The Collected Drama of H L Mencken

by S. T. Joshi

  1. Unidentified.

  2. Joe Weber (1867–1942) and Lew Fields (born Moses Schoenfeld, 1867–1941), an immensely successful comedy duo who began performing in the later nineteenth century; they broke up in 1904. Many of their routines revolved around comic use of Yiddish, German, and African American dialect.

  Et-Dukkehjemiana

  This article first appeared in Theatre 12 (no. 114) (August 1910): 41–44, vi, and has never been reprinted. It exhaustively relates the writing and early productions of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

  1. Hazel Kirke (1879), a play by American dramatist Steele MacKaye (1842–1894). The play, a sentimental melodrama, had more than 2,000 performances by 1883.

  2. Esmeralda (1881) is a sentimental play by British writer Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924). The Young Mrs. Winthrop (1882) is a play about a troubled marriage by American dramatist Bronson Howard (1842–1908).

  3. Helena Modjeska (1840–1909), celebrated Polish actress. HLM later reviewed Modjeska’s Memories and Impressions (1910): “Modjeska’s Book,” Baltimore Evening Sun (22 November 1910): 6.

  4. A Danish schoolteacher, T. Weber, published an English translation of A Doll’s House in 1880.

  5. The well-known British critic Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) was instrumental in introducing Ibsen’s plays to the English-speaking world.

  6. Émile Augier (1820–1889), French dramatist best known for his play Le Mariage d’Olympe (1855), about the purported rehabilitation of a prostitute. Thomas William Robertson (1829–1871), British dramatist whose naturalistic plays paved the way for Shaw and others.

  7. A translation of A Doll’s House was published in a Polish newspaper in 1880.

  8. William Archer (1856–1924), Scottish drama critic who, either alone or with others, translated numerous plays by Ibsen between 1889 and 1897.

  9. Henrietta Frances Lord’s translation of A Doll’s House was published in 1882 under the title Nora.

  10. Marguerite Gautier is the central character in the immensely popular play La Dame aux Camélias (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils, based on his 1848 novel of the same title. It is a play about a courtesan or “kept” woman. Verdi turned it into the opera La Traviata (1853).

  11. From William Archer’s introduction to The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume 7 (New York: Scribner, 1906), xv.

  12. Henry Watterson (1840–1921) founded the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1868. The source of the quotation from Modjeska has not been ascertained.

  13. From 1625 to 1925, Oslo, the capital of Norway, was called Christiania (not Christiana).

  14. Ednah D. Cheney (1824–1904), Nora’s Return: A Sequel to “The Doll’s House” (1890).

  15. Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman, Breaking a Butterfly: A Play in Three Acts (1884).

  16. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), British novelist and dramatist who became notorious for his flamboyant prose and melodramatic plots. Henry James Byron (1835–1884), British dramatist and author of dozens of comic plays.

  17. HLM refers to Janet Achurch (1864–1916), British actress, and A. B. Walkley (1855–1926), British drama critic.

  18. Beatrice Cameron (1868–1940), American actress who married the American director and producer Richard Mansfield (1857–1907).

  19. Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932), one of the leading American actresses of her day. HLM later wrote a survey of her career: “Mrs. Fiske’s Roles,” Baltimore Evening Sun (21 February 1911): 6.

  20. Maurice Prozor translated Ghosts and A Doll’s House into French as Les Revenants; La Maison de Poupée (1889). Wilhelm Lange (1849–1907) translated A Doll’s House into German as Nora, oder Ein Puppenheim (1880).

  21. John Olaf Paulsen (1851–1924), Erinnerungen an Henrik Ibsen (Berlin: Fischer, 1907), 54 (translation by HLM).

  The Revival of the Printed Play

  This review-article appeared in the Smart Set 33, no. 2 (February 1911): 163–68. HLM had been a reviewer for the Smart Set since November 1908, and he continued in that capacity through the end of 1923, including his years as coeditor (with GJN) of the magazine (1914–23). This article welcomes the increased publication of plays that can be enjoyed in the study as well as on the stage.

