Victorian Drama and Undergraduate Periodical Research

A student who picks up almost any drama anthology today might conclude that the Victorians mounted very few theatrical productions between the time of Richard Sheridan in the late eighteenth century and Henrik Ibsen a hundred years later – that, in fact, Victorian drama may not actually exist at all. Students are surprised to find that Victorian theatre was in truth a lively enterprise attracting large and enthusiastic crowds. There are so many neglected plays from this period that there is truly an overwhelming amount of research and study to be done. My goal in regularly teaching an undergraduate course on modern drama is to dispel this false impression about the state of the drama in nineteenth-century Britain. As a faithful Victorianist, I set out in this course to look for ways to give students a better picture of the Victorian stage as well as to expose them to the phenomenon of neglect that the canonical gap in Victorian drama represents.

Since Victorian drama does not fit neatly into what we think of as the traditional arc of theatre history, I frame the course (and justify calling it modern drama) by theorizing that modern drama in English "begins" in 1802, which is the date for the premiere of Thomas Holcroft's play A Tale of Mystery. George Rowell notes that early nineteenth-century playwrights, such as Holcroft, are responsible for the shift from eighteenth-century comedies of manners to the predominant Victorian theatrical form, the melodrama.¹ A Tale of Mystery is the first play to bill itself as a melodrama (or melodrame) on the English stage. In 1802, Holcroft translated, though perhaps the more correct term is appropriated, the popular French playwright Guilbert de Pixérécourt's Cœlina, ou L'enfant du mystère (1800), and he ended up with a respectable stage hit on his hands. The play opened at London's Covent Garden on 13 November 1802 and lingered there in repertory through June 1803, bringing in substantial audiences according to the financial records. In patent theatres such as Covent Garden during this period, melodramas were staged as afterpieces to other plays. During its initial run, A Tale of Mystery most often followed Frederick Reynolds's new play Delays and Blunders, but it also served to fill out the evening's entertainment with various well-known earlier plays such as Philip Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625), Ben Jonson's Every Man and His Humour (1598), Joseph Addison's Cato (1713), and Charles Macklin's A Man of the World (1781).² The semester, then, begins with a reading of Holcroft's play to situate the Victorian melodrama in theatrical history.³ Then we move on to other plays that remain in print from the Victorian period such as the stage phenomenon East Lynne (1874) by Ellen Wood (adapted by T. A. Palmer) and Alan's Wife (1893) by Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell, both available in Adrienne Scullion's Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century (Everyman 1996).

In the past, one semester project that has employed Victorian periodicals asks that students select a play from the nineteenth century to edit and republish on a webpage. As well, students conduct research on the playwright and on the critical reception of the play, an undertaking that is not only research intensive but can depend almost entirely on periodicals. Over the course of the semester, students produce three essays related to their projects: the first is a short response paper to reflect on the process of doing editorial and research work in Victorian-era materials; a second essay is an introduction to the author and the play itself; and the third essay looks at the lost play in the context of other, more well-known works we have read or seen throughout the semester. In addition, students prepare a 30-minute presentation in which they teach the Victorian play they have been working on to the class and conduct discussion afterwards.

Since I first assigned this project in the fall of 2000, the number of full-text databases that have reprinted...