When the UK'sGuardian newspaper featured “La Gioconda” as poem of the week in January 2010, the paper's popular readership discovered what many late-Victorian scholars had known about for some time: the poetic partnership of Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), known as “Michael Field.” The successful recovery of the Fields as significant late-Victorian writers – a project now in its second decade – seems poised to emerge into popular awareness driven as much by interest in their unconventional love affair as by the poetry itself.Footnote ¹ Scholars too have been seduced by the romance of a transgressive love story, and the critical nexus between sexuality and textuality has produced remarkable scholarship on the Fields’ lyric poetry: those texts in which the personas have a rough equivalence with Bradley and Cooper themselves.Footnote ² Yopie Prins first noted the complex engagement of multiple voices with lyric structure in Long Ago (74–111), and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Women Poets 175–95), Jill Ehnenn (73–96), and Hilary Fraser (553–56) expanded on this to uncover the transformation of the lyric's male gaze into a triangulated lesbian vision in Sight and Song (Reference Field1892). In contrast to the recognition accorded their lyric verse, most critics have overlooked Michael Field's verse dramas. While there have been attempts to shift attention onto the plays,Footnote ³ the significance of the Fields’ lesbian vision to the dramas has never been explored. This article seeks to redress this pervasive neglect and begin dismantling the boundaries that have grown up between critical approaches to the lyrics and the plays.

My analysis of Michael Field's early verse drama William Rufus (1885) builds on Fraser's work on visuality and visual hermeneutics in Sight and Song. Fraser argues that Sight and Song – a volume of ekphrastic poems inspired by iconic paintings – continues the project of Long Ago, the Fields’ poetic extension of Sappho's fragments. Fraser highlights the centrality of translation to both texts, and argues convincingly that the lyrics represent “an exploration and articulation of lesbian sexuality in the field of vision” (553). In this article, I contend that the concept of translation found in these lyric volumes is already present in the Fields’ approach to history in William Rufus, and that the translated historical experience can similarly be read as an articulation of lesbian experience through the visual field. As with the lyrics, history in William Rufus is multiply mediated: through Michael Field, and through the figure of Beowulf, the blind narrator. Beowulf's gaze, by which we interpret the world of the play, is both binocular and lesbian in that it is produced by a melding of his body – feminized by its blinding – with the chthonic Earth-mother. It is only through Beowulf's unique visual field that it is possible to see the subterranean (female) lives that lie beneath the conventional historical surface narrative, to interpret the effects of these powerful forces on King William Rufus and his above-ground world of hegemonic masculinity, and more broadly to understand the Fields’ project of de-naturalizing common English history.

Bradley and Cooper adopted the pseudonym “Michael Field” for their first volume of verse dramas, Callirrhoë/Fair Rosamond in 1884. Under this name they published eight volumes of lyric poetry and seventeen historical verse dramas. Other dramas were authored as Arran and Isla Leigh, anonymously, or published posthumously for a total of twenty-seven. Mary Sturgeon's original and unchallenged 1922 categorization of the plays as historical tragedies divides them into three rough thematic periods: English, Latin, and Eastern (118). Sturgeon suggests that the first group includes plays on Scottish and English history (written 1881–1890); that the second group (1892–1903) deals with Roman history; and that a third group (1905–1914) shares “an almost Oriental violence of passion” (198). Sturgeon herself acknowledges this loose grouping is problematic (119), but of more concern than the minutiae of written and publication orders is that this thematic grouping encourages a reading of the plays as “static, cumbersome, and ornate closet dramas” (Madden 63); dry historical recounts rather than unique revisionings. Many of Michael Field's early plays were written, like William Rufus, as Elizabethan five-act dramas in blank verse. I argue that while the choice of archaic genre has tended to damage the reputation of the plays, it can be read as contributing to a more radical project to present a fractured, multi-layered, and multi-visual translation of totalized English history.

The Historical William Rufus: 1066 and just after . . .

While most people are familiar with the Norman Conquest of 1066, few are aware of William the Conqueror's successor, the son who secured the throne of England over the claims of his elder brother, Robert. William II, called the Red or Rufus (probably because of his complexion or red beard) is not an obvious contender for eponymous dramatization. In Edward Freeman's 1882 study, the Reign of William Rufus and the Accession of Henry I – a key source for Michael Field's play – the king is described uninspiringly as:

A brief flurry of scholarly activity on William Rufus in the 1970s and 80s determined that Rufus was a more than adequate (even lucky) warrior and administrator,Footnote ⁴ who given enough time may have developed into “a king of renown” (Barlow 3), and who successfully managed to hold his father's territory together long enough to pass it to his younger brother, Henry I.

In summing up the reign of William Rufus, Frank Barlow, author of a major study of the king, offers only qualified praise. He notes that “Even for his detractors [William Rufus] was a prince who, if he could have corrected his moral faults, would have served as a model for all” (3). Barlow identifies these “moral faults” as an irreligious temperament and homosexuality. Writing in the nineteenth century, Freeman is less direct: William Rufus and his companions are accused of effeminacy in dress, mincing, the introduction of curly-toed shoes, “indulgence in the foulest forms of vice,” and extreme irreligion (1: 147). Later, Freeman identifies William Rufus as practicing the “vices of the East, the special sin . . . the habits of the ancient Greek and the modern Turk” (1: 159). Perhaps it is not surprising that the short, portly, stammering king in curly-toed shoes – bringing to mind nothing so much as an enraged Christmas elf – has proved impervious to historical redemption, and is chiefly remembered, if remembered at all, for the manner of his untimely death.

An 1895 drawing recreates the death of William Rufus, struck down by an arrow while hunting in England's New Forest. A cast iron memorial, the “Rufus Stone”, was erected in 1841 and claims to identify the site of an oak tree from which the fatal arrow rebounded before killing the king (New Forest National Park). Bradley and Cooper saw this monument whilst visiting the New Forest in the early 1880s (Michael Field, Preface to William Rufus). Medieval writers interpreted this death as divine retribution for the king's flamboyant anti-clericalism, and particularly his expulsion from the kingdom of Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Florence of Worcester expands on this, making it a condemnation of William the Conqueror's decision to enclose the New Forest:

This link between Rufus's death and the crime against the people of the forest – a crime against Nature herself – is central to the Fields’ revisioning.

Michael Field's William Rufus

In 1885, riding high on the success of their debut volume, Michael Field published a second book of verse dramas, including William Rufus. There have been no critical examinations of the play, and it is not mentioned in David Moriarty's overview, “‘Michael Field’ and their Male Critics.” The lack of women in the play is almost the sole critical notation upon this much-neglected drama. William Rufus was given several pages in Mary Sturgeon's 1922 study, in which it is described as “a full-dress drama of five acts . . . without a woman character” (136), and it is briefly mentioned in Emma Donoghue's We Are Michael Field where, in addition to its lack of women characters, Beowulf's eloquence and the play's relationship to the Irish Land Question – contemporary political commentary disguised as historical drama – is noted (41).

In the drama, the final days of Rufus are interpreted by the peasant, Beowulf. Rufus and Beowulf are linked together by disability: Beowulf's eyes were put out – a symbolic rape – by Rufus, the “young bull” (II.iii.175) whose masculine rage is articulated through his stammer and seizures. Thus while sexual politics appear absent from the text, they are embodied in Rufus and Beowulf through their disabilities.

While this paper argues that the play is most fruitfully read by attending to what lies beneath the surface of the narrative – the subterranean lives that do not appear in the dramatis personae – nevertheless, given the obscurity of the play, and its subject matter, a brief summary of the storyline is justified. The narrative of the play traces the major historical themes of the life of William Rufus: his amorous relationship with his favourite, Flambard; his campaign to wrest Normandy from Robert; Rufus's controversial relationship with Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury; and his death in the forest. These major historical events are played out alongside, and inflected through, the lives of the Saxon peasants of the New Forest: Beowulf the blind peasant, father to Purkis the charcoal-burner, himself father to Harold the poacher, Leofric the sculptor, and Wilfrith the cleric.

The play opens in the New Forest with the body of the king's nephew, Prince Richard, killed whilst hunting and discovered by Purkis and his sons. Subsequently, the Saxon Godric is displaced from the church at Twynham in favour of the Norman Flambard, who finds it insufficiently grand. News of the attendant uprising against Flambard, and rebellious poaching in the New Forest sends Rufus into an enraged seizure. Thus, the first act sets up societal tensions between Norman and Saxon, and between the peasants who live in the New Forest and the nobles who hunt there. Further, the New Forest is established as a liminal site between the material and supernatural realms as ghosts are seen moving through the forest, and strange, hunting-related deaths subsequently mount. The only nexus between these worlds and interpreter of their interactions is Beowulf himself.

