UNIT I: HISTORICAL CONTEXT main text: THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

1914-18: World War I.

main text: THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY ...................................................................................... 1 1918: Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry published.
. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ..................................................................................................... 1 1922: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
1922: James Joyce's Ulysses.
. POETRY ............................................................................................................................................... 4 1930: Period of depression and unemployment begins.
. FICTION............................................................................................................................................... 6 1939-45: World War II.
. DRAMA ................................................................................................................................................ 8
. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
[1683]The period, which for convenience we call "the twentieth century,"
sps begins really with the late nineteenth, when the sense of the passing of a major
phase of English history was Already in the air. Queen Victoria's Jubilee in
1887 and, even more, her Diamond Jubilee in 1897 were felt even by
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contemporaries to mark the end of an era. As the nineteenth century drew to a
The texts that comprise this unit have been extracted from a selected close, there were many manifestations of a weakening of traditional stabilities.
bibliography. You MUST quote those sources – and not this booklet
(“apostila”) - any time you use its texts to write an academic essay. You
The aesthetic movement, with its insistence on "art for art's sake," assaulted the
will find the page numbers of the original passages within square assumptions about the nature and function of art held by ordinary middle-class
brackets, [ ], so that you can provide the correct bibliographical
references. For more information on How to write an academic essay readers, deliberately, provocatively. It helped to widen the breach between
check the Professor’s website: www.letras.ufrj.br/veralima
artists and writers on the one hand and the "Philistine" public on the other—a
breach an earlier symptom of which was Matthew Arnold's war on the
Philistines in Culture and Anarchy and that was later to result in the "alienation
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR UNIT I
of the artist," which has since become a commonplace of criticism. This breach

ABRAMS, M. H. et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New was more than a purely English matter. From France came the tradition of the
York: Norton, 1993. 6 ª edição bohemian life that scorned the limits imposed by conventional ideas of
respectability, together with other notions of the artist as rejecting and rejected
by ordinary society, which in different ways fostered the view of the alienated
artist. The life and work of the French symbolist poets in France, the early

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 UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
novels of Thomas Mann in Germany (especially Buddenbrooks, 1901), and
James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) show some of the
very different ways in which this attitude revealed itself in literature all over
Europe. In England, the growth of popular education as a result of the
Education Act of 1870, which finally made elementary education compulsory
and universal, led to the rapid emergence of a large, unsophisticated literary
public at whom new kinds of journalism, in particular the cheap "yellow press,"
were directed. A public that was literate but not in any real sense educated
increased steadily throughout the nineteenth century, and one result of this
was the splitting up of the audience for literature into "highbrows." "lowbrows,"
and "middlebrows." Although in earlier periods there had been different kinds
of audience for different kinds of writing, the split now developed with
unprecedented speed and to an unprecedented degree because of the mass
production of "popular" literature for the semiliterate. The fragmentation of the
reading public now merged with the artist's war on the Philistine (and indeed
was one of the causes of that war in the first place) to widen the gap between
popular art and art esteemed only by the sophisticated and the expert. Another
manifestation—or at least accompaniment—of the end of the Victorian age was
the rise of various kinds of pessimism and stoicism. The novels and poetry of
Thomas Hardy show one kind of pessimism (and it was pessimism, even if
Hardy [1684] himself repudiated the term), and the poems of A. E. Housman
show another variety, while a real or affected stoicism is to be found not only in
these writers but also in many minor writers of the last decade of the
nineteenth century- and the first decade of the twentieth. Examples of this
stoicism—the determination to stand for human dignity by enduring bravely,
with a stiff upper lip, whatever fate may bring—range from Robert Louis
Stevenson's essays and the rhetorically assertive poems of the editor and
2
journalist VV. E. Henley, to Rudyard Kipling's jungle Books and many of his
short stories, the last stanza of Housman's The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux
("Bear them we can. and if we can we must") and W. B. Yeats's "They know that
Hamlet and Lear are gay."
