The result upon the home product was two fold. It reduced to a minimum the meagre band of English writers, and those that remained no longer even attempted to represent English life and thought. Instead, they provided for the public an impossible melange of French ideas and emotions served up in British dishes. In the second place, the adaptation and imitation of Scribe's methods proved the finishing blow to the moribund rhetorical conception of comedy by bringing in a French realism of mounting and stage-setting. When a stage room had three sides, a ceiling and real doors, many conventions of action and dialogue, unnoticed when an interior consisted only of wings and a back-drop with painted chairs, became ridicu lous and unendurable. Thus gradually a new ideal was developed, by which the play was forced to move a little nearer to the life now in a material way presented with considerable reality. Internally, however, the plays remained as artificial as they had been before, their char acters puppets impelled by theatrical and ab surd sentiments and exhibiting the crudest of psycholog.ies. The main dramatists of the per iod which this development closes were Bulwer, Tom Taylor and Charles Reade, and Dion Bou cicault. Bulwer, under the influence of the Romantic revival in France, produced 'The Lady of Lyons' and (Richelieu,' and his com edy (Money) shared the distinction of being the last representation of rhetorical comedy with Boucicault's (London Assurance) and (Old Heads and Young Hearts,' with Taylor and Reade's (Masks and Faces.) and with Taylor's 'Still Waters Run Deep.' Boucicault, the arch adapter and plagiarist of the period, had the good fortune to hit upon a type of his own in his series of very successful Irish plays, but they are no nearer real studies of life than the others of the period. The predominance of Scribe and his school had paralyzed native authorship.
Into this lifeless world came T. W. Robert son — a dramatist whose pleasant work has no great intrinsic value, although he possessed a strain of original genius — to create a new form of drama. It ignored not only the old rhetor ical tradition but the new French-English mon grel species. It was merely the comedy of manners clothed in natural speech and realistic setting, but it seemed absolutely original and spontaneous. It viewed the commonplace so cial relations from the outside, with a naiveté and humor which disguised to an unsophisti cated public the insipidity of its characters and the shallowness of their sentiments. Though he brought new life to the drama, fortunately his school, represented by H. J. Byron and Al bery, did not long survive him, else the stage would have found itself in almost as lifeless a way as when he rescued it and with an artifi ciality different from, yet as great as, that against which he effectively protested.
Though W. S. Gilbert could not be called a follower of Robertson, he made the same pro test against the fustian of the stage, and car ried on the verbal flippancy which had vied with sentimentality in the latter's plays. So thoroughly original was he that only the ad jective Gilbertian can cover the precise blend of wit, delicate fancy, satire and extravaganza, which achieved some brilliant successes on the legitimate stage and which finally secured the aid of musical accompaniment in a long series of comic operas that stand, like their author, in a class apart.
In spite of Robertson and Gilbert, however, the theatre lapsed again into a period of adapta tion from France. But there, meanwhile, had sprung up a larger type of social drama than that of Scribe,— a type of which 'Diplomacy' is an illustration,— and imitation of this wider species was less deadening than the former had been. When, however, international copy right was at last secured and French works could no longer be adapted for nothing, the effect of fair play for the English dramatist was seen almost immediately. A group of young writers arose who, beginning as imitators, were soon applying French methods to original and native purposes. Of this group, Mr. A. W. Pinero and Mr. H. A. Jones were pre-eminent. They sought their material at home and, ob serving carefully, reproduced sincerely. An other decade had to pass in experiment before these men really undertook a drama which evinced anything like a serious psychology and a vital relationship with life. Not until 1890 did they dispense with elementary love-idylls and the kind of story which had been up to that time inevitable to every play, or set out defi nitely for a more thoughtful and virile drama covering the field of social intercourse. Fol lowing their lead, Oscar Wilde and Mr. Ber nard Shaw developed the social comedy into a more serious content. Wilde's pyrotechnic brilliance of dialogue and inverted epigram concealed at first his genuine dramatic quality and adroit constructiveness as a playwright.
Mr. Shaw took up the stage as a lively form of presenting himself and his social propaganda, but, though his brilliant plays hardly succeed as drama, there can be no question of their success with the public and as literature. These men with Mr. Pinero and Mr. Jones have once more elevated the English drama not only to the level of Continental drama but of the literature of their own land.
The poetic drama during the reign is repre sented by Westland Marston, Talfourd, Brown ing and Tennyson. The formal dramas of the first two are long forgotten. Masterly as are some of Browning's plays, they seem remote from the purpose of the stage, and when some of them got there it was discovered that they could be only recited, not acted: at any rate, they can be successful, if at all, only in the manner of the rhetorical tradition for which they were conceived. Tennyson's plays, al though loosely constructed in the loosest of Elizabethan formulas,— the chronicle history.— have been acted with considerable success. This was due, no doubt, to the circumstances of their production, for his fine verse lacks vigor and he has not seized upon the essential mo ments of his stories, the crucial parts of most of his dramas taking place behind the scenes. In 'Queen Mary' and (Harold,' however, he presented genuine dramatic material. If the taste for the poetic play can be revived in the future, it must be as drama first and poetry afterward, and drama conceived in a modern rather than Shakespearian type.