University of Education Lahore

Department of English
Course Title: History of English Literature: Romantic Age to
Cotemporary Age

Programme: BS IV

Course Code: ENGL2118

Instructor Name: Hira Niaz

Modern Dramatists

• After the death of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Drama in

England suffered a decline for two centuries.
• The appearance of new dramatist and the revival of drama begin in
the last decade of the nineteenth century that has given drama again
a respectable place in English literature.
• Following are the most important modern dramatist who gave the
new wave to drama by writing in different style and introduced
different themes in plays.
G.B.Shaw (1856-1950)

George Bernard Shaw was born in July 26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland.
In 1876 he moved to London, where he wrote regularly but struggled
financially.
In 1895, he became a theater critic for the Saturday Review and
began writing plays of his own.
His play Pygmalion was later made into a film twice.
During his lifetime, he wrote more than 60 plays and won many other
awards, among them the Nobel Prize.
Early years of Shaw’s life

• Early on, Shaw explored the worlds of the arts under his mother's
guidance and through regular visits to the National Gallery of Ireland.
• In 1872, Shaw's mother left her husband and took Shaw's two sisters
to London, and four years later Shaw followed (his younger sister had
died in the meantime), deciding to become a writer.
• Shaw struggled financially, and his mother essentially supported him
while he spent time in the British Museum reading room, working on
his first novels.
How he started writing..

• Unfortunately, despite the time he spent writing them, his novels

were dismal failures, widely rejected by publishers.
• Shaw soon turned his attention to politics and the activities of the
British intelligentsia, joining the Fabian Society in 1884.
• The Fabian Society was a socialist group whose goal was nothing
short of the transformation of England through a more vibrant
political and intellectual base, and Shaw became heavily involved.
• The year after he joined the Fabian Society, Shaw landed some
writing work in the form of book reviews and art, music and theater
criticism
• Then Shaw began writing plays of his own.
As Dramatist

• Shaw's first plays were published in volumes titled "Plays Unpleasant"

containing
• Widowers' Houses
• The Philanderer and
• Mrs. Warren's Profession and
• "Plays Pleasant" which had
• Arms and the Man, Candida
• The Man of Destiny
• You Never Can
• The plays were filled with what would become Shaw's signature wit,
accompanied by healthy doses of social criticism, which stemmed
from his Fabian Society leanings.
• These plays would not go on to be his best remembered, or those for
which he had high regard, but they laid the groundwork for the
oversized career to come.
• While Shaw would write plays for the next 50 years, the plays written
in the 20 years after Man and Superman would become foundational
plays in his oeuvre.
• Works such as Major Barbara, The Doctor's
Dilemma, Pygmalion, Androcles and the Lion and Saint Joan, all firmly
established Shaw as a leading dramatist of his time. In 1925, Shaw
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Pygmalion was one of Shaw's most famous plays, was adapted to the
big screen in 1938, earning Shaw an Academy Award for writing the
screenplay.
• Pygmalion went on to further fame when it was adapted into a
musical and became a hit, first on the Broadway stage (1956) with Rex
Harrison and Julie Andrews, and later on the screen (1964) with
Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.
Characteristics of his plays

• George Bernard Show showed men and women in society as they

really are
• George Bernard Show wrote his plays with deliberate purpose of
propaganda.
• All the plays of George Bernard Show deal with some problem
concerning modern sociality.
• In widower’s house he put the blame on society and not on the
individual landlord for creating abuses of the right property.
• In Getting Married, he showed the unnaturalness of the home-life as
at present constituted.
• In The Doctor Dilemma, he exposed the superstation that doctors are
infallible.
• He attracted attention and became the most popular and influential
dramatist of his time.
• Caesar and Cleopatra has no particular theme, and that is why comes
near to being a play that most of show’s works.
• The apple Cart Show ridiculed the working of democratic form of
government and hinted that it needed a superman to set things right.
• In ST. Joan Show reached the highest level of his dramatic art dealing
in a tragic manner a universal theme involving grand emotions.
• He prepared the minds of the audience by written prefaces to his
plays which are far more conceiving than the plays themselves.
• Preparing the minds of audience by written prefaces to his plays
resulted to be more successesful when they were produced a second
and a third time when audience had read them in their published
forms. By means of the symbolism the dramatist could raise the dark
and even sordid themes to artistic levels.
Death

• Shaw died in 1950 at age 94 while working on yet another play.

