You
lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier...
Tom
Taylor,
Playwright (1817-80)
Tom Taylor was a prolific and successful pragmatic Victorian playwright, best known today for Our American Cousin, the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated. Fifty years after his death, Taylor's output was excoriated as representative of the worst defects of mid-Nineteenth Century British playwrighting. William Archer asserted that combining the commendable qualities of Tom Robertson and Tom Taylor, might make one good playwright. Another contemporary critic saw in all of Taylor's plays "personality and individual marks of distinction," but went on to complain that they were too conscious of the tastes of his audience. The critic would have had him write for the closet, it seems, rather than the stage. Revisiting them today, one is tempted to agree with those somewhat self-righteous critics, but some of his work deserves a second look. This category might include Masks and Faces, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, The Fool's Revenge, and perhaps even his Anne Boleyn.
Born into a wealthy household (his father owned a brewery) in Bishop-Wearmouth, outside Sunderland, October 19, 1817, Taylor was educated at the Grange in Sunderland and at the University of Glasgow before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, whence, in 1840, he received a B.A. with honors in both the classics and mathematics. (A man after my own heart.) There followed a Master's degree, a Professorship in English at London University, and law studies at the Inner Temple, admittance to the bar in 1846, and eventually appointment as Secretary of the Board of Health with an income of £1000 a year. He retired from public service in 1871 with an income of £650 a year. It is therefore surprising that he would feel the need to pander to the public taste, as it would seem that he did not need the income from his plays to survive.
But, Taylor's pragmatism may have sprung from a more democratic impulse. In an 1869 article called "Some Thoughts on the English Stage," he wrote:
| So long as the patent theatres survived, there was a home in them for artificial comedy as for a formal tragedy, and a body of actors trained to represent both with more or less finish and completeness. But the same influences,call them popular or democratic if you will, which were gradually modifying manners, political opinions and literature, were at work in the theatre, both to sap theatrical privilege and to new-mould theatrical amusements. The patents were broken down; all theatres were opened toall kinds of entertainments; actors became scattered; and whatever of artificial or stately in stage art had been maintained by the barriers of privilege, or the influences of tradition, began to melt away, and make room for ways of acting and forms of entertainment bearing a more popular impress. |
Perhaps this was a justification for the work that he had done--seventy odd plays in all--many of which were by this time already forgotten. But surely, so large a body of work, by a man with such reputable credentials, could hardly have been created out of purely cynical motives. But of the seventy, only a handful are available and only two or three are worth a second look.
Most of his plays were adaptations from the French; many were collaborations, perhaps one should say, most were collaborations, for clearly Taylor was willing to take into account the skills of the actors who were to play his parts. He couldn't have known what a sensation E. A. Sothern would make of the relatively minor role of Lord Dundreary in Our American Cousin, but he didn't object to the myriad "improvements" introduced by that actor which made his play "popular."
Other of his collaborators were rather more dominated by him. The venerable Charles Reade, who collaborated with him on one of his best plays, Masks and Faces, dedicated the novel which grew from the play to Taylor "to whom the reader owes much of the best matter of this tale." Taylor's brother Arnold, however, describes what must have been a frustrating process for the collaborator: "during the day (my brother being in town at his office), Reade wrote long passages, which were ruthlessly cut to pieces, or rejected, at night by my brother, when they sat down to put together and complete their work."