Daily tobacco leaf-chronicle. (Clarksville, Tenn.) 1890-1895, 1892-06-03
DRAMATIC GOSSIP.

Lord TennysOn's new play, "The
Forresters," at Daly'5 theatre in New
York, during March, is said to have
made one of the most pronounced
hits of any play produced there for
years, and the dramatic critics are
profuse in their endorsement of the
same. The realm into which the
play allures its auditors is the realm
of "Ivanhoe"-the romantic region
of Sherwood forest in the ancient
days of stout King Richard /. The
poet has gone to the old legends of
"Robin Hood" says the writer in
the Theater Magazine, and out of
those materials, using them freely
according to his own fancy, he has
chosen his scenes and his characters
and has made his story. 1t is not
the England of the mine and the
workshop he represents, and neither
is it the England of the trim villa
and the formal landscape; it is the
England of the feudal times, of gray
castle and armored knights, and fat
priests, and wandering minstrels,
and crusades and tournaments !;
England, in rush strewn bowers and
under green boughs; the England
which Wanda jested and Blondell
sung. TO enter into that realm is to
leave the barren world of prose; to
feel again the cool, sweet winds OF
summer upon the brow of youth; to
catch, in fitful glimpses, the simmer
of the Lincoln green in the sunlit
golden glades of the forest, and to
hear the merry note OF the huntsman
commingled far away with "horns of
Elfland family blowing"
*x*
The appeal is madeto the the prim-
tive, elemental, poetical in
stinct of mankind; and no
detail of realism is obtruded,
no question of probability considered,
no agony of the sin-tortured spirit
subjected to analysis, no controversy
promoted and no moral lesson en-
forced. For once the public is favor
ed with serious poetical play, which
aims simply to difiuse happiness by
arousing sympathy with pleasurable
scenes and picturesque persons, with
virtue that is piquant and humor
that is refined, with the cheerful for
titude that takes adversity with a
smile, and with that final fortunate
triumph of good over evil which is
neither ensauguined with gore nor
saddened with tears, nor made acrid
with bitterness. The play is pastoral
comedy, written partly in blank
verse and partly in Trose, and cast al
most wholly out of doors-in the
open air and under the greenwood
tree-and, in order to stamp its char
acter beyond doubt or question, one
scene of it is frankly devoted to con-
vocation of fairies around Titania,
their queen.
The impulse that underlies this
piece is the old, incessant, undying
aspiration, that men and women of
the best order feel, for some avenue
of escape, some relief, some refuge,
from the sickening tyranny of con-
vention and the commonplace, and
from the overwhelming mystery
with which all human life is haunt
ed and oppressed.
*x*
Merit, however, has very little to
do with plays and players. Look at
j. X. Emmett, the younger. He
started out last season to play
"Fritz" and he played it after a
fashion. lie pulled in the dollars by
the thousands, and his effort is put
down as a success. There is no merit
in him as an actor. Those who saw
him here were made very tired be-
fore the curtain fell on the last act
and they were glad when they could
go home. The fire that was in the
eye of "Fritz" Emmett, which made
"FritZ in Ireland" a beacon for
American dollars, was painfully
lacking in the son who aspires to the
fathers mantle.
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