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The Lady's Not for Burning
Fry's best-known play, The Lady's Not For Burning, is acclaimed for its optimism and exuberant word play. This edition contains only the text of the play.
72 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1949
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews
November 16, 2025
The Lady’s Not for Burning is a richly layered poetic drama that deftly intertwines farce with philosophical depth. At its heart lies the compelling juxtaposition of two central figures: Thomas, a man who seeks death, and Jennet, a woman accused of witchcraft who clings fiercely to life. Their opposing desires form the emotional and thematic core of the play, illuminating Fry’s exploration of life, death, and the redemptive power of love.
The play’s brilliance lies in its ability to balance humor with poignancy. Fry’s use of poetic verse, laced with colloquial wit, creates a tone that is at once whimsical and profound. Through absurd situations and sharp dialogue, he exposes the irrationality of societal norms and the fragility of human perception.
Love, in its many forms, threads through the narrative. The unconventional, almost metaphysical bond between Thomas and Jennet contrasts with the more traditional romance of Alizon and Richard, offering a spectrum of emotional connection that deepens the play’s human resonance. Fry does not present love as a simple solution but rather as a force that challenges despair and reclaims meaning in a chaotic world.
Perhaps most striking is the play’s blurred boundary between truth and imagination. Fry invites the audience to question the reality of the characters’ fears and beliefs, suggesting that truth is often shaped more by perception than by fact. In doing so, The Lady’s Not for Burning becomes not just a romantic comedy or a philosophical musing, but a timeless meditation on the human condition.
The play’s brilliance lies in its ability to balance humor with poignancy. Fry’s use of poetic verse, laced with colloquial wit, creates a tone that is at once whimsical and profound. Through absurd situations and sharp dialogue, he exposes the irrationality of societal norms and the fragility of human perception.
Love, in its many forms, threads through the narrative. The unconventional, almost metaphysical bond between Thomas and Jennet contrasts with the more traditional romance of Alizon and Richard, offering a spectrum of emotional connection that deepens the play’s human resonance. Fry does not present love as a simple solution but rather as a force that challenges despair and reclaims meaning in a chaotic world.
Perhaps most striking is the play’s blurred boundary between truth and imagination. Fry invites the audience to question the reality of the characters’ fears and beliefs, suggesting that truth is often shaped more by perception than by fact. In doing so, The Lady’s Not for Burning becomes not just a romantic comedy or a philosophical musing, but a timeless meditation on the human condition.
May 2, 2008
Definitely in the running for my favorite play of the 20th century (the other top contender being Arcadia. A verse drama set in the late Middle Ages, it abounds with beautiful language, interesting characters, wit, romance, and wisdom. Some of the speeches are extraordinarily beautiful, such as the following:
I seem to wish to have some importance
In the play of time. If not,
Then sad was my mother's pain, my breath, my bones,
My web of nerves, my wondering brain,
To be shaped and quickened with such anticipation
Only to feed the swamp of space.
What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
If not, if all is a pretty fiction
To distract the cherubim and seraphim
Who so continually do cry, the least
I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world
With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to
The ear of God, until he has appetite
To taste our salt sorrow on his lips.
And so you see it might be better to die.
Though, on the other hand, I admit
It might be immensely foolish.
Pamela Dean once compared the play to Jane Austen in its ability to show both the tragic and comic sides of a story.
I seem to wish to have some importance
In the play of time. If not,
Then sad was my mother's pain, my breath, my bones,
My web of nerves, my wondering brain,
To be shaped and quickened with such anticipation
Only to feed the swamp of space.
What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
If not, if all is a pretty fiction
To distract the cherubim and seraphim
Who so continually do cry, the least
I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world
With human deep-sea sound, and hold it to
The ear of God, until he has appetite
To taste our salt sorrow on his lips.
And so you see it might be better to die.
Though, on the other hand, I admit
It might be immensely foolish.
