"Introduction" to Keith Wilson, Thomas Hardy on Stage (Macmillan/St. Martin's, 1995).

Given the modest number of stages that Thomas Hardy was ever actually on, the literal application of this book's title might appear limited. Hardy himself, commenting on his youthful walk-on part in a Covent Garden pantomime, observed `More than forty years were to elapse before Hardy trod the same boards again.' Nor during those years did he tread many others, frequent though his visits were to the theatre and accessible to him as his reputation made the leading figures of the late-Victorian stage. Nonetheless, it is Hardy's involvement as playwright, adapter, adviser, and sympathetic, if reserved, onlooker in both amateur and professional stage performances of his work with which this study is primarily concerned.

Over the full span of his life a picture emerges of remarkable and sustained engagement with an art of which Hardy seemed often dismissive but from which his critical interest was seldom entirely distracted for any length of time. In youth and middle age, Hardy gave to the theatre a considerable part of his intellectual attention and social energy, allowing it to play a key role in both his early cultural education and his later entry into fashionable metropolitan society. By the time that age and geographical circumstance made theatre attendance difficult, and ultimately impossible, he enjoyed sufficient distinction that the theatre and its luminaries came to him. For the last thirty years of his life drama had an equivocal place in Hardy's imaginative affections, a place similar to that which prose fiction came to have in his middle years. While the move to poetry allowed the escape from fiction that, for a variety of private and public reasons, became so imperative for Hardy in the 1890s, an impulse to drama evident in much of the rendering of situation and setting in the novels was actually strengthened by the concentration on poetry. Adaptable as a dramatic mode was to the tonal variety of lyric poetry and situational cameo at one extreme and to the sonorousness of epic historicising at the other, it became increasingly pronounced in Hardy's later work, an emphasis emblematized in the secure place occupied by The Dynasts in Hardy's own assessment of his major achievements.

Hardy's interest in drama, evidenced technically in organizational and presentational aspects of his novels and poems, generically in The Dynasts and The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall, and anecdotally in letters and biography, is now well documented, so that his dismissive comments about the shortcomings of the contemporary theatre have a tempering context to modify their surface acerbity. The Hardy who declared to Florence Henniker that plays `are distinctly a lower form of art: what is called a good play . . . being distinctly in point of artistic feeling & exhibition of human nature no higher than a third rate novel', is the same correspondent who must have made identification of West End productions, producers, and performers one of the more laborious tasks for the editors of his letters. As he acknowledged in `Why I Don't Write Plays', his contribution to a discussion in the Pall Mall Gazette of the relative merits of drama and the novel, he had written by 1892 several `skeletons' of plays, a number of which still survive, although he had no desire to produce a play `just now'. Despite this assertion, within eight months he was working on at least two scenarios, one of which bore fruit in the professional première of The Three Wayfarers on 3 June 1893. From then on drama was never very far from Hardy's working plans, drama of a kind that public and professional enthusiasm for his work guaranteed would emerge from the closet more frequently than Hardy himself could have anticipated.

That Hardy's interest in the stage, and in the possibility of his own work appearing on it, was neither insubstantial nor passive is attested to by his extensive correspondence and periodic negotiation with would-be adapters, producers and performers, his recurrent toying with outlines for possible plays, his obvious interest in professional productions of adaptations from his work, even when they occurred on the other side of the Atlantic, and his contributions to one of the stranger public ventures that a major writer has ever sanctioned. Between 1908 and 1924, the Dorchester Debating and Dramatic Society performed stage adaptations of Hardy's work, limited in the first year to Dorchester itself but from 1909 on in Weymouth and London as well. The adaptations were of three kinds: those made by A. H. Evans, a Dorchester chemist and first producer of what became known as the `Hardy Plays', those made by his successor, T. H. Tilley, and those made by Hardy himself, one of which -- The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall -- was not in fact an adaptation but an original work written specifically for stage performance. Because of the Hardy association, the plays received national, and in some degree international, attention, which included extensive reporting of performances, interviews (until Hardy forbade them) with the leading players, photo-spreads in both tabloids and The Times, and the pilgrimage to Dorchester of celebrities from the fashionable and artistic worlds. For the best-known performer, Gertrude Bugler, who enjoyed substantial newspaper celebrity as a result of her rendering of the most popular and poignant Hardy heroines, culminating in her performance as Tess in Hardy's own adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the plays also provided the opportunity of experience on the professional London stage. A celebration of Hardy's work, especially its evocation of the world of Wessex, the plays offered to all those who participated in them a brief but regular taste of Hardy's own celebrity.

