Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett

An amused writer in the Galaxy in 1873 noted the “universal drenching” of literature and journalistic writing with Charles Darwin’s ideas.1 The concept of evolution caught the public imagination as no other scientific idea. There have been many studies of evolution in the novel (Gillian Beer, George Levine, Gowan Dawson, and many others); poetry (John Holmes); the visual arts; music; and other art forms, but apart from Jane R. Goodall’s groundbreaking Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, little consideration has been given to theatre in this context. This is a striking gap, given the popularity and variety of theatrical entertainment and the deep affinities between theatre and evolution, which explore the same basic questions: “What does it mean to be human? . . . to see (and be seen), to know (and be known), to relate to other humans?”² What is fundamental to evolution—“the relation of organism to organism . . . along with their relations to the wider shared environment”³—is also the basic stuff of drama and always has been. Theatre provides a particularly potent and fascinating example of how scientific ideas make their way into culture because of its combination of liveness and immediacy, kinetic human bodies in action, and time working on two levels (“real” and “theatrical” time) and because of its sheer variety, from mainstream drama to comedies to street theatre and the public lecture; from the expansive epic theatre of Bernard Shaw and Thornton Wilder to the spare minimalism of Samuel Beckett.

Yet, as the epigraph to this introduction indicates, more often than not theatre explores evolution to set the audience thinking, not to do its thinking for the audience (with the glorious exception of Shaw). This key distinction lies at the heart of this book. As one director puts it, theatre is a crucial, nonjudgmental space in which to explore ideas while the legislator’s and the pope’s backs are turned and where there is no committee on ethics.⁴ It is easy to forget how central theatre once was, that it was once deemed so threatening that it prompted theatrical censorship laws in Britain lasting from 1737 to 1968. “Who shall deny the immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of modern engines?” writes Henry James in The Tragic Muse. Despite theatre’s position at what Joseph Roach calls “the center of civilized life,” few studies have been done on the role of theatre and performance in intellectual history.⁵ Looking at how theatre has engaged with evolution restores this sense of the cultural importance and role of the stage.

The playwright Henry Arthur Jones once wrote: “The dramatist has at the most two hours and three-quarters to portray all that is vital in the lives of some dozen characters, to portray what Nature takes some hundred of years to portray.”⁶ In this same way, the paradox is that one cannot literally see evolution taking place because it is such a slow, gradual process, so one might think that it would not be suitable for live performance; yet, theatre was quick to engage with it. As has been so fully demonstrated, fiction and poetry could explain and chart evolutionary processes through the use of narrative, descriptive language and the luxury of time.⁷ In the theatre, the problem was how to depict something on stage without the luxury of narrative explanation, relying only on characterization, dialogue, the actors’ bodies, and scenery, and constrained by the two-hour traffic of the stage.

There is no such thing as “Darwinian theatre,” although a few plays refer directly to evolutionists by name, as in Shaw’s Misalliance (“Read your Darwin, my boy. Read your Weismann”) and Back to Methuselah (“Darwin is all rot”) or Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors (“Darwin, the great new man”). Some plays also physically place such figures on stage by calling for photographs or busts of them to be prominently displayed. Although such instances are entertaining, the main purpose of this book is not only to catalogue theatrical allusions to evolution but also to show the more indirect, oblique engagement with the ideas themselves. Putting scientific ideas within a theatrical framework involves what Beer calls a “changing of contractual terms of belief.”8 Entire theories are not generally incorporated wholesale into novels, plays, poems, or paintings; instead, notes Michael Whitworth, “one finds fragments of imagery and vocabulary from science subjected to processes of condensation and displacement.”⁹ Theatre particularly embraced varieties of non-Darwinian evolution, from Lamarckism to Ernst Haeckel’s monism to saltation. It did all of this indirectly, however, and it was by no means always the most scientifically accurate or faithful portrayal of evolution that was the most theatrically successful; instead, the stage often seemed to test scientific ideas in broader cultural contexts and with, as Goodall notes, “a cavalier attitude toward comprehension.”¹⁰ The danger of what George Henry Lewes termed “giving currency to vulgar error” was not a major concern of dramatists engaging with evolution. As Goodall puts it, “Show business intervened in the world of ideas with its own forms of expertise.”¹¹

A good model for the kind of interaction I explore in this book comes from the visual arts, in the exhibition “Endless Forms,” organized for the Darwin celebrations in 2009, which showed how “science and the visual arts meet on equal terms, and the interplay between them is made clear.”¹² The show is not about “cause and effect” but about “interplay,” “resonance,” “interchange,” and the “two-way street” of mutual influence. Such terms pepper this book. This kind of influence has theatrical parallels in nineteenth-century performance modes as not only human nature (always the mainstay of theatre) but also the fascination for nature in all its “endless forms” became popular theatrical fare. Artists, novelists, poets, and playwrights were not passive recipients of scientific stimuli and ideas or merely reflective of them; they actively engaged with science and often transformed the ideas they encountered in the process, so that the artistic end product of that encounter was a different beast altogether, often questioning the very science on which it was supposedly founded.

