Henry Arthur Jones was one of the founders and pioneers of modern English drama. Although his reputation largely collapsed in the early part of this century and has never recovered, he was among the leading English dramatists from the early 1880s until about 1905. Many of his plays had long, successful runs on the London stage and also in New York. He was a prolific writer, whose achievement includes more than eighty plays (not all of which were produced or published) as well as a good deal of prose work on the drama and on public affairs. One of his main subjects as a nondramatic writer was the "Renascence of the English Drama" (the title of a volume published in 1895), and through his playwriting he must be considered an important figure in that "Renascence."

Jones's anglicized spelling of renaissance is significant in that he was a decidedly English dramatist...