Pharisaism to the minds of us benighted Southerners. Was the
author making an anticipatory hit at Mr Lauder?

Somewhat later in the interview are these words: "Now, when you go to
the theatre you get the good and the bad characters, and I contend that
there is no necessity to show the bad." Alas! poor Shakespeare, Lauder
obliterates you with a sentence, and under his severe censure your
warmest admirers should try to save your reputation by accepting the
view that Bacon wrote the plays--and the poems as well. It would be
thrilling to have a drama in which all the characters were good, but how
would the dramatists construct their plots without the use of a villain?

However, to be just to Mr Lauder, by badness of character he means lack
of reverence for chastity. It is a curious point of view that involves
the banishment from the stage of all questions concerning right and
wrong in the traffic between man and woman, which condemns _What Every
Woman Knows_ as immoral. People used to think that the music-hall stage
might be a kind of feeding-ground for drama, might breed playgoers
capable of taking the view that drama has other functions than merely
that of amusing; but, if the illustrious Lauder is correct, the
music-halls stand aloof. Even the ladies of the promenade would be
shocked by _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_, fly blushingly from _The
Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith_, and put ashes on their dyed hair if _Iris_ were
offered to them. What a topsy-turvydom the entertainment world seems
when a popular star ventures to censure in a great daily paper the
modern drama of the country and takes himself quite seriously in urging
the superiority of the music-halls in taste and morality to the
theatres!

Mr Lauder, in addition to his curious ideas about drama from a moral
point of view, seems to have strange opinions concerning the nature of
plays. He says: "Moreover, in a theatre only one or two stars appear,
and they appear only now and again; otherwise they would not shine! If
they were always on the stage there would be a sameness in the
performance. And the other members of the company are only playing up to
these stars, giving so much padding to the entertainment. Little wonder
that the public is not satisfied with the play of to-day." If we
understand this correctly, and we have honestly tried to do so, it
involves a complete misunderstanding as to the nature of drama, and
means that Mr Lauder thinks that its whole purpose is t