Elizabeth Craven, Private Theatricals and Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers

Abstract

Subsequent to the 1737 Licensing Act, the eighteenth century saw an upsurge of private theatricals. Although not restricted to one social class, some of them were lavish and costly performances organized by the elite and, in fact, major social events. Elizabeth Lady Craven, later Margravine of Anspach, organized such private theatricals, both in Germany in the late 1780s and in Britain, especially in her own theatre in Brandenburgh House, in the 1790s, where she combined the roles of translator, writer, theatre manager and actress in one person. Sociable networks were essential for her thespian activities: actors as well as audiences were often friends and family, while hired professionals (stage managers, scene painters) helped to polish the productions. New plays were written, while already existing dramatic texts were adapted, translated or set to music. She reworked (and thereby depoliticized), for example, Friedrich Schiller’s notorious drama The Robbers (1781), staged by her in 1798.

On 7th March 1795, the Oracle and Public Advertiser (2) carried a notice about the following major theatrical event:

Verse

Verse THE MARGRAVINE OF ANSPACH Commenced her THEATRICAL ENTERTAINMENTS for the season, on Thursday last, at Brandenburgh House, which was numerously attended by persons of the first distinction. Besides the PROLOGUE, there was performed MARGARET of ANJOU. The Characters were— Margaret — Her Serene Highness. Edward (her son), Miss Le Texier. The Robber, — The Hon. Mr. Keppel Craven. There was also LE RETOUR IMPREUVE, a French Comedy in one act. The characters were performed by M. Le Texier, Hon. Mr. Keppel Craven, Madame Le Texier, Madlle. E. Berkeley, Madlle. G. Berkeley, Madame Le Comtesse de Linieres, M. Le Comte Benincasa, Le Comte D’Alet, M. Le Baron de Pursay.

The Margravine of Anspach,¹ or Elizabeth Lady Craven, was an avid performer: Involving family and acquaintances, the plays which she directed, adapted and in which she herself acted, were staged within her social circle. As was frequently the case, her fifteen-year-old son Keppel Richard Craven, the child closest to her, participated in this production, as did her hired theatre manager, Antoine Le Texier, together with members of his own family. Her theatrical activities, which drew on a variety of established and adapted texts, as well as plays written by herself, coincided with the climax of the fashion for private theatres. The performances were embedded into sociable events, accompanied and followed by dinners or suppers, concerts, even balls. This article will map out the scope of her theatre work and take the German writer Friedrich Schiller’s controversial drama The Robbers (1781), which she performed in 1798, albeit in a severely abbreviated and depoliticized version, as an example.

Elizabeth Craven was a prolific author of plays, poems and stories, a translator, successful theatre manager, adventurous traveller and popular hostess, who has received less attention than she merits, possibly because much academic criticism as well as original source material is in French and German. Born to Augustus, fourth earl of Berkeley, she was married to William Craven at the age of sixteen, and after giving birth to seven children, separated from him in 1783. Both of them had engaged in love affairs. In the wake of scandal, she left England in 1783 for France, where she encountered Karl Alexander, Margrave of Anspach-Bayreuth, whom she soon came to call “brother”, although they were presumably lovers. Between 1785 and 1786, she went on the tour described in A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789a). Her extensive travelling took her through France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Greece. She then lived with the Margrave at Triesdorf, where she built up a court theatre; and when both his wife and her husband died in 1791, they married within a few weeks and came to London. Not only did they encounter severe disapproval from the Court, where they were not received, but they also had to face the fact that several of the new Margravine’s seven children gave her the cold shoulder, as did some members of the bon ton. They bought a villa, Brandenburgh House, at Fulham, where the famous theatricals were staged. In 1806, the Margrave died. The Margravine herself eventually retreated to Naples, where she died in 1828.

While, again and again, eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century women’s writings remained unpublished, or suffered belated publication by finding their way into print only posthumously, Craven’s books appeared in her lifetime, but not always under her own name. Of her remarkable literary output, no complete edition exists. Scholars have so far paid some attention to A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, aligning it with Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), but have taken far less interest in her other writings.² Craven was highly productive, yet the exact nature of her authorship is not always easy to pin down. Especially when it comes to her theatre work, by its very nature a collaborative endeavour, it is difficult to figure out to what extent dramatic texts performed on her stage as well as their later published versions were composed by herself, whether she revised already existing texts by other playwrights and whether she received help, for example from her son Keppel, a frequent performer and active participant in the Brandenburgh House theatre. Like the hosting of sociable activities, her thespian endeavours aimed at attracting elite members of society as guests on a large scale and at thereby cementing her own social position.

