Trollope Reading Old Drama

Abstract

T R O L L O P E R E A D I N G O L D D R A M A ELIZABETH R. EPPERLY Memorial University of Newfoundland I t is impossible to say how many plays Anthony Trollope attended or how much drama criticism he actually read, but we do know that between 1866 and 1882 Trollope read more than two hundred and forty Elizabethan and Jacobean plays (excluding Shakespeare) — often more than once — and that he made extensive notes in his own copies.1 These comments, written carefully in the margin and at the end of the plays in eighty-six volumes now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., pro­ vide fascinating reading for anyone interested in how a determinedly indi­ vidualistic, gifted Victorian novelist reacted to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Trollope’s persistence in reading so many plays over so long a period is remarkable, though thoroughly characteristic of the man who undertook other enormous literary projects such as a History of World Literature2 and a history of prose fiction3 and who kept such meticulous records of his progress both with his recreational reading4 and with his professional writ­ ing.5 His judgments on the plays were probably formed through a variety of ways — childhood drama games at Julians,6 his own theatre attendance,7 literary friendships at the Garrick and Athenaeum clubs, contemporary drama criticism in the press, his extensive library holdings on early drama criticism,8 his close relationship with George Henry Lewes (who even ad­ dressed his epistolary introduction to On Actors and the Art of Acting to Trollope)0— but we only know for certain that he said himself he read the plays out of “curiosity in searching their plots and examining their characters” 10 and that he prided himself on covering a great many of them before his death. He writes this in 1876: “ If I live a few years longer, I shall, I think, leave in my copies of these dramatists, down to the close of the time of James I, written criticisms on every play. No one who has not looked closely into it knows how many there are” (367). No matter what public or private avenues formed Trollope’s taste and judgments and no matter what use Trollope made of the plots and charac­ ters he found, readers of the drama criticism itself will find it pointed and E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x iii, 3, September 1987 insightful as well as satisfyingly Trollopian. familiarly definite and bluff. The Trollope who emerges from the marginalia is wonderfully consistent with the robust novelist who strode through the woods swinging his cane as he laughed and cried over his characters.11 In his private reading, the char­ acters of the old drama were also alive for him, and his opinions about them and about their creators are expressed vigorously. Trollope rails against inadequate editorship or against lewdness; he praises subtleties of poetry and form; most of all, he scrutinizes plots and characters. But students of drama criticism as well as students of Trollope and his novels should find Trollope’s reactions to the chief Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists valuable. There is much to be learned in analyzing the literary taste and moral judgment implicit in Trollope’s drama notes: he puts Shake­ speare in a class by himself (it is regrettable that Trollope’s own notes on Shakespeare have not yet surfaced) ; he faults playwrights who could not paint realistic or admirable women; he prefers the rough and ready plays of the Tudors to either the more skilled but obscene or artificial Elizabethans or the convoluted Jacobeans; he prizes the language of Massinger; he ad­ mires the ingenuity but despises the lewdness of Beaumont and Fletcher; he demands that plays show excellence in plot, character, language, and some­ thing he calls sympathy; he chooses a play about women, by a forgotten playwright, as the closest to one by Shakespeare that he finds; he battles with editors’ opinion or partiality. Trollope makes numerous comments on editors and editing throughout the play volumes...