Victorian and Modern Drama: Social Convention and Theatrical Invention in T.W. Robertson's Plays

Victorian and Modern Drama: Social Convention and Theatrical Invention in T.W. Robertson's Plays PATRICIA D. DENISON It is not uncommon for one age to dismiss the accomplishments of another. It is even less uncommon for an era to dismiss as neither old enough to be venerated nor new enough to be valued the accomplishments of the era immediately preceding it. Twentieth-century theatre criticism has been no exception in this respect, and it has often portrayed nineteenth-century British drama in terms of decay and decline. In recent decades, however, interest in the Victorian theatre has revived, with various studies devoted to theatre history, production practice, the theatre as social institution, the plays in new editions, and the field as a whole in terms of broad surveys. These studies offer valuable material for anyone interested in Victorian theatre and drama. Yet Victorian plays themselves seem not to attract the kind of close analysis that characterizes scholarly activity in the fields of medieval drama, renaissance drama, restoration drama, and modem drama. I The plays of T.W. Robertson serve as a signal case in point. Robertson's work deserves detailed analysis of a kind it has rarely received. His plays tend to attract more attention for their place in theatre history than for their performance values, but if, as is often claimed, Robertson's work marks a pivotal point in the transition from Victorian drama to modern drama, the shape and significance of individual plays is likely to be just as important as the viability of the techniques he tended to employ from play to play. Situating Robertson's work in its larger cultural and theatrical context should thus provide a prelude to, rather than a substitute for, detailed study of particular plays. Certain habits of the historical mind tend, however, to deflect attention from the particular to the general. Booth, for example, in his classic study of English melodrama, resists examining particular plays in "comprehensive detail" because "exhaustive treatment is not essential for an understanding of melodrama. ... after a while in melodrama there is nothing new under the sun.,,2 But in the work of many Victorian playwrights a key structural and theModern Drama, 37 (1994) 401 402 PATRICIA D. DENISON matic issue involves not just choosing between the idiosyncratically particular and the conventionally general, but exploring various relationships between them. In Robertson's case it is by now widely recognized that his plays offer innovative variations on conventional melodramatic structures - not least because tension between invention and convention is of considerable importance both to the theatre in a period of transition and to society in a period of change. It is now generally acknowledged that, during this period of rapid social change, one of the peculiar virtues of Victorian popular theatre was its ability to attract and interest a wide cross-section of an increasingly diverse society. Theatre performances, which usually occurred on a grand scale, became as varied as the appetites of the rapidly growing urban populace. But this eclecticism was not without its tensions. The patent theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, with their exclusive licences to do "legitimate" drama and their auditoriums seating thousands, competed for audiences with the minor theatres , whose remarkably diverse forms of burletta registered the diversity characteristic of Victorian performance events. Broad-based entertainment could include in a single evening events as varied as Shakespearean spectacle, hippodrama, burlesque, circus, ballet-pantomime, aquatic drama, farce, music hall variety, and sensational melodrama, but the rapid diversification of performance events was accompanied by increasingly rigid conventional restraints. These opposing claims of variety and uniformity exemplified in the performance environment a tension between the claims of the old and the claims of the new that was to be resolved in the modernist movement decisively in favor of the latter. But in the Victorian period traveling companies and resident companies both domesticated and explored diversity by establishing recognizable stage types, depicting stock characters in stock situations, and using exaggerated, histrionic gestures to invoke conventional, pictorial effect. Indeed, at all levels of production, from acting styles to scenic backdrops , visual spectacle based on visual convention permeated the popular Victorian drama and provided a common currency...