Sos Eltis – författare

From seduced maidens to adulterous wives, bigamists, courtesans, kept women and streetwalkers, the so-called ''fallen woman'' was a ubiquitous and enduring figure on the Victorian and Edwardian stage. Acts of Desire traces the theatrical representation of illicit female sexuality from early nineteenth-century melodramas, through sensation dramas, Ibsenite sex-problem plays and suffrage dramas, to early social realism and the well-made plays of Pinero, Jones,Maugham, and Coward. This study reveals and analyses enduring plot lines and tropes that continue to influence contemporary theatre and film. Women''s illicit desires became a theatrical focus for anxieties and debates surrounding gender roles, women''s rights, sexual morality, class conflict, economics,eugenics, and female employment. The theatre played a central role in both establishing and challenging sexual norms, and many playwrights exploited the ambiguities and implications of performance to stage disruptive spectacles of female desire, agency, energy, and resourcefulness, using ingenuity and skill to evade the control of that ever watchful state censor, the Lord Chamberlain.Covering an astonishing range of theatrical, social, literary, and political texts, this study challenges the currency and validity of the long-established critical term ''the fallen woman'', and establishes the centrality of the theatre to cultural and sexual debates throughout the period. Acts of Desire encompasses published and unpublished plays, archival material, censorship records, and contemporary reviews to reveal the surprising continuities, complex debates, covert meanings,and exuberant spectacles which marked the history of theatrical representations of female sexuality. Engaging with popular and ''high art'' performances, this study also reveals the vital connections between theatre and its sister arts, tracing the exchange of influences between Victorian drama, narrativepainting and the novel, and showing theatre to be a crucial but neglected element in the cultural history of women''s sexuality.

A radical re-examination of Oscar Wilde's plays, Revising Wilde challenges long-established views of the writer as a dilettante and dandy, revealing him instead as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert the traditional values of Victorian literature and society. By tracing Wilde's painstaking revisions and redrafting of his plays, Sos Eltis uncovers themes subsequently concealed in successive versions which demonstrate that Wilde was in fact an anarchist, a socialist and a feminist.Wilde borrowed plots and incidents from numerous contemporary French and English plays, but he then subtly rewrote his plagiarized material in order to mock the conventions he imitated. By analysing previously unconsidered manuscript drafts, and comparing the finished plays with their sources, Eltis displays a surprising depth and complexity to Wilde's work. The little-known early play, Vera; or, The Nihilists is revealed as a politically radical drama, the society plays are shown to challenge Victorian sexual and social mores, and The Importance of Being Earnest is interpreted as an anarchic farce, which reflects the Utopian vision of Wilde's political essay, `The Soul of Man Under Socialism'. Taking into account the more recent scholarship and criticism, this accessible study will be of interest to Wilde specialists and enthusiasts alike.

Mrs Warren's Profession, Candida, and You Never Can Tell are plays which give a clear sense of the range of Shaw's first forays into playwriting. Together they showcase his early negotiations between his political and social concerns and the constraints and possibilities of the British stage at the fin de siècle. These plays are bound together by shared concerns with gender roles, sexuality, concepts of familial and social duty, and how all these are shaped by wider financial, political, literary, philosophical and theatrical influences. Mrs Warren's Profession is the best known of Shaw's 'Plays Unpleasant', his first exercises in using the theatre as a means to awaken the consciences of morally complacent audiences. Written in 1893 in angry response to the success of A. W. Pinero's sensational hit The Second Mrs Tanqueray and a revival of Dumas's La dame aux camélias, Mrs Warren's Profession did not receive a public performance in Britain until 1925. Shaw's provocative response to the sentimental 'fallen woman' plays that dominated the fin-de-siècle stage was a play in which prostitution was presented not as a question of female sexual morality, but as a direct result of the systematic economic exploitation of women. Candida (1894), by contrast, was categorised by Shaw as one of his 'Plays Pleasant', but the label was characteristically deceptive. The play appeared at first sight to offer audiences a reassuringly familiar drama of a marriage threatened by an interloper but ultimately reaffirmed when the wife recognises her true place and her dangerous admirer is sent out into the cold. But, as critics have noted, the play was a re-working by Shaw of Ibsen's A Doll's House in which the husband played the part of the over-protected doll, unaware of the real power dynamics of his marriage.You Never Can Tell (1897) was Shaw's seaside comedy of manners, complete with an all-knowing waiter, exuberant twins, a lovelorn dentist, a long-lost father, lashings of food, and a comic catchphrase to provide the title. Shaw took all these familiar elements of Victorian farce and reworked them into a modern play of ideas, in which etiquette and ideologies collide. Just as in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (a comparison which Shaw always stubbornly rejected), questions of class, marriage, manners, money, sex and identity underpin the plot of love-at-first-sight, mislaid parents and reunited families.