Rudolf Besier

• Born: July 2, 1878
• Birthplace: Java
• Died: June 13, 1942
• Place of death: Elmhurst, England

Other Literary Forms

Rudolf Besier is noted primarily for his dramatic works, although he was also engaged in journalism and translated works from the French.

Achievements

Though Rudolf Besier wrote a large number of plays, his international reputation depends on a single work, the historical dramaThe Barretts of Wimpole Street. This perennial favorite was produced for the first time at the Malvern Festival in England in 1930 by Sir Barry Jackson, following its rejection by two London producers. After twenty-seven American producers turned it down, Katharine Cornell accepted it, and the play opened in Cleveland and, shortly thereafter, at the Empire Theatre in New York.

Biography

Born in Java of Dutch extraction, Rudolf Besier was the son of Margaret (née Collinson) and Rudolf Besier. He was educated at St. Elizabeth College, Guernsey, England, and in Heidelberg, Germany. For several years, he was engaged in journalism, being for a time on the staff of the firm of C. Arthur Pearson. In 1908, however, Besier left journalism, having decided to devote his efforts entirely to the theater. He married Charlotte Woodward, the daughter of the Reverend J. P. S. Woodward, of Plumpton, Sussex. He wrote a large number of plays; the most famous of these plays and the one that confirmed his dramatic reputation is The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Critics praised the play, but it was severely criticized by members of the Barrett family, who objected to the Freudian implications in the portrayal of Edward Moulton Barrett. Later, a film version of the play was made. An extremely tall, handsome man who shunned public exposure, Besier spent the last part of his life at his home in Elmhurst, Surrey, where he died suddenly of heart failure on June 13, 1942.

Analysis

Though many playgoers were surprised by the general popularity of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, in retrospect, the groundwork for this achievement is evident. At the beginning of his career, Rudolf Besier had demonstrated his ability to draw a portrait of a peculiar poet, and in Secrets, his first genuine popular success, he demonstrated his sharp and sensitive knowledge of human feelings. Further, several of his earlier plays revealed a flair for melodrama. Though The Barretts of Wimpole Street exhibits characteristics of a comedy (it was labeled by Besier as such), a psychological drama, and a historical drama, the play contains many of the traits of the melodrama. Above all, the intrinsic appeal of the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning has given the play its enduring appeal, yet Besier must be given full credit for realizing the dramatic potential in this well-known romance—particularly the role of Elizabeth Barrett’s father, the quintessential Victorian tyrant.

Early Plays

At start of the twentieth century, dramatic language on the English-speaking stage had increasingly tended to become dry and uninteresting, and, as a result, dialogue seemed stilted. Besier’s first play, The Virgin Goddess, a classical tragedy written during a visit to the United States, clearly showed his eagerness to return colorful and lively dialogue to the stage. The play was greeted with mixed reviews. Three years later, Besier received considerable praise for his comedy Don, which centers on an eccentric and magnanimous poet. The play’s formal language and heavy sentimentality have dated badly. Lady Patricia, a satire on English affectations, and Kultur at Home, which delighted audiences for the manner in which it depicted German domestic life at its worst, kept Besier before the critics and the public.

Secrets

In Secrets, which Besier wrote with May Edginton , he used the device of allowing the first act to take shape as a prologue, commencing the main action with the second act. In the opening episode, Lady Carlton, old and exhausted from constantly tending her dying husband, falls asleep in an armchair beside his bed. The drama itself consists of a series of flashbacks presented in the form of a dream. In these, the lives of the couple are presented as they marry, endure initial poverty, and gradually attain affluence. During this time, the husband has an affair with another woman. His wife forgives him, despite her bitter jealousy, because of her realization that he needs her. Like several of Besier’s earlier plays, Secrets is highly sentimental, but it is distinguished by its acute perceptions into the psychology of the two main characters.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street

Like any work that deals with actual personages, a play demands some understanding of the lives of its characters and the times in which they lived if it is to be thoroughly appreciated. Understanding the fullness of The Barretts of Wimpole Street necessarily entails historical knowledge not only of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning but also of the general nature of Victorian customs, manners, and class distinctions.

The oldest child in a wealthy, upper-middle-class family, Elizabeth Barrett was educated at home. As a result of a back injury at the age of fifteen, she became a chronic invalid. From her early teens until the end of her life, she read widely and concentrated on writing poetry. At the time of the play, Barrett for a number of years had been confined to her room in her father’s London house on Wimpole Street. From there, she pursued her education, including the study of Greek, took frequent medication, and, with the exception of visits by her family and a few friends, remained by herself to write articles and the poetry that brought her recognition. Robert Browning , a poet then ignored by the public, one day came to pay his respects, and the celebrated literary romance began. The pair seemed ill-matched; she was six years older than he and her health was frail. Her father, moreover, had decided that none of his children should marry.

Despite such unpromising conditions, the two lovers secretly married and moved to Italy, where they lived for most of the fifteen years that remained of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life. There, they wrote most of their now famous poems and had a son. Elizabeth Browning strongly devoted herself to the Italian struggle for independence against Austria. She wrote not only The Cry of the Children (1854), in which she passionately argued against child labor in England, but also Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), her famous sonnet sequence celebrating her love for her husband. In 1861, she died and was buried in her beloved Italy.

