SOURCE: Fisher, Esther Safer. “Lascelles Abercrombie—Playwright.” Modern Drama 23, no. 3 (September 1980): 297-308.

[In the following essay, Fisher discusses how Abercrombie's plays convey “symbolic realism” through his frequent use of metaphorical language and symbolic settings, as well as by choosing anti-heroic themes and characters.]

I

Best known as a critic and poet, Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938) was also a playwright deeply concerned with the state of the English theatre in the first three decades of this century. For the most part, he was adversely critical of the commercial theatre of his day, opposed to the twin evils of sentimentality and the factual treatment of contemporary social issues, what he termed “naturalism.” He wanted to create and promote plays which conveyed the type of “symbolic realism” he found in the work of two fellow Georgians, John Drinkwater and Gordon Bottomley. In Drinkwater's Cophetua, he saw “a bold attempt to break through the accretions of dramatic convention … and to achieve a broader, simpler, more frankly symbolic method of drama”¹; and in Bottomley's The Riding to Lithend, he appreciated a play shaped not “according to nature, but according to the curves of beauty, into a symbol of life infinitely more powerful than any actuality could do.”²

Abercrombie was attracted to both symbolism and realism, each of which had helped to dissipate the nineteenth century emphasis on sentimentality. Like Yeats, he feared the tyranny of realism, but unlike Yeats, he distrusted the emphasis on imagination. Abercrombie viewed the Irish Dramatic movement as “nothing but the final effort of the great European Romantic movement—the Romantic movement carried to its extreme, Celtic fashion,” and he considered the plays of Yeats and Synge “something shadowy, insubstantial and delicate and only half-human.”³ Perhaps for these reasons he felt that Irish drama did not influence English poetic drama.⁴

Furthermore, in an approving way, Abercrombie linked masculinity and vigour with a sordid type of reality characteristic of much English poetic drama, including that of W. W. Gibson and Bottomley. He admired Bottomley's use of myth, legend and figures who, for all their domestication, are in the heroic or epic tradition. He wrote to R. C. Trevelyan, “perhaps Yeats is right in saying that a play ought not to deal with its own time.”⁵ Yet, for the most part, Abercrombie's plays are set in the present, and the characters are not aristocrats, however primitive, but rustics whose passions are universal. By means different from those used by Bottomley, he wanted to get away from contemporary realistic drama of social concerns and to create plays depicting fundamental human motives and actions.

II

Abercrombie wrote seven plays: The Adder (1908), A Tower in Italy (1910), Deborah (1912), The Staircase (1913), The End of the World (1914), The Deserter (1921), and Phoenix: [a] Tragicomedy (1922). The Adder, The Staircase, The End of the World, and The Deserter were published as Four Short Plays in 1922; Deborah and Phoenix, each containing three acts, were published in 1913 and 1923 respectively; A Tower in Italy,⁶ to which I shall refer briefly, was not published until 1976.

The central issue in Abercrombie's plays (with the exception of The End of the World) is man's duality, or what he termed Milton's predominant theme, “Fixt fate—free Will”; and for Abercrombie, as for Lawrence, sex was the single most important factor in determining man's fate. In Deborah, Abercrombie's first published play, the birth of an illegitimate child leads to Barnaby's madness, Miriam's suicide, and by extension, to Deborah's death. But sex is also the life-force embodied in Deborah who, like her Biblical namesake, is both a mother-figure and a heroine. In Phoenix, character determines fate: Rhodope, who is sexual attractiveness incarnate, does not fight against her fate; she triumphs over it, whereas the royal family is torn apart by sexual jealousy. In each of the one-act plays, sexual love is depicted as a type of madness over which man has little or no control.

In most of Abercrombie's plays, there is little development of character and little physical movement; both characterization and action are conveyed to a large extent by setting and poetry. Because these elements represent Abercrombie's major contribution to the theatre of his day, I shall concentrate on them, dealing first mainly with setting and then focusing on the poetry of The Staircase and Phoenix.

With the exception of Phoenix, the settings of Abercrombie's plays are rural and isolated. In The Adder, the ancient, almost obsolete occupation of charcoal burning practiced by Seth and Newby represents existence uncomplicated by the modern world. The title, suggesting the serpent in Eden, concisely conveys the theme of sexual knowledge and the Biblical connotations associated with it. These associations and the apparent spatial remoteness of the setting help to distance events; at the same time, the temporal setting in the present underscores the sense of passions smoldering beneath contemporary manners and lends a timeless, almost mythical quality to the action.

