From British Drama 1890 to 1950: A Critical History

By R. F. Dietrich

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End of Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

“OUR THEATRES IN THE NINETIES”: HAUNTED BY GHOSTS

   1890: DIONYSIUS IS DEAD; LONG LIVE DIONYSIUS

THE NEW DRAMA: PRECURSORS

OSCAR WILDE: THE MARLOWE OF THE NEW DRAMA

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: ANOTHER SHAKESPEARE?

The Death of Boucicault

Arthur Wing Pinero: The Ideal New Dramatist

  The Serio-Comedies

The Devil’s Disciple

The Birth of Ibsenism

Henry Arthur Jones: The Earnest Victorian

  Salomé

Plays Unpleasant

 

 

The Importance of Being Earnest  

Plays Pleasant

 

 

 

Plays for Puritans

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1890: DIONYSIUS IS DEAD; LONG LIVE DIONYSIUS  

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This volume could have started with the London production of Ibsen’s A Doll House1 in 1889, for that was a seminal event in the development of the New Drama, but 1890 has been chosen for the beginning of the modern period because in that year two events occurred, involving British playwrights of Irish origin, that loom even larger as symbols of history—the death of Dion Boucicault, one of the nineteenth century’s most popular, prolific, and innovative playwrights, and the birth of “Ibsenism” at the hands of George Bernard Shaw, two years away from writing his first play. The two events symbolize the death of the old order in the British theater and the rebirth of that theater in a new form.

Shedding light on these two events, a third significant event of 1890 was the publication of the first two volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which suggested that ancient myth and ritual survived in the hidden structures of literature and its processes. For example, the death of Boucicault and the birth of Ibsenism could be understood as manifestations of the spirit of Dionysius (also called Bacchus), a Greek god of vegetation (especially the grape), whose periodic death and resurrection was generally associated with the process of communal decay and regeneration. Dionysius was also the Greek patron saint of the theater because Dionysian rituals of lament for the god’s death and of celebration for his revival seem to have transmuted into the theater’s patterns of tragedy and comedy. The drama above all other genres seems to be the most appropriate for the communal contempla­tion and ritual experiencing of the rhythms of life.

It almost seems that it was as much the late Victorians and Edwardians who made Dionysius the patron saint of the theater as it was the Greeks. As archaeologists dug up the past, the British naturally looked through the remains of history for kindred societies. They were particularly intrigued by the rare combination of democracy and imperialism they found in classical Athens, site of the production of most of the extant Greek plays. There the British found Dionysius connected with drama at its root, though the connection was taken for granted by the Greeks and not much explained. To explain the god’s connection with drama to the modern world, Frazer’s new science of cultural anthropology joined with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1871) and myth criticism to produce such works as Jane Harrison’s Themis (1912), Cornford’s Origins of Attic Comedy (1914), and Gilbert Murray’s many treatises on the ritual basis of Greek drama, leading to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957).

Gilbert Murray’s focus on drama makes his work especially relevant. Murray argued so convincingly for the hidden presence of Dionysian ritual in Greek drama that many took his enthusiasm for evidence. Though the detailed ritual pattern Murray wanted to see in Greek drama appears not to be there as universally as he theorized, the general idea that most literature, especially drama, either celebrates the Dionysian life principle or bears witness to or prophesies its absence still may serve as a unifying concept. At any rate, what matters here is the historical effect of a developing idea as it met with other ideas of the late Victorian age, such as the idea of a renaissance of the drama and the establishment of a national theater based on an original model. And an account of Murray’s theory would have value if only because Murray was friend and counselor on Greek matters to Shaw, whose ideas about the Life Force, seen in the light of Murray’s theories, seem less newfangled than archetypal (see Figure 6  at the end of Chapter 1).  

The Nietzsche-Frazer-Cornford-Murray-Frye account of drama’s origin goes something like this (although they would not have agreed on some details):  Dionysius was a god who, like Christ, died annually in the rituals of religion and in the spring was miraculously reborn. The tragedy of this vegetation god’s “fall” in harvest time and the comedy of his springing back to life in seed time made natural material for drama, and apparently the priests themselves were the first to dramatize the tragicomic story, even as the priests of the Middle Ages were the first to dramatize the Bible.2  Through a complicated series of substitutions—priests and scapegoats substituting for Dionysius, eventually actors substituting for both, and the stories of Greek monarchs and heroes substituting for the story of Dionysius—the ancient drama passed into forms less recognizable, or not recognizable at all, as religious in origin, until tragedy and comedy lost their seasonal connection and the playing of the “fall” and “rise” was telescoped into a single week in spring, similar to the playing of Christ’s death and resurrection in Easter Week, and had more to do with communal well-being than with seasonal renewal, though the two could be related. By the 5th century B.C., the huge Theater of Dionysius had been built in amphitheater style on the southeastern slope of Athen’s acropolis, becoming the model, however modified, for all the Greek, Hellenistic, and Greco-Roman theaters built thereafter. That it was  also the model for the main theater of London’s present National Theatre (see Figure 2 at the end of Chapter 1) is the point here, suggesting that what modern British drama was driving at was a return to the origin of theater, to its cultural centrality and ritual significance. It was during the modern age that this return became a consuming idea, though not everybody understood that to return to the origin of drama was to revive the spirit of Dionysius and that to invoke Dionysius was to set loose a spirit inimical to certain Victorian ideals.

            The resurrecting of Dionysius may also partly account for the modern era’s being more an age of comedy and tragicomedy than of pure tragedy. Dramatic festivals in honor of the god were staged annually at the Theater of Dionysius, in keeping with his dual nature, tragic and comic. During the festivals’ richest development, in midclassical times, a balance was struck between tragedy and comedy, except that the comedies were generally performed last, with even the great tragedies in their trilogies being followed by comic satyr plays. The religious justification for comedy’s climactic position must have been to emphasize the triumph of life and joy over death and suffering. To the extent that this drama still embodied religious ideas, Dionysius, in the guise of however many Greek kings and heroes, never died in the tragedies or suffered a fall but he rose again in the comedies, for he was the personification of ever-renewing primal energy. Though the apparent ritual means of regeneration—sexual passion under the influence of strong drink and intoxicated destruction of the old for the sake of providing seed for the new—did not endear Dionysius to many Victorians, his life-affirming spirit and regenerative powers, Shaw and Murray thought, were the theater’s guiding principle, a principle Shaw thought was particularly needed in its comic mode to offset the age’s death-worshipping conventions. Certainly an age attempting a renaissance of the theater would do well to put the emphasis on Dionysian resurrection. The dominance of comedy in our modern period, especially when mixed with tragedy (tragicomedy simply being a further telescoping and thus intensification of the Dionysian dual nature), suggests that the playwrights of the age responded appropriately.

