Lecture 24History of English Literature

COMSATS Virtual Campus Islamabad

Modern Drama

Dramatists in The modern Period

IbsenStrindberg, ChekhovWildeShawSyngePirandello

Extracts from each play text

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• Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

• Strindberg’s Miss Julie

• Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard

• Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

• Shaw’s Pygmalion

• Synge’s Riders to the Sea

• Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author

Henrik Ibsen(1828-1906)

• Norwegian playwright, poet

• the father of modern drama

• the prose ‘social dramas’ – dramas of protest against social conditions, inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality

• domestic dramas

• realistic plays → naturalistic plays → symbolic plays

Henrik Ibsen: Notable Works

• A Doll’s House (1879) [1889 UK perf.] – a realistic play, a criticism of the acceptance of traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage

• Ghosts (1881) – a naturalistic play, commentary on Victorian morality

• The Wild Duck (1884) - Ibsen’s finest and the most complex work

• Hedda Gabler (1890) – psychological conflicts• The Master Builder (1892) – symbolic plays,

psychological conflicts

Ibsen’s contributions to the modern theater

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• Ibsen was a very important influence in opening up the discussion of the position of women in society . . . Nora in A Doll’s House started a discussion about the position of women in Victorian marriage; Mrs Alving in Ghosts drew attention to the double standards of morality for men and women; and Hedda Gabler ultimately constitutes a plea to allow women to develop their creativeness. (Martin Esslin, 1976: 98)

• ‘endowing his work with a double-leveled perspective’ (Robert Brustein, 1991: 49)

Ibsen’s contribution to modern British drama

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• Ibsen has been called ‘the father of modern drama’ because he was the first to use the stage to debate contemporary social dilemmas, as in his best known play, about a claustrophobic marriage, A Doll’s House.

• Ibsen’s plays offer ‘Lessons’ on the hypocrisy and dual standards of society

• He took for his subjects, for example, the role of women in society (A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler) and the consequences of inherited syphilis (Ghosts).

Ibsen’s contribution to modern British drama

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• When A Doll’s House was first performed in London in 1889 it triggered a major debate on the inadequacies of the commercial theatre.

• The Theatre of Ideas: ‘Ibsenites’ – young enthusiastic intellectuals for the new plays inspired by Ibsen – seized on the idea of theatre as a political force.

• Social comment, drawing audiences with realistic controversial drama concerning ordinary people

August Strindberg (1849-1912)

• Swedish play Writer • naturalistic drama

expressionistic drama

• Miss Julie (1888):a [one-act] naturalistic tragedy

• A Dream Play (1901): a symbolist and mystic style

Naturalism

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• was a movement, initiated by Emile Zola; the application of the new positivist, scientific spirit of the age to literature.

• Zola not only wanted a realistic representation of everyday life, he rejected the idea which had infused the classical, the romantic and even the realistic theatre of his period, that art should strive to show the beautiful, heroic, uplifting and inspiring. (Martin Esslin, 1976: 60)

Naturalism (continued)

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• Zola wanted the artist to uncover the truth about society in the same spirit of objective inquiry as that of a natural scientist’s approach to nature.

• It was in this spirit that Ibsen in Ghosts brought a hitherto taboo subject like venereal disease into the theatre and caused an enormous scandal. (Martin Esslin, 1976: 60-61)

Naturalism (continued)

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• The basic impulse behind the naturalistic movement was a determination to capture the whole of human experience, however sordid and ugly, to leave nothing unsaid. It did this by an accumulation of significant detail. In romantic drama, the heroes talked in lofty poetic terms about love or glory . . . By concentrating on the concrete detail rather than on abstract sentiments, naturalism tended to transform itself into a style in which objects increasingly became symbols, embodiment of ideas. So naturalism merged into symbolism. (Martin Esslin, 1976: 61-62)

Naturalism (continued)

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• Strindberg . . . who had started out as naturalist, took a slightly different path.

• In [his] determination to represent experience exactly as it really was, [he] soon discovered that depicting the external world tells only half the story; you also had to include the way that world was experienced by an individual, and that meant his internal world. (Martin Esslin, 1976: 62)

Expressionist drama

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• Hence Strindberg wrote a number such plays – The Ghost Sonata, To Damascus and the Dream Play itself which, quite in the spirit of naturalism, tried to depict a dream.

• In expressionist drama the characters frequently do not even have names (in Ghost Sonata: the Old man, the Student, the Mummy, the Colonel, etc.).

Bertolt Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’

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• Bertolt Brecht rejected naturalism as well as the classical and romantic theatre . . . although he took many ideas from them. His favourite term . . . was ‘epic theatre’.

• Brecht wanted an ‘undramatic’- an epic-theatre . . . in which [the audience] watch the play in a detached, critical frame of mind. This is the alienation effect. It really means strange-making effect.

Bertolt Brecht’s ‘epic theatre’

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• Brecht’s theatre therefore is anti-illusionist: that is, no effort is made to create an illusion of reality. Instead the stage becomes something of a lecture platform, a laboratory in which models of human behavior are examined, tested and evaluated.

