To these fifteen comedies originally produced in the eighteenth century, we may add seven plays produced in the first three score years of the nineteenth century: Tobin’s ‘Honeymoon’ (1805). Knowles’ ‘Hunchback’ (1832). Knowles’ ‘Love Chase’ (1837). Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘Money’ (1840). Boucicault’s ‘London Assurance’ (1841). Boucicault’s ‘Old Heads and Young Hearts’ (1844). Reade and Taylor’s ‘Masks and Faces’ (often called ‘Peg Woffington’) (1852). To the best of my recollection no one of these nineteenth century pieces has been seen on the New York stage since the twentieth century began. I have no right to assume that any other theater-goer of fifty years of experience would select exactly these twenty-two plays as being the Old Comedies; but I make bold to believe that my selection includes all the pieces which demand to be so grouped together. III A lover of the theater whose playgoing has been done in the past score of years may be moved to ask why it is that these plays, which evoked the loyal laughter of his father and his grandfather, have been utterly banished from the twentieth century stage, and why they are as unknown in the playhouses of London as they are in those of New York and of Boston. To this question it is possible to give three answers. In the first place these Old Comedies show the signs of age, even when we read them. They seem to most moderns more or less arbitrary in plot, more or less artificial in dialog, and more or less archaic in method. To assert this is to admit that they are hopelessly out of date both in their content and in their form. They abound, for example, in asides and in soliloquies, addressed directly to the audience; and they are decorated with frequent bravura passages, devised to exhibit the virtuosity of the performer, just as the solos of the earlier Italian operas were introduced merely to allow the soprano to execute her variations or the tenor to attain his high C. The tone of these humorous plays is too highly colored for our subdued taste, and many of their characters strike us as caricatures of humanity, almost fantastic in their wilful eccentricity. In short, these pieces one and all belong to a type of drama hopelessly out of fashion, unfamiliar in many of its aspects. In the theater what is unfamiliar is frequently ludicrous, merely because of its unfamiliarity; and we are inclined to laugh at it, as we do at the wearing apparel of a decade ago. In playmaking, as in dressmaking, styles change with disconcerting swiftness.