The drama of transition - 1922 Author:Isaac Goldberg Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SPAIN JOSE ECHEGARAY To all but his countrymen, Jose Echegaray was the author of The Great Galeoto and little else; to the history of his nation's drama he... more » will perhaps remain little more. Yet, when he passed away upon September 15, 1916, Spain lost one of the most remarkable figures that it has reared in recent years. For fatal fertility, for sheer versatility of talents, he was notable even in a land that had produced a Lope de Vega with his fifteen hundred dramas. For four decades he fairly dominated the Spanish stage, at the same time making for himself a reputation as scientist, mathematician, publicist, orator, educator, moralist, and, I believe, authority upon bridge construction. Perhaps it was this dazzling career, rather than his few worthy plays, that influenced the Nobel commission, in 1904, to award the prize for literature to him, in company of the Provengal poet, Mistral. Surely the dramatic output of the protean publicist had earned the distinction more through quantity than quality. Long before 1904 his most significant work for the stage had been completed. In English he had been known through The Great Galeoto, which has been translated a number of times and given upon the stage in at least two acting versions: that by Maude Banks and a freer (and not altogether adequate) version by Charles Nirdligner, known as The Worldand His Wife, and acted by Faversham. One ether of his plays, Mariana, was also once familiar to English audiences in occasional performances by Mrs. Patrick Campbell. It is now more than forty-five years since Eche- garay made his unpretentious and somewhat mature d6but upon the Spanish stage, with a clever one-act play entitled El Libro Talonario (The Check Book). Before that date he had been known to the intellectual public in some of...« less