The complete play is available for download
in both MsWord and Acrobat PDF files
at the bottom of this page.

Introduction

Who was the handsomest Englishman? According to the letters of a number of the contemporaries of English poet, Rupert Brooke, he was the handsomest Englishman of his time. He was handsome, magnetic, and highly intelligent. Although well aware of his good looks, his passion was for his poetry and his looks meant little, if anything, to him. Still, he could not avoid the reactions of others to his appearance--and their frequent attraction to him. His romantic adventures were rather a tangled web, and on one occasion a source of great distress. But over it all the life of the mind held sway for him and he laboured mightily to become the best poet in England. At the time of this play Rupert has already published some of his poetry and has new work ready to offer the public. But his attitude is changing, from its youthful exuberance and ambition to something less heady, something that speaks of disillusion.

The play takes place over five months in Rupert's life, from June to October of 1914, thereby encompassing the outbreak of the Great War, and a resultant change in the course of Rupert's life. He has just returned from a year abroad, part of which was spent in Tahiti where he occasioned an injury which would later contribute to his early death, but also where he enjoyed a romantic liason with a young Tahitian woman which has been noted as perhaps the one relationship in which he was entirely free of the constraints that he seemed to feel in his relationships with European women. The play examines these constraints as they exist in the time period it deals with.

The other characters in the play are, or have all been, close to Rupert. The latter is residing in the London apartment of his friend and mentor, Edward Marsh. At 41, Marsh is older than all of the other characters, who are in their mid-twenties. He is the private secretary to Winston Churchill, who was at that time First Lord of the Admiralty, and he is a devoted patron of the arts.

The current object of Rupert's love is Cathleen Nesbitt, a young English stage actress who is already successful, and is destined to have a long career in stage, film, and television. They met and became deeply, though not sexually, involved about six months before Rupert left for his year abroad and he has been faithful in his letter-writing to Cathleen during their separation.

The strongest impetus for Rupert's year-long absence from England was the breakup the previous year of his relationship with Katharine Cox, known to everyone as "Ka". For those interested in the Bloomsbury group of that period, Ka was one of the few people accepted by both Bloomsbury and by Rupert's own crowd. She was a fairly close friend of Virginia Woolf, and on occasion nursed her through the latter's mental difficulties. Ka seems to have been a motherly woman, ready to help and comfort rather than to shine intellectually or socially, yet she was not without her suitors, among them Geoffrey Keynes, brother of the famous economist, John Maynard Keynes. But the relationship with Rupert was paramount in Ka's life. Although she eventually married and had a child, after her sudden death of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one, Virginia Woolf wrote this of her: "Her own identical life ended when Rupert died. So I think. After that she was acting a part very carefully and deliberately chosen."

The final character is James Strachey, younger brother of Lytton Strachey, the eminent English biographer. Rupert's friendship with James began when they were ten-year-olds at Hillbrow school and continued through their years at Cambridge. James was besotted with Rupert, who, though a staunch friend, never returned James's passion and had little patience with it. Rupert broke with James a short time after the final rupture with Ka Cox, and the two never re-established their close friendship. In the play James is already a successful London journalist, and he eventually became a distinguished musicologist, a practising psychoanalyst, and an important translator of Sigmund Freud.

And so we have the characters in this play, Rupert Brooke, his mentor Edward Marsh, his betrothed Cathleen Nesbitt, his former lover Ka Cox, and his long-time friend, James Strachey. But above all we have Rupert. This is my understanding of him, as true as I can make it.

Nancy Maki - Playwright