George Bernard Shaw

“ No wonder Jonson's blank verse is the most horribly disagreeable product in literature, and in- dicates his most prosaic mood as surely as his shorter rhymed measures indicate his poetic mood. Marlowe never wrote a mighty line in his life: Cowper's single phrase "Toll for the brave" drowns all his mightinesses as Great Tom drowns a military band. But Marlowe took that very pleasant-sounding rigmarole of Peele and Greene, and added to its sunny daylight the insane splendors of night, and the cheap tragedy of crime. ”

“ A reasonable man may guess a reasonable law ; but no man can guess a foolish anomaly. Fortunately, by the time my book so suddenly revived in America, I was aware of the danger, and in a position to protect myself by writing and performing The Admirable Bashville. ”

“ To my mind, since her literary copyright probably brought her a fair wage for the work of writing the book, her real grievance was, first, that her name and credit were attached to a play with which she had nothing to do, and which may quite possibly have been to her a detestable travesty and pro- fanation of her story and second, that the authors of that play had the legal power to prevent her from having any version of her own performed, if she had wished to make one.
There is only one way in which the author can protect himself ”

“ But we have only to look at our own current criticism of Elizabethan drama to satisfy ourselves that in an art which has not yet found its Ruskin or its pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the same folly is still academically propagated. It is possible, and even usual, for men professing to have ears and a sense of poetry to snub Peele and Greene and grovel before Fletcher and Webster— Fletcher! a facile blank verse penny-a-liner: Webster! ”