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The Earliest Plays of J. M. Barrie - Bandelero the Bandit, Bohemia and Caught Napping (Hardcover, Annotated edition)
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The Earliest Plays of J. M. Barrie - Bandelero the Bandit, Bohemia and Caught Napping (Hardcover, Annotated edition)
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There are four reasons for producing this modern edition of
Barrie's earliest plays - 'Bandelero the Bandit', Bohemia and
'Caught Napping'. The first is canonical. Neither of the first two
has ever been published while only two copies of 'Caught Napping'
can be traced and these date from the year of its composition in
1883. The second is biographical. After being heralded as a genius
in his own day simplistic Freudian links between Barrie and his
most famous creation, Peter Pan threatened to turn him into a
one-play oddity or, more generally, a naive writer fleeing
sentimentally from serious themes and ideas. Although these views
have now been critically rejected and Barrie restored to his former
central place in the history of British drama, his childhood and
youth remain an especially important area of biographical enquiry.
While psychological analyses of these early days before Barrie
became a London playwright abound there is little by way of
literary comment and no printed texts to consult. These are the
gaps which this volume seeks to fill. 'Bandelero', the one-act play
he wrote in 1877, while still a pupil at Dumfries Academy, is
especially important. The three acts of Bohemia follow and were
composed in Edinburgh four years later when Barrie was studying at
Edinburgh University. 'Caught Napping' belongs to yet another stage
of development and introduces a third geographical setting. He is
now a full time journalist on The Nottingham Journal and so it is
unsurprising that the short farce is published in the Saturday
Supplement to that paper. The third reason is literary. The
critical introductions to these plays demonstrate the many ways in
which their form, theatrical techniques and themes anticipate
Barrie's later practice. For example, the frequent critical claim
that 'Ibsen's Ghost' in 1891 is the first of Barrie's plays to use
burlesque conventions implies ignorance of 'Bandelero's heavy
reliance on the same conventions ten years earlier. His heavy
technical reliance on the visual and aural powers of the theatre is
witnessed in all three. Thematically, while studies of women as at
once more powerful and more knowledgeable than men will become a
leitmotif in Barrie's work, it is usually traced back, at the
earliest, to 1891 and Walker, London. Yet clearer models, in
Bohemia's Vanity and Jenny in 'Caught Napping' pre-date that work.
The fourth motivation is editorial and is by way of a modest
proposal. Now that Barrie has once more 'arrived,' is it not time
that fully annotated modern acting editions, reflecting the many
changes he made in study and in theatre, might now be offered? The
simple editorial task afforded by the single witnesses to each of
Barrie's earliest plays may not in itself mirror the complexities
of that task but it does, literally, 'open up' the challenge.
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