Symbolically, Seth's murder of his daughter to protect her from sexual experience conveys the interrelationship between innocence and evil. The metaphysical implications of the play are balanced somewhat by the character of Newby, the practical man, and by the snake, who is both part of the setting and the main character. Although the creature is hidden in the box, its presence pervades the play. Associated with sin in the abstract sense, the snake is also a phallic emblem which represents Seth's incestuous desire for his daughter. Early in the play, he remarks, “My sins are lurking for the flesh they tasted / And liked so well, the flesh that is my daughter.”⁷ At the end, his language is explicitly sexual when he tells the girl to handle the snake, “play with it … search it thoroughly” (381-382). On this level of interpretation, it is her innocence that dies when the adder strikes her.

The scene takes place in autumn at dusk; the only light is that of the charcoal burner's stack. The opening lines complement the setting: “It is main quiet in a copse these days; / Fall's here and no mistake: do you snuff the mould?” (363); and they are deepened by the pun on “fall” in its association here with “mould” and the snuffing out of life. In production in 1913, the staging by Basil Dean “in dark curtains with a lurid sunset effect … ”⁸ linked the fall of the day and of the year with the “fall” of man and the death of Seth's daughter. The snake in the cage, the fire within the stack, Seth's sins suppressed beneath his religiosity, and a malignant nature seeking to reclaim the woods for herself, all suggest pent-up forces threatening to erupt and engulf the order and “morality” imposed by man; and they reveal that The Adder is a form of morality play which explores archetypal human problems. A modernized version of the fall of man, it is heavily influenced by still recent Freudian interpretations of human behaviour. The theme is universal; the treatment is typically Georgian in its attempt to combine dramatically symbolism with realism, and in its emphasis on rural life, concerns with problems of sexual freedom, revolt against Victorian inhibitions, and exploration of subconscious levels of awareness. In The Adder, unguarded passion determines human behaviour.

In Deborah, cosmic and human forces combine to convey a sense of determinism. As in Synge's Riders to the Sea, the background here is dominated by the grey of the water and the sky, evoking a brooding atmosphere, and there is a strong sense of inevitability: “jail'd by river and marsh … ” (455), the characters are at the mercy of the tides. Like the sea in Synge's play, Abercrombie's setting, in a type of primeval muck, is both realistic and a metaphor for the precariousness of life. For life in the universe of Deborah is also threatened by supernatural forces; Abercrombie's use of the folk-legend of the Gabriel Hounds works on both realistic and symbolic levels. Belief in the legend suits the rustic setting—the kind of environment where such tales are still plentiful—and the hounds are an appropriate image for Miriam's guilt which eventually leads to her death. In this setting, removed from urban civilization (like Masefield's setting in Tragedy of Nan), her frantic ravings for a knife to kill the hounds intensify the primitive effect of the scene.

The setting in The Staircase is rural but less primitive, all the action centring around a staircase (which a Joiner has built in hopes that the unknown girl who once lived in the country cottage will return and be the first to ascend). Abercrombie, like Adolphe Appia, realized the dynamic qualities, for the actor, of a “geometric” architectural structure on the stage. In The Staircase, the ludicrous qualities of the Joiner's aspirations are emphasized when the tramp woman's lover is the first to climb the stairs in his efforts to avoid the police. At the base of the stairs, the Joiner, still deluded, thinks he is well rid of his rival. The comic aspects of his fantasy heighten as the law officers rush up the stairs and then descend with the Tramp. Moreover, the stairs allow for more physical activity than is possible in Abercrombie's other plays; the chase conveys pursuit without disrupting and cluttering the horizontal plane of action. It also serves as a prelude to the surprise ending. When the curtain descends, the Woman, perhaps irrationally, goes off with her brutal lover, and the Joiner is left alone with his staircase. The setting, like the title, is integral to both the atmosphere and the action of this play.

Setting also adds depth to characterization in The Staircase. On one level, the staircase symbolizes the Joiner's proclivity to link material and spiritual worlds. When the vagrant woman reveals that she is the girl who once lived in the house, she tells the Joiner that the way out of a dream is uphill to truth. At that point, the staircase, the only stage property in the bare room, becomes the visual counterpart of his mental activity as he willingly decides to accept her rather than abandon illusion. To the Woman, the staircase is a metaphor for life:

They are pretty work, your stairs:
They look too white in this curst filthy room;
Like a mind where the dirty world has lived and slept,
But still remembering in midst of the soil
Some childish morning spent in games and laughter
Under a blowing orchard.