Private Theatres and Theatricals

There is hardly a family in high or low life, that has not its theatre of some kind or other, and its occasional performers. Not only Brandenburgh-house, but many a noble house of less notoriety is frequently opened for these dramatic exhibitions. Thither you see assembled animals of every description, like those in Noah’s ark, clean and unclean; pure and impure; grave and gay; gamblers and grumblers; who, dissatisfied with themselves and every thing around them, take refuge here. (Graves 1801, 58)

Richard Graves’s polemical anti-theatrical essay of 1801 bears witness to the vogue for private performances, which was at its height in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Privately staged plays were, as Catherine B. Burroughs points out, no “avant-garde movement” (2004, 187) but rather, as Gillian Russell observed, a “key social ritual” (2007, 191), exclusive but certainly not as private as the name denotes.³ Their popularity results at least partly from the 1737 Licensing Act, an instrument of censorship which gave two London patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, an effectual monopoly for staging plays in public. Moreover, every new play performed in public needed to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain. What the censor was not concerned with were private theatricals. These became increasingly popular in all echelons of society. They could be small and local events, performed in schools, or within families, involving friends and neighbours. At the other end of the spectrum were lavish and expensive performances, which were brought to the attention of the public through metropolitan newspapers such as the Morning Chronicle and The Times. The theatricals under scrutiny here are those staged by a social elite, in big houses, even in purpose-built theatres, some of which were opulently decorated and rivalled the London theatres. Like the public playhouses, these larger private theatres employed visual effects by using painted scenes, issued admission tickets⁴ and had playbills including a play and an afterpiece, sometimes a prologue and/or epilogue. If the private theatres at Richmond House and Brandenburgh House catered to London’s elite, others did so in the countryside, for example at Wynnstay in Denbighshire. The performances were costly: money was spent on costumes, scene painters, musicians and professional actors, who supported the cast. Even when large, audiences of aristocratic private theatres remained socially exclusive, and the performances often occurred in contexts of further sociable activities such as balls and suppers, and on special days like the host’s or the hostess’s birthdays. The theatricals were situated between public and private, and thus took place in the same in-between space as assemblies, balls and dinner parties. They offered women many opportunities for developing creative and managerial skills, for writing and acting, and allowed far more female participation than the major patent theatres in London.⁵ Although actresses like Sarah Siddons and Elizabeth Farren achieved stardom in the public theatres, a woman appearing on the public stage took the risk of tainting her reputation. Private performances, however, enabled women to explore the fascinating world of the theatre.

It would be wrong to assume that the boundary between public and private theatres was impermeable or even clearly demarcated. Theatre-specific personnel, such as actors and scene painters who worked for the patent theatres, were occasionally hired for private venues. Private theatricals were announced and reviewed in the papers. The same texts could be performed in both types of playhouses. The example of Schiller’s drama The Robbers, translated into English in 1792, staged in an abbreviated version in Brandenburgh House in 1798 and as a retitled adaptation, The Red Cross Knights, in Haymarket Theatre in 1799, proves that a text could be revised or even rewritten for individual productions. Moreover, the same prologues and epilogues, not necessarily considered to belong to one dramatic text only, were recited and recycled in both types of houses. Another example of a dramatic text meandering across boundaries is documented by the actor John Fawcett’s advertisement in The Morning Herald on 5th April 1799: “Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden. Mr Fawcett respectfully informs the Nobility, Gentry, his Friends, and the Public at large, that his BENEFIT is fixed for FRIDAY the 19th instant, when a very favourite COMEDY will be acted […]” (1). Under the benefit system, each actor in a patent theatre could once a year choose a play and keep the evening’s profit (Brooks 2011, 3). According to the records published in the monumental The London Stage, the main play in the performance on 19th April was the comedy A Cure for the Heart Ache, followed by a first afterpiece, a medley of passages from various plays, and then by a second afterpiece, an opera (Hogan 1968, 2164), in regard to which Fawcett’s advertisement had promised “that her Serene Highness the Margravine of ANSPACH has, with unprecedented kindness and liberality, lent him, for that night, the Manuscript of an Opera, in Two Acts, written by her Serene Highness, and acted at Brandenburgh House Theatre with uncommon applause” (3). The performance records provide the information that this opera was no other than The Princess of Georgia; it was a piece with music partly written by Craven and performed at Brandenburgh House in 1798 (Rosenfeld 1978, 67, 183).⁶ Presumably Fawcett, who acted in all three pieces, used her name for marketing purposes, to render his performance more attractive and to increase his profit. A further example of a dramatic text crossing the boundaries dates from Craven’s theatre work before her time at Brandenburgh House: her three-act comedy The Miniature Picture was originally performed privately at Benham House, Newbury, then at Newbury Town Hall for the benefit of the poor in April 1780, and in May of that year in Drury Lane (Rosenfeld 1978, 55, 190n6).