The problem with liberating the Dionysian spirit of comic revelry in the nineties, however much needed to redress an imbalance, was its anarchic tendency, which, bringing new freedoms, frightened as many as it exhilarated. Sexual freedom was especially frightening, for it threatened a society founded on the virginity of unmarried females and the monogamous family. It is no wonder that playwrights of the nineties were preoccupied with the “woman question,” for the invoking of Dionysius involved questions of sexual freedom that led to further questions about the equality of the sexes. The notorious Victorian double standard, tacitly allowing sexual license to males but not to females, was a contradiction of such intensity that it was certain to find dramatic embodiment. Traditionally, for male playwrights the problem of “woman” is the problem of life. To be Victorian was to avoid the problem by cliché thinking, compartmentalizing women into “good” and “bad” to serve the ambivalence of men. To serve their aspirations men invented “good” women, who were pure, angelic, and, well, “womanly,” an ideal at which most advertising aimed and whose illusion a surprising number of women took earnestly and contrived to achieve. But the presence of “beastly” impulses in men made it necessary that there also be “bad” women, whom poetic men liked to sentimentalize as “fallen angels.”  To be modern was to be aware of the contradictions between ideal and real, and to realize that to enforce angelic behavior on women through a stringent code of respectability was to outlaw those women who refused stereotyping and to condemn the obedient, smothered in conformity, to a sort of death-in-life, which ended in killing the souls of men as well. The test of modernity for a playwright of the nineties was whether he had truly liberated himself and his art from the sexual stereotypes of the Victorian double standard. There were more failures than successes, and the successes were mostly partial.  

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THE DEATH OF BOUCICAULT

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It is appropriate that the story of modern British drama begin with a death, then, for death must precede rebirth. The death of the old order in Victorian drama is symbolized by the death of a playwright happily named Dionysius Boucicault (1820?-1890).

Allardyce Nicoll reports that something like thirty thousand plays were produced in nineteenth-century England, not counting foreign plays. Only hack writers, cranking out formula plots or plagiarizing from the French, could turn them out at that rate. And only a few of the hack writers would be able to achieve enough popularity or give enough distinctive style to their works to be remembered. In some cases they would be remembered as “house dramatists,” more or less indentured servants of a particular star actor in a particular theater. Among those remembered was Dionysius Boucicault, perhaps not the best from a literary standpoint but supremely representative of the type, memorable too because he was one of the few hacks to make it on his own, in his heyday barnstorming the Western world with his own troupe of actors.

He is said to have written as many as four hundred plays, though many were translations, adaptations, and doctored scripts. Typical was a melodrama he adapted in 1857 from a French play entitled Les Pauvres de Paris—produced in New York, it was called The Poor of New York; in Liverpool in 1864, after revising place names, he changed it to The Poor of Liverpool; later, revising it again for London audiences, he changed it to The Streets of London. And so it went. He expressed his contempt for the whole proceeding by declaring playwriting “a degrading occupation, but more money has been made out of guano than out of poetry.”3  Boucicault simply followed the formula for melodramas, with nick-of-time rescues of fair maidens from cursing villains and happy endings with virtue triumphant.  But he also put his stamp on these plays with bold, thrilling theatrical effects, a flamboyant style, and broad humor for relief. Unlike most hack writers, he made several fortunes in the theater, even initiating for British playwrights the custom of being paid royalties (instead of flat rates); but his life-style was so expensive that he died broke, bewildered by the waning interest in the Old Drama and the gathering enthusiasm for the New Drama. Ironically, his dedication to making his spectacular stage effects up-to-date realistic (as in using the newly invented camera to solve a mystery in The Octoroon, an 1859 play dealing with slavery) encouraged a growing taste for the realism that would supplant him.

Though melodrama was his specialty, Boucicault wrote many kinds of plays, actually gaining his first fame, in 1841, with an imitation Restoration comedy of manners (London Assurance, revived in 1890 against the rising tide of the New Drama). And he was largely responsible for creating the comic stage Irishman—happy-go-lucky and irresponsible but witty, loyal, and lovable (as in The Shaugraun, revived in 1988 by the National Theatre). Whatever he wrote, however many little touches of real talent one may find in an unusually vivid characterization here or a bit of striking dialogue there, however much he might seem to challenge the day’s mores (as The Octoroon seemed to question slavery), or however much he experimented with the formulas (as he did in suggesting environmental reasons for the villainy of some of his villains), his plays, typical of all the hack writers, were always faithful at the last to conventions—their endings, strong in sentiment and simplistically moralizing, were always predictable, inartistically imposed from without rather than following from character and event. That is, Boucicault’s plays are full of life, of the Dionysian spirit, as recent London and New York revivals proved to delighted audiences, but they are also full of a form of death called conventionality. And in that they are symptomatic of the age. The paradox of the age was that a society so outwardly vital, so bustling in trade, so vigorous in empire building, so energetic in pursuit of science, so passionate in so many endeavors, should be so hidebound, so constrained, so convention-ridden, so morbidly preoccupied with the squelching of instinct and passion, so ruled from the grave in manners and morals. As though they feared their own freedom.

Civilization needs conventions—we need to know which side of the street to drive on, what clothes to wear for what occasions, what sort of small talk is appropriate when meeting strangers, what language formations are to be ended with a period and what with a question mark, etc. Such conventions keep civilization going. But some conventions are stoppers. By killing spontaneity, by replacing the spontaneous response with a programmed response, they cause human beings to act like zombies or robots. The French philosopher Henri Bergson based an entire theory of comedy on the idea that comedy arises from our reaction to seeing mechanical behavior enforced upon the living; obviously convention would be a major source of that enforcement.4  When Shaw said that “England is an island populated exclusively by comic characters,” he was referring to the Englishman’s tendency to mechanize manners and morals to the point of self-caricature. The value of Dionysius was that through the intoxication of wine he inspired passion, the means by which inhibition and mechanical behavior were overcome and the individual’s life force reestablished in a field of spontaneity. The passion of spontaneous laughter, Bergson theorized, was the means by which comedy sought to correct the over-mechanization of life. No wonder the period of modern British drama is one of the great ages of comedy and tragicomedy—no age ever needed laughter more.

   Conventions are invented by the living, but their tendency to last beyond their time, like the institutions they support, promoting routine response at the expense of real thinking and feeling, means that often they rule from the grave. One of the principal themes of modern literature is that of the living being ruled by the dead in the form of a duty to one’s parents and grandparents to keep alive the conventions that earlier ruled them from the grave, the conventions being part of the matrix of their beings, thus preserving in the conventions a form of immortality, however ghoulish. This theme was perhaps most beautifully expressed in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1914) and most harrowingly in Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881).  Joyce acknowledged Ibsen as his mentor in this. Shaw too knew well the theme of Ghosts and knew that the nineteenth-century theater was not only haunted by ghosts but by a play called Ghosts as well.

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THE BIRTH OF IBSENISM

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  Reacting to all the furor over the 1889 production of A Doll House (mistakenly interpreted as a call for women to abandon their chauvinist husbands), Shaw in 1890 delivered a lecture to his own Fabian Society, a group of socialist reformers, on the seemingly kindred spirit Ibsen, whose plays he knew mostly from the translations of his friend and fellow critic, William Archer. Shaw’s lecture, revised and expanded, came to be called The Quintessence of Ibsenism when published in 1891. The impetus for Shaw’s revision came partly from the public uproar over the Parnell scandal and partly from the reaction to the London production of Ibsen’s Ghosts early in 1891 as reported in an Archer essay. (Pause here to contemplate how a single work of genius can eclipse more diligent but less inspired work. Archer was Ibsen’s personally anointed champion in England, as Ibsen’s principal translator, as secret director and advisor for the many Elizabeth Robins’s productions of Ibsen in the nineties, and as critic. Indefatigable in his advocacy, Archer wrote almost two hundred essays and reviews on Ibsen, scattering gems of insights over many journals, books, and newspapers. But what history remembers is Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenismits controversial quality, its rhetorical brilliance, its astute summary of a new way of looking at human society and human psychology, and its fascinating, wide-ranging argument sending Archer’s efforts into the shade. Unfair, no doubt, but such is literary history.)

