The Victorian Era

Victorian Theatre and Drama

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

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Victorian theatre was the third great literary form of the period, after the novel and poetry, and the only one in which a writer could expect to reach a paying audience of several thousand at a single sitting. Over the course of the reign the stage moved from a marginal, often disreputable entertainment to a respectable mass medium with a national touring system, a recognised body of professional criticism, and an established place in the social calendar. The history of the wider literature of the period is set out in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word, and the context of the era as a whole is examined in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.

The Stage Before 1843

The Victorian stage inherited the regulated system of the eighteenth century. The two patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, had been granted a royal patent by Charles II in 1660, and by long-established convention they held a monopoly on the spoken drama, on Shakespeare, and on serious tragedy and comedy. The Haymarket, the Adelphi, the Olympic, and a small number of summer-licensed houses performed within the patent system, while a wider group of “minor” theatres — the Surrey, the Victoria, the East London, the Royalty — performed melodrama, farce, and musical entertainments outside the patent monopoly.

The early-century repertoire was built on the Georgian inheritance: Shakespeare, Restoration comedy, Goldsmith and Sheridan, and the late-eighteenth-century sentimental drama, with a continuing undercurrent of ballad opera, pantomime, and harlequinade. The dominant actors were John Philip Kemble, Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready, Charles Kemble, and Charles Young; the leading actresses were Sarah Siddons in her last years, Dorothea Jordan, and Helen Faucit, who made her debut as Juliet in 1820.

The Theatres Act of 1843

The Theatres Act of 1843 abolished the patent theatres’ monopoly on legitimate drama. From 22 August 1843 any house that could secure a licence from the Lord Chamberlain could perform the spoken drama. The two patent houses retained the title “Theatre Royal”, and the Examiner of Plays, who had been the stage censor since 1737, continued to vet every new script, but the structural monopoly of the two great houses was over.

The immediate consequence was a wave of new theatre building. The 1850s and 1860s saw the construction of the Lyceum, the Olympic, the Adelphi, the Haymarket, the Strand, the St James’s, the Princess’s, the Victoria, the Surrey, the Standard, the Marylebone, the City of London, the Pavilion, the Britannia, the Grecian, the East London, the Royalty, the Holborn, the Garrick, the Globe, the Charing Cross, the Royal Court, the Opéra Comique, the Criterion (1874), the Gaiety (1868), the Royalty (rebuilt 1887), and the Savoy (1881). The London theatre map of the late nineteenth century, in which a walk of a mile through the West End might pass half a dozen playhouses, was the product of this building boom.

The Actor-Manager

The defining figure of the Victorian stage was the actor-manager, who combined the functions of leading actor, producer, and administrator. The most important mid-century actor-managers were Charles Kean, who managed the Princess’s Theatre from 1851 to 1859 with a series of elaborately mounted Shakespearean productions designed in collaboration with the antiquary J. R. Planché; Samuel Phelps, who managed Sadler’s Wells from 1844 to 1862 and presented a more thorough Shakespearean repertoire than any contemporary; Benjamin Webster, who managed the Haymarket from 1837 to 1853 and the Adelphi from 1852 to 1859; Charles Fechter, who took the Lyceum in 1861; and Madame Vestris, who managed the Olympic from 1831 to 1839 and the Lyceum from 1847 to 1855, and who did more than any other mid-century manager to introduce box sets, gas lighting, and careful ensemble playing to the English stage.

The late-century actor-managers were the principal beneficiaries of the building boom and of the rising middle-class audience. Henry Irving took the Lyceum in 1878 and ran it until 1902, with Ellen Terry as his leading lady from 1878 to 1902; he was knighted in 1895, the first actor to receive the honour. Herbert Beerbohm Tree ran the Haymarket from 1887 to 1896 and then built and managed Her Majesty’s Theatre from 1897 to 1917. Squire and Marie Bancroft ran the Haymarket from 1880 to 1885 and were the first actor-manager couple in the modern style; John Hare managed the St James’s from 1889 and the Garrick from 1889 to 1895; Charles Wyndham managed the Criterion from 1876 to 1899 and the New Theatre from 1903; and Augustus Harris, son of the Covent Garden impresario Augustus Harris the elder, revived the Drury Lane pantomime from 1879 and managed the theatre until 1896. The history of the most famous of these is examined in Who was the most popular Victorian actor?.

The Repertoire

The Victorian repertoire moved, over the reign, from melodrama to the well-made play, from the drawing-room comedy to the problem play, and from the spectacular to the symbolist. The melodrama, examined in What was Victorian melodrama?, was the dominant form of the early and mid-Victorian period. The principal melodramatists were Douglas Jerrold, the author of Black-Ey’d Susan (1829); Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Lady of Lyons (1838), Richelieu (1839), and Money (1840); Dion Boucicault, the author of London Assurance (1841), The Octoroon (1859), and The Colleen Bawn (1860); and Tom Taylor, the author of Our American Cousin (1858), the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was shot at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865.

The well-made play, imported from the French of Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou, became the dominant form of the late-Victorian stage. T. W. 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 including 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 first of the English “problem plays”, and in The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895). 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 the high point of the late-Victorian stage. The history of the social milieu these plays addressed is examined in Victorian Society, Class, and Daily Life.

The Theatres of London and the Provinces

The patent houses Drury Lane and Covent Garden continued to mount the more spectacular forms — pantomime, ballet, and spectacular melodrama — and Drury Lane in particular became known for its annual Christmas pantomime, with Augustus Harris, Dan Leno, and Herbert Campbell in the principal comic roles. The Haymarket, under Buckstone, the Kendals, and Tree, was the home of the well-made comedy. The Lyceum, under Irving, was the principal house of the spectacular Shakespearean production. The Gaiety, the Criterion, the Savoy, the St James’s, the Garrick, the Shaftesbury, the Vaudeville, the Royalty, the Terry’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Strand, the Adelphi, the Olympic, the Alhambra, the Empire, the London Pavilion, the Gatti’s-in-the-Arches, the Oxford, the Canterbury, the Middlesex, the Evans’s, the Coal Hole, the Cider Cellars, the South London, the Marylebone, the Cambridge, the Bedford, the Royal Standard, the Eagle, the Grecian, the Britannia, the Surrey, the Victoria, the Standard, the Pavilion, the Royal Victoria, the City of London, the East London, the Royalty, the Marylebone, the Queen’s, the Grand, the Holloway, and the Astley’s Amphitheatre — together with the suburban and provincial theatres that mounted the touring companies — were the physical network of the Victorian stage.

The provincial theatre ran a stock system in which a resident company of fifteen to thirty actors and actresses performed a different play every night to a local audience. The principal provincial theatres were the Theatres Royal in Bristol, Bath, Norwich, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Brighton, York, Hull, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester, Derby, Wolverhampton, Plymouth, Exeter, Southampton, Portsmouth, Chatham, Reading, Windsor, Oxford, Cambridge, and Ipswich. The principal provincial actor of the mid-century was Samuel Phelps, whose Sadler’s Wells seasons of 1844 to 1862 were the most ambitious repertoire of the period.

The Pantomime and the Music Hall

The Christmas pantomime, written for the principal clowns and the leading ladies of the day, was the most popular form of the Victorian stage. Drury Lane’s annual pantomime, mounted by Augustus Harris from 1879, was the most famous, but the Adelphi, the Lyceum, the Covent Garden, the Surrey, the Victoria, the Grecian, the Britannia, and the East London all mounted their own pantomimes. The Drury Lane pantomime was the model for a tradition of spectacular scenic effect, with the principal transformations painted by the in-house scenic artists, the costumes designed by the wardrobe mistress, and the principal comedy parts played by Joseph Grimaldi in the early century, by Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell in the late century, and by Little Tich, Vesta Tilley, Marie Lloyd, and Johnny Danvers in the 1890s. The history of the parallel music-hall tradition is examined in Victorian Music Halls and Variety.

The Critics

The Victorian stage was the first to be reviewed in the daily press, and the dramatic criticism of the period was the formative body of theatrical criticism in the language. The principal dramatic critics were John Oxenford at The Times, Joseph Knight at The Athenaeum, William Bodham Donne at The Examiner, Westland Marston at the London Review, Dutton Cook at the Pall Mall Gazette and the World, and, in the 1890s, William Archer, Clement Scott, and J. T. Grein. The specialist dramatic papers included The Era, The Stage, The Theatre, and The Drama. The history of the literary criticism of the period is examined in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.