Divorced, except for passing moments, from the stage, English dramatic literature could during much the greater part of the 19th century hardly be regarded as a connected national growth; though, already in the last decades of the Victorian age, the revival of public interest in the theatre co-operated with a gradual change in poetic taste to awaken the hope of a future living reunion. Among English poets who lived in this period, Sir Henry Taylor probably approached nearest to the objective treatment and the amplitude of style characteristic of the Elizabethan drama.[264] R. H. Horne, long an almost solitary survivor of the romantic school, was able in at least one memorable dramatic attempt to revive something of the early Elizabethan spirit.[265] Of the chief poets of the age, Tennyson only in his later years addressed himself to a form of composition little suited to his genius, though the very fact of the homage paid by him to the national forms of the historic drama and of romantic comedy could not fail to ennoble the contemporary stage.[266] Matthew Arnold’s stately revival of the traditions of classical tragedy proper, on the other hand, deliberately excluded itself from any such contact;[267] while Longfellow’s refined literary culture and graceful facility of form made ready use of a quasi-dramatic medieval vesture.[268] William Morris’s single “morality,” too, cannot be regarded as a contribution to dramatic literature proper.[269] Of very different importance are the excursions into dramatic composition of Robert Browning, whose place in the living inheritance of the English drama has in one instance at least been not unsuccessfully vindicated by a later age, and some of whose greatest gifts are beyond a doubt displayed in his dramatic work;[270] and the sustained endeavours of A. C. Swinburne, after adding a flower of exquisite beauty to the wreath which the lovers of the Attic muse have laid at her feet, to enrich the national historic drama by a trilogy instinct with the ardent eloquence of passion.[271] Until a date too near the times in which we live to admit of its being fixed with precision, most of the English writers who sought to preserve a connexion between their dramatic productions and the demands of the stage addressed themselves to the theatrical rather than the literary public—for the distinction, in those times at all events, was by no means without a difference. The modestly simple and judiciously concentrated efforts of Joanna Baillie deserve a respectful remembrance in the records of literature as well as of the stage, though the day has passed when the theory which suggested her Plays on the Passions could find acceptance among critics, or her exemplifications of it satisfy the demands of playgoers. Sheridan Knowles, on the other hand, composed his conventional semblances of genuine tragedy and comedy with a thorough knowledge of stage effect, and some of them can hardly yet be said to have vanished from the stage.[272] The first Lord Lytton, though his plays were for the most part of a lighter texture, showed even more artificiality of sentiment in their conception and execution; but the romantic touch which he imparted to at least one of them accounts for its long-lived popularity. Among later Victorian playwrights T. W. Robertson brought back a breath of naturalness into the acted comic drama; Tom Taylor, rivalling Lope in fertility, made little pretence to original invention, but adapted with an instinct that rarely failed him, and materially helped to keep the theatrical diversions of his age sound and pure; an endeavour in which he had the co-operation of Charles Reade and that of most of those who competed with them for the favour of generations of playgoers more easily contented than their successors. The one deplorable aspect of this age of the English drama was to be found neither in the sphere of tragedy nor in that of comedy—nor even in that of farce. It was presented in the low depths of contemporary burlesque, which had degenerated from the graceful extravaganza of J. R. Planché into witless and tasteless emptiness.
Curiously enough, it was at this point that something like real originality—discovering a new sub-species of its own—first began, with the aid of a sister-art, to renovate the English popular comic stage. At the beginning of the 19th century the greatest tragic actress of the English theatre, Mrs Siddons, had passed her prime; and before its second decade had closed, not only she (1812) but her brother John Kemble (1817), the representative of a grand style of acting which later generations might conceivably find overpowering, had withdrawn from the boards. Mrs Siddons was soon followed into retirement by her successor Miss O’Neill (1819); while Kemble’s brilliant later rival, Edmund Kean, an actor the intuitions of whose genius seem to have supplied, so far as intuition ever can supply, the absence of a consecutive self-culture, remained on the stage till his death in 1833. Young, Macready, and others handed down some of the traditions of the older school of acting to the very few artists who remained to suggest its semblance to a later generation. Even these—among them S. Phelps, whose special merit it was to present to a later age, accustomed to elaborate theatrical environments, dramatic masterpieces as dependent upon themselves and adequate interpretation; and the foremost English actress of the earlier Victorian age, Helen Faucit (Lady Martin)—were unable to leave a school of acting behind them. Still less was this possible to Charles Kean the younger, with whom the decorative production of Shakespearian plays really had its beginning; or even to Sir Henry Irving, an actor of genius, but also an irrepressible and almost eccentric theatrical personality, whose great service to the English drama was his faith in its masterpieces. The comic stage was fortunate in an ampler aftergrowth, from generation to generation, of the successors of the old actors who live for us all in the reminiscences of Charles Lamb; nor were the links suddenly snapped which bound the humours of the present to those of the past. In the first decade of the 20th century a generation still survived which could recall, with many other similar joys, the brilliant levity of Charles Mathews the younger; the not less irresistible stolidity of J. B. Buckstone; the solemn fooling of H. Compton (1805-1877); the subtle humours of J. L. Toole, and the frolic charm of Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft), the most original comic actress of her time.
(A. W. W.)
Recent English Drama.—In England the whole mechanism of theatrical life had undergone a radical change in the middle decades of the 19th century. At the root of this change lay the immense growth of population and the enormously increased facilities of communication between London and the provinces. Similar causes came into operation, of course, in France, Germany and Austria, but were much less distinctly felt, because the numerous and important subventioned theatres of these countries remained more or less unaffected by economic influences. Free trade in theatricals (subject only to certain licensing regulations and to a court censorship of new plays) was established in England by an act of 1843, which abolished the long moribund monopoly of the “legitimate drama” claimed by the “Patent Theatres” of Drury Lane and Covent Garden. The drama was thus formally subjected to the operation of the law of supply and demand, like any other article of commerce, and managers were left, unaided and unhampered by any subvention or privilege, to cater to the tastes of a huge and growing community. Theatres very soon multiplied, competition grew ever keener, and the long run, with its accompaniments of ostentatious decoration and lavish advertisement, became the one object of managerial effort. This process of evolution may be said to have begun in the second quarter of the 19th century and completed itself in the 3rd. The system which obtains to-day, almost unforeseen in 1825, was in full operation in 1875. The repertory theatre, with its constant changes of programme, maintained on the continent partly by subventions, partly by the mere force of artistic tradition, had become in England a faint and far-off memory. There was not a single theatre in London at which plays, old and new, were not selected and mounted solely with a view to their continuous performance for as many nights as possible, anything short of fifty nights constituting an ignominious and probably ruinous failure. It was found, too, that those theatres were most successful which were devoted exclusively to exploiting the talent of an individual actor. Thus when the fourth quarter of the century opened, the long “run” and the actor-manager were in firm possession of the field.
The outlook was in many ways far from encouraging. It was not quite so black, indeed, as it had been in the late ’fifties and early ’sixties, when the “legitimate” enterprises of Phelps at Sadler’s Wells and Charles Kean at the Princess’s had failed to hold their ground, and when modern comedy and drama were represented almost exclusively by adaptations from the French. There had been a slight stirring of originality in the series of comedies produced by T. W. Robertson at the Prince of Wales’s theatre, where, under the management of Bancroft (q.v.) a new school of mounting and acting, minutely faithful (in theory at any rate) to everyday reality, had come into existence. But the hopes of a revival of English comedy seemed to have died with Robertson’s death. One of his followers, James Albery, possessed both imagination and wit, but had not the strength of character to do justice to his talent, and sank into a mere adapter. In the plays of another disciple, H. J. Byron, the Robertsonian or “cup-and-saucer” school declined upon sheer inanity. Of the numerous plays signed by Tom Taylor some were original in substance, but all were cast in the machine-made French mould. Wilkie Collins, in dramatizing some of his novels, produced somewhat crude anticipations of the modern “problem play.” The literary talent of W. S. Gilbert displayed itself in a group of comedies both in verse and prose; but Gilbert saw life from too peculiar an angle to represent it otherwise than fantastically. The Robertsonian impulse seemed to have died utterly away, leaving behind it only five or six very insubstantial comedies and a subdued, unrhetorical method in acting. This method the Bancrofts proceeded to apply, during the ’seventies, to revivals of stage classics, such as The School for Scandal, Money and Masks and Faces, and to adaptations from the French of Sardou.
