Act I

N.B.--There is a point of some technical interest to be noted
in this play. The customary division into acts and scenes has
been disused, and a return made to unity of time and place, as
observed in the ancient Greek drama. In the foregoing tragedy,
The Doctor's Dilemma, there are five acts; the place is altered
five times; and the time is spread over an undetermined period
of more than a year. No doubt the strain on the attention of
the audience and on the ingenuity of the playwright is much
less; but I find in practice that the Greek form is inevitable
when drama reaches a certain point in poetic and intellectual
evolution. Its adoption was not, on my part, a deliberate
display of virtuosity in form, but simply the spontaneous
falling of a play of ideas into the form most suitable to it,
which turned out to be the classical form. Getting Married, in
several acts and scenes, with the time spread over a long
period, would be impossible.

**

On a fine morning in the spring of 1908 the Norman kitchen in the
Palace of the Bishop of Chelsea looks very spacious and clean and
handsome and healthy.

The Bishop is lucky enough to have a XII century palace. The
palace itself has been lucky enough to escape being carved up
into XV century Gothic, or shaved into XVIII century ashlar, or
"restored" by a XIX century builder and a Victorian architect
with a deep sense of the umbrella-like gentlemanliness of XIV
century vaulting. The present occupant, A. Chelsea, unofficially
Alfred Bridgenorth, appreciates Norman work. He has, by adroit
complaints of the discomfort of the place, induced the
Ecclesiastical Commissioners to give him some money to spend on
it; and with this he has got rid of the wall papers, the paint,
the partitions, the exquisitely planed and moulded casings with
which the Victorian cabinetmakers enclosed and hid the huge black
beams of hewn oak, and of all other expedients of his
predecessors to make themselves feel at home and respectable in a
Norman fortress. It is a house built to last for ever. The walls
and beams are big enough to carry the tower of Babel, as if the
builders, anticipating our modern ideas and instinctively defying
them, had resolved to show how much material they could lavish on
a house built for the glory of God, instead of keeping a
competitive eye on the advantage of sending in the lowest tender,
and scientifically calculating how little material would be
enough to prevent the whole affair from tumbling down by its own
weight.

The kitchen is the Bishop's favorite room. This is not at all
because he is a man of humble mind; but because the kitchen is
one of the finest rooms in the house. The Bishop has neither the
income