Victorian theatre

Much scholarship on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus analyzes the use (or overuse) of violence and violent behavior. Literary scholarship on this play includes one glaring gap; there is little to no scholarship on Titus Andronicus and the Victorians. The central reason for this gap lies in the overwhelming Victorian aversion to Shakespeare’s first tragedy. 19th century audiences often espoused an outward veneer of virtue that prevented them from indulging plays that vigorously showcased violence the way that Titus Andronicus did. Reaching a grand total of fifteen murders, this play also touches on themes of rape, dismemberment, bodily mutilation, filicide, and cannibalism. For the “virtuous” Victorians, violent images like these resulted in the overall banning of this play’s production. Or could it be something else?
            Hosting such infamous criminals as Jack the Ripper and Typhoid Mary, 19th century people were not unfamiliar with violence or criminal behavior. Banning a play like Titus Andronicus for its violent themes and imagery seems weak at best. However, this morally upright populace was known for suppressing anything deemed “unsavory.” Therefore, it would make more sense that the play’s thematic relevance would have struck a much stronger chord than its violence. I argue that performances of Titus Andronicus were banned because the types of excessive violence resonated too strongly with Victorian audiences.

In her essay Critically Queer Judith Butler argues that drag performances cannot be regarded as a legit expression of one's subjective gender identity. On the contrary, she claims that the conscious choice of gender and acts involved in their creation represents an exposure and a mockery of the failures and contradictions of heterosexual regimes.

Obviously not all cross-dressed impersonations constitute a comment on society; however, Judith Butler’s consideration is particularly interesting in the case of the highly codified social order typical of the Victorian period, in which the fame of both male and female impersonators reached its peak. The popularity of this particular class of actors was strictly linked to the emergence of the music halls, one of the most widespread phenomena of the time and a symbol of Englishness.

Cross-dressed performers and actresses in particular extended their power over the masses far beyond the enclosed space of the theatre and were perceived as a strong disruptive force that could shatter the ideal of respectability fostered by the contemporaries.

This sense of apprehension and danger experienced by the Victorians finds its personification in Elizabeth Cree, the protagonist of Peter Ackroyd’s novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. The actress, with her impersonation of The Older Brother, is able to bring depth to her performance, overcome gender boundaries at will and, just like any other exceptional actress, exercise her influence over a ‘bigger stage’, namely the streets of London.

Elizabeth constitutes the perfect mockery of the Victorian social customs but provides also the opportunity to see Judith Butler’s theory concerning the meaning of crossed-dressed performances under a different light, since her shift from one gender to the other seems to be everything but conscious.

The unconscious element of Elizabeth’s personality makes everything so intricate that the reader is often left wondering what her gender was to begin with, or whether her cross-dressed alter ego is just a manifestation of her hidden nature.

Eventually, it could be argued that Elizabeth’s shifts from one gender to the other do not lead to a gender located somewhere between ‘male’ and ‘female’ along the gender spectrum. On the contrary, the end result might as well be something completely different, something that is neither male nor female and, perhaps, something close to a divinity.

A study of the professionally produced plays by four major Victorian writers, set against the context of the battle between the Major and Minor theatres over the legitimacy of popular dramatic forms. Given the potential threat to authorial reputation, the book asks, why did these writers choose to embark on dramatic careers?

Una lectura de la trama de The Importance of Being Earnest (1894) de Oscar Wilde de acuerdo al razonamiento de la paradoja de Grelling-Nelson, donde el desenlace de la obra ofrece una posible solución a dicha paradoja que estaría relacionada con el significado que la palabra earnest adquiere dentro de la obra, y cuyo concepto es opuesto al de bunburismo, el cual es el mecanismo que pone en movimiento la trama y que, en su oposición con el concepto representado por la palabra earnest, contiene un mensaje crítico hacia las convenciones de la sociedad victoriana de Inglaterra.

BAVS 2016: Consumins the Victorians

Romans and Revenues: the Toga Play in the Late Nineteenth Century.

The so-called toga play captured the imagination of the British theatregoing public from the 1880s until the almost wholesale transposition of the genre onto film in the early twentieth century, where it would evolve into the iconic classical epics of 1950s cinema. Set in the ancient world, toga drama was predominantly moralistic in tone, usually featuring the persecution of Christian characters by ancient Roman elites, or the conversion of pagan protagonists to the Christian faith. Yet the popularity and consequent financial success of these productions was also rooted in the spectacular depiction of the opulence and excess of the ancient Roman world. One production of Lew Wallace's Ben Hur (1880), for instance, cost $75,000 and toured the UK and USA for more than 60,000 performances, putting 20 live horses on the stage at Drury Lane to recreate the novel's famous chariot scene. Furthermore, the toga play spawned unprecedented merchandising opportunities, with theatregoers being sold souvenir photographs, sheet music, novelised versions of the plays, crucifixes and even replica Roman antiques after each performance. Drawing on new archival research from the Harry Ransom Centre archives, this paper will demonstrate the importance of the toga play genre as a site of cultural and economic consumerism. I will go on to suggest that this under-examined genre also constitutes an important moment in nineteenth-century receptions of antiquity, repurposing the ancient past for new audiences and to speak to very contemporary ideals and anxieties about materialism, masculinity, morality, and aesthetics.

