This Gaudy Gilded Stage

September’s hottie of the month is Richard Cumberland, an eighteenth-century dramatist. He was born in 1732 and died in 1811. Cumberland was one of the most productive and important playwrights of the late eighteenth-century. Best known for his sentimental comedy The West Indian, Cumberland also penned a number of other successful plays, including The Brothers (1769), The Fashionable Lover (1772), The Jew (1794), and The Wheel of Fortune (1795).

As the dates of these plays suggest, Cumberland’s career is often divided into two parts. After devoting the 1780s to writing relatively unsuccessful tragedies, musical theater, religious poetry, and novels, the successful production of The Jew began the later phase of his career. Indeed, this comedy brought international renown: it was produced throughout Europe and America, was revived in throughout the nineteenth century, and was even translated into Hebrew and Yiddish. The play was adapted in 2000 by New York playwright Robert Armin as Sheva, the Benevolent. I’m currently writing about The Jew, a play that I think is totally fascinating.

Scholars generally agree that Cumberland’s goal in writing The Jew was to bring greater tolerance of Jews to English society. He worked to do this by depicting the title character’s humanity in his play. In choosing the literary vogue of sentimentalism to achieve this goal, Cumberland departed from traditional representations of Jews as villainous usurers bent on the murderous destruction of Christians, an image made famous by Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and perpetuated in anti-Semitic treatises and a wide range of literary works throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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August has clearly been Jane Austen month for me. First, I read Pamela Aidan’s Darcy trilogy. Then I taught my favorite Austen novel in my Woman & Literature class, Persuasion. I also read Susan Kaye’s None But You, a rewriting of Persuasion from Captain Wentworth’s point of view. (I’ll blog about that novel in the next few days.) And finally, I saw Becoming Jane. I’m not sure I could get more Austen into one month!

I’ve always loved Persuasion. I can’t now remember when I first read it, but I assume it must have been in college. Whenever it was, I immediately identified with Anne Elliott. I’m not entirely sure why — I clearly wasn’t an aging woman still in love with the man who proposed to me seven years before! But something about her seemed to sum up my feelings as a young gay man too scared to fully come out yet. I’ve taught the novel twice since coming to OU. The first time was in a survey of eighteenth-century lit. I don’t think most of the students cared much for it. More of my students this summer seemed to like it, especially compared to Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, which not a novel I’m likely to teach again anytime soon.

My earliest memory of being aware of Austen was seeing the 1940 film version of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. My parents like old black and white movies, so we watched this one from time to time. I loved it. Here’s a good clip:

Then I actually read the book. I had no idea that Elizabeth visited Pemberley! Last summer, I had my students read the novel and then watch both the 1940 version and the 2005 film. They then wrote a paper on which version they think best captured the essence of the novel. I have to say that, despite its obvious problems, I love the romanticism of the 2005 film, as in this clip:

It’s beautiful to watch, and I’ve gotten used to the dreadful ending. (Like most people, I think that the 1995 miniseries version of Pride and Prejudice is by far the best adaptation. Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle are perfect as Darcy and Elizabeth.)

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While PJ and I were in London earlier this month, we visited the Tate Britain, a museum dedicated to British art from 1500 to the present. I was especially keen on seeing the museum’s exhibition of watercolors by J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). This is his 1798 self portrait to the right.

Part of the Turner exhibit was curated by David Hockney, himself a great watercolorist. The “Hockney on Turner Watercolours” exhibit features placards written by Hockney that express his opinions of Turner’s art, technique, etc. I first fell in love with Hockney’s work when I was a budding homosexual as an undergraduate at Texas A&M University. While in the same medium, Hockney’s work is so different from Turner’s that reading the former’s thoughts on the latter seemed like a very interesting prospect indeed. Here’s the kind of work Hockney does:

Based on this example, I’m sure anyone can see why a burgeoning homosexual might find Hockney’s work enjoyable! But I will also point out that I moved beyond the overtly sexual paintings and found myself enjoying Hockney’s larger oeuvre as well. So, I was excited that an artist I really like was going to comment on an artist that I had seen billed as one of England’s great masters.

While Hockney’s commentary was interesting, it wasn’t the aspect of the Tate Britain’s Turner collection that most impressed me. I’ll discuss what I liked about the exhibit after the jump.

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Today I finished writing my paper for the conference at which I’ll be presenting on July 10th in London. The conference is on Antisemitism and English Culture and is hosted by the University of London. My paper is about Maria Edgeworth’s 1817 novel Harrington, a work that I’m increasingly in love with. So Maria Edgeworth is my hottie of the month.

