E-Book, Englisch, 150 Seiten
Wardle Theatre Criticism
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ISBN: 978-0-571-30046-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 150 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-30046-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Irving Wardle
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Make the climb from Holyrood House to Arthur’s Seat, look down on Edinburgh, and one of the most remarkable sights you get is that of a building that stands out amid the Presbyterian spires like a Babylonian ziggurat. This is not a temple to the Golden Calf; but the work of a former Lord Provost who had risen from humble origins and made sure he would never forget it by rebuilding his parental cottage on the roof of his mansion.
Theatre critics are in no danger of being overwhelmed by civic glory. But they do have a certain pride in their lineage. And when anyone recalls their past, either to defend them or to lament their decline since the good old days, it is names like Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, G.H. Lewes and Bernard Shaw that come up. It boosts morale to remember them. They wrote for the moment and they are read today. They proved that reviewing can be an honourable trade, and they give you something to aim at. They are not, however, our progenitors. When Hunt arrived in the early 1800s, he joined a critical chorus that had been gathering force for a century. What he and his successors did was to adopt an existing practice and enlarge it to the point where journalism merged into literature. But they did not invent it. They did not make up the rules. They were conditioned, as we still are today, by their mostly forgotten ancestors who hacked out a living in the humbler regions of Grub Street.
It is beyond the scope of this user’s guide to theatre criticism to include a history of its Victorian grandees. In any case, their mansion has been thoroughly explored by scholars of the period. But I shall attempt a sketch of the cottage, in the hope of showing how the trade originated and made its way in the world.
Journalistic coverage of the London theatre began in the eighteenth century, and one generalization that can be safely made is that there was no great call for it. Harold Gray’s study of the period1 (which I have shamelessly pillaged in preparing this chapter) lists a stupefying mass of publications, most of which – from The Daily Universal Register (forerunner of The Times) down to the shortest-lived print-shop mayflies – opened by offering their readers regular intelligence of the latest splendours at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and then quietly let the idea slide. Had readers been clamouring for more, Grub Street would have supplied it.
Johnson, in his ‘Life of Addison’,2 casts a backward glance over the pamphlets, periodicals, and primitive newspapers that mushroomed from the turn of the century, and traces them back to the Civil War. It was then, he says, that ‘this mode of conveying cheap and easy knowledge began among us … when it was much the interest of either party to raise and fix the prejudices of the people.’ Those early tabloids focused on ‘controversy relating the Church and State; of which they taught many to talk, whom they could not teach to judge.’
All this is Johnson’s way of setting the stage for the arrival of The Tatler (1709) and The Spectator (1711), with their civilizing mission to improve the manners of political debate and teach ‘the frolick and the gay to unite merriment with decency’. That may be a fair claim for Addison and Steele’s magazines, but not for their contemporaries, to whom his earlier stricture still applies. When journalistic criticism began, its chief model was the schismatic pamphlet, a form with no literary grace, expressly designed to wound the object and bludgeon the reader into agreement. This is an inheritance we still have not shaken off.
It was not, however, the only form of theatrical intelligence that reached the eighteenth-century reader. Papers also ran an equivalent of modern ‘listings’ features, itemizing plots and casting with only the vaguest editorial comment; and Green Room gossip, which pursued backstage vendettas and theatrical rivalries, while vigorously ‘puffing’ the shows of favoured managements (this is the world of Sheridan’s The Critic). Where criticism led an intermittent life, gossip and puffs were perennial. Why? Partly because they were more fun to read. Also because, unlike criticism, they were generally written by theatrical insiders, sometimes representing managements who could pay their way into print (Garrick is said to have been a busy puff writer in support of his own ventures).
Corrupt or not, it is largely from the puff writers that you can form an idea of the eighteenth-century stage. In no matter how garbled or partisan a style, they described what was going on. The early critics would have considered this service beneath their dignity. For them, the theatre was an unfortunate obstacle between the author and his public. Johnson defines their position in his dictionary definition of dramatic performance as ‘a book, recited with concomitants that increase or diminish the effect’ (though lexicography took a back seat when Garrick staged Johnson’s Irene, and the author appeared in a box sporting the concomitants of a scarlet waistcoat and a hat trimmed with gold lace).
Criticism in the eighteenth century was a matter of rules, generally practised by Grub Street pedants who adopted a crabbed schoolmasterly tone, and were given to chastising offending authors with Aristotle for want of a cane. The neo-classic rules had been drawn up for poetic drama, so anything that lay outside them – such as opera and pantomime – was deemed to have no aesthetic existence. However, critics were far from having worked everything out, even to their own satisfaction. They took their stand on the elaborate neo-classic theory which, from Aristotle to Boileau, was an inheritance from mainland Europe; appropriated for Britain by the arch-pedant Thomas Rymer who sought to prove that, even without Aristotle, the ‘rules’ could be derived from nature by pure logic.
However, neo-classic theory did not succeed in calling all the shots even on its French homeground, where Corneille, for one, was in the habit of pointing out that his plays actually worked rather well on stage despite their regrettable departure from the precepts of the Abbé d’Aubignac. In England, theory was up against the hugely popular Shakespeare to whom the unities and the doctrines of bienséance and vraisemblance were a closed book. The task of the critic, as seen by such legislators as d’Aubignac and Rymer, was to decide on his principles and then rigorously apply them to whatever work fell into his clutches. Clearly – whatever the authorities’ appeal to natural logic – this would not do for manifestly great work that had developed in blithe indifference to theory. If the rules were all-important, why was the classicist Ben Jonson not preferred to Shakespeare? So, from its starting point in Dryden’s Prefaces of the late 1600s, English theatre criticism was in the revisionist business: accepting the neo-classic system for want of any alternative, but quibbling over the details and making all sorts of exceptions to fit the English genius.
I mention Dryden partly to establish the credentials of English theatre criticism. Whatever weeds it may have cast up, criticism has its roots in creative practice and originated at a time when writers wanted to make sense of what they were doing. Dryden and his contemporaries did not believe themselves to be more talented than Shakespeare and his contemporaries. They did believe that they were more consciously in control of such talent as they possessed; and that the art of letters could only benefit from technical analysis and the pursuit of general laws. In particular, they believed that the English language itself had undergone a civilizing transformation in the past century; and, so far as nondramatic prose is concerned, they had a point.
With all respect to the King James Bible, these writers converted an untamed wilderness into a formal garden. Whether or not you regard this as an ‘improvement’ (as eighteenth-century landscape gardeners termed their watery ways and artfully ruined temples), there is no doubt as to which is the more hospitable to the visitor. If English literary manners were to evolve beyond the bullying bigotries of faith and politics, the place to start was English grammar; which Dryden found in so chaotic a condition that he could only test the correctness of his own work by translating it into Latin. His civilizing zeal went astray in promoting rhymed couplets as a necessary improvement on blank verse. It was on safe ground in ‘purifying the dialect of the tribe’ for rational debate. Try cutting through the thickets of Jonson’s Discoveries after the neat straight walks of Dryden and Halifax. With them, English became an instrument for expressing things precisely, so that the process of conjecture and refutation could be carried on without blackguarding the opponent. However lethal to poetry, it was the critic’s basic tool – ‘not only keen but a shining weapon in his hand’, Dryden wrote: ‘it glitters in the eyes of those it kills.’3
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Another new factor, not confined to the world of letters, was the groundswell of middle-class morality against the courtly excesses of the Restoration. The theatre was a prime offender to the moral majority, and their feelings were devastatingly voiced by the Reverend Jeremy Collier in A Short View of the Immorality...
