The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays 19 – Anonymous · Library Across
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The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays 19Notes on the Dramas and the Dramatists
18
Literature · Fantasy
The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays 19
Notes on the Dramas and the Dramatists
AnonymousEnglish
Harold Chapin: THE PHILOSOPHER OF BUTTERBIGGENS
Harold Chapin, as we learn from Soldier and Dramatist (Lane, 1917), was an American both by ancestry and nativity. But he lived the greater part of his life in England, and died for England at Loos in April, 1915. His activity was always associated with the stage. When he was but seven years old he played the little Marcius to his mother's Volumnia at the Shakespeare Festival, at Stratford-on-Avon in 1893. In 1911 he produced Mr. Harold Brighouse's Lonesome-Like and several of his own short plays at the Glasgow Repertory Theatre. For several years before the war he was Mr. Granville Barker's stage manager, and helped him to produce the beautiful Shakespearean plays at the Savoy Theatre in London.
Of Chapin's own dramas, The New Morality and Art and Opportunity have been given recently in New York and in London, and several of the one-act plays at a memorial performance in London in 1916, in matinee at the Punch and Judy Theatre, and before the Drama League in New York in March and April, 1921. Of the shorter plays, mentioned in the bibliographies following these notes, It's the Poor that 'elps the Poor, The Dumb and the Blind, and The Philosopher of Butterbiggens have been given the highest praise by such critics as Mr. William Archer, who wrote, "No English-speaking man of more unquestionable genius has been lost to the world in this world-frenzy." These true and honest dramas represent the English Repertory theatres at their best in this brief form, and give promise of the great and permanently interesting "human comedy" which Chapin might have completed had his life not been sacrificed. In spite of the simplicity and lightness of the little play here given, there is more shrewd philosophy in old David Pirnie, and more real humanity in his family, than is to be found portrayed in many pretentious social dramas and difficult psychological novels. It is admirable on the stage, as was shown by the Provincetown Players last winter. In the memorial performance for Harold Chapin in London, the author's little son appeared in the part of wee Alexander.
"Butterbiggens," Mrs. Alice Chapin, the dramatist's mother, replied to an inquiry as to "what Butterbiggens is or are," "is, are, and always will be a suburb of Glasgow."
There is little difficulty with the modified Scots dialect in this play if one remembers that ae generally takes the place of such sounds as e in tea, o in so, a in have, and so on, and that a' means all. A wean is a small bairn, yinst is once, ava is at all, and thrang is "thick" or intimate.
Distempered means calcimined, or painted in water-dissolved color on the plaster.
Lady Gregory: SPREADING THE NEWS
In her notes on the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which she was most influential in building up, Lady Augusta Gregory says that it was the desire of the players and writers who worked there to establish an Irish drama which should have a "firm base in reality and an apex of beauty." This phrase, which admirably expresses the best in the play-making going on to-day, finds most adequate illustration in the work of Synge, of Yeats, and of Lady Gregory herself. The basis in reality of such jolly and robust comedies as her Seven Irish Plays and New Irish Comedies is clearly discernible. They are in the tradition of the best early English comedy, from the miracle plays onward; of Hans Sachs's Shrovetide Plays, and of Moliere's dramatizations of medieaval fabliaux, as in The Physician in Spite of Himself. Lady Gregory describes in her notes on Spreading the News how the play grew out of an idea of picturing tragic consequences from idle rumor and defamation of character. It is certainly not to be regretted that she allowed "laughter to have its way with the little play," and gave Bartley Fallon a share of glory from the woeful day to illuminate dull, older years.
The inhabitants of this same village of Cloon appear as old friends in other of Lady Gregory's plays, with, as usual, nothing to do but mind one another's business. In The Jackdaw another absurd rumor is fanned into full blaze by greed; upon Hyacinth Halvey works the potent and embarrassing influence of too good a reputation. Still other plays attain a notable height of beauty--notably The Rising of the Moon and The Traveling Man. The Gaol Gate tells a story similar to that of Campbell of Kilmhor, with genuinely tragic effect. She has written, besides, two volumes of Irish folk-history, Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which Mr. Yeats calls masterpieces of prose which one "can weigh with Malory and feel no discontent at the tally." A writer who has produced such range and beauty of works, from very human, characteristic comedy and farce to fine, poignant tragedy, besides writing excellent stories and contributing largely to an important experimental theatre, is secure of her share of fame.
