The Victorian Era

How Did Theatre Change in the 19th Century?

Article · Literature & Theatre · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The nineteenth century transformed the English theatre from a tightly regulated oligopoly of patent and licensed houses into the dispersed, commercially driven system that has survived, with modifications, into the present. The decisive moment was the Theatres Act of 1843, which abolished the patent theatres’ monopoly on the spoken drama and allowed any house that could secure a licence from the Lord Chamberlain to perform “legitimate” plays. The wider history of the stage is examined in Victorian Theatre and Drama, and the parallel development of the other arts is set out in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

The Theatre at the Beginning of the Century

In 1800 the London stage was dominated by the two patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, which had been granted a royal patent to perform the spoken drama by Charles II in 1660 and which, by long-established convention, held a monopoly on Shakespeare and on serious tragedy and comedy. The Haymarket Theatre, the Adelphi, and the Olympic held summer licences from the Lord Chamberlain, and a number of “minor” theatres — the Surrey, the Victoria, the East London, and the Royalty — performed melodrama, farce, and musical entertainments outside the patent monopoly.

The early-century repertoire was built around the Georgian repertoire of Shakespeare, Restoration comedy, and the well-made sentimental comedy of the late eighteenth century, with stock actors including John Philip Kemble, Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready, and Charles Kemble at the patent houses, and Charles Matthews, Madame Vestris, and Helen Faucit at the patent houses and the Haymarket. Theatrical lighting was by candles and oil lamps, scenery was painted on flats and wings, costumes were largely Regency dress adapted for period, and the audience was drawn from the upper and middle classes in the West End and from the working classes in the suburbs and the provinces.

The 1830s and the Call for Reform

Through the 1830s a sustained campaign was mounted against the patent monopoly, in Parliament, in the press, and on the stage itself. The dramatist Douglas Jerrold edited a theatrical newspaper, Punch’s Playbook, in 1842-3, and the actor-manager William Charles Macready fought a series of increasingly expensive campaigns at Covent Garden. Madame Vestris, who managed the Olympic from 1831 to 1839, demonstrated that a properly mounted comedy, with carefully rehearsed ensembles and convincing scenery, could be performed outside the patent system. Samuel Phelps at Sadler’s Wells and Benjamin Webster at the Haymarket and the Adelphi worked in the same direction.

The campaign was strengthened by the rise of a new kind of theatre building in the 1820s and 1830s — the Royal Coburg (later the Old Vic), Sadler’s Wells, the Surrey, the Victoria, the City of London — designed to seat audiences of two to four thousand at prices working people could afford. These houses mounted a melodramatic repertoire that gave the post-1832 electorate its first experience of the stage, and the political weight of that audience told in Parliament.

The Theatres Act of 1843

The Theatres Act, which received the Royal Assent on 22 August 1843, abolished the patent system and the monopoly of the two patent houses on legitimate drama, and it left the licensing of all new theatres in the hands of the Lord Chamberlain. The two patent houses retained the use of the words “Theatre Royal” in their titles, and the Examiner of Plays, who had been the censor of the stage since 1737, continued to scrutinise the scripts of every new play, but any playhouse could in principle stage any play.

The act was, in effect, a deregulation of the English stage. The number of London theatres grew rapidly in the 1850s and 1860s, and the provinces saw a similar expansion: by 1860 there were more than fifty regular theatres outside London, and the touring system that had carried the Kembles and Edmund Kean across the country in the 1820s and 1830s was replaced by a network of stock companies in fixed buildings.

The Long Depression of the 1850s and 1860s

The expansion did not produce an immediate flourishing. The Crimean War, the financial panics of 1857 and 1866, and the long agricultural depression of the 1870s produced a parallel crisis in the theatre: shorter seasons, fewer touring companies, lower wages, and a contraction of the patent houses, which retained much of the prestige but lost much of the audience. Drury Lane and Covent Garden both fell into the hands of speculators, and the most successful theatres of the mid-century were the patent survivors and a handful of well-run West End houses — the Haymarket under John Baldwin Buckstone and then the Kendals, the Olympic and the Lyceum under Madame Vestris and then Charles Fechter, and the Adelphi under Benjamin Webster.

The mid-century stage was dominated by the actor-manager, who combined the functions of leading actor, director, and producer. The most successful mid-century actor-managers were Charles Kean, who ran the Princess’s Theatre from 1851 to 1859 with a series of spectacularly mounted Shakespearean productions; Samuel Phelps, who managed Sadler’s Wells from 1844 to 1862 and presented a more thorough Shakespearean repertoire than any contemporary; and Benjamin Webster, who ran the Haymarket and the Adelphi in succession.

The Revival of the 1870s and 1880s

The theatrical economy turned in the 1870s. The railway network made touring profitable, the new West End houses — the Criterion (1874), the Gaiety (1868), the Savoy (1881) — were designed to seat smaller, more comfortable, and more profitable audiences than the old patent houses, and the actor-manager began to recover the prestige that the patent system had once guaranteed.

The most important actor-managers of the late Victorian period were Henry Irving, who took the Lyceum in 1878 and ran it until 1902; Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who ran the Haymarket from 1887 to 1896 and then built Her Majesty’s Theatre, which he managed from 1897 to 1917; Squire and Marie Bancroft, who ran the Haymarket from 1880 to 1885 and introduced the drawing-room comedy of T. W. Robertson; John Hare, who managed the St James’s from 1889; Charles Wyndham, who managed the Criterion and the New Theatre; and Augustus Harris, who revived the Drury Lane pantomime from 1879 and managed the theatre from 1879 to 1896.

Irving’s knighthood in 1895 — the first knighthood conferred on an actor — was a public recognition of the social standing the actor-manager had recovered. His reign at the Lyceum, with Ellen Terry as leading lady from 1878 to 1902, became the model for the late-Victorian commercial stage. The wider history of the late-Victorian actor-manager is examined in Who was the most popular Victorian actor?.

The Repertoire of the Late-Century Stage

The late-Victorian repertoire was carried by a small number of well-made plays and a great many short runs. Tom Robertson’s Caste (1867) and Society (1871) established the drawing-room comedy of upper-middle-class manners. W. S. Gilbert, before and alongside his work with Sullivan, wrote a series of prose comedies, The Wicked World (1873), Sweethearts (1874), and Engaged (1877). Arthur Wing Pinero brought the well-made play to serious social purpose in The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895), and Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ (1898). Oscar Wilde’s four society comedies — Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) — were a high point of the late-Victorian stage.

The late-century stage was also the great age of the pantomime, the Christmas spectacular at the patent and West End houses, and of the burlesque and the extravaganza, written for the principal clowns and the leading ladies of the day. The wider history of the Victorian drama is examined in Victorian Theatre and Drama, and the melodramatic tradition that supplied the minor theatres is examined in What was Victorian melodrama?.