Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett

2. Neil Vickers, “Literature and Medicine: A Snapshot” (keynote address, meeting of the British Society for Literature and Science [BSLS], April 2012); Stuart Firestein, “What Science Wants to Know,” Scientific American, April 2012, 10. See also Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and “The Pursuit of Ignorance” (TED talk, presented February 26, 2013, at TED2013, Long Beach, Calif., February 25–March 1, http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_firestein_the_pursuit_of_ignorance [accessed June 5, 2014]).

1. “Darwinism in Literature,” Galaxy 15 (1873): 695, quoted in Cynthia Eagle Russett, Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865–1912 (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976), 11.

2. Michael M. Chemers, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (London: Palgrave, 2008), x.

3. Gillian Beer, “Darwin and the Uses of Extinction,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 2 (2009): 323.

4. According to Jean-François Peyret, “Amusons-nous pendant que le pape et notre législateur ont le dos tourné et promenons-nous dans les lois pendant que le comité d’éthique n’y est pas” (“En avoir ou pas,” program notes for Ex Vivo/In Vitro [Théâtre de Colline, Paris, 2011], 7).

5. Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (London: Routledge, 2002), 5.

6. Henry Arthur Jones, The Relations of the Drama to Real Life [lecture presented at Toynbee Hall, London, November 13, 1897] (London: Chiswick Press, 1897), 8.

7. See, for example, Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon, eds., Evolution and Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). On the widespread engagement with evolutionary theory in nonfiction writing, see Louise Henson, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan R. Topham, eds., Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2004); Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Graeme Gooday, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan R. Topham, eds., Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Science Serialised: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).

8. Gillian Beer, “Science and Literature,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. Robert C. Olby, Geoffrey N. Cantor, John R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge (London: Routledge, 1990), 787.

9. Michael H. Whitworth, “The Physical Sciences,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 46.

10. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 6.

12. Diana Donald and Jane Munro, Endless Forms (pamphlet for the exhibition presented at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, February–May 2009, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, June–October 2009). See also Diana Donald and Jane Munro, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

13. Quoted in Patrick McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7.

14. Simon Stephens, comments at Panel on Theatre and Politics, with Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Billington, and Simon Stephens, Humanitas series, University of Oxford, February 10, 2012.

15. James Harrison, “Destiny or Descent? Responses to Darwin,” Mosaic 14, no. 1 (1981): 112.

16. Gillian Beer, “The Challenges of Interdisciplinarity” (speech presented at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, April 27, 2006), https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/news/annual_research_dinner/ (accessed June 5, 2014).

18. Luca Ronconi, “Movement as a Metaphor of Time” [interview with Maria Grazia Gregori], trans. Bruno Tortorella. The manuscript was kindly given to me by Pino Donghi.

19. Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan R. Topham, introduction to Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, ed. Henson et al., xx.

20. Whitworth, “Physical Sciences,” 47.

21. Beer, Open Fields, 171.

22. Tiffany Watt-Smith, “Darwin’s Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872,” Journal of Victorian Culture 15, no. 1 (2010): 101–17. See also Iwan Rhys Morus, “Worlds of Wonder: Sensation and the Victorian Scientific Performance,” ISIS 101, no. 4 (2010): 806–16.

23. Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (London: Icon Books, 2012), 2; Robert P. Crease, The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 4, 6.

24. Joseph R. Roach, “Darwin’s Passion: The Language of Expression on Nature’s Stage,” Discourse 13, no. 1 (1990–1991): 41.

25. Rita Felski, “‘Context Stinks!’” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 573–91.

26. Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick, eds., The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, 2 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2008); Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer, eds., The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, 3 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

27. Elin Diamond, “Beckett and Caryl Churchill Along the Möbius Strip,” in Beckett at 100: Revolving It All, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and Angela Moorjani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 286.

28. Paul White, quoted in Gowan Dawson, “‘Like a Megatherium Smoking a Cigar’: Darwin’s Beagle Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture,” in Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science, ed. Valerie Purton (London: Anthem, 2013), 83.

29. See, especially, Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), and The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); and Rebecca Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Bowler argues that the emphasis on Darwin as the “pivot around which everything else moved” has distorted his impact on both science and intellectual history(Non-Darwinian Revolution, 93, 4).

30. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 177. See also Chris Fleming and Jane Goodall, “Dangerous Darwinism,” Public Understanding of Science 11, no. 3 (2002): 261.

31. Bowler, Non-Darwinian Revolution, 5.

34. Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 287, 484. On the problems with this “triumphalist” narrative of Darwin’s reception, see also Joe Cain, introduction to Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Penguin, 2009), xxxiv.

35. Fleming and Goodall, “Dangerous Darwinism,” 269.

36. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

37. Charles Darwin to George Henry Lewes, August 7, 1868, Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk (accessed June 10, 2014).

38. Charles Darwin, “Autobiography, May 31, 1876,” in Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley: Autobiographies, ed. Gavin de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 54.

40. Bowler, Evolution, 358.

41. Thornton Wilder, The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–61, ed. Donald Gallup (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 24.

42. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science (London: Pandora, 1993). See also Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

43. Darwin, “Autobiography,” 15.

44. Angelique Richardson, ed., “Essentialism in Science and Culture,” special issue, Critical Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2011); Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–42; Levine, Darwin Loves You.

45. See, for example, Elaine Aston and Ian Clarke, “The Dangerous Woman of Melvillean Melodrama,” New Theatre Quarterly 12, no. 45 (1996): 31–32; and Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

46. For a penetrating analysis of this movement, see Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (2011): 315–47.

47. Seamus Perry, review of Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, by Brian Boyd, Times Literary Supplement, May 25, 2012, 8.

48. William Flesch, “Acting Together,” review of Theatre and Mind, by Bruce McConachie, Times Literary Supplement, September 20, 2013, 29.

49. The anthropological roots of theatre as ritual were long ago established by Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, Eugenio Barba, and many others, but that is a separate issue.

50. Marco Iacobini, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); Giacomo Rizzolatti, Corrado Sinigaglia, and Frances Anderson, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Action, Emotion, and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, eds., Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (London: Routledge, 2006); and David Z. Saltz, ed., “Performance and Cognition,” special issue, Theatre Journal 59, no. 4 (2007).

51. James M. Harding, ed., Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

52. Tamsen Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 7–8.

53. James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

54. Fleming and Goodall, “Dangerous Darwinism,” 265.

56. James Moore and Adrian Desmond, introduction to Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004).

57. Bowler, Non-Darwinian Revolution, 5.

58. Ibid., 24. But Darwin did not derive his idea of natural selection from Thomas Malthus: “Far from it. Darwin already knew, months before he read Malthus, that selection was the key to man’s success in breeding and improving cultivated plants and domestic animals” (Gavin de Beer, introduction to Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley, ed. de Beer, x–xi). Ironically, it is Darwin’s own Autobiography that overstates his debt to Malthus.

59. Bowler, Non-Darwinian Revolution, 25.

60. M. J. S. Hodge, “England,” in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, ed. Thomas F. Glick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 15.

61. Bowler, Non-Darwinian Revolution, 5.

62. Harrison, “Destiny or Descent?” 113.

63. Russett, Darwin in America, 16–17.

64. Hodge, “England,” 15 (emphasis added).

65. Rosaura Ruiz, “Lamarck,” in Encyclopedia of Evolution, ed. Mark D. Pagel, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1:601. See also Pietro Corsi, The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in France, 1790–1830, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and Evolution Before Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

66. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 40.

67. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, “Lamarckism,” in Encyclopedia of Evolution, ed. Pagel, 1:602.

68. Russett, Darwin in America, 10–11.

70. Harrison, “Destiny or Descent?” 113.

71. The story of how Joseph Hooker and Thomas Henry Huxley found a compromise so that Wallace’s work received some recognition while still foregrounding Darwin’s is well known and has formed the basis for several books, films, and at least one play: Peter Parnell’s Trumpery (2007). See Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, “Darwin on Stage: Evolutionary Theory in the Theatre,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33, no. 2 (2008): 107–15.

72. Alfred Russel Wallace website, http://wallacefund.info/faqs-myths-misconceptions (accessed June 5, 2014).

73. Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2.

74. Bowler, Non-Darwinian Revolution, 162.

75. Robert J. Richards, “Ernst Haeckel’s Alleged Anti-Semitism and Contributions to Nazi Biology,” Biological Theory 2, no. 1 (2007): 97–103, and Tragic Sense of Life, 506–12.

76. Nigel Rothfels, “Aztecs, Aborigines, and Ape-People: Science and Freaks in Germany, 1850–1900,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 165.

78. Keith R. Benson, “Recapitulation,” in Encyclopedia of Evolution, ed. Pagel, 2:985.

79. Bowler, Non-Darwinian Revolution, 88.

80. Ernst Mayr, introduction to Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, facsimile of the first edition, ed. Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), xvi–xvii.

81. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 74.

82. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 4th ed. (London: Murray, 1866), 504–5 (emphasis added). This passage does not appear in the first edition of Origin.

1. Robert Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 2.

2. According to George Rowell, “The late Victorian theatre remained fundamentally a popular theatre” (Late Victorian Plays, 1890–1914 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968], vi). Jane Goodall discusses Barnum’s definitive importance for the relationship between science and performance, his shows turning “the whole notion of species into a vast programme of entertainment,” in Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (London: Routledge, 2002), 21–45. On popular theatre, see especially Jacky Bratton, The Making of the West End Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

3. Iwan Rhys Morus, “Worlds of Wonder: Sensation and the Victorian Scientific Performance,” ISIS 101, no. 4 (2010): 814.

4. Quoted in Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 457. Lightman comments that Hutchinson is telling “the story of cosmic evolution . . . as if it were a stunning play.”

5. Rebecca Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 43. Janet Browne notes that Jemmy behaved like “a stock character from stage and literature” (Darwin: A Biography, vol. 1, Voyaging [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996], 237). Huxley, quoted in Chris Fleming and Jane Goodall, “Dangerous Darwinism,” Public Understanding of Science 11 (2002): 261.

6. For example, Allardyce Nicoll lists the two-act comic drama Lavater the Physiognomist and a Good Judge Too, by an unknown author, which played at Sadler’s Wells in March 1848 (Lord Chamberlain Collection [hereafter LCP], catalogue number 35/3/48), and the farce Mesmerism versus Galvanism by George Beswick, which played at the Albert in spring 1845, in A History of English Drama, 1660–1900, vol. 4, Early Nineteenth Century Drama, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 491, 267. Lavater was a “genuine and immense success” according to the Morning Chronicle (April 4, 1848). These plays are in addition to the numerous extravaganzas, equestrian melodramas, and other spectacular entertainments that proliferated during this period, well documented by Altick, Shows of London, 1978.

7. See, for example, Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875–1919: Vernacular Modernity in France (Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2009).

8. Diana Donald and Jane Munro, Endless Forms (exhibition pamphlet for the exhibition presented at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn., February–May 2009, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Eng., June–October 2009), 14.

9. Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900 (London: Unwin, 1984); Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Angelique Richardson, “The Life Sciences: ‘Everybody Nowadays Talks About Evolution,’” in A Concise Companion to Modernism, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 18.

10. Fleming and Goodall, “Dangerous Darwinism,” 259.

11. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 6.

12. James Harrison, “Destiny or Descent? Responses to Darwin,” Mosaic 14, no. 1 (1981): 114.

14. Emile Zola, preface to Thérèse Raquin, in Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre, 1850–1918, ed. Claude Schumacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 71.

15. In France, “the first African village in a Paris zoological garden” was set up in 1877 (Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 67).

16. Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and “Meeting the Zulus: Displayed Peoples and the Shows of London, 1853–79,” in Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840–1910, ed. Joe Kember, John Plunkett, and Jill A. Sullivan (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 183–98. See also Bernth Lindfors, “Ethnological Show Business: Footlighting the Dark Continent,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 207–18.

17. Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 67n.15, 95, 146–47 (referred to in one contemporary article as “Nubians”).

18. Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 114, 117.

21. Charles Darwin, “Autobiography,” in Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley: Autobiographies, ed. Gavin de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 46.

22. Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 5, 83, 243.

23. Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Joe Kember, John Plunkett, and Jill A. Sullivan, eds., Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840–1910 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012); Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science; Iwan Rhys Morus, “‘More the Aspect of Magic than Anything Natural’: The Philosophy of Demonstration,” in Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 122–39.

24. Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 75.

25. Morus, “Worlds of Wonder,” 815.

26. In 1894, the Daily Telegraph published a grave warning by a professor at the University of Geneva that bicycling will in the course of a thousand years render us unable to walk: “The theory of evolution leaves no doubt on the subject. The human feet will gradually get stunted and pine away,” and we will look like “ugly apes” (“A Terrible Future for Cyclists,” Jackson’s Oxford Journal, September 22, 1894, 6).

27. In The Earth on Show, O’Connor reveals the theatricality of Victorian geology and its popularization, but in a narrative sense—the narrative techniques employed by geologists to dramatize for their readers the prehistoric earth and the dinosaurs. Apart from a fascinating discussion of Byron’s unperformed play Cain (1821), there is no consideration of the depiction of landscape in melodrama and spectacle with regard to, and perhaps indirectly reflecting, the public interest in geological deep time.

28. O’Connor, Earth on Show, 386.

29. Lord Byron’s Cain, a Mystery: With Notes, ed. Harding Grant (London: William Crofts, 1830), 2.i, 192.

30. There was more than one Astley’s; the reference here is most likely to the Royal Amphitheatre at Westminster Bridge Road, whose most famous period was 1830 to 1841. See Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 1:223–25. For a succinct summary of key developments in Victorian theatre scholarship, see Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland, “Introduction: The Performing Society,” in The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–11.