  1. Sydney Grundy (1848–1914), British dramatist who wrote many plays (many of them adapted and to some degree bowdererized from French and German originals) from 1872 until his death.

  2. HLM refers to the dramatists Alfred Sutro (British, 1863–1933), John Galsworthy (British, 1867–1933), Eugene Walter (American, 1874–1941), Harley Granville Barker (British, 1877–1946), W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950).

  3. Jim the Penman (1886), a play by British dramatist Sir Charles Young (1839–1887) about a real-life forger of that name (James Townsend Saward).

  4. William Winter (1836–1917), American drama critic and author of Shakespeare’s England (1888) and biographies of the actors Edwin Booth and Joseph Jefferson.

  5. Henry Arthur Jones (British, 1851–1929), Saints and Sinners (1884), a controversial play about religion in a country town. Arthur Wing Pinero (British, 1855–1934) wrote no play called The Prodigal. HLM probably refers to The Profligate (1887), an early tragedy in which a man poisons himself after his marriage fails.

  6. HLM refers to the drama critics A. B. Walkley (see n. 17 to “Et-Dukkehjemiana”), James Gibbons Huneker (American, 1857–1921), Max Beerbohm (British, 1872–1956), George Bernard Shaw, Charles Henry Meltzer (British, 1864–1936), Norman Hapgood (American, 1868–1937), William Morton Payne (American, 1858–1919)

  7. HLM reviewed Strindberg’s Swanwhite in the Smart Set (July 1909); he reviewed Frank Wedekind’s The Awakening of Spring in the Smart Set (March 1910).

  8. Henrietta Crosman (1861–1944), American stage and screen actress.

  The New Dramatic Literature

  This review-article appeared in the Smart Set 34, no. 4 (August 1911): 151–55. It reviews new plays by Hauptmann, Synge, Shaw, and others.

  1. Edward Hugh Sothern (1859–1933) and Julia Marlowe (1865–1950) performed Hauptmann’s The Sunken Bell in 1906.

  2. The Girl of the Golden West (1905) is a play by American writer David Belasco. It was turned into an opera, La fanciulla del West (1910) by Giacomo Puccini, with a libretto by Guelfo Civinini and Carlo Zangarini.

  3. Sir Almroth Wright (1861–1947) was a British bacteriologist and a pioneer in the inoculation against typhoid fever.

  4. Robert Loveman (1864–1923), American poet who wrote the official state song of Georgia. Percy MacKaye (1875–1956), American dramatist. Eva Tanguay (1879–1947), Canadian singer and entertainer who worked extensively in vaudeville. Nat M. Wills (1873–1917), American actor and vaudeville entertainer. Horatio Parker (1863–1919) and George Whitefield Chadwick (1854–1931), American musicians and composers.

  Brieux and Others

  This review-article appeared in the Smart Set 35, no. 2 (October 1911): 151–58. It is an extensive review of an English translation of the plays of Eugène Brieux. Two years later, HLM himself wrote a lengthy preface to an English translation of Brieux’s Blanchette and The Escape (Boston: John W. Luce, 1913), i–xxxv i.

  1. Charles H. Parkhurst (1942–1933), Presbyterian minister who vigorously attacked political corruption in New York City.

  2. Theo Kremer (1873–1923), The Fatal Wedding (1901), a sentimental comedy.

  3. Evelyn Innes (1898), a novel by Anglo-Irish writer George Moore (1852–1933).

  4. “Yes-sayer,” a conception derived from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, who advocated a vigorous “saying yes to life.”

  The Terrible Swede

  This review-article appeared in the Smart Set 37, no. 2 (June 1912): 153–58, and largely discusses the work of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, although plays by Percy MacKaye, Israel Zangwill, and Alfred Noyes are also covered.

  1. Emil Schering translated many of Strindberg’s plays and other works into German, beginning in 1902.

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p; 2. Julie: A Tragedy, by Arthur Strindberg, translated from the Swedish by Arthur Swan (1911).

  3. The translators are unidentified; their translations of the Strindberg plays, if they were completed, were apparently not published.

