SOURCE: A review of Laodice and Danaë, in The Nation, New York, Vol. 103, No. 2676, October 12, 1916, p. 348.

In the following excerpt, Firkins reviews Laodice and Danaë.

In Laodice and Danaë an Oriental queen of sunken authority kills a maid of honor who has saved her conspiring lover from the penalties of his transgression. Mr. Bottomley takes the homicide very calmly; what excites him is the picturesqueness of the attendant ceremony. What he aims to do is to show fell passions, wrath, revenge, hatred, wandering luxuriously amid arcades, braziers, carpets, divans, unguents, roses, coffers, lamp-chains, brocades, jewels, lattices of cedar, and broidered curtains. This equalization of passion with setting, this pitting of the luxurious against the fiendish, is fairly original, not unimpressive, intensely exotic, and irreparably morbid.

Mr. Bottomley utilizes as instruments a dreamy, sensuous imagination quick to image this delaying, voluptuous, fastidious hate, and a blank verse, which, in...