defective character of her lover, but her pain and humiliation at losing him are nevertheless acute. In an ironic turn of events, it is discovered that her father was the victim of a miscarriage of justice: He was innocent of the charges, and she is paid a large sum of money in compensation for his death. Her former fiancé realizes that she is a richer prize than the cousin, so he turns to her again with a proposal of marriage. In a fury at his duplicity and temerity, Nan stabs him in the heart with a bread knife, saying that he must be killed to keep him from preying on any more innocent women. She then throws herself in the Severn River, closing the play on a note of unrelieved tragedy.

Although a summary of the play makes it appear like a study in naturalism, it is, in fact, less so than Masefield’s early plays; nevertheless, some contemporary drama critics indicted the drama for its use of dialect, vicious characters, and commonplace scenes to tell an ugly story. In general, The Tragedy of Nan seems most to echo Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891): Both are rustic melodramas that feature pure, beautiful country girls who are the playthings of cruel fate. Like Hardy’s Tess, Nan is truly a tragic protagonist, and her death induces the proper feeling of catharsis in the audience.

The Tragedy of Pompey the Great

Masefield followed The Tragedy of Nan with The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, which was written during the winter of 1908-1909 and produced for the stage in 1910, opening at the Aldwych Theatre in London under the direction of Harcourt Williams. Masefield began this history play as a one-act drama in which he tried to dramatize the life of the ill-fated Roman general as it was depicted in Sir Thomas North’s translation (1579) of Plutarch’s Bioi paralleloi (c. 105-115 c.e.; Parallel Lives, 1579). The events of the story required a fuller treatment, however, and Masefield expanded his play into a complete three-act drama. The tragic career of Pompey, who goes down to defeat with brave dignity in his struggle with Caesar, embodies a theme often found in Masefield’s work: the idea that the greatest victories are those of the spirit. Masefield draws Pompey’s character in more complimentary terms than history does, making him into a magnanimous, peace-loving general.

As a play, The Tragedy of Pompey the Great has some arresting scenes, with battles on land and sea that provide an opportunity for striking stage effects, but as Aristotle states in De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705), spectacle is the lowest artistic ingredient of the drama. The main weakness of this play, though, is its lack of dramatic tension. Masefield idealizes Pompey as a highly principled aristocratic leader who opposes Caesar’s mob appeal and egalitarian policies. Masefield’s Pompey, much like Shakespeare’s Brutus, is motivated by a patriotic desire to preserve the ideals of Republican Rome. Unfortunately, Caesar is not among the dramatis personae of Masefield’s play; as a result, there is no dramatic tension between Pompey and a worthy antagonist. Instead, there is only an extended exposition of Pompey’s character. Pompey’s tentative idealism is no match for the single-minded Caesar’s ambition; his efforts at compromise and his rational appeals to avert civil war are not successful, and strife breaks out with seeming inevitability. In this respect, some reviewers saw the play as an effort by Masefield to warn audiences of the threat to peace that international tensions posed in the period just before the outbreak of World War I.

The Faithful

One of Masefield’s next plays, The Faithful, a total departure from any of his previous dramatic works, reflects the vogue for Oriental culture that swept England and France during the early years of the twentieth century. Using Japanese rather than Roman history as his subject, Masefield—inspired perhaps by Yeats’s adaptations of N plays—tried a more experimental form of drama in The Faithful. The play opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1915 and ran until 1918. After the end of the war, it had a run of more than forty performances on Broadway, where it enjoyed a critical rather than a commercial success. The play is about the forty-seven rnin (masterless samurui), whose tragic story Masefield at first planned to tell in a verse narrative because he could not envision a dramatic structure for the story. Inspired in part by Granville-Barker’s productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will (pr. c. 1600-1602) and The Winter’s Tale (pr. c. 1610-1611), which, Masefield said, “showed me more clearly than any stage productions known to me the power and sweep of Shakespeare’s constructions,” he created a play of considerable lyric eloquence—a play that has all the blood and gore of a Jacobean tragedy, presented with a ritualistic air that mutes the violence and invests the action with a timeless quality.

The action, set in medieval Japan, revolves around a revenge plot. The play’s villain is an upstart tyrant named Kira, a newly rich daimyo, or feudal lord, who causes the death of a young rival, Asano. In the conflict that results, Asano’s followers try to avenge their leader, but the rebels are routed and their families are scourged by the ruthless Kira. Finally, however, the tide turns, and Kira is executed by one of Asano’s followers, the heroic Kurano. The curtain comes down with all the survivors preparing to commit seppuku, or ritual suicide. The pseudo-Japanese quality of the drama annoyed some of the play’s critics, who questioned its historical and cultural credibility, but Masefield should be given credit for his attempted synthesis of Western and Oriental dramatic modes. All in all, The Faithful is an interesting example of the impact of Japanese theater on the dramatic arts in England.

Melloney Holtspur

Only a few of Masefield’s post-World War I plays attracted any serious critical attention. One that did was a fantasy melodrama entitled Melloney Holtspur, a seriocomic ghost story about the way in which the peccadilloes of a past generation are passed on to the present. Written in the spirit of the supernaturalism of Sir James Barrie, the play was praised for its upbeat treatment of such solemn themes as ancestral sins and atonement. In addition, Masefield translated Jean Racine’s play Bérénice (pr. 1670; English translation, 1676); he also adapted Racine’s Esther (pr., pb. 1689; English translation, 1715). Masefield’s last effort at playwriting was A Play of St. George. This drama in verse and prose, which was never staged, treats the famous legend of England’s patron saint.