Victorian

Question 1

The Begger’s Opera is a play by?

Answer 1

• The Beggar’s Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch.
• The Beggar’s Opera premiered at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre on 29 January 1728 and ran for 62 consecutive performances

Question 2

Summary of The Begger’s Opera?

Answer 2

Peachum and his wife (thief-takers and receivers of stolen goods) learn that their daughter Polly has married the highwayman Macheath. They resolve to turn him in for a reward, but Macheath escapes. In Act 2, Macheath diverts himself among his favourite harlots. One of them betrays him, and he is arrested and taken to Newgate. There, he is confronted by Lucy Lockit (daughter of the prison-keeper) whom he has made pregnant and promised to marry. Polly arrives to claim Macheath as her husband, and the two women quarrel. Lucy helps Macheath to escape for a second time. In the third act, Lucy tries to poison Polly but fails. Macheath’s hiding place is revealed by a confederate, and he is arrested again. As he is brought back to Newgate, Polly and Lucy plead with their fathers to spare him but Macheath is tried, convicted and sentenced to death. He is only spared execution when the Player from the opening scene objects to the tragic ending, and the Beggar agrees that an ‘opera’ must end happily. Macheath is reprieved to enjoy the opera’s final scene with Polly and his doxies.

Question 3

Plays by T.W. Robertson?

Answer 3

T.W. Robertson (1829-71)
• He wrote realistic plays like
Society (1865), which includes dramatic enactment of real incidents like fun gangs being who used to go to clubs and play the competition Punch ‘Round Table’ where they used to have competition between ‘Punch’ and ‘Fun’ Magazines. It introduced ‘Drawing Room Comedy’ or ‘Cup and Saucer Drama’ to the world. It was also an example of Naturalism.
In Caste (1867), A French Nobleman’s son goes to the war after marrying a ballet dancer. He is supposedly dead and because of that his mother wants to snatch his child from his widow.
• Other Plays include Play (1868), School (1869), and M.P. (1870) also relating to social issues

Question 4

Plays by Thomas Hardy?

Answer 4

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
• He wrote Verse-Drama/ Closet Drama, The Dynast in three parts first in 1904, second in 1906, and third in 1908.
• Plot: It is the story of Napoleon from 1805 where he took the crown of Lombardy in Milan and then moves to his invasion plans of England. The play ends with his defeat at Waterloo after ten years.
• It includes nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes”. Not counting the Fore scene and the After scene, the exact total number of scenes is 131.
• He also wrote plays like The Three Wayfarers(1923) is a dramatic version of his short story ‘Three Strangers’
• The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwell (1923), a drama about Tristram Iseult, an old story of King Mark.

Question 5

Plays by W.S. Gilbert?

Answer 5

W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) wrote satirical plays which were witty, and were comic operas.
• He wrote plays like H.M. S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1880), Patience (1881), The Mikado (1885).
• His plays showed the ridiculousness of human nature during the Victorian era using musical fantasies.

Question 6

Plays by Henry Arthur Jones?

Answer 6

Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929)
• First Play The Silver King (1882) is a melodramatic play
• Plot: Denver happens to arrive at Ware’s home, at the precise moment when it is being robbed; Ware enters, the burglar shoots him, after applying the chloroform pad to Denver, across whose prostrate form he has stumbled, and the burglars leave. As Denver awakes to consciousness, now Dener the drunkard believes himself to be the murder of Ware.
• Saint and Sinners (1884) placed on the stage a picture of middle-class life and religion in a country town, and the introduction of the religious element raised considerable outcry.
• The Middleman (1889) and Judah (1890)
• He adapted A Doll’s House as Breaking a Butterfly (1884)
The Dancing Girl (1891), Michael and His Lost Angel (1896), The Liars (1897), Mrs Dane’s Defence (1900) The story focuses on Mrs. Dane’s betrothal to Lionel, adopted son of Sir Daniel who is a famous judge.
• It is rumoured that Mrs Dane, a young widow is having an affair with a married man in Vienna. Sir Daniel clears Mrs Dane’s name to marry her. She has to leave for the village from Sunningwater as her marriage becomes impossible.

Question 7

Plays by Oscar Wilde?