Dickens's extraordinary literary reputation and close associations with the Victorian period can be seen in action through the lasting comparisons between his most read novel, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and a now obscure play by the writer Watts Phillips: The Dead Heart (1859). While the facts surrounding any deliberate act of plagiarism between these two works have been critically discussed, the treatment of the subject by the popular presses that continued decades after the issue arose has been neglected. Using the motif of doubling that features prominently in A Tale of Two Cities, this article will explore how The Dead Heart became inextricably linked to Dickens's more famous novel, despite its own contemporary acclaim. Such resemblances were unlikely to be resolved as professional writers had more pressing concerns than partial resemblances to other works, with unlicensed international publications leading to a severe loss of revenue. Coincidental timing and a hierarchical, reputation-obsessed society trapped one text in the other's shadow, demonstrating a harmful tendency for works to be continually compared at the expense of exploring what led to such common ground.

Drama played an important but under-recognized role in the dynamic counterculture of Chartism, the working-class protest movement for political rights. Making use of a wide range of theatrical genres, the Chartists staged amateur productions in their own associations and held frequent benefits in many of London’s largest working-class theaters. They recontextualized an array of published plays and produced such original works as John Watkins’s John Frost, a Chartist Play (1841) and reenactments of the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet’s 1803 trial. Within Chartism, drama exemplified a form of collaborative labor that advanced claims about the capacity of working-class people to imagine and create alternative social formations. It also functioned as a means of debating the most pressing issues that the Chartists faced, including the potential and limits of political violence. Whereas Chartist poetry commonly shied away from endorsing “physical force,” on stage Chartists instantiated revolutionary crowds and enacted the threat of governmental reprisal.

Abstract
Thomas William Robertson (1829-1871), who is a Victorian playwright, made use of melodramatic techniques in his plays just like his contemporaries. The basic aim in melodramatic plays, which are marked by a tight plot structure, exaggerated characters and sensational events, is undoubtedly to move audience members emotionally. As an inevitable result of this aim, most playwrights attempted to make audiences be affected by the events in the play rather than showing an effort to reflect the realities of their time. Although in his plays Robertson embraced most of the techniques mentioned, he possessed a significant characteristic which differentiated him from most of his contemporaries; Robertson went beyond his time’s dramatic conventions and added realist and naturalist elements in his plays. In this respect, it can be said that Robertson’s plays carried the quality of being a bridge between Victorian theatre and realist theatre. The aim of this study is to investigate Robertson’s theatre career and the novelties he brought to Victorian theatre and to show how and to what extent he succeeded in being a precursor of British Realist Theatre in his play Caste written by the playwright in 1861.
Keywords: T. W. Robertson, Caste, Victorian theatre, melodramatic plays, British realist theatre

A fresh and intimate portrait of Queen Victoria 'at the play'. Through Victoria's diary, artwork and correspondence, we see her as enraptured spectator, bountiful patron and tyrannical director of private theatricals. At times, she appears formidable. More frequently she is impudent, high-spirited and unruly; a woman who delights in gory melodramas and circus acts. 'Queen Victoria and the Theatre of Her Age' gives readers a deeply personal account of her lifelong devotion to the stage. It will appeal to anyone interested in monarchy's place in popular culture

From the fussy and disordered rocaille of the neo-Louis XV style to the swirling and luxuriant ‘modern style’, lustful and deviant women on the theatrical stage in mid- to late nineteenth-century London and Paris merge with the materiality around them: they wear lavish dresses, and perform on sets crowded with furniture, trinkets, baubles, and ostentatious objects. In both Le Demi-monde (1851) and in Les Demi-vierges (1900), breaking the seemly decorum of social gender roles is materialised by flashy interiors according to the latest excessive fashion. Moreover, the dazzlingly overdressed women interact with the proliferating objects of their nouveau riche interiors, invading rooms that are not usually dedicated to them: living rooms, lounges, smoking rooms. Their social involvement is thereby spoofed, caricatured, and reduced to a failed attempt to mimic the high class, as well as the men who rejected them. The stereotype of a decadent materialism is emphasised through the xenophobic scope: in London, representations of French women's interiors in vaudeville or musical comedies go hand in hand with allusions to prostitution and an immoderate luxury taste. On the other hand, in Paris, the ‘modern-style’ or the ‘decadent costume’ can be associated with the Aesthetes from the other side of the Channel. Foreign, excessive and feminine, scenery and dress intertwined to create the material environment of decadence on stage: an eccentric behaviour both condemned and displayed as an appealing consumable product for both women and men of the audience.

