Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected,all other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling has beenmaintained.
ONE-ACT PLAYS
BY
MODERN AUTHORS
EDITED BY
Chairman of the Department of English in the
Washington Irving High School in the
City of New York
Author of "The Ballade"
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproducedin any form, by mimeograph or any othermeans, without permission in writing from the publisher.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.
To
M. S. S.
Had not both authors and publishers acted with the greatestgenerosity, this collection could not have been made. Though theeditor cannot adequately express her sense of obligation, she wishesat least to record explicitly her indebtedness to Mr. Harold Brighouse,Lord Dunsany, Mr. John Galsworthy, Lady Gregory, Mr.Percy MacKaye, Miss Jeannette Marks, Miss Josephine Preston Peabody,Professor Robert Emmons Rogers, Mr. Booth Tarkington, andProfessor Stark Young. The editor also desires to thank Chatto &Windus, Duffield & Company, Gowans & Gray, Ltd., Harper &Brothers, Little, Brown & Company, John W. Luce & Company,G. P. Putnam's Sons, Charles Scribner's Sons, and The SunwiseTurn, for permissions granted ungrudgingly.
Through the courtesy of Mr. T. M. Cleland, director of theBeechwood Players, the pictures of the Beechwood Theatre appear.Miss Mary W. Carter, chairman of the Department of English inthe High School in Montclair, New Jersey, contributed the photographsof the Garden Theatre. Other illustrations appear throughthe kindness of Theatre Arts Magazine, and of The NeighborhoodPlayhouse.
The editor is grateful to Mrs. John W. Alexander, Mr. B. IdenPayne, and Mrs. T. Bernstein for the privilege of personal conferenceson the subject of the book. To Mr. Robert Edmond Jones,who has allowed three of his designs to be reproduced and whohas read and corrected that part of the Introduction that deals withThe New Art of the Theatre, the editor takes this opportunity ofexpressing her warm appreciation. Finally, the editor wishes to thankher friend, Helen Hopkins Crandell for her indefatigable work onthe proofs of this book.
Perhaps the student who is going to read the plays in thiscollection may have felt at some time or other a gap betweenthe "classics" that he was working over in school and thecontemporary literature that he heard commonly discussed, buthe does not know that until recently few books were studiedin the high school that were less than half a century old. Consciousnessof the gap often drove him to trashy reading. Herecognized Addison as respectable but remote, and yet he hadno guide to the good literature which the writers of his ownday were producing and which would be especially interestingto him, because its ideas and language would be more nearlycontemporary with his own.
Even though the greatest literature has the quality of universality,it has been almost invariably my experience that, onlyas one grows older, is one quite ready to appreciate this quality.When one is y