British drama at the turn of the 19th and 20th century

For reasons that remain mysterious, the notable dramatists in the English theatre at the turn of the 19^th and 20th centuries were almost all Irish, although Ireland until the 20^th century had no theatre of significance because Ireland was entirely an agricultural country. This period is defined by Aesthetic movement represented by Wilde which proposed art for art's sake. They believed that art existed for its own space and should not have social, moral or didactic function. It represents the same tendencies ad decadence in France. 

OSCAR WILDE was a late Victorian playwright and novelist who came from a sophisticated high-profile Irish family but spend his creative years in London. He was a member of Aesthetic movement but did not always followed it because his work has critical function, targeting corruption of Victorian society. He was known for his witty dialogues and the ironic thing was that even though he criticized upper-classes, his audience were these people.

He was popular, flamboyant and one of the greatest celebrities of his time. However, after being accused of homosexuality (in fact, he was rather bisexual) and spending two years in prison, he died mentally and physically broken in Paris in poverty. The accusation ruined his reputation because in Victorian period reputation was everything. However, maybe his homosexuality was only a rebellion to Victorian morality. Wilde was a symbol of revolt, leading figure of decadence.

Except for being a playwright he was also a novelist so we can classify him into Victorian prose! His best known novel is The Picture of Dorian Gray with fantasy elements and Happy Prince and Other Stories which is a fairytale collection for children with Happy Prince being about a rich statue of prince but he is not happy because he sees poor people. He orders a bird to give his diamonds to the people until he is barred and shabby but finally happy inside. When winter comes, one swallow is late to make journey and dies. The statue is melted but its heart could not be melted.

Plays: Salome is a sexually open tragedy written in French and translated into English in by Wilde’s man-lover. An Ideal Husband revolves around blackmail and political corruption in addition. Lady Windermere's Fan was a biting satire on the morals of Victorian society, especially marriage.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy of manners, playing on words double meaning since “earnest” is both a name and human quality of being sincere. The theme is about putting on the mask, basically double false identity and deceiving others. The social setting is upper class – gentry that owns land but have no aristocrat blood. Set in the present London of 1895, the play opens with Algernon receiving his best friend, whom he knows as Ernest. Ernest has come from the country to propose to Algernon's cousin Gwendolen. Algernon refuses until Ernest explains why his cigarette case bears the name Jack. Ernest is forced to admit to living a double life. In the country, he has a serious attitude for his young ward Cecily and goes by the name Jack, while pretending that he must worry about a younger brother Ernest in London.

Algernon confesses a similar deception. He pretends to have an invalid friend in the country, whom he can visit whenever he wishes. Jack proposes to Gwendolen and she accepts but seems to love him very largely for his name Ernest so Jack resolves to be Ernest for her. Lady Bracknell is horrified that he was adopted after being discovered as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station and she forbids him contact with Gwendolen. Algernon wants to meet Cecily so he arrives at the country house pretending to be Ernest. She falls in love with him. Jack, meanwhile, has decided to put his double life behind him. Gwendolen arrives, she meets Cecily and each indignantly declares that she is the one engaged to Ernest so their deceptions are exposed. Lady Bracknell arrives in pursuit of her daughter. Jack refuses his consent to the marriage of his ward to Algernon until Lady Bracknell consents to his own with Gwendolen.

Then a teacher of Cecily arrives who Lady Bracknell recognises as the woman who twenty-eight years earlier was a family nursemaid that took a baby boy for a walk but never came back. The nanny explains that she had put the manuscript of a novel she was writing in the baby car and the baby in a handbag, which she had left at Victoria Station. Jack brings the very same handbag, showing that he is the lost baby, the son of Lady Bracknell's late sister and thus Algernon's older brother and suddenly eligible as a suitor for Gwendolen. Gwendolen remains firm that she can only love a man named Ernest. Lady Bracknell informs Jack that as the first-born he would have been named after his father and discovers that his father's name and hence his own real name was in fact Ernest. As the happy couples embrac: "I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of being Earnest".

