ABSTRACT
In considering the Victorian theatre, we are faced with a paradox. The nineteenth century was one of the most active, innovative, and playful periods in the history of British theatre. Yet the theatre – its practices, its politics, its aesthetics – was everywhere spoken against. Until the knighthood presented to Henry Irving in 1895, which symbolised the final acceptance of the actor into the ranks of ‘gentleman’ (significantly no actress was made a dame until 1918), the theatre was an embattled profession, struggling for recognition. Yet, as late as 1898, Clement Scott – a man of the theatre through and through – could declare: ‘It is really impossible for a woman to remain pure who adopts the stage as a profession’, encapsulating one significant aspect of Victorian anxieties about the theatre: the role of women within it. As Scott’s intemperate comment suggests, public discussions of the theatre as art, or entertainment, or work, more often focused on its immorality and excess than its achievements. Throughout the period there was a continuing ambivalence about the cultural and moral values of pleasure, entertainment, and enjoyment. But Victorian culture revelled in its theatrical and performative elements, in public ceremony and private entertainments. The theatre as an industry flourished as London’s West End became the theatrical capital of the world (Davis and Emeljanow 2001: 167), and regular international tours established British actors as pioneers of the globalisation of culture. This contradiction is never happily resolved in the period, and scholarship on the Victorian theatre has tended to replicate this anti-theatrical ambivalence.
