Culture and Materialism by Raymond Williams

Author:Raymond Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cultural Studies
Publisher: Verso
Published: 1980-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Caste extends the social reference. An aristocratic officer courts the daughter of an unemployed and drunken workman; she is an actress. This outrages his mother, the Marquise. The girl, left with his child, becomes poor when he is reported killed in India and her father has spent the money left for her. But D’Alroy resurrects, the Marquise is reconciled, and the old workman, the only embarrassment, is pensioned off to drink himself to death in Jersey. Of course remarks are made about the silliness of ‘caste’ feeling when compared with the claims of true love, but to go from Caste or Society to the pushing world of mid-Victorian England, with its ready conversion of business fortunes into peerages, its movement of actresses into the old aristocracy, to say nothing of the general triumph of the new social integration of ‘respectability’, is to perceive a theatrical convention as impervious as anything in melodrama. It can then be said that the difference is the ‘naturalness’ of the dialogue, and it is true that the writing of Society and Caste, and for that matter of Money and Retired from Business, can be sharply contrasted with the exclamatory and incident-serving dialogue of, say, Lady Audley’s Secret. In fact what is principally evident is a developed colloquialism at all but the critical points. Yet this again is not a novelty: The Ticket-of-Leave Man, slightly earlier, has more sustained colloquial speech, with less edge of caricature, within its ‘melodramatic’ plot. (Indeed it is an irony that the only words widely remembered from the play are the detective’s, on emerging from disguise: ‘Hawkshaw, the detective’, which became a comic catch-phrase. The speech of most of the play is the most sustained ‘naturalism’, in the popular sense, in the English nineteenth-century theatre.)

What then is new in Robertson? It is naturalism in the most technical sense: that of the ‘lifelike’ stage. There were, as we have seen, precedents for this, in Vestris and Mathews and in the ‘archaeological’ productions. But Robertson fixed the form, in the new theatres and the new staging of the 1860s. The changes in the social character of the theatre helped him single-play evenings, at the new later hours; longer runs. The technical means had only to be brought together, in an integrated production of an ‘enclosed’ play. It is in this exact sense that it is true to say that Robertson invented stage-management, and indeed invented the modern figure of the producer or director, impressing an overall atmosphere and effect. Styles of acting were modified to fit into this general effect, and the plays, in a real sense, are scripts for these productions, in a way that has since become familiar. Robertson’s detailed stage-directions are the most obvious evidence of this kind of integrated production, and the motive is undoubtedly, as in all technical definitions of naturalism, the ‘appearance (illusion) of reality’: ‘the ivy to be real ivy, and the grass to be grass matting—not painted’.32 In local ways these effects of environment arc intended to be symptomatic: ‘holding out kettle at arm’s length.

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