The four pleasant plays

Előszó

PREFACE
Readers of the discourse with which the preceding volume* commences wi.ll remember that I turnéd my hand to play-writing when a great deal of talk about " the New Drama," followed by the actual establishment of a "New" Theatre (the Independent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that the New Drama, in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination. This was not to be endured. I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse, I manufactured the evidence.
Man is a creature of habit. You cannot write three plays and then stop. Besides, the New movement did not stop. In 1894, Miss Florence Farr, who had already produced Ibsen's Rosmersholm, undertook the management of the Avenue Theatre for a season on the new lines. There were, as available New dramatists, myself, discovered by the Independent Theatre (at my own suggestion); Mr. John Todhunter, who had indeed been discovered before, but whose Black Cat had been one of the Independent's successes; and Mr. W. B. Yeats, a genuine discovery. Mr. Todhunter supplied A Comedy of Sighs: Mr. Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire. I, having nothing but "un-pleasant" plays in my desk, hastily completed a first
attempt at a pleasant one, and called it Arms and the
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* Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant: The Three Unplecisant Plays. (Tauchnitz Edition, vol. 4471.) Vissza