  4. John Augustin Daly (1838–1899), American dramatist and theatrical manager.

  5. Dion Boucicault (pseudonym of Dionysus Lardner Boursiquot, 1820?–1890), Irish actor and dramatist who became notorious for the flamboyance of both his plays and his acting.

  6. George Alexander Redford, the British Licenser of Plays from 1894 to 1911. In 1907, Edward Garnett’s play The Breaking Point, about an unmarried mother, was denied a license by Redford; it was published later that year as a book.

  Synge and Others

  This review-article appeared in the Smart Set 38, no. 2 (October 1912): 147–49, and provides a more detailed discussion of the work of J. M. Synge than in “The New Dramatic Literature.”

  1. “Oliver Optic” was the pseudonym of American writer William Taylor Adams (1822–1897), who wrote more than one hundred books for boys under that name.

  2. HLM refers to two best-selling writers of the period, E. Phillips Oppenheim (British, 1866–1946) and George Barr McCutcheon (American, 1866–1928).

  3. Charles Lever (1806–1872), Irish novelist. “Mr. Dooley” was a character invented by American humorist Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) in columns appearing in various Chicago newspapers beginning in the 1890s. Mr. Dooley spoke in a broad Irish brogue.

  Gerhart Hauptmann

  This review-article appeared in the Smart Set 39, no. 3 (March 1913): 153–58. It is among HLM’s most extensive discussions of the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann.

  1. Karl Heinemann (1857–1927) and Heinrich Bulthaupt (1849–1905), German drama critics; Otto Heller (1863–1941), German-American literary critic and author of Studies in Modern German Literature (1905), which contains a chapter on Hauptmann.

  2. Friedrich Kummer (1865–1939), German literary critic.

  3. Hauptmann’s The Assumption of Hannele (1893) opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre on May 1, 1894; Hauptmann and his wife were in the audience. The lead actress was scheduled to be the fifteen-year-old Alice Pierce; but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children objected to her appearance in the play, and Mayor Thomas F. Gilroy supported its cause. An adult actress replaced Pierce in the performance.

  4. HLM reviewed The Fool in Christ in the Smart Set (February 1912).

  5. HLM means Emil Schering (see n. 1 to “The Terrible Swede”).

  Thirty-five Printed Plays

  This review-article appeared in the Smart Set 44, no. 1 (September 1914): 153–60. It covers a wide array of printed plays, especially those by Nikolai Andreyev, Lord Dunsany, and others. The brief but favorable evaluation of a play by D. H. Lawrence is of note, as in subsequent reviews of Lawrence’s novels HLM expressed great disdain of the British writer.

  1. The play Don Carlos (1787) by Friedrich Schiller is an historical play concerning Carlos, Prince of Asturias (1545–1568). Richard Mansfield played the part on Broadway as late as 1906, when he was fifty-two.

  2. HLM refers to the Russian-American actress Alla Nazimova (1879–1945), the American actress Maude Adams (stage name of Maude Ewing Kiskadden, 1872–1953), Minnie Maddern Fiske (see n. 19 to “Et-Dukkehjemiana”) portraying Hedda Tesman (née Gabler) in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and Italian operatic soprano Luisa Tetrazzini (1871–1940) portraying Violetta, the lead character in Verdi’s La Traviata.

  3. HLM refers to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization founded by Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) in 1873. It frequently waged campaigns against books, plays, and other media that it considered obscene.

  4. The dramatists referred to (aside from those previously identified) are: St. John Hankin (British, 1869–1909), Henri Lavedan (French, 1859–1940), Arthur Schnitzler (Austrian, 1862–1931), and Hermann Bahr (Austrian, 1863–1934).

  5. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th baron Dunsany (1878–1957), Anglo-Irish fiction writer and dramatist who was instrumental in the development of literary fantasy in the twentieth century. HLM began publishing his work extensively in the Smart Set in 1915, at which time a Dunsany craze swept the United States. He later met Dunsany in New York.