Pamela Dean once compared the play to Jane Austen in its ability to show both the tragic and comic sides of a story.
December 14, 2020
it's all about serendipity baby ! one of my uni friends gave me this for my birthday, & fr the last few years i've treasured it as an Artifact -- it was found in a charity shop, with a note on the flyleaf that said it had belonged to a long-graduated student at st catharine's, my college, & a letter tucked into it that had been written on the twenty fourth of january, my birthday, in '78, nineteen years before i was born. it was one of those v lovely convergences of coincidence that feels meaningful & all the more so because someone else found & made sense of & gave it to me.
but then i was reading tam lin and there it was again, & it felt like it was finally time to take it down and read it. & now it's alive to me, absolutely & cracklingly alive, and i feel like that jenny slate meme, like. i can't think too much abt some of the lines in this play bc they make me too crazy ! it would just be like "the least / i can do is to fill the curled shell of the world / with human deep-sea sound, and hold it to / the ear of god, until he has appetite / to taste our salt sorrow on his lips" and i was like S C R E A M S !
it's so hysterically, grimly, gleefully funny & sometimes breathtakingly beautiful & sometimes equally breathtakingly bitter ! it's so clever ! it's so sad & also so joyful !
but then i was reading tam lin and there it was again, & it felt like it was finally time to take it down and read it. & now it's alive to me, absolutely & cracklingly alive, and i feel like that jenny slate meme, like. i can't think too much abt some of the lines in this play bc they make me too crazy ! it would just be like "the least / i can do is to fill the curled shell of the world / with human deep-sea sound, and hold it to / the ear of god, until he has appetite / to taste our salt sorrow on his lips" and i was like S C R E A M S !
it's so hysterically, grimly, gleefully funny & sometimes breathtakingly beautiful & sometimes equally breathtakingly bitter ! it's so clever ! it's so sad & also so joyful !
September 9, 2011
Fry shines more as a verbalist than a dramatist. His
talkiness is, really, next to Godliness. C 1950, when
TS Eliot was also writing verse plays, there was an
Eliot-Fry vogue of "lit-drama" -- for a while. This was
pushed aside x Theatre of the Absurd and the Kitchen Sink
School. Fry's work reminds some of Shakespeare, but I
agree w those who refer to him as a verseful of Shaw.
For he delights in contradiction, irony and paradox. With
Fry's imagery and lyrical wordplay, you really have to
perk up your ears. I'm more engaged by his translations
of Anouilh's "Ring Round the Moon" and Giraudoux's "Tiger
at the Gates." He was one of many scripters, along w Gore
Vidal, on Wyler's sputtering "Ben-Hur." It would be fun
to know his contribution to this Biblical bash.
talkiness is, really, next to Godliness. C 1950, when
TS Eliot was also writing verse plays, there was an
Eliot-Fry vogue of "lit-drama" -- for a while. This was
pushed aside x Theatre of the Absurd and the Kitchen Sink
School. Fry's work reminds some of Shakespeare, but I
agree w those who refer to him as a verseful of Shaw.
For he delights in contradiction, irony and paradox. With
Fry's imagery and lyrical wordplay, you really have to
perk up your ears. I'm more engaged by his translations
of Anouilh's "Ring Round the Moon" and Giraudoux's "Tiger
at the Gates." He was one of many scripters, along w Gore
Vidal, on Wyler's sputtering "Ben-Hur." It would be fun
to know his contribution to this Biblical bash.
August 20, 2018
This is, sincerely, one of the best and funniest plays I've ever seen, and I got to be in it as well.
November 2, 2008
My copy is a bit wrinkled and teary from my recent divorce; but still one of my favorite plays and I'd jump at the opportunity to see it performed.
I think probably the most apt description is Isiscaughey's: A lovely story of two rather sad people who manage to save each other. Which is really all that needs to be said, isn't it?
