Gordon Bottomley Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Gordon Bottomley

Gordon Bottomley devoted his artistic energies to poetry and to poetic drama in the manner of William Butler Yeats. He had published two volumes of poems before he turned to drama at the beginning of the twentieth century, and although he continued to write poems, he steadily increased his devotion to verse drama. In all, he wrote about thirty plays, most of them one-acts, most of them brief. The early plays were written with the stage in mind and most of them were produced--if only for one performance. The later plays were written either to be presented in a public reading, as at the Oxford Recitations established by John Masefield, or to be performed in an ordinary room without benefit of stage or setting. Bottomley alluded to his earlier works as "plays for the Theatre Outworn (up to and including Gruach)" and the later ones as "those for a Theatre Unborn." The later plays were experimental, using folders (a portable folding curtain held by three people) or a chorus of voices instead of arches and curtains, depending on modern lighting, effective costume, and especially on voices trained to convey the action and nuances of interpretation.

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