HALLGERD I am a hazardous desirable thing, A warm unsounded peril, a flashing mischief, A divine malice, a disquieting voice: Thus I was shapen, and it is my pride To nourish all the fires that mingled me. I am not long moved, I do not mar my face, Though men have sunk in me as in a quicksand. Well, death is terrible. Was I not worth it? Does not the light change on me as I breathe? Could I not take the hearts of generations, Walking among their dreams? Oh, I have might, Although it drives me too and is not my own deed.... And Gunnar is great, or he had died long since. It is my joy that Gunnar stays with me: Indeed the offence is theirs who hunted him, His banishment is not just; his wrongs increase, His honour and his following shall increase If he is steadfast for his blamelessness.

RANNVEIG Law is not justice, but the sacrifice Of singular virtues to the dull world's ease of mind; It measures men by the most vicious men; It is a bargaining with vanities, Lest too much right should make men hate each other And hasten the last battle of all the nations. Gunnar should have kept the atonement set, For then those men would turn to other quarrels.

GUNNAR I know not why it is I must be fighting, For ever fighting, when the slaying of men Is a more weary and aimless thing to me Than most men think it ... and most women too. There is a woman here who grieves she loves me, And she too must be fighting me for ever With her dim ravenous unsated mind.... Ay, Hallgerd, there's that in her which desires Men to fight on for ever because she lives: When she took form she did it like a hunger To nibble earth's lip away until the sea Poured down the darkness. Why then should I sail Upon a voyage that can end but here? She means that I shall fight until I die: Why must she be put off by whittled years, When none can die until his time has come?

(He turns to the hound by the fire.)

Samm, drowsy friend, dost scent a prey in dreams? Shake off thy shag of sleep and get to thy watch: 'Tis time to be our eyes till the next light. Out, out to the yard, good Samm.

(He goes to the left, followed by the hound. In the meantime HALLGERD has seated herself in the high-seat near the sewing women, turning herself away and tugging at a strand of her hair, the end of which she bites.)

RANNVEIG (intercepting him) Nay, let me take him. It is not safe—there may be men who hide.... Hallgerd, look up; call Gunnar to you there:

(HALLGERD is motionless.) Lad, she beckons. I say you shall not come.

GUNNAR (laughing) Fierce woman, teach me to be brave in age, And let us see if it is safe for you.

(Leads RANNVEIG out, his hand on her shoulder; the hound goes with them.)

STEINVOR Mistress, my heart is big with mutinies For your proud sake: does not your heart mount up? He is an outlaw now and could not hold you If you should choose to leave him. Is it not law? Is it not law that you could loose this marriage— Nay, that he loosed it shamefully years ago By a hard blow that bruised your innocent cheek, Dishonouring you to lesser women and chiefs? See, it burns up again at the stroke of thought. Come, leave him, mistress; we will go with you. There is no woman in the country now Whose name can kindle men as yours can do— Ay, many would pile for you the silks he grudges; And if you did withdraw your potent presence Fire would not spare this house so reverently.

HALLGERD Am I a wandering flame that sears and passes? We must bide here, good Steinvor, and be quiet. Without a man a woman cannot rule, Nor kill without a knife; and where's the man That I shall put before this goodly Gunnar? I will not be made less by a less man. There is no man so great as my man Gunnar: I have set men at him to show forth his might; I have planned thefts and breakings of his word When my pent heart grew sore with fermentation Of malice too long undone, yet could not stir him. Oh, I will make a battle of the Thing, Where men vow holy peace, to magnify him. Is it not rare to sit and wait o' nights, Knowing that murderousness may even now Be coming down outside like second darkness Because my man is greater?

STEINVOR (shuddering) Is it not rare.

HALLGERD That blow upon the face So long ago is best not spoken of. I drave a thrall to steal and burn at Otkell's Who would not sell to us in famine time But denied Gunnar as if he were suppliant: Then at our feast when men rode from the Thing I spread the stolen food and Gunnar knew. He smote me upon the face—indeed he smote me. Oh, Gunnar smote me and had shame of me And said he'd not partake with any thief; Although I stole to injure his despiser.... But if he had abandoned me as well 'Tis I who should have been unmated now; For many men would soon have judged me thief And shut me from this land until I died— And then I should have lost him. Yet he smote me—

ASTRID He kept you his—yea, and maybe saved you From a debasement that could madden or kill, For women thieves ere now have felt a knife Severing ear or nose. And yet the feud You sowed with Otkell's house shall murder Gunnar. Otkell was slain: then Gunnar's enviers, Who could not crush him under his own horse At the big horse-fight, stirred up Otkell's son To avenge his father; for should he be slain Two in one stock would prove old Njal's foretelling, And Gunnar's place be emptied either way For those high helpless men who cannot fill it. O mistress, you have hurt us all in this: You have cut off your strength, you have maimed yourself, You are losing power and worship and men's trust. When Gunnar dies no other man dare take you.

HALLGERD You gather poison in your mouth for me. A high-born woman may handle what she fancies Without being ear-pruned like a pilfering beggar. Look to your ears if you touch ought of mine: Ay, you shall join the mumping sisterhood And tramp and learn your difference from me.

(She turns from ASTRID.)

Steinvor, I have remembered the great veil, The woven cloud, the tissue of gold and garlands, That Gunnar took from some outlandish ship And thinks was made in Greekland or in Hind: Fetch it from the ambry in the bower.

(STEINVOR goes out by the dais door.)

ASTRID Mistress, indeed you are a cherished woman. That veil is worth a lifetime's weight of coifs: I have heard a queen offered her daughter for it, But Gunnar said it should come home and wait— And then gave it to you. The half of Iceland Tells fabulous legends of a fabulous thing, Yet never saw it: I know they never saw it, For ere it reached the ambry I came on it Tumbled in the loft with ragged kirtles.

HALLGERD What, are you there again? Let Gunnar alone.

(STEINVOR enters with the veil folded. HALLGERD takes it with one hand and shakes it into a heap.)

This is the cloth. He brought it out at night, In the first hour that we were left together, And begged of me to wear it at high feasts And more outshine all women of my time: He shaped it to my head with my gold circlet, Saying my hair smouldered like Rhine-fire through, He let it fall about my neck, and fall About my shoulders, mingle with my skirts, And billow in the draught along the floor.

(She rises and holds the veil behind her head.)

I know I dazzled as if I entered in And walked upon a windy sunset and drank it, Yet must I stammer with such strange uncouthness And tear it from me, tangling my arms in it. Why should I so befool myself and seem A laughable bundle in each woman's eyes, Wearing such things as no one ever wore, Useless ... no head-cloth ... too unlike my fellows. Yet he turns miser for a tiny coif. It would cut into many golden coifs And dim some women in their Irish clouts— But no; I'll shape and stitch it into shifts, Smirch it like linen, patch it with rags, to watch His silent anger when he sees my answer. Give me thy shears, girl Oddny.

ODDNY You'll not part it?

HALLGERD I'll shorten it.

ODDNY I have no shears with me.

HALLGERD No matter; I can start it with my teeth And tear it down the folds. So. So. So. So. Here's a fine shift for summer: and another. I'll find my shears and chop out waists and neck-holes. Ay, Gunnar, Gunnar!

(She throws the tissue on the ground, and goes out by the dais door.)

ODDNY (lifting one of the pieces) O me! A wonder has vanished.

STEINVOR What is a wonder less? She has done finely, Setting her worth above dead marvels and shows.

(The deep menacing baying of the hound is heard near at hand. A woman's cry follows it.)

They come, they come! Let us flee by the bower!

(Starting up, she stumbles in the tissue and sinks upon it. The others rise.)

You are leaving me—will you not wait for me— Take, take me with you.

(Mingled cries of women are heard.)

GUNNAR (outside) Samm, it is well: be still. Women, be quiet; loose me; get from my feet, Or I will have the hound to wipe me clear.

STEINVOR (recovering herself) Women are sent to spy.

(The sound of a door being opened is heard. GUNNAR enters from the left, followed by three beggar-women, BIARTEY, JOFRID, and GUDFINN. They hobble and limp, and are swathed in shapeless, nameless rags which trail about their feet; BIARTEY'S left sleeve is torn completely away, leaving her arm bare and mud-smeared; the others' skirts are torn, and JOFRID'S gown at the neck; GUDFINN wears a felt hood buttoned under her chin; the others' faces are almost hid in falling tangles of grey hair. Their faces are shriveled and weather-beaten, and BIARTEY'S mouth is distorted by two front teeth that project like tusks.)

GUNNAR Get in to the light. Yea, has he mouthed ye?... What men send ye here? Who are ye? Whence come ye? What do ye seek? I think no mother ever suckled you: You must have dragged your roots up in waste places One foot at once, or heaved a shoulder up—

BIARTEY (interrupting him) Out of the bosoms of cairns and standing stones. I am Biartey: she is Jofrid: she is Gudfinn: We are lone women known to no man now. We are not sent: we come.

GUNNAR Well, you come. You appear by night, rising under my eyes Like marshy breath or shadows on the wall; Yet the hound scented you like any evil That feels upon the night for a way out. And do you, then, indeed wend alone? Came you from the West or the sky-covering North Yet saw no thin steel moving in the dark?

BIARTEY Not West, not North: we slept upon the East, Arising in the East where no men dwell. We have abided in the mountain places, Chanted our woes among the black rocks crouching.

(GUDFINN joins her in a sing-song utterance.) From the East, from the East we drove and the wind waved us, Over the heaths, over the barren ashes. We are old, our eyes are old, and the light hurts us, We have skins on our eyes that part alone to the star-light. We stumble about the night, the rocks tremble Beneath our trembling feet; black sky thickens, Breaks into clots, and lets the moon upon us.

(JOFRID joins her voice to the voices of the other two.) Far from the men who fear us, men who stone us, Hiding, hiding, flying whene'er they slumber, High on the crags we pause, over the moon-gulfs; Black clouds fall and leave us up in the moon-depths Where wind flaps our hair and cloaks like fin-webs, Ay, and our sleeves that toss with our arms and the cadence Of quavering crying among the threatening echoes. Then we spread our cloaks and leap down the rock-stairs, Sweeping the heaths with our skirts, greying the dew-bloom, Until we feel a pool on the wide dew stretches Stilled by the moon or ruffling like breast-feathers, And, with grey sleeves cheating the sleepy herons, Squat among them, pillow us there and sleep. But in the harder wastes we stand upright, Like splintered rain-worn boulders set to the wind In old confederacy, and rest and sleep.

(HALLGERD'S women are huddled together and clasping each other.)

ODDNY What can these women be who sleep like horses, Standing up in the darkness? What will they do?

