Collected Plays, Volume I [I] 3801600641

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_ COLLECTED PLAYS _ oSVObLET

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The Collected Plays of John Drinkwater

The

Collected

of John Volume

Plays

Drinkwater I

Sidgwick and Jackson Limited: London 1925

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Preface Tue chronological order of the following plays is indicated in the Contents. The early plays in verse were written during my first experimental days at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, where for some years | was actor, producer, manager, and odd-

job man. If the present volumes were dedicated to one man I should not have to think for a moment beyond my friend Mr Barry Jackson, in honour of

one of my most greatly treasured friendships, and in memory of the days when for so long we tried to learn something of the craft of the theatre together. Hostile criticism will always find its occasions in whatever may be said by the object of its distaste,

and I wish for nothing better than that it should be as little concerned with myself as lam withit. But a writer, when he is gathering together the work of a good many years may be allowed to say a few words by way of explanation to his friends. When I so collected the poems that I had written up to the year 1923, I said nothing about them, because one cannot argue about one’s own poetry. For better or for worse it is there, and there it will

remain, of a permanent quality for changing tastes Vv

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to likeor dislike. But the drama is a more empirical affair, more subject to outside influences, and created more directly in relation to external necessities. It is a crude differentiation, untenable perhaps in esthetic theory, but it will serve

for the moment to say that poetry is written by the poet to please himself and drama to please himself and audiences. Ultimately the merit of his drama has to be judged by the degree of success with which he has been able while pleasing audiences really also to satisfy his own conscience. While, therefore, I should not be so ingenuous as to attempt to point out merits in these plays that might not otherwise be perceived, I may be allowed

to say something of the circumstances

in which

they were written, and, since they have properly

faced the rough-and-tumble of dramatic criticism, I may also be allowed to suggest not what they are, but certain things that they were never intended to be. My affections have never been divided between poetry and the drama. For some time in the early years at Birmingham it was an ambition to help as far as one could towards the restoration of the two upon the stage in union. I remember that John Galsworthy warned me that the shadow of the man Shakespeare was across the path of all who should vi

it

‘a

attempt verse drama in these days. The experience of Rebellion showed me that in that direction at least he was right. If anybody chooses to read into this confession any note of self-esteem, he is welcome to his delusion. Rebellion here appears as it was played, except that I have stripped it of a little of its rhetoric. The one-act plays in verse, _ which have not been revised at all, were attempts

to find some other constructional idiom whereby verse might be accepted as a natural thing by a modern audience. That two of them at least have been in more or less continual performance ever since they were written suggests that there was something in the method. The Masques which appear in the Appendix were written expressly for performance by a large number—between two and three hundred—of Messrs Cadburys’ workpeople at Bournville. The greatest simplicity of mass effect in the open air was

aimed

at, and a tech-

nique that would be within the acting resources of a large and enthusiastic but unskilled company of amateurs. The transition from verse to prose, from X=0, that is, to Abraham Lincoln, was not a surrender, but

a recognition that any chance of development in one’s dramatic technique depends upon an acceptance of the fact that if one insists on staying in the vil

‘

theatre at long as one solved was something

all one may be anything one likes so is not doctrinaire. The problem to be how to keep in the sparest prose idiom of the enthusiasm and poignancy of

verse. In the days when verse was the natural speech of the theatre, its beauty, like the beauty of all fine style, reached the audience without any insistence upon itself. The guiding principle of the speech of these plays later than X=o has been, so far as I could manage it, to make it beautiful without letting anybody know about it. When I wrote Abraham Lincoln, I had in my mind a group of historical plays conceived on a more or less definite plan. It was not that chancing upon Lincoln and Cromwell and the rest I thought they would be interesting characters to write about. It was that having deliberated a good deal on certain themes that I wanted to dramatise I found in these figures a release, as it were, for my imagination. One concrete example in three phases will suffice to illustrate my meaning. The problem of leadership, of the one man, human in all respects like the rest, being set in a position of great authority above his fellows, seemed to me to be of immense dramatic significance. And the problem presented itself in several aspects. ‘There was the man who, certain of his aims, had to face all the Viil