Henry Arthur Jones

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Henry Arthur Jones

Henry Arthur Jones (born September 20, 1851 in Grandborough , Buckinghamshire , † January 7, 1929 in Hampstead ) was an English playwright who wrote during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Life

Youth and the beginning of a career

Henry Arthur Jones was born on September 20, 1851 into a Puritan farming family of Welsh origin. He received his education at the local elementary school , which he was allowed to attend until he was ten, before his parents sent him to an apprenticeship with an uncle who worked in the drapery trade. From then on he had to work fourteen hours a day and soon began to hate his uncle. Reading was the only distraction for young Jones, who trained himself through frequent reading.

The prerequisites for Jones' career as a stage poet can be seen as poorly possible: his school years were short and his Puritan parents, who, like other Puritans, believed that the theater was morally reprehensible, must also have influenced the young Jones. Yet he wrote his first play at the age of sixteen, before he had ever attended a theater himself. In 1869, at eighteen, Jones moved to London , where he decided to become a playwright after attending a performance of the melodrama Leah . He obtained his "training" as a stage poet by attending performances of successful plays several times a week until he was familiar with their respective structure and the mechanisms that work. In his first year in London he wrote his first one-act play and continued to write over the next nine years, during which he remained active in the drapery trade. In 1875, after raising enough money to start a family, he married Jane Seely and moved to Exeter .

In 1878, Only Round the Corner at the Theater Royal in Exeter, his first ever performed play, after he wrote other, less successful pieces (an exception was A Clerical Error , 1879, which was also performed in London and which helped him to get some attention). In 1882 he finally achieved his breakthrough with the famous melodrama The Silver King , which he wrote together with Henry Herman for actor-manager Wilson Barret . The play was premiered at Princess's and performed continuously on a total of 289 evenings.

Success and development

With Saints and Sinners , which premiered in 1884 and was critical of religion , Jones made an attempt in the direction of more serious theater. The piece was praised by Matthew Arnold , but received mixed feelings from the public and press at the premiere - which did not detract from its popularity (it was performed on 182 evenings).

The next great success for Jones was with The Middleman , which premiered in 1889 and dealt with the connection between capital and labor . It was the first piece that was also produced in continental Europe . Strictly speaking, The Middleman can still be described as melodrama, but it deals with serious topics that never appear in other so-called pieces. Judah (1890) can be seen as a further step away from conventional melodrama (although The Dancing Girl , 1891, falls back into the genre of conventional melodrama). So Jones changed the themes, but mostly kept the form and structure of the melodrama, as the separation into "good" and "bad" characters coincided with his own strict moral attitude. Jones' mixing of genres is also typical; in some pieces the characteristics of several directions (like romance, "problem play", social drama, comedy etc.) can be determined.

The next important piece followed in 1894 with The Masqueraders , which, like Judah, also combined a mixture of satire and romance under the term melodrama. Jones' next play Michael and His Lost Angel (1896) was about a priest who fell in love with a married woman. Although it was thoroughly praised by George Bernard Shaw , the piece was a failure, which may also be due to Jones' rigid moral concept (influenced by his puritanical upbringing), which can be seen prominently in the piece. With Mrs. Dane's Defense , a "problem play" which premiered in 1900 at Wyndham's Theater in London, he achieved another success. The piece was shown on 209 evenings and eventually toured the United States .

Decreasing awareness and unsuccessful age

After the turn of the century , other pieces followed, such as Whitewashing Julia (1903) and Joseph Entangled (1904), none of which could follow on from his really great successes, as Henry Arthur Jones' style remained the same, but the times (and the theater) changed changed - away from the strict morals of the Victorian era .

In 1907 Harvard University awarded him an honorary doctorate; Jones was never ennobled, although he believed himself to have deserved it. Jones fell more and more depressed , withdrew, began to drink and shifted to giving lectures on theater theory and also writing essays on the subject. In 1912 he was diagnosed with cancer after an illness , in 1913 he made one last unsuccessful attempt in the genre of drama with Mary Goes First . Two years later a collection of his theoretical writings appeared under the title Theater of Ideas .

Jones' health remained poor; In 1926 he also suffered kidney failure, which was followed by a series of serious operations. Henry Arthur Jones finally died on January 7, 1929 in Hampstead, England.