GUNNAR Ye wail like ravens and have no human thoughts. What do ye seek? What will ye here with us?

BIARTEY (as all three cower suddenly) Succour upon this terrible journeying. We have a message for a man in the West, Sent by an old man sitting in the East. We are spent, our feet are moving wounds, our bodies Dream of themselves and seem to trail behind us Because we went unfed down in the mountains. Feed us and shelter us beneath your roof, And put us over the Markfleet, over the channels. We are weak old women: we are beseeching you.

GUNNAR You may bide here this night, but on the morrow You shall go over, for tramping shameless women Carry too many tales from stead to stead— And sometimes heavier gear than breath and lies. These women will tell the mistress all I grant you; Get to the fire until she shall return.

BIARTEY Thou art a merciful man and we shall thank thee.

(GUNNAR goes out again to the left. The old women approach the young ones gradually.) Little ones, do not doubt us. Could we hurt you? Because we are ugly must we be bewitched?

STEINVOR Nay, but bewitch us.

BIARTEY Not in a litten house: Not ere the hour when night turns on itself And shakes the silence: not while ye wake together. Sweet voice, tell us, was that verily Gunnar?

STEINVOR Arrh—do not touch me, unclean flyer-by-night: Have ye birds' feet to match such bat-webbed fingers?

BIARTEY I am only a cowed curst woman who walks with death; I will crouch here. Tell us, was it Gunnar?

ODDNY Yea, Gunnar surely. Is he not big enough To fit the songs about him?

BIARTEY He is a man. Why will his manhood urge him to be dead? We walk about the whole old land at night, We enter many dales and many halls: And everywhere is talk of Gunnar's greatness, His slayings and his fate outside the law. The last ship has not gone: why will he tarry?

ODDNY He chose a ship, but men who rode with him Say that his horse threw him upon the shore, His face toward the Lithe and his own fields; As he arose he trembled at what he gazed on (Although those men saw nothing pass or meet them) And said ... What said he, girls?

ASTRID "Fair is the Lithe: I never thought it was so far, so fair. Its corn is white, its meadows green after mowing. I will ride home again and never leave it."

ODDNY 'Tis an unlikely tale: he never said it. No one could mind such things in such an hour. Plainly he saw his fetch come down the sands, And knew he need not seek another country And take that with him to walk upon the deck In night and storm.

GUDFINN He, he, he! No man speaks thus.

JOFRID No man, no man: he must be doomed somewhere.

BIARTEY Doomed and fey, my sisters.... We are too old, Yet I'd not marvel if we outlasted him. Sisters, that is a fair fierce girl who spins.... My fair fierce girl, you could fight—but can you ride? Would you not shout to be riding in a storm? Ah—h, girls learnt riding well when I was a girl, And foam rides on the breakers as I was taught.... My fair fierce girl, tell me your noble name.

ODDNY My name is Oddny.

BIARTEY Oddny, when you are old Would you not be proud to be no man's purse-string, But wild and wandering and friends with the earth? Wander with us and learn to be old yet living. We'd win fine food with you to beg for us.

STEINVOR Despised, cast out, unclean, and loose men's night-bird.

ODDNY When I am old I shall be some man's friend, And hold him when the darkness comes....

BIARTEY And mumble by the fire and blink.... Good Oddny, let me spin for you awhile, That Gunnar's house may profit by his guesting: Come, trust me with your distaff....

ODDNY Are there spells Wrought on a distaff?

STEINVOR Only by the Norns, And they'll not sit with human folk to-night.

ODDNY Then you may spin all night for what I care; But let the yarn run clean from knots and snarls, Or I shall have the blame when you are gone.

BIARTEY (taking the distaff) Trust well the aged knowledge of my hands; Thin and thin do I spin, and the thread draws finer.

(She sings as she spins.)

They go by three. And the moon shivers; The tired waves flee, The hidden rivers Also flee.

I take three strands; There is one for her, One for my hands, And one to stir For another's hands.

I twine them thinner, The dead wool doubts; The outer is inner, The core slips out....

(HALLGERD reenters by the dais door, holding a pair of shears.)

HALLGERD What are these women, Oddny? Who let them in?

BIARTEY (who spins through all that follows) Lady, the man of fame who is your man Gave us his peace to-night, and that of his house. We are blown beggars tramping about the land, Denied a home for our evil and vagrant hearts; We sought this shelter when the first dew soaked us, And should have perished by the giant hound But Gunnar fought it with his eyes and saved us. That is a strange hound, with a man's mind in it.

HALLGERD (seating herself in the high-seat) It is an Irish hound, from that strange soil Where men by day walk with unearthly eyes And cross the veils of the air, and are not men But fierce abstractions eating their own hearts Impatiently and seeing too much to be joyful. If Gunnar welcomed ye, ye may remain.

BIARTEY She is a fair free lady, is she not? But that was to be looked for in a high one Who counts among her fathers the bright Sigurd, The bane of Fafnir the Worm, the end of the god-kings; Among her mothers Brynhild, the lass of Odin, The maddener of swords, the night-clouds' rider. She has kept sweet that father's lore of bird-speech, She wears that mother's power to cheat a god. Sisters, she does well to be proud.

JOFRID and GUDFINN Ay, well.

HALLGERD (shaping the tissue with her shears) I need no witch to tell I am of rare seed, Nor measure my pride nor praise it. Do I not know? Old women, ye are welcomed: sit with us, And while we stitch tell us what gossip runs— But if strife might be warmed by spreading it.

BIARTEY Lady, we are hungered; we were lost All night among the mountains of the East; Clouds of the cliffs come down my eyes again. I pray you let some thrall bring us to food.

HALLGERD Ye get nought here. The supper is long over; The women shall not let ye know the food-house, Or ye'll be thieving in the night. Ye are idle, Ye suck a man's house bare and seek another. 'Tis bed-time; get to sleep—that stills much hunger.

BIARTEY Now it is easy to be seeing what spoils you. You were not grasping or ought but over warm When Sigmund, Gunnar's kinsman, guested here. You followed him, you were too kind with him, You lavished Gunnar's treasure and gear on him To draw him on, and did not call that thieving. Ay, Sigmund took your feuds on him and died As Gunnar shall. Men have much harm by you.

HALLGERD Now have I gashed the golden cloth awry: 'Tis ended—a ruin of clouts—the worth of the gift— Bridal dish-clouts—nay, a bundle of flame I'll burn it to a breath of its old queen's ashes: Fire, O fire, drink up.

(She throws the shreds of the veil on the glowing embers: they waft to ashes with a brief high flare. She goes to JOFRID.)

There's one of you That holds her head in a bird's sideways fashion: I know that reach o' the chin.—What's under thy hair?—

(She fixes JOFRID with her knee, and lifts her hair.)

Pfui,'tis not hair, but sopped and rotting moss— A thief, a thief indeed.—And twice a thief. She has no ears. Keep thy hooked fingers still While thou art here, for if I miss a mouthful Thou shalt miss all thy nose. Get up, get up; I'll lodge ye with the mares.

JOFRID (starting up) Three men, three men, Three men have wived you, and for all you gave them Paid with three blows upon a cheek once kissed— To every man a blow—and the last blow All the land knows was won by thieving food.... Yea, Gunnar is ended by the theft and the thief. Is it not told that when you first grew tall, A false rare girl, Hrut your own kinsman said, "I know not whence thief's eyes entered our blood." You have more ears, yet are you not my sister? Our evil vagrant heart is deeper in you.

HALLGERD (snatching the distaff from BIARTEY) Out and be gone, be gone. Lie with the mountains, Smother among the thunder; stale dew mould you. Outstrip the hound, or he shall so embrace you....

BIARTEY Now is all done ... all done ... and all your deed. She broke the thread, and it shall not join again. Spindle, spindle, the coiling weft shall dwindle; Leap on the fire and burn, for all is done.

(She casts the spindle upon the fire, and stretches her hands toward it.)

HALLGERD (attacking them with the distaff) Into the night.... Dissolve....

BIARTEY (as the three rush toward the door) Sisters, away: Leave the woman to her smouldering beauty, Leave the fire that's kinder than the woman, Leave the roof-tree ere it falls. It falls.

(GUDFINN joins her. Each time HALLGERD flags they turn as they chant, and point at her.) We shall cry no more in the high rock-places, We are gone from the night, the winds and the clouds are empty: Soon the man in the West shall receive our message.

(JOFRID'S voice joins the other voices.)

Men reject us, yet their house is unstable. The slayers' hands are warm—the sound of their riding Reached us down the ages, ever approaching.

HALLGERD (at the same time, her voice high over theirs) Pack, ye rag-heaps—or I'll unravel you.

THE THREE (continuously) House that spurns us, woe shall come upon you: Death shall hollow you. Now we curse the woman— May all the woes smite her till she can feel them. Shall we not roost in her bower yet? Woe! Woe!

(The distaff breaks, and HALLGERD drives them out with her hands. Their voices continue for a moment outside, dying away.)

Call to the owl-friends.... Woe! Woe! Woe!

ASTRID Whence came these mounds of dread to haunt the night? It doubles this disquiet to have them near us.

ODDNY They must be witches—and it was my distaff— Will fire eat through me....

STEINVOR Or the Norns themselves.

HALLGERD Or bad old women used to govern by fear. To bed, to bed—we are all up too late.

STEINVOR (as she turns with ASTRID and ODDNY to the dais) If beds are made for sleep we might sit long.

(They go out by the dais door.)

GUNNAR (as he enters hastily from the left) Where are those women? There's some secret in them: I have heard such others crying down to them.

HALLGERD They turned foul-mouthed, they beckoned evil toward us— I drove them forth a breath ago.

GUNNAR Forth? Whence?

HALLGERD By the great door: they cried about the night.

(RANNVEIG follows GUNNAR in.)

GUNNAR Nay, but I entered there and passed them not. Mother, where are the women?

RANNVEIG I saw none come.

GUNNAR They have not come, they have gone.

RANNVEIG I crossed the yard, Hearing a noise, but a big bird dropped past, Beating my eyes; and then the yard was clear.

(The deep baying of the hound is heard again.)

GUNNAR They must be spies: yonder is news of them. The wise hound knew them, and knew them again.

(The baying is succeeded by one mid howl.)

Nay, nay! Men treat thee sorely, Samm my fosterling: Even by death thou warnest—but it is meant That our two deaths will not be far apart.

RANNVEIG Think you that men are yonder?

GUNNAR Men are yonder.

RANNVEIG My son, my son, get on the rattling war-woof, The old grey shift of Odin, the hide of steel. Handle the snake with edges, the fang of the rings.

GUNNAR (going to the weapons by the high-seat) There are not enough moments to get under That heavy fleece: an iron hat must serve.

