It depends, of course, upon the play as well as upon the reader, and though one has rather romantically instanced spectacular plays, their scripts do, as a rule, belong to the class of play which is not worth reading. They are, or are apt to become, the libretto to some specific scenery or stage effect and the imaginative reader, failing to hit upon the particular staging intended, is lost in puzzlement. Nor do plays of action make the best reading. There are no plays but plays of action, but action is of many kinds, and the play whose first concern is situation and rapid physical movement is so specifically a stage-play, so sketchy in its ground-plan until the collaborators work in unison upon it, as to make reading more of a torment than a pleasure. While you must have wordless pantomime at the basis of every play, it is those plays which exhibit in high degree the use of action in the form of dialogue that are the more comfortable reading; and, always postulating that a play is a play--not necessarily a playwright's play, the admiration of his brother craftsmen, but a thing practicable, actable and effective on the stage--the more physical action is subordinated to character, to the exploration of the springs of human motive, the better it is for reading purposes and the better for all purposes. Ibsen led the modern play, where the modern novel followed it, to the investigation of character rather than to the unfolding of a story, and one suggests that readers who find satisfaction in the modern psychological novel should find the reading of modern plays to their taste for the reason that the dramatists, though they haven't in a play the same opportunities for analysis as the novelists find in their more spacious pages, are essentially "out for" the same thing.