The "Removable Magistrate" is apparently one appointed by British officialdom; this one, having just come from the Bay of Bengal, is going to fit upon the natives of Cloon methods which may have worked in a rather different district.
The song "with a skin on it," which Bartley sings, is given in Lady Gregory's Seven Short Plays (Putnam, 1909).
Winthrop Parkhurst: THE BEGGAR AND THE KING
The Beggar and the King looks at first like a pleasant absurdity; it is in reality valuable as a short history of the ostrich method of dealing with realities. The beggar, of course, continues to cry aloud after his tongue, and even his head, have been removed, because there are so many millions of him. Again and again, in the course of history, he has gathered desperate courage to defy authority that is blind and evil. Always at last, as in the French and the Russian revolutions and in the more recent European revolts, he succeeds in wresting the power from those in autocratic authority. And yet, just as of old, not only kings, but all others who attempt dictatorship and the playing of providence, try the simple tactics of the ostrich; they close the window, or their eyes and ears, as a sufficient answer to rebellion. Appreciating the futility of these methods, we have no difficulty in continuing the drama ourselves beyond the fall of the curtain.
Mr. Winthrop Parkhurst, by birth a New Yorker, according to a family tradition is a descendant on his mother's side of John Huss, the Bohemian reformer and martyr, and on his father's of the executioner of Charles I of England. His writings include Maracca, a Biblical one-act play, and several short satirical sketches.
George Middleton: TIDES
Mr. George Middleton generally pictures in his dramas problems which are not easy to solve. And he does not try to give ready-made solutions. He merely shows us how various people have tried to work these problems; and his dramas are like real life because the attempts at solutions fail as often as they succeed. Certain of the problems Mr. Middleton presents are such as high-school students meet and can well consider; several of these plays appear in the lists following. Tides is about a man who has supported an unpopular theory. Nothing is said about whether his ideal is right or wrong, but it is clear that he has held to it in perfect sincerity of belief and has been quite unmoved by the bitterest persecution. But when he is offered honor and flattering respect, though he does not really change his belief and adherence, he compromises and partially surrenders his ideal. The fable is similar to that of Ibsen's The League of Youth, but the telling here is straighter and clearer. William White's self-deception is made evident to him and to us by his honest and courageous wife, who tells him frankly of it. "Haven't you sometimes noticed that is what bitterness to another means: a failure within oneself?" she comments wisely. An effective contrast is furnished by the son, who has altogether and honestly abandoned his father's theories in the face of new realities as he sees them.
Eugene O'Neill: ILE
Eugene O'Neill, American seaman, laborer, newspaperman, and dramatist, has been associated for several years with the Provincetown Players. This group, including Mrs. Glaspell and other playwrights of importance, gather in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, during the summer, and in winter present significant foreign and native plays in a converted stable on Macdougall Street in New York, where may be seen the ring to which Pegasus was once tethered! In 1919 Mr. O'Neill received the Pulitzer Prize for the most important American play of the year.
Mr. O'Neill has had experience of the sea, like the great Englishmen, Mr. Masefield and Mr. Joseph Conrad. He knows the interminable whaling voyages, as described in Melville's Moby Dick and the first chapter of Typee--best of all in Bullen's Cruise of the Cachalot. Out of this experience of hard life and harder men he has written many poignant and terrible dramas--perhaps the greatest this story of the skipper's wife who insisted on making the voyage with her husband and is worn to the edge of insanity by months of ice-bound solitude. The motive of Captain Keeney is like that which caused Skipper Ireson to leave his fellow townsmen to sink in Chaleur Bay. Against his iron determination his wife's piteous pleading and evident suffering are more potent than the mutinying hands; whether she can avail to turn him home "with a measly four hundred barrel of ile" is the problem of the play.