Answer 7

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
• His dramatic period was most active between 1892 and 1895
• He belonged to the fin de siècle esthetic movement believing in art as a substitute of life and not an escape.
• Lady Windermere’s Fan dealt with female indiscretions and talked about maternal love
• Its comic sequel A Woman of no Importance (1893)
An Ideal Husband (1895)
• Most Popular Play The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.
• His Biblical Tragedy, Salome (1891-92) was banned although it was written in French.

Question 8

Summary of The Importance of Being Earnest?

Answer 8

Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.
Plot: It is about the Victorian Upper Class presented in a comic manner.
Plot summary
JACK and ALEGERONON are wealthy. Algeronon has an imaginary friend BUNBURY whenever he wants to escape. Jack has invented ERNEST to go to London and enjoy.
Jack wants to marry Algernon’s cousin GWENDOLEN, but must first convince her mother, Lady Bracknell,

Eventually, Jack discovers that his parents were Lady Bracknell’s sister and brother-in-law and that he is, in fact, Algernon’s older brother, called Ernest. The two sets of lovers are thus free to marry.

Question 9

Plays by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero?

Answer 9

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934)
Earlier Dramatic farces, The Squire (1881), The Magistrate (1885), The School Mistress (1886), Sweet Lavender (1888) etc
• The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893)

• The Notorious Mrs Ebbismith (1895)
• The Benefit of the Doubt (1895)
• Iris (1901)
• The Princess and the Butterfly (1897),
• The Gay Lord Quex (1899)
• His best Comedy is Trelawney of the ‘Wells’

Question 10

Summary of The Second Mrs Tanqueray?

Answer 10

•	Plot: It is about marriage and domestic issues, it is a problem play
Mr Tanqueray’s friends are very disturbed about second marriage of Tanqueray to a Mrs Paula Jarman, a lower class woman with a known sexual past.
Misery of mismatched couple is revealed in the play and Mrs Tanqueray comes to know that her stepdaughter's fiancé; ruined her, years ago. She tells that to Mr Tanqueray who breaks the marriage of his daughter. All becomes angry because of that. Daughter wants to console her stepmother, but she finds her dead by suicide.

Question 11

Summary of Trelawney of the Wells?

Answer 11

Pinero
TRELAWNY of the “Wells” tells the story of ROSE Trelawny, a popular STAR of melodrama plays at the Barridge Wells Theatre (a thinly disguised Sadler’s Wells Theatre).
Rose leaves theatre to marry ARTHUR GOWER , only to find that its quite DULL to live with them. She goes back to theatre but can’t do melodrama because of her mundane experience of life. Arthur runs away to become an actor. Sir William helps Rose’s friend Tom Wrench to stage a play with Rose as a star and Arthur joins as the lead role. They unite in the end.

Question 12

Plays by James Matthew Barrie?

Answer 12

James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) 
A Scottish Playwright 
Quality Street (1902)
The Admirable Crichton(1902)
Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up or Peter and Wendy, often known simply as Peter Pan, in the form of a 1904 play and a 1911 novel.

Question 13

Summary of Peter Pan?

Answer 13

• The character of “Peter Pan” first appeared in The Little White Bird. The novel was published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1902, and serialised in the US in the same year in Scribner’s Magazine
• Peter Pan, innocent boy who is a little naughty. He can fly, and has many adventures on the island of Neverland that is inhabited by mermaids, fairies, Native Americans and pirates.
• The Peter Pan also has characters Wendy Darling and her two brothers, Peter’s fairy Tinker Bell, the Lost Boys, and the pirate Captain Hook.
• The play and novel were inspired by The writer’s friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family.
• Peter loses his shadow while trying to escape from Mrs. Mary’s Window. He wakes up Wendy, Mary’s daughter who succeeds in reattaching the shadow of Peter. Wendy is invited by him to Neverland as the mother of his gang,

Question 14

Some more plays by Barrie?

Answer 14

The Twelve Pound Look (1910) concerns a wife leaving her ‘typical’ husband once she can gain an independent income.
• Mary Rose (1920) This is the fictional story of Mary Rose, a girl who vanishes twice. As a child, Mary Rose vanishes when she is taken to a Scottish island by her father. She reappears twenty one days later.
Dear Brutus (1917),
• The Boy David (1936), which dramatized the Biblical story of King Saul and the young David.

Question 15

Summary of The Silver Box?