HALLGERD O brave! O brave!—he'll dare them with no shield.

GUNNAR (lifting down the great bill) Let me but reach this haft, I shall get hold Of steel enough to fence me all about.

(He shakes the bill above his head: a deep resonant humming follows.

The dais door is thrown open, and ODDNY, ASTRID, and STEINVOR stream through in their night-clothes.)

STEINVOR The bill!

ODDNY The bill is singing!

ASTRID The bill sings!

GUNNAR (shaking the bill again) Ay, brain-biter, waken.... Awake and whisper Out of the throat of dread thy one brief burden. Blind art thou, and thy kiss will do no choosing: Worn art thou to a hair's grey edge, a nothing That slips through all it finds, seeking more nothing. There is a time, brain-biter, a time that comes When there shall be much quietness for thee: Men will be still about thee. I shall know. It is not yet: the wind shall hiss at thee first. Ahui! Leap up, brain-biter; sing again. Sing! Sing thy verse of anger and feel my hands.

RANNVEIG Stand thou, my Gunnar, in the porch to meet them, And the great door shall keep thy back for thee.

GUNNAR I had a brother there. Brother, where are you....

HALLGERD Nay, nay. Get thou, my Gunnar, to the loft, Stand at the casement, watch them how they come. Arrows maybe could drop on them from there.

RANNVEIG 'Tis good: the woman's cunning for once is faithful.

GUNNAR (turning again to the weapons) 'Tis good, for now I hear a foot that stumbles Along the stable-roof against the hall. My bow—where is my bow? Here with its arrows.... Go in again, you women on the dais, And listen at the casement of the bower For men who cross the yard, and for their words.

ASTRID O Gunnar, we shall serve you.

(ASTRID, ODDNY, and STEINVOR go out by the dais door.)

RANNVEIG Hallgerd, come; We must shut fast the door, bar the great door, Or they'll be in on us and murder him.

HALLGERD Not I: I'd rather set the door wide open And watch my Gunnar kindling at the peril, Keeping them back—shaming men for ever Who could not enter at a gaping door.

RANNVEIG Bar the great door, I say, or I will bar it— Door of the house you rule.... Son, son, command it.

GUNNAR (as he ascends to the loft) O spendthrift fire, do you waft up again? Hallgerd, what riot of ruinous chance will sate you?... Let the door stand, my mother: it is her way.

(He looks out at the casement.) Here's a red kirtle on the lower roof.

(He thrusts with the bill through the casement.)

A MAN'S VOICE (far off) Is Gunnar within?

THORGRIM THE EASTERLING'S VOICE (near the casement) Find that out for yourselves: I am only sure his bill is yet within.

(A noise of falling is heard.)

GUNNAR The Easterling from Sandgil might be dying— He has gone down the roof, yet no feet helped him.

(A shouting of many men is heard: GUNNAR starts back from the casement as several arrows fly in.)

Now there are black flies biting before a storm. I see men gathering beneath the cart-shed: Gizur the White and Geir the priest are there, And a lean whispering shape that should be Mord. I have a sting for some one—

(He looses an arrow: a distant cry follows.)

Valgard's voice.... A shaft of theirs is lying on the roof; I'll send it back, for if it should take root A hurt from their own spent and worthless weapon Would put a scorn upon their tale for ever.

(He leans out for the arrow.)

RANNVEIG Do not, my son: rouse them not up again When they are slackening in their attack.

HALLGERD Shoot, shoot it out, and I'll come up to mock them.

GUNNAR (loosing the arrow) Hoia! Swerve down upon them, little hawk.

(A shout follows.)

Now they run all together round one man: Now they murmur....

A VOICE Close in, lift bows again: He has no shafts, for this is one of ours.

(Arrows fly in at the casement.)

GUNNAR Wife, here is something in my arm at last: The head is twisted—I must cut it clear.

(STEINVOR throws open the dais door and rushes through with a high shriek.)

STEINVOR Woman, let us out—help us out— The burning comes—they are calling out for fire.

(She shrieks again. ODDNY and ASTRID, who have come behind her, muffle her head in a kirtle and lift her.)

ASTRID (turning as they bear her out) Fire suffuses only her cloudy brain: The flare she walks in is on the other side Of her shot eyes. We heard a passionate voice, A shrill unwomanish voice that must be Mord, With "Let us burn him—burn him house and all." And then a grave and trembling voice replied, "Although my life hung on it, it shall not be." Again the cunning fanatic voice went on "I say the house must burn above his head." And the unlifted voice, "Why wilt thou speak Of what none wishes: it shall never be."

(ASTRID and ODDNY disappear with STEINVOR.)

GUNNAR To fight with honest men is worth much friendship: I'll strive with them again.

(He lifts his bow and loosens arrows at intervals while HALLGERD and RANNVEIG speak.)

HALLGERD (in an undertone to RANNVEIG, looking out meanwhile to the left) Mother, come here— Come here and hearken. Is there not a foot, A stealthy step, a fumbling on the latch Of the great door? They come, they come, old mother: Are you not blithe and thirsty, knowing they come And cannot be held back? Watch and be secret, To feel things pass that cannot be undone.

RANNVEIG It is the latch. Cry out, cry out for Gunnar, And bring him from the loft.

HALLGERD Oh, never: For then they'd swarm upon him from the roof. Leave him up there and he can bay both armies, While the whole dance goes merrily before us And we can warm our hearts at such a flare.

RANNVEIG (turning both ways, while HALLGERD watches her gleefully) Gunnar, my son, my son! What shall I do?

(ORMILD enters from the left, white and with her hand to her side, and walking as one sick.)

HALLGERD Bah—here's a bleached assault....

RANNVEIG Oh, lonesome thing, To be forgot and left in such a night. What is there now—are terrors surging still?

ORMILD I know not what has gone: when the men came I hid in the far cowhouse. I think I swooned.... And then I followed the shadow. Who is dead?

RANNVEIG Go to the bower: the women will care for you.

(ORMILD totters up the hall from pillar to pillar.)

ASTRID (entering by the dais door) Now they have found the weather-ropes and lashed them Over the carven ends of the beams outside: They bear on them, they tighten them with levers, And soon they'll tear the high roof off the hall.

GUNNAR Get back and bolt the women into the bower.

(ASTRID takes ORMILD, who has just reached her, and goes out with her by the dais door, which closes after them.)

Hallgerd, go in: I shall be here thereafter.

HALLGERD I will not stir. Your mother had best go in.

RANNVEIG How shall I stir?

VOICES (outside and gathering volume) Ai.... Ai.... Reach harder.... Ai....

GUNNAR Stand clear, stand clear—it moves.

THE VOICES It moves.... Ai, ai....

(The whole roof slides down rumblingly, disappearing with a crash behind the watt of the house. All is dark above. Fine snow sifts down now and then to the end of the play.)

GUNNAR (handling his bow) The wind has changed: 'tis coming on to snow. The harvesters will hurry in to-morrow.

(THORBRAND THORLEIKSSON appears above the wall-top a little past GUNNAR, and, reaching noiselessly with a sword, cuts GUNNAR'S bowstring.)

GUNNAR (dropping the bow and seizing his bill) Ay, Thorbrand, is it thou? That's a rare blade, To shear through hemp and gut.... Let your wife have it For snipping needle-yarn; or try it again.

THORBRAND (raising his sword) I must be getting back ere the snow thickens: So here's my message to the end—or farther. Gunnar, this night it is time to start your journey And get you out of Iceland....

GUNNAR (thrusting at THORBRAND with the bill) I think it is: So you shall go before me in the dark. Wait for me when you find a quiet shelter.

(THORBRAND sinks backward from the wall and is heard to fall farther. Immediately ASBRAND THORLEIKSSON starts up in his place.)

ASBRAND (striking repeatedly with a sword) Oh, down, down, down!

GUNNAR (parrying the blows with the bill) Ay, Asbrand, thou as well? Thy brother Thorbrand was up here but now: He has gone back the other way, maybe— Be hasty, or you'll not come up with him.

(He thrusts with the bill: ASBRAND lifts a shield before the blow.)

Here's the first shield that I have seen to-night.

(The bill pierces the shield: ASBRAND disappears and is heard to fall. GUNNAR turns from the casement.)

Hallgerd, my harp that had but one long string, But one low song, but one brief wingy flight, Is voiceless, for my bowstring is cut off. Sever two locks of hair for my sake now, Spoil those bright coils of power, give me your hair, And with my mother twist those locks together Into a bowstring for me. Fierce small head, Thy stinging tresses shall scourge men forth by me.

HALLGERD Does ought lie on it?

GUNNAR Nought but my life lies on it; For they will never dare to close on me If I can keep my bow bended and singing.

HALLGERD (tossing back her hair) Then now I call to your mind that bygone blow You gave my face; and never a whit do I care If you hold out a long time or a short.

GUNNAR Every man who has trod a warship's deck, And borne a weapon of pride, has a proud heart And asks not twice for any little thing. Hallgerd, I'll ask no more from you, no more.

RANNVEIG (tearing off her wimple) She will not mar her honour of widowhood. Oh, widows' manes are priceless.... Off, mean wimple— I am a finished widow, why do you hide me? Son, son who knew my bosom before hers, Look down and curse for an unreverend thing An old bald woman who is no use at last. These bleachy-threads, these tufts of death's first combing, And loosening heartstrings twisted up together Would not make half a bowstring. Son, forgive me....

GUNNAR A grasping woman's gold upon her head Is made for hoarding, like all other gold: A spendthrift woman's gold upon her head Is made for spending on herself. Let be— She goes her heart's way, and I go to earth.

(AUNUND'S head rises above the wall near GUNNAR.)

What, are you there?

AUNUND Yea, Gunnar, we are here.

GUNNAR (thrusting with the bill) Then bide you there.

(AUNUND'S head sinks; THORGEIR'S rises in the same place.)

How many heads have you?

THORGEIR But half as many as the feet we grow on.

GUNNAR And I've not yet used up (thrusting again) all my hands.

(As he thrusts another man rises a little farther back, and leaps past him into the loft. Others follow, and GUNNAR is soon surrounded by many armed men, so that only the rising and falling of his bill is seen.)

The threshing-floor is full.... Up, up, brain-biter! We work too late to-night—up, open the husks. Oh, smite and pulse On their anvil heads: The smithy is full, There are shoes to be made For the hoofs of the steeds Of the Valkyr girls....

FIRST MAN Hack through the shaft....

SECOND MAN Receive the blade In the breast of a shield, And wrench it round....

GUNNAR For the hoofs of the steeds Of the Valkyr girls Who race up the night To be first at our feast, First in the play With immortal spears In deadly holes....