Although the high tide of anti-Victorianism was marked by the
publication in 1918 of that classic of ironic debunking, Eminent Victorians by
Lytton Strachey (1880-1952), the criticism of the normal attitudes and
preconceptions of the Victorian middle classes first became really violent in the
last two decades of the nineteenth century. No one could have been more
savage in attacks on the Victorian conceptions of the family, education, and
religion than Samuel Butler, whose novel The Way of All Flesh (completed in
1884, posthumously published in 1903) is still the bitterest indictment in
English literature of the Victorian way of life. The chorus of questioning of
Victorian assumptions grew ever louder as the century drew to an end;
sounding prominently in it was the voice of the young Bernard Shaw, one of
Butler's greatest admirers. The position of women, too, was rapidly changing
during this period. The Married Woman's Property Act of 1882, which allowed
married women to own property in their own right; the admission of women to
the universities at different times during the latter part of the century; the fight
for women's suffrage, which was not won until 1918 (and not fully won until
1928)—these events marked a change in the attitude toward women and in the
part they played in the national life as well as in the relation between the sexes,
which is reflected in a variety of ways in the literature of the period.
The Boer War (1899-1902), fought by the British to establish political
and economic control over the Boer republics of South Africa, marked both the
high point of and the reaction against British imperialism. It was a war against
which many British intellectuals protested and one that the British in the end
 UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
were slightly-ashamed of having won. The development of the British Empire
into the British Commonwealth (an association of self-governing countries)
continued in fits and starts throughout the first half of the twentieth century,
with imperialist and anti-imperialist sentiment often meeting head on; writers
as far apart as Kipling and E. M. Foster occupied themselves with the problem.
The Irish question also caused a great deal of excitement from the beginning of
the period until well into the 1920s. A steadily rising Irish nationalism
protested with increasing violence against the political subordination of Ireland
to the British Crown and government. In World War I some Irish nationalists
sought German help in rebelling against Britain, aqd this exacerbated feeling on
both sides. No one can fully understand Yeats or Joyce without some
awareness of the Irish struggle for independence, the feelings of Anglo-Irish
literary people on this burning topic, and the way in which the Irish literary
revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (with which Yeats
was much concerned) reflected a determination to achieve a vigorous national
life culturally even if the road seemed blocked politically.
Edwardian England (1901-10) was very conscious of being no longer
Victorian. Edward VII stamped his extrovert and self-indulgent character on the
decade in which he reigned. It was a vulgar age of conspicuous enjoyment by
those who could afford it, and writers and artists kept well away from
implication in high society (although there were some conspicuous exceptions):
in general, there was no equivalent in this period of Queen Victoria's interest in
Tennyson. The alienation of artists and intellectuals was proceeding apace.
From 1910 (when George V came to the throne until war broke out in August
1914. Britain achieved a [1685]temporary equilibrium between Victorian
earnestness and Edwardian flashiness; in retrospect that Georgian period seems
peculiarly golden, the last phase of assurance and stability before the old order
throughout Europe broke up in violence with results that are still with us. Yet
even then, under the surface, there was restlessness and experimentation. If
this was the age of Rupert Brooke, it was also the age of T. S. Eliot's first
experiments in a radically new- kind of poetry.
Edwardian as a term applied to English cultural history suggests a period
in which the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age—country
houses with numerous servants, a flourishing and confident middle class, a
strict hierarchy of social classes—remained unimpaired, though on the level of
ideas there was a sense of change and liberation. Georgian refers largely to the
lull before the storm of World War I. That war, as our selection of the war
poets makes clear, produced some major shifts in attitude.
The postwar disillusion of the 1920s was, it might be said, a spiritual
matter, just as Eliot's Waste Land was a spiritual and not a literal wasteland.
Depression and unemployment in the early 1930s, followed by the rise of
Hitler and the cruel shadow of Fascism and Nazism over Europe, with its threat
of another war, represented another sort of wasteland that produced another
sort of effect on poets and novelists. The impotence of capitalist governments
in the face of Hitlerism combined with economic dislocation to turn the
majority of young intellectuals (and not only intellectuals) in the 1950s to the
political Left, the 1930s were the red decade, because only the Left seemed to
offer any solution. The early poetry of W. H. Auden and his contemporaries
cried out for "the death of the old gang" (in Auden's phrase) and a clean sweep
politically and economically, while the right-wing army's rebellion against the
left-wing republican government in Spain, which started in the summer of
1936 and soon led to full-scale civil war, was regarded as a rehearsal for an
inevitable second world war and thus further emphasized the inadequacy of
politicians. Yet though all this is reflected passionately in the literature of the
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 UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
period, particularly in the poetry, it was not accompanied by any interesting
developments in technique: many younger writers were more anxious to
express their attitudes than to construct new kinds of works of art. The
outbreak of World War II in September 1939, following very shortly on Hitler's
pact with Russia, which shocked and disillusioned so many of the young left-
wing writers, marked the sudden end of the red decade; the concern of writers
in Britain now was to maintain their integrity and indeed their existence in
what was from the beginning expected to be a long and destructive war. This
they did surprisingly well, but nevertheless the struggle brought inevitable
exhaustion, and winning a war. Great Britain lost an empire. India, long the
jewel in the imperial Crown, came to independence in 1947 and, although India
and the newly formed Muslim state of Pakistan elected to remain within the
British Commonwealth, other former dominions did not. The Irish Republic
withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1949, and the Republic of South Africa in
1961. While Britain was engaged in a painful reappraisal of its place in the
world, countries that had lost the war—West Germany and Japan—were, in
economic terms, winning the peace that followed.
