1779–1780. Madame de Genlis, who followed the educational theories of Rousseau,
made theatre a central experience for the children she taught, not only writing plays for
them to perform but taking them to the Comédie Française. Jonathan Levy, in the
introduction to his invaluable anthology The Gymnasium of the Imagination: A Collection
of Children’s Plays in English 1780–1860 (1992), notes that her strategies ‘became the
basis of a new dramaturgy for playwriting for children’.
[T]he premises of this new dramaturgy are threefold: first, that children’s plays
should be based not on the struggle between good and evil, but rather on the
struggle between good and not-yet-good; second, (a corollary), that in children’s
plays real evil will not be shown and that, when wickedness of any kind is shown,
unless it is clearly reformed and repentant by the final curtain, it will be shown to
be inept or else will be so outrageously overwritten as to be unbelievable; and third,
that the sensibility that suffuses plays for children should be one of triumphant
sweetness and light.
Levy 1992:2–3Under these general principles a century of inconspicuous but valuable playwriting for
children ensured that theatre as making and performing secured an active presence in
both school and home. Indeed, many of the plays written at this period were intended
for domestic performance by families, with parents and children taking part together. In
their common belief that the imaginative experience of children’s drama could
contribute to the moral and social education of children, it is possible to see these plays
as the precursors of the present-day Young People’s Theatre and Theatre-in-Education.
Levy separates their subjects into five categories: ‘dramatic proverbs and other moral
tales; history plays, including sacred history; sentimental comedies; fairy tales and
Eastern tales; and familiar dialogues’ (7–8).
Naturally, many of the plays written under such voluntary constraints are of minor
literary and dramatic merit, although important figures made their contribution. William
Godwin, the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, published his
Dramas for Children in 1809. But the most distinguished of English language children’s
dramatists in this century of activity was Maria Edgeworth. Edgeworth’s Little Plays
(1827) are only a small part of her prolific output, but they are tried and tested, having
been written for and performed by the younger children of her father’s enormous family,
and they are full of humour, lively and convincing dialogue, practical observation of real
people, and humane moral intelligence. These little plays deserve a continuing place in
the repertoire of children’s theatre.
Alongside this private drama for school and home, the major public event of children’s
theatre before the close of the nineteenth century was the emergence of pantomime in
the Victorian period as a children’s entertainment. As a distinctive dramatic convention
pantomime appeared in Britain early in the eighteenth century, forming a combination of
popular story (initially from classical mythology, but by the beginning of the nineteenth
century increasingly from fairy stories) with the traditional Italian harlequinade. A
‘transformation scene’ joined together the two parts of the entertainment. With the
freeing of the theatres from restrictive legislation in 1843, this developed into the
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