More puzzling is what they offered to Hardy himself, which must have been something substantial enough to offset his constitutional reserve and frequent unease in the role in Dorchester public life for which fame cast him. His involvement in the plays testifies to the complexity of Hardy's contribution to the inevitably somewhat parochial concerns of Dorchester, the small county town that helped feed his imagination without circumscribing its limits. For much of the time, his relationship to Dorchester life was institutional: school governor, justice of the peace, even involuntary tourist attraction seem like roles willingly undertaken as part of the modest price paid by genius to the commonplace, a price reasonably exacted when the material which best nourished Hardy's imagination had its roots so securely embedded in the commonplace. Vaguely paternalistic good works were Hardy's payment for the right both to inhabit and distance himself from an enclosed community. The pages of the Dorset County Chronicle, with their detailed recording of the minutiae of Dorchester public life, tacitly reveal the paradoxes of Hardy's place in Dorchester's sense of itself. A recurrent tone of protective possessiveness wants to make Hardy integral to the town's distinctive identity without dulling his uniqueness or presuming on his good nature, contradictory aims often doomed to disappoint and to generate some of the grudging suspicion that Hardy on occasion provoked, and can still provoke, in the town most intimately connected with his life and work. The self-consciousness of Dorchester's response to Hardy made all the more valuable those occasions on which institution and community could come together in relatively relaxed good-fellowship and understanding.

The yearly Hardy plays were the most successful and well-documented of those periodic convergences. They provided opportunity for Hardy to participate in the community life of the town both as neighbour and celebrity, with relatively little abrasiveness between the two contradictory roles. They allowed him to indulge the inclination towards engaged disengagement that has been well identified in more text-centred manifestations by such commentators as J. Hillis Miller, John Bayley, and Donald Davie. Hillis Miller was the first to make a sustained study of Hardy's playing of disengagement and involvement, `distance and desire', against each other, identifying both the inclination and its consequent strategy as a key to `those underlying structures which persist through all the variations in Hardy's work and make it a whole'. Bayley offered another version of that model in identifying a Hardy whose presence in his own novels, indicated in a distinctive voice that both asserts and defers, is that of `a private man in a public place'. For Bayley it is a `presence with all the intimacy of a self but none of its proclamation, or insinuation'. Expressed with more political vigour, Donald Davie's version of substantially the same trait is Hardy's `engaging modesty', a self-undercutting that leaves him open to the charge, against which Davie defends him, of having perpetrated a `crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors'. What all three judgements identify is a Hardy who, for whatever personal or aesthetic reasons, implies or affirms dispassion while simultaneously manifesting engagement. The same qualities in temperament and consciousness produce the subterfuge of a concealed autobiography, or the emotionally-charged confrontations and evasions of the `Poems of 1912-13'. They also dictate a version of community relationship of which Hardy's response to association with the Hardy Players is the clearest indication.

