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Play Publication, Readers, and the "Decline" of Victorian Drama

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bh.1999.0002

1529-1499

Daniel Barrett,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Play Publication, Readers, and the "Decline" of Victorian Drama Daniel Barrett (bio) On entering the auditorium of Terry's Theatre in London on 24 October 1891, playgoers attending the premiere of Arthur Wing Pinero's The Times received a revolutionary document: the text of the play. Pinero had arranged with the publisher, William Heinemann, to print a small, handsome reading edition of his comedy to coincide with its initial performance—the first revival of this practice, Pinero noted, since Browning's A Blot in the 'Scutcheon in 1843. 1 In his introduction, Pinero drew a colorful contrast between the drama preserved in manuscripts and acting editions throughout much of the nineteenth century and his own bookish play: It will hardly be denied that there exists in certain places the impression that an English play is a haphazard concoction of the author, the actor, and the manager; that the manuscript of a drama, could it ever be dragged, soiled and dog-eared, from the prompter's shelf, would reveal itself as a dissolute-looking, formless thing, mercilessly scarred by the managerial blue pencil and illuminated by those innumerable interpolations with which the desperate actors have helped to lift the poor material into temporary, unhealthy popularity. The publication of plays concurrently with their stage-production, in the exact shape—save for the excision of technical stage-directions—in which they have left the author's hands, can hardly fail, therefore, to be of some value to the English theatre at large. 2 Pinero's modest words belie his audacity in offering The Times not only as a performance to be witnessed, but as a literary work to be read. In doing [End Page 173] so, he defied a generally held belief that nineteenth-century English drama had declined in quality, approximately from the end of the previous century and Sheridan's last plays to the New Drama of Pinero's own time, and was unworthy of such pretensions. This comfortable assumption has been vigorously challenged, notably by Michael R. Booth, who has argued that, whatever the drama lacked in literary merit, the theater it supported featured splendid acting, artistic scenery, thrilling spectacles, and technical innovations in staging and lighting that laid the groundwork for the modern theater. 3 But in one sense, the old charge of the "decline of the drama" is perfectly correct, although it has attracted little scholarly attention. For the better part of the nineteenth century, and particularly the fifty-year period between the first publication of the collected works of James Sheridan Knowles and Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1841 and the publication of The Times in 1891, people stopped reading plays and playwrights stopped writing for readers, with profound consequences for the drama during that time and its reputation in our own. This phenomenon is all the more surprising because it occurred during the nineteenth century, when the print medium otherwise flourished. As Richard D. Altick has written, "Never before in English history had so many people read so much." 4 The rapid growth in population in England and Wales, from 8.9 million to 32.5 million during the century, was accompanied by the development and proliferation of the printing press, from the old wooden presses of the eighteenth century that could produce up to one hundred impressions an hour to the power presses of the mid-nineteenth century that could print twelve thousand sheets in the same amount of time. Meanwhile, with the increase in mass education, the number of potential readers exploded, by one estimate, from about 1.5 million in 1780 to 7–8 million in 1830. 5 Why, then, did the readership for plays decrease drastically during this period? Did the market somehow dry up, or did publishers turn to more lucrative forms of literature, or did the writers themselves no longer compose dramas worth reading? Most important, how did playwrights, critics, and the general public regard contemporary English drama during a time when readers were favored with novels, poems, essays, and short stories of the highest literary merit—in other words, every other written art form except the drama? In the two hundred years prior to 1800, dramatic authors had regularly published...