Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s by Kerry Powell (review)

Book Reviews Edmund Kean "a drunkard and a womanizer" was the prisoner of his itinerant background ; the author forgives Dorothy Jordan's racy reputation on the grounds of her devotion to her paramour, the Duke of Clarence, and her good humour; despite the Kemble background of provincial itinerancy, Mrs. Siddons "became a paradigm of domestic virtue" which thereby exonerates her. Theatre's adulthood arrives at last when its actors by the end of the century "now came from the upper middle class." The real thrust of this book is to argue for the primacy of the playwright and in so doing to deplore the Victorian circumstances which conspired against this. These include the presence of actors, scenic designers and audiences. Playwrights until the I 890S were forced to reject ideas because "one of the reasons ... the majority of nineteenth -century plays contain so few ... is that actors and audiences regarded drama as narrative ... ". Thus Robertson "was not a deep thinker, and his plays typify the sixties because of that," Gilbert's Engaged seems "to lack human warmth simply because the theatrical excesses Gilbert parodies are ... blessedly dead," the style of Jones's The Silver King "is more subdued than the ravings at Drury Lane or the Adelphi ... ". This determination to denigrate the conditions of performance makes the book singularly myopic and intolerant. Furthermore, it tells us little about the selected playwrights we don't already know and for a discussion of Victorian drama in its context, it is a disappointment . VICTOR EMEUANOW UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE, AUSTRALIA KERRY POWELL. Oscar Wilde and the Theatre ofthe 1890s. Cambridge etc: Cambridge University Press 1990. Pp. ix, 204· $39.50. Wilde is well known to have been a magpie, picking up ideas for plots from diverse sources. Kerry Powell has had the idea of looking closely at the borrowings to see how far he succeeded in creating from such material a drama quintessentially his own. The verdict is somewhat negative. Except for The Importance of Being Earnest he finds that the sources (as he says of An Ideal Husband) "seem at times to exercise almost as much control over the playas Wilde himself." As the sources include some very inferior material, this would be a damaging criticism, if the case were made. It is not; but some intriguing material is handled with brio in the course of the argument. Wilde's superiority in wit to his English contemporaries in the theatre of the 90S comes clearly enough through Powell's illustrations which he draws from an unusually wide range of nineteenth-century plays; some well known, some almost or totally forgotten . Interesting comparisons are drawn, for instance between An Ideal Husband and Haddon Chambers' The Idler (more usually matched with Lady Windermere's Fan) and A Woman of No Importance and Henry Arthur Jones's The Dancing Girl (their sharings included the presence of Beerbom Tree in a leading role). Kerry Powell deserves gratitude for his exhaustive and fruitful researches among so many out-ofdate farces and lachrymose society dramas in the Lord Chamberlain's manuscript col- Book Reviews lection at the British Library. (He supplies a useful appendix, listing basic facts on about 100 of the lesser-known playwrights.) Few if any of the unpublished plays will ever be seen on the boards again but Powell gives them a place in the story as possible models for Wilde. In a chapter amusingly called "The importance of being at Terry's" he opines that Wilde must have dropped in to that theatre about the time a play called The Foundling (by W. Lestocq and E.H. Robson) opened there in August of I894, when Wilde was starting on The Importance ofBeing Earnest. Powell suggests that this farce gave him just what he needed, to try his imagination against. It has a hero who has "lost" his parents and like Jack Worthing has to admit, "I don't know who I am." Like him too, he accosts a prim maiden lady in the mistaken belief that she is his mother. Unmistakable bare bones of the Earnest plot here but much of the fantasy in The Foundling, says Powell, gets no further than conversation . Wilde turns...