Far from being a mere reflection of evolutionary theory, theatre often reacts against it. The “top-down” model challenged by important recent scholarship on the popularization of science by Peter J. Bowler, Bernard Lightman, Gowan Dawson, Ralph O’Connor, Goodall, and others, whereby science is translated and disseminated through cultural mechanisms to a passive, receptive audience, simply does not apply here, for this is no story of benign assimilation: dramatists and theatre practitioners who dealt with evolution were often suspicious, doubting, and hostile to it even while deeply drawn to the new insights and possibilities it offered. Theatre and Evolution explores this often-deliberate wrong-headedness and what Beer has called the “creative misprisions” that can result when science meets art and literature. Theatre is no mere handmaiden to science, a means of transmitting its findings; theatrical encounters with evolution resist, challenge, and ultimately transform the ideas at their core, and my focus here is on how playwrights did this, complementing Goodall’s focus on performance and extending the scope of her study through the twentieth century.

Thus, my study generally undercuts the kind of praise lavished, for example, by the young William Empson on Maurice Maeterlinck for adopting “one of the artist’s new, important and honourable functions, that of digesting the discoveries of the scientist into an emotionally available form.”13 This “digesting” model breaks down quickly under the live conditions of theatre and in the hands of playwrights crafting work for an audience in the here and now. “Theatre is contrarian,” notes playwright Simon Stephens.¹⁴ In their uses of the biological sciences and evolutionary theory, playwrights often get it wrong, and this tendency of artists and writers has been noted by James Harrison; often, he writes, there is an “acceptance of evolution but dismay at Darwinism,” specifically the blind, mechanistic aspect of natural selection.¹⁵ In fact, it is those aspects of evolutionary theory that were its fallout rather than its main substance that tend to get their attention. Infanticide, rejection of maternal instinct—these are instances of the questioning of aspects and implications of evolution as they most fascinated and concerned playwrights. As Beer notes, “Scientific work always generates more ideas and raises more questions than can be answered solely within the terms of scientific inquiry.”¹⁶ She argues that “ideas cannot continue to thrive when locked away,” and that when they escape the confines of the library or laboratory, they change, which is to the good, even though it may mean that they are misused or misunderstood. This risk is worthwhile from a broader perspective: the artistic transformation of science can pose “disturbing cultural questions” beyond the contexts in which the original ideas arose.¹⁷

Of course, one could argue that theatre stages evolution, whether consciously or not, simply through the common ingredients of most drama: a struggle between organisms for survival, the presence of competition and conflict (especially over mate selection), the human body signifying universal physiological processes, and the emphasis on how organisms respond to their environments. Theatre does indeed foreground the individual’s relationship to his or her environment, within the ecosystem shown on stage. The audience accepts the physical limitations of the space and understands the metaphor of “all the world’s a stage” framing what it is watching. Given the temporal and physical constraints noted by Jones, it is not surprising that theatre’s engagement with evolutionary ideas tends to be metonymic, requiring techniques of extrapolation akin to Georges Cuvier’s discredited law of correlations: a single individual stands in for or represents the species, a single fragment represents the whole. The same is true of ideas. Playwrights use ideas as starting points, and by its very nature, it is more difficult to contain ideas in the theatre; a script is just a starting point, embodied and given new meanings through each performance. Sometimes, notes the director Luca Ronconi, ideas become dramatic characters themselves rather than being conveyed by characters, or for that matter mediated through plot or biography.18 Above all it is the presence of live bodies that gives theatre its strongest links to evolution; as Goodall puts it, theatre foregrounds “the evolutionary significance of the performer.” The human body rather than the story became the shorthand for evolution on stage. So, instead of the novelist evoking eons of geological time and change, as Thomas Hardy is able to do in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for example, the theatre relied on audiences recognizing in a single human body the processes and forces of evolutionary change.

