TENNYSON'S PLAYS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 5

TENNYSON'S PLAYS

Sir,-Tennyson lovers will have welcomed the report in The Listener on the success of his Queen Mary as a radio play. I should like, however, to comment on the statement that Tennyson’s plays were not a success on the stage. By ordinary standards of success in the theatre they may not have been, but as poetical drama goes (or doesn’t go) they were. No other user of this medium in Tennyson’s time drew so many people to the theatre, Lytton had far more popular success, but his plays, though "good theatre," are largely fustian. We: might have to go far beyond the nineteenth century to find poetical drama of Tennyson’s quality that made as considerable an appeal to the playgoer. Here are some facts, The Cup, produced by Irving, drew crowded houses in London, and ran for over 130 nights. The Falcon, played by the Kendals, ran for 67 nights. The Foresters had a long and successful run in New York. According to Tennyson’s official biography, Queen Mary, Becket, The Cup, The Falcon and The Foresters -were "all more or less. successful on the stage." In the nineties, Irving consid‘ered Becket one of the three most- successful plays produced by him at the Lyceum, and a better play than Shakespeare’s King John. It was at the end of a performance of Becket that Irving had his fatal seizure. ‘Tennyson’s plays have an important bearing on the appraisement of him as a poet. It has been a fairly common criticism of him that he was a sweet singer with no great intellectual equipment. The evidence to the contrary should be quite conclusive. Much of it can be summed up in the fact that Tennyson was the first poet since Lucretius to tackle science seriously. The plays were products of his middle and old age. He did not begin Becket till 1876, when he was 67. Long before this, according to some critics, he had declined on to the cushions of a Court poet. The English historical plays show something quite different, a man of vigorous and enquiring intellect and great industry (he did a lot of research) who, with old age in sight, set himself to the big and noble task of writing a series’ of plays depicting the development of his country. The historian J. R. Green said of Becket that all his researches into the records of the twelfth century had not given him so vivid a conception of the character of Henry II and his court as was embodied in this play. Tennyson was a great poet who went on developing to the end. The author of Locksley Hall would appreciate the ‘calling in of radio for the revival of Queen Mary, his own favourite among his plays. : ‘

ALAN

MULGAN

(Wellington).