31. Quoted in John R. Durant, “Innate Character in Animals and Man,” in Biology, Medicine and Society, 1840–1940, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 157.

32. Ibid., 161. Durant notes that there are three definitions of ethology: the portrayal of character by mimicry, the science of ethics, and the science of character. This last has gained greatest currency.

36. Julian Huxley, “Bird-Watching and Biological Science,” Auk 33 (1916): 143–44, quoted in ibid.

37. Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69.

38. Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, in The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (London: Odhams Press, 1934), act 3, 379.

39. “The Cameleopard,” Morning Chronicle, July 12, 1827.

40. “The Cameleopard,” Morning Post, July 11, 1827. In 1832, Saint-Hilaire formally articulated the concept of teratology, casting the freak as a “pathological specimen of the terata [monstrosity]” (Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” in Freakery, ed. Garland Thomson, 4). Saint-Hilaire’s observations of the occurrence of monstrosities in humans as compared with those in the lower animals shaped Darwin’s own thinking about monsters. See Michael M. Chemers, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (London: Palgrave, 2008), 64.

41. “Cameleopard,” Morning Post.

42. “Cameleopard,” Morning Chronicle.

43. Birds, Beasts and Fishes; or, Harlequin and Natural History, written and produced by Nelson Lee for the City of London Theatre (1854), LCP, Add. 52951.

44. Established in 1828 for scientific study, the London Zoo opened to the public in 1847. The first orangutan arrived there in 1837. See Rothfels, Savages and Beasts.

45. “Christmas Novelties,” Era, December 31, 1854, 11. The stage directions simply read: “A View of the Royal Zoological Gardens. With Birds, Beasts & Fishes” (Lee, Birds, Beasts and Fishes, 17).

46. “The Forthcoming Christmas Novelties,” Era, December 24, 1854, 11.

47. John Perry, James A. Herne: The American Ibsen (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978), 41.

48. Morus, “Worlds of Wonder,” 816.

49. The extensive literature on freakery includes Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), and Freakery; Marlene Tromp, ed., Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008); Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Chemers, Staging Stigma; and Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin.

50. See, for example, Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies and Freakery; Tromp, ed., Victorian Freaks; Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity; Chemers, Staging Stigma; and Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin.

51. Marlene Tromp and Karyn Valerius, “Introduction: Toward Situating the Victorian Freak,” in Victorian Freaks, ed. Tromp, 1.

52. Heather McHold, “Even as You and I: Freak Shows and Lay Discourse on Spectacular Deformity,” in Victorian Freaks, ed. Tromp, 23–24.

53. Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 271 and passim.

54. For example, in History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama, 1800–1850, Nicoll lists a pantomime in 1810 called The Hottentot Venus; or, Harlequin in Africa and a melodramatic entertainment called Brazilian Jack; or, The Life of an Ape in 1834. Caroline Radcliffe discusses specific instances of this cross-fertilization—theatre appropriating a popular exhibition and “remediating” it on the stage—in “The Talking Fish: Performance and Delusion in the Victorian Exhibition,” in Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840–1910, ed. Joe Kember, John Plunkett, and Jill A. Sullivan (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 147.

55. Rebecca Stern, “Our Bear Women, Our Selves,” in Victorian Freaks, ed. Tromp 200–233.

56. The Missing Link, unknown author, licensed March 11, 1893, LCP, no catalog number given. The piece is signed by W. H. Westwood, manager of Grand Theatre, Wolsall. Goodall notes the thriving genre of “monkey-man productions” in the 1840s and 1850s (Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 51). Other plays of the period bearing in their titles some allusion to missing links, apes, zoos, or savagery include The Missing Link (drama, 1886) by Hal Collier; The Missing Link (farce, 1894) by Arthur Shirley; My Niece and My Monkey (burlesque, 1876) by Henry Herman; At the Zoo (no date) by W. P. Ridge; Buffalo Bill (drama, 1887) by Gary Roberts; Buffalo Bill; or, a Life in the Wild West (drama, 1887) by H. J. Stanley, with Charles Hermann; The Ourang Outang and His Double; or, The Runaway Monkey (no date) by George Herbert Rodwell; Zoo, a Musical Farce (1875) with music by Arthur Sullivan; The Zoo (no date) by Benjamin Charles Stephenson; and Aunt Chimpanzee (musical farce, 1897) by Morton Williams, with music by Woodruffe. I am indebted to Tiziana Morosetti for compiling this list.

57. Missing Link, no page numbers.

58. Helen Hamilton Gardener, “The Moral Responsibility of Women in Heredity,” in Facts and Fictions of Life (Boston: Fenno, 1895), 199.

59. Unnamed physiologist in Deutsche Revue, quoted in Gardener, “Moral Responsibility of Women,” 179.

60. Shaw, Man and Superman, act 4, 400.

61. Bernard Lightman, “Scientists as Materialists in the Periodical Press: Tyndall’s Belfast Address,” in Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 202.

64. Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 50.

65. Ibid., 247–48. Already in the 1860s, long before the Darwinian Man song, Gilbert wrote about men as monkeys in verses for La Vivandière, or True to the Corps!, a burlesque of Donizetti’s Daughters of the Regiment.

66. As Gordon notes, although Darwin never made this explicit connection himself, the idea of a common ancestry with the apes implied a sexual union at some point between humans and monkeys; according to Diana Snigurowicz, “The spectre of cross-species fertilization continued to haunt the social imaginary” (quoted in Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 68).

67. Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan, 249.

68. Rebecca Stott, “‘Tennyson’s Drift’: Evolution in The Princess,” in Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science, ed. Valerie Purton (London: Anthem, 2013), 14.

69. Stott, “‘Tennyson’s Drift,’” 25.

71. Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan, 250.

72. Angelique Richardson, “Against Finality: Darwin, Mill and the End of Essentialism,” Critical Inquiry 53, no. 4 (2011): 21–44.

73. New York Times, January 21, 1894 (accessed May 10, 2011). The New York Daily Tribune, January 21, 1894, called it “dull, disjointed, undramatic and hardly intelligible.”

74. Robert Buchanan, Charlatan, LCP; no page numbers.

75. Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1890; Times (London), September 26, 1890, 7.

76. Times, September 26, 1890, 7.

77. Theatre, November 1, 1890.

78. Times, September 26, 1890, 7.

79. Theatre, November 1, 1890.

80. Penny Illustrated Paper, October 4, 1890, 210.

81. Era, September 27, 1890.

1. Downing Cless, Ecology and Environment in European Drama (London: Taylor and Francis, 2010), 15.

2. John Perry, James A. Herne: The American Ibsen (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978), 138.

3. James A. Herne, Shore Acres and Other Plays (London: Samuel French, 1928), 81, 87, 88.

4. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1885), quoted in Perry, James A. Herne, 81.

5. Hamlin Garland, quoted in Perry, James A. Herne, 125.

6. Perry, James A. Herne, 188.

7. Herbert J. Edwards and Julie A. Herne, James A. Herne: The Rise of Realism in the American Drama (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1964), 113.

8. Helen Hamilton Gardener, “Woman as an Annex,” in Facts and Fictions of Life (Boston: Fenno, 1895), 135.

9. J. Stanley Lemons, “Social Feminism,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, ed. Bonnie G. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1:81.

10. Quoted in Perry, James A. Herne, 97.

11. Perry, James A. Herne, 97.

12. Herne, Shore Acres, act 1, 24.

13. Ibid., act 2, 75; act 1, 30.

14. Ibid., act 1, 29, 31.

15. Ibid., act 1, 21.

16. Boston Evening Transcript, quoted in Perry, James A. Herne, 234.

17. Herne, Shore Acres, act 4, 107, 109.

18. Perry, James A. Herne, 234.

19. Herne, Shore Acres, act 4, 107, 109.

20. Donald Pizer, “Herbert Spencer and the Genesis of Hamlin Garland’s Critical System,” Tulane Studies in English (1957): 157–58.

21. Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 34.

23. “I left off writing a novel I was engaged upon, and gave most of my leisure to seeing plays and reading Herbert Spencer” (Doris Arthur Jones, The Life and Letters of Henry Arthur Jones [London: Gollancz, 1930], 34).

24. Letter dated February 19, 1878, in Doris Arthur Jones, Life and Letters, 39.

25. Henry Arthur Jones’s The Dancing Girl (premiere January 1891) ran for 310 nights at the Haymarket and was revived by Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s in 1909, though not to great success.

26. Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama, 4 vols. (Exeter, Eng.: University of Exeter Press).

27. Henry Arthur Jones, The Dancing Girl, act 4, 4, LCP 53466 G.

28. Henry Arthur Jones, The Dancing Girl (London: Samuel French, 1907).

29. Doris Arthur Jones, Life and Letters, 114.

30. Henry Arthur Jones, Dancing Girl, act 3, 13, LCP. These lines also appear in the Samuel French acting edition (1907).

31. James A. Herne’s Hearts of Oak (1879) also features people setting out for “the Arctics.”

32. Henry Arthur Jones, The Case of Rebellious Susan, in Plays of Henry Arthur Jones, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), act 3, 153.

33. Henry Arthur Jones, Dancing Girl, act 4, 8, LCP.

34. Henry Arthur Jones, quoted in Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Late Nineteenth Century Drama, 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 1:169.

36. Cyril D. Darlington, The Evolution of Man and Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 678. In Origin, chapter 4 and the conclusion summarize Darwin’s points about extinction.

37. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, facsimile of the first edition, ed. Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 318.

38. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: Murray, 1859), 431.

39. Charles Darwin, “Autobiography,” in Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley: Autobiographies, ed. Gavin de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 328.

40. De Curel’s career includes several plays with evolution-related themes. He had an enduring interest in science; for instance, his play The New Idol (1895; performed by the Stage Society in March 1902) dealt with “the cult of science at the expense of human value,” and his play The Soul Gone Mad (1919), “his only popular success,” was a comedy comparing human and animal emotions. See Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2014), s.v. “François, vicomte de Curel” (accessed July 12, 2013).

41. The play was written in October 1891 and premiered at the Théâtre Libre on November 29, 1892, with Claire played by Mlle. Berthe Bady and Antoine playing the duke. In 1897, Les Fossiles was considered by the Comédie française for its repertoire, and de Curel revised it to correct the weakness in how the revelation of paternity came about, which had seemed contrived; instead, he provided “la grande scène entre le duc et Robert, scène douloureuse” in act 3. See François de Curel, Les Fossiles, in Théâtre complet (Paris: Editions Georges Crès, 1920), 2:153. Fire at the theatre meant delay and an enforced move to the Odéon, and it was May 21, 1900—during the Exposition—when the play was revived there by the Comédie française, “devant un public distrait, venu pour la grande kermesse et parfaitement incapable de prêter une attention soutenue à une œuvre âpre et violente. Aussi les Fossiles n’eurent-ils que 20 à 25 représentations. Ils n’ont jamais été repris depuis cette époque” (introduction, June 1919, 153).

42. De Curel, Les Fossiles, act 3.iii, 3.v.

43. Ibid., act 4, 253–54.

44. Ibid., 3.ii, 224–25; translation in Samuel Montefiore Waxman, Antoine and the Théâtre Libre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926), 171.

45. L. K., “The Vaporings of Lovers” (review of the production of L’amour brode [Love Embroiders] in Paris), New York Times, November 26, 1893, 19.

46. Henry James: Guy Domville: Play in Three Acts, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961), 1, 135.

47. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004), 143.

48. James, Guy Domville, act 1, 138.

50. Ibid., 143 (emphasis added).

51. Gillian Beer, “Darwin and the Uses of Extinction,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 2 (2009): 322.

53. De Curel, Les Fossiles, 2.ii, 202.

54. James, Guy Domville, 21.

55. Ibid., act 2, 140–42.

58. Thomas H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” in Collected Essays (London, 1901), 9, 81–82, quoted in James Harrison, “Destiny or Descent? Responses to Darwin,” Mosaic 14, no. 1 (1981): 112.

59. James, Guy Domville, act 1, 136.

60. Bernard Shaw, “The Drama’s Laws,” Saturday Review, January 12, 1895, in ibid., 205–7.

61. Arnold Bennett, “Fitful Beauty,” Woman, January 16, 1895, in ibid., 216.

62. Herbert George Wells, “A Pretty Question,” Pall Mall Gazette, January 7, 1895, in ibid., 211–12.

63. John Stokes, In the Nineties (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 116–43.

64. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. George Thomas Bettany (London: Ward, Lock, 1890), viii.

65. Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 170.

67. Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “It’s Good to Be Alive,” London Review of Books, February 9, 2012, 36.

68. Amy Cook provides a succinct overview of the key research on mirror neurons and its implications for theories of acting in “Interplay: The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Scientific Approach to Theatre,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 4 (2007): 579–94. See also Bruce McConachie, “Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies,” Theatre Journal 59, no. 4 (2007): 533–77.

69. Jane Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (London: Routledge, 2002), 7.

70. Joseph Roach, “Darwin’s Passion: The Language of Expression on Nature’s Stage,” Discourse 13, no. 1 (1990–1991): 52, 53.

71. For discussion of Irving in The Bells, see, especially, Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). On mesmerism, see Jane R. Goodall, Stage Presence (London: Routledge, 2008), chap. 3.

72. Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940, ed. Mark S. Micale (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 154.

73. Roach, Player’s Passion and “Darwin’s Passion”; Rose Whyman, The Stanislavsky System of Acting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lynn M. Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004).

