The Confidential Clerk
by T. S. Eliot
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Sir Claude Mulhammer, a wealthy entrepreneur, decides to smuggle his illegitimate son Colby into the household by employing him as his confidential clerk. He hopes that his eccentric wife will take a liking to the boy and allow him to live as her adopted son. She in fact becomes convinced that Colby is actually her own son. Meanwhile Lucasta Angel wants to marry B. Kaghan, but neither seems to have any parents at all. A drama of mistaken identity and confusion ensues. Eliot's comic verse show more play premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953. show lessTags
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The first performance of this play was on August 25, 1953 at the Edinburgh Festival.
Mistaken identity is the nuts in this post-war period piece. There is no actual rollicking involved, but there is some very English romping going on. The very business-like Sir Claude Mulhammer thinks that Colby Simpkins is his long-estranged son, and tries to sneak him into the house as his "confidential clerk" in hopes that the very eccentric Lady Mulhammer will decide to "adopt" him. Yes, and it gets wackier and it gets more sobering as multiple parent-child identities are revealed or hinted at….
I won't spoil the ending. This is light stuff, mais un divertissement….one sympathizes with most of the characters because they're, well, needy, and they show more try to help each other, and there's no schlock….
It's a very genteel tragedy.
Read more on my blog: http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/ show less
Mistaken identity is the nuts in this post-war period piece. There is no actual rollicking involved, but there is some very English romping going on. The very business-like Sir Claude Mulhammer thinks that Colby Simpkins is his long-estranged son, and tries to sneak him into the house as his "confidential clerk" in hopes that the very eccentric Lady Mulhammer will decide to "adopt" him. Yes, and it gets wackier and it gets more sobering as multiple parent-child identities are revealed or hinted at….
I won't spoil the ending. This is light stuff, mais un divertissement….one sympathizes with most of the characters because they're, well, needy, and they show more try to help each other, and there's no schlock….
It's a very genteel tragedy.
Read more on my blog: http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/ show less
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T. S. Eliot is considered by many to be a literary genius and one of the most influential men of letters during the half-century after World War I. He was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. Eliot attended Harvard University, with time abroad pursuing graduate studies at the Sorbonne, Marburg, and Oxford. The outbreak of World War show more I prevented his return to the United States, and, persuaded by Ezra Pound to remain in England, he decided to settle there permanently. He published his influential early criticism, much of it written as occasional pieces for literary periodicals. He developed such doctrines as the "dissociation of sensibility" and the "objective correlative" and elaborated his views on wit and on the relation of tradition to the individual talent. Eliot by this time had left his early, derivative verse far behind and had begun to publish avant-garde poetry (including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which exploited fresh rhythms, abrupt juxtapositions, contemporary subject matter, and witty allusion. This period of creativity also resulted in another collection of verse (including "Gerontian") and culminated in The Waste Land, a masterpiece published in 1922 and produced partly during a period of psychological breakdown while married to his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot. In 1922, Eliot became a director of the Faber & Faber publishing house, and in 1927 he became a British citizen and joined the Church of England. Thereafter, his career underwent a change. With the publication of Ash Wednesday in 1930, his poetry became more overtly Christian. As editor of the influential literary magazine The Criterion, he turned his hand to social as well as literary criticism, with an increasingly conservative orientation. His religious poetry culminated in Four Quartets, published individually from 1936 onward and collectively in 1943. This work is often considered to be his greatest poetic achievement. Eliot also wrote poetry in a much lighter vein, such as Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection that was used during the early 1980s as the basis for the musical, Cats. In addition to his contributions in poetry and criticism, Eliot is the pivotal verse dramatist of this century. He followed the lead of William Butler Yeats in attempting to revive metrical language in the theater. But, unlike Yeats, Eliot wanted a dramatic verse that would be self-effacing, capable of expressing the most prosaic passages in a play, and an insistent, undetected presence capable of elevating itself at a moment's notice. His progression from the pageant The Rock (1934) and Murder in the Cathedral (1935), written for the Canterbury Festival, through The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949), a West End hit, was thus a matter of neutralizing obvious poetic effects and bringing prose passages into the flow of verse. Recent critics have seen Eliot as a divided figure, covertly attracted to the very elements (romanticism, personality, heresy) he overtly condemned. His early attacks on romantic poets, for example, often reveal him as a romantic against the grain. The same divisions carry over into his verse, where violence struggles against restraint, emotion against order, and imagination against ironic detachment. This Eliot is more human and more attractive to contemporary taste. During his lifetime, Eliot received many honors and awards, including the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- The Confidential Clerk
- Original title
- The confidential clerk
- Original publication date
- 1954
- First words
- Ah, there you are, Eggerston!
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Do you really believer her?
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- Members
- 235
- Popularity
- 137,994
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.35)
- Languages
- English, Finnish, German
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 11
- ASINs
- 21
