On the 27th of May 1893 _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ was produced at the St James's theatre. With _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ the English acted drama ceased to be a merely insular product, and took rank in the literature of Europe. Here was a play which, whatever its faults, was obviously comparable with the plays of Dumas, of Sudermann, of Björnson, of Echegaray. It might be better than some of these plays, worse than others; but it stood on the same artistic level. The fact that such a play could not only be produced, but could brilliantly succeed, on the London stage gave a potent stimulus to progress. It encouraged ambition in authors, enterprise in managers. What _Hernani_ was to the romantic movement of the 'thirties, and _La Dame aux camélias_ to the realistic movement of the 'fifties, _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ was to the movement of the 'nineties towards the serious stage-portraiture of English social life. All the forces which we have been tracing--Robertsonian realism of externals, the leisure for thought and experiment involved in vastly improved financial conditions, the substitution in France of a simpler, subtler technique for the outworn artifices of the Scribe school, and the electric thrill communicated to the whole theatrical life of Europe by contact with the genius of Ibsen--all these slowly converging forces coalesced to produce, in _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_, an epoch-marking play. Pinero followed up _Mrs Tanqueray_ with a remarkable series of plays--_The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith_, _The Benefit of the Doubt_, _The Princess and the Butterfly_, _Trelawny of the "Wells_," _The Gay Lord Quex_, _Iris_, _Letty_, _His House in Order_ and _The Thunderbolt_--all of which show marked originality of conception and intellectual force. In January 1893 Charles Wyndham initiated a new policy at the Criterion theatre, and produced an original play, _The Bauble-Shop_, by Henry Arthur Jones. It belonged very distinctly to the pre-Tanqueray order of things; but the same author's _The Case of Rebellious Susan_, in the following year, showed an almost startlingly sudden access of talent, which was well maintained in such later works as _Michael and his Lost Angel_ (1896), that admirable comedy _The Liars_ (1897), and _Mrs Dane's Defence_ (1900). Sydney Grundy produced after 1893 by far his most important original works, _The Greatest of These_ (1896) and _The Debt of Honour_ (1900). R. C. Carton, breaking away from the somewhat laboured sentimentalism of his earlier manner, produced several light comedies of thoroughly original humour and of excellent literary workmanship--_Lord and Lady Algy_, _Wheels within Wheels_, _Lady Huntworth's Experiment_, _Mr Hopkinson_ and _Mr Preedy and the Countess_. Haddon Chambers, in _The Tyranny of Tears_ (1899) and _The Awakening_ (1901), produced two plays of a merit scarcely foreshadowed in his earlier efforts.