Before the curtain

Summary

For many, the Victorian theatre is the scruffy orphan of high culture, somewhat redeemed by the cultivation of its Edwardian successors. Today's high-minded aficionados take their antitheatrical tone from the stuffiest Victorians: the stage was and is crude, embarrassing, primitive, compared to its sister arts, prose, poetry, and painting. In any case, the medium is by definition ephemeral, and so impossible to study. Its scripts, when they exist at all, are not moored by weighty volumes as literature is, or heavy canvases like paintings; like most screenplays today, Victorian plays are sketches for productions and performances now vanished in the mists that engulfed the world before film preserved it.

Collaborative, messy, and lost, the theatre is generally, and wrongly, dismissed as sub-canonical, at least until the 1890s, when the self-conscious literacy of Wilde and Shaw elevated it to the verbal sophistication that would become Edwardian drama. But the theatre’s elusive art can be retrieved and, in books like this, it is. Once we begin to piece this hybrid medium back together, we restore the prism through which all Victorian artists and audiences – and these were most Victorians – saw their world.