Ronald Duncan, associated with various thoughtful and progressive theater movements in England in the period immediately following World War II, wrote a number of distinguished verse plays, the best known of which are This Way to the Tomb (1945), Our Lady's Tumbler (1951), Don Juan (1953), and The Death of Satan (1954). He became, along with Norman Nicholson, Christopher Fry, and Lawrence Durrell, a part of the "second wave" of British verse dramatists (the first had consisted of T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice) whose work was at the time seen as the main hope for the rejuvenation of the British theater. The fact that the theater, responding to large social pressures which it could not have foreseen and which it only partly understood, suddenly veered in another direction in the late 1950s does not detract from the quality or the ultimate value of the verse dramatists'...