By Stephen Murray

A very adequate vehicle to take us on a journey through nineteenth-century British theatre is the short play. It was used and appreciated by the poorest members of society, as well as richer and more genteel people, and even the avant-garde. The form was affected by changes of taste, legal restrictions on public theatrical presentations, the economics of adapting foreign works, the charges made at different times at the door, and so on. It demonstrated as well a great variety of genres and levels of quality, and its popularity at the time, and its influence in the long-term, were very great indeed. The short drama, in effect, was never really taken seriously and was one of the dominant commercial entertainments of the century. As such, its fascination lies in the societies (in many senses of that word) that sponsored it and the interest of the characters and story it tells.

I. Music Halls

A very large number of short dramatic works were presented for the poorer citizens of nineteenth-century England. The penny gaff originated in the overcrowded working-class areas of cities in the 1820s. A spectator would perhaps see a show of about half an hour's duration - the most popular pieces, interestingly, being shortened versions of Shakespeare (say, a twenty-minute version of Hamlet) - but the bills included items from blackest tragedy to lewdest farce, with a steadily emerging quality of melodrama. James Grant, in his book Sketches in London (1838), estimated that about 24,000 people attended these shows each evening in London, and another estimate of 50,000 has been given for the Christmas presentations 1. If one compares these figures with the maximum combined capacity of 5,000 per evening for Covent Garden and Drury Lane, London's patent theatres, one gets a sense of their significance. The very existence of penny gaffs was evidence of the fascination the poorer sections of society had for dramatic presentations: to give one account, Henry Mayhew recorded some costermongers around the New Cut on Waterloo and Blackfriars Roads at the end of the 1840s as saying that they would visit the theatre an average of three times a week.

The pieces which would be presented here can be related to several of the dramatic forms which developed mostly outside the patent theatres, and which could evolve and be critical to degrees forbidden to "straight" plays: these included burletta and assorted dramatic pieces presented at the minor theatres and fairgrounds, pantomime, and the entertainments of strolling players. The type of audience had a bearing on this. A penny gaff was usually a shop adapted as a theatre in which an entertainment comprising sketches, songs, farces and drag acts would be presented when enough people were assembled. On average there would be six performances a night and the clientele generally ranged in age from eight to twenty. They were not the most decorous of venues. Blanchard Jerrold described a penny gaff as "the foulest, dingiest place of public entertainment I can conceive." But like the music halls, these penny gaffs functioned as an "important creative outlet: poking fun at the everyday disasters of life, they helped to set them in perspective." 2

A new Act of Parliament finally legitimised the minor theatres in 1843. But thereafter much of their old audience was won over to the new places of entertainment, the music halls. With managers like William Macready in the late 1830s at Drury Lane, Charles Kean in the 1850s at the Princess's Theatre, and Mrs. John Wood at the St. James's in the late 1860s all improving their buildings and their presentations, a new type of middle-class theatre appeared in its place which perhaps reached its pinnacle with Henry Irving at the Lyceum and George Alexander at the St. James's in the 1890s.

So it is to the music hall that one must go to discover the sort of short dramatic pieces which were being written after the 1850s for a predominantly working-class audience. "The origin of the Music Hall was rooted in the People themselves," attested William Macqueen Pope, "and chiefly among the humbler portion of the people who wanted brightness and music and laughter brought into their lives ... It was [in short] brought about as communal entertainment by the people."3 One can date these halls at least to the entertainment taverns called "free-and-easies", which began charging admission fees and introducing better bills at the start of the Victorian era, but more properly this branch of the entertainments industry began with the founding of the Canterbury Music Hall established by Charles Morton in 1851.

The music hall, from its very beginning, endeavoured never to become too high-brow for its regular patrons (many of whom were illiterate or semi-literate), though establishments wishing to improve their presentations for certain reasons, such as the high tastes of the owner-managers or the wish to attract a wealthier class of people, might present opera and short dramatic pieces. One should also remember that they had a precedent for the production of short dramatic pieces in the penny gaffs and elsewhere.

Those managements which chose to convert to music halls were subject to, among others, a law of 1751 which had principally been intended for the regulation of disorderly houses. This association with lewdness was just one reason for the perennially poor reputation of these halls.4 Theatres and places of entertainment were confronted with the legal choice, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of selling food and drink but being denied the right to present anything which could be regarded as a play (monologues were permitted but not dialogues, sketches, or 'double-acts', unless they were mimed); or they could present dramatic pieces subject to the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain.

The opening of the Oxford Music Hall, again by Charles Morton, on 26 March 1861 was a turning-point as it marked the end of the link with the old "free-and-easies" and the beginning of direct competition with the commercial theatres. Music hall buildings and furnishings were improved; the design of the typical music hall itself developed over the next thirty years from a single stage located at the end of a hall containing stools, tables and a bar, the proceedings orchestrated by a chairman, to the luxurious two- or three-tier auditorium with a fully equipped stage fronted by a proscenium arch of the 1890s. Dramatic sketches and excerpts of current hit plays were performed, often against the law. Indeed, to a great extent, just as the design of the halls took on the same aspect as the theatres, so presentations in many music halls progressively acquired theatrical characteristics, even so far as the production of straight dramatic fare. Though the mainstay of a bill up to about 1890 was almost always the comic, sentimental or character song, received with vociferous accompaniment by the audience, dramatic sketches - even complete one-act plays - were presented (as were comic and other variety turns, and even ballet). But in presenting these dramatic items, the halls were disobeying the law. The major obstacle to the production of dramatic pieces was the fact that they did not possess a licence allowing them the legal right to present stage-plays. There were four different types of "permit": patents, stage-play, music, and music and dancing licences. Originally, only one type of licence would be granted to an applicant at one time. But later, stage-play and music and dancing licences could be issued concurrently; for this reason, whether one called a hall a theatre or a music hall depended on the entertainment which was presented.

The extension of the stage-play licence to music halls was looked on with dread in some quarters. A writer in the Saturday Review commented in February 1878: "Attempts have been made to extend the licence now accorded to the music-halls so as to have certain kinds of dramatic pieces presented to an audience which is attracted by the fact that they can combine the delights of eating, drinking, and smoking with those of witnessing a stage play." But having shown the example of the "pernicious" influence of "cafe-concerts" and "vaudevilles", it observed that "such a licence may serve to warn us against the danger of an innovation which is pretty sure sooner or later to be attempted." 5

The very campaign which so frightened this commentator had, however, started as a concerted effort some sixteen years before, with the start of the "sketch question".6 The London Music Hall Proprietors' Association was formed around 1860 to act as an umbrella organisation to protect the halls from the legal actions instigated by the legitimate theatres which were understandably vexed by the type of entertainment offered, especially episodes of straight drama which could solely be presented by the legitimate stage according to the 1843 Act. It was little wonder that they were worried. By the 1880s, music halls outnumbered theatres in London by eight to one,7 and many of these halls supplemented their usual "turns" with short, dramatic items, which both satisfied the working-class members of the audience and attracted a more discerning sort of patron. The dramatic "song-scena" ("a form of respectable antiquity", as Harold Scott graciously calls it 8) was revived, and such phenomena as companies presenting short dramatic ballets (such as those of Paul Martinetti and the Lauri Family) and the performance of one-man sketches (a good example being R. A. Roberts' appearance in the popular short melodrama Dick Turpin) appeared in response to the laws concerned with the presentation of stage-plays. Keeping within these bounds, they did not break the law. Such was the success of these experiments that, by the 1890s, even members of the aristocracy were attending the music halls openly and in numbers. This was after the introduction of better considered programming, improvements in comforts, and quite often the presentation of short dramatic pieces and other such refined forms. 9

The larger halls would, for instance, stage opulently mounted tableaux of well-known battle scenes, in deference to the tastes of the times. Charles Godfrey, for instance, produced a number of patriotic and historical scenes (music hall audiences invariably liked anything which heightened their patriotic feelings, as was later the case with one-act war plays during the First World War), including Balaclava, Nelson, The Bridge, and The Last Shot. Harold Scott wrote of Godfrey, "...in his work in bringing to the music hall the element of popular drama, he adopted a method which was precisely that of the quasi-dramatic saloon theatre" - for this reason, Scott believed that Godfrey belonged "to a traditional line of performers."10 The halls had become better organised with the legalisation of matinées in 1866, the commencement of twice-nightly bills, again in the 1860s, and the introduction of the system involving performers doing their turn in a series of halls over the course of one night, a procedure initiated by Charles Morton. These conditions, along with certain others, made the halls better able to fashion their entertainments to attract the middle and upper classes.

