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Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, as Irish plays go, is a fine specimen; Canon Hannay has written two successful comedies, Eleanor's Enterprise and General John Regan the latter not wholly to the taste of the people of the west. James Stephens and Jane Barlow have also tried their hands at playwriting, with but moderate success.
He found books of criticism on plays and playwriting, and he mastered them. He found books that told how to construct plays, and he mastered them. Frank Merriwell was a person with a vivid imagination and great mechanical and constructive ability. Had this not been so, he might have studied forever and still never been able to write a successful play.
The masterpieces of Lope and Calderon, which inspired all subsequent playwriting in Europe, have sunk almost utterly into oblivion. The stage is flooded with the washings of the Boulevards. Bad as the translations are, the imitations are worse.
Ben Jonson was in turn a soldier, a poet, a bricklayer, an actor, and ultimately the first poet laureate. Lodge, after leaving Oxford, passed through the various professions of soldiering, medicine, playwriting, and fiction, and he wrote his novel Rosalind, on which Shakespeare based As You Like It while he was sailing on a piratical venture on the Spanish Main.
You can all of you stare at a famous man; but you haven't an atom of respect for his fame. If Shakspeare came to life again, and talked of playwriting, the first pretentious nobody who sat opposite at dinner would differ with him as composedly as he might differ with you and me. Veneration is dead among us; the present age has buried it, without a stone to mark the place. So much for that!
That actor's personality is a part of the playwright's material. Playwriting, it has been well said, is an art of preparing. The principal actor is one of the things for which we must be artfully prepared. The audience must first be wrought on, wrought up. Had Shakespeare been also Burbage, it is possible that he would have been even more painstaking than he was in leading up to the leading man.
And in half a dozen words she had exposed the lack of real wit in my attempts at playwriting. I was humbled before her superior intelligence. Her speech had still a faint flavour of the uneducated, but her judgments were brilliantly incisive; despite her inferentially limited experience, she had a clearer sight of humanity than I had. "You needn't look so depressed," she remarked.
King Rama's literary efforts have not been confined to playwriting, however, for his book on the wars of the Polish Succession is one of the standard authorities on the subject. If you go to Siam expecting to see an Oriental potentate such as you have read about in novels, His Majesty, Rama VI, is bound to prove very disappointing.
It was Jefferson's performance of the title rôle which gave vitality to the play. Of course, there are few actors who have this power, few great actors. What else could you expect? A critic might prove that playwriting was not an art on the majority of the evidence. Almost all the music composed in America could be piled up to prove that music was not an art.
Although it was several years after this that my brother's first long play was produced he never lost interest in the craft of playwriting, and only waited for the time and means to really devote himself to it. BOSTON, January 22nd, 1891.
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