Plays have their epochs, just as books do, and there are fashions in the drama as pronounced as those in dress. Always one successful work of a particular class brings about a host of imitations, and, for a time, it seems as though the public would never tire of that particular kind of entertainment. "The Prisoner of Zenda" was responsible for a hundred romances laid in mythical kingdoms; "Lady Windimere's Fan" brought drawing room comedy into vogue; "'Way Down East" bred a perfect epidemic of pastorals; "Sherlock Holmes" created a demand for plays concerning criminals. All of these varieties of entertainment, save possibly the last, have been laid on the shelf, and we now are going in vigorously for frothy farce and comic opera in long skirts. The manner in which one author follows the lead of another, as demonstrated above, extends beyond the selection of such important things as stories, and reaches even to titles. Ten years ago we couldn't have a name without the word "of" in it. On the bill-boards were advertised "The Whitewashing of Julia", "The Manoeuvres of Jane", "The Superstitions of Sue", "The Stubbornness of Geraldine" and a score of others. Then somebody christened a charming sketch "Hop-o'-My-Thumb", and for a while it seemed that we could get nothing but hyphenated titles, such as "Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire" and "All-of-a-Sudden-Peggy." Now-a-days the vogue seems to be the combination of an article and a noun--"The Boss", "The Nigger", "The Gamblers" and "The Concert."
Please do not understand that, in calling attention to these similarities, I intend to accuse anyone of plagiarism. Deliberate theft of ideas from contemporary offerings is likely to result in law-suits, and I don't believe that there are left in the printed dramas any ideas worth stealing. I used to hear an interesting story of Paul Potter's writing original plays in the Boston Public Library, but it seemed to me that much of his work was too good to have been filched from the old fellows whose publishers bound their vulgarity, their leaden dialogue and their uningenious situations in yellow covers. It is very difficult, as I have said, to squeeze new situations out of a dull world, from the manners and morals of which about four hundred dramas have been pressed every year during the past half century. It is especially hard to devise original material in America, where prudish restrictions hedge us about and anything deep and vital in life immediately is set down as immoral. American authors cannot wring novel incidents from the emotions; they must profit by such circumstances as the invention of wireless telegraphy and the automobile. The telephone and the motor car are speedily becoming bulwarks of the drama in the United States!