Though the halls did eventually come under the supervision of the Lord Chamberlain, beforehand there had been misgivings about this.

The licensing of halls in London finally became the prerogative of the Metropolitan Board of Works (later the London County Council) and, of those in the provinces, of local justices, in 1878.
This idea that rules governing the legitimate stage and the regulators who supervised them might have been out of place in the context of the workings and presentation of the halls cannot be easily dismissed. At a time when the legitimate theatre had its melodramas, farces, and the often sanitised versions of Shakespeare, and later the genteel naturalist plays of T. W. Robertson and his disciplines (who included Arthur Wing Pinero), "the music hall brought to London a refreshing and Elizabethan note of bawdiness [and] of frankness",12 much of its material coming from the hopes, elations, unsavoury character, virtues and despair of the working-class. Its rise and development was essentially pragmatic, the result of the conditions of the contemporary situation.

From the Restoration onwards, "variety" acts had been presented as curtain-raisers, entr'actes and afterpieces. Pantomime satisfied some of the demand for variety, but by no means all of it. Similar entertainments were presented at vaudeville theatres in the early decades of the nineteenth century, in places such as the City Vaudeville in London, where on 11 April, 1831, two burlettas, a vaudeville, a performance on the musical glasses, a dramatic recitation and a monologue in one act "in which Mrs. Glindon will sustain seven different characters" were presented.13 This type of variety was partly the result of the prohibition on the production of stage-plays at all theatres with the exception of the patent theatres. Limited by this ban and desiring to sell refreshments on the premises, the halls had concentrated on musical entertainments. Music hall performers were engaged for Christmas pantomimes, beginning in 1879, and for many in the audience (mainly middle-class people, including wives and mothers) this was their first experience with an often damned group of performers. Many of these people were won over to the halls, for this and other reasons, but the halls had to acclimatise as the new lower middle-class members of the audience preferred extravagance in scenery, special effects and movement over the comparatively unexciting soloists. This was to have the effect of making the essential quality of the programmes more theatrical, but it also acted as an incentive for the authors and adaptors of sketches and short plays to write coherent and self-sufficient pieces with a measure of scrupulousness which had hardly been witnessed before in the halls. This new public might well have not expected the same dramatically sound elements as they demanded from the theatre, but the quality of humorous pieces had to be improved all the same to satisfy their tastes.

What has been said with regard to the nineteenth century music hall has so far been a general overview. One can get a flavour of the movement towards the production of dramatic items at the halls as well as the conditions which dictated this orientation. But a single representative is called for to demonstrate how the incursion into the age-old preserve of the theatre occurred. Charles Morton stands out above all the other music hall proprietors during the nineteenth century for his devotion to the principle of putting on stage-plays. His philosophy was a mixture of the commercial, the ambitious and the cultured, and his halls reflected this in one way in being run according to stringent rules of taste. They stand out because of the absence of "dirt" in the turns, the presence of female performers and female members of the audience, and the inclusion of quality items on the bills. This set a standard for the music halls which followed.

In 1855, Morton staged a piece at Christmas, a tiny pantomime in the burlesque tradition called The Enchanted Hush by W. F. Vendevell. Having no licence from the Lord Chamberlain to perform a stage-play (which under the 1842 Act embraced farce, pantomime, tragedy, burletta, interlude, prelude, and similar entertainments), under pain of a £20 a night fine, Morton took the piece off. But he was determined to win the point. To get around the prohibition, one of the two actors performing in the play took on all the numerous parts himself and, since there was only one player, the piece was performed legally.

Morton continued his battle of wits with the law. In 1865, he presented a short version of The Tempest called Hodge Podge or, The Butterfly's Christmas Party. Though the piece could be classified as an opera, there was just enough indication at its ending of a pantomime to prosecute Morton. He was fined £5 for presenting a play on unlicensed premises. A few years later, Morton presented a small burlesque called Prince Love, which had a performance time of fifty minutes, and a group of excerpts from light opera, at the Philharmonic (later the Grand Theatre), Islington. Under threat of prosecution, Morton applied for and, because of his almost unmarked record, received a stage-play licence. The last episode in Morton's campaign to present sketches was in 1903, when he presented a shortened version of the opera La Toledad at the Palace Theatre.
In the same year, the hall owner chiefly responsible for introducing dramatic pieces into music hall programmes, explained to an interviewer why he insisted on doing so.

Then shortly after this, in 1907, an agreement was reached between the variety theatre managers and the Theatrical Managers' Association, by which music halls could stage plays no longer than thirty minutes and which could have a maximum of six principal players and twenty supers in the cast. The issue was all but decided when the great actor-managers of the day, Beerbohm Tree and George Alexander included, performed at the halls (and were well paid for doing so during an era of increasingly long runs of plays at the theatres they managed which rendered these actor-managers under-employed). In 1912, the music hall at last came under the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain.

This turn of events seems inevitable: with greater freedom after the late 1870s to emulate the fare of the theatres, gradually yet steadily the presentations on the music hall stage had acquired an ever more theatrical quality. Though the music hall was not much liked by some who regarded is existence as parasitic and debasing to the entertainment world in general and the theatre in particular, it was developing its own type of fare, and indeed its own type of dramatic pieces in response to the demands of its paying public. It had lured away many of the working-class audience of the legitimate theatres, and so helped to make it necessary for that institution to reorganise its programmes to consolidate its remaining, largely middle-class theatre-goers and to attract more of their number (for whom, for example, an afterpiece was unnecessary, a significant turn of events that will be explained later).

Harold Scott remarks that by the time the Tivoli was opened in 1891 by a syndicate which included the actor Edward Terry, a member of the famous acting family, "the promotion of music halls had become a part of normal theatrical enterprise, the licensed victualler being replaced by men of the type of Herbert Newsome Smith [manager of the Tivoli]."15 However, with the character of the music hall changing as new audiences were pursued and higher tastes satisfied, many of the old audience were beginning to feel alienated. The appeal of the halls early on was mainly to the working-class, but gradually, in ways similar to what happened in the French theatre in the nineteenth century, it attracted a more bourgeois audience, finding what Kenneth Richards calls a "fin de siecle intellectual approval."16 The music halls were even beginning to realise the economic force of the middle-class family group. The changes were tangible enough by the closing years of the century to bring the complaint that, in pursuit of respectability and middle-brow quality, the music halls were losing their traditional audiences. With a more critical audience looking on, more prudish and versed in the conventions of plays on the legitimate stage, the short piece (ranging form the smallest sketch to plays of various scenes) on the music hall stage had to improve considerably in quality. The average standard of the programmes was changing irretrievably since, before them, the average audience had changed also.

