The present volume of "Representative Plays by American Dramatists" includes many hitherto unpublished manuscripts. These are for the first time made available in authoritative form to the student of the American theatre. The Editor has tried consistently to adhere to his original basis of selection: to offer only those texts not generally in circulation and not used elsewhere in other anthologies. Exactions of copyright have sometimes compelled him to depart from this rule. He has been somewhat embarrassed, editorially, by the ungenerous haste with which a few others have followed closely in his path, even to the point of reproducing plays which were known to be scheduled for this collection. For that reason there have been omitted Mr. William Gillette's "Secret Service," available to readers in so many forms, and Mr. Percy Mackaye's "The Scarecrow." No anthology of the present historical scope, however, can disregard George Henry Boker's "Francesca da Rimini" or Bronson Howard's "Shenandoah." In the instance of Mr. Langdon Mitchell's "The New York Idea," it is possible to supersede all previous issues of this refreshing comedy by offering a text which, as to stage directions, has been completely revised by the author.
