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DRAMA
Having noted the decline of adaptation, we may now trace a stage farther the development of the English drama. The first stage, already surveyed, ends with the production of Sweet Lavender in 1888. Up to this point its author, Mr Pinero (b. 1855), stood practically alone, and had won his chief successes as a humorist. Mr Henry Arthur Jones {b. 1851) was known as little more than an able melodramatist, though in one play, Saints and Sinners (1884), he had made some attempt at a serious study of provincial life. Mr R. C. Carton (b. 1856) had written, in collaboration, one or two plays of slight account. Mr Sydney Grundy (6. 1848) had produced scarcely any original work. Hone of the other dramatists of to-day had as yet appeared on the horizon. The second stage may be taken as extending from 1889 to 1893. On 24th April 1889 Mr John Hare opened the new Garrick Theatre with The Profligate, by Mr Pinero— an unripe and superficial piece of work in many ways, but still a great advance, both in ambition and achievement, upon any original work the stage had seen for many a year. With all its faults, this play notably enlarged at one stroke the domain open to the English dramatist. And it did not stand alone. The same year saw the production of two plays by Mr Jones, Wealth and The Middleman, in which a distinct effort towards a serious criticism of life was observable, and of two plays by Mr Grundy, A FooVs Paradise and A White Lie, which, though very French in method, were at least original in substance. Mr Jones during the next two years made a steady advance with Judah (1890), his first really mature production, and The Dancing Girl and The Crusaders (1891), in the latter of which he made his first attempt to work the vein of social satire. Mr Pinero in these years was putting forth less than his whole strength in The Cabinet Minister (1890), Lady Bountiful and The Times (1891), and The Amazons (March 1893). But meanwhile new talents were coming forward. The management of Mr George Alexander, which opened at the Avenue Theatre in 1890, but was transferred in the following year to the St James’s, brought prominently to the front Mr Carton, Mr Haddon Chambers, and Mr Oscar Wilde. Mr Carton’s two sentimental comedies, Sunlight and Shadow (1890) and Liberty Hall (1892), showed excellent literary workmanship, but did not yet reveal his true originality as a humorist. Mr. Haddon Chambers’s work (notably The Idler, 1891) was as yet sufficiently commonplace; but in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) Mr Oscar Wilde showed himself at his first attempt a brilliant and accomplished dramatist. Mr Wilde’s subsequent plays, A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband and The Importance of being Earnest (1895), though marred by mannerism and insincerity, did much to promote the movement we are here tracing, and his painful downfall gave it a distinct, though temporary, check. As the production of The Profligate marked the opening of the second period in the revival of English drama, so the production of the same author’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray is very clearly the starting-point of the third period—of the phase of development still in progress. Before attempting to trace its course, however, we may do well to glance at certain conditions which probably influenced it. In the first place, economic conditions. The BancroftRobertson movement at the old Prince of Wales’s, between 1865 and 1870, was of even more importance from an economic than from a literary point of view. By making their little theatre a luxurious place of resort, and faithfully imitating in their productions the accent, costume, and furniture of upper and upper- middle class life, the Bancrofts had initiated a reconciliation
between Society and the Stage. Throughout the middle decades of the century it was the constant complaint of the managers that the world of wealth and fashion was by no means to be tempted to the theatre. The Bancroft management changed all that. It was at the Prince of Wales’s that half-guinea stalls were first introduced; and these stalls were always filled. As other theatres adopted the same policy of upholstery, both on and off the stage, fashion extended its complaisance to them as well. In yet another way the reconciliation was promoted—by the ever-increasing tendency of young men and women of good birth and education to seek a career upon the stage. For the past fifteen years, then, the theatre has been one of the favourite amusements of fashionable (though not necessarily of intellectual) Society. It is often contended that the influence of the sensual and cynical stall audience is a pernicious one. In some ways, no doubt, it is detrimental; but there is another side to the case. Even the cynicism of Society marks an intellectual advance upon the sheer rusticity which prevailed during the middle years of the 19th century and accepted without a murmur plays (original and adapted) which bore no sort of relation to life. In a celebrated essay published in 1879, Matthew Arnold dwelt on the sufficiently obvious fact that the result of giving English names and costumes to French characters was to make their sayings and doings utterly unreal and “ fantastic.” During the years of French ascendancy, audiences had quite forgotten that it was possible for the stage to be other than “fantastic” in this sense. They no longer thought of comparing the mimic world with the real world, but were content with what may be called abstract humour and pathos, often of the crudest quality. The cultivation of external realism, coinciding with, and in part occasioning, the return of Society to the playhouse, gradually led to a demand for some approach to plausibility in character and action as well as in costume and decoration. The stage ceased to be entirely “fantastic,” and began to essay, however imperfectly, the representation, the criticism of life. It cannot be denied that the influence of Society tends to narrow the outlook of English dramatists and to trivialize their tone of thought. But this is, in all likelihood, a passing phase of development; and cleverly trivial representations of reality are, after all, to be preferred to brainless concoctions of sheer emptiness. Quite as important, from the economic point of view, as the reconciliation of Society to the stage, was the reorganization of the mechanism of theatrical life in the provinces which took place between 1865 and 1875. From the Restoration to the middle of the 19th century the system of “stock companies” had been universal. Every great town in the three kingdoms had its established theatre with a resident company, playing the “ legitimate ” repertory, and competing, often by illegitimate means, for the possession of new London successes. The smaller towns, and even villages, were grouped into local “ circuits,” each served by one manager with his troupe of strollers. The “circuits” supplied actors to the resident stock companies, and the stock companies served as nurseries to the patent theatres in London. Metropolitan “stars” travelled from one country theatre to another, generally alone, sometimes with one or two subordinates in their train, and were “ supported,” as the phrase went, by the stock company of each theatre. Under this system, scenery, costumes, and appointments were often grotesquely inadequate, and performances almost always rough and unfinished. On the other hand, the constant practice in a great number and variety of characters afforded valuable training for actors, and developed many remarkable talents.
