FOREWORD
What is wanting in this list the reader will only too soon discover for himself. I do not, however, wish to offer a faltering apology for the incompleteness of the work. In truth, it needs none. Nevertheless, a brief word of explanation may not be amiss.
The duties of the bibliographer are more or less mechanical. He merely collects his data from the most available sources or from arcana known only to a few, arranges his material alphabetically and sends his copy to the printer.
The present list is an exception to the general practice. It will be noted that the bibliographer has broken his traces, forsaken his accustomed field and intruded, in some measure, upon the province of the critic. From the great mass of plays accessible in English I have sought to select only those which I hold best adapted to the little theater as it is to-day constituted. On the whole, they are plays which have encountered a certain measure of success or that I felt to be worthy of production. Rigid care has been taken to exclude such dramatic pieces which are fittingly described as "side-splitting farces." The latter contribute nothing to the art theater. Box and Cox, I doubt not, may be excruciatingly funny, but few would care to hear that Sam Hume, for instance, was about to produce it. Not that genuine laughter hasn't its place in the modern theater; but we cannot laugh to-day at the archaic drolleries of yesterday. We cannot abandon ourselves to papier-maché characterization in the theater. And this is what the art theater accomplished in its brief stay with us.
F. S.