For many, the Victorian theatre is the scruffy orphan of high culture, somewhat redeemed by the cultivation of its Edwardian successors. Today's high-minded aficionados take their antitheatrical tone from the stuffiest Victorians: the stage was and is crude, embarrassing, primitive, compared to its sister arts, prose, poetry, and painting. In any case, the medium is by definition ephemeral, and so impossible to study. Its scripts, when they exist at all, are not moored by weighty volumes as literature is, or heavy canvases like paintings; like most screenplays today, Victorian plays are sketches for productions and performances now vanished in the mists that engulfed the world before film preserved it.

Collaborative, messy, and lost, the theatre is generally, and wrongly, dismissed as sub-canonical, at least until the 1890s, when the self-conscious literacy of Wilde and Shaw elevated it to the verbal sophistication that would become Edwardian drama. But the theatre’s elusive art can be retrieved and, in books like this, it is. Once we begin to piece this hybrid medium back together, we restore the prism through which all Victorian artists and audiences – and these were most Victorians – saw their world.

Virginia Woolf declared as late as 1929 that bookshelves contained “no plays by women”and noted the common assumption that “women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.” But actually there was a significant and growing number of women writing for the English theatre by the latter part of the Victorian period, and women dramatists became both more numerous and vigorously political in the early twentieth century. Not only were the denials of their existence greatly exaggerated, but the contributions of women playwrights to the Victorian and Edwardian theatre were momentous, although still not as widely recognized as they deserve to be.

As Virginia Woolf’s comment in A Room of One’s Own illustrates, women playwrights worked under a cultural assumption that they did not and could not write drama – although they were doing just that. William Archer, the leading proponent of Ibsen and Shaw, omitted any notice of women playwrights in his canon-fixing book on the development of modern drama, The Old Drama and the New (1923), although he knew several notable women dramatists personally. By saying nothing at all on the subject, Archer and many other male critics who should have known better were able to perpetuate the widespread belief that women were unequipped to become playwrights. Nevertheless, by the end of our period women dramatists were increasingly difficult to ignore, and for those with eyes to see were breaking out of the myth of their own invisibility.

In 1904, the Court Theatre was a shabby, late-Victorian playhouse seating barely more than 600 patrons, a few underground stops away from the fashionable “theatreland” of the West End. That spring, H. Granville Barker, twenty-seven, an actor, director, and playwright, hired to direct and to play a supporting role in a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, booked the theatre for a series of matinees of Candida, by George Bernard Shaw. By the following fall, Barker, in partnership with J. E. Vedrenne, the business manager for the theatre's previous principal lessee, embarked on his own management of the theatre. Every second week a new staging would be given three matinee performances; if public attention or artistic merit warranted, the production would be moved into the evening bill for a limited run.

Victorian and Edwardian theatre audiences were so diverse that it is impossible to consider a generic audience for this period. Audiences varied from theatre to theatre and even within theatres to such an extent that any essentializing description is bound to be flawed. Consequently, Michael Booth's call for a more precise investigation of such audiences must be heeded, if we wish to understand the contexts in which Victorian and Edwardian playgoing took place. Booth laments that:

In the preface to the second volume of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898), George Bernard Shaw specifies the sort of actor he requires for the new kind of play represented by his first public success, Arms and the Man (Avenue Theatre, London, 1894). Actors in his plays, Shaw explains, had to become participants in transforming a society mired in pernicious romantic illusion into one grounded in a “genuinely scientific natural history.”The task was a demanding one. Actors in Shavian plays must comprehend mental states that “still seem cynically perverse to most people” and cultivate a goodhumored contempt for “ethical conventions” that had once seemed “validly heroic or venerable.” In his own sunny, arrogant way, Shaw is addressing actors who seldom if ever consider themselves the “abstract, and brief chronicles of the time,” as Hamlet had insisted they were, but who in Shaw's view amount nevertheless to epitomizing presences, reifying on stage the assumptions, attitudes, and prejudices of their age. Mere imitation of this kind, he insists, is no longer acceptable.

From our century-long perspective we can perceive Shaw to be aligning himself with the programmatic dramaturgy embraced by Continental practitioners of naturalism like Zola and Brieux, whose works reflected a “scientific” analysis of contemporary social conditions and their deleterious effects. Shaw’s champion exemplar of this radical strategy was, of course, Ibsen, whose “terrible art of sharpshooting” at an audience was intended, as Shaw would argue in his 1913 revision of The Quintessence of Ibsenism, to make them so uncomfortable that they would become “guilty creatures sitting at a play” (again, the idea is Hamlet’s) who might then rise up and reform society. Evidently, Shaw intends to draw actors away from unthinking service to a society against whose mores he is in revolt; for it is actors, he realizes, who are the ultimate means of enlisting audiences in that arduous enterprise.

Having dominated French theatre for over two decades, at the end of the nineteenth century the fallen woman became an ever-present figure on the English stage. In 1873 Henry James declared in disgust, “Just as the light drama in France is a tissue of fantastic indecencies, the serious drama is an agglomeration of horrors.” Confronted by a string of plays by Alexandre Dumas fils, Sardou and Augier, which variously enjoined husbands to chastize, forgive, banish or shoot their unfaithful wives, James concluded of the French drama that “adultery is their only theme.” A decade later, adulterous heroines still dominated the Parisian stage and threatened to extend their influence across the channel. The intellectual sterility of the British stage was such, warned George Bernard Shaw in 1885, that “we look on French dramatists as bold grapplers with social problems because their heroines sometimes commit adultery. Some of our own critics and playwrights, when lauding the French drama, occasionally express themselves in a manner that indicates their conviction that a little adultery would purify and ennoble the British stage.” But, he hastened to add, “Our drama is sinking for want, not of an Augier, but of an Ibsen.” His warnings were in vain. Dramas centring on adultery, seduction, and the issue of the sexual double standard became a staple of the London stage, so that by 1905 J. M. Barrie could write a comedy, Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, in which the inevitable affect of theatregoing on a young girl’s imagination is to make her believe that her mother must have a lover.