Authorship: “[…] but I confess I have added”

Craven did not possess a concept of authorship that centred on the notion of the solitary Romantic genius, the creator of a new work of art. If one considers how and where she obtained her models and themes, it is only fair to say that she sometimes preferred adaptation over the creation of an entirely new oeuvre. A good example is her anonymously published Modern Anecdote of the Ancient Family of the Kinkvervankotsdarsprakengotchderns: A Tale for Christmas 1779, a humorous love story with obstacles, set in Germany. A young woman, Cecil, is enamoured of a young man, whom her father, a baron with a strong belief in the value of ancestry, considers unsuitable. Locked up as a punishment, Cecil escapes by disrespectfully piling ancestral portraits on top of each other to be able to reach a window. Thus, Craven questions family background as the most important criterion for the making of matches in elite circles. She also lets Cecil, whose disrespectful use of the portraits is a performance full of erotic innuendo, become an active sexual agent. According to the “Dedication”, the original anecdote, which had reached the author via some detours, “was prettily written in French, by a German Lady, who passed some time in England with the late Madame Pushkin Moushkin” (n.p.). Craven admits that she had extended the story: “but I confess I have added personages, supposed circumstances, and given descriptions which I never heard or read of any where”.⁷ The slim book was dedicated to Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto also famously plays with a fictitious translator and invents its own textual history. Craven’s somewhat long-winded explanation of the story’s authorship may be a deliberate imitation of Walpole’s game with the reader. Unclear is not only whether, prior to her own publication, a French or German anecdote existed as a printed or manuscript text but also to what extent she adapted it. The Anecdote later became the basis for a comedy by Miles Peter Andrews, performed at the Haymarket in 1781 (Ley 1904, 57).

Hans Ley’s survey of her writings lists thirteen English and eight French plays.⁸ Differentiating between originals written by Craven herself, reworked translations and adaptations is sometimes difficult. Craven, like many other writers of her time, considered texts as raw materials, to be used, adapted and performed, and then to be re-adapted by someone else in due course. She recycled materials but did not aim to produce a final, definite and literary version of a drama. The eighteenth-century development from “a theatre of words” to “a theatre of spectacle” (West 2014, 287) rendered such rewriting more acceptable because the main interest lay in producing successful, spectacular and well-attended performances rather than great dramatic texts. Among Craven’s comedies is a translation or imitation of Antoine de Ferriol de Pont-de-Veyle’s French play Le Somnambule (1739), performed as The Sleep-Walker in 1778, and printed by Walpole’s press at Strawberry Hill. Walpole ran a private press for his own as well as his friends’ literary productions; being published there led to increased visibility as an author in one’s own circle and to being conceived as part of his sociable network. She also translated for the Margrave’s theatre in Germany, and for her own stage in Brandenburgh House. The three-act comedy Nourjad, for example, which takes Frances Sheridan’s oriental tale The History of Nourjahad (1767) as its model, was staged in French in Anspach sometime between 1787 and 1789 and was published in French (1789c) by a local German publisher, together with lyrics for a ballet, entitled Nourjad et Fatme. A German (1790) and an English version (1803) followed. Among Craven’s own plays were comedies such as The Miniature Picture (1780) and Love in a Convent (1805). Some plays, like The Yorkshire Ghost (1794), were never printed and have been lost. Apart from the texts she composed or adapted herself, she also took an interest in classics: a performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was planned in 1796 but then abandoned; John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed was played in 1795.

