Indeed, the Germans claim to have appropriated Shakespeare and to have made him their own. Now the only seventeenth century play outside of Shakespeare which still keeps the stage is Massinger’s comedy, “A New Way to Pay Old Debts.” This has frequently been given in America, with artists like Edwin Booth and E. L. Davenport in the leading rôle, Sir Giles Overreach. A number of the plays of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, and perhaps other Elizabethan dramatists continued to be played down to the middle of the eighteenth century, and a few of them as late as 1788. Fletcher’s comedy, “Rule a Wife and Have a Wife,” was acted in 1829; and Dekker’s “Old Fortunatus”[8] enjoyed a run of twelve performances in 1819. But these were sporadic revivals. Professor Gayley concludes that of the two hundred and fifty comedies, exclusive of Shakespeare’s, produced between 1600 and 1625, “only twenty-six survived upon the stage in the middle of the eighteenth century: in 1825, five; and after 1850, but one,—‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts,’—while at the present-day no fewer than sixteen out of Shakespeare’s seventeen comedies are fixtures upon the stage.” Now and then a favorite Elizabethan play like Ben Jonson’s “Alchemist,” or Dekker’s “Shoemaker’s Holiday,” or Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle” is presented by amateurs before a college audience or a dramatic club, or some other semi-private bunch of spectators. Middleton’s “Spanish Gipsy” was thus presented in 1898 before the Elizabethan Stage Society and was rather roughly handled by the newspaper critics. But these are literary curiosities and mean something very different from the retention of a play on the repertoire of the professional public theatres. It is a case of revival, not of survival.