same syntactical form in order to assert his decision to his two listeners and to endow his sentiment with clarity and power; however, the chiastic structure highlights the interchangeability of one person for another. Every character echoes the question of "Who am I?" throughout the play, making it an anxious refrain that underlies the text, and the phrase "I am" also repeats ceaselessly until it fades into meaninglessness. When Bertrade demands admittance to Claude's chamber to sing the praises of her son, she counters the guard's refusal with the statement, "I am Bertrade. / Canst comprehend?" (p. 144). The guard's refusal to admit her demonstrates that a name does not signify identity. Even when the characters do assert their identity, they betray a splintered self. Aymery, the character who struggles the most with his royal position, speaks consistently of himself in the third person ("I'll speak Count Aymery's thanks" [p. 67] and "Be once more actor of Count Aymery" [p. 71]) as if unable to fuse the signifier with the signified. In the same way, characters string together an endless number of signifiers to represent a single person. Demanding a kiss from Aymery, Bertrade states, "Kiss me my son; kiss me King Aymery" (p. 101), emphasizing both his filial duty and his position of power. Raymond attempts to explain why Gualhardine faints when St. Fabien's noblemen identify the man she loved as Aymery, saying that the name signifies much more than just the man she loved: "She knew who's Charles's Aymery:--/ That he is Raymond's Aymery, Peyriac's, / Claude's Aymery" (p. 76). The building up of monikers ad nauseam explodes the Victorian hope of stable identity and relishes the multiplicity of self.

Webster shows through the extreme theatricality of the drama that "playing a part" is endemic to narrative. Although on the surface Disguises suggests that one can exit the performance at any time, that claim is flimsy. Nearly everything garners the name "play," so much so that no one knows what "performance" and "reality" are. Aymery spurns St. Fabien as "a tedious show" (p. 7), and yet Raymond verses himself in Aymery's disguise in Aquitaine lest he "should maladroitly spoil the play / For want of cues" (p. 9). Escaping St. Fabien because of its theatricality proves futile since Aquitaine similarly requires both men to perform identity: no space remains untouched by performance. The characters' belief at the end of the drama that they can shirk the performance and return to the "truth" falls apart. Piarres tries to redeem Aymery as a suitable choice for his granddaughter, Gualhardine, by defending him as an authentic man: "I judge men by their own worth, not their kin's; / And Aymery has played a true man's part" (p. 170). Yet, in trying to promote Aymery's authenticity, Piarres says that Aymery merely "played the part." Piarres cannot identify a genuine attribute of Aymery's; he must rely on his performances to validate his claim. Even Gualhardine's final demand to throw off their theatrics appears mainly decorative:

   Hush! we'll feign no more.
   We have, in turns, all played disguiseful parts,
   Been life's forced actors, puppets to ourselves:
   The masque is ended, (p. 202)

Although she verbally demands an end to the masque, her statement that they were "life's forced actors" throws that declaration in question. If life generally has forced them into acting, then what is to say that life is not still commanding them to perform? Although she states that they now will embark on an authentic existence in honest relationships, their identities have been so distorted throughout the course of the text that it is unclear where the feigning stops. By refusing to provide the reader with resolution, Webster's play invalidates the masculine Romantic notion that text can reflect stable, authentic identity; identity is a performance even on and in the space of the printed page.

Throughout this play, Webster, instead of cautioning against theater's potential to mar an actor's core being, reveals that such a distinction between one's facade and one's identity is a lie. Modifying Diderot's actor-as-technician model of acting, Henry Irving encouraged actors to maintain a "double consciousness," or bring natural emotions to the role while still maintaining a distance from that character (Drama, p. 73). Disguises shows the impossibility of being both/and as these characters experience the physical consequences of their playacting and fail to return to an authentic, unmediated existence. Even as the text attempts to reinstate genuine identities, readers recognize the characters' awareness that this moment represents yet another performance. The text does not reflect, nor ensure, authentic identity. The return to the textual "truth," the feeling of uninhibited intimacy with these characters that Lamb would desire, never occurs. On a larger level, the drama's celebration of identity's multiplicity and mutability frustrates the Romantic belief in a universal reader or reading experience. Text contains no ultimate truth or genuine Lear that the reader must access; instead, through performative language and references to embodiment, Webster demonstrates the poetic drama is a place of fluidity and variability.

