Play: The Lamp and the Bell

Author and Context
"The Lamp and the Bell" (1921) is a five-act verse drama by Edna St. Vincent Millay, not Margaret Lee Runbeck. Written in heightened, lyrical language and set in a vaguely medieval court, the play uses the trappings of pageant and fairy tale to examine female loyalty and desire under the pressures of dynastic politics and public opinion.

Setting and Premise
At the heart of the play are two highborn women whose bond, pledged in youth, tests the limits of a world organized around marriages of state, male inheritance, and the spectacle of judgment. Millay frames their devotion as a vow, personal, absolute, and luminous, set against the clangor of court life, where rumor, ceremony, and power ring out like a bell that cannot be ignored.

Plot Summary
The opening movements establish the affinity between the women, cast as an unashamed, exalted love that refuses to be diminished by euphemism. They speak in declarations and images, lamps kept burning through the night, eyes that do not look away, while courtiers observe with fascination and unease. The court’s response is not yet punitive, but it is already proprietorial, reading their devotion as something to be harnessed or corrected.

Political necessity intervenes. One woman is pledged in marriage to secure an alliance, a union treated as a public ritual rather than a private choice. Millay stages the wedding as a counterpoint to the earlier vow: opulent, sanctioned, and accompanied by the loud tolling of expectation. The husband’s affection soon curdles into jealousy, not only of a rival person but of a rival kind of loyalty that cannot be commanded by rank or consummation. Advisors and relatives push him toward suspicion, until the private bond is translated, in the vocabulary of the court, into scandal.

Accusation becomes theater. What had been whispered is dragged into view, and the women are pressed to deny, recant, or submit to a display of contrition that would make their love harmless by naming it a childish error. They refuse. Millay gives them speeches whose music elevates defiance into clarity, insisting that what the court calls sin is simply truth without disguise. The price of such insistence is isolation. Interrogations, separations, and a public scene of judgment follow, with the machinery of law and ceremony closing around them like a cage that is also a stage.

The final act brings the competing claims, oath and ordinance, lamp and bell, into a single frame. The husband, unable to master what he cannot define, demands a definitive break. Instead he is offered a choice between maintaining his dominion and recognizing an integrity that does not bow to him. The women choose constancy. Millay does not grant them worldly victory; the consequences are stark, involving banishment, death, or an equivalent erasure from the social order. Yet the play’s last notes do not belong to the court. The image Millay leaves is of a light that endures even as the bell keeps sounding, a private radiance that the public clangor cannot extinguish.

Themes and Style
Millay treats female friendship as serious, erotic, and sacramental, refusing to translate it into either mere companionship or clandestine indulgence. The play critiques the ways institutions convert love into utility, demanding that feeling serve lineage and spectacle. The title’s emblems do double duty: the lamp as inward truth, vigil, and chosen fidelity; the bell as summons, alarm, and the external call of law and custom. The verse is musical and incantatory, with refrains and rhetorical parallelism that make the women’s speeches feel like liturgy against a chorus of political pragmatism.

Significance
Among early twentieth-century American plays, "The Lamp and the Bell" stands out for dramatizing same-sex love between women with gravity and sympathy, and for articulating a feminist ethic of loyalty that refuses the court’s definitions. Its tragedy is not a punishment from the gods but a judgment from society; its enduring gesture is the stubborn light of a promise kept.