Fans of drama should spend some time with this top-quality collection of short plays and play excerpts from a staggering array of early-twentieth-century masters, including William Butler Yeats, Eugene O'Neill, Lord Dunsany, and many more. It's a valuable introduction to the remarkable innovations that were occurring on the world's stages during the period, as well as the rich diversity of voices and styles that characterized the era.

"It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the "five hundred acres inclusive of lake" where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the Gothic

The Importance of Being Earnest is the last play Oscar Wilde ever wrote, and remains his most enduringly popular. It makes fun of social graces in the late Victorian era. Two seemingly unrelated parties are thrown into ridiculous entanglement when their fake identities, maintained in order to escape social responsibilities, grow ever more complicated to uphold.