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Sir Arthur Pinero (1855-1934)

Arthur Wing Pinero was born in London on 24 May 1855, the son of solicitor John Daniel Pinero and his second wife, Lucy Daines. After attending a charity school in Clerkenwell, Pinero was employed as a solicitor’s clerk, but at the age of nineteen he began to work as a professional actor, securing a place in R.H. Wyndham’s company at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, in 1874. By 1876, Pinero had made the transition from regional to London theatre and was a member of Henry Irving’s Lyceum company, and less than a year later his one act play £200 a Year was staged at the Globe Theatre, marking the beginning of his career as a dramatic author. He continued to work as an actor for another eight years, however, and in 1883 married the actress Myra Emily Hamilton, becoming stepfather to her two children. Pinero’s transition from actor to playwright became apparent when Daisy’s Escape , a one-act piece written for Irving, was staged at the Lyceum in 1879, then in

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=263 Pinero, Arthur. The Magistrate. 1885.

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7473 Pinero, Arthur. The Profligate. 1889.

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7654 Pinero, Arthur. The Schoolmistress. 1887.

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1790 Pinero, Arthur. Sweet Lavender. 1888.

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8453 Pinero, Arthur. Trelawny of the 'Wells'. 1898.

Trelawny of the “Wells” ranks with The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) as the most enduring, oft-reproduced play of Arthur Wing Pinero, the most successful British dramatist of the period extending from roughly 1885 to the end of the First World War. Debuting in January 1898, three years before Queen Victoria’s death, but set in the theatrical world of the 1860s, the deliberately sentimental comedy is not only a love letter of sorts to the plays and players Pinero fell in love with as a boy, but also, arguably, the first self-consciously historicist drama set in the Victorian period or, more precisely, in what Pinero and his contemporaries dubbed the “early” and/or “middle-Victorian” age. The play’s self-consciously nostalgic mood perhaps seemed natural to author and audience alike in January 1898, given the flood of reflections on the “Victorian age” unleashed by celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. But Pinero arguably ha

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=41 Pinero, Arthur. The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith. 1895.

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7680 Pinero, Arthur. The Second Mrs Tanqueray. 1893.

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=29620 Harjo, Joy. Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning. 2007.

/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10329 Pratchett, Terry. Wings. 1990.