Scott felt that to write for the stage in his day was a thankless and almost degrading occupation.  “Avowedly I will never write for the stage; if I do, ‘call me horse.’” he said in a letter to Terry.[125] Again in a letter to Southey:  “I do not think the character of the audience in London is such that one could have the least pleasure in pleasing them....  On the whole, I would far rather write verses for mine honest friend Punch and his audience";[126] and to a would-be tragedian he said:  “In the present day there is only one reason which seems to me adequate for the encountering the plague of trying to please a set of conceited performers and a very motley audience,—­I mean the want of money."[127] This degraded condition of the London stage Scott thought to be a consequence of limiting the number of theaters.  We can hardly suppose, however, that he was pessimistic in regard to the written drama of his day, when he could say of Byron, “There is one who, to judge from the dramatic sketch he has given us in Manfred, must be considered as a match for Aeschylus, even in his sublimest moods of horror";[128] or when he could place Joanna Baillie in the same class with Shakspere[129].

Scott probably did much reading in the drama in his early life.  We know that by 1804 he had “long since” annotated his copy of Beaumont and Fletcher sufficiently so that he wished to offer it to Gifford, who, Scott erroneously understood, was about to edit their dramas.[130] The edition of Dryden, published in 1808, shows familiarity with Elizabethan as well as Restoration dramatists.  He seems to have had first-hand knowledge of such men as Ford, Webster, Marston, Brome, Shirley, Chapman, and Dekker, whom he mentions as being “little known to the general readers of the present day, even by name."[131] But 1808 was the very year in which appeared Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets and Coleridge’s first course of lectures on Shakspere.  The old dramatists were beginning to come to their own, through the sympathetic appreciation of the Romantic critics.  Scott never refers, however, to the work of Lamb, Coleridge, or Hazlitt[132] in this field and we conclude that his researches in dramatic literature were the recreation of a man who realized that his business lay in another direction.  But in preparing the Dryden, he doubtless read more widely in Restoration drama than he would otherwise have done.  Throughout his life he continued to read plays at intervals, as we know from occasional references in the Journal; but after the Dryden appeared we can point to no time in his career when such reading was his especial occupation.  His familiarity with Elizabethan drama he showed even more emphatically than by serious critical writings on the subject, in his fragments from mythical “Old Plays,"[133] in his frequent references to single plays, and in the substance of some of the novels, particularly The Fortunes of Nigel and Woodstock, which make use of settings, situations, and characterizations suggested by the drama.[134] Mr. Lang says of The Fortunes of Nigel, “The scenes in Alsatia are a distinct gain to literature, a pearl rescued from the unread mass of Shadwell."[135]