Tennyson's Dramas 

  Abstract 

   The plays Tennyson wrote between 1875 and 1892 represent a significant and neglected body of his work. Critically overlooked, they have been seen as a footnote to his career rather than a fitting closing chapter. The plays dramatise many of the themes with which we are familiar in Tennyson, but raise a number of issues which have remained largely unexplored.

   The first of these concerns Tennyson’s endeavour to construct a panorama of English history. His history plays, Queen Mary, Harold, and Becket, were attempts to dramatise key moments in the spiritual development of the country. They sought to fill in the gaps left by Shakespeare’s chronicle plays, and were coloured by the poet’s own biography, providing extended metaphors for political and religious unrest in the late Victorian age. But they were also the work of others. Tennyson’s histories seldom strayed out of sight of his sources, and he struggled to create dramas that were properly separable from them. He was not slow to plagiarise historical and dramatic material and pass it off as his own, a method of composition which begged questions of his work generally.

   A second issue is the staging and theatrical context of the plays. A close examination of their contemporary reception reveals not just the heightened sense of religious sensitivity at the time, but the transitional state of Victorian theatre itself. Tennyson wrote his plays at the point where melodrama and verse drama were on the wane, about to be replaced by the new social dramas of Pinero, Jones, and Ibsen. In style, his plays were a throwback to a different milieu, to the world of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan stage, and did not appear to address the social concerns of the new society, a view confirmed by Henry Irving’s spectacular and recherché productions. In so doing, they reinforced the popularly held belief that Tennyson was no dramatist. The plays needed savage cutting to make them stageworthy, and helped to call the curtain on literary dramatic art in the nineteenth century.

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