St. John Emile Clavering Hankin - Assessments of His Work

Assessments of His Work

Bernard Shaw described Hankin's death as "a public calamity." Granville-Barker dedicated his first published volume of plays in 1909 "To the memory of my fellow-worker, St. John Hankin."

When The Dramatic Works of St John Hankin was published in 1912, The New York Times wrote that, "His influence is not to be measured by the fact that the London stage has apparently found no use for him....To have let a little light and air into the English theater at a time when the windows had for years been shut, and the blinds drawn was no mean accomplishment."

Hankin's comedy-dramas satirize snobbery and class-consciousness. His characters include types familiar to the Edwardian New Drama: autocratic men, crushed wives, spinster daughters, formidable dowagers. All feature conflict between parents, particularly domineering fathers, and their lively adult children who repudiate the values and conventions to which their parents hold. Though Hankin attacked abuses, he suggested no remedies. Consequently, it was said that "his plays, shot through with a cynical pessimism, made even Ibsen seem good-natured."

One may see Hankin as a successor of Oscar Wilde, whose comedies deconstructed prevailing Edwardian norms without offering any new values. Wilde criticised the traditional order, but his endings confirm rather than subvert its structures. Christopher Newton makes the argument that Hankin was the comic bridge between Wilde and Noël Coward.