"A Most Unholy Trade," Being Letters on the Drama
- Downloads
- Under 100
- First published
- 1923
- Pages
- 13
About this book
A Most Unholy Trade, Being Letters on the Drama is a small collection of Henry James's theater criticism, gathered together long after he died and given a title borrowed from one of his own sharper lines about the stage. James wrote about the theater all his life, often as a paying critic, and he had a complicated relationship with it. He admired great acting and he longed for a serious modern drama in English, but he also thought the working conditions of late Victorian theater were absurd.
The pieces collected here are letters and short essays on the drama as he found it in the 1870s and 1880s, mostly in London and Paris but with some attention to New York. He writes about French actresses he admired, about Ibsen who he was learning to appreciate even when he could not entirely follow him, and about the practical problem of putting a serious play in front of a London audience that wanted spectacle.
He is at his best when he is being honest about what he does not like. Some of the most enjoyable passages are gentle complaints about plays that almost work but fall short, or about actors whose technique is admirable but whose taste is not. James himself tried to write for the theater in the 1890s with mixed results, and the bitterness of the failed Guy Domville opening night is one of the famous episodes of his career. That experience is hovering behind a lot of his earlier observations once you know about it.
This is a book mostly for readers who already love James and want to see him thinking out loud about a form he never quite mastered as a writer but understood as a critic. It also sits well next to George Bernard Shaw's drama criticism from the same period, where the disagreement between two very different theatrical minds is a small education.
About the author
More from this genre
See all- O OrmondOrmond
- H The House of the Secret (La Maison Des Hommes Vivants)The House of the Secret (La Maison Des Hommes Vivants)
- Q The Queen of the IsleThe Queen of the Isle
- T Tales of the SupernaturalTales of the Supernatural
- D The Devil's Elixir, Vol. 1The Devil's Elixir, Vol. 1
- P The Poor ClareThe Poor Clare
Books like this one
Discussion
No comments yet. Share a thought, a question or a favourite passage.
Copyright concern? Read our DMCA policy
Read or download
Public domain book This work is in the public domain and free of copyright. Anyone may read, download and share it.
- EPUB 108 KB
-
KINDLE Send to Kindle Send
- Download the EPUB file to this device.
- Open Amazon's Send to Kindle page, sign in, and add the file. Open Send to Kindle (opens in a new tab)
On a phone: open the downloaded EPUB and share it to the Kindle app.
You can also email the file to your Kindle address (it ends in @kindle.com) from an email address you approved in your Amazon account.
- PDF 135 KB
- MOBI 75 KB
Downloads start right away. How to open EPUB on your phone
Book facts
- Author
- Henry James
- First published
- 1923
- Reading time
- About 10 minutes
- Pages
- 13
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Gothic Horror
- Formats
- PDF, EPUB, MOBI, Read online