Introduction

The revolutionary advent of actresses in the commedia dell’arte had a profound impact on the all-male stage. The transnational circulation of Italian texts, roles, topoi, and players prompted the emergence of the Italian-style innamorata in the drama of Shakespeare and his peers. As novelties who quickly became star attractions, the best actresses of Italy expanded on the bold innamorata of erudita drama, making her more poetic and versatile, qualities that enabled the actress to cross divides of genre, gender, and race. Theatricality and autonomy came to characterize these new female protagonists, roles created to display the prima donna’s glamour and skill. The diva’s fame leapt across borders as troupes ventured across the Alps to Vienna, Paris, and Madrid. In the 1570s, the “theatergram of the actress” took root in England. After the comici performed for Elizabeth and for popular audiences, Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, and others wrote groundbreaking plays featuring ardent women in love on the Italian model. In sum, the Shakespearean stage drew on the diva’s role-playing, materials, and methods to bring crowd-pleasing foreign “women” to a theater without women.

Gesamtkunstwerk

Lawrence’s engagement with a remarkable range of arts is demonstrated throughout this Companion; this chapter considers the extent to which he brought aspects of these various arts into play within single artworks, notably in Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent. The Gesamtkunstwerk (or total artwork) is usually associated with Wagner, whose influence disseminated through Nietzsche and the German Expressionists into a modernism that sought to engage all the senses at once. Yet, despite its totalising potential, the Gesamtkunstwerk consists of separate artistic media that struggle for coherence or supremacy, and thus it also works to fragment and loosen form, as illustrated by Lawrence’s most experimental works of the 1920s. This chapter considers Lawrence in the context of his German contemporaries ‒ Brecht, Kandinsky, Mann and Schoenberg ‒ and how the paradoxes inherent in the totalising and non-totalising potential of the Gesamtkunstwerk influenced his ambivalent attitudes to society as a form of brotherhood.

Performance

This chapter considers the variety of performances and performers in Lawrence’s life and writing: it shows how his fascination with performance extended far beyond the range of his theatre plays. It also establishes how hard it is to pin down an authorial habit of mind which so regularly returned to the performative, both in admiration of it and repulsion from it. It acknowledges the paradox of the solitary writer, often satirical about the performances of others, being also a most gregarious and brilliant performer with friends. Reading aloud, engaging in mimicry and imitation, in charades, in singing, watching and occasionally demonstrating dance, above all in writing fiction in which characters perform themselves – all were for Lawrence ways of exploring what the performative might reveal. The chapter ends with an extended analysis of the performances (sartorial, vocal, enacted) in Women in Love.

Romanticism, Decadence, History

This chapter tracks the impact of history on D. H. Lawrence's development from The Rainbow to Women in Love. It follows a development keyed to Lawrence's experience of the Great War, the traumatic event which, if unnamed in either of the two novels, generates and explains the striking difference between them. His process of development here provides a kind of history in miniature of a long nineteenth century, where the Romanticism of the earlier century turned into the decaying and then decayed Romanticism of Decadence and, through further turns of the early twentieth century, Modernism. In play and at stake in this process is the history and memory of Revolution, a substantial promise in earlier Romanticism, which abides in Lawrence's social imaginary as a possibility--now lost--of transformational historical change. The sense of despair in Women in Love discovers thus its longer historical memory and profounder literary consequence.

Sculpture

A brief history of declining interest in sculpture helps this chapter to contextualise why Joseph Epstein, Eric Gill and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska believed the only way forward for this art lay in a return to the ancient skill of direct-carving. Discussion of these sculptors’ relationship to direct-carving is related to Lawrence’s parallel ambition to ‘break down the boundaries between verbal and visual expression’ as evidenced by The Rainbow. Reviewing the sculptural efforts of Lawrence’s close friend, Mark Gertler, suggests how they impacted on Women in Love, through Lawrence’s depiction of the sculptor Loerke and the expression of ideas associated with Futurism, Deutscher Werkbund and Vorticism. This leads to the suggestion that the Vorticist sculptor, Gaudier, may have had more effect on Women in Love than has hitherto been recognised. The chapter concludes with evidence of Lawrence’s influence, primarily through Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.

The Idea of the Novel

This chapter relates Lawrence's ideas about novel writing to his own novels. Early in his career he wrestled with and rejected the Flaubertian ideal of careful 'construction' and 'form', precisely chosen words, and authorial impersonality. The ideas expressed in the six essays he wrote about the novel, five of them in 1925, inform his own fiction. The distinctive qualities of his best fiction include incomplete, open form - forcefulness, struggle and even danger - energy and quickness. While the chapter focuses mainly on Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love, it discusses all the novels except The Lost Girl. The chapter also considers the relationship of Lawrence's criticism of other writers, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Whitman, to his own novel writing.