Conversely, the music hall had an enormous influence on the theatre. Writing in 1885, George Moore felt that, since the music hall was "incarnate the life and joys of the living world," he felt it to be "a fertile ground from which a new drama would grow from the seeds of traditional sketches and comic business."18 He hoped that it would have the effect of simplifying plays and of reducing the dependence in particular on the well-made play. In 1889, Pinero held that the free exchange of dramatic ideas between the theatres and the music halls had "been insiduously developing for many years" and that legal recognition of the latter "would consolidate, not create" this commerce. In response, the writer in the Athenaeum wrote that the music hall was now the theatre's "favourite recruiting ground", and concluded that such commerce as then existed was in one direction, from the music halls to the theatres: "One thing at least is certain - the London managers are under no apprehension as to any new developed rivalry between the music hall and the stage."19 On the other hand, just four years later, a writer in the Saturday Review, commenting just after the failure of a quintiple bill at Terry's Theatre (a bill which included Barrie's Becky Sharpe), expressed the opinion that, as far as he could see, the short play is "an inappreciable quantity, and so consequently is not wanted at present either in the ordinary theatre or in that of the varieties." He further recorded the complaint of many music hall managers, "that their field of operations had been limited by the absorption of their best material by rival entertainers in a foreign field [that is, the theatre]." 20

In terms of the influence of the halls on the theatre, however, this absorption, this adoption of personnel, techniques, and theatrical methods, had far-reaching effects. More than this, it reminded the theatre of certain foibles in real life, which however much they were made larger than life, were presented in a genuinely felt depiction of these elements. The important point is that these feelings were from the prospective of its public. "It has," said Max Beerbohm, "an air of honesty and freshness not to be found in the theatre. It is nearer to life", in this sense, that what it presents "does not distort life exactly less than the average play; but, at least, it distorts life exactly as the public likes to see life distorted. It shows us, in fact, what are the tastes and sentiments of the public", and, in this way, it is a faithful representation of a certain facet of society. 21

II. The Farce Tradition

Short theatrical pieces which have certain similarities with the modern one-act play abounded in the nineteenth century. These took the form principally of one-act farces, either in the guise of curtain-raisers or afterpieces; of burlettas and short burlesques, of penny gaff and music hall sketches, one-act melodramas, and, later on, of short dramatic pieces whose characteristics are very close to what one would in the twentieth century define as the one-act play. However, one could argue that to stop here at the beginning of the nineteenth century would be premature, as certain dramatic pieces of centuries before seem to fulfil some or even most of the criteria defining the form. John Hampden, for one, wrote in 1938: "The anonymous authors of the mystery plays and of Everyman, The Interlude of Youth, and The World of the Child, demonstrated long ago the heights which it [the one-act form] can reach." He even argued that modern mummers (he gives the example of those of Chipping Campden) present one-act comedies which find their origins in "the fertility rites and human sacrifices of a dim prehistoric past."22 It has also been contended, on the other hand, that there is only a superficial similarity between these older forms and the modern one-act play. "One cannot match," Montrose J. Moses declared, "the material out of which the modern one-act play was cut with any material of an older period and of a similar shortness."23 Neither the afterpieces and curtain-raisers by men such as J. M. Morton (1811-1891), he felt, with their emphasis on comic elements and their dependence on showy acting, nor the partially didactic but amusing interludes, were real one-act plays. Nor can Moses see any of the elements essential to the one-act play in the "recitatives" at churches or plays in the form of dramatic dialogues.

Moses dwells in his argument on the observation that these short pieces were short because of forces extraneous to the material and the form itself - aesthetically speaking, they were not self-necessitating. But this does not cancel the fact that short plays were written and that these pieces were the forerunners, in style in certain respects and certainly in tradition, of the modern one-act play. I use the word tradition in this sense, that while the one-act play as a distinct and recognized dramatic form was only to appear in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the elements of brevity, unity and economy had been consistently present in the farce, interlude, sketch or whatever, and it is in this respect that one can relate the one-act play with these forerunners. This brief survey will, however, confine itself to the two hundred years before 1890 to give some idea of the workings of the outside sociological forces and aesthetic factors by which the short play evolved.
The one-act play has had a precarious, rather thankless, position in the professional theatre. Older equivalents to it were performed up to the seventeenth century, after which it was abandoned, to be revived in the eighteenth century in the shape of farces and burlesques which were given the positions of after-piece or curtain-raiser right up to the close of the nineteenth century. During this time, the short play never had reason to become a quality form concerned with serious issues; the influences which were to bring this about were only present from the 1880s onwards. Up to this time, in brief, the short play in the theatres was almost invariably a farce because of its subservient role on the bill and the demands of the audience for whom it was written.

Up to quite near the end of the seventeenth century, latecomers to the theatre were allowed in free of charge, after, say, the third act or so of a play. This naturally struck certain managers as a potential source of revenue. In 1686, Michael Davenant proposed that this custom be discontinued and that those who arrived late should pay a fee, which turned out to be comparatively small (6d. to half a crown for the pit or Is. to 4s. for the boxes). This system initially succeeded without any adverse reaction and was known as "after-money". The amount collected was kept as a bonus for the players and some earned as much as £400 or £500 a year. But the expectations of these latecomers (who were mostly shopkeepers or involved in the mercantile trade) changed after an admission charge began to be levied and this had an effect on the quality and type of entertainment produced.

At first, songs or dances were put on but this did not fully satisfy theatre-goers. Consequently, the post-Restoration playwrights wrote "Terminal masques of a more or less elaborate order," such as Dioclesian, or The Prophetess Anatomist (1696), and The Island Princess (1699). From this origin, the after-piece appeared as an identifiable item on bills in the 1710s. Terminal acts had been written before this but not in any numbers nor as part of the normal fare. W. J. Lawrence wrote of the advantages of the new dramatic vehicle: it was, he remarked, "Of extreme benefit, if only because it was the means of releasing our dramatists from the tyranny of the five-act form." 25

The vogue of the afterpiece began with the Drury Lane production of Aaron Hill's farce The Walking Statue, or The Devil in the Wine Cellar on January 9, 1709, which followed his tragedy Elfrid, or The Fair Inconsistent. The success of the farce - it survived the tragedy - seems to have set the example for the composition of afterpieces. Charles Johnson's farce Love in a Chest followed his full-length tragedy The Force of Friendship at the Haymarket Theatre in April of the same year, and Colley Cibber's burlesque The Rival Queans, with the Humours of Alexander the Great was produced in June.

Farces of one or two acts superseded the often fragmented and repetitious displays of tomfoolery which generally made up the full-length farce after the Restoration in 1660, and were often employed as curtain-raisers or afterpieces to five-act Restoration comedies, heroic tragedies, and revivals of reworked Shakespearean plays. The curtain-raiser was not as prevalent as the afterpiece at this time though it was to increase in importance, especially in the next century. Afterpieces were often written with relative care and spectacle as they were constructed to win the attention of an audience - as short items on the bill, they had to be that much more concerted and pointed to do this (they usually also contained songs and dances). This example of compactness had a direct influence the writing of structurally tighter full-length farces in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The audience which arrived late usually comprised shopkeepers and businessmen, and naturally the farce would have been written with this group in mind. The typical eighteenth farce had a running time of forty-five to sixty minutes. Humour was verbal and centred on the traditional diction devices of comic dialogue embracing puns, malapropisms, funny character names, stuttering and other speech defects; the most popular of all the devices was dialectical humour involving localised language usage and pronunciation.26 Tosser, a grenadier in The Area Belle, says: "In this old chair how many a time has this 'ere son of Mars sat courting of Venus - which her name is Penelope - vile the cold pigeon pie has been heating up in that there hoven." Interestingly, short farce pieces never acquired the sentimentality with which full-length comedy was imbued as the eighteenth century progressed. On the contrary, it normally preserved a more forthright type of comedy. Its plot usually involved an upper-class love intrigue, a basic story-line which continued in farces right up until the 1830s. The farce of this time was constructed in large part as a response to the social ambitions of their audiences. During this period farce was a bourgeois type of entertainment, a fact plainly seen when one observes that the characters portrayed on the stage belong to the higher classes to which many in the audience aspired.

In the nineteenth century, one-act farce assumed greater importance as well as new names. In order to circumvent the laws governing the permission to present evaluated pieces on appropriately licensed premises, the minor theatres (in other words, those playhouses up to 1843 without a patent, which in London, for instance, included all the theatres except Drury Lane, Covent Garden and the Haymarket Theatre during the summer months) began labelling their farces as "interlude", "comedietta", "petite romance" and "operatic farce", among others (and thus these assumed the same ambiguity of definition as the word "burletta"). This is an early example of the persistent legal pressure which helped direct, and in some ways to stifle, the development of the short play form. Burletta, for instance, was a short piece which included a token amount of singing so that, legally speaking, the piece produced was not a stage-play and, therefore, could be performed in theatres without royal patents. By the 1830s, after two decades of tentative productions, farce was presented openly at the illegitimate (non-patent) theatres, but the custom of mislabelling them persisted at least until the 1840s. After the passing of the 1843 Theatre Act, this custom gradually died out.

