Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part 1 Texts
- 1 Ideas, histories, generations and beliefs: the early novels to Sons and Lovers
- 2 Narrating sexuality: The Rainbow
- 3 Sex and the nation: ‘The Prussian Officer’ and Women in Love
- 4 Decolonising imagination: Lawrence in the 1920s
- 5 Work and selfhood in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
- 6 Lawrence’s tales
- 7 Lawrence’s poetry
- 8 Lawrence as dramatist
- Part 2 Contexts and critical issues
- Guide to further reading
- Index
8 - Lawrence as dramatist
from Part 1 - Texts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part 1 Texts
- 1 Ideas, histories, generations and beliefs: the early novels to Sons and Lovers
- 2 Narrating sexuality: The Rainbow
- 3 Sex and the nation: ‘The Prussian Officer’ and Women in Love
- 4 Decolonising imagination: Lawrence in the 1920s
- 5 Work and selfhood in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
- 6 Lawrence’s tales
- 7 Lawrence’s poetry
- 8 Lawrence as dramatist
- Part 2 Contexts and critical issues
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
For a writer never much regarded as a writer of plays in his own time - only three of his eight full-length plays were published before he died, and his plays were so substantially forgotten afterwards as to leave even competent scholars doubtful about what he had written - Lawrence has achieved a surprising posthumous success as a dramatist. Three of his plays (A Collier's Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd and The Daughter-in-Law) have, since the middle 1960s, entered the English repertory of theatre, radio and television, and another (The Fight for Barbara) has received occasional performances; while all eight of his full-length plays, even The Married Man (which at some point lost its first five pages in manuscript), have been staged.
This is the more remarkable because Lawrence – although an avid theatregoer – had no practical experience of theatre. He never saw a play of his own on the stage, never went back-stage, and until 1924 had only a passing acquaintance with actors.3 What is more, living abroad a good deal, he was only distantly concerned with the small number of performances his plays received while he was alive.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence , pp. 137 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001