Charlotte Brontë on stage: 1930s biodrama and the archive/museum performed

This chapter explores dramatic representations of the Brontës during the early 1930s in the broader context of heritage, tourism and scholarly editing. Following the public opening of the Parsonage Museum in 1928, and contemporary with the serial publication of the Shakespeare Head Brontë between 1931 and 1938, increasing numbers of playwrights and theatre makers turned their attention to the lives and work of the Brontë family. The resulting biodramas set their scene in the family home turned museum, filling their stages with prop replicas of personal possessions turned museum objects and weaving dialogue from lines extracted from the Brontë corpus. This chapter focuses upon two case studies(Alfred Sangster’s The Brontës and Rachel Ferguson’s Charlotte Brontë (to examine how biodrama engages with archival and curatorial evidence, exposing contingencies and exploring how textual and material remained are used to sustain biographical ‘myths’—traditions that supply a lack within, or counter the historical record. Biodrama is critical in its praxis: these plays dramatise the problems of performing the museum and archive, where objects and documents can be made to speak variously, sometimes falsely.