Lawrence, Douglas Goldring, and Plays for a People’s Theatre

In 1920 Thomas Seltzer published D.H. Lawrence’s Touch and Go and Douglas Goldring’s The Fight for Freedom as Plays for a People’s Theatre by Thomas Seltzer. The contemporary reviewer in Theatre Arts observed that “the phrase ‘people’s theatre’ challenges discussion—infinite and vague. Is it the theatre of an entire nation or a class—the ‘workers’? And who are the workers?” My paper will focus on these two plays, telling the story of how and why Lawrence became connected to Goldring and the People’s Theatre. The Prefaces to the two plays define two very different conceptions of a people’s theatre, and the two plays dramatize those conceptions – both with mixed success. The question of which of the two plays would be published first produced some of Lawrence’s finest invective.Douglas Goldring is basically unknown to Lawrence scholars apart from the role he played in getting Touch and Go published and failing to get it staged. My paper will include a brief biography of Goldring, who had a varied, fascinating career. He was a subeditor under Ford Madox Hueffer at the English Review and later published reminiscences of Ford and the English Review circle. He fought in World War I, but, after being invalided out of the army, he became a conscientious objector and – for a time – a radical socialist. He published five books of poetry, over a dozen novels, twenty-one travel books, and autobiographies in which Lawrence figures. He connected Lawrence with the American publisher Thomas Seltzer and the English literary agent Curtis Brown. In 1920 he published an essay about Lawrence in Reputations: Essays in Criticism. He helped Lawrence in his effort to get some of Maurice Magnus’s writings published. Fifteen letters from Lawrence to Goldring survive. The complex interaction between Lawrence and Goldring remains an intriguing episode in the history of Lawrence the mostly disappointed playwright.