• Whereas the naturalists and Brecht concentrate on social reality, the external world, other playwrights, following Strindberg and also novelists of dream states like Kafka and Joyce, turned towards the representation of the world of fantasy and dream.

Theatre of the Absurd

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• Theatre of the Absurd or Absurdist theatre

• . . . an absurdist play uses concretised poetic images which gradually unfold and disclose their deeper meaning.

• In the conventional realistic play, the main emphasis is on plot and character; in the Brechtian epic play it is on the demonstration of human behaviour patterns; in the absurdist play the main means of conveying significance and effect are image and metaphor.

Anton Chekhov

• Russian playwright • Four-act realistic plays

• The Cherry Orchard (1904)

• Three Sisters

• Uncle Vanya

• The Seagull

Chekhovian drama

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• Chekhov uses the drama neither as a vehicle for individualistic self-realization (Ibsen) nor as a means of exorcistic self-expression (Strindberg) but rather as a form for depicting that fluid world beyond the self, with the author functioning only as an impartial witness.

• His plays reflect both his sympathy for human suffering and his outrage at human absurdity, alternating between moods of wistful pathos and flashes of ironic humor which disqualify them from being mere slices of life.

Chekhovian drama (continued)

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• For if Chekhov is a detached realist, permitting life to proceed according to its own rules, he is also an engaged moralist, arranging reality in a particular way in order to evoke some comment on it.

• . . . his conviction that ‘life as it is’ is life as it should not be. (Brustein, 1991: 138, 139)

Chekhovian drama (continued)

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• Chekhov will introduce political, social, and philosophical discussions into his work, because these are threads in the fabric of reality. But he is careful neither to take sides nor to hint at solutions.

• “It is the duty of the judge to put the questions to the jury correctly,” he observes, employing his favorite courtroom metaphor, “and it is for members of the jury to make up their minds, each according to his taste.” (Brustein, 1991: 145)

Chekhovian drama (continued)

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• Chekhov’s personality is a surface characteristic; and beneath this surface is a satiric, admonitory moralist . . .

• Chekhov the realist pretends to have no other aim than the faithful representation of reality; but Chekhov the moralist is always conscious of a higher purpose than mere imitation.

Chekhovian drama (continued)

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• Chekhov’s revolt is directed against the quality of contemporary Russian life.

• The conflict between the cultured upper classes and their stupefying environment – between the forces of light and the forces of darkness – provides the basic structure of most of Chekhov’s plays

The Cherry Orchard (1904)

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• premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Constantin Stanislavski

• Chekhov intended this play as a comedy; however, Stanislavski directed it as a tragedy → the dual nature of the play

• has become a classic work of dramatic literature• the play’s influence on many dramatists including Eugene O’Neill,

Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Miller

The Cherry Orchard (1904) – synopsis

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• The play concerns an aristocratic Russian woman (Madame Ranevskaya) and her family (including her 17-year old daughter Anya) as they return to the family’s estate (which includes a large and well-known cherry orchard) just before it is auctioned to pay the mortgage.

• While presented with options to save the estate, the family essentially does nothing and the play ends with the estate being sold to the son of a former serf (Yermolai Lopakhin), and the family leaving to the sound of the cherry orchard being cut down.

The Cherry Orchard (1904)

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• Act One opens in May when the cherry trees in the Ranevskaya orchard are blooming.

• Trofimov – a young student who acted as tutor to Ranevskaya’s son, Grisha, who drowned five years prior to the beginning of the play

The Cherry Orchard (1904) – themes

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• the effect social change has on people, the theme of identity, the themes of cultural futility – both the futility of the aristocracy to maintain its status and the futility of the bourgeoisie to find meaning in its newfound materialism.

• In reflecting the socio-economic forces at work in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, including the rise of the middle class after the abolition of serfdom in the mid-19th century (1861) and the sinking of the aristocracy, the play reflects forces at work around the globe in that period.

Oscar Wilde(1854-1900)

• Irish-born English playwright, poet• comedy of manners (drawing-room comedy)• a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic

movement (Aestheticism) in England, which advocated art for art’s sake

• the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97).

Oscar Wilde’s Works

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his only novel: • The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

comic masterpieces: • Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) • An Ideal Husband (1895) • The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Aestheticism (art movement)

• late 19th-century European arts movement which centered on the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve no political, didactic, or other purpose.

• The movement began in reaction to prevailing utilitarian social philosophies and to what was perceived as the ugliness and philistinism of the industrial age.

Aestheticism (art movement)

• Its philosophical foundations were laid in the 18th century by Immanuel Kant, who postulated the autonomy of aesthetic standards, setting them apart from considerations of morality, utility, or pleasure.

• It was popularized in France, and the philosopher Victor Cousin, who coined the phrase l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”) in 1818.

Aestheticism (art movement)

• the movement’s ideal: the cultivation of refined sensibility

• In England, the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, etc), from 1848, had sown the seeds of Aestheticism, and their work exemplified it in expressing a yearning for ideal beauty through conscious medievalism.

