R. C. Trevelyan And His Edwardian Sisyphus

Abstract

ROBERT CALVERLEY TREVELYAN (1871—1951) was one of a group of four English poets—all close friends—who wrote mythological verse plays over the first four decades of this century. The experimental dramas of Trevelyan and his companions—T. Sturge Moore, R. Laurence Binyon, and Gordon Bottomley—received scant attention in their own time and they are all but completely neglected today. Many of the plays were never performed at all; others enjoyed only short professional runs, or were given by amateurs or verse reciters to meagre audiences— frequently in the provinces. Perhaps the principal reason for the neglect suffered by these verse dramatists is that their experiments impress today just as they impressed the majority of contemporaries— as both anachronistic and esoteric, at a quaint remove from the compelling urban problems which were concerning prose playwrights and novelists. Indeed, the general tendency of all Edwardian Georgian verse drama was escapist: the attempt was to wed tragic materials (either mythological, folk, or contemporary rustic) to idyllic and aesthetic ideals which were essentially late—Victorian. And the atmosphere was that of a lost cause: solemn and stifling.