A Simple and Rather Tender Thing? Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina in 1930s Britain and America

Abstract

From 1935 to 1939, audiences on both sides of the Atlantic thronged theatres to see Laurence Housman’s play Victoria Regina, a series of vignettes about the life of Queen Victoria. Those unable to purchase tickets were able to read about the show in magazines and newspapers, listen to a radio production, and purchase clothing and home furnishings that reflected the revival of interest in the Victorian era. Yet to the extent that scholars have discussed this incredibly popular play and the Victorian revival that it spawned, they tend to ascribe its success to a nostalgic impulse, or what Alison Light has described as the phenomenon of ‘conservative modernity’. This article reframes Victoria Regina, by treating it as a site of provocation and meaning-making in a charged transatlantic context. As I show, Housman (1865–1959)—a free speech advocate, Quaker pacifist, committed internationalist, anti-imperialist, feminist, and nascent gay rights activist—wanted to use Victoria to goad, intentionally so. His Victoria may have been romantic and feminine, but she was still intended as a vehicle of dissent. Housman wrote Victoria Regina primarily to protest censorship laws in Britain, but also to provide a more woman-centered version of the nation’s past, and to promote conciliation over the conflict between Germany and Britain. It was in its capacity as a cultural bridge between the UK and the USA, however, that Victoria Regina ended up making its most sizeable impact. This article thus offers an important meditation not only on the relationship between theatre and politics in the interwar period but also on the Victorian inheritance and its continuing and sometimes surprising applications in the twentieth century—especially in facilitating the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.