74. Gunning, “In Your Face,” 154.

76. Whyman, Stanislavsky System, 5.

78. James M. Barrie, What Every Woman Knows, in Peter Pan and Other Plays, ed. Peter Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), act 4, i, 229.

79. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 177.

80. Bruce McConachie, review of The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience, by Rhonda Blair, TDR: The Drama Review 54, no. 2 (2010): 183.

81. Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875–1919: Vernacular Modernity in France (Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2009), 2.

83. John R. G. Turner, “Mimicry,” in Encyclopedia of Evolution, ed. Mark D. Pagel, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1:734, 736.

85. George Henry Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting (London: Smith, Elder, 1875), 103. Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray says virtually the same thing: “We are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play” (quoted in Voskuil, Acting Naturally, 19).

86. Susan Bassnett, “Eleonora Duse,” in Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time, ed. John Stokes, Michael R. Booth, and Susan Bassnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 166. On Duse, see also Arthur Symons, Eleonora Duse (London: Elkin Mathews, 1926); William Weaver, Duse: A Biography (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984); Laura M. Hansson, Modern Women (London, 1896); Eva Le Gallienne, The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleonora Duse (London: Bodley Head, 1966); Jeanne Bordeux [pseud.], Eleonora Duse: The Story of Her Life (London: Hutchinson, 1925); and Helen Sheehy, Eleonora Duse (New York: Knopf, 2003).

87. The article in the Saturday Review is reprinted in Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties (London: Constable, 1932), 13:148–54.

88. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Joe Cain and Sharon Messenger (London: Penguin, 2009), 286.

89. Gerhart Hauptmann, Lonely People, in The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann, ed. Ludwig Lewisohn, vol. 3, Domestic Dramas (New York: Huebsch, 1922), act 2, 184; act 3, 236, 245; act 5, 304.

90. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Betrothal, or The Blue Bird Chooses, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (London: Methuen, 1919), 149.

91. Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, in The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (London: Odhams Press, 1934), act 2, 355.

92. Roach, “Darwin’s Passion,” 54.

93. Quoted in Bassnett, “Eleonora Duse,” 152.

94. Roach, “Darwin’s Passion,” 55.

95. Bassnett, “Eleonora Duse,” 155.

97. Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Voskuil, Acting Naturally; and John Stokes and Maggie Gale, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Actress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

98. Hansson, Modern Women, 106. Already in his early play The Vikings at Helgeland (1857), Ibsen asks for “repressed emotion” in many of his stage directions. See The Vikings at Helgeland, trans. William Archer (New York: Scribner, 1911), 61, 74, 94.

99. Elizabeth Robins, The Mirkwater (manuscript, Fales Collection, New York).

100. Hauptmann, Lonely People, act 3, 246.

101. Bassnett, “Eleonora Duse,” 141–42.

104. Hugo Von Hoffmansthal, quoted in ibid., 154; Gay Gibson Cima, Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).

105. Quoted in Rhonda Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: Routledge, 2008), 40.

106. Scott A. Harmon, “Attention, Absorption and Habit: The Stanislavski System Reexamined as a Cognitive Process Using the ‘Theatre of Consciousness’ Model of Bernard Baars” (M.A. thesis, University of Illinois, 2010), 15. Harmon is referring to Bernard Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and his concepts of the “suggestible state” and the “absorbed state.”

107. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 286.

108. Rebecca Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 47.

109. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 300.

111. Thomas Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing (London: Churchill, 1839), 11, quoted in Maurice S. Lee, Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 159.

112. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 309.

115. Bassnett, “Eleonora Duse,” 142.

116. Luigi Rasi, quoted in ibid., 142.

117. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 288.

119. Ibid., 295–97.

120. Quoted in Bassnett, “Eleonora Duse,” 168.

122. Luigi Pirandello, “The Art of Duse,” Columbian Monthly 1, no. 7 (1928), quoted in ibid., 124–25.

123. Adelaide Ristori, quoted in ibid., 137.

1. “Ibsen’s Place in Letters,” New York Times, May 24, 1906; Robert Ferguson, Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography (London: Cohen Books, 1996), 121, 261, 316, 349.

2. Work on Henrik Ibsen and Charles Darwin includes that of Asbjørn Aarseth, “Ibsen and Darwin: A Reading of The Wild Duck,” Modern Drama 48, no. 1 (2005): 1–10; Mathias Clasen, Stine Slot Grumsen, Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, and Peter C. Kjærgaard, “Translation and Transition: The Danish Literary Response to Darwin,” in The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, ed. Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 3:103–27; Linn B. Konrad, “Father’s Sins and Mother’s Guilt: Dramatic Responses to Darwin,” in Drama, Sex and Politics, ed. James Redmond, Themes in Drama, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 137–49; Thore Lie, “The Introduction, Interpretation and Dissemination of Darwinism in Norway During the Period 1860–1890,” trans. James Anderson, in The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, ed. Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (London: Continuum, 2008), 1:156–74; Tore Rem, “Darwin and Norwegian Literature,” in Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin, ed. Glick and Shaffer, 160–80; Ross Shideler, Questioning the Father: From Darwin to Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg and Hardy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); Eivind Tjønneland, “Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen,” Spring—Tidsskrift for moderne dansk litteratur 13 (1998): 178–99, and “Repetition, Recollection and Heredity in Ibsen’s Ghosts—The Context of Intellectual History,” in Ibsen on the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century: Critical Perspectives, ed. Pål Bjørby, Alvhild Dvergsdal, and Idar Stegane (Fyllingsdalen, Norway: Alvheim and Eide, 2005); and Tamsen Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

3. Brian W. Downs, Ibsen: The Intellectual Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), ix.

4. Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 814.

6. Tjønneland, “Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen,” 182 (my translation). I am indebted to the author for sending me this and other articles he has written on Ibsen and evolution.

7. Throughout this chapter, I give dates of plays’ first publication; dates of first performances are listed on the repertoire database at ibsen.nb.no.

8. Jane R. Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order (London: Routledge, 2002), 180.

9. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 31.

10. Clasen et al., “Translation and Transition,” 105.

11. Inga-Stina Ewbank, “Dickens, Ibsen, and Cross-Currents,” in Anglo-Scandinavian Cross-Currents, ed. Inga-Stina Ewbank, Olva Lausund, and Bjørn Tysdahl (London: Norvik Press, 1999), 301.

12. Brian Johnston, Text and Supertext in Ibsen’s Drama (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 27.

13. Ferguson, Henrik Ibsen, 349.

15. “A toad. In the middle of a block of sandstone./In a fossil world. Just his head showing” (Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, trans. Christopher Fry and Johan Fillinger [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], act 4, 89).

16. Ferguson, Henrik Ibsen, 316.

17. Henrik Ibsen, speech presented at a banquet in Stockholm (September 24, 1897), in Henrik Ibsen: Samlede Værker, vol. 10, ed. Halvdan Koht and Jens B. Halvorsen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1902), 516. This and all subsequent quotations from Ibsen’s works, drafts, letters, and speeches in their original Dano-Norwegian are taken from Samlede Værker and from Henrik Ibsen: Efterladte Skrifter, ed. Halvdan Koht and Julias Elias (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909); all of these can now be consulted on the online resource Henrik Ibsens Skrifter (http://ibsen.uio.no/forside.xhtml), which gives detailed annotations as well as facsimile versions of Ibsen’s writings, although as yet only in Norwegian. Given space constraints, I provide English versions of only texts quoted and refer the reader to the English translations that were used during Ibsen’s lifetime: The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, ed. William Archer, which includes From Ibsen’s Workshop: Notes, Scenarios, and Drafts of the Modern Plays, trans. Arthur G. Chater, vol. 12 (New York: Scribner, 1911). In some cases, I give my own translations in preference to those in this edition. English translations of a selection of Ibsen’s letters and speeches can be found in Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, ed. and trans. Evert Sprinchorn (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), but there is still no English translation of Ibsen’s complete letters and speeches. All translations throughout this chapter are mine except where indicated.

18. Clasen et al., “Translation and Transition,” 125.

19. Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, ed. James A. Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 386, quoted in Rebecca Stott, “‘Tennyson’s Drift’: Evolution in The Princess,” in Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science, ed. Valerie Purton (London: Anthem, 2013), 31.

20. Henrik Ibsen to Georg Brandes, October 30, 1888, in Ibsen, Letters and Speeches, 271–73.

21. See, for example, David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo (London: Hutchinson, 1996); Errol Fuller, The Dodo: Extinction in Paradise (Charleston, Mass.: Bunker Hill, 2003); and Mark V. Barrow, Jr., Nature’s Ghosts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

22. Henrik Ibsen to Sophus Schandorph, January 6, 1882, in Ibsen, Letters and Speeches, 201.

23. Henrik Ibsen, speech presented at the banquet of the Norwegian League for Women’s Rights (May 26, 1898), in Ibsen, Letters and Speeches, 337.

24. Bernard Shaw, preface to Getting Married, in Prefaces by Bernard Shaw (London: Constable, 1934), 15.

25. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 87; my translation differs from Chater’s.

26. Henrik Ibsen, Pillars of Society, act 4, 408; Archer renders it as “no eyes for womanhood.”

27. Ibsen, Pillars, act 4, 409; Archer renders it as “the spirits of Truth and Freedom—these are the Pillars of Society.”

28. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 185.

29. Shideler, Questioning the Father, 57. Shideler offers critical analyses of the Darwinian elements of some of Ibsen’s plays, including Pillars, Doll’s House, Ghosts, and Hedda. For him, these are the plays in which “environment and heredity in Darwin’s randomly evolving nature serve as fundamental elements of plot” (60).

31. Quoted in J. P. Jacobsen, “Menneskeslægtens Oprindelse,” Nyt Dansk Maanedsskrift 2 (1871): 122, quoted in Clasen et al., “Translation and Transition,” 110.

32. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 487.

34. Quoted in Downing Cless, Ecology and Environment in European Drama (New York: Routledge, 2010), 141.

35. Notice (1879?), in Ibsen, Henrik Ibsen: Samlede Værker, 18:364 (my translation).

36. Sigurd Ibsen (Ibsen’s son), in Human Quintessence, refers to a “great harmony of things,” echoing Haeckel’s popular monism but perhaps also Ibsen’s ideas on the synthesis of all laws into one law, all forms into one form. Without referring anywhere in his 300-page book to his father by name, Sigurd indirectly alludes to him in his wide-ranging musings on the nature of genius and what it means to be a great man. Certainly, the “power of anticipative synthesis is conspicuous in those who tower above others intellectually” (Sigurd Ibsen, Human Quintessence, trans. Marcia Hargis Janson [1911; London: Palmer, 1913], 294). This book was translated into many languages and was especially popular in America; in Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play Ah, Wilderness! the hero names it as one of the progressive books that influenced him in his youth. Bergliot Ibsen (Sigurd’s wife) claims that in America the book had the same standing as Friedrich Nietzsche’s work in central Europe. See Bergliot Ibsen, The Three Ibsens, trans. Gerik Schjelderup (London: Hutchinson, 1951), 169.

37. Lie, “Introduction, Interpretation and Dissemination,” 157. It is not clear whether Ibsen had first-hand knowledge of Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation or Lyell’s Principles of Geology.

38. Ibid., 171. See also Peter C. Kjærgaard, Niels Henrik Gregersen, and Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, “Darwinizing the Danes, 1859–1909,” in The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, ed. Eve-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (London: Continuum, 2008), 1:146–55. Ferguson notes the unique people and mechanisms in place that helped disseminate new ideas throughout Scandinavia (and put paid to the myth of Ibsen as the lone crusader struggling against narrow-minded Norwegian provincialism). See also the recent work of Narve Fulsås in this area, such as “Ibsen Misrepresented: Canonization, Oblivion, and the Need for History,” Ibsen Studies 11, no. 1 (2011): 3–20, and the invaluable commentary he provides on the database Henrik Ibsens Skrifter.

39. Downs, Ibsen, 162; Lie, “Introduction, Interpretation and Dissemination,” 161–62.

40. Lie, “Introduction, Interpretation and Dissemination,” 161.

41. Peter C. Asbjørnsen, “Darwins Nye Skabningslære [Darwin’s New Theory of Creation],” Budstikken [The Messenger], February–March 1861, quoted in ibid., 161–62.

42. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, act 2, 225.

43. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 201. See also William W. Demastes, Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 78.

44. Meyer, Ibsen, 171.

45. Lie, “Introduction, Interpretation and Dissemination,” 160.

46. Toril Moi argues that the finished text of the often-ignored Emperor and Galilean reflects “some of the most culturally contentious issues of its time, for example in its obsession with determinism. Darwinism surely contributed to the general preoccupation with the question, but so did the emerging disciplines of statistics and probability calculation” (Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006], 193).

47. Oskar Seidlin, “Georg Brandes, 1842–1927,” Journal of History of Ideas 3 (1942): 419.

50. Alrik Gustafson, Six Scandinavian Novelists: Lie, Jacobsen, Heidenstam, Selma Lagerlöf, Hamsun, Sigrid Undset (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1940), 81.

53. Quoted in ibid., 84.

54. Clasen et al., “Translation and Transition,” 103–27; see also Tjønneland, “Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen,” 178–99.

55. James Harrison, “Destiny or Descent?: Responses to Darwin,” Mosaic 14, no. 1 (2002): 121.

56. Tjønneland proposes that this longing indicates that Ibsen’s evolutionary vision may also have been shaped by the distinctly melancholic attitude to evolution in the Norwegian Darwin literature, that he had a “pessimistic understanding of evolution,” shown not only through his characters but also by himself (“Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen,” 186).

