Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Author's Note
- Introduction
- 1 The Victorians and the Bible
- 2 Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus
- 3 The Rise of the Fictional Jesus
- 4 The Fifth Gospel of Oscar Wilde
- 5 The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde's Oral Tales
- 6 A Peculiar Protestant: The Gospels According to George Moore
- 7 George Moore's Life of Jesus
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - A Peculiar Protestant: The Gospels According to George Moore
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Author's Note
- Introduction
- 1 The Victorians and the Bible
- 2 Nineteenth-Century Lives of Jesus
- 3 The Rise of the Fictional Jesus
- 4 The Fifth Gospel of Oscar Wilde
- 5 The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde's Oral Tales
- 6 A Peculiar Protestant: The Gospels According to George Moore
- 7 George Moore's Life of Jesus
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Paul was a cosmopolitan and Jesus was a provincial. Had they ever met in person, they would presumably have had little to say to each other […]
Gerd Lüdemann, Jesus After Two Thousand YearsBy the early twentieth century, the Gospels had undergone imaginative treatment in poetry, prose fiction and dramatic scenarios, but any ambitions to present them on stage were held firmly at bay by the rigid adherence of successive Examiners of Plays to the Theatres Act of 1843. Prohibiting dramas adapted from the Scriptures and placing an outright ban on the depiction of Christ or the Deity on stage, the legislation proved a more or less insurmountable barrier to aspiring religious dramatists – orthodox and unorthodox – and a bone of contention for members of the artistic community. Encounters with the censor, such as Wilde's over Salome, prompted a variety of public reactions, including a series of articles published in the New Review in 1893. Speaking for the traditionalists, F. W. Farrar insisted that:
The events narrated in the Bible are associated with the deepest and most sacred of our religious feelings. They have entered into our religious teaching from earliest childhood […] It seems altogether undesirable that they should be set before us amid the inevitable surroundings of the stage. Their representations in plays would be mixed up with questions of literary taste, or journalistic criticism, of the dress, the appearance, the success or the failure of particular actors.
Putting the case for the liberals, Henry Arthur Jones argued:
I see no reason why the great human stories of the Bible should not be utilised on our stage. I am speaking here with the utmost reverence for a Book, or rather Books, which I have clearly loved and constantly studied from my childhood […] The English theatre could not make a worse use of the Bible than the sects have done, or misunderstand it so completely.
As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, so the Theatres Act appeared more and more an anachronism to all but the staunchest traditionalists, prompting satirical responses such as this by the writer and civil servant Humbert Wolfe:
C is for Censor
Who keeps the stage clean
By ruling out God and the Crown as obscene.
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- Information
- The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination 1860–1920 , pp. 217 - 246Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2010