THE JUDGMENT OF FRANWIS VILLON. A Pageant- Episode Play in
Five Acts, by Herbert Edward Palmer. (The Hogarth Press. 25s.)—Francois Villon has been much used and abused, both in novels and in plays. His is not the ligure for a sentimentalizing treatment. Now Mr. Herbert Palmer makes a kind of pageant play out of him, The Judgment of Francois Villon, and is courageous enough to keep to the true story, as far as we know it. The result, however, is that the characters in the first part, Villon, his mother, the Conon, and Catherine de Vausselles, talk too lengthily and too stiltedly in their efforts to give us the necessary information: Catherine de Vausselles, who, we are sure. was never regarded by Villon as a mediaeval abstraction, as Mr. Palmer suggests, is priggish in her phraseology ; and " Isn't it lovely to see you again ?" seems an entirely wrong question on the lips of Villon's mother. The Abstractions who pass the dying Villog are not like the figures in a mediaeval mystery. "Healthy Love," for example, has surely strayed out from a Eugenics masque. Some of the more violent scenes are forcibly ex- pressed ; and La Grosse Margot has more warm reality than the rest. The play really deserves attention as an effort to deal honestly with Villon.
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