Excerpt from The Famous Mrs. Fair, and Other Plays Why print a play? The three plays by Mr. Forbes, collected in this volume, give, it seems to me, a rather conclusive answer. All three of them have been eminently successful on the stage, for which, of course, they were primarily intended, and upon which they must needs be seen, even by those trained to read play manuscripts, in order fully to catch their flavor or respond to their emotional appeals. Yet when they are read in cold print they are seen to vary greatly in merit, and what in the stage success of each one was dependent upon the extraneous elements of an actor's personality, or the rush of living action that permits the spectator no time for pause and reflection, or the passions and idiosyncrasies of the day, becomes suddenly clear. There is no magic in print. The dramatist who writes, indeed, for the page rather than the stage, aspiring to be "literary," is merely courting a very proper disaster. Yet the dramatist whose plot and personages - their speech, their motives, the lesson of their lives - will not stand the calmer and lingering scrutiny of the reflective reader, is only a hack writer, after all. In the high sense, a drama is "literature" not because it can be read with pleasure, but merely because it can endure close and reflective scrutiny. From the failure of our theatre to keep its successful plays in a repertoire, there is no other recourse to the dramatist who challenges such scrutiny - a praiseworthy challenge, surely - but to print his plays. That is why the number of printed plays is a fair indication of the serious ambition of our dramatists. Of the three plays offered here, "The Chorus Lady," no reader will need to be told, can least endure the scrutiny print affords. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.