But if all drama is fundamentally evolutionary, where do you draw the line? I adopt a more focused approach, looking at plays and performances that engage with evolution in ways that are not merely coincidental or loosely evolutionary but that map onto a specific theme or motif under debate, such as extinction or sexual selection. I do this because tracing the complex history of this engagement means understanding theatrical works as manifestations of the larger “cultural embeddedness of science.”19 Given the popularity of theatre, it is likely that more people encountered evolutionary theory through theatrical performances than through other art forms, especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, not only evolution specifically, but also biology more generally had an innate popular appeal partly through its direct relevance to everyday human life and partly through its accessibility. It could be fairly easily grasped (and misunderstood, as often happened) and could be found readily in nature just by looking around the garden or going to see fossils in a museum. By contrast, the emerging field of modern physics for many years “had no practical impact on people’s lives” until the first atomic weapon was used in 1945, and although it was “available to literary writers as a storehouse of images, concepts, and thought experiments that could be put to various uses, the new physics was inherently suited to describing unfamiliar and uncanny states of subjectivity.”²⁰

In this age of public engagement, the question of how science is disseminated, as well as how aware we are of its hegemonic power, is becoming increasingly important. “Ways of viewing the world are not constructed separately by scientists and poets; they share the moment’s discourse.”²¹ Many of the playwrights mentioned in this book had profound interests in science, far from dilettantism, such as August Strindberg, Maeterlinck, and Anton Chekhov. New research has uncovered valuable examples of performance influencing science, for example, in David Ferrier’s experiments with making monkeys flinch.²² Science has often borrowed from theatre for useful metaphors and analogies. Recent examples of this borrowing include Nessa Carey’s The Epigenetics Revolution, which uses the dual modes of drama as text and performance as an analogy for how epigenetic changes are registered, like pencil marks and Post-it notes on a script; and Robert Crease’s The Play of Nature, which argues that “scientific experiments and theatrical performances have deep, striking similarities. . . . The theatrical analogy allows one to develop not only a comprehensive approach to experimentation but also an adequate language in which to speak of it philosophically.”²³ Analogies also abound between theatre history and evolutionary science in their respective methodologies of reconstructing past events. Joseph Roach likens historians of performance to paleontologists digging in a fossil record: it is a “discipline devoted to the reconstruction of a once vital phenomenon now characterized by its total extinction. The evidence has forever receded from the thing itself,” so we extrapolate from “a few old bones” to imagine “the creature’s disposition and behavior, its natural habitat and local adaptations.”²⁴

In doing the research for this book, I tried to find as much evidence as possible regarding how the plays under discussion were performed and received, but this evidence is limited, and my discussion remains necessarily reliant on texts of plays. I do, however, treat all plays as dual entities consisting of both text and performance. Throughout the book, I try to balance the need to place plays within their historical and scientific contexts with the recognition that works of art are, in an important sense, autonomous.25 I am unable to go into the kind of depth I would like on some of the plays under discussion, each of which merits a fuller consideration—but I hope this will spark some interest for others to investigate further, especially finding more evidence of how these plays were acted.

In terms of the book’s scope, I make no claims to complete coverage. Rather than a comprehensive survey, I offer interconnected studies of representative examples that can be looked at in some depth. Each example is suggestive of distinct currents and patterns in the way theatre has encountered evolution. The book is largely chronological, with the first three chapters centered on the nineteenth century, followed by three chapters primarily on the period 1900 to 1920, although inevitably there is some overlap and the borders between these “periods” are fluid. After a chapter looking at theatrical engagements with evolution from about 1920 to 1950, I conclude with a chapter on Beckett and with an epilogue summarizing the main tendencies of more recent evolution-themed plays and performances and taking stock of what the book has suggested is important in this kind of theatre. Just as period boundaries are fluid, so are geographical ones when it comes to ideas. For the sake of scope and coherence, I focus mainly on British and American drama, but I include relevant cross-cultural examples when they illuminate how theatre engaged evolution in a distinctive and important way. Such geographical spread is necessary because evolutionary thinking was international and because ideas cannot be simply contained.²⁶

Elin Diamond notes that “artistic careers, when they are long and complex, continually demand new critical framing,”27 and at the core of this book are several key playwrights: Henrik Ibsen, whose profound engagement with evolutionary theory is just beginning to be understood; Shaw, whose “Creative Evolution” provides an alternative (and, as Tamsen Wolff argues in her recent study of eugenics and theatre, not altogether desirable one) to natural selection; James A. Herne, sometimes called “America’s Ibsen,” whose lifelong interest in evolution manifests itself in his plays; Elizabeth Robins, actress and playwright whose work deals trenchantly with questions about gender that are central to human evolution; Glaspell, whose plays The Verge and Inheritors offer pioneering theatrical treatments of plant genetics signifying larger concerns about human evolution; Wilder, who brings evolution to the stage in a modern, Brechtian mode; and Beckett, whose theatrical work is a complex, sustained, and mutating engagement with evolutionary ideas. Dozens of other playwrights (both well-known and less-canonical ones) also feature in the discussion. Many of them presciently raised concerns about the negative impact of human activity on our climate well before the crisis of global warming. Yet the dominant narrative of theatre history still gives little space to such developments.

