by Thomas Hardy
THE SINGLE WITNESS
THE SIX BOARDS
THE SLEEP-WORKER
THE SLOW NATURE (AN INCIDENT OF FROOM VALLEY)
THE SOMETHING THAT SAVED HIM
THE SON’S PORTRAIT
THE SOULS OF THE SLAIN
THE SPELL OF THE ROSE
THE SPRING CALL
THE STATUE OF LIBERTY
THE STRANGE HOUSE
THE STRANGER’S SONG
THE SUBALTERNS
THE SUN ON THE BOOKCASE
THE SUN ON THE LETTER
THE SUN’S LAST LOOK ON THE COUNTRY GIRL
THE SUNDIAL ON A WET DAY
THE SUNSHADE
THE SUPERSEDED
THE SUPPLANTER A TALE
THE SWEET HUSSY
THE TARRYING BRIDEGROOM
THE TELEGRAM
THE TEMPORARY THE ALL
THE TENANT-FOR-LIFE
THE THING UNPLANNED
THE THIRD KISSING-GATE
THE THREE TALL MEN
THE TO-BE-FORGOTTEN
THE TORN LETTER
THE TREE AN OLD MAN’S STORY
THE TREE AND THE LADY
THE TRESSES
THE TURNIP-HOER
THE TWO HOUSES
THE TWO MEN
THE TWO ROSALINDS
THE TWO SOLDIERS
THE TWO WIVES
THE UNBORN
THE UPPER BIRCH-LEAVES
THE VAMPIRINE FAIR
THE VOICE
THE VOICE OF THE THORN
THE VOICE OF THINGS
THE WALK
THE WANDERER
THE WAR-WIFE OF CATKNOLL
THE WEARY WALKER
THE WEDDING MORNING
THE WELL-BELOVED
THE WEST-OF-WESSEX GIRL
THE WHALER’S WIFE
THE WHIPPER-IN
THE WHITEWASHED WALL
THE WIDOW
THE WIND BLEW WORDS
THE WIND’S PROPHECY
THE WISTFUL LADY
THE WOMAN I MET
THE WOMAN IN THE RYE
THE WOMAN WHO WENT EAST
THE WOOD FIRE
THE WORKBOX
THE WOUND
THE YEAR’S AWAKENING
THE YOUNG CHURCHWARDEN
THE YOUNG GLASS-STAINER
THE YOUTH WHO CARRIED A LIGHT
THEN AND NOW
THERE SEEMED A STRANGENESS
THEY WOULD NOT COME
THIS HEART A WOMAN’S DREAM
THIS SUMMER AND LAST
THOUGHTS AT MIDNIGHT
THOUGHTS OF PHENA AT NEWS OF HER DEATH
THROWING A TREE
TIMING HER
TO A LADY OFFENDED BY A BOOK OF THE WRITER’S
TO A LADY PLAYING AND SINGING IN THE MORNING
TO A SEA-CLIFF
TO A TREE IN LONDON
TO A WELL-NAMED DWELLING
TO AN ACTRESS
TO AN IMPERSONATOR OF ROSALIND
TO AN ORPHAN CHILD A WHIMSEY
TO AN UNBORN PAUPER CHILD
TO C. F. H.
TO CARREY CLAVEL
TO FLOWERS FROM ITALY IN WINTER
TO LIFE
TO LIZBIE BROWNE
TO LOUISA IN THE LANE
TO MEET, OR OTHERWISE
TO MY FATHER’S VIOLIN
TO OUTER NATURE
TO SHAKESPEARE AFTER THREE HUNDRED YEARS
TO SINCERITY
TO THE MOON
TOLERANCE
TRAGEDIAN TO TRAGEDIENNE
TRANSFORMATIONS
TWO LIPS
TWO SERENADES
UNDER HIGH-STOY HILL
UNDER THE WATERFALL
UNKEPT GOOD FRIDAYS
UNKNOWING
UNREALIZED
V.R. 1819-1901 A REVERIE
VAGG HOLLOW
VAGRANT’S SONG
VALENCIENNES
VOICES FROM THINGS GROWING IN A CHURCHYARD
WAGTAIL AND BABY
WAITING BOTH
WE ARE GETTING TO THE END
WE FIELD-WOMEN
WE SAT AT THE WINDOW
WE SAY WE SHALL NOT MEET
WEATHERS
WELCOME HOME
WESSEX HEIGHTS (1896)
WHAT DID IT MEAN?