What Jeffrey Huberman has described as the "mass production" of farces now began as a huge demand appeared for afterpieces. One-act and short two-act farces were second only to melodrama in terms of popularity in the Victorian period: one of the first things that happened during this proliferation was that the average afterpiece was now reduced almost invariably to one act, instead of predominantly two, and from forty or sixty minutes to thirty or thirty-five minutes at the most. The authors of these afterpieces (and, gaining in popularity, curtain-raisers) were theatrical journeymen who wrote these pieces to show off an actor's talents to best advantage. One example is Raising the Wind by James Kenney, a shallow piece written so that the actor playing the character Jeremy Diddler could give a tour-de-force performance. W. T. Lewis, Charles Matthew and Henry Irving, among others, played the part with great popularity. W .B Jerrold copied this self-same formula when writing Cool as a Cucumber, another afterpiece, with the Diddler character in this instance being called Horatio Plumper. This gives some indication of the repetitive, formulaic nature of the one-act farce at this time, in terms of its construction and characterisation. The rewards did, however, encourage this custom of imitation in the period 1845-1875 since it was not unusual for it to take £100 per week after midnight.

At the level of both structure and characterisation, these afterpieces were rather crude. Comedy itself was not entirely suited to the Victorian stage because the auditoria were too large and the understanding of the late-night audiences too narrow. The audiences which now came to see these afterpieces (and for whom the afterpieces were written) were usually there not because they worked until a late hour but because admission was half-price after 9 p.m. Most would have had only a limited education and little grounding in more refined works. Many would also have been tired after a day's labour and in no mood for anything other than the lightest entertainment. As a result, the short dramatic pieces of this time were loud, blatant and unpolished.

Another reason for their poor quality centred on the fact that there were not enough original farces, so the dramatists plundered the one-act reserves of other countries, especially France, whose vaudevilles were adapted for the British stage.27 Though one might get the impression that the farceurs of this time were immensely prolific,28 many of these were adaptations. Indeed, the most popular of all nineteenth afterpieces, J. M. Morton's Box and Cox (1847) was adapted from Une Chambre a Deux Lits, an 1839 work by E. F. Prieur and A. Letorzec. Adaptation meant adopting the plot framework but often not precisely the subject-matter, which in the original French farce usually concerned marital infidelity and some sexual innuendo. This would be reworked to show domestic problems in a more wholesome situation. But the French influence was still palpable. "Especially popular," wrote George Rowell, describing some elements in British farce which originated in French farces, "were intrigues of jealousy and marital feuding and the myriad problems to be incurred from visiting relatives."29 Rowell goes on:

Farce had now a more pronounced reliance on the comedy of action. The action would almost always centre around the victimisation of an individual, an ordinary and uncomprehending person, by a relentlessly capricious universe against which he is powerless. This element is a precursor to the characteristic of determination in the one-act play that would develop later in the century. How the farce was structured depended on its brevity. Within the limits of its thirty or thirty-five minutes, action was of paramount importance and the storyline was advanced largely with comments on events in the form of pithy addresses by the victim declared directly to the audience. In Joseph Sterling Coyne's one-act farce, How to Settle Accounts With Your Laundress (1842), the luckless character Widgetts sees what he thinks is his beloved Mary in a water-butt. It is his own gullible interpretation of the scene which strengthens the comedy of the situation.

Again because of the tight frame, characters were usually no more than immediately recognizable types, often with names which informed the audience of their essential character.31 One should always keep in mind that character is a comic mechanism in farce. Moreover, an interesting point about characterisation in farce (as well as in other comic genres) is that a character, sanctioned by the very nature of this type of drama, can delineate both himself, those characters around him, and the situation he is in, in a flamboyant and rapid manner.

From the high-born heroes, impeccably attractive heroines and comic servants of Georgian farce, Victorian farce developed in a more mundane direction towards artisan characters. Plays now had the lower-middle classes represented in the first rank of their characters. For instance, in the one-act farce, The Area Bell (Adelphi, 7 March 1864), Pitcher is a member of the police force, Tosser a soldier in the Grenadiers, and Walker Chalks a milkman. It is also important to note that the average number of characters in an afterpiece was six, whereas for a modern one-act play it was three, a smaller number that facilitated fuller personalities - indeed, many single-act pieces of the early twentieth century had only two characters, and their example of concentrating on ordinary themes, character and dialogue over action influenced the development away from melodramatic technique of rapid movement to a slower pace, the substitution of disparateness with one dominant theme, and the improvement of dialogue to hold attention. However, the completeness and structural unity of the early one-act pieces can be explained if we understand that the writing of farce is more concerned with the creation of comic events and the control of structure (as in Box and Cox) to maintain the comic momentum and to lead to a satisfactory conclusion, rather than involving the intricacies of character-building and the relative looseness of realistic plotting.

The plot had changed as well, from one concerned with the social milieu of the upper classes to one preoccupied with middle and lower-middle class domesticity, being both house-bound and dwelling on domestic virtues, at least by implication or transgression. This can be related to a change in the make-up of the audiences and to the basic moral didacticism of the time.32 (All this of course also helped guarantee that the one-act plays that were developed later in the century would not as a matter of custom be peopled chiefly by persons of a higher social order.) The people going to the theatre in the second half of the nineteenth century were generally from backgrounds different to those of the earlier part of the century and this was reflected in the works presented. In addition, it is interesting to note that, among the users of this brief genre, the people who presented short farces at amateur theatricals were mostly members of the middle-class.

Some of the stalwarts of the one-act farce (such as the milkman, tailor and washerwoman) were swept aside in the second half of the nineteenth century as the writers took notice of the higher social position of many in the audience and responded to the work and social duty emphases in Victorian philosophy. Characters now included bankers, various types of entrepreneurs, and merchants, signifying that upward mobility was one of the themes of these late Victorian farces. Farces could have biting criticisms of the times because they were a minor item on the bill and did not need to be taken seriously. Moreover, some of the more outspoken characters often represented the unimportant members of society.

But while these pieces were extremely popular (the play-collections of this time contain many of them, reflecting their huge appeal,33 though royalty rights in mid-century were a paltry 10) only J. M. Morton's Box and Cox has a high quality of its own. In effect, one-act farce was not recognised as a serious theatrical form. There were a number of reasons for this. It was a judged according to the standards applied to comedy, which places a greater reliance on higher quality comic language and avoids depending on action - as a result, it was found wanting. The one-act farce lacks a propagandist or intellectual purposefulness: its aim is to entertain rather than to incite some degree of interpretation. And, finally, it was seen as entertainment for the masses whose undiscerning tastes had created something whose quality and significance were regarded as beneath proper critical examination.

Let us now consider Morton's play. Box and Cox is essentially a duologue, constructed in a highly systematic frame of parallel comments, activities and biography. It is this parallelism of their swings of mood and the similarity of phrase with which they express this that gives the play a vital comic energy. Its structure is too symmetrical by modern standards, leading to a lack of distinction between the two principal characters. One could also criticise the ingenious turns of fortune which lead to changes in destiny and attitude, all of which show that character is part of the comic mechanics of the piece. Box the printer and Cox the hatter are easily recognisable petit bourgeois personages: they are pompous with a keen sense of self-importance, speaking a vocabulary that Morton uses to satirise that class: "I should feel obliged to you if you accommodate me with a more protuberant bolster, Mrs. B." and "…she seems to set her face against my indulging in a horizontal position." But the play does have a number of characteristics which are also typical of the modern one-act play. The opening rapidly acquaints us with the character of Mr. Cox and the scheme of Mrs. Bouncer to have both tenants use the same room without knowing about the other, the basic situation from which all the ensuing complications arise. The intensive structure and pacing of the piece, by which matters built up from before the beginning of the play come rapidly to a head, in a way which leaves one with a sense of inexorability and the powerlessness of the individual, is reminiscent of the modern one-act form. Box and Cox initially presents long pieces of dialogue, then later very rapid exchanges of dialogue act in conjunction with the comically quick ramifications of events over which the characters have little or no control and which determines their actions and opinions.

