James Sheridan Knowles

• Born: May 12, 1784
• Birthplace: Cork, Ireland
• Died: November 30, 1862
• Place of death: Torquay, Devon, England

Other Literary Forms

Though James Sheridan Knowles is now remembered almost exclusively for his drama, he wrote several other works that were highly regarded in his own time. At the beginning of his literary career, he wrote a popular ballad, The Welch Harper (1796), which the critic William Hazlitt praised in his critical volume The Spirit of the Age (1825). In 1810, Knowles published (by subscription) a collection of his best early verses entitled Fugitive Pieces; this work received little acclaim, and Knowles subsequently wrote little nondramatic poetry.

Knowles’s most significant nondramatic writings concerned oratory and theater. The most famous and influential of these was The Elocutionist (1823), a textbook on debate that he wrote for his students while teaching at Belfast. This book expresses Knowles’s view that the effective speaker must avoid artificiality and be in earnest, and it contains one of his most popular model debates, “Was Julius Caesar a Great Man?” The Elocutionist became a very popular textbook in both English and American schools and went through many editions during Knowles’s lifetime. His writings and lectures on poetry were also well received by his contemporaries, and his Lectures on Oratory, Gesture, and Poetry, published posthumously in 1873, considered the adaptability of poetry for elocutionary purposes. Though these discourses often concerned poetry by important writers, such as Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, they were neither profound nor influential as literary criticism.

Knowles’s Lectures on Dramatic Literature, also posthumously published in 1873, reveals the depth of his practical knowledge of stagecraft. These discourses consider important dramatic subjects, such as Greek drama and William Shakespeare’s plays, and address significant technical questions of unity, plot, and characterization. Typically, Knowles concentrated more on issues relating to acting than to literary criticism, but his critical judgments were often sound. For example, his view that the unity of action is more essential to successful drama than are the unities of time and place reflects a significant departure from neoclassical dramatic theories. Knowles realized how much his audience valued carefully developed climactic action and powerful characterizations.

Knowles was not a sophisticated theologian, and the religious writings he produced after 1843 were zealous but unsophisticated. These tracts, such as The Rock of Rome: Or, The Arch Heresy (1849), were published during a period of great religious controversy in England involving the Oxford Movement, which sought to ally the Anglican Church with Roman Catholicism. In an age during which religious inquiry occupied some of England’s greatest minds, Knowles’s contribution was negligible. As a preacher, his elocutionary training served him well, but, though he could keep his congregation’s attention, his published sermons were undistinguished.

In his youth, Knowles wrote several operas and adaptations of plays written by others, but these are of little significance. His two novels, Fortesque (1846) and George Lovell (1847), though somewhat more successful in the United States than in England, have now been largely forgotten. Knowles’s fame rests primarily on his plays.

Achievements

During the course of the nineteenth century, England’s population quadrupled, and the nation became increasingly democratic. The rapidly growing theater audience of the time was largely uneducated. They had little use for either the poetry of Shakespeare or the numerous imitations of Jacobean drama that writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and a host of lesser talents—inflicted on them. Instead, they favored the melodrama, with its sentimentalized faith in justice and moral purity and its thrilling, often spectacularly staged, plots.

Though James Sheridan Knowles followed the traditional Aristotelian model in writing his tragedies, he consciously tried to write a less ornate poetic language that would be more appealing to his audience. The critic Hazlitt praised Knowles’s avoidance of artificial poetic language, and a reviewer in The London Magazine wrote in June, 1820, that the diction of his play Virginius was “colloquial and high-spirited; in short it is the true language of life.” Though Knowles’s attempt to write tragedy in a more realistic style was not always so well received by more conservative critics, his prosaic blank verse was the product of a conscious attempt to reconceive drama in the realistic terms required by his audience. Furthermore, Knowles’s concern for English domestic, patriarchal values, a theme that recurs frequently in his plays, touched the lives of his audience and contributed significantly to the success of Virginius and that of many of his later dramas. Though critics have complained that Knowles’s anachronisms and stilted verse result in inferior tragedy, his attempt to make his drama more realistic and contemporary suited the tastes of his audience. It also can be seen as a significant transition between the obsolete pseudo-Elizabethan style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century tragedies and gothic dramas and the more carefully crafted, satiric, and socially conscious dramas of W. S. Gilbert, Arthur Wing Pinero, and Henry Arthur Jones.

A further ground of Knowles’s achievement lay in his collaborations with the greatest actor of his day, William Charles Macready, who played the title role in Knowles’s Virginius. The great success of Virginius launched Knowles’s career as a playwright; at the same time, the success of Virginius also helped establish Macready as, in Harry M. Ritchie’s words, “the leading actor in England, confirming the supremacy of a new [acting] style based on ‘domesticity’ and ‘humanity.’” Until this time, Edmund Kean, another of Knowles’s acquaintances, had been the most celebrated actor in England, largely praised for his declamatory—some would say ranting—portrayals of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. When Kean opened in his own version of the Virginius story a few days after the first performance of Knowles’s play, he failed completely.