The second act begins with Beowulf mourning the death of his grandson, Harold, executed for poaching. It then turns to the relationship of Rufus and Anselm. Rufus, on his sickbed, promises Anselm to mend his ways, and in turn desires the Italian priest to stay in England and fill the vacant See of Canterbury. Anselm resists but reluctantly agrees, and Rufus on returning to health reneges on his promises. Anselm angers the king by refusing to extort more gold from his peasants and again unsuccessfully seeks to reform the king by exploiting his need for a fortuitous wind to take his fleet to Normandy.

In the third act, Rufus's horse is killed while hunting in the New Forest. He meets Beowulf in the forest and is directed out by Purkis. The king plans to buy Normandy from his brother who wants gold to lead a crusade, and this plan relies upon a significant sum flowing from the Canterbury revenues. Anselm defies the king, rejecting both Rufus and the other corrupt bishops and affirming his allegiance to the Pope. This conflict is extended further in the fourth act, culminating in Anselm's (self-selected) banishment from England.

The final act revolves around Rufus's death in the New Forest. Bad dreams and prophesies portend the death, and the Fields draw from several historical narratives for the events surrounding the fatal hunt: Rufus's reluctance to start early, the banqueting-feast, and the gift of two new arrows to Walter Tirel. In the forest, Tirel shoots the king and flees, as do the king's favourites, Fitz-Hamon and Laigle. The play ends with Purkis and Beowulf taking the body to Winchester in a lowly cart.

Embodying Disability and Gender I: The Feminization of Beowulf

In the opening scene of the play, Beowulf declares his blindness. Later, Purkis reveals the cause: “Old dad, they gouged yours out . . .” (I.i.115), and when Rufus meets Beowulf in the forest, at first taking him for a spectre, he recognizes Beowulf's blinding as an “ancient treason that hath cost thy sight” (III.i.91). Thus, it becomes clear that the blinding of Beowulf was punishment for having broken Norman law. The gouging out of Beowulf's eyes with a hot iron is a penetrative act that feminizes him, a reading that is confirmed by his grandson, Leofric, who describes him as “overgrown/with sorrow, all the faculties shrunk down/to pollard” (I.i.92–93) – a pollard is a deer or other horned animal who has cast his antlers (OED). The perpetrator is never named, and is irrelevant as treason is punished by royal authority: Beowulf's rapist is Rufus. In the forest, the king clearly declares his sovereignty: “I punish here” (I.iv.55).

Beowulf's blinding also ties him to the fate of the forest: not only does Leofric describe his grandfather as “overgrown” but Purkis muses on “the once pleasant uplands of his face” (I.i.212). Through the use of organic imagery, the Fields indicate that the ravaging of Beowulf's body reflects the destruction wrought on the New Forest by the Normans.

Throughout the play, Beowulf has privileged insight into exactly what is to come and why: in his opening monologue, he declares “Nature will never bear it: the fierce earth/Will rend the foreign, sacrilegious hands/As a great mastiff, humble to his lord,/ Is fatal to the fondling wayfarer” (I.i.1–5).Footnote ⁵ Again at the close of the play, Beowulf, acting as Greek chorus, reframes historical events specifically in terms of the all-powerful Earth-mother's revenge upon the Normans for their act of desecration: the enclosure of the New Forest:

Beowulf's recognition of the Earth-mother's primary role in directing human affairs is also accorded paratextual authority by a quotation from Æschylus's Eumenides that prefaces the play: “Proton men euxei teide presbeuo theon/ ten protomantin Gaian,” [“First among the Gods in this prayer I honour/the first prophet, Earth.”] (Æschylus 9). The significance of this quotation was underlined when Edith Cooper, in a letter to Katharine Bradley, wrote: “the Greek motto must be in large type – it is the kernel of the whole matter” (Michael Field, Fowl and Pussycat 134).

However, Beowulf's relationship with the feminine and with Nature is more than mere metaphor. In the first moments of his blindness, Beowulf states he was pierced by a burrowing organic “hope” that “took hold of me,” and that binds him to an older, darker, subterranean female power. It is this link that produces the lesbian visuality that has been noted in the Fields’ lyric poetry.

