Theatre in the Victorian Age. - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1993 by Judith L. Fisher

In 1988 the Actors Theatre of Louisville focused their "Classics in Context" series on Victorian drama. Their choice of productions suggests the variety, multiple appeals, and vitality of the nineteenth-century English stage. A delightful production of W. S. Gilbert's wicked comedy Engaged (discussed by both Jenkins and Booth), an authentically produced Peter Pan (except for the heresy of a husky young man playing Peter), and a poignant adaptation of scenes from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor carried the audiences from social realism to fantasy to self-conscious, sophisticated wit. The continued vitality of this theatre suggests that the two books under review here should reach a wider reading audience than professional theaatre historians and, indeed, both seem intended as intelligent introductions to the Victorian "classics" and their "contexts." In the process, The Making of Victorian Drama and Theatre in the Victorian Age illustrate the interdependence of interdisciplinary projects: each book read in isolation offers only a partial view of its subject although that partial view is often fascinating.

Jenkins' study offers us a systematic study of important Victorian dramatists whose selection implicitly determines which dramatists are the "classic" ones. But, of course, this premise is ambiguous. How is "classic" to be understood? Is a classic dramatist or drama one representative of the times or of particular cultural concerns? Jenkins' selection of Edward Bulwer Lytton, Tom Robertson, W. S. Gilbert, Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw answers both yes and no to this question. Lytton, Robertson, Jones, and Pinero are certainly representative in that they reflected and shaped the taste of their audiences. Pinero and Jones's problem plays succeeded because they created an illusion of daring while still affirming the conventions of their audience who could feel they were risking something but come away with their bourgeois assumptions intact. Jenkins does a good job of distinguishing between Jones and Pinero, who are too often seen as identical in their concerns. Chapters 5 and 6 place Jones and Pinero in light of their attempt to make serious modern English drama; Jones in particular saw his plays as literature, publishing all of them, and in The Renascence of English Drama (1895) arguing for the aesthetic importance of contemporary English drama. Jenkins sees Jones as "trapped" by his middle-class upbringing, evident in his antagonism to Ibsen. In contrast, Pinero adapted his dramatic technique in response to Ibsen, "discarding soliloquies, minimizing asides, and concentrating on his powers of characterization" (172). But neither playwright could follow Ibsen's stark social realism. Their attempts to deal with Ibsenesque issues, particularly the status of women, resulted in plays such as Jones's Michael and His Lost Angel and Pinero's The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith which wrench themselves out of structure and character in order to preserve conventional pieties about sexual purity. This distortion itself reflects the 1880s and 1890s, a point Jenkins does not adequately develop. The unconscious compromise which perverts both dramatic structure and characterization has kept Jones and Pinero from becoming "enduring" classics. Of these playwrights only Shaw and Wilde - and of Wilde only The Importance of Being Ernest - qualify as classics in this sense. Bulwer Lytton's pictorialism and pseudo-Shakespearean prose, while characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century endeavor to write traditional tragedy, looks backward and too often seems parodic of itself. But so few of Shaw's plays were actually produced during the nineteenth-century that typing him as a "Victorian" dramatist seems an endeavor to validate dramatists such as Lytton by associating him with one accepted by the academy.

The disparity in reputation between Lytton and Shaw stems from a shift in the nature of "drama" at the end of the century, a shift reflected in Jenkins" methodology. He studies these plays as literary texts, ignoring, for the most part, acting styles and production. Such isolation of the text is too rarefied for a drama which was nothing if not aimed at representation. That is, as Nina Auerbach points out in Private Theatricals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), the essence of Victorian theatricality was a visual display of the "self," such as the monumental presence of Macready's Richelieu or Irving's Mathias in The Bells. The visual code of gesture, costume, even facial expression was as important as the words, evidenced by the popularity of pantomime and melodrama for all classes. This fact accounts for the real struggle of Robertson, Jones, and Pinero to make the drama, not the production the thing. Jenkins account of Lytton's Richelieu illustrates the incompleteness of a purely literary approach. In Act 5, the seemingly defeated Richelieu undergoes a rebirth as Louis XIII begs him to "live!/If not for me - for France!" Jenkins discusses only the Cardinal's rhetoric, dismissing the transformation as simply "the Cardinal becomes himself once more" (53). But as contemporary accounts of the production make very clear, Macready's meticulous visual regeneration, not his words, gave the scene its point and power. His "restless fingers" playing wanly, his "vacant" face, and listless posture are those of a dying man when Louis" plea causes him to rise from his chair, renewed in vigor and power [see Denis Salter, "William Charles Macready's Richelieu" in When They Weren't Doing Shakespeare, ed. Judith Fisher and Stephen Watt (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 55-58].