THE DEACON'S HAT
BY
JEANNETTE MARKS
The Deacon's Hat is reprinted by special arrangement with Miss Jeannette Marks and with Little, Brown and Company, Boston, the publisher of Three Welsh Plays, from which this play is taken. All rights reserved. For permission to perform address the author in care of the publisher.
Jeannette Marks, well-known essayist, poet, and playwright, was born in 1875 at Chattanooga, Tennessee, but spent her early life in Philadelphia, where her father, the late William Dennis Marks, was professor of dynamics in the University of Pennsylvania and president of the Edison Electric Light Company. She attended school in Dresden, and in 1900 was graduated from Wellesley College. She obtained her master's degree from Wellesley in 1903. Her graduate studies were continued at the Bodleian Library and at the British Museum. Since 1901 she has been on the staff of the English Department at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Her chief courses are Nineteenth Century Poetry and Play-writing.
Miss Marks's interest in Welsh life is the result of her hiking several summers among the Welsh hills and valleys. She became intimately acquainted with Welsh peasant life. It is said that Edward Knobloch, well-known dramatist, on one of her homeward voyages from one of her summer outings in Wales, pointed out to Miss Marks the dramatic possibilities of the material she had thus acquired. Three Welsh Plays was the result. Two of these plays, without the author's knowledge, were entered in 1911 for the Welsh National Theatre prize contest. To her credit, the plays won the prize. The complete volume appeared in 1917.
The Deacon's Hat is a fine study of the life of the common folk of Wales.