James Bridie, Scottish playwright, was born in Glasgow, where he spent much of his life as a physician and a dramatist. Though it was not until he was fifty that the rewards of playwriting allowed him to take down his doctor's shingle, Bridie's interest in dramatic writing goes back at least to the years when he was qualifying as a medical practitioner. His dramatic ambitions were whetted from 1909 to 1914 by the Glasgow Repertory Theatre, which presented the great dramatists of the day--Shaw, Galsworthy, Barrie, Masefield, Ibsen, Chekhov--but failed to call forth a Scottish playwright of major importance. Even when serving as a doctor in the army (1914-1918), Bridie was preparing to fill that need, trying his hand at dialogue and plot structuring. By the end of his life in 1951 he had written more than forty plays, a number of which are frequently revived and have become an established...