57. Johnston, Text and Supertext, 80. Johnston does not cite a source for this, and I have been unable to trace it. According to Narve Fulsås (in private correspondence with author), there are no extant notes by Ibsen to Emperor and Galilean.

58. Tjønneland, “Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen,” 189. In this paragraph, Haeckel characterizes the upward development of nature, of which humankind is the “highest triumph,” and predicts that humans will “reach higher and higher spiritual perfection.”

59. Cless, Ecology and Environment, 146.

60. Ludwig Lewisohn, introduction to The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann, ed. Ludwig Lewisohn, vol. 3, Domestic Dramas (New York: Huebsch, 1922), vii.

61. Gerhart Hauptmann, Lonely People, in Dramatic Works, act 3, 255.

62. Ibid., act 2, 210. Shaw does this in Man and Superman, whose opening stage directions indicate the presence of a bust of Herbert Spencer (at whom Tanner will later stare “gloomily”) and an “enlarged photograph” of T. H. Huxley.

63. Hauptmann, Lonely People, act 4, 274. It is also worth noting another possible connection between Ibsen and Haeckel, through the name Allmers, the protagonist of Little Eyolf. The German poet Hermann Allmers was a lifelong friend of Haeckel, and their travels in Italy in the 1850s and 1860s parallel Ibsen’s own journey and residence there (where Haeckel spent his days in landscape painting and his nights in “dancing the tarantella”). See Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 59–63.

64. Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt: Studies in Modern Drama from Ibsen to Genet (Chicago: Dee, 1991), 12.

66. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 466.

67. Tjønneland, “Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen,” 184.

68. Ibsen’s titles often seem to allude to something familiar, but in unusual language that signals more complex meanings; for example, A Doll’s House is actually “a doll home,” a much more potent term indicating not a physical building (“house”) or a little girl’s plaything but the problematic meaning of “home” for modern women.

69. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 344, 370 (“the dying mermaid on the dry—”); Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 10.

70. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 366. Knut Hamsun was intrigued by Ellida’s state of being “a thing which isn’t a person, not even a crazy person.” In Ellida’s first speech, “those words about ‘human beings like sea creatures’ express a state of mind which correlates with the one I have when I fall sensually in love with light. My blood seems to sense that I stand in a nervous relationship with the universe, with the elements. Some day perhaps—in the fullness of time—humans will stand to today’s humans as today’s humans stand to today’s protista, beings which do not need to love some other being but which can love anything at all: water, fire, air. You know, Ibsen does have flashes of genius”(Hamsun to Amalie Skram, in Knut Hamsun: Selected Letters, 1879–98, ed. Harald Naess and James Walter McFarlane [London: Norvik Press, 1990], 1:83).

71. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 331.

72. Ibid., 364 (emphasis added).

73. Martin Puchner, The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 74.

74. Era, May 16, 1891, 10. Rose Meller played Ellida in this production at Terry’s Theatre, London (May 1891); the translation was by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Another reviewer called the play badly acted and scoffed at the “human mermaid” Ellida’s “amphibious” nature. See “Flashes from the Footlights,” Licensed Victuallers’ Mirror, May 19, 1891, 238.

75. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 377.

76. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, facsimile of the first edition, ed. Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 140–41.

77. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 331. The Times dismissed The Lady from the Sea in 1892: “Studies in morbid heredity are very well in a scientific treatise. On the stage, put forward as a public entertainment, they tend to perplex, irritate and repel, besides being useless for any practical purpose” (quoted in Meyer, Ibsen, 667).

78. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 331.

79. Ferguson, Henrik Ibsen, xii.

80. For in-depth consideration of the domestication-versus-wildness motif in Ibsen, see, for example, Tjønneland, “Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen”; Aarseth, “Ibsen and Darwin”; and Rem, “Darwin and Norwegian Literature.”

81. Tjønneland, “Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen,” 187.

82. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 185.

83. Max Nordau erroneously claimed that Ibsen actually “quotes Darwin” in his plays, in Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 350.

84. Downs, Ibsen, 165.

85. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 331.

86. Henrik Ibsen, The Lady from the Sea, act 3, 255.

87. Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 101.

88. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 480.

89. Ibid. In the draft to Little Eyolf, the eleven-year-old Alfred/Eyolf is “slim, slight . . . and undersized, and looks somewhat delicate” (471).

90. Henrik Ibsen, John Gabriel Borkman, act 2, 258.

91. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 21.

92. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 38.

93. For wider contextualization of this emphasis, see Elisabeth Gitter, “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination,” PMLA 99, no. 5 (1984): 936–54; and Carol Hanbery MacKay, Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 28–34.

94. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 17.

95. I am indebted to Jane R. Goodall for suggesting to me this further implication of Hedda’s hair.

96. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Joe Cain and Sharon Messenger (London: Penguin, 2009), 273–74.

97. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 475.

98. Meyer, Ibsen, 540.

99. Henrik Ibsen, speech presented to the Swedish Society of Authors, Stockholm (April 11, 1898) (my translation). See also Ibsen: Letters and Speeches, 335.

100. H. A. E. Zwart, “The Birth of a Research Animal: Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and the Origin of a New Animal Science,” Environmental Values 9 (2000): 93, 100.

101. Cless, Ecology and Environment, 142–43.

103. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 492.

104. Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 16.

105. “I am a miner’s son,” explains Borkman, “and my father used sometimes to take me with him into the mines. The metal sings down there.” He characterizes the hammer as setting the “metal” free because “it wants to come up into the light of day and serve mankind” (Henrik Ibsen, John Gabriel Borkman, act 2, 207–8).

106. Jessica H. Whiteside, “Wedges and Impacts: Darwin’s Enduring Legacy,” Brown Medicine, spring 2009, 2. I am indebted to James A. Secord for pointing me toward the wedge metaphor.

107. Darwin, Origin of Species, 67. Darwin includes the wedge metaphor in volume 2 of Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (London: Murray, 1868).

108. Whiteside, “Wedges and Impacts,” 2.

110. Darwin, Origin of Species, 14–15.

111. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 186.

112. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869, 1892), 1.

113. Downs, Intellectual Background, 165.

114. Georg Brandes to the biologist Carl J. Salomonsen, quoted in Meyer, Ibsen, 389.

115. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 33.

116. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 177.

117. Heather McHold, “Even as You and I: Freak Shows and Lay Discourse on Spectacular Deformity,” in Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. Marlene Tromp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 24.

118. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, full draft of A Doll’s House, act 1, 389.

119. Ibid., 390. Tjønneland notes Dr. Rank’s “marked Darwinistic standpoint” in the draft, in “Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen,” 183.

120. Tjønneland, “Darwin, J. P. Jacobsen og Ibsen,” 184. Ibsen clearly mused on the concept of “base” or “lower” nature. In the draft of The Pillars of Society, the reverend Dr. Rörlund piously inveighs against “unaided human nature” (which finds things like dinner parties on a Sunday amusing) as something to be “overcome.” There is some discussion between him and Dina of her “nature”—he says she must change it, but she feels that is just how she is. In the draft of The Wild Duck, Hjalmar, having discovered the truth about Gina, alludes to her “lower nature”(Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 35, 237).

121. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 399.

122. Ibid., full draft of A Doll’s House, act 1, 390–91 (emphasis added).

123. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 186.

124. Zwart, “Birth of a Research Animal,” 92.

125. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 36.

126. Gustafson, Six Scandinavian Novelists, 18.

127. Ibid. As Donald Mackenzie notes, “intellectual aristocracy” is a concept associated with the field of biometric eugenics headed by Karl Pearson and his followers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (“Sociobiologies in Competition,” in Biology, Medicine and Society, 1840–1940, ed. Charles Webster [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 276).

128. Gustafson, Six Scandinavian Novelists, 19.

129. Bart Van Es, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 304–6.

130. Cless, Ecology and Environment, 140.

131. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 331. A strong echo of this occurs in Shaw’s play On the Rocks (1933), when Chavender proposes harnessing “power from the tides” (Bernard Shaw, On the Rocks, in The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw [London: Odhams Press, 1934], act 2, 1199).

132. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 309–10.

134. Henry Arthur Jones, The Corner Stones of Modern Drama [lecture presented at Harvard University on October 31, 1906] (London: Chiswick Press, 1906), 6.

135. In Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke paid tribute to Ibsen and described his works as wild animals: “Loneliest of men, withdrawn from all. . . . [The people who once opposed you now] carry your words about with them in the cages of their presumption, and exhibit them in the streets and excite them a little from their own safe distance: all those wild beasts of yours. When I first read you, they broke loose on me and assailed me in my wilderness—your desperate words” (quoted in Meyer, Ibsen, 816). This long passage is full of scientific allusions—microscope, test tubes, fossils, gradualism:

You conceived the vast project of magnifying single-handed these minutiæ, which you yourself first perceived only in test-tubes, so that they should be seen of thousands, immense, before all eyes. Then your theatre came into being. You could not wait until this almost spaceless life, condensed into fine drops by the weight of centuries, should be discovered by the other arts, and gradually made visible to the few who, little by little, come together in their understanding and finally demand to see the general confirmation of these extraordinary rumours in the semblance of the scene opened before them. . . . You had to determine and record the almost immeasurable: the rise of half a degree in a feeling; the angle of refraction, read off at close quarters, in a will depressed by an almost infinitesimal weight; the slight cloudiness in a drop of desire, and the well-nigh imperceptible change of colour in an atom of confidence. All these: for of just such processes life now consisted, our life, which had slipped into us and had drawn so deeply in that it was scarcely possible even to conjecture about it any more. (Rilke, Notebook, trans. John Linton, 76–79, quoted in Meyer, Ibsen, 816–17)

This sounds like a climate more than a drama; in essence, Rilke describes Ibsen’s drama in terms drawn from meteorology.

136. Henry James, “John Gabriel Borkman,” Harper’s Weekly, February 6, 1897, in Henry James, The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872–1901 ed. Allan Wade (London: Hart-Davis, 1949), 291.

1. Sally Shuttleworth, “Demonic Mothers: Ideologies and Bourgeois Motherhood in the Mid-Victorian Era,” in Rewriting the Victorians, ed. Linda M. Shires (London: Routledge, 1992), 37.

2. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Motherhood,” in Encyclopedia of Evolution, ed. Mark D. Pagel, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1:E64. See also Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (New York: Ballantine, 1999), and The Woman That Never Evolved, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

3. Penny Farfan, Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.

4. Quoted in ibid., 5.

5. Jean Chothia, introduction to The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, ed. Jean Chothia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ix.

6. Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 252, 253. See also Hrdy, “Motherhood,” E56–64.

7. Chothia, introduction to New Woman, ed. Chothia, ix. See also Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 6.

8. Angelique Richardson, “The Biological Sciences,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 59.

9. See, for example, Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 43.

10. Andrew Sinclair, The Emancipation of the American Woman (1965), quoted in ibid., acknowledgments.

11. Quoted in Richardson, “Biological Sciences,” 59. Allen fulminates against educating women to the extent that they no longer want to fulfill their biological function, as they will become “flat as a pancake and as dry as a broomstick” (60).

12. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin, 2004), 631, 629.

13. Quoted in Howard I. Kushner, “Suicide, Gender, and the Fear of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Medical and Social Thought,” Journal of Social History 26, no. 3 (1993): 472.

14. Spectator, April 7, 1894, quoted in Plays by Henry Arthur Jones, ed. and intro. Russell Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 17.

15. Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 161, 251.

16. Angelique Richardson, “Against Finality: Darwin, Mill and the End of Essentialism,” Critical Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2011): 28. See also Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–42.

17. Mona Caird, “Marriage,” Westminster Review, August 1888, 186, in A New Woman Reader, ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2001), 185.

18. See, for example, Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915), imagining an all-female civilization, and her nonfiction writing, such as Women and Economics: A Study in the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (London: Putman, Small, Maynard, 1899).

19. Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 260–61.

21. Quoted in Hrdy, Woman That Never Evolved, 12.

22. Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 263.

23. Helen Hamilton Gardener, “Environment: Can Heredity Be Modified?” in Facts and Fictions of Life (Boston: Fenno, 1895), 297.

24. Helen Hamilton Gardener, “Heredity in Its Relations to a Double Standard of Morals,” in Facts and Fictions of Life, 201. In another essay, she draws on recent scientific findings that challenge the biometric basis for assuming women’s inferiority, quoting a physiologist in the Deutsche Revue as saying that in fact the evidence points to women’s superiority: “Darwin has demonstrated that female animals often revert to the masculine type, while the reverse seldom happens” (Helen Hamilton Gardener, “The Moral Responsibility of Woman in Heredity,” in Facts and Fictions of Life, 179).

25. Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 256. See John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies: Three Lectures by John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1894).

26. Hrdy, Woman That Never Evolved, 10.

27. Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 257.

28. Ibid., 258 (original emphasis).

29. Eltis, Acts of Desire, 204.

30. Walter M. Gallichan, “The Equality of the Sexes,” Reynold’s, May 27, 1894.

32. Ibid. (emphasis added).

33. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Joe Cain and Sharon Messenger (London: Penguin, 2009), 197, 80.

35. Henry Arthur Jones, The Physician (London: Chiswick Press, 1897), act 1, 18.

36. Harry W. Paul, Henri de Rothschild, 1872–1947 (Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2011). For a thorough documentation of these developments in America, see Janet Golden, A Social History of Wet-Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); for Britain, see Valerie A. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986). More generally, see Valerie A. Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); and Vanessa Maher, The Anthropology of Breast-Feeding: Natural Law or Social Construct (Oxford: Berg, 1992).

