Excerpt from The Press and the Stage: An Oration The position I assume is that the newspaper press has practically displaced the public in the exercise of judgment and the formation of the stage; that in ac cepting this ofice it has incurred its responsibilities; that this service of opinions to the public has paralyzed the freedom and strength of public judgment that actors seek to occupy high places by force of press advertise ment that the journalist, as a rule, is incompetent as a specialist in dramatic afi'airs, and encourages a trivial kind of drama and bujfoonery that the few journalists conspicuous by their capacity are too few to make head against this influence, and protest vainly, while the tor rent of ribaldry and charlatanism sweeps into bathos, and imposture sits on the dramatic throne. And of this state of things no great drama, no great actor, can possi bly come, and none has come - not one. Burlesque and so ciety melodrama monopolize the stage. So since 1850 not a single work of any enduring life has been added to dra matic literature: the age is barren. These are a few of the results I attribute largely to the agency of the press. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.