But if we still ask why Coleridge or Beddoes should not have written tragedy as well as Schiller or Victor Hugo, why the tragedy of passion, revolt, and idealism, applied to history or legend, did not flourish in the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon, of Kemble and Kean, of Byron and Browning, the best answer must be found in the fact that theatrical conditions offered no encouragement to tragic drama, but almost forbade a serious attempt to learn the ways of the theatre or to deal in its debased wares.
If theatrical conditions had been favorable, if the union of Macready and Browning could have continued, one fancies that the romantic drama might yet have succeeded. The chronicle of English tragedy finds its climax in the first act, with Shakespeare as its protagonist; henceforth, directed by his ghost, its action goes haltingly, vainly awaiting another climax and another protagonist. In Browning, it was, perhaps, nearer than ever before to finding both. Since the Restoration, no poet had come to the theatre so gifted with dramatic genius, no poet so concerned with the study of the vicissitudes of human motive, so alive to the dramatic values of crucial moments, so curious as to the meaning of passion and pain, suffering and evil, in the drama of life. "Strafford" and "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon" have the weaknesses of youth and experiment, but they are the plays of a pioneer who is not content with returning to the Elizabethans or the Greeks, but is seeking to convey through his stories and persons the truth that is in him. The study of Strafford is almost the first independent and acute study of an Englishman of history in all the historical tragedies since "Henry V"; "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon" one of the few plays to realize individual passions since Otway. And the dramatic defects—the failure to meet his audience half-way, the awkwardness and garrulity of expression, the lack of repression in form, while defects that continue in Browning's later poetry—are the very faults for which a severe apprenticeship to the theatre might have been the best discipline. An apprenticeship such as Shakespeare served might have turned Browning's monologues and lyrics into dramas; but the age was incapable of furnishing such a training, and the fiasco with Macready was the end of the period and the defeat of the poetical drama.
What comes after in the nineteenth century may best be left to the future historian, who will be able to interpret its plays in the light of a succeeding development. The plays of Tennyson, reverting again to Shakespeare, and the poems of Swinburne may, after all, be the forerunners of a new revival of poetical tragedy. Or the great development in technic that has proceeded, first under the guidance of the French dramatists, and then of Ibsen, and the serious essays of dramatists of the passing generation may be the pioneers of a national drama of first-rate importance in the generation to come. Certainly Ibsen, with his revolution in both the content and the form of the tragic drama, has been the great force in later nineteenth century tragedy. His work as it affects England and America, however neglected, postponed, or modified, must be the text of a succeeding chapter on English tragedy, which cannot yet be written.
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Genest's Account of the English Stage stops at 1830. A continuation of this work down to the present time is much to be desired. There is no thorough history or bibliography of the drama of this period. In addition to the histories of the theatre already mentioned, W. C. Oulton's History of the Theatres of London, 1795-1817, may be consulted. Memoirs of the Kembles are useful for this period, and also Macready's Reminiscences, ed. Sir F. Pollock (1875), Moore's Life of Sheridan (1825), Molloy's Life of Edmund Kean (1888), William Archer's admirable life of Macready (Eminent Actors Series), are all valuable. Random Recollections by Colman the younger, and memoirs of Kelly, O'Keefe, and Reynolds supply information in regard to the theatre and illegitimate drama. John Cumberland's collections, British Theatre (41 vols., 1829) and the Minor Theatre (15 vols.), are printed from acting copies, and the second comprises many illegitimate plays.
Dramatic criticism of the period includes Coleridge (see criticism of Maturin's Bertram in Biographia Literaria), Hazlitt, A View of the English Stage (1818); Leigh Hunt, Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres (1807) (selections from same, ed. W. Archer and R. W. Lowe, 1894); Lamb (see Lamb's Dramatic Essays, ed. Brander Matthews, 1893). See, also, R. H. Horne's New Spirit of the Age (1844), containing criticism of Knowles, Macready, Bulwer-Lytton, and Browning.
The dramatic work of the chief poets has been studied in connection with their other poetry by many editors and critics, but rarely in its relation to the drama of the period. Professor Beers's two volumes, English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (1899), and English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century (1901), deal with the German influence; C. H. Herford has an excellent though brief account of the drama of the period in his Age of Wordsworth; Watson Nicholson's The Struggle for a Free Stage in London (1906) is full and valuable. Ernest Bates's monograph on The Cenci (1908) discusses that tragedy and its relations to contemporary drama.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] See The Haunted Tower, an opera (1789), acted eighty times in two seasons.
[46] Its borrowings are noted by Genest, viii, 603. The scene is quoted in Archer's Life of Macready (Eminent Actors Series), p. 40.