This dissertation examines the popular theatre of the late-nineteenth century and focuses on the most commercially successful and popular playwrights of the era: Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, and Oscar Wilde. Looking at the major popular playwrights reveals that the commercial stage had different concerns than the avant-garde theatre of Ibsen and Shaw. Foremost among these concerns was religion, and starting with Jones’s 1884 play Saints and Sinners, a massive change swept through the commercial stage as religious prejudice and official censorship fell by the wayside. In its place, religion started to become a topic that was once again seen as acceptable, and the fin de siècle stage was awash with syncretic religious views. This syncretism was aided by the publication of scripts and the religious pluralism of the day. Though publication aided the literary and religious quality of the texts, they were crafted as staged works, complete with the shared, collective experiences and emotions of the audience, a collective affect that mimics the collective emotional experience of a congregation in a church, and the stage thus became one of the largest venues for ecumenical religion during the late-Victorian era. The alacrity with which this happened challenges not only the common conception of the secularization of the late-Victorian stage, but also of the larger culture
Dissertation
The syncretic stage: religion and popular drama during the fin de siècle
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Spring 2018
DOI: 10.17077/etd.otp3gpv2
Abstract
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The syncretic stage: religion and popular drama during the fin de siècle
- Creators
- Marija Reiff - University of Iowa
- Contributors
- Lori Branch (Advisor)Miriam Gilbert (Committee Member)Robert Chapel (Committee Member)Jeffrey Cox (Committee Member)Florence Boos (Committee Member)Lena Hill (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- English
- Date degree season
- Spring 2018
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.otp3gpv2
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- v, 299 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2018 Marija Reiff
- Language
- English
- Date submitted
- 08/29/2018
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-299).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
Most theatrical histories place playwrights like George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen and their progressive, secular concerns at the center of the revolutions taking place on the British fin de siècle stage. However, this project argues that their contemporaries Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, and Oscar Wilde played a far more influential role in the formation of a new type of popular theater, the syncretic stage, which had far-reaching effects not only on the theater but also on the era’s religious debates. Jones, Pinero, and Wilde probed religious subjects through the most visible means of their day, and the syncretic stage became one of the most vibrant venues for ecumenical religion during the fin de siècle. This dissertation seeks to reclaim the place of these playwrights in the canon as well as to explore their plays for their rich textual and religious significances. Jones, Pinero, and Wilde treated religion diversely and capaciously, and at the end of the 1800s, the stage was the place where dissent and orthodoxy freely comingled, and religion, religious feeling, and religious debate were thriving. Understanding the syncretic stage reveals the complex relationship popular entertainment has with religious beliefs while also rewriting theatrical history and affording a unique perspective on the evolution of religious culture as its practitioners came head-to-head with impending secular values.
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9983776798802771
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