Copyright, 1922, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. All rights reserved. The professional and amateur stage rights of these adaptations are PUBLISHED MAy, 1922 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA T PREFACE HIS fourth volume of Little Theater Classics reaches out to less familiar fields than have the others. Only one of its four plays is English, and that represents a period, the Restoration, heretofore neglected in this series. In a way it represents also the French classical tragedy of 1630-1830-its unities, its sentiment and decorum - which governed all the stages of Europe in the time of Louis XIV and Louis XV. Hardly anything of that school could be made to live again on our present stage: let All For Love with its strong Shakespearian coloring stand for it and hint at what it would be. The farce by Hans Sachs is sure to be welcomed by those groups that have been staging Patelin, Sganarelle, and The Scheming Lieutenant. It is "sure-fire" amateur stuff, tried out at Smith College only two months ago, and new to our Little Theaters. A few of Sachs' Shrovetide Plays have been translated in a book published in England, and one of them, The Hot Iron, was produced last season at the Vagabond Playhouse in Baltimore; but this version of The Wandering Scholar is entirely independent of that. I must, however, give thanks to Mrs. Penniman of the Vagabond Players for suggesting the play to me. The famous Indian drama, Shakuntala (accent on the kun, pronounced coon), has long been in the editor's plan. It was produced independently in both New York and London in 1919, and often theretofore, 496323 notably at Smith College in 1904. Professor Ryder of the University of California consented to let his translation, published in the Everyman Library, be used as a basis for this version, which is quite distinct from all previous acting editions. If it is an improvement on them, the fact will be soon ascertained; for the play has much charm for amateurs-especially, perhaps, in girls' schools and colleges and is suited to outdoor performance. It is longer than most of our plays have been so many of its stanzas deserve inclusion for their sheer beauty and felicity but the space will not be grudged by those who have tried to read the seven wordy acts of the original and realize how much that was tedious has been here omitted. Newest and most important of the four is the Persian Miracle Play. Very few people have read the bulky volumes in which its original was published, fifty years ago. I had dipped into them and lectured on Persian drama, but had not considered the possibility of making an acting play out of those bombastic dialogues until I noticed that the Stuyvesant Players in New York had produced, last spring, a play by Lester Margon, their director, called The Miracle of the Road the title of one of the scenes in the Persian play. Inquiry brought the manuscript, and it was plain that while Mr. Margon had added considerable of his own, the Persian original had unsuspected picturesque, dramatic, and even religious values. By laboriously rereading and annotating the original (from which comes every word of our version, though no one, I believe, could now trace each to its source) I gradually put together The Martyrdom of Ali, and eagerly await a chance to try it out. Other plays in this series, notably The Duchess of Pavy, which was triumphantly produced at Smith College last fall (along with The Wandering Scholar, and Polyxena from Volume I), have been created by similar painstaking patchwork, architecture with precious fragments of old beams and boards; and the fitting together of Shakespeare and Dryden in the last scene of All For Love in this book is an example marked for any one to scrutinize; but never before were the materials scattered over so many spacious pages. Yet the text, I think, conveys its message and tells a deeply moving story, hallowed by the religious awe and fervor of millions of our fellow beings, and if any one ventures to put it on before I can, may I wish him Godspeed and hope to see his results! There is nothing in this volume to repel the timid, as The Loathed Lover and The Duchess of Pavy and even Ricardo and Viola seem to repel them-for no one sends in royalties for productions of those plays. The consistent Puritan will object to the sentimentalism of All For Love, its sympathy with vice and want of "moral fibre," and may even cavil at the passionate softness, almost lusciousness, of Shakuntala; but all is decorous; there is nothing offensive in either: they are too shallow. Some day, through the bitter profundity of O'Neill and other writers of real, earnest, uncompromising drama for to-day, our public will be trained to stomach the deeper, harsher kinds of classic drama. Meanwhile there is enough, within this series and without it, to furnish forth our Little Theaters with all the pretty costumeplays they want. Here go four, amorous, funny, grand, and strange. January, 1922. SAMUEL A. ELIOT, JR. |