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW /sho:/ was and Irish author awarded a Nobel Prize in literature. He wrote socially oriented drama on criticism of society. His writing was verbally playful and showed his brilliant use of English. He is also know was his controversial belief in superior spiritual human of future.

Arms and the Man is about a soldier who doesn’t want to fight. In Man and Superman he put a motorbike on the stage which was a shocking innovation at that time.

Saint Joan is a historical play about Joan of Arc, considered one of his best works and presents the saint Joan as a strong-minded woman of great energy and courage – Shaw was a feminist. It depicts Joan as an ordinary girl who cannot shut her mouth about her visions, not a saint. When she is visited by clergy, she claims that she is directly connected to God, she says everything she wants and treat all people, even bishops and the king, as equals. She is abomination to the clergy and, in addition, she dresses in man's armour so that soldiers would see her as their equal, not just some woman. She goes to speak with the crown prince Charles who is not respected by the court and she herself crowns him, not an archbishop. Then she gets of the English but she is accused of witchery. The inquisition wants to torture her but she just tells them everything because she hates pain. She is offered a chance to live in prison but she chooses death instead. At the stake, she asks for a cross and only an Englishman takes pity and offers a cross. Joan refuses as he could be accused as well. After burning, her heart remains, she was truly saint. However, one characters clearly does not belong into the story and appears as a ghost. He wears clothes from 1920s and informs them that she is going to be declared saint in future.

Pygmalion /pygmelien/ is a romantic play based on Ovid’s Metamorphosis, adapted into a musical My Fair Lady and a movie (1964) with Audrey Hepburn. A professor of phonetics Higgins is teaching a poor flower-seller girl Eliza Doolitle, whose father is a dustman from the London streets proper English (she speaks Cockney dialect) and tries to shape her into an upper class lady because he bet with Colonel Pickering that he can change her. The original pay is light-hearted and comedic but conveys a serious issue of British class system and linguistic labelling of people (if you are born with certain accent you are signed as a certain class). There are two things that make a language of a lady: Received Pronunciation and the mastery of small talk (weather, fashion, everybody's general health). While Eliza masters RP, she fails at small talk because she converses about her relatives.

JAMES BARRIE is the author of a famous children play Peter Pan of the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up with the characters of Peter Pan, Wendy, Captain Hook and a fairy Tinker Bell.

JOHN GALSWORTHY was an English novelist and playwright, won the Nobel Prize in literature. Although he is best known for his series about upper-class family The Forsyte Saga, he’s also a dramatist of considerable technical skill. His first play The Silver Box shows the double standard of justice as applied to the upper and lower classes. Justice is a play describing the conditions of prisoners and led to a reform of the prisons in Britain, Churchill attended the performance and abolished solitary confinements. The Mob is his reaction to the WW1 where the voice of a statesman is drowned in the madness of the war-hungry masses.

  

Irish Renaissance

Celtic Revival was a cultural movement in Ireland at the turn of the 19th and the20th century whose goal was the revival of the Celtic tradition and appreciation of Irish literature. Ireland was divided politically as well as religiously (Catholic). Ironically, people like Synge were Protestants, though, nationalists in favour of Irish independence. All Irish dramatists found platform in the Abbey Theatre established in 1904 by Lady Gregory and Yeats.

JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE /sing/ was cosmopolitan and travelled a lot so nationalists accused him of losing contact with Irish culture. His work is full of controversy which triggered hatred against him. Irish nationalists hated immorality of almost all his characters since Synge did not show his nation in positive colours since he wanted to describe lives of ordinary people as they really were.

Riders to the Sea is a simple play from the point of a view of a common family with not politics involved. Mother loses all men members of the family to the sea and women just accept it because mortals die sooner or later anyway.

The Tinker’s Wedding features Irish nomadic people and it is his only comedy. The Well of the Saints is about two ugly blind people who are persuaded by villagers that they are beautiful but when the saint cures their eyesight, they are disgusted by each other.

