English Drama of the Early Modern Period 1890-1940

Jean Chothia

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315504193
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Letteratura
• Sous-sujet: Critica letteraria

The period 1890-1940 was a particularly rich and influential phase in the development of modern English theatre: the age of Wilde and Shaw and a generation of influential actors and managers from Irving and Terry to Guilgud and Olivier.Jean Chothia's study is in two parts beginning with a portrait of the period, setting the narrative context and considering the dramatic social and cultural changes at work during this time. It then focuses on some of the main themes in the theatre, from Shaw and comedy, to the rise of political and radio drama, providing an interpretative framework for the period. This volume will be of great benefit to students and academics of English literature and drama, as it covers the work of the major dramatists of the period as well as considering the dramatic output of literary figures, such as James, Eliot and Lawrence.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In 1890 George Moore, stirred by the French première of Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Théâtre Libre in Paris, asked:

Why have we not a Théâtre Libre? Surely there should be no difficulty in finding a thousand persons interested in art and letters willing to subscribe five pounds a year for twelve representations of twelve interesting plays? I think such a number of enthusiasts exists in London. The innumerable articles which appear in the daily, the weekly and monthly press on the London stage prove the existence of much vague discontent, and that this discontent will take definite shape sooner or later seems more than possible.¹

The question could be asked repeatedly of the years from 1890 to 1940. Why have we not a Théâtre Libre? – an Ibsen, a Strindberg, a Chekhov, a Pirandello, a Lorca? Where is British theatrical naturalism, symbolism, expressionism, futurism to be found? What are the dramatic equivalents of the innovations in prose fiction of late James and Conrad, Lawrence and Joyce? Where the theatrical counterparts of the poetic modernism initiated by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in the second decade of the new century? of the radical political commitment of 1930s poets and novelists? It is my purpose to address such questions in this book as well as to consider how it was that, in a period in which cinema came to replace theatre as the major popular form, the discontent did take such definite shape that the existence of drama as one of the lively arts, which had seemed lost in the nineteenth century, was reasserted.

The period was an astonishingly creative one in the history of Western drama. Although dominated by the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov, works by writers as distinct as Tolstoi, Hauptmann, Shaw, Synge, Brecht, Pirandello and O’Neill also joined the international repertoire. What such a list immediately makes apparent, however, is that in contrast with earlier golden ages – fifth-century Athens, Renaissance London, seventeenth-century Paris – this was an international resurgence. If the new movement began with Ibsen in Northern Europe, it did not remain localised in any one country. Plays, ideas and theatrical methods crossed national barriers: in some cases directly, in others in so modified a form as to be barely recognisable. The English drama, like other national dramas of the time, is a component of the scene – an idiosyncratic combination of influence, inspiration and insularity.

The availability and the style of the theatres in which plays are performed, as George Moore’s plea implied, affect not just the reception but the very existence of the drama and, throughout this period, a close interconnection is evident between new writing and the existence of particular theatrical ventures. Notably, as numbers of writers, actors and directors laid claim to a drama of greater significance than the light entertainment that characterised current commercial theatre, the idea of avant-garde, independent, alternative theatre (the labels change but the organising principles remain remarkably similar through to the present day) was created and this, rather than commercial or mainstream theatre, became the source of serious new drama.

André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, founded in Paris in 1887, was the first of a succession of independent theatres which sprang up throughout Europe to provide an outlet for new writing that had been rejected as uncommercial or in some way morally offensive or that, as with work by Ibsen and Tolstoi, had fallen foul of censorship regulations. Small, initially amateur, operations underwritten by a subscription list of supporters, they acted as magnets to the literary and social avant-garde and, with an impact far beyond their modest means, provided the basis for the division into avant-garde and commercial theatre which has become common in the twentieth century. Shaftesbury Avenue, the Boulevard and Broadway, against whose values these independent theatres have been pitted, have tended eventually to absorb the method, ideas and even, often, the plays of the avant-garde. Mainstream practice has thus been altered by a process that might be thought of as permeation rather than revolution, even as a new avant-garde has begun experimenting with a different style and a new seriousness. It is hard to identify a single major dramatist of the period whose work did not first find an audience through one or another of the independent theatres, Tolstoi (Théâtre Libre); Hauptmann (Freie Bühne); Maeterlinck (Théâtre d’Oeuvre); Strindberg (Stockholm Intimate Theatre); Chekhov, Gorki (Moscow Art Theatre); Shaw (Independent Theatre, Court Theatre); Granville Barker (Court Theatre); Yeats, Synge and O’Casey (Abbey Theatre); O’Neill and Susan Glaspell (Provincetown Players) and Clifford Odets (Group Theatre).