(384)

In contrast to the Joiner, a juvenile romantic, she is a mature realist, nostalgic for her youthful innocence, but aware that it is irrecoverable. There is little place for fantasy in her sordid world.

The characters in The End of the World become dupes of the imagination. They live in the country, yet they are part of the modern world, bored and trapped in a spiritual vacuum, ready to grasp at anything for excitement. They are ripe for deception. The specific setting of the kitchen of a public house imparts a sense of community. In addition, it is a fitting place for people to congregate in hot weather. There is continual reference in the poetry to the climate; the heat gives credibility to Dowser's prophecy and is an index of the inner climate of the characters. Before he hears of the impending doom, Huff, a kind of comic Mephistopheles, revels in the thought of his wife and Shale frying in Hell. Later, his dream seems to have come true as he anticipates the two being punished by fire for the fire of their passion. Here, the setting enhances the impression of human desire to escape monotony through either fantasy or beer. As a study of the play illustrates, Abercrombie usually makes careful and effective use of setting to integrate the symbolic and quotidian aspects of his themes. In The Deserter, another good example, the house represents death and treachery, and is related to the ironic resolution. Martha has been pawned to Luther along with all of Peter's property, and it is for shelter and financial security that she finally succumbs to the old man whom she finds sexually abhorrent. Throughout the play, the house symbolizes outer peace and protection, and inner death.

Abercrombie's most complicated setting combines towers and staircases in his last play, Phoenix. As early as 1910 he had used a three-dimensional setting in A Tower in Italy. This work, which he seems to have abandoned and which may not have been meant for the stage, has many features similar to Phoenix. Both are removed in time and place; the action in both takes place in and around towers, staircases and parapets; and like the staircase in the earlier play, these stage properties represent a means to close the gap between heaven and earth. In Phoenix, as in A Tower in Italy, the specific desire symbolized is escape from a loveless marriage to some ideal form of union with a new mate.

The elevated properties in Phoenix remain on the stage throughout the three acts with only slight modifications by means of an awning to suggest the luxury of a Levantine palace. The awning, which conceals the actors on stage level from those in the tower but not from the audience, allows actions in different places to occur simultaneously and also adds an element of secrecy. In the first few minutes of the play, the Queen, in one of the towers looking for her son, overhears Rhodope and Amyntor on the roof. The King speaks of their place under the blue awning as a kind of heaven, and with appropriate lighting that illusion might be achieved. For him it is a garden of the gods where the young woman will impart a type of immortality to the older man. In the last act, Rhodope is concealed in the tower with her latest lover, while father, mother and son are separated from one another by passions stirred up by the young girl. The watch-tower, built to protect the king and his family, shelters the woman who has destroyed them; the setting comments on the irony of the situation.

The adaptability of a single set in Phoenix both reinforces the unity of action and allows for variety. By 1922, when Abercrombie wrote Phoenix, specifically with stage performance in mind, he may have been familiar with Appia's theories about “three-dimensional” settings. The triple staircases would make an impressive and dynamic scenic device, one which underscores the difference between Rhodope and the others. In marked contrast to the immobile stage architecture, the movement of the members of the royal family on the stage suggests the relationship between them and the sea in the background which is forever changing, while Rhodope, like a rock in the sea, to which Phoenix compares her, is immutable:

                                                  firm and calm as a rock
When laughing sunny wind drives the water
To tear itself to surges to possess it;
And all the sea can do, as it lunges by,
Is to disguise the rock's insensible nature
In rearing glittering flights of spray, as white
And vanishing as love's imagination.

(548)

Here, poetry conveys both setting and character.

III

Abercrombie's “The Function of Poetry in the Drama” (1910) foreshadows Eliot's Poetry and Drama by some forty years. His contention that all language on the stage is highly ordered and artificial, and poetry, not prose, may be “the natural and straightforward medium for a play … ”,⁹ looks forward to Eliot's “prose, on the stage, is as artificial as verse: or alternatively, … verse can be as natural as prose.”¹⁰ Abercrombie emphasizes that poetry, in drama as elsewhere, acquires power through colloquialisms, and syntax and rhythms like those of ordinary speech. He feels that character, like language, must be intelligible, although it need not copy nature. The audience must be able to identify with the characters and to accept their concern with one particular aspect of life, their tendency to reveal their deepest feelings, and their language, which is not that of actual life. They are “real” in the sense that, as persons, they communicate with us.