37. Grant Allen, “Woman’s Place in Nature,” Forum 7 (1899), quoted in Russett, Sexual Science, 43.

38. Darwin, Descent of Man, 533.

40. Ibid., 535–36.

41. Ibid., 537 (emphasis added).

42. Elisabeth Badinter, Le Conflit, la femme et la mère (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), and The Myth of Motherhood: An Historical Overview of the Maternal Instinct, trans. Roger DeGaris (London: Souvenir Press, 1981). See also Hrdy, Woman That Never Evolved and Mother Nature (whose arguments Badinter fundamentally misinterprets).

43. Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2009), 4.

44. John Perry, James A. Herne: The American Ibsen (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978); Dorothy S. Bucks and Arthur H. Nethercot, “Ibsen and Herne’s Margaret Fleming: A Study of the Early Ibsen Movement in America,” American Literature 17, no. 4 (1946): 311–33; Donald Pizer, “The Radical Drama in Boston, 1889–1891,” New England Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1958): 361–74; Bernard Hewitt, “‘Margaret Fleming’ in Chickering Hall: The First Little Theatre in America?” Theatre Journal 34, no. 2 (1982): 165–71; Herbert J. Edwards and Julie A. Herne, James A. Herne: The Rise of Realism in the American Drama (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1964); Arthur Hobson Quinn, introduction to Margaret Fleming, in Representative American Plays: From 1767 to the Present Day, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn, 7th ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), 515–18.

45. “There is not, he declares [in an article in the Arena in November 1890], and there never has been, a literary institution which can be called the American Drama” (Dion Boucicault, “The Future of American Drama,” quoted in Review of Reviews 1 [January–June 1890]: 585).

46. Jean Chothia, Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 23.

47. Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 461.

48. Theodore Hatlen, “‘Margaret Fleming’ and the Boston Independent Theatre,” Educational Theatre Journal 8, no. 1 (1956): 18. The play was also staged for one matinee in New York (December 9, 1891), where it was “an unequivocal failure,” and in Chicago (July 7–16, 1892), where it received mixed reviews despite Herne’s concession to the producer to “soften” the play by allowing Philip and Margaret to be reconciled in the end. A further New York production, in April 1894, fared no better. Then, sixteen years after its Boston premiere (though unfortunately after Herne’s death), the play finally had theatrical success in Chicago in January 1907 in a production starring Chrystal Herne (James and Katharine Herne’s daughter)—an unexpected critical and popular success so great that the directors wanted to take it to New York after an extended Chicago run. But Chrystal Herne had already signed a three-year contract with another company; so just at the play’s “great moment . . . there was no one to grasp it” (Edwards and Herne, James A. Herne, 69–73).

49. This distinguished audience recalls the “gathering of literary, social, and scientific luminaries such as only Boston could assemble” for the debates in 1860 between Louis Agassiz and Asa Gray over Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Though American assimilation of Darwin’s ideas may have been slower than British, Boston was an important center for debate and discussion of them. See Russett, Darwin in America, 9.

50. Hamlin Garland, “On the Road with James A. Herne,” Century Magazine, August 1914, 577, quoted in Hatlen, “‘Margaret Fleming’ and the Boston Independent Theatre,” 18 (emphasis added).

51. Edwards and Herne, James A. Herne, 54. Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) can hardly be dismissed as mere “sentimental melodrama”; while certainly melodramatic in many ways, it is also a politically engaged drama that tackles the issues of slavery and racism and in so doing provides a bracing antidote to the often-saccharine and reductive stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that were popular throughout the last few decades of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.

52. Bucks and Nethercot, “Ibsen and Herne’s Margaret Fleming,” 327–30.

53. Edwards and Herne, James A. Herne, 161nn.11, 13.

54. Despite the introduction of better copyright laws for dramatic authors in this period, “Herne did not publish his plays, fearing that they would be performed without his consent” (Arthur Hobson Quinn, “Act III of James A. Herne’s Griffith Davenport,” American Literature 24, no. 3 [1952]: 330, prefatory note).

55. Gary A. Richardson, for example, clearly bases his detailed plot summary and extended discussion of the play on the reconstruction, but only later mentions in passing that there are two versions, in American Drama from the Colonial Period Through World War I: A Critical History (New York: Twayne, 1993), 195.

56. See, for example, Donald Pizer, “An 1890 Account of Margaret Fleming,” American Literature 27, no. 2 (1955): 264–67, which reprints and discusses Hamlin Garland’s detailed plot synopsis of the play.

57. Boston Evening Transcript, July 8, 1890.

58. Tice L. Miller, “Plays and Playwrights: Civil War to 1896,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol. 2, 1870–1945, ed. Don Wilmeth and Christopher W. E. Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 254.

59. Perry, James A. Herne, 191.

60. James A. Herne, Margaret Fleming, rev. and ed. Mrs. James A. Herne, in Representative American Plays, ed. Quinn, 544. The play was also published in Myron Matlaw, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Plays (New York: Applause Books, 1967), with an introduction discussing the differences between the original (lost) version and Katharine Herne’s reconstruction. Perry also lays out these differences in James A. Herne, 190–92.

61. Edwards and Herne, James A. Herne, 164n.36.

62. Bucks and Nethercot, “Ibsen and Herne’s Margaret Fleming,” 317.

63. Herne, Margaret Fleming, 540 (emphasis added). Apparently, this breast-feeding scene was Katharine’s idea, according to Edwards and Herne, James A. Herne, 164.

64. Marc Robinson offers an insightful and persuasive analysis of this moment in light of Herne’s innovative realist aesthetics in The American Play, 1787–1900 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 117–25, arguing that this moment in particular exemplifies the play’s “hesitating realism” (124).

65. New York Spirit of the Times, May 9, 1891, quoted in Perry, James A. Herne, 158.

66. Thomas Russell Sullivan, quoted in ibid., 156.

67. New York Spirit of the Times, May 9, 1891, quoted in ibid., 158.

68. Perry, James A. Herne, 158.

70. Introduction to Wilkie Collins, Hide and Seek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), xvii.

72. Lillian Nayder, Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 77.

73. For particularly potent evidence that public breast-feeding is a contentious issue in the United States, see New York Times, October 21, 2003, and June 7, 2005.

74. Darwin, Descent of Man, 462.

75. Interspecies nursing has a long history, as Fildes notes in Breasts, Bottles and Babies, 272–73.

76. Bucks and Nethercot, “Ibsen and Herne’s Margaret Fleming,” 18.

77. William Winter, quoted in ibid., 318.

78. Don Wilmeth, ed., The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 426.

79. Herne, Margaret Fleming, 526–27.

81. Quoted in Pizer, “An 1890 Account of Margaret Fleming,” 266.

82. Richardson, American Drama, 190.

83. Ibid., 193. There are many theatrical variations on this theme, most notably Rachel Crothers’s A Man’s World (1910), in which Frank, a woman who like Margaret has adopted a child not her own, rejects her lover because of what he has done to the fallen woman. She honors the dead mother by chastising the man who ruined her and in so doing indicates that she finds fulfillment in her adopted son rather than in sexual love.

84. Boston Post, May 5, 1891, 4, quoted in Perry, James A. Herne, 158.

85. Hatlen, “‘Margaret Fleming’ and the Boston Independent Theatre,” 19.

86. Matthew Arnold, “The French Play in London,” Nineteenth Century, August 1879, 243, quoted in John Stokes, Resistible Theatres: Enterprise and Experiment in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: Elek Books, 1972), 4.

87. Sadiah Qureshi, in discussion with the author, April 2012. Sometimes spectators could pay extra to arrange private viewings of these display peoples in their homes, where conditions would have been more conducive to breast-feeding.

88. First performed in February 1901 (for a three-week run) and again in early February 1907, though no performance date is given. See James B. Sanders, André Antoine, directeur a l’Odéon (Paris: Minard, 1978). There is no record of performance in England, although the Athenaeum mentions Les Remplaçantes as slated for a “season of French plays at the Avenue” in 1904.

89. Margaret Wiley, “Mother’s Milk and Dombey’s Son,” Dickens Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1996): 225.

90. Darwin, Descent of Man, 143.

91. Brieux, Les Remplaçantes, 8 (stage directions).

92. Jeffrey D. Mason, “‘Affront or Alarm’: Performance, the Law and the ‘Female Breast’ from Janet Jackson to Crazy Girls,” New Theatre Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2005): 179.

94. Anne Varty, “The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Stage Baby,” New Theatre Quarterly 21 (2005): 218.

95. Claire Tomalin, quoted in ibid., 218.

98. Perry, James A. Herne, 159, 170–71.

99. Quoted in ibid., 53.

100. James A. Herne, Hearts of Oak, act 5, 314, in James A. Herne, Shore Acres and Other Plays, rev. and ed. Mrs. James A. Herne (New York: French, 1928).

101. Ibid., act 3, 284–85.

102. Boston Evening Transcript, quoted in Perry, James A. Herne, 244.

103. Herne, Shore Acres, act 4, 112.

104. Ibid., act 2, 73.

105. Ibid., act 1, 20.

106. Varty, “Rise and Fall,” 218–29.

107. Alex Roe, correspondence with the author, September 4, 2010. My thanks to Alex Roe for sharing these insights with me.

108. Ibid., September 2, 2010.

109. Martin Denton, review of Margaret Fleming, September 24, 2007, indie theater now, http://nytheatre.com/Review/martin-denton-2007-9-24-margaret-fleming (accessed October 28, 2014). Note that Denton does not mention the breast-feeding.

110. Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 125. See also Fildes, Wet Nursing.

111. Henrik Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop: Notes, Scenarios, and Drafts of the Modern Plays, trans. Arthur G. Chater (New York: Scribner, 1911), 12:174.

112. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 131.

113. See, especially, Shuttleworth, “Demonic Mothers,” 31–51.

114. The Interlopers was staged on September 15, 1913, at the Royalty Theatre, London.

115. H. M. Harwood, The Supplanters (London: Benn, 1926), 85.

117. Ibid. In Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Lonely People (1891), Kitty puts her husband above her child: “I believe I could sooner give the baby up than you” (Gerhart Hauptmann, Lonely People, in The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann, ed. Ludwig Lewisohn, vol. 3, Domestic Dramas [New York: Huebsch, 1922], act 2, 222).

118. Anne Varty, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 15. See also Marah Gubar, “The Drama of Precocity: Child Performers on the Victorian Stage,” in The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, ed. Dennis Denisoff (Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2008), 63–78. Hawkins confirms that for the social Darwinists: “Women and children occupy the same position as ‘savages’ in the scale of evolution” (Social Darwinism, 34).

119. See, for example, Golden, Social History of Wet-Nursing in America.

120. Wiley, “Mother’s Milk and Dombey’s Son,” 217.

121. Golden, Social History of Wet-Nursing in America, 127.

124. Sally Shuttleworth, “Tickling Babies: Gender, Authority, and ‘Baby Science,’” in Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature ed. Geoffrey Cantor et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 201. As Darwin’s biographers have observed, Darwin experimented frequently on his own babies, for instance, deliberately startling them into crying to note their instinctive physiological responses. See, for example, Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, vol. 1 of A Biography (London: Pimlico, 2003); and Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially chapter 12, “Experiments on Babies.”

125. Joseph Jacob, quoted in Shuttleworth, “Tickling Babies,” 205.

126. Shuttleworth, “Tickling Babies,” 209.

128. Herne, Margaret Fleming, 541.

129. Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 136.

130. Clement Scott, “Tares,” Theatre, March 1, 1888, 152. He also notes that Beringer herself admits drawing on Gustav Freitag’s Graf Waldemar (1850) for inspiration.

132. Tares: A Social Problem in Three Acts [no author given] (London: Miles, 1887). Printed as manuscript, for private circulation only. Lord Chamberlain Play Collection, 9.

136. Ibid., 60–62.

140. Oscar Wilde to unidentified correspondent, February 23, 1983, in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 353. I am indebted to Sos Eltis for pointing this letter out to me.

141. Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre, 136.

142. Quoted in Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre, 138. The play has been temporarily removed from the Lord Chamberlain collection in the British Library for conservation due to its fragile condition and can therefore not be consulted at this time. Crackanthorpe’s correspondence with Lady Randolph Churchill shows that she repeatedly tried to have The Turn of the Wheel published in the Anglo-Saxon Review; the Churchill papers indicate that it was rejected, even though she persevered for nearly a year. A novel called The Turn of the Wheel by Crackanthorpe’s son Hubert (who committed suicide in 1896, in his mid-twenties) was published in 1901, edited by Blanche, but its plot bears little resemblance to Powell’s description of Crackanthorpe’s play; certainly, there is no rejection of a baby.

143. Francine du Plessix Gray, foreword to Badinter, Myth of Motherhood, xii–xiii.

144. Garland, “On the Road,” 577, quoted in Hatlen, “‘Margaret Fleming’ and the Boston Independent Theatre,” 19.

145. “Oh come,” Janet says to her parents, “I could have got along quite well without a father if it comes to that.” She says her father has never done anything for her or her sister except “try and prevent us from doing something we wanted to do” (St. John Hankin, The Last of the De Mullins, in The Dramatic Works of St John Hankin, intro. John Drinkwater [London: Secker, 1912], 123).

146. Shuttleworth, “Demonic Mothers,” 39–40. See also Nurse’s comment to Juliet: “Were not I thine only nurse, I would say thou hadst sucked wisdom from thy teat” (Romeo and Juliet, I.iii, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage [New York: Viking, 1969], 864).

