eerie poetic dramas of the supernatural that have been
written in the last two decades. To me the best-known
translations of Maeterlinck pale beside it.... I hold
"The Riding to Lithend" his greatest achievement. To
me it is like a piece of gorgeous tapestry blurred by
wood-smoke and sea-mist and hung on a granite wall.
The dramatic structure is knit as compact as a rock.
Across the shimmering imagery of the diction blows a
chill and foreboding wind of the spirit.... The verse
is nobly distinguished. "King Lear's Wife" is also a
notable piece of work.... It possesses convincing
reality.... Again the dramatic structure satisfies
completely. "Midsummer Eve" is packed with fragrant
beauty ... that creeps around the heart.... The
atmosphere is the important thing about this play and
is unforgettable. "Laodice and Danae" is more usual
(for Bottomley, for very few other writers), but it is
the work of a sure dramatic craftsman with an
enthralling tale to tell.... There is a splendid
artistic austerity about his work ... yet mixed with
this there is an entirely full-blooded love of the
earth, a delight in intensely human detail.... He has
indeed displayed many gifts imperishably bright. His
name should stand high in the roster of modern English
verse.
_The Morning Post._
The rare beauty and distinction of these works have
been ungrudgingly acclaimed by many critics, but they
have hitherto lacked that wider recognition for which
they are indubitably destined.... But now the bringing
of them together in one volume permits us all to
appraise the quality of what is the most significant
accomplishment of our Georgians. It is impossible to
be impervious to the strength and beauty, knit
together, of these dramas.... Criticism may note with
admiration the unerring skill of dramatic structure;
with delight the mastery of language, which constrains
the simplest words to the greatest needs; with wonder
the reading of the human heart.... The man who can
handle character and emotion with such mastery both of
language and imagination is indeed a poet.... In Mr.
Bottomley the Georgian era has found an authentic
voice--a veritable interpreter.
_The Times Literary Supplement._
We must honour the devoted writers who keep alive the
desire for the poetic drama, and none more than Mr.
Gordon Bottomley.... He is a poet and justifies his
use of poetic speech; he is eloquent, incisive, has a
blank verse of his own which he writes with increasing
mastery.... In "The Riding to Lithend" he rises with
his story ... the death of Gunnar is well done; you
read it breathlessly, for he makes it the death of
Gunnar indeed; and even the slayers feel the greatness
of it. Mr. Bottomley, in a more fortunate age, might,
we think, have been a dramatic poet like Fletcher; he
has Fletcher's eloquence though not his fun,... but
not, of course, Fletcher's familiarity with the
stage.... If he had been bred in the theatre, he
might, we think, have had Fletcher's real and
delightful success.
_John O' London's Weekly._
The cumulative effect of a re-reading of Mr.
Bottomley's work is to convince one that he is a real
poet who can write real drama. In the matter of
construction these plays approach perfection; the
building up is masterly, and the verse is full of
variety and imagination.... The finest as drama is
"King Lear's Wife," though for sheer beauty and
spiritual significance I should be inclined to place
"Midsummer Eve" first. Only one of these plays has
been acted in England. If we had a live stage they
would all be acted.
_The New Statesman._
Mr. Gordon Bottomley's plays are good art. There are
moments in "King Lear's Wife" when he approaches
greatness.... It contains passages of very rare force,
and the dramatic power ... is of a very high quality.
In this play and in "The Crier by Night" he recalls to
us not the late Elizabethans so much as that strange
uneasy genius Thomas Lovell Beddoes.... He is a purer
poet, dramatically, than was Beddoes, and his song has
a clearer richer quality, more imaginative, though
not quite so fantastic; but he resembles Beddoes in
his stern saddened preoccupations with the passing of
mortals. Few plays have a greater unity of atmosphere
or a more boding one than has "The Riding to Lithend."
In all the plays, however, one finds a real poet who
is also a real dramatist; there is little of
decoration in any of the plays, and nothing of that
windy seasonal rhetoric which is so common in some
poetic plays.
I. B. in _The Manchester Guardian_.
It is an excellent thing that these plays, the
earliest of which was published twenty years ago,
should have been brought together and given a new
lease of public life.... It is indeed quite
extraordinary that, with so much publishing of poetry
during the last few years, work of such high
distinction should have remained under cover. Mr.
Gordon Bottomley's art of tragedy, as well as his
craftsmanship in verse, can be seen ripening through
this series until it comes to a rich maturity in "King
Lear's Wife." Here ... austerity and compassion are
compounded, and so create the tragic atmosphere in
which small words are big with infinite meaning and
hints develope the power of hammer-blows.... It is the
best of the group, and it is significant, as showing
the inherent union between matter and form, that when
the poet writes his best play he also writes his best
verse.... He is admirably master of himself and of his
medium.
_The Spectator._
Neither in the setting of the scene of "King Lear's
Wife," the conduct of the story, or its embellishment
and illustration, is there a wasted word.... But amid
the abundance of this most rich, most ample of little
plays, there is surely nothing--nothing, we mean, that
can be detached from its setting--that surpasses
Goneril's two speeches to her mother.... Whether Mr.
Gordon Bottomley--though calling his creations by
their Shakespearean names in his heart--would not have
done better to call his monarch Cole or Cadwallader in
print is a question with which controversy will
probably long be busy. It is a play which would not be
spoiled if, in a pet, he had called the protagonists
Smith, Jones, and Robinson. We recommend this test, by
the way, to those who are called upon to pronounce
judgment upon the poetic drama. There is more in it
than meets the eye.
