Dickens and the Early Modern Theatre

Abstract

It was Shaw’s regret that the Victorian stage could not ‘enlist the genius of Dickens’,1 a failure which seems all the more surprising given Dickens’s fascination with the theatre, his taste for melodrama, and the fact that he was ‘himself an incorrigible actor’.2 Shaw blamed the strangling grip of nineteenth-century censorship for killing serious drama, in consequence of which ‘dramatists had to express themselves in novels’.3 Whatever the merits of such an argument, the fact remains that if Dickens could not succeed any more than Mr Wopsle ‘in reviving the drama’ of his own time, he was able to exert an influence over the theatre of the future. Indeed, as George Ford has observed, his mark ‘is more evident in the twentieth century drama’ than in ‘any of the novels which supposedly reflect his influence’.4 What follows is a brief consideration of Dickens, in the context not of the Victorian stage, but in his relationship to the early modern theatre of Shaw, Ibsen and Strindberg.KeywordsGreat ExpectationHappy EndingHoly GhostWomanly WomanDramatic ReadingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.