Nearly all residents of England and its colonies between 1860 and 1914 were active theatergoers, and many participated in the amateur theatricals that defined late Victorian life. The Victorian theater was not an abstract figuration of the world as a stage, but a media system enmeshed in mass lived experience that fulfilled in actuality the concept of a theatergoing nation. Everyone’s Theater turns to local history, the words of everyday Victorians found in their diaries and production records, to recover this lost chapter of theater history in which amateur drama domesticates the stage. Professional actors and playwrights struggled to make their productions compatible with ideas and techniques that could be safely reproduced in the home—and in amateur performances from Canada to India. This became the first true English national theater: a society whose myriad classes found common ground in theatrical display. Everyone’s Theater provides new ways to extend Victorian literature into the dimension of voice, sound, and embodiment, and to appreciate the pleasures of Victorian theatricality.

The influence of French literature on British theatrical productions of the second half of the nineteenth century has been a focus for Victorian theatre studies since Stephen Stanton’s work in the 1950s. However, the visual aspect of this influence is only rarely discussed; when it is, it tends to be with reference to the issue of gestural performance. For instance, scholars refer to Henry Irving’s observation after a visit of the Comédie-Française in London that ‘the pictures they produced went straight to the heart and needed no language for those of us who could not master French’. Yet Irving's comments could also be understood as acknowledgment of the art of staging. In the frame of constant artistic exchanges between the two countries, this paper considers how stage directors and artists interpreted the contemporary French visual environment through stage decor. For some plays, like those of Emile Augier or Victorien Sardou, the existing Parisian stage sets could have been copied or reinterpreted for the British audience. By contrast, other plays inspired by other French literary forms, like Alexandre Dumas’ novels, were fully-fledged British visual creations. How did British scene painters represent French interiors? What were their references? How did French theatre import decorative forms in England? Through the visuality and the materiality of various British plays created either ex nihilo or imported from France, the study aims to analyse the cultural transfer of decorative forms between Paris and London.

Anna Cora Mowatt’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Mimic Life: or Before and Behind the Curtain (1855), details the fate of an actress playing Ophelia who finally succumbs to the madness of her character, her role on stage merging with her life offstage. Exploiting the frequently implied connection between actresses and emotional instability, Mowatt’s text conflates the female experience of madness with theatricality and spectacle. Troubling the boundary between playing and embodying madness, A Mimic Life appears to call into question the division between authentic and inauthentic emotional states: can one become mad through the performance or faking of certain emotions? By the latter half the nineteenth century, the trope a woman driven mad by a life on the stage provided popular fiction with one of its most reliably sensational narratives. Charting the appearance of mentally afflicted actresses in several works of Victorian fiction—with primary focus given to George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife (1885) and Lillian Spencer’s Star Crossed: The Life and Love of an Actress (1888)—my paper will assess the role of the emotionally fluid actress in forming and disrupting notions of selfhood in the period. Expanding on Cary M. Mazer’s contention that, throughout the nineteenth century there existed, ‘a genuine fear of a woman actually acting…of being corrupted by the very transgressive act of becoming someone else, of finding within herself other selves to become’, my paper will consider the theatre, the popular novel and the asylum as comparable emotional spaces, engaged in a dialogue over these dangerous ‘other selves’ and their potential to splinter the unified or authentic self.

'Astley's has altered for the better - we have changed for the worse. Our histrionic taste is gone, and with shame we confess, that we are far more delighted and amused with the audience, than with the pageantry we once so highly appreciated.' Dickens' burning passion for theatre has often been overlooked by fans of his novels. A keen playwright and actor, he staged performances for which he oversaw every detail, and personally adapted many of his own fictional works. As a consummate self-publicist, he also undertook numerous stage tours and public readings of his own work. For Dickens, and for large swathes of Victorian society, theatre was a way of life and a hub of community: audience and performers would swell out onto the streets and into nearby drinking establishments after each show. This collection is a compelling and representative snapshot of Victorian theatre from one of the age's greatest storytellers. On Theatre draws on a variety of sources, both fictional and journalistic.