  6. A slight misquotation of Shakespeare, King Lear 4.1.36–37.

  7. Mrs. Dane’s Defence (1900), a society play by Henry Arthur Jones.

  8. See Frank Harris, “A Great One-Act Play,” Academy, no. 2061 (4 November 1911): 572–73.

  The Ulster Polonius

  This review-article appeared in the Smart Set 49, no. 4 (August 1916): 138–40, and constitutes one of several increasingly censorious discussions of the later work of George Bernard Shaw.

  1. Herbert Kaufman (1878–1947) was an American journalist who established the Kaufman Newspaper Syndicate and for many years was a widely syndicated editorial writer for several leading newspapers and magazines.

  2. Ramsden Balmforth, The New Testament in the Light of the Higher Criticism (1905).

  3. HLM reviewed Spargo’s book in the Smart Set (April 1916), in which he wrote: “Socialism and Christianity, in fact, are but facets of the same gem, and the doctrines actually preached by Christ were much nearer to the doctrines preached to-day by the more intelligent Socialists than to the doctrines revealed by the practice of any existing Christian church. At the bottom of Socialism and of pure Christianity there is exactly the same idea, to wit, that all men are equal before the Lord, and both address themselves to restoring the alienated rights of men of the more feeble and incompetent sorts, and to pulling them, by that process, on terms of equality with their betters. I cannot imagine a genuine Socialist dissenting from the Beatitudes.”

  4. HLM refers to William Booth (1829–1912), a British Methodist preacher who founded the Salvation Army in 1865; Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), a leading British suffragette; Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), American religious leader who founded Christian Science with Science and Health (1875); and Billy Sunday (1862?–1935), American itinerant evangelist whom HLM heard at a lecture tour in Baltimore in 1916.

  Ibsen: Journeyman Dramatist

  This article appeared in the Dial 64 (11 October 1917): 323–26, and constitutes HLM’s most succinct evaluation of the drama of Henrik Ibsen.

  1. Frank Crane (1861–1928), American clergyman and journalist and one of the most widely read columnists of his day. HLM regarded his work as trite and naively optimistic.

  2. Max Stirner (pseudonym of Johann Kaspar Schmidt, 1806–1856), German philosopher whose thought strongly affected such later movements as anarchism, existentialism, and nihilism. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816–1882), French philosopher and a leading advocate for racial prejudice.

  3. Nachgelassene Schriften (posthumous writings) appeared in German in four volumes in 1909. This edition is derived from the Swedish Efterladte skrifter (1909; 3 vols.), edited by Halvdan Koht and Julius Elias. A partial English translation appeared as From Ibsen’s Work shop (1913), edited by William Archer and translated by A. G. Chater.

  4. HLM refers to the French dramatists Octave Feuillet (1821–1890), Henri Meilhac (1831–1897), and Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908).

  5. The Danish critic Georg Brandes (1842–1927) was a leading figure in literary criticism in his time. He was the author of the pioneering study Henrik Ibsen (1899), translated by William Archer.

  6. HLM refers to George Howells Broadhurst (1866–1952), Anglo-American theater manager and dramatist and co-owner of the Broadhurst Theatre (established at 235 West 44th Street, New York, in 1917); and Charles Klein (1867–1915), Anglo-American dramatist and actor.

  About the Editor

  S. T. Joshi (A.B., A.M., Brown University) is a widely published author and editor. He has prepared several editions of works by H. L. Mencken, including H. L. Mencken on American Literature (Ohio University Press, 2002), H. L. Mencken on Religion (Prometheus Books, 2002), Mencken’s Amer
ica (Ohio University Press, 2004), and Mencken on Mencken (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). He has also compiled H. L. Mencken: An Annotated Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, 2009). Among his other works are such critical and biographical studies as The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990), The Modern Weird Tale (McFarland, 2001), Gore Vidal: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Scarecrow Press, 2007), and I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press, 2010). He has also written God’s Defenders (Prometheus Books, 2003), The Angry Right (Prometheus Books, 2006), and The Unbelievers (Prometheus Books, 2011). He is the editor of the Lovecraft Annual, Weird Fiction Review, and the American Rationalist.