An interesting element to recognise are the elaborate stage directions. A good many one-act farces, though only a small majority of those written, were published usually at the time of their first performance, in the form principally of French's or Lacy's Acting Editions (it is interesting to note that the charge for using this material was five shillings an act). What perhaps makes these most interesting, in terms of their effect on the reading public, was that there was a definite attempt to give the reader a clear and reasonably precise account of the play as it would have been produced. Indeed, the accuracy of this account would have affected the choice of work made by amateurs and others wishing to perform the piece, and the style of their production. This custom was a precursor to the elaborative, even novelistic stage directions fashionable by the turn of the century. This is an example of the highly domestic stage directions in Box and Cox: "Pokes fork into bacon, opens window and flings it out - shuts window again and returns to drawers for tea-things; encounters Box coming from his cupboard with his tea-things - they walk down stage together." In plays where the visual comedy was of central concern and where a tight orchestration of character movement was especially important given the objective of maintaining an unbroken rhythm in the course of a short drama, this development was of great assistance.

Farce gradually became full-length after the 1870s, a development which has been attributed in large part to the French naturalist farceurs like Labiche, Hennequin, Delacour and Feydeau. It had been the practice among the minor theatres earlier in the century to employ writers for around 10 a week, the work they produced (quite often short plays including farces) then being heralded as the property of the house. But after the revolution in royalty rights begun by Dion Boucicault in the middle of the century, a share of the box-office earnings was allotted to authors.34 As a consequence, there was more money in writing full-length farces: an established playwright like Sheridan Knowles could earn £100 for each act of a full-length play (and the usual number of acts was five), whereas an afterpiece might only earn £100 to £150 in total. In order to gain greater amounts, the average dramatist progressed in many cases inevitably from short farcical pieces to full-length farce and melodrama. Douglas Jerrold moved on in this way, as did Morton and T.W. Robertson, and the trend continued with Sydney Grundy (his debut work, A Little Change, was subtitled a "Farce in One Scene"), Henry Arthur Jones and Arthur Wing Pinero.

The abolition of the afterpiece had begun at least as far back as the 185's, when Charles Kean, actor-manager of the Princess's Theatre, changed the normal bill by eliminating the afterpiece and presenting just a curtain-raiser and a full-length main attraction (this immediately increased the comparative importance of the full-length play). Another reason for the demise of the afterpiece was that half-price admission was discontinued and this saw the loss of the public who availed of it (most were being attracted to the music hall in any case). After 1850, there were several attempts to revive short farce on the London professional stage by producing pieces which were even more brief than the normal one-acters: an example is Charles Smith Cheltman´s "farcical sketch" Christmas Eve (1870). There was even an attempt to reintroduce the old Haymarket Theatre practice of offering a series of three or four one-act farces in place of a main play and an accompanying piece. But these endeavours were isolated and proved unsuccessful.

One must conclude that short farces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though very popular with audiences and having a pivotal influence on the genesis of forms like melodrama and full-length comic plays, never achieved a high standard and relied for much of their impact on the acting talents of actors and comedians. The sole deep emotion in one-act farces, denoting their relatively unsentimental make-up (in stark contrast to melodrama), is an element of desperation or high tension as the pressures of a certain predicament take their toll on the characters. This lack of emotional substance must be expected, given that the emphasis was on action, that events had to be kept moving rapidly and irretrievably, and that there was not the time to build up a series of fully fleshed-out characters. But it is not by any means a source of good drama, the type that has real merit.

What effect did short farce have? It was important in that it succeeded in introducing farce or farcical elements into other forms, especially comedy. The first important figure in this dramaturgical mixing was H. J. Byron: his first comedy with traces of farce, Not Such a Fool as He Looks, was produced at the Globe on 23 October, 1869. This influence might have been more direct and stronger had not the sentimentalism in British comedy not stalled and then diluted its force. Fortuitously, in the final analysis, comments Jeffrey H. Huberman, "the overt inclusion of genuinely humorous actions in Victorian comedies was a crucial event in British dramatic history…. By the turn of the century laughter was again the definitive element of comedy."35 T.W. Robertson, the most successful exponent of this practice, began his playwriting career with three one-act farces in the 1840s and 1850s. He too was to bring this legacy into the writing of the influential cup and saucer full-length plays produced at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in the second half of the 1860s. The first successful full-length, three-act farcical comedy was W. S. Gilbert's Tom Cobb, or Fortune's Toy, produced at the St. James's Theatre on 24 April, 1875.36 Gilbert had already written, among much else, numerous one-act farces, and here he used the new term "farcical comedy" to describe his long play. In short, the mode of farce either remained in one-act or was adapted to full-length form, a trend beginning as we have seen in the mid-1870s, although many British dramatists found it difficult to extend the skill developed in writing one-act farce to full-length composition, accustomed as they were to the intensity of manic and abbreviated short pieces. Instead, lacking a long-play tradition in the form, they mostly resorted to translating and reshaping the ready-made full-length farces of their mentors in one-act farce, the French (thereby also adopting the myriads of windows and doors for unannounced entrances and expedient exits).

Later British dramatist were thrown on to their own resources. With the new copyright laws of the 1880s and 1890s, plagiarism was no longer widely practiced, and this abstention, along with the boredom which audiences felt with the old formulas, meant that much of the older mechanics of farce was dropped and a more obviously native farce grew up, the best written by Pinero in his Court Theatre years in the 1880s. Eventually, in the 1890s, comedy of manners was to predominate.

It was typical of the theatre of this time, in farce no less than in melodrama, to hide an absence of intellectual and structural solidity beneath visual spectacle, thus requiring that the dialogue need only be functional and the plot sufficiently rapid to prevent close scrutiny. The one-acters of the mid-century distracted attention from their deficiencies in logic simply by being so compacted and brief, while the full-length farces which succeeded them used the pace of action and the speed of playing to compensate for the absurdity of the incidents. Brief, in effect, became quick. There were two options for the full-length farceur: keep the number of characters small and invest one's time in bringing out distinct traits in each; or else have a large number of characters and concentrate on chaotic though (in the best cases) well-orchestrated action. To compare the two, then: the average number of characters in British afterpieces was six or so, while in full-length farces there could be as few as ten (as in Byron's New Brooms (1881)). Of course, with so many characters, a resolution was difficult. In a comedy based on misunderstanding, the one-act afterpieces would usually have two main characters (say Box and Cox) mistaking identities and thus only a single revelation is required. In a full-length piece - and this is where the British had difficulties because of their lack of grounding in the longer farce form - with so many mistaken identities, the plot and the resolution could be enormously complicated, and be reduced to mere tedium or a gratuitous conclusion.

The history of the curtain-raiser is distinct from the afterpiece, but the demands behind its composition and the type of play created because of this, made the two very similar and even synonymous in terms of structure and mood. So, much that has been said about the one-act farce afterpiece would apply to the curtain-raiser. The curtain-raiser is again very much a phenomenon of the idiosyncrasies of an audience. In the nineteenth century, members of the higher social classes began the custom of dining later and then attending the theatre at such times as seven p.m. or, by the last decades of the century, even eight p.m. This section of society had returned to the theatre from the mid-century onwards in sufficient numbers to make them a highly significant section of the theatre-going public. The managements were forced to adjust their programme timetable to suit this regime. They would have to put on the full-length item according to the time of arrival of these important patrons (that is, after supper). But, of course, there were still those poorer sections of the audience who arrived early and who required some entertainment. It was not necessary that the item should be of a particularly good quality, as their average artistic tastes were not too high. They wanted entertainment, easily viewed and satisfying.

