SOURCE: Burroughs, Catherine B. “‘A Reasonable Woman's Desire’: The Private Theatrical and Joanna Baillie's The Tryal.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 38, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1996): 265-84.

In the following essay, Burroughs examines Baillie's exploration in The Tryal of the “theatre of the closet,” or private theatricals performed by amateurs to invited audiences, showing that Baillie presents amateur acting as a means by which women could have temporary control of their domestic spaces.

Designed primarily to amuse those who had enough money to buy off boredom, late eighteenth-century British private theatricals were often unabashedly elitist projects not only in the sense that many took place in exclusive environments but because they required—in addition to time—a great deal of money to arrange. Sybil Rosenfeld writes that Lord Barrymore's expenses for cake alone at the opening night reception of his private theater at Wargrave in 1789 were “rumoured” to be...