Less obvious, but no less significant for English literature, were changes
on the national scene. London, as the capital of the empire, had long dominated
the culture as well as the politics and the economy of the British Isles. London
spoke for Britain in the impeccable southern English intonations of the radio
announcers of the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (known as the
BBC), but from the 1960s this changed. Regional dialects were admitted to the
air waves. Regional radio and television stations sprang up. The Arts Council,
which had subsidized the nation's drama, literature, music, painting, and plastic
arts from London, delegated much of its grant-giving responsibility to regional
arts councils. This gave a new confidence to writers and artists outside London
4
and has since contributed to a notable renaissance of regional literature. At its
best, this builds on the native tradition of Yeats and Hardy, transcending the
narrowly provincial to achieve true universality.
. POETRY
The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution.
The imagist movement, influenced by the philosopher-poet T. E. Hulme's
insistence on hard, clear, precise images and encouraged by the modernist
American poet, Ezra Pound, who was then living in London, fought against
romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism in poetry. The movement developed
simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, and its early members included
Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), John Could Fletcher, and
F. S. Flint. As Flint explained in an article in March 191?, imagists insisted on
"direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective," on the
avoidance of all words "that did not contribute to the presentation," and on a
freer metrical movement than a strict adherence to "the sequence of a
metronome" could allow. All this encouraged precision in imagery and freedom
of rhythmic movement, but more was required for the production of poetry of
any real scope and interest. Imagism went in for the short, sharply etched,
descriptive lyric, but it had no technique for the production of longer and more
complex poems. Other new ideas about poetry helped to provide this
technique. Sir Herbert Crierson's great edition of the poems of John Donne in
1912 both reflected and helped to encourage a new enthusiasm for
seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry. The revival of interest in
Metaphysical wit brought with it a desire on the part of some pioneering poets
to introduce into their poetry a much higher degree of intellectual complexity
than had been found among the Victorians or the Georgians. The full subtlety
 UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
of French symbolist poetry also now came to be appreciated; it had been
admired in the 1890s, but for its dreamy suggestiveness rather than for its
imagistic precision and complexity. At the same time a need was felt to bring
poetic language and rhythms closer to those of conversation or at least to spice
the formalities of poetic utterance with echoes of the colloquial and even the
slangy. Irony, which made possible several levels of discourse simultaneously,
and wit, with the use of puns (banished from serious poetry for more than two
hundred years), helped to achieve that union of thought and passion that T.S.
Eliot in his review of Crierson's anthology of Metaphysical poetry (1921) saw
as characteristic of the Metaphysicals and wished to bring back into modern
poetry. A new critical and a new creative movement in poetry went hand in
hand, with Eliot the high priest of both. It was Eliot who extended the scope of
Imagism by bringing the English Metaphysicals and the French symbolists (as
well as the English Jacobean dramatists) to the rescue, thus adding new criteria
of complexity and allusiveness to the criteria of concreteness and precision
stressed by the Imagists. It was Eliot. too. who introduced into modern English
and American poetry the kind of irony achieved by shifting suddenly from the
formal to the colloquial or by oblique allusions to objects or ideas that
contrasted sharply with those carried by the surface meaning of the poem.
Thus between, say. 1911 (the first year of the Georgian poets) and 1922 (the
year of the publication of The Waste Land) a major revolution occurred in
English—and for that matter American— poetic theory and practice—one that
determined the way in which most serious poets and critics now think about
their art. This revolution was by no means an isolated literary phenomenon.
