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Victorian drama<br />

341<br />

POLLY At what time?<br />

HAWTREE Seven.<br />

POLLY Seven! Why, that’s half-past tea-time. Now corporal, you<br />

must wait on me.<br />

HAWTREE As the pages did of old.<br />

POLLY My lady.<br />

HAWTREE My lady.<br />

POLLY Here’s the kettle, corporal.<br />

[Holding out kettle at arm’s length. HAWTREE looks at it through eye-glass.]<br />

HAWTREE Very nice kettle!<br />

POLLY Take it into the back kitchen.<br />

HAWTREE Eh!<br />

POLLY Oh! I’m coming too.<br />

HAWTREE. Ah! that alters the case.<br />

(Caste)<br />

The social issues, presented fairly uncontroversially by Robertson,<br />

became highly controversial in the 1880s and 1890s. This was the time<br />

when the realistic novels of the French writer Emile Zola and the major<br />

novels of Thomas Hardy were publicly burned because of the moral<br />

outrage they caused. In drama, equivalent outrage was caused by the<br />

English translations of the plays of the Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen.<br />

Ibsen’s early plays were written in the late 1860s, but it was not until<br />

1880 that The Pillars of Society was staged in England, and almost ten<br />

years later A Doll’s House received a successful production. George<br />

Bernard Shaw’s essay The Quintessence of Ibsenism, published in 1891<br />

(the same year as Oscar Wilde’s important The Soul of Man Under<br />

Socialism), gave the first great impetus to Ibsen’s work, and to the<br />

concept of the ‘play of ideas’ (see page 382). The new flood of ideas –<br />

socialist, Fabian (Shaw’s brand of socialism), and aesthetic – was leading<br />

to a reevaluation of the role of artistic expression in helping to formulate<br />

public opinion.<br />

For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in<br />

art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only<br />

in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic<br />

theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that

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