The Sentence (1887): Psychological Realism and the Performing Spectator

Like Disguises, Webster's The Sentence takes place in a historically distant location--this time, ancient Rome--and imbues that world with contemporary, Victorian concerns. Specifically, arguments of first-wave feminism--divorce, education, marriage, female agency--emerge from the text since Webster, while writing the piece, was active in and yet discouraged by the suffrage movement. (18) Patricia Rigg, in "'Present in the Drama': The Literary Dramas of Augusta Webster," observes that all of Webster's plays, including The Sentence, dramatize the significant challenges to the suffrage movement, asking the reader to think through, and debate on their own inner stage, the solutions to the patriarchal status quo (p. 112). Yet, while Webster's dramas certainly tackle late-nineteenth-century social and political issues, they also comment on the aesthetic conventions that reinforce masculine control.

Webster wrote this play at the moment in which Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw were gaining popularity through their realist dramas, a form that fundamentally altered the role of the audience in the auditorium. In some ways, Ibsen and Shaw echoed the textual bias of their Romantic predecessors--Byron, Coleridge, Lamb--revitalizing the theater by novelizing it, or by bringing literary conventions to this medium. (19) For instance, Shaw's infamous blackened pages, his heavy-handed authorial notations, and his long-winded prefaces transformed the script into a novel, minimizing the role of the production team and endowing the author with primacy and control. In a sense, a play became less embodied: the script--the textual form of the drama--always had the final word and the most authority. Not only did Shaw make theater literary through its appearance on the page, but some of Shaw's and Ibsen's earlier plays also engaged with psychological realism, a mode of theater that mimicked the social realist novel by entering into the dark recesses of its characters' minds and staging their interiority. (20) This type of theater sidelined the importance of the audience's role in the theatrical space. By envisioning the stage as an interior room with the auditorium being separated by an invisible fourth wall, playwrights rendered audiences incidental observers, inconsequential to the outcome of the play; the spectators are meant to assume that the action would proceed even if they were not there to witness it. (21)

Although Webster wrote The Sentence a few years before Ibsen's A Doll's House appeared in its original form on a London stage (it premiered on June 7, 1889, at the Novelty Theatre), Webster seems to have been privy to this trend in drama. By 1887, she certainly would have had opportunities to become familiar with Ibsen's work: an adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House called Breaking a Butterfly was staged at the Princess Theatre on March 3, 1884, and the English people were reading Ibsen long before his work appeared on main stages. (22) Although there is no record of Webster seeing this production, her intimate relationship with Edmund Gosse, an early translator and admirer of Ibsen's work, makes it likely that she was at least familiar with the Norwegian playwright (Rigg, Julia Augusta Webster, p. 156). Her 1887 verse drama seems a direct response to this psychological realist trend. In its pages, she stages the body of the spectator and suggests that this physical presence plays a crucial role in the making of the narrative; the spectator in this drama exercises an inordinate amount of control over the spectacle, even though other characters underestimate, or even forget about, the viewer's presence. By physically recreating the spectator and dramatizing the spectator's role in meaning making, Webster both demonstrates the audience's inextricability from the play and draws attention to the reader's own voyeurism and tangible participation in the narrative. All text, Webster says in The Sentence, necessitates an audience that guides its inscription.