Craven, whose travelogue Journey Through the Crimea abounds with descriptions of spectacular encounters, linked her experience of travelling to her dramatic work. Several of the plays performed at Brandenburgh House carry titles reminiscent of her tour through the East, Russia, Turkey and Greece in particular, and offered orientalist phantasmagorias to the audience: The Smyrna Twins (1796) with Turkish scenes and magnificent dresses, the opera The Princess of Georgia, where the harem’s chief appears on stage, as well as the Turkish tale Nourjad (1803), featuring a sultan. The orientalizing spectacles were conveyed not only through the story unfolding in the dialogues but also through costumes and scenery.

The Theatre: “The Muse Thalia Holds Imperial Sway”

Craven’s prolific activities as the manager of the Brandenburgh House stage are predated by earlier theatrical activities in England, at the time of her first marriage, and even more during her time in Germany. After arriving at Anspach in 1787, she converted an old building into a theatre and became its manager:

Every Thursday I went into the theatre at ten o’clock, and at two the Margrave came to take me away, to return to Triesdorf to dine. I was chief manager; and with M. Azimon, who was sub-governor to the pages, and my troop, we always contrived to keep the most profound secrecy as to what we intended to represent (Craven 1826, I, 191).⁹

While at Anspach, Craven wrote French pieces and translated English texts to furnish her little court theatre with material (1826, I, 201–02). To the local nobility, it was a place of meeting and social interaction: she gathered a little court around her and got its members to act in plays she wrote or adapted. The above-mentioned French edition as well as the German translation list among the actors the Baroness of Schilling, Baron Eichler d’Auritz, Baron von Woelwarth, Baron von Gemmingen and others, names which also appear as subscribers in the French edition, whose preface explains that the actors belonged to her court and that the plays gathered here had been acted between August 1787 and 1789 (Craven 1789b, n.p.). Among these plays is Nourjad, which Craven had written for the Margrave’s birthday. Henry Angelo, a well-known fencing master, visited Anspach at that time and later remembered: “a grand party of nobility and the corps diplomatique on that day were invited” (1830, II, 306). Some of them participated as actors, as did “Milady”, her son Keppel Craven, and Angelo, a keen amateur, who took over Nourjad’s part, although with some reservations: “I was to be the beloved (Nourjahad) buffo caracato,—no great figure for a prince,—and to be fallen in love with by a princess (Margravine), who was to represent herself as an enchantress (Fatima)” (1830, II, 306). One reason for involving him was that Craven had apparently not managed to enlist anyone else willing to study the lengthy text for this role. It was in her boudoir that Angelo, according to his own comic account, was ordered to accept the role of Nourjad. Subsequently and not unexpectedly, he was teased by other members of her court. In imitation of a lover’s plight, he fell ill prior to the performance, suffering, however, not from love but from stage fright. Angelo’s story highlights the fact that the group of actors could be reinforced by any traveller or visitor, and that the acting was a fundamental part of the court’s sociable interaction.

When Craven, now married to the Margrave, moved back to England in 1791, her great time as renowned theatre manager and writer began. In the great house near Hammersmith, situated on the river Thames and bought for 8,500 pounds, they hosted numerous gatherings. The largest part of Craven’s theatrical activities at Brandenburgh House occurred in the 1790s and early 1800s, until the Margrave’s death on 5th January 1806. The Margravine had her own theatre, “erected near the water side, in a castellated form, resembling an ancient ruin. It was one of the most elegant and convenient private theatres ever built in this kingdom”, The Gentleman’s Magazine nostalgically enthused in 1822, after the theatre’s decorations had been sold and the house had been demolished (299). The private playhouse was opened in April 1793, with a Prologue, two short plays, Fanfan et Colas and Le Poulet, a supper, a masquerade and a ball (Broadley and Melville 1914, I, lxxix). Among the 100 guests attending was the Prince of Wales.

