Plot
The play does not present events in chronological order; rather, the play features Thoreau remembering earlier parts of his life, not necessarily in the order they occurred. The play opens with Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his old age, recalling the memories of his friend, Henry. The play quickly shifts to Henry's current time in jail because he refused to pay the tax to support the war, where he meets Bailey, a homeless man falsely accused of arson. After meeting Bailey, Thoreau reflects on his recent past. Henry taught Bailey to spell his name by b-a-beanpole-turn the corner-comb-tree.
Henry, who would have graduated from Harvard, but refused to pay the one dollar fee to receive his diploma, becomes a schoolmaster and attempts to teach a class against the school's curriculum, but Deacon Ball, a logical, respected teacher, makes him flog the children, after which he quits. After leaving the school, Henry and John (Henry's brother) start an outdoor school, but soon all of the children are pulled out of classes by concerned parents. Ellen, the sibling of one of the former classmates, went to the school to find out more about Transcendentalism, which her father claimed the school was based on. After the school is disbanded and the children leave, Henry takes her on a boat ride. He tells her about Transcendentalism, and about how he loves her, but it becomes very awkward and he tells her to go to church with John. John is in love with Ellen, and proposes to her, but later Ellen tells him that her father wouldn't allow her to marry either of the Thoreau brothers.
Soon after, John dies from blood poisoning caused by a shaving cut, and Henry tries to cope with the loss.
Read more about this topic: The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)