The 19th-century produced scores of great novels and stories. But for the most part its stage works have not passed the test of time. Besides Chekhov and Ibsen, are there any other 19th-century playwrights whose plays are still performed regularly?
Any theories on why the novels have lasted while the plays have not?
This page has an interesting take on it, including:
By the end of the 19th century, plays began to take on more modern characteristics (i.e. dispensing with simple-minded crap), but their production ran afoul of the censors of the day. Because of this interference, an edgy play could only get a limited audience, while an edgy novel could be published anywhere. I’m sure there were many frustrated playwrights whose work was being stifled, and only a few (like Chekhov and Ibsen) managed to acheive serious and lasting fame.
It was the relaxing of censorship in the 20th century that let playwrights really cut loose, and allowed the ascendancy of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams, among others.
A simple google for “19th century playwright” turns up lots of info.
Oscar Wilde.
And you will occasionally run across a revival of “Our American Cousin.”
This has more to do with historical context around it than the play itself.
This came as a surprise to me, and I’m sure to you as well, Walloon, but Chekhov’s three most-performed plays–Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard–are all products of the 20th century! (1900, 1901, and 1903 respectively.)
Hmm…I think you have a point there about 19th century plays. The first playwright that came to mind for me was August Strindberg–but the only play I’ve seen of his in performance was The Ghost Sonata, and that, too, is a 20th-century product, written in 1906.
Shaw, The Devil’s Disciple, 1897. Not one of his bigger hits…
CHARLEY’S AUNT (1892) by Brandon Thomas. Still the funniest farce ever written.
Shaw wrote several plays in the 19th century:
Widower’s Houses, 1892
Arms And The Man, 1894
Candida, 1987
The Man Of Destiny, 1897
The Devil’s Disciple, 1897
The Perfect Wagnerite, 1898
The Philander, 1898
You Never Can Tell, 1899
As well, the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake puts on plays by Shaw and other playwrights who were his contemporaries (1856-1950), including revivals of plays from the late 19th century.
Well, there’s practically everything by Strindberg ("Miss Julie, et al.)
I notice that virtually all of the 19th-century plays mentioned here cluster into the 1890s (except Strindberg’s Miss Julie, 1887), leaving nine decades unspoken for.
One of Martin Amis’s characters once made a crack to the effect that you can’t drama seriously as a genre, since it peaked in 1602 and has done nothing but go downhill ever since. (Of course a novelist would say that…)
When was the last time Our American Cousin, the play President and Mrs. Lincoln were watching when he was shot to death, was produced?
Fiver, see the mention by Doug Bowe above. The Internet Broadway Database lists three revivals of Our American Cousin in New York, the last in 1915.
Pinero’s Trelawny of the Wells also gets revived occasionally and, as it was written in 1898, it further confirms the clustering pattern in the 1890s.
At the other end of the century, Schiller just about qualifies. I’ve seen a production of Mary Stuart, but, as that dates from 1800, pedants can argue that it is really an eighteenth-century play. The thing however about Schiller is that English-speaking audiences are more familiar with his works as operas. This illustrates a more general rule which is that many nineteenth-century plays do survive in the repertory but that they do so as opera adaptations.
One obvious answer is that there were loads of great novelists in the 19th century, and no great playwrights. But that doesn’t help much. In my limited experience, however, I do think that poor quality was a reason. Plays thrived on popularity and the most popular format was either the farce (which tends to become old-fashioned quickly) or melodrama (ditto). People weren’t really interested in writing (or attending) artistic plays. None of the great artistic movements, such as Romanticism, affected the theatre. (When poets did write plays, they weren’t usually meant to be staged). It would be really nice to think that there are loads of underrated Victorian plays out there just waiting to be discovered, but that probably isn’t the case.
Plays weren’t copyrighted in the U.S. until the 20th century, so talented writers went elsewhere. There was no money in writing plays, so playwrights of the 19th century were usually hacks – most commonly, a member of the theater company.
In fact, the most popular playwright in 19th century America was William Shakespeare. Since you could fill the house with any version of his plays, there wasn’t much incentive to write something new and lose audiences to another revivial of “Richard III.”
Those who did write plays at the time tended toward popular entertainment, and “popular” back then does not work nowadays. Not only did it tend to be offhandedly and viciously racist, but the jokes don’t even seem remotely funny (Remember, the line that got the biggest laugh in “Our American Cousin” was: “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal - you sockdologizing old mantrap!”). What passed for comedy back then is unlikely to get a laugh from anyone today. And what passed for drama would seem horribly melodramatic (yes, they actually had plays where people were tied to the railroad track or put on a buzzsaw*).
In addition, the theater – other than Shakespeare – was considered with quite a bit of scorn. Women who appeared on the stage were considered one step above (and sometimes one step below) a prostitute.
*Augustin Daly created both cliches. The railroad track bit appeared in “Under the Gaslight,” only it was the hero tied to the tracks and he was rescued by the heroine. I see there was a revival of it as late as 1929, but it’s too racist for audiences today (the character of Sam would raise pickets immediately – for good reasons) and even if that were fixed, it would only work if they camped it up and turned it into a farce.
I was going to mention Shaw, one of my all-time favorites, if no one else did, but i got to this thread too late.
Some nitpicks:
The Perfect Wagnerite isn’t a play – it’s a critique. Strongly suggested reading for anyone interested in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, if only because Shaw’s interpretation is so completely different from that of anyone else – yet brilliantly supported.
It’s “The Philanderer”.
The problem with most 19th century plays, I think, is that they’re incredibly talky, and styles have changed. Shaw had scintillating dialogue and wit, as did Wilde, so their stuff still gets produced. If Twain had written a play, I’ll bet it would still be produced.
How about the Gilbert and Sullivan operattas (more renowned for their songs and music, of course, but the dialogue is part of the package), or the Arthur Conan Doyle/William Gillette play Sherlock Holmes?
The Copyright Revision Act of 1856 first granted copyright protection to dramatic works.
19th century opera also still gets performed, of course–Verdi and Wagner (mentioned by someone above) are still very big (in a couple of senses:)).
I would guess that The Importance of Being Ernest by Wilde is probably his most revived play–from the 1890s as again noted above.