Oscar Wilde(1856-1900)

• Early Life:
• Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, in
Dublin, Ireland.
• His father, William Wilde, was an acclaimed doctor who was knighted
for his work as a medical advisor for the Irish censuses.
• Wilde's mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, was a poet and had a deep
influence on her son's later writing.
• Wilde was a bright and bookish child.
• He attended the Portora Royal School at Enniskillen where he fell in
love with Greek and Roman studies.
• He won the school's prize for the top classics student in each of his
last two years, as well as second prize in drawing during his final year.
• Upon graduating in 1871, Wilde was awarded the Royal School
Scholarship to attend Trinity College in Dublin.
• After graduation in 1874, Wilde received the Berkeley Gold Medal as
Trinity's best student in Greek, as well as the Demyship scholarship
for further study at Magdalen College in Oxford.
• At Oxford he received first class marks from his examiners in both
classics and classical moderations.
• It was also at Oxford that Wilde made his first sustained attempts at
creative writing.
• In 1878 his poem "Ravenna" won the Newdigate Prize for the best
English verse composition by an Oxford undergraduate.
Beginning of career

• Upon graduating from Oxford, Wilde moved to London to live with his
friend, Frank Miles, a popular portraitist among London's high society.
• There, he continued to focus on writing poetry, publishing his first
collection, Poems, in 1881.
• While the book received only modest critical praise, it nevertheless
established Wilde as an up-and-coming writer.
• In 1882, Wilde traveled from London to New York City to embark on
an American lecture tour, for which he delivered a staggering 140
lectures in only nine months
• There he managed to meet with some of the leading American
scholars and literary figures of the day, including
• Henry Longfellow
• Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Walt Whitman.
• Wilde especially admired Whitman. "There is no one in this wide
great world of America whom I love and honor so much,'' he later
wrote to his idol.
• Through his lectures, as well as his early poetry, Wilde established
himself as a leading proponent of the aesthetic movement..
Acclaimed Works

• In 1888, seven years after he wrote Poems, Wilde published The

Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of children's stories.
• In 1891, he published Intentions, an essay collection arguing the
tenets of aestheticism.
• He also published his first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray
in 1891.
• His novel lack morality according to different critics.
• In the last five years of his life he turned his attention to writing for
stage.
• During his lifetime his plays became very popular, and they were
thought to represent a high mark in English drama.
• The success of Oscar Wilde as a writer of artificial comedy or comedy
of manners was due to his being a social entertainer, and mainly as
entertainment that his plays have survived.
• The importance of Oscar Wilde plays was exaggerated because; they
are merely the work of skilled craftsman.
• Oscar Wilde had the tact of discovering the passing mood of the tome
and expressing it gracefully.
• Otherwise, his plays are all superficial and none of them adds to our
knowledge or understanding of life.
• Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan, opened in February 1892 to
widespread popularity and critical acclaim.
• It encouraged Wilde to adopt playwriting as his primary literary form.
• Then Wilde produced several great plays that were witty, highly
satirical comedies of manners that nevertheless contained dark and
serious undertones.
• His most notable plays were
• A Woman of No Importance (1893),
• An Ideal Husband (1895) and
• The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Death

• Wilde died of meningitis on November 30, 1900, at the age of 46.

• More than a century after his death, Wilde is still better remembered
for his personal life’
• his exuberant personality
• consummate wit and
• infamous imprisonment for homosexuality
• than for his literary accomplishments.
J. Galsworthy(1867-1933)

• He was born in Aug. 14, 1867 at Kingston Hill, Surrey, England.

• He was the English novelist and playwright and winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1932.
• He believed in the naturalistic Technique both in the novel and drama
as they are free from prejuidices.
• Galsworthy delicate sympathies for the poor and unprivileged classes
which make his heart melt for them.
Important Works

• Important works of Galsworthy are:

• Strike
• Justice
• The skin Game and
• The silver Box
• All these plays deal with social and ethical problems.
Death

• He died from a brain tumor at his London home, Grove

Lodge, Hampstead in 1933.
Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946)

• He was born in November 25, 1877, in London, England.

