W. G. Wills, Dramatist and Painter

Abstract

THE poetry of the stage-play is as far from the highest poetry as the drama of the poet from the requirements of the stage.But, measured with those who have devoted poetical gifts to practical stage-work, the author of i Olivia ' and ' Charles I.' may fairly be considered the poetic dramatist of the Victorian era.Even in the height of his fame, however, W. GL Wills was personally so little known, and was so free from self-advertise- ment, that his biographer is under a disadvantage, for his subject is but a name.He had many claims to rank high among his literary contempo- raries.He restored poetry to the stage at a time when the poetic drama was supposed to be dead.He successfully took up the thread of history plays when managers were saying that Shakespeare spelled ruin.His dramas were literature to the cultured, while they were human nature to the crowd, thus acquiring among all classes a wide- spread popularity.Some of them, like the two I B 2 W. G. WILLS have mentioned, have taken their place as classics, and his name as a dramatic writer is interwoven with those of the best actors and actresses of his day.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.