Abstract
Sophia Lee’s five-act, blank-verse tragedy Almeyda; Queen of Granada was performed at Drury Lane in 1796, and although it received positive reviews and its title star was Sarah Siddons, the play lasted only four nights.1 Its recent hypertextual revitalization and critical attention might be explained, in part, due to the fact that its tragic heroine succumbs to mental disease in the course of the play’s central conflict and that insanity dominated periodical, political, religious, medical, legal, and popular discourses at the end of the eighteenth century in Britain. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, this is also a period during which medical interests were theatricalized and theatre was medicalized, and no wonder, given the dramatic actual events in which insanity figured prominently.2 Lee was living in geographical locations and in a cultural milieu, including London, Bristol, Clifton, and Bath, in which topical controversies about medicine and science were commonplace.3
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Notes
Sophia Lee, Almeyda; Queen of Granada. 1796.
Judith Barbour, “Lee, Sophia (1750–1824) and Harriet (1757–1851),” in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 581–82.
Eileen Finan, with update by Steven J. Gores, “Sophia Lee,” in An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, rev. ed., ed. Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 386–87; Rebecca Garwood, “Sophia Lee (1750–1824).
Ellen Donkin, Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London 1776–1829 (London: Routledge, 1995), 77–108.
William Pargeter, Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Reading: Printed for the Author and Sold by Smart and Cowslade; London: J. Murray; Oxford: J. Fletcher, 1792), 4.
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Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effects It Has Produced in Europe, 1795 (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975), 520.
John Hooper, The New Spaniard, 2nd ed. (1986. New York: Penguin, 2006), 222.
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Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 203.
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John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 531–2.
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Jonathan Fiske, The Life and Transactions of Margaret Nicholson (London: Printed for J. Fiske, 1786), 30.
[Percy Bysshe Shelley], Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; being poems found amongst the paper of that noted female who attempted the life of the King in 1786 (Oxford: J. Munday, 1810), 11.
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Woodbery, “The Mad Body,” 662–3; “The Silence of the Lambs: Anti-Maniacal Regimes in the Writings of Mary Lamb,” Women’s Writing 5.3 (1998): 289.
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Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 56.
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© 2011 Judy A. Hayden
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Purinton, M.D. (2011). Lee: The New Science and Female Madness. In: Hayden, J.A. (eds) The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118430_12
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