   Ghosts* was a play that proved its point—that convention haunts the living from the grave—by eliciting the very response from some of its critics that it exposed as ghost-ridden in the play. Certain critics, more ghost-ridden than others, became hysterically and uncustomarily vituperative in their denunciation of play and author, Shaw picking out Clement Scott as the most horrible example of a critic gone haywire, as though the “Do Not Touch!” button had been pushed on a nuclear reactor.6  It was in his analysis of Scott’s berserk reaction that Shaw found the best proof of his clue to Ibsen, to society at large, and to the universe, drawing conclusions thereby that were to have a profound effect on his own dramatic career, on the critical reception other dramatists were to have, and on the general understanding of the age held by the avant-garde.

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*Shaw’s summary of Ghosts is as follows: “A clergyman and a married woman fall in love. . . The woman proposes to abandon her husband and live with the clergyman. He recalls her to her duty, and makes her behave as a virtuous woman. She afterwards tells him that this was a crime on his part. Ibsen agrees with her, and has written the play to bring you around to his opinion.”

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   Shaw saw Ibsen as a prophet of human evolution, presenting in dramatic parables the social and individual conflicts that arise out of evolution’s uneven progression. Individual human destiny is partly a matter of what stage of evolution one is born to. According to Shaw, Ibsen’s characters represent three stages of evolution—in ascending order, the Philistine, the Idealist, and the potential Realist (here capitalized to distinguish it from the literary realist). Each is imbued with a will to power (the aggressive phase of the Dionysian life impulse or the Darwinian survival instinct) and thus is in conflict with the other as each seeks to control his or her environment or self. Such conflict is healthy if it is a spur to growth or creativity, as Shaw emphasized, but Ibsen more often showed its destructive, frustrated side. Shaw saw the prime motor of Ibsenist evolution as will, which Shaw defined as “our old friend the soul or spirit of man.7  Life consists in the fulfillment of the will,” said Shaw, “which is constantly growing.”8  Because the will seeks fulfillment in ways appropriate to its stage of growth, it experiences frustration when it encounters conventions that represent the wills of the dead, wills arrested at an earlier stage of development, wills that would imprison the living within a sarcophagus of moral response. How one reacts to this frustration determines one’s identity as Philistine, Idealist, or Realist (although in practice both Shaw and Ibsen presented these identities as psychological principles in conflict within the minds of characters as well, implying that we all have a bit of Philistine, Idealist, and Realist in us, though one principle often dominates in moments of crisis).9

   Shaw listed a number of ideals that Victorian society mandated as absolute truth: that men spontaneously love their kindred better than their chance acquaintances (“blood is thicker than water”), that the woman once desired is always desired (“passion is eternal”), that the family is woman’s proper sphere (“a woman’s place is in the home”), that “no really womanly woman ever forms an attachment, or even knows what it means, until she is requested to do so by a man.” But in his principal example, Shaw presented his three types or principles as reacting differently to conventional marriage and family arrangements. The Idealists, when failures at marriage, continue to idealize marriage as “made in heaven” and the family “as a beautiful and holy natural institution,” insisting guiltily on suppressing any attack on the institutions; the easygoing, comfort-loving, silent-majority Philistines, though cynical of the Idealists’ fancy picture of things, and always trying to get away with as much as they can, when pressed go along with the Idealists for the sake of convenience and safety (the Idealists, though fewer, are usually more powerful, as leaders of institutions); and the rare Realist, seeing that because institutions are man-made, temporary, and relative to culture they must be changed periodically to keep pace with human evolution and the individual growth of will, proposes reform and advises the Idealists not to be ashamed of their failure to live up to their own ideals, for the impossible ideals are at fault, not human nature.  Drama arises from the fact that when the Realist proposes a reform, such as abolishing the compulsory character of marriage, “the Philistines will simply think him mad. But the Idealists will be terrified beyond measure at the proclamation of their hidden thought—at the presence of the traitor among the conspirators of silence. . . . At his worst they will call him cynic and paradoxer: at his best they do their utmost to ruin him if not to take his 1ife.11  This at least was the reaction to Ibsen, who in his dramatizing of the evolution of the species portrayed “a conflict of unsettled ideaIs  in the clash among Philistine, Idealist, and Realist principles.

Shaw believed that Clement Scott went berserk in reviewing Ghosts because it championed Dionysian freedom, the seemingly anarchic primacy of the individual’s desire for self-renewal, over convention’s dictate that because marriages are made in heaven, the individual should sacrifice personal desires to that ideal. Scott’s ideal or “fancy picture” of marriage, inherited from the ghosts of the past, is contradicted by experience everyday; yet Scott, desperate to have the ideal vindicated, as though it were his very life, screeched the vilest imprecations of denial at the Ibsenist reformer who would change the marriage laws to accommodate individuals’ different rates of growth.13 Shaw’s examples of Realists are those who like Ibsen and Shelley pierce the illusion— insisted upon as real by the Idealist—in order to see the ever-evolving truth behind the “eternal verities” and, so seeing, attempt to bring society and individuals more in line with the way things are.

Shaw’s Quintessence was, among other things, a clever semantic ploy to regain the initiative for art in a world increasingly dominated by scientific materialism. Artists could be greater Realists, Shaw implied, than scientists and businessmen, for reality is more what the poet “envisions” and less what the materialist “observes.” His complaint against literary realism was that it too often was a sellout to literal-minded, surface-obsessed scientific materialism. Ibsen felt the same way but was forced by circumstances to shift from the poetic, heroic drama he favored to mimetic realism, which he then subverted with a secret symbolic- expressionistic method that used surface reality to evoke a greater reality.  Quintessentially, Shaw thought, Ibsen’s priorities were correct, the poet’s vision mattering more to him than mere scientific observation.

Shaw had been an art and music critic since 1885, and a novelist before that, and now The Quintessence of Ibsenism launched him on a career as a drama critic. Largely unable to get his plays staged in the nineties, he worked as drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1895 to 1898, at the height of the sensation caused by the Ibsenite New Drama; his reviews were collected under the title Our Theatres in the Nineties. His criticism expectedly jibed with the views of Archer and others about the shallowness, conventionality, and inartistic nature of the long-popular Boucicaultian theater (though Shaw had some kind words for its crude vitality).  But unexpectedly Shaw found that the drama that was becoming popular, the New Drama, was a sham, the realism merely a veneer—this drama had some “observation” but not much “vision.” Further, overpowering even what observation it had, the ghosts of convention still ruled it from the grave, the same sentimental stereotyping and the same inartistic bailing out at the end prevailed, and thus its patrons still came for escapist pleasure, precisely because this New Drama ultimately had little more to do with “real life” than did the old melodramas and farces. The point of Shaw’s criticism was that drama and theater should abandon their trivial pursuit of escapist pleasure and take up once again the seriousness and fundamentally religious purpose of the ancient Greek theater, thereby becoming worthy of playing a central role in the cultural development of a world civilization.

Boucicault’s death in 1890 conveniently symbolizes that his kind of theater had reached a decadent phase, symptomatic of the decadence of those Victorian conventions that ruled its dramaturgy from without. True to the spirit of Dionysius, the dying out of one kind of theater was the occasion for the birth of a new kind of theater, supposedly Ibsenist. But did the New Drama of Pinero and Jones embody Ibsenism? The tip-off, Shaw thought, was that neither of them thought all that highly of Ibsen, however much they traded on his stylistic revolution; their Ibsenism was superficial at best. Thus in Shaw’s view the decadence merely continued in a disguised form. Well, did Shaw’s Drama of Ideas any better embody Ibsenism? Not as far as surface appearances are concerned, but perhaps quintessentially it did. Both Ibsen and Shaw emphasized vision over observation. Both visions were of the rottenness of the old order and the need to start over. Both partly embodied their visions in parodied versions of the old forms, the familiarity with the old forms making their works more accessible to many, but, at the same time, the satiric charge given the content exploding the conventions, necessary to the regenerating of both drama and society.14  And though Ibsen’s perspective was more tragic than comic and Shaw’s more comic than tragic, both employed a tragicomic blend to express unusually comprehensive and dynamic visions.

Regardless of whether the Shavian or the Pinero-Jones New Drama is taken as the model, the British New Drama of the nineties was seen as a “deliverance,” and the playwrights were “prophets” of a new dispensation. But we can see now that most of the prophets of the nineties were more like precursors of an even greater drama to come.

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 THE NEW DRAMA: PRECURSORS

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The theater in the nineties was a mixture of Old Drama and New, though matters were further confused by a New Drama that wasn’t realistic. In addition to Shaw, an interesting counterpoint to the rising tide of realism was the staging of plays by Maeterlinck, the Belgian Symbolist who was sowing the seeds of a wholesale revolt against realism; the first production of a play by Yeats, who would follow Maeterlinck into Symbolism and thereby temper the realism of Irish drama to come; and the start of the career of James Barrie, who would become a master of fantasy. And the staging of Tennyson’s Becket proved that the seemingly vain effort to make a success of verse drama was continuing despite realism’s vogue. To be sure, plays roughly in the realistic, “well-made” camp increasingly gained on the Old Drama, but the "realism" often disguised melodrama, and the "problem plays" were often unproblematical. And not all the Ibsen productions together could match the commercial success of Wilson Barrett’s melodramatic Sign of the Cross or Brandon Thomas’s farcical Charley’s Aunt. A distinction must always be made between the drama that appealed to the intelligentsia, mostly short runs in smaller theaters, and the popular plays that ran longer in larger theaters. To be a New Dramatist at the larger theaters, one had to tone down one’s Ibsenism and let convention have the last say; one could be “unpleasant” in one’s realism only if one were melodramatically “moral” in one’s denouement. The masters of this compromise in the nineties were Pinero, Jones, and Wilde, though Wilde more fooled with compromise than actually did so.  

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ARTHUR WING PINERO: THE IDEAL NEW DRAMATIST

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  Throughout the 188os William Archer watched for a savior of the theater, someone who would do for British drama what Ibsen was doing for European drama. As early as 1882, in his English Dramatists of To-Day, Archer had noted the promise of two young and barely produced playwrights named Jones and Pinero. As the eighties came to a close, both showed signs of moving toward a more realistic sort of theater. But the one who first made the great leap forward was Pinero, gaining in courage from the change in atmosphere brought about by the ground-breaking Ibsen productions of the day. At the sudden appearance of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), Archer declared it “the one play of what may be called European merit which the modern English stage can as yet boast” and immediately treated Pinero as his champion of the New Drama.15

Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) was born in London, the grandson of a Portuguese Jew who, emigrating to England, changed his name from Pinheiro and became a wealthy and prominent solicitor, marrying into a fine old English family. Pinero’s father inherited the law practice, married well himself, but, through carelessness, allowed the practice to decline, so that at the age of ten Pinero was taken out of school and set to work in his father’s office. There, countering his father’s insouciance, the boy developed a meticulous, precise, industrious style that was to be characteristic of his later playwriting and directing. On his father’s retirement he took jobs in a library and with another law firm. Finding law boring, Pinero studied elocution at night school, capping off his education by playing Hamlet. From his earliest years his parents had taken him to the theater, and every chance he got he attended the one nearest him, the old Sadler’s Wells, eventually branching out to others, especially the Prince of Wales under the Bancrofts, where T. W. Robertson’s realistic social comedies were “revolutionizing” the theater.

When Pinero was nineteen his father died, and the young man, hopelessly stage-struck by then, abandoned law for an acting career. He began as general utility actor for Wyndham’s stock company, then in Edinburgh; moved to Liverpool for a short stint in a Wilkie Collins’s novel adaptation; was recommended by Collins (apparently mistaking Pinero for another actor) for a part in another such adaptation at the Globe Theatre in London; and eventually was recruited by Henry Irving for minor roles at the Atheneum, where he gained a reputation as a character actor, especially in the roles of old men. He may have been a mediocre actor, or perhaps the more realistic style he was attempting was not to the tastes of the day’s critics; but whatever the verdict, he gave up acting for playwriting in 1882. Three years earlier, in 1879, in a piece of his own, he had played opposite an actress named Myra Holme, a widow with a son and daughter, and they married in 1883.  She at first refused to leave the stage, as he wanted.

Pinero had been writing plays from at least 1874, but a one-act curtain raiser was the first, in 1877, to be produced. Walter Lazenby, the only critic who has attempted to categorize all fifty-seven of Pinero’s extant works, dismisses his first ten plays, written before he retired from acting in 1882, as fledgling work, “tentative efforts in which the emerging playwright had not exactly found his métier.”16  These plays are remarkable in their attempt, not entirely successful, to avoid melodrama, to break down character stereotypes, and, in the longer plays, to give more depth and variety to the plot than was usual in melodrama and farce. From the start Pinero appears to have been interested in “the drama of reputation,” particularly as it concerned women with a past.    One wonders about Pinero's ex-actress wife.

The surprise comes when, looking at Lazenby’s categorizing of Pinero’s work from 1883 on, one discovers that this model of the New Drama actually wrote only seven plays that could be considered well-made, realistic problem plays. Discounting some overlap, a total of thirty-four plays are listed as either farces (twelve), sentimental comedies (twelve), or comedies of manners (ten), which leads to the conclusion that comedy was really Pinero’s forte. Certainly Pinero’s first great success came with the writing of playful farces and sentimental, Robertsonian comedies.

The farces are excellent of their kind, and many of these witty, rollicking pieces would be playable today. After he became successful at writing “serious” problem plays, Pinero claimed that his farces and comedies were a necessary rest, relaxing him for the more serious efforts, but one suspects a camouflaging of a predilection that he knew would displease the likes of Archer. A sort of English Feydeau, Pinero might be better known and appreciated today had he been more proud of and more open about his comic genius.

The farce that vaulted him into the front ranks of successful dramatists was The Magistrate (1885; revived in 1987 by the National Theatre). With over three hundred performances, it set a record and was the first of a quick succession of similar farces that was staged at the old Court Theatre. Pinero sought “to raise farce a little” from its “low pantomime level” and make it a more artistic genre, “thinking ... that farce should have as substantial and reasonable a backbone as a serious play.”17 His more realistic drawing of characters led him to discard the old stock figures that were merely vehicles for star actors. As Lazenby says, “drawing upon the wealth of types in Victorian society, he grounded his plays in observable Victorian realities and created fresh emblems of the institutions and assumptions whose sanctity his audiences may have secretly wanted to violate. The result was a new formula for farce based on showing possible people doing improbable things.”18 Pinero’s technique in the Court farces was to take pillars of the community—such as a judge in The Magistrate, a teacher in The Schoolmistress (i886), a church dean in Dandy Dick (1887), and a respected politician in The Cabinet Minister (1890)—and contrive to show them, by the pursuit of their own rectitude, caught in a downward spiral of events that finds them at last confronted with some ultimate indignity (for example, the magistrate is nearly tried in his own courtroom for a crime) before being rescued at the last minute.  That these plays take upright Victori­ans to the very depths of disreputableness suggests some subversive intention, but Pinero escaped any such suspicion by making their comic downfall purely circumstantial and accidental. No satiric comment is necessarily directed at institutions; rather, all the fun is in seeing the foibles of individuals exposed to the test of trying circumstances, usually of an improbable nature. Further evidence of Pinero’s conservatism can be seen in the way he simply domesticated the French bedroom farce to suit a more prudish audience.

Pinero was also having success with sentimental comedies, Sweet Lavender (1886) setting records and Lady Bountiful (1891) doing well enough, and already quite wealthy, he might have rested on a career of farces and sentimental comedies. But he knew that critics like Archer were calling for a native drama that would match the stature and seriousness of the European social drama, and he was aware that productions of Ibsen’s plays were causing both box-office controversy and a readiness for something new. In a bid for posterity, then, Pinero attempted what he considered a higher drama—the realistic problem play. His first, pre-Ibsen. effort. The Profligate (written in 1887, produced in 1889), was timid, but his next, post-Ibsen, effort, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), was much bolder. One can look further back and see in The Rector (1883), Lords and Commons (1883), and The Ironmaster (1884) some experimentation with problem-play material, but they were more in the line of Dumas fils than of Ibsen, that is, more “well-made” than truly problematic or truly realistic. The question about The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and the other problem plays that followed is whether they were what they pretended to be.

Stage directions for The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, setting a fully realistic stage, are noticeably more detailed than in the standard play of the century. The story is of Aubrey Tanqueray, a man of forty-three and long widowed, who marries a twenty-seven-year-old woman legally known as “Paula Ray,” but who has used other names in plying her unstated trade as courtesan. She has convinced high-minded Tanqueray that she has been “ill-treated,” meaning that she was always promised marriage but never given it, and so they have fallen in love, determined to live down any scandal. She has given Aubrey a list of her “adventures,” which he chivalrously burns without reading. But Aubrey has “a problem” when his saintly, convent-raised daughter, Ellean, comes to live with them. While he is willing to say “yes” to the question of whether a particular woman with a past can “get back,” he feels pressured by the problem of his “pure” daughter’s being thrown into the company of his “tainted” wife. Complications occur when pleasure-loving Paula, bored with life in the country and increasingly angered by their ostracism, jealously quarrels with Aubrey over what seems to be his greater regard for his “angel” daughter than for his “fallen angel” wife. When an opportunity arises for Ellean to go to Paris with a neighbor, Aubrey consents, partly, as he confesses later, to remove Ellean from the coarseness and wild impulsiveness he has noticed in Paula. Ellean returns with a young man she has fallen in love with, but by the long arm of coincidence he turns out to have been on the list that Aubrey so nobly burned in act I. In act 4, as Aubrey and Ellean gradually “discover all,” they arrive at the automatic truth that a pure young girl cannot be expected to marry a man who was the lover of the girl’s stepmother, and so the young man is sent packing. Having ruined everybody’s life, finding no forgiveness from Ellean (until too late), seeing through Aubrey’s lame proposal to live abroad and live for the future (“I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate,” says Paula), and seeing her best intentions go awry, Paula kills herself offstage (means unspecified), leaving father speechless and daughter penitent and faint­ing. With the gratifying death of this challenger to social convention, the Victorian audience must have breathed a sigh of relief as the double standard was, if not entirely vindicated, at least not put to the further stress of a continuing attempt to make the Tanqueray’s marriage work. The heroine at least had the sense to know there was a fate worse than death.

William Archer said that “technically, the work is as nearly as possible perfect,”19 but on its publication in 1895 Shaw attacked it on those very grounds, noting the crude, wasteful, and naive machinery of much of the exposition and plotting. “It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that what most of our critics mean by mastery of stagecraft is recklessness in the substitution of dead machinery and lay figures for vital action and real characters.”20  Archer plausibly defended Pinero, but the further point Shaw made, that in crucial spots Paula speaks not in her own character but “from the Tanqueray-Ellean-Pinero point of view,” is very damaging. Paula ceases to be a believable character when she capitulates totally to a set of values that the character Pinero has given us would have rejected or at least challenged. Too often the hand that wrote this play, Shaw thought, was the dead hand of convention. Paula is made to behave, not as she would behave, but as convention would have her. Underneath this play’s realism works the old machinery of melodrama, which served convention by allowing villains and rakes to reform themselves at the last and redeem themselves by suffering the consequences of their “sins.”

Archer replied that, regardless, the play worked and that is all that matters in the theater. It seems to have been both Pinero’s virtue and his vice as a dramatist to be so single-mindedly a man of the theater. As a director of his own plays from The Magistrate (1885) on, he was concerned with making his plays work for their audiences, with emphasis on theatrical effect, as he had learned from the Scribe-Sardou-Dumas fils school. With a reputation as a masterful stage craftsman, Pinero was bowed to by even the great actor-managers of the day (such as George Alexander, who lent the St. James Theatre for Mrs. Tanqueray and played the role of Aubrey as Pinero wanted). But character and theme were too often sacrificed to this passion for effect. Pinero was bold enough to put something resembling the New Woman on the stage and raise questions about the double standard, but his concern for effect forced him to abandon both Paula’s character and her affront to the double standard for the sake of a sensational development and ending. He tried to rescue the play by having Aubrey, just prior to discovering Paula’s suicide, curse all the womanizing men who in pursuit of “a man’s life” create the social misery that Aubrey has just experienced, a telling point but a mere afterthought; had Pinero made this the mainspring of his action, his play would have exploded with the force of dynamite rather than merely titillate with theatrical fireworks.

Pinero had a reputation for having “no philosophy of life, no message that he was burning to deliver to the public, no deep-rooted personal obsessions which had willy-nilly to find expression. He was a professional writer who took his position seriously, and his plays, where they triumph, are above all a triumph of craftsmanship. . . . He had ideas too: not so much ideas about life, but ideas for subjects which would make interesting plays. He was . . . a writer who could tell interesting stories to maximum effect on the stage.”21 While granting the general truth of this, one should note the presence of at least one deep-rooted personal obsession—with the “tainted” woman and her conflict with the double standard. But there is little evidence that he knew, except from afar, the sort of woman he was obsessed with, another of Shaw’s objections—a realist is supposed to draw from life, but Pinero’s woman with a past seems to be largely a figment of the conventional and secretly erotic literary imagination.

An even more curious version of his obsession turned up in his next “serious” play, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895). The central role of Agnes Ebbsmith was played by the young Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who had just made her London debut as Paula Tanqueray. Unlike Paula, Agnes is not a retired courtesan but a young, idealistic woman, unconventionally raised and bitterly experienced, who “lives in sin” with a man out of contempt for mere respectability and the day’s demeaning and unfair marriage laws, and who dresses and speaks plainly out of disdain for standard feminine ways. Pinero seems to be playing with fire when he at first gives all the strongest speeches to this highly principled but “sinning” woman, but in the course of the play, after countless vacillations and theatrical turns of the plot, she reveals herself to be the usual Pineroesque woman after all—impulsive, luxury loving, possessively jealous, sensitive to reputation, and a bit catty—what Pinero apparently suspected all women were whatever their pose. As with Paula, Pinero makes Agnes do and say things dictated solely by melodramatic convention, things totally out of keeping with her character (such as making agnostic Agnes theatrically snatch out a Bible she had thrown into the fire). It’s convention, not her character, that makes her decide at the last to give her lover back to his wife and go into religious retreat. Now vacillation and ambivalence are well-established principles of human psychology, and August Strindberg even wrote a preface to his Miss Julie (i888) explaining their validity in character portrayal, but Pinero’s use of these traits seems less psychological than theatrical.  They simply do not follow from what he gives us.   It is possible for a woman to be two different people, but a dramatist, especially a realistic dramatist, is obligated to relate the two.

   Though the problem plays were his major successes of the nineties, Pinero never lost sight of the fact that he had two audiences, the one led by Archer waiting for his next “serious” play, the other hoping that he would write another Court farce or another Sweet Lavender.  The Amazons (1893), a satire on the idea that the New Woman could be “manly,” was his only pure farce in the nineties, but he wrote his best sentimental comedy, Trelawney of the “Wells,” in 1898 and a series of comedies of manners, The Benefit of the Doubt in 1895, The Princess and the Butterfly in 1897, and The Gay Lord Quex in 1899.  Through the remainder of his career he kept all the genres going, with comedy in the majority, but ended with surprisingly experimental, nonrealistic plays.  His major plays of the Edwardian era, after which he was considered so old-fashioned he could no longer command a West End box office, were His House in Order (1906), The Thunderbolt (1908), and Mid-Channel (1909).

    The nineties, though, saw the gradual triumph of Pinero’s brand of realism, and one has only to look at the increasingly detailed stage directions of Pinero’s comedies to realize the comedy was growing more realistic too.  In fact, Trelawney of the “Wells” (1898) was a salute to the man Pinero believed had planted the seed of realism in English soil.  The character of Tom Wrench, utility actor turned playwright, is based on Tom Robertson and his “wrenching” of the theater from old ways to new.  Though Robertson’s 1860s “revolution” at the Prince of Wales looks very slight to us now, Pinero remembered it as a significant turning point, a courageous, visionary effort that renewed interest in native-born drama.22

                        Despite the plays’ glow of nostalgia, the realism of Trelawney is perhaps the most convincing of Pinero’s plays because he was here writing about something he really knew—the theater.  Further, Pinero himself had experienced the clash between stuffy middle-class values and the bohemian values of theater people, as he had the conflict between stuffy theatrical conventions and a new artistic impulse.  The play gains strength too from its bittersweet treatment of the theme of change, which counters its nostalgia. Styles in the theater, as in life, must change, it says, and stoic acceptance by the outdated is the most dignified course of action. Pinero must have had a prevision of his own future, as well as a flash from the past. Another strengthening element is the play’s fond parodying of Robertsonian dialogue and, in act 2, its placing on the back wall “a large mirror with a painted reflection of the fireplace, and the mirror above it, which would naturally occupy the fourth wall of the room.” This, as Lazenby says, “mocks the ideal of the utterly Realistic box set which observes the ‘fourth wall’ convention.”23

Shaw was disarmed by this play because it made no pretense at being up-to-date:

Its charm .  . . lies in a certain delicacy which makes me loath to lay my critical fingers on it. . . . Mr. Pinero, as a critic of the advanced guard in modern life, is unendurable to me. . . . When he plays me the tunes of 1860, I appreciate and sympathize. Every stroke touches me: I dwell on the dainty workmanship shewn in the third and fourth acts: I rejoice in being old enough to know the world of his dreams. But when he comes to 1890, then I thank my stars that he does not read the Saturday Review.24

 Pinero would be surprised to know that Trelawney has become the most enduring of his works, and the most beloved.

The Gay Lord Quex (1899) shows Pinero at his best in the comedy of manners, of which The Weaker Sex (1884), Mayfair (1885), The Hobbey Horse (1886), and The Times (1891) were early examples in his career (The Times, by the way, is noteworthy as the first British play to be published under newly revised international copyright laws. Unheard of before, copies were sold on opening night). Pinero wrote Quex contemplating the recent successes of Wilde and Jones in this line. As with Jones, Pinero fell far short of the standard of wittiness set by either Wilde or the original Restoration models. According to Clayton Hamilton, Quex is a comedy of manners “because it skillfully contrasts the manners of the aristocracy with the manners of the lower classes and sets forth a tense and thrilling struggle between the different ideals of conduct. 25 The plot concerns the determination of Sophy, a slightly vulgar manicurist, to keep her foster sister, Muriel, from marrying Lord Quex, an old rake claiming to be reformed, and to have her marry instead the romantic young Captain Bastling. After four acts of incredible machinations, first to get her way and then to undo what she has wrought, Sophy comes to realize that Lord Quex really is reformed, whereas Captain Bastling is just getting started as a rake. In the process, Lord Quex develops respect and admiration for Sophy’s courage and loyalty to a code of honor. Lazenby believes that the notorious “amoral” quality of Restoration comedy of manners is present here, although more as a foreshadowing of the Edwardian age, in that the play shows that “sensible women simply adopt the way of the world and accept men for what they all are.”26 But Lazenby also notes that “Quex’s reformation seems to be curiously genuine,” a sentimental note, and that the play lacks the despairing satiric denunciation of an entire society that seems characteristic of Restoration comedy of manners. Whether Pinero has managed a traditional comedy of manners or not, there is no gainsaying that this play is one of many plays that show Pinero’s mastery of comic effect in the theater, something that should have been more highly valued.