While the modern drama appeared to have relapsed into a comatose condition, poetic and romantic drama was giving some signs of life. At the Lyceum in 1871 Henry Irving had leapt into fame by means of his performance of Mathias in The Bells, an adaptation from the French of Erckmann-Chatrian. He followed this up by an admirably picturesque performance of the title-part in Charles I. by W. G. Wills. In the autumn of 1874 the great success of Irving’s Hamlet was hailed as the prelude to a revival of tragic acting. As a matter of fact, it was the prelude to a long series of remarkable achievements in romantic drama and melodrama. Irving’s lack of physical and vocal resources prevented him from scaling the heights of tragedy, and his Othello, Macbeth, and Lear could not be ranked among his successes; but he was admirable in such parts as Richard III., Shylock, Iago and Wolsey, while in melodramatic parts, such as Louis XI. and the hero and villain of The Lyons Mail, he was unsurpassed. Mephistopheles in a version of Faust (1885), perhaps the greatest popular success of his career, added nothing to his reputation for artistic intelligence; but on the other hand his Becket in Tennyson’s play of that name (1893) was one of his most masterly efforts. His management of the Lyceum (1878-1899) did so much to raise the status of the actor and to restore the prestige of poetic drama, that the knighthood conferred upon him in 1895 was felt to be no more than an appropriate recognition of his services. But his managerial career had scarcely any significance for the living English drama. He seldom experimented with a new play, and, of the few which he did produce, only The Cup and Becket by Lord Tennyson have the remotest chance of being remembered.
To trace the history of the new English drama, then, we must go back to the Prince of Wales’s theatre. Even while it seemed that French comedy of the school of Scribe was resuming its baneful predominance, the seeds of a new order of things were slowly germinating. Diplomacy, an adaptation of Sardou’s Dora, produced in 1878, brought together on the Prince of Wales’s stage Mr and Mrs Bancroft, Mr and Mrs Kendal, John Clayton and Arthur Cecil—in other words, the future managers of the Haymarket, the St James’s and the Court theatres, which were destined to see the first real stirrings of a literary revival. Mr and Mrs Kendal, who, in conjunction with John Hare, managed the St James’s theatre from 1879 to 1888, produced A. W. Pinero’s first play of any consequence, The Money-Spinner (1881), and afterwards The Squire (1882) and The Hobby Horse (1887). The Bancrofts, who, after entirely rebuilding the Haymarket theatre, managed it from 1880 till their retirement in 1885, produced in 1883 Pinero’s Lords and Commons; and Messrs Clayton and Cecil produced at the Court theatre between 1885 and 1887 his three brilliant farces, The Magistrate, The Schoolmistress and Dandy Dick, which, with the sentimental comedy, Sweet Lavender, produced at Terry’s theatre in 1888, assured his position as an original and fertile dramatic humorist of no small literary power. It is to be noted, however, that Pinero was almost the only original playwright represented under the Bancroft, Hare-Kendal and Clayton-Cecil managements, which relied for the rest upon adaptations and revivals. Adaptations of French vaudevilles were the staple productions of Charles Wyndham’s management at the Criterion from its beginning in 1876 until 1893, when he first produced an original play of any importance. When Herbert Beerbohm Tree went into management at the Haymarket in 1887, he still relied largely on plays of foreign origin. George Alexander’s first managerial ventures (Avenue theatre, 1890) were two adaptations from the French. Until well on in the ’eighties, indeed, adaptation from the French was held the normal occupation of the British playwright, and original composition a mere episode. Robertson, Byron, Albery, Gilbert, Tom Taylor, Charles Reade, Herman Merivale, G. W. Godfrey, all produced numerous adaptations; Sydney Grundy was for twenty years occupied almost exclusively in this class of work; Pinero himself has adapted more than one French play. The ’eighties, then, may on the whole be regarded as showing a very gradual decline in the predominance of France on the English stage, and an equally slow revival of originality, so far as comedy and drama were concerned, manifesting itself mainly in the plays of Pinero.