The Sentence traces the devolution of Caius, a fictionalized representation of the Roman emperor Caligula, into depravity, alongside a story of marital infidelity among Roman citizens. At the beginning of the text, Caius discusses his political ambitions with a Roman noblewoman, Laelia, who is the wife of the soldier Stellio and mother to his two children. Stellio, upset with the fact that he depends on Laelia's royal lineage for his reputation, has entered into a romantic liaison with Aeonia, an ambitious noblewoman. Although relatives attempt to alert Laelia to the affair, she refuses to believe the worst of her husband. Caius, aware of the oncoming conflict and the potential harm to his close friend Laelia, invites everyone on a holiday to Baiae: Stellio and Aeonia agree on the basis that they might sneak away time together, and Laelia accepts in the hopes that the change of location will allow her and Stellio to reignite their love. Caius, though, spends his time at Baiae secretly observing these characters in hopes that he can use their immorality as an opportunity to demonstrate his potency as emperor.

The opening pages of The Sentence emphasize issues of spectacle and spectatorship, just as the first scene of Disguises highlights the play's concern with malleable identity. The beginning features a conversation between Laelia and Caius. In the midst of discussing Caius's insecurities about his fitness for emperor, the two compare each other's reactions to the gladiatorial games. Heavily metatheatrical, the moment serves to underline their respective personalities as spectators. Indeed, the discussion between the two also highlights three characters' unique reactions to the spectacle, three persons whose type of spectatorship will be dramatized and contrasted throughout the course of the plot. Thus, not only does the play present spectatorship as important, but it also acknowledges the uncontrollable diversity of the audience's bodies and subjectivities. Whereas Caius unsurprisingly cares only for the spectacular extravagance, Laelia finds the humanity in these executed men, thereby feeling so emotionally wrought that she shrieks and hides her face. Laelia also recounts Aeonia's response to the games: "That's waste," Laelia says, repeating Aeonia's comment: "Men lost without a good, pain for no purpose." (23) Unlike Laelia, Aeonia reads as apathetic, unable to identify with others' suffering and only concerned about the event's usefulness. In contrast to Caius's celebration of theatricality, she ventriloquizes antitheatrical arguments: according to her, this type of playacting contains no reality and does not deserve her attention. By beginning the text with this conversation, Webster accomplishes two things: first, she introduces a discussion of theatrical realities into a historically literary form, and second, she dismantles the notion of a single, ideal type of audience.

Throughout the text, Webster juxtaposes the two diametrically opposed viewpoints--Aeonia's snobbish antitheatricality and Caius's lavish theatricality--to create a dialogue between them. Both characters embody these initial aesthetic responses as the plot progresses. Aeonia's disdain for spectacle manifests itself in her refusal to yield to onlookers. In response to Stellio's fear of their relationship becoming public, Aeonia rhetorically asks, "What should 1 be to the jeerers?" (p. 37). Her diction here--"jeerers" instead of "citizens" or "peers"--along with her biting tone reinforces her dislike of an insolent audience. Assured of her own blemish-free public conduct with Stellio, she sets herself beyond the reach of others' machinations. She later critiques Stellio's nervous wooing because it forces her to worry about this insignificant spectator: "Stooped me to fears, to feigning, to shamed blushes, / Timorous to every eye lest it should read me" (p. 41). Although Aeonia seemingly touts antitheatrical sentiments, her statement aligns reading ("read") and spectatorship ("eyes"), suggesting that both involve gazing on a performing body. To resist this critical voyeur (both the spectator and the reader), Aeonia thrives on appearing lifeless. As Caius says,

   She can have languorous eyes,
   Being unaware; then, cautious suddenly,
   Compel them into blankness, two mere crystals;
   Can, postured like stone Peace, perceptionless,
   Thrill at a word he drops, note if she stirs, (p. 47)

Similar to textual art, Aeonia strives for "blankness" and imperceptibility; she deliberately spurns the populace's glare. However, Webster proves that her attempts at impenetrability and inactivity fail. Caius's use of the word "compel"--a performative verb--signifies that Aeonia does take action, even if just to conceal her emotions; she performs blankness and inactivity. Additionally, Caius's assessment of her suggests that she struggles to remain inscrutable since he can observe these intimate moments with voyeuristic pleasure.

