G. H. Lewes's Criticism of the Drama

Abstract

In discussing the important English dramatic critics during the first half of the nineteenth century (Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, John Forster, and George Henry Lewes), William Archer concluded that “Lewes alone has anything of note to say upon the principles of dramatic composition, as a living art”, that “Lewes was probably the most highly-trained thinker who ever applied himself to the study of theatrical art in England.” He pointed out that Lewes not only had a “special and personal interest in the art of the playwright which his predecessors lacked” but also had “much more attractive matter for discussion” because the “modern drama, the drama as we know it to-day, was just coming into existence, or rather was just making its existence felt in England.” Consequently it was a happy chance … that in the four years of Lewes's critical campaign [1850–54] such an unusual, and probably unprecedented, number of the greatest dramas in the world should have passed over the London stage. … Thus he gives us, as it were, an unsystematic survey of the drama of the world from Sophocles to Scribe.