Answer 15

John Galsworthy
The Silver Box is a three-act comedy, was his first play .
It was originally produced in London in 1906, and attracted much attention. In New York it was first seen in 1907.
Plot: A rich young man is held for the theft of purse belonging to a prostitute and a silver cigarette case is also stolen from his father’s home. In the end justice is delivered.

Question 16

Summary of Strife?

Answer 16

Strife(1909) Strike in a factory as the union and the owners try to resolve it and the workers are going through the hardship.

Question 17

The Skin Game Summary

Answer 17

The Skin Game It was first performed at the St Martin’s Theatre, London, in 1920, and made its way to the Bijou Theatre, Broadway, in the same year.
Plot: At the end of the First World War, Squire Hillcrist Jill lives with his daughter Jill and wife. Hornblower who throws old retainers the Jackmans out of their home, and plans to capture the Hillcrist’s rural estate with factories.

Question 18

Plays by J.M. Synge

Answer 18

John Millington Synge, (born April 16, 1871, Rathfarnham, near Dublin, Ireland—died March 24, 1909, Dublin),
• He met William Butler Yeats while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1896.
• The ARAN Islands (1907) plays showed the poor condition in which people from rural Aran Island were having in Ireland.
• His one-act plays In the Shadow of the Glen (first performed 1903) talked about the spirit of Aran Islander and their relationship with the sea.
• Riders to the Sea (1904) on islanders’ stories.
• In 1905 He produced his first three-act play, The Well of the Saints,
• The Playboy of the Western World (1907
The Tinker’s Wedding

Question 19

Summary of The Playboy of the Western World?

Answer 19

• The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Was inspired by his travels to the Irish west coast, It is comedy in three acts.
• A peasant boy becomes a hero by claiming that he killed his father, but his reputation is gone when the villagers find out that his father is alive.

Question 20

Summary of The Tinker’s Wedding?

Answer 20

JM Synge
Sarah Casey convinces Michael Byrne to marry her by threatening to run off with another man.
• Michael’s mother harasses the priest and steals the can to exchange it for more drink, as she is drunk. The next morning Sarah and Michael go to the chapel, but when priest refuses to marry them without the can, and after a fight he is tied up in a sack. He is only let free as he agrees to not call the police.

Question 21

Summary of Deirdre of the Sorrow?

Answer 21

• Deirdre of the Sorrows is a three-act play The play, based on Irish mythology, in particular the myths concerning Deirdre, Naoise, and Conchobar, was unfinished at the author’s death on 24 March 1909. It was completed by William Butler Yeats and Synge’s fiancée, Molly Allgood.
• Dreidre is asked to be cared by LAVARCHAM till she becomes marriageable to the old king of Ulter Conchuber, but when she grows up, she doesn’t want to marry him. She asks Naoise to take her away from Ulster.
She lives for seven years with the sons of Usna when Fergus arrives bearing an offer of peace from Conchubor, and asks Deirdre and Naoise to return with him to Emain Macha.
• Deirdre convinces Naoise to to accept Conchubor’s offer, reasoning that it is better to die young, at the peak of their love, than to grow old and live in the shadow of their past happiness. Naoise is killed in the battle with Couchubor’s army. In the end, Deirdre takes Naoise’s dagger, stabs herself, and falls into his open grave, leaving Conchubor with nothing.

Question 22

Plays by Somerset Maugham?

Answer 22

• His plays include The Tenth Man (1910),
• The Circle (1921) was a comedy of manner.
• Plot: The play is about young married woman who wants to leave her husband for another man, and takes advice from an elderly peer and his partner.

Our Better (1917) criticises the aristocratic society of England who wanted to become like Americans. ,
The Constant Wife (1926),
Plot: Constance Middleton knew about her husband ‘s affair with her best friend, Marie-Louise. She wants to create an independent life and gets a job, when the affair becomes known to the public. After that she gets a new lover while still giving money to her husband.
The Letter

Question 23

Summary of For the Service Rendered?

Answer 23

For the Service Rendered (1932) is about the sacrifices of the arm forces and how young life is wasted due to war. Leonard and Charlotte Ardsley are parents to Ethel, Eva, Sydney and Lois. They are fighting for survival after the first world war.
Ethel is married to a former officer, Howard Bartlett, a tenant farmer after the war. Sydney has been blinded in the war and keeps knitting sitting on a chair.
Sydney speaks about the devastating madness of war on the people. Eva is martyring herself to the cause of brother, Sydney and not marrying.