In contrast, Caius, delighted by spectacle, positions himself in the role of the spectator. Apart from his extended introduction in act 1, scene 1, Caius rarely reappears in the first act, and even in the second act, he spends most of his onstage time observing others by perching himself on an elevated terrace where, he assures his complicit servant, "we see and are not seen" (p. 48). His servant Memnon, instructed "Come home to me when there's news" (p. 46), bears the brunt of the tedious vigilance, but Memnon still functions merely as a cipher for Caius's own desire, especially since his master so meticulously positions his vantage point: "Keep that ilex always left, / The olive right--that's range enough to walk, / And here's a seat in the angle--near thy laurels" (p. 48). Caius's ceaseless attention to the surrounding world and his persistent commands to "[s]py on," "hide and hear" (p. 49), and "[l]ean forth" (p. 61) attest to his theatrical aesthetic. He transforms supposedly private moments--Aeonia and Stellio's affair--into his own public spectacle. Even as he watches, Caius automatically performs. His commands to Memnon are implicit performatives, enacting a way of viewing through language. Through the use of these commands, it is clear that the spectator, even if not readily visible to Aeonia and Stellio, wields tremendous force to arrange how and what he sees and others see.

The opposition between Aeonia and Caius--between disengaging from the drama and observing it--ends up not being an opposition whatsoever. Although Aeonia is already implicated in the drama because of her affair with Stellio, she frantically attempts to conceal her involvement, scolding her lover for talking to her or touching her and advising him, "so thou never breathe me prayer again, / So thou keep our dead love a nameless thought" (p. 40). In an echo of Isabel from Disguises, Aeonia acknowledges a moral link between words and action; however, she makes the mistake of whispering this command to Stellio, assuming that they occupy a private space in the text. Caius discovers her secrets despite her affected impenetrability, but the emperor's extreme voyeurism merely stands in for the reader's own persistent presence. His unwavering observation might seem the product of a deranged mind, but the reader must admit that his or her behavior is similar. Even if Caius were not observing at this moment, the reader still witnesses, and responds to, Aeonia's words; Caius's place in the text just renders the reader, the unseen observer, visible. Therefore, Aeonia's strategy to "never breathe" backfires: by the fact that the text inscribes her hushed words, the reader has already witnessed behavior that she assumes is invisible to onlookers.

Aeonia's belief that she can remain merely a passive observer proves foolhardy. Unhappy as the other woman, Aeonia finally pleads with Stellio to leave his wife at Baiae; in other words, she wants to enact action without being the one enacting that action. She pushes Stellio to alter the situation so that she can maintain her innocence. Desperate for a resolution, Stellio speaks in hushed tones about murdering his wife. Aeonia's initial insistence that they "let her live" quickly alters when the virtuous wife stumbles upon their private tete-a-tete (p. 74). Bitter from being passive and self-denying for so long, Aeonia declares their nefarious musings outright to Laelia through a litany of performatives: "We planned thy ailing death," "For months we have been betrothed," "For months we have schemed deliberate," she raves to her distraught listener (p. 76). Although Austin contends that performatives typically take the grammatical form of first-person subject and present indicative verbs, the past tense still suggests that some illocutionary action took place, that Stellio and Aeonia's marriage and Laelia's death have already been performed. Distraught, Laelia flees and throws herself off a cliff. Neither Stellio nor Aeonia physically pushes her off the edge, but the text still questions whether they are responsible and whether Aeonia's symbolic push--the verbalization of their murderous plot--marks them as the killers. Austin, aware of the confusion in identifying an illocutionary act from a perlocutionary one, offers this distinction: "So here are three ways, securing uptake, taking effect, and inviting a response, in which illocutionary acts are bound up with effects; and these are all distinct from the producing of effects which is characteristic of the perlocutionary act" (p. 117). Is Laelia's death Aeonia's words taking effect or a subsequent action she takes because of these words? The lingering ambiguity pervades the reader's, Aeonia's, and Stellio's thoughts as the play continues. However, whether an illocutionary or perlocutionary act, the virtuous wife's death is a physical action set into motion by wards, and it instills a longing for justice in the reader, convincing us that the verbal command enacts the very deed it encourages.

