Victorian Theatre Research Articles

An Investigation of the "Green World Escape" in Three Victorian Plays

Urban gardens, parks, and conservatories had grown popular by the late nineteenth century and were now widely available to the public on a cultural and social level. Creating natural areas inside cities merged the rural and urban sectors into a single locale. In order to examine the "green world" experience in Victorian theater, three plays by three British playwrights namely Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, and Oscar Wilde from the second half of the nineteenth century have been chosen for this study. The plays span farces, fantasy, and melodrama, presenting many viewpoints on the idea of escapism along with the discovery of and yearning for other worlds. By analyzing the dreams and experiences of the alternate universe, it is feasible to understand Victorian views about the landscape and its role as a respite from urban or industrial commercial centers. This can assist to spark a discussion about characters' desires for escape and the circumstances that drive them to seek tranquility in rural locations. The protagonists' otherworldly experiences inside the alternate worlds may be examined if it is obvious what they are trying to get away from. After knowing what happens in the green world, it is possible to examine how often characters are able to go through difficult situations.

Is She A Woman?: Alternative Critical Frameworks for Understanding Cross-Dressing and Cross-Gender Casting on the Victorian Stage

As the study of nineteenth-century theatre has expanded over the decades, the extent and popularity of cross-dressing and cross-gender casting on the Victorian stage is being revealed. Yet there is an enduring tendency in Victorian theatre criticism to situate transvestite performances within broad-brush assumptions of binary attitudes towards gender amongst theatre audiences. Universalised gender norms and assumptions of binary thinking have long been discarded in critical analysis of Victorian fiction, and their lingering influence on Victorian theatre studies has arguably been unhelpful. Building on the vital pioneering work of Jacky Bratton, this article will focus on the careers of Louisa Cranstoun Nisbett and Mary Anne Keeley, two prominent and acclaimed mid-century actresses, drawing on reviews, memoirs, and commentaries on their performances to attempt to construct alternative theories for how they were viewed and understood. The critical and popular success of their performances and the language and ideas employed by reviewers and commentators to record and explain them reveal far more flexible, multiple, fluid, complex, and imaginative attitudes to gender roles and identities than allowed for in established critical narratives.

Hidden Identities, Forgotten Histories: Female Provincial Touring Artists in Britain, 1887–1900

Provincial touring companies of the late Victorian period, comprising mostly unknown actors and actresses, have received minimal scholarly attention until recently. The sheer number of ‘on-the-road’ artists who were employed in such enterprises from the late nineteenth century onwards increased to such an extent that to establish a framework for their individual and collective study presents significant challenges. This article addresses this problem by proposing a method, grounded in genealogy, that records the male and/or female artists of a given touring company over its full term without selective bias in order to establish a cohort of subjects for further examination. It tracks the touring companies of actor-manager Lawrence Daly, an individual unheard of today, between 1887 and 1900, the year of his death. One hundred and twenty-five female artists employed by Daly during this period are recovered, and their careers, family histories, and personal identities are subjected to statistical analysis. The conclusions drawn here not only contribute to the better understanding of the social history of non-elite female provincial artists of the late nineteenth century, but also afford the opportunity to shine a light on figures whose names, lives, and achievements are long forgotten. Further, a case is made for the method as the basis for a wide-ranging database of provincial touring companies and artists. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed several articles on Victorian and Edwardian theatre to New Theatre Quarterly.

Why Does Polly Dance? Caste and the Function of Dance in the Victorian Theatre

What is the effect of the dance scene in Tom Robertson's play Caste? Little emphasis has been placed on the contribution of dance to Victorian theatre practice. Yet dance was ubiquitous, featuring prominently in such genres as melodrama and extravaganza, and providing the source material for burlesque. Dance was employed as a component of the mise-en-scène, as a marker of transformation, and to express what could not otherwise be expressed in a censored theatrical environment. In Caste these functions serve to provide a counterweight to, and enable a critique of, the play's prevailing naturalism.