While analysis of the figure of the “typewriter girl” abounds in literary scholarship, few have yet taken the real typewriting women, those individuals involved in the production of literature, as serious subjects of literary study. This article focuses on one such typist, Ethel Kate Dickens (1864–1936), in an examination of the types of intellectual and social work that constituted her literary-adjacent career. Ethel Dickens was not only a representative “independent literary typist” at the turn of the twentieth century, she was also the granddaughter of the “inimitable” Charles Dickens, a business owner, and a playwright; she typed for G. B. Shaw, J. M. Barrie, and other notables. Leveraging evidence that includes Barrie's “The Twelve Pound Look,” archival letters, historic typewriting manuals, and a wide array of periodicals, I argue that reevaluating her work as specifically literary labor recuperates significant processes that are frequently omitted from official accounts of literary history. Recovering the interpretive and transformative processes of Ethel Kate Dickens's professional literary copying thus expands what it might mean to make and experience literature, and to have literary value, beyond the persistent paradigms of “originality” that continue to structure literary studies today.
Access the full text of the article here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/victorian-literature-and-culture/article/interpreting-the-labor-and-legacy-of-the-independent-literary-typist-or-the-typing-of-ethel-kate-dickens/60D6EF35C54148AC415E7492ED0D1BE3/share/1370cb44a2fde49bb171a6b62f9f63023c7f2162

Summarising the primary observations of each preceding chapter, this concluding chapter answers the founding premise girding this thesis. Written, literary texts such as travelogues, reports, and novels were important sources of metropolitan familiarisation and cultural contact, but for a society of disproportionate literacy such as Victorian Britain it is important to remember that visuality and corporeality played a much more impactful role in informing notions and stereotypes of cultural selfhood. Britons’ imagination of India inevitably aestheticized—Orientalised—it in predictably racial and cultural terms, but their conceptions of the subcontinent were nonetheless informed crucially by a growing corpus of ethnographic knowledge and a nascent yet exponential commodity culture. The chapter argues that the resultant accessibility to India did not translate into greater accuracy in its depictions because the kind of realism at play in novelistic texts—and on the theatrical stage—chose to foreground the just legitimacy of British rule in the subcontinent. Apart from written texts, metropolitan Britons were exposed to a plethora of avenues which rendered colonial dominions such as India tangibly familiar—to see, to touch, to smell, to eat—on a regular, even daily, basis. As close textual analysis of the primary texts under consideration demonstrates, the affective charge of this contact in terms of its material footprint is what lent a ready and easy intimacy—known, yet not experienced—to metropolitan notions of India throughout this period.

This chapter will rethink the nature and scope of sources of cultural contact between metropole and colony in Victorian Britain. It will prioritize the materiality of merchandise as a key constituent in the discursive construction of India in the realm of popular representation. It will also define this notion of the popular, covering in its ambit not just literary texts across the genres of adventure and travel writing but also theatre and scientific and industrial fairs and exhibitions.

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"Ellen Terry (1847–1928) was one of the most memorable performers on the British stage and she inspired some of the greatest artists of her day. But the familiarity of Terry to the world of the nineteenth-century theatre may to some extent have obscured some of the more contradictory and modern aspects of her approach to her work and life.

The archival repositories on Ellen Terry are numerous and widespread. This physical obstacle, together with the fact of her prolific epistolary output and the hitherto uncatalogued state of her own archive, has rendered many questions frustratingly unanswered. This collection of essays tackles some of these challenges and explores the spheres of influence of the Victorian actress. Established experts and new researchers drawn from an international field, reassess the performances and cultural significance of Ellen Terry, her daughter Edith Craig (1869–1947) and her son Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), as well as Bram Stoker, Lewis Carroll and some less familiar figures.

1 Ellen Terry and Her Circle: Formal Introductions and Informal Encounters – Katharine Cockin

Part One: Ellen Terry's Influences on others

2 Introduction: Ellen Terry’s Lost Lives – Nina Auerbach

3 Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and the Lyceum’s Vampires – Catherine Wynne

4 Ellen Terry and G F Watts, 'Blasted with Ecstasy' – Veronica Franklin Gould

5 The Burden of Eternal Youth: Ellen Terry and The Mistress of the Robes – Jenny Bloodworth

6 Suffrage and Shakespeare: Speaking like a Citizen – Katherine E Kelly

Part Two: Family influences

7 Introduction: Edward Gordon Craig: Prophet or Charlatan? – Michael Holroyd

8 E W G and E G C: Father and Son – Mike Walton

9 In the Looking-Glass: Lewis Carroll's Reflections on Victorian Actresses – Richard Foulkes

10 Edith Craig’s staging of Claudel in the European context of art theatre – Roberta Gandolfi

11 Velona Pilcher – Charlotte Purkis

12 Ellen Terry: Preserving the Relics and Creating the Brand – Katharine Cockin

13 Describing the Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Archive – Julian Halliwell and Katharine Cockin"