The Saturday Westminster Gazette.
Of their kind, Mr. Bottomley's plays are remarkably good. They have atmosphere and action; they are exquisitely wrought; they are moving and dramatic. They will surely be among the most delightful discoveries of future generations; and if by the beginning of the twenty-first century our successors have contrived to establish a national or folk theatre, it is fairly safe to prophesy that three at least of them will find a place in its repertory.
The Observer.
Since the issue of "The Crier by Night" in 1902, Mr. Bottomley has worked with a sincerity and devotion which are more commendable than the more frequent essays of less conscientious artists. We remember one considerable and beautifully produced book of miscellaneous verse, "The Gate of Smaragdus," and there have been other plays issued semi-privately, until the publication of "King Lear's Wife" gave him a wider public, and reminded younger readers of his very definite and dignified talent.... If as a tour de force, the latter is the greatest, we still prefer, for sheer poetic beauty, for propriety of phrase and for directness of action, the earlier "Riding to Lithend." Hallgerd is an exceptionally fine creation, and she is given to speak passages of rare force and beauty. This play, too, has a fierce dramatic quality.
Mr. R. Ellis Roberts in The Daily News.
Mr. Bottomley's plays have all one merit without which poetical drama is a thing indefensible. There is always in them a definite note of necessity.... Not only does Mr. Bottomley choose subjects which make his decision to write in verse seem natural and right, he writes blank verse of a dignity and worth which responds at once to the needs of natural, and the convention of poetic, speech. His poetry is in the full English tradition; he enjoys his vocabulary with that careful, inventive joy which is the privilege of all who are sensitive to the individual word. He can use rhetoric; but he rarely allows himself to be drawn away into mere hectic luxury of language. The best of his plays is, I think, "The Riding to Lithend," a rendering of the old life of Iceland, which really represents for us the passionate, hasty life of the old Sagas, while it is free from the pedantry which spoils so many efforts to reproduce Scandinavian heroics. Hallgerd is a genuine piece of dramatic creation. "Midsummer Eve," with its quiet, wind-blown pathos, is equally notable; and the quality of its verse shows Mr. Bottomley's talent at its highest and simplest.
The Actor.
In these plays, the public is reminded of Mr. Gordon Bottomley's almost unique power, as among his contemporaries, of presenting the sinister, the grim, the tragic, or the merely weird, in a poetic garment of power and beauty ... in dramatic force and verse charm.
The Journal of Commerce, Chicago, U.S.A.
These plays are put into a format and style of book that honour the contents, and when you know the contents of this remarkable dramatic poetry that is praise indeed. They hold you strangely.... The dialogue is skilfully modulated, it is a veritable song-speech, illuminated by luminous pauses, by the speaking silences that can invest, if rightly used, the static with so much more dramatic feeling than the more obviously emotional action. The plays are impressive even in the reading of them, then how much more effective they would be if acted and declaimed—but in a manner worthy of their high art.