Craven’s private theatricals also involved hired professionals. In 1792, the well-known theatre manager M. Le Texier accepted a position at Brandenburgh House (Rosenfeld 1978, 59), which meant that apart from acting and writing for the theatre, he was also in charge of running the couple’s huge parties, or “fêtes”. Since the working relationship between Le Texier and the Margravine deteriorated and was terminated within a few years, even leading to a Chancery Case, some of their financial transactions and the ensuing arguments are documented (Vesey 1827, 322–28): Le Texier, who initially obtained a salary of 120 pounds per annum, also received 1,100 pounds per quarter “for providing the table of the Margrave”, but soon found that the sum was insufficient for the “very expensive fêtes and entertainments” (Vesey 1827, 323). He complained that the Margravine had asked him to lay out his own money, and that he had not been fully reimbursed. The court proceedings also highlight the tasks of a hired theatre man, which ranged from reading plays in French to supervising the building of a pavilion. Such experienced staff from the bigger playhouses was frequently hired for elite private theatricals, either for longer periods or for specific performances.

During the performances, Elizabeth Craven’s son Keppel regularly played opposite his mother (Hawley 2014, 199, 208). Since more than one play was on the playbill, she herself occasionally acted twice in one day. Notices in the daily press give a picture of how the personal and the theatrical were intertwined: “To-morrow there is to be a Grand Fête at Brandenburgh-house, which the MARGRAVINE of ANSPACH gives in celebration of the Birthday of her Son, the Hon. Mr. KEPPEL, who, that day, will enter his eighteenth year. There is to be a Theatrical Sketch, but nothing in the Musical way” (The True Briton, 13th April 1796, 3). His participation as actor and writer was mentioned occasionally by the press alongside his mother’s efforts. Mother and son even held roles that cast them in the relationship of lovers, or brothers (Hawley 2014, 208). Angelo ironically commented that the Margravine often played “the daughter or pert chambermaid” and Keppel “the lover, or the intriguing lackey” (1830, II, 32–33). Judith Hawley has suggested that rather than employ an outmoded Freudian model, one should assume that Craven enjoyed her social power and narcissistically “adopted a masculine position” (2014, 201, 208).

The plays Craven wrote, translated, adapted and directed were, together with the accompanying fêtes and other events, performances of her financial and cultural capital. An article in the Register of the Times sketches the programme of the reopening of her theatre after a period of refurbishment on 5th March 1795. The information provided there goes beyond the initially cited article from the Oracle and Public Advertiser in describing the entire event. It commenced with airs and choruses written by Craven, and music from the Italian composer Paesiello, followed by a historical one-act play, Margaret of Anjou, which her friend Edward Jerningham had written in 1777, a French one-act comedy, and an Italian pastoral. The Margravine impressed the audience as writer, and as performer in the prologue and the historical play. The newly refurbished theatre had undergone a “total internal alteration”, while “several new scenes and decorations have been added” (66). Wigstead, a well-known scene painter, had been hired to supervise the latter task. The theatrical performance was followed by a supper and a ball. The article names the two most prestigious visitors, the Duchess of Cumberland and the Duke of Norfolk. That the guests were still dancing when “Phoebus roused from the embraces of his Thetis” (66), that is, at sunrise, is clear proof of the evening’s success.

Among the reasons to attend was not only the artistic quality of the entertainment. The suppers seem to have been opulent, as an enthusiastic description by Angelo, frequent actor and guest, shows:

A long table, spread with a profusion of massive plate, vases, plateaus, chandeliers, &c. The first coup d’œil was a grand sight to any one. Here was a pleasant interval, after hours seated in a hot theatre; and having much influence with Mr. Browne, the house-steward, I could order anything I chose to call for; often I procured old hock and champagne, which were very acceptable to those whom I took to see the supper-room (1830, II, 311–12).

Access to Brandenburgh House was also a desirable marker of status. Angelo’s autobiography throws an interesting light on the ticketing system, which motivated amateur actors to participate: the performers obtained six tickets each that they could give to family and friends. They also demonstrated their social status in being able to introduce friends to this elite circle: “I need not be afraid of mentioning how many I have introduced to the supper table. On one occasion I had the Margravine’s permission to fill a coach, and what was very gratifying to my pride, I was enabled to present the family of the late Rev. George Glasse to the levee which always preceded the supper” (1830, II, 311).

