attacked by his friend, David King, whose nerves are frayed by the whole experience and by his concern for Peter’s apparent untroubled acceptance of the situation in which they find themselves. In their subsequent dreams, these two reenact the conflict in the roles that their names and natures suggest—Abel and Cain, Absalom and David, Isaac and Abraham—until they finally join Corporal Adams in his dream, and the three of them become Shadrac, Meshac, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, the crucible of humankind’s experience.

The creation of their dreams in terms of army life gives the whole play a sense of immediacy while underwriting the repetitive nature of history and the cumulative meaning of human experience. The mixing of biblical situations and military terminology provides a very effective vocabulary for the verse of the play, creating the same kind of tensions that the larger design of the play encompasses.

The fourth character, Meadows, a man beyond the maximum age for enlistment, has accepted his involvement with humankind by the symbolic act of voluntary enlistment, and he provides the structural links between the waking and sleeping worlds. For the most part, as the other dreamers act out their passions, Meadows lies awake in his bunk; the others wake fitfully from time to time, and the waking men interact on the edge of their dreams. For example, after Adams, as Joab, has cut down Absalom with his tommy gun, David (no longer the king) awakens, and in the anxiety of his guilt, which had been objectified by his dream, asks Meadows, who has been awake, if he has heard a shout (the cry of the dying Absalom). Meadows’s reply, “Nobody shouted,” indicates the complexity of the formal convention of the dream, which is to be compared to the interior monologue technique in the sense that the world of the dream creates its own significant content and form although its larger setting is the external world.

There is a progression in the dreams that David and Peter enact, moving from the wrathful killing by Cain when Abel wins at dice to the meaningful but averted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. In the final experience of the furnace, when all three join in a single dream, Meadows appears as Man, who undergoes with the others the purgatorial fires in which humankind is tried. The fourth figure, the role which Meadows takes, is present in the biblical story and is traditionally identified with Christ; yet only if Christ is to be seen as a type of Everyman—not God but first of all Man, sharing the experiences of humankind—does this reading of the figure do no violence to accomplishment of the play.

In A Sleep of Prisoners, Fry deals more directly with the state of human beings in the modern world than in any of his other plays. David, for example, has the obsession Auden expressed in the 1930’s, that the world is divided into “we’s” and “they’s,” “ours” and “theirs”; “I’ve got to know which side I’m on./ I’ve got to be on a side.” The intent of the play is to suggest, however, that sides and the wars and hatreds they represent offer no solutions, for no person is an island: “Whatever happens on the farthest pitch,/ To the sandman in the desert or the island-man in the sea,/ Concerns us very soon.” The involvement of humankind in its history is a purifying experience, just as the flames in the biblical furnace suggest the purgatorial nature of the dreams the men have endured. The flames in the furnace become human figures, the unquenchable fire of breath and blood, which “can only transform.”

Fry comes closer in A Sleep of Prisoners to achieving a totally realized verse drama than in any of his other attempts. Fry’s problem in moving toward longer plays was to find a form in which to put his particular kind of language into a sustainable relationship to the whole. The most critical problem encountered in the longer play, the three-act or the five-act play, appears to be that of a structure in which verse can play an integral part and which will, in turn, justify the use of verse, for the problems of verse drama appear to be intensified and complicated by the necessities of the longer play. In the “seasonal comedies” and in Curtmantle, Fry stubbornly attacks the problem of the longer play in verse, only partially succeeding.

The Lady’s Not for Burning

Fry’s idea of a comedy for each season of the year is not a gimmick, but rather it belongs to the aesthetic notion that the “comedy of mood” or “comedy of seasons” can provide a unity of setting, time, and mood that will create the wholeness symbolized by the year itself.

Mood is everything in The Lady’s Not for Burning. Two charming, young eccentrics—the rationalistic accused witch and the disenchanted soldier who wants to die—are pitted against two antagonists, one of which represents spring and all the forces of life and the other the petty world of a society that claims that “The standard soul/ Must mercilessly be maintained. No/ Two ways of life. One God, one point of view./ A general acquiescence to the mean.”

All in all, this spring comedy is determined to prove that April is not the cruelest month, that human beings can survive the birth pangs of self-knowledge, accepting finally even the burden of an unreasonable future and an imperfect world. Typically, love reclaims the characters for life and an intuitive recognition of the wonder of the universe. In the course of their reclamation, however, there is a good deal of sheer “talk” for its own sake of the kind that weakens rather than strengthens Fry’s comedies. Even the eccentricity of the characters cannot excuse a language often so circuitously poetic that the most notable thing about it is its derivative quality. The verbal high jinks, the excesses of language and imagery are as obvious as the literary derivations, and although Fry intentionally does this sort of thing at times in a scheme of romantic mockery, the device does not always work, since he is quite capable of creating a passage bearing the same verbal characteristics when his intention is entirely otherwise.

Venus Observed

Venus Observed, the autumnal comedy, is set in the declining season of the year, and its hero, the Duke of Altair, is well past the green age of youth. He has a grown son who becomes his rival in love and teaches him that he must accept the encroachments of age. At the beginning of the play, the Duke thinks that he has accepted the limitations imposed by his age, and he has gathered three of his former mistresses in his bedroom observatory to watch an eclipse of the sun through his beloved telescope. The Duke’s son, Edgar, is to perform the Judgment of Paris for his father and present one of the three women with the symbolic apple, also appropriate to the day of the year, All Hallow’s Eve, and to the autumn harvest. The apple is further to be identified with the legendary apple of the Fall of Man, so that through symbol and image, the scene of the play is extended to include the whole ruined Eden of the contemporary world, although there is no emphasis in the play on the modern situation.

The memory of Eden, of his first, unspoiled love, remains in the Duke, in spite of his autumnal resolves. When the eclipse has passed and the first renewed light of the sun reveals Perpetua Reedbeck standing in its rays, the Duke forgets that “‘mellow’/ Is the keynote of the hour,” and takes the apple to offer it to her youth and beauty. It is not until one of the Duke’s aging mistresses destroys his observatory, which she sees as symbolic of the Duke’s isolation and his invulnerability, that the Duke is brought to realize that so much he had “delighted in is all of ash.” Out of the ash finally arises the Duke’s acceptance of a love befitting his declining years. The action of the play brings the Duke into harmony with its autumnal mood—a mood that, like that of The Cocktail Party, leads all the characters to an examination of their limitations and to the adjustments necessary to make the best of the fading world in which they find themselves. In this respect, the play is close to the traditional function of comedy as a revelation of the follies and foibles of humankind, which brings human beings into an acceptable balance with society. As a part of this function, the speeches of certain characters (particularly of the Duke as Age pursuing lost Youth) are self-mocking, like those in A Phoenix Too Frequent, although Fry has achieved on the whole a quieter and less high-pitched verse.

A Phoenix Too Frequent

The verse in this play shows, in general, a certain flexibility not achieved in the earlier comedies, and it is a verse that wears for three acts with much less friction than the verse of The Lady’s Not for Burning. The language itself is closer to the contemporary idiom, and it is “poetic” in unobtrusive ways, which involve concealed end-rhymes, internal rhymes, and alliteration. This is, on the whole, a more mature play than the earlier three-act comedy, and the language reflects this maturity. The verse almost entirely avoids the nondramatic philosophizing one ordinarily expects in a Fry play, and when such general comments do occur, they are part and parcel of the action or mood of the play.

The Dark Is Light Enough

The Dark Is Light Enough is a “winter comedy” presumably because it involves the physical decline and death (but spiritual victory) of its heroine, who triumphs in death as in life, not so much through her own action as through her influence on those around her. This is a comedy, not of manners, but of the spiritual fiber that informs the world of manners, even in a no-man’s-land between two warring forces. As in The Firstborn, the play is held together by a single, commanding character, that of the Countess, and her sphere of influence is the area of the play, even in the final moments after she has suffered death and yet controls the action about to be performed. The language, as befits a winter comedy, is sober in comparison with that of the other comedies, but on the whole, it is undistinguished either by Fry’s excesses or by his achievements. At its worst, the language of the play suffers from the same sentimentality that mars the whole work. At its best, it is a language that rises out of the situation to catch and hold the mood of the play, as when the dying Countess descends the stairs for a final Thursday evening with her devoted group of admirers and tells them, “We must value this evening as the one/ Thursday in the universe, for the rest/ Have gone, and no more may come,/ And we should be on our most immortal behaviour.”

A Yard of Sun

A Yard of Sun is set in an Italian summer during the first Palio to be celebrated following the conclusion of World War II. This ancient contest, with its religious and civic affirmations, becomes the fitting occasion for the trial of individual identity, which is a central action of all of Fry’s plays. It is also the occasion to bring the characters into an acceptance of the flawed universe, the world that will not bend itself to their own conceptions and desires, but which is, in spite of this fact (or, more likely, because of it), worthy of acceptance and affirmation. In fact, Ernst Cassirer’s definition of comedy in “An Essay on Man” seems to have been made for Fry. Cassirer sees comic art as possessing “in the highest degree that faculty shared by all art, sympathetic vision. By virtue of this faculty it can accept human life with all its defects and foibles, its follies and vices. . . . We live in this restricted world, but we are no longer imprisoned by it.”

A Yard of Sun is set in the courtyard of an ancient Siena palazzo, and the scene is never varied, for in a technique reminiscent of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (pr., pb. 1907), the news of the various stages of the running of the traditional horse race comes to the audience only by report. The contest, an occasion for family reunions, provides the heightened moment which unlocks the potentiality for the real challenges of the play.

The sun in this summer comedy seems to suggest to Fry the light before which the inner shadows of the characters must yield and modify themselves. The “heat of the day” (the original title of the play) is a time for clarity, and into the yard of the palazzo come nine characters, representing a variety of modern views and problems, each related to the others in ways that must be clarified before they can accept the ambiguities of their own experiences. Winning turns out, in the end, not at all to mean what the characters had thought it would.

The verse of A Yard of Sun is much more controlled and unobtrusive than in any of Fry’s other plays. The people are more nearly people talking to one another than they are characters making poems on the stage, and the action of this play seems to fit its meaning with an ease never before achieved. There is nothing very original in the play itself, but it is original within the Fry canon in the sense that it does not strain toward either the condition of verse or the condition of drama.