Criticism
In general, the critics felt that the play reflected Gilbert's 1860s style more than his more mature playwriting. The closing line, "Let us pray", added by Gilbert late in the play's construction, was widely believed to ruin the final scene and cause hilarity where drama was needed. Gilbert soon cut the line, but it was too late, and the play folded. Clement Scott's harsh review (especially of Neilson) led to the termination of Gilbert's relationship with Scott and threats of legal action. According to Barrington's 1908 memoir, the critics also felt that no woman would go to the lengths that the heroine does in the play to save her husband's father.
Read more about this topic: Brantinghame Hall
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)