Like many other women authors of her time, Sophia Lee was a literary amphibian. Throughout her writing career, she moved with considerable facility between the genres of tragedy, comedy, novel, novella and ballad. Almeyda, Queen of Granada was, however, Lee's only tragedy. It was first presented to the public at Drury Lane on 20 April, 1796 with a strong cast of actors drawn largely from the Kemble acting dynasty, and including Sarah Siddons herself. Such a strong cast did not, however, guarantee the success of the tragedy, and it closed after only four nights. Clearly, this apparent failure affected Lee's future writing, for thereafter she avoided writing tragedies and tried her hand at more fiction and later, a comedy, The Assignation. This was also staged at Drury Lane in 1807, but it also proved to be a commercial failure.

The tragic inevitability in this play becomes swiftly evident: Abdallah's character is too formed to allow him to stop his quest to be in charge of the monarchy; and Almeyda's character is, according to Ramirez, 'too frank, incautious and ungovern'd' to permit her to change her determination. Ramirez warns of her 'fatal flaw' in Act I when he advises that: 'She must conceal those passions to be great,/ Subdue them to be happy. /In the mind all sov'reignty begins, and ends.' What neither Ramirez nor Abdallah count on, however, is that to Almeyda, love and personal happiness are more important than the empty cipher of the crown. Almeyda refuses to marry Orasmyn in order to retain her crown. The tragic plot unravels in a manner strongly reminiscent of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet when Almeyda, believing her lover Alonzo to have been murdered by Abdallah, temporarily loses her sanity, and thus her crown. When she regains both and reveals Abdallah's treachery to the rest of the court, she is poisoned by him. Alonzo, having in the meantime been rescued from death by Orasmyn, appears at the end of the play only to find Almeyda expiring with Abdallah who has simultaneously poisoned himself.

Almeyda, Queen of Granada bears strong parallels to the themes established in this earlier prose work. Lee participated in the contemporary literary debate about women's education and regulation. This was a debate which explored the governing and subjugation of women's passions in favour of reason. It was a subject which was highlighted and critiqued by Fanny Burney in (amongst others) her famous novel Camilla (1796), and Ann Radcliffe, a friend of Lee's, also explored this particularly effectively in The Mysteries of Udolpho of 1794. Lee's tragedy, written contemporaneously with the emergence of these other writers' works, shows a clear participation in this debate. What is different about Lee's work, however, is the more overt critique that her play provides of the government of passion. In the tragedy, it is principally the male characters who ask Almeyda to subdue her passions in favour of her crown. When she proves less pliant than they expect, Abdallah in particular constructs her as insane in order to deprive her of her regal power. Through the portrayal of this male manipulation, criticised and highlighted by the heroine herself, Lee makes the point that unless one has the freedom to choose whom to love and marry, there can be no true sanity anyway. The corrupted state of mind of the heroine Almeyda becomes the literal embodiment of the corrupted state.

When Almeyda is counselled by her friend Victoria in Act I to 'govern these wild transports,/ Which ever warp your judgement', she exclaims: 'Away with reason! melancholy hermit! /Who idly eyes the storm, then, vainly active,/ Collects, and treasures, ev'ry wreck of passion!'. Reason here becomes equated with solitude in a manner strongly reminiscent of Lee's earlier work The Recess where the heroines' safe underground home becomes synonymous with imprisonment because, in spite of their protection, they cannot love freely. Almeyda is haunted by the same dilemma as these earlier fictional characters. She must choose between rank, title, safety and solitude on the one hand, and on the other the option of following her heart and thus losing her title. At the beginning of Act II, she makes this dilemma clear:

Are these the charms of empire? Have we pow'r
To give that happiness, we ne'er must know?
- The meanest slave attending on our person,
Makes her heart's free election, and adorns
With life's first charm a poor, and vulgar home!
While rank, that splendid misery to woman,
Enchains us to the car of victor man;
(Act II, sc.ii)

For Almeyda, there is in fact no dilemma. Her palace and home, where she is tracked suspiciously by Abdallah, becomes an 'imperial prison' and her crown is a 'vain, vain pageantry of regal power'. What is clear here is that any semblance of power that Almeyda may feel is illusory. Manipulated by Abdallah, her crown in fact becomes a mockery of power; her domestic space, the palace, becomes a prison. This mockery of power and safety becomes equated with insanity because Almeyda's heart remains imprisoned and tortured. Like Lee's other heroines, Almeyda has a self-awareness of her own tragically manipulated situation that clearly separates her from the possibly more conservative protests of such characters as Radcliffe's Emily St. Aubert or Burney's Camilla. The emphasis placed throughout this tragedy on imprisonment and insanity within the domestic sphere clearly marks it as a radical and innovative play that bears significant relationship to Sophia Lee's other work, and to the work of her contemporaries.

Angela Wright
University of Aberdeen

Angela Wright has published articles on French melodrama; the Marquis de Sade and Matthew Lewis. She is now preparing her monograph of her thesis work on such Gothic novelists as Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, the Marquis de Sade, and Mary Wollstonecraft. She also has a forthcoming essay in PMLA on teaching Sophia Lee's The Recess and Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron.