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From British
Drama 1890 to 1950: A Critical History By R. F. Dietrich |
“OUR THEATRES IN THE NINETIES”: HAUNTED BY GHOSTS
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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
Gilbert Murray’s focus on drama makes his
work especially relevant.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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