THE PLAY WITH A PAST: ARTHUR WING PINERO'S NEW DRAMA

Abstract

In the late Victorian period, when writers, critics, and actors of the English theatre became obsessed with defining a decidedly New Drama – with establishing its history, directing its progress forward, and creating a literary drama – the majority of the plays produced focused upon forms of femininity. Strangely, these innovative dramas engaged not with the future, but with an all-too-familiar stock character: the woman with a past. This well-known type was “a lady whose previous conduct, rightly or wrongly, disqualified her from any position of rank or respect” (Rowell 108–09). Familiar examples of such plays include George Bernard Shaw'sMrs. Warren's Profession(1893) and Oscar Wilde'sLady Windermere's Fan(1892); lesser-known ones include Henry Arthur Jones'sCase of Rebellious Susan(1894) and two plays that form the focus of this essay, Arthur Wing Pinero'sThe Second Mrs. Tanqueray(1893) andThe Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith(1895). Several English theatre historians (including Richard Dietrich and Jean Chothia) present these plays as the basis of modern intellectual drama, yet none explains the paradox that the theatre of modernity is founded upon the woman with a past, a figure whose future in these plays is foreclosed or ambivalently conceptualized at best.