Question 24

About Seam O’ Casey?

Answer 24

Sean O’Casey, original name John Casey, (1880-1964)
• Irish playwright born in Dublin.
• His plays were realistic dealing with the Dublin slums in war and revolution.
• He was born into a lower middle-class Irish Protestant family. His father died when John was six, and they became poor. He was self-educated started work at 14 as a manual labour,
• He got involved with Irish nationalism, and labour movement and wrote for the ‘Irish Worker’.
• He also joined the Irish Citizen Army, a paramilitary arm of the Irish labour unions, and drew up its constitution in 1914.
• After several of his plays had been rejected, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin produced The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1923 and published in 1925. Originally titled “On the Run. The play is set during the guerrilla strife between the Irish Republican Army and British forces.

Question 25

Summary of Juno and the Peacock?

Answer 25

SEAM O’ CASEY
Juno and the Paycock(1924) is set during the period of civil war over the terms of Irish independence.
• It is a tragicomedy in three acts set in slums of Dublin during the Irish civil war of 1922–23. Boyle family is suffering with poverty. They get involved in the Irish independence movement due to the grim realities of their life. People think that the poet Donal Davoren, is an IRA hero who shares an apartment with the peddler Seumus Shields. Mr. Maguire is the real IRA man who leaves a briefcase containing explosives with them. When Maguire is shot and the Black and Tans raid the apartment, the pair are saved by Minnie Powell, but she is killed while going to the prison due to IRA ambush.

Question 26

Summary of The Plough and the Stars?

Answer 26

• SEAM O’ CASEY
The Plough and the Stars, tragicomedy of four acts. performed and published in 1926. The play caused riots at the Abbey by patriots who thought the play denigrated Irish heroes.
• Plot: It is about the Easter Rising in Dublin. Nora and Jack try to live their life after the war. JACK goes to street fights although NORA is pregnant. Bessie Burgess who lost her son to the rebels becomes Nora’s caretaker but is killed by a sniper’s bullet.

Question 27

Biography of Bernard Shaw?

Answer 27

George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
• Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, started his self-education there. He became a theatre and music critic.
• His father George Carr Shaw and mother Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw. belonged to the Protestant “ascendancy”—the landed Irish gentry,
• He grew up in genteel poverty and was tutored by a clerical uncle, rejected schools and started working in a land agent’s office at 16.

Question 28

Some minor plays by Bernard Shaw?

Answer 28

Widowers’ Houses, is influenced by Ibsen and is about the scandal of slum landlords in London. A young Englishman falls in love but finds out that his and his future fathers-in-law’s income is a result of the exploitation of the poor.
• You Never Can Tell (performed 1899), is about two lovers who are amorist and rationalist but are taken into grip by someone who don’t believe in these things.
• Three Plays for Puritans (1901), is a collection of play having plays like The Devil’s Disciple (performed 1897) is a play set in New Hampshire during the American Revolution and is an inversion of traditional melodrama.
• Caesar and Cleopatra (performed 1901) where Cleopatra is 16 rather than the 38 years old like the famous Shakespearean heroine. Caesar as a lonely and a combination of a philosopher and a soldier.
• Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (performed 1900), is a sermon against various kinds of folly masquerading as duty and justice.
• Heartbreak House (performed 1920), is about the futility of war and spiritual bankruptcy of the current times, where they are falling into “the bottomless pit of an utterly discouraging pessimism,”
• In his collection Back to Methuselah (1922), he wrote five plays which expound his philosophy of creative evolution in an extended dramatic parable that progresses through time from the Garden of Eden to 31,920 CE.
• Saint Joan(1923) Joan of Arc is a crushed between Church and law and her tragic death shows the paradox that is the reason of the killing of many great heroes.
• He won the Nobel Prize because of the play, but he rejected it.
• The Apple Cart (performed 1929), is a futuristic high comedy about the dilemma he has between his mistrust of human’s ability to govern themselves and his radical politics.
• His later, minor plays include Too True to Be Good (performed 1932), On the Rocks (performed 1933), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (performed 1935), Geneva (performed 1938), and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1939).
• Farfetched Fables (performed 1950), Shakes Versus Shav (performed 1949), and Why She Would Not (1956),

Question 29

Summary of Arms and the Man?

