notable dramatists are Edward Sheldon whose Romance, with Doris Keane in the principal part, was extraordinarily successful in England; George Broadhurst h'.s Bought and Paid For was described by Arnold Bennett as one of the best commercial plays he had ever seen; David Belasco; the late Clyde Fitch; Langdon Mitchell, the author of a brilliant comedy, The New York Idea; Augustus Thomas, whose The Witching Hour, The Harvest Moon, As a Man Thinks and The Other Girl are plays of uncommon quality; the late Charles Klein; Eugene Walter, author of two particularly able realistic plays, Paid in Full and The Easiest Way; Channing Pollock; A. E. Thomas; Booth Tarkington who, more popularly known as a novelist, achieved remarkable success in 1920 with a light comedy called Clarence; Zoe Akins;and Susan Glaspell. The condition of the theatre in America at the end of the decade 1910-20 was more hopeful than that in England because of the greater gen- eral interest in meritable plays and of the noticeable desire, especially in New York, to support original enterprises.
The standard of acting in America so far as actresses are con- cerned, is higher than in England, but there is more all-round efficiency among English actors than there is among American actors. The latter excel in character-parts a very admirable instance of this is the case of Frank Bacon in his own play Lightnin' but are less capable in what are known as " straight " parts. With the exception of John Drew there are few American actors who can interpret characters such as were acted by Sir George Alexander. It is very difficult to discover either actors or actresses in America who can speak verse. These flaws in technique are remediable, however, and are slowly being rectified. One result of the war was to cause a distinct decline in the quality of acting among young players in England, and it is probably true to say that there was less acting ability among the younger members of the English theatrical profession at the end of 1920 than at any other period in the history of the English theatre. In America, on the contrary, there was a marked growth in technical skill among young actors and actresses.
GERMANY
In 1910, the condition of the drama in Germany was very curious declining in Berlin, but flourishing in the provinces. Metropolitan taste was fickle and vulgar; provincial taste was steadfast and of high quality. The result of this odd reversal of customary positions was that the German provinces absorbed almost the whole of the interest of dramatic students. More experiments were made out- side Berlin than were made inside it, not only in the quality of the plays performed, but also in the methods of production and in the interior economy of the theatre. Volksbiihnen (people's theatres) were organized in many places, at which performances of classical and modern pieces were given at very moderate prices. The two Freien Volksbiihnen of Berlin, which were typical in most respects of all the other people's theatres, had between them a membership of 60,000 persons, of whom a considerable number were working- men. These Freien Volksbiihnen contracted with various theatre- managers for the performance of specified plays for their members, and the larger of the two, Die Neue Freie Volksbiihne, was spending 25,000 per annum in 1910 on plays produced at 1 1 different theatres. This society even started a building fund, which in that year had reached 5,000, for the purpose of establishing a theatre of its own, to hold 2,000 persons. The members of this society paid one shilling for each performance witnessed, and seats were allotted by ballot. A similar society, with a membership of '9,000 persons, existed in Vienna, under the direction of Stefan Grossmann, a dramatist. The Cologne Stadt-theater organized performances on lines similar to those of the Volksbiihnen, on Sunday afternoons before audiences drawn from workmen's societies which were allowed to nominate the play to be produced. In 1909, the trade unions of Cologne chose Galsworthy's Strife for performance, and this play was received with enormous enthusiasm. A Deutsches Volkstheater was in process of erection in 1909. Each subscriber to this society was to be admitted to one performance per week in a season of 40 weeks and to receive a theatrical paper, delivered free of charge, together with free ad- mission to a number of lectures, for an annual subscription of 20 shillings! The number of Stadtbund theatres was increasing re- markably, and certain towns either subsidized or completely owned the local theatre. The following is a record of sums paid by German cities and towns for their own theatres: Cologne, 25,000; Frank- fort, 13,000; Barmen, 6,000; Dortmund, 6,000; Essen, 4,000; Elberfeld, 4,000; Aachen, 3,500; Breslau, 3,000; Diisseldorf, 2,500; Magdeburg, 2,500; Kattowitz, 1,000; Thorn, 1,000.
The two great German dramatists, Gerhart Hauptmann and Her- mann Sudermann, had reached the apex of their powers in 1910 and were beginning to yield place to new men, of whom the chief were Frank Wedekind, Arthur Schnitzler (an Austrian and, like Somerset Maugham and H. M. Harwood in England, a doctor of medicine) and Hermann Bahr. Problem and " tendency " plays were prolifically produced, and the drama of intellectual concepts rather than the drama of human emotions seemed to predominate. Just before the outbreak of the World War, a number of allegorical plays were being performed, such as Haus am Meer by Stefan Zweig and Mutter and Gelebtes Leben by W. von Molo. But, apart from the extraordinarily experimental character of much of German drama
and stage production during this time, the general range of theatrical entertainments was very catholic, extending from harshly realistic plays of the soil, such as Sudermann's Strandkinder, to purely poetic plays, such as Medusa, by a young dramatist of promise, Hans Kyser. In addition to the very diverse quality of native drama, the German theatre produced many foreign plays, equally diverse in character, ranging from Shaw's plays to plays by Jerome K. Jerome. Ibsen, Bjornson and Strindberg (who died in 1912) had much pop- ularity in Germany, and so had many French dramatists, but none of them had greater popularity than Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Gals- worthy. Other English writers, Maugham, Sir James Barrie, Sutro, Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock, Monckton Hoffe, H. H. Da vies, Sir Arthur Pinero, W. J. Locke and L. N. Parker, were freely and extensively admitted to the German theatre. Shakespeare, of course, had long been a popular author in Germany and this popularity did not decline during the war.