Lecturing at the Malvern Festival in 1934, Abercrombie elaborated on his earlier theories:

[The characters] have to tell us … what they mean in the plot and what the plot means to them, and to a very large extent what the plot is. All this they have to do in dialogue: the burden on language therefore in drama is and must be vastly greater than it ever is in real life. … In drama … they must impress their characters on us—they must always … speak in character. And, though they must not as a rule seem to be doing this intentionally, they must combine it with a further and perhaps even more significant revelation: they must express the action and their absorption in it and what it means, for it is in order to express the action in terms of personality that they exist at all. And all this to a very large extent must be done by their language—though of course it is a language designed to be acted, and to gain immensely from being acted. Still, the language most suited to drama must evidently be language in the highest degree expressive in itself: that is to say, poetry.¹¹

Ultimately, the burden of the entire play falls on language expressed through character.

In keeping with his theories, the poetry in Abercrombie's own plays expresses “action in terms of personality.” While the Woman in The Staircase is encouraging the Joiner to confess all of his fantasy about her, she is suckling her infant; finally exasperated with his illusions, she rebukes him:

                                                                                I have not lived
In notions, but in seeings things; that's one:
Cold morning, a white road, and at the side
A tramp lies dead of starving, and all around him …
Ugh! [Her voice begins to accuse him.]
And I've a mind to stop you cockering
Your halfling blood. What right have you to be
So brave and comfortable with your dreams
Of that lost fool—you always in a house—
While she, the truth of them, goes broad awake
In agony?

(389-390)

The counterpointing of the basic iambic meter with trochees at the beginnings of the third and fifth lines, and the changes from the five-foot line to hexameter in the fourth, and to the single syllable “Ugh!” in the fifth line, adapt the blank verse to the rhythms of ordinary speech. Diction conveys the Woman's disdain for the Joiner: the unusual word “cockering,” with its connotation of pseudo-masculinity associated with the training of gamecocks and its meaning of “pampering,” in conjunction with the adjective “halfling,” displays her resentment. The vigour of her language points up his weakness; in both word and gesture, she emphasizes active physical life. In contrast to her “concrete” language, the Joiner's speech expresses the truth he has acquired in vague terms of “light,” “dreams,” and height:

                                        And now I've climbed
Where nothing stops the light, not even dreams.
We'll not get higher than this, either of us.

(393)

These lines are a verbal counterpart of what his staircase symbolizes.

To emphasize the opposition between the Woman's harsh pragmatism and the Joiner's sheltered existence, she also conveys the “brutality” that is a common feature of much Georgian poetry. Admonishing the Joiner for his use of the commonplace “Rats deserting a sinking ship” to describe the ill fortune of society's outcasts, she counters:

But you're not fair to rats. What have they done
That you should liken them to charity?
This would be better: Vermin crawling out
From the clothes of a beggar's corpse, soon as they feel
The warmth of their lodging chill.

(389)

It is as though only the vilest of images can purge him of the delusion that he can love her as she is.

In contrast to the Joiner, the Tramp in The Staircase is without any illusions. He is saved from being merely a stage villain by touches of humour in his language. When he attempts to beat the Woman for not having found food for them, the Joiner intercedes and the Tramp responds:

Have I to down you first before I tan
My woman? …
… you with your belly crammed and good:
It's low! Stand off and be an Englishman.

(396)

There is drollness in his unconventional behaviour. Again, when he has been captured, his repetition of the colloquial “copt” (a contraction of “cop it” for “to catch it”) punctuates and interrupts the Joiner's plea for the Woman to choose her man. Although the drama critic for the Liverpool Courier could not fathom why the Woman leaves the Joiner for the Tramp,¹² in a way the Tramp's earthiness and rawness justify her choice. From one point of view, that is, The Staircase dramatizes the artist's position. At the beginning, the Joiner speaks of “shaping” the wood, of his hands “obeying” his will. He is a joiner in the sense that he dreams of uniting illusion and reality, but because his emphasis is on what Abercrombie terms “pure inwardness,” he fails. The Tramp represents life or actuality. The Woman is Abercrombie's symbol for the balanced artist; she may lapse into romantic reverie, but she chooses life.

