The Jewel Merchants: A Comedy in One Act

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Clare Boothby and PG Distributed Proofreaders
The Jewel Merchants A Comedy in One Act
James Branch Cabell
Io non posso ritrar di tutti appieno: pero chi si mi caccia il lungo tema, che molte volte al fatto il dir vieti meno.
NEW YORK 1921
This latest avatar of so many notions which were originally hers.
Prudence urges me here to forestall detection, by conceding that this brief play has no pretension to literary quality. It is a piece in its inception designed for, and in its making swayed by, the requirements of the little theatre stage. The one virtue which anybody anywhere could claim for The Jewel Merchants is the fact that it acts easily and rather effectively.
And candor compels the admission forthwith that the presence of this anchoritic merit in the wilderness is hardly due to me. When circumstances and the Little Theatre League of Richmond combined to bully me into contriving the dramatization of a short story called Balthazar's Daughter , I docilely converted this tale into a one-act play of which you will find hereinafter no sentence. The comedy I wrote is now at one with the lost dramaturgy of Pollio and of Posidippus, and is even less likely ever to be resurrected for mortal auditors.
It read, I still think, well enough: I am certain that, when we came to rehearse, the thing did not act at all, and that its dialogue, whatever its other graces, had the defect of being unspeakable. So at each rehearsal we—by which inclusive pronoun I would embrace the actors and the producing staff at large, and with especial (metaphorical) ardor Miss Louise Burleigh, who directed all—changed here a little, and there a little more; and shifted this bit, and deleted the other, and tried out everybody's suggestions generally, until we got at least the relief of witnessing at each rehearsal a different play. And steadily my manuscript was enriched with interlineations, to and beyond the verge of legibility, as steadily I substituted, for the speeches I had rewritten yesterday, the speeches which the actor (having perfectly in mind the gist but not the phrasing of what was meant) delivered naturally.