Textualization of the English Theatre and Its Consequences in the 19th Century: Theatre Publisher Samuel French in the Mid-Victorian Period

Abstract

The period from the 1830s to the 1880s has been termed a "black hole" in the history of English theatre (Radcliffe and Mattacks 2009). Victorian drama was said to be in "decline", devoid of the literary merit required for elevation to the rank of national literature. Most of the plays performed on stage are unknown today because they were published as cheap, flimsy pamphlets or simply not published at all. Victorian plays mounted before 1891 were "forgotten" to all but theatre historians (Pearson 2015).Recent research on the Anglo-American performing rights points out "from the early 1840s to 1891, plays in finely bound, carefully printed reading volumes all but disappeared from the market, replaced by cheaply furnished, poorly printed, inexpensive acting editions" (Miller 2018). Since most English dramatists did not publish their plays, argued Miller, published plays were a marginal commodity for professional theatre. What, then, is the analytic relevance of closely examining poorly made, inexpensive prints?The task of this article is to illuminate how published mid-Victorian plays contributed to the making of an imagery cultural sphere, the English theatre. In this paper, Dion Boucicault's The Long Strike is used as an example of mid-Victorian play publication. The play is a typical publication of the mid-Victorian period, in the sense that it was one of many texts published surreptitiously across the Atlantic due to imperfect copyright protection. Although English playwrights refrained from publishing their texts, their plays mysteriously continued to appear in the US publishing market. The consequences of the production of printed plays of questionable authenticity remain largely unknown.Through the case of The Long Strike, I have clarified the manner in which a considerable number of pamphlet-like plays were circulated by Samuel French. The firm first published play texts in New York without the authors' permission. These US-issued play texts were distributed worldwide through various postal services. My aim in tracing this process is to argue that the proliferation of plays-sometimes published promptly in an illicit fashion, as was the text examined in this study-contributed to the creation of a theatrical culture well beyond England during and after this period.