Aesthetic Movement Satire: A Dramatic Anthology: The Grasshopper; Where’s the Cat?; The Colonel; Patience

From long-haired ’Fleshly Poets’ to intense, ’ultra pre-Raphaelite’ artists, few stylistic movements in the history of art and literature have provoked the imagination and indignation of British playwrights as much as the Aesthetic Movement.

During an intense and short-lived period from 1877 to 1881, the London stage saw fierce competition as playwrights and theatre managers raced to capture the zeitgeist, capitalizing on the unorthodox, eccentric and highly theatrical proponents of the Aesthetic Movement. The ’quite too utterly utter’ Apostles of this new school were satirized to such an extent that the Illustrated London News (1881) complained that the London stage was ’thickly sown over with a crop of lilies and sunflowers’, with ’aesthetes in every burlesque and comic opera produced’.

This edited volume brings the four key plays satirizing the Aesthetic Movement together for the first time in an easily accessible format, allowing scholars and students to discover their secrets:

The Grasshopper by John Hollingshead (Gaiety Theatre, 1877)
Where’s The Cat? by James Albery (Criterion, 1880)
The Colonel by F.C. Burnand (Prince of Wales’s Theatre, 1881)
Patienceby W.S. Gilbert (Opera Comique/Savoy, 1881)

Including a brief introduction by Dr. Devon Cox, providing background and context to the dynamic, symbiotic relationship between the Aesthetic Movement and the British stage, and complete with biographical notes and an introduction to each play, Aesthetic Movement Satire: A Dramatic Anthologyshines a light on this explosive flashpoint in British Theatre

Dr Devon Cox is an art and theatre historian with a specialisation in the Aesthetic Movement. In 2015, he published a biography, The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde & Sargent in Tite Street, which was nominated for the prestigious William MB Berger Prize in British Art History. Between 2018 and 2020, he catalogued paintings in the collection of Mells Manor, Somerset for the Paul Mellon Centre’s Collection and Display project. In 2022, he edited Constance Wilde’s Autograph Book, 1886-1896 for the Oscar Wilde Society. He is currently working on a new biography of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) to be published in 2025.