This book is, to all intents and purposes, entirely new. No considerable portion of it has already appeared, although here and there short passages and phrases from articles of bygone years are embedded--indistinguishably, I hope--in the text. I have tried, wherever it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the student may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason, among others, which led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of my illustrations, was that they are the most generally accessible of playwrights.

If the reader should feel that I have been over lavish in the use of footnotes, I have two excuses to allege. The first is that more than half of the following chapters were written on shipboard and in places where I had scarcely any books to refer to; so that a great deal had to be left to subsequent enquiry and revision. The second is that several of my friends, dramatists and others, have been kind enough to read my manuscript, and to suggest valuable afterthoughts.

LONDON

January, 1912

To

Brander Matthews

Guide Philosopher and Friend