Writers on both sides of the English Channel were influenced by the French
impressionist, postimpressionist and cubist painters' radical reexamination of
the nature of reality. Pound wrote boob about the French sculptor Henri
Caudier-Brzeska and the American composer George Antheil. Wilfred Owen
wrote in 1918: "I suppose I am doing in poetry what the advanced composers
are doing in music"; and Eliot, while writing The Waste Land three years later,
was so impressed by a performance of the composer Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre
du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) that he stood up at the end and cheered. [
1687]]
The posthumous publication by Robert Bridges in 1918 of the poetry of
Gerard Manley Hopkins encouraged experimentation in language and rhythms.
Hopkins combined absolute precision of the individual image with a complex
ordering of images and a new kind of metrical patterning. The young poets of
the early 1950s— Auden. Stephen Spender. C. Day Lewis—were much
influenced by Hopkins as well as by Eliot (then the presiding genius of modern
English and American poetry) and by a variety of other poets from the
sixteenth-century John Skelton to Wilfred Owen.
Meanwhile the remarkable career of Yeats, stretching across the whole
modem period, showed how a truly great poet can reflect the varying
developments of his or her age yet maintain an unmistakably individual accent.
Beginning among the aesthetes of the 1890s, turning later to a more tough and
spare ironic language without losing his characteristic verbal magic, working
out his own notions of symbolism and bringing them in different ways into his
poetry, developing in his full maturity a rich symbolic and Metaphysical poetry
with its own curiously haunting cadences and its imagery both shockingly
realistic and movingly suggestive, Yeats's work is itself a history of English
poetry between 1890 and 1959. Yet he is always Yeats, unique and
inimitable—without doubt the greatest English-speaking poet of his age.
In his poem Remembering the Thirties. Donald Davie declared: "A neutral
tone is nowadays preferred." That tone—the coolly clinical tone of Auden—
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 UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
dominated the poetry of the decade, but as it ended and World War II began, a
neutral tone gave way to the vehemence of what came to be known as the New
Apocalypse. The poets of this movement, the most notable of whom was Dylan
Thomas, owed something of their audacity and violence to the example of the
French surrealist poets and painters, who sought to express, often by free
association, the operation of the subconscious mind. Many of these, such as
Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, were both poets and painters, whose poetry
was introduced to English readers in translations and in A Short History of
Surrealism (1956) by David Gascoyne, one of the poets of the New Apocalypse.
With the coming of the 1950s, however, the pendulum swung back again. A
new generation of poets that included Donald Davie, Thorn Cunn. and Philip
Larkin reacted against what seemed to them the verbal excesses of Dylan
Thomas, Edith Sitwell, and others. "The Movement," as this new group came to
be called, aimed once again for a neutral tone1, a purity of diction, in which to
render an unpretentious fidelity to experience. Larkin, its most notable
exponent, explicitly rejected the imported modernism of Pound and Eliot in
favor of a native tradition represented in this century by Hardy. That tradition
now flourishes in the work of Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney. Other of the
younger poets, following the example of Craig Raine and taking their name—
the Martian School—from his poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home once
again look to the painters for their inspiration. Loot is the operative word, for
the eye is paramount in their poetry, an eye that sees the world with the
freshness of a child or a painter or a visitor from Mars and records what it sees
with an often exuberant wit.
In 1912, Edward Marsh introduced the first of his anthologies of
Georgian Poetry with the claim that "English poetry is now once again putting
on a new strength and beauty." That claim can be made with more justice
6
today, and perhaps with more justice than it could have been made at any point
in the years between.
. FICTION
The years 1912 to 1950 were the Heroic Age of the modern novel, the
age of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence. Virginia Woolf, and E. M.
Forster. One can trace three major influences on the changes in attitude and
technique in the fiction of this period. The first is the novelists' realization that
the general background of belief that united them with their public in a
common sense of what was
[1688] significant in experience had disappeared. The public values of
the Victorian nox-el, in which major crises of plot could be shown through
changes in the social or financial or marital status of the chief characters, gave
way to more personally conceived notions of value, dependent on the novelists'
own intuitions and sensibilities rather than on public agreement. "To believe
that your impressions hold good for others," Woolf once wrote (discussing Jane
Austen), "is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality-."
