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Imagining realism: Strategies for reform in the late-Victorian and Edwardian drama of the West End
Abstract
In the period 1890-1914, such playwrights as G. B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Harley Granville Barker, Henry Arthur Jones, and Elizabeth Robins led a movement to revive the drama as an intellectual art: these playwrights sought to create a theater that could treat social and political issues and themes hitherto banned from (or limited in treatment on) the public stage while at the same time retaining the theater's hold over a popular audience. In the case of Jones, Wilde, and Shaw, each playwright would revise his early style to create plays that had strong ties to more traditional popular dramas but which nonetheless offered a critique of those older, expected forms. Despite the severe limitations in the theater, dramatists had room for experimentation in the relation of genre to the mise en scene. The nineteenth-century theater had been notable for its preference for "fantasy" genres, such as melodrama and farcical comedy; at the same time, however, the audience maintained an appetite for realism in the staging of plays. It is in this seeming opposition of dramatic form and theatrical realization, the mechanistic and fantastic versus the hyper-real, that the innovators of this period could find a way to change the older drama while working within it. Victorian stage "realism" was in fact carefully contained within generic structures that artificially "solved" social problems depicted in the plays. Wilde, Jones, and Shaw would all manipulate conventions of genre and scenic effect in order to make overt the problem of defining the "real" in the theater. On another front, their critical and theoretical writings analyzed this troublesome connection between the worlds on-and off-stage, and were intended to change the way audiences viewed plays by providing a critical "frame." The Edwardian playwrights also faced the problem of enforced generic continuity, and some of them, particularly St. John Hankin, Harley Granville Barker, and John Galsworthy, would use the continuing popularity of realism to undermine melodramatic structure. Often the settings of their plays, in their mannered distortion of traditional representative scenes, alter the desires of the audience for generic conformity.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Theater
Recommended Citation
Holder, Heidi Joan-Marie, "Imagining realism: Strategies for reform in the late-Victorian and Edwardian drama of the West End" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9329627.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9329627