In writing this preface, my purpose is not to conduct a futile investigation to determine whether I have written a good play or a bad one. It is too late for that. Rather, it is scrupulously to subject it to examination (and I should do this under any circumstances), in order to discover whether I have written a blameworthy piece of work.

Since no one is obliged to write a comedy in strict imitation of other comedies, if I have strayed from the well beaten path for reasons I felt to be sound ones, am I to be judged, as the Messrs. so & so have judged me, by rules which are not my rules? Or, as they fatuously proclaim in print, for taking art back to its infancy, because I am attempting to blaze a new trail for that art whose first, perhaps whose only law, is to entertain while instructing? But that is not the question.

Lorenzaccio, published in 1834, was revised by Alfred de Musset for the 1853 edition. This final text is reproduced by Paul Dimoff in his La Genèse de Lorenzaccio (1936) together with those passages of Benedetto Varchi's Storia fiorentina which were used by Georges Sand for her Une conspiration en 1537 as well as by Musset, who amply availed himself not only of Varchi's chronicles but also of Sand's brief play.

The play has five acts, each of which is divided into six to eleven scenes. Very seldom do the individual scenes of any act occur in the same setting. This complete disregard for the unity of place produces the effect of a constantly changing panorama of early sixteenth-century Florence, wherein glimpses of the seemingly unrelated actions of a great number of characters gradually merge into an integrated impression which creates a mood, an atmosphere. The technique anticipates the more recent impressionistic concern for apparently fleeting or accidental phenomena.

That once flourishing but now moribund institution, the road, has had a long and frequently exciting past. It can be traced back at least 200 years to the time when the Old American Company toured its repertory up and down the East Coast. As the country grew and the road expanded, the problems of booking became increasingly complex. By the middle of the nineteenth century, actors arid managers of attractions were finding it almost impossible to book a road season adequately, since they were forced to deal individually with the multitude of local theatre managers across the country. The local managers were finding it equally difficult to book their theatres profitably, since they had to book each attraction separately. The resultant confusion grew to the point of chaos, particularly among the many one-night stands.

An hour before the departure of the train, a pater familias staying at a summer cottage walks into a friend's house, holding in his hands a glass lamp globe, a toy bicycle, and a child's coffin, and sinks down on the couch, completely exhausted.

“My dear fellow,” he mumbles, out of breath, and senselessly rolling his eyes, “I'd like to ask you a favor. I beg you, lend me your revolver until tomorrow. Be a friend.”

“What do you need a revolver for?”

“I do need it… Oh, Lord! Give me some water. Quickly, some water—I need it. At night I have to drive through dark woods— so, in case anything happens—lend it to me, be so kind.”

The friend looks at the pale, exhausted face of the pater familias, at his perspiring forehead and mad eyes, and shrugs his shoulders.

The soil from which art will grow is ever unpredictable and its discovery after the fact often suggests that caprice, rather than mind or nature, governs the relation. Why Dublin?—one would like to know. The question recurs whenever one thinks of how much poetry and drama has come from that mediocre city in the last hundred years: Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Sean O'Casey—to say nothing of their lesser brothers inside or outside the Abbey Theatre: an unlikely but unmistakable golden age.

If we look at O'Casey, now its chief survivor, the mystery turns into paradox. For although commonly accounted a leading dramatist of the age, he commands no theatre and is rarely played. He is clearly in the Abbey tradition, but the Abbey rejected him early in his career.

No name in acting is accorded the reverence by the American theatre as is Stanislavski's. He has been the high priest of American acting since the 1930's when the Group Theatre incorporated his system into their program; and today, a modified Stanislavski System is central to the “Method” of the Actor's Studio. Whether this great regard for Stanislavski has been a good thing for our theatre is much debated, but very little has been said about the effect of Stanislavski's System upon the way the actor approaches the written text of a play. It is time this be considered, for the effects have been insidious and may well have been harmful to the art of our theatre.