that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still
say, ‘This was their finest hour.’Shakespeare too was recruited to the war effort in Laurence Olivier’s memorable
film ofHenry V.
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas(1914–1955) conformed to a journalistic stereotype (he drank). He
was also a sonorous public reader of poems such as ‘The force that through the green
fuse drives the flower’, ‘And death shall have no dominion’ and ‘Do not go gentle into
that good night’. As these first lines suggest, he wove phrases musical with allitera-
tion and assonance into rhythmic lines. These were then worked into rhythmical
stanzas, which in Thomas’s ‘poetry voice’ sounded good to audiences. Yet if his best
poem, ‘Fern Hill’, is compared with his model, Hopkins, a consciously ‘lovely’
manner has melted the meaning – it is almost as if Swinburne had seen the light and
taken up hymn-writing. Thomas could also exploit and mock the folk-poetry of
Welsh speech, as in his delightful radio play Under Milk Wood (1954), set in the
village of Llareggub, a palindrome more exact than Waugh’s Llanabba. His prose
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and his short stories show a gift for
comedy.
Drama
From the demise of Wilde until his own death in 1950, Shaw was the leading English
dramatist and,with the exceptions of Sean O’Casey and T. S. Eliot, and possibly
W. B. Yeats, the only literary dramatist of stature. In 1904 he had answered Yeats’s
request for ‘a patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre’
with John Bull’s Other Island. At a command performance, King Edward VII laughed
so much that he broke his chair. The playwright Henry Arthur Jones wrote of the
first English performance in 1924 ofThe Cherr y Orchardthat it gav e him ‘the impres-
sion of someone who had entered a lunatic asylum and taken down everything the
lunatics said’. Chekhov was too far from English theatrical conventions to seem real-
istic. Drama is the only literary form directly engaged with the public, and the
English theatre-going public was solidly middle class. So theatre in 20th-century
England remained conservative, and conventions survived. In the year 2000, the
Festival Theatres in Malvern and Pitlochry had the audiences Shaw knew. These
theatres revived plays by the sentimental Barrie, the solid Galsworthy, the cynical
Maugham, the bright Coward, the workmanlike Priestley and the stylish Rattigan.
The 20th-century English novelists reviewed above were all public-school men, but
each was very different, and their fictional worlds are more varied than those found
in the middle-class moral-problem plays of Terence Rattigan (1911–1977),
educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Oxford:French Without Tears,The
Winslow Boy,The Browning Version,The Deep Blue Sea,Separate Tables. A master of
theatrical narrative, Rattigan perfected a highly stylized and understated mode of
dialogue. Introducing his Collected Works(1953), he invented an ‘Aunt Edna’ whom
playwrights ignore at their peril, for there are things she would not like.
Rattigan was ultimately of Irish extraction, and the Irish play a huge part in the
London theatre. In a preface to The Playboy of the Western World,J. M. Synge
(1871–1909) opposed ‘countries where the imagination of the people, and the
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