NOTES
SPREADING THE NEWS
The idea of this play first came to me as a tragedy. I kept seeing as in a picture people sitting by the roadside, and a girl passing to the market, gay and fearless. And then I saw her passing by the same place at evening, her head hanging, the heads of others turned from her, because of some sudden story that had risen out of a chance word, and had snatched away her good name.
But comedy and not tragedy was wanted at our theatre to put beside the high poetic work, The King’s Threshold, The Shadowy Waters, On Baile’s Strand, The Well of the Saints; and I let laughter have its way with the little play. I was delayed in beginning it for a while, because I could only think of Bartley Fallon as dull-witted or silly or ignorant, and the handcuffs seem too harsh a punishment. But one day by the sea at Duras a melancholy man who was telling me of the crosses he had gone through at home said—“But I’m thinking if I went to America, its long ago to-day I’d be dead. And its a great expense for a poor man to be buried in America.” Bartley was born at that moment, and, far from harshness, I felt I was providing him with a happy old age in giving him the lasting glory of that great and crowning day of misfortune.
It has been acted very often by other companies as well as our own, and the Boers have done me the honour of translating and pirating it.