Nineteenth-century theatre
Nineteenth-century theatre describes a wide range of movements in the theatrical culture of Europe and the United States in the 19th century. In the West, they include Romanticism, melodrama, the well-made plays of Scribe and Sardou, the farces of Feydeau, the problem plays of Naturalism and Realism, Wagner's operatic Gesamtkunstwerk, Gilbert and Sullivan's plays and operas, Wilde's drawing-room comedies, Symbolism, and proto-Expressionism in the late works of August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.[1]
Melodrama
Beginning in France after the theatre monopolies were abolished during the
Melodrama involved a plethora of scenic effects, an intensely emotional but codified acting style, and a developing stage technology that advanced the arts of theatre towards grandly spectacular staging. It was also a highly reactive form of theatre which was constantly changing and adapting to new social contexts, new audiences and new cultural influences. This, in part, helps to explains its popularity throughout the 19th century.[3] David Grimsted, in his book Melodrama Unveiled (1968), argues that:
Its conventions were false, its language stilted and commonplace, its characters stereotypes, and its morality and theology gross simplifications. Yet its appeal was great and understandable. It took the lives of common people seriously and paid much respect to their superior purity and wisdom. [...] And its moral parable struggled to reconcile social fears and life's awesomeness with the period's confidence in absolute moral standards, man's upward progress, and a benevolent providence that insured the triumph of the pure.[4]
In Paris, the 19th century saw a flourishing of melodrama in the many theatres that were located on the popular Boulevard du Crime, especially in the Gaîté. All this was to come to an end, however, when most of these theatres were demolished during the rebuilding of Paris by Baron Haussmann in 1862.[5]
By the end of the 19th century, the term melodrama had nearly exclusively narrowed down to a specific genre of salon entertainment: more or less rhythmically spoken words (often poetry)—not sung, sometimes more or less enacted, at least with some dramatic structure or plot—synchronized to an accompaniment of music (usually piano). It was looked down on as a genre for authors and composers of lesser stature (probably also the reason why virtually no realisations of the genre are still remembered).
Romanticism in Germany and France
In Germany, there was a trend toward historical accuracy in costumes and settings, a revolution in theatre architecture, and the introduction of the theatrical form of German Romanticism. Influenced by trends in 20th -century philosophy and the visual arts, German writers were increasingly fascinated with their Teutonic past and had a growing sense of romantic nationalism. The plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and other Sturm und Drang playwrights, inspired a growing faith in feeling and instinct as guides to moral behavior. Romantics borrowed from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to formulate the theoretical basis of "Romantic" art. According to Romantics, art is of enormous significance because it gives eternal truths a concrete, material form that the limited human sensory apparatus may apprehend. Among those who called themselves Romantics during this period, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck were the most deeply concerned with theatre.[6] After a time, Romanticism was adopted in France with the plays of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Musset, and George Sand.
Through the 1830s in France, the theatre struggled against the
By the 1840s, however, enthusiasm for Romantic drama had faded in France and a new "Theatre of Common Sense" replaced it.
Well-made play
In France, the "
Scribe himself wrote over 400 plays of this type, using what essentially amounted to a literary factory with writers who supplied the story, another the dialogue, a third the jokes and so on. Although he was highly prolific and popular, he was not without detractors: Théophile Gautier questioned how it could be that, "an author without poetry, lyricism, style, philosophy, truth or naturalism could be the most successful writer of his epoch, despite the opposition of literature and the critics?"[9]
Its structure was employed by realist playwrights
Theatre in Britain
In the early years of the 19th century, the
Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron were the most important literary dramatists of their time (although Shelley's plays were not performed until later in the century). Shakespeare was enormously popular, and began to be performed with texts closer to the original, as the drastic rewriting of 17th and 18th century performing versions for the theatre were gradually removed over the first half of the century. Kotzebue's plays were translated into English and Thomas Holcroft's A Tale of Mystery was the first of many English melodramas. Pierce Egan, Douglas William Jerrold, Edward Fitzball, James Roland MacLaren and John Baldwin Buckstone initiated a trend towards more contemporary and rural stories in preference to the usual historical or fantastical melodramas. James Sheridan Knowles and Edward Bulwer-Lytton established a "gentlemanly" drama that began to re-establish the former prestige of the theatre with the aristocracy.[12]
Theatres throughout the century were dominated by
Melodramas, light comedies, operas, Shakespeare and classic English drama,
In 1871, the producer John Hollingshead brought together the librettist W.S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan to create a Christmas entertainment, unwittingly spawning one of the great duos of theatrical history. So successful were the 14 comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, such as H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) and The Mikado (1885), that they had a huge influence over the development of musical theatre in the 20th century.[13] This, together with much improved street lighting and transportation in London and New York led to a late Victorian and Edwardian theatre building boom in the West End and on Broadway. At the end of the century, Edwardian musical comedy came to dominate the musical stage.[14]
In the 1890s, the comedies of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw offered sophisticated social comment and were very popular.