• He was an English dramatist, producer, and critic
whose repertoire seasons and Shakespeare criticism profoundly
influenced 20th-century theatre.
As Dramatist

• He is a dramatist belongs to that group of dramatist like Galsworthy

who dealt with Domestic Tragedy and problems play.
• He occupied his place in modern drama mainly as a writer of four
realistic plays.
• The marrying of Anne Leete
• The Voysey Inheritance
• Waste
• The Madras House
• The Marrying of Anne deals with the Life Force, and attacks the
convention and hypocrisy surrounding the social culture of the time.
• The Voysey Inheritance deals with the problem of prostitution.
• In Waste, Granville-Barker again deals with the problem of sex.
• The Madras House deals with social forces which play havoc in the
lives of individuals who try to oppose them.
Themes of Plays

• Each of his play deals with dominant problem of social life.

• The importance of Granville-Baker in the 20th century drama lies in
his fine delineation of character and realistic style.
• His plays seem to be full of real life to greater extent than even those
of Galsworthy.
• The dialogue is very natural and near to ordinary conversation.
• The life presented in those plays is the narrow and petty life lived by
the upper-class in England in his days.
Death

He was died in August 31, 1946, in Paris, France.

John Masefield (1878-1967)

• He was born June 1, 1878 in Ledbury, United Kingdom.

• He belongs to the same school as Galsworthy and Granville-Baker.
• He combines in himself high imagination and sternly classical spirit,
Passionate, enthusiasm, and cold logic, fantasy and realism.
As Dramatist

• Though he clings to the natural world and is a confirmed realist, he is

wrapped in the spirit of mysticism.
• All these conflicting qualities are seen in his greatest play The Tragedy
of Nan, which is the best modern example of the form of domestic
tragedy.
• The social forces do not play any significant part in it.
• In spite of the supernatural and imaginative cast of the play, the story
is one of unflinching realism.
• Other plays of Masefield are:
• The Daffodil Fields
• Reynard the Fox
• Melloney Holtspur
• Esther and Berenice
• The Campden Wonder and
• Mrs. Harrison.
Death

• He was died in May 12, 1967 in Abingdon, United Kingdom.

J.M Barrie (1860-1937)

• He was Born on May 9, 1860, in Scotland.

• J.M. Barrie was a Scottish dramatist.
• After graduating from Edinburgh University in 1882, Barrie worked as
a journalist.
• He published his first novel, Better Dead, in 1887.
• Barrie soon had a string of popular novels set in Scotland, including A
Window in Thrums (1889).
As Dramatist

• M. Barrie did not belong to any school of dramatists.

• The best of his work is marked by imaginative fantasy, humour and
tender pathos.
• His most characteristic and original play is The Admirable
Crichton (1902), a drawing-room comedy in which the family butler is
the hero.
• As Barrie did not find himself at peace with himself and the society,
he was fond of capturing and treasuring a child’s dream of what life
ought to be. This is exactly what we find in this play.
• From day-to-day life of London to the world of romance, of
innocence, which is a so refreshing after the sordid picture of real life.
• Three other plays
• Peter Pan
• The Golden Bird and
• The Golden Age
• They have the children story-book characters in them, who are
brought to life by the writer’s skill.
• Barrie also wrote A Kiss for Cinderella, a fantasy.
• In all these plays Barrie shows himself as a pastmaster in prolonging
our sense of expectancy till the end of the last act.
• Moreover, no one since the Elizabethan era, has so effectively
suggested the close proximity of the fairyland with the visible world.
• Barrie’s last and most ambitious drama was The Boy David (1936) in
which he has given a fine picture of the candid soul of boyhood.
• As the play deals with a story from the Bible, which is well-
known, Barrie could not here effectively make use of the element of
surprise, which is his strongest point in other plays.
• On the whole, Barrie is a skilled technician.
• The episodes in his plays grow out of each other with refreshing
unexpectedness, giving rise to crisp dialogue and contrast of
character.
• He discovered that in an age of affectations and pretensions, the
theatre-goers needed the sincerity and innocence of childhood, and
he earned his popularity by giving them what they needed.
Death

• J.M. Barrie died on June 19, 1937, in London, England.

• As a part of his will, he gave the copyright to Peter Pan to a children's
hospital in London.
References

• www.profnaeem.blogspot.com
• Author: Arthur Compton-Rickett
Title: A history of English literature
Publisher: London, T.C. & E.C. Jack; New York, Dodge publishing co
Subject (keywords, tags): English literature -- History and criticism
Contributor: University of California Libraries
• A History of English Literature By Dr. T. Singh (AH Publishers), AH
publishers, Dr. T. Singh