As we shall see, Hardy's routine disclaiming of all responsibility for the Hardy plays, at least until 1923's production of The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall and 1924's Tess, was designed to ensure that he would remain untouched by the adverse criticisms that these amateur productions might provoke. But the repeated denials of personal involvement in the plays often shared letters with offers to acquire tickets should correspondents be interested in attending a performance. As time passed and the yearly Hardy play itself became an institution, its familiarity breeding affection both inside and outside Dorchester, Hardy became less wary of being associated with productions, moving from agreement to the performance of his own play, The Three Wayfarers, in 1911 to willingness to patch together himself the extracts which comprised 1916's `Wessex Scenes' from The Dynasts. While war-time charitableness may have accounted for Hardy's assistance with this production -- profits from the performances went to the Red Cross -- his greatest compliments to the Hardy Players cannot be dismissed as the courtesies of duty. By allowing the Players to perform The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall and his own adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy was signalling far more than mere condescension towards the efforts of a local group of enthusiastic amateurs. Even his fascination with Gertrude Bugler, who achieved her greatest triumph playing Tess, cannot explain the energy with which Hardy assisted in these productions, particularly when one remembers that she played no part in either The Queen of Cornwall or the previous year's play, A Desperate Remedy.

Hardy's growing enthusiasm for the plays can only be explained by locating it against the wider appeal to him of drama and the working stage. The activities of the Hardy Players, once they had revealed themselves not to be a major embarrassment to Hardy himself, offered him gratifying fulfilment of a life-long attraction to the theatre. It may have been an interest felt despite the reservations of his better judgement, and despite the fiasco into which his first theatrical enterprise, a stage adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd co-authored with J. Comyns Carr, had degenerated in 1881-82. But the interest was enduring and deeply-based, and in its reference to his own works was fittingly to be satisfied within the community that nourished his literary imagination. The Queen of Cornwall, for example, allowed Hardy to explore some of his idiosyncratic ideas about the proper aim of serious drama, ideas that were largely responsible for his caustic comments on the triviality of the contemporary theatre. Preparations for its actual stage production benefitted from the detailed advice of Harley Granville Barker, at the time arguably the most influential force, apart from the monolithic Shaw, in British drama. Its opening night was noticed by the drama reviewers of every major London journal. Hardy thus achieved some of the rewards of the serious dramatist while running few of the risks, either financial or emotional, that would have attached to more orthodox theatrical presentation of a new work by England's most respected living writer.

In a very real sense, the Hardy Players made the stage safe for Hardy's own experiments in drama, allowing him to experience minor successes, virtually from the comfort of Max Gate, at the same time as providing him with the option of declaring limited involvement in the event of a humiliating catastrophe. For someone as sensitive as Hardy to critical slights, both real and imagined, this was a workable compromise not to be underestimated. Nor did it preclude his work from appearing again, and more auspiciously, on the professional stage, once his own interest and that of theatre managements and the public had been sparked by the amateur productions. So connected are the amateur and professional dramatizations of Hardy's work that a study of Hardy and the stage inevitably finds itself charting the line from Dorchester's Corn Exchange to London's West End, a course less surprising in its directness than it might be for an author whose distinctive genius was less dependant on the translation of an intransigently regional materiel into works of such metaregional expansiveness.

Unfortunately, the Hardy Players became most useful to Hardy himself at about the same time that they were becoming most threatening to his second wife, who saw in their activities a possible disruption of the protective care with which she was nursing him through his ninth decade. `I hope we shall see something of you. The times when those hateful plays are being performed are so unsatisfactory', wrote Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen in late December 1922. Admittedly the letter was written a month after the performances of A Desperate Remedy, one of the worst of the adaptations, but the sudden spark of passion suggests a response to something more than the infelicities of a particular production. Nor had Hardy's infatuation with Gertrude Bugler yet developed to an extent that would explain Florence's outburst to a woman whose discretion painful experience should already have taught her to suspect. The extent of the interest, both emotional and cerebral, that the aging and frail Hardy was displaying in the adaptations of his novels provides a more convincing reason for Florence's concern, and his willingness to provide his own scripts for the two final amateur productions seems incontrovertible evidence of their importance to him.

