The Man with a Load of Mischief : A Comedy in Three Acts

George H. Doran Company [Published Date: 1924]. Hardcover, 90 pp. No other printings listed. In good condition/ NO dust jacket. Tan paper over boards with cream paper title labels on front and spine. Light chipping and tearing to paper over the hinge creases on front and rear covers and light overall scuffing, aging and soiling to covers as well. Binding tight. Pages lightly aged but otherwise unmarked with s few small nicks to the fore edges of a few pages. A three-act comedy set in Georgian England that takes place at a wayside inn. Characters include: An Innkeeper, his wife, A Nobleman, His Man, A Lady and her maid. [From Saturday Review of Literature, Feb. 6, 1926] The Man with a Load of Mischief, is that difficult achievement: successful period play. Mr. Dukes is no amateur; his play satisfactorily breathes the atmosphere of Georgian England with its coaches, gibbet-haunted highroads, candle-lit inns, pump-room belles and rakes, and the gaming tables of Bath. There is even a gouty Hanoverian prince looming in the background, but no famous names weigh down the list of characters who are presented anonymously as "A Nobleman," "A Lady," etc. Mr. Dukes proves himself artistically aware of the era he has in hand; he also shows a neat talent as a playwright. His play has form, it has a style as definite and polished as the style evolved by artists and artisans of the Eighteenth Century. His lines have brevity and an appropriate elegance, under the tress of emotion, they develop an authentic poetic lilt. What they lack, except in a few scattered instances, is the sophisticated wit which is a more or less indicated asset of the period he is dealing with. There is nothing exuberant, kinetic, unexpected in Mr. Dukes's talent; for that very reason, perhaps, he is able to be correct, to draw his picture with unfailing taste, to sustain a graceful note. More, he is romantic without being sentimental, and back of his plot there is keen and civilized philosophy.…