So the curtain-raiser acquired a stature on the bill that it had never enjoyed before, though there was of course very little of the pressure on this theatrical form to improve in quality as there was on the full-length play because of the larger numbers of better educated and more cultured sections of the audience, who mostly arrived after the curtain-raiser. A better class of curtain-raiser had been attempted on occasion. Earlier in the century, for example, the "privileged" theatres had often emulated the fare of the minor theatres and demoted Shakespeare to the position of a curtain-raiser or a final piece. These would only be portions of complete plays, accompanied by music. They were not, however, well received by many of the working-class, who made up the majority of the theatre's audience at this time.

The French were using the curtain-raiser during the first half of the nineteenth century and dramatists who specialized in it included Carré, Dupré and Blum. The British followed when the need arose. Curtain-raisers were employed to bridge the period between the beginning of the performance and the late arrival of the bourgeois members of the audience. It is, however, perhaps a sign of the difference in quality between the curtain-raiser and the full-length play which followed it, and the separation between those who came early and those who came late, that the curtain-raiser had little or no qualitative or thematic relation to the full-length play.

What had happened in Britain was that the formal hour of dinner had advanced to seven p.m. by the mid-century. Charles Kean instituted the practice of presenting one long play preceded by a curtain-raiser in the 1850s. Like the rise of the matinee (which began in the 1860s and was well established by the 1880s, quite often allowing managements to put on experimental work), this restructuring of bills was primarily the result of social change. Its effect was far-reaching. "Perhaps it was not too much to say," wrote Allardyce Nicoll, that the characteristic modern dramatic performance was created by a change in society's dinner hour."37
What this change eventually meant was that the afterpiece vanished, but also that afterwards the curtain-raiser was dropped, as fashionable society went to the theatre in greater numbers and more frequently, and the music halls attracted many of those for whom the short dramatic piece had been performed. The Bancrofts had got rid of the curtain-raiser and presented only a full-length play as early as the late 1860s, and by the close of the century, the curtain-raiser was hardly seen in London theatres, thought it was still played in the provinces. It is perhaps an indication that the lower classes were still well-represented that the curtain-raiser was kept on for so long (sometimes even into the new century), but the practice was no longer an economic imperative in some theatres as early as thirty years before the end of the nineteenth century, with fewer patrons habitually coming early or inclined to sit through a long programme.

III. The Amateur and Progressive Theatrical Movement in Britain in the Nineteenth Century

Henry James wrote of the English theatrical world of about 1880 that theatre-going was now all the rage.38 As the theatre was now accepted by society and the church, in response to improvements in the quality of plays, of the furnishings, of the staging and acting, and probably also as a result of the desertion of the theatre by substantial numbers of the poor and misbehaved, members of rich families (specially the young) interested themselves much more in drama. Opinions had changed, and with them the condescension shown towards the theatre had diminished. According to The Gentlemen's Magazine in 1883, for instance, "The revival of interest in the actor's art is perhaps the most remarkable social phenomenon."39 This was symptomatic of the renewed respect accorded to the theatre, reflected in, among other things, the sales of published plays, the space given to drama critics in magazines and newspapers, the production of amateur theatricals, and, most significantly as a symbol, the knighting of actors, beginning with Henry Irving in 1895. In the Victorian period, ideas against the theatre based on conventional religious and social standards were gradually dropped, and it was during this period that short plays came into their own as the most amenable form for amateur actors to use at home and elsewhere.

As well as dancing (polka and waltz, among others), card games, charades, and other activities, the wealthier members of society, particularly the lower middle class, often amused themselves with amateur theatricals after dining. This involved

Amateur theatricals flourished in the 1860s and the 1870s, but lacking the enthusiasm and resources of their predecessors in the eighteenth century, the presentations were often comparatively limited affairs. The real importance of amateurs lies, however, in the societies and clubs they formed to practice their art more publicly. As early as 1845, the great actor William Charles Macready was noting "this craze for amateur theatricals" which seemed to be sweeping the country at the time.41 But City gentlemen, lawyers, civil servants, bankers and the like all took up this hobby in their leisure time. Beginning with drawing-room pantomimes and recitals, "home-made" parlour plays, play-readings and discussions, the pieces they engaged in became gradually more realistic.

These amateurs began in the 1840s to organise themselves into amateur dramatic societies. It was upon the instigation of the brothers John and W. de Clair Baker that the Hon. Frederick Ponsonboy (later Earl Bessborough) established a group in 1842 which eventually called itself the Old Stagers. In its first fifty years, the Old Stagers presented from three to seven plays a season, some short so as not to extend beyond the period of the Canterbury Cricket Festival around which the society organised its presentations. The most popular revival and the play with which the society celebrated its Jubilee Year was Box and Cox.

The Manchester Athenaeum Dramatic Society was formed in 1847, initially as a play-reading group. Its primary aim was decided in May of that year: "The object of the Society is to cultivate a taste for Standard Dramatic Literature and Poetry and be a source of mutual improvement and amusement to its members." (This did not, however, prevent the members from staging a number of farces in the succeeding years.) One gets a flavour in this sentence of the self-satisfaction and pedagogic nature of this and other societies which followed it. One exception to this was the Ingoldsby Club, founded at the Walworth Institute in London in 1860. In contrast to the Manchester amateurs, these players put only slight emphasis on encouraging literary taste and understanding, and their plays were selected because of their entertainment value rather than their "educational" qualities. Their first programme, on 7 February, 1861, for example, contained a piano and song recital, the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice and a farce by J. M. Maddox entitled A Fast Train! High Pressure!! Express!!! It even encouraged its members to write plays. One member, James Albery (later author of the successful comedy Two Roses (1870)), wrote a farce called A Pretty Piece of Chiselling which was given its first production by the Club in 1864. As the conditions amateurs in general had to work in included the limited time to learn lines and rehearse, the scarcity of finances, the lack of players, and so on, the demand was often mainly for plays of up to one act in length or for abbreviated plays. W. G. Elliot advised in 1898 that "as a rule, one-act plays are by far the best, as they are easier to rehearse in a short time, and go much better than three- or four-act pieces." 42

After the advances in realistic drama made by T.W. Robertson and the impetus of Ibsen, among others, these amateurs were inspired to progress from either the rather staid works they would revive, or the farces and other trifles they would put on to amuse themselves. Adrian Rendle, to give one example, believes that the "cup-and-saucer" plays of Robertson must have encouraged many to take up acting. He continues:

Amateur drama was now taken much more seriously compared to the attitude towards it earlier in the century, involving more an intellectual challenge than a slighter histrionic gratification. One can add to this that not alone did the characters seem easier to embody and that the furnishings and sets would be relatively ready to hand, but that the novelty of these plays would have encouraged greater experiment in playwriting (and staging) simply because they represented both a break with a stilted past and an indication of directions which could be followed.

The status of amateurs in the eyes of the law was such that they could perform banned plays so long as the production was not open to a paying public. This had a far-reaching effect. The Shelley Society's performance of The Cenci in May 1886 (the society had been formed the previous January chiefly for this purpose), a private matinee performance at which only members could attend, paved the way in Britain for the system of private staging of the Independent Theatre and other theatre clubs and societies, the most important of which was the Stage Society with its "club" performances on Sundays.

I will use the example of the Windsor Strollers to give some impression of the plays performed by a typical amateur group. The Windsor Strollers began as an attempt by officers of the Windsor garrison to raise funds for those who had suffered in putting down the Indian Mutiny. They played Morton's comic drama Our Wife; or, The Rose of Amiens, A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion, and Boots at the Swan, on 30 and 31 October, 1857. In November, 1860, they met and formally established their society. With one exception, all were members of the Old Stagers. Their usual fare was light and forgettable, often comprising one-act farces with titles like A Hasty Conclusion, How Stout You're Getting, Tom Noddy's Secret and A Family Failing. Again, like most other amateur dramatic societies, there was a club rule that no member of the acting profession could join, thus keeping the club strictly amateur (jealously isolating themselves from members of the commercial theatre, thus stifling their advance in theatrical work). They did sometimes engage professional actresses, but these would receive no payment and thus the amateur status of the society would remain unimpaired. In all, in its first thirty-five seasons (spread over thirty-eight years), the club gave 88 bills composed of 168 plays (to give some sort of comparison, the Old Stagers presented a higher number of dramatic pieces but over a longer period: the society produced 289 plays between 1842 and 1898).