His best known play The Playboy of the Western World (1907) caused fighting in the theatre when it was first performed in Dublin. It can be comedy that shows absurdity as well as tragedy with theme of murder, forbidden love and isolation of people. The title implies something bigger then it is really because the west of Ireland was bigoted, the most traditional and backwards. However, he shows that even though the Irish are uneducated, their language is imaginative enough to produce a work of art. It met with outburst of anger of theatre goers who thought that this play could misinterpret Irish people because at that time Irish tried to promote themselves the best way they could so that they could create independent nation. Synge presents Irish as bunch or immoral drunks. Yeats had to defend the play and its author. The preface of this play helps to understand author´s attitude and is considered as an act of self-defence. He deliberately used a simple language of Irish peasantry in an imaginary way because he believed that language in its simplicity is also powerful, beautiful, rich and imaginative.

Christy stumbles into the tavern. He claims that he is on the run because he killed his own father. He is admired by local people because he had guts to do something big they would never have courage to do in their isolated community, plus he brings excitement into their boredom. Ladies are also drawn to him and Pegeen falls in love with him, because she is engaged to Shawn who is weak, boring, stupid and rural. Christy is a skilful storyteller and Ireland has a reputation of having excellent storytellers so his story about how he killed his father is catchy and exciting.

Eventually Christy's father, who was only wounded, tracks him to the tavern. When the townsfolk realize that Christy's father is alive, everyone says he is a liar and townspeople prepare to hang him to avoid being his accomplices. Christy's life is saved when his beaten still alive father crawls back onto the scene. At the end, Christy and his father decide to wander the world. Up to the moment of murder the father was very strong fatherly figure controlling firmly his son. Then he comes back and saves him from hanging but now Christy is the dominant one, finally taking charge of his life. Shawn suggests he and Pegeen get married and she laments her betrayal of Christy. She chose to stay with community but lost the possibility for more interesting life.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS /jejts/ (1865-1939) was born into a mixed Anglo-Irish family. His father was a famous painter and his mother introduced him into mythological stories. He attended Trinity College and became a part of an occult group Golden Dawn. He got involved with the nationalist movements which made him turn to national poetry. However, he was against violence and when the Civil War broke out, he bought a tower and hid there with his family. In 1910 upon meeting Ezra Pound, he became writing also modernist works. He was introduced to Lady Gregory who encouraged him to focus on writing drama and together founded the Abbey Theatre.

Yeats dreamt about Ireland ruled by a perfect race, a bit like Nazi’s idea, but for him it was educated nobility, not some specific race race. He fell in love with Maud Gonne, a patriotic revolutionist. He saw her as a perfect woman for the new race but he got rejected by her and her daughter as well, the end of fantasy.

Cathleen Ni Houlihan is written together with Lady Gregory and encourages young Irishmen to sacrifice their life for the heroine Cathleen, Ireland. It is based on a mythological tales of an ancient Celtic countess who saved her people from starvation by selling her soul to the Devil, a Faustian motive.

Later he met Ezra Pound who told him to study Japanese Noh drama, a symbolic type of drama that he used in his play At the Hawk’s Well. His Purgatory is even more experimental, using a bare stage and flashbacks.

  

SEAN O’CASEY (ou kejsy) was an Irish dramatist whose best-known plays are set in the time of great events in Ireland but seen from the point of view of the ordinary people. He did not romanticize Ireland, set his dramas in Dublin slums and was a committed socialist. The Shadow of a Gunman is set at the time of the Irish War of Independence and events are shown as they affect the lives of the ordinary people who suffer most from it. Juno and the Paycock is one the most regarded Irish plays, set in the Irish Civil War of 1920s. In Plough and the Stars he expresses that it is always women who suffer most from war while the men dream of becoming heroes. These three plays are known as Dublin Trilogy.

ISABELLA AUGUSTA or LADY GREGORY was a dramatist and folklorist. She wrote about mythology of Ireland and depicts Irish heroes as young, muscular, handsome and the best fighters and leaders. Gods and Fighting Men is a book retelling Irish mythology in the form of fairy tale. Together with Yeats she wrote Cathleen Ni Houlihan.