Important Information--June 20

Important Deadlines:

Special Events

Conference attendees are asked to register for all special events as soon as possible. Several events--such as the theatrical performances--have generated enormous enthusiasm, even among those who are not speaking at the conference. However, before offering the general public tickets to these events, the conference committee would like to give priority to those who are speaking and/or chairing at the conference.  (We would also like to inform attendees that a large majority of conference registrants have reserved tickets not only for the theatrical performances but also for the conference cruise and banquet.)  Those who have already registered for the conference may also sign up for additional events through the same online registration process, without affecting their original registration.  

We cannot guarantee reservations for special events after July 4, 2003.

Speakers

Conference speakers are also asked to register for the conference as soon as possible. Since there is a large waiting list of papers to be presented, the conference committee cannot guarantee that places on the program will be held without registration confirmation after July 4, 2003.

Cancellations

We cannot guarantee full refunds for cancellations after July 6, 2003.  If you will be unable to attend the conference, whether you have registered or not, please email   nassrnyc@fordham.edu at your earliest convenience.

NEW Graduate Student Prizes:

Due to the generosity of the Conference Co-Sponsors listed on this site--as well as the individual gifts of several registrants--the conference committee is delighted to announce that there will be an increased number of Graduate Student Prizes offered at NASSR 2003. The committee therefore encourages all graduate students to submit their eight to ten page papers for these prizes.   The deadline for submissions for Graduate Student Prizes awarded by the 2003 NASSR Conference Committee is July 1, 2003.  If you wish to be considered for these prizes, please e-mail your completed essay--together with your name and institutional affiliation--to nassrnyc@fordham.edu, with the words "Graduate Student Prize" in the subject heading.  Submissions should be no longer than ten double-spaced pages.

Changes to Program:

Please verify your name, email address, institutional affiliation and paper title by checking the conference program here.  Email any corrections to nassrnyc@fordham.edu with the words "Program Correction" in the subject heading.  Corrections will be included if they reach us before July 4, 2003.

Dormitory Accommodations:

If you requested housing in the dormitories at Fordham's Lincoln Center Campus during registration, but have not yet confirmed your room via email, you can click here to access the instructions and form to do so.

Advance Reviews of Baillie's Count Basil:

The full production of Count Basil, directed by Leslie Jacobson, is now in repertory in Washington, DC, before coming to New York and NASSR 2003. Early reviews include the following:

"I've just returned from seeing the production of Count Basil, and I think you will find it fascinating. The two leads are especially gifted, and, as the second act (now composed of Acts IV and V), unfolds, the play takes us on a journey that highlights Baillie's vision of a theatre devoted to the exploration of--especially--masculine vulnerability. To see her concept of 'sympathetic curiosity' in action was thrilling to me!"

--Catherine Burroughs, Wells College

 

"I found the professional production of Baillie's Count Basil deeply moving. It also gave me several new ideas for teaching the play to my students. The production provided a fresh perspective on Baillie's 'plays on the passions'--as well as her concepts of the male gaze, unmitigated desire, and the British ambivalence toward military fame. After finally seeing this powerful play on stage--two centuries after Baillie wrote it--I felt as if she had come back from the dead and was speaking to us directly once again." 

--Michael Macovski, Fordham University

 Program Notes for Horizons Theatre's World Premiere of Joanna Baillie's Count Basil
(June 5-29, 2003)

By Catherine Burroughs

Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) is arguably themost important British female playwright between the 17th century (Aphra Behn) and twentieth century (Lady Gregory). During her lifetime, Baillie wrote twenty-seven plays and numerous prefaces in which she outlined an ambitious plan to reform the British stage. As she stated in her famous "Introductory Discourse" (1798)--in which she announced her dramatic vision--her aim was to elicit "sympathetic curiosity" in her viewers by having them witness "what men are in the closet as well as in the field; by the blazing hearth and at the social board." In theory, Baillie's theatre of the passions would be unrelentingly psychological: her plays sought to showcase "even the smallest indications of an unquiet mind, the restless eye, the muttering lip, the half-checked exclamation and the hasty start."     

Count Basil is Baillie's tragedy on the passion of love. She wrote the play in her twenties and published it anonymously in 1798 as part of the first volume of her three-part project titled A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind, each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy (1798; 1802; 1812). This volume caused a sensation; reviewers made comparisons to Shakespeare. Many assumed that the playwright was a man--perhaps Sir Walter Scott. But several notable women writers insisted otherwise. Hester Thrale Piozzi wrote: "I felt it was a Woman's Writing, No Man makes Female Characters respectable--no Man of the present Day I mean, they only make them lovely... ."

Readers have frequently noted Count Basil's appeal on the page. In 1831, for instance, as she studied to perform Juliet in London, Fanny Kemble (niece and successor to the famous Sarah Siddons) enthused:  

Yesterday, I read for the first time Joanna Baillie's "Count Basil." I am not sure that the love she describes does not affect me more even than Shakespeare's delineation of the passion in "Romeo and Juliet." There is a nerveless despondence about it that seems to me more intolerable than all    the vivid palpitating anguish of the tragedy of Verona; it is like dying of slow poison, or malarial fever, compared with being shot or stabbed or even bleeding to death, which is life pouring out from one, instead of drying up in one's brains. I think the lines beginning--"I have seen the last look of her heavenly eyes," some of the most poignantly pathetic I know.

Yet, even though Baillie has long been considered a "closet playwright"--one who writes to be read rather than acted--her letters and prefaces reveal that she dearly desired her plays to be performed on the stage, and, between 1800 and 1826, a number of Baillie's plays received major productions. One of these, De Monfort (published with Count Basil), starred the most famous actors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries--John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and Edmund Kean--and was performed in London, Edinburgh, New York City, and Philadelphia, even at an English country fair "in a great waggon along side of the wild beasts," according to one of Baillie's letters.

That tonight, over two-hundred years after its composition, Count Basil will at last be seen on stage would certainly have thrilled and astonished Baillie. Indeed, one can imagine her responding to this event by uttering the words she purportedly voiced upon learning that one of her plays was to be performed by "some obscure provincial company": "I am so happy! You see my plays can be acted somewhere!"

--Catherine Burroughs (Author of Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theatre Theory of British Romantic Women Writers, 1997)

Catherine Burroughs is Associate Professor of English at Wells College and Visiting Lecturer in English at Cornell University. Her publications include: Reading the Social Body (Co-Ed., Iowa, 1993); Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Pennsylvania, 1997), and Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840 (Ed., Cambridge University Press, 2000). She is also a member of Actors' Equity Association.

Return to NASSR 2003 Home