St John Hankin
Encyclopedia
St. John Emile Clavering Hankin (25 September 1869 - 15 June 1909) was a British
Edwardian
essay
ist and playwright
. Along with George Bernard Shaw
, John Galsworthy
, and Harley Granville-Barker
, he was a major exponent of Edwardian "New Drama". Despite success as a playwright he died by his own hand, and his work was largely neglected until the 1990s.
, England
. During Hankin's youth, his father suffered a nervous breakdown and became an invalid.
Hankin attended Malvern College
and then Merton College, Oxford. Following his graduation in 1890, he became a journalist in London
for the Saturday Review. In 1894 he moved to Calcutta
and wrote for the India Daily News, but he returned to England the next year after contracting malaria.
Hankin became a drama critic for The Times
. He also contributed a series of comic "sequels" to famous plays, including Ibsen
's A Doll's House
, to Punch
. These were published in book form as Mr. Punch's Dramatic Sequels (1901) and Lost Masterpieces (1904).
In 1901 Hankin married Florence Routledge, the daughter of publisher George Routledge
.
led him to associate himself with the Stage Society
and the Royal Court Theatre. Both groups were supportive of attempts to break loose from the conventionalities of the day. Hankin was actively involved in running the Stage Society, a London theater group that was founded in part to avoid the Lord Chamberlain
's censorship.
Hankin's first play, The Two Mr. Wetherbys, was produced by the Stage Society in 1903, and was followed by The Return of the Prodigal (Court Theatre, 1905), The Charity that Began at Home (Court Theatre, 1906), The Cassilis Engagement (Stage Society, 1907) and The Last of the De Mullins (Stage Society, 1908). Hankin also wrote two one-act pieces, The Burglar Who Failed, performed in 1908, and The Constant Lover, first performed posthumously in February 1912. Unlike most comedies, his plays generally end on a note of discord.
Hankin's plays never transferred to the West End
, but they received regional productions, particularly at the Birmingham Rep
. His plays were little performed after his death, the most notable exception being a 1948 revival of The Return of the Prodigal at the Globe (now Gielgud) Theatre
featuring John Gielgud
and Sybil Thorndike
, with costumes by Cecil Beaton
.
Hankin wrote a series of essays from 1906 to 1908 criticizing the established theatrical system of his day. His published writings have been out of copyright since 1960.
. He left his wife a letter expressing his fear that he would "slip into invalidism," which he could not bear, and ended by telling her, "I have found a lovely pool in a river and at the bottom I hope to find rest."
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 Noel Coward
.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
Edwardian
Edwardian period
The Edwardian era or Edwardian period in the United Kingdom is the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910.The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 and the succession of her son Edward marked the end of the Victorian era...
essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
ist and playwright
English drama
Drama was introduced to England from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose. By the medieval period, the mummers' plays had developed, a form of early street theatre associated with the Morris dance, concentrating on themes such as Saint George...
. Along with George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
, John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy OM was an English novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter...
, and Harley Granville-Barker
Harley Granville-Barker
Harley Granville-Barker was an English actor-manager, director, producer, critic and playwright....
, he was a major exponent of Edwardian "New Drama". Despite success as a playwright he died by his own hand, and his work was largely neglected until the 1990s.
Early years
Hankin was born in SouthamptonSouthampton
Southampton is the largest city in the county of Hampshire on the south coast of England, and is situated south-west of London and north-west of Portsmouth. Southampton is a major port and the closest city to the New Forest...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. During Hankin's youth, his father suffered a nervous breakdown and became an invalid.
Hankin attended Malvern College
Malvern College
Malvern College is a coeducational independent school located on a 250 acre campus near the town centre of Malvern, Worcestershire in England. Founded on 25 January 1865, until 1992, the College was a secondary school for boys aged 13 to 18...
and then Merton College, Oxford. Following his graduation in 1890, he became a journalist in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
for the Saturday Review. In 1894 he moved to Calcutta
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
and wrote for the India Daily News, but he returned to England the next year after contracting malaria.
Hankin became a drama critic for The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
. He also contributed a series of comic "sequels" to famous plays, including Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...
's A Doll's House
A Doll's House
A Doll's House is a three-act play in prose by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It premièred at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 December 1879, having been published earlier that month....
, to Punch
Punch (magazine)
Punch, or the London Charivari was a British weekly magazine of humour and satire established in 1841 by Henry Mayhew and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Historically, it was most influential in the 1840s and 50s, when it helped to coin the term "cartoon" in its modern sense as a humorous illustration...
. These were published in book form as Mr. Punch's Dramatic Sequels (1901) and Lost Masterpieces (1904).
In 1901 Hankin married Florence Routledge, the daughter of publisher George Routledge
George Routledge
George Routledge was a British publisher.He gained his earliest experience of business with a bookseller at Carlisle...
.
Career as a dramatist
Hankin's admiration of the work of George Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
led him to associate himself with the Stage Society
Stage Society
The Incorporated Stage Society, commonly known as the Stage Society, was an English theatre society with limited membership which mounted private Sunday performances of new and experimental plays, mainly at the Royal Court Theatre but also at other London West End venues...
and the Royal Court Theatre. Both groups were supportive of attempts to break loose from the conventionalities of the day. Hankin was actively involved in running the Stage Society, a London theater group that was founded in part to avoid the Lord Chamberlain
Lord Chamberlain
The Lord Chamberlain or Lord Chamberlain of the Household is one of the chief officers of the Royal Household in the United Kingdom and is to be distinguished from the Lord Great Chamberlain, one of the Great Officers of State....