Hauptmann, who received the Nobel prize on his fiftieth birthday in 1912, was fairly prolific during the five years preceding the war. Griselda, founded on Boccaccio's legend, was produced in 1909, and was followed in 1911 by Die Ratten (The Rats). Gabriel Schillings Flucht (The Escape of Gabriel Schilling) was produced in 1912. and in 1913 came the famous Festival Play commissioned by the city of Breslau to celebrate the war against Napoleon for freedom. This play was produced by Reinhardt in the new rotunda of the Breslau Centenary Exhibition, and its democratic sentiments were so displeasing to the Junkers that it provoked a great uproar. The then Crown Prince threatened to cancel his patronage of the exhibition unless the play were withdrawn which was done. Another play, entitled Der Bogenspanner Odysseus (Odysseus the Archer), was written in 1913.
Hermann Sudermann was less prolific than Hauptmann. His Strandkinder, a play about people living on the shores of the Baltic Sea, was produced in 1909. This play had considerable affinity with the work of a dramatist who died in 1909, Ernst von Wildenbruch, two of whose plays. Lieder des Euripides and Der Deutsche Konig, were performed, after his death, in that year. Strandkinder was fol- lowed by an historical niece, entitled Der Blinde von Syracus in 1911 and Der Cute Ruf in 1913.
The ascending dramatists, Bahr, Wedekind and Schnitzler, pro- duced many plays in the first half of the decade, as did another well- known, but peculiar and unsuccessful dramatist, Herbert Eulen- berg. Bahr, whose gift is for human comedy, is known abroad by Das Konzert (The Concert) which was not notably successful in London, but was very popular in America as well as in Germany. Another play, Kinder, was produced simultaneously in 20 different German theatres in 1910. It was followed by Das Prinzip and Das Tanzchen in 1912 and by Phantom in 1913. Frank Wedekind, a dramatist of queer, undisciplined genius, was by far the most prolific of all the dramatists in Germany during the period under review and probably of all the dramatists in Europe. He produced nine plays in five years, four of which, indeed, were in one act. The plays were Die Junge Welt, Die Zensur (one act), Der Liebestrank, Die Buchse der Pandora, and three one-act plays, In Allen Satteln Gerecht, Mil Allen Hunden Gehetzt and In Allen Wassern Gewaschen, which were combined in 1911 under the general title of Schloss Wetterstein and issued with the statement that they contained his views " on the inner necessity on which Marriage and the Family rest." These plays were followed by Der Stein der Weisen and Franziska, the latter, prohibited by the censor in Vienna, being produced in Munich. Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese, known in England through the Anatol playj, translated by Granville-Barker, and Der griine Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo), had four plays per- formed in the first five years of the decade, Komtesse Mizzi, Der junge Medardus (which took five hours to perform), Das Weite Land and Professor Bernhardi, the latter of which was forbidden in Vienna. Herbert Eulenberg was responsible for six plays, Der naturliche Vater, Anna Wolewska, Samson (his most popular piece), Attes um Geld, Alles um Liebe, Belinde (which won the Volksschiller prize), Zeitw inde and a one-act play, Paul und Paula. Hans Kyser, in addition to the play already named, produced Titus und die Judin and Erziehung zur Liebe.
The list of meritable German dramatists is a very long one. It includes men such as Paul Ernst, Hans Franck, Otto Harnack, Carl Schonherr, whose Volksstiick (" people's play ") Glaube und Heimat was performed in more than a thousand theatres in six months, Edward Stucken, Max Halbe, Ludwig Fulda, Ludwig Thoma, Franz Dulberg, Leo Birinski, Reinhard Sorge and Arno Holz. The records of the German theatre during the war indicate that a better standard of play was maintained there than elsewhere. Since the signing of the Armistice a new group of dramatists has arisen, of whom Georg Kaiser is known in England, because of the performance of his play Von Morgens bis Mitternacht (From Morn to Midnight) before the Stage Society in 1919. He experiments with new dramatic forms, but his work hardly merits the extravagant claims made for it. In addition to the play named, he has written others, of which the most meritable are Die Burger von Calais (Burghers of Calais) and Die Koralle (The Coral). A violence of sex-interest has been mani- fested in much of the post-war German drama, and this was most plainly to be detected in Schnitzler's Reigen (The Chain).
Perhaps the most interesting figure in the German theatre since the signing of the Armistice has been Max Reinhardt, who derives,