As I have suggested, the generic emphasis in the work of the second half of Hardy's writing life helps explain his interest in the plays. His insistence in the `Preface' to Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) on the `dramatic or impersonative' nature of much of his poetry, or his indication in the `Preface' to Time's Laughingstocks (1909) that the first-person lyrics should be `regarded, in the main, as dramatic monologues by different characters', is not mere special pleading to absolve himself of personal allegiance to the views that the poems seem to sanction. The dramatic form of so many of the poems owes more to Hardy's aesthetic bent and to his inheritance from older Victorian contemporaries than it does to authorial expediency. It was a ballad dramatization of a local story, `A Trampwoman's Tragedy', that Hardy regarded as `upon the whole, his most successful poem'. He spent thirty years maturing the ideas that eventually resulted in The Dynasts, and the actual writing occupied more than ten. That Hardy should have chosen to include in his self-authored biography the tribute that he received from younger writers on his eighty-first birthday, part of which reads `We thank you, Sir, for all that you have written . . . but most of all, perhaps, for The Dynasts', is an indication of his own ranking of his work. The dramatic, if not always conventional drama, the theatrical, if not always conventional theatre, are inextricable from Hardy's own sense of his major accomplishments.

The fact that he initially regarded his main dramatic work as unstageable, defensively declaring that `The Dynasts is intended simply for mental performance, and not for the stage', may have been due more to what he sensed contemporary producers and audiences would accommodate than to lack of interest in the possibility of stage performance. It took a Granville Barker to see the stage potential of The Dynasts, but as soon as he did, Hardy was enthusiastically helping him with preparations for the Kingsway Theatre's 1914 adaptation. The theatre of 1914 was very different from that of 1903, when Hardy had speculated `Whether mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life', while at the same time suggesting techniques to make his unstageable play stageable. Part of what made it different was Barker's direction, during the very years when Hardy was publishing The Dynasts, of four productions of Euripides -- Hippolytus (1904), The Trojan Women (1905), Electra (1906), and Medea (1907) -- which were followed in 1912 by Iphigenia in Tauris. Barker's were virtually the first professional productions in English of classical Greek drama, and the influence of his experience both in those and in the staging of Shakespeare on his adaptation of The Dynasts was very apparent, as was the debt that Hardy owed to Barker's flair and originality. The scheme was primarily Barker's, and there were things that Hardy would have done very differently, but as he wrote to A. E. Drinkwater, Barker's general manager, `seventy performances will be really a very respectable run'.

The Kingsway Dynasts may have been a superior cut-and-paste job achieved by an exceptionally skilled director, in part against Hardy's recommendations. But its existence and relative success serve as reminders that the divide between the dramatic and the theatrical in Hardy's work was neither as absolute nor as welcome to Hardy himself as passing comments about his own work and the failures of the contemporary stage have made it seem. All the indications are that Hardy had a life-long, informed interest in the operations of the working theatre, and no objection in principle to his own work appearing in it, subject, of course, to the kind of controls that no commercial management with an eye to a profit was likely to grant him. Hence the lengthy delay in the arrival of his own version of Tess in a professional theatre. I am not suggesting that in his mid-seventies Hardy, flush with the excitement of seeing the work of which he was most proud receive the serious attention of the most important director of the time, had any great ambition to become a significant force in British theatre, particularly given the up-hill struggle that he had already faced to convince both public and critical opinion that his passage from fiction to poetry was not merely a whim of age and professional security. But he was prepared to contemplate, with growing enthusiasm and genuine pleasure, the possible appearance of his own work on the stage, and, Florence Hardy's reservations notwithstanding, to devote a not inconsiderable portion of the declining energy of his later years to various theatrical enterprises. It was his good fortune that the Hardy Players were conveniently to hand to help him indulge longstanding theatrical fancies, and to generate sufficient public interest in seeing Hardy on stage to help ensure that the curtain would rise on a West End Tess, authored by Hardy, during his lifetime.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION