Dorriforth. It would be a small ordeal to resist—if there were anything in them. Look at the novels!
Amicia. The text is the French brochure. The “adaptation” is unprintable.
Dorriforth. That’s where it’s so wrong, It ought at least to be as good as the original.
Auberon. Aren’t there some “rights” to protect—some risk of the play being stolen if it’s published?
Dorriforth. There may be—I don’t know. Doesn’t that only prove how little important we regard the drama as being, and how little seriously we take it, if we won’t even trouble ourselves to bring about decent civil conditions for its existence? What have we to do with the French brochure? how does that help us to represent our own life, our manners, our customs, our ideas, our English types, our English world? Such a field for comedy, for tragedy, for portraiture, for satire, as they all make-such subjects as they would yield! Think of London alone—what a matchless hunting-ground for the satirist—the most magnificent that ever was. If the occasion always produced the man London would have produced an Aristophanes. But somehow it doesn’t.
Florentia. Oh, types and ideas, Aristophanes and satire—!
Dorriforth. I’m too ambitious, you mean? I shall presently show you that I’m not ambitious at all. Everything makes against that—I am only reading the signs.
Auberon. The plays are arranged to be as English as possible: they are altered, they are fitted.
Dorriforth. Fitted? Indeed they are, and to the capacity of infants. They are in too many cases made vulgar, puerile, barbarous. They are neither fish nor flesh, and with all the point that’s left out and all the naïveté that’s put in, they cease to place before us any coherent appeal or any recognizable society.
Auberon. They often make good plays to act, all the same.