The hero of Besier’s play, Robert Browning, was strong, spirited, and optimistic; like Barrett, he began writing when he was young. The criticism that attended his poetry early in his career failed to discourage him, for he continued to write prolifically. His whirlwind courtship overwhelmed Barrett’s initial resistance, and their romance ended only with her death, after which he returned to England. His reputation today rests primarily on his dramatic monologues, in which the speakers’ own words provide psychological insights into their characters. He died in Venice in 1889, but his body was returned to England and buried in Westminster Abbey, where many of England’s great poets are buried.

Set against Browning in the play is the antagonist, Barrett’s father, Edward Moulton Barrett, who at the age of nineteen left Cambridge University to marry a woman more than five years older than he. The union produced twelve children; one child, a girl, died in childhood, and two boys died as adults. After his wife died, he ruled his nine remaining children like a despot, refusing to explain any of his commands and forbidding any of the children to marry. Three eventually disobeyed him, and as a result, he disinherited them and refused to see them again.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street takes place during the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. Though the living and working conditions of the lower classes were slowly improving, the poor found it difficult to make gains through their employment. The exploitation of women and child laborers was common. Putting in long hours for pitifully low wages under oppressive and unhealthy conditions, workers were barely able to survive. Then, too, the class distinctions were rigidly structured and observed, with opportunities to rise to a higher class practically nonexistent. Though not of the aristocracy, Edward Moulton Barrett had inherited large sums of money and had land holdings on the British island of Jamaica. Consequently, he was able to attend Cambridge University. Supported by his own means and the wealth that came to him through his wife, he lived comfortably in a fashionable London district and reared his large family, though he was temporarily inconvenienced financially when all slaves were freed in the British Empire.

Both sons and daughters of the upper classes were dependent on their fathers for financial support. Robert Browning was himself supported by his parents until his poetry began to earn money for him. The various Barrett sons assisted their father in his office, taking orders while he attended to business in the financial quarter of London or while he was abroad supervising his land holdings. Daughters were never permitted to engage in business affairs, and, as a result, some, such as Bella, became social butterflies, while others, such as Arabel, worked in support of various social or religious causes. Certain others became little more than house decorations, awaiting the opportunity to marry. Elizabeth Barrett, therefore, stands out in contrast, for she had both a career of her own and a limited inheritance. She was fortunate also in being able to secure a respectable education. Women of the upper classes were generally encouraged to pursue only the refined graces of music, manners, and needlework. Barrett gained additional education through her own intense and varied reading and from her brothers’ tutors.

Characterized by prudery, repression, and formality, the Victorian period was highlighted by a fear of outspokenness and by the evasion of facts. In The Barretts of Wimpole Street, for example, Arabel upbraids Bella for speaking of the birth of children and scolds Henrietta for describing their father with language she considers ugly. Houses of the wealthy were heavily and formally furnished. Women, moreover, dressed in voluminous layers of clothing, and men indulged in formal attire. When he first called on Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning faultlessly dressed in the manner of the times—a cape fastened around his neck, a high hat, lemon-colored gloves, and a cane. Edward Moulton Barrett, together with his sons, wore evening clothes for dinner with the family each night. The wealthy also were transported in fine carriages that were attended by coachmen and footmen wearing powdered wigs.

Besier’s purpose necessitated many of the dramatic techniques he used in the play. His intention was not so much to present the love affair between Barrett and Browning as to portray a family dominated by a tyrannical, repressed father. The revolt of the most unlikely family member of the Barretts of Wimpole Street constitutes the romantic and dramatic climax, and appropriately enough, the play is set entirely in Elizabeth Barrett’s room. The use of only one setting focuses audience attention on the one room that every family member visited. By this means, Besier could portray the attitudes of the various sons and daughters toward their father and, in turn, his effect on them. The play’s conclusion maintains and reinforces this dramatic focus. The audience does not view Elizabeth Barrett’s marriage, nor is there any scene in Italy. The play closes with the father’s frustrated endeavor to destroy her dog, Flush, a final indication of his unreasoning cruelty.

Terror affects each member of the Barrett family. Elizabeth continues to drink the porter that she so detests in order not to displease her father, while Henrietta, ever rebellious, accedes to Barrett’s demands and swears on the Bible that she will neither see nor communicate with her suitor, Captain Surtees Cook. Representing all the boys who, through fear of their father, are leading “a life which isn’t a life at all,” Octavius calls Barrett “His Majesty.” The whole family is elated when informed that the father is undertaking a two-week business trip. Arabel, more placid than most of the other children, hopes that he will be detained. Elizabeth herself later declares that “our family life was one of unrelieved gloom.” Besier relieves the tense, strained, family atmosphere with scenes of a lighter, even humorous, quality. The Browning story primarily supplies these brief interludes, but to a degree, the story of Henrietta and Captain Cook does so as well. Entertainment also is provided by the refreshingly frivolous Bella, whose ostentatiousness reveals an aspect of the father not brought out by any of the other characters.

