British literature

8.3 Victorian drama
For much of the first half of the 19th century, drama in London and provincial theatres was restricted by a licens­ing system to the Patent theatre companies, and all other theatres could perform only musical entertainments (al­though magistrates had powers to license occasional dra­matic performances). The passing of the Theatres Act 1843 removed the monopoly on drama held by the Patent theatres.

Irish playwright Dion Boucicault (1820-90) was an ex­tremely popular writer of comedies who achieved suc­cess on the London stage with works like London Assur­ance, (1841), in the middle of the 19th century. However, drama did not achieve importance as a genre in the 19th century until the end of the century, and then the main figures were also Irish-born. In the last decade of the century major playwrights emerged, including George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Arms and the Man (1894), and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Both of these Irish writers lived mainly in England and wrote in English, with the exception of some works in French by Wilde.

9. 
   Twentieth-century
   

Main articles: Twentieth-century English literature, Scottish literature, Irish literature, and Welsh literature in English

The year 1922 marked a significant change in the rela­tionship between Great Britain and Ireland, with the set­ting up of the (predominantly Catholic) Irish Free State in most of Ireland, while the predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. This separation also leads to questions as to what extent Irish writing prior to 1922 should be treated as a colonial literature. There are also those who question whether the literature of Northern Ireland is Irish or British. Nation­alist movements in Britain, especially in Wales and Scot­land, also significantly influenced writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

1.