CLASSICS STATE

VOLUME ONE

ADAPTED AND EDITED BY

SAMUEL A. ELIOT, JR.

The professional and amateur stage rights of these adaptations are
strictly reserved by the Editor. The fee for amateur productions is
$10 for the first performance and $5 for each succeeding performance.
For royalty for professional performance apply to Samuel A. Eliot, Jr.,
care of Little, Brown, & Co., 34 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.

TYPOGRAPHY BY THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS., U.S.A.
PRESSWORK BY S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, MASS., U.S.A.

PREFACE

HE Little Theater Movement is a fact. It is,

THE
in the minds of many farsighted lovers of the

theater, the most important fact in the theatrical situa-
tion in America to-day. It promises in the end to
replace, in all our larger cities west of the Atlantic
seaboard, the wasteful road-company method and the
equally wasteful stock-company method of providing
serious drama and theatric art to that part of our
people which will not rest content with cheap shows
or moving pictures. No doubt, plays that are ex-
traordinarily well liked in New York will always later
seek the West, and the stock managers will continue to
present, in routine, inadequate fashion, at "popular"
prices, the out-dated attractions of the commercial
stage. But the primarily artistic theater, growing
up in the community because the community needs,
nourishes, and uses it, will more and more meet and
satisfy the demand of drama-loving, art-loving theater-
goers for new, experimental, and beautiful things.

But what drama are these artistic theaters to present, which will mark them at once as shrines apart from the movie house, the road theater, or the stock company? Here admittedly has lain their stumblingblock so far. In answer to their cry for original plays, the American dramatist, though stimulated by numberless prize offers, and splendid chances to try out new ideas in genuine "workshops", has not yet given to the Little Theaters anything great, scarcely anything

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comparable with the best products of the business theater. The Washington Square Players have developed their own genre of saucy comedy, suited to New York but often disliked when presented at other Little Theaters; Stuart Walker has devised his original interludes, and brought forward the foreign genius of Lord Dunsany, in his Portmanteau Theater; the Wisconsin Players and the Provincetown Players have produced a great deal of experimental drama by little-known writers; - of course, there is advance upon, and distinction from, the mercantile farces and melodramas: else the Little Theater Movement could never have moved so quickly, widely, and far. The mere cold fact that it must, for safety,1 give mainly one-act plays, and thereby more plays, is for many of our playwrights a stimulus to initiation and invention which the "legitimate" theater formerly stifled. But every Little Theater director utters still the timeworn plaint of the Broadway managers: Where are my plays?

It is to meet this want, learned through the editor's actual and varied experience, that this series of Little Theater Classics is now begun. Since new plays are so hard to get, and since plays of already tested character now demand substantial royalties less and less easily evaded as the art theaters emerge from privacy, the classic drama becomes a natural resource for an unfrightened director. Some will recoil: Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Sheridan, a dubious Browning, a drab

1 Three or four widely varied playlets in a bill make an obviously broader and safer appeal to a varied audience than one long play could hope to make. Very often a single one-act play has saved a whole production from failure. A long play puts all the director's eggs in one uncertain basket.