Antic Hay

Antic Hay is a satirical masterpiece which takes its title from one of Marlowe's couplets:

My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay.

The place and the period of the story is in London in the years immediately after 1914-18 war, years of disillusion and excess in which old values were submerged in a tidal wave of cynicism. They live a crazy life, these artists adrift, intellectuals who have lost heir bearings, and woman who try to forget their griefs in the pursuit of a good time. Huxley has drawn these rakes and escapists with such precision and colour that some of his critics were misled into the assumption that he approved their attitude to life....