Theatre and Evolution builds on the momentum of the Darwin celebrations of 2009, which focused both scholarly and popular attention on evolutionary theory as never before and spawned a wealth of publications presenting new ideas about the man and his work, yet also narrowed the range of our understanding of evolutionary theory in concentrating so exclusively on Darwin and the “Darwin-o-centrism” of so much scholarship on nineteenth-century culture.²⁸ Ideas about evolution go back to Aristotle.²⁹ It is simply not the case that Darwin’s “dangerous idea” exploded out of the blue onto an inherently conservative Victorian scene; it was one of many voices in the discourse on evolution, and certainly one of the most prominent, but by no means the only valid one. What was new through Darwin’s work was the idea of descent with modification: species are not fixed but change through natural selection and sexual selection, the determining forces in the processes of evolution, with the irrefutable implications for humans that all the evidence from the plant and animal worlds showed. And it was “new” in the way it quickly became Social Darwinist. Goodall argues that Joseph Roach, Daniel Dennett, and others overstate Darwin’s impact as a paradigm shift and a “dangerous idea,” and she points to critics like Bram Dijkstra and Michael Ruse, who argue that far from being shocked and scandalized, Victorian society was predisposed toward evolutionary ideas.³⁰

Darwinian evolution, argues Peter Bowler, was a “catalyst that helped to bring about the transition to an evolutionary viewpoint within an essentially non-Darwinian conceptual framework.”31 By non-Darwinian, he means “preserving and modernizing the old teleological view of things.”³² The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in 1900 led to the founding of the study of genetics, but these developments took decades, and it is essential to recapture what people thought before the Modern Synthesis around 1930 when genetics finally confirmed natural selection as the key mechanism of evolution and showed how it worked, as doing this can “reveal many of the factors that still shape the nonscientist’s image of evolution.”³³ Theatre reveals this image as it was taking shape through a complex interaction of plays, performances, audiences, and critics. Lamarckism held a particular attraction for artists and writers well into the twentieth century: Spencerian ideas as they took shape in “social Darwinism” proved irresistible; Haeckel’s mystical materialism as well as his recapitulation theory continued to garner support. In short, Darwin’s was just one of a range of competing theories, and Theatre and Evolution shows the staying power of non-Darwinian ideas in the theatre long after their supposed demise in scientific circles. The so-called eclipse of Darwinism (from about the 1880s to the 1920s) coincides with some of the most strikingly original, creative, and profound theatrical engagement with key aspects of evolutionary thought. There is now an exciting timeliness to this endeavor, as the field of epigenetics suggests a possible validity to once-discredited ideas about what factors bring about evolutionary change.

So enduring is the “culture shock narrative” of Darwin’s impact that even so careful and scholarly a work as Richard D. Altick’s The Shows of London is conflicted about this, claiming that Darwin came like a “thunderbolt” into Victorian culture (a term echoed by Michael M. Chemers in Staging Stigma), yet also saying that well before Origin the concept of evolutionary theory was widely discussed and the foundations already laid for Darwin’s ideas.³⁴ This is not just about getting the facts right about Darwin’s impact; it is also about letting go of our stubborn fondness for stages, epochs, watersheds, and other forms of “‘punctual or decisive change’” that characterize the Kuhnian “revolution narrative” of science.³⁵

Two aspects of evolution have particular relevance for theatre. First, there is often a too-easy equation of evolution with degeneration, as if the two are synonymous. I do not see Ibsen, Beckett, and other playwrights treating evolution in this way; the picture is far more complex than that.36 Although there certainly were fears across European cultures about reversion and regression, climaxing in the degeneration furore caused by Max Nordau in the 1890s, there was equally profound belief in progress emanating from a Darwinian worldview. Darwin once wrote in a letter to George Henry Lewes that “if we could collect all the forms which have ever lived, we shd have a clear gradation from some most simple beginning.”³⁷ He was troubled by the idea of “brutal reversion” as he put it, but distanced himself from eugenic proposals like those of Francis Galton. In fact, Darwin often characterized evolution as progressive. On the Origin of Species ends with the claim that “all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection,” and his Autobiography asserts the belief that man “in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is.”³⁸ This is in the teeth of all the evidence showing the blindness of nature and the randomness of natural selection. Natural selection “is not perfect in its action, but tends only to render each species as successful as possible in the battle for life with other species under wonderfully complex and changing circumstances.”³⁹ Yes, there is much suffering in the world, but “if all the individuals of any species were habitually to suffer to an extreme degree they would neglect to propagate their kind”; this clearly is not the case.