Amateur theatricals were staged by Liberal, Conservative and Labour clubs, co-operative societies, workingmen's clubs and friendly societies. Many of these would present their entertainments on such occasions as annual parties for employees of factories, and those for old people and widows. Their performances would take place in venues like schoolrooms, mechanic institutes and temperance halls. Presented along with the songs and ballads they would render was the "dialogue", the common title for short plays and sketches. These were employed extensively as no fee had to be paid. (One should keep in mind that, in general, short dramatic pieces had a significantly smaller performance fee than larger plays, and this is a point which worked in its favour when an organisation of limited means was choosing a play). This had its disadvantages. "Plays which carry no fee reflect their poor quality as well as the low standard of the people who perform them."44 Some of the societies - and this is an indication of how circumstances were changing - were associated with churches and chapels.

Andrew Davies holds that one of the reasons why the British Theatre failed to create a large, experimental alternative to the commercial stage after the decline of melodrama in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was because the country lacked what many European countries had, "a culturally organised movement."45 In Germany, for instance, there were eight hundred workers' educational associations as early as 1860, forming the basis of the Social Democratic Workers' Party (which had half a million members by the close of the 1870s) and the Freie Volksbuhne, the Workers' Theatre (established in 1890). In the context of these projects, Britain had been slow to organise. The Workingmen's Clubs in Britain, however, did total eight hundred by 1880 and claimed to have a total membership of a quarter of a million men (and some women) by 1900. Though nearly all of these clubs had the use of stages and scenery, they usually put on farces and comedies rather than works which might have acted as the beginnings of an alternative theatre. However, some members of the middle class with advanced ideas had other plans: the Fabian Society (naturally, Shaw stands out) did encourage more serious work, and these plays (and their authors) were often the backbone of societies like the Independent Theatre, the New Century Theatre (founded in 1897), and the Stage Society (1899).

Of course, much of the philosophy of the amateurs as it evolved in the 1880s and 1890s, of giving a platform to otherwise neglected plays (both old and new) and of bringing the theatre to the people (something which Shaw 46 and other argued for), was embodied in these organisations and, from the first decade of the new century, in the Little Theatre movement in Britain.
But there were mixed feelings concerning this phenomenon (just as there were fears expressed about the influence of the music hall). A writer in the Saturday Review in 1890 argued that amateurs sometimes had a bad effect on drama: "it must be confessed," he wrote, "that the patronage which the professional-amateur bestows upon the drama seldom betrays any very tender solicitude for its highest interests."47 The important point, however, to be grasped about the rise of the amateur movement is that, reflecting the newly won public acceptance of drama, from those involved in the workingmen's clubs to the monarch with her royal command performances (which on several occasions were given by amateurs), it helped to invigorate the British theatre by encouraging people to be not alone interested in the theatre but actually to write, act and assist in its productions. Though an amateur's reading might never get beyond French's Acting Edition, the tradition in which he was taking part was the catalyst, if not the model, for much of the reawakening in the British theatre that came after. This was perhaps something that George Moore intuited when he wrote in 1888, after a performance by amateurs of his one-act play, The Honeyman in Eclipse, had been badly received: "Personally I believe that amateurs will prove of real service to those who would break with the soul-wearying conventionalities of the modern stage."48 Bringing the theatre to the people had just begun.
As I suggested, much of the fare presented by amateurs was insubstantial and untaxing on both their histrionic and financial capacities. The same writer in the Saturday Review observed that, even with the absence of severe financial and organizational commitments, the amateur as he knew him had not begun performing the "unwanted and little-acted drama," preferring instead some "washed-out replica of what may be witnessed on the regular stage."49 Amateurs were invariably conservatives in their choice of plays. As well as other considerations, there was very little tradition as yet of performing progressive plays, though as was pointed out the amateur was in a good position to do this.

Innovations on the continent, however, were to point the way forward. Antoine's Théâtre Libre, established in 1887, was founded with a view to staging the types of novel plays which would not usually be performed on the commercial stage because of the pressures of finance and the censor. In order to have an entirely free choice of plays, Antoine had rejected the suggestion of involving a patron in the venture and, instead, he had formed an amateur society financed by subscriptions. The first season, though there were a few verse and symbolist plays, was dominated by naturalist plays overwhelmingly of one act in length and of a relatively high quality. Native French authors (as well as a lesser number of foreign dramatists), intent on advancing the frontiers of drama, were now given the platform upon which they could present their often radically innovative pieces. Whether because many of the techniques were new and unpolished, the authors inexperienced, the period of time they had to write their plays was short, or they expected the audience would only sit through a limited period of dramatic innovation - for whatever reasons, most of the plays were short. There is, however, one central aesthetic reason for this which Archibald Henderson pointed out in 1914, that it is the essence of naturalistic drama to be static an short:

Fortunately, as it was not rare to see bills of one-act plays in Paris, this in itself was not too great an impediment to a reasonably warm public reception of the enterprise. Antoine's example was being followed in France. "Is there any need," Antoine wrote in his magazine, "to recall the twenty identical efforts that have blossomed forth in Paris itself, in the last two years, after the success of the Théâtre Libre, and which may one day be capable of supplying new outlets for young dramatists?"51 The playwright Francois Curel, who had his first major successes with the Théâtre Libre, said of this theatre:

Indirectly, Antoine's influence was almost as strong on the British theatre. A commentator on the Little Theatre movement, Anna Irene Miller, wrote that "if Ibsen and Scandinavia quickened the spirit of English lovers of drama, Antoine and France suggested the form of the revolution."53 Some of the groundwork had already been done. There were at this time the beginnings of societies which were involved in the development of drama through play-going and debate. Many members of the British public were now buying plays in book form, which encouraged dramatists to write a better standard of dialogue since the compositions of the playwright were now looked upon as literature and could not rely on the histrionic talents of an able actor. More than this, because novels were that much less confined by convention and were much more advanced than the average play, in published form plays could be expected to be, and some tentatively became, as radical as the other genres in print. Indeed, publication allowed banned plays to become widely known. It was no false claim for Thomas H. Dickinson to say in 1920, "The two foundation stones upon which rest the drama of the early twentieth century are the experimental theatre and the printed play."54 At about the same time, the new international copyright laws were barring British dramatists from merely plagiarizing foreign plays. "Thenceforward," wrote Augustin Filon, "it was necessary for the English dramatist to invent plots for himself, to be original, to be himself. It was thus the English drama came to life." 55

So conditions were quite good for the formation of an amateur society similar to the Théâtre Libre. The French group had visited London in 1889, a tour which further cemented the fact that "by 1890 it had become almost impossible to think of reform in the London theatre without reference to the Théâtre Libre."56 J. T. Grein began his campaign to found a theatre society with similar objectives to the Théâtre Libre after the French company's visit in 1889. From the outset, he declared that he regarded the Théâtre Libre as the model he would follow. The principal purpose behind the founding of the Independent Theatre was to be the encouragement of playwriting, a priority which anticipated the aims of the repertory theatres, among others. Both scenery and acting considerations were to be secondary. "A play," wrote Grein, "that depends upon the interest of its subject can stand by itself without the aid of great acting or costly mounting."57 On the other hand, he was not going to follow the repertoire of the Théâtre Libre. He regarded this as below the "moral tone" he wished to establish for the enterprise and in the end only produced three Théâtre Libre plays. "The British free stage," he made clear in one of his four articles in The Weekly Comedy which outlined his plan, "should banish all that is vulgar, low and cynically immoral. It would nurture realism, but realism of a healthy mind."58 Ironically enough, London actually offered a more accommodating centre for realistic drama than the Paris of Antoine since, by that time, the commercial theatres of the English capital were much more naturalistic in their staging than their French boulevard equivalents as a result of the work of T.W. Robertson and the Bancrofts in the 1860s and 1870s, and of those who emulated them later.

