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New theatres were constructed, and a broader repertoire of genres was offered to spectators flocking to London thanks to improved transportation systems. The liberalisation of theatres in 1843 brought forth new productions that answered to the demands of an increasingly heterogeneous audience.
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Beyond the wider framework of the protectionism of English theatre, the phenomenon is symptomatic of an age of cultural permeability in which the very public interest in Frenchness should not be undermined. It is precisely this necessity to reinstate a collective sense of a national identity within the theatre industry that should serve the current critic as a starting point.ĤTraditionally, literary critics have explained the massive importation of French plays and actors in terms of economic and aesthetic dependency. The alleged inevitable impoverishment of the genre only made the assimilation of foreign models (namely the French) all the more viable, thus ultimately diluting any semblance of national identity associated to the theatre. Contributing to such creative barrenness was the willpower to educate and elevate the taste of the public, thus helplessly handcuffing theatre to class-based criteria. As Katherine Newey asserts, ‘the Victorian theatre was innovative, adaptative and, most of all, contemporary’ (126).ģIn line with Newey’s observation, we may say that the stigmas on Victorian theatre were the result of the persistence in representing conventional, classical forms such as the five-act tragedy or the three-act high comedy, themselves reminiscent of the palmy days of Jacobean theatre and of eighteenth-century drama. Dramatic texts absorbed and responded to the issues troubling and attracting the collectivity-as metaphorical thermometers of sorts, they measured the concerns and the spirit of civil masses. Encrypted within its structures and its organic developments lies a scenario that reveals the dynamics of the nineteenth-century entertainment industry, of the underlying entrepreneurship, and of a growing public in search of new dramatic formulas. However, a number of current analyses have challenged such notions, suggesting instead that far from being eclipsed by the novel, the short story or poetry, Victorian theatre merits a fairer, more objective consideration.
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Indeed, the recommendations made by the 1832 Select Committee to revitalize the British theatre are proof of the period’s own awareness of an impending decline in its drama. On ne desserre sa chaîne et on ne lui donne à manger que quand il a fini sa lugubre tâche’ (41).ĢThe most recent scholarly approaches to the Victorian theatre have confronted the somewhat detrimental image perpetuated by traditional literary histories, according to which the drama of the period was characterized by a spell of creative dormancy.
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As indicated by the French critic Augustin Filon, it was even being rumoured that ‘ le directeur du Princess’s tient sous séquestre un malheureux qui traduit pour lui du français sans relâche. Such perceptions represented the culmination of sentiments penned decades earlier: in 1859 the dramatist Edward Fitzball protested against the current state of the theatre, for it was ‘nearly all composed of translations’ (I, 1), and Punch honoured its signature style of humour by describing the English dramatist as ‘a French dictionary on legs’ (Rowell 33). The openly belligerent tone of the article voiced the hostility of opinionated critics who looked upon the incursion with contempt. 1In an article published in The Theatre on July 1 st, 1897, suggestively titled ‘The French Invasion’, British author Edward Morton denounced the relentless importation of French plays and actors, decrying how ‘at half a dozen theatres, English translations, versions or perversions of French plays are now being performed, to say nothing of the French comedians in possession of the Adelphi and the Lyric’.