Page:Robert Louis Stevenson, the dramatist.pdf/5



Some of you, perhaps—and some, too, who would call themselves ardent Stevensonians—are scarcely aware that Robert Louis Stevenson was a dramatist at all, that he ever essayed the dramatic form. If I were to ask those among my audience who have read his three plays to hold up a hand, I fear the demonstration would not be a very considerable one; and that demonstration would be still less imposing, I think, if my question were to take this shape—"How many of you have seen one or other of these works upon the stage?" Yet it is a fact that Stevenson wrote, or at any rate actively collaborated in, three plays. Three plays? More—four, five. But two of the five I propose to disregard entirely. One, The Hanging Judge, written in collaboration with Mrs. Stevenson, has never been published and may therefore be regarded as exempt from criticism. The other, Macaire, does not profess to be an original work except in details of dialogue. We will, therefore, with your permission, put that, also, aside and concentrate our attention on the three original plays—Deacon Brodie, Beau Austin, and Admiral Guinea—which Stevenson produced in collaboration with Mr. William Ernest 3