The Victorians were not the only people who habitually confused earnestness of manner with seriousness of purpose, but they were the most notorious for it. And thus their inclination to confuse the comic with the frivolous. When Archer, Pinero, or Jones referred to “serious” drama, they meant drama that was not comic. The serious drama of the social-problem-play sort was not tragic either, in Aristotelian terms, but it mimicked tragedy in its general solemnity of tone and disastrous outcome. With only serious plays considered worthy, a playwright with a comic bent might be intimidated enough to denigrate his comedy and strain after “tragedy” for the sake of his reputation. Pinero was a wonderful example of a man who understood perfectly the importance of being earnest and somehow contrived to get himself recognized as the leader of the earnest New Drama, despite two-thirds of his plays being comedies. The trick was to deprecate the comedies, referring to them as “relaxation,” preparatory to writing “serious” drama. The trick worked splendidly but to the cost of Pinero’s ultimate reputation. Had he recognized that much of the situation and characterization of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, and other problem plays was fundamentally ridiculous, he might have turned those plays into great comedies or tragi-comedies that would not now be questioned for their authenticity.

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HENRY ARTHUR JONES: THE EARNEST VICTORIAN

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There is much good to be said about Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929).  No one sought more earnestly the welfare of the theater as a cultural institution. As a pamphleteer and speaker he fought for a literary drama, challenging dramatists to publish their plays and thus submit them to literary criticism. He argued for the abolition of an addlepated censorship, for almost two centuries a great blight on the stage. He was for whatever would reinstate the theater as an edifying and ennobling force in the national culture. As early as 1883, following the suggestions of William Archer and Matthew Arnold, Jones began a long campaign for the endowment of a national theater.27  As a dramatist he tried to show the way by attempting a high drama concerned with serious matters; in this he made the best of what talents he had, achieving a considerable popularity that lasted for over thirty years.

In old age Jones might have looked back with satisfaction on a worthwhile career, but instead his old age was filled with gall and wormwood. The circumstances of his life, and the limitations of his talent and vision, conspired ultimately to make his career one of the sad tales in the annals of British theater. His is the very familiar story of the late Victorian who was unable to free himself sufficiently from the ghosts of the past. Though he intellectually rebelled against his provincial, fundamentalist Christian upbringing, it overwhelmed him emotionally at crucial times and distorted his responses to life.

Jones was born in the West Country village of Gandborough, Buckinghamshire, in 1851, his hardworking father a tenant farmer of Welsh ancestry and his neurotically pious, self-sacrificing mother the daughter of a farmer; the ruralist-religionist outlook inculcated there haunted him however far he roamed. That included his roaming in books. Limited to six years of formal schooling, Jones later educated himself by reading the classics, but self-educated meant self-limited. Never entirely at home in the modern industrialized city either, Jones later would think fondly back to that childhood farmhouse where, as though Ruskin or Morris had approved it, “every utensil, every piece of crockery, every piece of furniture was a thing of beauty.”28 It was a wholesome and tidy environment to grow up in, but strictly puritanical. “Dancing, card-playing and theatre-going were vices. Lying was a sin to be promptly punished by a severe thrashing.”29  This was compounded by his quitting school at the age of twelve and being sent to his uncle at Ramsgate to earn his living. His hated uncle was a deacon of a Baptist chapel, stern and joylessly fundamentalist, exacting fourteen-hour workdays from Jones for the next six or seven years. Escaping his uncle’s dominion in 1869, he worked in trade in Gravesend and London and then as a traveling salesman in the west of England until 1879, when he committed himself entirely to writing. As early as 1869 he had entered that stronghold of the devil, the theater, and immediately converted to its brazen rites by writing his first play, The Golden Calf (which, like about half of his hundred plays, went unstaged). The theatergoing and his voracious reading in the classics and modern science (particularly Herbert Spencer) seemingly liberated Jones from his puritanical upbringing, for he said many harsh things about the prudery and hypocrisy of his times and usually took the side of science against religion, but many of his plays suggest otherwise in their defeat, frustration, or ridicule of characters who stand for modern, liberated values.  

His first play staged, in Exeter in 1878, was a one-acter, and his first London production, a comedietta, occurred at the Court in 1879. The greatest financial success of his life came in 1882 with Wilson Barrett’s production of The Silver King, a frequently revived play generally regarded as the classic melodrama of the century. Though sometimes extravagant (such as spending summers in Nice) and, with a family of seven children, worried about money, Jones was well off from that time on, which occasionally gave him the opportunity to indulge in less popular styles of playwriting and even manage his own productions (usually disasters). A constant complaint of his was the sorry need of dramatists to lower themselves to popular taste, but at times that seemed to be a rationalization for an inability to write much above those tastes.30 There was little in his first decade of writing to indicate that he would become a leading figure of the New Drama. His melodramas and rather Robertsonian comedies may have disdained the tableaux (a picture-poster style of act conclusions) and avoided the spectacular scenery and sensational effects of Boucicaultian drama, but they unsparingly used the old devices of asides and soliloquies, eavesdropping, stereotyping, deus ex machina, and inexplicably sudden reformation of character. To accommodate Wilson Barrett, Jones provided an ultra-theatrical “strong drama,” in which typically a sympathetic character triumphs over impossible odds. What Barrett did not want, for commercial reasons, was irony and satire, acute observation of life, moral ambiguity, and honest portraiture—that is, anything unpleasantly thought-provoking. Jones’s most notable play in the eighties, because it sought a slightly higher level, was Saints and Sinners (1884), indirectly satirizing religious hypocrisy.

Jones made a questionable contribution to Ibsen’s public fame in 1884 by writing, in collaboration, a very free adaptation of A Doll House called Breaking a Butterfly, which, by tacking on a miraculously happy ending, revealed either Jones’s incomplete absorption of Ibsenist principles or his willingness to forego those principles for commercial reasons. Actually, Jones seems more astute in his reading of Ibsen than most, had more in common with the dour Norwegian than he knew, and might have led Ibsenism on a different path if he had not so often taken Ibsen’s reputation—what he was supposed to have meant—for what he actually meant.31 Throughout his life Jones indignantly denied that Ibsen had any influence on him, justifiably citing English sources and experiences as his models and inspiration. At times confusing Ibsen with Zola, a common mistake, he protested against the Ibsenist school of modern realism that “founded dramas on disease, ugliness, and vice.32 Jones made many disparaging remarks about realism as mere photography, disdaining its concern to reproduce the merely pedestrian and commonplace (an argument Ibsen would have sympathized with) and once wrote a play in verse to demonstrate his defiance of it, but still most of the plays that made his reputation were roughly of the Ibsenite well-made, realistic problem-play school.

The Middleman (1889), containing some satiric commentary on the exploitation of worker-inventors by capitalist middlemen, is often cited as the play that saw Jones turn toward the New Drama, in that it contains a slight shift away from the drama of pure action toward the drama of character and social criticism; but it is still obviously a melodrama. ]udah (1890), a seduction drama of the sort Jones became obsessed with, featuring a spiritual man whose passion for a worldly woman would lead him into a crisis, is somewhat more realistic, not so much in its topical interest in faith healing as in the fact that it replaces the melodramatic improbabilities of his earlier plays with some psychological subtlety in characterization and allows the usual confession scene climax to develop more naturally from the moral struggles of the characters. It includes as well some satire directed at the aristocratic patronage of fads, especially aiming at the mannish New Woman, a favorite target of his. The Dancing Girl (1891), his biggest success since The Silver King, shows Jones suffering a relapse. Supportive of the Victorian double standard, the play depicts a wastrel aristocrat (winningly played by Herbert Beerbohm Tree) eventually rewarded with what we would consider undeserved happiness (partly in the form of marriage to a pure heroine) after his last-minute repentance, and a rebellious, seductive, “pagan” woman, who had escaped a boring existence in a small country town to find meaning as a dancer in London and as the aristocrat’s mistress, reaping death at the hand of a Victorian poetic justice that would strike us as injustice. Jones was incorrigibly unfair in depicting rebelliousness in the young, as though making up for his own transgressions to appease a puritan conscience.