Modern novelists could no longer believe this: they had to fall back on
personality, drawing their criteria of significance in human affairs (and thus
their principles of selection) from their own intuitions, so that they needed to
find ways of convincing readers that their own sense of what was significant in
experience was truly valid. A new technical burden was thus imposed on the
novelist's prose, for it had now' to build up a world of values instead of drawing
on an existing world of values. Woolf tried to solve the problem by using some
of the devices of poetry to suggest the novelist's own sense of value and vision
of the world. Joyce, on the other hand, made no attempt to convey a single
personal attitude but reacted to the breakdown of public values by employing a
 UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
kind of writing so multiple in its implications that it conveyed numerous points
of view simultaneously, the author remaining totally objective and committed
to none of them—a mode that required remarkable technical virtuosity.
The second influence on the changes in attitude and technique in the
modern novel was a new view of time; time was not a series of chronological
moments to be presented by the novelist in sequence with an occasional
deliberate retrospect ("this reminded him of," "she recalled that") but a
continuous flow in the consciousness of the individual, with the "already"
continuously merging into the "not yet" and retrospect merging into
anticipation. This influence is closely bound up with a third: the new notions of
the nature of consciousness, which derived in a general way from the pioneer
explorations of the subconscious bv Sigmund Freud (1856-1959; and Carl Jung
(1875-1961), but were also part of the spirit of the age and discernible even in
those novelists who had not read either of these psychologists. Consciousness
is multiple; the past is always present in it at sonic level and is continually
coloring one's present reaction. Marcel Proust in France, in his great novel
sequence Remembrance of Things Past (191 ?-28), had explored the ways in
which the past impinges on the present and consciousness is determined by
memory. The view that we are our memories, that our present is the sum of our
past, that if we dig into the human consciousness we can tell the whole truth
about people without waiting for a chronological sequence of time to take them
through a series of testing circumstances, inevitably led to a technical
revolution in the novel. For now, by exploring in depth into consciousness and
memory' rather than proceeding lengthwise along the dimension of time. a.
novelist could write a novel concerned ostensibly with only one day of the
protagonist's life (Joyce's Ulysses and VVoolf's Mrs. Dalloway). This view of
multiple levels of consciousness existing simultaneously, coupled with the view
of time as a constant flow rather than a series of separate moments, meant that
novelists preferred to plunge into the consciousness of their characters in order
to tell their stories rather than to provide external frameworks of chronological
narrative. The "stream-of-consciousness" technique, in which the author fries to
render directly the very fabric of a character's consciousness without reporting
it in formal, quoted remarks, was developed in the 1920s as an important new
technique of the English novel. It made for more difficult reading, at least for
those accustomed only to the methods of the older English novel. No "porch"
was constructed at the front of the novel to put the reader in possession of
necessary preliminary information: such information emerged, as the novel
progressed, from the consciousness of each character as it responded to the
present with echoes of its past. No conventional signposts were put up to tell
readers where they were, for that was believed to interfere with the immediacy
of the impression. But once readers learn how to find their way in this
unsignposted [1689]territory, they are rewarded by new delicacies of
perception and new subtleties of presentation.
Concentration on the stream of consciousness and on the association of
ideas within the individual consciousness led inevitably to stress on the
essential loneliness of the individual. For all consciousnesses are unique and
isolated, and if this unique, private world is the real world in which we live, if
the public values to which we must pay lip service in the social world in which
we move are not the real values that give meaning to our personalities, then we
are all condemned to live in the prison of our own incommunicable
consciousness. How is true communication possible in such a world? The
public gestures imposed on us by society never correspond to our real inward
needs. They are conventional in the bad sense, mechanical, imposing a crude
standardization on the infinite subtlety of experience. If we do try to give out a
7
 UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
sign from our real selves, that sign is bound to be misunderstood when read by
some other self in the light of that self's quite other personality. The theme of
such modern fiction is thus the possibility of love, the establishment of
emotional communication, in a community of private consciousnesses. This is,
in different ways, the theme of Joyce, of Lawrence, of Woolf, of Forster, and (on
a rather different scale and not always so directly) of Conrad. The search for
communion and the inescapable isolation of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses is
symbolic of the human condition as seen by the modem novelist. Similar inves-
tigations of this basic condition are Forster's explorations of the conventions
that seem to be helps to living but that in fact prevent true human contacts,
and Woolf's projection of the relation between the self's need for privacy and
the self's need for genuine communication. The theme of all Lawrence's novels
is human relationships, the ideal of which he restlessly explored with shifting
emphasis throughout his career; such relationships can be all too easily
distorted by the mechanical conventions of society, by notions of respectability
or propriety, by all the shams and frauds of middle-class life, by the demands of
power or money or success. One might almost say that the greatest modern
novels are about the difficulty, and at the same time the inevitability, of being
human. The dilemma of the human condition is never really solved in these
novels; but knowledge that the dilemma is shared—a knowledge so brilliantly
conveyed in Ulysses and so wryly proffered by Forster—can both illuminate
and comfort.
