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''Exiles'' is a play by James Joyce. It draws on the story of "The Dead", the final short story in Joyce's story collection ''Dubliners'', and was rejected by W. B. Yeats for production by the Abbey Theatre. Its first major London performance was in 1970, when Harold Pinter directed it at the Mermaid Theatre. In terms of both its critical and popular reception, it has proven the least successful of all Joyce's published works – only ''Chamber Music'' runs it close. In making his case for the defence of the play, Padraic Colum conceded: "...critics have recorded their feeling that () has not the enchantment of ''Portrait of the Artist'' nor the richness of (HREF="http://www.kotoba.ne.jp/word/11/Ulysses (novel)" TITLE="Ulysses (novel)">Ulysses'' )... They have noted that ''Exiles'' has the shape of an Ibsen play and have discounted it as being the derivative work of a young admirer of the great Scandinavian dramatist."〔Introduction to the 1979 Panther Books edition of ''Exiles'' with an introduction by Padraic Colum, pp 7–8, ISBN 0-586-04806-5〕 ==Premise== The basic premise of ''Exiles'' involves a love triangle between Richard Rowan (a Dublin writer recently returned from exile in Rome), Bertha (his common law wife) and his old friend Robert Hand (a journalist). (There are obvious parallels to be drawn with Joyce's own life – Joyce and Nora Barnacle lived, unmarried, in Trieste, during the years the fictional Rowans were living in Rome, while Robert Hand is roughly the same age of Joyce's friends Oliver St. John Gogarty and Vincent Cosgrave, and shares some characteristics with them both.) This arrangement is slightly complicated by a second love triangle, involving Rowan, Hand, and Hand's cousin Beatrice Justice. (The fictional Beatrice, who in the play has recovered from a life-threatening illness, is just two years younger than Joyce's cousin Elizabeth Justice, who died in 1912.)〔(Chronology of the events in ''Exiles'' )〕 However, ''Exiles'' is by no means straightforwardly autobiographical. Rowan's complicated relationship with his dead parents is subtly different from that of Joyce: Rowan's mother is characterised by her "hardness of heart", in contrast to the generosity of his "smiling handsome father". This hard-heartedness manifests itself in two significant antipathies towards women in Rowan's life: first towards his childhood friend Beatrice (whom his mother calls "''the black Protestant'', the pervert's daughter"), and second towards Bertha herself, particularly for giving birth to their child out of wedlock: "There were tongues (Dublin ) ready to tell her all, to embitter her withering mind still more against me and Bertha and our godless nameless child." Rowan, Hand and Beatrice have been friends since childhood. Hand and Beatrice became secretly engaged as teenagers, which Hand admits to Rowan some years later, when the two men share a house in their early twenties. Those house-sharing years are remembered by Hand as "wild nights" involving "drinking and blasphemy (Hand )... and drinking and heresy, much worse (Rowan )." On one of those nights, the two friends meet Bertha, who from the very first night chooses to be with Rowan, despite the attentions of Hand. Rowan and Bertha soon elope, and head to exile in Italy. Hand has tried to dissuade them both, suggesting to Rowan that he should go first alone ("to see if what he felt for () was a passing thing") in the hope (as he later admits to Bertha): "that you might turn from him when he had gone and he from you. Then I would have offered you my gift. You know what it was now. The simple common gift that men offer to women. Not the best perhaps. Best or worst-- it would have been yours." Once in exile, Rowan has physical relationships with other women ("grossly and many times") while he continues to live with Bertha. He also begins regularly writing letters to Beatrice, and sends her the chapters of his novel. For her part, Beatrice recovers from a life-threatening illness and begins to feel "a coldness" towards Hand, whom she now regards as "a pale reflection" of Richard Rowan. This is the background of the characters who meet again, in the suburbs of Dublin, on Rowan and Bertha's return from exile in the summer of 1912. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Exiles (play)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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