I think probably the most apt description is Isiscaughey's: A lovely story of two rather sad people who manage to save each other. Which is really all that needs to be said, isn't it?
August 19, 2018
I love it. Such a wonderful little play!!
Second read:
It's not really fair to say this was a second read, because I was just IN this play (as Jennet) so I've been through it dozens of times this summer, memorizing huge sections of it and driving it into my physical being for almost four months. After looking at it in such intense detail for so long I feel fairly confident in saying this is one of my favourite plays of all times.
Even on the night of our last performance when the whole thing was as familiar to me as this keyboard under my fingers, I still cracked up. It's so clever and funny and bombastic that my carpool was still having interesting conversations about individual lines and moments, even as we drove to opening night. It's so human that I saw myself in every character at some point, from Thomas' desolation to Margret's cold hearted statement that "sin is so inconvenient." And in amongst all the jokes and the criticism and the lechery is an ever present sweetness that prevents the whole thing from being nihilistic.
What can we do to make life worth living? How can we save each other? Where can we go to find hope and happiness? And in the end, no, love doesn't change the world, but maybe we can draw it up over our eyes for a while and maybe we're allowed to take up space in the world, even on our darkest nights, even those of us who don't conform to the mean, even those who were come across instead of born, and even those who just wanted to be happy.
Second read:
It's not really fair to say this was a second read, because I was just IN this play (as Jennet) so I've been through it dozens of times this summer, memorizing huge sections of it and driving it into my physical being for almost four months. After looking at it in such intense detail for so long I feel fairly confident in saying this is one of my favourite plays of all times.
Even on the night of our last performance when the whole thing was as familiar to me as this keyboard under my fingers, I still cracked up. It's so clever and funny and bombastic that my carpool was still having interesting conversations about individual lines and moments, even as we drove to opening night. It's so human that I saw myself in every character at some point, from Thomas' desolation to Margret's cold hearted statement that "sin is so inconvenient." And in amongst all the jokes and the criticism and the lechery is an ever present sweetness that prevents the whole thing from being nihilistic.
What can we do to make life worth living? How can we save each other? Where can we go to find hope and happiness? And in the end, no, love doesn't change the world, but maybe we can draw it up over our eyes for a while and maybe we're allowed to take up space in the world, even on our darkest nights, even those of us who don't conform to the mean, even those who were come across instead of born, and even those who just wanted to be happy.
May 14, 2015
This play is so neglected these days! The Lady's Not for Burning is a wonderful rural-social-fantasy in which 'the costumes are as much 14-century as anything else'. Thomas Mendip is a world-weary soldier fed up with living who wanders into a small medieval town determined to get hanged. He swears he's the devil, 'he who sings solo bass in Hell's madrigal choir' (and who's voice should on no occasion be confused with that of a peacock!) and insists that the towns people hang him at once. The only problem is that the town is in a right flap over another supernatural phenomenon, that of Jennet Jourdemayne, the ravishing, solitary daughter of a deceased alchemist who tinkers with her father's chemistry equipment, talks french to her poodle and dines with her pet peacock on Sundays. The old adage that unconventional, independent women got burned at the stake rings true in this comical drama, as the townspeople are convinced that Jennet is a witch and are hammering on the mayor's door insisting that she be tindered. All very inconvenient, when you consider that young Alizon Elliot is arriving from the nunnery to meet her betrothed: slow, uninspiring Humphry, son of the Mayor - who is currently being petitioned by Thomas for a sentence and hanging.
Things come to pass at a dance to welcome Alizon that night, where Thomas and Jennet pace it out, one wants to die, the other wishes to live, and the frivolous self-absorbed townspeople are making them both wait before they can discover their fates.
