The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd E-Book

D H Lawrence

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 114

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price An intense and powerful drama, set in a Nottinghamshire mining town. Elizabeth Holroyd is an educated woman with refined sensibilities, struggling to make a good home for her two children in the grime and poverty of a Nottinghamshire mining town. Poverty is not the only problem she faces. Her husband, a miner, is a brutish man, prone to fighting, drinking and spending his evenings in the pub. When Blackmore, a mine electrician, recognises Mrs Holroyd as a kindred spirit, he asks her to leave her husband for him, with the promise of a new life for her and her children in faraway Spain. It's a promise that Mrs Holroyd is almost ready to accept... D.H. Lawrence's second play, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd was written in 1910 but went unpublished until 1914. It was staged for the first time in 1916, by the Players Producing Company at the Little Theatre in Los Angeles, USA. In 1920 it was staged in Britain, in an amateur production at the Garrick Theatre in Altrincham. This edition, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, includes an introduction by Colin Counsell, a glossary of difficult words, a chronology and suggestions for further reading.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

THE WIDOWINGOF MRS HOLROYD

by

D.H. Lawrence

with an introduction by Colin Counsell

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Introduction D.H. Lawrence: Key Dates

The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd

Glossary

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)

David Herbert Lawrence was born in the Nottinghamshire coal-mining town of Eastwood, the son of a miner and a former schoolteacher. After working as a clerk and a teaching assistant, he trained and qualified as a teacher himself, gaining the education his father lacked but his mother had enjoyed. His real passion, however, was writing, first poems and short stories, and then novels. Having achieved some literary fame in 1910 with his first novel, The White Peacock, he went on to develop a successful writing career, producing a string of popular works including Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), novels that were eventually to be recognised as landmarks in twentieth-century English literature.

Lawrence’s relationship with authority was always fraught. Travelling in Germany in 1912, prior to World War I, he was briefly detained on suspicion of being a British spy. Having returned to England in the company of his German partner, Frieda von Richthofen, he was then accused of being a German spy, suspected of signalling to U-boats off the coast of Cornwall where the couple lived. Perhaps it was this experience that prompted him and Frieda to begin what he called their ‘savage pilgrimage’, leaving Britain and travelling the world to such exotic places as Mexico, Sri Lanka, Australia and Italy, and finally settling in the USA. As he travelled, he wrote, producing acclaimed novels such as Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), and becoming one of the most widely read serious writers in Britain at the time. If Lawrence is best known as a novelist, however, his output was very varied: it included travel writing, literary criticism and, of course, plays. Although he wrote eight plays in all, only two, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (written in 1910 and published in 1914) and David (1926), were performed in his lifetime, and it was left to posterity to stage the rest of his dramatic work.

Lawrence’s career was overshadowed by controversy. Owing to the supposedly sexually charged nature of some of his writing, notably The Rainbow, he gained a reputation as a pornographer, although this probably says more about early twentieth-century British society than it does about his work. The situation reached a head with the publication of his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), which was banned in Britain until, in a famous trial in 1960, the ban was successfully challenged. But Lawrence did not live to see his work vindicated. Always suffering from poor health, he was frequently laid low by diseases of the chest like pneumonia, influenza, and finally tuberculosis. Lawrence died in France in 1930 at the age of forty-five.

The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd: What Happens in the Play

Elizabeth Holroyd is unhappy, and with reason. An educated woman with refined sensibilities, she struggles to make a good home for her two children in the grime and poverty of a Nottinghamshire mining town. Poverty is not the only problem she faces, for her husband, a miner, is a brutish man, prone to fighting, drinking and spending his evenings in the pub. Mrs Holroyd’s qualities do not go entirely unacknowledged, however: Blackmore, a mine electrician, and a gentle and sensitive man, recognises her as a kindred spirit. Courting Mrs Holroyd, he asks her to leave her husband for him, promising to make a new life for her and her children in faraway Spain.

Matters come to a head when Mr Holroyd arrives home from the pub one evening in the company of two strange women, ‘hussies’ who are his drinking and dancing partners. It soon becomes apparent that his relationship with one of the women, Clara, is more than casual, and that they have probably been having an affair. But Clara is her own woman, and her own history includes an unhappy marriage, which causes her to empathise with Mrs Holroyd’s situation. Recognising the hurt caused by her visit, Clara leaves, and the angry Mrs Holroyd then throws her husband out – only to have him return a few hours later for an angry confrontation with Blackmore, the man who is courting his wife.

The action concludes when Mr Holroyd once again fails to return home after work. Believing that he has gone to the pub as usual, Mrs Holroyd begins to take Blackmore’s proposal more seriously. However, she then learns that there has been an accident at the mine, and that her husband was trapped. Finally she is told that he has been killed. The play ends with his wife and mother preparing his body for burial.

Drama of the Environment

The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd is part of a tradition of naturalist drama. Coined in the mid-nineteenth century, the term ‘naturalism’ was originally used to describe certain new kinds of scientific thought, most notably the work of Charles Darwin. In On the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin set out his theory of evolution, explaining how living organisms change in response to changes in their environment. When a particular environment alters, he argued, some individuals within a species will prove better suited to its new conditions – will be taller or shorter, have longer necks or thicker fur – and so will thrive. Able to compete successfully against their fellows, those individuals will produce more offspring, so that after a number of generations the species as a whole will have changed, possessing characteristics appropriate to that altered world. In his 1871 work The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin applied similar principles to the study of humankind. Darwin’s theories caused considerable controversy at the time, partly because they offered a different account of the natural world to the Bible. Equally importantly, his work applied scientific principles to the study of living things, and ultimately human beings, showing how human life was shaped by natural forces that could be described via scientific laws.