WHAT’S THERE TO TELL?
WHEN DEAD
WHEN I SET OUT FOR LYONNESSE
WHEN OATS WERE REAPED
WHERE THE PICNIC WAS
WHERE THEY LIVED
WHERE THREE ROADS JOINED
WHILE DRAWING IN A CHURCH-YARD
WHISPERED AT THE CHURCH-OPENING
WHO’S IN THE NEXT ROOM?
WHY BE AT PAINS?
WHY DID I SKETCH
WHY DO I?
WHY SHE MOVED HOUSE
WINTER IN DURNOVER FIELD
WINTER NIGHT IN WOODLAND
WITHOUT CEREMONY
WITHOUT, NOT WITHIN HER
WIVES IN THE SERE
XENOPHANES, THE MONIST OF COLOPHON
YELL’HAM-WOOD’S STORY
YOU ON THE TOWER
YOU WERE THE SORT THAT MEN FORGET
YOUR LAST DRIVE
YULETIDE IN A YOUNGER WORLD
ZERMATT
The Plays
Hardy in his garden at Max Gate, c. 1910
THE DYNASTS
Hardy’s epic drama of the war with Napoleon was published in three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes in 1904, 1906 and 1908 respectively. Written in verse, the action is impossible to present on stage due to its complex battle-scenes, so the play is best described as a closet drama.
The Dynasts is extremely ambitious, some critics having likened it to Tolstoy’s momentous War and Peace. Scenes of ordinary life are placed beside acts of major historical figures of the times, concentrating on their desire to found dynasties and preserve their power. Also, there are extensive descriptions of landscape and battle scenes that are characterised by shifts of visual perspective that anticipate cinematic techniques. The drama is notable for the tragic chorus of metaphysical figures that observe and comment on the events.
Hardy regarded the drama as his magnum opus and devoted much of his later life to its completion, but the work was treated harshly by critics and has yet to achieve the renown of his poetry and novels.
The Lower Bockhampton Schoolhouse, which was attended by a young Hardy
THE DYNASTS
AN EPIC-DRAMA OF THE WAR WITH NAPOLEON,
IN THREE PARTS, NINETEEN ACTS, AND
ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY SCENES
The Time covered by the Action being about ten Years
“And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong,
And trumpets blown for wars.”
CONTENTS
PART FIRST
CHARACTERS
ACT FIRST
ACT SECOND
ACT THIRD
ACT FOURTH
ACT FIFTH
ACT SIXTH
PART SECOND
ACT FIRST
ACT SECOND
ACT THIRD
ACT FOURTH
ACT FIFTH
ACT SIXTH
PART THIRD
ACT FIRST
ACT SECOND
ACT THIRD
ACT FOURTH
ACT FIFTH
ACT SIXTH
ACT SEVENTH
For the detailed Table of Contents, click here
PREFACE
The Spectacle here presented in the likeness of a Drama is concerned with the Great Historical Calamity, or Clash of Peoples, artificially brought about some hundred years ago.
The choice of such a subject was mainly due to three accidents of locality. It chanced that the writer was familiar with a part of England that lay within hail of the watering-place in which King George the Third had his favourite summer residence during the war with the first Napoleon, and where he was visited by ministers and others who bore the weight of English affairs on their more or les
s competent shoulders at that stressful time. Secondly, this district, being also near the coast which had echoed with rumours of invasion in their intensest form while the descent threatened, was formerly animated by memories and traditions of the desperate military preparations for that contingency. Thirdly, the same countryside happened to include the village which was the birthplace of Nelson's flag-captain at Trafalgar.