• The attitudes of the movement were also represented in the writings of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater

art-for-art’s-sake

• a slogan translated from the French l’art pour l’art, which was coined in the early 19th century by the French philosopher Victor Cousin. The phrase expresses the belief held by many writers and artists, especially those associated with Aestheticism, that art needs no justification, that it need serve no political, didactic, or other end.

(Britannica Online Encyclopedia)

• Irish-born English playwright • Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925

George Bernard Shaw (GBS)(1856-1950)

George Bernard Shaw(1856-1950)

• Shavian ‘play of ideas’ or thesis drama• The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1890)• plays unpleasant: Mrs Warren’s Profession (1902), etc. • plays pleasant: Arms and the Man (1894) – farcical

comedy, Candida (1897), etc. • three plays for puritans: The Devil’s Disciple (1897), etc. • Other major works: Man and Superman (1903), Major

Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1912) – an antitype of the popular Cinderella story, etc.

Shaw’s contribution

• Shaw, an Ibsenite, or a fervent apostle of Ibsen’s, grew to be the true colossus of the new theatre.

• He began his literary career as a novelist, working also as a critic of music and drama.

• The beginning of modern drama in England can be dated in 1890 when Shaw gave his lecture on ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism’, which marks a watershed between traditionalism and new politicized forms of drama.

Shaw’s contribution

• Playwrights like Ibsen or Shaw attacked the social codes of their society; conventional drawing-room comedy probably reaffirmed the social code of the upper classes that formed its audience.

• Shaw’s brilliant and amusing demonstration of his socialist point of view contributed much to the rise of left-wing thinking in Britain and elsewhere.

Shaw’s contribution

• Shaw’s campaign to promote the ‘new’ drama

• Transforming drama into a vehicle for ideas• His preface and sense of ethical purpose provide a

model for Edward Bond• His intellectual comedy, and the verbal brilliance he

shares with Wilde, look forward to Tom Stoppard

Pygmalion (1912) – My Fair Lady (1964)

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• an antitype of the popular Cinderella story

G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912) - synopsis

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• Based on Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion in Metamorphoses.

• It tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, who makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can successfully pass off a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a refined society lady by teaching her how to speak with an upper class accent and training her in etiquette.

• In the process, Higgins and Doolittle grow close, but she ultimately rejects his domineering ways and declares she will marry Freddy – a young, poor, gentleman.

Pygmalion (1912) – the first production

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• His Majesty’s Theatre, London on April 11, 1914

• Starring Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza and

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Henry Higgins

• It was directed by Shaw himself.

J. M. Synge (1871-1909)

• Irish playwright • Folklore collector, Irish Literary

Revival, Co-founder of the Abbey Theatre

• Riders to the Sea (1904)

• The Playboy of the Western World (1907)

Riders to the Sea (1904)

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• A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran Islands, and like all of Synge's plays it is noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural Ireland.

• Synge's plays helped set the Abbey house style for the following four decades.

• The stylised realism of his writing and plays of peasant life were the main staple of the repertoire until the end of the 1950s.

Riders to the Sea (1904) – plot synopsis

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• Maurya has lost her husband, father-in-law, and five sons to the sea. As the play begins Nora and Cathleen receive word that a body that may be their brother Michael has washed up on shore in Donegal, far to the north.

• Bartley is planning to sail to Connemara to sell a horse, and ignores Maurya's pleas to stay. As he leaves, he leaves gracefully. Maurya predicts that by nightfall she will have no living sons, and her daughters chide her for sending Bartley off with an ill word.

Riders to the Sea (1904) – plot synopsis

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• Maurya goes after Bartley to bless his voyage, and Nora and Cathleen receive clothing from the drowned corpse that confirms it as their brother.

• Maurya returns home claiming to have seen the ghost of Michael riding behind Bartley and begins lamenting the loss of the men in her family to the sea, after which some villagers bring in the corpse of Bartley, who has fallen off his horse into the sea and drowned.

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)

• Italian playwright • Nobel Prize in Literature (1934) • Metadrama

• Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)

• Satirical tragi-comedy

Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)

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• In modern drama, playwrights have become more conscious than ever of the potential of that tension between illusion and reality, fact and fiction, in the theatrical experience.

• Pirandello used it in Six Characters in Search of an Author by going so far as to show us the actors as they really are as private individuals assembled for a rehearsal, then the characters as imagined by the author, and then these characters as portrayed by those actors. (Martin Esslin, 1976: 91)

Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)(continued)

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• a movement in the early 20th century called theatricalism or anti-illusionism.

• rejected realist drama and substituted the dreamlike, the expressive, and the symbolic.

• disapproved of realism because it had abandoned the defining tools of drama, such as poetry, interaction between actors and audience, soliloquies, asides and bare stages.

• The theatricalists thought realism could not depict the inner life of human beings.

Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)(continued)

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• The play demonstrates these ideas in several ways. The focus of the play is on the interactions of the six characters with the real actors in the theater. This suggests that human beings cannot distinguish between the real and the apparent – the distinction itself is illusory. “Reality” is merely what one happens to believe in at the moment.

• The Father character argues that fictional characters are more “real” than living ones, since they are fixed eternally, while a living person is constantly changing and subject to time.

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