Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Lights O’ London and Other Victorian Plays ed. by Michael R. Booth

1997; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1997.0017

1913-4835

John Ripley,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

her own ballads to sharpen their ironic edge, a process Stone documents by adducing manuscript evidence. With Aurora Leigh Barrett Browning’s glory shines out or fades. Stone’s last two chapters set forth a compelling account of how that innovative epic, Titanic in its time, was sunk by “broad cultural transformations” (194) at the turn of the century and by ideological contention incipient when the poet died, entering her after-life of debilitative myth. Rather than raise up Au­ rora Leigh as a woman poet’s Kunstlerroman — the feminist salvage-tactic practised ever since that submerged work was rediscovered in the 1970s— Stone envisions the poem as it was read by many through the latter half of the nineteenth century: as a work of sage discourse, a polemical, visionary “modern epic that philosophically addressed some of the most urgent issues of the age” (139). A retailored version of the Romantic prophet-poet, the Victorian sage is yet another Promethean avatar and contemporary he-man with whom Barrett Browning contended, boldly co-opting and gynocentrically subverting sage writing to make it incorporate her metaleptic “woman’s figures” (154) and to destabilize its own “authoritative stance” (138). Taking up the “key question” of Barrett Browning’s literary-historical prominence and recession, Stone tells “ ‘a story of power relations and strug­ gle’ ” (5) continuing still in the “hand-to-hand textual transmission” of her works (227). What emerges from the story is a closer view of Barrett Brown­ ing writing in a period “less repressive ... for women writers than the 1890s and the early twentieth century” (196), a view achieved in part by eman­ cipating some critical telescopes from the fixtures turning them away from Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, woman and poet. What Stone also makes clear in this fresh and vigorous reading of Barrett Browning’s unscrupulously Ro­ mantic works is the palimpsestic power of her “veritable presence.” lin d a e . m a r s h a l l / University of Guelph Michael R. Booth, ed., The Lights O ’ London and Other Victorian Plays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). xxxiii, 251. $108.00 hardcover. The addition of five nineteenth-century plays to the relatively meager acces­ sible stock is a welcome event. Michael Booth’s choices for the Oxford Drama Library edition are high-quality examples of several key genres, all stage hits of their time. Four of them have not been readily available until now. Edward Fitzball’s The Inchcape Bell, first staged in 1828, typifies the nautical melodrama (albeit with overtones of the Gothic). The hairsbreadth rescue of the Dumb Boy from pirates by Captain Taffrail and his crew and the Captain’s subsequent union with the aristocratic Amelia chauvinistically 487 celebrates Britain’s commercial and military rulership of the waves incarnate in a clutch of glamourized Jack Tars. Did You Ever Send Your Wife To Camberwell? (1846), a domestic farce by Joseph Sterling Coyne (played in Victorian Halifax as Did You Ever Send Your Wife to Dartmouth?), rings the comedic changes on missing husbands, misled spouses, and a misplaced baby. These relatively short pieces, driven by romantic spectacle and low comedy respectively, were designed as appetizers on an early nineteenthcentury playbill, which typically comprised a curtain-raiser, a mainpiece, and a pantomime, to' say nothing of miscellaneous entr’acte entertainments. Vast theatres in thrall to poor acoustics and rowdy audiences understandably privileged visual thrill over verbal finesse. The other three scripts, products of the second half of the century when theatre auditoriums assumed a less cavernous character and programs dwin­ dled to a curtain-raiser and mainpiece, reveal a marked preference for domes­ tic realism and subtler craft. George Henry Lewes’s The Game of Speculation (1851), the only modern reprint of a Lewes drama, is a telling expose of midVictorian industrial venturism — “Wood pavement — quilted pavement — salt marshes — railways— waterworks” — and an economy fueled, like our own, by debt: “[I]n these days credit is everything — credit is the wealth of commerce, the foundation of the State! If my tradesmen refuse credit, it is a proof that they have no respect for the British Constitution,” argues Hawk, the speculator (54). Lewes’s send-up of market culture and...