This was Kean’s first London defeat, and as such it can be considered the beginning of the decline of the exaggerated, romantic acting style for which he was so famous. From this point on, Kean’s acting career declined, while Macready’s flourished. Virginius not only established Macready as a powerful figure in the London theater but also marked his debut as the leading practitioner of a more natural style of tragic acting. More than one-third of Knowles’s subsequent plays were written for Macready or at his suggestion, and their symbiotic relationship enabled both to achieve considerable success and to influence the development of nineteenth century English drama.

Though Knowles was an actor as well as a playwright, his own performances were generally not very successful in England. He lacked the physical stature and intensity required of a great performer, and he had an Irish brogue that many English critics found objectionable. Nevertheless, in September, 1833, he was elected an honorary member of the Cambridge Garrick Club. Knowles’s English audience recognized him primarily for his playwriting, but when he toured America in 1834, he was phenomenally successful as an actor and as a lecturer with the less sophisticated American audiences.

Perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the English public’s esteem of Knowles as a playwright is the fact that, in 1850, he was one of four writers nominated to succeed William Wordsworth as poet laureate of England. The other nominees were John Wilson, Sir Henry Taylor, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; the latter was finally chosen by Queen Victoria, largely because of Prince Albert’s liking for Tennyson’s great elegy In Memoriam (1850). The fact that a writer of Knowles’s limited poetic talents could be seriously considered for such an honor might now seem peculiar—even ludicrous—but it shows how highly Knowles’s contemporaries regarded his dramas.

Biography

James Sheridan Knowles was born on May 12, 1784, in the city of Cork, Ireland. His father, James Knowles, a somewhat well-known Protestant schoolmaster and lexicographer, was also a first cousin of the great playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, for whom he named his son. Knowles was such a frail child that his parents frequently feared for his life, until he finally recovered his health at about the age of six. When he was twelve years old, he made his first visit to the theater; it was at that point that he resolved to be a dramatist.

Knowles’s parents had originally intended that he study medicine, but, when his mother died in 1800, his father remarried, and young James, who disliked his stepmother, left home. When he finally did begin to study medicine in 1806, his heart was not in it. Instead, he became interested in the ministry and spent considerable time listening to sermons and yearning to preach to vagrants in the streets of London. Knowles still longed to be a dramatist, and the moral and didactic fervor that he had inherited from his father found expression in the plays that he soon began to write. After receiving his medical degree and practicing for three years, Knowles abandoned his medical career and joined a professional acting company in 1808.

Knowles’s acting debut, in which he ill-advisedly attempted the demanding role of Hamlet, was a total failure, and he soon joined another company at Wexford. There, in July of 1809, he met Catherine Charteris, a young Edinburgh actress, whom he married, after a rather tempestuous courtship, on October 15 of the same year. The newlyweds moved to Waterford and joined Cherry’s acting company. At Waterford, Knowles first met the as yet unknown actor Edmund Kean, who encouraged him to complete a play entitled Leo: Or, The Gypsy, which became a minor hit. Knowles was also improving as an actor, and by the time he and his wife moved to Swansea in 1811, he had acted successfully in operas, comedies, and tragedies. His first child, James, was born the same year, and the young family moved to Belfast.

At this point, Knowles’s budding stage career was temporarily halted when his depleted finances forced him to accept a teaching position. Knowles enjoyed teaching, and his love of oratory made him so successful at it that he opened his own school in Belfast. A short time later he joined his father, who was then headmaster at the Belfast Academical Institution, as his assistant. When the two quarreled violently over the son’s theory of elocution, the father was fired and the son resigned his post. Then, in 1815, the success of Knowles’s first mature play, the tragedy Caius Gracchus, rekindled his theatrical ambitions, and the family moved to Glasgow, where Knowles was teaching in 1820 when the success of Virginius made him famous.

Following the triumph of Virginius, Knowles established a Whig newspaper, The Free Press, in Glasgow, but the enterprise collapsed after three years. In 1825, Knowles was rescued from financial problems by the success of his historical drama William Tell, but his first comedy, The Beggar’s Daughter of Bethnel Green, performed in 1828, failed miserably. Beset again by financial problems, Knowles lectured publicly to supplement his income. His lectures on poetry, elocution, and drama were generally admired, and his financial situation improved accordingly.