147. Hrdy, “Motherhood,” E57.

148. Perry, James A. Herne, 186–87.

150. Helen Hamilton Gardener, “Woman as an Annex,” in Facts and Fictions of Life, 132.

154. Gardener, “Moral Responsibility of Women,” 169.

155. Ibid., 153–55.

156. Ibid., 177–78.

158. Hankin, Last of the De Mullins, act 3, 126.

159. Eltis, Acts of Desire, 179.

160. Hankin, Last of the De Mullins, act 3, 126.

161. Eltis, Acts of Desire, 179n.68.

162. Hankin, Last of the De Mullins, act 3, 127.

163. Janet’s impulse may be eugenic—co-opting “women’s desire for the reproductive good of the race” (Eltis, Acts of Desire, 180)—but it could also be a case of desire for desire’s sake and for the fulfillment of the maternal urge, not necessarily to improve the race through its genetic stock.

164. Max Beerbohm, Last Theatres, 1904–1910 (London: Hart-Davis, 1970), 414.

165. Ibid., 413–15; originally reviewed December 12, 1908.

166. Sophie Treadwell, Constance Darrow, in Broadway’s Bravest Woman: Selected Writings of Sophie Treadwell, ed. Jerry Dickey and Miriam López-Rodriguez (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 107. Dickey points out that the play was retitled The High Cost and copyrighted in 1911 (“Treadwell the Dramatist,” 72).

167. Dickey, “Treadwell the Dramatist,” 73.

1. August Strindberg, “To the Heckler,” in Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 159, quoted in Tamsen Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 231n.75.

2. Michael Meyer, Strindberg: A Biography (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985), 30, 32.

3. Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt: Studies in Modern Drama from Ibsen to Genet (Chicago: Dee, 1991), 87.

5. Michael Robinson, introduction to Strindberg, Selected Essays, 12.

6. August Strindberg, “The Death’s Head Moth,” in Strindberg, Selected Essays, 150.

7. August Strindberg, “Indigo and the Line of Copper,” in Strindberg, Selected Essays, 158.

8. Meyer, Strindberg, 485, 492.

9. In addition to Strindberg, Selected Essays, see Sue Prideaux, Strindberg: A Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012).

10. Strindberg, “To the Heckler,” 159.

11. Robinson, editorial comment in a footnote to Strindberg, “The Mysticism of World History,” in Strindberg, Selected Essays, 267.

12. August Strindberg to Torsten Hedlund, October 25, 1895, in Strindberg, Selected Essays, 12–13.

13. Strindberg, “Mysticism of World History,” 207.

14. August Strindberg, “Whence We Have Come,” in Strindberg, Selected Essays, 248, 108–9.

15. August Strindberg, “In the Cemetery,” in Strindberg, Selected Essays, 142.

16. Strindberg, “Death’s Head Moth,” 154.

17. Strindberg, “Mysticism of World History,” 190.

18. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 17.

19. Ibid., 20; chapter 1 gives extended analysis of Strindberg.

20. Marvin Carlson, “Ibsen, Strindberg, and Telegony,” PMLA 100, no. 5 (1985): 774–82.

21. See, especially, Ross Shideler, Questioning the Father: From Darwin to Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg and Hardy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).

22. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), xxi. On Chekhov’s interaction with various popular notions about seeing, particularly those relevant to his work in medicine, see also Michael Finke, Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005)

23. Bunin, About Chekhov, xxi.

24. Downing Cless, Ecology and Environment in European Drama (New York: Routledge, 2010), 15.

26. Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (Farnham, Eng.: Ashgate, 2008), 244.

28. Michel Pharand, Bernard Shaw and the French (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 85.

30. Maternité (1903) was translated as Maternity by Mrs. Shaw and published along with Damaged Goods (trans. John Pollock) and The Three Daughters of M. Dupont (trans. St. John Hankin) in Three Plays by Brieux (New York: Brentano, 1911). This volume also includes a new version of Maternity translated by John Pollock. In his preface to Three Plays by Brieux, Shaw linked sexuality to creativity: “Sex is a necessary and healthy instinct; and its nurture and education is one of the most important uses of all art; and, for the present at all events, the chief use of the theatre.” Four years later, Shaw wrote another defense of Brieux, “The Play and Its Author”—two thousand words on La Femme Seule (1912), which Charlotte Shaw translated as Woman on Her Own (produced by the Actresses Franchise League, December 8–13, 1913). Shaw says in this preface that Brieux treats prostitution “much more disturbingly” than Shaw himself did in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which (although staged independently in 1902) was not granted a license for public performance until 1924.

31. Quoted in Pharand, Bernard Shaw, 89. In 1910, Bennett predicted, accurately, that “nothing can keep Brieux’s plays alive . . . because they are false to life” (96–97).

32. Julian B. Kaye, Bernard Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Tradition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 155.

33. William Archer to Bernard Shaw, August 1903, in Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, ed. Dan E. Laurence, vol. 2, 1898–1910 (London: Max Reinhardt, 1972), 356.

34. Bernard Shaw, preface to Back to Methuselah, in Prefaces by Bernard Shaw (London: Constable, 1934), 523.

36. Bernard Shaw to Charles Rowley, February 11, 1907, in Collected Letters, 2:672; in a letter to Julie Moore (October 15, 1909), he likewise refers to “the chapter of accidents called Natural Selection” (873), a phrase that recurs in his other writings on evolution.

37. J. D. Bernal, “Shaw the Scientist,” in G.B.S. 90: Aspects of Bernard Shaw’s Life and Work, ed. S. Winsten (London: Hutchinson, 1946), 94, 96.

38. Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, part 2, in The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (London: Odhams Press, 1934), 880. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Shaw’s plays are from this edition.

39. Ishrat Lindblad, “Creative Evolution and Shaw’s Dramatic Art: With Special Reference to Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah” (Ph.D. diss., Uppsala University, 1971), 10.

40. Bernard Shaw to Augustin Hamon, January 9, 1907, in Collected Letters,2:670. I am indebted to Sos Eltis for pointing this letter out.

41. Shaw, preface to Back to Methuselah, 492. For a consideration of Schopenhauer’s interpretation of evolution of species in terms of a theatrical analogy, see Kaye, Bernard Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Tradition, 116.

42. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 49.

43. Although Shaw “admitted to appropriating from him [Bergson] the expressions évolution créatrice and élan vital” (Pharand, Bernard Shaw, 246), his ideas about creative evolution had been fermenting for at least four years before Bergson’s terminology became known to him, as Man and Superman makes clear.

44. George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 187.

45. J. L. Wisenthal, Shaw’s Sense of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 132. See also J. L. Wisenthal, The Marriage of Contraries: Bernard Shaw’s Middle Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974).

46. Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, act 1, 340, 342. Ramsden is described in the opening stage directions as “an Evolutionist from the publication of the Origin of Species.”

47. Ibid., act 1, 340. In the Don Juan in Hell scene, the Devil is “enormously less vital than the woman” (act 3, 372). John Osborne complained in a letter to the Guardian that Shaw made women into mere “bullies”; my thanks to Michael Billington for pointing this out.

48. Shaw, Man and Superman, act 4, 403.

49. Ibid., act 1, 346.

50. Ibid., act 3, 384, 378. See also Shaw’s Misalliance, one long theatrical discussion of female sexual selection; in one scene, for example, Hypatia declares “I’ll catch you” as “she dashes off in pursuit” of Percival, who has “bolted” from her (626), and in the end she suggests to her father, “Papa: buy the brute for me” (640).

51. Bernard Shaw, You Never Can Tell, act 2, 197.

53. Shaw, Misalliance, 639.

54. Shaw, Man and Superman, act 1, 337. As with so many of his contemporaries, Shaw uses “race” and “species” interchangeably. See, for example, Man and Superman, act 4, 392.

55. Ibid., act 3, 378. Shaw also acknowledges the self-sacrifice implicit in childbirth as woman must “risk her life to create another life” (act 1, 343).

56. A full consideration of Shaw’s women as the Life Force can be found in the section “Woman: The Biological Agent of Evolution” in Lindblad, “Creative Evolution and Shaw’s Dramatic Art.” He notes how frequently Shaw’s plays characterize women in animal similes; thus, Ann Whitefield is a “boa-constrictor,” “grizzly bear,” and “seabird” devouring the “scrap of fish” that is Tanner.

57. Shaw, Man and Superman, act 3, 375.

59. Ibid., 378. On the wider cultural resonance of the megatherium, see Gowan Dawson, “‘Like a Megatherium Smoking a Cigar’: Darwin’s Beagle Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture,” in Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science, ed. Valerie Purton (London: Anthem, 2013), 81–96. The megatherium, which crops up again in Back to Methuselah, is a “scrapped experiment,” a favorite motif of Shaw’s, and his invocation of this beast is, like so much of his thinking on evolution, redolent of earlier theories of evolutionary already being displaced.

60. Shaw, Back to Methuselah, part 2, 886.

61. Ibid., 888. Shaw’s faith in Creative Evolution endured; in the preface to On the Rocks (1933), for example, he calls it his “religion.”

62. Strindberg, “Mysticism of World History,” 219.

64. Shaw, Misalliance, 611.

65. Shaw, Back to Methuselah, part 2, 885.

66. James Harrison, “Destiny or Descent? Responses to Darwin,” Mosaic 14, no. 1 (2002): 114–15.

67. Shaw, Back to Methuselah, part 2, 866–67; Alfred Russel Wallace, “Evolution and Character,” Fortnightly Review, January 1908.

68. Shaw, preface to Back to Methuselah, 490.

69. Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

70. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 270.

71. Bernard Shaw, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (produced by the Stage Society in its 1909/1910 season) and The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932) both admit that the Life Force makes mistakes on the road to perfection, as witness disease, evil, and so on.

72. Shaw, Back to Methuselah, part 5, 948.

74. Bernard Shaw, Too True to Be Good: A Political Extravaganza, act 2, 1150.

75. Lindblad, “Creative Evolution and Shaw’s Dramatic Art,” 52.

76. Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 43.

77. Jeff Wallace, “T. H. Huxley, Science and Cultural Agency,” in Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers, ed. Purton, 154.

78. Back to Methuselah had its world premiere in 1922 at the New York Theatre Guild. In October 1921, one part of it (part 5, the final section) had been produced at the Court Theatre, to generally positive responses. The play in its entirety was first produced in England in 1924.

79. Lindblad, “Creative Evolution and Shaw’s Dramatic Art,” 48.

80. Shaw, Back to Methuselah, part 5, 938.

81. Wisenthal, Shaw’s Sense of History, 134.

82. Shaw, Man and Superman, act 3, 375.

83. Shaw, Back to Methuselah, part 5, 962.

84. Maurice Valency, The Cart and the Trumpet: The Plays of George Bernard Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 362.

85. Louis Crompton, Shaw the Dramatist (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 183–84.

86. Shaw, Back to Methuselah, part 3, 905.

87. Shaw, preface to Back to Methuselah, 489.

88. Pharand, Bernard Shaw, 93.

89. Lindblad, “Creative Evolution and Shaw’s Dramatic Art,” 114 (emphasis added).

90. Bernard Shaw, preface to Getting Married, in Prefaces, 16.

91. Lindblad, “Creative Evolution and Shaw’s Dramatic Art,” 86.

92. Jill Davis, “Women Defined: The New Woman and the New Life,” in The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914, ed. Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford (London: Prentice-Hall, 1992), 27–29.

93. Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 177.

94. Kaye, Bernard Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition, vii.

95. Bernal, “Shaw the Scientist,” 93. Yet, far from dismissing it, Bernal wrote that the preface to Back to Methuselah “should form part of every biological student’s education because it shows better than any other single piece of writing both the social origins and the social effects of Darwin’s teaching” (96).

96. The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–61, ed. Donald Gallup (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 89.

97. Shaw, Too True to Be Good, act 3, 1157.

98. Ibid., act 1, 1132.

99. Maria Grazia Gregori, “Movement as a Metaphor of Time: An Interview with Luca Ronconi,” trans. Bruna Tortorella (manuscript, 2002), kindly given to me by Pino Donghi. Ronconi is specifically referring to playwrights engaging with science; he has directed several science-related theatre productions, including Infinities (to which his comments specifically refer) and Biblioetica. See also Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

100. The Admirable Crichton was produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre (November 4, 1902), under the management of Charles Frohman and the direction of Dion Boucicault; it ran for 828 performances.

101. Hubert Henry Davies, Mrs. Gorringe’s Necklace, in The Plays of Hubert Henry Davies, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921), quoted in Hugh Walpole, introduction, 1:xviii.

102. Davies, Mrs. Gorringe’s Necklace, 73–74.

103. Wilson Barrett and Louis N. Parker, Man and His Makers, LCP Add 53692 B. The play was performed at the Lyceum in October 1899.

104. Ibid., act 2, 10.

105. Ibid., act 4, 2.

106. Era, October 14, 1899; Lloyds Weekly, October 8, 1899, 13.

107. Morning Post, October 9, 1899, 6.

108. Pall Mall Gazette, October 9, 1899, 3.

109. Max Beerbohm, Last Theatres, 1904–1910 (London: Hart-Davis, 1970), 535.

110. The Mollusc premiered at Wyndham’s on May 12, 1903.

111. “Plays of the Month,” Play Pictorial 53, no. 320 (1928): 4.