Second, as knowledge about human evolution grew, it foregrounded gender and raised issues concerning the roles of women that had lasting societal impact. Bowler writes that sexual selection was still largely ignored by scientists in the 1950s, and that it “has become important for perhaps the first time since Darwin proposed the idea.”⁴⁰ But theatre immediately took up sexual selection as a central and productive idea with great audience appeal. This is partly because of the conditions of theatre, whose raw materials are bodies and emotions, not just words in a script. Wilder once wrote that “a laugh at sex is a laugh at destiny. And the stage is peculiarly fitted to be its home. There a woman is so quickly All Woman.”⁴¹ This sense of what happens to the female body in the eyes of the spectator, what she could signify from an evolutionary perspective, underpins many of the plays discussed in this book and helps to explain why gender is at its core.

Darwin and other evolutionists were building on an internalized, unquestioned depiction of nature itself as female; animals and plants functioned according to gender stereotypes, got married, were seduced, and so on, in a system laid down by Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin.42 The miniature dramas within this conceptual framework replicated gender stereotypes of the submissive, passive female, the fallen woman, the heroic male. The Victorians inherited this tradition of seeing nature as gendered and anthropomorphizing the relations between the different sexes within the plant and animal kingdoms. Although of course to a certain extent a product of his age and its view of women, Darwin had great sympathy with the plight of women, not least because his father’s experience as a physician gave him particular insight into women’s lives: “He often remarked how many miserable wives he had known.”⁴³

Recent work has looked beyond the stereotypical views Darwin expresses about women’s inferiority in The Descent of Man and shown how thoroughly his startlingly progressive theory undermines them.⁴⁴ Already at the turn of the century, Mona Caird and other women writers were quick to see how aptly suited Darwin’s work was for feminism by freeing it up from the notion of gender essentialism to focus instead on the constant process of change and flux at the heart of evolution. We still refer to “Mother Nature.” The animal kingdom’s division based on those with mammary glands and those without illustrates this tendency to ascribe to other living things gendered roles that have more to do with social mores than with biology. This system, and the gender roles embedded within cultures, has been of primary concern to playwrights, many of whom directly challenged these assumptions in their works, in both mainstream and popular theatre.⁴⁵ In exploring gender, I pay particular attention to the actress in case studies of Robins, Eleanora Duse, and Thorndike that are spread throughout the book.

I have outlined what I attempt to do in this book; prior to moving on, I want to mention briefly some of the things I am not doing. Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, and others have argued that literature plays a key role in human evolution, claiming, for example, that storytelling makes us fundamentally human and distinct from animals.46 One has to wonder why, as Seamus Perry puts it, we need to “ennoble” art by thinking of it as “an evolutionary advantage.”⁴⁷ The literary Darwinists give scant attention to theatre, perhaps because it does not fit into their idea of storytelling, despite the fact that “theatre is so deeply embedded in human culture in some form or other it is probably a human universal,” writes William Flesch.⁴⁸ Literary Darwinism reintroduces a teleological element to the discussion, as if we are constantly evolving toward ever-higher forms and literature merely assists in this process. It fails to account for a far more salient candidate for theatre’s evolutionary “functionality”: not the verbal element of drama, but its performance side.⁴⁹ In a generally nonnarrative form, interiority must be conveyed through other means—facial expression, voice, movement—putting the focus on what is around the character as much as what is inside. What happens when actors simulate and mimic, and what cognitive processes are engaged (e.g., empathy), have been the subject of much investigation lately, including areas such as mirror neurons.⁵⁰ This seems to me far more fruitful as it has little to do with design and teleological development. It also requires much more attention than I can give it in this book.

Likewise, the concept of the drama as a living organism that itself evolves, and its role in the evolution of human culture, is not a concern here. If anything, theatre consistently and deliberately flouts adaptation to its environment, for example in the “self-annihilating” productions of avant-garde theatre, with its short-lived experiments and fleeting groups that seem antievolutionary, self-destructing rather than self-preserving; to create new forms, theatre continually attacks itself, threatening its own extinction.⁵¹ This would seem to go against the principles of evolution. Obviously, there are many other kinds of theatre that do survive and thrive, but theatre historiography still tends to privilege the subversive, often counterevolutionary and ephemeral productions that effected lasting change while themselves dying out. Many scholars have objected to this romanticizing of theatre as “primarily a site of subversion,” so that the historiography is full of “narratives of resistance in which theatre triumphs over the social evils of conservatism and conformity.”⁵² This book intervenes in the debate through the selection of a range of plays that do not fit neatly into either category.

