John Drinkwater

• Born: June 1, 1882
• Birthplace: Leytonstone, London, England
• Died: March 25, 1937
• Place of death: London, England

Other Literary Forms

Starting in 1903 with Poems, John Drinkwater published a number of volumes of poetry, the most significant of which are Poems, 1908-1914 (1917), Poems, 1908-1919 (1919), Selected Poems (1922), New Poems (1925), and The Collected Poems of John Drinkwater (in three volumes, two published in 1923 and one in 1937). His most important critical and biographical studies are William Morris: A Critical Study (1912), Swinburne: An Estimate (1913), Lincoln, The World Emancipator (1920), The Pilgrim of Eternity: Byron—A Conflict (1925), Mr. Charles, King of England (1926), Cromwell: A Character Study (1927), Charles James Fox (1928), Pepys: His Life and Character (1930), and Shakespeare (1933). His autobiographical volumes are Inheritance (1931) and Discovery (1932); they cover only the period to 1913.

Achievements

For three decades, from early in the twentieth century until he died in 1937, John Drinkwater was a consummate man of the theater—a playwright, actor, producer, director, and critic. Foremost among his achievements was his role in the organization and development of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre , one of Great Britain’s most innovative and influential companies. In addition, the popular success of his verse dramas encouraged other playwrights to work in the same genre, and his prose play Abraham Lincoln was the most notable historical-biographical play of its time. Both it and the earlier verse drama X = O were important expressions of antiwar sentiment, to which audiences responded enthusiastically, and Abraham Lincoln enjoyed long runs in London and New York. Active as he was in the theater, Drinkwater was also a prolific man of letters. He wrote critical studies of Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, and William Shakespeare; biographies of such famous men as Abraham Lincoln, King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Pepys, and Lord Byron; a novel; essays; and film scripts. He also was a major poet in the Georgian movement. Although he was a popular poet, critics did not regard his poetry favorably, labeling it derivative, unimaginative, and sentimental.

Though public and critical interest in him had faded by the time of his death, and he and his work have been largely ignored in the decades that followed, Drinkwater merits at least a footnote in studies of modern English drama for his attempts to revitalize poetic drama in the twentieth century and to develop the chronicle play into a viable modern dramatic form. More than most playwrights, he brought to his craft (as Arnold Bennett put it) “a deep, practical knowledge of the stage.”

Biography

John Drinkwater was born on June 1, 1882, in Leytonstone, Essex, England, to Albert Edwin and Annie Beck Brown Drinkwater. His father, headmaster of the Coburn Foundation School at Bow, in East London, had been active in amateur theatricals and, in 1886, embarked on a career in the theater as an actor, playwright, and manager (setting a pattern for his son to follow years later). Because his mother was terminally ill, young Drinkwater was sent to live with his maternal grandfather in Oxford when he was nine. An indifferent student, he left Oxford High School in 1897 for Nottingham, where he worked for the Northern Assurance Company and did some acting in amateur productions. His transfer in 1901 to the Birmingham branch of the firm was a fortuitous move, for there he met Barry Jackson, a well-to-do theater enthusiast (two years older than Drinkwater) who presented plays at his father’s palatial home. When Jackson’s group went public as the Pilgrim Players, Drinkwater joined them, and, in 1909, he gave up his career in insurance to work for the Players, becoming general manager in 1913 (by which time the Pilgrim Players had become the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and had a theater). By the time he left Jackson’s employ in 1918, Drinkwater had directed more than sixty productions, had appeared (under the name of John Darnley) in about forty roles, and had written a number of plays, including X = O and Abraham Lincoln. His wife, Kathleen Walpole, whom he had married in 1906, also acted in the company (as Cathleen Orford).