Grein already had an earnest but rather unsuccessful background in encouraging the composition of new plays. He had advocated that plays which had been rejected by the professional theatres could be performed by amateurs, while at the same time he was aware of the drawbacks of amateur dramatic productions. He proposed that new plays could be professionally mounted by a "Professional Stage Association", which would include theatre managers, but there was no response. Then, six months after Antoine's Théâtre Libre gave its first performance (on 30 May), Grein circulated a leaflet entitled "A British Théâtre Libre". It welcomed the new direction towards "native work" in place of "foreign fare", but deplored the unwillingness of managers "to go outside the beaten track" for fear of financial failure. Jerome K. Jerome was one publicly dissenting voice: he thought the scheme would create "a sort of theatrical hothouse for the rearing of dramatic plants, too delicate, or too abnormal to thrive in the natural air of the outer work-a-day world."59 But the atmosphere was propitious for the founding of a radical theatre venture. George Moore, writing in the summer of 1890, noted that "The innumerable articles which appear in the… press on the London stage prove the existence of much vague discontent, and that this discontent will take definite shape sooner or later seems more than possible." 60

The Independent Theatre opened with Ibsen's Ghosts, the symbol of the new drama and the "free" theatres throughout Europe, on Friday, 13 March 1891. It was greeted with unmitigated critical abuse of both Ibsen's play and Grein.61 But as the group was not dominated by concerns regarding the censor and profit-making, the theatre endeavoured to stimulate the writing of original British drama according to the theories it had formulated as to how to achieve this.

In this it failed badly. From the start, the omens were not good. The single original British play which came forth until Shaw's Widower's Houses (produced 9 December 1892) was a one-act adaptation, Arthur Symons' The Minister's Call. There were definite limits to what Grein could do. Unlike Antoine, he did not have a permanent company or his own theatre, and it was constantly a problem to find appropriate players who were available on the often somewhat uncertain dates of production. Finances were so tight (membership never increased to more than one hundred and seventy-five) that Grein had to subsidise the theatre from his own pocket. But the scarcity of plays by British authors reflected a much more basic pitfall, that native authors were not responding as French authors had responded to the Théâtre Libre. And it was not through lack of demand: William Archer wrote, "Never was Messiah more eagerly waited."62 Easily a majority of the plays which the Independent Theatre eventually produced were the works of foreign dramatist and this could have only solidified the accusation of elitism. Further, many of those plays by native dramatists were of one act in length, on bills with other one-act plays or with a vastly more impressive full-length play of foreign origin. Given that work from native British drama was not forthcoming - unlike the Théâtre Libre, not even many one-act plays were submitted, perhaps because there was as yet no tradition of high quality one-act drama as there was in France - the Indpendent Theatre had resorted to producing some of the best full-length works of contemporary European dramatists. None of these European imports was a masterpiece, with the exception of Ibsen's plays, but, on the other hand, only Shaw's full-length Widower's Houses is now remembered among the pieces by British playwrights. 63

In terms of the number of quality native drama which the Independent Theatre managed to inspire, the results were undoubtedly poor after such high hopes. But its legacy was immense. Along with Ibsen's plays, several of the Society's pieces were revolutionary. Grein might have declared that drama can "only in the most indirect way … contribute to the solution of moral or social questions,"64 but many of the plays the Independent Theatre produced were given potency by the force of their contentious themes. Many of them ran counter to the social conventions, in particular on the question of a woman's position in society and her status when married. Ibsen's A Doll's House stands out but dilemmas along similar lines are also taken up in George Brandes' The Visit, Alan's Wife, a drama by Mrs. Hugh Bell and Elizabeth Robins, and Symons' The Minister's Call, among the one-act plays. It is important to recognize this break with convention - indeed, this campaign against the near-ritualised styles and plots of British drama as it then stood. "Despite its declared object," wrote Jan McDonald,

The Independent Theatre was charged repeatedly with over-zealously and provocatively staging plays of almost unrelieved pain and social or domestic conflict. A respected critic of the time, A.B. Walkley, observed that the old conventions were embodied in the self-absorbed, ineffectual and sensual husband, the magnanimous wife, the "catastrophic baby", all contained in the "morbid, overstrained, almost inhuman morality of the … play."66 The quality of morbidity was mostly due to the introspection of the authors as they attempted to destroy the prevailing value judgments of society at the time - this often manifested itself in the form of violent action, for instance, as the weight of obsolete social mores was felt. Furthermore, the new subjects centring on a reappraisal of social and moral standards were hampered by the fact that the old dramatic forms which had suited the out-dated standards were still largely in place. A new subject-matter demanded a new form which was created by the vigour of their feeling forcing the limits of their dramaturgical knowledge. The one-act play was largely the result, and the form would consistently appear in the next two decades whenever playwrights felt that they had some message to put across to an audience in a dramatically persuasive way. In certain ways, there are parallels to this in the religious didacticism of the medieval morality plays, in that both are short dramas attempting to communicate a lesson by argument, deliberation and conclusion embodied in a short dramatic world.

It is partly for highlighting these elements that the programme of the Independent Theatre is important. This capacity to disturb by departing from the fashionable in dialogue, characterization and story-line, was the element which chiefly condemned it in some camps. But as a model for later organizations with similar aims, of producing quality (even crusading) plays comparatively cheaply in local theatres or halls, it was a landmark society. With regard to the one-act play, one can say this: that for pretty much the first time in the history of British drama, the short play became the qualitative equal of the full-length play because it was needed to push the cause of the new drama by exemplifying the highly lyrical and intensive reaction to contemporary social conditions. It never had this importance before; indeed, it never had this aesthetic recognition before, and the one-act play as an identifiable and respected form came into its own. There was something of a trend towards shorter forms in the Britain of this time: for instance, the short story, with its emphasis on disciplined construction, compactness of significance, and narrative excitement; and the short article, pithy and preoccupied often with the leanest description of contemporary affairs, were also emerging and becoming very popular.

At the time of the founding of the Independent Theatre, there was an increase in little theatres and special performances, a revival of interest in classical works at Oxford, The Cenci had been performed by the Shelley Society, there was a vogue for pastoral performances, Ibsen was being performed, and the young critics, the "Moderns", were all in favour of innovations similar to those of the Théâtre Libre. Two years earlier, when Antoine had first visited London, one leading critic, William Archer, had warned that such an organisation could not exist in England because the English had neither the playwrights, the public, nor the critics for such a venture. But in the 1890s, the new drama, and with it the system of organisation needed to make it a living concern, caught the imagination of the intellectuals and writers. Grein had intended that his society would encourage the writing of "unconventional drama" by "those who strive to foster the undeniable renaissance of the drama"; he reasoned that "the impetus being once given, the endeavours will follow."67 It was through its successors that the impetus originating in the Independent Theatre was to have substantial results in terms of the number and quality of plays written for them. The Stage Society was the most important of its later equivalent organizations in the 1890s. It presented, from its inception in November 1899, to June 1914, a total of 101 plays of which 31 were short or one-act plays. A good many of these were by foreign authors whose importance as dramatists was only later appreciated in the English-speaking theatre: authors like Maeterlinck (whose Interior and Death of Tintagiles received their first English production at the Stage Society), Wedekind (first English production of The Tenor) and Strindberg (Creditors).

As one can see, the short play was now playing a central part in the dramatic revival. It was used quite often to bolster the first programmes of new theatre groups. These novices would require a form which was testing and satisfying for both player and onlooker, while at the same time not being too difficult to cast, perform and finance. However, it was sadly often the case that the form would later be abandoned as the society became better established and the players more experienced.

Responsable: Stephen Murray
Correo electrónico: smurray@ds.uas.mx