In this final section, I briefly sketch some of the main evolutionary ideas and thinkers referred to in this book. Given the wide availability of this information, this discussion is not intended to be comprehensive but simply to provide some necessary background for the rest of the book.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, William Paley’s natural theology (his “argument from design”) and the notion of the fixity of species prevailed. The only way to account for the complexity of organisms in nature and their fittedness to their environments was to assume a Creator who had made them. Prominent scientists like Robert Owen fiercely upheld these ideas even in the face of growing evidence to the contrary. In 1844, the sensational best seller Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation suggested close evolutionary links between humans and animals, but the author’s natural theological position kept design in the picture.53

Vestiges opened the way for further evolutionary ideas to be disseminated and discussed and indeed raised a much greater outcry than Origin of Species (1859), which, if anything, helped to resolve rather than create a crisis, in James Secord’s analysis.⁵⁴ In Origin, Darwin put forth his “long argument” for natural selection but avoided dealing with the question of human evolution. The connection between primates and humans had already been established, however; in 1832, in volume 2 of his Principles of Geology, Lyell had suggested the evolution of man from the orangutan, and the concept of ape ancestry made its way into the popular imagination through an array of satirical treatments in both print and performance.⁵⁵ It was not until The Descent of Man (1871) that Darwin addressed the issue of human evolution fully, and that book caused a much greater scandal than Origin, which on its first publication was actually well received and did not generate the kind of frenzied response one often supposes because of events like the famous debate between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in Oxford in 1860.⁵⁶ As Bowler puts it: “The antiteleological aspects of Darwin’s thinking prized by modern biologists were evaded or subverted by the majority of his contemporaries,” by quietly assuming some degree of agency and purpose behind seemingly random adaptations.⁵⁷

Darwin combined his own expert observations of the natural world with several key influences: Alexander von Humboldt’s biogeographical approach, Charles Lyell’s uniformitarianism as elucidated in Principles of Geology, and the work of Thomas Malthus on population control. Darwin got from Malthus the insight that “the tendency of any population to breed beyond the available food supply would result in a constant ‘struggle for existence.’”58 This, Darwin realized, meant that “those individuals best adapted to the environment would do better in the struggle than their rivals and would thus survive and transmit their characters to future generation.”⁵⁹ From Lyell came the insight that species have been constantly changing and indeed being replaced by new ones at a steady pace “ever since the oldest fossiliferous rocks were formed, will surely continue in the future, and is, therefore, going on right now, though too slowly to be noticeable.”⁶⁰ He also drew on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s idea of the inheritance of acquired characters, one of the most popular and enduring ideas of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Even now it is enjoying something of a return through epigenetics, showing that certain environmental influences can be passed on to subsequent generations.

The dominant model of evolution in Darwin’s time was “developmental,” put forth mainly by Herbert Spencer years before Origin and emphasizing the “orderly, goal-directed, and usually progressive character of evolution.” This developmental model continued to dominate late nineteenth-century thought.⁶¹ Spencer accepted the mechanism of natural selection, came up with the term survival of the fittest, and extended these concepts to humankind, but his “development” hypothesis emphasized progress through an ever-increasing heterogeneity; he supplied “some of the same reassurance” as “a divinely ordained teleology.”⁶² Spencer’s ideas had a widespread impact in Britain and America in the late nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth century, and many playwrights in my discussion were heavily influenced by him. Spencer was “the common man’s Darwin, proffering the intellectual certainties of Darwinism on a cosmic scale, without Darwin’s scientific rigor” to the extent that “his popularity soon outstripped Darwin’s.” Where Darwin appealed to the “harder, clearer intellects. . . . Spencer appealed to the multitudes.”⁶³

Darwin maintained that “new species originate in conformity, not to any law of adaptation to conditions nor to any law of progress, but rather to the law of common descent. Within any natural grouping of species there has been an irregularly branching adaptive divergence, in which new species have arisen from pre-existing varieties, the main agent in the conversion of varieties into species being a natural selection of hereditary variants in the struggle for existence.”⁶⁴ Natural selection had nothing to do with animal will or with a Creator, with divine intent or design, or with a progression toward perfection; if species progressed they could just as easily decline.

