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

great a coincidence that Eva should seek her father's forgiveness
at the precise moment of Edgar*a return.
Having adopted a realistic and modern subject, Tennyson
appears to have treated it in a semi-realistic manner. Philip
Edgar enters in act One, soliloquisingi
This author, with hie che,rm of simple style
And close dialectic, all but ?:>roving n: n
An automatic series of sensations,
Has often numb'd me into apathy,
Against the unpleasant jolts of this rough road
That breaks off short into the abysses - made me
A Quietist taking all things easily,
19
Edgar tispenses free-thinking to the audience with the intimacy
of Hamlet or Richard III, but he has nothine of any urgency
to confide, no scheme to justify. The verse has a limpness
and repose that bespeak the character's dullness, and his
moments of figurative language are laboured and unilluminating:
C onvent i onali sm,
VUio shrieks by day at what she doe; by night,
v'oulcl c- 11 this vico; but one time's vice may be
The virtue of another; and Vice and Virtue
Are but two macks of self; and what hereafter
Shall mark out Vice from Virtue in the d~alf
Of never-dawning c!arkness? 0Q
The hero'c introc lection is plainly in debt to that of Hamlet,
but lie does not live in a world of objects - he livec by ideas,
and !ais soliloquies con >arc one idea with anotlior. Edgar has
probably never seen a bare bodkin, and whereas Hamlet's reflections
arc -rovokoc' by hfinjeh circunictances and dilemmas, Edgar'L
are the prevailing: taste for realism in strain:.: end writing.
Irving could "do justice" to Tennyson only when provided with
material subcervient to his peculiar talents as an ctor and
producer, v/liicii will be discussed presently, and for Irving's
purposes Tennyoon'0 texts were eimply a more illustrious
equivalent for those of .ills and Comyns Crrr. But before
examining the nature and ambitions of pictorial sta^in^, it
will be u&eful to ^Look at a commercially : ucceccful olayv/rit ht' s
attempts to write on cerious tonics.
Arthur -ing Pincro ostabliciieC himself as a writer of
comedies am' farces t urin/; tae eight eon-eighties, and in tiie