Answer 29

Arms and the Man is a comedy whose title comes from the opening words of Virgil’s Aeneid, in Latin: Arma virumque cano (“Of arms and the man I sing”).
• The play was first produced on 21 April 1894 at the Avenue Theatre and published in 1898 as part of Shaw’s Plays Pleasant volume.
• Plot: During the Serbo-Bulgarian war in 1885, RAINA PETKOFF engaged with SEGIUS Saranoff, a Bulgarian War Hero who she idolizes. After the battle of Slivinitza, Captain BLUNTSCHLI, who is a Swiss soldier in Serbian army comes through the window in night and threatens to shoot Raina if she gives alarm and he hides not to found out when the Bulgarian and Russian army comes to search him. She is shocked by Bluntschli scepticism about war. He puts chocolates instead of arms, He is hidden in Raina’s father’s court to go out.
At the end of the war, a peace treaty is signed and both her father and lover come back. Sergious flirts with Louka instead of Raina, and she finds him tiresome. Bluntschli returns to give back the court and is asked to stay back by her father as both of them have met Bluntschli. Raina believes that he respects women and Sergious doesn’t. Sergious and Raina break off engagement when Louka tells him that she is in love with Bluntschli.
Sergious challenges him for a duel. Petfokk comes to know about all this, Segious proposes to Louka. Bluntschli proposes to Raina with his inheritance but she wants him back as a “chocolate-cream soldier” and not as a wealthy man, He claims that he is the same and they can get married.

Question 30

Summary of Candida?

Answer 30

Candida (1897) is considered to be a feminist play which gave a new perspective.
• Plot: Clergyman James Morell has a wife Candida who is persuaded by a poet called Eugene Marchbanks. The play talks about the desire of a wife and what are her needs from her husband. He believes that she is wasting her time in housework and deserves much more. She choses her husband as for her he is weaker among the two.

Question 31

Summary of Man and Superman?

Answer 31

Man and Superman is a four-act drama in 1903
• Man and Superman opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 23 May 1905, but it omitted the third act.
• A part of the act, Don Juan in Hell (Act 3, Scene 2), was performed when the drama was staged on 4 June 1907 at the Royal Court.
• It was only performed in its entirety in 1915, when the Travelling Repertory Company played it at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh.
• Plot: Mr. Whitefield’s will says that his daughter ANN should be in care of two men ROEBUCK Ramsden and John Tanner. Ramsden doesn’t like Tanner as he has revolutionary ideas. Ann accepts Tanner as her guardian though he is not ready for it and challenges his revolutionary beliefs. He is impressed by Ann who wants him to marry her. She choses him instead of Octavius Robison, who is pursuing her more vigorously.

Question 32

Summary of Major Barbara?

Answer 32

• In Major Barbara (performed 1905),
• Plot: Barbara Undershaft is a major in Salvation Army, who finds out that her father though shows himself to be unorthodox but is religious and is responsible for many deaths. He gives money to the army, but she doesn’t want that to happen. He claims to help people by giving them job is more important than Barbara’s Army Service.
• The Doctor’s Dilemma (performed 1906), is a satire upon the medical profession.
• In Androcles and the Lion (performed 1912) It is a philosophy play about true and false religion and talks about early Christianity.

Question 33

Summary of Pygmalion?

Answer 33

Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological figure. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1913.
• In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which comes to life.
• W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea that was first presented in 1871.
• It was adapted in Hollywood as “My Fair Lady”
• Plot: Two linguists Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering bet with each other about Eliza Doolittle that she will be able to speak in proper English leaving her cockney dialect behind by the help of Higgins.
• Alfred, her father keeps going to Higgins to meet her and to get some money, he doesn’t recognize her she is transformed. She is taken to an Ambassador’s party of High class people to see if they find out who she actually is and people think of her as someone who is an aristocratic foreigner. Higgins’ mother doesn’t like the way Eliza’s life is a matter of an experiment for them. She becomes angry with Higgins as she doesn’t understand what to do with herself as she can’t live here or go back to her place. Eliza goes to Mrs Higgins’ house and praises Pickering for treating her well. She threatens Higgins that she will go to Nepommuck the rival Phoentician. Higgins believes she’ll come back to him. Elizabeth has an option to chose between her lover Freddy, Higgins or to live independently.