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25
(1837-1901)
The literary scene
Drama in the Victorian Age.
Theatre-going was very
popular in the 19th century and especially so during the
Victorian Age. It is true, though, that during the same period
no major writer seriously turned his or her talent to drama.
Even the poetic plays of Byron
(
➤
Manfred
, vol. 1
), Shelley
(
➤
Prometheus Unbound
, vol. 1
), Browning (
➤
p. 20
) and
Tennyson (
➤
p. 51
) were meant to be read, not staged –
that’s why they are usually called
‘closet’ plays,
that is, plays
intended for private reading in one’s closet rather than for
performance in the theatre.
Apart from music-hall and farce, light
melodrama
was the
favourite genre. Melodrama was often adapted from popular
French models and it also tended to follow the narrative
patterns of the Victorian novel, especially those of Dickens
(
➤
p. 28
) or the horror and crime novels (
➤
Map 6.3
). The
best plays before the triumphal appearance of Wilde on the
London stage, however, were the
comic operas
by
William
S. Gilbert
(1836-1911) and
Arthur Sullivan
(1842-1900), for which
Gilbert wrote the libretti and Sullivan the music. Their most interesting
work is
Patience
(1881), a satire of the Aesthetic Movement and in
particular of its main exponent: Oscar Wilde.
Modern drama.
The era of modern British drama really begins with the
plays of
Oscar Wilde
(
➤
p. 95
) and
George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950)
in the 1890s, when for the first time since the Renaissance major writers
devoted their literary talent to the stage and attracted the public just as
poets and novelists did. The wit of Wilde’s ‘drawing-room comedies’
was carried further by Shaw who used it to shock the audience and force
them to reconsider standard values.
The new ‘comedy of manners’.
Oscar Wilde
revived the Restoration
‘comedy of manners’ (Congreve) or the 18th-century ‘sentimental
comedy’ (Sheridan), adapting them to Victorian society. He wrote
four major plays. The greatest of them all,
The Importance of Being
Earnest
(1895), is still regarded as the perfect comedy of its type. It
was immensely popular for its
wit and sparkling dialogues
above all,
and also for its upper-class fashionable settings. Beneath its brilliant
surface, though, its comic dialogues and the extreme and slightly absurd
situations expose the
superficiality of the English upper class
and the
shallowness of their lives. This is achieved, as always in Wilde, through
his favourite
technique of contraries
: to treat “all the serious things of
life with sincere and studied triviality”.
Victorian drama
Music cover of
1878: at this time
the combination
of words and
music was in
great vogue on
stage.
S
tudy queStionS
1
What were the ‘closet plays’?
Who wrote them?
2
What was melodrama?
3
Who were the best authors of
comic operas?
4
When did modern British drama
really begin?
5
Which is the best play by Oscar
Wilde? What kind of comedy
is it?
6
Why was it popular?
7
Explain Wilde’s technique of
contraries.
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001-027_The Victorians.indd 25
16/01/12