The dialectic of antitheatricality and theatricality comes to a head at the end when Caius asserts the undeniable physical force of the spectator. Webster's drama takes a sharp turn from a romantic tale to a tragic bloodbath thanks to Caius, the startlingly absent and thereby forgotten character. It is exactly Caius's passive spectatorship, his inscrutable position behind the figurative fourth wall, that allows for this hostile hijacking of the plot, since only by obsessively observing characters' habits can he succeed in thwarting the lovers' intentions. On the day of Aeonia and Stellio's wedding, Caius offers Aeonia a chance to murder Stellio and marry him instead, a claim he knows she will accept because he has surreptitiously witnessed signs of her ambitious nature. Indeed, Caius's hunch is correct since Aeonia's initial refusal to kill Stellio (she throws the poison Caius offers to the ground) quickly transforms into compliance. Caius's role as an observer puts him in the prime position to enter into the narrative; and indeed, he successfully leaps from voyeur to manager, arranging these characters' demise with theatrical flair. He calls Aeonia a "Poppet" when asking her to kill Stellio, and he acts as a puppeteer through the concluding string of events. He dictates a certain hall for the lovers' wedding and treats it as his private stage: when he assumes that Aeonia has poisoned Stellio, he shuts a curtain that closes off the attendees from the violence, only opening it once the damage has been completed. Behind that curtain, Caius instructs Aeonia to perform the murder in an aesthetically pleasing and entertaining manner. "I would have had him taste his dying more," he says after he hands Aeonia a sword to finish off Stellio. Even when Stellio is dead, Caius choreographs a tableau: "Stand over him so: Yes, struck to stone / Dumb grief at gaze ... a very pretty pose: / We'll draw the curtains back on that" (p. 132). By tracing the development of Caius from spectator to director / stage manager, Webster suggests that the observer is already a participant in the spectacle and, even more so, that the observer controls that spectacle.

Lest Caius's violent jamming of the narrative be considered a warning about embodied, collective art, Webster complicates the morality of his behavior. Readers might condemn Caius as a madman since he heaps severe punishment on these citizens without any ethical or moral qualms. Rigg supports this claim when she characterizes Caius's ruthless voyeurism as godlike indifference: "Caligula adopts the careless and cruel stance of the gods who laugh at human misery" (Julia Augusta Webster, p. 245). Indeed, Caius occasionally draws parallels between himself and Jove, suggesting that his royal power should place him on a pedestal above humankind. However, there are two complications in reading Caius as solely a madman. First, Caius's revenge operates out of both his love of sadism and his concern for Laelia. Despite the fact that Stellio and Aeonia want to forget Laelia's death and their involvement in it, Caius resuscitates her. By doling out injuries to this pair, Caius reminds them of the physical consequences of their actions. Aeonia's efforts to remove herself from the surveillance of others and to make herself impenetrable fail. Caius might exhibit maniacal tendencies, but his judgment of the lovers is somewhat justifiable. With an eye-for-an-eye mentality, he rains physical violence onto those who commit textual violence because, even if the lovers do not enact Laelia's death, the "consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons"--that is, Laelia's suicide--is the action incited by those words (Austin, p. 101). Second, to read Caius as a madman is, by extension, to call the reader a madman. Like Caius, the reader observes these characters with, as Rigg states, "the careless and cruel stance of the gods," taking aesthetic pleasure from these stories of human misery.

Besides reminding the characters of the visceral effects of their actions, Caius also reinforces the physical and emotional power of spectatorship. Among his blocking directions for Aeonia and Stellio, Caius instructs the pair to gaze upon each other. "Aye, gaze from one to the other, gasp and choke," he demands of the lovers after Aeonia has stabbed and poisoned Stellio (p. 131). Such a move functions differently than his other directing choices. Aside from just penalizing their actions, Caius emphasizes that the relationship between viewer and viewed is a mutual act of viewing. He physicalizes the unseen audience member, in this case Aeonia, and removes the fourth wall separating actor and spectator; by doing so, he forces the spectator to acknowledge her action's effect on a living body. Fearful of not driving this point home, Caius even more heartlessly ushers in Stellio's children in the final pages to witness the death of their father and kiss him good-bye. Caius, guilty of adding insult to injury, highlights the fact that art is a physical and emotional relationship between parties. The choice to conclude with an act of spectatorship brings the play full circle; even after Caius stops watching, he ensures that another viewer will take his place.