When, as the first published result of these accidents, The Trumpet Major was printed, more than twenty years ago, I found myself in the tantalizing position of having touched the fringe of a vast international tragedy without being able, through limits of plan, knowledge, and opportunity, to enter further into its events; a restriction that prevailed for many years. But the slight regard paid to English influence and action throughout the struggle by those Continental writers who had dealt imaginatively with Napoleon's career, seemed always to leave room for a new handling of the theme which should re-embody the features of this influence in their true proportion; and accordingly, on a belated day about six years back, the following drama was outlined, to be taken up now and then at wide intervals ever since.
It may, I think, claim at least a tolerable fidelity to the facts of its date as they are give in ordinary records. Whenever any evidence of the words really spoken or written by the characters in their various situations was attainable, as close a paraphrase has been aimed at as was compatible with the form chosen. And in all cases outside the oral tradition, accessible scenery, and existing relics, my indebtedness for detail to the abundant pages of the historian, the biographer, and the journalist, English and Foreign, has been, of course, continuous.
It was thought proper to introduce, as supernatural spectators of the terrestrial action, certain impersonated abstractions, or Intelligences, called Spirits. They are intended to be taken by the reader for what they may be worth as contrivances of the fancy merely. Their doctrines are but tentative, and are advanced with little eye to a systematized philosophy warranted to lift "the burthen of the mystery" of this unintelligible world. The chief thing hoped for them is that they and their utterances may have dramatic plausibility enough to procure for them, in the words of Coleridge, "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith." The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade, in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation, even in verse, and excluded the celestial machinery of, say, Paradise Lost, as peremptorily as that of the Iliad or the Eddas. And the abandonment of the masculine pronoun in allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy seemed a necessary and logical consequence of the long abandonment by thinkers of the anthropomorphic conception of the same.
These phantasmal Intelligences are divided into groups, of which one only, that of the Pities, approximates to "the Universal Sympathy of human nature—the spectator idealized" of the Greek Chorus; it is impressionable and inconsistent in its views, which sway hither and thither as wrought on by events. Another group approximates to the passionless Insight of the Ages. The remainder are eclectically chosen auxiliaries whose signification may be readily discerned. In point of literary form, the scheme of contrasted Choruses and other conventions of this external feature was shaped with a single view to the modern expression of a modern outlook, and in frank divergence from classical and other dramatic precedent which ruled the ancient voicings of ancient themes.
It may hardly be necessary to inform readers that in devising this chronicle-piece no attempt has been made to create that completely organic structure of action, and closely-webbed development of character and motive, which are demanded in a drama strictly self- contained. A panoramic show like the present is a series of historical "ordinates" [to use a term in geometry]: the subject is familiar to all; and foreknowledge is assumed to fill in the junctions required to combine the scenes into an artistic unity. Should the mental spectator be unwilling or unable to do this, a historical presentment on an intermittent plan, in which the dramatis personae number some hundreds, exclusive of crowds and armies, becomes in his individual case unsuitable.
In this assumption of a completion of the action by those to whom the drama is addressed, it is interesting, if unnecessary, to name an exemplar as old as Aeschylus, whose plays are, as Dr. Verrall reminds us, scenes from stories taken as known, and would be unintelligible without supplementary scenes of the imagination.
Readers will readily discern, too, that The Dynasts is intended simply for mental performance, and not for the stage. Some critics have averred that to declare a drama as being not for the stage is to make an announcement whose subject and predicate cancel each other. The question seems to be an unimportant matter of terminology. Compositions cast in this shape were, without doubt, originally written for the stage only, and as a consequence their nomenclature of "Act," "Scene," and the like, was drawn directly from the vehicle of representation. But in the course of time such a shape would reveal itself to be an eminently readable one; moreover, by dispensing with the theatre altogether, a freedom of treatment was attainable in this form that was denied where the material possibilities of stagery had to be rigorously remembered. With the careless mechanicism of human speech, the technicalities of practical mumming were retained in these productions when they had ceased to be concerned with the stage at all.
To say, then, in the present case, that a writing in play-shape is not to be played, is merely another way of stating that such writing has been done in a form for which there chances to be no brief definition save one already in use for works that it superficially but not entirely resembles.