The music hall is a specially Victorian institution. It came into existence as the queen was crowned, flowered with her reign, and entered the twentieth century ready to decline. Its heyday was roughly from 1890 to 1910. The first purpose-built halls for this kind of entertainment began to be erected in numbers in the early 1840s, with forerunners such as the Star at Bolton which opened in 1832. Signs of the end were the 1907 performers' strike and the 1912 Royal Command performance. During this period huge success attended the transformation of a multitude of small-scale entertainments presided over by pub proprietors and semi-professional chairmen into seriously capitalized big business that operated according to increasingly strictly enforced and eventually overdetermining rules. At first the growth of the halls provided a leisure service to growing urban populations, and enabled talented individuals to develop star careers and fortunes. Cultural change and aspiration, the broadening of the audience to include more segments of late-Victorian society, and concomitant moves to increase discipline and market control shifted power into the hands of business managers and investors.

Among contemporary feminist theorists and critics, and particularly in discussions of identity, performance has become a central term. Scholars across a range of disciplines, inspired largely by the groundbreaking work of Judith Butler, now regard identity not as a stable construct, but rather as constituted by and through the performative acts that bring an “I” into being. Regarded in this light, performative acts generate rather than undermine the cultural fiction of the stable self, soliciting our assent to it, in Butler's words, as “a compelling illusion, an object of belief .” Extending the point to textual production, Sidonie Smith argues that “there is no essential, original, coherent autobiographical self before the moment of self-narrating”: the textual “I” achieves subject status by “the inclusion of certain identity contents and the exclusion of others; the incorporation of certain narrative itineraries and intentionalities, the silencing of others; the adoption of certain autobiographical voices, the muting of others.” By contrast with Elizabeth Robins’s view of stage performance, “where your business is not to be your real self,” the poststructuralist discourse on identity seems to contend there is no “real self” not to be.

In an 1845 issue of the London Musical World, editor Henry Lunn criticized the use of music in the contemporary theatre. He objected first of all to managements' abuse of audiences by requiring them to endure continuous and apparently irrelevant entr'acte music during the intervals. Secondly, he offered a sharp criticism of the pervasive style of “incidental” music designed to accompany the standard melodrama:

For this, Lunn alleged, the theatre management wasted the services of a small orchestra each night. Moreover, the theatre’s music director (usually also a composer), was obliged to choose and lead such music, a procedure that Lunn called “a mere mechanical matter.”

The great social changes occurring in the early and mid-Victorian period affected the comedy and farce of the time as much as they did the more serious forms of drama, or any kind of artistic expression; this is equally true of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Chief among these changes was the vast expansion of urban populations and a substantial growth in audience numbers; the development of a railway system that brought audiences to London and actors and companies to the provinces; the growing sophistication and developing taste of a middle-class audience co-existing with a huge demand for regular entertainment from a much larger working- and lower-middle-class audience. All this contributed to a considerable increase, especially from the 1860s, in the number of theatres in London; the growth of theatres built for touring companies and neighborhood theatres and music halls catering to local populations and local class taste; the extinction by law of the monopoly on “legitimate” drama held by Drury Lane and Covent Garden and the consequent loss of their traditional primacy and importance for the drama and for actors.

Economists, like all historians, make assumptions. One of their favorite assumptions concerns a hypothetical but ubiquitous entity called homo economicus (“economic man”), who makes rational choices to maximize his or her own profit within the organized chaos that is called a marketplace, buyers seeking to pay low prices and sellers trying to get high prices. When homo economicus is present, the degree of maneuverability on prices is determined by the scarcity of what is being sold. While this may be too reductive to encompass the entire range of human choices, economists nevertheless recommend that historians test the concept against the evidence.

When we think of the Victorian theatre's staging techniques, two complementary tendencies come to mind, which stand out in the requirements indicated by the stage directions in the acting editions of the scripts. One is spectacle, and in particular, the kind of effect described vividly in 1881 by Percy Fitzgerald in The World Behind the Scenes:

Theodore Dreiser had one story to tell, and he never tired of telling it. A young man or woman from the American hinterland flees from provincial boredom or (sometimes) moral disgrace, seeking a new life in the city; the consequences range from exaltation to destruction. Dreiser gave this archetypal form a specific social, historical, and geographical locale. He wrote (repeatedly) the history of the urbanizing United States between the Civil War and World War I, not from any Olympian perspective but from the inside out, from the perspective of clerks and shopgirls striving to do more than merely survive in a baffling new world of threats and opportunities.

Dreiser implicitly recognized the emotional dimension long missing from textbook accounts of “the rise of the city” - the dimension of desire: for sensuous pleasure and luxury, for the intense experience that seemed lacking in everyday life, or at least for some fleeting facsimile of ecstasy. Though in his philosophical asides Dreiser traced human behavior to cosmic forces, his narration of history subverted that sort of determinism. For him, the basic energies of historical change arose from human longings - perverse, unpredictable, and sometimes self-defeating, but powerful, persistent, and never more apparent (he thought) than during the transition to urban modernity.