Victorian writers and the stage
Subtitle: the plays of Dickens, Browning, Collins and Tennyson
By: Richard Pearson, Lecturer, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Series: Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 249
ISBN-13: 9781137504678
Subjects: Theater; LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama; LITERARY CRITICISM / General; Literature and society; English drama; History and criticism; Theater and society; LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; History
Description: "This book comprises a study of the plays of Dickens, Browning, Wilkie Collins and Tennyson, alongside the fiction and periodical writings of Thackeray and others. These major Victorian writers authored several professional plays, but why has their achievement been overlooked? Victorian Writers and the Stage brings together comprehensively, for the first time, the professionally performed plays of a group of well-known authors - some of which plays enjoyed long and successful seasons, but all of which have been largely forgotten. The author examines the goal of these writers to become part of an expanding theatrical industry and the problems they encountered in risking their reputations on a literature felt by many to be vulgar and illegitimate. A wealth of new detail carefully positions the plays within the context of the changing Victorian theatre industry and the great battle between the Major and Minor theatres for the future of the modern stage"--
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: List of Figures; title: Acknowledgments; title: Chronology; title: Introduction: Legitimacy and Playwriting; title: PART I: COMEDY AND TRAGEDY, BEFORE THE THEATRES ACT OF 1843; title: 1. Farce, Family and the Minor Theatres: Dickens as a Legitimate Playwright; title: 2. Text and Performance: Robert Browning and the Struggle of the Dramatic Author; title: PART II: COLLABORATIONS AT MID-CENTURY, 1845-1868; title: 3. The Novelist at the Stage Door: Dickens' and Thackeray's Dialogue with the Theatre; title: 4. Dramatic Collaboration: Dickens' and Collins' Melodramas; title: PART III: DRAMATIC IDENTITIES, 1870-1883; title: 5. Adapting to the Stage: Wilkie Collins and the Double Text; title: 6. Cometh the Hero? Alfred Lord Tennyson as the Nation's Playwright; title: Notes; title: Selected Bibliography; title: Index.