Jacob Grein, who had witnessed Antoine’s opening productions in Paris in 1887, asked in an article the year before George Moore’s much publicised piece whether ‘a British Théâtre Libre, a theatre free from the shackles of the censor, free from the fetters of convention, unhampered by financial consideration’ was possible, and offered a practical answer when, in March 1891, he gave a closed house performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts as the opening production of the Independent Theatre.² Shaw commented:

Everything followed from that: the production of Arms and the Man by Miss Horniman and Florence Farr at the Avenue Theatre, Miss Horniman’s establishment of repertory theatres in Dublin and Manchester, the Stage Society, H. Granville Barker’s tentative matinées of Candida at the Court Theatre, the full-blown management of Vedrenne and Barker, Edy Craigs Pioneers, and the final relegation of the nineteenth-century London theatre to the dustbin by Barrie.³

But the truth is that in England, by comparison with most of the rest of Europe, these things took a considerable time to follow for reasons rooted in late nineteenth-century British culture.

Public life was notably conservative and paternalistic. The daily press assumed the role of guardian of public morality. The Times, which denounced the Théâtre Libre as ‘the happy hunting ground of the ultra realistic or fin de siècle dramatist who specially affects the horrible and revolting’ (5.2.1889). did not protest when Tolstoi’s Power of Darkness, the work that had put Antoine’s venture on to the international map and the play into the international avant-garde repertoire, was forbidden performance in London. Whereas the French critics had attacked Ghosts as morbid or even tedious, much of the English press, led by Clement Scott’s notorious denunciation of the play as ‘a dirty act done publicly,’⁴ registered deep offence and moral shock on behalf of their readers and engaged in debate about what was and was not fit for the public stage.

Various commentators have noted the provincialism and insularity of English culture in the 1890s. According to one of the most acute, Samuel Hynes:

What England was splendidly isolated from was the great intellectual ferment on the continent. In Europe those were the years [1870s–90s] of the new realism in French fiction, of the great Russian novels, of Ibsen, of French Symbolism and Impressionism – the years when the foundations of twentieth-century art and thought were laid. In England they were the years of the laureateship of Tennyson, who wrote of the ‘poisonous honey spread from France’ and ‘the thoughts of Zolaism’. In the last decade of Victoria’s reign you couldn’t buy a translation of La Terre, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov in London or see Ghosts or look at any French Impressionist picture in any public or private gallery.⁵

But numerous literary figures including Yeats, Synge and Wilde whose subsequent writing would be germane to the renewal of the English theatre, did visit the continent to taste the poisonous honey, while growing discontent with the social and political system in Britain is evinced in the successive foundation of such groups as the Fabian Society (1884), the Independent Labour Party (1893) and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (1897). The plays of Ibsen, even more than the writings of Zola and the French Naturalists, seemed to speak to and for each of these groups and, despite the personal puritanism of such leading Fabians as Shaw and the Webbs, the attack on stage censorship figured strongly among their proposed social and political reforms.

The matter of Britain

The fifty years covered by this book coincide with the hesitant arrival of modernity to Britain in the form of more fully democratic government, recognition of the idea of female emancipation and, by the end of the period, a technologically based society which, it was believed, could and, as importantly, should improve the living standards of the whole society. Internationally, the period is punctuated and concluded by two horrific European wars and the establishment of totalitarian regimes in Germany and Russia which slaughtered millions of their own population in concentration camps in the name of ideologies. Positioned at the outer edge, Britain was both a part of and apart from the experience of the rest of Europe. Although not itself invaded, it nevertheless suffered terrible losses and millions of its citizens found themselves on alien territory for the first time. The British Empire, seemingly wholly secure in the 1890s, came under increasing pressure, while America and Russia slowly emerged as dominant world powers. The impression of British invincibility, dented by the Boer War (1899–1902), was further undermined by the Easter Rising in Dublin (1916) and the ceding of Irish Independence (1921). Its title to rule the colonies, source of raw materials and secure markets for manufactures, was increasingly questioned and, in India, the cornerstone of colonial power, horror at the 1919 Amritsar shootings helped establish Ghandhi’s independence movement.

