The Play With a Past
Arthur Wing Pinero's New Drama
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12411440 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Heather Anne Wozniak (University of California, Los Angeles, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 391-409 |
| Publication date | 2009-06-11 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1060150309090251 |
| OpenAlex | W2131677075 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
In the late Victorian period , when writers, critics, and actors of the English theatre became obsessed with defining a decidedly New Drama – with establishing its history, directing its progress forward, and creating a literary drama – the majority of the plays produced focused upon forms of femininity. Strangely, these innovative dramas engaged not with the future, but with an all-too-familiar stock character: the woman with a past. This well-known type was “a lady whose previous conduct, rightly or wrongly, disqualified her from any position of rank or respect” (Rowell 108–09). Familiar examples of such plays include George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) and Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); lesser-known ones include Henry Arthur Jones's Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and two plays that form the focus of this essay, Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895). Several English theatre historians (including Richard Dietrich and Jean Chothia) present these plays as the basis of modern intellectual drama, yet none explains the paradox that the theatre of modernity is founded upon the woman with a past, a figure whose future in these plays is foreclosed or ambivalently conceptualized at best
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Character (mathematics · Drama · Femininity · Literature · Modernity · Period (music · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Literature Analysis and Criticism · Philosophy · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |