KING · LEAR'S · WIFE THE · CRIER · BY · NIGHT THE · RIDING · TO · LITHEND MIDSUMMER-EVE LAODICE · AND · DANAË PLAYS · BY · GORDON BOTTOMLEY

CONTENTS

Note.—Throughout the stage-directions in the following pages the words "right" and "left" are used with reference to the actor's right and left, not the spectator's.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The plays here collected were originally published separately at various dates during the past eighteen years, and are now brought together for the first time. The details of the previous issues, now for the most part out of print, are appended.

NOTE

KING LEAR'S WIFE

TO T. STURGE MOORE

February 29th, 1916.

KING LEAR'S WIFE

Toward the front a bed stands with its head against the right wall; it has thin leather curtains hung by thongs and drawn back. Farther forward a rich robe and a crown hang on a peg in the same wall. There is a second door beyond the bed, and between this and the bed's head stands a small table with a bronze lamp and a bronze cup on it. Queen Hygd, an emaciated woman, is asleep in the bed; her plenteous black hair, veined with silver, spreads over the pillow. Her waiting-woman, Merryn, middle-aged and hard-featured, sits watching her in a chair on the farther side of the bed. The light of early morning fills the room.

THE CRIER BY NIGHT

THE CRIER BY NIGHT

THE RIDING TO LITHEND

TO EDWARD THOMAS

30 June 1908.

THE RIDING TO LITHEND

The side wall is low and wainscotted with carved panelling on which hang weapons, shields, and coats of mail. In one place a panel slid aside shews a shut bed.

In front of the panelling are two long benches with a carved high-seat between them. Across the end of the hall are similar panellings and the seats, with corresponding tables, of the women's daïs; behind these and in the gable wall is a high narrow door with a rounded top.

A timber roof slopes down to the side wall and is upheld by cross-beams and two rows of tall pillars which make a rather narrow nave of the centre of the hall. One of these rows runs parallel to the side wall, the pair of pillars before the high-seat being carved and ended with images; of the other row only two pillars are visible at the extreme right.

Within this nave is the space for the hearths; but the only hearth visible is the one near the women's daïs. In the roof above it there is a louvre: the fire glows and no smoke rises. The hall is lit everywhere by the firelight.

The rafters over the women's daïs carry a floor at the level of the side walls, forming an open loft which is reached by a wide ladder fixed against the wall: a bed is seen in this loft. Low in the roof at intervals are shuttered casements, one being above the loft: all the shutters are closed.

Near the fire a large shaggy hound is sleeping; and Ormild, in the undyed woollen dress of a thrall, is combing wool.

Oddny stands spinning at the far side; near her Astrid and Steinvor sit stitching a robe which hangs between them.

MIDSUMMER EVE

Summer 1921—Spring 1922.

MIDSUMMER EVE

A late June twilight is deepening; a faint moist heat-haze hides nothing, only distinguishing the planes of the distant trees with a cloudy delicacy. There is no wind, nor any movement; one blackbird sings somewhere for a little while, then it ceases and there is no sound in the fields.

The whole prospect is of a solitary, fruitfully overgrown valley shut in from everywhere.

Within the barn, to the left, is a high hay-mow with a ladder leaning against it; much hay has been tumbled at its foot in forking from the carts. To the right is a space of floor where the corn is to be heaped in the ending of summer: as yet, however, it is empty, save for a wooden plough, a homely rough wooden roller, wooden harrows, an uptilted, pleasantly shaped cart whence the hay-shelvings have not yet been removed. In the far corner of the bare walls of undressed stone at this side is an open door leading into a mistal. Presently a cow is heard moaning sickly beyond this door.

The barn is still more dim than the land, so that a stretch of soft brown darkness is all that is known of the far-off roof. Nearing footfalls are heard in the road, and a woman's singing grows clearer.

LAODICE AND DANAË

TO B. J. FLETCHER

March 8th, 1909.

ARGUMENT

Antiochus Theos, one of the Hellenic Kings of the East of the line of Seleucus, reigned in Antioch. He had espoused Laodice his kinswoman, according to the usage of his race; but after many years he put her from him, and took to wife Berenice, daughter and sister of Ptolemys of Egypt, for reasons of state.

Laodice withdrew to Ephesus and kept court there: long affection, resurgent, sent Antiochus thither to join her. Shortly afterward he died at Ephesus in Laodice's care.

Berenice and Laodice then warred, each to gain the kingdom for her child: the infant son of Berenice disappeared, and eventually Seleucus II., the son of Laodice, held the throne of Antiochus.

In the course of their wars Laodice retired from Ephesus on finding that Sophron, the governor of the city, secretly trafficked with the party of Berenice. While she sat in some adjacent city Sophron unsuspiciously rejoined her counsels; she immediately devised his death, but he, being warned by his old love Danaë, the queen's favourite, saved himself by flight.

LAODICE AND DANAË

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

"KING LEAR'S WIFE" was performed for the first time on 25 September 1915 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, with the following cast:

Costumes and decoration designed by Mr. Barry V. Jackson.

Production by Mr. John Drinkwater.

In the course of the production the song of the Elder Woman, toward the close of the play, was fitted with so appropriate a melody, by a fortunate modification of a folk-tune, that it seems well to continue the connexion by printing the arrangement here.

This represents the extension of the melody used for the final stanza of the song: it can be adapted to the forms of the first and second stanzas by the omission of the sections A-C and B-C respectively. The Coda is intended for use with the final stanza only.

First performed in London on 19 May 1916 at His Majesty's Theatre, under the direction of Miss Viola Tree.

Play produced by Mr. John Drinkwater, and mounted by Mr. Purcell Jones: music by Mr. Ivor Novello.

APPENDIX B

"THE CRIER BY NIGHT" was first performed by Mr. Stuart Walker's Portmanteau Theatre Company in Wyoming, U.S.A., in September 1916, and in New York at the Princess Theatre on 18 December 1916, with the following cast:

Play produced by Mr. Stuart Walker and mounted by Mr. W. J. Zimmerer.

SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF

KING LEAR'S WIFE and other plays. 1920. 4to. With binding design by Charles Ricketts. Pp. 209. 15s. net. (Out of print.)

A special edition of 50 copies signed by the author, in white and gold binding. 31s. 6d. net. (Out of print.)

Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie (Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Liverpool) in The Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury.

This volume has been long overdue. It was the great good fortune of "Georgian Poetry" that it was permitted to give this remarkable tragedy of "King Lear's Wife" to the world, and thus to have the privilege of pioneering Mr. Bottomley's reputation among those who are unable to do much experimental reading. It was obviously not only a dramatic poem but an actable play; so actable, indeed, that it had the extraordinary fortune of being acted; and what was perhaps even more remarkable of a poetic play nowadays, it showed itself capable of being acted precisely and entirely as it had been written, the technique of the poet contriving to be, with a completeness not to be paralleled anywhere to-day except in Italy, simultaneously the technique of the playwright.

The other plays contained in this volume are still to be staged. They would certainly be not less effective than "King Lear's Wife" ... the cunning elaboration of supernaturalism in "The Crier by Night" and "The Riding to Lithend," its combination in the former with the elemental humanities, in the latter with vivid character and strangely heroic passion; the deft lucidity of "Laodice and Danaë," which might serve as a type of dramatic suspense passing at the exact moment into inevitable catastrophe: these things, one would think, should be eminently practical politics for the theatre. If any manager wants plays in which exciting action is at the same time profound significance, here they are.

However, we are only able to speculate on this aspect of Mr. Bottomley's work. But we can console ourselves by simply reading the plays as poetry.... In the days when theurgy was still an honourable profession, Apollonius of Tyana said "Knowing what people say is nothing; I know what people don't say." That might be put as motto for such poetry as Mr. Bottomley writes. It is the art of exhibiting realities. What people don't say is what they really are; and they don't say it because they can't get hold of it. But he can, and he can make them say it ... they speak and act as unconstrainedly as the folk of the everyday world; yet every word and every gesture is a flashing revelation of spiritual destiny. And not only men and women, but nature also: tarns and mountains, winds and the night, trees and stars—of these, too, Mr. Bottomley "knows what they don't say."

To the technical beauty of Mr. Bottomley's poetry I have not alluded. It is extraordinary; but, as in all great poetry, it is no more than the sign that the reality of things is being successfully exhibited.

Mr. John Drinkwater in "The Nature of Drama" ("Prose Papers": London, Elkin Mathews, 1917, p. 220).

I do say that the capital power of the commercialised theatre in England to-day is so great that it has been able to impose its standard on nearly all the people who are habitually in contact with its merchandise ... so that one piece of catchpenny insincerity after another is extolled by what passes for expert opinion as a valuable contribution to the great art of the dramatist, while a piece of work like Mr. Gordon Bottomley's "King Lear's Wife," which ... is for vigour of imagination, poetic eagerness, and dramatic passion not to be excelled by anything that has been put on to the English stage since the Elizabethans, is met with a clamour of ignorance ... in most cases (1915-16) we find no standard whatever being brought to the judgment of an original work of art other than a spurious morality.

Solomon Eagle in The Outlook.

The various societies which desire to regenerate the theatre talk a good deal about the poetic drama of the future, but they do not seem to take much trouble to find it.... Of Mr. Gordon Bottomley's fine plays only one, to the best of my knowledge, has yet been produced in this country.... There is certainly the possibility of a great play in their author, and one at least of them is better than any play in verse which has been staged for many years, and is likely to live longer than most of the so-called masterpieces of our time. If "Midsummer Eve" had been by Claudel, or "The Riding to Lithend" by some German (a most unlikely supposition) all the coteries would have been talking about them years ago....

"Midsummer Eve" is original, and the work of a poet.... There is fine meditative poetry in it, poetry, moreover, not grafted or glued on to its main structure, but growing out of the dialogue naturally, in an inevitable manner.... "Laodice and Danaë" is equally good reading, and it is dramatic. But none of these plays is equal to the two latest, "The Riding to Lithend" and "King Lear's Wife."...

Enough has been written about the grimness of "King Lear's Wife," the fine bursts of poetry in it, and the remarkable character of Goneril.... "The Riding to Lithend" is, up to the present, the best of Mr. Bottomley's plays; and its superiority is a superiority which, I think, would be still more evident on the stage than it is in print.... It comes straight out of an old tale; the characters are recreated and enriched.... The diction is, as a rule, perfect in its propriety and often striking in its beauty. And, above all, Gunnar is a hero, his fight a heroic fight, his courage, his generosity, his humanity (a few sentences to wife and hound are wonderfully chosen), and even his weaknesses are such as to move the heart. His fall is like the fall of all noble and fighting things; the sense of defeat comes with it, but above that a feeling of exultation. On the stage the end, I fancy, would be profoundly moving, and the fight exciting to a degree, though there is no obvious rhodomontade about it.

Mr. John Freeman in The Bookman.

This comely volume at last makes public what has been too long a fugitive and cloistered pleasure.... These five plays show the author in the most powerful exercise of his faculties. Imagination here is free and moves with growing ease, music enlarges like a splendid wind through the verse; and the common reproach of mere "poetic plays" has been avoided in these, where character and action develope as surely as music itself. Gordon Bottomley has remembered that his plays can have no life except in the activity of his characters.... Fine careless raptures alone will not produce a play like "The Riding to Lithend" ... you may quote almost any lines from this fierce Icelandic play and find that what you are reading is vital and essential to the expression of character and action. And in this poetry, too ... the beautiful images flow in and out with the ease of light on water; the rhythms have the natural movement of thought, and the secret discipline of masculine habit. "King Lear's Wife" will be familiar to many readers, but to others it will come with the delicious shock of a new creation.... The new play is a beam of light crossing the darkness of the old. Few passages of modern verse reach the beauty of Goneril's hunting-narration; and it is no isolated beauty.

Mr. William Rose Benèt in The Literary Review of the New York Evening Post.

"The Crier by Night" is one of the most powerful and eerie poetic dramas of the supernatural that have been written in the last two decades. To me the best-known translations of Maeterlinck pale beside it.... I hold "The Riding to Lithend" his greatest achievement. To me it is like a piece of gorgeous tapestry blurred by wood-smoke and sea-mist and hung on a granite wall. The dramatic structure is knit as compact as a rock. Across the shimmering imagery of the diction blows a chill and foreboding wind of the spirit.... The verse is nobly distinguished. "King Lear's Wife" is also a notable piece of work.... It possesses convincing reality.... Again the dramatic structure satisfies completely. "Midsummer Eve" is packed with fragrant beauty ... that creeps around the heart.... The atmosphere is the important thing about this play and is unforgettable. "Laodice and Danaë" is more usual (for Bottomley, for very few other writers), but it is the work of a sure dramatic craftsman with an enthralling tale to tell.... There is a splendid artistic austerity about his work ... yet mixed with this there is an entirely full-blooded love of the earth, a delight in intensely human detail.... He has indeed displayed many gifts imperishably bright. His name should stand high in the roster of modern English verse.

The Morning Post.

The rare beauty and distinction of these works have been ungrudgingly acclaimed by many critics, but they have hitherto lacked that wider recognition for which they are indubitably destined.... But now the bringing of them together in one volume permits us all to appraise the quality of what is the most significant accomplishment of our Georgians. It is impossible to be impervious to the strength and beauty, knit together, of these dramas.... Criticism may note with admiration the unerring skill of dramatic structure; with delight the mastery of language, which constrains the simplest words to the greatest needs; with wonder the reading of the human heart.... The man who can handle character and emotion with such mastery both of language and imagination is indeed a poet.... In Mr. Bottomley the Georgian era has found an authentic voice—a veritable interpreter.

The Times Literary Supplement.

We must honour the devoted writers who keep alive the desire for the poetic drama, and none more than Mr. Gordon Bottomley.... He is a poet and justifies his use of poetic speech; he is eloquent, incisive, has a blank verse of his own which he writes with increasing mastery.... In "The Riding to Lithend" he rises with his story ... the death of Gunnar is well done; you read it breathlessly, for he makes it the death of Gunnar indeed; and even the slayers feel the greatness of it. Mr. Bottomley, in a more fortunate age, might, we think, have been a dramatic poet like Fletcher; he has Fletcher's eloquence though not his fun,... but not, of course, Fletcher's familiarity with the stage.... If he had been bred in the theatre, he might, we think, have had Fletcher's real and delightful success.

John O' London's Weekly.

The cumulative effect of a re-reading of Mr. Bottomley's work is to convince one that he is a real poet who can write real drama. In the matter of construction these plays approach perfection; the building up is masterly, and the verse is full of variety and imagination.... The finest as drama is "King Lear's Wife," though for sheer beauty and spiritual significance I should be inclined to place "Midsummer Eve" first. Only one of these plays has been acted in England. If we had a live stage they would all be acted.

The New Statesman.

Mr. Gordon Bottomley's plays are good art. There are moments in "King Lear's Wife" when he approaches greatness.... It contains passages of very rare force, and the dramatic power ... is of a very high quality. In this play and in "The Crier by Night" he recalls to us not the late Elizabethans so much as that strange uneasy genius Thomas Lovell Beddoes.... He is a purer poet, dramatically, than was Beddoes, and his song has a clearer richer quality, more imaginative, though not quite so fantastic; but he resembles Beddoes in his stern saddened preoccupations with the passing of mortals. Few plays have a greater unity of atmosphere or a more boding one than has "The Riding to Lithend." In all the plays, however, one finds a real poet who is also a real dramatist; there is little of decoration in any of the plays, and nothing of that windy seasonal rhetoric which is so common in some poetic plays.

I. B. in The Manchester Guardian.

It is an excellent thing that these plays, the earliest of which was published twenty years ago, should have been brought together and given a new lease of public life.... It is indeed quite extraordinary that, with so much publishing of poetry during the last few years, work of such high distinction should have remained under cover. Mr. Gordon Bottomley's art of tragedy, as well as his craftsmanship in verse, can be seen ripening through this series until it comes to a rich maturity in "King Lear's Wife." Here ... austerity and compassion are compounded, and so create the tragic atmosphere in which small words are big with infinite meaning and hints develope the power of hammer-blows.... It is the best of the group, and it is significant, as showing the inherent union between matter and form, that when the poet writes his best play he also writes his best verse.... He is admirably master of himself and of his medium.

The Spectator.

Neither in the setting of the scene of "King Lear's Wife," the conduct of the story, or its embellishment and illustration, is there a wasted word.... But amid the abundance of this most rich, most ample of little plays, there is surely nothing—nothing, we mean, that can be detached from its setting—that surpasses Goneril's two speeches to her mother.... Whether Mr. Gordon Bottomley—though calling his creations by their Shakespearean names in his heart—would not have done better to call his monarch Cole or Cadwallader in print is a question with which controversy will probably long be busy. It is a play which would not be spoiled if, in a pet, he had called the protagonists Smith, Jones, and Robinson. We recommend this test, by the way, to those who are called upon to pronounce judgment upon the poetic drama. There is more in it than meets the eye.

The London Mercury.

It is some years since the public was surprised to learn that Mr. Gordon Bottomley had written a prelude to "King Lear," which not only offered some solution of the problems of that work, but was also in itself a play of considerable beauty, originality, and power. This piece now serves for the title of a volume of collected plays.... It was effective and moving on the stage, and it makes its effect, though perhaps a different one, when it is read in the study.... An extract will serve to illustrate the flexible, elastic, and individual versification. We should do wrong, however, if we were to give the impression that his plays are only for the study, valuable for such passages, and lacking in the harder bones of dramatic merit. The action is not an excuse for decorative poetry, but is the immediate and all-important thing.... These are the creations of a dramatist who has no need of descriptive decoration to conceal the weakness of his prime conceptions.

The Nation.

The wave of poetic drama has now ebbed, and this form is practised very little to-day, lyrical and experimental verse having almost entirely supplanted it. Mr. Bottomley's plays are the only ones which, with the going-out of the tide, have managed to escape its "long withdrawing roar" and retain a place on the shore.... Without any doubt they express a singular power of mysterious evocation.... They are not at all vague and inchoate—on the contrary, these towering shadows are remarkably and firmly differentiated.... We find "The Crier by Night" and "The Riding to Lithend"—especially the former—the most darkly and magically impressive of all the plays.... An image in the former positively makes you jump as Donne makes you jump with his imagery.... But perhaps his most striking achievement is the way he can make these shapes of an intensely brooding ... imagination speak out in taut, muscular, even gruffly vivid language. He has avoided, and very properly avoided, the tenuous chantings, effeminate imagery, and listless monochrome of the Celtic drama. Mr. Bottomley's plays, in fact, are peculiar and esoteric, but they undoubtedly achieve a strong success in their own character.

The Athenæum.

Mr. Gordon Bottomley is one of the few writers of poetical plays whom it is necessary to take very seriously: his blemishes are minor and few in number; his poetical qualities very much outweigh his defects. He is at his best in expressing subtle states of mind, and in formulating generalizations. His real distinction lies in his dramatic power. His characters have solidity and life ... they are not mere symbols, but human beings. His plays are marked by the economy of construction of stage plays. It is significant to note that Mr. Bottomley's pieces are excellent in proportion as they are actable.

The Saturday Westminster Gazette.

Of their kind, Mr. Bottomley's plays are remarkably good. They have atmosphere and action; they are exquisitely wrought; they are moving and dramatic. They will surely be among the most delightful discoveries of future generations; and if by the beginning of the twenty-first century our successors have contrived to establish a national or folk theatre, it is fairly safe to prophesy that three at least of them will find a place in its repertory.

The Observer.

Since the issue of "The Crier by Night" in 1902, Mr. Bottomley has worked with a sincerity and devotion which are more commendable than the more frequent essays of less conscientious artists. We remember one considerable and beautifully produced book of miscellaneous verse, "The Gate of Smaragdus," and there have been other plays issued semi-privately, until the publication of "King Lear's Wife" gave him a wider public, and reminded younger readers of his very definite and dignified talent.... If as a tour de force, the latter is the greatest, we still prefer, for sheer poetic beauty, for propriety of phrase and for directness of action, the earlier "Riding to Lithend." Hallgerd is an exceptionally fine creation, and she is given to speak passages of rare force and beauty. This play, too, has a fierce dramatic quality.

Mr. R. Ellis Roberts in The Daily News.

Mr. Bottomley's plays have all one merit without which poetical drama is a thing indefensible. There is always in them a definite note of necessity.... Not only does Mr. Bottomley choose subjects which make his decision to write in verse seem natural and right, he writes blank verse of a dignity and worth which responds at once to the needs of natural, and the convention of poetic, speech. His poetry is in the full English tradition; he enjoys his vocabulary with that careful, inventive joy which is the privilege of all who are sensitive to the individual word. He can use rhetoric; but he rarely allows himself to be drawn away into mere hectic luxury of language. The best of his plays is, I think, "The Riding to Lithend," a rendering of the old life of Iceland, which really represents for us the passionate, hasty life of the old Sagas, while it is free from the pedantry which spoils so many efforts to reproduce Scandinavian heroics. Hallgerd is a genuine piece of dramatic creation. "Midsummer Eve," with its quiet, wind-blown pathos, is equally notable; and the quality of its verse shows Mr. Bottomley's talent at its highest and simplest.

The Actor.

In these plays, the public is reminded of Mr. Gordon Bottomley's almost unique power, as among his contemporaries, of presenting the sinister, the grim, the tragic, or the merely weird, in a poetic garment of power and beauty ... in dramatic force and verse charm.

The Journal of Commerce, Chicago, U.S.A.

These plays are put into a format and style of book that honour the contents, and when you know the contents of this remarkable dramatic poetry that is praise indeed. They hold you strangely.... The dialogue is skilfully modulated, it is a veritable song-speech, illuminated by luminous pauses, by the speaking silences that can invest, if rightly used, the static with so much more dramatic feeling than the more obviously emotional action. The plays are impressive even in the reading of them, then how much more effective they would be if acted and declaimed—but in a manner worthy of their high art.

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Varied hyphenation was retained. This includes things such as bed-clothes, bedclothes and bed-time, bedtime.

The remaining corrections made are indicated by dotted lines under the corrections. Scroll the mouse over the word and the original text will appear.