pushed to produce anything of any real quality despite many of the most renown poets of the time (Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Browning, Arnold, Tennyson) producing work in the genre. As T.S. Eliot remarked later, at the opening of the century, there were plays written by poets who had no knowledge of the stage, or by men who knew the stage but were no poets at all.6
Ibsen therefore decided to abandon verse drama and turned “to the very much more difficult art of writing the genuine, plain language spoken in real life”7 and although this idea was not new8 it heralded an era of realism almost concurrent with the surge in popularity of other ‘realist’ creative forms, most notably the novel. Realism by all accounts, possessed a far stronger ability to connect with the preoccupations of the day in a register that chimed with the concerns of the theatre-going populous. Ibsen’s The Doll House, written 12 years after his last verse-play Peer Gynt (1867) is a case in point. Here was a play that challenged the status quo of the time notably the role of women in modern society. It stirred a great deal of controversy at the time, something that advocates of verse drama were not doing, focused as they seemed to be, on looking backward rather than forward.
Verse drama’s death knell therefore was sounded not by the limitations of the form itself, proven over the centuries to be a most adequate and expressive medium, but by the failure of the 19th century dramatists to engage with and adequately dramatize not just the concerns, but the speech of the day. Their inability to evolve and innovate, their propensity to simply imitate the style of Elizabethan poetic drama rather than push the boundaries of the form was the key to its fall from grace. Ibsen retracted his statement about the harmful effect of verse on drama in another letter a year later: “l still remember that I once expressed myself somewhat disrespectfully about the art of v...