Abstract
“Pinero’s Old-Fashioned Playgoer” focuses on Arthur Wing Pinero’s Society play The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893). Pinero, I argue, responds to Ibsen’s challenge to idealized conventional marriage by depicting and ultimately dismissing alternative forms of union—in particular, an unconventional marriage that endeavors to level the sexual double standard. Whereas Ibsen and Shaw criticize the melodramatic behaviors and assumptions that they associate with traditional marriage relationships, Pinero implies that attempts to circumvent or discard these conventions are likely to prove even more theatrical and less successful.
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Notes
- 1.
Shaw’s more acrid reviews of Pinero were carefully laced with disclaimers, as, for example, in his conclusion on The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith : “Many passages of the play, of course, have all the qualities which have gained Mr. Pinero his position as a dramatist; but I shall not dwell on them, as, to tell the truth, I disliked the play so much that nothing would induce me to say anything good of it” (TN1, 65).
- 2.
See, for example, Susan L. Carlson, “Two Genres and Their Women: The Problem Play and the Comedy of Manners in the Edwardian Theatre”; Heather Anne Wozniak, “The Play with a Past: Arthur Wing Pinero’s New Drama”; and Rudolf Weiss, “‘Our Little Parish of St. James’s’: Centrality, Orthodoxy and Self-Reflexivity in the 1890s London Theatre.”
- 3.
For comments on the ways in which Mrs. Linden follows and diverges from the traditional confidant role in A Doll’s House , see Chap. 2.
- 4.
In “Lady Hamilton, Nelson’s Enchantress, and the Creation of Pygmalion,” Jesse Hellman gives a fascinating account of the production and reception of Nelson’s Enchantress, discussing its importance in the relationship between Shaw and Campbell and suggesting Home’s portrayal of Lady Hamilton as a possible prototype for Eliza Doolittle.
- 5.
For details on burlesque conventions, as well as some samples of the genre, see Richard W. Schoch, Victorian Theatrical Burlesques.
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Christian, M. (2020). Pinero’s Old-Fashioned Playgoer. In: Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists. Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40639-4_4
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