Dramatic Opinions and Essays

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SLAVES OF THE RING Slaves of the Ring: a new and original play in three acts. By Sydney Grundy. Garrick Theatre, 29 December, 1894. OF all wonderful scenes that the modern theatre knows, commend me to that in the first act of Wagner's Tristan, where Tristan and Isolde drink the death draught. There is...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SLAVES OF THE RING Slaves of the Ring: a new and original play in three acts. By Sydney Grundy. Garrick Theatre, 29 December, 1894. OF all wonderful scenes that the modern theatre knows, commend me to that in the first act of Wagner's Tristan, where Tristan and Isolde drink the death draught. There is nothing else for them to do; since Tristan, loving Isolde and being beloved by her, is nevertheless bringing her across the sea to be the bride of his friend, King Mark. Believing themselves delivered by death from all bonds and duties and other terrestrial fates, they enter into an elysium of love in perfect happiness and freedom, and remain there until their brief eternity is cut short by the shouts of the sailors and the letting go of the anchor, and they find themselves still on earth, with all secrets told and barriers cast down between them, and King Mark waiting to receive his bride. The poison had been exchanged by a friendly hand for a love potion. At what period Mr. Sydney Grundy came under the spell of this situation, and resolved that he, too, would have a new and original turn at it, I do not know. It may be, since these dramatic imaginings are really the common heritage of the human imagination, and belong to no individual genius, however grandly he may have shaped them into a masterpiece of his art, that Mr. Grundy may have found the situation in the air, and notat Bayreuth. Howbeit he conceived it somehow, and proceeded to make out of it the play entitled Slaves of the Ring, which differs from Wagner's Tristan in this very essential respect, that whereas Tristan is the greatest work of its kind of the century, Slaves of the Ring is not sufficiently typical or classical to deserve being cited even as the worst. It is not a work of art at ...