The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays by Gordon Bottomley et al. (best books to read .TXT) 📕

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 matinée 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