516
DRAMA
Drama..—The last quarter of the 19th century witnessed a very distinct progress in the theatrical life of the world at large. It is at present too early to unify this movement by tracing it to any one cause or set of causes, political, economic, or psychological. Yet the fact is clear that the new theatrical literature of England, France, Germany, and even of Italy and America, represents a break with tradition rather than a continuance of it. In England the whole mechanism of theatrical life had undergone a radical change in the middle decades of the 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 disdrama* Alb 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 (1829-1871) at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, Tottenham Street, 1 where, under the management of Mr and Mrs Bancroft, 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 1 Sir Squire Bancroft, who was knighted in 1897, was bom on 14th May 1841, and made his debut at Birmingham in 1861. In 1865 he joined the company with which Miss Marie Wilton (whom he afterwards married) opened the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, in Tottenham Court Boad, London; and he became co-manager with his wife in 1868. They moved to the Haymarket in 1880, and formally retired from the stage in 1885, but at rare intervals afterwards occasionally reappeared.
died with Robertson’s death. One of his followers, James; Albery (1832-1889), possessed both imagination and wit, but had not the strength of character to do justice to his talent, and sank into a mere adaptor. In the plays of another disciple, H. J. Byron (1836-1884), the Robertsonian or “ cup-and-saucer ” school declined upon sheer inanity. Of the numerous plays signed by Tom Taylor(1817-1880) some were original in substance, but all were cast in the machine-made French mould. WilkieCollins (1824-1889), in dramatizing some of his novels,, produced somewhat crude anticipations of the modern “ problem play.” The literary talent of Mr W. S. Gilbert (b. 1836) displayed itself in a group of comedies both in verse and prose; but Mr 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 (b. 1838) 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 Charles I. in a play of that name by W. G. Wills (1828-1893), a writer of some talent, which ran to waste for lack of an adequate sense of either dramatic or literary form. In the autumn of 1874 the great success of Mr 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. Mr 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.,. Shy lock, lago, 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 unfortunately 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 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, Mr John Clayton, and Mr 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 Mr John Hare, managed the St James’s Theatre
