Charles Haddon Chambers, though now an almost forgotten figure, was in his own time a playwright who was not only sought after by several leading actor-managers but also regarded with respect by some of the foremost critics of the day. Max Beerbohm pronounced him comparable as a craftsman to George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville Barker, W. Somerset Maugham, Henry Arthur Jones, and Hubert Henry Davies. George Jean Nathan, though not an enthusiast for the tradition of what he called "rococo polite comedy," saw Chambers as the equal of such members of a later generation of playwrights as Frederick Lonsdale and John van Druten. A quarter of a century after Chambers's death, Allardyce Nicoll, defending the proposition that the late 1890s was a relatively rich period for dramatic literature, cites as evidence The Tyranny of Tears, one of Chambers's most successful plays, in a list made up of works...