Prof Emma Mason
Interior Drama in the Catholic Revival
Abstract: Liturgy and performance have long been linked in British history. Critics argue that from the Middle Ages the experience of private devotional reading was shaped by the theatre: readers imagined themselves in the text as performers worshipping communally with others. Liturgy became at once aesthetic experience and a material reality founded on faith. Yet the relationship between liturgy and performance was complicated in nineteenth century Britain as the theatre embraced new forms of entertainment such as pantomime, operetta, burlesque, farce, melodrama, and musical theatre. For the already vilified Anglo- and Roman Catholic Church, the association between performance and liturgy opened them to accusations of pretence and the return of ritual as nothing more than a stage show. Modern critics often echo this prejudice by aligning many of these writers with Victorian decadence and are then confused by their apparent commitment to Catholicism. It is only in relation to their Catholic faith, however, that we can make sense of their dramatization of liturgy and theology. My paper discusses Catholic writers including Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, and John Gray (the supposed model for Wilde’s Dorian Gray), to explore this dramatization in their verse-dramas and poetry. I also consider early twentieth-century Catholic Revival writers who more directly critique decadence to insist on the tangibility of the sacrament and doctrine of the Real Presence.
Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She has written widely on Christian poetry, and her publications include Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012). Her research and teaching are focused on Catholic contemplation/mysticism, Christian literature and ecology, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century studies.