Excerpt from The Contemporary Drama of England It has been the fate of the theatre that gave to the world the first dramatist of modern times to rest always under the imputation of failure. Sidney, Addison, and Goldsmith, separate in time, are one in deploring the low state of the theatre. When we come into the nineteenth century we find Byron, surveying the nonsense, the puns, the mummeries of the German schools of English drama, exclaiming: Who but must mourn, while these are all the rage The degradation of our vaunted stage. A score of years later, in 1829, Carlyle writes, "Nay, do not we English hear daily, for the last twenty years, that the Drama is dead, or in a state of suspended animation; and are not medical men sitting on the case, and propounding their remedial appliances, weekly, monthly, quarterly, to no manner of purpose?" About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.