J.A. Ferguson: CAMPBELL OF KILMHOR
This tragic story of the war and hatred in Scotland belongs in the series of attempts made by Charles Edward Stuart and his father to regain the throne lost by James II in 1688. "The Young Pretender's" vigorous campaign in 1745, carried far into England, might easily have succeeded but for the quarrels and disaffection of the Highland chiefs who supported him. His failure was completed at the bloody battle of Culloden, or Drumossie Moor, in 1746, celebrated in Scottish story and song of lamentation. Scott's hero Waverley went into the highland country shortly after these uprisings, and David Balfour, in Kidnapped, had numerous adventures in crossing it with Allan Breck Stewart, who was in the service of his kinsmen, the exiled Stuarts. The hatred of Campbells and Stuarts, of Lowlander and Highlander, Loyalist and Jacobite, is intense throughout the record of those days.
The young Scot and his stanch and proudly tearless mother are, of course, the heroic characters in the play. We have a hint that Charles Edward Stuart himself is with the band whom the young man protects so loyally. It may seem strange that the drama is named, not for him, but for the crafty and pitiless executioner of the king's justice. But he is after all the most interesting character in the piece, with his Biblical references in broad Lowland Scots (we may suppose that the Stewarts speak Gaelic among themselves), his superstition, his remorseless cruelty. We should like to see how he takes the discovery that, perhaps for the first time, he has been baffled in his career of unscrupulous and bloody deeds!
This play represents the most successful work of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre in 1914. The author has written no others which have been published, though he is credited with a good story or two. It may be hoped that he will write other dramas as excellent as this one. He has put into very brief and effective form here the spirit and idea of a most intense period of merciless conflict.
A kebbuck is a cheese; keek means peek; toom, empty; a besom, a broom; and soop, sweep.
John Galsworthy: THE SUN
According to Professor Lewisohn and other critics Mr. Galsworthy is without question the foremost English dramatist to-day. Without arguing or attempting to offer solutions, he gives the most searching presentation of problems which we have to face and somehow settle. In Strife, after a furious contest and bitter hardships, the strike is settled by a compromise which the leaders of both sides count as failure. Things are much as they were at the start; the difficulty is no nearer solution. In Justice, "society stamps out a human life not without its fair possibilities--for eighty-one pounds," because obviously clear and guilty infraction of law cannot go unavenged. Justice is not condemned by the facts shown in this play, nor is its working extolled. In The Mob, the patrioteering element destroys a man who proclaims the injustice of a small and greedy war of conquest. In The Pigeon, brilliant debate is held, but no conclusion reached, as to what we should do with derelict and wasted lives, with men who do not fit into the scheme of success and society.
In his sketches and stories Mr. Galsworthy presents these same problems, and again without attempted conclusions. The Freelands particularly is a most dramatic novel of conditions and results similar to those in some of the dramas mentioned above. Many of his sketches and essays also--for example, "My Distant Relative" in The Inn of Tranquillity and "Comfort" in A Commentary--are of biting and almost cynical irony in viewing proposed and present solutions of problems; but none suggest panaceas. They merely make us think soberly of the size of our problems and their immense complexity, move us to go out to look for more information and to examine carefully our most solid institutions as well as suggested alterations in them.
A large part of Mr. Galsworthy's time and thought, both during the war and since, has been given to the problem of some measure of justice to soldiers, and particularly to wounded and broken soldiers. In A Sheaf and Another Sheaf appear various papers presenting sharply the conditions of suffering and neglect that actually exist. The Sun is a brief sketch of after-war days,--this time of a wounded man who has gained an advantage over one who escaped injury,--and of joy in deliverance from the hell of war--a joy so profound and luminous that the released soldier cannot let a sharp mischance and disappointment mar his happiness. The whole piece is in the key of Captain Bassoon's verses after the Armistice:--
"Every one suddenly burst out singing."
The other two think the happy soldier mad. We are left wondering what the reaction will be from this height of joyful release to the harsh and sombre conditions of workingmen's life after the peace.
The silver badge represents a discharge for wounds. Crumps are, of course, shells.
Louise Sounders: THE KNAVE OF HEARTS
The Knave of Hearts is one of the happy tradition of puppet-plays, which come down in unbroken line from the most ancient history, through the illustrious Dr. Faustus and Mr. Punch, to new and even greater favor and fame to-day. For just as the ancient puppet-shows of Italy and England seemed to be losing ground before the moving-picture invasion, they have been heroically rescued by Mr. Tony Sarg,--whose performance of Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring is perfectly absurd and captivating,--and by other excellent artists.