Edgeworth was born in 1767 and died in 1849. She was definitely a daddy’s girl, living with her father until his death in 1817. She penned several important novels of the Romantic period, including Castle Rackrent (1800), Belinda (1801), and, of course, Harrington. She was also the author of several books for children and young adults. At some point in the near future, I want to start working my way through her major works, since I need to put Harrington in a larger authorial context — I shamefacedly confess that this novel is the only work by Edgeworth that I’ve read. I taught it last year in my graduate class. I would love the opportunity to teach it again sometime, perhaps in a Women & Literature or Major Authors course.

In her Broadview edition of the novel, Susan Manly sums up its plot like this:

Harrington is the personal narrative of a recovering anti-Semite, a young man whose phobia of Jews is instilled in early childhood and who must unlearn his irrational prejudice when he falls in love with the daughter of a Spanish Jew.

Harrington has quickly reemerged from obscurity to assume a central place in studies of Romanticism and antisemitism. Scholars have largely studied the novel’s plot line of education and its depiction of its Jewish characters (though these are all in supporting roles). One thing I like about the novel is that it pulls together just about everything eighteenth-century writers had used in their depictions of Jews and shows how/why they were all so antisemitic.

My paper looks at the novel in slightly different terms. I am interested in it mostly as a representative text from the Romantic period, one that contradicts some scholars’ arguments that Romantic literature depoliticized representations of Jews. I am also more interested in the novel’s depiction of gender and sexuality than most other scholars have been.

I suddenly find myself very interested in Romanticism and its authors’ depictions of Jews. I’m still not sure if this is working toward a chapter in one book project or a whole other book, but it’s fascinating to return to this period after years of relative disinterest. I feel like such a cliche — the eighteenth-century scholar who intellectually migrates to Romantic lit. Before long I’m going to be teaching major authors classes on Jane Austen instead of Aphra Behn!

Or maybe I’ll teach one on Edgeworth ….

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May’s hottie (just in the nick of time) is Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753-1784), an eighteenth-century African-American woman who was a slave and a poet. While PJ and I were in Boston last week, we saw the Boston Women’s Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue, a series of three statues of Bostonian women: Wheatley, Abigail Adams, and Lucy Stone.

Wheatley was the first black American to be published. She is also credited with originating the genres of African-American poetry and African-American women’s literature. She was born in Africa and kidnapped and sold into slavery when she was about 7-years-old. She was purchased by a Boston tailor and quickly learned English and how to read and write.

Her poems, which were mostly about religious subjects, were first published in England, since no one in America was willing to print them. In fact, Americans initially doubted that a slave woman could have written these poems, and so Wheatley was subjected to an interrogation by several prominent Bostonian men to determine whether she did indeed write them. They concluded that she did.

This poem, which gives a taste of her work, is inscribed on the memorial:

Imagination! Who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
Th’ empyreal palace of the thund’ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.

As eighteenth-century British literature scholars and teachers attempt to diversify our canon, Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano have begun being included in anthologies of British literature. While her work (and Equiano’s autobiography) is admirable for its literary achievement and historical significance, it seems a bit of a stretch to include her in an eighteenth-century British literature course.

Wheatley died young: she was only about 31-years-old. Despite her acclaim as a poet, she died in poverty while working as a scullery maid in a boarding house. Not only is she an important figure in American history and literature, but she is now also May’s hottie of the month!

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April’s hottie of the month is William Beckford (1760-1844), the eighteenth-century novelist, critic, and politician.

This portrait is of the 21-year-old Beckford. It is an engraving by T. A. Dean after a portrait painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Like Rochester and Sedley, Beckford is a true hottie and not just an opportunity for me to spout off about some aspect of eighteenth-century studies.

Beckford is probably best known for writing Vathek, published in 1786. Vathek is a rather bizarre “Arabian tale,” as its subtitle tells us, that depicts its protagonist’s quest for supernatural power. It’s a crazy little novel; I taught it last year in my graduate course. My students seemed to find it really interesting, and several of them wrote their final papers on it.

Beckford is also of interest to scholars because of his eccentricities, which apparently included queer sexual interests. George Haggerty, for example, has a chapter on Beckford, called “Beckford’s Pederasty,” in his book Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century. One of my graduate students last year couldn’t get beyond the title of this chapter to see what Haggerty was actually arguing. He seemed to think it was some sort of celebration of pedophilia, which isn’t at all what the chapter’s about.

I probably won’t be teaching Beckford again for quite some time. He’s not major enough to teach in my undergraduate courses, and the next time I teach a grad class on the late eighteenth century I will probably focus it on a different topic. While I don’t have a continuing professional interest in Beckford or his work at the moment, his portrait alone demonstrates why he’s this month’s hottie!

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