‘There is another way, if you could hit on't’

The Scornful Lady was presented by Birmingham’s amateur Pilgrim Players in 1909–1910, while a condensed version of The Humorous Lieutenant formed a prominent part of the 1918 Pageant of Drury Lane Theatre. Despite the plays’ contrasting genres, they are linked by their explicit promotion of alternative behaviours, in relation to sexual, social and military ethics, and portray characters and relationships of greater complexity than has previously been recognized. In the early twentieth century, however, they again presented problems to practitioners owing to their sexually explicit bawdy – something that proves helpful in attempting to reconstruct an outline of Louis Napoleon Parker’s Pageant version of The Humorous Lieutenant from the available evidence.