This play is an absolute gem, I've read before that Fry's images lack symmetry, but I find the description of a castle 'draughty as a tree' absolutely delightful. It's a bittersweet story about two reluctant lovers who find falling in love more complicated and inconvenient than anything else. But in the end, the 'pitshaft of love' is what saves one of them from life, and one of them from death. Jennet and Thomas's jaded romance is balanced by a subplot involving the young, foolish, all-consuming love that develops between our two orphans: Alizon and the mayor's servant, Richard. One of the reasons the play works so well is that one can recognise both predicaments tenderly from experience.
Fry's images and language are delightful, painfully tender, wickedly, deliciously funny, his characters are recognisable, some of them sufferable, some lovable. The language and approach is fresh, even at age 70, and the ending is just sumptuous, tying everything in just so. I long to see a production of this play, having only read it, even though the characters are already so alive. Bitter Thomas, Gentle Jennet, Pompous Hebble the Mayor, Insufferable Nicholas (he has three virtues, how many do you have?). I'd be roling in the isles, laughing and weeping at this tragic comedy that transcends any century.
Things come to pass at a dance to welcome Alizon that night, where Thomas and Jennet pace it out, one wants to die, the other wishes to live, and the frivolous self-absorbed townspeople are making them both wait before they can discover their fates.
This play is an absolute gem, I've read before that Fry's images lack symmetry, but I find the description of a castle 'draughty as a tree' absolutely delightful. It's a bittersweet story about two reluctant lovers who find falling in love more complicated and inconvenient than anything else. But in the end, the 'pitshaft of love' is what saves one of them from life, and one of them from death. Jennet and Thomas's jaded romance is balanced by a subplot involving the young, foolish, all-consuming love that develops between our two orphans: Alizon and the mayor's servant, Richard. One of the reasons the play works so well is that one can recognise both predicaments tenderly from experience.
Fry's images and language are delightful, painfully tender, wickedly, deliciously funny, his characters are recognisable, some of them sufferable, some lovable. The language and approach is fresh, even at age 70, and the ending is just sumptuous, tying everything in just so. I long to see a production of this play, having only read it, even though the characters are already so alive. Bitter Thomas, Gentle Jennet, Pompous Hebble the Mayor, Insufferable Nicholas (he has three virtues, how many do you have?). I'd be roling in the isles, laughing and weeping at this tragic comedy that transcends any century.
June 20, 2015
The Lady’s Not for Burning is a delightful comedy/farce. I especially enjoyed the light touch of its humor upon dark subjects. The plot is also very well formed and moves along rapidly to a satisfying denouement.
I have more than a passing interest in verse drama, so I find the success of this play very interesting. (It had long runs on the England and the American stages in the 1950s.) The reason is simple: It is a piece of good theatre – interesting characters, excellent plot, suspense and surprise.
For better or worse, though, it is a good piece of theatre despite its verse. Fry is good at creating interesting, well-spoken characters using an expansive vocabulary. At times though, it seems he goes off on a riff of words that don’t seem to make any sense. “Flesh weighs like a thousand years” “I was conceived as a hammer and born in a rising wind.” “What does love understand about hereinafter-called-the-mortgagee” Huh? These all sound very profound, but I can’t understand what they mean. And did 14th century people even know what a mortgage was, or coprolite (which is used as an insult)?
That all said, these excesses do not mar a well-made play. I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys good drama.
I have more than a passing interest in verse drama, so I find the success of this play very interesting. (It had long runs on the England and the American stages in the 1950s.) The reason is simple: It is a piece of good theatre – interesting characters, excellent plot, suspense and surprise.
For better or worse, though, it is a good piece of theatre despite its verse. Fry is good at creating interesting, well-spoken characters using an expansive vocabulary. At times though, it seems he goes off on a riff of words that don’t seem to make any sense. “Flesh weighs like a thousand years” “I was conceived as a hammer and born in a rising wind.” “What does love understand about hereinafter-called-the-mortgagee” Huh? These all sound very profound, but I can’t understand what they mean. And did 14th century people even know what a mortgage was, or coprolite (which is used as an insult)?
That all said, these excesses do not mar a well-made play. I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys good drama.
