What Every Woman Knows (produced in 1908) shows Barrie’s dramatic art at its height.  He knows how to introduce variety and to give his characters an opportunity to reveal themselves.  Every word, every movement of the heroine, Maggie Shand, adds to the unfolding of a fascinating personality.  A period of intensely dramatic action may be followed by a comparative pause, such as occurs when the audience sees Maggie’s husband slowly realize her cleverness and helpfulness, —­qualities that had been long apparent to every one else.

Barrie shows the ability to present dramatically situations that are emotionally appealing or delightfully humorous.  His plays exhibit admirably the deep feelings, the momentary moods, the resourcefulness, or the peculiar whimsicalities of men and women.

John Galsworthy.—­As a means of presenting social problems, Galsworthy utilizes the drama even more than the novel.  Faulty prison systems, discords between labor and capital, discrepancies between law and justice, are some of the themes he chooses to dramatize. The Silver Box (1906) ironically interprets Justice as blind rather than impartial.  The poor man is often punished while the more fortunate man goes free. Strife (1909), in some respects the most powerful of his plays, illustrates the clash between capital and labor.  In The Eldest Son (1912), the conflict is between two social orders. Justice (1910), which secured reforms in the English prison system, shows how a young man is affected by an inflexible but legal punishment; and how such a method fails to assist him humanely to a better manhood, but drives him to lower and lower depths.

In Joy (1907), a delightful play, Galsworthy momentarily relinquishes social problems for a drama of more personal emotion.  In the mystical, poetical composition, The Little Dream (1911), he presents an allegory of the maiden in the Alps, dreaming first of the simple mountain life and then of the life in cities.  With its spiritual note and delicate fancy, The Little Dream turns a golden key on the ideal world beyond the strife and gloom dramatized in the sociological plays.

Galsworthy has good stagecraft.  His characterization is distinct and consistent.  His plays are simple in construction and direct in movement.  He strictly avoids rhetorical and theatrical effects, but his dramatic economies often sacrifice all charm and aesthetic appeal.  His gray world leaves no hope save the desperate one that conditions so grim may shame and spur society to reform.

Stephen Phillips.—­This dramatist and poet was born at Somerton, near Oxford, in 1864.  The boy was sent to Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon, to attend school.  He entered Cambridge, but at the end of his first term he left the university to join a company of Shakespearean players.  His six years with them initiated him into the technique of stagecraft, which he later applied in the writing of his poetic dramas.