length, its divergence from the characteristic moods of Hauptmann's art,
and that failure of high success which the author himself has implicitly
acknowledged. The arrangement of the volumes follows, with such
modifications as the increase of material has made necessary, the method
used by Hauptmann in the first and hitherto the only collected edition of
his dramas. Five plays are presented here which that edition did not
include, and hence the present collection gives the completest view now
attainable of Hauptmann's activity as a dramatist.

The translation of the plays, seven of which are written entirely in
dialect, offered a problem of unusual difficulty. The easiest solution,
that namely, of rendering the speech of the Silesian peasants or the
Berlin populace into some existing dialect of English, I was forced to
reject at once. A very definite set of associative values would thus have
been gained for the language of Hauptmann's characters, but of values
radically different from those suggested in the original. I found it
necessary, therefore, to invent a dialect near enough to the English of
the common people to convince the reader or spectator, yet not so near to
the usage of any class or locality as to interpose between him and
Hauptmann's characters an Irish or a Cockney, a Southern or a New England
atmosphere. Into this dialect, with which the work of my collaborators
has been made to conform, I have sought to render as justly and as
exactly as possible the intensely idiomatic speech that Hauptmann
employs. In doing this I have had to take occasional liberties with my
text, but I have tried to reduce these to a minimum, and always to make
them serve a closer interpretation of the original shade of thought or
turn of expression. The rendering of the plays written in normal literary
prose or verse needs no such explanation nor the plea for a measure of
critical indulgence which that explanation implies.