Copyright, 1921, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. All rights reserved. The professional and amateur stage rights of these adaptations are strictly reserved by the Editor. The fee for amateur productions is $10 for the first performance and $5 for each succeeding performance. For royalty for professional performance apply to Samuel A. Eliot, Jr., care of Little, Brown, & Co., 34 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass. Published April, 1921 O PREFACE F THE four plays in this third volume of Little Theater Classics, the first, though the latest in date, is the most remote and foreign. The other three together form a kind of unit, epitomizing the naïve spring, blooming summer, and gaudy autumn of the great epoch in English drama that closed with the winter of Puritan prohibition. No playwrights are more truly representative of these three stages than Peele, Shakespeare, and Ford. Before them we place an act from a typically feudal, i.e., medieval, Japanese play, showing that the essentials of drama, in itself and as a reflection of its age, are the same in every land and time. Beginning and closing thus with tragedy, the volume retains that symmetry in variety which we have tried to make a feature of its two predecessors. Like most of the Little Theater Classics, three of these plays have been recently produced and tested. Bushido, in a less direct and terse translation, was done by the Washington Square Players in 1916 and, sometimes under other titles, has been presented by several Little Theaters since. The Old Wife's Tale, unadapted, has been produced at Washington University, St. Louis, in 1916, and at Bryn Mawr College as part of the out-door May-day festivities last spring. And Pericles was acted on Shakespeare's Birthday, 1920, by the Smith College Theater Workshop. The 491099 Duchess of Pavy, in a yet shorter version than the present, was considered by the Washington Square Players and rehearsed at the Cincinnati Art Theater in 1917, but has not yet attained performance. The New York Drama League's Community Theatre Exchange has listed more than a hundred "non-professional producing groups" now active the country over, and receives from them innumerable appeals for plays; so we may hope that these four, heavy as the volume may appear, will fill a real breach. So far as we know, only the concluding farces of the first two volumes have been produced since this series began. There is no farce here. August, 1920. SAMUEL A. ELIOT, JR. |
