Response

Victorian Theater: Three Axioms

If you know little about Victorian theater, and care still less, you are in good company. Consider this statement, made in 1832:

Acting had always appeared to me to be the very lowest of the arts. . . . It originates nothing: it lacks, therefore, the grand faculty which all other arts possess—creation. An actor is at best but the filler up of the outline designated by another. . . . A fine piece of acting is at best, in my opinion, a fine translation.

Art must be to a certain degree enduring. . . . To me [acting] seems no art, but merely a highly interesting and exciting amusement.

(125)

The author of this pronouncement was neither a lofty sage nor an anti-theatrical crusader, but a young actress, Fanny Kemble, whose family was the closest England had to thespian aristocracy. To be sure, the very reasons Kemble gave for denying acting the status of art would have led her to embrace dramatists capable of creating original, enduring works. Yet for most of the century Victorian plays and playwrights fared no better, precisely because they were considered subordinate to players. In 1866, for example, drama critic Henry Morley diagnosed the contemporary drama as “an ailing limb of the great body of our Literature” (8) and traced the cause of the disease to the public taste for plays that were “all leg and no brains” (6). The popularity of actors cutting capers and actresses flashing thighs resulted in “the too frequent perversion of the stage into an agent for the ruin of the written drama” (6–7).

With enemies like these in its past, it is not surprising that Victorian theater has so few friends in the present. The belief that drama is only aesthetically worthy if it approximates literature, and can become literary only by leaving theater’s corporeality, popularity, and ephemerality behind, has few explicit adherents today. Nonetheless, an opposition between theatricality and dramatic literature shaped modernism (Puchner), modern literature departments (Jackson, Professing), and even performance studies programs (Carlson 196).¹ A persistent cleavage between art and entertainment helps to explain why theater has such a negligible place in Victorian literary studies today, despite (or even because of) theater’s popularity for much of the nineteenth century. Like Kemble and Morley, most Victorianists prefer studying durable works by well-known authors to reconstructing the ephemeral work of acting, and have little interest in theater that elevated performers over authors (Stephens xiii) and does not lend itself to being read as literature. The work most often pressed into service as the representative Victorian play, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), is Victorian only on a technicality, produced six years before the monarch’s death but well after the birth of the fin-de-siècle. The major Victorian playwrights—Thomas Holcroft, Douglas Jerrold, Dion Boucicault, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Tom Taylor, Thomas Robertson, Charles Reade, W. S. Gilbert, Sydney Grundy, Arthur Jones, and Arthur Pinero—are mostly absent from histories of European drama, surveys of Victorian literature, and English department syllabi and orals lists.²

It is not exactly my contention here that we do the authors and texts of Victorian plays an injustice by neglecting them. Victorian playwrights rarely fancied themselves originators and creators of lasting works of art, and labored under conditions that vitiated the author function. Few playwrights developed individual styles; instead, most wrote to order for specific theaters and performers. Victorian actors often improvised dialogue, invented their own stage business, and claimed generic roles (butler, soubrette, fop) as “lines” whose distinctive points and costumes defined plays even more than the words penned by authors (Booth; Tolles; Wojcik 228–30). Indeed, until the 1890s, British playwrights had such weak property rights in their work and were so poorly paid that few took the time to write original works from scratch (Stephens; Tolles). For much of the nineteenth century, Kemble’s point that acting was at best a fine translation applied even more literally to plays, which were often poor translations that adapted German and French hits to English tastes (Rowell; Marcus). As Henry James put it, with less hyperbole than one...