THIRD MAN Try at his back....

MANY VOICES (shouting in confusion) Have him down.... Heels on the bill.... Ahui, ahui....

(The bill does not rise.)

HROALD (with the breaking voice of a young man, high over all) Father.... It is my blow.... It is I who kill him.

(The crowd parts, suddenly silent, showing GUNNAR fallen. RANNVEIG covers her face with her hands.)

HALLGERD (laughing as she leans forward and holds her breasts in her hands) O clear sweet laughter of my heart, flow out! It is so mighty and beautiful and blithe To watch a man dying—to hover and watch.

RANNVEIG Cease: are you not immortal in shame already?

HALLGERD Heroes, what deeds ye compass, what great deeds—- One man has held ye from an open door: Heroes, heroes, are ye undefeated?

GIZUR (an old white-bearded man, to the other riders) We have laid low to earth a mighty chief: We have laboured harder than on greater deeds, And maybe won remembrance by the deeds Of Gunnar when no deed of ours should live; For this defence of his shall outlast kingdoms And gather him fame till there are no more men.

MORD Come down and splinter those old birds his gods That perch upon the carven high-seat pillars, Wreck every place his shadow fell upon, Rive out his gear, drive off his forfeit beasts.

SECOND MAN It shall not be.

MANY MEN Never.

GIZUR We'll never do it: Let no man lift a blade or finger a clout— Is not this Gunnar, Gunnar, whom we have slain? Home, home, before the dawn shows all our deed.

(The riders go down quickly over the wall-top, and disappear.)

HALLGERD Now I shall close his nostrils and his eyes, And thereby take his blood-feud into my hands.

RANNVEIG If you do stir I'll choke you with your hair. I will not let your murderous mind be near him When he no more can choose and does not know.

HALLGERD His wife I was, and yet he never judged me: He did not set your motherhood between us. Let me alone—I stand here for my sons.

RANNVEIG The wolf, the carrion bird, and the fair woman Hurry upon a corpse, as if they think That all is left for them the grey gods need not.

(She twines her hands in HALLGERD'S hair and draws her down to the floor.)

Oh, I will comb your hair with bones and thumbs, Array these locks in my right widow's way, And deck you like the bed-mate of the dead. Lie down upon the earth as Gunnar lies, Or I can never match him in your looks And whiten you and make your heart as cold.

HALLGERD Mother, what will you do? Unloose me now—- Your eyes would not look so at me alone.

RANNVEIG Be still, my daughter....

HALLGERD And then?

RANNVEIG Ah, do not fear— I see a peril nigh and all its blitheness. Order your limbs—stretch out your length of beauty, Let down your hands and close those deepening eyes, Or you can never stiffen as you should. A murdered man should have a murdered wife When all his fate is treasured in her mouth. This wifely hairpin will be sharp enough.

HALLGERD (starting up as RANNVEIG half loosens her to take a hairpin from her own head) She is mad, mad.... Oh, the bower is barred— Hallgerd, come out, let mountains cover you.

(She rushes out to the left.)

RANNVEIG (following her) The night take you indeed....

GIZUR (as he enters from the left) Ay, drive her out; For no man's house was ever better by her.

RANNVEIG Is an old woman's life desired as well?

GIZUR We ask that you will grant us earth hereby Of Gunnar's earth, for two men dead to-night To lie beneath a cairn that we shall raise.

RANNVEIG Only for two? Take it: ask more of me. I wish the measure were for all of you.

GIZUR Your words must be forgiven you, old mother, For none has had a greater loss than yours. Why would he set himself against us all....

(He goes out.)

RANNVEIG Gunnar, my son, we are alone again.

(She goes up the hall, mounts to the loft, and stoops beside him.)

Oh, they have hurt you—but that is forgot. Boy, it is bedtime; though I am too changed, And cannot lift you up and lay you in, You shall go warm to bed—I'll put you there. There is no comfort in my breast to-night, But close your eyes beneath my fingers' touch, Slip your feet down, and let me smooth your hands: Then sleep and sleep. Ay, all the world's asleep.

(She rises.)

You had a rare toy when you were awake— I'll wipe it with my hair.... Nay, keep it so, The colour on it now has gladdened you. It shall lie near you.

(She raises the bill: the deep hum follows.)

No; it remembers him, And other men shall fall by it through Gunnar: The bill, the bill is singing.... The bill sings!

(She kisses the weapon, then shakes it on high.)

[CURTAIN]



QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION IN READING THE PLAYS

1. The Forces in the Play.

What is the "passion"—that is, what exactly do these people desire who "want their ain way"? What forces favor these desires, and what oppose them—for instance, David Pirnie's determination to tell wee Alexander a bit story, in The Philosopher of Butterbiggens? Can you always put any one character altogether on one side? Or does his own weakness or carelessness or stupidity, for example, sometimes work against his getting what he wants, so that he is, in part, not on his own side, but against it, as Brutus is in Julius Caesar? Are there other forces in the play besides the people—storm or accident or fate? With what side or what character are you in sympathy? Is this constant throughout the play, or do you feel a change at some point in it? Does the author sympathize with any special character? Does he have a prejudice against any one of them? For example, in Campbell of Kilmhor, where is your sympathy? Where is the author's, apparently?

2. The Beginning and the End.

What events important to this play occurred before the curtain rises? Why does the author begin just here, and not earlier or later? How does he contrive to let you know these important things without coming before the curtain to announce them himself, or having two servants dusting the furniture and telling them to each other?

What happens after the curtain falls? Can you go on picturing these events? Are any of them important to the story—for instance, in The Beggar and the King? Why did the author stop before telling us these things?

Does the ending satisfy you? Even if you do not find it happy and enjoyable, does it seem the natural and perhaps the inevitable result of the forces at work—in Riders to the Sea and Campbell of Kilmhor, for instance? Or has the author interfered to make characters do what they would not naturally do, or used chance and coincidence, like the accidentally discovered will or the long-lost relative in melodramas, to bring about a result he prefers—a "happy ending," or a clap-trap surprise, or a supposed proof of some theory about politics or morals?

Does the interest mount steadily from beginning to end, or does it droop and fail somewhere? You may find it interesting to try drawing the diagram of interest for a play, as suggested in chapter X of Dr. Brander Matthews's Study of the Drama, and accounting for the drop in interest, if you find any.

3. The Playwright's Purpose.

What was the author trying to do in writing the play? It may have been:—

Merely to tell a good story To paint a picture of life in the Arran Islands or in old France or in a modern industrial town To show us character and its development, as in novels like Thackeray's and Eliot's (Of course, brief plays like these cannot show development of character, but only critical points in such development—the result of forces perhaps long at work, or the awakening of new ideas and other determinants of character.) To portray a social situation, such as the relation between workmen and employers, or between men and women To show the inevitable effects of action and motive, as of the determined loyalty of Dugald Stewart and his mother, or the battle of fisher-folk or weavers with grinding poverty.

Of course, no play will probably do any one of these things exclusively, but usually each is concerned most with some one purpose.

What effect has the play on you? Even if its tragedy is painful or its account of human character makes you uncomfortable, is it good for you to realize these things, or merely uselessly unpleasant? Is the play stupidly and falsely cheering because it presents untrue "happy endings" or other distortions of things as they are? Do you think the play has merely temporary, or genuine and permanent, appeal?



NOTES ON THE DRAMAS AND THE DRAMATISTS

Harold Chapin: THE PHILOSOPHER OF BUTTERBIGGENS

Harold Chapin, as we learn from Soldier and Dramatist (Lane, 1917), was an American both by ancestry and nativity. But he lived the greater part of his life in England, and died for England at Loos in April, 1915. His activity was always associated with the stage. When he was but seven years old he played the little Marcius to his mother's Volumnia at the Shakespeare Festival, at Stratford-on-Avon in 1893. In 1911 he produced Mr. Harold Brighouse's Lonesome-Like and several of his own short plays at the Glasgow Repertory Theatre. For several years before the war he was Mr. Granville Barker's stage manager, and helped him to produce the beautiful Shakespearean plays at the Savoy Theatre in London.

Of Chapin's own dramas, The New Morality and Art and Opportunity have been given recently in New York and in London, and several of the one-act plays at a memorial performance in London in 1916, in matinee at the Punch and Judy Theatre, and before the Drama League in New York in March and April, 1921. Of the shorter plays, mentioned in the bibliographies following these notes, It's the Poor that 'elps the Poor, The Dumb and the Blind, and The Philosopher of Butterbiggens have been given the highest praise by such critics as Mr. William Archer, who wrote, "No English-speaking man of more unquestionable genius has been lost to the world in this world-frenzy." These true and honest dramas represent the English Repertory theatres at their best in this brief form, and give promise of the great and permanently interesting "human comedy" which Chapin might have completed had his life not been sacrificed. In spite of the simplicity and lightness of the little play here given, there is more shrewd philosophy in old David Pirnie, and more real humanity in his family, than is to be found portrayed in many pretentious social dramas and difficult psychological novels. It is admirable on the stage, as was shown by the Provincetown Players last winter. In the memorial performance for Harold Chapin in London, the author's little son appeared in the part of wee Alexander.

"Butterbiggens," Mrs. Alice Chapin, the dramatist's mother, replied to an inquiry as to "what Butterbiggens is or are," "is, are, and always will be a suburb of Glasgow."

There is little difficulty with the modified Scots dialect in this play if one remembers that ae generally takes the place of such sounds as e in tea, o in so, a in have, and so on, and that a' means all. A wean is a small bairn, yinst is once, ava is at all, and thrang is "thick" or intimate.

Distempered means calcimined, or painted in water-dissolved color on the plaster.

Lady Gregory: SPREADING THE NEWS

In her notes on the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which she was most influential in building up, Lady Augusta Gregory says that it was the desire of the players and writers who worked there to establish an Irish drama which should have a "firm base in reality and an apex of beauty." This phrase, which admirably expresses the best in the play-making going on to-day, finds most adequate illustration in the work of Synge, of Yeats, and of Lady Gregory herself. The basis in reality of such jolly and robust comedies as her Seven Irish Plays and New Irish Comedies is clearly discernible. They are in the tradition of the best early English comedy, from the miracle plays onward; of Hans Sachs's Shrovetide Plays, and of Moliere's dramatizations of medieaval fabliaux, as in The Physician in Spite of Himself. Lady Gregory describes in her notes on Spreading the News how the play grew out of an idea of picturing tragic consequences from idle rumor and defamation of character. It is certainly not to be regretted that she allowed "laughter to have its way with the little play," and gave Bartley Fallon a share of glory from the woeful day to illuminate dull, older years.

