Editing Frances Burney (section)

=== The court plays ===
[[File:Bodleian_Libraries,_Playbill_of_Drury_Lane_Theatre,_Tuesday,_March_10,_1795,_announcing_The_merchant_of_Venice_&c..jpg|thumb|Bodleian Libraries, Playbill of Drury Lane Theatre, Tuesday, 10 March 1795, announcing The merchant of Venice &c.]]

From 1788, Burney's diaries record the composition of a small number of playtexts which were neither performed nor published in the author's lifetime, remaining in manuscript until 1995. These are the dramatic fragment conventionally known as ''Elberta'' and three completed plays copied out in handwriting in ordered booklets, suitable for private circulation, if not publication. These are ''[[Edwy and Elgiva]]'', ''Hubert de Vere'', and ''The Siege of Pevensey''. ''Edwy and Elgiva'' was the only one to be staged, although for one night only, on 21 March 1795, garnering unanimous negative reviews from the public and critics. The long-delayed publication of these plays has largely kept critics.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=RGSxlDWXry8C Joyce Hemlow, ''The History of Fanny Burney'' (Clarendon Press, 1958)]; Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (Rutgers UP, 1988); Barbara Darby, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=5iV87xRmcgEC Frances Burney Dramatist: Gender, Performance, and the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage]'' (UP Kentucky, 1997); Jacqueline Pearson, "'Crushing the Convent and the Dread Bastille': Anglo-Saxons, Revolution, and Gender in Women's Plays of the 1790s," in D. Scragg and C. Weinberg (eds), ''[https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/literary-appropriations-of-the-anglosaxons-from-the-thirteenth-to-the-twentieth-century/3AA6EA8B3DEDE450EC136D560D233D79 Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century]'' (CUP, 2000), 122--27.</ref> Even for the handful of scholars who have dealt with them, these texts remain devoid of particular dramatic qualities, indeed 'wretched', as they are often called: in the form in which they have come to us they seem too long to be staged; characterizations are stereotyped; the endings are weak, and the plots convoluted and inconsistent. The style, rhetorical and emphatic, makes them sound clumsy and heavy to the modern ear. However, when properly contextualized and studied as theatrical texts, rather than as unfortunate second-order productions within the works of a successful novelist as Burney, the four Court plays suggest a distinct thematic-stylistic-discursive alignment, more in line with the dramatic production of the late 18th century than has been recognized thus far.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Saggini |first=Francesca |title=Opening Romanticism: Reimagining Romantic Drama for New Audiences |url=https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/892230 |access-date=29 April 2022 |website=CORDIS}}</ref>