ated with the fortunes of Sir Squire
Bancroft and his wife, _The Magistrate_ (1885) being an excellent
illustration of the type. The dates are significant in showing the
turning of these skillful playwrights to play-making that was more
serious in the handling of life and more artistic in constructive
values; they are practically synchronous with the introduction of Ibsen
into England. Both authors have now long lists of plays to their credit,
with acknowledged masterpieces among them. Pinero's earlier romantic
style may be seen in the enormously successful _Sweet Lavender_, a style
repeated ten years later in _Trelawney of the Wells_; his more mature
manner being represented in _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, the best of a
number of plays which center in the woman who is a social rebel, the
dramatist's tone being almost austerely grim in carrying the study to
its logical conclusion. For a time Sir Arthur seemed to be preoccupied
with the soiled dove as dramatic inspiration; but so fine a recent play
as _The Thunderbolt_ shows he can get away from it. Jones' latest and
best work as well has a tendency to the serious satiric showing-up of
the failings of prosperous middle-class English society; this, however,
in the main, kept in abeyance to story interest and constructive skill
in its handling: _Mrs. Dane's Defense_, _The Case of Rebellious Susan_,
_The Liars_, _The Rogue's Comedy_, _The Hypocrites_, and _Michael and
His Lost Angel_ stand for admirably able performances in different ways.

At the time when these two dramatists were beginning to produce work
that was to change the English theater Bernard Shaw, after writing
several pieces of fiction, had begun to give his attention to plays so
advanced in technic and teaching that he was forced to wait more than a
decade to get a wide hearing in the theater. His debt to the Norwegian
has been handsomely acknowledged by the Irish dramatist, wit and
philosopher who was to become the most striking phenomenon of the
English theater: with all the differences, an English Ibsen. A little
later, in the early eighteen nineties, another brilliant Irishman, Oscar
Wilde, wrote a number of social comedies whose playing value to-day
testifies to his gift in telling a stage story, while his epigrammatic
wit and literary polish gave them the literary excellence likely to
perpetuate his name. For the comedy of manners, light, easy, elegant,
keen, and with satiric point in its reflection of s