The Lights o' London and Other Victorian Plays (Oxford Drama Library) - Hardcover

Fitzball, Edward; Coyne, Joseph Stirling; Lewes, George Henry; Sims, George Robert; Jones, Henry Arthur; Booth, Michael R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198121733 ISBN 13: 9780198121732

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1995

Synopsis

The Lights o' London and Other Victorian Plays is a new selection of five nineteenth-century English plays, none of which has been recently available in print. Each represents vividly and masterfully the three dominant dramatic forms of the Victorian era: melodrama, farce, and comedy. All were extremely popular with audiences, and much vigour, excitement, and variety of dramatic expression of their time can be found in these texts. Included are Edward Fitzball's The Inchcape Bell; Joseph Stirling Coyne's Did You Ever Send Your Wife to Camberwell?; The Game of Specualtion by George Henry Lewes; George Robert Sims's he Light's 'o London; and The Middleman by Henry Arthur Jones. The texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with an introduction and detailed annotation.

About this title

About the Author

Edward Fitzball,Joseph Stirling Coyne,George Henry Lewes,George Robert Sims,Henry Arthur Jones

From the Back Cover

The Plays in this volume were all successful in their time. Edward Fitzball (1792-1873) was a prolific writer of melodramas, and The Inchcape Bell (1828) contains the Gothic and nautical elements then popular on the stage. Joseph Stirling Coyne (1803-68), who wrote Did You Ever Send Your Wife to Camberwell? (1846), was principally an author of farces, and the play is typical of the kind of farce with a humble domestic setting and characters to match, popular in the 1840s. George Henry Lewes (1817-78) wrote relatively few plays, but The Game of Speculation (1851) is a cutting comic satire upon greed and duplicity, softened by the usual Victorian sentimental ending. George Sims (1847-1922), the author of seventy plays, specialized, like Fitzball, in melodrama, but melodrama on a much larger social and urban scale. The Lights o' London (1881), which has never been printed, is the most famous of Sims's plays, with a stage history that stretched into the 1930s. The Middleman (1889), a play about capitalist exploitation and how the tables are turned, is a good example of the way in which the older melodrama became that staple of the late Victorian theatre, the 'drama'. Its author, Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929), soon came to be ranked with Pinero and other important dramatists of the 1890s.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198121733
• ISBN 13: 9780198121732
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288