Theatre in the United States
In the
Known as the "Father of the American Drama", Dunlap grew up watching plays given by British officers and was heavily immersed in theatrical culture while living in London just after the Revolution. As the manager of the
From 1820 to 1830, improvements in the material conditions of American life and the growing demand of a rising middle class for entertainment led to the construction of new theatres in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, including Catham Garden, Federal Street , the Tremont, Niblo's Garden and the Bowery. During the early part of this period, Philadelphia continued to be the major theatrical centre: plays would often open in Baltimore in September or October before transferring to larger theatres in Philadelphia until April or May, followed by a summer season in Washington or Alexandria. However, rivalries and larger economic forces led to a string of bankruptcies for five major theatre companies in just eight months between 1 October 1828 and 27 May 1829. Due to this and the import of star system performers like Clara Fisher, New York took over as the dominant city in American theatre.[15]
In the 1830s,
Star actors amassed an immensely loyal following, comparable to modern celebrities or sports stars. At the same time, audiences had always treated theaters as places to make their feelings known, not just towards the actors, but towards their fellow theatergoers of different classes or political persuasions, and theatre Riots were a regular occurrence in New York.
In the pre-Civil War era, there were also many types of more political drama staged across the United States. As America pushed west in the 1830s and 40s, theatres began to stage plays that romanticized and masked treatment of Native Americans like Pocahontas, The Pawnee Chief, De Soto and Metamora or the Last of the Wampanoags. Some fifty of these plays were produced between 1825 and 1860, including burlesque performances of the "noble savage" by John Brougham.[19] Reacting off of current events, many playwrights wrote short comedies that dealt with the major issues of the day. For example, Removing the Deposits was a farce produced in 1835 at the Bowery in reaction to Andrew Jackson's battle with the banks and Whigs and Democrats, or Love of No Politics was a play that dealt with the struggle between America's two political parties.
In 1852,
After the Civil War, the American stage was dominated by melodramas, minstrel shows, comedies, farces, circuses, vaudevilles, burlesques, operas, operettas, musicals, musical revues, medicine shows, amusement arcades, and Wild West shows. Many American playwrights and theatre workers lamented the "failure of the American playwright", including Augustin Daly, Edward Harrigan, Dion Boucicault, and Bronson Howard. However, as cities and urban areas boomed from immigration in the late nineteenth century, the social upheaval and innovation in technology, communication and transportation had a profound effect on the American theatre.[21]
In Boston, although ostracized from Gilded Age society, Irish American performers began to find success, including Lawrence Barrett, James O'Neill, Dan Emmett, Tony Hart, Annie Yeamans, John McCullough, George M. Cohan, and Laurette Taylor, and Irish playwrights came to dominate the stage, including Daly, Harrigan, and James Herne.[22]
In 1883, the Kiralfy brothers met with Thomas Edison at Menlo Park to see if the electric light bulb could be incorporated into a musical ballet called Excelsior that they were to present at Niblo's Gardens in New York City. A showman himself, Edison realized the potential of this venture to create demand for his invention, and together they designed a finale to the production that would be illuminated by more than five hundred light bulbs attached to the costumes of the dancers and to the scenery. When the show opened on 21 August, it was an immediate hit, and would subsequently be staged in Buffalo, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco. Thus, electric lighting in the theatre was born and would radically change not just stage lighting, but the principles of scenic design.[22]
The Gilded Age was also the golden age of touring in American theatre: while New York City was the mecca of the ambitious, the talented and the lucky, throughout the rest of the country, a network of theatres large and small supported a huge industry of famous stars, small troupes, minstrel shows, vaudevillians, and circuses. For example, in 1895, the Burt Theatre in
New York City's importance as a theatrical center grew in the 1870s around Union Square until it became the primary theatre center, and the Theater District slowly moved north from lower Manhattan until it finally arrived in midtown at the end of the century.