Because his primary intention was not simply to dramatize the romance between two gifted poets, Besier was confronted by the problem of subordinating the literary activities and interests of his principal characters to the analysis of a family’s spirit in the household of a tyrannical father. Besier’s dramatic maturity is evident in the masterful manner in which he resolves the problem. He employs the play’s various references to poetry either to delineate character or to move the plot forward. When Barrett, for example, is reflecting on what she perceives to be the obscure nature of Browning’s poetry (“No—it’s quite beyond me! I give it up!”), the audience is prepared for the tender, more intimate scene in which the shared poetic sensibilities of the lovers establish their rapport and suggest their determination to overcome the obstacles that life sets before them.

The play is divided into the classical five acts, as opposed to the more modern three, and each act is given a title: “Porter in a Tankard,” “Mr. Robert Browning,” “Robert,” “Henrietta,” and “Papa.” All five acts revolve around the commanding presence (or absence) of the father: act 1, his insistence that Barrett drink porter as medicine; act 2, the appearance of his as yet unknown opponent; act 3, Browning’s deepening hold on Barrett’s affections; act 4, the father’s cruelty to Henrietta and Barrett’s realization that she must agree with Browning’s wedding plans; and act 5, Barrett’s final interview with her father, in which she is so revolted by his words that she becomes distraught. Indeed, the father’s influence, even when he is not actually onstage, is so extensive, so tangible, that in many ways he, and not Barrett or Browning, is the main character of the play.

Much of Besier’s portrayal of the father accords with the known facts of his life and personality. Not only did he terrorize his children, but also he prohibited them to marry and actually disowned three who disobeyed his injunction. In other details, however, Besier used dramatic license. He collapsed the actual time of Barrett’s romance with Browning from one year to approximately four months, and he inserted into the dialogue a remark that was not to achieve acclaim until some years later. When Browning finally achieved recognition, Browning societies were established all over England for the express purpose of discussing and analyzing his poetry. Browning, after receiving a letter from a member of one of these societies asking for an explanation of one particularly obscure poetic passage, replied: “When that passage was written, only God and Robert Browning understood it. Now only God understands it.” Besier felt at liberty to include the remark in a conversation between Barrett and Browning, thereby reinforcing the warmth and the humanness of their relationship.

The reader can trace in The Barretts of Wimpole Street the change in Barrett’s feelings for her father and, at the same time, her increasing health and desire for life as she comes increasingly under the influence of Robert Browning. When the first act begins, she is “so tired—tired—tired of it all,” and later she admits that she “was often impatient for the end.” To Browning, she declares that love can have no place in the life of a dying woman. Three months later, however, she is miraculously revitalized, full of energy and desirous of experiencing nature’s passionate embrace, all of which she attributes not to the doctors or the porter but to Browning himself: “I wanted to live—eagerly, desperately, passionately—and only because life meant you—you—and the sight of your face, and the sound of your voice, and the touch of your hand.” Carried along by Browning’s inspiring vitality, she nevertheless continues to resist the idea of marriage simply because of the difference in their ages. When she views her father’s brutal treatment of Henrietta, however, she becomes more sure about marriage, and following her final interview with her father, when she realizes that he is “not like other men,” all of her doubts disappear. With a self-assurance and determination not earlier evident, she whispers to herself: “I must go at once—I must go—I must go. . . .”

Besier raised The Barretts of Wimpole Street from what could have been mere sentimentalism to the genuinely dramatic. The result was a play that has continued to please audiences on stage, on television, and in film.

Biliography

Gillmore, Margalo, and Patricia Collinge. The B. O. W. S. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945. A classic account of the American Theater Wing’s overseas production of Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

Hochman, Stanley, ed. McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama. 2d ed. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. This biographical article covers the highlights of the playwright’s career in the United States, including the production of The Virgin Goddess and Lady Patricia. The article features a photograph of Besier and Katharine Cornell in the first American production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

Hutchens, John. “The Actor’s Month: Broadway in Review.” Review of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier. Theatre Arts Monthly 15 (April, 1931): 273-277. Hutchens reviews the original American performance of Besier’s most famous play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, which featured Katharine Cornell as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He reveals that Besier’s script attributes incestuous impulses to Barrett’s father as the root of his tyrannical behavior. At the time, this play was considered a shocking and psychologically advanced twist to a well-known romantic tale.

Skinner, Richard Dana. “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.” Review of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier. Commonweal 13 (February 25, 1931): 469. Commonweal is a Catholic periodical, and its theater critic is predictably conservative. Skinner applauds the romance of Besier’s The Barretts of Wimpole Street, yet he condemns the psychosexual abnormality of the character of Edward Moulton Barrett as “gratuitous.” He calls the abnormality “a discordant note in what is otherwise one of the most beguiling stage romances of recent years.”

Van Doren, Mark. “Drama: Early Victorian Father.” Review of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier. The Nation 132 (February 25, 1931): 224-225. Van Doren compliments The Barretts of Wimpole Street by saying that “Mr. Besier had the almost unique inspiration to make his famous hero and heroine behave as if they did not know they were famous…. This was delightful.” He states that the play’s weakness lies in Besier’s characterization of the father as a perfect, predictable monster.