Abercrombie was adept at conveying the complexities of female personality. Like the Woman in The Staircase, Rhodope in Phoenix has the capacity to endure. Acted upon, she does not try to shape life; nevertheless, she has independence and integrity. Only Rhodope is unscathed at the end. Completely free from any sense of conventional respectability, and oblivious to the pain she is causing the old man, in the father's presence she tells Phoenix:

Give him old women: they'll be glad of him.
But I'll not hold him up, clinging against me
With bushes in his nostrils and his ears.
Take me away, Phoenix. I loathe him.

(531)

Her explicit evocation of her disgust at the sex act with Amyntor conveys her down-to-earth attitude. She loves being worshipped and temporarily tolerates, perhaps enjoys, her affair with each of the men, abandoning each in turn. At the end, she sets out for a new life in another place where she can start the same cycle all over again. Ironically, she is the true Phoenix of the play.

Rhodope may be adept at love-making, but she is incapable of love. There is no love in the play. Eventually there is nothing but what Amyntor sees as “Insolent animalism …” (536), and the idealization of Rhodope turns to hate. The poetry, especially the imagery, conveys the change in the characters' perceptions, and ultimately, the general atmosphere in which they exist. At first, Amyntor, somewhat like Tennyson's Ulysses, sees himself bound by responsibilities, but as he tells Rhodope, she has made him young again:

I've been mere senseless duty until now,
Like blundering in a mist. But over me
You dawn: at your first glance my foggy air
Spangled with particles of whitening gold;
Now that bewilderment of milky fire
Clears to a blaze of morning in my eyes—.

(506)

In his implied comparison of Rhodope with the dawn, he conveys various levels of his enchantment. He is transported from “a mist” to awareness of the “whitening gold” of pure perfection, and beyond that to a glorious apprehension of rebirth in “a blaze of morning.”

At the end, Amyntor dismisses Rhodope in images of “nature red in tooth and claw:”

                                             We throw discarded meat to dogs.
She thought herself a feast for a King. The King
Has tasted her; and gives her to his soldiers.
They shall devour her.

(549)

Throughout the play, metaphors of savage appetites, almost of cannibalism, convey the anger and frustration of both father and son. Here is Phoenix speaking to Amyntor about Rhodope:

I've heard of this in tales, …
………………………
… how there have been
Fathers who've set their smooth ingenious lusts
To plunder with a relish their own sons
Deliciously!

(530)

And Amyntor, realizing that the harlot cannot be his, tells the Queen:

Caught and stifled again! …
With misery and shame ten times as fiercely
Fastened upon me in a gluttony
Like starving leeches!

(540)

Ultimately, the characters' feelings erupt in physical violence. The theme of cruelty is emphasized by the sight of the “whip” and by constant references to it. Phoenix, who was ready to fight his own father for the sake of Rhodope, is eager to see her whipped at the end. For Amyntor, his bought plaything was the last source of dreams; bereft of her, he sadistically whips the soldier. The Queen's efforts to change the course of events are to a large extent self-defeating; she loses both her son and the possibility of any heirs. Like the others, she vents her frustration in violence as she goads her husband to lash the girl. Among other things, the whip is obviously a phallic symbol, as the Queen intimates when she taunts Amyntor for his inability to punish Rhodope: “your whip / Trails behind you limp and harmless …” (535). To compensate for impotence, each of them hopes to derive some sort of sexual satisfaction from inflicting punishment on another. What has started out as romantic sport has turned into a grim game. Ultimately, Phoenix seems to be a dramatization of sexual frustration.

Both the published and stage versions of Phoenix were received with a good deal of interest and, frequently, of negative criticism. Herbert Read compared the play with Flecker's Hassan: “it lacks experiential motives. ‘Hassan’ can perhaps be justified as a fantasy, but ‘Phoenix’ has no intention of this kind … it is extremely unreal, in motive, in characterization, and in dénouement.”¹³ James Agate, who saw Phoenix on the stage, was of the opposite opinion: “The piece is, so far as it goes, immensely true to life, and very like Zola seen through rose-coloured spectacles.”¹⁴ Read was correct in calling attention to the similarities with Hassan. As in Hassan, which Abercrombie admired, the problem is that the distancing of events both in time and space is a means of evading the central question, the relationship between sexual and transcendent love. Agate, in his comparison with Zola, was close to the truth in that Phoenix, in the Georgian manner, examines fundamental passions. Abercrombie's emphasis, especially in language, on the futility of idealizing love between the sexes conveys a type of cynical realism. In fact, this play can be seen as a parody of a favourite Georgian plot “in which men fight to lead the pack and struggle for a woman.”¹⁵