On the musical stage,
Meiningen Ensemble and Richard Wagner
In Germany, drama entered a state of decline from which it did not recover until the 1890s. The major playwrights of the period were
The Meiningen Ensemble traveled throughout Europe from 1874 to 1890 and met with unparalleled success wherever they went. Audiences had grown tired with regular, shallow entertainment theatre and were beginning to demand a more creatively and intellectually stimulating form of expression that the Ensemble was able to provide. Therefore, the Meiningen Ensemble can be seen as the forerunners of the art-theatre movement which appeared in Europe at the end of the 1880s.[25]
Richard Wagner (1813–1883) rejected the contemporary trend toward realism and argued that the dramatist should be a myth maker who portrays an ideal world through the expression of inner impulses and aspirations of a people. Wagner used music to defeat performers' personal whims. The melody and tempo of music allowed him to have greater personal control over performance than he would with spoken drama. As with the Meininger Ensemble, Wagner believed that the author-composer should supervise every aspect of production to unify all the elements into a "master art work."[26] Wagner also introduced a new type of auditorium that abolished the side boxes, pits, and galleries that were a prominent feature of most European theatres and replaced them with a 1,745 seat fan-shaped auditorium that was 50 feet (15 m) wide at the proscenium and 115 feet (35 m) at the rear. This allowed every seat in the auditorium to enjoy a full view of the stage and meant that there were no "good" seats.
Rise of realism in Russia
In
Realism began earlier in the 19th century in
Ostrovsky is often credited with creating a peculiarly Russian drama. His plays
Naturalism and Realism
The realisation of Zola's ideas was hindered by a lack of capable dramatists writing naturalist drama.
The work of Henry Arthur Jones and Arthur Wing Pinero initiated a new direction on the English stage. While their work paved the way, the development of more significant drama owes itself most to the playwright Henrik Ibsen.
Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828. He wrote 25 plays, the most famous of which are
After Ibsen, British theatre experienced revitalization with the work of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and (in fact from 1900) John Galsworthy. Unlike most of the gloomy and intensely serious work of their contemporaries, Shaw and Wilde wrote primarily in the comic form.
Technological Changes
Stage lighting
The eighteenth century theatre had been lit by candles and oil-lamps which were mainly provided for illumination so that the audience could see the performance, with no further purpose. This changed in the early 19th century with the introduction of gas lighting which was slowly adopted by the major theatres throughout the 1810s and 1820s to provide illumination for the house and the stage. The introduction of gas lighting revolutionized stage lighting. It provided a somewhat more natural and adequate light for the playing and the scenic space upstage of the proscenium arch. While there was no way to control the gas lights, this was soon to change as well. In Britain, theatres in London developed limelight for the stage in the late 1830s. In Paris, the electric carbon arc lamp first came into use in the 1840s. Both of these types of lighting were able to be hand-operated and could be focused by means of an attached lens, thus giving the theatre an ability to focus light on particular performers for the first time.[31]
From the 1880s onwards, theatres began to be gradually electrified with the Savoy Theatre becoming the first theatre in the world to introduce a fully electrified theatrical lighting system in 1881. Richard D'Oyly Carte, who built the Savoy, explained why he had introduced electric light: "The greatest drawbacks to the enjoyment of the theatrical performances are, undoubtedly, the foul air and heat which pervade all theatres. As everyone knows, each gas-burner consumes as much oxygen as many people, and causes great heat beside. The incandescent lamps consume no oxygen, and cause no perceptible heat."[32] Notably, the introduction of electric light coincided with the rise of realism: the new forms of lighting encouraged more realistic scenic detail and a subtler, more realistic acting style.[33]
Scenic design
One of the most important scenic transition into the century was from the often-used two-dimensional scenic backdrop to three-dimensional sets. Previously, as a two-dimensional environment, scenery did not provide an embracing, physical environment for the dramatic action happening on stage. This changed when three-dimensional sets were introduced in the first half of the century. This, coupled with change in audience and stage dynamic as well as advancement in theatre architecture that allowed for hidden scene changes, the theatre became more representational instead of presentational, and invited audience to be transported to a conceived 'other' world. The early 19th century also saw the innovation of the moving panorama: a setting painted on a long cloth, which could be unrolled across the stage by turning spools, created an illusion of movement and changing locales.[34]
See also
References
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 293–426).