At a time of war with France, her predilection for plays in French or plays translated and adapted from French, presumably with the help of Le Texier, took a new turn. Being an Honorary Freeman to the Fishmongers’ Company, she organized a fête in July 1794, during which The Yorkshire Ghost and Les Poissardes Anglois were staged. In an act of social cross-dressing, the Margravine appeared as “a Billingsgate girl”, a gin-sipping fishwife in praise of her country (“John Bull is a very good soul”), as the Whitehall Evening Post reported (19th–22nd July 1794, 3; Sporting Magazine 1794, 232).¹⁰ In its review of the performance, The Times relates the anecdote that when some “distressed” French emigrants had gone to Billingsgate in search of affordable food, they had not only been “loaded” with fish but had received further help from the generous fishwomen, who had made a subscription for them (21st July 1794, 3). At a period of war with the French, Craven’s performances thus showcased British national virtues.

She also skilfully used the genres of prologue and epilogue, which in Georgian private and public theatres were staple elements of the performance, thereby addressing audiences and establishing further links with them (Bolton 2014, 36). As texts, they were unstable in that they were not permanently attached to one play only but could be appended variously, or altered to fit an occasion. They could be recited by important persons: well-known actors, writers, or theatre managers. Sometimes they were printed on their own, or reprinted in newspapers, thereby providing a flavour of the performance: thus, the epilogue of The Yorkshire Ghost, the play delivered before the Fishmongers’ Company, was published in the Whitehall Evening Post, allowing us a glimpse of an otherwise lost dramatic text.

Craven was not only the author but also the performer of such appended recitals. A print entitled “Prelude”, which has survived, was probably written for the opening of the theatre in 1793.¹¹ The fairy Queen Mab, in all likelihood played by the Margravine, conjures up the banners of England and Prussia, after which furies enter, “trampling under the foot the Banner of France”, as the stage direction explains (4). Addressed by Queen Mab, the “rebellious fiends”, rebuked and warned against the British, sink down, while fairies sing and even the River God Thames offers support. An alternative to the “pomp” and “falsehood” (6) found at Court, the new theatre and its activities would be “magic”, “harmonious” and “happy” (8). The “Prelude” constitutes a public presentation of a patriotic agenda, demonstrating a union between Prussia and England at a time of war against revolutionary France. The Margravine, who in the final line promises that “The Muse Thalia holds imperial sway” (10), thus indicates that her house symbolizes a cultural and political union, that it is a safe haven in more than one sense.¹²

The Margravine’s Robbers: Free from “Jacobinical Speeches”

Elizabeth Craven’s treatment of the German playwright Friedrich Schiller’s notorious Robbers, which took the shape of a rather severe depoliticizing of his ideas, is an example of the cross-cultural encounters staged in the Brandenburgh House theatre. Schiller’s play, printed in 1781 and first staged in Germany in 1782, had reached Britain fairly soon. As early as 1787, an article in the Edinburgh Magazine condemned the ambivalent attraction emanating from a play written “in the very worst taste”, but also abounding with “sublime strokes” that enforce “a horrible kind of interest” (225). The drama was highly successful in revolutionary France, and the National Assembly appointed Schiller a French honorary citizen in 1792. A first English translation of 1792 quickly went into several editions. Its author was Alexander Fraser Tytler, who had carefully pruned the text, abbreviating and toning down a number of scandalizing passages.¹³ The Robbers’ dynamic plot, centring on a conflict between two brothers, Karl and Franz, an old father, Amalia, Karl’s sweetheart, and a band of outlaws, corresponded to the prevailing fashion of melodrama, but the political message, the critique of the feudal system as well as the outlaws’ crude brutality, were unacceptable on the British stage. In June 1798, the parody The Rovers appeared in The Anti-Jacobin. Another free translation, or rewriting, was J. G. Holman’s The Red Cross Knights, set in Spain and performed on 21st August 1799 at Haymarket Theatre. Holman’s first attempt at staging The Robbers had been circumvented by the censor in 1792. A review of the 1799 performance in the London Chronicle referenced Schiller’s play, “totally unfit for the English stage”, as a model, justifying the transformation of this text so “hostile to the institutions of civilized life”, while adding only some moderate praise for the adaptation with its completely reworked text (180). Despite the fact that Schiller himself was no Jacobin, the play soon “came to figure an amorphous, pan-European threat” to the English, as Peter Mortensen has suggested (2004, 155). In general, contemporary German literature—sentimentalism, the Gothic mode, high-flung political ideas as those in The Robbers, likewise Kotzebue’s politically moderate plays—was sometimes considered to be of low taste and immoral if not dangerous (Mortensen 2004, 1, 9).

