Only a bold man dare call the blank-verse drama an
exhausted form, but certainly it has reached a stage where only a very strong personality can escape burial under the amalgamated style of his predecessors. Mr. Cecil Roberts, in A Tale of Young Lovers (Heinemann, 2s. 6d.), is not one of these. The Romantics borrowed; with occasional success, the Elizabethan notion of the proper setting for a tragedy—a ducal court in Italy and a vaguely Renaissance chronology. The morality of borrowing conventions is strictly pragmatical ; it is not worth while sewing oneself a clumsy pair of gloves when an experienced glover can provide a pair which after a little manipulation will clothe our hands perfectly. Mr. Roberts, however, fell in love with some of the Renaissance gauntlets in the literary museum and must make himself a pair. But the secrets of that particular craft have been mislaid ; his seams bulge ; the stitches gape and reveal an unmistakably modern hand stained, if at all, with red ink, which only very young children mistake for real blood. The play was successfully produced at the Nottingham Repertory Theatre last year.
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