Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

66
speeches and tableaux. This was a common criticism of poetic
dramatists. In a review by Sidney Lee of Colombe's Birthday,
produced at St. George's Hall in November 1885, we find the
accusation levelled at Browning:
...Mr Browning is unable to control the rapid
workings of his awn intelligance, and leaves gaps
in his dramatic argument to be supplied by the
reader,or spectator at the expense of much
mental labour, which the supreme artist i.e.
Shakespeare invariably spares him.
(The Academy. 28 November 1885)
Archer complains of Tennyson's Queen Maryt
There is nothing in it of the conflict essential
to a true drama. The scenes follow each other
without vital connection. It is a oanorama
of a period of history, its sole claim to organic
unity lying in the elaborate and interesting
character-study which gives the play its name,,g
This is reminiscent of the accusation against such liocec as
Pluck, that they were simply a succession of spectacular tableaux,
lacking organic shape.
The Athenaeum, in a notice of Tennyson 1 s The Cup and The
Falcon (1884), offered a lengthy discussion of the problems
encountered by poets who wished to write for the theatre. One
almost insurmountable obstacle was the prevailing mode of
realism, f;iven added v/eight by the technical refinements of
illusionist ccene building. It was by now an accepted fact
"that literary beauties aeem positively out of place in an
o,cted play, whether tragic or comic, being destructive of
that realism which the dramatist ic obliged to moke his one
quest" (8 Uarch 1884). Three of the Laureate*o plays v;cro
performed in the ei;.;hte en-eighties: The Falcon (St. James's,
18 December 1880), The Cup (Lyceum, 3 January 1881), and Tho
Promise of Jay (Globo, 11 November 1884). Socket r/rs performed
at the Lyceum on 6 February 1893» four months after the poet's
death on 6 October 1092.
Tho tv/o early productions wc^e ftiure notable fjz their
stewing than for any outstanding literary qualifies in the text.
In The Promise of May Tennyson attempted a modern rubjcct rind,
so f.'-'r as he v/ao able, a drama of ideas: the ^lay was v/ritten
in -rcn.0 and verso, and dealt v/ith the relationship betv/cen