England: Above and Below

Not only are there no women in the dramatis personae of William Rufus, there are no women in the above-ground world of Norman England – women belong only to the subterranean world of the Earth-mother. In act V, Leofric the architect comes across an old man seeking the unmarked grave of his daughter in the new Norman Church, and offers to make him a headstone. The old man replies:

This represents an absolute division between genders in the play: even the little space occupied by a headstone does not obtrude into the above-ground world. The only living woman mentioned in the play is Flambard's mother who writes to him in hiding from her “dark covert” in France (IV.ii.9). Flambard presents her as a witch, not unlike Tullia in Michael Field's Brutus Ultor (Reference Field1886). Women in the play, like the dead girl in her unmarked grave and Flambard's mother with her evil eye, have no place in Norman England, and are relegated to the supernatural world.

These gendered divisions also apply to the religion of the play. The medieval story surrounding the death of William Rufus is a Christian morality tale in which a monarch is brought low by his failure to respect the laws of God. For Bradley and Cooper, Christianity itself is the late-comer who usurps the land and fails to respect the ancient laws. Beowulf describes the Christian God unflatteringly:

In the above-ground world of men, there is little difference between the secular and the clerical, and this becomes apparent through the Fields’ critique of the materialism of Norman society. Those who wield power in the play, especially the English lords and bishops are invariably self-serving if not also avaricious and materialistic. Vadillo has argued that “Michael Field's use of history responded to a very clear rejection of Materialism” (“Outmoded Dramas” 238), and this is particularly true in the case of William Rufus. Rufus's unbridled lust for possession sets the tone:

Again, Rufus is no exception to the rules and values of Norman society, but rather the very pinnacle of it.

Relations between Church and State are overtly commodified – the Church is merely a lucrative means for gaining possessions, gold, power and self-aggrandizement. In act IV, Rufus and Flambard gloat over how easily it is to convince the bishops to extort money from their own churches:

Later, when Rufus fails in his attempt to use the bishops to leverage Anselm's allegiance, the bishops buy off Rufus's ill-humour with gold, and Rufus attempts to buy the Papal legate's support against Anselm. Indeed, Rufus displays his complete mastery over this commodified world, and his greater claim to its rule, when he declares, “I covet; and defy the great command/To earth's horizon: my rapacity/Knocks at the very gates of Rome itself (III.i.40–42).

The relationship between Rufus and Flambard is also explicitly materialist. Rufus gives Flambard the Priory at Twynham, and Flambard “with a proud and dancing eye,/That inventories all it looks upon” (I.ii.56–57) destroys the ancient priory constructed by the labour of a metaphysical Stranger who sought no payment, in order to replace it with another to modern tastes.

Even the historic disagreement between Rufus and Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, is tainted by commerce. Rufus can buy his brother's lands in Normandy only “if Canterbury yield/ Her due revénues” (III.ii.40–41). While Anselm, the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury, who “would take no further from his lacking churls” (II.iv.32) initially seems above the avarice of King, nobles and bishops, he quickly caves to self-interest and abandons the suffering English peasants. Anselm's desire to return to Italy is consistently represented in terms of his own pleasure: “where comfort, rest,/And light would fall as summer on my grief” (IV.ii.102–23). A citizen comments, “most of us townsfolk [are] in a wonder one of so gentle a disposition as our Lord of Canterbury should grow restless for his pleasure, while people endure the bitter onslaughts of calamity” (IV.iii.16–20). Anselm's comfortable and civilized Italy, a short wander to the halls of Heaven where angels harvest and children are fed a “silver-bleachèd morsel” (II.ii.21) is a betrayal of the New Forest where men are executed for killing deer. Anselm is ultimately reduced to little more than a saintly dilettante.

In the play, the Normans and their Christian church are tied up in their own corruption or narcissism, and completely disinterested in what is happening to the peasants and to England. In contrast to the materialism of the male Christian world is the pagan maternalism of England below, the Earth-mother's realm:

While the men of the Church betray or exploit the peasants of England, the pagan earth is constant and nurturing.