Craven, hardly likely to endorse the social criticism voiced in Schiller’s play, performed The Robbers in June 1798 in Brandenburgh House in a version free from “Jacobinical Speeches that abound in the Original”, as the “Preface” promises (Craven 1799, n.p.). She (or her son Keppel, to whom this work has been ascribed [Lady’s Monthly Museum 1798, 58; Morning Herald 1798, 3])—did not produce her own translation, however. A comparison of Schiller’s drama, Tytler’s translation and the Brandenburgh House version (published in 1799) show that she must have worked from Tytler, administering substantial cuts and expurgating many more passages likely to be objectionable (see Willoughby 1921, 304–06). Although the prologue of the Margravine’s 1799 text promises that the new play had been “prun’d with British care” (3) a review in the Morning Chronicle found fault even with the mutilated version: “The democratic points of this heavy Play were mostly cut out; but the tendency remains” (1798, 3).

Much of this pruning occurred on the level of plot: like Tytler, the Margravine situates the play in the early sixteenth century and thus far back in history, whereas the second edition of Schiller’s original explicitly sets it in the mid-eighteenth century and thus close to the present. The Robbers were highly controversial in Germany due to the outspoken critique of the feudal system, and many German performances cut the text, too, not out of aesthetic but out of political motivations. In the Margravine’s rendering, the scenes are much shorter, and the number of robbers, who appear less uncouth and aggressive, is diminished. Essential characters are endowed with new, less controversial plotlines. She may have administered cuts not only to reduce infuriating content but also to obtain a short, action-packed piece with dynamic dialogues. For example, both Tytler and the Margravine rearranged act I: In Schiller’s drama, scene I.i, which commences with Franz’s intrigues, fuelled by rivalry with his gifted brother, is emotionally highly complex. This scene is briefer in Tytler, who cut Franz’s long monologues and thus also his display of self-hatred. In Craven’s adaptation, so much text is omitted that the detailed exposition of Franz’s evil nature fails to take shape, so that the play’s action is foregrounded.

Occasionally, Tytler shifted scenes: In Schiller’s drama, scene I.i shows Franz and his father, and I.iii Franz and Amalia, whereas I.ii presents the robbers in the forest. Tytler merged I.i and I.iii into one single scene, followed by the forest scene. This structure was followed by Craven. Especially in act IV and V Craven discards a lot of text by not only condensing Tytler’s passages but by cutting vital plot elements. The five scenes of Schiller’s act IV are reworked severely: where Tytler rearranges the plot, shifting text between the scenes, Craven’s act IV consists of one scene only, a very condensed version of Schiller’s scene IV.v. The fate of the central female character Amalia, Karl Moor’s beloved, is altered: She quickly disappears from the Brandenburgh House stage. As in the German original, she has an argument with Franz in act III, but Craven then makes her permanently withdraw to a convent, whereas Schiller and Tytler let Amalia reappear among the outlaws (with slightly varying dying scenes) in the final act. Kosinsky, a dissatisfied nobleman, appears in Tytler but not in Craven. Franz, Karl’s infamous brother, commits suicide in Schiller’s play in act V. In Tytler’s translation, he is pursued across the stage by robbers, whereas he falls into the robbers’ hands in the Margravine’s version and is carried off.

Craven also changed the robbers considerably: The first scene among the robbers (Schiller I.ii) is dominated by Spiegelberg’s derisive, highly provocative bragging and his biting critique of society, which are partly retained in Tytler’s (39–43) but severely cut in Craven’s version (23). Another example is the monologue about the rings in II.iii (Schiller), where Karl talks to a monk who has offered himself as a go-between. When Karl Moor elaborates on the symbolically charged four rings, taken from men who had abused their power, these objects symbolize the elite’s corruption and hypocrisy. Tytler retains much of this very dynamic speech (although his “commissary” is no churchman). In Craven’s version, this passage is omitted, so that Karl’s justification, the abuse of power by the mighty, is missing. Changes also occur on the linguistic level. For example: in I.i, Schiller’s “schwarzer giftiger Lügner” [black, poisonous liar] (16) is a “black infernal liar” in Tytler (3) but only “a liar” in Craven’s text (6). Swear words, criticism of church and clerics as well as sexual content, allusions to sexual violence, are removed or toned down. All in all, Craven reduced the play’s potential to stir controversy. Her outlaws are far less immoral and dangerous than in the original.

