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

81
A disproportionate outlay on scenic decoration
and furniture for the performance of modern
comedy - nay, even on the playhouse itself -
is at the root of the question* It began, no
doubt, with genuinely artistic intentions, and
has never been dissociated from good taste*
But what was an adroit and a justifiable bait to
begin with ends by being hardly an attraction at
all, and only a tyranny*
(7 February 1880)
Punch gave Bancroft the blunt advice, "Give us less costly
realism, and more real acting" (7 February 1880).
Enthusiasm for the virtues of Bancroft's method had
be&n qualified for some time by a fear that it imposed limit*
«
at^ons upon the writer who, by becoming a stage-manager, had
lost a larger freedom* It was the avoidance of heroism and
broad effects, whiclt The Bra attributed to the aftermath of
war, which was beginning to pall. Robert Buchanan wrote in
18761
The beet of Mr Robertson's drama surpass
the best of Mr Boucicault's, as the best of
Mr Blackmore's novels surpass the best of
Mr Trollope's - by virtue of their gleams of
simple poetic feeling... There is obviously
poetry in it - os situation, of picture, though
not of character and dialogue.
He felt that this attenuation of the literary content of
drama had been accompanied by a reduction of emotional scale,
and that there had been a consequent lessening of "the art
of the scene-painter, who used to produce grand effects by
Turaeresque delineations of the brush" - now it had been
"exchanged for the microscopic skill of the Cabinet designer",
In 1886 he added a postscr^ to this, in a less courteous
vein:
iVhen Robertson loomed above the horizon, the
world prepared for something cosmic, only to
discover that what it imagined to be a sun
was a sort of gigantic tea-cup.^
Punch's obituary verses on the death of Benjamin Webster,
who died in 1882, represent the "venerable sage" as turning
his back on f"coat-and-trouser* pieces and a milk-and-water
stage" and despising "a decorated drama and an Art of bric-
'a-brac" (22 Juiy 1882). The subtleties of the reformed stage