Three Plays

A. A. Milne turns wit into a way of seeing, whether he is teasing Shakespeare, skewering social ambition, or laying bare private heartbreak. These plays move from playful self-awareness to sharp domestic comedy and devastating emotional truth, tracing the gap between public reputation and the lives people actually endure. This collection brings together Hamlet, a review, a slyly critical and affectionate take on Shakespeare's tragedy, alongside original works that probe identity, marriage, status, and self-deception. In The Great Broxopp, Milne follows an advertising man's rise from modest Bloomsbury lodgings to a house of celebrity, where a famous baby portrait, a snobbish butler, and a curious newspaper interview expose the absurdities of wealth and publicity. The Dover Road offers a similarly comic tangle of relationships and social awkwardness, while The Truth about Blayds shifts into more serious territory, as Isobel confronts the sacrifices demanded by devotion to a "great poet" and the years of youth, marriage, and motherhood they cost her. Throughout, Milne's dialogue is crisp, ironic, and humane. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.