Victorian drama 1837-1901

VICTORIAN DRAMA  1837-1901

The Victorian Age witnessed the emergence of "show business", that is playwriting, staging and acting on a commercial basis, and the "star system", great actors in rich costumes and spectacular acting, who became the favourites of the audiences and were paid high sums of money.

Many theatres were rebuilt or refurbished with technological innovations such as gas or electric lighting, stage machinery, authentic props, spectacle (chariot races, for instance), backcloths by artists of reputation (creating a three-dimensional setting), music. Here tickets were expensive. The general effect was an illusion of reality, which the front curtain enhanced as it opened on a "real-life scene". Victorian drama was more visual than aural (as it had been in Elizabethan times).

The audience was mainly the middle class, "perfectly commonplace people" and audience demand was for entertainment and relaxation. They enjoyed the so-called "well-made plays" (A form of French theatre developed in the 1800s. EugËne Scribe and Victorien Sardou popularized it. The well-made play involves secrets and timely arrivals of surprise characters and sudden twists in plot introduced by external threats.) or the classics.

It was a period of intense playwriting (the list of plays written from 1800 to 1900 runs to 1,000 pages) but playwrights did not produce "risky plays" and Shakespearean works were bowdlerized, that is vulgar or gross scenes were cut out.

The most popular genres among the lower classes were farce and MELODRAMA. Originally, melodrama was a play in which dialogue had a musical accompaniment. In Victorian theatre, melodramas were usually concerned with the sufferings of the innocent at the hands of the wicked, who were usually vanquished by the end of the play after a series of fearsome adventures involving sensational risks. In this period there were also the so-called domestic melodramas expressing sympathy for the socially, economically or sexually oppressed.

In the second half of the century, drama acquired higher cultural standing and social respectability thanks to the rising status of actors and dramatists, to a wider critical reputation and a wider reading audience for play texts. British drama also underwent European influences: from France (Scribe and Becque), from Germany (Hauptman and Wedekind), from Italy (Giacosa, Verga, D'Annunzio), from Russia (Chekhov), from Sweden (Strindberg), from Norway (Ibsen).

The greatest English playwrights in the 1890s were H.A.Jones, Sir Arthur W. Pinero (social drama), Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw (who wrote "problem plays", comedies dealing with the social issues of his time, attacking evils, institutions and hypocrisy in a witty language).

The Aesthetic Movement

The aesthetic movement developed in the universities and in the intellectual circles in the last decades of the 19th century.

Originating in France with the theories of Teophile Gautier it reflected the sense of frustration of the artist and their reaction against the materialism of society.

The word comes from a Greek word which means to perceive, or to feel. In fact the Aesthetic mood stresses sensations as the main source of art. The task of the artist is first of all to feel sensations and live 'aesthetically'and then to make the reader feel these sensations. The aesthetic message was to live one's life as a work of art, that is to say to feel all kinds of sensations. The finest sensations were to be found in art. The founder of the English Aesthetic Movement was Walter Pater (1839-1894) and its leading exponent was Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). These artists were profoundly influenced by the French 'Symbolists' poets and by the ideas of Walter Pater on the criticism of art. The movement is important because it represented a complete break with the ideas which had been fundamental to Victorian literature; moreover several of its doctrines strongly influenced the writers and critics of the 20th century. This movement was generally considered decadent; it wanted to move art away from its traditional role as teacher and moral guide. Art had its own reason and purpose, the creation of Beauty. Art for art's sake was the motto of Aesthetic Movement which stressed sensations as the main source of art. The 'art for art's sake' theory and practice led the Aesthetic movement to a kind of 'spiritual and moral perversity'. Wilde, who represents the entire English Aesthetic Movement, with his work The Picture of Dorian Gray he meant to provoke and shock.