Скачать или смотреть Dr Sarah Parker on Michael Field's Verse Dramas. TU English & Creative Writing Research Seminar.

Bound Women: Freedom and Constriction in Michael Field’s Verse Dramas
Dr Sarah Parker (Loughborough University)

Abstract:

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) were generally accustomed to the negative reception that their verse dramas received. Although they had attracted early acclaim for their verse dramas Callirrhoë and Fair Rosamund (1884), many of their later plays were greeted with ridicule or ignored by reviewers. Nonetheless, they remained deeply committed to verse drama as a form. This paper asks: why did Bradley and Cooper continue to write blank verse dramas in the twentieth century, despite the critical disparagement of these works? Why employ a seemingly antiquated form to reflect on modernity? What exactly does the verse drama enable them to do that other poetic forms cannot accomplish? In this paper, I will argue that Bradley and Cooper use blank verse to respond to issues of desire, restriction and female autonomy. I use the concept of ‘affordances’ to consider how such ‘antiquated’ blank verse in fact provides the ideal vehicle for Field to contemplate these contemporaneous issues of constriction and liberation. Through my readings of Anna Ruina (1899) and Deirdre (1918), I demonstrate how Field’s blank verse conveys the tensions between freedom and restriction, duty and desire faced by their heroines on a formal level. I conclude by discussing the enduring influence of Field’s verse dramas on dramatists of the younger generation, including W. B. Yeats and Margaret Sackville.