First, for a general reading public which has little or no acquaintance with the Greek and Latin classics in the original but has a deep and abiding interest in the drama together with a desire to learn more of the prototypes and masterpieces of the genre. This situation has made necessary an amplitude of explanatory matter which, I fear, will at times prove irksome to my professional confrères. On the other hand, I have felt that intellectual honesty required me to treat the topics discussed in my Introduction and to meet the problems there raised at some length and without evasions. But to do so necessitated the interpretation of Greek texts and the presentation of much jejune material. Perhaps, therefore, some of my non-classical readers will prefer to omit the Introduction. By cross-references and slight repetitions I have endeavored to make the rest of the book intelligible without it. The English word “stage” is too convenient to be avoided in discussing theatrical matters, but those who omit the third section of the Introduction are to understand that its use in my text does not mean that I believe that the Greek theater of the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. had a raised stage for the exclusive use of actors. Secondly, although much that I have written is necessarily well known to classicists, still, since I have striven to incorporate the results of the latest investigations and have arranged under one co-ordinating principle phenomena which are usually regarded as unrelated, and since I have combined points of interpretation which are scattered through scores of books and monographs, I venture to hope that my discussion will not be without interest even for specialists. Inasmuch as the comedies of Plautus and Terence are but translations and adaptations of Greek originals, and since Seneca’s tragedies are constructed upon the Greek model, I have not hesitated to cite these Latin plays whenever they seemed to afford better illustrations than purely Greek productions. I must express my constant indebtedness to such invaluable storehouses of data as Müller’s _Lehrbuch der griechischen Bühnenalterthümer_ (1886) and _Das attische Bühnenwesen_ (1902), Navarre’s _Dionysos_ (1895), and especially Haigh’s _The Attic Theatre_, third edition by Pickard-Cambridge (1907); also to Butcher’s _Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, fourth edition with corrections (1911), and Bywater’s edition of Aristotle’s _Poetics_ (1909).