Jones tended to follow box-office successes with more experimental plays of the sort he really wanted to write, and when those failed he went back to writing for the public. And so the success of The Dancing Girl was followed by the failure of The Crusaders (1891), which he managed himself, to his financial embarrassment. Then followed The Bauble Shop (1893), a romantic melodrama that Charles Wyndham turned into a big hit at the Criterion. This success emboldened him to try his hand at a four-act blank verse tragedy, The Tempter (1893), which looked all the odder appearing in the year of Pinero’s epitome of the New Drama, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Pinero’s great triumph pushed Jones to write now popular New Drama of his own, starting with The Masqueraders (1894), and to abandon poetic drama forever. Nevertheless the “unsuccessful” plays were of greater literary worth and even broke new ground.

From The Masqueraders to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Jones was at his zenith, producing hits often at the rate of two per year. Critics are divided about the sort of play that best represents his achievement, some backing the type of realistic social drama represented by Mrs. Dane’s Defence (1900), others claiming that he was best at realistic social comedy with a light satiric touch, of which The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and The Liars (1897) are representative. As usual, disdainful of popular taste, Jones chose a box-office flop, Michael and His Lost Angel (1896), another seduction drama (of spiritual man by worldly woman), as his best play. But perhaps the play that holds the best clue to the potentially greater drama he might have written is Grace Mary (1895), an unproduced one-act tragedy in the Cornish dialect that reminds one of those miracles of Irish dialect that would soon be written by John Millington Synge. Shaw thought highly of it. If Jones had been psychologically adjusted to being the poet of his people, doing in the drama for Buckinghamshire what Housman had done in poetry for Shropshire and what Hardy had done in the novel for Wessex, he might have managed a more authentic drama. But Jones notoriously came to despise the lower middle class from which he had escaped. The plays that made his reputation depict, with more regard for its conventions than satire for its follies, the upper-middle-class and aristocratic society his success in the theater allowed him to know from the inside.

Mrs. Dane’s Defense (1900) is perhaps Jones’s most earnest attempt to write the sort of play Archer idolized and Pinero epitomized—the well-made, realistic problem play. The “problem” is whether Mrs. Dane—supposedly a widow but actually a woman named Felicia Hindemarsh who had been involved in a scandal in Vienna a few years before—can disguise her “fallen” state and “get back” into respectable society. She has settled in a country community in England and fallen in love with Lionel Carteret. They are headed for marriage when accidentally she is discovered by someone who knew the scandal. At first she successfully proves her innocence, but in the play’s most compelling scene, under pitiless cross-examination by Lionel’s guardian, a judge named Sir Daniel, she is forced to admit her guilt. Forced to leave the community as well, Mrs. Dane suffers a “tragic” but supposedly deserved exile. Unfortunately Jones tacked on a romantic fourth act in which we are to be consoled by Lionel’s return to a former, more worthy love and by Sir Daniel’s decision to marry Lady Eastney after a long engagement. Despite the commercial happy ending, the play through three acts expertly counterpoints characters, building through an emotional crescendo to a very theatrical climax, displaying Jones’s deserved reputation for tight construction and story­telling ability.

Yet Jones once dismissed the play as “drawing room melodrama,” perhaps because he knew in his heart of hearts that, once again, he had allowed convention to overrule characterization. Convention alone, not the logic of character, made Mrs. Dane a villainess. And convention also cancelled the “problem,” for the conclusion was foregone. Another typical feature is that the play’s raisonneur (spokesman for the author), Sir Daniel, who represents the idea that women can be kept straight only through a diligent and unforgiving rectitude, confesses offhandedly that he himself has had affairs, once with a married woman, but he expects no blame, knowing full well that the double standard excuses in men what it finds inexcusable in women. Sir Daniel is typical of the raisonneurs Jones would use in other plays, presenting the worldly-wise point of view of an avuncular, conservative old bachelor, counseling caution and discretion to the rebellious (usually younger women) and, however sympathetic he finds their case, arguing that society is justified in meting out unhappiness to those who defy its conventions. This simply mirrored Jones’s own absolute abhorrence of divorce and general fear of anarchy.

The play in which Jones first used the cynical and rather unlikable raisonneur is also one of his best high comedies, The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894). His comedies were not of the witty sort Wilde delighted in but were comedies of humor derived from incongruity of situation. The play is the story of a charming lady who, instead of forgiving a philandering but abjectly apologetic husband, as the worldly-wise raisonneur would counsel, decides to retaliate with a little romantic adventure of her own. Back from Cairo ten months later, she is taken back by a grumbling and fundamentally unenlightened husband, both swearing fidelity evermore, for what it’s worth. The play is amazingly forward in its suggestion that Susan actually committed adultery and could be forgiven for it, but Jones got away with it by making the suggestion ambiguous, by having the presumed adulteress so charming and vivacious over and against her husband’s dullness, by having the raisonneur present convention’s case so powerfully, and by ending in a way that makes the husband seem triumphant and Susan’s rebellion a trifling fiasco. The strongest lines go to the raisonneur: “What is sauce for the goose will never be sauce for the gander”;33 “Men are brutes. Once recognize that simple fact in all its bearings, and we start on a basis of sound philosophy” (112); “There is an immense future for women as wives and mothers, and a very limited future for them in any other capacity. Go home! . . . Nature’s darling woman is the stay-at-home woman who wants to be a good wife and a good mother and cares very little about anything else” (153-54). (While both Jones’s wife and his four daughters were raised in this doctrine of domestic self-sacrifice, his success with it seems to have been limited to his wife, and that in itself was probably limited in ways we’ll never know.) In the final scene Susan admits that the affair had made her very uncomfortable at the time; that because of the inconstancy of her lover, her romantic affair has soured; and that women don’t really have the means to retaliate.

In a variation on this theme in The Liars (1897), a wife is tempted to desert her older husband for a younger, more heroic adventurer, but when she stumbles into an inadvertent dalliance with him she begs her friends to lie for her. At the last she is persuaded by the usual male raisonneur to stick to her husband, who is willing to overlook her indiscretions. As in The School for Scandal, model for all Jones’s comedies of manners, an entire society is satirized for its double-faced predilection for the scandalous and its desperate willingness to lie to avoid scandal personally.

Whitewashing Julia (1903), Dolly Reforming Herself (1908), and Mary Goes First (1913) are other fine examples of Jones’s talent in this genre. A critic who thinks the social comedies are Jones’s best work and finds them praiseworthy, Richard A. Cordell, nevertheless suggests why they fall short of the best work of the age:

The sparkling comedies skim delightfully over the surface of a society (bitterly analyzed by Shaw in the Preface to Heartbreak House) almost as unlike the society of post-war Europe as that of the seventeenth century. In these. . .plays Jones holds the mirror up to his own age as faithfully as do Farquhar and Sheridan to their own times. If the comedies seem old