Puppet-shows are delightful because they are easily made and quite convincing. Very good ones have been improvised even by tiny children, with a pasteboard suit-box opening to the front, a slit at the top to let down paper-doll actors on a thread, a bit of scenery, outdoors or in, drawn as background, and a showman to talk for all the characters. Still better puppets are doll heads and arms of various sorts, dressed in flowing robes and provided with holes for two fingers and a thumb of the operator, who moves them from below. They can be made to dance and antic as you like on a stage above the showman's head, as Punch and Judy have always done. The more elaborate marionettes are worked with strings from above, so that they can open and close their mouths and otherwise act most realistically; these are, of course, more difficult, but quite possible to make. In such simple theatres, Goethe and Robert Louis Stevenson and many other famous people played themselves endless stories. If you want to pursue this idea further, a list of references below gives you opportunity for all the information you like about marionettes and puppets.
The Knave of Hearts is charming, either as a puppet-play or, as a class in junior high school gave it recently, a "legitimate drama." The remarks of the manager are all the funnier when applied to real characters. The play explains clearly the reasons for the strange behavior of a respectable nursery character. It is to be published soon in a book of its own with illustrations by Mr. Maxfield Parrish (Scribner's). The author has written other plays and stories, some of which you may have seen in St. Nicholas, and also a pleasant operetta, with music by Alice Terhune--The Woodland Princess, listed in the bibliography following. She is also an actress with the New York Comedy Club, an excellent amateur organization.
Pompdebile's coat of arms, with a heart rampant (i.e., standing on its hind legs, however that may be accomplished), reminds one of the arms suggested for the old clergyman-scholar, Mr. Casaubon, in George Eliot's Middlemarch--"three cuttlefish sable and a commentator rampant."
Lord Dunsany: FAME AND THE POET
Lord Dunsany (Edward Moreton Max Plunkett), the eighteenth baron of his name, is the author of a number of stories and plays unique in their type of clever imaginativeness. Besides the inimitable Five Plays and other dramas listed in the bibliography, his best writings are to be found in Fifty-One Tales, which includes "The Hen," "Death and Odysseus," "The True Story of the Hare and the Tortoise," and other highly entertaining matters. Fame and the Poet, originally published in the Atlantic, has been recently produced with good effect by the Harvard Dramatic Club. Fame's startling revelation to her faithful worshiper of her real nature and attributes is naturally most distressing--even more so, perhaps, than the rendezvous which this same goddess appointed another poet, in the Fifty-One Tales: "In the cemetery back of the workhouse, after a hundred years."
Lord Dunsany was a captain in the First Royal Iniskilling Fusileers--a regiment mentioned in Sheridan's Saint Patrick's Day--and saw service in Syria and the Near East as well as on the western front. He was wounded on April 25, 1916, in Flanders. Since the war he has visited the United States and seen a performance of his Tents of the Arabs at the Neighborhood Playhouse, New York City.
Beulah Marie Dix: THE CAPTAIN OF THE GATE
Miss Dix is author of several plays--in addition to those from Allison's Lad included in the play-list, of Across the Border, and, with the late Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, of the frequently acted Rose of Plymouth Town. She has also written several favorite historical stories, including Merrylips. The Captain of the Gate is a tragedy of Cromwell's ruthless devastation of Ireland. The determined and heroic captain surrenders, to face an ignominious death, to keep his word and ensure delaying the advance of the enemy upon an unprepared countryside, and his courage inspires exhausted and failing men to like heroism. This is an effective piece of dramatic presentation.
Percy Mackaye: GETTYSBURG
Mr. Percy Mackaye has been most active in the movement for a community theatre in the United States and for the revival of pageantry. He contends rightly that this development might be one of the strongest possible influences for true Americanism, and his dramatic work has all been directed toward such a theatre. Most notable are his pageants and masques, particularly Caliban by the Yellow Sands, for the Shakespeare Tercentenary; his play The Scarecrow, a lively dramatization of Hawthorne's Feathertop; his opera Rip van Winkle, for which Reginald De Koven composed music; and The Canterbury Pilgrims, in which the Wife of Bath is the heroine of further robustious adventures. Mr. Mackaye is also translator, with Professor Tablock, of the Modern Reader's Chaucer. The little sketch presented here is taken from a volume of Yankee Fantasies, in which various observations of past and present New England life are recorded. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, a powerful story of the Civil War, is a most excellent help to realizing what the boy Lige really endured in those days of battle.
