The Tempter

The Tempter is a verse tragedy in four acts by Henry Arthur Jones, originally published in 1893. Subtitled A Tragedy in Verse in Four Acts, the play represented Jones’s attempt to apply his serious dramatic intentions to the elevated verse form that the major English Romantic poets and their Victorian successors had used for their attempts at serious historical drama.

The play is set in medieval England and combines historical romance with the kind of moral and theological material that the verse tragedy tradition typically explored. The plot involves a complicated situation of love, religious doubt, and supernatural temptation, with the figure of the tempter of the title functioning as both a literal supernatural presence and as a symbolic representation of the various forms of moral pressure that the central characters must work through across the course of the play.

Jones was working in a difficult dramatic tradition. The verse tragedy in English had been attempted by various major writers throughout the nineteenth century, from Wordsworth and Coleridge through Byron and Shelley and on to Tennyson and Browning, but the form had rarely been successful on the stage. Most of the major Romantic and Victorian verse tragedies had been better suited to private reading than to public performance, and Jones’s attempt to revive the form in the 1890s faced the same fundamental difficulties that had constrained his predecessors.

The Tempter was published in book form and was performed in various productions, but it never achieved the commercial success of Jones’s contemporary social comedies and serious prose dramas. The verse style is competent rather than distinguished, with the kind of elevated diction and formal blank verse construction that the genre required but that often felt artificial alongside the more naturalistic dialogue that the better English plays of the 1890s were beginning to develop.

The play is mostly of interest now as a document of the late nineteenth century English engagement with the verse tragedy tradition and as an example of Jones’s range across different dramatic modes. He was one of the most prolific and commercially successful playwrights of his period and produced work in various styles, with the more substantial reputation resting on his social comedies and serious prose dramas rather than on the occasional verse experiments. The play runs about a hundred pages and reads in a single sitting. It pairs naturally with the verse tragedies of his contemporary Stephen Phillips.