The presentation of Abraham Lincoln at Sir Nigel Playfair’s theater, the Lyric, in a London suburb, starting on February 19, 1919 (it had a run of four hundred performances), and its subsequent New York production made Drinkwater a celebrity on two continents. Birmingham gave him an M.A. in 1919, and he was in demand for lecture tours of the United States. On his return home, in 1921, from his second trip to the United States, Drinkwater met and fell in love with the violinist Daisy Kennedy. This shipboard romance led to an affair that culminated in the breakup of Drinkwater’s marriage to Kathleen Walpole and of Kennedy’s to Russian pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch. Drinkwater and Kennedy married in 1924 and during the next decade traveled widely on concert, lecture, and stage tours in the United States, on the Continent, and in Britain. They also became major figures on the London social circuit. Through this entire period, Drinkwater wrote for the stage; wrote articles, poems, and biographical and critical studies; did screenplays as well as lyrics for films; wrote two volumes of autobiography; and edited anthologies. He also continued to act, and shortly before he died—at his London home on March 25, 1937—appeared in the role of Prospero in a Regent’s Park, London, production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Analysis

In an early essay, “The Nature of Drama,” John Drinkwater says that a person chooses to write drama “quite definitely with the response of a theatre audience in his mind, and it is for this, and not because of any inherent virtue which he finds in this form and in no other, that his choice is made.” The public reaction to at least three of his plays—X = O, Abraham Lincoln, and Bird in Hand—suggests that he chose well.

Cophetua

In the preface to his collected plays, Drinkwater says that his “affections have never been divided between poetry and drama,” and he recalls that he hoped “to help as far as one could towards the restoration of the two upon the stage in union.” Despite John Galsworthy’s admonition to him that “the shadow of the man Shakespeare is across the path of all who should attempt verse drama in these days,” Drinkwater was not deterred, and his first solo venture as a playwright (he previously had put a Barry Jackson sentimental comedy, Ser Taldo’s Bride, into rhymed verse) was Cophetua, a one-act play in verse about a stubborn king who resists the demands of his mother and counselors that he wed but then decides to marry a beggar-maid, whose beauty and purity win over the aghast mother and counselors. Though the play has neither literary nor dramatic merit, it is of some interest, for the independent-minded Cophetua is a character type that reemerges in later Drinkwater plays. Drinkwater wrote the play as a conscious experiment: “I used a variety of measures for the purpose of seeing whether a rapid and changing movement of rhyme might not to some extent produce the same effect on the stage as physical action.” The effort failed, but Drinkwater concluded: “The experiment, I think, showed that there were exciting possibilities in the method, and if I had been born into a theatre that took kindly to verse as a medium I believe that interesting things might have been done in its development.”

Rebellion

Drinkwater’s only full-length poetic drama, Rebellion, also was a failure, in large part because of its overly rhetorical blank verse (which Drinkwater “stripped . . . of a little of its rhetoric” in the printed version). Nevertheless, it remains interesting because it recalls William Butler Yeats’s The King’s Threshold (pr. 1904), also about a struggle between a king and a poet, and foreshadows later Drinkwater plays that focus on war and the conflict between liberty and tyranny.

The Storm

Little more than a curtain raiser, The Storm also has an Irish connection, for it is a contemporary rural tragedy that echoes John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea (pb. 1903). The only one of Drinkwater’s poetic dramas with a contemporary setting, The Storm is about women vainly awaiting the return of the man of the house, who is lost in a storm. The conflict centers on the boundless optimism of the young wife and the insistent pessimism of an old neighbor. Though blank verse is too stately a measure for the occasion, the play does possess tragic intensity, primarily because of the fully developed character of the wife, Alice, who is Drinkwater’s most memorable creation.

The God of Quiet

The death in 1915 of poet Rupert Brooke, who was serving in the Royal Naval Division, heightened Drinkwater’s antipathy toward war. He had met Brooke through Sir Edward Marsh, editor of Georgian Poetry (1912-1922), in which both were represented, and the two had become close friends. Drinkwater’s last verse plays, The God of Quiet and X = O, are complementary works that reflect both sorrow over Brooke’s death and disdain for war. The earlier of these one-act plays is the lesser of the two.

