PLAY-MAKING

_A Manual of Craftsmanship_

by William Archer


1912




PREFATORY NOTE

This book is, to all intents and purposes, entirely new. No considerable
portion of it has already appeared, although here and there short
passages and phrases from articles of bygone years are embedded
--indistinguishably, I hope--in the text. I have tried, wherever
it was possible, to select my examples from published plays, which the
student may read for himself, and so check my observations. One reason,
among others, which led me to go to Shakespeare and Ibsen for so many of
my illustrations, was that they are the most generally accessible of
playwrights.

If the reader should feel that I have been over lavish in the use of
footnotes, I have two excuses to allege. The first is that more than
half of the following chapters were written on shipboard and in places
where I had scarcely any books to refer to; so that a great deal had to
be left to subsequent enquiry and revision. The second is that several
of my friends, dramatists and others, have been kind enough to read my