Produced by Suzanne Shell, Clare Boothby and PG Distributed Proofreaders
The Jewel Merchants A Comedy in One Act
By
James Branch Cabell
"Io non posso ritrar di tutti appieno:
pero chi si mi caccia il lungo tema,
che molte volte al fatto il dir vieti meno."
NEW YORK
1921
This latest avatar of so many notions
which were originally hers.
Prudence urges me here to forestall detection, by conceding that thisbrief play has no pretension to "literary" quality. It is a piece inits inception designed for, and in its making swayed by, the requirementsof the little theatre stage. The one virtue which anybody anywhere couldclaim for The Jewel Merchants is the fact that it "acts" easily andrather effectively.
And candor compels the admission forthwith that the presence of thisanchoritic merit in the wilderness is hardly due to me. When circumstancesand the Little Theatre League of Richmond combined to bully me intocontriving the dramatization of a short story called Balthazar'sDaughter, I docilely converted this tale into a one-act play of whichyou will find hereinafter no sentence. The comedy I wrote is now at onewith the lost dramaturgy of Pollio and of Posidippus, and is even lesslikely ever to be resurrected for mortal auditors.
It read, I still think, well enough: I am certain that, when we came torehearse, the thing did not "act" at all, and that its dialogue, whateverits other graces, had the defect of being unspeakable. So at eachrehearsal we—by which inclusive pronoun I would embrace the actors andthe producing staff at large, and with especial (metaphorical) ardor MissLouise Burleigh, who directed all—changed here a little, and there alittle more; and shifted this bit, and deleted the other, and "tried out"everybody's suggestions generally, until we got at least the relief ofwitnessing at each rehearsal a different play. And steadily my manuscriptwas enriched with interlineations, to and beyond the verge of legibility,as steadily I substituted, for the speeches I had rewritten yesterday,the speeches which the actor (having perfectly in mind the gist but notthe phrasing of what was meant) delivered naturally.
This process made, at all events, for what we in particular wanted,which was a play that the League could stage for half an evening'sentertainment; but it left existent not a shred of the rhetoricalfripperies which I had in the beginning concocted, and it made of theactual first public performance a collaboration with almost as manycontributing authors as though the production had been a musical comedy.
And if only fate had gifted me with an exigent conscience and a turn fororatory, I would, I like to think, have publicly confessed, at that firstpublic performance, to all those tributary clarifying rills to the play'sprogress: but, as it was, vainglory combined with an aversion to"speech-making" to compel a taciturn if smirking acceptance of thecurtain-call with which an indulgent audience flustered the nominal authorof The Jewel Merchants…. Now, in any case, it is due my collaboratorsto tell you that The Jewel Merchants has amply fulfilled the purposeof its makers by being enac