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One-Act Plays By Modern Authors By: Various |
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ONE ACT PLAYS BY MODERN AUTHORS
EDITED BY
HELEN LOUISE COHEN, Ph.D.
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 reproduced
in any form, by mimeograph or any other
means, 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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Had not both authors and publishers acted with the greatest
generosity, this collection could not have been made. Though the
editor cannot adequately express her sense of obligation, she wishes
at 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, and Professor
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 Sunwise Turn, for permissions granted
ungrudgingly. Through the courtesy of Mr. T. M. Cleland, director of the Beechwood
Players, the pictures of the Beechwood Theatre appear. Miss Mary W.
Carter, chairman of the Department of English in the High School in
Montclair, New Jersey, contributed the photographs of the Garden
Theatre. Other illustrations appear through the kindness of Theatre
Arts Magazine , and of The Neighborhood Playhouse. The editor is grateful to Mrs. John W. Alexander, Mr. B. Iden Payne,
and Mrs. T. Bernstein for the privilege of personal conferences on the
subject of the book. To Mr. Robert Edmond Jones, who has allowed three
of his designs to be reproduced and who has read and corrected that
part of the Introduction that deals with The New Art of the Theatre,
the editor takes this opportunity of expressing her warm appreciation.
Finally, the editor wishes to thank her friend, Helen Hopkins Crandell
for her indefatigable work on the proofs of this book.
PREFACE
Perhaps the student who is going to read the plays in this collection
may have felt at some time or other a gap between the "classics" that
he was working over in school and the contemporary literature that he
heard commonly discussed, but he does not know that until recently few
books were studied in the high school that were less than half a
century old. Consciousness of the gap often drove him to trashy
reading. He recognized Addison as respectable but remote, and yet he
had no guide to the good literature which the writers of his own day
were producing and which would be especially interesting to him,
because its ideas and language would be more nearly contemporary with
his own. Even though the greatest literature has the quality of universality,
it has been almost invariably my experience that, only as one grows
older, is one quite ready to appreciate this quality. When one is
young, it is easier to enjoy literature written from a point of view
nearer to one's own life and times. Reading good contemporary
literature is likely also to pave the way for a deeper appreciation of
the great masterpieces of all time. This is a collection of one act plays, some of them less than five
years old, chosen both because their appeal seems not to be limited to
the adult audiences for which they were originally written, and
because they may well serve the purpose of introducing the student to
contemporary dramatists of standing. Some of them, it is true, make
use of old stories and traditions, but the treatment is in all cases
modern, if we except the literary fashion that we find in Josephine
Preston Peabody's Fortune and Men's Eyes ... Continue reading book >>
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