The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall

After a prologue by Merlin the play proper opens with both King Mark of Cornwall and his queen, Iseult, returning to Tintagel from separate sea-voyages.

We learn that Queen Iseult has travelled toward Brittany to find her old lover, Tristram, whom she believed to be dying, and has called off her voyage only on hearing a false report that he was already dead.

The history of the play goes back as far as 1870, when Hardy, living for a short while in Cornwall, began his courtship of Emma Lavinia Gifford, the woman who was to become his first wife, and visited the ruins of Tintagel Castle with her.

The version of the Tristan legend he then began to plan only started to take solid form in September 1916, after Emma's death, when he revisited Tintagel along with his second wife, Florence.

[4][8] The first performance of the play was given by the Hardy Players, an amateur troupe in Dorchester, and was intended to star their leading actress, Gertrude Bugler, though her pregnancy prevented this.

[20] One further source for The Queen of Cornwall can be found in Hardy's own novel A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), the dialogue of which he in one scene quotes from extensively.

[1] In 1916, when Hardy was turning over ideas for the play in his mind, he told a friend that "I visited [Tintagel] forty-four years ago with an Iseult of my own, and of course she was mixed in the vision of the other.

Some critics have also argued that the marital strains in the latter years of Hardy's marriage to Emma find expression in Queen Iseult's bitterness towards Tristram.

[24] The verse style of The Queen of Cornwall has been variously described as "plain and archaic, in conformity with an unsophisticated age",[25] and as employing "an ironic compression...classically laconic [with a] convoluted brevity...more in the manner of Browning".

[33] Ivor Brown, in one of the original reviews of the play, complained of its "combination of rare and strained words with a prosaic diction that approaches bathos",[31] and likewise modern critics have called the verse style "clotted",[30] "workmanlike rather than inspired",[25] and "lack[ing]...any rich metaphorical or prosodic vitality".

A. L. Rowse considered it "a curious little work, easy to underestimate or misconceive", and suggested that it would benefit from the visual and sound-effects of the Cornish coastline possible in a filmed version.

[35] Robert Gittings thought it was "on its own terms, a considerable achievement", and believed that "the dramatic power, even in awkward phrases, was unmistakable".

[36] Harold Orel wrote that "overall the elaborateness of the rhymes, the occasional soaring eloquence...and Hardy's continuing control of theatrical elements are impressive...[T]here are several moments of dark beauty that finally stir in the audience a genuine sense of pity for the plight of Iseult the Whitehanded.