The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (review)

As Nina Auerbach points out in her vivid introduction to this volume, the Victorian theatre is "the scruffy orphan of high culture." "Collaborative, messy, and lost," she writes, "the theatre is generally, and wrongly, dismissed as subcanonical, at least until the 1890s, when the self-conscious literacy of Wilde and Shaw elevated it to the verbal sophistication that would become Edwardian drama" (3). The abyss between Sheridan and Shaw is one all too familiar to generations of theatre historians specializing in the Victorian period, whose field of research is all too often greeted with a mixture of amused bewilderment and scarcely concealed disdain. This volume aims to challenge such stereotypes and confirm the field of Victorian and Edwardian theatre as rich and exciting, to sum up the achievements of recent research, and to open up new avenues for the next generation of scholars.

It is sometimes tempting to take Companions to task for their gaps and silences. Such a practice is at once irresistible and unfair: it is impossible, given the prescribed number of words, to "cover" a period (here, almost a century) in any comprehensive way. Moreover, the need for coverage in certain key areas inevitably conflicts with the desire to highlight emerging areas of research. In my judgement, Kerry Powell has created an intelligent balance between these competing objectives. Notwithstanding this conviction, the weight of this Companion does fall rather heavily on the last decade of the nineteenth century. As Nina Auerbach observes, " almost half of the essays […] focus on the urbane theatre of the fin de siècle and its Edwardian descendants" (6). And she is right to think that this is a pity, simply because the effect has the unintended consequence of rehearsing the traditional historiography of the nineteenth-century theatre.

Unfortunately, the theatrical geography of the volume is perilously metropolitan. As David Mayer points out, "[T]he nineteenth century was the first era of mass theatre-going, with theatre attendance active in all parts of the British Isles" (146). With a few exceptions, however, this Companion deals almost exclusively with London; there are few references to provincial theatrical culture and almost none at all to international and colonial performances. In an age of empire, when star performers embarked on world tours, and the stage helped to underpin the creation of empire around the globe, this omission is regrettable. Moreover, at a time when there is increased interest – both among theatre historians and among politicians – in the relationship between culture and urban regeneration in contemporary Britain, it would have been good to learn more about the role played by the theatre in the civic life of cities such as Birmingham or Manchester.

From many perspectives, however, this Companion represents a thoroughly impressive achievement. The strengths of the volume lie in the breadth of its theatrical perspectives and in its contributors' sensitivity to the complexity of performance as a subject of analysis. In a variety of ways, Powell's contributors rightly insist upon the interdisciplinary character of theatrical research: the need to think about words, music, and images all in the same breath. Several embryonic areas of critical inquiry also appear, notably questions of economics and business (both the capital that underpinned the Victorian theatre and theatrical representations of the world of capital) as well as the complex relationships between the stage and the performance of identity in Victorian print culture (see the argument made by Mary Jean Corbett). The volume includes an authoritative essay by Joseph Donohue on "Actors and Acting," an admirable investigation of theatrical music by Michael Pisani, and a characteristically rich discussion of Victorian and Edwardian audiences by Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow. Tracy C. Davis offers a perceptive account of the economics of the campaign for a national theatre; David Mayer's fine essay on melodrama establishes an important set of critical questions about this cultural form, certain to enrich the thinking of established scholars and undergraduates alike; comedy...