erine complete even idiosyncratically, leaving her politics out of
the question. For example, she wrote bushels of plays. I confess I
have not yet read any of them. The truth is, this play grew out of the
relations which inevitably exist in the theatre between authors and
actors. If the actors have sometimes to use their skill as the author's
puppets rather than in full self-expression, the author has sometimes to
use his skill as the actors' tailor, fitting them with parts written to
display the virtuosity of the performer rather than to solve problems of
life, character, or history. Feats of this kind may tickle an author's
technical vanity; but he is bound on such occasions to admit that the
performer for whom he writes is "the onlie begetter" of his work,
which must be regarded critically as an addition to the debt dramatic
literature owes to the art of acting and its exponents. Those who have
seen Miss Gertrude Kingston play the part of Catherine will have no
difficulty in believing that it was her talent rather than mine that
brought the play into existence. I once recommended Miss Kingston
professionally to play queens. Now in the modern drama there were no
queens for her to play; and as to the older literature of our stage: did
it not provoke the veteran actress in Sir Arthur Pinero's Trelawny of
the Wells to declare that, as parts, queens are not worth a tinker's
oath? Miss Kingston's comment on my suggestion, though more elegantly
worded, was to the same effect; and it ended in my having to make good
my advice by writing Great Catherine. History provided no other queen
capable of standing up to our joint talents.

In composing such bravura pieces, the author limits himself only by the
range of the virtuoso, which by definition far transcends the modesty
of nature. If my Russians seem more Muscovite than any Russian, and
my English people more insular than any Briton, I will not plead, as
I honestly might, that the fiction has yet to be written that can
exaggerate the reality of such subjects; that the apparently outrageous
Patiomkin is but a timidly bowdlerized ghost of the original; and
that Captain Edstaston is no more than a miniature that might hang
appropriately on the walls of nineteen out of twenty English country
houses to this day. An artistic presentment must not condescend to
justify itself by a comparison with crude nature; and I prefer to admit
that in this kind my dramatic personae are, as they sh