Not all the novelists of the period, of course, were concerned with these
themes or employed the new techniques appropriate to them. The
"documentary" novelists, such as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy (and, in
at least some of his novels. H. G. Wells), presented, often with great skill, the
changing social scene, showing considerable insight and sympathy in recording
8
aspects of it through the behavior of their imagined characters. Woolf called
these writers "materialists," maintaining that they were content to deal with
externals and did not go on to explore those aspects of consciousness, of our
true inward life, in which human reality resides. She was perhaps judging
unfairly, by standards that were not applicable to their sort of fiction, but
modem criticism has on the whole agreed with her.
The short story in this century has benefited from the new techniques of
exploration in depth. A great consciousness of the symbolic uses to which
objects and incidents can be put and a greater subtlety in the ways in which
patterns of suggests cness are built up below the quietly realistic surface can
be found in the short stories of writers so different from each other as Joyce,
Katherinc Mansfield, Lawrence, Forster, Doris Lessing, Edna O'Brien, and Susan
Hill. Mansfield learned from the Russian short-story writer Anton Chekhov
(1860-1904) how to use the casual-seeming incidents of ordinary life in such a
way as to set up haunting overtones of meaning. The apparently
inconsequential surface masking the carefully organized substructure is found
in much modern fiction (perhaps most of all in Ulysses): it is one of the results
of the coming together, in the novel and the short [1690] story, of realism and
symbolism, of contemporary probability and timeless significance. These
things, of course, come together in great fiction of all ages, but modern writers
contrive their coexistence with greater self-consciousness than their
predecessors.
. DRAMA
Modern drama begins in a sense with the witty drawing-room comedies
of Oscar Wilde; yet Wilde founded no dramatic school. His wit was personal
and generative of paradoxes for their own sake, unlike the wit of Restoration
 UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
comedy, which reflected an attitude to the relation between the sexes that was
part of a view of society held J by a whole (if a small) social class. Bernard
Shaw brought still another kind of wit into drama—not Wilde's light-hearted
sparkle or yet the assured sophistication of the Restoration dramatists but the
provocative paradox that was meant to tease and disturb, to challenge the
complacency of the audience. Shaw's discussion plays were given dramatic life
through the mastery of theatrical techniques, which he learned during his years
as a dramatic critic. In his general attitudes he represents the anti-Victorianism
of the late Victorians; his long life should not obscure the fact that his first—
and some of his best—plays belong to the 1890s. Other attempts by twentieth-
century dramatists to debate social questions on the stage—by John
Galsworthy, for example—deserve respect for their humanity and intelligence
and sometimes for their theatrical craftsmanship, but they lack Shaw's verbal
and intellectual brilliance and his superb capacity to entertain.
We must turn to Ireland to find another really impressive variety of
dramatic activity. The Irish Literary Theatre was founded in 1899, with Yeats's
early play The Countess Cathleen as its first production. The founders—Yeats,
Lady Gregory, George Moore, and Edward Martyn—wanted to make a
contribution to an Irish literary revival, but they were influenced also by the
Independent Theatre in London, founded in 1891 by J. T. Grein in order to
encourage new developments in the drama. In 1902 the Irish Literary Theatre
was able to maintain a permanent all-Irish company and changed its name to
the Irish National Theatre, which moved in 1904 to the Abbey Theatre, by
which name it has since been known. Many of the plays produced at the Abbey
Theatre were only of local and ephemeral interest. But J. M. Synge's use of the
speech and imagination of Irish country people, Yeats's powerful symbolic use
of themes from old Irish legend, and Sean O'Casey's use of the Irish civil war as
a background for plays combining tragic melodrama, humor of character, and
irony of circumstance brought new kinds of vitality to the theater. T. S. Eliot
attempted with considerable success to revive a ritual poetic drama in England
with his Murder in the Cathedral 11935). His later attempts to combine
religious symbolism with the box-office appeal of an entertaining society
comedy (as in The Cocktail Party, 1950). although impressive technical
achievements, were not wholly successful: the combination of contemporary
social chatter with profound religious symbolism produces both an uneveness
of tone and disturbing shifts in levels of realism. Elsewhere in modern drama
the conflict between realism and symbolism (first clearly seen in works by the
great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. 1828-1906) is acted out in a variety
of ways.
