The Not-So-Merry Monarch

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 64, 13 September 1940, Page 5

The Not-So-Merry Monarch

"TBE best scene in the play ("In Good King Charles’s Golden Days") is the last, when Charles, his wig-the symbol of his position. in "society as the Merry Monarch-put aside, has returned to talk things over with his wife, Catherine of Braganza. There is true tenderness and sympathy

in the portraiture here. This is where Charles confesses that his job of retaining his head upon his shoulders is not the easy, flippant task he pretends to make it, and that he finds the English a proud, difficult race. It is not required of your book reviewer to declare whether he considers Shaw’s pi¢fure true or false. The case is pleaded elo-

quently enough to send me to the other historians for another side to the picture, and that is always a good thing. And looking at Macaulay’s biting portrait, I do feel that it is not Shaw who is the caricaturist. A, more interesting commentary, so far as the character of a rather misunderstood king is concerned, may be found in the Earl of Mersey’s statement. When Charles was eight, Mersey declares, Lord Newcastle advised him "to be courteous and civil to everybody, and to be very civil to women, especially great ones." From these precepts, Mersey adds, Charles Stuart always profited. (John Moffett, in a review of G. B. Shaw's play "In Good King Golden Days," 4YA, August 28), : ;