In The God of Quiet, war-weary people (young and old beggars, a citizen, and a soldier) meet at a life-size statue of their god, a Buddha-like figure, where they are joined by their king, who also has tired of the lengthy conflict and now preaches humility and love. The enemy king comes in prepared to resume the battle, denounces the God of Quiet for having “slacked the heat” and turned the people against war, and drives his dagger into the god’s heart. The effigy comes to life, cries out “Not one of you in all the world to know me,” and collapses. The first king is angered (“Why did you do it? He was a friendly god,/ Smiling upon our faults, a great forgiver . . ./ He gave us quietness—”), curses his enemy, draws his sword, and vows “to requite the honour of this god.” The din of war is heard as the curtain falls. Although the message is clear, the play lacks impact because the generalized characters are merely two-dimensional (not at all universal types), the dialogue is stilted, and the setting lacks precision.

X = O

On the other hand, X = O, the theme of which is the same, is a play of enduring sensitivity and impact. Briefer even than The God of Quiet, X = O was a critical and popular success when first presented, and the passage of time has not dimmed its luster. Its structure is simple: Set during the ninth year of the Trojan War, the parallel scenes of the play show a pair of Greek soldiers and then two Trojan warriors lamenting what they consider a futile war, regretting the need to kill their adversaries, and yearning to return home. Each man is named and distinctively individualized, and all share an appreciation of the beauty and promise of life; as the mathematical equation in the title suggests, the erstwhile enemies are portrayed as sharing character traits and aspirations.

One of the youths in each camp must leave for his daily chore of killing an enemy soldier. The Greek who remains, a poet, is killed by the Trojan who is a would-be statesman with a dream of “Troy regenerate.” The Trojan who stays behind, a sculptor, is killed by the Greek who wants to become a politician. On each side, then, an artist is slain by an aspiring politician, a representative of the state, a detail that surely has its genesis in the deaths of Brooke and other young poets of Drinkwater’s generation in World War I, which was at its height when Drinkwater wrote the play.

In writing his five verse plays, Drinkwater attempted “to find some other constructional idiom whereby verse might be accepted as a natural thing by a modern audience.” By 1917, however, despite the popular success of X = O, Drinkwater had (as he reports in his autobiography) “a growing conviction that if I was to take any effective part in the practical theatre of my time, I should have to abandon verse for prose. Full of reforming ideas as we all were, I soon began to realise that in this fundamental matter of expression it would be futile, and indeed pointless, to try to alter the habit of an age.” Somewhat defensive about his decision, he says in the preface to the collected plays:

The transition from verse to prose, from X = O, that is, to Abraham Lincoln, was not a surrender, but a recognition that any chance of development in one’s dramatic technique depends upon an acceptance of the fact that if one insists on staying in the theatre at all one may be anything one likes so long as one is not doctrinaire. The problem to be solved was how to keep in the sparest prose idiom something of the enthusiasm and poignancy of verse. In the days when verse was the natural speech of the theatre, its beauty, like the beauty of all fine style, reached the audience without any insistence upon itself. The guiding principle of the speech of these plays later than X = O has been, so far as I could manage it, to make it beautiful without letting anybody know about it.

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was a transitional work for Drinkwater; although it was his first prose play, the dramatic tableaux that dominate this chronicle are linked by choral odes in verse. The play was closely tied to its immediate predecessors by its theme as well, for it is as obviously an antiwar drama as is X = O. It also set the pattern for Drinkwater’s plays Oliver Cromwell and Robert E. Lee; all three of these historical plays dramatize the problem of leadership, and each is developed in a series of episodes that chronologically traces the development of the hero and cumulatively delineates his personality. Indeed, Drinkwater said that he conceived of the three plays as a unit and according to “a more or less definite plan.”

In a note included in the first edition of Abraham Lincoln, Drinkwater says that his “purpose is not that of the historian but of the dramatist . . . of the dramatist, not that of the political philosopher,” and that his “concern is with the profoundly dramatic interest of [Lincoln’s] character, and with the inspiring example of a man who handled war nobly and with imagination.” Given his primary aim, he has “freely telescoped [historical] events, and imposed invention upon [their] movement, in such ways as I needed to shape the dramatic significance of my subject.”

Abraham Lincoln begins in Springfield, Illinois, with townsmen talking of their neighbor’s nomination for the presidency; it concludes with the assassination of the president at Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln is portrayed as a peace-loving man who endures the agonies of war for the sake of lasting freedom. His last speech, given to the theater audience immediately before his assassination, epitomizes his character; he concludes: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, it is for us to resolve that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Drinkwater’s use of Lincoln’s words in this context typifies the dramatic license that he exercises throughout the play.

