Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In May 1837 William Bell Scott went to the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, where he saw one of the five performances of Robert Browning's new verse drama, Strafford. Scott, later to emerge as a significant Pre-Raphaelite painter, was already an admirer of Browning's dramatic poem Paracelsus (1835) and his expectations for the new play were high. But, as his memoirs record, he was bitterly disappointed by what he saw on stage: ‘The speakers’, he wrote, ‘had every one of them orations to deliver, and no action of any kind to perform. The scene changed, another door opened, and another half-dozen gentlemen entered as long-winded as the last’ (Scott 1892:I, 124).In his preface to the published edition of the same play, Browning described Strafford as attempting something new: it was a play of ‘Action in Character, rather than Character in Action’. It seems that he and Scott had very different understandings of the idea and the role of ‘action’ in drama. This chapter is about some of these differences.Scott's criticism is typical of responses to productions of the quixotic genre that is Victorian verse drama: that it is full of static scenes, of monotonous, repetitive and undra-matic speeches, of events reported but not seen. Typically, Victorian verse drama is cast as a form caught between literary fashion and theatrical convention - in its particular balancing of action and character ... log in or subscribe to read full text