The Long Run of Victorian Theater

Abstract

It's March 2020 as I write this, and the theaters are closed. Broadway is dark, and the Globe is once again shut due to a plague. Perhaps “self-isolation” is a strange condition under which to be thinking about crowded Victorian playhouses. As I make dates to watch movies with friends hundreds of miles away on the Netflix Party app, the media environment in which I pursue entertainment has perhaps never felt more dissimilar to that of nineteenth-century theatergoers. But, then again, maybe the photos of empty auditoria and deserted streets are the best demonstration of the space that public culture has taken up in our lives. The vacuum shows us that what's missing mattered. And if scholars of Victorian theater have shared a primary goal, it's to insist on how deeply the collective experience of playgoing influenced the everyday practices and beliefs of the period—even when theater and drama may not always appear on Victorian syllabi or conference programs. This essay considers three recent studies in Victorian theater—The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (2018), edited by Carolyn Williams; The Drama of Celebrity (2019), by Sharon Marcus; and Everyone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914 (2019), by Michael Meeuwis—to register the force that theatrical performance exerted on Victorians and to explore how that force could change our sense of the field. By dwelling with archives and objects that might otherwise get classed as cultural “ephemera,” these studies push us to acknowledge that the run of Victorian theater hasn't ended. In the collective pause before a moment of intense feeling, or in a contradictory attachment to a public figure who is both imitable and extraordinary, they find a repertoire of spectator behavior from which many of our own modes of attention derive.