The Theater: Newsclips of 1936

CROWN MATRIMONIAL

by ROYCE RYTON

In Crown Matrimonial, British Playwright Royce Ryton qualifies as one of the grounds keepers of history. He rakes up a pile of yellowed 1936 newspaper clippings to reassemble the tale of how Edward VIII abdicated his kingship in order to marry "the woman I love."

At this late date, the yielding up of an imperial crown for the hand of Wallis Warfield Simpson cannot remotely claim the urgency and import that H.L. Mencken once assigned to it when he called it "the greatest story since the Resurrection." Ryton is a slave to the egalitarian fallacy—namely, that under the trappings...