In 1832, Knowles presented a petition to Parliament seeking greater protection for authors’ rights through a copyright bill. In 1833, he supported an actors’ movement that opposed the monopoly theaters. Neither enterprise produced results, and Knowles continued to increase his acting roles both in his own dramas and in productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Because his stage activities had become full-time, the Knowles family had settled in London, but by that time Knowles had ten children, and, when an acting tour of Ireland in April and May of 1834 was unsuccessful, he resolved to travel to the United States, where his dramas had been much more widely acclaimed than in England.

When Knowles arrived in New York on September 6, 1834, he was hailed as the greatest living English playwright. The tour was a resounding success; Knowles himself was thoroughly surprised by the warmth and praise of the American audiences. He captivated them with dramatic performances in his own plays, lectures, and readings from his poems; indeed, so great was his American success that he formed a lasting friendship with President Andrew Jackson, and, as a farewell gesture, a huge dramatic festival was held in his honor on April 8, 1835. Knowles understandably retained a warm regard for the United States until his death and continued to correspond with his many American friends.

During the eight years following his return to England in 1835, Knowles continued to act in his own plays and wrote several more dramas. He toured Dublin and Edinburgh in 1836 and acted in William Tell, The Hunchback, The Wife, Virginius, The Beggar of Bethnel Green (his revised version of the earlier, failed effort), and Alfred the Great; later that year, he performed in several plays by Shakespeare. Though he announced in November, 1837, that he would retire from acting, he continued to perform from time to time and to manage his own plays until as late as 1849. The Secretary was produced in 1843, but he continued to write plays until 1846. Nevertheless, by 1843, Knowles, for all practical purposes, was no longer actively involved with the stage.

Knowles’s retirement from the stage and his subsequent ordination as a Baptist minister can be at least partly explained by certain character traits that he had always possessed. Throughout his life, he had been a man of strong moral principles, and his plays often reflected his convictions. His love of oratory and elocution, combined with his concern with matters of conscience, had almost turned him to preaching in the streets earlier in his life, so Knowles’s conversion from the boards to the pulpit was not so radical a change as it might at first appear. Knowles himself was not comfortable preaching against acting and drama, as his new calling required him to do; in fact, he wrote two novels after being ordained and continued to present friends with copies of his plays.

Though his American tour had made him wealthy, Knowles was both generous and careless with his earnings. He continued to realize some income from his popular plays, but not nearly what he would have received if copyright laws had been more stringent. His financial state, therefore, became so critical that in 1846 a group of his friends tried to obtain a pension for him, finally succeeding in establishing a fund for his benefit in 1848. Knowles himself succeeded in securing a pension of two hundred pounds a year. This, with his earnings as curator of Shakespeare’s house at Stratford—a post he was awarded in 1848—enabled him to support himself until his death on November 30, 1862.

Analysis

As a dramatist, James Sheridan Knowles was trying to achieve two conflicting goals. He wanted to reach his audience by banishing artificiality from dramatic poetry and by using more natural cadences of speech, yet he could not help but aspire to the traditional poetic standards of the greatest Renaissance writers. Both Knowles’s tragedies and his comedies reflected the taste of his time as well as the limitations of his creative abilities. Nevertheless, they are often superior to the dramas of his contemporaries, many of whom gave themselves up to writing facile and sensationalized melodramas. Knowles’s drama has its share of such elements, but their presence is always counterbalanced by the playwright’s attempt to restore the grandeur of the Renaissance tradition to the nineteenth century stage.

Caius Gracchus

Though critics have maintained that Knowles’s tragedy Virginius is his greatest play, many of Knowles’s most characteristic themes find their earliest expression in his first mature and original play, the tragedy Caius Gracchus. Caius Gracchus is not a great play, but in spite of its flaws, it is in some respects both intense and compelling. Knowles’s radical political attitudes were crudely but vividly presented in some of the title character’s speeches, and the prosaic quality of the blank verse reflects Knowles’s intention of writing dialogue in a language that would be more accessible to his audience. The play also seeks to combine elements of the popular melodrama with the more traditional themes of political intrigue and ambition that characterize Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy. Caius Gracchus is, in fact, modeled on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and Knowles’s title character closely resembles Shakespeare’s protagonist, particularly in his self-destructive devotion to the state. Caius Gracchus was Knowles’s first attempt to synthesize different dramatic influences into a popular form, the domestic tragedy. The later success of Virginius can largely be attributed to the fact that in that play Knowles achieved a more natural synthesis of these disparate influences than he did in Caius Gracchus. Therefore, the earlier play is interesting as a precursor of the values and techniques that Knowles tried to refine in his later tragedies.

Virginius

Part of the problem with Caius Gracchus was that Knowles had selected an inappropriate story on which to graft his rather mundane and sentimental values. His choice of the traditional and popular story of Virginius, the noble Roman who kills his own daughter, Virginia, rather than allow her to be defiled by the tyrant Appius, was a much more appropriate vehicle to express his ideals of virtue, honor, and liberty. Knowles probably based his tragedy on the version of the story told by Livy, the Roman historian, though he often departed significantly from that model. In Virginius, as in his other tragedies, Knowles used the classical five-act structure and emphasized many of the themes he had developed in Caius Gracchus: oppression of the common people, the purity of familial (domestic) love, and the importance of justice and liberty.

The villain, Appius, is a deceitful Roman senator who has turned against the citizens who elected him, and Knowles’s characterization of him is effective. Appius’s evil machinations, though somewhat improbable, are cleverly conceived, and the audience certainly appreciated the malice, if not the psychological subtlety, of his character. Appius is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Richard III, and, though he lacks Richard’s complexity, his absolute depravity generates an exciting plot. Appius’s character was clearly conceived in the tradition of the “fall of princes” tragedy, and Knowles obviously intended his audience to rejoice loudly at his demise. In fact, the playwright seems consciously to have sacrificed psychological complexity for moral effect.

Virginius, on the other hand, is as noble as Appius is evil. In act 4, Virginius reviles Appius for his treachery and incites the crowd to attack him. After leading the charge, Virginius is deserted by the cowardly citizens. Realizing that he can no longer save his daughter from Appius, Virginius stabs her to death and races, mad with grief, from the Forum. Knowles conceived the daughter’s character along typically sentimental Victorian lines. She is beautiful and pathetic in her innocence and vulnerability, but she lacks any deeper qualities. Thus, her death has no real tragic impact. Though it is Virginia who dies, Knowles directs the audience’s real pity toward her father, forced by circumstances to kill his only child.

William Tell

Like Caius Gracchus and Virginius, Knowles’s next tragedy, William Tell, has civic liberty as its main theme. William Tell is based on a play by the great German playwright Friedrich Schiller, but it lacks the philosophical depth of its model. By modern standards it also suffers considerably from the excessive ranting of the protagonist. Knowles was probably influenced by the work of Lord Byron in this regard, but while the Byronic hero is driven by some mysterious obsession, the emotions of Knowles’s hero are superficial. The addition of humorous episodes and lyrics also tends to detract from the play’s unity, and it was later revised from five to three acts, which improved it greatly. Next to Virginius, William Tell was Knowles’s most popular tragedy. Its romantic excesses and volatile speeches were well suited to Macready’s acting style and thus made it successful onstage.

Comedies

Knowles’s comedies are somewhat less competent than are his tragedies. Though his tragedies frequently suffered from shallow characterizations and unimpressive poetry, they often succeeded in terms of presenting an exciting plot that could keep an audience involved. Furthermore, both Caius Gracchus and Virginius combine contemporary, Renaissance, and classical dramatic influences into a compelling whole. In his comedies, however, Knowles’s characters are often poorly conceived, while the complex plots and subplots, inspired by Elizabethan comedies, are poorly integrated. Knowles’s penchant for the five-act structure caused him to include considerable extraneous material in his comedies. In fact, one of his best comedies, The Beggar of Bethnel Green, is a three-act revision of the earlier, unsuccessful five-act play The Beggar’s Daughter of Bethnel Green. Knowles’s most popular comedy, The Hunchback, was also much improved by revision from five to three acts. None of his comedies, however, showed the artistic consistency of Virginius.

Bibliography

Davies, Robertson. “Playwrights and Plays.” In The Revels History of Drama in English, 1750-1880. Vol. 6. London: Methuen, 1975. Davies describes and evaluates each of Knowles’s plays in chronological order. He draws attention to the recurring theme of “fatherhood” and focuses on Knowles’s artistic development.

Fletcher, Richard M. English Romantic Drama: 1795-1843. New York: Exposition Press, 1966. Basing his work on previously unavailable materials, Fletcher seeks to correct evaluations previously made about English Romantic drama. He concludes that it is more vibrant, vital, and artistic than has been generally acknowledged. He recognizes Knowles’s success and original approach but laments his lack of savoir faire. Extensive bibliography.

Meeks, Leslie Howard. Sheridan Knowles and the Theatre of His Time. Bloomington, Ind.: The Principia Press, 1933. This classic introduction to Knowles’s plays is based mainly on primary sources. Meeks places the works into historical and literary context and provides a thorough analysis of Virginius, The Hunchback, and William Tell. The other plays are examined only briefly. Bibliography and index.

Parker, Gerald D. “‘I Am Going to America’: James Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius and the Politics of ‘Liberty.’” Theatre Research International 17, no. 1 (Spring, 1992): 15. Contains a profile of Knowles and an examination of the political and moral contents of his work, particularly Virginius.