Pompey in the Parlor

I was rather disappointed by John Masefield's The Tragedy of Pompey the Great. C.S. Lewis liked it (in 1922) and D.L. Page (in 1928) won the Gaisford Prize at Oxford for a translation of Act 2 Scene 1. It lacks a sense of grandeur and it is dated by its British chumminess in vocabulary (e.g. "Look. Man."). The first two acts read as though set in a sitting room with many pregnant pauses rather than words of merit.