The Plays of D. H. Lawrence

THE PLAYS OF D. H. LAWRENCE I IN 1913 D. H. LAWRENCE spoke of his plays as relaxation from the more arduous work of novel writing: "I enjoy so much writing my plays-they come so quick and exciting from the pen-that you musn't growl at me if you think them a waste of time."l Although he wrote seven plays and a fragment,2 Lawrence didn't take his dramatic work very seriously, and when' two of his plays were given stage performances , he didn't bother to see them. The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd was done in London in 1926 and David the following year, but Lawrence, who was living in Italy at the time, wrote that he couldn't come.S In fact, he rarely went to the theater, so his knowledge of the drama was fairly well limited to texts rather than stage presentations.. Lawrence seldom talks about the theater in his letters, but does mention that he prefers Synge and Shakespeare above other playwrights.4 Catherine Carswell sums up Lawrence's attitude toward his plays when she comments on his refusal to attend the performance of David: "But Lawrence would not risk the strain and disappointment. Though he always had a half a hope that one of his plays would succeed on stage, I doubt if he had much belief in them as stage plays, or if he felt their failure acutely."5 For the most part critics have ignored Lawrence's plays. They are justified in that none of them is very good drama and contains nothing new in dramatic technique. They are important, however, in their relationship to Lawrence's other work, as they do reflect and sometimes severely qualify the themes of his other forms. If we are to praise Lawrence as an important thinker as well as an artist, as Mr. Leavis does, then we had better know the plays where his ideas are not always the same as in his novels. In the differences between Touch and Go and Women in Love, which I shall treat later, we find that Lawrence has handled the theme of industrial England in opposing ways. A case, then, can be made for the plays, and in this paper I pro1 . The LetteTs of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley, 2nd. ed. (London: Heinemann, 1932), p. 90. 2. The plays in chronological order are: A Collier's Friday Night (1906-07), The Married Man (1912), Altitude (1912), The Merry-Co-Round (1912), The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1913), Touch and Co (1919), David (1925), and Noah, a fragment (l925?). The Plays of D. H. Lawrence (London: Martin Seeker, 1933), contains The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, Touch and Co, and David. I have not been able to examine Altitude, published in Laughing HOI·se. 1·he Married Man was published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, XVI, pp. 524-547, and The Merry-Co-Round in volume XVII of the same magazine, pp. 3-44. Noah can be found in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1936). 3. LetteTs, pp. 673 and 676. 4. Ibid., p. 7. 5. Catherine Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), p. 253. 349 350 MODERN DRAMA February pose to discuss Lawrence's plays in relation to his other work, and to analyze their dramatic nature in order to show Lawrence's artistry, for better or worse, at work. One last point before I tum to the plays themselves: they reflect a trait of Lawrence's character which has been often overlooked. Since the plays do qualify the ideas of his novels and short stories, they show that Lawrence never gave in to anything without a great deal of hedging. As Richard Aldington says, "Lawrence would not have been Lawrence if he had come at once to a clear decision and had acted upon it without hesitation," and he speaks of Lawrence's "chronic indecision and almost pathologfcal self-mistrust."6 I believe we need to examine Lawrence, not as a philosopher with a consistent system of thought, but as an artist whose ideas were continually being shaped by the demands of his...