October 21, 2010
Fry writes a modern Shakespearean comedy, complete with two pairs of lovers, clownish twins and some May Day madness where everything mixed up is made right again. Excellent ensemble roles and beautifully written love poetry interspersed with his usual wit and intelligence. A good choice for a director with a great cast looking to show their stuff without reverting to the usual classics.
September 13, 2019
Practically perfect*. God, I love this play.
*I do wish the two throwaway racist lines weren't in there because WHY. I mean, the answer is White Writer in the 1940's, but still.
*I do wish the two throwaway racist lines weren't in there because WHY. I mean, the answer is White Writer in the 1940's, but still.
March 13, 2021
incandescently good
July 1, 2018
Exquisitely hilarious.
July 31, 2018
Jennet and Thomas are stubborn and wonderful and heartbreaking and I'm so glad they end where they do.
Possible spoilers in my favourite quotes:
“Humphrey’s a winter in my head. But whenever my thoughts are cold and I lay them against Richard’s name, they seem to rest on the warm ground where summer sits, as golden as a humblebee.”
"Then if time and space have any purpose, I shall belong to it. If not, if all is a pretty fiction to distract the cherubim and seraphim who so continually do cry, the least I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world with human deep-sea sound, and hold it to the ear of God, until he has appetite to taste our salt sorrow on his lips.”
And now I'm crying at my desk again.
Possible spoilers in my favourite quotes:
“Humphrey’s a winter in my head. But whenever my thoughts are cold and I lay them against Richard’s name, they seem to rest on the warm ground where summer sits, as golden as a humblebee.”
"Then if time and space have any purpose, I shall belong to it. If not, if all is a pretty fiction to distract the cherubim and seraphim who so continually do cry, the least I can do is to fill the curled shell of the world with human deep-sea sound, and hold it to the ear of God, until he has appetite to taste our salt sorrow on his lips.”
And now I'm crying at my desk again.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 16, 2018
A gift from friends who would never give me something not worth my while. I found this was hard to read in my everyday world, so I finally just set it aside until I had a concentrated bit of time to indulge. Yes! That was the way to enjoy it. I loved being transported to another era of language and manners and comedy. I would relish seeing a production; I pictured it on stage as I read it. In high school productions I was typically the "matron/housemaid" role and how I would love to be Margaret, the mother, in this play. My thanks go to my friends, and now I am trying to find a book to recommend to them.
January 23, 2025
Clever and funny at times, but with very few stage directions, I found it difficult to visualize the play.
May 7, 2011
I had been meaning to read The Lady's Not For Burning: Comedy in Verse in Three Acts pretty much forever. But when events conspired - a book group decided to read about witch trials, and our local library demoted the script to the "friend Shop" for sale, I decided I had to have it. What the heck took me so long? I think the idea of a comedy in verse might scare lots of people off, but Shakespeare wrote comedies in verse and they're still really popular. This play should still be popular, not discarded. The story is set in England, when people were sure there were witches and occasionally burned them at the stake. There is a disillusioned man who claims (falsely) he murdered two people, and demands that authorities hang him forthwith. There is a lovely young woman who villagers think used witchcraft to make a missing man turn into a dog - but of course she didn't. There are other characters, a viol-playing cleric, am idiotic judge and his long-suffering wife, a couple of brothers, another sweet young woman looking for love and a hoard of angry villagers lusting for blood. But the only two characters that count are the pseudo-murderer and the falsely accused witch. It is their relationship, their wit, their sparring and sparkling dialog that carry the play to its conclusion. This is a comedy not because of the subject matter, which is grim indeed, but because the characters' language and insight into the nature of life make us smile, and because, as in Shakespeare's plays, it all works out in the end. I suspect that seeing this play would be better than reading it gave me an hour or so of real pleasure.
April 17, 2025
My favorite Fry play, and one not produced nearly enough. The words sparkle on the page, but they absolutely burst into fireworks lit by funny and poignant emotions when done by the right actors.