112. Hubert Henry Davies, The Mollusc, in Late Victorian Plays, 1890–1914, ed. George Rowell (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), act 1, 174. The reference to the Germans here is worth noting, perhaps indicating their status as recognized leaders in the biological sciences and proponents of morphological studies as opposed to the geneticists led by Bateson.

113. Davies, Mollusc, 322.

114. “Plays of the Month,” 4.

115. Percival P. Howe, Dramatic Portraits (London: Secker, 1913), 215–16.

116. Athenaeum, October 26, 1907, 527.

117. Walpole, introduction to Plays of Hubert Henry Davies, xx.

118. Max Beerbohm, Saturday Review, November 2, 1907, in Last Theatres, 392, 332.

119. Rebecca Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History’s Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 10.

120. Ibid., 248–49, 246.

122. Penny Farfan, “Comic Form and Conservative Reaction: Hubert Henry Davies’s The Mollusc,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 18, no. 1 (2003): 45–56.

123. Beerbohm, Last Theatres, 332.

124. Doormats was staged at Wyndham’s (October 3, 1912), a high-profile production starring Gerald du Maurier as Noel Gale and Nina Boucicault as Josephine. The Playgoer and Society Illustrated ran a twenty-two-page feature on the play in its December 1912 issue.

125. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre, 59.

126. Hubert Henry Davies, Doormats, in Plays of Hubert Henry Davies, vol. 2, act 3, 201 (emphasis in original).

127. Ibid., act 3, 200.

128. Ibid., act 3, 206.

129. Ibid., act 3, 200 (emphasis in original).

130. Howe, Dramatic Portraits, 216, 218.

131. Daniel J. Kevles, “Genetics in the United States and Great Britain, 1890–1930,” in Biology, Medicine and Society, 1840–1940, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 206–8.

132. Ibid., 203–4.

134. Quoted in Donald Mackenzie, “Sociobiologies in Competition,” in Biology, Medicine and Society, ed. Webster, 267.

136. Quoted in ibid., 282.

137. Bookman, March 1922, 277.

139. Ted Bain, “St John Hankin,” in British Playwrights, 1880–1956: A Research and Production Sourcebook, ed. William W. Demastes and Katherine E. Kelly (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 207–8.

140. William H. Phillips, St. John Hankin: Edwardian Mephistopheles (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979), 53.

142. Ibid., 51, 50. Jean Chothia mentions “plays that concerned themselves with Natural Selection” such as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Granville-Barker’s The Marrying of Ann Leete and The Voysey Inheritance, and Hankin’s The Last of the De Mullins (introduction to The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays, ed. Jean Chothia [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], xxiv).

143. Phillips, St. John Hankin, 59, 61.

144. The play was performed on February 14, 1918, at the New Theatre, London; it was published in 1922 by Heinemann, though the copyright page gives the date 1917.

145. I have been unable to find evidence of Edward F. Benson’s book as source material for Arthur Wing Pinero’s play, though this would be entirely plausible. Benson also employs terms associated with evolution elsewhere, as in his highly successful Dodo (1983), reflecting their absorption into popular discourse.

146. Arthur Wing Pinero, The Freaks: An Idyll of Suburbia (London: Heinemann, 1922), 37.

147. Tatler, March 13, 1918. In “Claude Shepperson (An Appreciation),” Alfred Noyes discusses Shepperson’s “infallible instinct for beauty,” which was his “distinguishing characteristic” as an artist; he eschewed “the ugliness of modernity” (Catalogue of the Memorial Exhibition of Works by the Late Claude A. Shepperson [London: Ernest Brown and Phillips, Leicester Galleries], Exhibition 332 [March–April 1922], 7, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford).

148. Penny Griffin, Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones (London: Macmillan, 1991), 162.

149. Arthur Pinero, March 19, 1918, in The Collected Letters of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, ed. J. P. Wearing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 269–70.

150. Pinero, Freaks, 43.

153. Ibid., 100–101.

154. Ibid., 107–8.

155. Christine C. Ferguson, “Elephant Talk: Language and Enfranchisement in the Merrick Case,” in Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. Marlene Tromp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 115.

156. For example, the script indicates that the play is set “before the War—those far-off days when, in our ignorance, small troubles seemed great, and minor matters important.” Pinero thought of the play as wartime amusement: “The little piece is simple in subject and treatment, and has no higher aim than to amuse—which I take to be the function of the theatre at the present moment. There are more ways than one of trying to be amusing, you will say. I must hope The Freaks will not be judged as falling into the lowest category” (Arthur Pinero, January 25, 1918, in Collected Letters, 269). See also Griffin, Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones, 161.

157. Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 175.

159. “The Re-Appearance of Sir Arthur Pinero,” Saturday Review, February 23, 1918, 156.

160. The sensational and shocking film Freaks (directed by Tod Browning, MGM, 1932) has a similar story but is far more explicit in the suggestion of sexual encounters between freaks and nonfreaks.

161. Arthur Pinero to Louis E. Shipman, January 7, 1918, in Collected Letters, 269. His deprecation of the play carries on to his biographer, who calls it an “inconsequential comedy” (John Dawick, Pinero: A Theatrical Life [Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1993], 344).

162. Griffin, Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones, 159.

163. Michael M. Chemers, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 4.

165. Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims” (1904), in The Fin de Siecle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900, ed. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 332–33.

166. Charles Darwin, “Autobiography,” in Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley: Autobiographies, ed. Gavin de Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 22.

167. Wolff, Mendel’s Theatre. On the ubiquity of the eugenics movement, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985); Geoffrey R. Searle, “Eugenics and Class,” in Biology, Medicine and Society, ed. Webster, 214–42; Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), which among other things reminds us of the respectability eugenics once enjoyed (Winston Churchill was a proponent). See also Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Early promoters of eugenics with particular relevance for my discussion include Clémence Royer, the first French translator of On the Origin of Species, and Helen Hamilton Gardener, popular lecturer and feminist writer whose work influenced James A. Herne, as discussed in previous chapters.

168. Searle, “Eugenics and Class,” 238 (emphasis added).

169. Ibid., 230, 239–40. Searle notes that “the Fabians never joined the Eugenics Society” (230).

170. Pharand, Bernard Shaw, 93.

171. Bernard Shaw, preface to Misalliance, in Prefaces, 51.

172. Searle, “Eugenics and Class,” 231.

173. Adam Neave, Woman and Superwoman: A Comedy of 1963 in Three Acts (London: Griffiths, 1914), 10.

174. Ibid., act 2, 36.

175. Ibid., act 1, 18.

176. Bookman, December 1914, 106.

177. H. M. Harwood, The Supplanters (London: Benn, 1926), 12. In Susan Glaspell’s play Springs Eternal (1943), a character utters a sarcastic jibe at the heart of Harwood’s criticism of Beatrice: “I’ve always heard that a woman who never had children of her own knows just how to bring them up” (Susan Glaspell: The Complete Plays, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and J. Ellen Gainor [Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010], 380).

178. Harwood, Supplanters, 15. In The Return of the Prodigal, Eustace declares: “England is covered with hospitals for the incurably diseased and asylums for the incurably mad. If a tenth of the money were spent on putting such people out of the world, and the rest were used in preventing the healthy people from falling sick, and the sane people from starving, we should be a wholesomer nation” (St. John Hankin, The Return of the Prodigal [New York: Samuel French, 1907], 4:97).

179. Harwood, Supplanters, 16. In 1893, Helen Hamilton Gardener argued similarly against erecting more and more “charitable and eleemosynary institutions” to house the unfit when positive eugenics would prevent their birth in the first place (“Environment: Can Heredity Be Modified?” in Facts and Fictions of Life [Boston: Fenno, 1895], 298–99).

180. Karl Pearson, Tuberculosis, Heredity and Environment (1912), quoted in Searle, “Eugenics and Class,” 225.

181. M. J. S. Hodge, “England”, in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, ed. Thomas F. Glick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 17.

182. Harwood, Supplanters, 17.

184. Ibid., 17 (emphasis in original).

185. Brian Harrison, “Women’s Health and the Women’s Movement,” in Biology, Medicine and Society, ed. Webster, 61.

186. Harwood, Supplanters, 19.

187. Elizabeth Baker, Bert’s Girl: A Comedy in Four Acts, Contemporary British Dramatists, vol. 56 (London: Benn, 1927), act 1, 12. The play was produced at the Court Theatre, under Sir Barry Jackson, in March 1927. I am indebted to Sos Eltis for drawing it and others by Baker to my attention.

188. Ibid., act 1, 30; act 3, 75.

189. Ibid., act 2, 43.

190. Ibid., act 2, 47–48.

191. Ibid., act 2, 53.

192. Ibid., act 2, 48–49.

193. Ibid., act 2, 51.

194. Ibid., act 3, 66.

195. Ibid., act 3, 62.

196. Ibid., act 3, 67.

197. Ibid., act 4, 98.

198. Ibid., act 4, 99.

199. Pinero’s The Mind-the-Paint Girl likewise revolves around breeding and puts the burden of producing fitter humans on women because men (especially upper-class ones) are inadequate. One character wonders why lately so many “weedy” young men have married sturdy, “keen-witted young women full of the joy of life, with strong frames, beautiful hair and fine eyes, and healthy pink gums and big white teeth” (Arthur Wing Pinero, The Mind-the-Paint Girl [London: Heinemann, 1912], 1:20). The play slyly suggests that in their liaisons with upper-class men the actresses are doing eugenic work; they will be “the salvation of the aristocracy in this country and the long run!” (act 1, 21, and repeated in act 4, 234).

1. Review of Reviews, January–June 1904, 615. See also Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 133–88.

2. Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 210.

3. Henrik Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop: Notes, Scenarios, and Drafts of the Modern Plays, trans. Arthur G. Chater (New York: Scribner, 1911), 12:294.

4. Eltis, Acts of Desire, 175.

5. Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 144–45.

7. The actress Eleonora Duse was hit hard by menopause at age fifty, “shipwrecked by a natural process shared by all women, yet one no playwright had ever written about” (Helen Sheehy, Eleonora Duse [New York: Knopf, 2003], 250).

8. John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 187.

9. St. John Hankin, The Last of the De Mullins (London: Fifield, 1909), act 3, 124.

10. Ibid., act 3, 125.

11. Stanley Houghton, Hindle Wakes, in Late Victorian Plays, 1890–1914, ed. George Rowell (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), act 3, 503.

12. Hankin shares Bernard Shaw’s “sense of the life force, the biological imperative underlying human activity and relationship . . . [and] is alert to the contemporary attention to Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest” (Jean Chothia, introduction to The New Woman and Other Emancipated Woman Plays [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], xxv). Hankin knew Brieux’s Three Daughters of M Dupont well and probably wrote an unpublished essay on it in 1904. See William H. Phillips, St. John Hankin: Edwardian Mephistopheles (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979), 86, 82. The essay is called “The Propagandist as Playwright,” and it lauds Brieux’s “masterpiece.”

13. See, especially, Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

14. Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 138.

15. Gillian Beer, “Systems and Extravagance: Darwin, Meredith, Tennyson,” in Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science, ed. Valerie Purton (London: Anthem, 2013), 140.

16. Ibid., 147–48.

17. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Human Selection,” Fortnightly Review, September 1890, 329, http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S427.htm (accessed October 10, 2013).

19. George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 201.

20. Ibid., 177, 178. See also Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 315.

21. As Levine points out, “virtually nobody” believed in it in Darwin’s lifetime or, indeed, until very recently: “The scientific community found it impossible to credit the idea that the female could have had much to do with evolutionary development.” The deep cultural “hostility” to the idea of female choice makes Darwin’s theory of sexual selection all the more “thrilling, . . . inventive and productive.” It also makes Darwin “a kind of ideological hero in spite of himself” (Darwin Loves You, 189, 200).

22. Charles Webster, ed., Biology, Medicine and Society, 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3.

23. Dorothy Brandon, Wild Heather, Lord Chamberlain Play collection, 1917/17. The play was produced at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester (August 1917) and later transferred to London’s Strand Theatre. I am indebted to Sos Eltis for bringing this play to my attention; see also her discussion of it in Acts of Desire, 208.

24. Bernard Shaw, Misalliance, in The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw (London: Odhams Press, 1934), 610.

25. Throughout The Descent of Man, Darwin frequently refers to the male of a species having “special organs of prehension for holding” the female securely while mating (The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond [London: Penguin, 2004], 241).

26. Martha Vicinus, Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972).

27. Marie Stopes to Alfred Sutro, November 1927, quoted in Esther Beth Sullivan, “Vectia, Man-Made Censorship, and the Drama of Marie Stopes,” Theatre Survey 46, no. 1 (2005): 85.

28. Marjorie Strachey, “Women and the Modern Drama,” The Englishwoman, May 1911, quoted in Maria DiCenzo, “Feminism, Theatre Criticism, and the Modern Drama,” South Central Review 25, no. 1 (2008): 51.

29. Cicely Hamilton, Life Errant (London: Dent, 1935), 55.

30. See, for example, Brian Harrison, “Women’s Health and the Women’s Movement in Britain: 1840–1940,” in Biology, Medicine and Society, ed. Webster, 64.

31. The autobiographical basis for this can be found in Ruth Hall, Marie Stopes: A Biography (London: Virago, 1977).

32. Marie Stopes, A Banned Play and a Preface on the Censorship (London: Bale, Danielsson, 1926), 113. See also Eltis, Acts of Desire, 206–7.

