The most amusing thing about the first performance of this littleplay was the exposure it elicited of the quaint illiteracy of ourmodern London journalists. Their only notion of a king was apleasant and highly respectable gentleman in a bowler hat andVictorian beard, shaking hands affably with a blushing footballteam. To them a queen was a dignified lady, also Victorian as toher coiffure, graciously receiving bouquets from excessively washedchildren in beautiful new clothes. Such were their mental picturesof Great Edward's grandson and his queen Philippa. They were hurt,shocked, scandalized at the spectacle of a medieval soldier monarchpublicly raging and cursing, crying and laughing, asserting hisauthority with thrasonic ferocity and the next moment blubberinglike a child in his wife's lap or snarling like a savage dog at adauntless and defiant tradesman: in short behaving himself like anunrestrained human being in a very trying situation instead of likea modern constitutional monarch on parade keeping up an elaboratefiction of living in a political vacuum and moving only when hisministers pull his strings. Edward Plantagenet the Third had topull everybody else's strings and pull them pretty hard, his fatherhaving been miserably killed for taking his job too lightly. Butthe journalist critics knew nothing of this. A King Edward who didnot behave like the son of King Edward the Seventh seemed unnaturaland indecent to them, and they rent their garments accordingly.They were perhaps puzzled by the fact that the play has no moralwhatever. Every year or so I hurl at them a long play full ofinsidious propaganda, with a moral in every line. They neverdiscover what I am driving at: it is always too plainly anddomestically stated to be grasped by their subtle and far flungminds; but they feel that I am driving at something: probablysomething they had better not agree with if they value theirlivelihoods. A play of mine in which I am not driving at anythingmore than a playwright's direct business is as inconceivable bythem as a medieval king.Now a playwright's direct business is simply to provide the theatrewith a play. When I write one with the additional attraction ofproviding the twentieth century with an up-to-date religion or thelike, that luxury is thrown in gratuitously; and the play, simplyas a play, is not necessarily either the better or the worse forit. What, then, is a play simply as a play?Well, it is a lot of things. Life as we see it is so haphazardthat it is only by picking out its key situations and arrangingthem in their significant order (which is never how they actuallyoccur) that it can be made intelligible. The highbrowed dramaticpoet wants to make it intelligible and sublime. The farce writerwants to make it funny. The melodrama merchant wants to make it asexciting as some people find the police news. The pornographerwants to make it salacious. All interpreters of life in action,noble or ignoble, find their instrument in the theatre; and all theacademic definitions of a play are variations of this basicfunction.