New Theatre Quarterly does not normally include purely text-based studies of plays. since it is our feeling that journals of literary criticism offer a more appropriate home for such work. However, there are certain important plays which are in danger of becoming virtually lost to the world repertoire, when non-performance or flawed first productions have seemingly closed them off from further critical attention. One such play – or, to be precise, sequence of three plays – is The Island of the Mighty, which in a condensed form was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1972, but in a production from which the authors dissociated themselves, in a dispute they described in an article in Performance (Fall 1973). Javed Malick, who has recently been awarded his doctorate from McGill University for a study of Arden's plays, here argues that The Island of the Mighty forms an important part of the Arden canon, expressing in its fullest and most coherent form themes and attitudes discernible in the earliest plays – and that its characteristic refusal to ‘do things properly’ is essential both to the authors' view of a polarized world, and to the dramaturgy they have evolved to give expression to that view, which made The Island one of their last works for the conventional theatre. Javed Malick now teaches English at Khalsa College in Delhi University.