Whether mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life, is a kindred question not without interest. The mind naturally flies to the triumphs of the Hellenic and Elizabethan theatre in exhibiting scenes laid "far in the Unapparent," and asks why they should not be repeated. But the meditative world is older, more invidious, more nervous, more quizzical, than it once was, and being unhappily perplexed by—
Riddles of Death Thebes never knew,
may be less ready and less able than Hellas and old England were to look through the insistent, and often grotesque, substance at the thing signified.
In respect of such plays of poesy and dream a practicable compromise may conceivably result, taking the shape of a monotonic delivery of speeches, with dreamy conventional 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. Gauzes or screens to blur outlines might still further shut off the actual, as has, indeed, already been done in exceptional cases. But with this branch of the subject we are not concerned here.
T.H.
September 1903.
PART FIRST
CHARACTERS
I. PHANTOM INTELLIGENCES
THE ANCIENT SPIRIT OF THE YEARS/CHORUS OF THE YEARS.
THE SPIRIT OF THE PITIES/CHORUS OF THE PITIES.
SPIRITS SINISTER AND IRONIC/CHORUSES OF SINISTER AND IRONIC SPIRITS.
THE SPIRIT OF RUMOUR/CHORUS OF RUMOURS.
THE SHADE OF THE EARTH.
SPIRIT-MESSENGERS.
RECORDING ANGELS.
II. PERSONS [The names in lower case are mute figures.]
MEN
GEORGE THE THIRD.
The Duke of Cumberland
PITT.
FOX.
SHERIDAN.
WINDHAM.
WHITBREAD.
TIERNEY.
BATHURST AND FULLER.
Lord Chancellor Eldon.
EARL OF MALMESBURY.
LORD MULGRAVE.
ANOTHER CABINET MINISTER.
Lord Grenville.
Viscount Castlereagh.
Viscount Sidmouth.
ANOTHER NOBLE LORD.
>
ROSE.
Canning.
Perceval.
Grey.
Speaker Abbot.
TOMLINE, BISHOP OF LINCOLN.
SIR WALTER FARQUHAR.
Count Munster.
Other Peers, Ministers, ex-Ministers, Members of Parliament,
and Persons of Quality.
..........
NELSON.
COLLINGWOOD.
HARDY.
SECRETARY SCOTT.
DR. BEATTY.
DR. MAGRATH.
DR. ALEXANDER SCOTT.
BURKE, PURSER.
Lieutenant Pasco.
ANOTHER LIEUTENANT.
POLLARD, A MIDSHIPMAN.
Captain Adair.
Lieutenants Ram and Whipple.
Other English Naval Officers.
Sergeant-Major Secker and Marines.
Staff and other Officers of the English Army.
A COMPANY OF SOLDIERS.
Regiments of the English Army and Hanoverian.
SAILORS AND BOATMEN.
A MILITIAMAN.
Naval Crews.
The Lord Mayor and Corporation of London.
A GENTLEMAN OF FASHION.
WILTSHIRE, A COUNTRY GENTLEMAN
A HORSEMAN.
TWO BEACON-WATCHERS.
ENGLISH CITIZENS AND BURGESSES.
COACH AND OTHER HIGHWAY PASSENGERS.
MESSENGERS, SERVANTS, AND RUSTICS.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.
DARU, NAPOLEON'S WAR SECRETARY.
LAURISTON, AIDE-DE-CAMP.
MONGE, A PHILOSOPHER.
BERTHIER.
MURAT, BROTHER-IN-LAW OF NAPOLEON.
SOULT.
NEY.
LANNES.
Bernadotte.
Marmont.
Dupont.
Oudinot.
Davout.
Vandamme.
Other French Marshals.
A SUB-OFFICER.
..........
VILLENEUVE, NAPOLEON'S ADMIRAL.
DECRES, MINISTER OF MARINE.
FLAG-CAPTAIN MAGENDIE.
LIEUTENANT DAUDIGNON.
LIEUTENANT FOURNIER.
Captain Lucas.
OTHER FRENCH NAVAL OFFICERS AND PETTY OFFICERS.
