Today our play comes from an Everyman edition of plays called "Female Playwrights of the Nineteenth Century". The play is called The Family Legend, a Tragedy in Five acts by Joanna Baillie. It is a tale of warring scottish clans and is written in Shakespearean iambic pentameter blank verse. I really enjoyed reading this one.
Unlike the last two there is an easily discernable plot and characters who talk mostly to each other. They also do things as well as talk about them. Calling this play a tragedy would have Aristotle very annoyed. Two people die and that's not nearly enough for a good tragedy, but also the people who die are hardly sympathetic. They are noble so that is in their favor, but for the people we most care about, all is well at the close of the curtain or after passing the last period.
The play is about two scottish clans, the Campbells and the Macleans, who were often at war and seemed rather to have enjoyed fighting. They are now at peace because the new chief of the Macleans has married Helen, the daughter of the old Campbell chief. All seems quite well, but Maclean's vassals miss war and don't much like their new young chief and are distrustful of his lovely, "bewitching" bride. They are also think ill of the the "unnatural" baby that is now heir to a unified Maclean/Campbell chiefdom. They plot to kill Helen and her child and get the war back going.
The language is very Shakespearean. "Thee"s and "Thou"s are all over the place, as is that strange poetical syntax where the verb inverted is. Unlike Shakespeare, there are no prose characters. Even the slightly silly clownish characters speak in verse. Reading verse plays like this one realizes both Shakespeare's greatness and his averageness at once.The play was written in 1810, about two hundred years after Will's heyday. It very closely follows his style and does so quite credibly, but there is never quite his gift for turning a phrase or fashioning a metaphor. The verse however is solid, well formed and fun to read aloud. One realises, reading this, that there are a lot of blank verse out there and that while Shakespeare was very good at this style, he was not the only one who wrote this way.
The plot is very melodramatic, and reads more like a history than a tragedy. I would love to see ,more plays like this produced because I am tired of the same Shakespeare show after show. There are some good speeches and some fun characters like Helen who is the embodiment of all good that ever was, Maclean whose inability to function at court is his undoing and Sir Hubert De Grey,Helen's ex who is the most perfect of men.
Someone somewhere (maybe me) should produce this.
Unlike the last two there is an easily discernable plot and characters who talk mostly to each other. They also do things as well as talk about them. Calling this play a tragedy would have Aristotle very annoyed. Two people die and that's not nearly enough for a good tragedy, but also the people who die are hardly sympathetic. They are noble so that is in their favor, but for the people we most care about, all is well at the close of the curtain or after passing the last period.
The play is about two scottish clans, the Campbells and the Macleans, who were often at war and seemed rather to have enjoyed fighting. They are now at peace because the new chief of the Macleans has married Helen, the daughter of the old Campbell chief. All seems quite well, but Maclean's vassals miss war and don't much like their new young chief and are distrustful of his lovely, "bewitching" bride. They are also think ill of the the "unnatural" baby that is now heir to a unified Maclean/Campbell chiefdom. They plot to kill Helen and her child and get the war back going.
The language is very Shakespearean. "Thee"s and "Thou"s are all over the place, as is that strange poetical syntax where the verb inverted is. Unlike Shakespeare, there are no prose characters. Even the slightly silly clownish characters speak in verse. Reading verse plays like this one realizes both Shakespeare's greatness and his averageness at once.The play was written in 1810, about two hundred years after Will's heyday. It very closely follows his style and does so quite credibly, but there is never quite his gift for turning a phrase or fashioning a metaphor. The verse however is solid, well formed and fun to read aloud. One realises, reading this, that there are a lot of blank verse out there and that while Shakespeare was very good at this style, he was not the only one who wrote this way.
The plot is very melodramatic, and reads more like a history than a tragedy. I would love to see ,more plays like this produced because I am tired of the same Shakespeare show after show. There are some good speeches and some fun characters like Helen who is the embodiment of all good that ever was, Maclean whose inability to function at court is his undoing and Sir Hubert De Grey,Helen's ex who is the most perfect of men.
Someone somewhere (maybe me) should produce this.
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