The reaction against French influence, however, was no less apparent in the domain of melodrama and operetta than in that of comedy and drama. Until well on in the ’seventies, D’Ennery and his disciples, adapted and imitated by Dion Boucicault and others, ruled the melodramatic stage. The reaction asserted itself in two quarters—in the East End at the Grecian theatre, and in the West End at the Princess’s. In The World, produced at Drury Lane in 1880, Paul Meritt (d. 1895) and Henry Pettitt (d. 1893) brought to the West End the “Grecian” type of popular drama; and at Drury Lane it survived in the elaborately spectacular form imparted to it by Sir Augustus Harris, who managed that theatre from 1879 till his death in 1896. The production of G. R. Sims’s Lights o’ London at the Princess’s in 1881, under Wilson Barrett’s management, also marked a new departure. This style of melodrama was chiefly cultivated at the Adelphi theatre, from 1882 until the end of the century, when it died out there as a regular institution, apparently because a host of suburban theatres drew away its audiences. Of all these English melodramas, only one, The Silver King, by Henry Arthur Jones (Princess’s, 1882), could for a moment compare in invention or technical skill with the French dramas they supplanted. The fact remains, however, that even on this lowest level of dramatic art the current of the time set decisively towards home-made pictures of English life, however crude and puerile.
For twenty-five years, from 1865 to 1890, the English stage was overrun with French operettas of the school of Offenbach. Hastily adapted by slovenly hacks, their librettos (often witty in the original) became incredible farragos of metreless doggrel and punning ineptitude. The great majority of them are now so utterly forgotten that it is hard to realize how, in their heyday, they swarmed on every hand in London and the provinces. The reaction began in 1875 with the performance at the Royalty theatre of Trial by Jury, by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. This was the prelude to that brilliant series of witty and melodious extravaganzas which began with The Sorcerer at the Opera Comique theatre in 1877, but was mainly associated with the Savoy theatre, opened by R. D’Oyly Carte (d. 1901) in 1881. Little by little the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (of which the most famous, perhaps, were H.M.S. Pinafore, 1878, Patience, 1881, and The Mikado, 1885) undermined the popularity of the French opera-bouffes, and at the same time that of the indigenous “burlesques” which, graceful enough in the hands of their inventor J. R. Planché, had become mere incoherent jumbles of buffoonery, devoid alike of dramatic ingenuity and of literary form. When, early in the ’nineties, the collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan became intermittent, and the vogue of the Savoy somewhat declined, a new class of extravaganza arose, under the designation of “musical comedy” or “musical farce.” It first took form in a piece called In Town, by Messrs “Adrian Ross” and Osmond Carr (Prince of Wales’s theatre, 1892), and rapidly became very popular. In these plays the scene and costumes are almost always modern though sometimes exotic, and the prose dialogue, setting forth an attenuated and entirely negligible plot, is frequently interrupted by musical numbers. The lyrics are often very clever pieces of rhyming, totally different from the inane doggrel of the old opera-bouffes and burlesques. In other respects there is little to be said for the literary or intellectual quality of “musical farce”; but, being an entirely English (or Anglo-American) product, it falls into line with the other indications we have noted of the general decline—one might almost say extinction—of French influence on the English stage.
To what causes are we to trace this gradual disuse of adaptation? In the domain of modern comedy and drama, to two causes acting simultaneously: the decline in France of the method of Scribe, which produced “well-made,” exportable plays, more or less suited to any climate and environment; and the rise in England of a generation of playwrights more original, thoughtful and able than their predecessors. It is not at all to be taken for granted that the falling off in the supply of exportable plays meant a decline in the absolute merit of French drama. The historian of the future may very possibly regard the movement in France, no less than the movement in England, as a step in advance, and may even see in the two movements co-ordinate manifestations of one tendency. Be this as it may, the fact is certain that as the playwrights of the Second Empire gradually died off, and were succeeded by the authors of the “new comedy,” plays which would bear transplantation became ever fewer and farther between. Of recent years Henri Bernstein, author of Le Voleur and Samson, has been almost the only French dramatist whose works have found a ready and steady market in England. Attempts to acclimatize French poetical drama—Pour la Couronne, Le Chemineau, Cyrano de Bergerac—were all more or less unsuccessful.