33. Sullivan, “Vectia,” 84.

34. Stopes, Banned Play, 143 (emphasis in original).

35. Sullivan, “Vectia,” 80.

36. Elizabeth Baker, Partnership: A Comedy in Three Acts (New York: French, 1921), 38. The play also suggests an environmentalist stance in depicting Fawcett as anti-urban and back-to-nature; being on the hills at daybreak on a spring morning, he says, shows you real color, and “a human being then seems an intruder, and you step softly as if not sure of your place on earth. Your cocksuredness gets rubbed” (61).

37. H. M. Harwood, The Supplanters (London: Benn, 1926), 80.

38. Bernard Shaw, Getting Married, in Complete Plays, 551.

39. Harwood, Supplanters, 86.

41. Saturday Review, September 20, 1913, 360.

42. Academy, September 27, 1913, 401.

43. Harwood, Supplanters, 68.

44. See the discussion of marriage’s enduring popularity in Eltis, Acts of Desire, 201–2; and Martin Pugh, We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Vintage, 2009), 145.

45. Eltis, Acts of Desire, 201–2, citing Pugh, We Danced All Night, 160.

47. Darwin, Descent of Man, 656.

49. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 484.

55. Elizabeth Robins, The Silver Lotus, act 1, 4 (in copy of typescript, Fales Collection, New York, kindly sent to me by Joanne E. Gates); each act begins at p. 1.

56. Joanne E. Gates, Elizabeth Robins, 1862–1952: Actress, Novelist, Feminist (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 88. Angela V. John, Robins’s other biographer, does not comment on the play, in Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life (London: Routledge, 1995).

57. Robins, Silver Lotus, act 1, 7.

58. Ibid., act 1, 13.

59. Ibid., act 2, 6.

60. Ibid., act 1, 21.

61. Ibid., act 1, 24.

62. Ibid., act 2, 8.

63. Ibid., act 2, 9.

64. Ibid., act 2, 30.

65. Ibid., act 2, 27.

66. Ibid., act 2, 34.

67. Ibid., act 2, 8.

68. Gates, Elizabeth Robins, 89.

70. Though neither of Robins’s biographers mentions this coincidence, it is possible that Robins had known about or even seen James A. Herne’s play, since she was working in Boston where it was performed, establishing her acting career at the time. In January 1889, Drifting Apart was in Boston and was seen and admired by the young Hamlin Garland (discussed at length in chapter 4), whose brother Franklin was an actor who lived with him in Boston, suggesting a possible further connection to Robins. Playwrights continued to mine the idea of hereditary addiction—for example, in Wilson Barrett and Louis N. Parker’s Man and His Makers (1899). An amateur science enthusiast, Sir Henry Faber, declares that his would-be son-in-law comes from a long line of drunkards and drug addicts and that in their conceptions of heredity, “Darwin, Henley, Spencer, Nisbet, Nordau, Zola and Lombroso are all perfectly right!” (Licensing copy of Man and His Makers, licensed October 26, 1899 [LC Add 53692 B], act 1, 3).

71. The play was an adaptation of a Swedish story by Elin Ameen called “Befriad” (Freed), and under Swedish law, a woman guilty of infanticide was not sentenced to death but to imprisonment. William Archer states in his introduction to Alan’s Wife that Robins showed him the Swedish magazine Ur Dagens Krönika of January 1891 containing “Befriad” ([Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins,] Alan’s Wife, a Dramatic Study in Three Scenes. First Acted at the Independent Theatre in London, ed. Jacob T. Grein [London: Henry, 1893], xi). Unpublished letters by Robins and Bell from 1892 indicate that their working title for the adaptation was “Mother’s Hands,” Fales Collection, New York University Library.

72. Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, “‘It Was Ugly’: Maternal Instinct on Stage at the Fin de Siècle,” Women: A Cultural Review 23, no. 2 (2012): 216–34.

73. Henrik Ibsen, Samlede Digterverker (Kristiania [Oslo]: Gyldendal, 1922), 5:378 (my translation).

74. Ibsen, From Ibsen’s Workshop, 439.

76. Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660–1900, vol. 4, Early Nineteenth Century Drama, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), and vol. 5, Late Nineteenth Century Drama, 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). The Cataract of the Ganges! or, The Rajah’s Daughter opened at Drury Lane on October 27, 1823.

77. Betsy Bolton, “Saving the Rajah’s Daughter: Spectacular Logic in Moncrieff’s Cataract of the Ganges,” European Romantic Review 17, no. 4 (2006): 481.

78. Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 138.

79. Ibid., 138–39.

80. Quoted in ibid., 139.

82. Nicoll lists an unknown author’s drama called Infanticide at Queen’s in 1831, in History of English Drama, 4:482.

83. Review of Alexandra, Bristol Mercury, March 11, 1893, 8.

84. Review of Jeanie Deans, Aberdeen Weekly Journal, May 30, 1899, 4. Though many theatrical adaptations of Scott’s novel were made, the only one called Jeanie Deans was by Dion Boucicault (New York, 1860). See Ernest Reynolds, Early Victorian Drama, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Heffer, 1936), 140.

85. Review of The Scarlet Dye, Era, February 9, 1887, 15.

86. Arthur B. Walkley, review of Alan’s Wife, The Speaker, May 6, 1893, quoted in Archer, introduction to [Bell and Robins,] Alan’s Wife, xxix.

87. Darwin, Descent of Man, 659.

89. Ibid., 141. Darwin relies on others’ reports in many of these instances.

92. Glenn Hausfater and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, eds., Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Aldine Transaction Press, 2008), xi. The editors argue that “the evolutionary importance of infanticide and related phenomenon [sic]” have been “heretofore overlooked,” and that “infanticide has only recently come to be regarded as a biologically significant phenomenon” (xi, xiii).

93. Grein, editor’s preface to [Bell and Robins,] Alan’s Wife, vi.

94. Archer, introduction to [Bell and Robins,] Alan’s Wife, xlvi. Only years later were Robins and Bell revealed as the authors/adapters; they had elected anonymity most likely because they feared that if their gender were known, it would damage the response to the play even more. Even Grein’s preface goes so far as to refer to the play (twice) as one of the finest and truest tragedies “ever written by a modern Englishman.” He further adds, “I am not able to divulge the name of the author, which, in deference to my solemn promise to Miss Robins [who was playing the main character], I have not even endeavoured to ascertain” (viii). Archer refers to the author as “he” throughout his lengthy introduction.

95. John, Elizabeth Robins, 127.

96. Archer, introduction to [Bell and Robins,] Alan’s Wife, xiii (emphasis added). Not showing the infanticide would not necessarily have lessened its intensity for the audience. In the Finnish playwright Minna Canth’s play Anna-Liisa (1895), the act of infanticide has taken place four years before the play begins, but it is vividly recalled by the protagonist, who was fifteen at the time and is now engaged to a man who knows nothing of her past. The infanticide is described so graphically that it is arguably far more uncomfortable for the audience than Jean’s swift crime, as Anna-Liisa dwells at length on the baby’s physicality, whereas Jean’s act is oddly more symbolic than real for an audience that never sees the baby itself.

97. Katherine E. Kelly, “Alan’s Wife: Mother Love and Theatrical Sociability in London of the 1890s,” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 3 (2004): 550. In her memoir Both Sides of the Curtain (1940), Robins recalls that the work of aspiring female playwrights in the 1890s went into “an unmarked grave,” and that women in theatre generally were subjected to “slavery . . . the unworthy bondage of the successful as well as the unsuccessful women of the stage” (quoted in Kerry Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 158). In an unpublished sequel to these memoirs, Whither and How, Robins is even more forceful in her condemnation of 1890s theatre with regard to women. She quotes her own diary kept at the time, in which she imagined a theatre made up of “an association of workers” rather than monopolized by any individual such as George Alexander, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, or Henry Irving (Robins, quoted in Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre, 159). Her founding in 1891 of the Joint Management with Marion Lea was a step toward realizing this dream. See Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890–1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997).

98. McDonagh, Child Murder, 179.

99. John, Elizabeth Robins, 163.

100. Kelly, “Alan’s Wife,” 558.

101. McDonagh, Child Murder, 180.

102. Sheila Stowell, A Stage of Their Own, quoted in Penny Farfan, Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.

103. Elizabeth Robins, Discretion (manuscript, Fales Collection).

104. John, Elizabeth Robins, 163.

105. Susan Carlson, “Conflicted Politics and Circumspect Comedy: Women’s Comic Playwriting in the 1890s,” in Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 266.

106. Grein, editor’s preface to [Bell and Robins,] Alan’s Wife, viii.

107. In Anna-Liisa, the baby-killing mother likewise refuses to speak, though this is temporary. Her husband-to-be complains, “You can hear what they’re accusing you of, but you don’t/say a word.” She becomes lifeless, immobile, “like a statue. . . . The poor thing can’t see or hear anything any more” (Minna Canth, Anna-Liisa, in Portraits of Courage: Plays by Finnish Women, ed. S. E. Wilmer [Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1997], 77, 79, 73–74).

108. Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago, 1981), 44.

109. Archer, introduction to [Bell and Robins,] Alan’s Wife, xii.

110. Sally Shuttleworth, “Demonic Mothers: Ideologies and Bourgeois Motherhood in the Mid-Victorian Era,” in Rewriting the Victorians, ed. Linda M. Shires (London: Routledge, 1992), 36.

111. Archer, introduction to [Bell and Robins,] Alan’s Wife, xxiv.

112. McDonagh, Child Murder, 180.

113. In this regard, the translation of the original title “Befriad” becomes absolutely central. In a letter to Robins as they worked on their translation/adaptation, Bell wrote: “Let me implore you to call it Set Free. . . . The last sentence of the play ends w. it. do do say you like it” (Florence Bell to ER, November 9, 1892, Fales Collection).

114. Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins, Alan’s Wife, in New Woman Plays, ed. Linda Fitzsimmons and Viv Gardner (London: Methuen, 1991), 10–11.

115. Angelique Richardson, “The Life Sciences: ‘Everybody Nowadays Talks About Evolution,’” in A Concise Companion to Modernism, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 18. See also Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

116. For a critique of this trend, see Anna Farkas, “Between Orthodoxy and Rebellion: Women’s Drama in England, 1890–1918” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 2010).

117. ER to Florence Bell, probably November 1892, Fales Collection.

118. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, eds., Modern French Theatre: The Avant-Garde, Dada and Surrealism, an Anthology of Plays (New York: Dutton, 1964), xvi.

119. Guillaume Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tiresias, in ibid., 70.

120. Guillaume Apollinaire, preface to Les Mamelles de Tiresias, in ibid., 58.

121. Apollinaire, Les Mamelles de Tiresias, 80.

122. Susan Glaspell, Bernice, in Susan Glaspell: The Complete Plays, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi and J. Ellen Gainor (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2010), act 2, 103.

123. Chains of Dew was performed in April 1922, though probably written around 1920. See Susan Glaspell, Chains of Dew, in Complete Plays, 125.

124. Ibid. Note Emma Goldman’s interest in theatre as in the previously mentioned lectures published as The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (Boston: Badger, 1914).

125. Eltis notes that an earlier draft of the play submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for licensing ended “not with Vida identifying herself as particularly suited to political activism because of her childlessness, but rather with a wider identification of herself with all vulnerable women” (Acts of Desire, 171). The line indicating this was deleted in this licensing copy.

126. Mary Papke, Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), 73.

127. Barbara Ozieblo and Jerry Dickey, Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell: American Modernist Women Dramatists (London: Routledge, 2008), 38.

128. Michael Billington gave Chains of Dew four of five stars and called the play “astonishing” and “amazing,” in “Glaspell Shorts,” Guardian, April 9, 2008, www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/apr/09/theatre (accessed October 12, 2013).

129. Patricia Knight, “Women and Abortion in Victorian and Edwardian England,” History Workshop 4 (1977): 57–68; Leslie Reagan, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

130. Eltis, Acts of Desire, 208. Although the play was refused a license initially, Barker presented it privately in two performances sponsored by the Stage Society at the Imperial Theatre in November 1907, playing Trebell. The play was finally licensed in 1920 and performed in 1936, though in a rewritten version. See Eric Salmon, Granville Barker: A Secret Life (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983). Salmon’s study provides a detailed comparison of passages from both versions of the play.

131. Salmon, Granville Barker, 143. Salmon argues that Waste is about “the clash, at the very centre of life, of the natural forces of creation with the natural forces of destruction, which bafflingly co-exist in one life, in all life” (142).

132. Ibid., 143. Harwood indirectly caused the revision of the play; he offered to produce it at Ambassador’s Theatre, so it was resubmitted to the Censor in 1920, though not performed then despite being given a license.

133. Granville Barker, Waste, quoted in Salmon, Granville Barker, 159; he gives no citation for this excerpt from the play.

134. Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women! in New Woman, ed. Chothia, act 3, 198.

135. Eltis, Acts of Desire, 170.

136. Abortion was rejected by the Provincetown Players and not performed in O’Neill’s lifetime; though published in Ten “Lost” Plays of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Bennett Cerf (London: Cape, 1964), it was virtually unknown until staged (without sets or costumes) during the O’Neill Festival in 1999 to mark the reopening of the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. As with Chains of Dew, the play was a revelation to critics and audiences, a “stunning surprise . . . an emotional roller coaster of a play” (Les Gutman, review of Abortion, CurtainUp, www.curtainup.com/oneillreport.html [accessed October 13, 2009]). Tennessee Williams adapted this dramatic situation in Sweet Bird of Youth, in which a “townie” youth gets a rich girl pregnant, she has a botched abortion, and her father viciously avenges her death. However, O’Neill frames abortion within an evolutionary discourse that is absent from the Williams play.