This vision of human life as determined by natural forces, and particularly by forces of the environment, impacted upon literature. Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin (1867) deals with a murder but, instead of simply condemning it on moral grounds, seeks to explain it, dwelling on the degraded social circumstances in which people live, and which give rise to such acts. It was on drama, however, that this ‘naturalist’ vision had its most profound influence. In plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881), Henrik Ibsen detailed the oppressive social conditions which affected his characters’ lives, limiting their possibilities for happiness and self-fulfilment. The example of Ibsen was followed in different ways by a number of seminal dramatists such as August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Gerhart Hauptmann and, in Britain, George Bernard Shaw, all of whom sought to explain human actions partly as a product of the world in which they occurred.

It is precisely this vision of life as shaped by a social and material environment that we see in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. In his description of the set, Lawrence provides a surprising level of detail about the Holroyd family home, including its chintz-backed sofa, copper-shaded lamp and even the glass knobs on the kitchen dresser. The play’s events, he suggests, must be understood as born of this particular time and place, the social and historical milieu evoked by those objects. A similar particularity is suggested by the play’s language. Although the characters speak differently, and those differences prove significant, all the dialogue bears the imprint of a working-class Nottinghamshire dialect. Language and accent are always evocative on a stage, locating events geographically and, sometimes, in history. In The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd they are especially distinctive, however, indicating that this is not a tale of humanity in general but of these particular people, its events peculiar to the world in which they live.

It is the wider environment, however, that has the greatest impact in the play. Although Mrs Holroyd is shown tending her home, the house is described as a ‘pigsty’. We learn that it is ‘alive with rats’, vermin encroaching from beyond its walls, one rat even invading the kitchen during the action and causing the women to leap onto chairs in fright. The incident has symbolic significance, for it indicates that despite Mrs Holroyd’s best efforts the outside world will not be kept at bay. The feature of that world that most impacts on characters’ lives is the coal mine. We see Mrs Holroyd drying her washing, trying to maintain standards of cleanliness, but the results are marred by smuts blown from the colliery. The action in the Third Act is accompanied by the distant sound of the mine’s machinery at work, its drone and the clanking of its wheels entering the home. Indeed, when the door opens we see the mine head through the open portal. The mine literally shapes these people’s existence, Lawrence suggests, its low wages condemning them to lives of poverty and the brutal experience of mining work, hacking at the stone in darkness in the bowels of the earth, dehumanising the men it employs. But it also functions symbolically, a metaphor for all the degraded circumstances in which such people live.

Ideas such as these inform our view of the characters. The figure of Mr Holroyd is conjured via teasing details long before he actually appears onstage. His wife slightingly describes how he dresses himself up like a ‘turkey-cock’ to go out, even miming the gestures he makes in front of the mirror. Talking to Blackmore, she tells how her husband is a drinker and a brawler, ‘taken up for a fighting man’, and how he would come home after a night in the pub to thump the table and shout, waking the children. Indeed, the family only moved to this dilapidated house, she explains, so that he would not pass a pub on his way back from work. She thus builds for the audience an image of her husband before he makes his first appearance, a supremely negative view that is confirmed when he finally arrives home, drunk and in the company of strange women. Yet as the play proceeds, our judgement of him perhaps begins to alter, for as details build of existence in the mining town, it becomes apparent that Mr Holroyd is a product of the life he is forced to lead. Working each day in the darkness of the mine, living in dirt and danger, it becomes less surprising that he should seek to escape into drink, violence and the company of ‘loose’ women.

Nor are those women excluded from Lawrence’s understanding. Appearing late at night in the family home, acting brazenly, Clara initially seems no more than the ‘hussy’ Mrs Holroyd perceives her to be. Our sympathies are all with the aggrieved wife, humiliated by a husband happy to bring his mistress into the home that she struggles to maintain. But Clara has her own history. When she reveals that she too was married to a ‘brute’, a man who treated her badly and finally killed himself with alcohol, it becomes possible to sympathise with her desire for a little happiness, an evening spent drinking and dancing in a pub. She also reveals a more sympathetic side to her character. Explaining that she only agreed to visit the house because Mr Holroyd claimed he was unmarried, she comes to sympathise with Mrs Holroyd’s plight, and leaves before she can cause more hurt. She even gives young Jack Holroyd her bracelet, a gift suggestive of pleasure, something beyond the dour grind of life in the mining town. Clara too, it seems, is a victim of her world. There are no villains in Lawrence’s play, for the lives of all have been moulded by a wider environment, circumstances over which they have no control.

Drama of Class

The dominant tradition of naturalist drama represented by such writers as Ibsen, Chekhov and Shaw usually focuses on middle-class characters. Typically more financially and socially secure, the ‘environmental’ forces shown to be limiting their lives are most often of a social or cultural order – repressive attitudes towards women in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, for example, or Puritan attitudes to sex and pleasure in his Ghosts. In contrast, the characters of Lawrence’s play are exclusively working class, comprising workers at the mine and their families, and they live lives that are physically and financially more precarious. As a consequence, the play focuses on factors of a more directly material and economic sort: their poverty, housing conditions, the horrors of work in the pit, and so on. The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd is a work of ‘gritty’ realism in the sense that it examines and exposes to public scrutiny the lives of working-class people, and deals with the less romantic dimensions of their existence, those often ignored in other dramas of the time.