This same company produced Lawrence's eighth and final play,
David, giving it a single Sunday night performance in London on 22 May 1927. With the exceptions of
The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914),
Touch and Go (1920), and
David (1926), the remainder of Lawrence's dramatic work was unpublished until after his death.
The son of a Nottingham coal miner, John Arthur Lawrence (the Walter Morel of Sons and Lovers) and his wife Lydia Beardsall Lawrence (Gertrude Morel in the highly autobiographical novel), David Herbert Lawrence was born in the mining village of Eastwood in the English midlands. When Lawrence was a child, his imagination was captured by the performances of Teddy Rayner's traveling players who presented gory melodramas in their tented theater. Later, as a scholarship boy and teaching student in Nottingham, he spent what little pocket money could be spared to him on visits to the theater where he was particularly enraptured by Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux Camelias and had little contact, as a student, with the new drama. Upon completion in 1905 of a two-year teacher-training course at University College, Nottingham, Lawrence accepted a post as a qualified teacher in Croydon. He enjoyed the greater opportunities for theatergoing afforded him in nearby London, where he also scoured the bookstalls for copies of the latest plays by Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg about whom his letters express varying degrees of enthusiasm.
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