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swathes of Tennyson-inspired art that had been produced in the second half of the
n o
nineteenth century. The reviews were mostly appreciative,
though George Bernard
Shaw was unsatisfied with the piece. Apart from deriding the play’s incidental music
by Arthur Sullivan and terming Carr a ‘jobber’, Shaw was particularly affronted by
Arthur’s speech to Guinevere. Describing it as an ‘unpardonable scene’, he went on:
That vision of a fine figure of a woman, tom with sobs and remorse, stretched
at the feet o f a nobly superior and deeply wronged lord of creation, is no doubt
still as popular with the men whose sentimental vanity it flatters as it was in
the days o f the Idylls o f the King. But since then we have been learning that a
woman is something more than a piece of sweetstuff to fatten a man’s
emotions.
Indeed, at a time when the London stage was filled with considerations of ‘the woman
question’ - and with dramatists such as Pinero, Ibsen, Wilde and, indeed, Shaw asking
many of the questions - Carr’s portrait of a prostrate and pathetic Guinevere does
seem anachronistic. And as Arthurian drama stretched into the next century, through
the work of F.B. Money Coutts, Ernest Rhys, Morely Steynor and Arthur Dillon, the
1 OQ
whole Tennysonian paradigm began to appear increasingly out of date.
An element
of stagnation had appeared which playwrights seemed unable to counter.
Occasionally some dramatist would offer a contradiction to the patriarchal
structure of the corpus o f Arthurian drama. In the same year as Carr produced King
Arthur, Henry Newbolt published Mordred: a tragedy, which presented Arthur as a
flawed king who contravenes his own rules of chivalry in concealing the fact that
Mordred is his illegitimate son, which leads to the concluding calamity. In the final
dialogue between Arthur and Guinevere, it is not the queen who is forced to ask for
forgiveness, but Arthur. Although she had loved Lancelot for many years, she had
* Shaw also lamented that the notable talents of Ellen Terry, who played Guinevere in Henry Irving’s
production, were wasted on such ‘sham-feminine twaddle in blank verse’: ‘it was the old story of real
women’s parts condemned to figure as a mere artist’s model in costume plays which, from the
woman’s point of view, are foolish flatteries written by gentleman for gentlemen’.
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remained loyal to the king because of her respect for his high idealism. Yet when she
learns of his deceit, she too falls, later saying to the king:
I scorned thee not
For any fault o f boyhood, but I heard
A man, midway upon the road of life,
A king, for justice throned, deliberate,
Upholding lust and treason for the sake
Of the old-time fellowship they claimed with him.
I heard thee: love and hate that moment broke
The dungeon-keep of duty.140
Newbolt’s play, however, was an aberration - both in terms of the Tennysonian
paradigm and the author’s own highly conservative politics.* Unlike Carr’s play
which achieved great commercial success, Newbolt’s Mordred was never performed
and is unlikely to have influenced any later dramatic treatment, and the author is now
chiefly remembered for his jingoist line ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’.141
Other playwrights who refused the patriarchal structure of Carr’s adaptation of
the Idylls include Graham Hill and the Scottish dramatist, Martha Kinross. In
Guinevere (1906) Hill largely paraphrased Morris’s ‘Defence of Guinevere’ as the
queen attempts to exonerate herself in front of Arthur’s court:
And yet I lie not when I say ye lie!
Since first I came, my heart has ever roamed
Loveless through Arthur’s halls, and quite alone,
While he [Lancelot] was near that loved me as his soul.
* It is not only Guinevere who appears very different from her usual Victorian character. Mordred, too,
is treated much more sympathetically than in other Victorian texts. Throughout the play Mordred
perceives himself to be aggrieved - not only because of his unrecognised relationship to Arthur but also
because he sees Arthur’s idealism as tyranny:
We do but crave
For freedom; every current of the rime
Sets toward a kindly faith and tend’rer laws;
Only these vows oppress us, crying still
‘Thou shalt not,’ in the ear of lusty youth,
To whom no voice should call but Nature’s own. (V.i.)
This theme of oppression continues until the penultimate scene in which, despite the protests of his
knights, Arthur slays Mordred, who with his dying breath cries ‘Life! Life! One year of life -
untyrannised’ (V.ii).
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Love is not shame, nor lack of it a crime;
I speak God’s truth, and tell ye that ye lie!142
Yet despite Hill’s assertion that Guinevere is ‘not guilty’ the play, like Morris’ poem,
has very little to offer by way of defence other than to repeat the refrain ‘And yet I lie
not when I say ye lie’. Martha Kinross’s Tristram andIsoult (1913), another blank-
verse drama, is also sympathetic to Guinevere’s position. The play begins with
Guinevere and Isoult discussing their unhappy relationships, while watching the
knights of Arthur’s court engage in jousts. Yet it is the Cornish queen who becomes
the feminist focus o f this drama. As Isoult resists the violent Mark and brings the
drama to its conclusion, through choosing to drink the poison in a last act of defiance,
Guinevere is left to describe her fellow queen as ‘fearless’, but is unable to alter her
own fate.143
Kinross’s play was one of a large body of Tristram and Iseult dramas produced
in the early part of the twentieth century. Antonia Williams, J. Comyns Carr, Thomas
Herbert Lee, Maurice Baring, Michael Field (the pseudonym of Katherine Harris
Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper) and Arthur Symons all produced such plays in the
first decades o f the century, with more appearing in the 1920s, including Thomas
Hardy’s The Famous Tragedy o f the Queen o f Cornwall (1923) and John Masefield’s
Tristan and Isolt (1927).144 Verse renditions by G. Constant Lounsbery, Cyril Emra
and Laurence Binyon all appeared before the First World War.145 Perhaps part of the
appeal of the Tristram and Iseult story, in comparison to the Arthurian, lay in the
greater freedom with which writers could compose their own versions. The nineteenth
century produced four distinct retellings of the legend - each with particular appeal.
There was the moral-domestic tale of Arnold’s Tristram and Iseult; the brief
Arthurian version o f Tennyson’s ‘The Last Tournament’; Swinburne’s sensual and
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