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Jacques-Louis David's famous portrait, The Death of Marat (La Mort de Marat, 1793), garners Charlotte Corday's assassination of Jean-Paul Marat attention in art history. However, theater critics have not sufficiently explored the wealth of European plays that stage this dramatic event. Scholars know very little about dramas depicting Charlotte Corday and Marat since in the 1790s they were performed outside of London or in unlicensed playhouses. Yet a trail of newspaper accounts and dramatizations of Corday's story in France, England, and Ireland demonstrates a shared set of preoccupations with gender and violence. Dramatists outside of France persisted in drawing parallels between the assassination of Marat and the beheading of Marie Antoinette. Examining the reactions of contemporary Anglophone audiences to this French political event, this paper focuses on Edmund John Eyre's (1767-1816) play The Maid of Normandy; or, the Death of the Queen of France (1794/1804). Eyre's play, first performed in Dublin, Ireland, in 1794, was denied a license by the English censor owing to its open references to God and events in France, the very elements that most appealed to Irish audiences. Irish vicar Matthew West even plagiarized Eyre's play as a closet drama, Female Heroism, a Tragedy in Five Acts Founded on Revolutionary Events that Occurred in France in the Summer and Autumn of 1793 (1803). Anglo-Irish translations of Marat's assassin carry with them a specifically French mode of performance because docudramas that chronicle the French Revolution cannot escape its embedded theatricality and rely on dramatic allegory. In the case of Charlotte Corday, they reproduce the hagiography of Liberty, the woman who sacrifices love and life for her country.
Not surprisingly, Corday's assassination of Marat produced a frenzied and spectacular afterlife. Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (1768-93) assassinated the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat on 13 July 1793 during the height of the Terror. Corday originally planned a theatrical setting for the murder, on the stage of the National Convention on Bastille Day, but Marat's illness forced her to commit the assassination a day early. Bound to a bathtub owing to a skin condition he caught while living underground, Marat nevertheless continued to write the very incendiary rhetoric that so angered Corday in his journal The Friend of the People (L'Ami du peuple). Corday showed him a list of counterrevolutionary conspirators from her hometown and then stabbed him with a six-inch kitchen knife. When accounts of Corday's trial and execution spread rapidly through France and abroad, contemporaries asked questions about gender and power--about how they could be tied inextricably. (1) How could a twenty-five-year-old from Normandy assassinate one of the leading political figures of Paris? To answer this question, doctors looked for evidence of sex; they examined her body but found it was virginal. In contrast to the Jacobin authorities' suspicions, Corday did not have a male lover to assist her in stabbing Marat.
Fact and fiction became interchangeable in accounts about Corday, and these dramatic elements made her an attractive subject for media across Europe. Corday contributed to her own dramatization by writing an "Address to the French" that evoked Brutus from the third act of Voltaire's tragedy The Death of Caesar (La Mort de Cesar, 1733), and by citing in a letter to her father, published in Parisian and English papers, a verse from her great-great grandfather, the playwright Pierre Corneille (1606-84). (2) After Corday's decapitation on the guillotine, the executioner slapped her severed head, which purportedly blushed. British newspapers relished the opportunity to write about the French in theatrical terms, and docudramas used newspapers, in turn, to reconstruct recent history. Mainstream media reported news from France in dramatic style, as shown in this London Times report on Corday's trial:
Herault announced that the Minister of the Home Department had received information from Calvados, that there was a plot to assassinate him. It seems, says he, there is a sort of correspondence between this letter from Calvados, and Charlotte Corde, and her conductor Duperret--[Loud murmurs]. (3)
Corday's trial attempted to ascertain who her accomplices were, but although attention shifted among several male suspects, she acted alone.
The motivations and supposed romantic liaisons of Corday became central components of her stage renderings. Immediately following Marat's death, European playhouses repeatedly staged the scene Corday failed to make public. Whereas Parisian theaters focused on Marat, Corday emerged as a transnational figure; German writers formed a "Corday cult" about the "female Brutus," who embodied a longing for national unity. (4) In 1790s Paris, such pieces de circonstance were common, but the situation differed in London. The Lord Chamberlain forbade representing the Revolution in patent theaters such as Drury Lane and Haymarket. A play commemorating the fall of the Bastille was banned at Covent Garden, which only encouraged unlicensed playhouses to meet public demand for reconstructions of recent events. Astley's Amphitheatre staged the storming of the Bastille in Paris in an Uproar (premiere 18 August 1789). At Sadler's Wells, Gallic Freedom; or, Vive La Liberte (premiere 28 September 1789) was so popular that "servants were allowed to keep their master's places only until 7:30, instead of the usual 8:30." (5) Subsequent English retellings of the Revolution were relegated to unlicensed playhouses or provincial stages. Several English-language plays about Corday were written and sometimes staged in the nineteenth century, when a war with France no longer dominated cultural life, but few Corday dramas appeared in the 1790s, with the exception of The Maid of Normandy; or, the Death of the Queen of France by English actor Edmund Eyre. (6)
The Maid of Normandy; or, the Death of the Queen of France is a self-proclaimed tragedy in four acts. Asynchronous plots trace two events: Corday's assassination of Marat and the imprisonment, trial, and separation of Marie Antoinette from the Dauphin. Eyre's Corde (hereafter Corday) decides to assassinate Marat because she believes he is responsible for the death of her fiance Alberto, who turns out to be living under the alias of Theodore. In his preface, Eyre explains why his drama takes artistic liberties with recent history:
As most publick stories, when represented on the stage, lose the power of pleasing from their want of novelty; and as nothing is better able to supply that defect, or relieve the attention of a spectator, than the apposite introduction of unexpected incidents; I chose rather to interweave the imaginary character of Theodore, than tire the auditor by dwelling upon the whole circle of historical events [sic]. (7)
Among the "unexpected incidents" is Theodore's manipulation of several events from behind his alias. He pretends to be a friend of Robespierre, who charges him to defame the Queen's "virtue, paint her as the cause / Of ev'ry tyranny which France has borne" (13). Like Corday, Theodore plots revenge for the murdered king, while Marat and Robespierre prey on the widowed Queen like melodramatic villains. Moments before her demise, Corday realizes her fiance still lives, but she dies between the third and fourth acts. The play concludes with Theodore's attempt to rescue the Queen and his resolve to let "freedom smile, beneath the reign of Kings!" (84).
Perhaps because it was performed outside London, no attention has ever been given to the performance of The Maid of Normandy. Records of the first performance in late 1793 or early 1794 at the Theatre Wolverhampton are unavailable because The Wolverhampton Chronicle is no longer extant for this period. However, we do know that The Maid of Normandy experienced moderate success when Eyre brought it to the Theatre Royal in Dublin, Ireland in May 1794. International politics complicate the play and its stereotypes about gender roles. Eyre tailors his version of Corday to appeal to British audiences' sense of proper behavior for a young woman, but his style comes across as foreign. Anglo-Irish translations of Marat's assassin carry with them a specifically French mode of performance: even the "objective" mask of the docudrama cannot escape theatricality and relies on dramatic allegory when it chronicles the French Revolution.
Scholars often find Romantic drama difficult to describe because it blends genres, such as tragedy, comedy, and melodrama. The modern term docudrama, sometimes used by professionals of television and the cinema for "drama-documentary," (8) is a suitable hybrid for Eyre's play: the term implies a lack of...
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