{"product_id":"2940013696662","title":"The Six of Calais","description":"The most amusing thing about the first performance of this little\u003cbr\u003eplay was the exposure it elicited of the quaint illiteracy of our\u003cbr\u003emodern London journalists.  Their only notion of a king was a\u003cbr\u003epleasant and highly respectable gentleman in a bowler hat and\u003cbr\u003eVictorian beard, shaking hands affably with a blushing football\u003cbr\u003eteam.  To them a queen was a dignified lady, also Victorian as to\u003cbr\u003eher coiffure, graciously receiving bouquets from excessively washed\u003cbr\u003echildren in beautiful new clothes.  Such were their mental pictures\u003cbr\u003eof Great Edward's grandson and his queen Philippa.  They were hurt,\u003cbr\u003eshocked, scandalized at the spectacle of a medieval soldier monarch\u003cbr\u003epublicly raging and cursing, crying and laughing, asserting his\u003cbr\u003eauthority with thrasonic ferocity and the next moment blubbering\u003cbr\u003elike a child in his wife's lap or snarling like a savage dog at a\u003cbr\u003edauntless and defiant tradesman: in short behaving himself like an\u003cbr\u003eunrestrained human being in a very trying situation instead of like\u003cbr\u003ea modern constitutional monarch on parade keeping up an elaborate\u003cbr\u003efiction of living in a political vacuum and moving only when his\u003cbr\u003eministers pull his strings.  Edward Plantagenet the Third had to\u003cbr\u003epull everybody else's strings and pull them pretty hard, his father\u003cbr\u003ehaving been miserably killed for taking his job too lightly.  But\u003cbr\u003ethe journalist critics knew nothing of this.  A King Edward who did\u003cbr\u003enot behave like the son of King Edward the Seventh seemed unnatural\u003cbr\u003eand indecent to them, and they rent their garments accordingly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey were perhaps puzzled by the fact that the play has no moral\u003cbr\u003ewhatever.  Every year or so I hurl at them a long play full of\u003cbr\u003einsidious propaganda, with a moral in every line.  They never\u003cbr\u003ediscover what I am driving at: it is always too plainly and\u003cbr\u003edomestically stated to be grasped by their subtle and far flung\u003cbr\u003eminds; but they feel that I am driving at something: probably\u003cbr\u003esomething they had better not agree with if they value their\u003cbr\u003elivelihoods.  A play of mine in which I am not driving at anything\u003cbr\u003emore than a playwright's direct business is as inconceivable by\u003cbr\u003ethem as a medieval king.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow a playwright's direct business is simply to provide the theatre\u003cbr\u003ewith a play.  When I write one with the additional attraction of\u003cbr\u003eproviding the twentieth century with an up-to-date religion or the\u003cbr\u003elike, that luxury is thrown in gratuitously; and the play, simply\u003cbr\u003eas a play, is not necessarily either the better or the worse for\u003cbr\u003eit.  What, then, is a play simply as a play?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWell, it is a lot of things.  Life as we see it is so haphazard\u003cbr\u003ethat it is only by picking out its key situations and arranging\u003cbr\u003ethem in their significant order (which is never how they actually\u003cbr\u003eoccur) that it can be made intelligible.  The highbrowed dramatic\u003cbr\u003epoet wants to make it intelligible and sublime.  The farce writer\u003cbr\u003ewants to make it funny.  The melodrama merchant wants to make it as\u003cbr\u003eexciting as some people find the police news.  The pornographer\u003cbr\u003ewants to make it salacious.  All interpreters of life in action,\u003cbr\u003enoble or ignoble, find their instrument in the theatre; and all the\u003cbr\u003eacademic definitions of a play are variations of this basic\u003cbr\u003efunction.","brand":"WDS Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47152727195888,"sku":"2940013696662","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940013696662_p0.jpg?v=1763584133","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940013696662","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}