The Drone A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS ACT I. Scene: The farm kitchen of John Murray. It is large and spacious, with a wide open fire-place to the right. At the back is one door leading to the parlour and other rooms in the house, also a large window overlooking the yard outside. To the left of this window is the door leading into the yard, and near the door an old-fashioned grandfather's clock. Opposite to the fire-place on the left side is another... more...

TO THERIGHT HONOURABLE CHARLES MONTAGUE,ONE OF THE LORDS OF THE TREASURY. Sir,—I heartily wish this play were as perfect as I intended it, that it might be more worthy your acceptance, and that my dedication of it to you might be more becoming that honour and esteem which I, with everybody who is so fortunate as to know you, have for you.  It had your countenance when yet unknown; and now it is made public, it wants your protection.... more...

SCENE 1 SCENE—A room with lighted fire, and a door into the open air, through which one sees, perhaps, the trees of a wood, and these trees should be painted in flat colour upon a gold or diapered sky. The walls are of one colour. The scene should have the effect of missal Painting. MARY, a woman of forty years or so, is grinding a quern. MARY. What can have made the grey hen flutter so? (TEIG, a boy of fourteen, is coming in with turf,... more...

INTRODUCTION The City Bride, by Joseph Harris, is of special interest as the only adaptation from the canon of John Webster to have come upon the stage in the Restoration. Nahum Tate’s Injur’d Love: or, The Cruel Husband is an adaptation of The White Devil, but it was never acted and was not printed until 1707. The City Bride is taken from A Cure for a Cuckold, in which William Rowley and perhaps Thomas Heywood collaborated with... more...

THE FIRST ACT. Debt The scene is a conservatory built and decorated in Moorish style, in the house of the Rt. Hon. Sir Julian Twombley, M.P., Chesterfield Gardens, London. A fountain is playing, and tall palms lend their simple elegance to the elaborate Algerian magnificence of the place. The drawing-rooms are just beyond the curtained entrances. It is a May afternoon. Brooke Twombley, a good-looking but insipid young man of about... more...

THE BIG DRUM   THE FIRST ACT The scene is a room, elegantly decorated, in a flat in South Audley Street. On the right, two windows give a view, through muslin curtains, of the opposite houses. In the wall facing the spectator are two doors, one on the right, the other on the left. The left-hand door opens into the room from a dimly-lighted corridor, the door on the right from the dining-room. Between the doors there is a handsome... more...

PREFACE The Author. 'It is surprising,' says Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, 'how much English Comedy owes to Irishmen.' Nearly fifty years ago Calcraft enumerated eighty-seven Irish dramatists in a by no means exhaustive list, including Congreve, Southerne, Steele, Kelly, Macklin, and Farquhar—the really Irish representative amongst the dramatists of the Restoration, the true prototype of Goldsmith and Sheridan. Thoroughly Irish by birth and... more...

INTRODUCTION The greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age. Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to... more...

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE The first great English poet was the father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse. Chaucer and Spenser were great writers and great men: they shared between them every gift which goes to the making of a poet except the one which alone can make a poet, in the proper sense of the word, great. Neither pathos nor humor nor fancy nor invention will suffice for that: no poet is great as a poet whom no one... more...

ACT I It is noon. In the Underwoods' dining-room a bright fire isburning. On one side of the fireplace are double-doors leadingto the drawing-room, on the other side a door leading to thehall. In the centre of the room a long dining-table without acloth is set out as a Board table. At the head of it, in theChairman's seat, sits JOHN ANTHONY, an old man, big,clean-shaven, and high-coloured, with thick white hair, and thickdark eyebrows. His... more...