London Assurance and Other Victorian Comedies [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONThe plays selected for this volume span a period longer than Queen Victoria's reign. Bulwer-Lytton's Money (1840) was first produced not long after her accession to the throne in 1837, while Henry James's The High Bid (1908) will take the reader well into the Edwardian years, although its initial conception dates from late Victorian times. The four plays are presented together in one volume, as they all characteristically deal with central concerns of nineteenth-century social life. More specifically, they can be read as sharing a common focus on the major themes of love and money, particularly in the institution of marriage. At the same time, each of the plays provides its own variation on these issues, as determined by its author's choice of dramatic mode and genre, but also by the conditions of production at the particular theatre where it was first performed. The volume thus offers the opportunity to explore a palette of views on these vital issues as they evolve through the Victorian era and beyond, and to see how they are interpreted and presented, on a rich and changing stage, by actresses and actors whose art and techniques are reflected in the play texts, and, often enough, as decisive factors in the texts' very conception.Throughout Victorian times, the 'romantic' view of pure love and sacrosanct marriage with the attendant concepts of clear-cut role-models for all concerneddevoted, protecting male; idealized, vulnerable, and obedient female; dutiful child, generous and wise parentwas part of the official cultural discourse, exemplified by the Queen herself as loving spouse and as faithful 'Widow of Windsor' after the Prince Consort's death in 1861. Walter E. Houghton has given a classic summary of this Victorian view on love:The whole attitude is exactly what we call Romantic, and it was, in fact, a direct inheritance from Romanticism: partly from its naturalism, which found the instincts good and appealed to the feelings or the heart as the supreme guide to conduct and wisdom; partly from its idealism, whether Platonic or chivalric. The study of Victorian love is the study of how this tradition, embodied mainly in the works of Rousseau, Shelley, and George Sand, was domesticated under the powerful influence of Evangelical and family sentiment, and then emphasized, as a protection against, or a solution for, someix