My anthology The Modern Theatre — five volumes in Anchor Books—is made up of plays written between 1830 and 1950. The première of Victor Hugo's Hernani in 1830 has always been considered a landmark, though closer to my own thoughts were Musset, Büchner, and Gogol, all of whom wrote plays in the early eighteen thirties.

That anthology, readers will agree, was not just another bundle of famous plays. On the contrary, justly famous items—and unjustly famous ones—were omitted. Famous authors like O'Casey and Anouilh were represented only by non-famous works. It was an anthology of protest—against the standardization of the repertoire. For our theatres limit their range even more than our orchestras and our museums do. My anthology was issued in the hope of persuading some of them to look at other things, other kinds of things. The volumes serve a purpose even if that hope is vain.