The Earth-mother, as with all women in the drama, is explicitly chthonic – dwelling in or beneath the earth. Men are suckled within the earth (I.i.63) and this idea is repeated and emphasized in act II as Beowulf ponders Harold's executed corpse:

As a chthonic goddess, the Earth-mother is closely related to Demeter. She is a fertility goddess in the preface, which describes the narrative as: “Nature's anger at the destruction of her food-bearing fields for the insolence of pleasure.” The significance of Nature in terms of the fertility of the earth, and the slight offered her by enclosing the New Forest, is then repeated in the first line of the play: “They turn our bread-lands to a pleasant ground” (I.i.1).

Bradley and Cooper's practice of what Camille Cauti has called “a loose neoclassical paganism” (181) is well known. This paganism is predominantly Dionysian in its aspect – the backyard of Bradley and Cooper's house in Richmond, The Paragon, featured a Bacchic altar – and as Yopie Prins has convincingly argued, in their early verse, Michael Field “are interested in reviving the Bacchant in the present” (59). In William Rufus, this paganism is no less fierce, but is articulated in Eleusian terms as a critique of Christianity.

Margot Louis in her excellent book Persphone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality (Reference Louis2009) considers the late Victorian shift from Olympian gods to the chthonic goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Louis traces this shift through the writings of Walter Pater, whose work the Fields were intimately familiar with, and Jane Harrison, who attended Girton college alongside Bradley. Louis argues that implicit in the late-Victorian rejection of the Olympian gods and a corresponding rise in interest in the Eleusian Mysteries is a critique of the transcendent Christian God:

When the materialism and corruption of England above is revealed by Beowulf's doubly mediated field of vision and contrasted to the pagan underworld of England below, it is not difficult to see the play broadly in the terms described by Louis.

Field and Forest: History and Visuality

If Beowulf's binocular vision is an extension of the Fields’ lesbian collaborative gaze, it is tempting to speculate to what extent the spatial metaphors within the play – the untamed pagan forest underlying the enclosed hunting-ground – might be suggestively extended to encompass the “Field” of the joint pseudonym. Is “Michael Field” not only a collaborator but a double agent who is only outwardly confined within the effacing boundary of male singular authorship? Beowulf's unique visuality not only functions within the narrative as a double mediation of historical events within the play, but Beowulf himself is also the site at which the Fields can deploy their own doubly mediated field of vision to deconstruct the truths of common English history.

As argued above, Beowulf occupies a pivotal nexus between worlds: male and female, Christian and pagan. He is a blind man in a seeing world, and arguably a seeing man in a blind world. More than that, Beowulf is an anachronism: he is a Saxon after the Norman Conquest; he is a Greek chorus in an archaic Shakespearian five-act drama; Beowulf's very name intertextually associates him with the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon epic that narrates the adventures of a sixth-century warrior. He is a man bodily, temporally, spatially, even generically “out of time.”

Kate Thomas has argued that the Fields are deliberately “out of time” in the sense that in their poetry, letters, and journals they embrace “a specifically broken, interrupted teleology” (330) in their self-canonizing vision of themselves as unappreciated in the present but celebrated in the future, as reflected in lyrics such as “Prologue.” The Fields’ temporal disorderings, Thomas comments, are significant for queer theorists because

As a “man” out of time and place, Beowulf's anachronistic presence creates an interstitial space through which Michael Field can present both conventional historical narrative and construct an alternate field of vision to represent and reinterpret events.

Freeman's Metanarrative: Finding the Center

Bradley and Cooper's personal letters have revealed a great deal of information regarding the production of their early verse dramas, and it is clear that Michael Field's historical plays were rigorously researched using both primary source material and scholarly work, and frequently by appealing directly to experts.⁷ In the early 1880s, Freeman's recently published account of the life of William Rufus represented the cutting edge of historical scholarship. In William Rufus, the Fields both reproduce Freeman's narrative and fundamentally disrupt the comfortable teleology of a totalized, male-centered English history.

Freeman's history functions within the Fields’ drama as a metanarrative – a mode of totalizing representation by which history is created as a unified, coherent narrative. Linda Hutcheon, working within a very different body of literature, British postmodern fiction, uses the term historiographical metafiction to describe those twentieth-century novels which attempt to de-totalize and de-naturalize history:

While not wishing to claim that William Rufus fits into the postmodern genre of historiographical metafiction, nevertheless, it seems to me that what the Fields are seeking to do in this drama is to create a kind of metafictional self-reflexivity similar to that which Hutcheon finds in later twentieth-century novels.