When originally produced at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on October 12, 1918, the play was a great hit. This provincial success did not assure a West End opening, however. In fact, managers either ignored or rejected it, and the London production was at Hammersmith, a suburb. Enlightened by its popularity there, West End managers tried unsuccessfully to convince Sir Nigel Playfair to bring it to the city. Finally, the city came to the play. The public loved it, for Abraham Lincoln was timely and obviously touched a responsive chord, a pervasive concern among people living with war and desiring peace, and brought admiration for a strong, principled leader who could guide his country through a dangerous period. Another determining factor in the popular success of the play was that the United States and Great Britain had jointly fought in a common cause, and the British, who had become increasingly interested in American history, saw in the play a reflection of their own sufferings and triumphs. In like manner, when Abraham Lincoln was produced in New York (for which production Drinkwater made his first trip to the United States, appearing in the play as a chronicler), Americans responded favorably to the patriotic theme and noted the intended parallels between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson. In sum, it matters not that today, Abraham Lincoln seems closer to melodrama than it is to tragedy; it was the right play for its time.

Bird in Hand

Among Drinkwater’s other plays (and masques, a form of which he was fond), Bird in Hand merits attention, in part because it is an atypical light comedy in the tradition of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (pr. 1773), but also because it shows Drinkwater’s skill at orchestrating a varied group of well-developed characters in a realistic Midlands setting. His familiarity with the Cotswolds, where he rented a cottage for a time and about which he wrote in Cotswold Characters (1921), is apparent. The plot revolves about the reluctance of an innkeeper to permit his daughter to marry the son of a local baronet as he believes that people should keep to their station in life. The efforts of his daughter, wife, and assorted guests fail to persuade him to renounce his prejudices, and he is moved to consent only through trickery. Although the plot is not very original, the play succeeds because Drinkwater gave his characters—stereotypical though they are—a measure of individuality, and he had them speak realistic dialogue. Further, the frivolity of the complications and the lightness of style and tone do not obscure the serious dimension of the play: an examination of the perennial problem of the generation gap. Coming almost ten years after the success of Abraham Lincoln, which prompted him to move to London, Bird in Hand marked Drinkwater’s triumphant return to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. The play was first produced there, with Drinkwater directing and including Peggy Ashcroft and Laurence Olivier as the young lovers. Its subsequent popularity in London and New York rivaled that of Abraham Lincoln, and reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic were generally more enthusiastic than they had been about any of Drinkwater’s other plays.

Bibliography

Abercrombie, Lascelles. “The Drama of John Drinkwater.” Four Decades of Poetry, 1890-1930 1, no. 4 (1977): 271-281. Abercrombie was a fellow dramatist who also wrote one-act verse plays in the 1920’s. This article, an edited version of a previously unpublished 1934 lecture, contains a discussion of verse drama and the possibilities for its acceptance by twentieth century audiences and analyses of Drinkwater’s plays.

Berven, Peter. “John Drinkwater: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him.” English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920 21 (1978): 9-66. Introduced by a two-page biographical-critical statement, this comprehensive work contains almost five hundred annotated entries, covering the full range of Drinkwater’s career as playwright, poet, critic, biographer, and anthologist.

Clark, Keith. The Muse Colony: Rupert Brooks, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, and Friends: Dymock, 1914. Bristol, England: Redcliffe, 1992. A look at the Dymock group of poets, to which Drinkwater belonged. Bibliography and index.

Gale, Steve H. “John Drinkwater.” In Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century British Literary Biographers, edited by Steven Serafin. Vol. 149 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: The Gale Group, 1995. A concise overview of the life and works of Drinkwater.

Parker, Rennie. The Georgian Poets: Abercrombie, Brooke, Drinkwater, Gibson, and Thomas. Plymouth, England: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1999. A look at the poets Drinkwater, Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, and Edward Thomas. Provides insight into Drinkwater’s dramatic works. Bibliography and index.