SOURCE: Gilbert, Deirdre. “Joanna Baillie, Passionate Anatomist: Basil and Its Masquerade.” Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 16, no. 1 (2002): 42-54.

In the following essay, Gilbert focuses on the use of the masquerade in Basil and argues that the device is used to comment on female visibility and invisibility as well as Baillie's own relationship to the theater.

For the past decade or so, scholars of theatre history—Jeffrey Cox, Catherine Burroughs, Ellen Donkin, and, most recently, Peter Duthie—have attempted to secure a literary place for Joanna Baillie. Because of their efforts, we now recognize her centrality to a discussion of Gothic drama, her active part in shaping theatre history, and her importance as a theorist of theatre. Judith Slagle, Baillie's preeminent biographer, offers the playwright's letters as a record of “the development of a remarkable thinker and writer who knew from the beginning of her creative span that...