From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West by Carolyn Grattan Eichin

From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West by Carolyn Grattan Eichin

Stage Piracy in Victorian Britain: Bleak House Adaptations

Pirating novels for the stage was a staple of the Victorian theatre. There were many theatrical piracies of Bleak House in the second half of the period, but they all share a common feature: pirates had to decide how to reshape the narrative for audience consumption since the whole of this sprawling novel was impossible to stage. Thus fidelity to the original text was out of the question. This essay examines two Bleak House adaptations, an early and largely forgotten version and a later version that gained a global reputation. It considers the range of challenges pirates faced when adapting Bleak House as well as how the narrative is adapted to audience expectations across time and genre in the late Victorian period so that, out of the novel’s multivocality, Jo emerges as the centre of the story.

From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West

From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West

From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West

From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West

The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, edited by David Punter

Reviewed by: The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts ed. by David Punter Aviva Briefel (bio) The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, edited by David Punter; pp. xx + 520. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $195.00, £150.00. In the opening to his monumental anthology on art and the gothic, David Punter signals that there is one question the volume will not answer: “What is the Gothic?” What the book attempts instead is to illustrate how the gothic “has inflected form and meaning across a huge range of cultural discourses, from medieval architecture to contemporary gaming; from graveyard poetry to modern dance; from the eighteenth-century novel to internet fiction” (1). In its content, scope, and form, The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts fulfills its promise of capaciousness, which rivals and in many ways exceeds that of Punter’s voluminous A New Companion to the Gothic (2012). His skill as an editor in both volumes is to gather and exhibit an assortment of writings on the gothic that allow the reader to experience as well as learn about the excesses of the genre (or is it a mode? a form? The jury is still out). By the time we exit the book’s gallery of horrors, we have become acclimated to—but are still fascinated by—its collision of genres, historical periods, and interpretations. The volume distributes its thirty-three essays into five sections: Architectural Arts, Visual Arts, Music and Performance Arts, Literary Arts, and Media and Cultural Arts. While there is some slippage between these categories—the gothic, after all, is notorious for not staying in its lane—they provide enough structure for the chapters and sections to build on each other. Each of these sections features stand-out pieces that offer promising new directions for the study of the gothic. These include Sara Wasson’s chapter in the architecture section, “Gothic and the Built Environment,” which contends that “although the built environment is created by human beings, it can paradoxically be deathly to the human, yet simultaneously host to unnatural ‘life’, to an alien and malevolent agency” (36). Wasson traces this idea from Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime through the Victorian urban gothic of Richard Marsh, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Machen, before moving on to the twenty-first-century writings of Alasdair Gray and China Miéville and to our all-too-current “architectures of incarceration” (46). Another exceptional chapter is Kendra Preston Leonard’s “Gothic and Music: Scoring ‘Silent’ Spectres,” which raises the fascinating question of what ghosts sound like. In pursuing this subject, Leonard takes us through the rappings of the séance to the musical accompaniments of early spectral cinema, including Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du Diable (1896). The Music and Performance Arts section also contains an excellent piece by Steven Bruhm on the gothic and dance, which begins with a resonant claim that will stay with me for a while: “The Gothic is in large part a choreography. Drawing upon the allegorical feel of the romance tradition whose genre it adopted, Gothic narrative is the stylised spectacle of bodies moving through large emotions or mental states, conveying through grand gestures a limited set of primal, dramatic emotions” (214). Finally, Clive [End Page 431] Bloom’s wonderful essay on gothic melodrama in Victorian theater takes us on a gripping tour of the “excessive staging” and colorful history of this theatrical tradition (354). Bloom’s is one of several essays in the collection that contribute to the ever-growing body of Victorian scholarship on the gothic. These include Tom Duggett’s chapter on the influence of the Lake Poets on John Ruskin and William Morris’s writings on gothic architecture; Kamilla Elliott’s essay on the trope of the gothic portrait in novels including Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1839), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); and Jerrold E. Hogle’s essay on abjection and the “Gothic image” in narratives such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860). Other chapters position Victorian texts in...

