of English comedy. Something in Sheridan’s style, but quite without his brilliancy, is the most successful play[1] of the unfortunate General Burgoyne. R. Cumberland, who too consciously endeavoured to excel both in sentimental morality and in comic characterization, in which he was devoid of depth, closes the list of authors of higher pretensions who wrote for the theatre.[2] Like him, Mrs Cowley[3] (“Anna Matilda”), T. Holcroft,[4] and G. Colman the younger,[5] all writers of popular comedies, as well as the prolific J. O’Keefe (1746–1833), who contributed to nearly every species of the comic drama, survived into the 19th century. To an earlier date belong the favourite burlesques of O’Keefe’s countryman K. O’Hara[6] (d. 1782), good examples of a species the further history of which may be left aside. In the hands of at least one later writer, J. R. Planché, it proved capable of satisfying a more refined taste than his successors have habitually consulted.
The decline of dramatic composition of the higher class, perceptible in the history of the English theatre about the beginning of the 19th century, was justly attributed by Sir Walter Scott to the wearing out of the French model that had been so long wrought upon; but when he asserted that the new impulse The English drama of the 19th century.which was sought in the dramatic literature of Germany was derived from some of its worst, instead of from its noblest, productions—from Kotzebue rather than from Lessing, Schiller and Goethe—he showed a very imperfect acquaintance with a complicated literary movement which was obliquely reflected in the stage-plays of Iffland and his contemporaries. The change which was coming over English literature was in truth of a wider and deeper nature than it was possible for even one of its chief representatives to perceive. As that literature freed itself from the fetters so long worn by it as indispensable ornaments, and threw aside the veil which had so long obscured both the full glory of its past and the lofty capabilities of its future, it could not resort except tentatively to a form which like the dramatic is bound by a hundred bonds to the life of the age itself. Soon, the poems with which Scott and Byron, and the unrivalled prose fictions with which Scott, both satisfied and stimulated the imaginative demands of the public, diverted the attention of the cultivated classes from dramatic literature, which was unable to escape, with the light foot of verse or prose fiction, into “the new, the romantic land.” New themes, new ideas, new forms occupied a new generation of writers and readers; nor did the drama readily lend itself as a vessel into which to pour so many fermenting elements. In Byron the impressions produced upon a mind not less open to impulses from without than subjective in its way of recasting them, called forth a series of dramatic attempts betraying a more or less wilful ignorance of the demands of dramatic compositions; his beautiful Manfred, partly suggested by Goethe’s Faust, and his powerful Cain, have but the form of plays; his tragedies on Italian historical subjects show some resemblance in their political rhetoric to the contemporary works of Alfieri; his Sardanapalus, autobiographically interesting, fails to meet the demands of the stage; his Werner (of which the authorship has been ascribed to the duchess of Devonshire) is a hastily dramatized sensation novel. To Coleridge (1772–1834), who gave to English literature a splendidly loose translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein, the same poet’s Robbers (to which Wordsworth’s only dramatic attempt, the Borderers, is likewise indebted) had probably suggested the subject of his tragedy of Osorio, afterwards acted under the title of Remorse. Far superior to this is his later drama of Zapolya, a genuine homage to Shakespeare, out of the themes of two of whose plays it is gracefully woven. Scott, who in his earlier days had translated Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, gained no reputation by his own dramatic compositions. W. S. Landor, apart from those Imaginary Conversations upon which he best loved to expend powers of observation and characterization such as have been given to few playwrights, cast in a formally dramatic mould studies of character of which the value is far from being confined to their wealth in beauties of detail. Of these the magnificent, but in construction altogether undramatic, Count Julian, is the most noteworthy. Shelley’s The Cenci, on the other hand, is not only a poem of great beauty, but a drama of true power, abnormally revolting indeed in theme, but singularly pure and delicate in treatment. A humbler niche in the temple of dramatic literature belongs to some of the plays of C. R. Maturin,[7] Sir T. N. Talfourd,[8] and Dean Milman.[9]
Divorced, except for passing moments, from the stage, English dramatic literature could during much the greater part of the 19th century hardly be regarded as a connected national growth; though, already in the last decades of the Victorian age, the revival of public interest in the theatre co-operated with a gradual change in poetic taste to awaken the hope of a future living reunion. Among English poets who lived in this period, Sir Henry Taylor probably approached nearest to the objective treatment and the amplitude of style characteristic of the Elizabethan drama.[10] R. H. Horne, long an almost solitary survivor of the romantic school, was able in at least one memorable dramatic attempt to revive something of the early Elizabethan spirit.[11] Of the chief poets of the age, Tennyson only in his later years addressed himself to a form of composition little suited to his genius, though the very fact of the homage paid by him to the national forms of the historic drama and of romantic comedy could not fail to ennoble the contemporary stage.[12] Matthew Arnold’s stately revival of the traditions of classical tragedy proper, on the other hand, deliberately excluded itself from any such contact;[13] while Longfellow’s refined literary culture and graceful facility of form made ready use of a quasi-dramatic medieval vesture.[14] William Morris’s single “morality,” too, cannot be regarded as a contribution to dramatic literature proper.[15] Of very different importance are the excursions into dramatic composition of Robert Browning, whose place in the living inheritance of the English drama has in one instance at least been not unsuccessfully vindicated by a later age, and some of whose greatest gifts are beyond a doubt displayed in his dramatic work;[16] and the sustained endeavours of A. C. Swinburne, after adding a flower of exquisite beauty to the wreath which the lovers of the Attic muse have laid at her feet, to enrich the national historic drama by a trilogy instinct with the ardent eloquence of passion.[17] Until a date too near the times in which we live to admit of its being fixed with precision, most of the English writers who sought to preserve a connexion between their dramatic productions and the demands of the stage addressed themselves to the theatrical rather than the literary public—for the distinction, in those times at all events, was by no means without a difference. The modestly simple and judiciously concentrated efforts of Joanna Baillie deserve a respectful remembrance in the records of literature as well as of the stage, though the day has passed when the theory which suggested her Plays on the Passions could find acceptance among critics, or her exemplifications of it satisfy the demands of playgoers. Sheridan Knowles, on the other hand, composed his conventional semblances of genuine tragedy and comedy with a thorough knowledge of stage effect, and some of them can hardly yet be said to have vanished from the stage.[18] The first Lord Lytton, though his plays were for the most part of a lighter texture, showed even more artificiality of sentiment in their conception and execution; but the romantic touch which he imparted to at least one of them accounts for its long-lived popularity. Among later Victorian playwrights T. W. Robertson brought back a breath of naturalness into the acted comic drama; Tom Taylor, rivalling Lope in fertility, made little pretence to original invention, but adapted with an instinct that rarely failed him, and materially helped to keep the theatrical diversions of his
- ↑ The Heiress.
- ↑ The West Indian; The Jew.
- ↑ The Belle’s Stratagem; A Bold Stroke for a Husband, &c.
- ↑ The Road to Ruin, &c.
- ↑ John Bull; The Heir at Law, &c.
- ↑ Midas; The Golden Pippin.
- ↑ Bertram.
- ↑ Ion.
- ↑ Fazio.
- ↑ Philip van Artevelde.
- ↑ The Death of Marlowe.
- ↑ Becket; The Cup.
- ↑ Merope.
- ↑ The Golden Legend.
- ↑ Love is Enough.
- ↑ Strafford; The Blot on the Scutcheon.
- ↑ Atalanta in Calydon; Bothwell; Chastelard; Mary Stuart.
- ↑ Virginius; The Hunchback.