Hutcheon argues that historiographical metafiction makes obvious the politics of representation inherent in narrating history that is central to historiographic theory. This is achieved by creating a double effect in which “the text's self-reflexivity points in two directions at once, toward the event being represented in the narrative and toward the act of narration itself” (76). This doubleness with regard to history and its relationship with the interpretative historian creates what Hutcheon calls a juxtaposition of “what we think we know of the past (from official archival sources and personal memory) with an alternate representation that foregrounds the postmodern epistemological questioning of the nature of historical knowledge” (71). In this way the text de-naturalizes or de-totalizes the historical events it relates, opening them up to alternate readings by marginalized or “ex-centric” voices, “those relegated to the fringes of the dominant culture – the women, blacks, gays, Native Peoples, and others who have made us aware of the politics of all – not just postmodern – representations” (17).

In William Rufus, the text engages in metafictional self-reflexivity in several ways. Michael Field's preface clearly states, “In the matter of accuracy this play is not to be regarded as a study of the Past.” I have already commented that the Fields deliberately selected an archaic verse form in Elizabethan five-act drama for their early plays, foregrounding the issue of the plays’ form and their overt textuality. But perhaps the most striking way in which history is problematized as a narrative in the play is the character of Eadmer the biographer. Eadmer plays Boswell to Anselm's Johnson; his function is to “write/ The chronicle of your loved destiny,/That walks along the earth;” (II.ii.57–59) explicitly for “future days” (25). There is no sense of objectivity in Eadmer's chronicle of the saintly life of Anselm, rather he performs a dual role as biographer and subservient manservant: “Edmer [sic], my stole is falling; set it right” (III.iii.2). Eadmer is a minor character in the play, a representation of the early chroniclers. At one level his purpose is as sounding board for Anselm to soliloquize upon his relations with the king – but, nevertheless, the relationship between Anselm and Eadmer, and the act of chronicling, highlights the narrative and narrated character of history.

The totalizing metanarrative of a bad king is also fragmented by the subplots within the play in which the effects of the King's decisions unevenly impact the lives of the peasants of the New Forest. These are not always supportive of Freeman's narrative: Harold is executed for poaching deer in the New Forest, but Wilfrith enters the monastery under Flambard and flourishes, while Leofric the artist has the opportunity to carve the New Minster and is rewarded at the end of the play with an even larger commission.

Hutcheon also notes that metafictional historiographies often deliberately use anachronism to de-naturalize temporal relationships (71); that is to say historical figures articulate a kind of presentism in that the ideas and language they espouse frequently belong to the contemporary moment. In William Rufus, Beowulf represents a similar kind of engagement with atemporality – a dislocation that revels in its own queer temporality and functions as a means of articulating an alternate or ex-centric vision. Beowulf's multiple disruptions disturb the politics of representation inherent in Freeman's metanarrative history. Paratextual elements, such as the preface and the introductory quotation, underline the authority of Beowulf's visuality, highlighting the superficial nature of authorized history which fails to apprehend – indeed is blind to – the powerful, pagan, female forces in determining events. The metanarrative is further destabilized by Eadmer and his subservient biography – not only is history de-naturalized as one of a number of possible representations, but its reliance on the act of narration, and on the narrator, is similarly unveiled.

From the start of the recovery of “Michael Field,” boundaries have been set up between their lyric poetry and their verse dramas. The past decade has witnessed remarkable critical scholarship on the lyric verse of Long Ago and Sight and Song, and much of that is influenced by the notion that it is possible to read in the text itself the doublings and re-doublings not only of collaborative authorship, but of lesbian partnership. However, while critics have readily embraced the concept of multiple textual voices and complex fields of vision in the lyrics, to date there have been but few attempts to engage with the verse dramas, and these invariably take a different approach from readings of the lyric texts. While Michael Field is still quite a new area for study, and this goes some way to explain the relatively narrow range of texts subject to rigorous scholarly investigation, nevertheless it is time to question the boundary that divides lyric from verse drama. In this article, I have challenged the prevailing belief that Michael Field's historical dramas are fundamentally different – less generically innovative and less interesting – than their books of lyric poetry. In William Rufus, I have found that Bradley and Cooper, through the figure of Beowulf, reproduce a visuality similar to that performed in the lyric verse. They use this field of vision as a nexus between the worlds of the play, and as a means of translating historical events. Further, Beowulf then becomes a site from which Michael Field can deconstruct the master narrative of English history.