Victorian Drama

BOOK REVIEWS Sutherland Edwards, Shaw describes his subject's musical taste as "Italian and frivolous." Shaw's juxtaposition here of frivolousness and Italianess seems to anticipate Brittanus's line about Caesar that "his manner is frivolous because he is an Italian." To go along with this omission I did find one sin of commission: the Shakespeare line, "Happy man be his dole," Tyson assigns to Falstaff in Henry TV, Part One, whereas it really has a joint ownership by Slender in Merry Wives and Leontes in Winter's Tale, but then Falstaff rather has a history of taking what does not belong to him. One last carp: Tyson chooses to reprint the reviews with their headings as these appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, relegating the title and author of the book being reviewed to the bottom of the page. I suppose there is a certain authenticity to this procedure, but I would have preferred not to have to search for the author and title in reduced type. As an inducement to readers of ELT to go out and buy Brian Tyson's new edition of Shaw's book reviews (or at least to read it at their local library), I offer them one final sample of the pleasure to be found in the book, the opening sentences of Shaw's review of a pamphlet on death by one Edwin Arnold: "Sir Edwin Arnold's prose is one of the literary wonders of the age; and the largest circulation in the world is no more than it deserves. The zest with which he decorates trivial subjects and vulgar prejudices by magnificent platitudes and impetuous alliterations is as extraordinary as his power of saying, with perfect and sincere gravity, things that make an ordinary man lie down on the hearthrug and scream himself breathless with merriment. One grain of susceptibility to the ridiculous would spoil him forever, as irremediably as it would have spoiled Mr. Pecksniff." John A. Bertolini ___________________ Middlebury College Victorian Drama Anthony Jenkins. The Making of Victorian Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xii + 301 pp. $49.50 THE AVOWED INTENTION of Anthony Jenkins's book is to examine the work of seven dramatists who were able to surmount the limitations of mainstream Victorian drama, who treated the theatre's "dominant theme" of love and the "Woman Question," and who struggled with conventional "ideals that barred the way to a drama of ideas." The seven dramatists who exemplify Jenkins's thesis are Bulwer-Lytton, T. W. 497 ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 Robertson, W. S. Gilbert, H. A. Jones, Pinero, Wilde and Shaw. Jenkins's account of these dramatists is interesting and essentially uncontentious , but the scholar of nineteenth-century English theatre will be left wondering what Jenkins adds to our knowledge and understanding. In addition to this perceived absence of critical novelty, Jenkins seems not to have absorbed fully the developments of the last two decades or so with regard to theatrical historiography. So, while the publisher's blurb claims Jenkins examines plays "within the social and political context of the Reform Bills, the Revolution of 1848, the Great Exhibition, royal patronage, censorship and copyright," Jenkins provides very little strictly social or historical context beyond his introductory chapter. Indeed, most of his discussions of individual plays are literary close readings which provoke the desire for the added dimension some theatre or social history would provide. However, Jenkins is not really a theatre historian who wants to account for the development of the Victorian theatre, that is, to examine the evidence in its totality and let it speak to us. Rather, he values only those dramatists who showed signs of wanting to write "a drama of ideas." Consider, for example, Jenkins's conclusion to chapter one where he provides the contextual basis for singling out his chosen seven dramatists: But amidst these uneasy alliances with actors, audiences, and critics, and despite the imponderabilities of theatrical productions copyright laws, and box-office receipts, the responsibility for a vital drama lay with the writers themselves. Most Victorian playwrights could not look piercingly at life, for even those who consciously set out to enliven the stage often shaped their plays...