The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays Part 83

+Edmond Rostand+

CYRANO DE BERGERAC: A great play of a swashbuckling hero of the Paris of Moliere's time.

Doubleday; also in d.i.c.kinson's Contemporary Dramatists, I, Houghton Mifflin.

L'AIGLON: The tragic story of Napoleon's son, the little King of Rome, captive among enemies determined to tame his spirit.

Harper.

THE PRINCESS FAR-AWAY: The story of the Troubadour Rudel and the Princess of Tripoli, celebrated in one of Browning's poems, represents all wors.h.i.+p of what is beyond attainment.

Stokes.

THE ROMANCERS: The foolish and romantic notions of two lovers are ably caricatured by their fathers' plots and stratagems.

Baker, 1906.

+Arthur Schnitzler+

LAST MASKS: A dying man in the Vienna Hospital contrives an opportunity for the cruel stroke he has intended at a man who has succeeded where he himself has failed; at the moment of possible triumph a different mood controls him. There are three excellent studies of character in the play.

In _Anatol and Other Plays_, Boni and Liveright.

+George Bernard Shaw+

ANDROCLES AND THE LION: The old story of a saint whom the lion remembered as his friend--with much shrewd light upon certain types of early Christians.

Constable.

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA: New views of the chief characters, introduced by two interesting scenes--of a garrison in Syria by night and of Cleopatra in the arms of the Sphinx.

In _Three Plays for Puritans_, Constable.

THE MAN OF DESTINY: Napoleon after Lodi, attacking all courses of his dinner simultaneously, drawing maps with his fork dipped in the gravy, and discoursing shrewdly on courage and success.

Constable.

O'FLAHERTY, V.C.: On a recruiting mission in his own country, O'Flaherty must account to his mother for his. .h.i.therto concealed crime of fighting not against, but for England.

In _Heartbreak House_, Constable.

AUGUSTUS DOES HIS BIT: A high-born muddler in Britain's conduct of the war.

_Ibid._

+Arthur s.h.i.+rley+

GRINGOIRE THE BALLAD-MAKER: A translation and adaptation of de Banville's comedy about another poet than Villon in the hands of Louis XI.

Dramatic Publis.h.i.+ng Company.

+Thomas Wood Stevens+

THE NURSERY MAID OF HEAVEN: "Vernon Lee's" eighteenth-century legend of Sister Benvenuta and the Christ-Child, in a simple and effectively dramatic form.

In _Fifty Contemporary One-Act Plays_, Stewart and Kidd.

+Alfred Sutro+

THE MAN ON THE KERB: A workman who has failed in every attempt to get work or help faces starvation with his wife and baby in a London tenement bas.e.m.e.nt. No solution of the problem is offered.

In _Five Little Plays_, Duckworth, London.

A MARRIAGE HAS BEEN ARRANGED: Comedy of a rejected proposal for a society "marriage of convenience," followed by an adjustment of understanding upon another basis.

_Ibid._

+John Millington Synge+

DEIRDRE OF THE SORROWS: A beautiful and poetic dramatization of the tragic Celtic legend of Deirdre and the Sons of Usna. This may well be compared with Yeats's dramatization of the same story.

Luce.

THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD: Rather fearful comedy of the popular idolatry offered by Irish peasants to a man who boasts he has killed his father.

Luce.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN: An awesome husband makes a test of his wife's love.

Luce.

THE TINKER'S WEDDING: Rather boisterous comedy of a tinker-woman who upsets ancient custom by insisting on a church wedding.

Luce.

THE WELL OF THE SAINTS: A gruesome tragedy of a blind beggar and his wife. All these dramas are as strangely filled with beauty and poetry of expression as is the Riders to the Sea.

Luce.

+Rabindranath Tagore+