The inhabitants of this same village of Cloon appear as old friends in other of Lady Gregory's plays, with, as usual, nothing to do but mind one another's business. In The Jackdaw another absurd rumor is fanned into full blaze by greed; upon Hyacinth Halvey works the potent and embarrassing influence of too good a reputation. Still other plays attain a notable height of beauty—notably The Rising of the Moon and The Traveling Man. The Gaol Gate tells a story similar to that of Campbell of Kilmhor, with genuinely tragic effect. She has written, besides, two volumes of Irish folk-history, Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which Mr. Yeats calls masterpieces of prose which one "can weigh with Malory and feel no discontent at the tally."[1] A writer who has produced such range and beauty of works, from very human, characteristic comedy and farce to fine, poignant tragedy, besides writing excellent stories and contributing largely to an important experimental theatre, is secure of her share of fame.

The "Removable Magistrate" is apparently one appointed by British officialdom; this one, having just come from the Bay of Bengal, is going to fit upon the natives of Cloon methods which may have worked in a rather different district.

The song "with a skin on it," which Bartley sings, is given in Lady Gregory's Seven Short Plays (Putnam, 1909).

[Footnote 1: Appendix to The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats, volume II, (Macmillan, 1912).]

Winthrop Parkhurst: THE BEGGAR AND THE KING

The Beggar and the King looks at first like a pleasant absurdity; it is in reality valuable as a short history of the ostrich method of dealing with realities. The beggar, of course, continues to cry aloud after his tongue, and even his head, have been removed, because there are so many millions of him. Again and again, in the course of history, he has gathered desperate courage to defy authority that is blind and evil. Always at last, as in the French and the Russian revolutions and in the more recent European revolts, he succeeds in wresting the power from those in autocratic authority. And yet, just as of old, not only kings, but all others who attempt dictatorship and the playing of providence, try the simple tactics of the ostrich; they close the window, or their eyes and ears, as a sufficient answer to rebellion. Appreciating the futility of these methods, we have no difficulty in continuing the drama ourselves beyond the fall of the curtain.

Mr. Winthrop Parkhurst, by birth a New Yorker, according to a family tradition is a descendant on his mother's side of John Huss, the Bohemian reformer and martyr, and on his father's of the executioner of Charles I of England. His writings include Maracca, a Biblical one-act play, and several short satirical sketches.

George Middleton: TIDES

Mr. George Middleton generally pictures in his dramas problems which are not easy to solve. And he does not try to give ready-made solutions. He merely shows us how various people have tried to work these problems; and his dramas are like real life because the attempts at solutions fail as often as they succeed. Certain of the problems Mr. Middleton presents are such as high-school students meet and can well consider; several of these plays appear in the lists following. Tides is about a man who has supported an unpopular theory. Nothing is said about whether his ideal is right or wrong, but it is clear that he has held to it in perfect sincerity of belief and has been quite unmoved by the bitterest persecution. But when he is offered honor and flattering respect, though he does not really change his belief and adherence, he compromises and partially surrenders his ideal. The fable is similar to that of Ibsen's The League of Youth, but the telling here is straighter and clearer. William White's self-deception is made evident to him and to us by his honest and courageous wife, who tells him frankly of it. "Haven't you sometimes noticed that is what bitterness to another means: a failure within oneself?" she comments wisely. An effective contrast is furnished by the son, who has altogether and honestly abandoned his father's theories in the face of new realities as he sees them.

Eugene O'Neill: ILE

Eugene O'Neill, American seaman, laborer, newspaperman, and dramatist, has been associated for several years with the Provincetown Players. This group, including Mrs. Glaspell and other playwrights of importance, gather in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, during the summer, and in winter present significant foreign and native plays in a converted stable on Macdougall Street in New York, where may be seen the ring to which Pegasus was once tethered! In 1919 Mr. O'Neill received the Pulitzer Prize for the most important American play of the year.

Mr. O'Neill has had experience of the sea, like the great Englishmen, Mr. Masefield and Mr. Joseph Conrad. He knows the interminable whaling voyages, as described in Melville's Moby Dick and the first chapter of Typee—best of all in Bullen's Cruise of the Cachalot. Out of this experience of hard life and harder men he has written many poignant and terrible dramas—perhaps the greatest this story of the skipper's wife who insisted on making the voyage with her husband and is worn to the edge of insanity by months of ice-bound solitude. The motive of Captain Keeney is like that which caused Skipper Ireson to leave his fellow townsmen to sink in Chaleur Bay. Against his iron determination his wife's piteous pleading and evident suffering are more potent than the mutinying hands; whether she can avail to turn him home "with a measly four hundred barrel of ile" is the problem of the play.

J.A. Ferguson: CAMPBELL OF KILMHOR

This tragic story of the war and hatred in Scotland belongs in the series of attempts made by Charles Edward Stuart and his father to regain the throne lost by James II in 1688. "The Young Pretender's" vigorous campaign in 1745, carried far into England, might easily have succeeded but for the quarrels and disaffection of the Highland chiefs who supported him. His failure was completed at the bloody battle of Culloden, or Drumossie Moor, in 1746, celebrated in Scottish story and song of lamentation. Scott's hero Waverley went into the highland country shortly after these uprisings, and David Balfour, in Kidnapped, had numerous adventures in crossing it with Allan Breck Stewart, who was in the service of his kinsmen, the exiled Stuarts. The hatred of Campbells and Stuarts, of Lowlander and Highlander, Loyalist and Jacobite, is intense throughout the record of those days.

The young Scot and his stanch and proudly tearless mother are, of course, the heroic characters in the play. We have a hint that Charles Edward Stuart himself is with the band whom the young man protects so loyally. It may seem strange that the drama is named, not for him, but for the crafty and pitiless executioner of the king's justice. But he is after all the most interesting character in the piece, with his Biblical references in broad Lowland Scots (we may suppose that the Stewarts speak Gaelic among themselves), his superstition, his remorseless cruelty. We should like to see how he takes the discovery that, perhaps for the first time, he has been baffled in his career of unscrupulous and bloody deeds!

This play represents the most successful work of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre in 1914. The author has written no others which have been published, though he is credited with a good story or two. It may be hoped that he will write other dramas as excellent as this one. He has put into very brief and effective form here the spirit and idea of a most intense period of merciless conflict.

A kebbuck is a cheese; keek means peek; toom, empty; a besom, a broom; and soop, sweep.

John Galsworthy: THE SUN

According to Professor Lewisohn and other critics Mr. Galsworthy is without question the foremost English dramatist to-day. Without arguing or attempting to offer solutions, he gives the most searching presentation of problems which we have to face and somehow settle. In Strife, after a furious contest and bitter hardships, the strike is settled by a compromise which the leaders of both sides count as failure. Things are much as they were at the start; the difficulty is no nearer solution. In Justice, "society stamps out a human life not without its fair possibilities—for eighty-one pounds," because obviously clear and guilty infraction of law cannot go unavenged. Justice is not condemned by the facts shown in this play, nor is its working extolled. In The Mob, the patrioteering element destroys a man who proclaims the injustice of a small and greedy war of conquest. In The Pigeon, brilliant debate is held, but no conclusion reached, as to what we should do with derelict and wasted lives, with men who do not fit into the scheme of success and society.

In his sketches and stories Mr. Galsworthy presents these same problems, and again without attempted conclusions. The Freelands particularly is a most dramatic novel of conditions and results similar to those in some of the dramas mentioned above. Many of his sketches and essays also—for example, "My Distant Relative" in The Inn of Tranquillity and "Comfort" in A Commentary—are of biting and almost cynical irony in viewing proposed and present solutions of problems; but none suggest panaceas. They merely make us think soberly of the size of our problems and their immense complexity, move us to go out to look for more information and to examine carefully our most solid institutions as well as suggested alterations in them.

A large part of Mr. Galsworthy's time and thought, both during the war and since, has been given to the problem of some measure of justice to soldiers, and particularly to wounded and broken soldiers. In A Sheaf and Another Sheaf appear various papers presenting sharply the conditions of suffering and neglect that actually exist. The Sun is a brief sketch of after-war days,—this time of a wounded man who has gained an advantage over one who escaped injury,—and of joy in deliverance from the hell of war—a joy so profound and luminous that the released soldier cannot let a sharp mischance and disappointment mar his happiness. The whole piece is in the key of Captain Bassoon's verses after the Armistice:—

"Every one suddenly burst out singing."

The other two think the happy soldier mad. We are left wondering what the reaction will be from this height of joyful release to the harsh and sombre conditions of workingmen's life after the peace.

The silver badge represents a discharge for wounds. Crumps are, of course, shells.

Louise Sounders: THE KNAVE OF HEARTS

The Knave of Hearts is one of the happy tradition of puppet-plays, which come down in unbroken line from the most ancient history, through the illustrious Dr. Faustus and Mr. Punch, to new and even greater favor and fame to-day. For just as the ancient puppet-shows of Italy and England seemed to be losing ground before the moving-picture invasion, they have been heroically rescued by Mr. Tony Sarg,—whose performance of Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring is perfectly absurd and captivating,—and by other excellent artists.

Puppet-shows are delightful because they are easily made and quite convincing. Very good ones have been improvised even by tiny children, with a pasteboard suit-box opening to the front, a slit at the top to let down paper-doll actors on a thread, a bit of scenery, outdoors or in, drawn as background, and a showman to talk for all the characters. Still better puppets are doll heads and arms of various sorts, dressed in flowing robes and provided with holes for two fingers and a thumb of the operator, who moves them from below. They can be made to dance and antic as you like on a stage above the showman's head, as Punch and Judy have always done. The more elaborate marionettes are worked with strings from above, so that they can open and close their mouths and otherwise act most realistically; these are, of course, more difficult, but quite possible to make. In such simple theatres, Goethe and Robert Louis Stevenson and many other famous people played themselves endless stories. If you want to pursue this idea further, a list of references below gives you opportunity for all the information you like about marionettes and puppets.

The Knave of Hearts is charming, either as a puppet-play or, as a class in junior high school gave it recently, a "legitimate drama." The remarks of the manager are all the funnier when applied to real characters. The play explains clearly the reasons for the strange behavior of a respectable nursery character. It is to be published soon in a book of its own with illustrations by Mr. Maxfield Parrish (Scribner's). The author has written other plays and stories, some of which you may have seen in St. Nicholas, and also a pleasant operetta, with music by Alice Terhune—The Woodland Princess, listed in the bibliography following. She is also an actress with the New York Comedy Club, an excellent amateur organization.

Pompdebile's coat of arms, with a heart rampant (i.e., standing on its hind legs, however that may be accomplished), reminds one of the arms suggested for the old clergyman-scholar, Mr. Casaubon, in George Eliot's Middlemarch—"three cuttlefish sable and a commentator rampant."

