Educated at Clifton, one of England's best public schools, he went on in 1881 to Oxford, where as a student at Corpus Christi College he graduated with a first class in classical moderations (1882) and a second class in
litterae humaniores (1885). In 1887 Newbolt was called to the bar and practiced law for the next twelve years. Meanwhile, in 1889 he married Margaret Edina Duckworth, whose home, Orchardleigh, at Frome, became the scene of his romance,
The Old Country (1906). While Newbolt worked hard at his profession, often contributing to the
Law Digest, his love of literature and history embodied itself in such early works as a novel about the Napoleonic wars,
Taken from the Enemy (1892), and a blank-verse tragedy,
Mordred (1895), based on Arthurian legend.
Newbolt's play develops around the title character, Arthur's son by Morgance. Of illegitimate birth, Mordred, unable to understand the rigid moral code his father professes, sympathizes with Lancelot and Guinevere and rejects the kinds of external laws, the Ten Commandments included, which his father upholds. Mordred and Arthur, as embodiments of what Newbolt in the preface refers to as Hegel's "two opposed Rights," are in the course of the action intended to win the reader's admiration, but, unfortunately, the play fails as tragedy because each in his own way instead earns the reader's scorn.
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