Introduction<br > A study of the works of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur<br >Jones is necessarily not so much an essay in literary criticism as it is<br >the performance of a literary post-mortem. Less than a century has<br >passed since their deaths (Jones died in 1929， Pinero in 1934)， but<br >(at least) eight years have gone by since their demise as seriously<br >considered writers. There would be nothing remarkable in this had<br >Jones and Pinero been run-of-the-mill popular playwrights. No-<br >body expected such successful playwrights of their day as Haddon<br >Chambers， R. C. Carton， W. G. Wills， or Sydney Grundy to last<br >much beyond their own times; but Pinero and Jones were different.<br >With the sole exception of George Bernard Shaw， the leading crit-<br >ics-literary critics， not just play reviewers--writing between 1885<br >and 1910 looked upon these two men as regenerators of the Eng-<br >lish drama， important men of letters， profound thinkers， sensitive<br >observers and portrayers of human psychology， and masters of the-<br >atrical form. In short， they were looked upon as part of the main-<br >stream of English literature， writers whose work would last，<br >theatrical innovators， and dramatic pioneers who had restored to<br >the English drama the elevated seriousness of literary form and the<br >philosophical profundity of intellectual theme that it had lacked<br >since Elizabethan times. Their careers are object lessons for dra-<br >matic critics. Dramatic criticism is， in a sense， literatT bookmak-<br >ing: the work of the critic boils down to calculating the odds on an<br >author s reputation. To write a favourable criticism of a new author<br > xi<br >