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First I would put Montrose J. Moses’s ample works. His Representative British Dramas: Victorian and Modern is not only a complete history of the British stage, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 1914; it presents the complete texts of twenty-one English and Irish plays superbly representative of its century. Representative Continental Dramas: Revolutionary and Transitional does much the same thing for Europe as a whole. Eight European countries are represented in this anthology, which contains the complete texts of fifteen plays, with a general survey of the development of Continental drama and individual bibliographies. But the greatest demand is for anthologies of one-act plays; a demand richly met by the following standard works:
Representative One-Act Plays by American Authors, compiled by Margaret G. Mayorga, contains the complete texts of twenty-four, all of which have been produced in Little Theaters. Among the dramatists included are Percy Mackaye, Stuart Walker, Jeannette Marks, George Middleton, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, and Beulah Marie Dix.
Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays edited by Frank Shay and Pierre Loving, is an international selection of astonishing variety and exceptional merit.
Twenty Contemporary One-Act Plays—American, edited by Frank Shay, is an anthology which affords variety of choice for acting and ample variety for the reader.
Barrett H. Clark’s Representative One-Act Plays by British and Irish Authors contains complete texts of twenty one-act plays. Some of the authors are Pinero, Jones, Arnold Bennett, Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Granville Barker and Lord Dunsany. Mr. Moses is the compiler of Representative One-Act Plays by Continental Authors. Maeterlinck, Arthur Schnitzler, Strindberg, Andreyev, Franz Wedekind, Sudermann, von Hofmannsthal, Lavedan are some of the playwrights whose work is included; and the book is equipped with bibliographies.
Frank Shay is the compiler of Twenty-Five Short Plays: International, in which is much exotic work—plays from Bengal and Burma, China and Japan and Uruguay, as well as from countries with whose drama we have more contact. But as an example of Mr. Shay’s selections we may note, from among the writers whose work is fairly familiar, that Austria is represented by a Schnitzler piece, Italy by one of Robert Bracco’s comedies, Hungary by Lajos Biro’s “The Bridegroom,” Russia by an example of Chekhov and Spain by Echegaray.
I may at this point advantageously call attention to Mr. Shay’s One Thousand and One Plays for the Little Theatre, and his new One Thousand and One Longer Plays—not anthologies, but exhaustive lists. The plays are listed alphabetically by authors and by organizations, and the title, nature of the work, number of men and women characters, publisher, and price of each play is given.
Certain other books, though offering a number of one-act plays, have too few inclusions to be described as anthologies. Such are One-Act Plays from the Yiddish, translated by Etta Block and presenting half a dozen effective pieces; Three Modern Japanese Plays, translated by Yozan T. Iwasaki and Glenn Hughes, and showing the direct result of Western influences on the Japanese theatre; and Double Demon and Other One-Act Plays, by A. P. Herbert and others, one of the British Drama League series.
Colin Campbell Clements, whose Plays for a Folding Theatre is known to most amateurs, has a new book this season called Plays for Pagans, containing five entertaining short plays, all easy of stage production. Another such group is to be found in Garden Varieties, by Kenyon Nicholson, six plays, most of them farcical and amusing.
Certain other one-act plays I shall speak of later in this chapter. But the record of excellent anthologies is not yet completed. A Treasury of Plays for Children, by Mr. Moses, provides fourteen dramas with the abundance of incident and action which young people demand but with considerable literary merit besides. Mr. Shay, again, is the compiler of A Treasury of Plays for Women, eighteen in all, requiring only women to cast or containing only such male characters as may easily be enacted by women; and also of A Treasury of Plays for Men, twenty-one altogether, which men may stage without feminine help. A Treasury of Plays for Men also offers a working library list for the Little Theater and a bibliography of other anthologies.