Belasco devoted most of the summer of 1911 to work on William C. De Mille’s play entitled “The Woman,” which he produced for the first time in New York, September 19, that year, at the Republic Theatre: a trial production of that play had been effected, April 17 preceding, at the New National Theatre, Washington, D. C. It is a highly effective melodrama, of the “contemporaneous interest” type, and it implicates twelve persons, nine of whom are germane to its action. It is neat in construction; it skilfully utilizes the invaluable element of suspense, and interest in its progress is cumulative to the dramatic climax. This, in brief, is its story:

A corrupt politician, the Honorable “Jim” Blake, a member of the national legislature, is scheming to get a specious bill enacted into law, whereby over-capitalization of railroad corporations and wholesale swindling of the public can be perpetrated in the guise of legality. Another member of the legislature, the Honorable Matthew Standish, perceptive of the latent iniquity of that measure and of the predatory intent of Blake, has so vigorously opposed the enactment of it and so bitterly assailed its sponsors that Blake and his associates fear to force its passage. They determine, therefore, to divert attention of the people from the opposition of Standish to their corrupt measure and purposed malfeasance by blasting his personal reputation with social scandal. In their effort to do this they ascertain that several years previous the Honorable Matthew, inflexible before Plutus, has succumbed before Venus—has, in short, registered at an hotel with a woman not his wife. The name of that woman is not known to their informant, and it is the despicable task of Blake and his adherents to ascertain her identity in order to ruin his public career by convicting him of private misconduct. That task they attempt to perform by endeavoring to extort from a young woman, Wanda Kelly, the operator in charge of a telephone exchange desk, a telephone number in New York which Standish, in Washington, has called for, immediately after being apprised of the dastardly purpose of Blake and his associates. The identity of the concealed and errant she as Blake’s daughter, the wife of one of his chief supporters, the Honorable Mark Robertson, is deftly discovered to the audience by the device of a second telephone message to her, by her husband, immediately after the close of the warning of impending disclosure by Standish. The sympathetic Miss Kelly resolutely persists in her protective secrecy as to The Woman at the other end of the wire, and the climax is then attained when Standish refuses to be driven from his public duty by the threatened assault on his private character and when Mrs. Robertson, having in an agony of dread listened to the unsuccessful coaxing and badgering of Miss Kelly, with sudden and desperate courage terminates the anxious situation by avowal of her delinquency, thus providing her corrupt parent and spouse with considerably more information than they desire to publish as to the amatory weaknesses of the obdurate Standish. This was the cast with which that play was first presented in New York:

The exceptional success of Belasco’s production of “The Woman” prompted a genius thitherto unknown to fame, a certain inspired and amiable barber of New York, Mr. Abraham Goldknopf, to assert that it was stolen from a sublime drama indited by himself in the intervals of tonsorial exercise and entitled “Tainted Philanthropy.” Belasco, in defending himself against this preposterous claim, resorted to a unique and costly though conclusive expedient. But before describing the trial of Mr. Goldknopf’s allegations, it is convenient here to examine with some particularity the general subject of