“Heredity, Heredity!”: Recovering Henry James’s The Reprobate in Its Scientific and Theatrical Contexts

Abstract

The reception of Henry James’s plays has long been scripted by his fiction, overshadowing James’s broad engagement with the concerns of fin-de-siècle drama. This article offers a different approach, reading his play The Reprobate (1895) within its theatrical context and emphasizing its relations with the genre of “Ibsen parodies” – in particular, those produced by authors such as J.M. Barrie and Robert Williams Buchanan. Attention to the play’s humorous treatment of heredity – in the midst of a theatrical scene engaging with the paradigm of degeneration – reveals James as surprisingly in step with dramatic developments informed by contemporary evolutionary paradigms, ideas about gender, and comedic genres. The Reprobate’s clear relationship to works by Ibsen, Barrie, and others – as well as the intellectual framework it shares with plays by George Bernard Shaw – suggests the need to reconsider the entrenched view of James’s output in this period, especially as a playwright.