Change was already apparent in many spheres in late Edwardian Britain. Received ideas were increasingly questioned. The great nineteenth-century debates about religion were over. Although church-going continued, it was in decline throughout the period and for many was more of a social than a spiritual activity. In philosophy there was a retreat from metaphysics into linguistic analysis. Ongoing urbanisation meant that by 1911, 80 per cent of the inhabitants of England and Wales lived in towns and the development of public transport, the underground railway and then the motor bus made populations within those towns much more mobile. Quasi-scientific social surveys in the last decade of the nineteenth century, beginning with Charles Booth’s massive Life and Labour of the People of London (1891–1903) and successive investigations and occasional papers published by the Fabian Society, had exposed the extent of poverty in Britain and helped create a climate in which ideas of social justice could be discussed and changes in social organisation could at least be contemplated. Such anthropological works as Frazer’s massive study of ritual and religions The Golden Bough (1890–1915), introduced a new sense of cultural relativism while the psychological sciences undermined clear-cut notions of good and evil in human behaviour. The writings of Freud and Jung directed attention, in ways that would be directly relevant to the stage, to biological instincts and the workings of the subconscious and to the tendency of these to reveal themselves in dreams, in slips of the tongue and in implications to be read into every-day talk.

Agitation had led to debate, to an Irish Home Rule Bill (1893), a Divorce Bill (1902), a Female Enfranchisement Bill (1907) and to Parliamentary Select Committees on Censorship (1892; 1909), a Royal Commission on Labour (1891) and on Divorce (1909), if not yet to changes in the law. The First World War, with its accompanying upheaval in the young male population, its need for a female labour force and its huge and horrifying slaughter and rumbling questioning of decisions made by government and military establishment, has rightly been taken as marking the watershed in a period in which old certainties were questioned.

In the immediate post-First World War period, there was an identifiable shift in the composition of the British ruling class. While the king, unlike the Kaiser, the Tsar and the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, had kept his throne, he had had to act to secure it in 1917 by changing his House’s name to Windsor from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in response to anti-German sentiment and by distancing himself from his friend and cousin, Tsar Nicholas, following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The image George V presented of bourgeois rectitude, with none of Edward VII’s inclination to high living and womanising, seemed appropriate to his time and, although he gave up none of his personal wealth, he notably summoned a commoner, Stanley Baldwin, to form the government in 1923 instead of the aristocrat, Lord Curzon. Indeed, although most Members of Parliament were still primarily drawn from the moneyed and privately educated classes, there were now very few titled figures in the Cabinet.

Although poverty was widespread among the working classes and working conditions were still terrible, for example in the mines, the idea that government should play its part in providing for its people and creating a more equitable distribution of wealth was acknowledged in Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ (1909). The London County Council had improved organisation of services in the capital since its foundation in 1888, and national expenditure on social services doubled between 1905, when the Liberals took office, and the outbreak of the First World War. That the working classes were increasingly politicised and unionised is demonstrated by the scale of its involvement in the 1926 General Strike and by the progress of the Labour Party which, while continuing to collaborate with them, replaced the middle-class Fabians as the major voice of the left; it also overtook the Liberal Party for the first time in the 1922 election and formed a minority government, albeit short-lived, following the 1924 and 1929 elections under the leadership of the Board School-educated Ramsay MacDonald. Responding to and feeding the need for intellectual stimulation, Penguin began publishing its sixpenny paperbacks in 1935 and, the following year, Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club began operating. The growing politicisation registered in some unexpected and some very direct ways in the theatre.

Investigations of sexuality by the likes of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis in the 1890s, although much denounced – Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex being suppressed shortly after publication in 1897 – fed a widening concern with issues of gender. If working people in the later nineteenth century were developing a more confident sense of self and of individual rights, so were women, strengthened by new educational possibilities and changes in property rights. Women began to write and speak out publicly, despite attacks on them as unfeminine ‘platform women’. Voices declaring the right of unmarried girls to be treated as individuals and insisting on woman’s duty to herself faced ridicule to pit themselves against a culture that promoted female self-effacement and self-sacrifice as an ideal.⁶ And, just as working-class demands found a voice through Trade Unionism and the Labour Party, so demands for female emancipation found a focus in the suffrage movement.

Various disparate groups having united in 1897, the movement developed teeth with the founding of the more fiercely activist Women’s Social and Political Union (1903) led by Emmeline Pankhurst. The Women Writers’ Suffrage League and the Actresses’ Franchise League, founded in 1908, played a leading role in promoting arguments for electoral reform through their productions at meetings, in theatres hired for the occasion and under the auspices of such independent groups as Edy Craig’s Pioneer Player...