RALEIGH, as every schoolboy knows him, seems to belong to
Hollywood rather than to history ; but the authors of this play have avoided all the temptations, if not all the pitfalls, implicit in the modern technique of dramatising history. The result is an excellent drama. At the St. Martin's it is continuously interesting ; a different cast and a better production could have made it continuously exciting.
We meet Raleigh first in 1612. Eight years in prison have not blurred his visions (limned here, it must be admitted, in trite and Hentyish phrases) of gold in Guiana ; but another four years are to pass before James is jockeyed by base motives into giving Raleigh his freedom under hampering conditions dictated by the Spanish Ambassador. The explorer, still technically an unpardoned traitor, sails with an ill-found fleet for the Orinoco. The mines elude him, he loses his son, and The Don in London easily destroys his slender credit with the slavering king. Raleigh, for honourable reasons, returns to England to play, on the scaffold, the Sydney Carton of the Spanish Main.
It is a fine and tragic story, told with no little, but acted with no great, distinction. Mr. Wilfrid Lawson's James dominates the play, a memorable study of pocked and shambling turpitude.
Mr. Wyndham Goldie's Raleigh fills out the husk of Aubrey's description : " tall, handsome, and bold, but damnable proud." But there is nothing in this performance—save when fever
breaks down that Journey's End reserve—to show why many hated, and some loved, the man. Raleigh's fall was, in the true Shakespearean tradition of tragedy, due to an unhappy
blending of the best and the worst in the man's character; Mr. Goldie makes his encounter with the headsman seem the effect solely of injustice and extraordinary bad luck. The authors are partly to blame for the inadequacy of the trial- scene ; but Mr. Goldie's dignified heroic resignation hardly chimes with the echo of a contemporary comment : " Save it went with the hazard of his life, it was the happiest day he ever
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