Views

Private and Political

Henry Arthur Jones was a patriot all his life and could not understand people like George Bernard Shaw or HG Wells , who openly criticized England and the kingdom. His relationship with Shaw was therefore not the best.

Jones made enemies in other areas as well, using both state censorship and the power of actor-managers (successful actors who had their own theater built or rented one, who put together a troupe of which they were, and had the say both in the selection of the pieces and in the production) criticized the stage writers. He therefore also had his problems finding management and staffing.

His puritanical background was always noticeable in Jones, who firmly adhered to the strict moral standards that his parents had given him. He also defended the moral double standard that was absolutely valid for the Victorian era, which allowed men to have a revealing sexuality, but prescribed absolute loyalty, submission and selflessness to women, and punished a woman who had lost her virginity with complete social exclusion.

To the theatre

Henry Arthur Jones was against undemanding entertainment on stage and for an active participation of the audience in the happenings of the unfolding play (by shaking along, puzzling along, etc.). He was also of the opinion that the stage had a moral duty to fulfill - it should therefore exemplify moral “purity” for the audience and educate the audience. He also believed that drama was the highest form of literature, which in this form should be read rather than actually played out.

Jones as a child of his time

Henry Arthur Jones was one of the most successful playwrights of the late 19th century , along with Arthur Wing Pinero , Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw , who breathed life back into the rigid Victorian theater. He wrote a total of more than 60 pieces and was famous beyond Great Britain , which the USA - "tours" of his pieces prove. His most famous works include The Silver King (1882), Saints and Sinners (1884), The Middleman (1889), Judah (1890), The Masqueraders (1894), The Liars (1897) and Mrs. Dane's Defense ( 1900).

Jones, however, was largely an author of the transition phase between the morally strict Victorian theater and the new, more liberal theater of the early 20th century, where he opted for the then almost outdated moral concepts. This fact is probably the main reason that his pieces are of little interest to today's audiences - and even then the younger audience, which was more inclined to the liberal pieces by George Bernard Shaw and the Ibsen translations by William Archers , was no longer particularly addressed. Compared to his writing contemporaries, Jones is now almost forgotten. But he remains one of the most important English playwrights of the late 19th century.

Works (selection)

Pieces
  • Breaking a Butterfly (1884)
  • Saints and Sinners (1884)
  • The Crusaders (1891),
  • The Bauble Shop (1892?),
  • The Tempter (1893),
  • The Masqueraders (1894),
  • The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894),
  • The Dancing Girl (1891),
  • The Triumph of the Philistines (1895),
  • Michael and His Lost Angel (1896),
  • The Rogue's Comedy (1896),
  • The Physician (1897),
  • The Liars (1897),
  • Carnac Sahib (1899),
  • The Maneuvers of Jane (1899),
  • The Lackeys' Carnival (1900),
  • Mrs Dane's Defense (1900),
  • The Princess's Nose (1902),
  • Chance the Idol (1902),
  • Whitewashing Julia (1903),
  • Joseph Entangled (1904),
  • The Chevalier (1904),
  • Mary Goes First (1913)
Theater theory
  • The Renascence of the English Drama (1895)
  • The Theater of Ideas (1915)

literature

  • William Archer: The Old Drama and the New. An essay in re-valuation . Dodd, Mend & Co, New York 1929 (reprinted London 1923 edition).
  • Richard A. Cordell: Henry Arthur Jones and the Modern Drama . Kennikat Press, Port Washington, NY 1968 (reprinted New York 1932 edition).
  • Victor Emelyanov: Victorian Popular Dramatists . Twayne, Boston, Mass. 1987, ISBN 0-8057-6935-8 .
  • Aubrey W. Goodenough: Henry Arthur Jones. A study in dramatic compromise . Dissertation, University Press, Iowa City 1920.
  • Doris A. Jones: The life and letters of Henry Arthur Jones . Scholarly Press, St. Clair Shores, Mich. 1971 (reprinted from London 1930 edition).
  • Hans Teichmann: Henry Arthur Jones' Dramas . Dissertation, University of Giessen 1913.

Web links

credentials

personal data
SURNAME Jones, Henry Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English playwright
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1851
PLACE OF BIRTH Grandborough , Buckinghamshire
DATE OF DEATH January 7, 1929
Place of death Hampstead