Abercrombie's plays illustrate the Georgian concern to convey dramatically a fuller, deeper, more basic “reality” than that of contemporary social drama. His settings, like those of Masefield, Gibson and Bottomley, help to reinforce the timelessness of his themes. But unlike their plays, which often rely on logical plot or story-line, Abercrombie's work has a sense of the irrational that is conveyed through his frequent use of highly metaphorical language and symbolic settings. In addition, to emphasize “realism,” Abercrombie chose anti-heroic themes and characters, and he rejected the “grand style” and rhetoric of such poet-dramatists as Stephen Phillips. In both subject matter and technique, his plays show a turning away from Victorian opulence and the effeteness of the nineties. In his own time, his innovative use of irregular blank verse, and of language and syntax approximating that of ordinary speech, were considered revolutionary. Arthur Waugh, unable to discern meter in Abercrombie's poetry, referred to it is as “vers libre”;¹⁶ and Edward Shanks, among others, spoke of the “brutality” of Abercrombie's verse.¹⁷

All of Abercrombie's plays are brutal in the manner in which they destroy illusion. His debunking of romanticism is not only typically Georgian but entirely consistent with his theories of literature. But his brutality, like Synge's and unlike that of his fellow Georgians, is tempered with comedy. Comedy of situation and of the characterization and language of the Tramp adds complexity to The Staircase; and black comedy mingles with both slapstick and farce in Phoenix.

There are, of course, weaknesses in Abercrombie's work. His longer plays are too diffuse; his insistence that all art must be governed by a metaphysic and that to be great a poem must be long (so that it can give us “long experience of the whole huge, multifarious, rebellious substance of living”)¹⁸ interfered with his practice. Instead of concentrating on a particular theme and mode, he seems to have felt that when working in three acts, he had to convey complexity by cramming in as much diverse material as possible.

In the short plays, on the other hand, he made the most of a dramatic situation; by concentrating on one aspect of life, and especially through the use of poetry and setting, Abercrombie achieved a maximum of intensity and concision to complement the violent conflicts and passions associated with his themes. Language and setting effectively integrated help to suggest more than the physical reality of his characters. Characters are given further psychological “depth” which enhances their lifelike qualities and also contributes to more than one level on which the plays can be interpreted. In Abercrombie's terms, they convey “symbolic realism.” This is most effectively realized in The Staircase, one of the finest examples of the Georgian contribution to English drama and of Abercrombie's efforts to create an alternative to prose plays.

Notes

1. “Books of the Day: Poetry,” Daily News, 23 January 1912, p. 4.

2. Letter: L. A. to G. B., 14 July [1909].

3. Abercrombie, “Irish Poets,” lecture notes, 1920.

4. By 1937 Abercrombie acknowledged the superb contribution of Yeats and Synge; nevertheless, he felt that “they had little to do with the development of English drama as a whole, and that is true too of the efforts to revive poetic drama in the English theatre.” Abercrombie, “Modern Drama,” lecture notes, 1937.

5. Letter: L. A. to R. C. T., 27 February [1908].

6. Abercrombie, Four Short Plays (London, 1922); Deborah (London, 1913); Phoenix (London, 1923); A Tower in Italy (Toronto, 1976).

7. Abercrombie, The Poems of Lascelles Abercrombie (London, 1930), p. 369. Subsequent page references will appear in the text.

8. Grace Goldie, The Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 1911-1934 (London, 1935), p. 83.

9. Abercrombie, “The Function of Poetry in the Drama,” Poetry Review, 1 (1912), 107.

10. T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama (London, 1951), p. 13.

11. Abercrombie, “The Drama of John Drinkwater,” Four Decades, 1 (1977), 273-274.

12. “A Poet's Plays,” Liverpool Courier, 5 March 1920, p. 3.

13. Herbert Read, “Tuxigraphe,” Nation and Athenaeum, 34 (1923), 157-158.

14. James Agate, “‘Gruach’ and ‘Phoenix’,” in The Contemporary Theatre, 1924 (London, 1925), p. 160.

15. Michael Sidnell, “Yeats and the Georgians,” typescript for lecture delivered at Sligo, August 1976. Quoted by permission of the author.

16. Arthur Waugh, “The New Poetry,” Quarterly Review, 226 (1916), 371.

17. Edward Shanks, “An Earnest Play and the Co-optimists,” Outlook, 20 October 1923, p. 303.

18. Abercrombie, “The Age and Poetry,” New Weekly, 1 (1914), 138.