The Uncle. The light! The light! [At this moment, quick and heavy steps are heard in the room on the left.—Then a deathly silence.—They listen in mute terror, until the door of the room opens slowly, the light from it is cast into the room where they are sitting, and the Sister of Mercy appears on the threshold, in her black garments, and bows as she makes the sign of the cross, to announce the death of the wife. They understand, and, after a moment of hesitation and fright, silently enter the chamber of death, while The Uncle politely steps aside on the threshold to let the three girls pass. The blind man, left alone, gets up, agitated, and feels his way round the table in the darkness.]
The Grandfather. Where are you going?—Where are you going?—The girls have left me all alone!
[THE CURTAIN.]
FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES[53]
A DRAMA IN ONE ACT
By
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
Josephine Preston Peabody (Mrs. Lionel S. Marks) was born in New York on May 30, 1874. She attended the Girls' Latin School in Boston and later went to Radcliffe College. From 1901 to 1903 she taught English literature at Wellesley College. Her verse, dramatic and lyric, has made her an outstanding figure in American letters.
Fortune and Men's Eyes (1900), the first of her published plays, is written in blank verse. Marlowe, likewise a study of a great Elizabethan, The Wings, the setting of which is early English, The Piper, a new version of the medieval legend made famous by Browning, and The Wolf of Gubbio, dominated by the lovely figure of St. Francis of Assisi, are also poetic dramas. Her best known play, The Piper, was awarded the first prize in 1910 in the Stratford-on-Avon competition in which there were three hundred and fifteen contestants. It was then produced at the Memorial Theatre at Stratford.
In recent years two playwrights have consulted Shakespeare's sonnets for dramatic themes; first, Josephine Preston Peabody found in them a motive for her poetic play, Fortune and Men's Eyes, and later George Bernard Shaw turned them to dramatic account, in his own fashion, in The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The dramatic situation chosen for Fortune and Men's Eyes has been read by some Shakespearian scholars into the familiar dedication of the 1609 edition of the Sonnets, which runs: "To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth T. T." The last initials stand for the name of the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. "Begetter" has been variously interpreted as inspirer of the Sonnets or as partner in the commercial enterprise of their publication. "Mr. W. H." has been more usually identified with William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, though some have thought that the initials were inverted and referred to Henry Wriothesly, earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare's other poems were dedicated. If W. H. does refer to the earl of Pembroke, it is usually held that the "dark lady" is in reality the blond Mistress Mary Fytton, whose name was coupled with Pembroke's. Whether the sonnets are in any sense at all autobiographical has also been endlessly debated. It was admittedly an age when every poet tried his hand at sonnet sequences and in all these sequences, not excepting Shakespeare's, there are to be found the same conventional conceits. But it is generally believed now that the sonnets of Spenser and Sidney refer to the personal experiences of their authors. It is quite possible, then, that Shakespeare, too, may have used a literary convention as a means of personal expression, though it seems impertinent in any case to question the feeling back of "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." This brief reference to conflicting interpretations of the Sonnets shows how material of dramatic value may lurk even in the purlieus of textual criticism.
Josephine Preston Peabody herself says: "The play was written after long worship of the W. S. Sonnets, as a method of introspection, to satisfy my own curiosity concerning the truth of the sonnet theories. In spite of recurrent threats, by one actor after another, it has never yet been produced on the professional stage. But it has been read and recommended for reading, in various colleges, as a picture of Elizabethan times, and as an interpretation of the Pembroke-Fytton aspect of the sonnet story."
FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES
"When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes" ...