2025 update
Richard Chamberlain passed away recently. A marvelous actor, he's also the reason I fell in love with Fry's play. The PBS broadcast of Chamberlain's version (1974) was repeated in later years on A&E. It boasted a fabulous cast but Chamberlain was best of all as the philosopher soldier. For years, I searched for this version but it was not made available on VHS or DVD as far as I can tell. Some bootleg versions from broadcast copies exist online, mostly blurry pictures, but you can hear Chamberlain's sonorous speeches. Prop the computer open, set the video to play, and lean back to listen. Fry's words weave a spell while the messages subtly slipped under the wisecracks and romance have never felt so relevant.
There's also a very good Kenneth Brannagh version of this play which is more easily found. It makes slightly different or more cuts than the Chamberlain version, particularly in Jennet's speeches (and that seems unkind for a lady sentenced to burn).
2025 update
Richard Chamberlain passed away recently. A marvelous actor, he's also the reason I fell in love with Fry's play. The PBS broadcast of Chamberlain's version (1974) was repeated in later years on A&E. It boasted a fabulous cast but Chamberlain was best of all as the philosopher soldier. For years, I searched for this version but it was not made available on VHS or DVD as far as I can tell. Some bootleg versions from broadcast copies exist online, mostly blurry pictures, but you can hear Chamberlain's sonorous speeches. Prop the computer open, set the video to play, and lean back to listen. Fry's words weave a spell while the messages subtly slipped under the wisecracks and romance have never felt so relevant.
There's also a very good Kenneth Brannagh version of this play which is more easily found. It makes slightly different or more cuts than the Chamberlain version, particularly in Jennet's speeches (and that seems unkind for a lady sentenced to burn).
January 30, 2011
A truly great peace of pointed, funny writing that works on the stage very well. The made for TV version (with Kenneth Branagh and Cherie Lunghi) was very good, but the live production I saw of it filled my senses and mind with energy. A woman is to burnt for being a witch, and a man confesses to a killing in a bid for suicide by state intervention. The town's authorities refuse to believe in his guilt, and refuse to believe in the woman's innocence. The irony is not lost on the man or woman, who strike up a friendship that frustrates the would be executions. The solution? Talk about it at a last dinner.
There is a complex interplay of cross gendered roles; the woman to be burnt is an epitome of manly logic and science, whereas all the men are swallowed by emotion and illogic. In the end, logic does not win the day, but the day is won with a kind of twisting of logic by feeling and all ends well.
This is, quite simply, brilliant.
There is a complex interplay of cross gendered roles; the woman to be burnt is an epitome of manly logic and science, whereas all the men are swallowed by emotion and illogic. In the end, logic does not win the day, but the day is won with a kind of twisting of logic by feeling and all ends well.
This is, quite simply, brilliant.
May 9, 2013
This was suggested to me by my acting teacher for a monologue and I am so glad she lent it to me. Not only did I get a fantastic monologue out of it, but I loved the whole play. Nicholas had me cracking up with his "murder" of his brother. Thomas, who has decided he MUST be hanged and persistently petitions the judge throughout the play to hang him, is wonderful. Very odd, very poetic, very set on dying, but oh so wonderful. Jennet, who is accused of being a witch, comes in laughing at the absurdness of it all, so of course I was absolutely smitten.
I fairly nearly hugged this playbook at the end (it was falling apart, so I didn't).
I fairly nearly hugged this playbook at the end (it was falling apart, so I didn't).
December 20, 2014
Charmingly, satirically, hysterically comic short play in verse. The fun of having joined goodreads is to have a peek into books others have read. This was one I had not heard of before so I read it at the library today and had to control my laughter so as not to disturb other patrons.
I learned that Richard Burton and John Gielgud (as well as Claire Bloom) played in this one on Broadway in 1950. If you can find it at your library, enjoy! Out of fashion though it may be, this play has some great lines.