Lord Dunsany: FAME AND THE POET

Lord Dunsany (Edward Moreton Max Plunkett), the eighteenth baron of his name, is the author of a number of stories and plays unique in their type of clever imaginativeness. Besides the inimitable Five Plays and other dramas listed in the bibliography, his best writings are to be found in Fifty-One Tales, which includes "The Hen," "Death and Odysseus," "The True Story of the Hare and the Tortoise," and other highly entertaining matters. Fame and the Poet, originally published in the Atlantic, has been recently produced with good effect by the Harvard Dramatic Club. Fame's startling revelation to her faithful worshiper of her real nature and attributes is naturally most distressing—even more so, perhaps, than the rendezvous which this same goddess appointed another poet, in the Fifty-One Tales: "In the cemetery back of the workhouse, after a hundred years."

Lord Dunsany was a captain in the First Royal Iniskilling Fusileers—a regiment mentioned in Sheridan's Saint Patrick's Day—and saw service in Syria and the Near East as well as on the western front. He was wounded on April 25, 1916, in Flanders. Since the war he has visited the United States and seen a performance of his Tents of the Arabs at the Neighborhood Playhouse, New York City.

Beulah Marie Dix: THE CAPTAIN OF THE GATE

Miss Dix is author of several plays—in addition to those from Allison's Lad included in the play-list, of Across the Border, and, with the late Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, of the frequently acted Rose of Plymouth Town. She has also written several favorite historical stories, including Merrylips. The Captain of the Gate is a tragedy of Cromwell's ruthless devastation of Ireland. The determined and heroic captain surrenders, to face an ignominious death, to keep his word and ensure delaying the advance of the enemy upon an unprepared countryside, and his courage inspires exhausted and failing men to like heroism. This is an effective piece of dramatic presentation.

Percy Mackaye: GETTYSBURG

Mr. Percy Mackaye has been most active in the movement for a community theatre in the United States and for the revival of pageantry. He contends rightly that this development might be one of the strongest possible influences for true Americanism, and his dramatic work has all been directed toward such a theatre. Most notable are his pageants and masques, particularly Caliban by the Yellow Sands, for the Shakespeare Tercentenary; his play The Scarecrow, a lively dramatization of Hawthorne's Feathertop; his opera Rip van Winkle, for which Reginald De Koven composed music; and The Canterbury Pilgrims, in which the Wife of Bath is the heroine of further robustious adventures. Mr. Mackaye is also translator, with Professor Tablock, of the Modern Reader's Chaucer. The little sketch presented here is taken from a volume of Yankee Fantasies, in which various observations of past and present New England life are recorded. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, a powerful story of the Civil War, is a most excellent help to realizing what the boy Lige really endured in those days of battle.

Mr. Mackaye has adopted here a regularly rhythmic verse without the conventional capital letters at the beginnings of lines —perhaps to typify the simple homeliness of the talk.

Harold Brighouse: LONESOME-LIKE

Mr. Brighouse has been best represented in this country by an excellent comedy, Hobson's Choice, which was widely played and was printed in the Drama League series of plays (1906). His other best-known work here is the present play, and The Price of Coal (1909), a picturing of the hard life of miners' wives and their Spartan firmness in expectation of fatal accidents. He has produced and published a number of other plays, among them those listed in the bibliography. Mr. Brighouse represents in this volume the work of the English Repertory theatres, which parallel the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Glasgow Repertory Theatre, and various European stage-societies. That at Manchester, with which he has been associated, is directed by Miss Isabel Horniman, has seen beautiful stage-settings designed by Mr. Robert Burne-Jones, and counts among its dramatists such well-known men as Messrs. Allan Monkhouse, author of Mary Broome, a sombre and powerful tragedy; Stanley Houghton, and Gilbert Cannan. The Liverpool Theatre has become even more famous through the dramatic work of Mr. John Drinkwater. The Little Theatre movement in this country, our Drama League, and the various dramatic societies in our colleges and cities are our nearest parallel to these repertory theatres.

Lonesome-Like, Mr. Brighouse's most effective short play, is written in a modified Lancashire dialect, the speech of the village weavers and spinners. Many of the words are English of Elizabethan days and earlier, derived mostly from Anglo-Saxon.

Gradely (graithly) means willingly, meekly or decently; clem means starve; sithee is see you or look you; clogs are shoes with wooden soles and leather uppers, and dungarees, garments of coarse cotton cloth rather like overalls. A is used throughout for I.

As in many English stories, an extreme and painful dread of the workus, or poorhouse, provides a strong motive force.

John Millington Synge: RIDERS TO THE SEA

The work of the Irish Renaissance in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin reached its most powerful and tragic height in this tragedy, which Mr. Yeats compared to the Antigone and (Edipus of Sophocles). Synge at first wandered about Europe, poetizing; it was Yeats who brought him back to study and embody in genuine literature the poetry of life among his own people. On the bleak Arran Islands he lived in a fisherman's cottage, and through the floor of his room heard the dialect which he presents in simple and poignant beauty in this drama of hopeless struggle. The "second sight"—called "the gift" in Campbell of Kilmhor, and an incident also in The Riding to Lithend—was a sort of prophetic vision altogether credited among Celtic peoples, as among those of Scott's Lady of the Lake. When the mother sees the "riders to the sea,"—her drowned son and her living son riding together,—she feels convinced that he must soon die. The sharp cries of her grief and, above all, the peace of her resignation at the end, after all hope is gone, make this, as a writer in the Manchester Guardian is quoted as calling it, "the tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever it has been in Europe, from Galway to Prague, it has made the word tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to the spirit than it did."

The speech of the people is not difficult to understand when you master a few of its peculiarities. One is the omission of words we generally include, as in, "Isn't it a hard and cruel man (who) won't hear...." Another is the common form "It was crying I was." A few phrases, like what way for how, the way for so that, in it for here or near, and itself for even, or with no particular meaning, as "Where is he itself?" The meanings of other words will be easily untangled.

William Butler Yeats: THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE

Mr. Yeats's best poetic dramas, and particularly this one, represent beyond question that "apex of beauty" to which Lady Gregory spoke of the Abbey Theatre dramatists as aspiring. This play is not founded on any particular Irish folk-tale. It is filled with the half-dread, half-envy with which the tellers of Irish legends seem to regard the fate of mortals bewitched by the Leprechaun or Good People. It is rich, too, with the music of beautiful words, without which, Mr. Yeats contends no play can be "of a great kind." He says too, "There is no poem so great that a fine speaker cannot make it greater, or that a bad ear cannot make it nothing."

Mr. Yeats has written broad comedy like Synge's Shadow of the Glen and Lady Gregory's Irish Comedies; his Pot of Broth is a most clever retelling of an old, comical tale. But it is by his mystical and poetical plays that he would be judged as playwright and poet—particularly Deirdre, which should be compared with Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows; The Unicorn of the Stars, written in collaboration with Lady Gregory; Cathleen Ni Hoolihan, a dramatization of the spirit of Ireland; The King's Threshold, a high glorification of the poet's art, with a fable, based on an ancient Celtic rite, of the hunger strike; and The Land of Heart's Desire, most beautifully perfect of all.

Gordon Bottomley: THE RIDING TO LITHEND

"The Riding to Lithend is an Icelandic play taken out of the noblest of the Sagas," wrote Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his review of the published drama in 1909. "[It] is a fight, one of the greatest fights in legend.... The subject is stirring, and Mr. Bottomley takes it into a very high region of poetry, giving it a purport beyond that of the original teller of the tale.... [The play] is not a representation of life; it is a symbol of life. In it life is entirely fermented into rhythm, by which we mean not only rhythm of words, but rhythm of outline also; the beauty and impressiveness of the play do not depend only on the subject, the diction, and the metre, but on the fact that it has distinct and most evident form, in the musician's sense of the word. It is one of those plays that reach the artist's ideal condition of music, in fact."

This is high praise; but who, after studying the play, will doubt that it is deserved? The powerfully moving events of the story indeed lead up to the climax in a forthright and exciting manner. The terror of the house-women and the thrall, the fearful love of Gunnar's mother Rannveig, and the caution of Kolskegg his brother, who "sailed long ago and far away from us" in obedience to the doom or sentence of the Thing—all these bring out sharply the quite reckless daring of Gunnar himself, who braves the decree. A mysterious and epic touch is added by the three ancient hags-evidently of these minor Norns who watch over individual destinies and announce the irrevocable doom of the gods. It was Hallgerd who broke their thread, representing, of course, Gunnar's span of life.

The centre of interest, as well as the spring of the action, is clearly Hallgerd, descendant of Sigurd Fafnirsbane and of Brynhild—

... a hazardous desirable thing, A warm unsounded peril, a flashing mischief, A divine malice, a disquieting voice.

She, and not any superstitious belief in "second-sight" and death decreed, is the cause of Gunnar's remaining outlawed. She wrangles about the headdress, not because she particularly wants it, but to send her husband on a perilous mission to secure it. She says openly that she has "set men at him to show forth his might ... planned thefts and breakings of his word" to stir him to battle. Mr. Abercrombie believes that "She loves her husband Gunnar, but she refuses to give him any help in his last fight, in order that she may see him fight better and fiercer." We should, then, have to suppose that her amazing speech at his death—

O clear sweet laughter of my heart, flow out! It is so mighty and beautiful and blithe To watch a man dying—to hover and watch—

is not for the blow Gunnar had given her when she "planned thefts and breakings of his word," but is rather, as the lines powerfully indicate, the exultation of a descendant of the Valkyrie watching above the battlefields.

Really poetical plays—plays which are both poetic and strongly dramatic—are indeed exceedingly rare. Mr. Bottomley is one of the few who have produced such drama in English. For many years he printed his work privately, in beautiful editions for his friends; but of late several of the plays have been made available—King Lear's Wife in Georgian Poetry, 1913-15, and in a volume of the same title, including Midsummer Eve and The Riding to Lithend, published in London last year.

Those who want more stories of this sort will find them in Thorgils and other Icelandic stories modernized by Mr. Hewlett; in the Burnt Njal, translated by Sir George Dasent, from which this story itself springs; and in the translations by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris, the Saga Library—particularly the stories of the Volsungs and Nibelungs, and of Grettir the Strong.

louvre—a smoke-hole in the roof

thrall—a captive or serf

bill—a battle-ax

second sight—prophetic vision, as in Riders to the Sea and Campbell of Kilmhor

fetch—one's double; seeing it is supposed to be a sign that one is fey or fated to die

wimpled—"clouted up," as Hallgerd expresses it, in a headdress rather like a nun's. A widow, apparently, might wear her hair uncovered

byre—cow-barn

midden—manure

quean—in Middle-English, a jade; in Scotch, a healthy lass; the history of this word and of queen, which come from the same root, is strange and interesting

ambry—press

Romeborg—Rome; Mickligarth—Constantinople (Viking names)

Athcliath—evidently an Irish port

mumpers—beggars

Markfleet—a fleet in an inlet of the sea

mote or gemote—a formal assembly for making laws

thing—assembly for judgment, or parliament; this is an early Icelandic meaning of the word thing



BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PLAYS FOR READING IN HIGH SCHOOLS

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

MERCEDES: A tragic story of the inextinguishable hatreds and reprisals of the French invasion of Spain in 1810, and of a woman's terrible heroism.

In Collected Works, Houghton Mifflin.

PAULINE PAVLOVNA: Cleverly executed, slight plot in dialogue, wherein the character of the hero is sharply revealed; reminiscent of Browning's In a Balcony, though with a quite different scheme.

Ibid.

Mary Austin

THE ARROW-MAKER: The tragedy of a noble medicine-woman of a tribe of California Indians, and of a weak and selfish chief.

Duffield.

Granville Barker

Rococo: In which we discover a clergyman and his relatives in physical altercation over a rococo vase, and follow their dispute to a determinative conclusion.

Sidgwick and Jackson, London.

VOTE BY BALLOT: A drama of English elections and the forces involved.

Sidgwick and Jackson.

THE VOYSEY INHERITANCE: The inheritance is a dishonored name and a dishonest business.

In Three Plays, Sidgwick and Jackson.

Granville Barker and Dion Calthorpe

HARLEQUINADE: Its development from the days of Persephone, Momus, and Charon is displayed and explained by Alice and her uncle.

Sidgwick and Jackson.

James Barrie

THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON: In the struggle for existence on a desert island, the family butler provides the brains and safety for an English family; the party is then rescued, and returns to the impeccable conventions of London.

Scribner's, New York; Hodder and Stoughton, London.

ALICE SIT-BY-THE FIRE: A mother with keen insight and a delightful sense of humor has to deal with a serious attack of romantic imagination in her very young daughter, who feels responsible for the conduct of the family.

Scribner's; Hodder and Stoughton.

THE OLD LADY SHOWS HER MEDALS: Mrs. Dowie, a charwoman who has resorted to desperate remedies in order to have some part in the war, goes through an agonizing crisis of exposure, into real joy and sharp sorrow. The rich humor of the characters makes this quite unique among plays of its type.

In Echoes of the War, Scribner's.

THE WELL-REMEMBERED VOICE.

Ibid.

PETER PAN: A charming fairy drama of the baby from the Never-Never Land and of his make-believe play with his friends in the nursery.

Scribner's.

THE TWELVE-POUND LOOK: On the eve of achieving knighthood the hero suffers a startling disclosure which leads him to look suspiciously for the "twelve-pound look" in his lady's eyes.

In Half-Hours, Scribner's.

WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS: As we behold the creation of John Shand's career by Maggie his wife, who lacks charm, and particularly as we observe her campaign against a woman fully possessed of charm, we want to learn "what every woman knows." The secret is enlightening.

Scribner's.

Lewis Beach

BROTHERS, A SARDONIC COMEDY: Two "poor whites" quarrel violently over a worthless inheritance, and then combine in arson to prevent their mother from getting it: a disquieting and searching study of depths of shiftlessness and passionate meanness.

In Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays, edited by Frank Shay and Pierre S. Loving. Frank Shay.

THE CLOD: A powerful drama of the flare-up of a stolid and apparently unfeeling nature in the flame of the pity and horror of war.

In Washington Square Plays, Doubleday.

Jacinto Benavente

HIS WIDOW'S HUSBAND: An absurd comedy of the small gossip and rigid conventions in a Spanish provincial capital. (Translated by John Garrett Underhill.)

In Plays, First Series, Scribner's.

Arnold Bennett

A GOOD WOMAN: A farcical triangular plot with particularly good comic characters.

In Polite Farces, Doran.

THE STEPMOTHER: Satirical presentment of a lady novelist, her efficient secretary, and her stepson, not to mention the doctor downstairs; amusing studies in character.

Ibid.

THE GREAT ADVENTURE: Good dramatization of the astounding adventures of Priam Farll (from Buried Alive), who attends his own funeral in Westminster Abbey, marries a young and suitable widow with whom his late valet has corresponded through a matrimonial bureau, and meets other amazing situations.

Doran.

THE TITLE: A delightful comedy in which several people who have denounced the disgraceful awarding of English titles have a bad time of it with Mrs. Culver, who does not propose to let slip the opportunity of being called "My Lady." You can probably guess which side wins in the end.

Doran.

Gordon Bottomley

KING LEAR'S WIFE: An episode in King Lear's earlier years, which throws much imaginative light on Goneril's and Cordelia's later treatment of their father. Lear's wife herself, as we might have guessed, is a pathetic figure.

Constable, London; also in Georgian Poetry, 1913-15.

MIDSUMMER EVE: Several farm maidservants meet to see their future lovers' spirits on Midsummer Eve, but see only the "fetch" or double of one of them, foretelling her death.

In King Lear's Wife and Other Plays, Constable.

Anna Hempstead Branch

ROSE OF THE WIND: A fairy play of the dancing and allurement of bewitched slippers, and of other wonders.

Houghton Mifflin.

Harold Brighouse

THE DOORWAY: A sharp and cruel picture of unsheltered people on a freezing night in London.

Joseph Williams, London.

THE GAME: A cocksure and triumphant girl meets more than her match in an old peasant woman, the mother of the man she wants to marry.

In Three Lancashire Plays, Samuel French.

HOBSON'S CHOICE: In which the eldest daughter at Hobson's plays a winning game against her tyrannous father and superior-feeling sisters, using a quite excellent but disregarded piece.

Constable, London; Doubleday, New York.

MAID OF FRANCE: An effective play in which Joan of Arc lays aside her old hate for the English soldiers, whom she discovers on French soil again.

Gowans and Gray, Glasgow.

THE OAK SETTLE

Gowans and Gray.

THE PRICE OF COAL: Picturing the stoical and terrible resignation to peril of death of old women in the coal regions—and presenting an unexpected ending.

Gowans and Gray.

Harold Brock

THE BANK ACCOUNT: A small but poignant tragedy of the savings-account which a clerk has counted upon to free him after many years of drudgery, and which he has entrusted to his stupid and vulgar and cheaply frivolous wife.

In Harvard Dramatic Club Plays, First Series, Brentano's.

Alice Brown

JOINT OWNERS IN SPAIN: The two most refractory inmates of an Old Ladies' Home have to face and solve the problem of living in the same room.

Walter H. Baker.

Witter Bynner

THE LITTLE KING: A delineation of the cruel suffering and the dauntless courage of the small Louis XVII; he refuses to be cowed by the bullying of his keeper or to let a poor boy assume his fate.

Kennerley.

George Calderon idealized him meanwhile that her realization of the altered situation brings an astounding reaction.

Sidgwick and Jackson.

Margaret Cameron

THE TEETH OF THE GIFT HORSE: A pleasant farce built about two huge and hideous hand-painted vases and a charming little old lady who perpetrated them.

French.

Gilbert Cannan

EVERYBODY'S HUSBAND: Three generations of ladies discuss the individual characteristics of their husbands, but find them, after all, indistinguishable men.

Seeker, London.

JAMES AND JOHN: They are faced with their invalid mother's request that they crown many years of tedious sacrifice and atonement for their father's weak crime by taking him into their lives again.

In Four Plays, Sidgwick and Jackson.

MARY'S WEDDING: Bill's mother tries in vain to dissuade Mary from the certain and inescapable misery of marrying her drunkard son. Bill himself settles the problem.

Ibid.

A SHORT WAY WITH AUTHORS: An entertaining farce showing how a great actor-manager goes about encouraging serious dramatic composition.

Ibid.

Harold Chapin

AUGUSTUS IN SEARCH OF A FATHER: He returns from abroad and discusses with a night-watchman the problem of his search for his father.

THE LITTLE STONE HOUSE: A mother has denied herself everything to build a small mausoleum to her dead son, and so Gowans and Gray.

THE AUTOCRAT OF THE COFFEE STALLS: A strange character with an astonishing history is shown us in the night-light from a refreshment wagon in London streets.

Gowans and Gray.

THE DUMB AND THE BLIND: A study of a bargeman's family in London tenements. Mr. William Archer calls this "a veritable masterpiece in its way—a thing Dickens would have delighted in.... We feel that the dumb has spoken and the blind has seen."

Gowans and Gray; forthcoming, French, New York.

IT'S THE POOR THAT 'ELPS THE POOR: Of the simple kindliness of London costermongers and their neighborly help and sympathy.

French.

MUDDLE ANNIE: Of course, it is "Muddle Annie" who helps their friend the policeman save the more suave and self-satisfied members of her family from a precious rogue.

Gowans and Gray.

THE THRESHOLD: Tells of a Welsh girl about to elope with a specious rascal, and of the intervention of her old father, who is killed in a mine accident.

Gowans and Gray; forthcoming, French.

COMEDIES.

Chatto and Windus, London.

Colin Clements and John M. Saunders, translators

LOVE IN A FRENCH KITCHEN: A comical medieaval French farce. Jacquinot endures a miserable compound tyranny of petticoats until matters are brought to a head by cumulative injustice and the intervention of accident.

In Poet Lore (1917), 28:722.

Padraic Colum

MOGU THE WANDERER: Pageantesque and dramatic story of the rise of a beggar to be the king's vizier, and of as sudden and entire reversal of fortunes.

Little, Brown.

THOMAS MUSKERRY: The tragic story of a poorhouse-keeper who repeats Lear's error of letting go his cherished power, and who suffers as keenly a more humble tragedy.

Maunsell, Dublin.

Rachel Crothers

HE AND SHE: A woman's designs win over those of her husband, who has the greater reputation, a large competitive award for a piece of sculpture; but she declines the commission in face of nearer and higher responsibilities.

In Quinn's Representative American Plays, Century.

Windsor P. Daggett and Winifred Smith

LELIO AND ISABELLA: A COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE: The story of Romeo and Juliet, as the foremost players of the Italian Comedy of Masks may have given it in seventeenth-century Paris—with an ending of their choice. An interesting study in the type.

In manuscript: N.L. Swartout, Summit, N.J.

H.H. Davies

THE MOLLUSC: Clever study of a woman who is a mollusc—not merely lazy, since she is capable of huge exertions to avoid being disturbed; she finds plenty of opposition to show forth her powers upon.

Baker.

