Satirical Comedy in Victorian Theatre
William Wycherley (1641 – 1716): The Country Wife (1675)
Upper-class town rake Horner
- Wants to seduce as many ladies as possible.
- Claims to be impotent
- Opportunity to be alone with married wives.
- Sexual intercourse is assumed to take place
- Repeatedly off stage
- Play is driven by succession of near discoveries of the truth about Horne’s sexual activities
- Saves himself by quick thinking and good luck
- Never becomes a reformed character
- Keeps his secret till the end.
- His competition seems to go on beyond the play
Rake characters
- Cool, charming character
- Manipulative, notorious lies, disguise their true intentions.
- Admired characters, those are pushing the act forward.
- Morally dissolute
The comedy of manner =) inmoral characters
- The plot focuses on amorous intrigues among the upper class.
- The dialogue focuses on witty language. Claver speech, insults and “put.downs” are traded between characters.
- Society if often made up of clichés .
Victorian Theatricality
- Monopoly of the two patent theatre broken by the Theatre Regulation Act in 1843
- “well-made play” concurred British stages
- Air of authenticity/ reality, familiarity “you are there” loved by the middle class.
- Shift in theatre from audience for aristocracy to all classes involved.
- Due to the strive of natural sciences, technology
George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950): Pygmalion (1913)
Born in Dublin 26 July 1856. Died in 1950 in England.
Arrived in London 1876
Active socialist, brilliant platform speaker.
Output: music, art, theatre reviews, novels, plays
Wrote on social aspects
Awarded Novel Prize 1925
“Shavian” as new adjective in English used to embody all his brilliant qualities.
The Pygmalion Myth:
- From Orvid’s metamorphoses
- Pygmalian is a sculptor and created a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with her
- Wished for her to be alive
- Aphrodite granted his wish
- When he kissed the sculpture it turned into life.
Comic effects (Incongruity)
Higgins is another of egoism, a tyrant, a bully.
But in the innocent unawareness of his own monstrosity hi is oddly charming
Brought alive for us by his small tastes and mannerisms, such as the chocolate and fruit that he munches and the keys and coins he fingles in his pocket.
There is also the charm of the moral –free doc little.
Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900): The Importance of Being Ernest (1895)
Oscar Wildes’s achievement as playwright, essayist and aesthete was not to inaugurate censure of the period but rather to fashion a new and highly effective form of social critique.
His poems and plays are more than reject mid-Victorian values in life and art in the name of aestheticsim: they deficiently provoke a response to difference.
Wilde does not focus on real people but in fictional characters who make further fiction of their identities. He always questions institution, moral imperatives, and social clichés, he rarely suffers facts gladly.
His major technique of creating laughter is (social and linguistic) incongruity
Wilde clearly parodied the formulaic and melodramatic fiction of the Victorian theatre.
“The importance of being Ernest” is his most sprawling, witty and lighthearted play of social follies and high society.
It is lighter in tone than Wild’s early comedies. It lanchs the self-consciens decadence found in “the picture of Doriam Gray” and his drama Solme.
The play was written in late 1894 and is now considered Wilde’s masterpiece.
Wilde wrote: “it is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy… that we should treat all the trivial thing of life serially, and all the serious thing in life with sincere and studied triviality.
Topic of switched identities: the play’s two protagonist engage in “bunburying”, that is the maintenance of alternative personas in the town and country, which allows them to escape Victorian Social codes.
John Worthihg (who prefers to call himself jack) and Algeman Moncrieff (Algy) are two fashionable young gentlemen. John tells that he has a brother called Ernest, but in town john himself is known as Ernest, and Algemon also pretends to be the profligate brother Ernest.
Wilde question just how much control the men have over their invented alternate (public and private) identities.
Guendoline Fairfax and Cecily Cardes are two ladies whom then snobbish characters acurt. Guendoline declares that she never travels without her diary because “one should always have something sensational to read in the train”
All of the characters lie as readily as they tell the truth, and mest of their lies tell truths.
In the end, the play’s emphasis on land celebration of disguise falls prey to its plot of discovery; Jack’s true identity is gradually uncovered as he is rerated to be Ernest (if not earnest) and also , from time to time the older brother of Algemon.
Jack must admit the detail of his orphan status, i.e. that he was found in a hand-bag in a clouthroom at Victoria Station. The mental abstraction put the manuscript of her three – volume novel in a perambulator, and by mistake, the baby (jack) in the handbag.