STORY OF D. U. PLAY, "BURY FAIR"

The Harvard Chapter of Delta Upsilon will this year present Thomas Shadwell's "Bury Fair," the sixteenth production of old English plays. Although the play does not fall under the Elizabethan period, it has so many affinities of story and characterization that the Chapter has gone out of its proper field to present it. The play is a farce comedy whose humor is surprisingly up to date as a satire on our own social system.

The author, Thomas Shadwell, was a man of position in the London of the Stuarts. He was a contemporary and opponent of Dryden, who made him the butt of his satire "MacFlecknoe" or "The Satire upon the True-Blue-Protestant Poet," an epithet which the readers of Shadwell's plays will consider inappropriate. Shadwell's tendency is to copy old models. "Bury Fair" is adapted from Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair" and from Moliere's "Les Precieuses Ridicules." The poet draws from these comedies a satire on the people of his own time and the English court life as he saw it.

The Plot of the Comedy.

The story of the play centres in Bury St. Edmonds, a small town near London. A young gentleman from the metropolis mingles with the provincial society of the little town. There are two ladies, mother and daughter, whose ideas of social breeding are synonymous with their name, Fantast, and who are extremely eager to take up the latest arrival in fashion from Paris. Two old gentlemen of the town are continually playing practical jokes which would now be regarded as social errors rather than as marks of a cultivated intellect. The Londoner, a French barber, launches into the society in the disguise of a French count and becomes the social lion of the moment. He succeeds in winning the hand of the "younger lady of culture," and the complications which ensue are most amusing and possibly not out of date.

Performances and Tickets.

The costumes have been designed with accurate detail by G. Hale '15, who is also painting the scenery. The rehearsals are being directed by S. J. Hume 1G. Five performances of the comedy will be given as follows: Brattle Hall, Cambridge, March 16 and 17; Jordan Hall, Boston, March 18; Eliot Hall, Jamaica Plain, March 19; "The Barn," Wellesley, March 21. There will be dancing after the second Cambridge performance and after the Jamaica Plain performance.