Abstract
The field of Victorian drama does not immediately suggest a catalogue of literary names. English literary criticism is hard pressed to invent even one canonical playwright from the 1830s to the 1880s, and most dramatists have been forgotten to all but performance specialists and theatre historians. For literary studies, the final decade of the nineteenth century, which saw the linguistic games of Wilde, the political comedy of Shaw, the psychological intensity of Ibsen and Elizabeth Robins, the subtle social dismantling by Pinero, and the symbolist poetics of Yeats and Maeterlinck, saw also the re-emergence of a celebrity playwright to rival that of the celebrity novelist or poet. Before this, all is silence: generic popular forms, such as melodrama, burletta and farce, that are seen not to constitute valuable literature, and an industry of anonymous, or, at best, second-rate, authors.
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Notes
Jeffrey Masten, ‘Playwrighting: Authorship and Collaboration’, A New History of Early English Drama eds D.S. Kastan and J.D. Cox (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 371.
Robert B. Patten, Charles Dickens and ‘Boz’: The Birth of the Industrial Age Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 19–20.
Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38;
Andrew Bennett, The Author (London: Routledge, 2005), 5.
Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Marysa Demoor ed., Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 15.
Jacky S. Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 38–39.
Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983);
see also M. Meisel, How Plays Work: Reading and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Anthony Jenkins, The Making of Victorian Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
Katherine Newey, Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 39.
Richard Foulkes, Victorian & Albert, Art and Love: Mr Macready and his Monarch (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2012), 7.
Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811–1846 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 161;
and see Richard Pearson, W.M. Thackeray and the Mediated Text: Writing for Periodicals in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London: Ashgate, 2000), Appendix 3.
W.M. Thackeray, Philip, The Cornhill Magazine (March 1862), V, 258 (Chapter 31).
D. J. Taylor, Thackeray (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999) 103–04.
[W.M. Thackeray], Flore et Zephyr, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, with Biographical Introductions by his Daughter, Anne Ritchie, 13 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1898–99), IX, [following p. lx].
[W.M. Thackeray], Sketches by Spec, no. 1 — Britannia Protecting the Drama (Cunningham [1840]); reproduced in Lewis Melville, The Life of William Makepeace Thackeray, 2 vols (London: Hutchinson, 1890), II, opp. 123.
‘The Revival of the Drama’, New Quarterly Magazine, XIII (January 1880), 55–66; see Newey’s discussion of the female author Isabel Hill’s attempt to save the ‘temple of the National Drama’, Covent Garden, in Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 12.
Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660–1900, Vol. 5: Late Nineteenth Century Drama second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 1.
Michael Booth ed., T.W. Robertson: Six Plays (Ashover: Amber Lane Press, 1980), xxii.
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Pearson, R. (2015). Introduction: legitimacy and playwriting. In: Victorian Writers and the Stage. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137504685_1
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