SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF
KING LEAR'S WIFE and other plays. 1920. 4to. With binding design by Charles Ricketts. Pp. 209. 15s. net. (Out of print.)
A special edition of 50 copies signed by the author, in white and gold binding. 31s. 6d. net. (Out of print.)
Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie (Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Liverpool) in The Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury.
This volume has been long overdue. It was the great good fortune of "Georgian Poetry" that it was permitted to give this remarkable tragedy of "King Lear's Wife" to the world, and thus to have the privilege of pioneering Mr. Bottomley's reputation among those who are unable to do much experimental reading. It was obviously not only a dramatic poem but an actable play; so actable, indeed, that it had the extraordinary fortune of being acted; and what was perhaps even more remarkable of a poetic play nowadays, it showed itself capable of being acted precisely and entirely as it had been written, the technique of the poet contriving to be, with a completeness not to be paralleled anywhere to-day except in Italy, simultaneously the technique of the playwright.
The other plays contained in this volume are still to be staged. They would certainly be not less effective than "King Lear's Wife" ... the cunning elaboration of supernaturalism in "The Crier by Night" and "The Riding to Lithend," its combination in the former with the elemental humanities, in the latter with vivid character and strangely heroic passion; the deft lucidity of "Laodice and Danaë," which might serve as a type of dramatic suspense passing at the exact moment into inevitable catastrophe: these things, one would think, should be eminently practical politics for the theatre. If any manager wants plays in which exciting action is at the same time profound significance, here they are.
However, we are only able to speculate on this aspect of Mr. Bottomley's work. But we can console ourselves by simply reading the plays as poetry.... In the days when theurgy was still an honourable profession, Apollonius of Tyana said "Knowing what people say is nothing; I know what people don't say." That might be put as motto for such poetry as Mr. Bottomley writes. It is the art of exhibiting realities. What people don't say is what they really are; and they don't say it because they can't get hold of it. But he can, and he can make them say it ... they speak and act as unconstrainedly as the folk of the everyday world; yet every word and every gesture is a flashing revelation of spiritual destiny. And not only men and women, but nature also: tarns and mountains, winds and the night, trees and stars—of these, too, Mr. Bottomley "knows what they don't say."