In spite of the achievements of Shaw. Yeats, and Eliot, it cannot be said
of the drama, as it can of poetry and fiction in the first half of the century, that
a technical revolution occurred that changed the whole course of literary
history- with respect to that particular literary form. The reformers of the
1890s invoked the name of Ibsen: like Shaw they saw him as essentially a critic
of middle-class society rather than (as critics tend to see him today) as an
essentially poetic dramatist experimenting with symbolic modes of expression.
This may be the reason why the influence of Ibsen soon petered out in run-of-
the-mill plays of humanitarian social concern. The staple of the London West
End theater remained social comedy-stiffened by occasional irony and
sweetened by sentimentality (Noel Coward, 1899-1973). [1691]]was one of the
best, as well as most successful, purveyors of this sort of fare). The cleverly
contrived sentimentalities of). M. Barrie (1860-1937) were highly popular in
their day; Barrie's plays showed a great theatrical skill and a determined
cunning in the exploitation of the audience's reaction. That audience consisted
9
 UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
for the most part of tired Philistines, and it was they who determined what was
to be a box-office success.
The course of British and Irish drama during the first half of the century
may have been less revolutionary than developments in poetry and fiction over
the same period, but its revolution was to come, and since the end of World
War II it has been the major area of literary innovation. There is no accounting
for the emergence of genius. In the history of cultural movements, it appears
sporadically and less often singly than in constellations, as if it were the
property of great "stars" to attract lesser. A factor in the emergence of such a
constellation in twentieth-century British and Irish drama has been the role
played by the BBC in commissioning and promoting new work. Wartime verse
plays, written for radio by Louis Mac-Neice and other poets, helped prepare the
audience that in the late 1940s and early 1950s rapturously received the verse
plays of Christopher Fry (1907-). It seemed that these were about to bring a
new kind of poetic life into English drama. But Fry's exuberantly witty use of
metaphor soon lost its appeal, and by the late 1950s a very different kind of
drama brought vitality to the British theater. )ohn Osbome's Look Back in
Anger was produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956. Angrily, violently, and
in an unadorned and sometimes brutally colloquial dialogue, it thrust on the
audience the revelation of psychological and social problems left unresolved, or
even exacerbated, by the welfare state. The Entertainer (1957) was similar in
its brash virtuosity;Osbome's third play, Luf/ier (I960), shows him moving out
of a preoccupation with a restricted part of the contemporary social scene to
wider concerns and a freer use of imagination. Arnold Wesker was another
Royal Court discovery and became the most prominent of the so-called kitchen
sink playwrights. In a trilogy that began with Chicken Soup with Barley (1958),
he explored, although less stridently than Osborne, related social and
10
psychological problems. Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop introduced
another kind of vigorous new theatricalism. with an impromptu-seeming kind
of play made up of numerous small scenes: distinctive examples are Brendan
Behan's The Quare Fellow (1956) and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey
(1958). Another significant factor in the recent resurgence of British drama has
been the interaction of such innovative directors as Peter Brook and Peter Hall
with the outstanding playwrights of the period and with several generations of
superlative actors.
It is clear, however, that the major star in the constellation of playwrights
that has emerged in the last three decades is Samuel Beckett. Friend and
amanuensis of the major star of an earlier literary constellation, James Joyce,
Beckett changed the course of English drama with his first play, written in
French in 1948 and translated by the author himself as Waiting for Godot
(1953), which strongly influenced a younger group of playwrights that includes
Harold Pinter. South African Athol Fugard. and Tom Stoppard. These, now at
the height of their powers, have benefited from the variety of outlets for their
work—large stage, small stage, film, radio, and television—and have helped to
make London once again the capital citv of the theater world.
UNIT 1. HISTORICAL CONTEXT

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