Review: From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West, by Carolyn Grattan Eichin

Review: <i>From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West</i>, by Carolyn Grattan Eichin

From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West. By Carolyn Grattan Eichin

<i>From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West.</i> By Carolyn Grattan Eichin

The Ghost on the Machine: The Corsican Trap and the Spirit of Industrial Capitalism

In 1852, Charles Kean (1811-1868) mounted the original production of a melodrama that spawned a multimedia sensation - The Corsican Brothers by Dion Boucicault (c. 1820-1890). The runaway success of Boucicault's melodrama was largely owed to the legendary ghost scene at the end of Act One, in which a phantom rose from beneath the stage, borne aloft by technology specifically invented for the play and eventually nicknamed ‘the Corsican trap’. The production history of The Corsican Brothers illuminates Victorian and Edwardian theatre's ambivalence towards the spirit of industrial capitalism. This ideology took root during the Industrial Revolution, inculcating expectations of ceaseless innovation in the realm of technology. It taught Victorians to value industrial wonders, modern machines like the trains and telegraphs transforming the world around them, machines that entered and re-entered the market in countless iterations, always new, improved, faster, more efficient and profitable. These attitudes towards industrial wonders informed reactions to what I term ‘New Spectral Stagecraft’, cutting-edge technologies invented to conjure theatrical phantasms. In 1852, the rapturous reception of the Corsican trap affirmed the spirit of industrial capitalism. And yet the contraption debuted in a play that resisted that same ideology, activating nostalgia for a pre-industrial, pre-enlightened past through its supernatural subject matter and romanticized display of obsolete machinery. In decades to follow, revivals of Boucicault's play further refused to satisfy Victorians’ hunger for the new, redeploying the Corsican trap in lieu of novel devices -- a nostalgic tribute to Kean's production that disappointed some audience members. In the end, the rise, fall and revival of the Corsican trap reveal mixed feelings towards technological innovation and further lay bare a persistent - and often productive - tension between industrial logic and theatrical aesthetics in Victorian and Edwardian London. The article concludes with remarks on how this case study shines a light on contemporary performance.

L’Enfer du Théatre

For many working in old European theatres, like the few remaining Victorian theatres in the UK, the understage space is nicknamed ‘Hell’. It is a term that is becoming less common as understage spaces fall into disuse and is absent in theatres without an understage at all. The space beneath the stage has always been important technologically and scenographically, but its less well-documented associations with an infernal underworld have a cultural resonance that reaches far beyond the history of the Victorian wood stage. This article explores the idea of the understage as a space that, even when it is not present, has an important aesthetic role in the theatre with cultural and historical precedents to be found in ancient Greek, medieval and Elizabethan theatres as well as Japanese Kabuki. In theatre, ‘Hell’ is the space that sits between the materiality of a technical theatre history and the experience of scenography. It is a persistent theatrical reminder that whatever is shown to an audience is also masking something. This article explores the history of the origin of this space and how the acceptance and rejection of its presence have shaped and influenced theatre theory and performance for centuries.

From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West by Carolyn Grattan Eichin

From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West by Carolyn Grattan Eichin

“Sardoodledom” on the English Stage: T. W. Robertson and the Assimilation of Well-Made Play into the English Theatre

The article discusses a vital figure in the development of modern English theatre, Thomas William Robertson, in the context of his borrowings, inspirations, translations and adaptations of the French dramatic formula pièce bien faite (well-made play). The paper gives the definition and enumerates features of the formula created with great success by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe. Presenting the figure of Thomas William Robertson, the father of theatre management and realism in Victorian theatre, the focus is placed on his adaptations of French plays and his incorporation of the formula of the well-made play and its conventional dramatic devices into his original, and most successful, plays, Society and Caste. The paper also examines the critical response to the well-made play in England and dramatists who use its formula, especially from the point of view of George Bernard Shaw, who famously called the French plays of Scribe and Victorien Sardou—“Sardoodledom.”

Mesmerism in Late Victorian Theatre

Originating as a medical practice and ultimately rejected as pseudoscience, mesmerism evolved into a literary symbol in the later Victorian era. This paper focuses on three plays that use mesmerism as a symbol of marital control and domination: the comedy His Little Dodge (1896), adapted from Le Systême Ribardier (1892), by George LeFeydeau and Maurice Hennequin; Trilby (1895), adapted from the novel by George Du Maurier; and, finally, Johan Strindberg’s The Father (1893). The mesmeric power one character imposes over another, overriding both consent and awareness in the trance state, serves both to reaffirm hierarchies of power and highlight anxieties about social change in the fin-de-siècle.

