Page:Robert Louis Stevenson, the dramatist.pdf/18

16 marry your sister, and pay your debts, and gull the world a little longer! The Deacon's going to bed—the poor sick Deacon! Allons! Only the stars to see me! I'm a man once more till morning."

But it is needless to dwell long on Deacon Brodie—ripeness of stagecraft is not to be looked for in a first attempt, a prentice piece. The play is chiefly interesting as exemplifying the boyish spirit of gleeful bravado in which Stevenson approached the stage. Again I say his instinct was to play with it, as he had played, when a boy, with his pasteboard theatre.

In Admiral Guinea—a much better drama—the influence of his penny-plain-twopence-coloured studies is, if possible, still more apparent. Deacon Brodie was the melodrama of crime; this was to be the nautical melodrama. As the one belonged to the school of Sweeny Todd, so the other was to follow in the wake of Black Ey'd Susan, The Red Rover, Ben Backstay and those other romances of the briny deep in which that celebrated impersonator of seafaring types, T. P. Cooke, had made his fame. If you require a proof of the intimate relation between Admiral Guinea and "Skelt's Juvenile Drama," as the toy-theatre plays were called, let me draw your attention to this little coincidence. In his essay on the Juvenile Drama, Stevenson enlarges not only on the sheets of characters, but also on the scenery which accompanied them. "Here is the cottage interior," he writes, "the usual first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of onions, the gun and powder-horn and corner cupboard; here is the inn—(this drama must be nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit)—here is the inn with the red curtains, pipes, spittoons, and eight-day clock." Well now, the two scenes of Admiral Guinea reproduce, with a little elaboration, exactly the two scenes here sketched. The first is the cottage interior with the corner cupboard; the second