By dramatizing Caius's sadistic spectatorship, Webster implicates the supposedly distant reader in the embodied act of viewing. Staging an audience in a play functions in the same way as presenting an act of reading does in a novel; the mise en abyme forces the audience to acknowledge their presence in the playhouse. In typical realist fashion, the fourth-wall notion convinces the audience that they are omniscient, privy to all the privileged information that an oblivious cast of characters cannot access. Just when readers might assume that they occupy a distant vantage point, however, Caius destroys that illusion. His final staging of Aeonia and Stellio's death, complete with a curtain to block the event from the wedding attendees, demonstrates that unmediated access is never genuine. Both in the theater and in literature, these private lives are staged and constructed. In addition, Caius never lets the reader forget his own physicality in the process. His titular line after the lovers' death--"I heard, saw, sentenced"--perfectly elides inscription and enactment (p. 133). A play on Caesar's famous "vini, vidi, vici," or "I came, I saw, I conquered," this statement alters the first term and thereby elevates the act of viewing. "Sentenced" here links the embodied spectator to the literary reader. Although the word signifies a physical action ("to punish"), the phrase also invokes the written word ("to write a sentence"). Just as Caius can violently punish, the reader, in the role as viewer, can contribute to the written text.

In the biocritical study Julia Augusta Webster, Rigg exalts The Sentence as the perfect fusion between stage drama and literary drama: "In The Sentence Webster would bring to fruition her awareness of the points at which stage drama and closet drama might merge to produce the kind of drama she describes, particularly in more precise setting and actor position and expression notes than appeared in her earlier plays" (p. 153). Rigg is correct that Webster, in her final drama, winnows down the text to a performable length, adds more explicit stage directions and takes more care for the visual picture on the stage; in effect, she fashions the text of her play to be more like a script than a book. However, she also merges stage drama and closet drama by inscribing the facets of the embodiment into the poetics of these pieces, in addition to simply bolstering the number of stage directions. Webster's play violates the principles of realist drama, which drew on Romantic notions about the superiority and universality of text. By embedding a physical spectator into the text and giving textual words corporeal force, The Sentence calls on poetics to acknowledge its indebtedness to a physical reader and to admit the force of that spectator in creating meaning for the work.

Monodramas, Nonfiction Writings, and Verse Dramas: A Unified Aesthetic

The fact that Augusta Webster's poetic dramas have not received substantial critical attention does not mean that her dramatic aesthetic has gone unnoticed. Rich and engaging scholarship on Webster's unique use of the Victorian genre of the dramatic monologue has recently appeared in publication. (24) This analysis of her verse dramas attempts to build on--and not demolish--those estimations of her dramatic poetry. Her monodramas, which tweak Robert Browning's dramatic-monologue form to better represent the struggles of women caught between the social edicts of their worlds and their own desires, (25) likewise rework the genres of male authors by blending performativity into the verse. Browning's monologues, which tend to feature a morally bankrupt speaker who exposes his deranged mind as the poem unfolds, safely set the reader outside the theatrical apparatus through their use of an interlocutor. Since both the actor and audience appear in the text, the poem allows the reader to take a bird's-eye view without fear of physical interaction. Whereas Browning puts the theater on display for the reader, Webster integrates her reader into theatrical presentation by making the reader and the interlocutor one and the same. The speakers of these pieces, who are typically women ostracized by the world in which they live, are aware that they are part of a performance and recount their stories to elicit understanding from their audience, a position that the reader must assume.

