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"Don't be too sure, Drexley," Douglas said, smiling. "The public must decide, you know. They may not like it as you do. A first-night audience takes strange whims sometimes." Drexley shook his head. "Disappointed playwrights may tell you so, but don't believe it," he answered. "A London audience as a rule is absolutely infallible. But then such a play as this lays itself open to no two opinions.
Paul and the Royal and the Queen's Chapel, whose companies of choir-boy actors were famous in London and rivaled the players of the regular theaters. These choir masters were our first stage managers. Finally, the regular playwrights, Kyd, Nash, Lyly, Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, brought the English drama to the point where Shakespeare began to experiment upon it.
There were artists, writers, playwrights, singers, actresses, and some nondescript figures of the ultra-social world young men principally who seemed to come here in connection with beautiful young women, models and other girls whose beauty was their only recommendation to consideration. The scene was not without brilliance. A butler and numerous flunkeys fluttered to and fro.
For after all it seems to have been left for modern artists to grow wealthy and live comfortably upon the proceeds of their own relation of the world's despair; if they are playwrights, to live most snugly upon the box-receipts of an entrapped audience unnerved for the struggle of life by their ghastly picture of life's gloom.
It is easy for such people to impart charm in whatever art they practise. And it is not true, as modern novelists and playwrights seem to imagine, that "depth" always implies what is sinister, and that only the surface of life is charming. Let us once again believe in fragrance in art. Summer is as great as winter.
It was no plagiarism from "Midsummer Night's Dream," only drawn from the common stock of playwrights.
And in not a single instance were anecdotes and biographical traits of playwrights recorded, except when the men published matter about themselves, or when they became notorious in some way unconnected with their literary works. Drummond, in Scotland, made brief notes of Ben Jonson's talk; Shakespeare he never met.
Some one probably one of those Frenchmen whose life job it was to make epigrams -once said that there are but two kinds of women: good women, and bad women. Ever since then problem playwrights have been putting that fiction into the mouths of wronged husbands and building their "big scene" around it. But don't you believe it.
A great many of our contemporary playwrights travel like Cook's tourists through the traditional subject-matter of the theatre. They stop off here and there, at this or that eternal situation; but they do not, by imagination, make it real.
As a matter of fact, and in the process of time, I did read somewhat of all these, but rather in the minor than the major way; and I soon went off from them to the study of the modern poets, novelists, and playwrights who interested me so much more.
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