For Love of Peg

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

This play is below the average, such as that is, of current melodrama. The story is sheer idiocy. Hugh, the hero is turned out of his home for being in love with a married woman: nothing comes of this emotion. He goes to Ireland and then learns that his father is dead and has left a will to the effect that Hugh must marry within six months, and must not himself return home until he is a father, but that his wife must come home "for the advent of her first baby". He promptly marries Peg, though he does not love her. She learns this fact with grief but goes home to fulfil the conditions of the will and for no sane reason becomes a servant in the house. The villainess - in league with the villain, proclaims himself as Hugh's wife (Hugh having gone abroad as a soldier) and denounces Peg as an imposter, but Hugh arrives and expose the plot. The villain and villainess remain, however inmates of his home, and in the last scene the latter, after an ineffectual attempt to poison the baby, introduce the villain into Peg's bedroom to compromise her, but after he has talked the recognised villain's talk on such an occasion, Hugh arrives and says he knows his wife is innocent - thus breaking with the tradition of suspicious heroes - and then Peg forgives Hugh for not having loved her before. There is no real harm in this bed-room scene: it is too obviously absurd. But it is undesirable, chiefly in view of precedents, that the heroine should get into bed and spring out of it, or that the villain (though only for purposes of compromise) should take off his coat - v.pp.70-73 - and it might be well to order that the scene should be played without these occurrences: i.e. The heroine, Peg, must not undress or get into bed, and the villain, "Lionel", must not take off his coat. (In pen added 'Script for pages referred to submitted and passed.'  G. S. Street 1 January 1917