VICTORIAN DRAMA

Abstract

MosT HISTORIANS OF Victorian life and art have not given sustained and serious attention to the drama and the theatrical environn1ent in which it was produced. The theatre as a social pheno1nenon is forgotten in the wake of other, more pressing concerns-the growth of industry, labor legislation , public health, and political enfranchisetnent-while the drama written during the bulk of the century is generally looked upon as the black sheep of Victorian literature. Indeed, even historians of theatrical art tend to treat the nineteenth-century English theatre with overtones of derision, while most surve ys of British dra1na seem to suggest that the genre underwent a nearly total eclipse between the plays of Sheridan and Shaw. Yet the Victorian theatre was one of the most vitally active in the long history of dramatic art. Particularly afte r the well-reported attendance of the newly ascended Queen Victoria made it unquestionably respectable, the theatre was a part of the lives of Londoners of all classes. And since the theatre was patronized by such a broad spectrum of the population, the study of the types of dramatic entertainment which were demanded and made available cannot help but be revealing of the society of the time . As a repository for the resources for such a study, the Lilly Library is as richly endowed with materials relating to the nineteenth-century British theatre as it is in the street literature and other aspects of Victorian popular culture. The core of the Lilly's holdings in this area is the vast collection of nineteenth-century British