's censorship.
Hankin's first play, The Two Mr. Wetherbys, was produced by the Stage Society in 1903, and was followed by The Return of the Prodigal (Court Theatre, 1905), The Charity that Began at Home (Court Theatre, 1906), The Cassilis Engagement (Stage Society, 1907) and The Last of the De Mullins (Stage Society, 1908). Hankin also wrote two one-act pieces, The Burglar Who Failed, performed in 1908, and The Constant Lover, first performed posthumously in February 1912. Unlike most comedies, his plays generally end on a note of discord.
Hankin's plays never transferred to the West End
West End theatre
West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English speaking...
, but they received regional productions, particularly at the Birmingham Rep
Birmingham Repertory Theatre
Birmingham Repertory Theatre is a theatre and theatre company based on Centenary Square in Birmingham, England...
. His plays were little performed after his death, the most notable exception being a 1948 revival of The Return of the Prodigal at the Globe (now Gielgud) Theatre
Gielgud Theatre
The Gielgud Theatre is a West End theatre, located on Shaftesbury Avenue in the City of Westminster, London, at the corner of Rupert Street. The house currently has 889 seats on three levels.-History:...
featuring John Gielgud
John Gielgud
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, OM, CH was an English actor, director, and producer. A descendant of the renowned Terry acting family, he achieved early international acclaim for his youthful, emotionally expressive Hamlet which broke box office records on Broadway in 1937...
and Sybil Thorndike
Sybil Thorndike
Dame Agnes Sybil Thorndike CH DBE was a British actress.-Early life:She was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire to Arthur Thorndike and Agnes Macdonald. Her father was a Canon of Rochester Cathedral...
, with costumes by Cecil Beaton
Cecil Beaton
Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, CBE was an English fashion and portrait photographer, diarist, painter, interior designer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre...
.
Hankin wrote a series of essays from 1906 to 1908 criticizing the established theatrical system of his day. His published writings have been out of copyright since 1960.
Final years
From 1907 Hankin suffered increasing ill health, and he was plagued with the fear that he would suffer the same fate as his father. On a "dull, sultry, wet" June day in 1909, Hankin tied two seven-pound dumbbells around his neck and drowned himself in the River IthonRiver Ithon
The River Ithon is a major left-bank tributary of the River Wye in Powys, mid Wales. It rises in the broad saddle between the western end of Kerry Hill and the hill of Glog to its west and flows initially southwards to Llanbadarn Fynydd...
. He left his wife a letter expressing his fear that he would "slip into invalidism," which he could not bear, and ended by telling her, "I have found a lovely pool in a river and at the bottom I hope to find rest."
Assessments of his work
Bernard ShawGeorge Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
described Hankin's death as "a public calamity." Granville-Barker
Harley Granville-Barker
Harley Granville-Barker was an English actor-manager, director, producer, critic and playwright....
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
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...
seem good-natured."
One may see Hankin as a successor of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, 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
Christopher Newton
Christopher Newton is a Canadian director and actor and served as Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival from 1980-2002.Newton was born in England and educated at Sir Roger Manwood's School in Kent, the University of Leeds, Purdue University in Indiana and the University of Illinois, where he...
makes the argument that Hankin was the comic bridge between Wilde and Noel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
.
Revivals since 1993
- 1993 The Return of the Prodigal - The Orange Tree Theatre, London
- 1994 The Return of the Prodigal - BBC Radio Four
- 2001 The Return of the Prodigal - The Shaw FestivalShaw FestivalThe Shaw Festival is a major Canadian theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the second largest repertory theatre company in North America...
, Canada - 2002 The Charity that Began at Home - The Mint Theater, New York
- 2007 The Return of the Prodigal - The Mint Theater, New York
- 2007 The Cassilis Engagement - The Shaw FestivalShaw FestivalThe Shaw Festival is a major Canadian theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the second largest repertory theatre company in North America...
, Canada
Plays
- The Two Mr Wetherbys, 1903
- The Return of the Prodigal, 1905
- The Charity that Began at Home, 1906
- The Cassilis Engagement, 1907
- The Last of the De Mullins, 1908
- The Burglar Who Failed, 1908
- The Three Daughters of M. Dupont, (Translation of play by Eugene Brieux, in "Three Plays by Brieux" first published 1911)
- The Constant Lover, first performed 1912
- Thompson, (Posthumously completed by George Calderon, first published 1913)
- A Pleasant Evening, (Unperformed; first published 2005)
Books
- Mr Punch's Dramatic Sequels, 1901
- Lost Masterpieces, 1904
- Three Plays with Happy Endings, 1907 (The Return of the Prodigal, The Charity that Began at Home and The Cassilis Engagement)
Essays
- "The Censorship of Plays". Academy 74 (29 February 1908): 514-515
- "Puritanism and the English Stage". Fortnightly Review 86 (1 December 1906): 1055-1064
- "How to Run an Art Theatre for London". Fortnightly Review 88 (1 November 1907): 814-818
- "The Need for an Endowed Theatre in London". Fortnightly Review (1 December 1908): 1038-1047.
External links
The full text of a previously unpublished Hankin play, A Pleasant Evening, with Introduction and Notes by Rudolf Weiss, can be found at http://www.xix-e.pierre-marteau.com/ed/hankin.html.- St John Hankin in the Literary Encyclopedia
- St John Hankin at theatredatabase.com