ABSTRACT
The popularity of the theatre in the Victorian age cannot be overestimated. Henry James and Matthew Arnold publicly indicated that it was becoming as important a representation of contemporary civilisation as the stage had been in Hellenic society. James valued the theatre for the way it could present action as independent of authorship. It enforced the exclusion of the triple-decker novel's psychological monologue, the location of 'the muffled majesty of authorship'. It willed the absence of the author from the scene and constituted psychological realism, or as James would have had it, it provided the audience with 'the illusion of life'. He followed Ibsen, Pinero, Antoine and others in abandoning as much as possible the novel's equivalents to soliloquies. Abandoning the soliloquy's direct explanation of motivation resulted in a need to perform it as action. Indeed, deducing the motivation of desperate characters became the dramatic mainstay of Pinero's serious plots.