The performances took place on 29th May and 6th June 1798 (Rosenfeld 1978, 68). The reviews provide a glimpse of the performance. According to The Morning Chronicle, Karl Moor was played by Keppel Craven, Franz by Mr Wynne, Old Moor by Mr Hamilton, Spiegelberg by Mr Wade, Hermann by Sir Walter James, Schweitzer by Mr Joseph Maddox and Amalia by the Margravine herself. Keppel and his mother faced one another on stage, playing lovers amidst their theatrical friends. In the role of Amalia, Craven displayed “sensibility” and “tenderness and passion”, as the Morning Chronicle suggested (apparently, the acting was so powerful that “a Lady in the upper boxes fainted away” [3]), while the Lady’s Monthly Museum praised her “classical propriety” (58). The epilogue was followed by a farce, W. C. Oulton’s All in Good Humour, with the Margravine appearing as a country girl. Afterwards, select guests were invited for supper. Considering Craven’s previous stage practice and her predilection for pastorals, one may assume that her Robbers were staged as a celebration of rural life. Two new scenes, probably backdrops, were highly praised: “a sunset, on the banks of the Danube” and “the moonlight, in the forest of Bohemia” (Lady’s Monthly Museum, 59).¹⁴ She even added an epilogue to emphasize the innate nobility of the Robin-Hood-like robbers, whom her pen had completely depoliticized. The true robbers, she argued, were the “Pamphleteers”, the newspapers, that “now call at fire and murder every day; Yet say we’re safe, if we will fight or pay” (103). This is an allusion to a journalistic practice in which an editor threatened to disclose—frequently false—rumours in his paper unless the victim would buy his silence. Attacking the press, the Margravine’s epilogue boldly declared that she envisioned herself as a “Captain” (103) heading a group of “Robbers” (104) who aimed to achieve universal good. Thus, her play ended on a denial of the robbers’ cause. Her rewriting and production shows that she wanted to create a spectacular performance, not a literary masterpiece. Through this dialogic engagement with the press, she also marked her territory and defied criticism.¹⁵ She proved that as theatre manager, she was aware of new developments: “the fashionable and sombre writings of the German school have not been neglected”, The Monthly Mirror remarked in praise in 1801 (11).

A further play that may have drawn on the success of her Robbers was The Gauntlet (1804), about which little is known. The most detailed information appears in the autobiography of the indefatigable Angelo, who believes that it was yet another adaptation of Schiller’s play. Rosenfeld, however, doubts this (1978, 72–73, 192n75). The Gauntlet as Angelo describes it is set in Germany, with banditti, whose leader Wolfanga (Angelo ) is planning to rob the Bishop of Fulda. A fight with a prince disguised as a wood cutter (Keppel) leads to Wolfanga’s death. Tongue in cheek, Angelo improved his death scene through adding a monologue of his own making: “I gave them my dying speech, and following my instructor, favoured the audience with sundry groans and struggles, which, to use a newspaper puff, received unbounded applause”, but incurred the Margravine’s displeasure (1830, II, 34). A prologue or epilogue, printed in The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1804, invites the audience’s admiration and uses military imagery, at a time of war between England and France, thus casting her theatre again as a patriotic venue (Craven 1804, 552).

Craven’s European theatre functioned on several levels. As a thriving performance space near London, predominantly open to a wealthy elite, it added an international component to metropolitan theatrical life. Craven brought German, French and Italian plays, music, and lay as well as professional performers together with local and international guests, while her thespian endeavours also served to highlight her own political views. Her theatre was at the centre of a number of sociable activities, which she conducted with and for family and friends. Thus, she fulfilled the female role of a great hostess and combined it with that of a creative agent. Private theatricals allowed women to participate in the theatre to an extent which would not have been acceptable on the public stage. The press reactions to the demolition of Brandenburgh House in 1822 and six years later to her death bear witness to her impact. In 1822, The Gentleman’s Magazine mythologically imbued its “former grandeur and magnificence” (298) by citing Virgil in the Latin original (“Campus [sic] ubi Troja fuit”) to compare its disappearance to that of Troy.