A poetics that incorporates both the intellectualism of print literature and the corporeality of theater parallels Webster's dual life as a writer and a political activist. Comparing Webster and George Eliot as dramatists, Katherine Newey suggests that, while Webster wrote dramas, she never aspired to the theater because of the stage's salacious reputation: "Webster is caught, as so many women writers were, between the desire to participate on equal terms with working playwrights, with all their connections in the theater industry, and the disadvantages imposed by her feminine respectability, and her persona as a 'British matron.'" (26) Webster did lead a conventional life for a late-nineteenth-century woman in some regards, but she was also a prominent, public figure on the political stage. Her long tenure on the London School Board and her participation in the National Committee for Women's Suffrage call into question the assumption that she had concerns about maintaining her image as a "British matron" and instead suggest that she would subvert gender norms to advance her political and social causes. Her work as an activist enacts her poetry's preoccupation with gender inequality, while her verse dramas show that the written word is already a type of enactment. For a writer who speaks so passionately about the lived realities of Victorian women, it is not a stretch to believe that Webster would be drawn to the embodied nature of theatrical performance and employ its tools in her work.

Despite the ideological and aesthetic continuity of Webster's diverse art pieces, her monodramas have outshined her full-length verse dramas perhaps because they resemble poetry more closely. Poetic drama, in contrast, sits in a position of hybridity, fashioned as both literature to be read and drama to be performed, and, as such, rarely finds a home in discussions of either Victorian theater or Victorian poetics. Because Romantic closet dramas, in their rejection of the nineteenth-century stage, vehemently declared their allegiance to print literature, it makes sense to read them in the context of poetics. The Victorian use of this form, though, is more of a head-scratcher. Webster is one of a series of woman writers who wrote verse dramas that weighed evenly both terms of the genre: Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, writing as "Michael Field," as well as George Eliot, are the other most obvious examples. On the one hand, these plays, which are sold as books and not acting scripts, imitate Romantic closet dramas; on the other, these works, which play with performativity, refuse that straightforward classification. Despite the assumption that these women spurned drama as unfeminine and damning, all these writers regularly visited the theater, aspired to stage their works, and had connections to Victorian theater practitioners. Nevertheless, literary scholarship remembers these women primarily as poets and not as dramatists, and these verse dramas remain outside the conversation precisely because they challenge that characterization.

The definition of poetic drama that Webster proposes to readers of her Athenaeum review of Gycia provides a means by which to evaluate these late-Victorian pieces by women writers. For Webster, verse drama occupies a hybrid position between poetry and theater; to ignore the theater in the poetry is to do a disservice to the spirit of the work. Print literature and theatrical presentation are no longer inviolate categories for Webster; instead, she dismantles the supremacy of the printed page from the inside out, using the hybrid genre as a means to show the inherent performance in text's inscription. Reading the invocation of embodied performance in these verse dramas enhances our historical understanding of the verse drama and of the late-nineteenth-century literary landscape more broadly. Specifically, it illustrates a dynamic and dialectic relationship between forms, consistent with the characterization of the nineteenth century as "the most dazzling multigeneric" era in literary history. (27) The slipperiness of these dramas, their refusal to comply with our standard categorizations, asks us to broaden our definitions and to conceive of Victorian poetry as conversing with contemporaneous art forms. Since women writers such as Webster have existed between and outside standard narratives about Victorian literature, it is no surprise that their works also exist between and outside standard paradigms; however, incorporating these seemingly anomalous pieces into the critical conversation can offer a more nuanced representation of late-Victorian poetics and drama that accounts for women's voices as writers and readers and a richer discussion of cross-generic hybrids that provide a crucial response to the dominant masculine culture.

Notes

(1) Augusta Webster, review of Gycia: A Tragedy in Five Acts, by Lewis Morris, Athenaeum, no. 3086 (December 18, 1886): 835.

(2) Patricia Rigg, "'Present in the Drama': The Literary Drama of Augusta Webster," Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 10 (2004): 112-113.

(3) Lord Byron, "Born for Opposition": Byron's Letters and Journals, vol. 8, 1821, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), p. 210.