Mr. Mackaye has adopted here a regularly rhythmic verse without the conventional capital letters at the beginnings of lines --perhaps to typify the simple homeliness of the talk.
Harold Brighouse: LONESOME-LIKE
Mr. Brighouse has been best represented in this country by an excellent comedy, Hobson's Choice, which was widely played and was printed in the Drama League series of plays (1906). His other best-known work here is the present play, and The Price of Coal (1909), a picturing of the hard life of miners' wives and their Spartan firmness in expectation of fatal accidents. He has produced and published a number of other plays, among them those listed in the bibliography. Mr. Brighouse represents in this volume the work of the English Repertory theatres, which parallel the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Glasgow Repertory Theatre, and various European stage-societies. That at Manchester, with which he has been associated, is directed by Miss Isabel Horniman, has seen beautiful stage-settings designed by Mr. Robert Burne-Jones, and counts among its dramatists such well-known men as Messrs. Allan Monkhouse, author of Mary Broome, a sombre and powerful tragedy; Stanley Houghton, and Gilbert Cannan. The Liverpool Theatre has become even more famous through the dramatic work of Mr. John Drinkwater. The Little Theatre movement in this country, our Drama League, and the various dramatic societies in our colleges and cities are our nearest parallel to these repertory theatres.
Lonesome-Like, Mr. Brighouse's most effective short play, is written in a modified Lancashire dialect, the speech of the village weavers and spinners. Many of the words are English of Elizabethan days and earlier, derived mostly from Anglo-Saxon.
Gradely (graithly) means willingly, meekly or decently; clem means starve; sithee is see you or look you; clogs are shoes with wooden soles and leather uppers, and dungarees, garments of coarse cotton cloth rather like overalls. A is used throughout for I.
As in many English stories, an extreme and painful dread of the workus, or poorhouse, provides a strong motive force.
John Millington Synge: RIDERS TO THE SEA
The work of the Irish Renaissance in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin reached its most powerful and tragic height in this tragedy, which Mr. Yeats compared to the Antigone and (Edipus of Sophocles). Synge at first wandered about Europe, poetizing; it was Yeats who brought him back to study and embody in genuine literature the poetry of life among his own people. On the bleak Arran Islands he lived in a fisherman's cottage, and through the floor of his room heard the dialect which he presents in simple and poignant beauty in this drama of hopeless struggle. The "second sight"--called "the gift" in Campbell of Kilmhor, and an incident also in The Riding to Lithend--was a sort of prophetic vision altogether credited among Celtic peoples, as among those of Scott's Lady of the Lake. When the mother sees the "riders to the sea,"--her drowned son and her living son riding together,--she feels convinced that he must soon die. The sharp cries of her grief and, above all, the peace of her resignation at the end, after all hope is gone, make this, as a writer in the Manchester Guardian is quoted as calling it, "the tragic masterpiece of our language in our time; wherever it has been in Europe, from Galway to Prague, it has made the word tragedy mean something more profoundly stirring and cleansing to the spirit than it did."
The speech of the people is not difficult to understand when you master a few of its peculiarities. One is the omission of words we generally include, as in, "Isn't it a hard and cruel man (who) won't hear...." Another is the common form "It was crying I was." A few phrases, like what way for how, the way for so that, in it for here or near, and itself for even, or with no particular meaning, as "Where is he itself?" The meanings of other words will be easily untangled.
William Butler Yeats: THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE
Mr. Yeats's best poetic dramas, and particularly this one, represent beyond question that "apex of beauty" to which Lady Gregory spoke of the Abbey Theatre dramatists as aspiring. This play is not founded on any particular Irish folk-tale. It is filled with the half-dread, half-envy with which the tellers of Irish legends seem to regard the fate of mortals bewitched by the Leprechaun or Good People. It is rich, too, with the music of beautiful words, without which, Mr. Yeats contends no play can be "of a great kind." He says too, "There is no poem so great that a fine speaker cannot make it greater, or that a bad ear cannot make it nothing."