Staging the Unnatural: Zacky Pastrana and the Animal–Human Divide in the Victorian Melodrama For Ever

The melodrama For Ever, by Paul Meritt and George Conquest, first performed at the Surrey Theatre on 2 October 1882, was a controversial late-Victorian stage production that fed the period’s appetite for dramatic histrionics, exotic displays, and monstrosity. An ephemeral piece that enjoyed no literary archetypes and few revivals, the play’s raison d’être was Conquest’s portrayal of Zacky Pastrana, a ‘man-monkey’, and his unrequited love for the murderous Ruth – a theme unique in the context of simian-based drama. Central to the play’s infamy was the covert allusion to the age-old myth of unnatural unions between simians and humans, and, although condemned as absurd and revolting by some critics, and laughable by others, its notoriety ensured popular success. Drawing on the original script submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for licensing and censoring, and situating Pastrana among famous fictional monstrosities adapted from literature for the British stage, most significantly Caliban, this article is a thematic analysis of Conquest’s unique role. It highlights through a series of interrelated readings how Pastrana’s multidimensional otherness and hybrid fluidity serves as a site of conceptual contention located at the animal–human boundary, exposing the cultural tensions in late-Victorian Britain. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of the Victorian and Edwardian theatre to NTQ.

Beyond the Opera House: Some Victorian Ballet Burlesques

Histories of ballet have tended to pay little attention to Victorian theatre dance that was not performed in the opera house or the music hall. A great deal of dance was embedded in such popular theatrical genres as melodrama, extravaganza and burlesque, and is therefore best understood in the context of the wider theatrical culture of the period. This essay examines two ballet burlesques performed at the Adelphi Theatre in the 1840s: The Phantom Dancers (a version of Giselle) and Taming a Tartar (based on Le Diable à quatre). When located in relation to the generic qualities of other theatrical burlesques of the period, their particular combination of parody and serious attention to classical dance is clarified. In both plays classical dance is set against more demotic dance styles. This serves as a way of mocking the excesses of the original ballets, but also as a way of interrogating the nature and significance of the danse d’école when presented to a popular theatre audience.

The Long Run of Victorian Theater

It's March 2020 as I write this, and the theaters are closed. Broadway is dark, and the Globe is once again shut due to a plague. Perhaps “self-isolation” is a strange condition under which to be thinking about crowded Victorian playhouses. As I make dates to watch movies with friends hundreds of miles away on the Netflix Party app, the media environment in which I pursue entertainment has perhaps never felt more dissimilar to that of nineteenth-century theatergoers. But, then again, maybe the photos of empty auditoria and deserted streets are the best demonstration of the space that public culture has taken up in our lives. The vacuum shows us that what's missing mattered. And if scholars of Victorian theater have shared a primary goal, it's to insist on how deeply the collective experience of playgoing influenced the everyday practices and beliefs of the period—even when theater and drama may not always appear on Victorian syllabi or conference programs. This essay considers three recent studies in Victorian theater—The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama(2018), edited by Carolyn Williams;The Drama of Celebrity(2019), by Sharon Marcus; andEveryone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914(2019), by Michael Meeuwis—to register the force that theatrical performance exerted on Victorians and to explore how that force could change our sense of the field. By dwelling with archives and objects that might otherwise get classed as cultural “ephemera,” these studies push us to acknowledge that the run of Victorian theater hasn't ended. In the collective pause before a moment of intense feeling, or in a contradictory attachment to a public figure who is both imitable and extraordinary, they find a repertoire of spectator behavior from which many of our own modes of attention derive.

Virtual Reality Avant la Lettre: Loutherbourg and the Origins of Urban Spectacle

Michael Booth's essays and books on Victorian theatre provided a formative and comprehensive set of scholarly works examining the origins of realism on the Victorian stage. Using Booth's arguments about the evolution of theatrical realism, this essay probes the notion of virtual reality and its impact on the spectator to examine the Eidophusikon – an invention of the artist, scene designer and engineer, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. This essay examines this phenomenon in terms of how the urban spectacle plays out within it, the fundamental role of technology and science in its success, and the paradoxical play of realism and imagination in how his work was received by audiences experiencing its immersive effects in the age of panoramas and post-Newtonian ideas of light, sight and viewing.