[Footnote 13:  “It is time to deny a statement that has been repeated ad nauseam in every notice that professes to give an account of Mr. Browning’s career.  Whatever is said or not said, it is always that his plays have ‘failed’ on the stage.  In point of fact, the three plays which he has brought out have all succeeded, and have owed it to fortuitous circumstances that their tenure on the boards has been comparatively short.”—­E.W.  GOSSE, in article in The Century Magazine.]

Most people who saw the performance of “Strafford” given in 1886, under the auspices of the Browning Society, were surprised as well as impressed:  for few, apparently, had realised from perusal the power of the play as made manifest when acted.  The secret of this is that the drama, when privily read, seems hard if not heavy in its diction, and to be so inornate, though by no means correspondingly simple, as to render any comparison between it and the dramatic work of Shakspere out of the question.  But when acted, the artistry of the play is revealed.  Its intense naturalness is due in great part to the stern concision of the lines, where no word is wasted, where every sentence is fraught with the utmost it can convey.  The outlines which disturbed us by their vagueness become more clear:  in a word, we all see in enactment what only a few of us can discern in perusal.  The play has its faults, but scarcely those of language, where the diction is noble and rhythmic, because it is, so to speak, the genuine rind of the fruit it envelops.  But there are dramatic faults—­primarily, in the extreme economy of the author in the presentment of his dramatis personae, who are embodied abstractions—­monomaniacs of ideas, as some one has said of Hugo’s personages—­rather than men as we are, with manifold complexities in endless friction or fusion.  One cardinal fault is the lack of humour, which to my mind is the paramount objection to its popular acceptance.  Another, is the misproportionate length of some of the speeches.  Once again, there is, as in the greater portion of Browning’s longer poems and dramas, a baneful equality of emphasis.  The conception of Charles I. is not only obviously weak, but strangely prejudiced adversely for so keen an analyst of the soul as Browning.  For what a fellow-dramatist calls this “Sunset Shadow of a King,” no man or woman could abase every hope and energy.  Shakspere would never have committed the crucial mistake of making Charles the despicable deformity he is in Browning’s drama.  Strafford himself disappears too soon:  in the fourth act there is the vacuum abhorred of dramatic propriety.