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

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Both managements had ^recourse to bowdlerized adaptations of
French plays and remnants of the eighteenth-century repertoire.
Bancroft had abandoned broad effects in acting which tfere
essential to the Comedy of Manners - a mode imitated by the
work of Lytton (in Money) and Boucicault (in London Assurance).
The"types" had been deposedi
I believe, at the time, I was by more than one
actor thought to be mad for venturing to clothe
what was supposed to be f more or less, a comic
part, in the qiietast of fashionable clothes, and
to appear as a pale-faced man with short, straight
black hair. The innovation proved to be as
successful as it was daring,, Q
The world of the comedy had changed, and it was no longer
viewed with the aristocratic - or, at least, "town" - detachwmt:
of the older comedy.
Changes in the nature of stage scenery, from the swift
changes of shutter-and-groove to the ponderous rhythm of setscenes
punctuated by carpenter-scenes, sorted ill with the
structure of plays like The School for Scandal. In 1874
Bancroft revised the comedy to make four single set scenes,
without any regard for the plot* Although Sheridan vouchsafed
Punch*s critic a visitation innwhich he pronounced the new
version "an improvement - yes, really an improvement - on my
own plan" (18 ApmL 1874), most of the reviewers shared Wedmore*s
dismay at the atrocity. In his Academy review he suggested tha t
Sheridan had been ill-used, but recognised that the author was
a secondary consideration for the manager:
ffirs Bancroft promised - and the promise has been
kept - that it should be produced with unexampled
attention to scenery and appointments. It should
illustrate last century life, and that would suit
the movement of the day.
(11 April 1874)
The "movement" was a renewed interest in eighteenth-century
architecture and decoration, to which the representation of
eighteenth-century characters in action clearly deferred.
Henry James, reviewing a production of the same play at the
Boston Museum in December of the same year, thought that
Bancroft had given a new lease of life to Sheridan, but found
the antique furnishings displayed on st$^,e "melancholy tokens
that, for a sceptical age, even The School for Scandal cannot