Canada’s Lost Plays, Volume Two, Women Pioneers, ed. by Anton Wagner

Abstract

poems richer in human interest can, and will, be made in our country as facts of history intersect with truths of creative imagination. carl f . k l in c k / University of Western Ontario Canada’s Lost Plays, Volume Two, Women Pioneers, edited by Anton Wag­ ner (Toronto: CTR Publications, 1979). 272. $13.95 doth, $7.95 paper Since Murray D. Edwards’ A Stage in Our Past, English-Language Theatre in Eastern Canada from the ijgos to 1914 ( 1968), the first published book of Canadian theatre history in English, a number of research ventures have resulted in an enrichment and broadening of Canadian dramatic and theatrical resources. Among these have been The Brock Bibliography of Published Canadian Stage Plays In English, 1900-1922 (1972) by Christo­ pher Johnson and others, Love and Whisky (1973) a history of the Do­ minion Drama Festival by Betty Lee, and A Bibliography of Canadian Theatre History, 1583-1929 (1976) by John Ball and Richard Plant. Three academic journals have been created to widen the scope of study: Canadian Theatre Review in 1974, Canadian Drama/L’Art dramatique canadien in 1975 and Theatre History in Canada/Histoire du théâtre au canada in 1980. In the 1970s several publishers emerged who have devoted themselves exclu­ sively, or nearly exclusively, to the publication of Canadian play scripts: the Playwrights Co-op (now Playwrights Canada)1in Toronto, Simon and Pierre in Toronto, and Talonbooks in Vancouver. The beneficiaries of this lively new interest in Canadian drama and theatre have been schools, universities, and our amateur as well as regional professional theatres. Hand in hand with the production of many new Canadian plays has gone the study of older plays and of Canadian theatre history. Against this backdrop of eager research, study, and performance during the last twelve years must be set the Canadian drama reprint series Canada’s Lost Plays which appeared first in 1978. Volume One, The Nineteenth Cen­ tury, edited by Anton Wagner and Richard Plant, set forth the aims of the series as an attempt “to reclaim a small part o f. . . [400 years of live theatre in Canada] for Canadian playwrights and producers, for critics seeking to place our theatre in an appropriate historical context and for scholars wish­ ing to identify Canada’s early theatrical history.” In their introduction to Volume One, the compilers brought together a variety of references, com­ ments, play titles, and pictorial material to sketch in a context of theatre history in miniature. The natural inference from this first volume of the series was a continued historical approach: further volumes, one assumed, 500 would provide eighteenth-century and twentieth-century reprints. This ex­ pectation, however, has not yet been fulfilled. Volume Two departs from the period approach by means of a thematic slant: Women Pioneers are the authors of the six plays collected here. The third volume bears the title The Developing Mosaic: English-Canadian Drama to Mid-Century. Neverthe­ less, the treatment of the authors and plays presented in Volume Two is conscientiously historical within the limits of the specific frame of reference. Anton Wagner is the sole editor of the second and the third volumes. A comparison of the authors and titles in the second and third volumes suggests a bias in favour of “established” playwrights and known plays, par­ ticularly in Volume Three. This tendency, while not unusual in anthologies of this nature, does leave some deplorable gaps. Why, for example, was the time span between 1897, the year of Catharine Nina Merritt’s When George the Third Was King, and 1939, the date of Gwen Pharis Ringwood’s Pasque Flower, not abridged by either Mazo de la Roche’s prize-winning domestic comedy Low Life (1925) or, even more appropriately, with Isabel Eccle­ stone Mackay’s Two Too Many (1927), a delightful social comedy in the manner of American playwright Rachel Crothers? Since the third volume contains seven plays, the six-play limit of Volumes One and Two does not appear to be an inevitable one. Sarah Anne Curzon, a well-known leader of the Canadian women’s suffrage movement, is represented by two plays in Volume Two, the historical verse-drama Laura Secord...