The Princess Marries the Page: A Play in One Act

xii, 50 [1] pp. Color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations by J. Paget-Fredericks. Structured in verse and filled with fairy-tale language, it portrays a Princess in her tower whose reading is interrupted by a Page playing a song on his silver pipe. When he refuses to stop playing on her command, she becomes intrigued and is quickly attracted to him. While beginning to fall in love with her as well, the Page confesses that he is really the son of their enemy monarch and had come to ruin her father. When her father, the King, comes to her, questioning if she has seen the spy posing as a page, she lies and says no, but the Page jumps out of hiding so as to not let her perjure herself. He reveals his true identity, but also reveals he has purposefully failed in his spying mission by one day. The King informs him his father has died the day before. Because of his honesty, The King acknowledges the desire of the “Page” to be with his daughter. Edna St. Vincent Millay (February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950) was an American lyrical poet and playwright. Encouraged to read the classics at home, she was too rebellious to make a success of formal education, but she won poetry prizes from an early age, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and went on to use verse as a medium for her feminist activism. She also wrote verse-dramas and a highly-praised opera, The King's Henchman. Her novels appeared under the name Nancy Boyd, and she refused lucrative offers to publish them under her own name. Millay was a prominent social figure of New York City's Greenwich Village just as it was becoming known as a bohemian writer's colony, and she was noted for her uninhibited lifestyle, forming many passing relationships with both men and women. She was also a social and political activist and those relationships included prominent anti-war activists including Floyd Dell, editor of the radical magazine The Masses, and perhaps John Reed. She became a prominent feminist of her time; her poetry and her example, both subversive, inspired a generation of American women. Her career as a poet was meteoric. In 1923 she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer prize in poetry. She became a performance artist super-star, reading her poetry to rapt audiences across the country. [1] A road accident in middle-age left her a partial invalid and morphine-dependent for years. Yet near the end of her life, she wrote some of her greatest poetry.--Wikipedia