(4) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare, and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists, with Other Literary Remains, ed. H. N. Coleridge (New York: Harper, 1854), p. 110.

(5) Augusta Webster to W. M. Rossetti, November 25, 1887, Angeli-Dennis Collection, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Special thanks to Patricia Rigg for sharing this unpublished material with me.

(6) William Michael Rossetti, introduction to Mother and Daughter: An Uncompleted Sonnet-Sequence, by Augusta Webster (London: Macmillan, 1895), p. 14.

(7) Unsigned review of Disguises, by Augusta Webster, Academy: A Weekly Review of Literature, Science, and Art 413 (April 3, 1880): 247.

(8) Unsigned review of The Sentence, by Augusta Webster, Spectator 61 (February 11, 1888): 212.

(9) Unsigned review of The Sentence, by Augusta Webster, Month: A Catholic Magazine and Review 60 (February 1888): 295.

(10) Charles Lamb, "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," in The Works of Charles Lamb, ed. Thomas Noon Talfourd (London: George Bell and Sons, 1889), p. 587.

(11) See Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990); Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992); Rebecca Stern, "Moving Parts and Speaking Parts: Situating Victorian Antitheatricality," ELH 65, no. 2 (1998): 423-449.

(12) William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems, vol. 1, 4th ed. (London: R. Taylor, 1805), p. xi.

(13) Denis Diderot, Paradox of Acting, trans. Walter Herries Pollock (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), pp. 8-9; Constant Coquelin, Art and the Actor, trans. Abby Langdon Alger (New York: Dramatic Museum of Columbia, 1915), pp. 60-63.

(14) Henry Irving, The Drama (Boston: Joseph Knight, 1892), pp. 72-74; William Archer, Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting (London: Longmans, Green, 1888), pp. 4-5.

(15) Henry Irving, "Dramatic Art," Voice: An International Review of the Speaking and Singing Voice 7, no. 5 (1885): 71.

(16) J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 99-101. All references to Austin come from this edition.

(17) Augusta Webster, Disguises (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1879), p. 3. All references to Disguises come from this edition.

(18) Patricia Rigg, Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2009), p. 242. All references to Rigg's Julia Augusta Webster come from this edition.

(19) W. B. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), p. 45. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller has debated whether Shaw actually aspired to novelize the theater, arguing that Shaw, critical of the novel's status as a symbol of capitalist mass production, critiques the idea of a "coherent authorial voice" in his plays. See Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2013), p. 87. Whether Shaw's novelistic writing critiqued the novel or aspired to its aesthetic, his drama still tended to this novelistic style at the fin de siecle.

(20) "Psychological realism" here is a limited term and certainly does not apply uniformly to these playwrights' oeuvres. However, I use "psychological realism" here because, although it is but a brief phase in their careers, it was incredibly influential especially around the late nineteenth century, when Webster wrote The Sentence.

(21) J. A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th ed. (Oxford, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), s.v. "fourth wall," p. 288.

(22) Augustin Filon, The English Stage: Being an Account of the Victorian Drama, trans. Frederic Whyte (London: John Milne, 1897), p. 296.

(23) Augusta Webster, The Sentence: A Drama (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), p. 7. All references to The Sentence come from this edition.

(24) Patricia Rigg, "Augusta Webster: The Social Politics of Monodrama," Victorian Review 26, no. 2 (2000): 75-107; Susan Brown, "Determined Heroines: George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and Closet Drama by Victorian Women," VP 33, no. 1 (1995): 89-109.

(25) Patricia Rigg, "Augusta Webster, Dramatic Forms, and the Religious Aesthetic of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book," VP 53, no.1 (2015): 4.

(26) Katherine Newey, "The 'British Matron' and the Poetic Drama: The Case of Augusta Webster," George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies no. 60/61 (2011): 138.

(27) Dallas Liddle, The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2009), p. 8.

Article Details

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Author:	Steffes, Annmarie
Publication:	Victorian Poetry
Article Type:	Critical essay
Geographic Code:	4EUUK
Date:	Mar 22, 2017
Words:	9994
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