Thomas H. Dickinson

IN HOSPITAL: A poignant small dialogue of a husband and wife who meet courageously the threatened shipwreck of their happiness.

In Wisconsin Plays, First Series, B.W. Huebsch.

Beulah M. Dix

ALLISON'S LAD: A Cavalier lad, about to be shot as a spy, is seized by terror, but dies bravely, "as if strong arms were around him."

In Allison's Lad and Other Martial Interludes, Holt.

THE DARK OF THE DAWN: Colonel Basil Tollocho spares a boy he has sworn to destroy in revenge of a great wrong, and is made glad of his clemency.

Ibid.

THE HUNDREDTH TRICK: Con of the Hundred Tricks takes fearfully stern measures against possible betrayal of his cause.

Ibid.

Beulah Marie Dix and Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland

ROSE O'PLYMOUTH TOWN: A pleasant play of Puritans and their neighbors.

Dramatic Publishing Company.

Oliphant Down

THE MAKER OF DREAMS: Poetical small play in which love appears with a new make-up but in the old role.

Gowans and Gray.

Ernest Dowson

THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE: A quite charming tale of Pierrot and the Moon-Maiden.

In his Collected Poems, Lane.

John Drinkwater

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A dramatic presentation of episodes in Lincoln's life, from his nomination to the presidency to his death.

Sidgwick and Jackson; Houghton Mifflin.

COPHETUA: In which King Cophetua justifies to his court and councillors his marriage to the beggar maid.

Sidgwick and Jackson; Houghton Mifflin.

THE STORM: An intense but quiet tragedy of a woman who waits while men search for her husband, lost in a great storm in the hills.

In Four Poetic Plays, Houghtou Mifflin; Pawns, Sidgwick and Jackson.

THE GOD or QUIETNESS: The zest of war draws away all the notable worshipers of the god of quietness, and an angry war-lord slays the god himself.

Ibid.

X-O: A NIGHT OF THE TROJAN WAR: Trojans and Greeks, lovers of poetry, fellowship, and justice, carry on ruthless slaughter, and by irreparable losses strike a balance of exact advantage to either side.

Ibid.

Lord Dunsany

THE GODS OF THE MOUNTAIN: Of seven beggars who wear pieces of green silk beneath their rags, and by brilliant devices of Agmar, their leader, contrive to be taken for the gods of the mountain disguised as beggars—until the real gods leave their thrones at Manna.

In Five Plays, Richards, London; Little, Brown.

KING ARGFMENES AND THE UNKNOWN WABBIOR: A slave, born a king, finds an old bronze sword buried in the ground he is tilling, and henceforward has less interest in the bones of the king's dog, who is dying.

Ibid.

THE GOLDEN DOOM: A child's scrawl on the palace pavements furnishes the text for the soothsayers' prophecy of disaster.

Ibid.

THE LOST SILK HAT: Of the embarrassment of a rejected suitor who, in his agitation, has left his hat in the lady's drawing-room and dislikes the idea of returning for it.

Ibid.

THE QUEEN'S ENEMIES: They are invited to a feast of reconciliation in the great banquet room below the level of the river.

In Plays of Gods and Men. Unwin, London; J.W. Luce, Boston.

A NIGHT AT AN INN: A commonplace ancient plot is filled anew with dramatic terror and a sense of mystery.

Ibid.

Edith M.O. Ellis (Mrs. Havelock Ellis)

THE SUBJECTION OF KEZIA: Joe Pengilly, a Cornish villager, is finally convinced that strong measures toward her subjection are alone capable of keeping his wife's love, and buys a stout cane. We learn how he fared in carrying these measures out.

In Love in Danger, Houghton Mifflin.

St. John Ervine

FOUR IRISH PLAYS:

MIXED MARRIAGE: A tragedy of the violent hatreds of Ulster.

Maunsell.

THE ORANGEMAN: A comic study of the petty madness of the same hatreds.

Maunsell.

THE CRITICS: Dramatic critics furiously condemn a play at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Gradually we discover the idea of the play through their abuse, and at last we recognize it.

Maunsell.

JANE CLEGG: A strong and clear-sighted, honest woman has to deal with a feeble and braggart husband whose foolish crime threatens to wreck her own and her children's lives.

Sidgwick and Jackson.

Rachel Lyman Field

THREE PILLS IN A BOTTLE: Fantastic play of a little sick boy who gives the medicine that was to have made him strong to feeding the starved and abused souls of various passers-by.

In Plays of the 47 Workshop, First Series, Brentano's.

Anatole France

THE MAN WHO MARRIED A DUMB WIFE: A mad and comic farce, in the tradition of Pierre Patelin and The Physician in Spite of Himself. Judge Botal calls in a learned physician and his aides to make his dumb wife speak. The result is so astoundingly successful that he pleads for relief. Finally a desperate remedy is found.

Translated by Curtis Hidden Page, Lane, 1915.

J.O. Francis

CHANGE: The tragic conflict of ideals of two generations which have grown irreparably apart in social and economic views.

Educational Publishing Company, Cardiff; Doubleday, New York.

Zona Gale

THE NEIGHBORS: Kindliness called forth among village people to aid a poor seamstress who is to undertake the care of her orphan nephew.

In Wisconsin Plays, First Series, B.W. Huebsch.

MISS LULU BETT: A starved life blossoms suddenly and unexpectedly. This play, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1920, is stronger and finer work than the author has done heretofore.

Appleton (in novel form).

John Galsworthy

THE ELDEST SON: Sir William Cheshire comes to quite different solutions of similar problems when different individual and class factors enter into them.

Scribner's.

JUSTICE: Mr. Ludwig Lewisohn writes: "The economic structure of society on any basis requires the keeping of certain compacts. It cannot endure such a breaking of these compacts as Falder is guilty of when he changes the figures on the cheque. Yet by the simple march of events it is overwhelmingly proven that society here stamps out a human life not without its fair possibilities— for eighty-one pounds."

Scribner's.

THE LITTLE MAN: Brilliant caricature of various national types of tourist, and absurd apotheosis of the Little Man, of no particular nation and of insignificant appearance, who proves quietly capable of doing what the rest discuss.

Scribner's.

THE MOB: The reply of the hysterical and "patrioteering" members of his own class, and of the many-headed rage, to a man who stood against an unjust war.

Scribner's.

THE PIGEON: A discussion of social misfits and mavericks, with, of course, no attempted panacea or solution.

Scribner's.

THE SILVER Box:

"Jones: Call this justice? What about 'im? 'E got drunk! 'E took the purse—'E took the purse, but (in a muffled shout) it's 'is money got 'im off! Justice!

"The Magistrate: We will now adjourn for lunch." (Act II.)

In Plays, First Series, Scribner's, 1916.

STRIFE: In the strike the leaders of the men and of the employers are stanch against compromise, but "the strong men with strong convictions are broken. The second-rate run the world through half-measures and concessions." (Lewisohn.)

Ibid.

Louise Ayers Garnett

MASTER WILL OF STRATFORD: A pleasant drama of Will Shakespeare's boyhood. Compare Landor's "Citation and Examination of Will Shakespeare for Deer-Stealing."

Macmillan.

Alice Gerstenberg

OVERTONES: While two women are conversing politely, they are attended by their real, unconventional selves, who interrupt to say what the women actually think and mean. Compare Ninah Wilcox Putnam's Orthodoxy (Forum, June, 1914, 51:801), in which everyone in church says what he is thinking instead of what is proper and expected.

In Washington Square Plays, Doubleday.

Giuseppa Giacosa

THE RIGHTS OF THE SOUL: Anna is sternly loyal to her husband Paolo, but refuses to submit to his incessant prying into her individuality and questioning of her thoughts and her feelings.

Frank Shay.

THE WAGER: "Sentimental comedy, poetic and graceful, by one of the greatest contemporary Italian dramatists."

Barrett H. Clark, translator. French.

W.S. Gilbert

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN: A most absurd parody on Hamlet, wherein a lamentable tragedy written and repented by his uncle the king is unearthed and turned to the sad prince's undoing.

In Original Plays, Scribner's.

ENGAGED

PRINCESS IDA

William Gillette

SECRET SERVICE: A most intense situation in Richmond during the Civil War, ably handled by a quiet and brilliant Northern secret-service man; weakened by a manufactured happy ending.

French.

Susan Glaspell

TRIFLES: Two women, by noting the significant trifles which the sheriff and the attorney overlook, discover the story of suffering which led to a crime. Speaking of their neglect of neighborly kindness, one says, "That's a crime too, and who's going to punish that?"

In Washington Square Plays.

Lady Gregory

IRISH FOLK-HISTORY PLAYS:

I. THE TRAGEDIES: Stories of the beautiful and potent queens who brought suffering upon themselves and upon others; compare Synge's and Yeats's stories of Deirdre.

Putnam.

II. THE TRAGI-COMEDIES: THE WHITE COCKADE: In which James II defeats the gains of his loyal subjects by his abject and ridiculous cowardice.

Putnam.

CANAVANS: A covetous miller, his clever wandering brother, and some pleasant absurdity about the popular worship of Queen Elizabeth by her loyal subjects in Ireland.

Putnam.

THE DELIVERER: Apparently an Irish peasant's idea of the story of Moses.

Putnam.

WORKHOUSE WARD; HYACINTH HALVEY; THE JACKDAW:

Comedies full of Irish wit, conscious and unconscious comedy, and endless complication of events and hearsay in Cloon.

All in Seven Short Plays, Putnam.

THE BOGIE MAN; THE FULL MOON; COATS:

More about Cloon people, including the rescue of Hyacinth Halvey from his troublesome reputation and from the place by the magic and lunacy of moonlight.

In New Irish Comedies, Putnam.

DAMER'S GOLD: A fortunate rescue from the torments of miserliness and pestilent heirs; the author's notes on the origin of the play are interesting.

Ibid.

THE GAOL GATE: A brief and effective tragic story of two women who fear that their man has betrayed his mates, but who find that he has been hanged without informing; the mother improvises a psalm of praise of his steadfastness.

In Seven Short Plays.

THE TRAVELING MAN: A peasant woman who has been befriended by a mysterious wanderer expects his return so that she may thank him. She drives away a tramp from her kitchen, and then discovers who he was.

Ibid.

THE GOLDEN APPLE: Many scenes, some excellent fun; of a search for miraculous fruit, of a giant who is high and bloodthirsty only in carefully fostered reputation, and the like matters.

Putnam.

St. John Hankin

THE PERFECT LOVER: Delightful dramatic version of Suckling's "Constant Lover."

In Dramatic Works, Seeker.

RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL: The same young man, or his close image, having managed to be received by his family as a returned prodigal, calmly puts upon them the question of his future.