Mr. Yeats has written broad comedy like Synge's Shadow of the Glen and Lady Gregory's Irish Comedies; his Pot of Broth is a most clever retelling of an old, comical tale. But it is by his mystical and poetical plays that he would be judged as playwright and poet--particularly Deirdre, which should be compared with Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows; The Unicorn of the Stars, written in collaboration with Lady Gregory; Cathleen Ni Hoolihan, a dramatization of the spirit of Ireland; The King's Threshold, a high glorification of the poet's art, with a fable, based on an ancient Celtic rite, of the hunger strike; and The Land of Heart's Desire, most beautifully perfect of all.
Gordon Bottomley: THE RIDING TO LITHEND
"The Riding to Lithend is an Icelandic play taken out of the noblest of the Sagas," wrote Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his review of the published drama in 1909. "[It] is a fight, one of the greatest fights in legend.... The subject is stirring, and Mr. Bottomley takes it into a very high region of poetry, giving it a purport beyond that of the original teller of the tale.... [The play] is not a representation of life; it is a symbol of life. In it life is entirely fermented into rhythm, by which we mean not only rhythm of words, but rhythm of outline also; the beauty and impressiveness of the play do not depend only on the subject, the diction, and the metre, but on the fact that it has distinct and most evident form, in the musician's sense of the word. It is one of those plays that reach the artist's ideal condition of music, in fact."
This is high praise; but who, after studying the play, will doubt that it is deserved? The powerfully moving events of the story indeed lead up to the climax in a forthright and exciting manner. The terror of the house-women and the thrall, the fearful love of Gunnar's mother Rannveig, and the caution of Kolskegg his brother, who "sailed long ago and far away from us" in obedience to the doom or sentence of the Thing--all these bring out sharply the quite reckless daring of Gunnar himself, who braves the decree. A mysterious and epic touch is added by the three ancient hags-evidently of these minor Norns who watch over individual destinies and announce the irrevocable doom of the gods. It was Hallgerd who broke their thread, representing, of course, Gunnar's span of life.
The centre of interest, as well as the spring of the action, is clearly Hallgerd, descendant of Sigurd Fafnirsbane and of Brynhild--
... a hazardous desirable thing,
A warm unsounded peril, a flashing mischief,
A divine malice, a disquieting voice.
She, and not any superstitious belief in "second-sight" and death decreed, is the cause of Gunnar's remaining outlawed. She wrangles about the headdress, not because she particularly wants it, but to send her husband on a perilous mission to secure it. She says openly that she has "set men at him to show forth his might ... planned thefts and breakings of his word" to stir him to battle. Mr. Abercrombie believes that "She loves her husband Gunnar, but she refuses to give him any help in his last fight, in order that she may see him fight better and fiercer." We should, then, have to suppose that her amazing speech at his death--
O clear sweet laughter of my heart, flow out!
It is so mighty and beautiful and blithe
To watch a man dying--to hover and watch--
is not for the blow Gunnar had given her when she "planned thefts and breakings of his word," but is rather, as the lines powerfully indicate, the exultation of a descendant of the Valkyrie watching above the battlefields.
Really poetical plays--plays which are both poetic and strongly dramatic--are indeed exceedingly rare. Mr. Bottomley is one of the few who have produced such drama in English. For many years he printed his work privately, in beautiful editions for his friends; but of late several of the plays have been made available--King Lear's Wife in Georgian Poetry, 1913-15, and in a volume of the same title, including Midsummer Eve and The Riding to Lithend, published in London last year.
Those who want more stories of this sort will find them in Thorgils and other Icelandic stories modernized by Mr. Hewlett; in the Burnt Njal, translated by Sir George Dasent, from which this story itself springs; and in the translations by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris, the Saga Library--particularly the stories of the Volsungs and Nibelungs, and of Grettir the Strong.
louvre--a smoke-hole in the roof
thrall--a captive or serf
bill--a battle-ax
second sight--prophetic vision, as in Riders to the Sea and Campbell of Kilmhor
fetch--one's double; seeing it is supposed to be a sign that one is fey or fated to die
wimpled--"clouted up," as Hallgerd expresses it, in a headdress rather like a nun's. A widow, apparently, might wear her hair uncovered
byre--cow-barn
midden--manure
quean--in Middle-English, a jade; in Scotch, a healthy lass; the history of this word and of queen, which come from the same root, is strange and interesting