_The London Mercury._
It is some years since the public was surprised to
learn that Mr. Gordon Bottomley had written a prelude
to "King Lear," which not only offered some solution
of the problems of that work, but was also in itself a
play of considerable beauty, originality, and power.
This piece now serves for the title of a volume of
collected plays.... It was effective and moving on the
stage, and it makes its effect, though perhaps a
different one, when it is read in the study.... An
extract will serve to illustrate the flexible,
elastic, and individual versification. We should do
wrong, however, if we were to give the impression that
his plays are only for the study, valuable for such
passages, and lacking in the harder bones of dramatic
merit. The action is not an excuse for decorative
poetry, but is the immediate and all-important
thing.... These are the creations of a dramatist who
has no need of descriptive decoration to conceal the
weakness of his prime conceptions.
_The Nation._
The wave of poetic drama has now ebbed, and this form
is practised very little to-day, lyrical and
experimental verse having almost entirely supplanted
it. Mr. Bottomley's plays are the only ones which,
with the going-out of the tide, have managed to escape
its "long withdrawing roar" and retain a place on the
shore.... Without any doubt they express a singular
power of mysterious evocation.... They are not at all
vague and inchoate--on the contrary, these towering
shadows are remarkably and firmly differentiated....
We find "The Crier by Night" and "The Riding to
Lithend"--especially the former--the most darkly and
magically impressive of all the plays.... An image in
the former positively makes you jump as Donne makes
you jump with his imagery.... But perhaps his most
striking achievement is the way he can make these
shapes of an intensely brooding ... imagination speak
out in taut, muscular, even gruffly vivid language. He
has avoided, and very properly avoided, the tenuous
chantings, effeminate imagery, and listless monochrome
of the Celtic drama. Mr. Bottomley's plays, in fact,
are peculiar and esoteric, but they undoubtedly
achieve a strong success in their own character.
_The Athenaeum._
Mr. Gordon Bottomley is one of the few writers of
poetical plays whom it is necessary to take very
seriously: his blemishes are minor and few in number;
his poetical qualities very much outweigh his defects.
He is at his best in expressing subtle states of mind,
and in formulating generalizations. His real
distinction lies in his dramatic power. His characters
have solidity and life ... they are not mere symbols,
but human beings. His plays are marked by the economy
of construction of stage plays. It is significant to
note that Mr. Bottomley's pieces are excellent in
proportion as they are actable.
_The Saturday Westminster Gazette._
Of their kind, Mr. Bottomley's plays are remarkably
good. They have atmosphere and action; they are
exquisitely wrought; they are moving and dramatic.
They will surely be among the most delightful
discoveries of future generations; and if by the
beginning of the twenty-first century our successors
have contrived to establish a national or folk
theatre, it is fairly safe to prophesy that three at
least of them will find a place in its repertory.
_The Observer._
Since the issue of "The Crier by Night" in 1902, Mr.
Bottomley has worked with a sincerity and devotion
which are more commendable than the more frequent
essays of less conscientious artists. We remember one
considerable and beautifully produced book of
miscellaneous verse, "The Gate of Smaragdus," and
there have been other plays issued semi-privately,
until the publication of "King Lear's Wife" gave him a
wider public, and reminded younger readers of his very
definite and dignified talent.... If as a _tour de
force_, the latter is the greatest, we still prefer,
for sheer poetic beauty, for propriety of phrase and
for directness of action, the earlier "Riding to
Lithend." Hallgerd is an exceptionally fine creation,
and she is given to speak passages of rare force and
beauty. This play, too, has a fierce dramatic quality.
Mr. R. Ellis Roberts in _The Daily News_.
Mr. Bottomley's plays have all one merit without which
poetical drama is a thing indefensible. There is
always in them a definite note of necessity.... Not
only does Mr. Bottomley choose subjects which make his
decision to write in verse seem natural and right, he
writes blank verse of a dignity and worth which
responds at once to the needs of natural, and the
convention of poetic, speech. His poetry is in the
full English tradition; he enjoys his vocabulary with
that careful, inventive joy which is the privilege of
all who are sensitive to the individual word. He can
use rhetoric; but he rarely allows himself to be drawn
away into mere hectic luxury of language. The best of
his plays is, I think, "The Riding to Lithend," a
rendering of the old life of Iceland, which really
represents for us the passionate, hasty life of the
old Sagas, while it is free from the pedantry which
spoils so many efforts to reproduce Scandinavian
heroics. Hallgerd is a genuine piece of dramatic
creation. "Midsummer Eve," with its quiet, wind-blown
pathos, is equally notable; and the quality of its
verse shows Mr. Bottomley's talent at its highest and
simplest.
_The Actor._
In these plays, the public is reminded of Mr. Gordon
Bottomley's almost unique power, as among his
contemporaries, of presenting the sinister, the grim,
the tragic, or the merely weird, in a poetic garment
of power and beauty ... in dramatic force and verse
charm.
_The Journal of Commerce_, Chicago, U.S.A.
These plays are put into a format and style of book
that honour the contents, and when you know the
contents of this remarkable dramatic poetry that is
praise indeed. They hold you strangely.... The
dialogue is skilfully modulated, it is a veritable
song-speech, illuminated by luminous pauses, by the
speaking silences that can invest, if rightly used,
the static with so much more dramatic feeling than the
more obviously emotional action. The plays are
impressive even in the reading of them, then how much
more effective they would be if acted and
declaimed--but in a manner worthy of their high art.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
Varied hyphenation was retained. This includes things such as
bed-clothes, bedclothes and bed-time, bedtime.
Page 9, repeated word "the" removed from text (from the body estranged)
Page 39, "gradully" changed to "gradually" (she gradually forces)
Page 107, "dais" changed to "dais" (by the dais door)