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 277).
- ^ Booth (1995, 300).
- ^ Grimsted (1968, 248).
- ^ The golden age of the Boulevard du Crime Theatre online.com (in French)
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 278–280).
- ^ Booth, Michael R (1995). Nineteenth-century Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 308.
- ^ a b Encyclopædia Britannica Editors. "well-made play". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 1 November 2015.
- ^ Gautier, Histoire de l'art dramatique en France (1859), cited in Cardwell (1983), p. 876.
- ^ a b 19th century theatre. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 1 November 2015.
- ^ Bratton, Jacky (15 March 2014). "Theatre in the 19th century". Retrieved 23 March 2018.
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 297–298).
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 326–327).
- ^ a b The first "Edwardian musical comedy" is usually considered to be In Town (1892). See, e.g., Charlton, Fraser. "What are EdMusComs?" FrasrWeb 2007, accessed 12 May 2011
- ^ a b Quinn, Arthur Hobson (1923). History of the American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War. Harper & Brothers. p. 203.
- ^ Quinn, Arthur Hobson (1923). History of the American Drama: from the Beginning to the Civil War. Harper & Brothers. p. 161.
- ^ Reed, Peter. "Slave Revolt and Classical Blackness in The Gladiator". Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture: 151.
- ISBN 0-195-11634-8.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ Quinn, Arthur Hobson (1923). History of the American Drama. Harper & Brothers. p. 275.
- ^ Wilmeth, Don B. (1998). Staging the Nation: Plays from the American Theater, 1787–1909. Boston: Bedford Books. p. 181.
- ^ Postlewait, Thomas (1999). Wilmeth, Don B.; Bigsby, Christopher (eds.). The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Volume II, 1870–1945. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. p. 147.
- ^ ISBN 0-521-65179-4.
- ^ Postlewait (1999, 154–157)
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 357–359).
- ^ Fischer-Lichte (2001, 245)
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 378).
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 293).
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 370).
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 370, 372) and Benedetti (2005, 100) and (1999, 14–17).
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 362–363).
- ^ Booth (1995, 302)
- ^ Baily, p. 215
- ^ Booth (1995, 303)
- ^ Baugh (2005, 11–33)
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- Baugh, Christopher (2005). Theatre, Performance and Technology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Benedetti, Jean. 1999. Stanislavski: His Life and Art. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1988. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-52520-1.
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- Brockett, Oscar G. and Franklin J. Hildy. 2003. History of the Theatre. Ninth edition, International edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0-205-41050-2.
- Cardwell, Douglas (May 1983). "The Well-Made Play of Eugène Scribe". American Association of Teachers of French 56 (6): 878–879. Retrieved 12 May 2012.
- Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2001. History of European Drama and Theatre. New York: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-415-18059-7.
- Grimsted, David. 1968. Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800–50. Chicago: U of Chicago P. ISBN 978-0-226-30901-9.
- "well-made play". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2015. Web. 1 November 2015.
- Stephenson, Laura, et al. (2013). Forgotten Comedies of the 19th Century Theater. Clarion Publishing, Staunton, Va.. ISBN 978-1492881025.