It is common to think of Darwin’s ideas supplanting those of Lamarck, who inherited the Enlightenment assumption of man as the pinnacle of life forms.65 He believed that nature had a plan and a goal (teleology), yet also that nature goes through unpredictable changes induced by the environment. Lamarck emphasized adaptation (although he did not use this term) and thought of it as an interaction between organism and its circumstances. He was also uniformitarian and gradualist, against Cuvier’s catastrophism; instead, he believed in the “gradual accumulation of small changes.” In this, and in his opposition to natural theology’s theory of design, he and Darwin think alike. Where they strongly diverge is in the degree of importance accorded to environmental factors and in the possible role of the will in evolution, although as a central plank in Lamarckism, articulated in Shaw’s preface to Back to Methuselah (1921), this has been distorted by historians of science because Lamarck’s discussion of will amounts to only seven pages, a tiny faction of his principal work, Zoological Philosophy.⁶⁶

Lamarck is most famous for the idea of the “inheritance of acquired characters” by which environmental impact on an organism could effect changes that could be passed on (such as the familiar example of the giraffe getting a longer neck by successive generations reaching for higher and higher leaves). By this logic, one might expect changes wrought on an organism to be inherited, but in the late 1890s, August Weismann spectacularly discredited this idea by showing that chopping the tails off mice had no effect on the tail lengths of successive generations. But the inheritance of acquired characters retained an interest for many biologists, and Darwin himself accepted it to a certain degree, actually increasing the role he ascribed to it in his works over time rather than diminishing it.⁶⁷ The key point here is that because the mechanism of inheritance of acquired characters occurs in both Darwin and Lamarck, it is not accurate to describe a theory that accepts the inheritance of acquired characters as non-Darwinian.

Lamarckism continued to exert wide appeal for decades into the twentieth century (and in fact is now experiencing something of a vindication through epigenetics). Lamarckism gained ground because it could more easily accommodate religion, “since direction could be translated into theological terms as providence,” and because it offered, “as Darwinism did not, firm scientific support for the efficacy of education in improving humanity . . . [and] muting the initial harshness of the Darwinian challenge to established truths and thus facilitating its general acceptance.”68 American scientists tended to combine the inheritance of acquired characters with natural selection in their approach to evolution.⁶⁹ This is true across other fields as well; Freud, who greatly admired Darwin, yet remained “an unrepentant Lamarckian to the end of his days” because natural selection, which depended so completely on chance, seemed not to support his own psychological theories.⁷⁰ Natural selection and the inheritance of acquired characters were complementary.

The idea of descent with modification through the mechanism of natural selection is identified as Darwin’s, but it should really be called the Darwin–Wallace theory since they codiscovered it. Alfred Russel Wallace’s manuscript formulating natural selection forced Darwin to rush his own findings into print after twenty years of hesitation, completing the manuscript of On the Origin of Species in less than a year.⁷¹ George Beccaloni suggests that Wallace was eclipsed because, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, natural selection became unpopular as an explanation for evolutionary change; most biologists posited alternatives such as neo-Lamarckism, orthogenesis, or mutation. Wallace continued to make key contributions to evolutionary thought well into the twentieth century; he is sometimes neglected because of the more mystical tone of his later work.⁷² Such neglect is similar to the fate of the German biologist Haeckel, whose groundbreaking work in morphology and embryology and as a disseminator of Darwin’s ideas has been overshadowed.

More people learned about Darwin through Haeckel than through Darwin’s own writings.73 Haeckel’s hugely successful book The History of Creation (1876), expressing a Lamarckian interpretation of evolution that did not support natural selection, continued to be reprinted until 1926. He never accepted natural selection as the sole explanation of the formation of new species. Instead, his Darwinism “concentrated on the struggle between rival species or subspecies.”⁷⁴ Haeckel’s reputation suffered from allegations of plagiarism in the use of illustrations in one of his books and more lingeringly from the erroneous and widespread notion that he was a proponent of scientific racism and that his ideas led to Nazism; this has been convincingly refuted by Robert Richards.⁷⁵ Throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Haeckel was a highly public scientist, frequently lecturing to large audiences and being discussed at length in the press. His many contributions have sometimes been forgotten, such as his coining of the term ecology and his correct prediction of where to find one of the “missing links” of human evolution in Africa in the 1890s. He is perhaps best known now for his biogenetic law, “phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny,” which posited that an individual organism’s development from embryo to adult retraced the path of its genetic heritage in accelerated fashion.⁷⁶ He also argued that in species development, the lower forms of mental activity had always existed, while the higher forms were recent in evolution.

Haeckel’s combination of evolution and recapitulation remained hugely popular and “powerfully convincing” for decades.⁷⁷ This idea fell from grace in the early twentieth century, challenged by genetics and the availability of increasingly powerful microscopes to test it, and in 1932 the English embryologist Gavin de Beer finally put the nail in the coffin of recapitulation in his scathing Embryos and Ancestors.⁷⁸ Haeckel also retained an “almost mystical belief in a purposeful nature.”⁷⁹ This was articulated most fully in his theory of monism, as expounded in The Riddle of the Universe (1901), positing the unity of all matter in a single substance throughout the universe, rather than the dualism of matter and energy, mind and body. It was a modern version of an old idea, in effect uniting Benedict Spinoza with contemporary science to argue that the physical world and the human mind were contained within one system, and it proved popular. In 1905 Haeckel founded the Monist League, which continued until 1933 with chapters in many countries. Widely derided by scientists, monism nonetheless attracted a passionate following, particularly among artists, writers, and theatre-makers, and it was a deep influence on many of the playwrights discussed in this book.

What remained elusive throughout the nineteenth century, and helped to feed the artistic imagination as much as the scientific, was an adequate explanation for how the modifications brought about by the pressures of natural selection were actually passed on. One theory put forth was pangenesis, espoused by scientists from Darwin to Hugo de Vries, who published Intracellular Pangenesis in 1889. Pangenesis posited that the entire organism is involved in heredity, the parent transmitting “gemmules” (tiny units of heredity) to the offspring. This had a pronounced Lamarckian element, and it did not explain how certain traits were inherited. Weismann’s theory of germ plasm was of definitive importance in positing a distinction between “germ cells,” which contain heritable information, and “somatic cells,” which do not but which carry out other, nonreproductive functions. The two kinds of cells operate separately in that the information passed through the germ line is not affected by the somatic line; a kind of wall exists between them, known as the Weismann barrier. The rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900, made available through the efforts of de Vries and colleagues, confirmed Weismann’s work and led to the establishment of modern genetics through the work of William Bateson, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and others. This was eventually combined with Darwinian natural selection and population studies to create “the Modern synthesis,” announced by Julian Huxley in 1942 but worked on before then by many leading scientists.

One of these scientists, Ernst Mayr, also wanted to correct a misconception about the seeming randomness and blindness of nature. Survival, “the essence of the whole concept of natural selection,” he writes, “the ability to contribute to the genetic content of the next generation, is not at all a matter of accident, but a statistically predictable property of the genotype.” He claimed that science has abundantly demonstrated that “natural selection is a direction-giving force, within the limitations of the evolutionary potential set for a given species by its genotype,” rendering absurd the “glib claim that Darwinism expounds the production of perfection by accident, the rule of ‘higgledy-piggledy,’ as Samuel Butler called it.”80 Butler, Shaw, and many of their contemporaries had trouble with this particular aspect of Darwinian thought, refusing to accept that nature leaves everything to chance, insisting on some degree of human agency. In Origin, Darwin refutes the notion of chance as a “false” view.⁸¹ The urgent and ongoing sense of debate about this issue is an important part of the cultural landscape of this book.

Two other aspects of evolutionary theory relate specifically to the plays discussed in this book. One is the eugenics movement, which I discuss in chapter 5 and intermittently throughout the book as it forms an important part of the landscape of ideas with which theatre was engaging. Wolff’s Mendel’s Theatre is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the relationship between theatre and eugenics, and my work is indebted to her pioneering scholarship. Second, the interaction of theatre with evolution reflects a key shift brought about by The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions, which together had the effect of focusing inordinately on animal development as synonymous with evolution—defining evolution mainly through the behavior of mammals and birds. These are, of course, most liable to anthropomorphism. Botany and marine and insect life receive short shrift in the popular reception of evolution from about the 1870s onward, even though it was through Darwin’s work on barnacles, orchids, and earthworms; Mendel’s experiments with peas; and Morgan’s work on fruit flies that we eventually got to the modern understanding of evolution. This makes those rare plays that eschew furry mammals in favor of marine life or plants—like Hubert Henry Davies’s The Mollusc or Glaspell’s The Verge or Inheritors—all the more significant and give a more complex picture of how theatre has engaged with evolutionary ideas.

In later editions of Origin, Darwin wrote of theatricality as mere trickery: “The wonderful manner in which certain butterflies imitate, as first described by Mr. Bates, other and quite distinct species” is like acting, employing “mimicry” and “counterfeiting.” He asked why “certain butterflies and moths so often assum[e] the dress of another and quite distinct form: Why, to the perplexity of naturalists, has nature condescended to the tricks of the stage?”⁸² I want to use this damning view of theatre as a starting point to explore how evolution found its way into the public imagination through the stage’s many “tricks,” showing both the deep engagement between theatre and evolution and the distinctly questioning stance of the former toward the latter that begins to emerge and that becomes one of its defining characteristics.