The drama of nineteenth-century Britain has often been cited for its alleged failure to deal substantially with the issues and ideas of its time. No one would claim, says the author of a representative modern survey, that T. W. Robertson, Henry Arthur Jones, and Arthur Wing Pinero 'belong to literature'; and it is only in Wilde and Shaw that the drama recovers 'a measure of linguistic vitality and social function'.' True, the question is one of vitality, but not necessarily of a linguistic or literary kind. The question might be phrased in this way: does this drama reveal an extensive and penetrating relationship with contemporary life, and does it continue to shed light on the subject when examined from a later perspective? The question, it should be clear, is not of whether these plays have a specifically literary vitality: that is, of whether they present, in the text itself, significant and enduring ideas and images of human life viewed apart from the circumstances of their theatrical origin and the conventions of their rhetorical form. Rigorous application of the latter criterion may result in some surprising discoveries but, overall, obscures or distorts the true nature of the drama of that age. The relationship of dramatic text and performance, is, it seems, a problematic one for us. To our eyes, for example, perhaps the single most distinctive, sometimes painfully apparent feature of nineteenth-century drama in its textual form is the stage direction. The opening of Robertson's Caste (Prince of Wales's, 1867) is typical: