eare, who was very scrupulous
about the publication of his sonnets and his narrative poems, printed a
carefully edited text of his plays only when he was forced, in
self-defense, to do so, by the prior appearance of corrupt and pirated
editions; and we owe our present knowledge of several of his dramas merely
to the business acumen of two actors who, seven years after his death,
conceived the practical idea that they might turn an easy penny by printing
and offering for sale the text of several popular plays which the public
had already seen performed. Sardou, who, like most French dramatists, began
by publishing his plays, carefully withheld from print the master-efforts
of his prime; and even such dramatists as habitually print their plays
prefer nearly always to have them seen first and read only afterwards.

In elucidation of what might otherwise seem perversity on the part of great
dramatic authors like Shakespeare, we must remember that the
master-dramatists have nearly always been men of the theatre rather than
men of letters, and therefore naturally more avid of immediate success with
a contemporary audience than of posthumous success with a posterity of
readers. Shakespeare and Moliere were actors and theatre-managers, and
devised their plays primarily for the patrons of the Globe and the Palais
Royal. Ibsen, who is often taken as a type of the literary dramatist,
derived his early training mainly from the profession of the theatre and
hardly at all from the profession of letters. For half a dozen years,
during the formative period of his twenties, he acted as producing manager
of the National Theatre in Bergen, and learned the tricks of his trade from
studying the masterpieces of contemporary drama, mainly of the French
school. In his own work, he began, in such pieces as _Lady Inger of
Ostrat_, by imitating and applying the formulas of Scribe and the earlier
Sardou; and it was only after many years that he marched forward to a
technique entirely his own. Both Sir Arthur Wing Pinero and Mr. Stephen
Phillips began their theatrical career as actors. On the other hand, men of
letters who have written works primarily to be read have almost never
succeeded as dramatists. In England, during the nineteenth century, the
following great poets all tried their hands at plays--Scott, Southey,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning, Mrs. Browning,
Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and Tennyson--and not one of them p