says Iseult of her journey to Brittany.
“I’ll fade your face to strangeness in my eyes!”
are Tristram’s words to his wife, Iseult the Whitehanded. Somewhere Iseult speaks of “the self-sown pangs of prying”. And in the music of such lines as those of Iseult the Whitehanded, broken with tragedy, lies the note of the play itself:—
“... This stronghold moans with woes,
And jibbering voices join with winds and waves
To make a dolorous din!...”
Plays of the nature of “The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall” demand, it must be remarked, a curious type of production. On its title page Mr. Hardy has called his work “a play for mummers in one act requiring no theatre or scenery”. So it will be given by the local players in Mr. Hardy’s own town of Dorchester. He has himself, in the preface to “The Dynasty”, suggested for “such play of poesy and dream ... a monotonic delivery of speeches, with dreamy conventionalized gestures, something in the manner traditionally maintained by the old Christmas mummers, the curiously hypnotizing impressiveness of whose automatic style—that of persons who spoke by no will of their own—may be remembered by all who ever experienced it”. The effectiveness of such a manner, coupled with Mr. Hardy’s blank verse and the brooding accompaniment of the chorus of chanters—the shades of dead old Cornish men and the shades of dead Cornish women—would be very great indeed.
It is enough to say, though, that Mr. Hardy has held his position of eminence for almost fifty years and that in “The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall” his power has not been lost. In such lines as—
“Nor life nor death