A. W. Pinero and the Court Farces

Abstract

W. D. Dunkel, in his critical biography of Pinero in 1941, writes of how Pinero won fame and fortune in the period 1885 to 1891, with a dozen plays, many of them farces, and then revealingly he goes on to say,

but had he quit in 1891, at the age of 36, there would have been no justification to write a book about him…. For to this point in his career, he had not written for posterity; he was only a remarkably successful writer for the commercial theatre.¹

Dunkel’s observation reflects accurately enough the opinion of Pinero’s contemporaries: thus a critic, reviewing Dandy Dick after the first night in 1887, praised it highly, but went on to reflect,

the pity of it is, that it is bound to be so ephemeral; for it is as certain as anything can be that your Magistrates and Schoolmistresses and Dandy Dicks will never be heard of again when their first popularity is exhausted. They are for the moment and the moment only. Plays like The Squire (a tragedy) may live and tell another age about Pinero and his style; but a Dandy Dick will be unrecognisable.²