Drama in Rehearsal: Arthur W. Pinero's Trelawny of the 'Wells'

Drama in Rehearsal: Arthur W" Pinero's Trelawny of the 'Wells' PATRICIA D. DENISON Arthur W. Pinero"s Trelawny ofthe 'Wells' (1898) concludes with the rehearsal of adrama in the making - an image ofdrama in process that now seems more characteristically modern than Victorian. Yet drama in the making, in a different but related sense, has also been regarded as characteristically Victorian. Late nineteenth century British drama is often described as "drama in transition,'" although the connection has not often been made between drama in the process of transition and particular dramas in the process of unfolding. Yet this, I would suggest, is the source of strength of Pinero's best work, of which Trelawny of the 'Wells' is an illuminating instance. II is not often recalled now that the novelty ofPinero's work was perceived at the time of its initial production to be so important that it seemed to mark the emergence of something radical and enduring in the English theatre. Many of Pinero's contemporaries, weary of a Victorian diet of extravagant melodrama, sentimental comedies, burlettas, and pantomimes, hailed his serious social plays in particular as signalling quite clearly a new drama in the making - the drama of the modern English era" Indeed, so high was the playwright's reputation at the turn of the century, it is difficult to account for its subsequent decline. As we approach the centenary of Pinero's most successful plays, we need, therefore, to understand more clearly why Pinero, regarded in the last decade of the nineteenth century as Britain's leading innovative dramatist, could be so rapidly dismissed that, by the second decade of our century, his work had become an emblem of everything conventional and old-fashioned in the theatre. Such was the rapidity and extent of the change that it has left many puzzled and uncertain. Nicoll, speaking for unspecified others, has noted that there has evolved in recent years "an uneasy feeling that perhaps the condemnation of Pinero has been over-severe...3 Another critic describes Pinero as "one of the most neglected of the major dramatists,,,4 and though the PATRICIA D. DENISON chorus is not yet overwhelming, there is reason to consider whether the moment has now come to remedy that neglect. And to do so, we must give careful attention to the peculiar vulnerabilities and complex realities of a drama in transition. Although most of Pinero's contemporaries believed he succeeded admirably in establishing a modem English drama, the voice of Bernard Shaw eventually proved strong enough not only to damage his later reputation but also to raise grave doubts about whether he had a right to one in the first place. As Meisel puts it, Pinero was "the most esteemed and approved writer of the period, and the particular Object of Shaw's castigation,"Sand for an object to be so situated was to be in a very daogerous position. Not until eighteen months after the opening night of the play which established Pinero's place in the history of modem drama (The SecondMrs. Tanqueray, 1893) did Shaw begin writing for the Saturday Review, but his forthright remarks on Pinero and other contemporary dramatists rapidly earned him a reputation for scathing commentary aod provocative criticism. Later he was unabashedly prepared to admit that his critical strategy had often been one of accusing his opponents of "failure because they were not doing what I [Shaw] wanted, whereas they were often succeeding very brilliantly in doing what they themselves wanted."· This is a candid acknowledgement ofthe limited nature of a perspective that, in Pinero's case at least, was granted an authority it scarcely deserved. Keen to establish his own place in the history of the theatre, Shaw preached the need for a new kind of theatre - his theatre - to replace the old . Like most early modernists, Shaw understood aesthetic change in terms of violent rupture, revolution, and discontinuity.7 The shock of the new was regarded by Shaw as defining the new, and he grew to be very much a spokesman for a modernist aesthetic which advocated a violent break from the past. However, such attitudes towards the past and towards the nature of...