its effect at certain moments on the way
in which the stage is lighted may have his play sent suddenly to failure at
any of those moments if the stage-electrician turns the lights
incongruously high or low. These instances are merely trivial, but they
serve to emphasise the point that so much stands between the dramatist and
the audience that it is sometimes difficult even for a careful critic to
appreciate exactly what the dramatist intended.

And the general public, at least in present-day America, never makes the
effort to distinguish the intention of the dramatist from the
interpretation it receives from the actors and (to a less extent) the
stage-director. The people who support the theatre see and estimate the
work of the interpretative artists only; they do not see in itself and
estimate for its own sake the work of the creative artist whose imaginings
are being represented well or badly. The public in America goes to see
actors; it seldom goes to see a play. If the average theatre-goer has liked
a leading actor in one piece, he will go to see that actor in the next
piece in which he is advertised to appear. But very, very rarely will he go
to see a new play by a certain author merely because he has liked the last
play by the same author. Indeed, the chances are that he will not even know
that the two plays have been written by the same dramatist. Bronson Howard
once told me that he was very sure that not more than one person in ten out
of all the people who had seen _Shenandoah_ knew who wrote the play. And I
hardly think that a larger proportion of the people who have seen both Mr.
Willard in _The Professor's Love Story_ and Miss Barrymore in
_Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire_ could tell you, if you should ask them, that the
former play was written by the author of the latter. How many people who
remember vividly Sir Henry Irving's performance of _The Story of Waterloo_
could tell you who wrote the little piece? If you should ask them who wrote
the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, they would answer you at once. Yet
_The Story of Waterloo_ was written by the author of those same detective
stories.

The general public seldom knows, and almost never cares, who wrote a play.
What it knows, and what it cares about primarily, is who is acting in it.
Shakespearean dramas are the only plays that the public will go to see for
the author's sake alone, regardless of the actors. It will go to see a bad
performance of a play by Sha