A Quarterly Review of Dramatic Literature Editor, THEODORE BALLOU HINCKLEY Advisory and Contributing Editors BRANDER MATTHEWS, Columbia University. THOMAS H. DICKINSON, University of Wisconsin. NATHANIEL W. STEPHENSON, College of Charles ton. GEORGE P. BAKER, Harvard University. RICHARD BURTON, University of Minnesota. STARK YOUNG, University of Texas. S. H. CLARK, University of Chicago. BENEDICT PAPOT, Chautauqua Institution. Entered as second-class matter February 25, 1911, at the postoffice at Chicago, Illinois, under the Act of March 3, 1879. FRANK WEDEKIND, by Frances Fay..... DEPERSONALIZING THE INSTRUMENTS OF THE DRAMA, by Huntley Carter..... 495 A SELECTIVE LIST OF ESSAYS AND BOOKS ABOUT THE THEATRE AND OF The Drama for November will be a notable number. Rabindranath Tagore will contribute an article on the stage that crystallizes much of the present diverse generalization, especially in discussions of stagecraft. Julius Brouta, perhaps the most celebrated drama critic of Spain, will write of the work of Benavente, a brilliant Spanish playwright of today. A puppet play of Benavente, the popular Los Interessos Creados, will be printed in its entirety. The New Stage Art in its Relation to Drama will be considered from a new point of view by Alice Corbin Henderson. The articles begun in the present number, Playing Hamlet as Shakespeare Staged It in 1601, by Charlotte Porter, and The Evolution of the Actor, by Arthur Pollock, will be concluded. In November also will appear what promises to be one of the most important pieces of dramatic poetry ever written in America, Edwin Arlington Robinson's Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford. In beauty of verse, in poetic vision, and in its appreciation of the fine human quality of Shakespeare the poem is a leading feature of the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration. THE DRAMA A Quarterly Review of Dramatic Literature No. 19 August 1915 A Letter from Eugène Brieux to Barrett H. Clark to be used in The Drama and as a preface to a volume of four plays by EMILE AUGIER Monsieur et cher Confrère: As I had occasion to explain to you when you were planning the present volume, I can see among the various reasons for the success which it will achieve, that it is above all a timely book, introducing as it does the work of Emile Augier to the American public at the moment when the evolution of the taste of that public is directed precisely toward that form of dramatic art which is exemplified by the author of Le Gendre de M. Poirier. No longer content merely with dramas of adventure and plays in which sensational incidents and arbitrary development render them close akin to the newspaper serial or the fairy-tale, this public has ceased looking to the theater solely as an amusement, a pleasant recreation and distraction from its daily occupations; it is now interested in more complex problems; it is willing to listen to arguments-a process more taxing possibly than the other, but conse quently only the more fascinating. Avid of progress and bent on the quest of the most recent and most profound manifestations of thought, it cannot fail at this time to be interested in the theater of ideas. Indeed, as the drama of Ibsen has already attracted the attention of this public, it is certain that there existed some other transitional form of dramatic art between that drama and the drama which was first presented in America. Each epoch has its particular way of thinking and its particular plays. Our epoch is that of the social play. The material progress of civilization, reducing the distance and obstacles which hitherto separated nations, has resulted in bringing us closer to each other, arousing our common interests, stimulating those mental and spiritual qualities which unite the Old World with the New. Art is in my opinion only that sympathetic note which we seek in those who not many years ago were total strangers to us. You have made a most wise and careful choice among the works of Emile Augier. Le Gendre de M. Poirier, his most celebrated comedy, together with Le Mariage d'Olympe and Les Fourchambault, set forth and defend principles which cannot but find favor in the United States. Le Gendre de M. Poirier may be compared with an exciting knightly tournament, in which the contestants represent the two forms of nobility: that of the heart or spirit, nobility pure and simple, and that of caste. The first triumphs over the other, yet without crushing it—as is just and fitting. Antoinette Poirier, having succeeded in arousing the enthusiasm and admiration of her husband, the Marquis de Presles, to the point where he renders her the highest possible homage (he acknowledges that |