Thus
and not otherwise occurred that remarkable revival of the British
drama at the beginning of the century which made my own career as
a playwright possible in England. In America I had already
established myself, not as part of the ordinary theatre system,
but in association with the exceptional genius of Richard
Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no difficulty: the system
of publicly aided theatres there, Court and Municipal, kept drama
of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted to the
Emperor of Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a
time when the sole official attention paid me by the British
Courts was the announcement to the English-speaking world that
certain plays of mine were unfit for public performance, a
substantial set-off against this being that the British Court, in
the course of its private playgoing, paid no regard to the bad
character given me by the chief officer of its household.
Howbeit, the fact that my plays effected a lodgment on the London
stage, and were presently followed by the plays of Granville
Barker, Gilbert Murray, John Masefield, St. John Hankin, Lawrence
Housman, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Drinkwater, and
others which would in the nineteenth century have stood rather
less chance of production at a London theatre than the Dialogues
of Plato, not to mention revivals of the ancient Athenian drama
and a restoration to the stage of Shakespeare's plays as he wrote
them, was made economically possible solely by a supply of
theatres which could hold nearly twice as much money as it cost
to rent and maintain them.
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