Book contents
1 - Breaking through the darkness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
The time has come when a change may be produced in the destinies of the stage as complete as that in a nation bursting from slavery to freedom. The patronage of the drama by her majesty at Court was the first streak of welcome light breaking through the darkness of the dramatic horizon. The bright dawn is already advancing; and if the profession be but true to itself, we may live to see the sun of prosperity shedding its noon-tide glories on the British Stage.
The Court Theatre and Royal Dramatic Record of Performances at Windsor (1849)The attempt to rescue British Drama from the theatre's rowdy spectacle began a few months before Princess Victoria became Queen. By the time the Empress died, the theatre itself had grown respectable and a drama of ideas, adapted (more or less) to middle-class taste, had its place in that respectability. For without the approbation of the box-office, no dramatist, however independent and open-minded, could make his mark. Until theatre buildings and actor-managers became fashionable enough to attract the sort of audience which might, for whatever reason, support a serious drama, ‘the worst and deadliest enemy of the English drama [was] – the English theatre’. Even by the mid nineties, when theatres had become safely domestic and actors were gentlemen and ladies, a mind like Shaw's was prisoner to a manager's idea of popular taste.
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- The Making of Victorian Drama , pp. 1 - 29Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991