English drama (Comedy); London (England) -- Drama; Marriage -- Drama; Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Drama
I hope Mrs Warren's Profession will be played everywhere, in season and
out of season, until Mrs Warren has bitten that fact into the public
conscience, and shamed the newspapers which support a tariff to keep
up the price of every American commodity except American manhood and
womanhood.
Unfortunately, Mr Daly had already suffered the usual fate of those who
direct public attention to the profits of the sweater or the pleasures
of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side by side with me. Months
elapsed before the decision of the courts vindicated him; and even then,
since his vindication implied the condemnation of the press, which was
by that time sober again, and ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received
a rather sulky and grudging publicity. In the meantime he had hardly
been able to approach an American city, including even those cities
which had heaped applause on him as the defender of hearth and home when
he produced Candida, without having to face articles discussing whether
mothers could allow their daughters to attend such plays as You Never
Can Tell, written by the infamous author of Mrs Warren's Profession, and
acted by the monster who produced it. What made this harder to bear was
that though no fact is better established in theatrical business than
the financial disastrousness of moral discredit, the journalists who had
done all the mischief kept paying vice the homage of assuming that it
is enormously popular and lucrative, and that I and Mr Daly, being
exploiters of vice, must therefore be making colossal fortunes out of
the abuse heaped on us, and had in fact provoked it and welcomed it with
that express object. Ignorance of real life could hardly go further.
One consequence was that Mr Daly could not have kept his financial
engagements or maintained his hold on the public had he not accepted
engagements to appear for a season in the vaudeville theatres [the
American equivalent of our music halls], where he played How He Lied
to Her Husband comparatively unhampered by the press censorship of
the theatre, or by that sophistication of the audience through press
suggestion from which I suffer more, perhaps, than any other author.
Vaudeville authors are fortunately unknown: the audiences see what the
play contains and what the actor can do, not what the papers have told
them to expect. Success under such circumstances had a value both for Mr
Daly and myself which did something to console us for the very unsavory
mobbing which the New York press organized for us, and which was not the
less disgusting because we suffered in a good cause and in the very best
company.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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