I learned that Richard Burton and John Gielgud (as well as Claire Bloom) played in this one on Broadway in 1950. If you can find it at your library, enjoy! Out of fashion though it may be, this play has some great lines.
February 18, 2008
I first saw this play on PBS in the 1980s with Richard Chamberlain in the lead. It's a comedy set in the 1400s and in the style of Shakespeare, but it was first performed in 1948. The main characters are a disillusioned soldier, a woman accused of being a witch, the local magistrate and his household.
I love the language and the plot, as two people sick of the world find each other and love in the midst of absurdity.
I love the language and the plot, as two people sick of the world find each other and love in the midst of absurdity.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 29, 2009
I very much enjoyed this play. The language is delicious and the wit is sharp. The story ends a little silly, but that's alright, as the main characters are the depressed hopeless people who decide to live because they find love in each other, even if that doesn't change how the feel about how horrible the world is. Well-crafted with fun costumes. I actually think Playmakers might really enjoy this show.
August 24, 2014
Oh! This was so wonderful. Every line was a gem. Of course, that meant I got slightly blinded by the constant glitter.
ALIZON Our father
God moved many lives to show you to me.
I think that is the way it must have happened.
It was complicated, but very kind.
Of course, it did suffer from the plague of plays - that is, everyone who fell in love did so in the space of five minutes. But what a fall!
ALIZON Our father
God moved many lives to show you to me.
I think that is the way it must have happened.
It was complicated, but very kind.
Of course, it did suffer from the plague of plays - that is, everyone who fell in love did so in the space of five minutes. But what a fall!
February 13, 2008
A roommate in college used to quote this play nonstop so eventually I had to find out why. When the book is somewhere handier I will throw a few choice quotes in here. I adore how expressive the author is with his words. The book is set in the 15th century and concerns a woman who is trying to avoid being burned as a witch and a man who wishes to be executed.
January 30, 2009
I read this play ages ago (it seems) because Dean mentions it in "Tam Lin". This is your typical British romantic play, where a thousand incredulous things are all happening at once complete with humourous miscommunication, and ends with an even number of happy couples. Thomas Mendip in particular is both a vexing and humorous lead character.
March 6, 2020
"O Jennet,
Jennet, you should have let me go, before
I confessed a word of this damned word love. I'll not
Reconcile myself to a dark world
For the sake of five-feet six of wavering light,
For the sake of a woman who goes no higher
Than my bottom lip."
Is this still my favourite play of all time? Hmm, signs point to yes.
Jennet, you should have let me go, before
I confessed a word of this damned word love. I'll not
Reconcile myself to a dark world
For the sake of five-feet six of wavering light,
For the sake of a woman who goes no higher
Than my bottom lip."
Is this still my favourite play of all time? Hmm, signs point to yes.
May 20, 2021
ok fine I read this because of the tam lin pamela dean name-drop, guilty as charged. BUT it is SO FUNNY I mean I know it says comedy on the cover but I didn't think it would actually be...funny. and I mean yes it is also tragic and incredibly romantic and GOD the things I would do to see this performed live!!!!!!
reread 5/21: I love you but the world's not changed....
reread 5/21: I love you but the world's not changed....
June 8, 2007
A wonderful play, set in the middle ages, though it was written post World War II. A lovely story of two rather sad people who manage to save each other.
This was referenced in Tam Lin, which is what brought my attention to it, but I truly enjoyed it for its own sake upon reading it.
This was referenced in Tam Lin, which is what brought my attention to it, but I truly enjoyed it for its own sake upon reading it.
October 2, 2008
This was recommended to me by a dear friend, but I found it very difficult to get through. It may be better on stage than on paper.
Act one drags a bit with a lot of background info, but by act three you are fairly invested in the characters.
Act one drags a bit with a lot of background info, but by act three you are fairly invested in the characters.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews