“A Most Unholy Trade,” Being Letters on the Drama

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.